would_be_appreciated

It pressures the system in those cities or states, which is actual pressure to the system, just not direct pressure on the federal government. History shows you can mount pressure through local and state changes until it gets overwhelming support on a federal level.

You can make the argument there might be more effective or quicker solutions, but this is unquestionably one path toward it.

Then Putin should be very scared of that risk and withdraw immediately!

He should, but he doesn't appear to be. That puts the ball in everybody else's court, unfair though it is.

Or the Russian people should be scared of that and force him to withdraw.

Who am I kidding, the Russian people can’t stand up to President Putin, they’re too busy listening to General Stolichnaya.

A large number of Russians are trying to protest. They typically get killed or imprisoned. It's hard to fault the remainder for not risking their lives for a probably fruitless attempt at dissent.

He will run out of people, at the expense of both Russian human beings and Ukrainian human beings. That's the best case scenario with continued war, assuming it doesn't escalate to directly include other countries.

This has the possible side effect of nuclear war.

How Parking Garages Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

How Public Parks Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

How the Street Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

How Literal Playgrounds Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

Maybe if these things are happening everywhere, it's not the app that's the issue. This kind of talk opens us up to bans on Signal and similar apps, and that's just unacceptable. Address the core issues in society, don't try (and typically fail) to bandage it by taking away more and more of people's rights and freedoms.

IANAL, but my understanding is entrapment is when they convince you to do something you might not otherwise have done. So if the cops create an account of a minor and message an adult asking if they want to fuck, and the answer is like "uh no, absolutely not," and then the cops follow up by repeatedly sexting, and the adult blocks their account, but the cops relentlessly keep sexting from burner accounts, and plant people in the adult's work and social environments who keep talking about how normal it is to fuck minors who sext you out of the blue, and then the adult is finally like "oh whatever, fine" - that's entrapment.

Now, most people still are literally never going to take the minor up on the offer, no matter how relentless they are or how normalized it is in their environment. That's true about most crimes. The question is how many people wouldn't have committed that crime unless this very specific police-created situation came up, and that difference is what falls into entrapment.

I'd argue this isn't even close to entrapment, because all they did was set up an account much like all the others that exist, and waited for others to find them. It's no different from leaving a bike unlocked, then catching somebody who steals it. There are unlocked bikes everywhere, and people don't suddenly decide to steal the only bike of their life because they happened to find that unlocked bike.

Of course, they could also be spending this time and money getting to the root of societal issues and fixing the core problems instead of catching a small percentage of active pedophiles and letting the rest of them continue to cause irreparable harm.

I don't think that's true. Cheney's just not part of Trump's in-crowd. Cheney would go full fascist if he were at the top of it.

I don't think society on a local, national, or world level is past persecution for stupid reasons, and I fall into a number of categories that certain people might go after me for if they got into power. I want to make that difficult for them.