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>At the end of the day, we all want food, shelter, safety, and some amount of personal privacy and freedom.

That may be the case, but different policies and social norms will result in different people getting more or less of those things.

>My limited but non-zero experience in real-world situations has shown that "Angry Mobs" are far more likely to be armed than "Peaceful people"

And my point is that it doesn't really matter that much if the angry mob is armed or not, whereas you having one can have a huge impact on the outcome. There are a lot more of them than you. They can very easily kill you with a gun or without one. But you cannot possibly hope to dissuade any angry group of people from attacking you without at least a gun. Obviously it won't make you invincible, and gets less likely to help as the size of the mob increases (for that situation, you'd want to have a bunch of other armed people at your side), but that's not the point.

>which is why I've vouched/upvoted your comments - we're all allowed a personal & subjective perspective and it tests our ideas:

Downvoting to show disagreement is pretty sad behavior.

There is a fundamental asymmetry. Attackers only have to fight battles that they judge to be worth fighting. If they don't think their chances are good enough, whether because they don't have the right weapons or the right numbers or the right circumstances, they can wait for a better opportunity.

Defenders have to fight whatever battle is brought to them.

Or you could compare them to the partisans that conducted sabotage against the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe, for instance. The military would grind to a halt without a functioning supply chain, and it's very difficult to protect all of the links in that chain against an armed and hostile population.

Many more of those links would be physically inside the US than were inside Afghanistan.

Is Singapore's political system suffering from decades of being torn apart by identity politics and being dominated by a small class of people that detests the people that constitute the bulk of the population? Because that's why Trump is president of the US, and why the government can't or won't come together to look out for the people.

It doesn't really work both ways. Angry mobs looking for food don't need guns to cause problems for peaceful people. Peaceful people do need guns to protect themselves from angry mobs looking for food.

I don't think you could have gotten that less straight. What is convenient is that many definitions exist, so a convenient one can be chosen based on its suitability for making a particular argument at a particular time.

>They cover their methodology pretty clearly.

OK, but where do they suggest a rigorous definition of a support network, which is what I asked about?

>Quite a few

Convenient.

Where do they suggest a rigorous definition of a support group in that article?

>The idea is that women have less access to various support networks that men do

Source? Is there a rigorous definition of a support network, and some statistics showing that women have less access to them?

>it's strong evidence that we shouldn't be uniquely concerned over negative portrayals of trademarks.

Again I'm not sure how it's evidence of that, but I agree that we should not be uniquely concerned about negative portrayals.

I see what you are saying now though, and I agree with you on that point.

Of course the people who make a lot of money off of positive advertising generally are the ones who stand to lose a lot of money from negative portrayals, and they also happen to have a lot of money, so it's not surprise that the law does not treat them equally.

The plaintiff would have to show that they lost revenue as a result of the false statements, which I would think would be particularly difficult to do in that case, because portrayals made openly by a competitor are not as likely to harm the reputation of the company as are portrayals made by someone who does not obviously have anything to gain from the negative portrayal. But that's just a guess.

>The fact that we don't ban deceptively positive depictions of branded products is strong evidence that we do trust consumers to know the difference between fiction and reality.

I would definitely not classify that as strong evidence. I'm not sure I'd classify it as evidence at all. There are many people that benefit considerably from consumers not being immune to psychological tricks in advertising, and they have a lot of money and a lot of incentive to make sure they're allowed to keep using those tricks on people.

The small subset of the population that is even aware of the magnitude of the manipulation that the people are subject to has comparatively little incentive to stop it from happening.

>We still allow people to publicly criticize products.

Yes, but you're not allowed to harm people or businesses by knowingly making false statements about the product in your criticism. I would guess that a negative fictional portrayal of the product would run afoul of that. Satire often uses branding that is fake but similar enough to the real thing that it's obvious what it's meant to portray.