ArmedTooHeavily
Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.
User ID: 2895
ArmedTooHeavily
3hr ago
Did it, or did everybody just collectively forget about all of the forgettable trash?
ArmedTooHeavily
3hr ago
Alien: Romulus is excellent.
ArmedTooHeavily
1d ago
Disagree with this. Carriers have been performing extreme maneuver drills on a regular basis with planes onboard since they first were created, and the Nimitz class has been doing it since the first one was commissioning in 1975. Planes don't usually fall off during these drills.
ArmedTooHeavily
1d ago
Yeah, having gotten some more info from people in this thread, I'm coming around to it just being a spectacular fuckup by the guy towing.
ArmedTooHeavily
1d ago
Thanks, absolutely banger song. Gonna listen to the rest of the album now.
ArmedTooHeavily
1d ago
fwiw, and not knowing this poster's alleged prior history, the OP doesn't seem like an objectionable top level post.
ArmedTooHeavily
1d ago
Looking at it at the state level is insufficiently granular.
ArmedTooHeavily
1d ago
They have a strategic stockpile of rice! (What a thing for a government to choose to do, have the expertise to manage, etc.) Which they've opened, and only slightly pushed prices a bit.
as an aside to your point, strategic grain reserves are pretty common.
ArmedTooHeavily
1d ago
I would like to register profound disagreement here. We should absolutely not relax any rules because "everybody knows we all agree." Allowing consensus building will degrade the quality of commentary significantly.
ArmedTooHeavily
1d ago
See my response to a different commentator here, I misunderstood.
ArmedTooHeavily
1d ago
Ah, different kind of decoy. I was thinking "thing they'd shoot at instead of the real thing", rather than "thing that will confuse people looking at transport logistics".
ArmedTooHeavily
2d ago
It is prioritising emotional connection over intellectual dissection and emotional connection is the heart of good art.
Personally, I see no reason the two are mutually exclusive. You don't have to turn off your brain to feel things and keeping your brain turned on doesn't stop you from feeling. A really great movie watching experience, to me, is seeing something that makes me feel strongly, understanding why and how it's making me feel those things, and then layering that intellectual appreciation of the technique on top of the emotional appreciation of the scene. I picture the scene in "Amadeus" when Salieri describes Mozart's music. His appreciation of the art is enhanced by technical understanding, not diminished. Understanding the camera tricks that make Hannibal Lector so intimidating doesn't make the scene boring, it makes watching the scene more compelling. When you see a brilliant musician play a great piece of music, there is beauty in both the sound of the music and in the masterful playing itself. Noticing one doesn't preclude noticing the other, they enhance each other. For me, it's the same with movies.
ArmedTooHeavily
2d ago
A random person in real life described Sinners glowingly then talked about how it was about how evil white people are.
Politely, this is critical analysis of the film on a 6th grade level. Yes, there are evil white people in the movie. There are also good white people, and also evil black people, and some of the "evil" white people are revealed to be/portrayed as surprisingly sympathetic. The movie is very much a Black (capitalization intended here) movie, and racism is certainly a central theme of the movie, but I think overall the film is much more about the search for a meaningful black identity than about racism or evil whitey or whatever. It's a good movie.
ArmedTooHeavily
2d ago
From the top working down:
why cover up losses of the Bin Laden raid, even from a helicopter crash?
That's not the only thing about the raid they're covering up, the official story is almost certainly not completely true. Just as an example, the only reason we know they were using a stealth blackhawk, or that the stealth blackhawk even existed, is because they screwed up the landing and crashed one and then failed to sufficiently destroy it to render it unidentifiable. Had they not crashed that helicopter, the official story would be completely different and we'd never know. Why are there no pictures of Bin Laden's body? The official story is that after shooting him, they flew the body out to the iirc USS Harry Truman in the gulf, ran genetic tests to identify it, and immediately chucked it overboard. That strikes me as being incredibly weird, that no proof of his death has ever been offered and they destroyed the only conclusive evidence within 24 hours.
General killed by missiles
You could cover this up without involved more than a dozen people. You'd need to get his body out of Ukraine, into his quarters, and then not let anybody see it after it's "found" except an examining doctor you'd brief in to what's going on. His immediate family would probably find out, but immediate family of military killed in secret missions are generally very trustworthy, when was the last time you heard about some SEAL's wife blowing the lid off a secret mission?
faking missile hit on a ship by calling a collision
Agreed here, everyone on the ship would know what happened and that's too many low-level sailors to keep the secret.
covering up special forces killed during some off-the-book op
This is not uncommon, and there are declassified stories about doing this sort of thing from wars past. The cooperation of the dead soldier's comrades is more or less guaranteed, weeding out people who can't be trusted to not spill the details on how their friend died is one of the basic requirements of elite special forces selection and training.
ArmedTooHeavily
2d ago
which given the speed at which those hunks of metal can move and turn, is incredibly plausible (also the pilot recovery with zero issues)
Disagree, see my comment here.
So saying "oh fighter fell off bc evasive maneuver" smells like BS.
Concurred. I was onboard a carrier while it performed emergency maneuver drills after a shipyard period (max speed ahead to max speed reverse, full speed turns, exactly the sort of things you'd do as "evasive maneuvers"). None of the motion was violent enough to have caused a plane to fall off the ship during towing unless the person driving the tow vehicle was completed retarded. Carriers are huge and change directions very slowly.
That being said, I can also report from my time in the Navy that retards were very common and unbelievably expensive and unbelievably stupid accidents definitely happened.
ArmedTooHeavily
2d ago
How exactly do you propose you would use an aircraft specifically designed to be stealthy as a decoy? The whole point is that the real thing is nigh-on undetectable. Either your decoy is also stealthy, and therefore is a shit-ass decoy because nobody notices it, or your decoy isn't stealthy and therefore obviously isn't the real thing.
Not really, no. It has some right angles is all.
Seconded, "looks like a swastika" is nonsense.
ArmedTooHeavily
27d ago
I don't see how that's relevant to my point at all, which is that that death rates don't tell you much about rates of bad behavior. Obviously cars are more likely to kill someone, ke=1/2mv^2 and cars have a lot more m and a lot more v. I think cyclists commit bad behaviors much more often.
ArmedTooHeavily
29d ago
Not anymore, emergency auto braking is becoming pretty common.
ArmedTooHeavily
29d ago
No, statistics show that cars cause deaths 8x more. That doesn't tell you anything about cyclist behavior, because cyclists are unlikely to cause deaths. My experience has been that cyclists violate road laws much more frequently and egregiously than cars; I see bicyclists run red likes roughly 10x more often than I see cars do so, and I see a LOT more cars than bicycles on any given day.
rarer opposite example of temperamental liberals running on conservative memes?
I think this is the vast majority of people on this website. Hlynka was definitely right about that. Yarvin called them (us) "dark elves" in that one substack post (which did have some good insights, but dear lord is he terrible at optics), and the same people are the "tech right" that has been so recently ascendant until like 8 hours ago. The extremes always pull the moderates to the edges (h/t martyrmade's "Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem", the best podcast about Israel and Palestine that's ever been made), and the culture war has pulled scott's "grey tribe" towards the blue and red, and in more even proportions than you'd think.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
I also grew up on Pointless Waste of Time. FYI, the guy who ran PWOT, Jason Pargin (nom de poast David Wong) still has an internet presence. His twitter feed is pretty damn funny. He now has a substack that I think is pretty good and in particular does a very solid job of threading the needle between "don't piss off the blue normies" while still being actually insightful, same basic thread as he did back in the day. He's also been very successful on tiktok (not really my thing, can't comment on quality or anything), I think that's actually mainly how he mainly makes his living.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
This Kurzgesagt video evokes a similar feeling to me: losing something that can never be regained, the crushing weight of the rules of material reality.
The toaster fucker greentext might answer your question.
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