Bearded blond guys with deer horns on their heads must be cleaning up... Hang on, I could be that guy!
Pity the deer around here have even more pitiful racks than the women do. Might have to go on a hunting trip out east.
Yeah, Blockbuster's mutant power to collapse local property values was a little on the nose.
It might be one of the earliest examples of existing franchises cramming left wing politics in for critical acclaim and foundation funding at the cost of becoming incoherent. Supposedly the mutant adventures thing was floundering before they decided to become a civil rights comic.
I just found the quote I'd misremembered as being by either Niven or Pournelle, but which turns out to be from "The Killing Star".
I won't dump the whole thing because most people will be familiar with it, but it's the one that ends with "There is no policeman. There is no way out. And the night never ends."
You can tell it's from 1995 because the worst imaginable cosmic horror is to be stuck in NYC's Central Park after dark.
So the idea has been bouncing around in science fiction for decades, rather than being slept on.
Still find it hilarious that people went through years of debate over whether antifa/BLM was being treated with kids' gloves as regime foot soldiers. And now the whole thing's been put to rest by a conflict between antifa and a group with even more political power behind them.
The government-backed mob gets to do whatever they want, and the people they do it to get rounded up and arrested. And I say this as someone with literally zero sympathy for the Hamas supporters it's happening to this time: analyzing how "crime" is used as an extrajudicial enforcement tool by the total liberal state is more important than arguing for a side.
I should do a book report on Schmidt's Theory of The Partisan, because nobody else has come close to describing how regime-backed mob violence works as a political force.
There's been so many examples in the past month. "Just stop oil" being escorted by police while their victims are arrested, Portland antifa burning a dozen police cars without any sign of an investigation happening (the website they used to claim responsibility is still online!), and now this.
It all reminds me of the old story from the UN human rights investigator in Yugoslavia, hearing stories about how the police would come round to confiscate guns from a town to clear the way for "unaffiliated" militias to commit massacres the next day. And of course the closely related Existential Comics vision of a "police-free" society ruled by leftist gangs..
Is this the future of ethnic and religious conflict in modern states?
I've never read Bear, but Forge and Anvil have been recommended several times. Are they any good?
I loved saberhagen's berserker series. Templar Radiant is brilliant, and The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron is a paragon of the classic pure concept scifi short story.
And Neil deGrasse Tyson said unto him: more blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have fucking loved the science
SteveKirk
2yr ago
Conservatives were stupid enough to think these weapons were only going to be used against Osama bin durka durka jihad, which is why all the original "counter-terrorism surveillance tools" had foreign activity requirements.
None of them ever suggested using them against domestic political opponents, and naively believed Democrats would also consider that out of bounds.
If I was going to own up to how stupid I think conservatives and their politicians are, I would be at it all day and inevitably get banned.
SteveKirk
2yr ago
Did anyone who complains about "trumpers" ever complain about the opposite, or it is just usual tactic of "identify the community population as problematic, suggest doing something about them"?
"ghost gun raid on Staten Island nets arsenal of firearms"
"Members of the financial crimes task force are embedded with Homeland Security Investigation's NY EDTF"
"We just basically track Internet purchases from eBay, PayPal, Amazon, different various online companies. We get a list every other month... With people purchasing components that could possibly create a ghost gun, like the rails, the 3d printer "
Should a certain number of purchases related to making a ghost gun be made, Vaughn says the task force moves toward in conducting investigations on the individual, including social media
The last two paragraphs were edited out of the article, but you can still see them on archive.is. DHS and fincen are still trying to keep it under wraps that literally every bank and store sends them complete customer data to comb through, but every so often some junior dumb fuck assigned to a state task force brags about it on record.
SteveKirk
2yr ago
Not when you can casually cross-reference all credit card transactions to automatically detect "home grown violent extremists" who shop at sporting goods stores and search for political topics. That narrows it down well enough to make a target list for manual investigation.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEEkKBDWgAA6g4R?format=jpg&name=large
You do not seem to realize what the Democratic party are capable and willing to do to maintain power, and what a powerful tool the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is when used as a political weapon.
SteveKirk
2yr ago
They are literally tracking all the online purchases of people buying 3d printers, checking them against social media and reports by leftist informants, and raiding people at 3am.
Thinking about "revolution" is insane with the kind of tyranny you're facing.
SteveKirk
2yr ago
I haven't had more, but that one I got a few weeks ago knocked me flat on my back.
It's not just me aging either, because a few elderly guys who got it did much better. Suspect there's something going around they were once exposed to that we've never had before.
I remember the Berkeley online courses being ordered removed, and the switch from "that's an absurd hypothetical slippery slope that would never happen" to "of course that happened, it's how the law works idiot, why do you hate disabled people?"
But the ADA lawsuit trolls who were making millions filing thousands of suits against places they'd never been to were my wakeup call.
There's always one argument defending this stuff: "there's a procedural outcome! How can you complain about a procedural outcome? Do you not like juries of your peers?"
SteveKirk
2yr ago
He might be an MMTer. That's gotten popular among the in crowd recently for obvious "we can print as much money as we want without worrying about inflation" reasons.
SteveKirk
2yr ago
The big downside of self-insuring for a company is probably political. If you've got a policy from Lloyd's any effort to bankrupt you through insurance payout lawfare is going to get a lot of very important people upset on your behalf.
If musk self-insured there's nothing stopping Some Judge In New York from ordering 70 billion dollar payouts every time a Tesla is involved in a fender-bender.
You need to smear the money around for self defense, and pay off enough of the Party that they at least can't unify in looting you.
SteveKirk
2yr ago
Helium's gotten cheaper? I thought there was a huge shortage after they finished selling off that absurdly massive strategic helium reserve.
What consoles did everyone have growing up?
Showing my age here, but the N64 was the first and last I ever owned (and didn't buy many games after ocarina of time, not even goldeneye). My high school boyfriend had a gaystation 2, but in college the most common game was Mario Cart 64.
Some people also got a Wii senior year, but I had time to play it like twice.
(Edit: I had a PC, but never anything good enough to play modern games. My treasured CD was a pirate compilation of a whole bunch of 90s games, including homm2 and Raiden fighters.
Asking because a few friends were talking about video game nostalgia, and I was shocked at the number of different consoles they'd had access to.
Yeah, the geological carbon cycle is still a cycle, but slow enough there's no equilibrium at human timescales.
At least when I was in college the geo cycle, rock weathering, and vulcanism was considered the most probable driver of temperature over geologic time. Burning coal is basically short-circuiting that cycle by releasing fossil carbon that wouldn't have subducted and come out of a volcano until a hundred million years from now.
It's like comparing surface eddies with a deep ocean current.
You can tell because they only defend them when they're being attacked, like everything they know is wrong but also disliked by the enemy. They also try to pull the "Republicans pounce! It's right wing culture war!" card instead of a real defense on the merits, just like with "whiteness must be exterminated because it means showing up to work on time"
There were never any NYT articles crowing about how 75% of all professor applicants are now pre-screened out by the DEI department, before their resumes are even given to the official hiring committee.
Maybe even you don't know that, even though people have told you before... It's that kind of defense through carefully cultured and reinforced blindness.
It's not happening, only those people commit the faux pas of noticing it, and now that it's been brought up everyone uncomfortably shifts their eyes around the room to avoid defending it. It's almost a relief when LaShawna from HR launches into "how DARE you!", and you can just nod along silently cringing and memorizing her spiel for your next promotion review.
SteveKirk
2yr ago
Respectability cascade was the one I thought he might be talking about, but I couldn't remember the name, thanks.
Trump got rid of the worst excesses of Title IX, which Biden just made even worse with a (literal) vengeance. Did you pay attention to that one?
This "trump never did anything so don't support him" thing bothers me coming from liberals because it's transparently dishonest. Just say "I'd rather have Biden's "misgendering-is-a-crime" Title IX policy" than try to trick people into thinking there's no difference.
I hinted at this with "liberal total state", but I think that this is a new environment of omnipresent state control + supposed "liberal norms" about the use of state power.
Once upon a time a feuding clan could come and kill you and the king couldn't do much about it. Sometime later the king could send his men to kill you and nobody could do much about it.
Now we're at a point where the state has almost total power to restrain or permit violence, but in theory isn't supposed to have you murdered for opposing the state/because it wants to loot your ethnic group. So state violence against its victims is carried out extrajudicially by a criminal underclass that is allowed to e.g. carry guns in Chicago to do drivebys without being prosecuted. Or antifa thugs in Portland and Seattle that carry around illegal rifles in public to burn police stations. Or leftist hackers allowed to DDOS opposition websites, spam them with child porn uploads, and call in threats to the host/registrar/tier1 networks.
Or, even more hilariously, gangs of IDF-backed Jewish frat boys lol.
The state uses the criminal class as a hands-off weapon of anarcho-tyranny. It's not a subtle tool, and sometimes to their shock it bites the hand that feeds it; as Marion Barry said after being beaten by home invaders who stole his drugs, "I thought they knew I'm on their side"
This is all pretty new and unexpected as far as I can tell. Everyone predicted totalitarian control through a surveillance state and the secret police, not party NGOs raising money for violent street thugs, hacking rings, and doxxing groups.
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