Communists were already doing that a hundred years ago, it's a common trick. They even used to play themselves up as victims when the czar pardoned them for trying to assassinate his family, and it worked on the intelligencia because they are universally retarded and easily molded by any propaganda delivered with enough repetition and chutzpah.
Just one of those little moldbuggian "isn't that weird" quirks of history you only notice examining it from a critical perspective.
SteveKirk
7mo ago
This is literally how my dad raised me to be more straightedge than him. He introduced me to all his brain fried retard friends from his San Francisco days, and from the age of 4 told me stories about his lawyer friend who ended up in prison for cross-border drug smuggling, emphasising how embarrassing it was he married a fat druggie bitch from jail rather than "crime bad."
Grew up with more "winners don't do drugs" messages than a 90s arcade.
Yeah, I don't understand why you'd get rid of the gun. Then again, mcveigh got caught because he had an unpermitted CCW on him when he was pulled over for speeding driving without plates lmao
SteveKirk
7mo ago
Roundup and crossbow are wonderful, and it takes a tiny amount to kill stuff poking up out of gravel.
A weed burner on a 20lb propane tank is another good solution. It can also sear steak.
I've been meaning to write a post about the irony of dirt-poor post-grad white men being the most motivated regime propagandists on Twitter; compensating for lack of real status by signalling luxury beliefs as hard as possible.
The guys who were sneering hardest at every concern about inflation, crime, and woke discrimination were the ones getting mugged on their way to teach a graduate seminar in European history for $14.50/hr, because they'd watched all the tenured positions go to Queer Black History profs.
SteveKirk
7mo ago
But they also die much earlier and without elderly care, which is on a totally different level of cost. Also significant savings on social security: the state loves a man who dies on his 65th birthday and covers payments for a lawyer who lives to 98.
I don't really mind if there is a right way to do things, irl or in games. It's just that figuring it out should feel like reasoning from first principles, not trying to get into the head of the writer to follow his weird moon logic.
It's like the old adventure game puzzles where to fix a broken pump you had to use a banana on a metronome to hypnotize a monkey. There's no way your intuition can lead you there, you just have to know what the designer wanted you to do.
Minecraft mod packs almost transcended this because the appeal is in exploiting unintended interactions between different designers' moon logic progressions. You're back to real reasoning again, but at the end it's still built on a pile of gibberish.
And yeah, I feel the same way about working with what you get. Starsector is at its most fun in the early game, when you're using ships and weapons because they're what you salvaged from an ancient debris field.
It's less fun later on when you're micro-optimizing fleet builds to farm the end game content for 1% AI core loot drops
I'm starting to think factorio space age suffers from the same gamey mechanics problems that make modded Minecraft unappealing for me.
Everything goes quadratic, everything before a particular weird meta becomes instantly obsolete the second you hit an arbitrary point on a tech beeline.
Like the correct way to make Legendary Concrete is a rube Goldberg system of turning stone into basic furnaces and recycling them back into stone with quality modules and filtering. Then taking all the non-legendary concrete, painting stripes on it, then erasing the stripes in an infinite loop to farm a 1% drop rate of the highest tier concrete. It's a game mechanic totally disconnected from both reality and the internal rules established at the start of the game.
The same sort of thing turned me off Minecraft too. You get invited to a group server and play for a bit, and then someone goes:
"you're mining?? in Minecraft?! You utter fool! You complete moron! The correct meta is to use your first quadlebonic extractor to make a fairy farm, then grind the faries into ruby dust to be catalyzed with magic tomes from Beecraft (obviously automated with the bibliotek autocasting lectern), producing infinite materials on demand from Greg's Quantum Replicator! Didn't you read the pinned reddit link on the modpack discord?!
I don't know, it just ends up seeming so arbitrary that there's no real joy in thinking your way through it, like one of the old point and click adventure games with the nonsense puzzles.
Maybe I'm just a stick in the mud, but this is the reason I always preferred the vanilla experience in games. It's like all the mods are just cheat mode but with an extra long and frustrating to type console command. And space age feels like a mod.
And the week after I compare Snape's parentage to race-mixing, the new series makes him a half-black formerly known as Prince. Absolutely perfect.
My God, that was you? I've had that conversation in the back of my mind for most of this decade.
Actually tried to look up "Veronica D" recently. Anyone have a clue?
It's pretty close! The big problem is lethality of subsonic ammunition at long ranges, especially pistol cartridge hollow points that are designed for expansion at much closer to their starting muzzle velocity (at typical 0-25 yard handgun ranges)
If you were only going to get a few shots off, the guy probably has an 80-90% chance of surviving (single gunshot wounds are down to 13% fatal, vs 19% for multiple, almost all from handguns ofc). And that's before all the targets start wearing low profile IIIa business suits.
Honestly it might be best to give up on the subsonic requirement outside of a very dense city, especially because the area they need to search for you scales with the range^2 xπ. A 400m shot means a .5 km^2 circle they have to search, vs .03 km^2 for a 100m shot. Pretty huge difference in the number of candidate cars and windows, giving much more time to escape the search area before they narrow it down.
Course, a 400m shot means a much better shooter with a much better rifle. At the very least a skill level that requires buying enough practice ammo to make you light up the map when they check who was in the area. Especially if you're visiting NYC from Idaho, and are already on a terrorist watchlist for asking your school board why "Dr Diddles Yeets The Teat" is in the kindergarten storytime rotation.
I'm going to say something controversial and suggest there is absolutely a niche for a short barreled folding stock rifle (legally required to identify itself as a handgun with a Disability Brace), with a (integral?) suppressor, a sub/supersonic cartridge, and a good optic for easy holdover.
Small enough to fold into a gym bag or use from a car. Far zero of around 100m for shots up to 125-150m, only halfway decent mechanical accuracy required. Maybe stick a little bipod on it for firing from a window sill or van.
It honestly wouldn't be an awful general purpose carbine either. People underestimate the importance of short, handy hearing-safe guns for home defense.
In a world where most high value targets are surrounded by drones in an environment full of shot-spotters, your choices are a) full kamikaze, b) car bomb, c) mortars, d) American Sniper 360 noscope, or E) stealthy mid-range shooting with an escape plan.
E is going to be the most practical option I should think. But if people get angry enough, option A of whipping out a giggle switch Glock and dumping the mag is going to be pretty popular too.
But maybe I'm overthinking this and most people are just gonna keep strolling up on a roof and wave to the secret service before lobbing a few rounds at the president.
SteveKirk
8mo ago
I mean, it becomes a very unattractive state to any company that doesn't obey the party. If they can keep alternatives from developing, this is just another win win for them.
SteveKirk
8mo ago
I'll see if I can still find them. Those particular ones were on the motte reddit I think.
SteveKirk
8mo ago
Is that supposed to go straight to Cooke's Twitter profile? Not logged in ATM, so can't see if his most recent post is an exchange with you or something.
Starting to see recognition of this in fiction now. Just translated something with a few lines like
"My God, why can't you just use robots?"
The researcher gave him a puzzled look.
"Humans are much cheaper, of course."
Literally zero attempts to prosecute them of course, unlike people standing silently across the street from an abortion clinic.
(Edit: actually it looks like Florida got one in jail and fines for a few others! Clever trick, basically forcing the feds to evenly apply the FACE act against abortionist terrorists)
Oh the press has been doing it since before JournoList, that's baked in. What's new is spreading it to places like this through sophisticated distributed propaganda campaigns: delivering talking points to partisans and using them to manipulate people who trust them.
Take the surge in shoplifting for example. It wasn't just MSNBC or Vox lying about it, they had explainers on how to lie to family members about it. They had people showing up even in tiny communities like this to dress up the propaganda line in rationalist colors and make it go down smoother. They had YouTubers paid to go on rants about how it was all in our imagination and anyway it was just Corporate Greed.
What do you even do against a fully distributed and inescapable reality distortion machine like that? Obviously this election showed the limits of convincing people to ignore their lying eyes, but it took an amazing set of circumstances to wake people up.
I mean we literally just had a discussion with someone arguing that inveterate lying was perfectly valid, after a campaign season full of the most shameless lying I've ever seen.
There are limits. I think people would appreciate an apology for the lies before extending any more charity. At least for the whole "our internal polls agreed with the prediction markets that trump was winning but we still called them insane cryptobro conspiracy theorists who did their own research (gross! Ick!)". Or "Biden's not senile you're just a rabid maga partisan for noticing." Or "the economy is amazing and Biden solved Trump's crime wave, illegal immigration isn't happening and you're imagining the price of eggs and why do you care anyway, you're weird!" All lies that were used here with no consequences for the liars other than going on some people's mental lists of sociopathic manipulators.
There's a point where you can't just get done with another round of lying and go "hey bro no hard feelings bro I was just using rhetoric to destroy your ability to understand reality and gaslight you into thinking you were insane for questioning our lies, leaving you helplessly adrift in a sea of mass propaganda to serve my own interests. Come on bro we've all done that, I do it to you all the time you can't stay mad at me! What about charity bro?! What about niceness and understanding?!"
It's time to coordinate some meanness against this tactic, because it's antithetical to everything this place tries to do, and it incinerates what little trust anyone has left. I want to come here to read people who will help me understand things I'm unaware of or confused about, not to get force fed this week's edition of "Blob Propaganda Magazine"
SteveKirk
8mo ago
Imagining a social media intern barging into the HRW editor's office.
"Someone linked your report, sir!"
"Excellent, what conclusion did he draw from it?"
"Um..."
Well played. (I was curious because Twitter has never shown me irl hardcore porn. Don't know if there's a setting or the algorithm knows not to show it to me)
Getting a start on his memoirs? Again, if the police are going through your pockets you're probably already caught. The behaviors to avoid are driving without taillights or hopping BART turnstiles.
(I tried to find the news article about the guy who murdered his gf/hooker and fled to SF, only to get caught for evading a $3 ticket, but there were too many other articles about recent murders on BART)
There was some other shooter in Washington who killed a
coppark ranger while fleeing a mass shooting, because he thought he was caught when she pulled him over for a snow tire check or something.The important thing is not getting L.E. attention, and not triggering escalation if you do. The papers you have on you aren't a factor, but the gun might be.
More options
Context Copy link