So here’s an article on a meta-analysis that covers the a positive correlation. You can also see some newer individual studies that link it to certain violent behaviors such as the treatment of firearms.

Of course, media often overblows such studies because they don’t understand what a strong or weak correlation is and what behaviors these studies are correlating against, which leads to a lot of misunderstanding. Social science may be among the most difficult of the sciences simply because it is measuring patterns with unique biases in their subjects, such as the Hawthorne effect, and extremely high variance that can be difficult to address. For example, the frequency at which and types of games people play now vs 30 years ago is radically different. This is why meta-analyses that examine results across many studies can be valuable, as it often takes repeated studies under changing methodologies and populations to get a proper idea of a social correlation.

I should also emphasize that a positive correlation doesn’t really imply games need to be banned or controlled. In fact the articles linked above mention exactly that – the real concern with a lot of studies is the influence of violent video games on children and their propensity to bully. This doesn’t necessarily imply that video games should be banned, but it can be helpful for guidance to counselors to understand how even minor factors influence social dynamics.

Yeah, we know it’s because they got caught with their pants down performing war crimes and covering it up. Their response to the leaks were… Go after the leaker and get better at hiding their war crimes.

There’s evidence that they’re linked to additional violent thinking, but not a sole factor in making a sane, healthy person into a killer. The former is more nuanced than simply "ban because bad correlation’ though

One thing I wish we could ban are opportunistic suits from hungry law firms that are just hoping that these companies will settle rather than fight an obviously frivolous suit. This is an insult to the civil legal system

The main reason is that both Democrats simply inherited a deal for withdrawal before a Democrat became President. For the Afghanistan war in particular, around 80% of troops had already withdrawn by the time Biden was inaugurated. Republicans and Democrats seem to get this confused – many of the issues with withdrawals were due to Republican predecessors negotiating the deal (especially in regard to Trump), and the successor rarely had the power to significantly change the terms of those withdrawals. In Biden’s case, he really did have no choice – returning troops to Afghanistan at the original number would have been tantamount to re-invasion.

I don’t really see a difference in parties when it comes to war. Entering/leaving wars seems to be more motivated by approval numbers rather than some party policy. In the meantime, both sides have been fine with creating their war crime detention facilities or drone striking civilians when we aren’t paying attention.

Emacs built with Nix. I host my configuration on GitHub.

I like to use the non-acronym name, so that I can say: “Structured Query Language. Or, with the JSON field type, more like UNSTRUCTURED query language!” And then I laugh like a maniac for 5 minutes while the other people in the line at Wendy’s give me weird looks.

Same here. It’s made my life a whole lot easier since on previous distros, I had to depend on documenting manual hacks I had done.

I’m betting they hit some edge case caused by a particular subreddit going private, or a group of subs going private. I’m sure someone’s got a subreddit hard-coded in for health checks or something similar.

Honestly I really don’t see much of a future for profit-driven social media. Time and time again we’ve seen that power over communication is just too much power for an individual company to have. The fediverse makes a lot of sense, but I’m not sure if it’s the ultimate end state. It would be very nice if it were