They all talk about "serving their country". They join "to serve", or they join because they think they're hot shit and want to get some combat experience so they can feel tough. The second group should be shoved in a locker and tossed off the bridge; the first wouldn't join if they thought 95% of the wars they would get deployed to were unjust, as they'd only see themselves as instruments of murder and not heroes fighting for freedom.

In other words: people who worship glorious, heroic veterans of wars are more likely to become veterans themselves. They see it as some high honor, and jump into a war they know nothing about. If they start thinking war is a horrible thing and not an exercise of glory and valor, they might start thinking if war is necessary--and, deciding that it is, might grasp further to decide if any given war is itself necessary rather than a political sideshow. They may stop worshiping returned veterans and start pitying them.

We want dead bodies and stories about the war and trauma and your buddies dying at the hands of krauts and sand-niggers, not living proof of the pain and suffering of war.

War is a far-away thing: your daddy went off and didn't come back, or he came back with mental problems because he is a pussy. We don't want war sitting in our houses, in our day-to-day lives. We might stop worshiping veterans and start questioning if all the wars we're in are necessary or if we should only take to arms under more scrutiny.

I don't get it. Doesn't thin ice melt faster? I spread my ice to make it melt more quickly.

Yeah the scripted thing is best supported by timestamps, not writing style. That's a dumb argument.

It is, but it's also not as much of a problem as people think. Come on, we find 6000 year old urns and reverse engineer the recipe for the beer they used to contain; do you think we can't analyze dried meat for atherosclerosis?

Sure there's going to be noise; but there will also be some mild level of confidence about whether this guy had a body full of horrific bullshit from a bad diet or what.

From American high school history, Freedom was invented in the 1700s, in the new world.

So we need average infant and child mortality, and average adult lifespan?

So it's bayesian science instead of frequency science?

The renal system is supposed to adjust after a few days and correct this, such that you expel the excess salt and your blood pressure normalizes. Of course jumping from a 2000mg sodium diet to a 4000mg sodium diet will up your blood pressure; but, three days later, it should be normal again, while you're still downing 4000mg of sodium every day.

The original study linking sodium to high blood pressure was to feed a rat an intake equivalent to 500g of salt in a human per day. Humans are safe up to 6g of sodium intake per day; salt is a lot more than 10% sodium by mass.

That's not really the issue.

If, 150 years ago, the average life expectancy was 30-40 years, but the average human level of general health in those 30-40 years was better than the same in the first 30-40 years of modern humans's lives, then you could say that something we did back 150 years ago was better and we were healthier and living well on whatever we were doing.

In short: strain, work, lack of surgery and vaccines, poor understanding of disease, bad hygiene, the like, could take a toll; but, meanwhile, people have healthy hearts, strong livers, good blood flow, clear blood vessels, low blood pressure, strong lungs. In such a situation, we could conclude with relative certainty that our lower constant work load, lower exposure to disease, and greater access to health services has provided the greater lifespan; and everything else is suspect, and something in that pile of everything was better off 150 years ago.

This is relatively easy to explore. All we need are dissection records or dissection of well-preserved corpses from the era, so as to examine the state of organs. Finding the source material is difficult. We don't, however, need to take a time machine back and put people on EKG and take blood tests and blood pressure.

Not really, but somewhat. Being aware of everyone and not being surprised that someone is suddenly on you is good; if you hear them or otherwise notice them rushing at you, you have time and space to work with--it may not be enough to draw a gun, but it's enough to take control of the knife arm.

I can stab you fatally with a pencil. A 3 inch folder (which can be a fixed blade, not a folding knife) is plenty bad; it doesn't need to be an 11 inch Tanto. Boot knives are effective, but far away from the hand. For muggery, murder, or rape, the best weapon is a small, fixed-blade knife easily concealed in the hand: you can hold the blade in your hand without cutting yourself (even a very sharp knife), and then rotate it to have a proper grip on the knife for assault in a smooth, immediate motion.

That's what you need to defend against: knives coming out of nowhere.

Point-blank is the distance at which the travel of a bullet by wind resistance or gravity is not an issue, and so you don't need to adjust for any drift. You point directly at the target (on a practice target, this is the white "blanc" bull's eye) and fire. If the target is a human, there is no leading; you don't shoot in front of, but rather directly at a person.

This can be a lot of distance.

Second, any weapon is massively deadly. My fists are massively deadly. If they can't be used effectively, that doesn't much matter. At close range, the opportunity to score a fatal or disabling hit with a gun is much lower; and the threat of losing the firearm in grappling is higher. Stray bullets are more likely. If it's not pointed at your face, it's not going to shoot you in the face.

This is a passive-predatory stance. If everyone left the violent areas, the criminals would move after the victims. It's like saying you should be a highland sheep, because the population of highland sheep is too low to sustain a generational wolf population, and the highlands are just a tad too far out for wolves to come to hunt, and there are virtually endless sheep in the lowlands and so the wolves are not interested in moving outward for prey. If the sheep all move to the highlands, the wolves will follow.

The problem with blaming people for living in violent areas is they would put you at risk by moving out of those violent areas. You should thank them for being decoys.

This is what I've been trying to explain, but nobody listens.

"Cosmologists can speculate with high confidence." Everything about that sentence is terrible.