FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
LCIAA was passed in 2005. Gun control has been a political fault line at least since the Clinton administration and its attempted gun control policies, notably the Assault Weapons Ban and the Waco raid a decade and a half prior. The 90s also saw numerous attempts to use spurious lawsuits to bankrupt the firearms industry. LCIAA was supposed to forestall those efforts once and for all. That it did not is seriously damaging to the standard narrative of how our system of laws operates.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
There was a rather more pointed example of this, IIRC, where deniable Russian troops in Syria got in a dustup with the US military. The story I heard is that US forces contacted the Russians demanding that their forces cease fire and withdraw, were told that no Russian forces were involved, tee hee, and responded by annihilating the Russian troops with a sustained, overwhelming bombardment.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
Anyone have a read on whether or not there are still "Trump is the anti-war President" true believers and, if so, how those people are trying to square the circle?
I continue to believe that Trump is the real anti-war president, as I did when he bombed an Iranian general, and indeed as I did when he bombed Iran. I will freely agree that he is not as anti-war as I would prefer, but he has in fact been more anti-war than any other president in my lifetime.
I "square the circle" by noting the fact that he has, to date, not initiated any large-scale wars, even in circumstances that it seems likely other presidents would have. A good example would be his bombing of Iran, followed promptly by him announcing that there was no need for further engagement, and actually declining to engage further, following which the ongoing and escalating war actually petered out.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
Connecticut for one of the more prominent examples, Massachusetts for another. The lawsuit against Remington was eventually settled for $73 million, the lawsuit by Mexico was eventually struck down by the supreme court after being upheld by some lower courts.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
Are they more or less of a threat to me than a terror suspect attending a wedding in some Afghan village?
Luckily they haven't been able to implement such laws well.
WE implemented laws perfectly well to preclude such lawsuits. Blues found those laws inconvenient and chose to ignore them, and have successfully done so. Perhaps you might have argued that doing so was a bad idea, and would undermine necessary norms, but if so it appears your arguments did not carry the day. Alternatively, you believe that it is my tribe that should adhere to norms, and your tribe that should adjudicate exceptions. It hardly matters which is the case; you cannot now argue that Reds should not do a thing, because otherwise Blues might do the thing they've repeatedly done and are currently doing. One cannot endorse a compromise that has already been repeatedly violated.
Enshrining the same logic however is a great step to helping it happen!
I reiterate that all evidence indicates that such detente does not exist and never will. Blues will do and have done what they want to do. Neither law nor custom nor social norms restrain them. Trading off my tribe's values in pursuit of some mythical compromise is evidently unworkable; such compromises last until Blues find them inconvenient, and then they are swept aside.
The way my tribe will keep our guns is by systematically undermining and removing the legal and social mechanisms that might be used to take them, which we are currently well on our way to doing, and by making it abundantly clear that we will burn the country to ashes before we allow Blues to disarm us, which we are also well on our way to doing. At no point is any degree of cooperation with Blues required for this process. At no point do formal legal mechanisms determine this process; we already know that the Constitution and the laws supposedly based upon it are a sham.
Well yeah, people who choose to use drugs in a bad way hurt others/themselves.
"Bad way" and "hurt others" are terms of no fixed meaning, and I have no reason to believe that you and I share a common understanding of them sufficient to draw comparisons in this way. More generally, there does not appear to be an objective measure of social harm, and Blues have already demonstrated that they are willing to abruptly and drastically redefine what is and is not actionable social harm overnight.
Some people sold a gun by a gun shop will go home and use the gun to kill themselves or another person. That is not victimless, people died from the gun being sold.
I do not agree that this is a valid chain of causality, and I do not believe that you would accept chains of causality much, much less ambiguous if they cut against your tribal interests. For example, Judges frequently release prisoners convicted of multiple violent felonies who then commit additional violent felonies. Would you agree that the judge more directly causes such violent felonies than the employees of the gun shop in your example? Do you support the recent push to hold judges accountable for the crimes of convicts they release? If not, why not? Such releases are absolutely not victimless, and the judge has far better evidence of the nature of the convict they release than the gun store owner does of a random customer.
Apparently yes, according to this logic, the seller is responsible for what the buyer chooses to do!
It seems to me that the fewer valid uses a buyer has for the thing being bought, the more this logic obtains, and the more valid uses they have, the less it obtains. Guns have numerous valid uses to the degree that, if we are currently pretending that it matters, legal ownership of them is specifically enshrined in the Constitution. "getting super high and physiologically addicted" is not nearly so valid a use as "defending myself and my family from illegitimate violence."
There is no discussion to be had with such a victim complex.
Assessing the values and motives of others based on what they say and do is not a victim complex. Your rhetorical strategies do not appear to me to be particularly complex. You pick an issue and frame it in whatever way is maximally-convenient to the argument you wish to make at this particular moment, with no apparent regard to arguments you've made before or will make in the future. You do not appear to have principles deeper than "Who, Whom". And I disagree, there is much discussion to be had: see above. I appreciate that this may not be the discussion you particularly wish to have, but that is your business, not mine.
In any case, it does not seem to me that pointing to clear examples that contradict your statements constitutes "emotional argument" or a "victim complex". You are arguing that my side should stop doing bad things. I am disagreeing with you that what we are doing is bad, and further that your side does worse than what you accuse us of, much less what we have actually done.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8hr ago
You left off the part where that legislation has been pointedly ignored and that the lawsuits it banned have continued.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8hr ago
What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for
"Don't resist our lawbreaking, interfere with our operations or inform on us to the authorities."
what are the violent acts
and what civilian population do they instill fear in?
Apart from that, and also responding to @JTarrou above, as much as this is something few want to say out loud, but until now there has been a general tacit understanding that since 9/11 at the latest (if not since the founding of Israel), Middle Easterners are a special class that in the eyes of the US does not really have human rights;
I fundamentally disagree with this characterization. The middle-east wars were sold with pseudo-white-man's-burden arguments, and opposed over concerns of their harmful effects on the locals. Neither represents a lack of concern for the human rights of middle-easterners.
If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry.
To the extent that we tolerate supermarket theives, we do so from the belief that they are only occasional theives and might yet amend their ways and rejoin productive society. Those who make victimizing others a fundamental part of their identity and way of life are not productive targets for this type of forebearance.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8hr ago
There are people who make the argument that gun sellers should be held responsible for anything done with their product, but it's generally laughed out of American society. Especially by the right wing, given the long history of focusing on personal responsibilities.
If by "laughed out of society", you mean an opinion fervently held and actively implemented by half the country, in which pursuit they have proven willing and able to violate black-letter federal law and support the murder of innocents.
Drugs are not equivalent to guns. Drug dealing is not a victimless crime. Drug Cartels are a very close aproximate to classical examples of Hostis Humani Generis. But more damningly, even if these facts were not the case, even if the equivalency you are drawing were not entirely spurious, I am confident that you personally would be willing to offer people like them significantly more protection from the law than people like me no matter what I or my side says or does now or in the future, so I do not recognize value in preserving some hypothetical form of detente here. You will never be willing to treat me and mine with the care and respect you steadfastly insist must apply to narcoterrorists.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
but when it came to it, the CCP let millions of people starve so they could pretend to the world that everything was going great.
...I would like to think that I am not inclined to take a rosy view of the crimes of communist regimes, but I generally adhered to the narrative that the CCP "let millions of people starve" until a recent conversation here resulted in another commenter quoting details. Paraphrasing: "Mr So-and-so and his wife were accused of hoarding. Their fellow villagers beat them to death. Their children were turned out and denied food and shelter by the rest of the community until they starvced to death", repeated over and over again, leaving the distinct impression that this fate was routine for unfortunates in the period in question. In my view, that's pretty clearly murder.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
It seems to me that you and @faceh are framing this as though law and public sentiment are two distinct things, and are wondering why Trump is making appeals to public sentiment when he could simply use the law. But it is evident that the law is much weaker than legible public sentiment, even disregarding the legal mechanisms by which law emerges from public sentiment in the first place.
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. Coordinating public sentiment is the most effective method possible for reducing the amount of trouble one gets in when hurting the outgroup. The law is a whore, and public sentiment is the coin she trades in; if public sentiment is on-side, paper rules are no impediment at all.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
That's not to diminish that there are plenty of pretty bad women out there, but, statistically, if a member of a couple is being killed, it's usually the wife by the husband.
What does the math look like when you include suicides?
Let me make the question a bit more explicit.
Within the existing system, what is the proper way to respond to Blue Tribe weaponizing the justice system to partisan ends? Because if the answer is "there isn't one", it behooves us to find alternatives outside the existing system.
People accuse me of being an accelerationist, but what's the alternative? We've seen recently that rifles and rooftops are certianly an option on the sociopolitical conflict menu, with the understanding of course that such actions cannot reasonably be attributed to the tribes from which they might emerge because stochastic terrorism abruptly stopped being a coherent concept. What other options are plausibly available?
This does indeed seem to be a plausible description of the thought process of these prosecutors.
If I, as a citizen, believe that this is in fact the calculus being performed by members of the executive branch, what conclusions should I draw?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
This sort of post is obviously against the rules here, as you appear to be aware. You have no mod history, positive or negative. This is not a great way to start things off. You don't have to agree with people, or even like them. You may even believe that they are enemies who should be fought to the death. But here we do not fight over words, but meet the arguments of others with arguments of our own.
Normally we start with a warning, but again, you seem to understand the rules and are choosing to egregiously ignore them. Banned for three days, and if you continue to communicate in this way, the bans will escalate rapidly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
Best orcs are Project Long Stairs orcs. Wattsian P-Zombies that breed explosively and instantly learn and integrate any tactical behavior they observe.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
I heard of them back in the day, and have no memory of how they ended up. Definately interested in the effortpost.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
The post was filtered. I have approved it on the sole theory that you would have banned the person if you thought more than a warning was necessary, not in an endorsement of its worthiness.
It was ATF, not the FBI, but the attempts to entrap Randy Weaver demonstrably were part of the radicalization of McVeigh, although Waco was probably a larger factor and as far as I'm aware wasn't "entrapment" per se.
Not entrapment, no, but very clearly corrupt. There is overwhelming evidence that the investigation was being run as a PR operation, and this focus on generating press rather than law enforcement is the direct cause of the subsequent disaster. Not least because there is strong evidence that the crimes the Davidians were initially being investigated for were entirely fabricated by the ATF.
Waco is one of the worst law-enforcement scandals in American history. Federal Agents and their agencies very clearly committed numerous felonies in an attempt to curry favor with the incoming Clinton administration, and then to cover their asses when it all went horribly, horribly wrong right in front of the TV cameras.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
You beat me to it.
The FBI is and always has been a fundamentally corrupt organization.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
True, but media has also been undergoing a major structural disruption due to the internet for the past twenty years; they're desperately trying to do whatever it takes to keep eyeballs.
"whatever it takes" notably didn't involve breaking the story that the President was mentally incompetent, and before that it didn't involve breaking the story that the president's son was selling access to his father to foreign interests. In fact, there's no shortage of stories that could have earned the news corps an avalanche of eyeballs that they passed on for clearly ideological reasons. This argument that the media class is fundamentally mercenary and are just seeking to maximize attention and ad revenue might have been weakly plausible in 2014, but at this point it is pretty clearly an undead argument immune to any degree of contrary evidence.
The terrorist in the Afghan village is not engaged in combat at all. He is not engaged in terrorist activities by attending a wedding, there is no reasonable standard by which his immediate actions constitute combat. Yet we bomb him and those around him anyway. If this is acceptable, which it evidently has been for decades now, then it must be because his allegiance is sufficient to justify striking him, regardless of his present actions. And if that be the case, how does similar logic not apply to narcos in boats?
By what moral logic is it acceptable to bomb a crowded wedding to kill one of the guests, but bombing narcos engaged in smuggling becomes a serious crime only when the second bomb drops? What do you suppose the first one was for?
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