"When did being a racist become worse than being a serial killer?"
Given that Jeffery Dahmer spent a good part of his police interrogation trying to make it very clear that his victim typology was just co-incidental because of where he lived and that he was not a racist, I would say 1991.
ABigGuy4U
11hr ago
I’m defining “serious” here as there actually being a completed attempt. I don’t count two retards being arrested for a completely unrelated crime 2000 miles from DC and then engaging some idle fantasy about an assassination during the interrogation as a serious attempt.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
I think most of people who are afraid of handguns (I don’t mean people who just support gun control, I mean the ones who are genuinely scared of guns), haven’t been around much violence in general, so they don’t realize how easy it is to hurt someone with your bare hands or literally any object (just ask a prison guard). So to these people a gun is kind of like a magic totem of death.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
They aren’t that common. Obama and Clinton had no serious attempts. Bush II had one, Bush I had one that was broken up in the planning. Reagan, Carter, Ford, had one each. To have one President get three serious attempts is pretty odd.
A few comments
•The Sons of Jacob definitely aren’t supposed to be a mainline Christian denomination. The name “Jesus” is pointedly never mentioned by anyone in Gilead, ever, nor is anything from the New Testament. The SoJ have difficulty controlling the Deep South due to Baptist insurgents, which would imply that many hardline denominations are not on board. Additionally, book Gilead has a strong racial apartheid element, with the “Sons of Ham” being confined to South Africa style Zanzibar-stans. This would seem to imply the SoJ are a strain of Dominionist weirdos and not mainline Christians. This was changed in the tv show to make the SoJ racially egalitarian, which honestly probably tracks better with radical Christian groups today. Many of the lower level political commissars of Gilead are former rad-fems, which also doesn’t really track with any 80s right wing or religious movement (though it seems oddly prescient today).
•It seems to be implied the fertility crisis caused massive social pressure which allowed the SoJ to seize power, and that the handmaids and the rest of the social structure are more of a semi-pragmatic measure to deal with that, and not just some stupid LARP. It annoys me that in the show Canada seems to be able to just be a normal liberal brunchtopia in the face of an existential demographic crisis.
•I think post-script seemingly taking place after the fall of the regime is an homage to Orwell’s 1984 with the Newspeak dictionary at the end.
An unknown assassin has attempted to kill President Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight. One person is dead. President Trump is unharmed. The disposition of the assassin is unknown.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
Well statistically, wouldn’t “just like that of your parents” mean “divorced” for about half of them?
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
it seems strange why nobody did so
It’s a norm that evolved gradually. For most of the forties and fifties it was assumed that nukes were going to become commonplace in combat, and it would only be worrying if superpowers used them against each other.
Then Truman passed on using them in Korea, and Eisenhower passed on using them them to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu. That began to solidify that these were really only special occasion devices, not just something you use because not doing it would be a pain in the ass.
Once you get to the Nixon administration, it’s starting to get set in stone. The Nixon admin considers using them in Vietnam, but determines the international blowback would be too severe.
Now, we’re getting close to Dune levels of nuclear taboo, where using them in any context would be highly controversial.
They aren’t necessarily an instant win button, but in both Ukraine and Iran they would be extremely useful. Iran’s nuclear facilities and underground missile bases would be pretty easy to dismantle with nuclear ground bursts. In Ukraine, every time the Russians had to spend nine months besieging an empty town like Bahkmut or Kramantorsk, they could have just dropped a 380kt warhead on it and been done in a week (mostly waiting for the fallout to settle).
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
You’re misinterpreting it. We’ve shot way past the point we can actually do anything about it, and it’s going to be much worse, much faster than previously expected. The calmness you’re seeing is public panic management.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
It wouldn’t necessarily need to be that bloody. There are plenty of ways to use nuclear weapons on Iran or Ukraine that would be highly effective and cause minimal civilian casualties.
ABigGuy4U
16d ago
Half Life 2 is one the few games that capture how “ugly” assault rifles and grenades feel in real life. It’s like the video game equivalent of Heat
The interesting thing about Halo and the TV show 24 is how they were both thematically and tonally a perfect fit for the aftermath of 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror, even though they were both written before it happened.
ABigGuy4U
18d ago
Experts say the crisis was caused by years of ill-conceived dam projects and overpumping that destroyed a centuries-old system for tapping underground reserves.
To be fair, Iran is just one of the first countries to get hit by this. There’s a pretty good chance that you will see similar hydrological collapses in multiple other middle eastern countries, India/Pakistan, Western China, and the American Southwest.
ABigGuy4U
18d ago
What is the name for the epistemological framework where you believe whatever is maximally hilarious?
ABigGuy4U
22d ago
I cannot think or comprehend of anything more cucked than having a daughter. Honestly, think about it rationally. You were feeding, clothing, raising and rearing a girl for at least 18 years solely so she could hike off into the woods and get eaten by a bear. All the hard work you put into your beautiful little girl - reading her stories at bedtime, making her go to sports practice, making sure she had a healthy diet, educating her, playing with her. All of it had one simple result: her body was more enjoyable for the bear who would eventually feast on her every limb.
Raised the perfect girl? Great. Who benefits? If you're lucky, a random bear who had nothing to do with the way she grew up, who eats her. He gets to chow down on her tight juicy body. He gets the benefits of her wholesome and nutritious organs that came from the way you raised her.
As a man who has a daughter, you are LITERALLY dedicating at least 20 years of your life simply to produce bear feed. It is the ULTIMATE AND FINAL cuck. Think about it logically.
ABigGuy4U
24d ago
The administration was getting a bunch of bad HUMINT from the Tehran university bubble about how the regime was on the brink of collapse. It was assumed that the whole thing would come down like a house of cards the second the Ayatollah died.
That’s partially it though, Europe gave a lot of scarce military equipment to Ukraine and now their belts have to be a lot tighter.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I'm sorry, but I don't see this behavior as demonstrably different from MLK.
The evidence here is a lot stronger (especially from a left-wing perspective) than MLK’s “totally real rumors in J. Edgar Hoover’s burn book”
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
They pretty overtly made it a massive turd on purpose in order to spike further monetization attempts.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I don't think Vladimir Putin has been credibly accused of rape either.
Not that I’m aware of. In his youth he was probably something of a womanizing cad but in consensual way (hard to believe but as a young man he was something of a pretty-boy). Once he got into the higher rungs of power he quickly ended up married to the job, and he lost a wife and then two mistresses by being a workaholic.
I feel like with all four of those we kind of “got lucky” that nothing particularly important was happening at the time. Even with Lincoln, the Civil War was basically over when he died. We aren’t guaranteed that it will always be like that. If equally obscure President Rutherford Hayes had been shot instead of Garfield, we may very well have had a second civil war.
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