JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
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
Meh. I've never been a Trump partisan, but this changes little for me. I still view Trump as the prole's middle finger, and his decline into persecuted irrelevance is part of the cyclical tragedy of class politics.
I called this right at the start. Trump is not Caesar, Trump is not Hitler. Trump is Tiberius Gracchus. He was, is, and will always be the failed aspirations of the working class projected onto an incredibly flawed cartoon of a human being.
We're not to revolution yet, but if and when we get there, the memory of how Trump revealed the depths of the deep state and baited the establishment into scrapping all their old norms will be strong.
The working class has been defeated, their champion will now be buried under every over-charging liberal prosecutor in every state and city where they have authority. The PMC cannot allow the threat that Trump poses to their hegemony to go without absolutely humiliating and destroying him (in their own minds, anyway).
So, when a competent successor appears, promises all the same things Trump did, and manages to get his hands on the military, he might well decide there's no point in comfortable retirement, because that won't be an option. If you want to lead the Populare faction, you must win or die in prison, poverty or both. The proles will not be allowed an equal voice in the operation of the country except by force.
The American Empire will have its emperor soon enough, and we will have Alvin Bragg to thank, in some small part. The senatorial thugs who killed the Gracchi rejoiced at their victory over the Populares. Sulla dug up the bones of Marius and threw them into the Tiber, and the senate rejoiced because they had reset the constitution to ensure the proles would never threaten again. And Julius Caesar watched it all, and when his turn came, he did not submit to the orders of the Senate. And yet he could not bring himself to kill them all, so they killed him.
Man has only two choices in government, autocracy or oligarchy. The people will support an emperor because the oligarchy is uncontrollable otherwise.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Let's talk shitty policing!
The story starts back in August, when police (specifically, Adams County Sherriff's Department of Ohio) raided the home of Joseph "Afroman" Foreman on a warrant for narcotics and kidnapping. Perhaps they thought that the author of "Because I got high" would be a slam dunk, but they walked out with a couple roaches and a few grand in cash.
When they discovered a grand total of jack and shit, they were forced to return most of the money, except the stuff they stole.
Reason covered the case here:
And the man himself has weighed in with a music video that is all security footage of the raid titled "Will you help me repair my door?"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
Down with qualified immunity, the legalized piracy known as civil asset forfeiture, and the self-funding militarized security state.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Once you take the wide view on culture, you can start to see that stereotypical behaviors of cultures are the result of the pressures of that society. Congolese, Italians and Mexicans are not "lazy", they are optimized for their local culture, which does not reward work nor punish the lack of it. How this interfaces with global sort-of-capitalist economics is uneven at best.
Black culture in the US is likewise poorly suited to producing steady blue collar workers, but really good at producing various entertainers (at lottery-level rates), and extremely vibrant in cultural production/innovation. Black americans have better mental health and general happiness than many other groups, so the question of culture is also a question of what we value.
This is cultural relativism to a point. Cultures are not good nor bad, but they are good/bad for specific things. Jewish/north european/east-asian culture generally produces people well suited to modern mechanized capitalism, so they do well in modern mechanized capitalistic societies. Native american, Hmong, Somali etc. cultures by and large do not. Much of what gets called "structural racism" is in fact merely cultural mismatch to the political and economic realities of the world.
Every culture must follow their own path in responding to modernism/globalism, but some paths lead to better places than others.
One can admire the Chinese/Japanese work ethic, but I'd rather live as an Italian.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I'm perfectly ok with kids acting out (within reason). It's part of testing boundaries, developing a sense of self.
That said, I think it is incumbent on adults to contextualize and police this process. The problem as I see it is not that kids are somehow "worse" now than they used to be. The problem is that adults pretend to believe the little psychos and seem to be incapable of telling them "no". Also, we've extended the zone of acceptable rebellious behavior long past adolescence into the twenties, thirties and forties. The problem is not "kids today", it's kids thirty years ago, who never grew up and refuse to shoulder the responsibility of being the buzzkill adults. Sometimes you have to tell the kids "hey, I know you're nonbinary today, but maybe don't take a bansaw to your genitals until you really think it over and are a legal adult". Yes, they're gonna rage and call you mean names, it's ok. That's what fucked-up kids do. I did the same thing when I was thirteen, but I grew out of it and learned some shit. So now, I'm in a position to contextualize all that anger and silliness. Been there, done that. Most of them will probably be as embarrassed about their antics in twenty years as I am about that mohawk.
We don't have to take the tantrums of hormonal teens (or terminally online/mentally ill adults) as some sort of universal Truth. Disagreement and caution are not "hate", and when we accept that framing, we lose moral authority to do the right thing for people who are incapable of it in the moment.
JTarrou
1yr ago
When your work tells you to feel like you "belong", or that you are part of a "family", watch your wallet and your asshole. They gettin ready to fuck y'all.
Work is a job. If they didn't pay you to show up, you wouldn't do it. They're trying to get you to identify with an opposing force. They aren't your family and no one "belongs" at work.
JTarrou
7mo ago
This sensible advice will always founder on the rocks of female sexuality. Women do not want to be safe, they do not want safe men, and if the literature they consume is any clue, practically every "romance" novel has a positively described rape scene in it. Rape is simultaneously a hideous crime and the central sexual fantasy.
Gay guys don't want to catch HIV, but they want to do all the stuff that produces that outcome. Straight dudes don't want to get stabbed by a crazy girlfriend, but they definitely want all the stuff that produces that outcome. We are all enslaved by our own sexuality to a greater or lesser degree. Some people don't have much trouble with it, but it's a reliable failure mode of humanity.
JTarrou
1yr ago
This is a lot of boo words ("chattel", really?).
This looks pretty simple to me. Blue cities vote on policies that increase the burden on border states, border states start shipping their burden to the blue cities. What did people think they were voting for when they made their towns "sanctuary cities"? Were they hoping they'd never have to pay up on that assertion?
The second big thing to remember is that the Federal government is already doing this, as a matter of policy. They just don't send them to NYC or Martha's Vineyard. No, they go to places like Chattanooga. Everything you're saying about the small number of stunt flights the Republicans are doing applies just as well to the much larger operation that the federal government is running. But, since they're dumping them in red states (Georgia, Nebraska, Tennessee, etc.), neither the national media nor you seem to care much.
This whole thing is in my view some perfect hardball politics. A lot of towns got caught up in TDS and made stupid laws to virtue signal about immigration (using those same human beings you're outraged at Republicans for "manipulating"). All the while thinking they weren't going to be getting the midnight flights of immigrants dumped on their doorstep. Abbot and DeSantis are just including them in the distribution network, in the meanest and most politically advantageous way they can.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I've been catching bits and pieces, don't follow pop culture that closely, and here's the sort of "memory headlines" I recall.
1: New LOTR property coming to Amazon! - awesome if they don't fuck it up
2: Black Dorves! - oh jesus they're gonna woke-fuck the godfather of fantasy, maybe I'll wait until a few shows are out to see if it sucks or not
3: Our audience are all racists! - Well that's always a good sign, especially when your show is months from release.
4: We have to delete reviews because we're being review-bombed by all the racists! - Hmmmmm
Then, last week Amazon put RoP in my "continue viewing" roster despite the fact that I have never opened the show once, nor watched even one second of it. Not in my "suggested for you", not in "TV we think you might like". "Continue Viewing".
Fuck you Amazon. If you had a good show, you wouldn't be slagging off your fans, removing reviews or trying to con people who hadn't watched the show. Those are all things you do when you have a turd on your hands and you're trying desperately to gin up culture war valence so at least some people will watch it.
Don't put shit in my queue
JTarrou
1yr ago
[Looks up from his vast collection of being called a racist, homophobe, transphobe, white supremacist, rape supporter, Nazi, etc.]
Welcome to political discussion!
JTarrou
1yr ago
It looks like the far-right (of the quite openly far-right, even post-fascist variety)
So.......the normal center-right that always gets called "far right, semi-to-full-fascist"?
Call me when the ovens kick on. Until then, the boy called "Nazis" one or two trillion times too many.
What are your expectations?
I expect that they will govern exactly as competently and moderately as every other Italian government of the last five hundred years.
JTarrou
10mo ago
My prediction is that everyone just fudges it and keeps discriminating. Blue states might pass some laws mandating discrimination, and they'll play the same shell game they do with gun laws. It will all get struck down, in a decade. By which time they'll have come up with a new bullshit workaround.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Most western intellectual movements have been disproportionately jewish, including fascism at one point.
The most parsimonious explanation is that they are a small enough group that any significant representation is over-representation, combined with (in the Ashkenazi wing of judaism) higher average IQ and disproportionate representation in intellectual pursuits. New political movements come out of a very specific demographic, upper-middle-class intellectuals who view their lack of power and authority as an indictment of society, hence the drive for change. Jews in the west are highly overrepresented in this class, and thus in most political movements.
They are also over-represented among conservative intellectuals, anarchy theorists, communists, anti-communists, dadaists, SocJus inquisitors, etc. Pretty much any intellectual fad popular with that demographic is going to be "disproportionately jewish".
JTarrou
1yr ago
This is just ignorance from morons who don't know anything about what it takes to purchase or own a firearm and the vast library of pernicious and malicious laws that one must navigate.
I work in a gun shop, and the "I watch CNN, I know you just sell guns, I'm not filling out paperwork" guy is a perennial favorite. My job is mostly paperwork compliance. Of the ten or so employees, four are dedicated to paperwork, compliance, legal shit.
In my city, state, and counting federal statutes, there's around 75,000 separate laws governing firearms. Anyone who wants another one should explain very carefully how what they propose is going to affect crime, not just all gun owners, and this proposal does a total of jack and shit for crime.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Once you've been through a few youth fad eras, it's hard not to see this sort of thing as just more pleas for attention. "I'm special, there's no one like me, I'm [punk/metal/hippie/anorexic/ADD/neurodivergent etc.]". People are terrified that "Fight Club" might have been right, and we aren't unique or notable in and of ourselves. Look at the language we're using here, where not understanding an arcane and constantly changing gender taxonomy makes one a "normie". As in: "normal". The horror! You can hear the fear.
It's a common adolescent obsession, but extending adolescence has extended the obsession. I cut my mohawk off when I was sixteen, seems to be taking some people a bit longer.
JTarrou
7mo ago
I think you've hit on one leg of a very important elephant.
I've noticed similar phenomena from gun clubs to veterans organizations to churches to beer-league sports. Commonly there is a life cycle, and if the initial stages are strong enough, the legacy can live on a while. But ultimately, unless external conditions are producing more of whatever fed that cause, it dies. I've noped out of a few organizations just because I didn't want to be the last guy holding the bag. When they start canvassing for board members, I'm done.
Some of it is just failing to adapt to the times, but if you adapt to the times too much, you can also crater your organization as it loses focus and splits. For example, if your Street Rod org started taking roller skates, it probably wouldn't help.
Another issue is that almost all organizations eventually end up being run by the people who can be assed to show up and do the clerical work necessary. This naturally concentrates power in the hands of a small minority who can steer the organization along their personal preferences. Occasionally this is done well, but that's a rarity.
A third is that any successful organization is going to generate good will and money, which are natural targets for idiots, grifters, con men, politicians and degenerates everywhere.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I think any analysis that focuses on the internal mental states and thoughts of other people is doomed. It's a mistake I made myself just prior to this conflict, in which I could not envision what could possibly motivate Putin to invade Ukraine. Suitably chastened, I'll restrict my analysis to the best facts we have, which at current point are:
1: Ukraine has held. You can blame western weapons and aid if you want, but the point is the Ukrainian people have used that aid to hold off the Russians. All the military aid in the world didn't do shit for the Iraqis or Afghans, because they had no nationalistic impulse to bind them together. Ukraine is finding and founding their national myths for the future, if they survive.
2: With the recent offensive, the Ukrainian military has proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that they can run a competent conventional military offensive operation, which isn't nearly as simple as civilians might think. What's more, it has worked at least to some significant degree. Once again, you can blame western weapons or badly trained Russian troops, but both those things are realities.
Early on, I was fairly pessimistic about Ukrainian chances in a stand-up war with Russia, and I think the fundamentals do still favor Russia. But we are seeing the cracks in this consensus idea. Yes, Russia could mobilize fully, but will their economic and political system withstand the strain? Yes, they could nuke, but that doesn't solve their problem. They're trying to annex this territory, after all. What is becoming clear is that without committing significantly more resources to the fight, Russia is not on track to defeat Ukraine outright. We don't know if Ukraine can continue their offensive, or repeat their success, but the idea that Russia can ignore their military capability is now dead. Beyond that, speculation can take a man anywhere he wants to go.
JTarrou
7mo ago
in the course of practising the profession
A tweet
appearance on the podcast
A tweet
A tweet
A tweet
Peterson’s tweet
That's your argument refuting itself.
JTarrou
23d ago
They're not China, they're Canada.
Politically irrelevant backwater just north of an actual powerful country. Being "progressiver-than-thou" about Britain is Scotland's national identity. Just another not-really-a country making stupid laws to stick it to The Man (meaning the people who protect their borders and fund their government).
JTarrou
1yr ago
Lol "We discriminated against men and wrote a million think-pieces about how shit they all are, and now they publish fewer books with us, proving that women are better at writing!"
Just to reiterate what I posted on the subreddit prior to Exodus 3:
1: There are two allegations here, one that someone in the student section shouted racial slurs, and one that Richardson was accosted by a white man who told her to "watch her back".
2: The second allegation was the UVU student, but it's unclear what exactly he said. Reports seem to indicate some sort of mental impairment, though apparently not enough to bar him from college. My read is that a weird kid said something weird and this got connected in Richardson's head to the (possibly imaginary) racism of BYU fans.
3: I had to watch women's volleyball for this, so I'm riding it as far as I can. The slur allegation was that someone (or multiple someones) in the freshman section was shouting the slur "every time she [richardson] served". She served once in the second set and twice in the fourth, so "every time" was three instances, specifically. Doesn't really impact whether the allegation is true, but some of the reporting made it sound like the crowd just chanted it for two whole sets. Which would, of course, be difficult to hide on footage.
4: I must say, I am heartened by BYU's second response. Their first was exactly as craven and shitty as we've come to expect, but apparently cooler heads prevailed.
5: Public service reminder that fake "hate incidents" are real hate incidents, just with the valence reversed. Jussie Smollett concocted a hateful and racialized plot to play the victim and thereby victimize white people, Republicans, and Trump fans specifically. To the degree that we believe a racial accusation to be false, I think it is a mistake to classify it as a "hoax". It isn't, it's a false flag intended to harm people. This isn't about sympathy or clout, it's about hurting a race of people based on their race, by making false accusations. In other words, it's the same shitty mob behavior that lead to lynchings in the past. We would not describe a false rape accusation of a black man in the Jim Crow South as a "hoax", but as an act of racism and incitement to violence.
JTarrou
5mo ago
I smell statistical bullshit.
My normal standard of living has taken a noticeable if not disastrous turn. My pay is roughly the same, my costs are a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries etc.). My rent is up 30%, the value of my savings is down 20%, and the cost of buying a house is up 50%.
Three years ago I had a lot more disposable income. Now, all that might fit fine within the "economy is doing fine" narrative, but it doesn't feel fine to me. What I hear from posts like this is "economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies". I am noticeably poorer today than I was in 2020. All the statistics in the world aren't going to change that.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Naming conventions as class signifiers with implications for discussion of race, wealth, sexuality etc.
I had a form come across my desk today with a really bad name on it. Very stereotypically ghetto black, badly spelled, four middle names (one of which was “Mykween”). The name is too long for the name box on a federal form, so I had to file a supplemental sheet for it. Which got me thinking about why people name their kids stupid and stereotypical names, and what that means for the larger conversation about social divisions.
I live in a majority-minority city, I work with black people, we have lots of black customers etc. etc. There's more than one sort of black person, just as there is more than one sort of every group.
I look around my friend group and co-workers, not a one of them has a name like that. Eric, Dom (Dominic), Reggie (Reginald), Hezzie (Hezekiah), etc. Most of my black friends and co-workers have either very normal “white” names, or old fashioned/religious names. A few have african names, but that's because they're from Africa.
This is because the stereotypically “black” names are more specifically black underclass names. The working class' most serious social problem is distinguishing themselves from the underclass. So they name their kids very differently. And, in turn, if you see a black person with an african (or even better, fake african) name, a political portmanteau or a double-barreled last name, that's a middle- or upper-class thing. Hannah Nicole-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Edna Kane-Williams etc. We see similar patterns in other races, most Cletuses do not attend Harvard and the hyphenated last name is similarly an aspirational middle and upper class affectation. In addition, naming conventions change over time, so what is signalled by a name in one decade may signal something very different later. The name “Isis” dropped off pretty severely after about 2014.
This all brings to mind Scott's parable of the colored togas.
JTarrou
1yr ago
1: I am extremely skeptical of the "role model" thing as relating to celebrities or strangers. Actual role models are people in other people's lives, and no amount of group X in job Y is going to increase that.
2: The problem is that what really does affect the life choices of underclass kids of all races is their role models in the neighborhood, school, and social circle. Who is cool, who gets dates, who is feared, who is funny etc.
For the overwhelming majority of underclass kids, they aren't one black lead actor away from a successful career in law. Their realistic options are welfare poverty, crime, or low-paid, low-status work permanently. Is it such a shock that for many, welfare and crime seem like lesser evils? It's more of a shock to me that so few take that path. The majority still take the low-paid low-status work, in most places.
If you want to create role models for poor kids with low prospects, you need jobs that bring either reasonably good wages or social status, that can be done by people in the bottom quarter of IQ, self control and time horizon distributions. And you need social change among the underclass community to value that sort of effort, rather than viewing it as an attack on their culture and dignity. White people can really only influence one of these things in the black underclass.
White people move in - Gentrification
White people move out - White Flight
White people stay where they are - Segregation/xenophobia
White people move somewhere else - Colonization
Few progressives will say it, but 'ol Willy Ockham's shaving implements point to a direct and explanatory answer.
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