You've got midi-chlorians shooting out of your nose, young padawan. Don't burst.

That's what Perl and shell scripts are for.

The right word for that other one is "Imperial".

This exact scenario has been rehashed in more than one fiction book that I've read.

By the way, you can think even further outside the box. Rich people don't just have yachts, they also have private planes. How much screening do those go through when they enter US airspace? And how devastating would an air explosion over a populated city be?

Sovereignty has to be meaningfully exercised to be considered legitimate. If you claim sovereignty over some territory, but in practice there is a hostile militant group there that's on a murderous rampage for several months now, your claim is not particularly strong.

My understanding is that "Daesh" omits the "Islamic" part of the name.

Either way, it seems to piss off the mujis when they hear themselves being referred to under that name, to the point that any local heard using it in the areas controlled by them is punished. Given that they clearly hate it, I'm all for using it on that basis alone, regardless of what it means.

FWIW, most Moon landing conspiracy theories claim that Soviets were in on the scam, either because they were bribed (a common theme claims food shipments were the bribe, thereby "explaining" why the USSR didn't have any more devastating famines),

It's not modern, but it's also non-violent (so far as I know), and remarkably similar to secular humanism in many ways.

How would you explain Lokayata, then?

This! Except for:

Two years? If you're a lucky one, I suppose that's true. I'm looking at about 4 years right now, and I know some guys from India for whom it's more like 6, and I believe even that's not the worst.

There are plenty of libertarians in the F/OSS movement who don't like GNU and Stallman's personal politics.

Did you see the stats for the growth of their middle class over the past 15 years or so?

I'm not disputing that the country is ardently capitalist and has tightly guarded elite circles. But for most people in there, that's not where they are aiming for. What they want is basically just comfortable living, and their standard for it is getting pretty close to what the West enjoys. And with every new generation, there are millions more actually enjoying it - even though there's still hundreds of millions locked out. But for now, the trend is good.

Was it, though? China circa 1960s/70s was a totalitarian dictatorship where Tiananmen square was an impossibility simply because any dissent would be crushed long before it would get to mass protest stage, and the yearly number of victims was far greater, too. Compared to China after Tiananmen, the latter is far more liberal. It's even more liberal today.

I did not suggest doing such a thing. The best thing you can do is just trade (and yes, this doesn't preclude e.g. tariffs to even out the price of labor differences, environmental concerns etc).

As Chinese economy grows, so does its middle class. As its middle class grows, it demands more democratic reforms and more government responsibility - ultimately, a way to better China, for both its people and its neighbors.

So if you want a better China, you should do the exact opposite of what you're doing.

If you read the news headlines less and statistical data more, you'd know that the chances of that happening are far, far lower than your kid being hit by a school bus, or drowning in your pool. You might as well worry about him dying in the next 9/11.