Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)D
Posts
0
Comments
148
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I dunno whether or not you've been hit with this before, but if you haven't, it's your lucky day, have a two hour miniature documentary on the bombs specifically, and how they weren't really justified at all. People should probably still be pissed about it. I'd also say that stuff about japan being locked away from the resources it needed, is kind of dubious. I dunno if it passes the smell test, it smells like modern japan post ww2 nation building narrative stuff, to me. Maybe if we include "in the form it was in" to encompass the entirety of their imperial exploits up til that point. We maybe get, at some point, to the further debate about opening japan up as a more isolationist country through the use of force, by the US specifically. None of this is something I'm prepared to talk about in any respectable level of detail.

    As for the prevalence of violence and war crimes in the world, I'd say, yeah, pretty undeniable, undeniably common. I don't much like war, many reasons, that is among them. I think that vietnam, and the continued and unerring deviation from what vietnam basically was, all the way until the modern day, where we're funding an apartheid state that's bombing a minority population, is a testament to the character of the united states. Which is not to say it's beyond rationalization, or is done out of pure evil, rather than cold self-interest, but I think that the true and fundamental character of the united states, as illustrated from those foreign escapades, is kind of self-evidently apparent. Trump's only notable characteristic is that he's turning that gun towards the domestic population a little more, or that he's more rhetorically fascistic, or some other difference, but this sort of a behavior is something I fully believe to be within our fundamental character as a nation. As a political system. Elon exists on that continuum.

  • I'd kind of be willing to wager that we actually hated nazis mostly because they were foreign, more than anything else. I think all that ww2 valorizing history schlock about me and the good old boys from ken-tucky and all over going out and killing all the nazis has totally cooked america's understanding of that war. I dunno, towards the end we did nuke a country, twice, in a totally superfluous and cruel act, and we also concentrated the domestic immigrant population that we were bombing during that war into camps. Everyone brushes over that part, though, and america is truly faultless. These aren't our true characters, being revealed, no, this is just some errant deviation from a much more civilized and reasonable norm! Surely, that must be the case.

  • Yeah, the people who see this as a significant deviation from the norm aren't exactly incorrect, but I wonder to what degree they really understand the total history and scope of america as it has existed for basically all of it's span. What we've done, in this country.

  • I think a lot of people would cut contact with their family at times like this due to the ways in which these kinds of beliefs often intersect with massive amounts of interpersonal abuse and broadly dysfunctional and unhappy relationships. I think this is most especially true of people who are queer, neurodivergent, disabled, or a member of some other minority, who are easily going to be subject by that abuse from their family more and more, especially as they may be more dependent on them and as they're more noticeably going to see that abuse well up as a result of those narratives. You know, people who get to see the "ugly sides" of their family.

    I would say that if you're not actively dependent on your family, and you're not part of an actively hated minority which they will more easily discard, disrespect, and abuse, then that makes it easier to cut them out of your life, but that's also definitely a time at which you will counterintuitively be in the best position to sway them, since you're at your most secure.

    So I would say that this is, in some part, a decision which you should probably make in reflection of your current material circumstances, the current state of your life. This also isn't a decision which you need to make right now, really, to cut him out of your life or decide to blow this particular one up. You said he's already married, and that your other two brothers aren't going, so one more probably won't hurt things that much even if you invent an excuse.

    I'm like 90% sure if I showed my dad the picture of elon musk hitting the five knuckle shuffle live on stage in 4k 60fps three times in a row, he'd probably flee to the "my heart goes out to you" comment, right before trying to find some sort of talking point he could throw down the hopper in order to justify this shit, which is really to say nothing of the fact that he basically just fundamentally agrees with elon's actions on basically every level if he was to actually sit down and think about it for long enough. There's some people which cannot be helped, because they will repeatedly choose not to be. There isn't exactly a correct answer, here, I think the major thing is that if it goes sideways because of your decisions, you shouldn't beat yourself up or crash out over it, or become overly callous.

  • This is probably why the tech industry has been hardened against that sort of thing, and is, say, famously hard to unionize.

  • And… a great example of that is Palestine. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call what Hamas did “attacking a target”. What was the outcome of that? Israel had “justification” to engage in mass ethnic cleansing for over a year.

    You put justification in quotes here, and I think you clearly understand why. Netenyanhu propped up hamas as the de facto government specifically in order to ensure a more militant party would give israel the necessary "justification" to attack the people there. So, even their governance, and that attack itself, is traceable to israel's state violence. A minor note, but an important one, I think. And I think one which requires more thought than just like, pointing to that and then saying "See, I told you, violence doesn't work, and is bad, and israel wants it!", because israel's obviously not an overly rational state which is actually functional, either for it's people or for it's goals.

    More broadly though, it's not necessary at all for people to have guns, in order for cops to kill them. Cops can invent any number of reasons to kill someone in their day to day. The gun is something you just see in the news media a lot because it's incredibly common in america, and especially common in the hoods where cops go out and kill people in larger numbers. Again, we can see that as an extension of a context, created by the state, which has naturally created violence. Partially through the valuable, and illegal, property, mostly in the form of drugs, which must be protected through extralegal means, i.e. cartels and gangs, but also just naturally as a result of police violence in those places as an extension of that, which is an intentional decision to create by the ruling class. It's a way to create CIA black budgets, it's a way to incarcerate and vilify your political opponents at higher rates, etc. You can't be intolerant to the idea of guns as a blanket case, in that context, because it's a totally different kind of context, and is one which is created by the state.

    I would maybe also make the point that a protest is incentive enough against killing people, because it would be widely known and televised as a massacre in the media. You know, just gunning people down in the street, en masse. That line is sort of, becoming less clear over time, as the government seems to be more and more willing to condone that, if not outright do that, but I don't really think that if, say, everyone in the BLM riots was armed, the cops would just start randomly firing into the crowd. They'd be hopelessly outnumbered, for one, so that's a pretty clear reason for the police not to just start sputtering off rounds like a bunch of idiots, but you'd also probably see a protracted national guard response over the course of the next several weeks, which nobody really wants to deal with, both in terms of the media response and just the basic type of shit that would happen.

    You also have several extrapolations you can make from just that happening in the first place, even though it never would. Like, the kind of city which could get up to that, in america, would maybe reveal something incredibly uncomfortable to the ruling institutions about that particular city and its political disposition and potentially that could be extrapolated to the entire country. Most places don't get to that point because they reach civil war before that, which is kind of more along the lines of what the preceding commenter is talking about. More along the lines of, say, IRA tactics.

    Which is all to say, that this is something which is shaped entirely by the government's intentional responses and the contexts that they create. When they decide to escalate, that should be seen, naturally, as being on them, and not on your average person. I think what the previous commenter is trying to say, with a good faith reading, is that we are probably due, in the next 4 years and perhaps beyond, for an escalation. I don't think that's really a morally great thing, or a good context, but I do think they're potentially right based on how things shake out, and I think that people should probably come to terms with that even as we try to avoid it.

    Edit: Also I forgot to note this, but this isn't really a disagreement in core ideals, but just of tactics. Dual power isn't so much a deliberate choice of tactic so much as it should just be a certainty, being that both sides of this debate are mutually beneficial to one another. If you have, or can place, a more reasonable politician in office, either through violence (highly unusual, but does happen occasionally if the dice reroll lands well enough), or through the political system itself, then that reasonable politician is just that, more reasonable. i.e. more likely to accomplish goals which are desirable to any violent guerillas. Likewise, the pressure that violent guerillas exert can be seen as a kind of abstract economic cost constantly being leveraged against unreasonable political powers, in favor of reasonable elements of that political system.

    The main point against this, is that the united states is currently so unreasonable, politically, that it's functionally impossible to bargain with in really any way. Any violence, under such a political system, one which refuses any attempt at change, is seen as kind of ultimately meaningless. But I think that's maybe also part of a broader point about how people just generally feel, understandably, incredibly pessimistic about the future, and are sort of retreating back into a kind of survival mode. Especially, I think, because they've been made to feel totally responsible for the weight of the world, when ultimately the decision of the political power to retaliate and do mass violence is, as previously stated, both inevitable, and entirely their own decision, that they must be held responsible for, rather than the people.

  • Depends on context, which I think is missed in basically all these discussions. Solar, wind, and hydropower are obviously contextually dependent technologies, that are well suited to particular environments. They have to line up with energy demand curves, or else impose expensive and inefficient battery solutions. They don't have a whole lot of efficiency in terms of land use, which there are some proposed solutions for, but they're pretty efficient both economically, and are pretty ecologically contentious as long as recycling is being done adequately. Nuclear solves a different problem. It provides base load, which is somewhat important, it's potentially not as flexible as a technology, but it's easier to build infrastructure for because it's more consistent. It can also be somewhat land-use agnostic, though things like water use for cooling towers and tradeoffs such as that are definitely a consideration. It's also much denser in terms of land use, meaning it's potentially more efficient for larger cities.

    They're both just different technologies, with different applications, and they both have a place in any sensible structuring of the world. I don't understand why people become so split along the obvious astroturfed and petrol-funded propaganda that floats around for both sides. You have pro-nuclear people that are saying solar panels like, require exotic materials mines, which is insanely ironic, and you have solar people who are fearmongering about solved problems like nuclear waste and safety concerns and efficiency in terms of economic cost, which is also insanely ironic. The fact that this conflict comes up every time strikes me as kind of horrendously stupid and obviously favorable to petrol lobbies.

  • Because for the majority of the world, the average American is a selfish bourgeois with a big house and two cars, who thinks oppression is when the gas price rise.

    I mean I fucking live here and that's pretty much my assessment as well to be honest. Maybe not your average american if we're working on like, who's right just based on home ownership statistics, but certainly, that's not really an invalid perception.

  • I think it's kind of stupid that we're defaulting to the idea that a billion dollars as sort of the default "well, that's too much money, nobody could ever possibly deserve THAT much money!" metric we're using. Not particularly because there are really any good billionaires, I mostly think that's not really the case and agree that any claim to the contrary would probably strain credibility.

    About the most you could point to is somebody like taylor swift, or any musical performer, or athlete, someone who specifically gains money based almost exclusively on their command of cultural capital and ability as a performer rather than necessarily on extracting the surplus labor value of others, though to a certain extent, you have to have some sort of corporate backing or management company to reach that level, and even if those performers don't control it, there's probably some level of loaded complicity going on there. These types would maybe be just above the sorts of people who just run good or more ethical companies, as far as companies can be, on the billionaire morality totem poll.

    No, my criticism isn't so much that billionaires aren't necessarily evil, because I think it's mostly true enough that billionaires are all evil for it to be as true a heuristic as a heuristic can be true. I think my ire draws less from that, and more from how this sort of like, meaningless agreement over this particular example doesn't really necessarily lend itself towards any more in depth analysis. We've put the marker too high, the standard too high. A billion dollars is obviously very extreme, you can see that with the comparisons from a million to a billion. What about a million, though? Is that bad, is that a bad standard of evil, if you have a million dollars, does that make you evil? Where's the cutoff, here? I'm sure plenty of people know someone with a million bucks, you could probably just point at anyone who owns a home in LA.

    My point is that instead of some arbitrary cutoff we should probably just be looking at what's actually going on here in terms of the relationships at work and the constructed hierarchies. If that's the case then we can probably draw the line less at a billion dollars and more at anyone propping up this stupid bullshit type hierarchy, and specifically those more critical lynchpins which hold it together. Perhaps, like a "not necessarily a billionaire" healthcare CEO. Now that, that would be a good start.

  • kind of racist

    kind of?

  • Eastern propaganda

    lol

  • I’m not defending the insurance industry or capitalism for-profit healthcare, but I worry more generally about society normalizing or celebrating violence.l and where that’s moght take us.

    society already normalizes and celebrates violence plenty. it just doesn't tend to normalize it or celebrate it against the people who actually deserve it, pretty much apparently until a couple days ago when everyone sort of collectively seems to have realized that they all agree.

  • yeah except for basically all of them

  • this is potentially true, though if there's any flexion or breakage in the 3d print material, you'd probably some underpressure in the cartridge, not that such a thing would matter much, or a more troubling lack of accuracy, which may be significant even at this distance, but probably not. both especially if you're not using hardware store parts. at a certain point, you do just kind of get into shinzo abe doohickey territory, with that sort of a thing, maybe easier just to use a couple pipes. on that note, you could also conceivably use a wipe-based suppression system with a classic hardware store four winds shotgun, OR a contained gas firing system, if you're going the probably over-complicated 3d printing route, especially if you avoid some larger pressures which are probably unnecessary.

    you really don't need any advanced rifling or superior ballistics or anything, at the distance this guy was at. he could've even just used a knife, or a brick, or his hands, to be honest, especially since the CEO was not dressed in ballistic armor or protected in really any way. though I imagine the public would be somewhat less sympathetic to those methods since they're seen as kind of brutal or psychotic, even if they have the same end result.

  • you can use alcohol to eliminate those, and there's really no reason to retain those or even the uhhh. bunny cage? if they're properly cleaned, because caliber can be determined just by forensics and is totally useless for most LE to know, unless you're getting really weird with it. yeah. bunny caliber, the caliber of bunnies.

  • as a hobby, it's basically just another form of consumerism, and the culture surrounding it is not unlike that of car culture, with the same purported values. freedom, agency, maintaining control over your own life, it's all just marketing speak to drive customer traffic, and ends up being politicized only really insofar as everything must exist inside of a political context.

    there are definitely advantages to having guns for certain populations, certainly, marginalized populations that are already at risk, but those populations already have more prevalent firearms use for obvious reasons, and would probably maintain higher firearms use rates regardless of legality as a result of their marginalization, where more strict gun laws won't really factor in, or rather, would be just another meaningless slap-on charge to extend sentencing.

    most of your other actual pro2a people are gonna by random hobbyists, hunters, and fudds, who can't really be expected to put up any organized resistance against anything, and the other half are people who would already be a fan of any plan to march around and take away other people's guns, because they're ex-military chuds, or cops, or what have you.

  • you could probably 3d print a booster, and use a spring, I bet. it wouldn't be reliable since it'd get hot, but I don't think there would be too big an issue with too high of pressures or anything causing it to break. alternatively, you could just go with something that doesn't use a tilting or rotating or locking barrel mechanism, like a steyr GB, or even just a hi-point, which I think is just straight blowback.

    you'd also probably wanna go with a mainly wipe-based suppressor rather than one with just baffles, since you're making something that's basically disposable anyways, and those can fit into smaller packages while being more effective than something with baffles.

  • they legit just send out the interns to go get coffee, so much that it's a trope at this point. these people barely raise their own fucking kids, they don't give a shit about any of those like, minor pleasures. they have cocaine, and other rich people who are constantly willing to kiss each other's ass in a big circle, human centipede ouroborous style.

  • they already do that shit. elon already has a pretty big security retinue and his ass almost never goes out in actual public anymore, only ever hosts private events with verified people and pretty good security. most CEOs and billionaires aren't gonna be that paranoid, but most of them don't have to be, and they already tend to live in totally different contexts than your average person.

    what I'd be more interested in knowing is how this guy figured out that this particular guy was going to be outside this particular hotel at this particular time. this wasn't a crime of pure opportunity, this was something which seems like it was probably planned in advance. if it was publicly accessible where this guy was going, that's a much easier and cheaper thing for businesses and CEOs to solve, and is probably the most important part of this kind of security.