If it is intentionally done to draw attention to some political issue and/or carries an explicit political message, then sure.

What distinguishes terrorism is one's ultimate goal, not the means or the scale of the crime.

Mark Lynas self-identifies as environmentalist, and is strongly in favor of nuclear power from that perspective.

Seeing how humans are animals, sounds like it is, then, indeed more dangerous to us - which is the relevant metric here.

I didn't say that I'm not biased. I said that I don't let my bias get in the way of observations (i.e. raw facts, numbers, and other objective data), at least on this particular matter.

I do read the same /. you do, I just don't let my bias get in the way of my observations.

Don't be ridiculous. We're not in a court here. When people say "assault", they mean the common sense definition of a thing.

In any case, "touching someone" is not at all what we discussed here. I'll quote OP: "punching someone is grounds for murder now, is it?"

It and the journal you wrote Saturday and a third you wrote Sunday. So yes, it's borked.

There's nothing disproportionate about responding to a physical assault with lethal force. There's nothing illegal about it, either, in pretty much every state in the Union (though some have a "duty to retreat" first).

It's funny how the lefties here are complaining about the libertarian moderator cabal, while the libertarians are complaining about the liberal moderator cabal.

Truth is, there's neither. Those kinds of posts go to +5 to -1 and back in matter of minutes, both of them.

It's assault. Sometimes, it kills people. As such, it's grounds for use of all available means, including lethal, to stop it as quickly as possible. The moment you initiate this level of violence against another person, you lose all protection against violence being employed against you, until the confrontation is over.

You can run the Russian version of the Wikipedia article through a translator to see a reasonably complete modern historiographic take on it from the Russian perspective - it also mentions a bunch of associated mythology, correcting it as needed (e.g. the ice breaking under the weight of retreating Germans - it's a late addition, and wasn't in the primary sources). But you can also see what is not there.

In case you haven't noticed, there are already thousands of Russian volunteers fighting in militia units in Donbass. And it keeps ramping up.

I was talking about a popular attitude of Russian citizens, which is not necessarily shared by the Russian government.

Also note that the heavy-handed intervention always seems to be stopping short of full-on invasion (which, let's face it, would have the country steamrolled in matter of weeks if not days). Right now it's arms and munitions supply, artillery strikes across the border where the range allows, and occasional infiltration by the more elite units to lend a hand at hot spots (like Mariupol), but all covert and unofficial. No air support - which would make a really huge difference! - and no Russian tank columns rolling across the border in numbers.

From the "failed state" perspective, this actually makes a great deal of sense - you want to help it fail faster, but don't want to overtax yourself in doing so.