NoneOfUrBusiness

but now we have a few users saying pedophiles are harmless...

Pedophiles aren't harmless by default, but they can be harmless with proper support from their loved ones, just like with any other mental illness. Do you want to stop children from being raped or do you want to virtue signal about being real upset when people who have no support community give in to their darkest desires and rape kids? Tough on crime nonsense doesn't work for anything else, why the hell would it work when the crime is diddling kids?

That aside, the problem with child porn is that it supports or encourages the abuse of kids. How is that any different to supporting child slavery by buying chocolate farmed on slave plantations? If you have a well-thought out point I'd be glad to hear it, otherwise your blind moral outrage is not helping anyone.

OP's intention is to let Europe and Western democracies look bad.

Uh... again, your Europe and Western democracies are literally funding a genocide. You're Israel's biggest trade partner, still have a preferential trade agreement with them after almost two years of genocide and you think you don't already look bad? And that's before we even get into all the other crimes against humanity Europe has assisted or quietly observed in the past few decades.

Okay so:

Your daughter has a medical condition, because ultimately that's what pedophilia is. It's not a nice one, certainly not the kind you'd talk about to others, but the goal here should be for you and your daughter to get through this thing without any children being raped, not pass judgement on her for a crime that is frankly no more morally wrong than buying clothes made with slave labor. Less (but still some) moral judgement, more understanding and more thinking about how to get her into a better situation will probably do both of you a lot of good.

I'm pretty sure I already addressed that.

Are there US citizens in Gitmo? If so then that's definitely fucked up, if no then it's still fucked up, but it's the imperialist kind of fucked up which is a completely different conversation.

What the fuck? How is that even legal? Aren't stocks supposed to be ownership stakes in the company? How can they just take that away?

Oh true. Lemme correct that: There's nothing such as a domestic terrorist organization in the US. The point being that it's impossible under US law to make affiliation with or support for a domestic organization a criminal act. The charge is dubious all around, but it's not an attack on free speech.

The world, objectively, has been at an absolute high water mark for peace. The conflicts that happen are nowhere as sweeping or brutal as the historical norm.

Uh... welcome to globalization and industrialization? Industrial with strong global trade tend to be more war-averse; this has nothing to do with the so-called Pax Americana.

If you told someone in the late 1800s that the need to control Puerto Rico and Hawaii as naval bases would lead to needing 128 foreign military bases worldwide in a little over a century they wouldn't believe you.

It would, in fact, have been pretty believable. Also, you know, manifest destiny. America has been a land and money-hungry empire from the very beginning.

Only "nothing but good" if you think self determination infinitely outweighs the violent political turmoil and instability of the power vacuum.

Which it does. The violent turmoil is of course bad, but it can (and in many places, did) get better. The state of backwards stagnation enforced by European colonizers wasn't much better, if at all. Living in a state of debased slavery to foreign powers with no right to even hope for a better future was worse than any war, which is why many former colonies in fact violently liberated themselves. And that's before you get into violent atrocities. The people involved all seem to have preferred war over a deeply unjust peace.

Not to mention many of those subjugated people came out the other side still under the thumb of the new American/Soviet influence.

Which was far less intrusive than the European version, so it was an improvement.

Wait, are we talking about the same Western Roman collapse where basically all measures indicate a precipitous drop in quality of life for the average person in Europe?

The Western Roman collapse where measures indicated that kids finally started getting enough to eat, yes.

Archeological evidence from human bones indicates that average nutrition improved after the collapse in many parts of the former Roman Empire. Average individuals may have benefited because they no longer had to invest in the burdensome complexity of empire. Tainter's view is supported by later studies which indicate that European men in the medieval period were taller than those of the Roman Empire. Average stature is a good indicator of nutrition and health.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_the_fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire

We're also talking about an unexplored era of major conflicts with nuclear powers. Things might "end" a little more emphatically than we want.

Nuclear powers can manage (and for the most part are managing) their own business.

Depends on the alternative.

Well you have no idea, that's the whole point. If you were an Indian whose country had been turned into one massive scale plantation, and whose only choice seemed to be independence or a continuation of that state of economic slavery, would you have chosen independence or not?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say with a self-administered grain of salt that colonialism didn't really matter that much to European development in the grand scheme of things. Really we're looking at the Renaissance and the beginnings of capitalism here. The only contemporary society that could've competed on both fronts was the formerly-Abbasid, formerly-proto-capitalist Middle East, but the Mongols heavily derailed that. I'm not sure how correct the post is in general, but it does bear thinking how the Renaissance would've went had Florence met a fate similar to Baghdad.

There's legal direct action (striking for example). As for the illegal stuff I have no idea, but it happens. Just Stop Oil made it three years before disbanding, and there are plenty of direct action-focused groups lying around.

a certain mid-20th century regime that your own people barely escaped from, Israel?

Nothing like that exists. Holocaust survivors and their descendants don't make anywhere near the majority, or even a significant minority, of Israel's Jewish population.

Yes, but lately I've found that to be insufficient. The full form is: If a headline is a question, the answer is always the one where people who need to act morally don't. Will the EU stop financing Israel's genocide? No. Will climate change kill us all? Yes. Will the Supreme Court stop Trump from doing a bad thing? No. Is free speech in Britain dead? Yes.