JTarrou
13hr ago
Presumably, their plan was to force Congress to certify Trump as the election winner at gunpoint.
With zero guns? My god man. There's a slight problem with your theory.
JTarrou
13hr ago
Sounds like a slam dunk to me.
Right after you prosecute the last fifty Democrats to use similar language. Don't rush, I'll wait.
JTarrou
13hr ago
Part of Seattle seceded from the union.
But we did get a great natural experiment in anti-racist policing, which started shooting unarmed black kids in just under two weeks.
JTarrou
15hr ago
Leaders are almost always elites. You need to get your shit and run if a former bank robber or army corporal takes over the government.
What's interesting to me is how far down the elite governance scale Republicans had to go to find someone who would fight. Whole goddamned party, not one set of nuts between them. Turns out, only Democrats are willing to fight Democrats, the Republican establishment has completely internalized its social position as the Washington Generals of politics.
JTarrou
15hr ago
Adopting the exact same tactics as your side is a "spiral toward civil war"? What was it when your people were doing it?
Now that the other side has learned, now it's a spiral?
There's nothing you think the left should do to de-escalate? No off-ramps you see? The entire elite superstructure of our nation and the world just has zero accountability? No amends that could be made? No compromise?
Doesn't sound like it's my spiral. But I am waiting at the bottom for the rest of you.
JTarrou
1d ago
Nothing scares the left like the thought of the right doing politics to them the way they do it to the right. That's really the fear. That all these corrupt and undemocratic mechanisms the left uses to exploit their dominance in media, bureaucracy and academia to electoral effect might be used against them.
Charge the leading presidential candidate with a hundred felonies over some bullshit? Hope your mortgage applications were all in order!
"Onoes, muh norms and civility!"
I don't like Trump much, but my dearest hope is that he does exactly everything the left has done to him by the time he's out of office. Two wrongs don't make a right, but they do make it fair, and that's as close as politics gets to "right".
JTarrou
1d ago
Did Trump not accept it and leave office peacefully? I think it is you who is playing word games.
JTarrou
2d ago
A bit long, but well said.
Personally, I've found the Trump phenomenon encouraging, because it means that the elites who control our government are still too incompetent to resist public input indefinitely. They threw absolutely everything from the intelligence agencies to the courts to the actual assassins at him, and still got waxed by a lone reality TV star and real-estate mogul. Twice!
JTarrou
2d ago
The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics.
Really? That's not how I remember things.
In my recollection, each side denies every single election they lose, at least in some respect. Sometimes this is "Obama is a Kenyan", sometimes it's "Hanging Chads", but it is every single election. Sometimes the sitting president sends the FBI to launder oppo research to accuse his replacement of having been elected by Russian election fraud.
JTarrou
2d ago
Their hatred legitimizes him to his base. They can't trust politicians who lie to them, but they can trust the guy with a hundred felony counts and a bullet hole in his ear to not swap sides. Trump elicits these responses because the one thing his people need to be sure of is that he's not The Elites' Guy. Luckily for Trump, our elites are stupid and their culture makes no distinction between Hitler Hisself and someone who wants a border.
JTarrou
2d ago
The day a brass-fed AR isn't the best choice, I've no doubt there will be someone ready to sell whatever is. AR killers are like Glock killers. There's fifty a year and none in ten. Everyone just makes slightly different Glocks and ARs because what we're optimizing for is peripherals, and popularity determines compatibility.
It's not that Glocks and ARs are the best things ever. But they are optimized for value and reliability, and there's so many of them that the industry innovation has been immense within those platforms. In many ways, standardizing on two weapon platforms let the civilian market go nuts with ways to modify and improve all the bits.
There was always going to be an inflection point where the idea of what a gun is stabilized around some reasonable approximation of the mature state of the art. You can see this as a lack of innovation, or a shift of innovation to the areas where serious progress is still possible, such as optics, lasers, weight etc.
The only part of the NGSW I think is conceptually sound is the optic, which in my view if it works, they should strap to full length accurized ARs in 5.56 or 7.62 and give to squad designated marksmen only.
JTarrou
3d ago
Enlighten me on the massive performance boost we're getting with this hybrid-case blasty cartridge. You seem to be saying it's basically .308 from a shorter barrel.
Which, fine, but the line doesn't carry .308s. And they're not going to carry something twice as heavy as a 5.56 gun just so they can have .308 performance in a short gun, because soldiers don't need .308 performance in a short gun, we have it in big fuck-off machine guns, DMRs and sniper rifles. You don't WANT .308 performance clearing houses. You don't WANT power and range and penetration when your own guys are clearing the next apartment separated by third-world drywall. You also don't want something the length of an M-16, which turns itself into a flashbang grenade every time you shoot it in the short configuration.
Getting big-boy long range ballistics from a short barrel is not that hard. Thompson/Center was doing it in the seventies. The question is what trade-offs you're getting for that performance, and whether line troops can even use big-boy long range ballistics. All the tech and cartridges and range-finding scopes aren't going to fix bad marksmanship, you still have to be an excellent shot, and the average soldier is never going to be that.
JTarrou
3d ago
Nah, it's just that gunpowder is a mature technology, and has been for a century. There has been nothing new in firearms or ammunition in a hundred years. Frankly, I don't think there's much room to go anywhere significantly better until we get energy weapons. You can make the guns lighter, faster, bigger mags, more sighting capabilities, but the fundamental gun and cartridge haven't changed and probably won't much, ever.
JTarrou
3d ago
I think you're still drinking the marketing kool-aid. The ballistics are not that much better than conventional modern cartridges (6 ARC etc.), so the high pressures aren't getting you much more for all those trade-offs. The length doesn't matter much when the gun weighs 15-20 lb. Drop the suppressor to make it "as short as an M4" and the recoil is unmanageable (according to testers). The muzzle blast also gets much higher without the can, and you're envisioning shortening it to clear buildings? Guys' heads are going to pop trying to shoot these indoors with no can and no hearing protection.
JTarrou
3d ago
I don't think this is the answer. Sustained fire is a more basic explanation, and a more important one.
JTarrou
3d ago
80,000 PSI doesn't require that much more barrel.
Apparently it does. There's a reason no one else is running pressure like this, it's bonkers and for little reason. Any tiny improvements in ballistics are swallowed by the increase in weight. Beyond the pressure, the heat is also cranked way up, which the suppressor also serves as a sort of radiator. I'm guessing those barrels turn into noodles in half a mag if they're any lighter.
JTarrou
3d ago
From the reports I've seen of guys who have shot the real hot stuff, the recoil is stupid without the suppressor. The can is basically necessary to make the gun comfortable to shoot, and that's another pound and a half of steel hanging off the front of the gun. Absurdly front-heavy.
There's no free lunch in physics.
Recently I had a disagreement with someone in here on the NGSW program and the SIG rifle it's based on. For the uninitiated, this is the Army's newest multibillion dollar boondoggle, rich with corruption and marketing lies. I've been bagging on this system since it was announced years ago, and it has progressed through military testing despite really withering criticism. Many people better qualified than I have articulated the problems with the system both conceptually and in practice. I want to focus on one simple thing that might be easier for non-military/gun people to understand. Weight.
Weight is incredibly important, which is why when I saw that the bare, unloaded weight of the gun was 9.8 lb, I knew it wasn't going to be a general issue weapon. We now know that the whole system in standard configuration weighs about 13.5lb unloaded and somewhere between fifteen and sixteen loaded, depending on ammo. This is with the fancy scope and suppressor, but crucially, not with a flashlight or IR laser device, both of which are standard for line infantry. With all that, we're pushing twenty pounds.
Forget all that extra weight, and just focus on the advertised 9.8 lb a moment. For comparison, the M4 variants most commonly issued now are about 6.5 lb. With sights, lights and lasers, about ten pounds. The old full-length M-16s that they dropped for those M4s weigh 7.5 lb. The gigantic, heavy M1 Garand from ww2 was 9.5, and didn't need any more weight to make it work. The 1903 Springfield, named for the year of its adoption, was 8.6. The last generally issued service weapon to weigh more than the bare NGSW was the french muskets they sent us in the Revolutionary war, and that's only because they were heavier than the British models. The Brown Bess musket from the eighteenth century weighed less than the bare SIG.
Roughly eight to ten pounds is what almost all standard-issue firearms weigh in practice. Any lighter and you add capability, any heavier and the average troop can't lug it.
If we count the actual loaded, serviceable weight of the gun, the last generally issued service weapon to be even close to that heavy was the Macedonian Sarissa pike, at 12-14lb.
If adopted generally, the NGSW would be by a substantial margin the heaviest weapon ever carried by the line in human history. The last infantry to have more weight in their hands were the Roman legions, if we're counting that big-ass shield. On weight alone, this gun is DOA for general issue.
JTarrou
5d ago
Let me shorten this for you.
Amateur "pro" wrestler roid-rages during match, badly injures opponent.
Apparently subcontinental ethnic bigots have strong feelings on the matter, which is the more interesting bit.
He acts like a friend, and the two use cuss words when they talk.
and scene.
JTarrou
5d ago
I'm saying if you want to use civilian definitions that every single platoon that has ever deployed to a hot zone commits "war crimes". Fuck me, even pictures are "war crimes". People have cell phones. Even soldiers. It's a meme in the vet community for a reason. There's war misdemeanors and war felonies. Even a few war capital crimes, but if you don't have a single technical "war crime" to your name, you've never seen combat. Bet.
Also, the laws of war are a bit like the laws of politics. It matters who wins.
No, almost none go that way. Officers start out in college, usually with a communications degree. Then they get a couple weeks learning military terminology, a few schools for their specialty, and then they get a platoon of dudes who don't respect them and wouldn't follow them into a public restroom. 99% aren't in combat billets. For the few who are, they spend six months to a year as second lieutenants on "the line", the only time in their career they'll regularly interact with real soldiers. Mostly they'll be bailing them out of jail and handling their pay.
After that, it's administration for twenty years, and if you're shit hot, maybe a command.
JTarrou
5d ago
"War crimes"
Jesus. Son, you need an education.
Read up on the US civil war, especially the "irregular" areas. Go look up Canadian war trophies, WW1. Go read the history of the Red Army's advance to Berlin in WW2. Go read absolutely any actual memoir from any actual soldier in any actual war, and see how much of it you've been taught to think is "war crimes". Then go read the actual history and definition of war crimes and the incidence of prosecution (or not).
And when you're done, come back and tell the class what you learned. Right now, you simply don't know enough about the subject to even ask the right questions.
JTarrou
5d ago
It's all officers, who by definition are not soldiers and know fuck and shit about fighting all making up theories about how soldiers fight. They quite literally know nothing. They're vaguely aware that they're in charge of fighting, and a good officer might even know which sergeant he needs to tell to go fight, but they know as much about the process as a big city mayor knows about trash collection.
Very nearly 100% of all military analysis, history and theory has been catalogued and written by people who have never even seen a gunfight firsthand, much less kicked a door. Interesting so far as it goes, but to use any of it as a practical manual is ridiculous.
Do you think lefties like creedal citizenship? Because that's been the opposite of what I've seen and heard.
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