For a second I thought it was former General Mark "Marxist-Leninist-Maoist" Milley.

What's been your favorite non-Abrahamic, non-local celebration?

On the other hand, if my workplace was on a list of announced missile targets, I'd stay away.

Assuming that there's no real chance of their enemy setting up a defense in time:

• It reduces probability of civilian causalities (improves their international image, reduces incentives for affected people to join the fight against them)
• If there is some failure in the attack and the center isn't disabled, they still reduced productivity. I'd say indefinitely
• Tactic could theoretically be used to threaten or feint. For example, publicly list five target but only bother bombing three, and you get the benefits of scaring away people at the other two without spending weapons. This could also be used to manipulate enemy logistics, like moving their defenses or response teams to one place and then attacking another.

Reflecting on this, I think it's fair to consider the International Court of Justice (part of the UN) to be a legal system with legitimate jurisdiction over most countries - even if it's frequently unable to enforce its law. And therefore it's reasonable to describe a war as "illegal", wrt the UN.

But I do believe it's a pointless description - I can't think of any legal wars, especially if one believes committing war crimes makes even a UN-sanctioned war illegal. I consider it a propagandic description used to put spin on a war. (And just adding that on a personal level, I believe legality is irrelevant to morality and acceptability)

Retaliation is generally understood to be self defence, as a deterrent against further attacks.

While the statement may be true, I want to emphasize that a common tactic is for a country to harass or suppress another country until they retaliate, and claim that retaliation is in fact unprompted aggression which must be retaliated against. While there are notable cases of this in the past decade, this tactic is tried and true across centuries. Therefore, we often see wars where both sides claim self-defense, and both their blocs generally understand their side to be justified.

Minutes.

You may not like it, but twins are the ideal couple.

Honestly, if they offered citizenship and a modest pension, they'd have people lining up to take the centers out.

It seems to me like many have arrived from huge mainstream sites and don't realize that the fedi is actually pretty big. There are many thousands of us, just look at this community's stats alone!

When you've explored beyond the core of the internet and found websites where there truly are dozens of you, it's much more calm and communal (or as screentime enthusiasts would call it, slow and ded). I actually was on Lemmy back when there were mere hundreds of us, when many were yearning for the day when reddit would shoot its own foot and bring people here. So I'm very grateful that there aren't dozens of us! Welcome!

Perhaps its too late for the largest instances, but the idea of a site like this being a spectator activity, about consumption, rather than creating communities. Some smaller instances, and even some larger ones, have an actual unique atmosphere and have larger projects across the instance. When we suddenly got a flood of reddit users escaping from the third-party API fiasco and the Luigi bans, that was huge enough to dilute some of the communities with large amounts of people used to simply voting and commenting, or having a website premade for them.

What’s the actual point of holding someone back from joining your online community if they don’t have enough “points” on their comments or posts?

It is a legitimate anti-abuse tactic. Like you've mentioned, there are obvious flaws, but it does help prevent brigadiers, advertisers and other bad actors from easily spinning up throwaways to harass or manipulate a community.

Another way to do this could be account age testing, but this can be defeated by pre-registering empty accounts.

Like they’re leftists who just like the vibe of the right.

Depending on where you are and who you listen to, their impression of the vibe of "the left" beyond the Democrats (whether through grifters/news, propaganda, online experience with dirtbag left, radlibs or even just university campuses) is often characterized as explicitly-political (rather than framing as common-sense), sensitive, language policing, idpol, critical and negative, and not really achieving much. Unless people have direct links to good people on "the Left", the externally-visible impression of it is a pretty bad vibe. And the disappointing thing is, once you make connections or make an effort to look into it, we're actually doing so much, and in many cases directly improving peoples' lives - we need to be loud and proud with that vibe, and let regular people hear it!

On the other hand, how deep in [award nominations] are these people that thought “liberation” was ever in cards?

Funny you should say that, I heard this one in person today. "Trump is meant to be liberating them, and then he says they'll be bombed back to the Stone Age?" Non-America, the couple saying it seemed status-quo/conservative, anti-Trump. A lot of conservatives here seem to just criticize Trump for being unprofessional and tactless, rather than any deeper thought.