Who decides what constitutes "openly waging war"?

I hear the recent developments on the subject is that you just redraw the border in the more convenient way.

Yet every single device in my house (by half a dozen different manufacturers), with the sole exception of those made by Apple, uses a single USB plug to connect and charge. Explain that.

The Russian state demanded that VK release info on (Ukrainian) users who used VK to organize Euromaidan protests. Durov told them to go fuck themselves.

Now not only he's fired, but he left Russia, and he went on record saying that he has no intent of returning. Can't blame him. I had to go there on a two-week business trip, and I always had that nagging thought of shit hitting the fan while I'm on the wrong side of the border (since I'm still a Russian citizen, it would probably result in me ending up as a conscript somewhere in a trench in Ukraine).

To be more specific, they're using a blend of ultra-patriotism and religious traditionalism (not one specific religion, but whatever's traditional for various ethnic groups within Russia - i.e. Eastern Orthodoxy for Russians, Islam for Tatars etc) as the new state ideology.

Is there a causative link here, though, or is it just correlation?

Say, what is the average wait time for a poor white person to vote in Michigan?

I am a self-identified liberal (albeit with a libertarian bent).

Scalia's dissent on this particular issue is entirely correct.

His opinions on many other issues (such as sodomy laws or abortion) are still entirely wrong. And, as a person, he is still a complete and utter asshole, though.

No matter how you twist it, something like 80% of techies are solidly liberal/progressive, judging by their political donations.

Last I checked, Texas was neither liberal nor progressive in practically any sense of the word.

And in Afghanistan, the idea that a person renouncing Islam should be put to death, or that it is okay to marry girls at age 9, also enjoys 90% popular support. So what?

Yet murder rate did not change significantly - it kept going down at the same rate as before the last ban.

(which is because those massacres are a statistically insignificant event, basically)

Yet again, one of those bullshit "by a gun" statistics. Who cares about a subset of murders where guns specifically are used? What matters is the overall murder rate regardless of tools. That did not show any correlation to gun bans.

Another pointless "gun ..." stat.

BTW, it's true that Australia (and most other First World countries) has an overall lower homicide rate, and generally violent crime rate. But that has to do with the different approach to healthcare and other forms of welfare in US, which results in significantly higher income inequality, stratification, high poverty rates and low social mobility - which translates to more crime. Guns don't really play any role in this, as is evident when looking at crime rates within US - they correlate strongly with poverty, and not at all with lax/strict gun laws.

Another pointless "gun ..." stat. As noted before, the overall homicide rate was going down before the bans, and kept going down after them at the same rate - i.e. the decline was caused by other factors. It should be noted that this is a trend that is observed in all Western countries, including US, and in the latter said decline does not correlate with gun law changes (like AWB).

Another pointless "gun ..." stat. The overall suicide rate did not change, people just used different methods (hangings in particular spiked as firearm suicides dropped).

This is an utterly stupid statement. You are much more likely to be shot in my home country - Russia - that despite it not being even remotely "in complete anarchy or war" - and despite the much more stringent gun laws, which are only marginally more liberal than Australian ones. Heck, US has lower homicide rates than a good half of Europe.

Then, of course, the rate varies wildly within US from state to state, so much so that the average is meaningless. In my state of residence, it's the same as in Finland and Norway, and it's not some kind of rural depopulated place.

Yet the overall murder rate trend did not change appreciably - despite the fact that it should have included those massacres. In fact, it briefly went up after the ban, despite there being a massacre immediately before the ban...

Which, I suppose, just goes to show just how small and insignificant those massacres are in the big picture, if you take the media attention they receive out of the equation and look at raw numbers. Yet people keep referring to them as some major factor that should be a significant driver of public policy. It's about as ridiculous as the security theater that followed 9/11.

Well, except that due to the way the US electoral system works, it's possible to get elected without having a majority. Heck, it's possible for 1/4 of the country population to amend the Constitution over the heads of the other 3/4 if they gang up!

So much for democracy.

And then, of course, a state can be a democracy today, and a dictatorship tomorrow. Germans found that out the hard way back in 1933.

Perhaps someone should sue the feds and demand that this law is reworded to be gender-neutral, as it is clearly discriminatory with no good reason.

Use Lojban. A language explicitly designed for clarity and lack of ambiguity (you can be ambiguous in it, but any ambiguity is explicit).

That makes no sense. Are you saying that freedom of speech is not a fundamental right? Perhaps you don't think it is, but the people who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights certainly considered it a natural right - and yet they codified it.

The reason why is very simple. Bill of Rights, for the most part, is the codification of those natural rights that were actually threatened or infringed immediately before or during the American Revolution. Hence why they were deemed to be the most vulnerable, and therefore most deserving of the extra degree of protection that codifying them would yield. That's why BoR has some really weird stuff, like a separate amendment about "quartering soldiers" - because that's precisely what the British did.

The overall trend has been down both before and after, actually. Basically, the ban had zero measurable effect.