FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
"Ballistics" means how fast the bullet is moving, in what direction. Most silencers have negligible effects on ballistics; they change point-of-impact and can increase velocity slightly due to freebore boost, but nothing that would be forensically relevant. What would really get him would be the rifling pattern on the fired bullets, which would match the barrel of his gun and which the suppressor has no effect on.
Otherwise, much agreed. ditching the gun seems like such an obviously good idea that I can't understand his not doing it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky.
....and all the externalities caused by strung-out junkies are just an unrelated random happenstance? Like, the part where they are using drugs is entirely unrelated to all the other stuff they do because they're a person addicted to drugs?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
My plan would be use low-key Golden Retriever mode, channel humility, vacuous attentiveness, and moderate excitement to be involved in this novel experience: a wide-eyed, gawking tourist enjoying their guided walkthrough of the famous American Justice system. I'd be interested in hearing how or why this would fail.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
And the system doesn't distinguish between types of warnings like "bad formatting" vs "being a shithead on purpose"
It does do that. We have notes on the warnings that can be general or specific, and can mention extenuating or aggravating factors.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
I trace this back to Vox Day (anyone remember him?)
I stopped reading him after the 2020 election, but dropped back in after this last one. He's apparently writing a furry comic now?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Try me. We have a rule here: speak plainly. If you think "a lot of this is far beyond", then lay out which things you're talking about and why, and then we can discuss it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
re: the gun, your train of thought seems reasonable, but goddamn do I hate the media.
Police believe the shooter used a B&T Station Six
I can believe that a police officer said this to a journalist at some point. I have no reason to consider this as having any weight until they explain exactly why "police" think that. Unique extractor markings on the cases left at the scene? Witness testimony? I do not believe that "police" generally know more about guns than I do. Many of them know considerably less, and the journalists passing the message know nothing at all.
known in Great Britain as a Welrod pistol, according to police sources.
I call bullshit, completely off the cuff. I do not believe the B&T Station Six is "known in Great Britian as a Welrod pistol". I do not believe that there are enough Station Sixes in Great Britian to be "known" as anything. I am confident that what is "known in Great Britain as a Welrod" is the Welrod, which was developed there in WWII. The S6 is a modernized version of the concept built in Switzerland.
The gun doesn't have a silencer but does have a long barrel that enables the 9 mm to fire a nearly silent shot.
This statement is a perfect example of why you should never, ever listen to journalists about anything to do with firearms, or indeed on any technical matter, or indeed in any way at all. But at least it's not a lie, RITE GIYZ!? The S6 does have a silencer. Moreover, a barrel long enough to act as a silencer for 9mm parabellum would be... impractically long. At a guess, a couple dozen yards long at least, and that's a very conservative guess.
The gun requires manually cycling ammunition from the magazine.
C-c-combo breaker! This is the only sentence in this paragraph that is not egregiously wrong.
As for the rest of your post:
Why an insurance exec and not oil?
For the same reason that hundreds of thousands of people are publicly celebrating the murder right now. Health Care costs are peak culture war.
If he had the patience to learn a gun, make a suppressor, go in with a plan, not freak out — why not do all that with a rifle against a comparatively hardened target?
Because this is easier and far more survivable. The part where he does this and gets away with it makes it incredibly effective from a propaganda perspective.
Or why not use a bomb like the Red Army Faction and Alfred Herrhausen?
To put it a bit reductively, bombs are much harder on a whole variety of axes. This was very, very, very easy to do, and required resources that are a rounding error even to someone working minimum wage.
There's no objective, no real victory, and that applies to revenge
The last several years are best understood as a massive, distributed search for the best way to hurt the outgroup without getting in too much trouble. This is a search result popping into the hopper. That's the objective and the victory, when you get down to it.
The target and method say vendetta, not politics.
Then why are people who have no possible connection to this vendetta openly celebrating its execution?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
In a world where masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair, you use it to make a fake mustache to disguise yourself as a man who doesn't have a mustache.
This is my favorite sentence of the week.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
I will again reiterate, for our audience, that I, for one, do not think it's "clear" at all, that you have not provided sufficient evidence to back this claim
This is true, I have repeatedly refused to lay out my evidence, publicly or to you. You have claimed I'm lying, and I have agreed that by refusing to provide the full evidence behind my claim, your interpretation is reasonable.
On the other hand, you have a well-established reputation of advocating suicidal despair or mass murder, and so detailed discussions of the mechanics of rebellion with you or with the public generally are probably not a good idea.
We've just had an election. My prediction was that Trump was going to win. What was your prediction?
Looks specifically like a pistol with an integrated suppressor and manual action, in the vein of the B&T Station 6, and 9mm casings were recovered at the scene.
Screwing a home-made suppressor onto the average semi-auto handgun turns it into a manual action. Most handguns use a delayed-blowback system where the delay is provided by tilting the barrel to disengage some form of locking lug. Adding an extra pound or so of weight to the front of the barrel throws this system off, causing the gun to fail to cycle properly, which means you need to cycle it by hand. But don't take my word for it, here's Gun Jesus making the same point. The video alone should be sufficient, though, since on the first shot you can clearly see the slide moving and the large puff of gas exiting the ejection port as the gun partially cycles. Manual actions like the B&T do not do this.
Factory suppressors generally incorporate a Nielsen device, a small spring-loaded device that bypasses this issue, allowing suppressed semi-auto fire. Dedicated suppressed pistols sometimes use a slide lock to disable the semi-auto function completely. But what we see in the video is highly consistent with a semi-auto pistol mounting a simple, home-made suppressor that is compromising its semi-auto function.
My bet is that this is left-wing terrorism by a competent, motivated individual. No particular bet on a military or law-enforcement background; nothing here screams super-special operator to me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Had the Holy Roman Empire and its enemies had access to machine guns and mustard gas during the Thirty Years’ War, we can be certain that the casualty figures in that war would have been even worse than the over 50% fatality rate suffered by many of the affected areas.
I see no reason to believe that this should be the case.
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My understanding is that the 30 Years War was as lethal as it was because the fatality rate is measured by the population in the area the war was being fought in, not by the population of the belligerent states involved.
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Technology shapes conflicts decisively. Had the Holy Roman Empire had machine guns and mustard gas, and presumably also telegraphs and railways and steam ships and modern farming, I see no reason to believe that the war would have played out the way it did only with increased lethality. It seems to me that what would actually happen is, essentially, something like World War 1 on the tactical level, higher lethality for the military forces and much, much lower mortality for the general population of non-combatants. You might even get significantly lower mortality for the soldiers; the Christmas Truce didn't emerge due to Materialist Rationality, after all.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
The Church of Christ has been good for me. It has its foibles, but it's decentralized so there's no way to skinsuit it from the top. Individual churches may not be immune to lady ministers and Rainbow politics, but they are generally quite resistant to them.
As for belief, it seems to me that the best approach for most atheists moving in this direction starts with interrogating what human beliefs are and how they actually work. The popular narrative is that beliefs are forced by evidence through a deterministic process; once people have adopted this belief, they note that contrary beliefs are not being forced by the subsequent evidence they encounter, and so conclude that the evidence for those contrary beliefs must not be very strong, and so can be safely discarded. This creates a system of self-reinforcing circular logic that is nearly impervious to contradiction so long as it is not examined too closely.
If you examine the process by which beliefs are formed and modified, though, you will clearly see that this narrative is very clearly false. Beliefs are not forced by evidence through a deterministic process, but rather very clearly chosen through an act of will. We reason from axioms, and axioms are necessarily chosen pre-rationally.
It seems to me that people who find genuine belief in God impossible are trying to believe in God in defiance of their own axioms, which is never going to work well. The solution is to confront the axioms themselves in particular and the nature of axioms generally, and to internalize that the consensus Rationalist Materialist narrative is not nearly as seamless as it presents itself. This ought, it seems to me, free them up to allow doubt to work for their faith rather than only against it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
I trolled through the posts on thing of things, searching for my old handle till I got a hit, and worked it from there... I was pretty sure that conversation was one of the last I had on that blog, so it wasn't that hard to work through posts until I found it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
my only regret is the shooter didn't go for his wife and two children instead of him.
Advocacy for the cold-blooded murder of women and children is not an example of the sort of conversation we are trying to foster here. Advocacy for the murder of anyone is not the sort of conversation we are trying to foster here. This is a place for conversation, not for calls to war; we aim to discuss the culture war, not wage it. If you cannot do that, this place is not for you.
You have a lot of warnings and one tempban in the log, and no QCs. I am banning you for a week, and if the other mods think that duration too short I encourage them to lengthen it. If you continue to post things like this on your return, the bans will escalate rapidly. Please do not do that.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
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Tolerance is not a moral precept. "Tolerant" societies rely on their population having sufficiently coherent values such that the differences in values can be ignored. Observably, humans can and have sufficiently divergent values that "Tolerance" cannot bridge the gaps.
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Humans do not default or even gravitate to the norms and views of a moderate California Liberal circa 1995; mutually incompatible values are quite common. A population's values drift over time, and the capacity for drift is large. Liberalism, at least as it has existed in the last two or three generations, has no comprehension that this is even possible, much less any plan for how to deal with it. Worse, Liberalism seems to actively encourage values-drift, removing the values-coherency that allows it to function in the first place.
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Formalized rules cannot constrain human will. All rules have loopholes, and the more complex the ruleset the more loopholes they have. Rules organize cooperation, but are powerless to constrain defection. Liberalism appears to have no native comprehension of the phrase "manipulation of procedural outcomes"; I'm convinced that merely grokking the meaning behind that phrase makes one significantly less liberal.
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Atomic individualism is, at a minimum, closer to Hell than Heaven. Humans are social creatures. Humans are hierarchical creatures. Humans need community and structure, and community and structure cannot coexist with monomaniacal maximalization of individual freedom. Social Cohesion and Social Trust do not spring eternal from the void, you have to build and maintain them or they go away, never to return to you.
Why would the game be over? The game has barely even started. Do you think, if this last election had gone the other way, that would have been game, set, match? Would the Death Star have appeared in orbit and engaged primary ignition?
If Trump dies tomorrow, the Culture War will go on. If Blue Tribe jails Elon, the Culture War will go on. If another pandemic breaks out, the culture war will go on. And as I was arguing ten years ago, I argue today: Red Tribe is not only going to win, but is clearly going to win. The question is how and at what cost, but all the plausible costs seem acceptable to me.
“So yeah, the war. It is everything. Is this really how you want it? We’ll win.”
I rather think you won’t, actually. Your side seems to have a much easier time making enemies than friends, in my experience. Your comrades hate too fast and forgive too slow, and the obvious problems with your ideology keep expressing themselves in open fratricide. By de facto embracing a “revolutionary conscience” model of ethics, the movement generates an endless series of hypocrisies that must be covered up or explained away, thereby burning good-will it might otherwise turn to the cause. Social Justice’s gains have been significant, but it seems to me that the current generation is trading on goodwill amassed by their forebears, and that most of their success comes easy because the general population does not see where the movement is leading them.
A fair point. Now offer your plan for how the powers we've seen turned against Red Tribe can be reliably leashed in the future. Tell me how we get back to a trustworthy media ecosystem. Tell me how we end systemic discrimination in education and employment against non-Blues. Tell me how we get the FBI to stop breaking the law to persecute Republicans, and then breaking it the other way to protect democrats. Tell me how we lock up cancel culture for good. Tell me how we solve the thing where the general Blue population believes that they have an inalienable right to lawless violence against perceived Reds without consequence or retaliation.
The system whereby we share power with Blues cannot survive the abuses we have seen. It has to go. One of the best ways to convince Blues of that fact is to use it against them, forcing them to fight back against it themselves out of self-preservation. This does not even require breaking laws in the way that they repeatedly have done, and continue to endorse doing. Merely enforcing the letter of the law will, I think, be more than sufficient.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Thomas Matthew Crooks' plan involved walking along a rooftop, openly carrying a rifle, in front of a crowd pointing and shouting his location and in direct view of at least two secret service snipers, taking a position, and then firing more than a half-dozen shots at a VIP while the snipers assigned to protect that VIP did nothing.
His attempt demonstrated a number of things. "Competence" was not one of them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
All legally-owned silencers are registered with the federal government, and I believe part of the regulation involves consent to searches at the ATF's discretion. There's workarounds that might or might not work, but racking the slide isn't nearly great enough an inconvenience to override the advantage of disposability and untracability. Making a suppressor is also very simple.
Crimes are real, and people in high places commit them. But prosecuting them is reactive, and prosecutorial discretion lends itself to petty political witch hunts. Trump supporters, of all people, should realize this.
No, we shouldn't. What we should realize is that the system has been used against us, legitimately or illegitimately, and so now it needs to be used against them as well. If the ways that federal, state, social and corporate power have been used against Red Tribe were acceptable, then they remain acceptable when we use them against Blue Tribe. If that cannot and will not be allowed to happen, then that is valuable information that we would do well to confirm before considering where we go from here.
If in fact the situation is one where Blue Tribe is fundamentally unwilling to accept application of their own rules against their interests, then this fact needs to be made common knowledge.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
The shooter was using subsonic ammunition that did not have the necessary oomph behind it to work the action - he knew the slide was going to need to be racked after each shot.
Or he was using a homemade suppressor that did not incorporate a Nielsen device.
Because most semi-automatic pistols for sale utilize a moving barrel of one type or another, adding a suppressor (or any 9mm muzzle device) to the end of that barrel can have a detrimental effect to the firearm’s reliability, even in some cases to the point of preventing the gun from cycling at all. To remedy this, handgun suppressors commonly use a Nielsen device, also sometimes referred to as a piston or booster. This device increases the amount of energy that is directed rearward into the firearm’s barrel, counteracting the weight of the suppressor at the end and aiding in unlocking the action during the firing cycle.
I would be very surprised if he acquired this suppressor legally, and fairly surprised if he stole it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
yeah, that general sort of thing would be my guess, but it could just as easily be a scratch-built baffle stack or a tube packed with steel wool or a 3d-printed plastic toob. The actual muffling components of suppressors are not complicated. The dingus that makes them compatible with a tilting-block semi-auto pistol action is much more so.
Looks like a suppressed semi-auto pistol. my guess would be a home-made suppressor, which is why he's having to rack the slide between shots. Suppressors mount to the barrel, and the added weight throws off the physics of the most common forms of delayed-blowback actions, turning your semi-auto into a manually-operated single shot. Factory versions usually have a free-float mechanism that decouples the suppressor long enough for the weapon to cycle, but a homemade device is almost certainly not going to have one of those. The shooter seems to be pretty clearly practiced with this particular weapon; I see two clean operations with no hint of surprise at the failure to cycle and then what looks like a failure to enter battery that he efficiently taps the slide to clear for the third shot.
Concur on this clearly being an assassination.
[EDIT] - Video is now down.
That seems like a plausible motivation, but goddamn is it stupid. Disassemble the pistol, douse the pieces in gasoline and burn them. Take a bus somewhere near the coast, walk to the beach and chuck it into the ocean. Either of those would be more than sufficient.
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