JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
No bio...
User ID: 4009
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2d ago
My understanding is that 0.38 Special is roughly equivalent to 9x19mm Parabellum in terms of terminal ballistics with 9mm ultimately winning out on the basis of being more compact, that that 0.45 and 9mm have killed a roughly equal number of people over the years, but I hadn't considered the 0.357 mag side of things. I may owe @hydroacetylene an apology.
"Lone wolves" that enjoyed a broad base of moral and material support from both the wider left, and ostensibly neutral parties such as yourself.
I chose to create this account and "rejoin" the motte after a year+ of mostly lurking as a reaction to Charlie Kirk's murder, or more specifically as a reaction to the reaction. I see the fact that a lot of people celebrated it, and that a fair number of users here are trying to dismiss and down play it as a serious problem because what you are doing is actively working to normalize sectarian violence in the US.
As I have said in prior posts on the subject I don't think it was Charles Sumner (the man in my profile pic) being beaten half to death on the floor of the senate that killed the existing norms against political violence and made Civil War inevitable. It was the fact that the Democrats along with the "Moderates" from Sumner's own party (the Whigs) chose to defend his attackers. In a world where Preston Brooks and Laurence Keitt are immediately arrested and face clear bi-partisan condemnation, a radical like Lincoln never gets elected.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2d ago
When is this alleged shift supposed to have occurred? 9x19 Parabellum and 0.45 ACP have been the dominant cartridges in police and civilian use since the 1930s, and the two runners up 0.22 Long rifle and the "modern" 12 Gauge Shotgun cartridge both date back to the 1880s.
Yes 5.56 NATO is a relatively new cartridge that only saw wide-spread civilian adoption in the aftermath of the cold-war but that's a rifle cartridge and rifles represent a relatively small percentage of recorded homicides in the US. Approx. 2,700 out of 81,000 if the FBI's crime data explorer is to be believed. Even if we assume that 100% of homicides committed with an unrecorded type were committed with a 5.56 Rifle that's still not much more than the number of people killed with conventional handguns.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2d ago
If you want to "speak softly" you need a big stick.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6d ago
I don't know what he was like before coming to the US but my understanding is that he's a normal establishment progressive by the standards of Europe which puts him well into "far left" territory by the standards of US Politics.
I first became aware of him during the the 2012 election while he was at CNN where he described Mitt Romney as a dangerous far right authoritarian and claimed that the republicans were going end women's suffrage if they won. He was a outspoken supporter of woke cancel mobs and social media censorship through Obama's second and Trump's first terms, and nothing I've seen from him to date has made me think that he doesn't still hew to those views.
It's like watching someone sink tons of three pointers but can't even dribble.
Which in turn feeds the narrative regarding Fuentes being a "Fed"/"Trojan Horse"/"Controlled Opposition" that you'll see in more conservative aligned spaces. The fact that this interview is coming from a nakedly progressive partisan like Piers Morgan only fans those flames.
There is no objective truth, there are no facts. Particularly on Reddit, facts are distorted to promote a narrative.
This is not just on reddit, this is everywhere including here. The absence of a clear truth (objective or otherwise) is a core feature of online discourse.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
Would a full-blown attack on GPS satellites not cross the nuclear threshold for the US?
30 years ago? Probably not. However I can imagine a scenario where someone in the decision loop interprets it as an attempt disable American early warning and missile defense assets in preparation for a more general nuclear strike, and then makes that case to the President.
Today? Absolutely not. The huge expansion of civilian space infrastructure along with massive improvements in the fidelity of both space and earth-based sensors means that we are no longer dependent as we once were on a small number of strategic satellites that could easily be knocked out by an adversary. And with the US representing a super-majority of world's total space lift capacity I think the more likely outcome in the event of such an attack would be a bunch of Chinese Satellites suffering sudden unexplained failures or falling out of the sky for no reason while the US Space Force conspicuously refuses to confirm nor deny playing any role in the matter.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
9d ago
I don't find it difficult to understand at all. They're starting from the position that Mangione should not be punished, and then formulating their arguments accordingly.
Take your troops home like Soviets did
The US has proposed doing just that on multiple occasions (most recently in March/April of this year) and the response from both the German and UK establishment has always been overwhelming opposition.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
10d ago
I feel like this is bait, because there are quite a few Americans who this denunciation would apply to today.
Yes, that is a large component of what makes Trump and the MAGA movement so divisive.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
10d ago
A society that looks like church #1 sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me. Something like the society in Ayn Rand's book Anthem.
It is funny, on one hand church #1 sounds really nice to me, on the other I also kind of hate both the Randian Dystopia and the Randian Protagonist. I'm curious to hear why it triggers that reactions because I feel like it might tell us both something meaningful about ourselves.
Piers' and the general Conservative, boomer, narrow loyalty to certain propositions, legal documents, and historical institutions is a thinly veiled expression of loyalty to socially dominant Memes...
First; Peirs Morgan has never been a "conservative", in fact much of his career has been defined by his opposition to both Conservate and American hegemony. He's one of the central examples of an advocate for enlightened neo-liberal technocracy.
Second; As I said in a earlier post Something I don't think you or a lot have users here have really grasped is that Trump and a core contingent the MAGA crowd are playing Teddy Roosevelt's bit about "Hyphenated Americans" absolutely straight,. Racially-oriented thinking is not "taboo", so much as it is viewed as weak, degenerate, and anti-American. To quote Teddy...
The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic...
...The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
10d ago
There was a release of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in widescreen where they not only didn't remove crew at the edge of shots, they also forgot to darken the night scenes and tint them blue.
I had completely forgotten about the "Day Walker Edition" of BtVS when I wrote my own post, but yes. I would wager that this is exactly what happened.
My read was not that everyone suddenly began acting like idiots once they touched down, it's that the Cardinal was an idiot from the start but was insulated from the consequences of his idiocy by a combination of luck and people who where more careful than he was. Two resources that ran out quickly once he was on his own.
The levels of contempt I am hearing against the US and Americans in my personal circle are basically the highest they have ever been.
Europe is the proverbial toxic parent who can not accept that their children are grown, that they've moved out, they've gotten married, and they have bills and kids of their own to deal with. They keep trying to play the "So long as you live under my roof you need to shut up and do as I say" card, but that's just the thing. We haven't lived under your roof in years.
If Europe wants to laugh at us and and hold us in contempt, I say let them. Call me when they put a man on the Moon.
If Europe wants to align itself with Asia and the Subcontinent that's fine. They're adults and it's their choice. But by the same token they won't have any grounds to complain when the kids decline to visit, or refuse to pay for their nursing home.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
12d ago
Regarding the specific Mad Men example. A possible explanation that springs to mind is that while the original on-set recording may have been done in a higher resolution format, broadcast was still at 1080p and as a result the original VFX where the vomit hose technician would have been painted out were done at 1080p and the failure to re-do the paint out at a higher resolution was a product of negligence, laziness, or penny pinching on the part of the parent company.
As for the rest, I've always kind of hated the rhetoric surround the alleged "sense-making crisis" because if anything I feel like politics and culture of today are more legible to the average citizen than they have been at anytime in living memory. I don't think that the average citizen has suddenly become more savvy, so much as the pretenses have been dropped. The legacy media was never unbiased or impartial but there was a time when they cared enough about the appearance of impartiality to give someone like Billy Graham the chance to make his case. That is not the world we live in today, and a lot of the alleged "crisis" is not a crisis so much as a failure by affluent liberals to adapt to the new paradigm. They still haven't accepted the fact that they live in a low trust society.
My mind goes to The Sparrow. A novel that popped up in my "you might be interested in..." feed and that I recently finished reading. The plot is a classic golden-age of sci-fi style first contact story in the same vein as Rendezvous with Rama or The Mote in God's Eye. I enjoyed the read, and I don't want to give any spoilers but things do not end well. I do not know if this was the author's intent, but my personal takeaway from the story was that things would have played out a lot better for everyone involved, humans and aliens alike, if the people running the first contact mission had been a bit less Ivory Tower idealist and a bit more military or working class. That is to say a bit more cynical, and a bit more paranoid about things like disease and establishing a proper permitter around your camp.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
13d ago
There was a LOT of wink wink nudge nudge, subtle endorsements of these tactics I saw online when they happened.
Indeed, I created this account after an extended period of lurking/inactivity not in response to Charlie Kirk's death but in response to the efforts of others to down play it.
MAGAs must make up their minds about whom they dislike first.
Something I don't think a lot Democrats or Foreigners have really grasped is that Trump and the core of the MAGA crowd are playing Teddy Roosevelt's bit about "Hyphenated Americans" absolutely straight.
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.
This is just as true of the man who puts "native" before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else.
The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.
The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.
- Theodore Roosevelt Addressing the Knights of Columbus, October 12th, 1915
Despite being a meme @ChickenOverlord's Rawhide Kobayashi is recognizably and quintessentially "American" in a way that people like Ilhan Omar Nur, and Zohran Mamdani are not. The MAGA crowd is not failing to "make up their minds" so much as they are treating this sort of recognition is part and parcel of "Making America Great".
Is that actually a thing, where 'gentle parenting' results in kids who are stealing iPhones or doing more or less organized crime? I genuinely have no idea.
Anecdotally yes, in fact I have seen this precise dynamic in play out in my own community and even family. If you don't discipline your children, your children are likely to become undisciplined adults.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
15d ago
You are free to feel that way. Clausewitz's On War is widely viewed as a seminal work but then so to is Marx's Das Kapital.
In the meantime Secretary Hegseth is echoing a view that has been shared by military thinkers as diverse as Musashi Miyamoto and Tecumseh Sherman. The ultimate purpose of any soldier (or army) is to kill the enemy.
The vessels were not displaying an ensign, visible from a distance, while making the crossing from Venezuela to Trinidad - they don't have to.
Pretty much every report I've read has placed the boat in international waters which means that they would have been well north of Trinidad and Tobago.
The drone strike was carried out from a distance where the drone operator wouldn't have known whether the boats in question where displaying their name and port of registry
The drone strike was allegedly carried out with a hellfire missile which is a laser guided (IE line of sight) weapon. If they were close enough to score a hit, they were close enough to tell whether the boat was displaying a name and a flag even if they couldn't necessarily read it.
In any case, one of the core differences between "Admiralty Law" and conventional Anglo judicial tradition is that there is no presumption of innocence. Anyone in international waters is presumed to be operating outside the law unless they take explicit steps to remain within the law.
If the boat was in international waters, and I will concede that this is a big "IF", it was by default a legitimate target unless evidence is provided to the contrary.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
16d ago
Who's bombing lifeboats?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
16d ago
The third and fourth worlds moved up a slot when the "second world" disappeared.
If you're asking me, personally (as opposed to the state) I say "Fuck it we ball".
If your partner is infertile, that is unfortunate, but miracles do happen. Things like adoption as well as integrating yourself into the lives of your nieces and nephews, or becoming a godparent to the children of your friends are also options you could pursue. Heck, you could even coach little league.
I do not want to come across as dismissing your fears out of hand but I am going to dismiss them. My early life was not as rough as yours, but it was also not without it's trauma and drama. I was a bit of a delinquent in my youth, and I know all too well the "joys" of sharing a family with addicts, alcoholics, and paranoid schizophrenics. Much of my adult life has been shaped by a desire to prove that I am not like them, and that I could turn things around. The fact that you are scared is a sign of a healthy outlook. You know who isn't worried about fucking up her kids? Your fucked up sister.
My first was an accident, completely unplanned, and I was scared shitless when I found out. I shared many of your concerns and your uncertainty. However, with the benefit of hindsight I also recognize that if my partner and I had waited till we were "ready" it would have never happened. Our first is now in middle school and has since been joined by multiple siblings, the youngest of whom we welcomed into the world just a few weeks ago. I'm still scared shitless but I'm also used to it now. What I've learned is do not let fear stop you from doing things that need to be done.
To echo @BreakerofHorsesandMen, for better or ill, the choices that will define your old age are on you. It is OK to be afraid, but do not let fear stop you from making those choices.
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