No, you can't. You have to procure a license to DJ publicly. A Public Performance License is offered by most of the major music conglomerates, or you have to find a venue that has or will pay for such a license. Profiting off infringement worsens your situation legally, but any copying and distribution by any means of copyrighted material is illegal without a license.

Several western countries could kill their more extreme parties overnight simply by enacting a few reforms with immigration and/or affordability.

Foreign propaganda in democracies is as old as democracies themselves. It is by no means anything new; foreign influence campaigns spent enormous sums and labor trying to sway democracies from the very beginning - often very successfully. I don’t see why it’s any different for it to be published on Facebook instead of laundered through print media and rumor mills. At the end of the day you either recognize these problems and appreciate that trusting your electorate/having a liberal democracy is the best option we have compared with the alternatives…or you don’t.

You’re right back to what authoritarian states say and do, and diametrically opposed to what underpins liberal democracy: the idea that the demos decides what is true and good. That idea has lots of very obvious problems but we decided it was preferable to the other systems, one of which you are now advocating for. In a liberal democracy we all are responsible for persuading the people that lies are lies, not censoring them.

If you believe that the Algorithm is just too powerful and you can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas against people lying - well, you don’t believe in liberal democracy. You believe in an ideologically authoritarian state that tells you what’s true or not, and where people are not allowed to make free, (un)informed decisions.

That is the view of paternalistic authoritarian states whose primary concern is public harmony, not liberalism.

For example, are you suggesting that Facebook begin censoring information about the climate emergency because it makes people depressed and anxious? Should Facebook make sure that people don't see content they disagree with, because that promotes discord? Or is it the other way around - they shouldn't see content they agree with, because that creates an echo chamber which increases discord when they do encounter other views?

What people don't like is huge masses of people coming together and having opinions that counter our modern mainstream elite consensus. Because elites are generally pretty smart that means a lot of these opinions are, frankly, dumb. Some of them simply represent different values (pro vs anti immigration, as one example.) Both are considered intolerable.

It is also perfectly true that people spend lots of time on non-politicized content. Baby videos, cat videos, feel-good human interest stories, all sorts of positive stuff is also massively popular on these platforms. That gets ignored in favor of inveighing for tight control over the political discourse because social media spreads crimethink.

The Western democratic ideal is that you have to convince the masses you're right - a disturbingly large portion of the movers and shakers have decided that instead, we should control what the masses are allowed to say and know, so we don't have to fight those battles.

We can have both, and the former precludes the idea that plaintiffs and judges can simply invent new fundamental rights that require enormous sums of money and labor to implement without any democratically designed framework because they're a good idea.

We have a route to do this, it's legislation and regulation. Note that in this particular case, while these things did not work perfectly - the Jackson water system had a lot of well-reported problems, and the lawsuit was filed in response to that - there's been hundreds of millions poured into remediating the problem. It is not simply being "ignored". People are not doing "nothing." The EPA, MSDH, and Jackson authorities have been working on the problem, not ignoring it because it's not a Constitutional right. In late 2025 the work resulted in the Jackson water supply once again meeting Safe Drinking Water Act requirements.

Here is the latest comprehensive water quality report, on a reporting website that the DOJ, EPA, and courts forced JXN to create:

https://jxnwater.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/JXNWater-202...

The USG has a somewhat different description of events, and appears to have had video that they showed a jury.

> The defendants dressed in “black bloc”—dark clothing with head and face coverings that concealed their identities—designed to hide each individual’s identity but also to aid and abet those members engaged in illegal acts by making members indistinguishable from one another to law enforcement. Evidence introduced at trial revealed that the defendants brought eleven firearms, body armor, and eleven military-grade first aid kits with tourniquets and other items to treat gunshot wounds to the scene of the attack. [...] After ANTIFA Cell members arrived at the detention facility, they began shooting off and throwing fireworks (explosives) at the facility and vandalizing vehicles and a guard shack on Prairieland property. [...] Witnesses testified that an Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911. When the officer began issuing commands to defendant Nathan Baumann, Benjamin Song can be heard on police bodycam video yelling, “get to the rifles!” and then he opened fire on the officers, striking the Alvarado police officer in the neck as the unarmed correctional officers ducked and ran for cover.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-antifa-cell-members-no...

Note you can see in the pictures they were definitely not just setting off fireworks "near" the detention facility, but from the camera stills its obviously intended as harassment. And "some idiot" didn't bring a gun, they were all part of a group, they brought lots of guns, and he actually shot a police officer during their "protest." Note also that the USG explicitly uses the word "fireworks", contrary to your framing.

Yeah, sorry, if you a) join a group that states it wants to overthrow the USG b) go with a bunch of members to a federal facility as part of a violent protest c) set off fireworks, vandalize everything in reach, and d) shoot a cop, you are all going to prison, and that makes perfect sense.

I always find this mindset peculiarly baffling. From a secular perspective, we've understood since at least the 1800s that "morality" is simply the pro-social instincts that we've developed as a social species of apes, and that they are historically contingent on a million different factors for any particular group of humans, such that the exact manifestation of "morality" differs widely from culture to culture and over time. Yet comments like this invariably accept Christian moral realism as a given (and granted, it's obviously a large genealogical contributor to Western social norms today) but then sever its grounding from God and place it in...their personal feelings about right and wrong. So God using the Israelites/Babylonians/Romans/etc as his instrument of divine justice is evil "xenophobic garbage"...because divine justice is real (xenophobia is objectively evil) but the God described in religious texts actually has nothing to do with it, and actually its wrong because....uh...we say so and we're the final and ultimate arbiters of right and wrong I guess? Us, specifically, that is.

It really seems like this is the genealogical origin of the idea of "progress" you see throughout these comments as well - people are "better" now, because you can clearly see over time a large subset of people developing social norms closer and closer to our own! And unlike theirs, ours are objectively right and true, or at least closer to it. This is certainly a historically unusual view, which may have typically been rather provincial and close-minded, but which certainly did general not have this universalist, and dare I say, colonialist bent, that all must agree.

Also, is there any inherent reason why police salaries should not exceed "physician administrators, investment managers and top elected officials" and other fields the article mentions? Also noted in the article is that some of these people are working ~30 hours a week average in overtime (70 hour weeks.)

What gives you that impression?

It takes very little time to prepare and cook most simple meals - if you want to dress it and garnish it and execute a 1000 step recipe, that is of course on you. For example, you can have a steak and potato (loaded with cheese and sour cream) as good as anything you get in a restaurant in under ten minutes. It is rarely faster to go out to eat. That is of course taking as a given that people really are working more hours, which I am very skeptical of and which BLS data does not support.

I am sympathetic to people's arguments about cost and free time generally, but I think "cooking your own food" is mostly a victim of the increasingly sky-high value people place on convenience vs doing almost anything for themselves that constitutes "work" in their minds. It is definitely not true that money is the issue, as other commenters already mentioned.