JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
JTarrou
1yr ago
They very much violate the unspoken assumption that a school is trying to make a better American citizen
Then public schools are worse. The Hasids are just scamming America, not trying to train its executioners.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Alright, but that's just grounds to fix all of them
Fair enough. Once we've made all the public schools cost-effective, educational and nonpartisan, the Hasidim are next.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I'm fine with fixing the welfare laws to prohibit lifelong moochers in the vast majority of cases. I'm fine with banning public funds from going to religious schools.
I don't think it's logical to construct a just-so scenario that lands exclusively on one out of thousands of religious groups. Seems really specific.
JTarrou
1yr ago
He did. I paraphrased.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Oh god, you're giving me flashbacks. YES. They made not-Maduro a conservative. They couldn't even set it in Chile or something. Wild, wild stuff.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Self-reporting is a flaw, but it is with all survey questions. Either surveys tell us nothing because it's self-reports, or they tell us something and we have to scrabble through the phrasing and operationalization to figure out what that is.
The study did use a very broad definition of "defensive gun use", and may have been misunderstood by some fraction of respondents. I think we can safely surmise that the numbers the survey presents are a theoretical maximum, the true number is almost certainly smaller, but might not be much smaller.
JTarrou
1yr ago
There is simply no chance that 44% of black gun owners have used their gun in self defense.
Is there not? Black gun owners are the most likely of any demographic to have to defend themselves. The definitions used in the survey are very broad, but I think granting the definition it's at least plausible. Perhaps an upper-bound estimate, but plausible.
By the definitions of the survey (as best I interpret them), I've had two DGUs, and I'm not particularly high risk. I wrote up the story of one of them on the main page.
JTarrou
1yr ago
All this can be true, and yet it's still the best around. Your complaints boil down to one that is irrelevant (dirty gas), one that is actually a positive thing (the ability to tune the gas system to a wide variety of calibers), and one that is valid but incredibly minor (lack of ability to fire the gun with the stock folded/lack of folding stock).
There's a lot of military-pattern rifles that are very decent, but none that have anything like the raw number of options that the AR platform does. That is partially because the gun is military-pattern, which is always popular with civilians in the US. But moreso it's because those civilians are way out ahead of the government when it comes to innovation and technology applied to firearms. Competitive shooting drives technological innovation, civilians fund it by buying new "high speed" doodads for their guns, the military skims the stuff that works out the best. It's a "virtuous cycle" of technological development. If you added all the accessories available for the next ten most popular military-pattern rifles in the world together, they would be a tiny fraction of what's available for the AR.
Go ahead and just try to put a scope on an AK-pattern rifle. You'll see why the AR is popular. Shoot a Tavor and you'll appreciate the gas system from the AR. Try to re-chamber a G3 in the new hot caliber and you'll understand why it lost out. Every gun has its fanboys, but the AR is dominant in the same way the US military is dominant. It's not perfect, just better than everything else combined.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Yes and no.
At the most macro level, no. I don't want my tax dollars going to fund religious groups at all.
Given the fact that I don't get a choice in this, my money is going to religious groups, I find the orthodox relatively unobjectionable. Certainly and clearly better than Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, LDS, Academics, etc. On numbers alone if nothing else, they just aren't a priority problem to me. I don't see how they could be for anyone given their insular behavior. They aren't proselytizing, they aren't bombing shit, they aren't doing drive-bys. They're scamming the welfare system so they can sit in tiny rooms and argue about the Talmud rather than man a deli counter. If we're going to waste the taxpayer's money (and, I hope we can agree, we are), our country could do a lot worse, and does so on a regular basis.
If I were king, I would end all federal money going to schools, period. There's no such thing as secular education, so the state should GTFO. But that's not a political possibility, so we're talking about the least-bad policy to have. Lots of religions run this sort of scam, there was a whole thing in Minneapolis about Somali day-care centers that involved a lot of graft a few years back. I suspect which one people get outraged about depends on whether they consider jews or muslims to be their outgroup.
The only interesting thing I see here is that apparently, the NYT considers orthodox jews to be outgroup now.
JTarrou
1yr ago
This all assumes that "instability" can only be caused by powerful interference, which in the Middle East is hysterical. The place is built on instability, everyone hates everyone and the minute a strongman falls (like Ghadaffi or Hussein), everyone goes right back to the blood feuds, terrorism and murder that are the normal social interactions of the ME.
These are societies built on ever-shifting clan alliances, backroom dealings, secret accords and political gamesmanship dressed up as muslim piety. It does not require the US or Israel to destabilize it, it is already unstable. Now, both countries and many more have done a lot of bad shit in the ME, but that's a different question to what causes it. And the sad answer is: the will of the people. This is what the populace of the ME wants, an endless struggle of internecine violence, intermittent warfare, insane racism and religious bigotry. This is what they vote for, given a chance (MB in Egypt, Hamas in the territories, Erdogan in Turkey etc.). This is what they default to any time a dictator installed to keep a lid on things so the oil keeps flowing falls.
Ghadaffi, for all his faults, at least didn't allow slavery. Hussein, a truly despicable tyrant, was 100% better than the ISIS regime his people installed at the first opportunity once he and the US were gone. This is not a US problem, it's not an Israel problem, hell, it's not even a dictator problem. It's a people problem. You can't have peace among people who don't want it. You can enforce it, for a while, if you're strong enough. But every dictator falls, and every foreign intervention runs out of money or political will eventually. You're left with the population, and if the boys want to fight, you better let 'em.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Meh, we disagree. I think the AR is dominant because the US has a civilian gun culture with disposable income. No military in the world would put the time and money into iterating a system like the American Gun Nut.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Do you remember Clinton's presidency? Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Federal Building bombing?
We have a ways to go before we get there again. Or take it back to the '70s and the Days of Rage.
That, I think, is the point. Not that things are so good now, but that they were much worse relatively recently. Biden is setting the stage for that sort of repression, but he hasn't actually done much yet. Maybe he'll sack up on the rhetoric and we'll get to fuck around and find out. Or maybe he won't. No sense catastrophizing before the fact. Just keep your head on straight and https://youtube.com/watch?v=O_3_-UrhZH0
JTarrou
1yr ago
Is it? People vent more online, but there was no online really in previous eras. I remember the '90s being pretty polarized, the 80s too. Clinton was impeached, so was Bush. You can still meet old leftists as pissed off about Reagan as modern lefties are about Trump. If political violence is our measure, the '80s and '90s were much worse. Reagan was shot, the feds murdered a bunch of people (Waco saw 76 dead) and some militia terrorists blew up a federal building in retribution (body count 168). And that's just the headlines.
Seems to me that people are pretty angry, but over less and less. The '80s had all the banana republic wars, Iran/Contra, AIDS, homelessness, the Cold War etc. The '90s had the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, Kosovo etc. The oughts had Iraq and Afghanistan. What are people freaking out about now? Neopronouns and hysterical conspiracy theories? The Overton Window has never been smaller, yet people are as pissed off as ever.
I'm open to being wrong here, but your assertion just doesn't ring true to me. If you have a measure of polarization in practical terms, I'd love to see it.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Well, we're going to find out. Many of the laws being passed about CRT and trans issues, though provoked by really bad behavior, are licenses for censorship, and mostly being implemented by red state legislatures. We'll see if the right can censor as hard as the left, but as of right now, I doubt it.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Free speech is rarely a primary goal.
It's a defensive line when you lose control of the mechanisms of censorship. This has nothing to do with left or right, it's like the deficit. Good when you're in power, bad when you're out of power. The left figured out how to stampede private companies into enforcing their censorship, but that's an unstable equilibrium. Sooner or later someone is going to remember that twitter trolls don't command armies, and can be safely told to fuck off.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Meh, that hasn't really been my experience. I live in a pretty red part of the country and work in a gun store. I'm an open atheist and nobody gives a shit (at least not out loud). I've clocked a few shady looks about my discussion of religion and politics, but a Purple Heart covers all sins on the right. As with race, sexuality etc. I don't think it's atheism at all that people object to, it's the politics they assume goes along with it. Prove you're not the outgroup, and the atheism doesn't matter. The right thinks the left hates America. I can prove I don't, so they're fine with it.
This is a bit tougher with the left. There's no straightforward path to legitimacy for heretics.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Reposting on request from Zorba:
The discussion of defensive gun usage in a major survey in the CW thread got me thinking about an experience I had some years back. I thought I'd tell the story to illustrate the sorts of things that can happen around violent or potentially violent situations. For what it's worth, I'm not sure if I classify this as a defensive gun use or not, but it qualifies under the terminology of the survey. It was very much a memorable night, and made me rethink the way I carry guns and the sorts of scenarios I prepare for.
First thing: I was drunk. Dancing-in-public drunk. My girlfriend and I had attended a wedding of some friends, someone else was the DD, so I took full advantage. At the time, my girlfriend lived with another single girl in a house outside town. Isolated, quiet. Cornfields and scattered houses. The housemate had been on a date, and the two of them were back at the house when we got dropped off. We said hello and left them to do whatever people on dates do on darkened living room couches while we went upstairs to bed. I passed out almost immediately.
The GF woke me up a short time later, there was a commotion downstairs. A strange man had arrived and was banging on the main door of the house, loudly demanding to speak to the housemate's date. I went downstairs, the date said he knew the man, that it was his pastor. He said he'd handle it, so I went back upstairs. As a precaution, I retrieved my carry gun and kept it close to hand. At this point, I was regretting the drinking. Waste of a good drunk.
Outside, the date had gone out onto the porch to talk to the guy, we could hear muffle conversation, then escalating in volume. There was a series of loud crashes, and the housemate started screaming that she was calling the police. Fuck me running. I remember clearly getting out of bed the second time, gun in hand, wearing basketball shorts, dress socks and nothing else. An ironic thought occurred to me: "so this is why people look like this on 'Cops'". Not the sort of situation I had envisioned when I started carrying a firearm.
I got downstairs and the date was bleeding from his face, apparently his pastor had assaulted him. The housemate had called the police, but it would be over twenty minutes before they arrived (given where we were, that was probably a fast time). Meanwhile, the pastor had discovered a hatchet that had been left out of the shed and started walking around the house, hitting the siding with the hatchet and shouting for the date to come back out and talk to him. Needless to say, that dude didn't seem enthused about the proposition. The crashing I'd heard had been the date falling into and through the screen door on the porch after the guy decked him.
The GF was curious, but I sent her back upstairs, told the housemate to lock the door behind me, and went out onto the porch. I might be tanked, but it was not my first rodeo. I leaned against the wall of the house (casually, I hoped) both to stay steady on my feet and to conceal the pistol I was now holding behind my leg. The situation was fairly simple: The man would have to make a 90-degree turn to come up the steps to the porch, after which I'd be within arms reach. I set my line at the bottom of the steps. If he tried to come up onto the porch, I would shoot him.
For a lunatic who was banging a hatchet on the side of a random house at 2AM in the middle of a cornfield, the pastor sounded lucid. He just wanted to talk, he felt bad, the whole thing had gotten out of hand etc. etc. Whole time he had the hatchet in his hand. In my hazy state, I decided to go with simplicity. "Put down the ax, go back to your car, and drive away". He'd try to argue something, and I'd just repeat it. This went on for maybe ten minutes. I was feeling like a broken record, but finally, finally he walked away. He dropped the hatchet, got into his car, and drove away. Shortly thereafter, the police showed up.
I went back to bed.
The coda is that the date didn't press charges, turns out the "pastor" was a self-proclaimed one with a long history of mental illness, sort of a street-preacher type. The housemate had to pay for the siding repair herself. The police were little help, and the prosecutor's office wasn't interested in dealing with a mental patient over property damage.
So that's the story. It's weird, but in my very limited experience it looks a lot more like the median "DGU" than a shootout in a pawn shop. These are the sorts of stories that do not generally make the papers or the police reports, but happen on a daily basis, many many times.
JTarrou
1yr ago
My read is a pretty simple one:
Young men are a dangerous and often degenerate demographic and they really have only two motivations: Sex and violence. Sex is what they want and violence is what they can do. One of the prime problems of society is how to get young men into adult society without doing anything too damaging. In the past, this was accomplished with marriage. Boys got married young, and the combination of sexual access, family responsibility and parental attachment was generally a strong enough combo to blunt the worst impulses.
That system is gone now, for most of the developed world.
The intersection with feminism is one of several reasons for this. Feminism wants equality with men, but specifically in the male dominated spaces, not the female spaces they had already dominated for millennia. The problem is that while all people are status-seeking, women are mate-status-seeking. Men don't much care, so long as a woman is attractive and pleasant. Achievement is sexy on a man, it's completely orthogonal for a woman. By gaining status in formerly male fields, women reduced the number of mates they are willing to consider substantially. The success of women in academics and the workplace creates a large and growing sector of the male population competing over a small and shrinking number of women who are poorer and lower status than they are. It also creates the phenomenon of wildly successful women complaining bitterly there are no decent (i.e. higher status/richer) men anymore. And there aren't, because the ladies succeeded in pricing themselves right out of a mate. Men can and will date down the heirarchy. Women (as a generality, exceptions, NAW, all that) don't.
This state of society is unstable in the long run. Young men who are not brought into society will eventually turn on society. And once they turn, it's only a matter of time before they organize, find a cause and start using the only power they really have: a violent death wish. I believe we already see the first stage of this with school shooters, ISIS recruits, etc.
The question is which way women want to go? They can keep the money and status, but they'd have to fight their own psychology and mate down. Or they can give up the money and status and have more mate options that coincide with their preferences. Or they can rely on repression to keep the men in line, but that requires men to do it, the women will still be alone, and people who are willing, even eager to die are really hard to stop.
JTarrou
1yr ago
This is all true, and it's why I didn't make a statement to the police at all. I'm fairly sure I was on firm self-defense territory, but I'm glad we never got to find out. You never know when you're going to fall into a media scandal, or an overzealous prosecutor, or just a bad cop. At the time, my thought was that with the hatchet, he could break the sliding glass door on the other side of the house and be inside in seconds. It is also the case that staying on the porch was on purpose, as it is legally part of the house (or curtilage).
Of all of it, the intoxication thing got to me the most. Prior to that night, it never occurred to me that just because I don't carry a gun to the bar doesn't mean I might not have to use a gun while drunk. There's no straightforward solution except to not have guns or not drink, and neither option appeals to me. I drink less now, and the lessons of that night are one reason.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Men can achieve status and reputation through social skills, sports achievements, comedy, etc.
Absolutely, but crucially, these are low percentage options. They are handsomely rewarded at the highest levels, but for every pro athlete, actor or comedian there are thousands who didn't make it. Simply put, these sorts of jobs cannot be the solution to a population-level problem. There just aren't enough of them.
A more realistic method is crime, and this is the prime driver of violence cycles in dysfunctional communities. The gangs provide a hierarchy to rise within, there's danger and money and drugs. And because of all that, there's sexual access as well. My pet theory is that this explains the crime level in our more dangerous areas. When it becomes the easiest way to gain protection, brotherhood, status and pussy, what red-blooded teenager wouldn't join a gang? I did. I just had the caution and foresight to make sure it was the toughest gang in the world.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Ten percent of 350 mil is thirty five million dudes. The whole US military, National Guard and all police put together are about two million. Plus, they're staffed by who again? Oh yeah, young men. Right now the radicalization rate is tiny, but if even a tenth of one percent of that ten percent get as radicalized as school shooters, that's almost twice the size of the Marines. Probably not enough to stage a full-on revolution, but plenty enough to seriously degrade society. Three percent of them radicalized would most likely bring down the government.
JTarrou
1yr ago
To my knowledge, the guy never saw the gun. I did not display it, I did not mention it. I don't think the housemate or her date saw it either, though as I said, I was on the liquor a bit and not really dressed for concealment.
JTarrou
1yr ago
As I said at the beginning of the story, I'm a bit on the fence on the classification of that night myself. If you're criticizing the methodology of the survey, that's fair enough so long as you recognize that most of the time when a gun is present in a dangerous situation, it is not fired, and sometimes not even brandished. Maybe there needs to be an intermediate category, but the point is, this is why people want guns, and because the situation resolved peacefully, that can be lost as a data point. We should not take the moral restraint of legal gun owners as an argument to disarm them.
Bottom line for me is, I was going out on that porch with or without a gun. Having the gun gave me a better plan than bringing a knife to a hatchet fight with a guy who outweighed me by a hundred pounds.
JTarrou
1yr ago
No and yes.
No, I don't think they need to be particularly organized.
Yes, they need to be significantly more radicalized than street criminals.
FWIW, I don't think this is a likely scenario, I'm merely pointing out that you don't need all that high a percentage of the population to be suicidally homicidal to make a big difference.
I give you the Rogan Formulation:
1: In a cult, it's run by one guy who knows the whole thing is bullshit.
2: In a religion, that guy died.
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