I'm not sure that's necessarily true... Customers have limited space for games; it's a lot easier to justify keeping a 23GB game around for occasional play than it is for a 154GB game, so they likely lost some small fraction of their playerbase they could have retained.

I experimented with GPT-5 recently and found its capabilities to be significantly inferior to that of a human, at least when it came to coding.

I was trying to give it an optimal environment, so I set it to work on a small JavaScript/HTML web application, and I divided the task into small steps, as I'd heard it did best under those circumstances.

I was impressed overall by how far the technology has come, but it produced a number of elementary errors, such as putting JavaScript outside the script tags. As the code grew, there was also no sense that it had a good idea of how to structure the codebase, even when I suggested it analyze and refactor.

So unless there are far more capable models out there, we're not at the stage where generative AI can match a human.

In general I find current model to have broad but shallow thinking. They can draw on many sources, which is extremely useful, but seem to have problems reasoning things through in depth.

All this is to say that I don't find the joy of coding to have gone at all. In fact, there's been a number of really thorny problems I've had to deal with recently that I'd love to have side-stepped, but due to the currently limitations of LLMs I had to solve them the old-fashioned way.

I find the LLMs struggle constantly with languages there is little documentation or out of date. RAG, LoRA and multiple agents help, but they have their own issues as well.

This is a particular sweetspot for LLMs at the moment. I'll regularly one-shot entire NextJS codebases with custom styling in both Codex and Claude.

But it turns out the OP is using Copilot. That just isn't competitive anymore.

As a quick check I asked Codex to look over the existing source code, generated via Copilot using the GPT-5 agent. I asked it to consider ways of refactoring, and then to implement them. Obviously a fairer test would be to start from scratch, but that would require more effort on my part.

The refactor didn't break anything, which is actually pretty impressive, and there are some improvements. However if a human suggested this refactor I'd have a lot of notes. There's functions that are badly named or placed, a number of odd decisions, and it increases the code size by 40%. It certainly falls far short of what I'd consider a capable coder should be doing.

I think we should step back and ask: do we really want that? What does that imply? Until recently nobody would use a tool and think, yuck, that was inferior of a human.

GPT-5 what? The GPT-5 models range from goofily stupid to brilliant. If you let it select the model automatically, which is the case by default, it will tend to lean towards the former.

I also briefly tried out some of the other paid-for models, but mostly worked with GPT-5.

The technology is progressing very fast, and that includes both the models and the tooling around it.

For example, Gemini 2.5 was considered a great model for coding when it launched. Now it is far inferior to Codex and Claude code.

The Githib Copilot tooling is (currently) mediocre. It's ok as a better autocomplete but can't really compete with Codex or Claude or even Jules (Gemini) when using it as an agent.

  npm install -g @openai/codex

The models are one part of the story. But the software around it matters at least as much: what tools does the model have access to, like bash or just file reading or (as in your example!) just a cache of files visited by the IDE (!). How does the software decide what extra context to provide to the model, how does it record past learnings from conversations and failed test runs (if at all!) and how are those fed in. And of course, what are the system prompts.

None of this is about the model; its all "plain old" software, and is the stuff around the model. Increasingly, that's where the quality differences lie.

I am sorry to say but Copilot is just sort of shoddy in this regard. I like Claude, some people like Codex, there are a bunch of options.

But my main point is - its probably not about the model, but about the products built on the models, which can vary wildly in quality.

Clojure is clearly a niche language, but Stack Overflow is also not a place that Clojure developers typically go, so Clojure usage there is going to be under reported.

> I do wish Clojure would adopt a bit more of an opinionated way of doing things and coalesce around some solid core/common libraries that the official docs could point to.

Solid core/common libraries to do what?

It seems unclear to me why Clojure developers would not go to Stack Overflow, and especially unclear why they would avoid SO more than developers in other niche languages. When I learned Clojure, I spent a very long time on SO.

I suppose I’m just a little skeptical. I often hear similar sounding rationales - “oh don’t worry, <my favorite language/technology> is under-represented by the data”. Somehow every niche technology is underreported by the data! But to an outside observer, Clojure to me seems to be used very rarely in the types of engineering work I come in contact with, and 1% doesn’t seem that wrong to me.

That said, it's always worth checking the numbers, so I took a look at the 2024 State of Clojure Survey. Around 18% of those surveyed used Stack Overflow, while the 2024 Python Developers Survey had at least 43% of respondents using Stack Overflow.

Now, you might well say that even so Clojure is still a niche language - and I agree. But it may be the case that instead of a 1.3% share, Clojure has a 3% share - if we assume that the Python community's usage numbers are more typical.

The Python question is more broad: “Where do you typically learn about [python]?”

The Python question I'd say is more narrow, as it asks specifically about "new tools and technologies". What if I have a question about an tool I've been using for a while?

In any case, my point is not what market share Clojure actually has, but that there's reasonable doubt in using SO's developer survey as a basis for that answer. If a far smaller percentage of the Clojure community uses SO than is average for a language, then it's going to skew the results.

Yes, but a large percentage of people use SO without posting a question - e.g. an answer pops up in a google result.

Immutability, for example, is another great constraint that's not considered in the article, but should certainly be on your mind if you're deciding between, say, Rust and Java.

The article delves into some of the drawbacks of static typing, in that while it can be more expressive, it can also contain a lot of information that's useful for the compiler but decidedly less useful for a reader. The Rust example that loads a SQL resultset into a collection of structs is a standard problem with dealing with data that's coming from outside of your static type system.

The author's solution to this is the classic one: we just need a Sufficiently Smart Compiler™. Now, don't me wrong; compilers have gotten a lot better, and Rust is the poster child of what a good compiler can accomplish. But it feels optimistic to believe that a future compiler will entirely solve the current drawbacks of static typing.

I was also slightly surprised when templates were suggested. Surely if you're aiming for rigor and correctness, you want to be dealing with properly typed data structures.

I don't think that's an ideal mental model. Code in any (useful) language can do what you want, and can not do what you don't want. The question is how far that code is from code that breaks those properties -- using a distance measure that takes into account likelihood of a given defect being written by a coder, passing code review, being missed in testing, etc. (Which is a key point -- the distance metric changes with your quality processes! The ideal language for a person writing on their own with maybe some unit testing is not the same as for a team with rigorous quality processes.) Static typing is not about making correct code better, it's about making incorrect code more likely to be detected earlier in the process (by you, not your customers).

By 'constraint' I mean something the language disallows or at least discourages. Constraints in software development are generally intended to eliminate certain classes of errors. Static typing, immutability, variable scoping, automatic memory management and encapsulation are all examples of constraints, and represent control that the language takes away from the developer (or at least hides behind 'unsafe' APIs).

By 'expressiveness' I mean a rough measurement of how concisely a language can implement functionality. I'm not talking code golf here; I mean more the size of the AST than the actual number of bytes in the source files.

Adding constraints to a language does not necessarily reduce its overall expressiveness, but static typing is one of those constraints that typically does have a negative effect on language expressiveness. Some will argue that static typing is worth it regardless, or that this isn't an inherent problem with static typing, but one that stems from inadequate compilers.

One of the most untapped and misunderstood areas in language design is static metaprogramming. Perhaps this is what you meant by "inadequate compilers", but there is no reason why Java can't provide compile-time metaprogramming. With a comprehensive implementation it can compete directly with dynamic metaprogramming, with the benefits of static analysis etc., which is a game changer.

What often annoys me about proponents of static typing is that they sound like it doesn't have a cost. But it does.

1. It makes syntax more verbose, harder to see the "story" among the "metadata".

2. It makes code less composable, meaning that everything requires complex interfaces to support everything else.

3. It encourages reuse of fewer general types across the codebase, vs narrow scoped situational ones.

4. It optimizes for "everything must be protected from everything" mentality, when in reality you only have like 2-5 possible data entries into your system.

5. It makes tests more complex to write.

6. Compiled languages are less likely to give you a powerful/practical REPL in a live environment.

For some, this loses more than it gains.

Also, albeit I haven't seen this studied, human factor probably plays bigger role here than we realize. Too many road signs ironically make roads less safe due to distraction. When my code looks simple and small, my brain gets to focus better on "what can go wrong specifically here". When the language demands I spend my attention constructing types, and add more and more noise, it leaves me less energy and perspective on just taking a step back and thinking "what's actually happening here".

"write 99% correct code in 1 week and then try to fix it as you go, but your fixes often break existing things for which you didn't have proper tests for. It then takes you total of 2 years to finally reach 100% correct code."

Which one do you choose? It's actually not as simple as 1 year vs 2 years. For a lot of stuff 100% correctness is not critical. 99% correct code can still be a useful product to many, and to you it helps you to quickly validate your idea with users.

However, the difference between static and dynamic typing is not that drastic, if you compare dynamic typing to an expressive statically typed language with good type inference. Comparing, for example, Python to C++ is not really fair as there are too many other things that make C++ more verbose and harder to work with. But if we compare Python to for example F# or even modern C#, the difference is not that big. And dynamic typing has a costs too, just different.

1. "Story" can be harder to understand without "metadata" due to ambiguity that missing information often creates. It's a delicate balance between too much "metadata" and too little.

2. Too much composability can lead to bugs where you compose wrong things or in a wrong way. Generic constraints on interfaces and other metaprogramming features allow flexible and safer composability, but require a bit more tought to create them.

3. Reuse is similar. No constraints on reuse, doesn't protect you from reusing something in corner case where it doesn't work.

4. (depends on how you design your types)

5. Dynamic languages require you to write more tests.

6. F# and C# for example both have REPL.

Quality statically typed language is much harder to create and require more features to be expressive, so there are less of them or they have some warts and they are harder to learn.

It's a game of tradeoffs, where a lot of choices depend on a specific use case.

Whether you write document them or not, types still exist, and you have to think about them.

Dynamic languages make it really hard to answer “what is this thing, and what can I do with it?”. You have to resort through tracing through the callers, to check the union of all possible types that make it to that point. You can’t just check the tests, because there’s no guarantee they accurately reflect all callers. A simple type annotation just gives you the answer directly, no need to play mental interpreter.

[1]: https://max.engineer/maintainable-code

I work on airplanes and cars. The cost of dead people is a lot higher than the cost of developer time. It’s interesting to ask how we can bring development costs down without compromising quality; in my world, it’s not at all interesting to talk about strategically reducing quality. We have the web for that.

You have some level of quality ya'll are used to, that was already achieved by compromise, and you'd like to stay there. How was that original standard established?

On an exponential graph of safety vs effort (where effort goes up a lot for small safety gains) you are willing to put in a lot more points of effort than general industry to achieve a few more points of safety.

Safety-critical code for aviation co-evolved with the use of digital systems; the first few generations were directly inspired by the analog computers they replaced, and many early systems used analog computers as fallbacks on failures of the digital systems. These systems were low enough complexity that team sizes were small and quality was maintained mostly through discipline. As complexity went up, and team sizes went up, and criticality went up (losing those analog fallbacks), people died; so regulations and guidelines were written to try to capture best practices learned both within the domain, and from across the developing fields of software and systems engineering. Every once in a while a bunch more people would die, and we'd learn a bit more, and add more processes to control a new class of defect. The big philosophical question is how much of a washout filter you apply to process accumulation; if you only ever add, you end up with mitigations for almost every class of defects we've discovered so far, but you also end up fossilized; if you allow processes to age out, you open yourself to make the same mistakes again. To make it a less trivial decision, the rest of software engineering has evolved (slowly, and with crazy priorities) at the same time, so some of the classes of defect that certain processes were put in to eliminate are now prevented in practice by more modern tooling and approaches. We now have lockstep processors, and MPUs, and verified compilers, and static analysis tools, and formal verification (within limited areas)... all of which add more process and time, but give the potential for removing previous processes that used humans instead of tooling to give equivalent assurances.

Perhaps. Speaking personally now (instead of trying to generalize for the industry), I feel like almost all of the success stories about increasing code quality per unit time have been stories about putting defect detection and/or elimination left in the development process -- that is, towards more and deeper static analysis of both requirements and code. (The standout exception to this in my mind is the adoption of automatic HIL testing, which one can twist as moving testing activity left a bit, but really stands alone as adding an activity that massively reduced manual testing effort.) The only thing that I can see removing static types is formal proofs over value sets (which, of course, can be construed as types) giving more confidence up front, at the cost of more developer effort to provide the proofs (and write the code in a way amenable to proving) than simple type proofs do.

In the industries I've worked, it's not a huge problem if you have a bug. It's a problem if you can't iterate quickly, try out different approaches quickly, bring results quickly. A few bugs are acceptable as long as they can be fixed. I've even worked at a medical device startup for a bit and it wasn't different, other than at some point there need to happen some ISO compliance things. But the important thing is to get something off the ground in the first place.

Having competent people is a huge time (cost) savings. But if you don't have a process that avoids shipping software even when people make mistakes (or are just bad engineers), you don't have a process that maintains quality. A bad enough team with good processes will cause a project to fail by infinite delays, but that's a minor failure mode compared to shipping bad software. People are human, mostly, and if your quality process depends on competence (or worse, on perfection), you'll eventually slip.

So you're using proof on every line of code you produce?

No, except for trivially (the code is statically and strongly typed, which is a proof mechanism). The set of activities chosen to give confidence in defect rate is varied, but only a few of them would fit either a traditional or formal verification definition of a proof. See DO-178C for more.

We have started to use typed HTML templates in Ruby using Sorbet. It definitely prevents some production bugs (our old HAML templates would have `nil` errors when first going into production).

What I'm proposing is quite a bit more reasonable—so reasonable that versions of it exist in various ecosystems. I just think they can be better and am essentially thinking out loud about how I'd like that to work.

You use `req.cookies['token']` as an example of a subtle bug in JavaScript, but this isn't necessarily an inherent bug to dynamic typing in general. You could, for example, have a key lookup function that requires you to pass in a default value, or callback to handle what occurs if the value is missing.

    req.cookies.get('token', () => {
      throw new AuthFailure("Missing token")
    })

That's one of the insights in WUFFS. Yes, most problems cannot be solved with WUFFS, but, we often don't want to solve those problems so that's fine. WUFFS code, even written by an incompetent noob, categorically does not have most of the notorious problems from systems languages, yet in the hands of an expert it's as fast or faster. It has a very limited purpose, but... why aren't we making more of these special purpose languages with their excellent safety and performance, rather than building so many Swiss Army Chainsaw languages which are more dangerous but slower ?

The specific problems in the example could be solved by changing how the data is represented. Consider the following alternative representation, written in edn:

    {:aws.s3/buckets
     {:aws.region/eu-west
      {:alpha-hourly  {:lifecycle/policy {:delete-after #interval/days 4}}
       :alpha-daily   {:lifecycle/policy {:delete-after #interval/days 30}}
       :alpha-monthly {:lifecycle/policy {:delete-after #interval/days 365}}

       :bravo-hourly  {:lifecycle/policy {:delete-after #interval/days 4}}
       :bravo-daily   {:lifecycle/policy {:delete-after #interval/days 30}}
       :bravo-monthly {:lifecycle/policy {:delete-after #interval/days 365}}}}}

Obviously this doesn't prevent all errors, but it does prevent the specific errors that the RCL example solves, all without introducing a Turing-complete language.

Finding the "right" representation for a given set of data is an interesting problem, but most (all) of the time the representation is specified by someone/something else.

In the past I've written a [preprocessor][1] that adds some power to the representation while avoiding general purpose computation. For example,

    (buckets
      (let ([(regional region (name policy) ...)
             ((['name name] ['region region] ['lifecycle_policy policy]) ...)])
        (regional us-west
          (alpha-hourly (delete_after_seconds 345600))
          (alpha-daily (delete_after_seconds 2592000))
          (alpha-monthly (delete_after_seconds 31536000))
          (bravo-hourly (delete_after_seconds 345600))
          (bravo-daily (delete_after_seconds 259200))
          (bravo-monthly (delete_after_seconds 31536000)))))

[1]: https://github.com/dgoffredo/llama

> This is a terrible assertion. The subjectivity of what is just or unjust would lead to overwhelming violent lawlessness if this were true. Thankfully, we have no such duty.

The United States was founded by people defying unjust tax laws. It wouldn't exist as a country if its people had quietly accepted British law. The idea that it's the duty of Americans to disobey unjust laws is very much in line with its founding.

And when we look to history, the people who advanced freedoms and civil rights, the people we really remember - a great many of them were lawbreakers. Mahatma Gandhi was arrested for defying the British salt tax and colonial rule. Nelson Mandela was arrested for opposing apartheid. Martin Luther King Jr was arrested for breaking segregation laws and marching without a permit. Every person who signed the US Declaration of Independence was committing treason against the British crown.

It is not the duty of every American to establish their own tax laws and form their own confederacy of themselves and do whatever they feel like. You're comparing the establishment of a government to the duty of a citizen. I think you can see how that makes no sense, right?

MLK was a non-violent pacifist, and his march was legal. Overly restrictive permitting laws violate the first amendment and he made that clear by exercising his civil liberties, lawfully, in the face of disagreement and unlawful arrest.

Gandhi was arrested by an opposition government. He broke none of his nation's laws.

Mandela fought a war. He participated in revolution. Are we all supposed to lead revolutions? Every week a new AR-15 carrying psychopath should shoot people up that he disagrees with? - Obviously not.

Disagreeing peacefully with unjust laws is a protected right. But violence and lawlessness is absolutely not a duty. It's not even advisable.

And promoting it as such is completely senseless in a country where peaceful discourse is a protected right. You already won! You have a peaceful way to make a difference! Why would you break laws to make a statement when you can already make a statement without risking a prison sentence?

None of the people you've listed had that option.

I'm very much horrified that a clearly educated person could arrive at such a misguided and dangerous conclusion.

Does that mean that disobeying an unjust law is acceptable if a lot of people disobey? How many makes it acceptable?

> MLK was a non-violent pacifist, and his march was legal.

Not according to Circuit Judge W. A. Jenkins Jr., who issued an injunction that led to MLK's arrest in Birmingham. Nor were the sit-ins he participated in legal according to the segregation laws at the time.

> Gandhi was arrested by an opposition government. He broke none of his nation's laws.

India at the time was ruled by the British. If we're going to say that colonized or conquered nations don't count, where do we draw the line? How recent does the conquest have to be?

> Mandela fought a war. He participated in revolution. Are we all supposed to lead revolutions?

So again this seems like it comes down to amount of support, at least in your view. People can disobey unjust laws as long as they have enough people agreeing with them. Is that correct?

> And promoting it as such is completely senseless in a country where peaceful discourse is a protected right. You already won! You have a peaceful way to make a difference! Why would you break laws to make a statement when you can already make a statement without risking a prison sentence?

Because non-violent civil disobedience is often more effective than discourse.

Rosa Parks broke the law and was arrested, and that ultimately lead to the law being declared unconstitutional. But if no-one broke the law, would it have been overturned as quickly?

MLK went on marches that there were injunctions against, and participated in sit-ins that were against the segregation laws at the time. Would the campaign for civil rights been as successful if there was no civil disobedience at all?

Suffragettes like Emmeline Pankhurst broke the law to draw attention to their cause. Would women have gotten the vote as soon if they obeyed the law?

No it doesn't. The establishment of government can be done without warfare in most cases, despite the nation's history. There was no framework for diplomacy or democracy within the kingdom. Your argument looks more like you've jumped to violence and lawlessness, even given alternatives. That's just bloodlust. That's not MLK. That's not Ghandi. You know that.

> India at the time was ruled by the British. If we're going to say that colonized or conquered nations don't count, where do we draw the line? How recent does the conquest have to be?

I won't entertain this example because it's irrelevant to the discussion. Is the US occupied by a foreign military, or are you just ignoring the political options at your disposal because you'd prefer to focus on how fast we can jump to arms and shoot each other? Let's skip this tangent.

>So again this seems like it comes down to amount of support

My argument against this example is that it's a last resort, while you're presenting it as the option of choice. A duty, no less.

>Because non-violent civil disobedience is often more effective than discourse.

It's sometimes more effective in the absence of alternatives. And non-violent civil obedience is most often effective and in most cases far more persuasive with the majority. Prioritize your efforts. No need to get violent when we can be disobedient. No need to get lawless when we can participate in democracy. Even fools won't follow a fool.

>Rosa Parks broke the law and was arrested, and that ultimately lead to the law being declared unconstitutional.

It was already unconstitutional. She didn't break the law. The judicial branch doesn't make new laws, it interprets existing ones. Her disobedience was lawful, and only required because she lacked a platform to reach the courts.

>(MLK...) Would the campaign for civil rights been as successful if there was no civil disobedience at all?

Same thing here, it was already unconstitutional to prevent peaceful demonstrations. Opposing local government with the law on your side to get the attention of a superior governing body is disobedience but as we can see by the court rulings, it's in fact not unlawful.

Even if it were unlawful behavior, it is not a duty. I have no imperative to go looking for laws to break, and anyone who tells me I have to is sick. I'm not MLK. There's 10 examples in history that this panned out for. I'm not such a megalomaniac as to think I'm going to be one of them. And I certainly don't think we all are.

It's not a duty. The claim is simply absurd.

Why do you assume that disobeying unjust laws automatically implies violence?

The only example I've given that involves violence is the American War of Independence, and only then because it's particularly pertinent to the idea that Americans have a duty to disobey unjust laws. All my other examples have been non-violent civil disobedience.

When someone tells me that they believe they have a duty to disobey unjust laws, my first thought isn't that they intend to be violent; it's that they intend to engage in non-violent civil disobedience. You can believe that you have a duty to disobey unjust laws and also believe that violence is a last resort.

> Is the US occupied by a foreign military, or are you just ignoring the political options at your disposal because you'd prefer to focus on how fast we can jump to arms and shoot each other?

The US was founded by foreign invaders. This is why I ask how recent a conquest needs to be.

By the time Gandhi was protesting in the 1930s, India had been under British rule for over 170 years. If Gandhi is morally justified to defy laws set by the invading British, then Native Americans are surely morally justified to defy laws set by the invading US government.

And again, you jump to the idea that defying unjust laws automatically means shooting people.

> It's sometimes more effective in the absence of alternatives. And non-violent civil obedience is most often effective and in most cases far more persuasive with the majority. Prioritize your efforts. No need to get violent when we can be disobedient.

Then we effectively agree. How long do you think we should give a government to fix an unjust law before engaging in civil disobedience and disobeying that law? Presumably it depends on the severity of the injustice, but I'm interested to get a feel for your intuition on this.

> It was already unconstitutional. She didn't break the law. The judicial branch doesn't make new laws, it interprets existing ones. Her disobedience was lawful, and only required because she lacked a platform to reach the courts.

So is someone justified in breaking the law if they believe that law will be overturned by a higher one? What if they're wrong?

Also, how would we test laws for constitutionality if no-one ever breaks those laws? Surely there needs to be something that brings the case in the first place.

> Even if it were unlawful behavior, it is not a duty. I have no imperative to go looking for laws to break, and anyone who tells me I have to is sick.

So if someone tells you that you have a duty to behave morally, that person is sick? Doesn't that include the vast majority of Americans, who at least in theory follow religions that advocate people act morally above all else?

You seem to acknowledge that civil disobedience, even violence, can be justified as a last resort. Yet you also seem to hold legal obligations higher than moral ones, and are dismissive of people who'd choose morality over legality.

You find yourself in a reality of consequences wherein choosing to break laws is a really bad option in nearly all cases.

Because of that, one cannot call it a duty. A duty obliges ALL citizens to break laws. ALL and seldom/last resort are mutually exclusive, logically.

You have found yourself in contradiction. You can't both believe that breaking laws is a last resort and also believe that it is a duty based on subjective criteria like morality.

It is a logical impossibility.

Can you break unjust laws? Yes. Is that ever the best option? Yes.

Is that a duty? No.

It's almost NEVER a good choice. It is a last resort. It was a good choice in extremely rare cases and a terrible choice for the majority of humanity in the majority of cases so often that it's justified to generalize that it's never going to be good for you as an individual.

You need to be a megalomaniac to believe it's going to be good for you. That you are somehow special like MLK. And let's not forget it wasn't good for him either. Sadly.

Don't let your star struck glamorization of moral icons and historical outliers lead you to make statistically bad decisions. These examples are famous moral icons BECAUSE they are outliers. They aren't MORAL outliers, they are rare examples of cases in society where morality was not overwhelmingly agreed upon. That's the expected course of growth for nearly all legal frameworks of justice.

You are most probably not an outlier and when you are you won't know that you are because legal framework is derived from the same majority opinion from which your understanding of morality originates anyway.

It's safe to assume, if you are breaking laws in a democracy, that you are on the wrong side of morality because the laws themselves, in a democracy, originate in the majority's moral agreement.

There is no way in hell, given that the above is true, that it should be a duty.

That rhetoric of duty throughout history has been used to charge the public for revolutions, and most especially violent ones. It is by no means a rational, or scientific conclusion. That is the objective reality, sir.

Don't be a jackass. Obey the law. You're not smarter than everyone that made the law. When you are, we'll tell you. That's democracy.

I don't take the phrase "a duty to disobey unjust laws" as literally as you do. If it's more effective to overturn the law through legal means, then of course do that first.

Calling something a "duty" doesn't mean you get to turn your brain off and follow it blindly. Ships have a duty to help people in distress at sea, but they obviously need to first ensure that they don't put themselves in danger.

> That you are somehow special like MLK.

Believing that you need to be 'special' to act morally is one of the main causes of widespread societal injustice. As MLK said:

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"

> Don't be a jackass. Obey the law. You're not smarter than everyone that made the law. When you are, we'll tell you. That's democracy.

I was in favor of gay marriage long before it became law, or even was supported by the majority of people. Yet now it is. So the law at the time was ultimately wrong and I was ultimately right. By your definition, doesn't that mean I am smarter than everyone who made the law?

I don't think you need to be smarter than lawmakers to identify unjust laws. You need only look at the progressive causes of today to find the moral norms of tomorrow.

You didn't have to break any laws for me to help you vote for gay marriage. We all knew it was wrong that's why it's legal. Not because you punched someone or burned a car, or whatever illegal things you did, or in your revised view, advised people to do using the wrong definition of the word "duty."

Next time just be patient. Wrong laws take time to fix. And they take longer when you derail society into thinking that people who support gay marriage are violent law breakers.

Democracy requires that citizens have a duty to obey the law. Not a duty to break it.

Gay marriage is now the law in your example. I don't want everyone opposed to that law to go ahead and break it! Right? Wouldn't it be better if they just went ahead and tried to overturn it legally so that we normal people can do normal things like not letting them?

So, no, you don't appear to me to be the most intelligent person on the block. Certainly not enough to carry the cause for us tactfully. I wouldn't follow you. Neither would the vast majority of Americans, thankfully.

And don't tell people it's their duty to do illegal things, that is also illegal, especially when it leads to violence.

Just accept that you're not smarter. Have humility. Chill out. Get a law degree if you want to help. Don't be annoying. Don't be an idiot. Don't break the law. Have some respect for society. You didn't single handedly create it. Stop acting like you did.

We all created it; and the laws that run it. And we all need to come together and discuss what laws fit for us today. And we can't do that if you go around breaking them and acting like the conversations we agree on don't matter.

No, I'm pointing out that we need to use our brains when considering glib generalizations.

If you want a more accurate phrase, you could say that:

"People have a moral duty to oppose unjust laws, beginning with legal avenues of opposition, followed by non-violence civil disobedience, followed by violent uprising as a last resort, all while giving a reasonable period of time between steps that is governed by the severity of the injustice being perpetrated, weighed against the actions being taken to prevent it."

However, that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. The point of a phrase like "Americans have a duty to disobey unjust laws" is to trade precision for concision. It's up to you to extrapolate what people mean, or just ask them to clarify. I'm guessing this is something you find difficult?

> You didn't have to break any laws for me to help you vote for gay marriage. We all knew it was wrong that's why it's legal.

What do you mean by this? It was only in 2010 that the majority of Americans finally believed that same-sex marriage should be allowed.

If we accept that same-sex marriage is moral, then we must also accept that the majority of Americans prior to 2010 were wrong. Similarly, people were wrong in the past about racial segregation, women's rights and so forth.

Doesn't this indicate to you that morality is not just what the majority think?

> And they take longer when you derail society into thinking that people who support gay marriage are violent law breakers.

Why are you so obsessed with bringing violence into this? At every point I've emphasized that violence is a last resort, and that breaking the law does not automatically imply being violent.

> Just accept that you're not smarter.

You've missed my point.

I didn't say I was smarter than lawmakers; I pointed out that by your criteria I was, thereby implying that your criteria was flawed.

It was a self-deprecating rhetorical device, but I see it flew over your head, so let me try to speak more plainly:

I don't believe that morality is defined by the majority, because to do so would imply that it was moral in 1950 to persecute people by the color of their skin, and that it was moral in 1980 to persecute people by their sexual orientation. I reject that.

I do believe that people have a duty to act morally, even if this means breaking the law. That's not to say that people shouldn't exhaust legal means of protest first; legal protests are less personally risky and in free societies can be very effective. But I can certainly think of scenarios where doing the right thing would necessitate breaking the law, and in these situations, people have a duty to do what's right.

It's not difficult, it's incorrect. It means something completely different.

>Doesn't this indicate to you that morality is not just what the majority think?

No. It indicates that there is no such thing! And you're not qualified to be the arbiter of the subjective devices we call societal justice and morality all by yourself. You must be convincing to the many. And only then can you have a decent hope of being considered moral.

>I don't believe that morality is defined by the majority.

Then you agree with all the most reviled villains in history who also knew better what is moral for everyone else.

>...would imply that it was moral in 1950 to persecute people by the color of their skin...

Again you're assuming that the law dictated what was moral, but it's the opposite causal relationship. Law follows morality over many years. Morality doesn't follow the law. But we must work within the law to adjust it over time to fit what the all consider moral. Until that happens it won't change, and especially not typically by violence. Just the opposite, violence can be used by the law to empower itself, but it cannot be used by the law breaker in the same way because it brands you a villain damaging your ability to convince the majority. That's because the majority gave that power to the law, not to you. Only in a democracy is that true.

>I do believe people have a duty to act morally...

Me too! But clearly that's subjective. Here we are disagreeing on what that is. The law was invented to settle exactly these such cases.

>Why are you so obsessed with bringing violence into this?

To me it looks like you're obsessed with bringing violence into this, and you haven't thought it out far enough to see that.

Let's play this out. You break the law. People, known as law enforcement, who chose of their own free will a violent career path will arrive with loaded firearms. These individuals are intentionally chosen for their lack of mental ability and for their willingness to follow orders and endure violent and dangerous situations, aggressively.

I can guess what the next step looks like. Don't play stupid. So can you.

Does this mean that you have no internal conscience? You just go along with what the majority of society considers to be moral?

You've indicated you believe that same-sex marriage is moral, but before that became a majority opinion, did you believe the opposite?

>> I don't believe that morality is defined by the majority.

> Then you agree with all the most reviled villains in history who also knew better what is moral for everyone else.

You mean like Jesus of Nazareth or Buddha?

The belief that morality isn't defined by the majority is an extremely common viewpoint. Probably the most common viewpoint, since its one shared by every major religion.

> Let's play this out. You break the law. People, known as law enforcement, who chose of their own free will a violent career path will arrive with loaded firearms. These individuals are intentionally chosen for their lack of mental ability and for their willingness to follow orders and endure violent and dangerous situations, aggressively.

So America's police force is so corrupt and violent that they'd think nothing of gunning down unarmed protestors in cold blood.

Why do you think that following the law would stop this?

I'm honestly trying to understand your thought process here. On the one hand you imply that most police officers are a hair trigger away from firing on a crowd; on the other, you seem to be insinuating that a individual's adherence to the law is an absolute defense.

As pertains to the law. Yes!

>did you believe the opposite?

Did I behave the opposite would be the question. You're talking about duty which implies action. No. I did not break any laws.

>You mean like Jesus of Nazareth or Buddha?

There is no evidence of any Jesus, but that's another discussion. The Buddha is a fantastic example of a man who advised the acceptance of all beliefs in society, showing humility and exemplifying how his beliefs were not the end all doctrine for morality. An opposition to invasion isn't relevant here because invasion isn't an attempt at a societal agreement on morality.

>The belief that morality isn't defined by the majority is an extremely common viewpoint.

No it isn't. All religions attempt to align society on a singular "higher" shared morality provided by the church, which throughout history represented their state and their justice system too.

>police force is so corrupt and violent that they'd think nothing of gunning down unarmed protestors in cold blood.

I didn't say corrupt. But violent, yes. Unarmed protesters aren't breaking any laws.

But if they fail to move when instructed, breaking the law, then that definition no longer applies and they are indeed physically relocated by increasingly violent means.

>Why do you think that following the law would stop this?

The law is the closest thing to a moral agreement of the majority. You're acting against that agreement when you break the law. Any amount of force used by police to protect that moral agreement becomes easy to justify in court. How many cops are sitting in jail? It's not a big number. That should tell you all you need to know. You're giving the opponent a justification for violence if they want it. And as I said before, they are selected from a pool of people who want it. That's a job requirement.

No individual agrees with all laws. But society must agree with that near moral agreement known as the law. It's the best we have.

When people don't have that near moral agreement, the fabric of society is degraded into anarchy, which empowers the most violent. And that's so much worse, isn't it?

> As pertains to the law. Yes!

I'm interested in where you draw the line.

For instance, suppose a doctor is treating an underage rape victim whose pregnancy would put their life in danger, but the doctor practices in a state that outlaws abortion. The doctor decides to prescribe abortion pills anyway, breaking the law but following their oath to do no harm. Do you believe the doctor acted morally or immorally in this case?

To be clear, this isn't me attempting to catch you out - I'm just trying to understand what you personally believe. Are there any instances where you would agree that breaking the law is the right thing to do?

I'm also curious how you view changes to beliefs over time. Was it moral in 1950 to discriminate based on race and sex, because that was the majority opinion at the time? Or is it only today's majority opinion that matters? And if so, what happens in the future when the opinions of the majority shift further?

> No it isn't. All religions attempt to align society on a singular "higher" shared morality provided by the church, which throughout history represented their state and their justice system too.

Christians, Jews and Muslims would say that God is the highest moral authority. That's core to their faith.

How much society influences their interpretation of God's word is up for debate, but their belief is that morality does not stem from majority opinion; it stems from the word of God.

> I didn't say corrupt. But violent, yes. Unarmed protesters aren't breaking any laws.

Unarmed protesters certainly can break laws! You don't need a weapon to block off a highway, break into a building, or deface a wall with graffiti.

But if the police aren't corrupt, then why do you suggest that they're likely to shoot? Because they're stupid or under-trained?

> The law is the closest thing to a moral agreement of the majority. You're acting against that agreement when you break the law. Any amount of force used by police to protect that moral agreement becomes easy to justify in court. How many cops are sitting in jail? It's not a big number. That should tell you all you need to know.

Sure; it tells me that the law is unjust when it comes to punishing police officers who commit crimes.

> No individual agrees with all laws. But society must agree with that near moral agreement known as the law. It's the best we have.

I don't disagree that society needs laws to function, but there are also many laws that are unjust, and they won't change without societal pressure.

Obviously the safest way to change laws is through legal protest and democratic reform, but that isn't always the most effective way. Breaking the law is a good way to make headlines and spread awareness.

Another issue with democratic reform is that democracies are not all equally representative. A system like the USA is less representative than, say, Switzerland. In other words, its more difficult in the US to change laws than in some other democracies, even if the majority agree the law should be changed.

As long as is necessary to be lawful, civil and non-violent.

> The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/schedule/1/part...

While the US has restrictions on speech, there are far far fewer restrictions.

The "uncodified constitution" that we have doesn't guarantee you "Freedom of Speech" either. I've read the relevant parts of the constitution in the UK. It gives Parliamentarians the right to unlimited speech.

Finally "Freedom of Expression" and "Freedom of Speech" are not the same thing.

"This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."

As you point out, all countries have some restrictions on speech. We can obviously agree that somewhere like North Korea has no freedom of speech, in the same way we can agree the Moon is clearly outside our atmosphere. But in the margins it comes down to where you draw the line.

There's also a difference when it comes to theory and practice. In theory the US is more permissive; it lacks the ECHR's caveats that permit restricting speech to protect health, morals and territorial integrity. But in practice the US is rated as coming below the UK in the World Press Freedom Index and the Freedom of Expression Index. The US government has a lot of power to lean on organisations and individuals to stifle speech, which of course it's currently doing.

The former includes things like how much editorial control journalists are subjected to, the right of journalists to unionize, the cost to print/distribute newspapers, whether journalists are subject to economic constraints (like being dependent on advertising money), etc.

The later is not only far more opaque in how it measures things, relying on a panel of country-specific experts, but it also more press/media related and includes things like media bias and print/media perspectives which is more about diversity of press opinion than freedom of expression (arguably, media bias shouldn't negative affect a freedom of expression index unless it is government imposed).

A more objective comparison of freedom of expression/speech would rate how the government would respond to specific instances of public and private speech - like say calling for the king/president/prime minister/etc. to be replaced, posting nudes (or going nude), blaspheme a particular religion, publishing embarrassing and reputation harming information about a celebrity/someone powerful/a judge/a religious figure, playing loud music outside, refusing to speak when ordered to by a police/judge/legislature/ruler, wearing the clothes various sexes, etc.

It might be difficult to create perfectly equivalent speech across countries, but I think one could get close enough.

Pointing at extreme examples like North Korea and pretending their isn't an issue because we are better them is classic whataboutism.

I also don't care about what some random index that people pull out of their backsides. I care about the legality. Freedom of Speech in the US is enshrined in the constitution. It is not enshrined anywhere in UK law.

As for the section you quoted, that is made effectively moot by the exceptions that I originally quoted.

Generally I am pretty tired of people engaging in apologia for the British state.

I mean, I agree with you on that, but it's a circular argument.

My comparison to North Korea wasn't whataboutism; it was intended to illustrate that while there are obvious points for agreement (i.e. that the DPRK obviously has no freedom of speech), for many countries the comparison is less black and white. Which restrictions on free speech can you accept and still call it free speech?

I also respectfully disagree with you that only legality matters. If a government is actively punishing those who speak against it, even if it is strictly legal for them to do so, then I'd question whether that country is has freer speech in practice. Few developed countries have a government as hostile to the press as the current US administration!

I certainly don't align with the British government on many issues, encryption backdoors being one of them, but framing free speech as a binary is, I think, ultimately unhelpful. All countries have restrictions on speech, and drawing a line upon what is in reality a gradient over-simplifies the issue.

I personally agree that morality and territorial integrity aren't adequate reasons to restrict speech, and I'd say that a country without those restrictions has freer speech (from a legal perspective) than those with them. But again, it's a relative comparison; I wouldn't say that a country had no free speech if they did have those restrictions.

No. My point is that in the UK we do not have freedom of speech enshrined in constitution or law.

I believe Freedom of Expression is weasel words to obfuscate the conversation as now you have an additional legal concept in the mix, with some nebulous definition that reads like a Terms and Conditions from one of the big tech players.

That is it.

> My comparison to North Korea wasn't whataboutism; it was intended to illustrate that while there are obvious points for agreement (i.e. that the DPRK obviously has no freedom of speech), for many countries the comparison is less black and white. Which restrictions on free speech can you accept and still call it free speech?

It is the fact that it is brought up at all is engaging in whataboutism.

Why are you even mentioning NK? Why do you care what old Kim Jong does? Really think about why you are even mentioning North Korea. I don't expect or want an answer BTW.

> I also respectfully disagree with you that only legality matters. If a government is actively punishing those who speak against it, even if it is strictly legal for them to do so, then I'd question whether that country is has freer speech in practice. Few developed countries have a government as hostile to the press as the current US administration!

I don't care about the left/right slop politics. I don't care who the "villian of the week" is. Most politics is presented to you in the same way as Scooby Doo.

Why do you care about what Donald Trump is doing in the US? Please actually think about why you are even mentioning it. I don't expect (or want) an answer BTW.

> I certainly don't align with the British government on many issues, encryption backdoors being one of them, but framing free speech as a binary is, I think, ultimately unhelpful. All countries have restrictions on speech, and drawing a line upon what is in reality a gradient over-simplifies the issue

The very fact that you are making this argument about gradients of freedom, and everyone has restrictions etc. Is literally the issue. The conversation about it has been obfuscated deliberately.

I don't care what restrictions they have in France, NK, China or anywhere else. That is their business.

I care about the restrictions in the UK, why they exist and whether they are valid.

As for the encryption back-doors, why do you think they actually want to do it? GCHQ just happens to be looking for more developers BTW! I know this for a fact because I had one of their recruiters phone me. I told him what I thought about the British state and not to ever call me again.

We do, in the Human Rights Act 1998.

Now, you've said you don't believe that the definition of freedom of expression in the HRA and ECHR lines up with your definition of free speech. That's fine. You are of course welcome to that opinion.

But you act as though your definition of free speech is authoritative, and yet you also have not defined it. When I've prompted you to narrow it down, you avoid the question.

So let me ask you extremely directly: what's your definition of "free speech"? Or to be more precise: which restrictions on speech are allowed, and which are forbidden, in order for a country to have "free speech" in your book?

No we don't. I've explained why. It even says in the text of the law the caveats it carves out.

But you can believe whatever fantasy you like. I am tired of trying to convince the fish that they are indeed swimming in water. The funniest thing is that until you've had it affect something/someone you like or respect, you won't change your mind.

BTW, I used to make all of the same arguments as you do btw about the Human Rights act and the ECHR etc. I realised after actually reading them, and seeing what actually happened and how the state operates, that what I believe was all bollox and I had been deceived.

> Now, you've said you don't believe that the definition of freedom of expression in the HRA and ECHR lines up with your definition of free speech. That's fine. You are of course welcome to that opinion.

It doesn't line up with any definition of free speech because it is a separate legal concept. I've already explained why they are different.

I happen to believe that legal concept is done deliberately so people like yourself will engage in this time wasting discussions about what is and isn't free expression. That is evidenced in this very discussion.

Ask yourself. If you happen to support Palestinian Action and do so publicly how long until police visit you or you are put on a watch list? Probably not long.

> But you act as though your definition of free speech is authoritative, and yet you also have not defined it. When I've prompted you to narrow it down, you avoid the question.

If I provide you with any sort of definition someone else will say "well that definition isn't correct", all of which ultimately deflects from the issue and is another waste of time.

The issue is that speech is restricted in the UK. It is done selectively. Some viewpoints are allowed by the British state and other aren't. Some of this is done directly, some of this is done indirectly.

e.g. There was a super injunction granted sometime last year to hide information about a large number of Afghan migrants / refugees / nationals being resettled after the Taliban took back control. Therefore the public, the press (little good they are) and presumably oppositional political parties couldn't scrutinise these plans. These types of super injunctions happen all the time.

What good is it that someone it is written on a piece of paper that you are legally able to have opposing view (as long as they fit inside the Overton window), when they literally hide information that is important for you to have any sort of informed view from you?

I asked you in my previous reply to go away and think about why certain narratives are presented to you. I never mentioned Trump, yet you seemed to want to talk about him without explicitly saying his name.

Someone somewhere wants you to worry about the press freedoms in the US. This is likely to distract you from more important things like the US have just landed some strategic nuclear bombers in the UK ahead of peace talks between Ukraine/Russia.

> So let me ask you extremely directly: what's your definition of "free speech"? Or to be more precise: which restrictions on speech are allowed, and which are forbidden, in order for a country to have "free speech" in your book?

It is irrelevant, I've explained why above. Any nation state will suppress your speech when it deems it to be necessary and will invent excuses as why it has to do it. That is the reality of it. How you choose to deal with that reality is your own choosing.

You believe that the HRA does not grant "free speech" due to some, or all, of the exceptions.

You refuse to define which specific exceptions you have a problem with, or define what you mean by "free speech", because if you did, people could argue against you.

That's all fine, but I wish you'd led with that. Next time write something like:

"I have my own definition of 'free speech' which I will not share, and according to this definition the UK has no freedom of speech."

To which the only response can be: "OK."

> they have raided newspapers offices and destroyed data, arrested journalists and taken people's private information at borders

This does not happen in many countries.

The situation in the UK is particularly bad I think because the legal situation is a hodgepodge of a missing written constitution, interweaving of the government branches (as I understand, the government can sometimes ignore the courts or is above them), the libel laws, and while still (for now) a member of the ECHR which gives some guarantees, it's rulings are always (many years) after the fact. Crucially, the UK is a very class-based society. The ruling class gets what it wants and it does not want free speech.

Like many countries, the UK government makes the laws and the courts interpret them. The government can't ignore the courts, but can introduce new legislation.

The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries, but free speech, for the most part, has broad public support. There's a lot of discussion around where the line should be drawn, however, and the government tends toward a more restrictive interpretation, while the opposition tends to oppose censorship.

There is a strong element of class in the UK, but this is often misinterpreted. Class in the UK is not particularly fluid. You can have power and wealth, and still not be considered upper class. In the current government, only a minority of MPs are upper class, and of the current cabinet, only one attended a private school (a typical indicator of being upper-class).

The raiding of the Guardian over the Snowden leaks was justified as recovering stolen national security information, and was widely (and rightly) criticised by the press at the time. It's not a common occurrence.

Now, I don't mean to justify the UK government's behaviour. The government bows to the whims of GHCQ far more than it should do, particularly on any technological issue, where it seems GHCQ is the only one ever consulted. Obviously putting backdoors in messaging software, or raiding newpapers, is both incredible stupid and has ultimately lead to the UK government backing down.

But that, I think, is the important part - that it backed down. The UK has a lot of flaws, and certainly isn't at the top of the press freedom list, but it's also consistently in the upper quartile (and notably above Slovakia, if you want a reference point). Looking from the outside, you see the exceptions and controversies - the parts where the system fails - which makes it easy to get a distorted picture of the situation.

And yet their policies are broadly right-wing conservative. Point is the government itself does not have to consist of upper-class people for the class to steer and benefit from the policies. Why is that? Well...

> The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries

We really don't know that because the population has been massaged by right-wing propaganda for (at least) decades. I remember even in the 90's reading Financial Times or something like that and the opinion articles about the EU were quite simply lying. Can imagine it was even worse in the Daily Mail etc. The result regarding the EU is well known, but I think this applies to everything; the population seems to lean conservative because the ruling class prefers it like that and the media owners oblige.

To return to the free speech/press freedom issue, it's the same again: it only works as far as the ruling class allows that. One obvious example are the past climate and current anti-genocide protests, where the government heavily abuses anti-terrorism laws to limit free speech.

edit: from today, this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/23/private-eye-ca...

Stuff like this simply does not happen here.

I'm not going to defend the actions of the UK government, but I will ask that you give time for the courts to do their work before passing final judgement. In the case of the article you linked, for example, the man was arrested but not charged, and in the case of Palestine Action as a whole, there's an ongoing court case against the government's ban, which seems likely to succeed.

Obviously these incidents shouldn't have occurred in the first place, and I fully agree that the government is abusing the law to get its way. But the actions of the home office don't necessarily reflect the country as a whole. They don't even necessarily reflect the Labour Party as a whole.

Yes but the issue is already the government acting like this. They most probably know they are in the wrong and are acting anyway, because they want to quell the dissent. The damage is already done.

> They don't even necessarily reflect the Labour Party as a whole.

Of course. I still think about the Labour as 'the good ones', compared with the Tories (or Reform) anyway. OTOH I think this does reflect the country as a whole and not only the current government. That is my feeling from living in the UK some time ago.

I will end this saying that IMO the main difference in speech/press freedom between the UK and say Slovakia is that the UK imagines itself a powerful country fully in control of its destiny, and this illusion enables executive overreach. While Slovakia is a small country thrown around by external forces so much that only the dumbest politicians waste their energy trying to limit press freedom.

It may be that I'm conditioned to expect the Home Office to be authoritarian screw-ups that need to be babysat by the courts and principled backbenchers. But you're right that, ideally, the government shouldn't be doing this in the first place.

However, it seems to be the case that, even amongst conservatives, the view in the UK is that the government is infringing on free speech.

If Russia were serious about self-determination of the Dombas and Crimea regions, they'd have first proposed a referendum audited by international observers, and pressured Ukraine diplomatically to accept.

Instead, Russia chose to invade. They started the war, and they can stop it and withdraw at any time they choose. Every death from the Ukraine war is entirely on Russia's head.

It's a fact. A free and fair referendum cannot be held by an occupying force, because their very presence biases the results.

This is true even if the occupiers are honorable. It goes double for a leader like Putin, who imprisons and assassinates his political opponents.

> U.S. invades other countries whenever it likes. > > Why can't Russia do just the same?

In both cases it's wrong. But if you want the realpolitik answer, it's because the US has a competent military.

> If Ukraine feels so lucky as to fight a Goliath - let Zelensky be that David and send as many soldiers to death as he please until the unrest inside his country ends his presidency or the other side's forceful actions lead to the same result. Harsh, but kinda fair. Know your fights. Don't fight with a Goliath alone, if you are a tiny David, and if you are - group up with others and bow to them if the success of your very existence becomes dependent on their help.

David won against Goliath, remember? That's the whole point of the parable. At least find a metaphor that supports your argument.

Besides, isn't finding support exactly what Zelensky's been doing all this time? The US may be withdrawing its support, but European support is increasing. And in terms of population, economy, and military spending, Europe is a lot bigger than Russia.

You say Ukraine should know their fights, but doesn't that apply more to Russia? They expected the war to be over in 3 days, and it's been 3 years. Putin vastly overestimated the strength of his own army, and underestimated the resistance Ukraine would put up.

How much longer can Russia's reserves actually last? Those steadily rising Russian interest rates indicate an economy that's edging ever closer to collapse.

No, facts can't contain undefined properties like "free and fair".

Who should decide whether a referendum is free and fair?

No one.

It's basically the question of whether people of that region agree or disagree with the referendum enough as to defend their position with force.

As you can see - Crimeans are quite content they are part of Russia and not in ruins under a nazi regime.

(That's also an opinion, the fact is that there's just no unrest.)

> But if you want the realpolitik answer, it's because the US has a competent military.

If Russia's military is so incompetent - Zelensky is going to win ~ soon, let's wait.

> David won against Goliath, remember? That's the whole point of the parable. At least find a metaphor that supports your argument.

You missed the point: Zelensky sees himself as a David from the metaphor, but reality is that he is a clown, not a leader, not even a politician, but rather a parody to one.

> And in terms of population, economy, and military spending, Europe is a lot bigger than Russia.

Yep. But Russia is at war and Europe is only cuckoldily fighting right now. Let Europe get into full blown war if they want to participate so much.

> You say Ukraine should know their fights, but doesn't that apply more to Russia? They expected the war to be over in 3 days, and it's been 3 years. Putin vastly overestimated the strength of his own army, and underestimated the resistance Ukraine would put up.

They got Ukraine military in the chokehold at the start of the operation, then Zelensky agreed to proceed with diplomacy and Russia pulled its forces back.

But then Ukraine got some spoken assurances from US and EU of receiving money and military help from them. And then Russia had to start liberation from the border again. It goes quite slow for a few reasons: first of all, Russia isn't in a hurry: it gets really valuable first hand experience in modern warfare, the kind that almost none gets (even US hasn't fought a real war (without bombarding the area to the smithereens first) for quite a long time). Another reason is that Russia successfully mobilized its economy for war time. Just in case it has to go into a bigger war now/later, but it needs time to produce more new weaponry. Another reason for going slow is that Russia isn't really fighting a genocidal war, where everyone on the other side is seen as an enemy, they just demilitarize Ukraine, fighting just its soldiers, trying not to harm civilians, and that's not so simple, actually.

Free and fair are very much defined. It's why in democratic countries we have election observers and secret ballots, to remove or at least reduce possibilities of voter coercion.

> If Russia's military is so incompetent - Zelensky is going to win ~ soon, let's wait.

It remains to be seen whether Russia is incompetent enough to fail completely. They still have 4 times the population as Ukraine.

> You missed the point: Zelensky sees himself as a David from the metaphor, but reality is that he is a clown, not a leader, not even a politician, but rather a parody to one.

He's done remarkably well defending his country for a clown, don't you think?

> Yep. But Russia is at war and Europe is only cuckoldily fighting right now. Let Europe get into full blown war if they want to participate so much.

In that, we agree. Russia's barely making progress in a war with an opponent that, on paper, shouldn't have lasted a week. I'd be very interested to see how they do against a military with 4 times their funding.

> They got Ukraine military in the chokehold at the start of the operation, then Zelensky agreed to proceed with diplomacy and Russia pulled its forces back.

Oh, is that the Kremlin's reason for all those humiliating retreats in the initial months of the war?

> It goes quite slow for a few reasons: first of all, Russia isn't in a hurry: it gets really valuable first hand experience in modern warfare, the kind that almost none gets (even US hasn't fought a real war (without bombarding the area to the smithereens first) for quite a long time).

Ah, I see. So the 700,000 casualties Russia has incurred so far was worth it to get valuable, first-hand experience. Presumably the first lesson is: don't incur 700,000 casualties when fighting against a country a quarter your size.

> Another reason is that Russia successfully mobilized its economy for war time.

A "war time economy" comes at the cost of the civilian economy. Every man sent to Ukraine is one who can't work at home. Every piece of ordinance, every destroyed tank and plane, represents wasted investment that could be used to create civilian goods and services.

You need only look at the steadily rising interest rates to see the signs of an economy that's spending more than it's earning. Russia has poured billions into the Ukraine war; so has Europe, of course, but Europe's economy is 14 times larger. Europe can afford to outspend Russia.

> Another reason for going slow is that Russia isn't really fighting a genocidal war, where everyone on the other side is seen as an enemy, they just demilitarize Ukraine, fighting just its soldiers, trying not to harm civilians, and that's not so simple, actually.

Given the devastation to cities in Ukraine, they're very bad at avoiding civilian infrastructure. I know the Russian army's weapons are outdated and inaccurate, but are they really that inept?

When stopping means the genocide of your people and you personally being tortured and murdered, “stopping” isn’t really an option, is it.