Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.
Correct. Since the entire history of gun control regulation has shown that advocates of gun control will never admit to a policy failure. Any violence that occurs is ultimately because there was insufficient gun control in place, thus no failure is actually a failure of gun control policy, it is instead a failure to go far enough.
California has some of the most stringent gun laws in the country and also one of the higher murder rates. To say nothing of fucking CHICAGO. You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms, and you also can't find many places with a higher murder rate. They've tried heavy gun control and it didn't help. So can they admit that gun control has failed in this instance?
If there are no circumstances under which they'll admit the policy is failing, then in what sense can they be said to be acting in good faith?
Every single compromise gun rights advocates have made previously has been met with demands for further compromise, and nothing is offered in return.
The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.
Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.
The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.
The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...
You see the subtle error in reasoning here?
Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder.
And because those instances are given outsized attention by the national media, who has every intention of maximizing the fear felt by their viewership.
But that's a fundamentally different problem. If it weren't terrorism it'd be something else.
IIRC the statistically average Ukrainian woman wanted to be a mail order bride before the war, so it’s entirely possible that the vast majority of the most fertile women leave and never come back.
But gets to my point. If Ukraine wins, they've got a decades-long rebuilding project ahead of them, and their standards of living will be comparatively horrendous in the meantime. How do you convince people (esp. females) to return, stick around, and have babies when they could just retreat to a wealthier country and shack up with a local there?
And if you CAN'T convince them to return and have kids, then the country dies out in a couple generations anyway, despite rebuilding efforts.
That said, the thought has crossed my mind that if my dating life doesn't improve over the next few years, the idea of finding a displaced Ukrainian woman who would presumably be quite grateful to not be in an active warzone vs. the current elevated standards of American women has a certain appeal.
faceh
11mo ago
If we posit the world where the guns are removed, you've just made it so that physical prowess is solely determinant of success in violent encounters.
Which is to say, you're making females less able to resist male attackers, or allowing organized groups to terrorize individuals more freely, or make it harder for the old and infirm to defend themselves.
This leaves aside the generally observed tendency towards government tyranny become gradually (or suddenly) more harsh against disarmed populations.
And of course probably going to see a rise in Cars as tool of mass homicide
Bud Light/Anheuser-Busch just penned a large advertising partnership deal with the UFC. The unconfirmed reports I've read are suggesting the 7-year deal totals about $100 million or so.
Dana White, President of the UFC, suggests its 'not determined by the money' and while this is an eyeroll-worthy statement, in a sense it must be correct, because the obvious benefit to Bud Light is that partnering with one of the few remaining bastions of 'toxic' masculinity left to Western Culture offers a promising route to rehabilitate their image and customer base after the Dylan Mulvaney Kerfuffle tarnished their red-blooded, blue-collared reputation.
Which of course means it is still about the money, since Bud Light sales remain in the tank and thus regaining customers would mean a return to their former glory and profitability.
Will it work? I'm personally skeptical. The move is actually a pretty good, and costly, way to show that they're returning to their roots as a beer for the hard-working and rough-handed everyman, since the UFC is honestly synonymous with uncouth, politically incorrect athletes beating the snot out of each other, and features sexy ring girls at every fight with the Machisimo levels simply off the charts. Trump himself is known to attend events and get standing ovations. Tying themselves to THAT brand is actually likely to hurt their 'cred' (such as it exists) with any liberals who might have been swayed by their moves towards increased inclusion. I'm honestly looking forward to the next Sean Strickland (the current UFC middleweight champion) fight, just to see how he might mouth off in a way that will lead to controversy against Bud Light pushing in the other direction. EDIT: It has already begun LMAO
That said, it's not like anyone expects the "beefy men beating each other to death" league to try to conform with polite norms anyway.
Still. It isn't anything resembling an acknowledgement of the mistake, and even if the logo is plastered all over the Octagon and fighter's shorts, all that has to happen for this to backfire is for people to just... not buy the beer. The UFC pockets the money and the needle doesn't budge otherwise. It sure didn't work for Crypto.com or Vechain, both of whom forked over a ton of money for UFC sponsorship.
There's also the insidious take that this is an attempt to try to bring the UFC itself to heel, by exerting enough influence over it to cause it to clamp down on its athletes and 'clean up' its image (read: bring in line with progressive values) rather than allow it to exist as a potential rogue cultural element resisting the leftward swim of Cthulhu.
Given that I hold the position that martial arts/combat sports are probably the last remaining healthy outlet for positive masculinity, if THAT is the goal I'd be extremely alarmed. Not saying it is, but when that much money is getting thrown around, you expect strings to be attached.
I had 'jokingly' suggested to friends a while back that the single best way to bring male customers back to Bud Light was to simply hire a cadre of busty women who would stand in the beer aisle at the grocery store wearing an American Flag bikini and offering to fellate anyone who bought a case. Boom. Apology accepted.
And considering how many buxom ladies with relatively lax morals you could afford to hire for $100 million, I am wondering if that might have been a better plan overall.
A thought and question I've had bouncing around in my head that I don't expect a real answer to, or even a coherent framing, since its possible there are a few false premises at work here.
Is it possible that one side effect of the rise of Onlyfans/digital prostitution is that (many) men are noticing that (many) women know precisely what men want in a sexual partner and are willing to provide it... but only outside the context of a committed relationship.
Simply put, Onlyfans creates an extremely liquid marketplace for attractive women to produce smut content for a large audience. Content producers want to optimize to capture as many customers as possible. Something like 87% of the customers/users on OF are men. So competitive forces drive the (mostly females) creators to figure out exactly what men's sexual preferences are and provide content tailored to those preferences and produce it en masse.
So by sheer economic necessity, these women are demonstrating that they are willing to engage with men's deepest sexual desires in order to make a buck.
Imagine being a 20-something male in the current environment, being aware of the fact that you can go on OF and for the price of a cheeseburger find women who will perform almost any male sexual fantasy you could imagine. Then going on the dating market to find a woman who might be willing to indulge in fantasies with him (assume he's seeking an otherwise healthy, committed relationship).
If he goes into the dating marketplace and is open about his own personal sexual desires, he can be branded as a pervert or a sex pest because "women don't exist solely to please men" and/or "you can't reduce women to sex objects, even if they sexualize themselves." In some cases, they might just simply express ignorance of men's sexual preferences and act as though expecting sexual gratification from a partner is suspect!
But this would read as extremely bad faith given that, as above, women clearly can figure out what men want if they put in a modicum of effort, and WILL provide it when provided sufficient incentive.
Seems, to me, that seeing the difference between what women are willing to do for money and attention from thousands of onlookers online vs. how they can be unwilling to indulge their own partner's personal desires could lead to a feeling of resentment.
faceh
1mo ago
There's a solid point that the U.S. being able to offer a higher standard of living than virtually anywhere else is its single greatest power to tempt defection and dissuade its own defectors. As you say, if you defect somewhere you don't have immediate cultural ties, you'll almost certainly end up living a far crappier lifestyle once the initial rewards for your valorous actions are spent.
Like how in the Hunt for Red October the defectors manage to persuade themselves that American life will be idyllic if they can pull it off.
I know the feeling. I was also surprised that Russia wasn't able to even get to Kiev with the main body of it's forces. Miles-long convoys, a dominant air force, and an underprepared defender should have, one thinks, enabled a Thunder Run to the Capital and they should have been able to at least temporarily control the territory.
It's like if the U.S. decided to invade Mexico and could only penetrate about 100 miles from their own border before bogging down. But then again, if China was providing ample material support to the Mexican fighters maybe that is what would happen.
But man, there's simply no systemic way to exercise good rationality here for various reasons:
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Russia is pretty good at the propaganda game. They're even better at the 'muddy the waters and deny objective reality as much as needed' game. Being confident that Russia is lying or withholding the truth doesn't actually help you determine the real truth.
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War is chaos. Determining which signals are good and which are misleading at best is nigh impossible in the moment.
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Ukraine has massive incentive to lie about stuff too (Ghost of Kiev, etc.) and will exaggerate Russian 'atrocities' and casualties as a matter of course.
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The "Russia is evil empire, Ukraine is brave freedom fighters" narrative is firmly locked-in, so anything that makes Ukraine look bad or weak will be downplayed and ignored whilst likewise Russia's 'wins' will be minimized by Western media.
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As seen from the Wagner situation, the nature of the conflict can shift unexpectedly on a dime, so any prediction over the medium-long term is eminently susceptible to black swans.
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The situation on the ground is subject to information you simply cannot get. Local knowledge which can't be easily summarized and translated.
So you can't understand a situation this complex and dynamic simply by absorbing all possible information you can find. You have no way to verify said information, and the information you DON'T have will probably end up being critical to accurate predictions anyway. And the good info will become outdated rapidly. Adjust your confidence levels accordingly.
In lieu of making predictions on week-to-week occurrences I've tried my best to understand the broad-strokes motives, capabilities, and weaknesses of the relevant parties. A few things I'm relatively confident about:
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'Russia' (the government that is representing it, at least) has to view this conflict as existential, since they need to control certain geographic positions if they are to be safe from future invasion. Further, they are now beginning a terminal decline in demographics. Beyond anything else, they'll never have as many fighting-age males as they do now. So they are committed to see this through and will throw bodies at the problem as long as it can.
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Ukraine's demographics are even worse. They cannot win a war of attrition unless Russia knuckles under.
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Ukraine is not generally valuable in-and-of-itself to ANYONE but the Ukrainians. Neither the U.S. nor Russia stands to achieve much economic gains from merely controlling the territory, so in that sense broad destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure is acceptable to both parties.
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Russia's logistics are in atrocious shape, so Ukraine is punching above its' weight regardless of anything else because their soldiers have ammunition, food, and working equipment.
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Even the U.S. Manufacturing capacity isn't quite filling the gap, however.
What do these facts allow me to predict? Not much. Other than a long, bloody, conflict which will probably result in a Russian 'victory' but also with Russia ceasing to be any kind of major player in world affairs.
I've noticed an appreciable number of my old acquaintances who have gotten married to and had kids with women who are first generation immigrants, including from Latin-American or Eastern Asian countries. And by all accounts they appear happy and stable.
Compare that to friends who married a woman they met in college, most have kids now, some don't, and a handful are divorced already.
But the real eye-opener is the female friends who didn't lock down a guy in college or shortly thereafter, a few of whom do have kids now, and they seemingly spend most of their time angry at the world/males for letting them down, and 90% of them are clearly letting their personal health slip, too. I'd be hard pressed to think of any who seem happily single AND seem appealing as a potential partner. Thems just the breaks.
To make my point explicit: It seems like near 100% of friends who married immigrants are still married and currently happy, 75-90% of those who married American women are still married and currently happy, and MAYBE 10% of the women who are still unmarried are currently happy.
The almost inescapable conclusion is that if you're an American guy who is entering his thirties and is single, if you limit your dating options to women who are in your peer group in terms of age, nationality, and education you'll find exceedingly slim pickings. The best partners will have been snagged early and those that remain will have high standards and shitty attitudes to go with it. So finding a woman who isn't a ticking divorce bomb almost certainly does require broadening the search.
I know the argument for going now, while he has momentum going, and that waiting will just dissipate anything he has built up
The other argument for going now is that Biden is just an incredibly weak candidate who will not inspire voter turnout, and the only person who can almost certainly lose to him, and can inspire Dems to turn out, is Trump.
2028 will be a whole different ballgame, and the Dems currently have a shallow bench, but if Trump wins the nom, then Biden likely wins re-election, which means 4 more years for Democrats to attempt to shore up their electoral odds.
Oh, and for a fun bonus, if Trump wins the primary but loses the general in 2024, he is STILL ELIGIBLE TO RUN IN 2028, so if his health permits he very well could CONTINUE to be the 800 pound gorilla.
This seems to be a quandary, but not one that suggests waiting on the sidelines as the wise choice.
I don’t think religion is that strong anymore on the right. I say this because there is a lot of tolerance for Trump being not a Christian. He bangs hookers. So red tribe has an internal sub-war between their traditional alpha male and their good Christian Desantis.
Yeah, and Christianity is generally okay with sinful, imperfect men being used as instruments to spread the word of God and advance the cause.
I mean, look at King David's reign or King Solomon (he of 1000 of h̶o̶o̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ women) and tell me Trump is really beyond the pale.
Problem is every group wants to tap into religious fervor and the fanaticism/loyalty that comes with a deep faith that you're doing the right thing, but nobody can present a leader who is capable of actually embodying the ideals that the religions (including the secular ones) profess so it becomes hard for anyone but the most ardent of adherents to actually buy into a movement that can't possibly deliver on its promises because there is no all seeing all knowing deity at its center to actually make things happen.
You can look at Trump and see him as a charlatan who talks a great game and maybe even is an extremely strong negotiator but has zero actual principles and no higher goals in mind other than enriching himself and bolstering his own fame.
You can look at the LGBTQ+ movement and see it as a divisive and somewhat incoherent mishmash of different interest and activist groups that at best manages to be a pale echo of the original civil rights movement but has no other core, defining belief system and thus they only manages to cling together because the members have been convinced that their very survival depends on presenting a unified front.
But you can't shake the faith of the followers of those respective secular religions and get them to turn away and embrace a different religious order merely by pointing out how their respective gods have utterly failed them.
Desantis, speaking somewhat cynically, seems to have a chance to actually live up to the ideals he tries to espouse and thus might function as the head of a secular religion (with Christian trappings) where even the less devout might pledge to follow.
But many competing groups (including the Trumpists and the LGBTQ+ mentioned already) consider it blasphemy to even consider lending him support, so I'm very curious to this election seasons develops in the midst of increasingly fanatical cults of personality.
faceh
11mo ago
What does the murder rate look like in Chicago a year later? How about 10 years later? Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?
I mean,
See my other post about conservatively estimating that we could expect around 50,000 LEO casualties in trying to enforce a gun confiscation program.
PLUS the fact that guns can be 3D printed now, so it's not sufficient to confiscate those already in circulation.
Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?
I might concede this if you concede we would probably see an increase in vehicular-based massacres
Since nothing in your hypothetical has actually dealt with the issues that make mass shooters want to kill people, we have full reason to expect many of them will merely shift methods.
And if we accept the idea, for arguments sake, that we could toss out our civil rights in the name of achieving lower crime, then maybe the example of El Salvador represents a much MORE EFFECTIVE path we could follow to achieve a similar impact on violent crime.
So perhaps it looks really suspicious to zero in on the Second Amendment and impacting the rights of huge swaths of peaceful citizens in your zeal to bring down the crime rate, when there are readily conceivable alternatives that are less intrusive?
Thought experiment: let's just ignore the fourth and fifth amendment and massively incarcerate the most violent members of Chicago's population. What does the murder rate in Chicago look like a year later?
Does anyone still 'collect' music (i.e. keep locally stored copies in some kind of organized database, regardless of format) in the current age of ubiquitous streaming?
I assume that Spotify (and the rest) has all but killed the idea of 'keeping' music on your local computer or phone amongst the youth.
As someone who has a music collection going back to when I first started obsessively ripping CDs to my PC in my teens, I find that I mostly keep doing it through force of habit, and the slight fear that things I like might disappear. Some of the older files in my collection are hard or impossible to find online these days. But with so many different streaming options and, now, an AI that can produce radio-quality music in seconds it seems like there's really no point to keeping a large local music collection unless its related to your career in some way.
So if you DO still store music locally, what are your reasons and methods?
How about "Firearm ownership is literally written into the founding document of this country as a fundamental right and thus we are literally entitled to ignore your pleas for gun control unless and until you can garner sufficient political support to amend said document."
Since "we're trying to overturn a civil right that the very founders of the country thought important enough to specifically enshrine AND ignore the actual procedure for making changes to the founding document in the effort" isn't exactly inspiring either, and it's certainly accurate to describe the gun-control movement's approach to the issue.
Or in short, the deal is that we follow the rules set forth when the nation was created, and those rules happen to include this particular provision for gun rights, so amend it or, literally, GTFO to a country that is more politically suitable to your own beliefs.
faceh
3mo ago
The woman might be the one who files the divorce papers, but in a lot of cases the man checked out a long time ago and has been, sometimes willfully sometimes passive-aggressively, baiting her into filing.
This is going to be very hard to quantify because I'd wager it's always a slow spiral that eventually takes such a sharp downturn that one party finally pulls the chute. Who pulled away first? What was the first defection? I don't think you can draw a strong conclusion as to who pulled away from whom, especially from the outside.
Is it the man 'checking out' of marriage for entirely internal reasons, or is it partially a response to the wife being less sexually available, or putting less effort into housework (esp. if housework is shared,), or has the wife become openly and constantly critical of him even if not directly abusive?
I would sincerely believe that if two people spent 10 years or more together, the ultimate destruction of the relationship is due to the two parties each reciprocating in small wounds which go untended and thus slowly kill the coupling rather than one side unilaterally having changed feelings out of the blue.
What I would guess is that the man is the one who more often wants to fix it rather than throwing it out and buying a new one, vs. a woman seeing no reason to repair what is damaged when it's easy enough to find a replacement.
It is a bit interesting to me that very, very few educational reform proposals I hear ever mention that we should be teaching and implementing epistemics as a core, fundamental aspect of any well-rounded curriculum. It seems almost self-evident and yet...
It's cliche to say that "education should be about teaching you how to think, not what to think," but I think that's actually a pretty decent goal. I'm not say you completely excise the 'rote memorization' aspects, but perhaps also provide the tools that make that rote memorization useful.
Seriously. Shouldn't we be able to at least ensure that someone who graduates high school has the ability to consider the truth-value of a statement and at least weigh whether they should incorporate the statement into their beliefs about the world or not? That they're able to make predictions based on limited evidence and reject falsehoods when there are actual consequences on the line.
And working off the assumption that not many students will be capable of autistically applying Bayes' Theorem to every new piece of evidence they encounter, it would still be pretty useful to teach the variety of heuristics that have a proven track record and teach the more blatant fallacies to avoid, and provide them with ample opportunities to learn in a controlled environment how to detect when people are lying or when the evidence isn't strong enough to support the purported conclusions, and to notice when someone is just trying to manipulate them.
Epistemics is like the ONE truly useful branch of philosophy, so it seems like making students slog through Ethical, Political, and Aesthetic philosophers without addressing the foundations of knowledge is a backwards approach to 'classical' education.
I say all this already knowing that even if we taught all students how to ascertain truth, the real lesson of high school is how to navigate complex social environments and to identify where you are situated in the hierarchy and, from that, what beliefs you need to adopt and which signals you need to send in order to maintain or improve your status.
And that's a core of human psychology that has been engrained into us over millions of years, so any lessons about how to think better will, in most cases, be suborned to the innate need to fit in with and protect the tribe.
So it's not like I expect teaching epistemics to produce a generation of enlightened thinkers, it just seems like its a bare minimum that ought to be done to ensure education isn't merely brainwashing/propagandizing with some math and science tacked on.
(Yes, I know that from the perspective of the state and ideological actors, the brainwashing is in fact that point)
Do we see those effects in societies which have almost no guns available? Are there stats on relative frequency of such crimes in e.g. Japan or Australia?
Japan has virtually no violence to speak of at any rate, so I don't know what you'd even expect to measure, there.
But suffice it to say, there is a reason The Yakuza can function so easily. They have the capacity for coordinated violence, and your average citizen has no means to resist them even if they wanted to.
Of course, in Mexico the Cartels also function pretty easily but engage in far, FAR more violence than the Yakuza do... despite guns also being nominally banned there.
So perhaps the problem is more that Mexican culture and Japanese Culture have different norms around the use of violence.
This gets to the REAL point at issue: the driving force of violence in any given nation is NOT the availability of weapons.
First of all, I'm not certain the armed populace are not themselves being tyrannical or supporting tyranny. History is littered with pro-tyranny rebellions against the government such as the US Civil War,
I'm going to resist my first instinct to accuse you of bad faith and just ask:
How is a nation actively choosing to separate itself from a government that it no longer wishes to participate in, and to thus secede from participation in said government "pro-tyranny?"
By this literal, exact logic the original American revolution was also 'pro-tyranny.'
Armed defenders of liberty against state tyranny is one possible dynamic, but armed forces of tyranny against the democratic state is a pretty common one too.
Seems like a good reason to allow pro-democracy forces to keep weapons? I dunno what examples you're thinking of in particular.
Second, I don't think it's true that there's a correlation between stricter gun laws and backsliding on democracy or basic civil rights, and I'd like you to support that claim.
North Korea, 2009:
"N. Korea enacts rules on regulating firearms"
North Korea has had a gun control law since 2009, recently obtained data showed Monday, in what was seen as an effort to tighten control over the society at a time of power succession.
Venezuela, 2012:
"Venezuela bans private gun ownership"
Afghanistan, 2021:
"Taliban in Afghan capital Kabul start collecting weapons from civilians"
Saudi Arabia, 2023 (timely!)
"Saudi Arabia announces new gun laws, restrictions on ownership"
Even if we don't assume that banning guns = slide into tyranny... the actual tyrants seem to think that banning guns is helpful to their ends.
Here's a fun exercise for you, can you point out any country that is heavily tyrannical and has very little democracy or protection of basic civil rights... and yet allows broad gun ownership?
Seems almost facially obvious to me that banning civilian-held guns is a DEFINING FEATURE of tyrannical nations, and that ONLY places with functional democracies (e.g. Switzerland) end up having permissive guns laws.
It definitely annoys me that "access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do, anywhere in the world, even on the internet.
Maybe there's one bank/payment processor that holds out and willingly acts to handle the 'controversial' transactions, but that just removes things one layer back, as other banks and processors will eventually blacklist that bank. And thus rendering that bank mostly useless for any other purpose. If it doesn't shut down it'll struggle to remain solvent.
Lets say that some pornography company was wealthy enough it could 'become its own bank' and processes payments on behalf of users and extends credit and otherwise runs all its own transactions and only has to interface with the financial system to purchase the services it needs to operate. Once it is known as the 'porn bank' it'll probably be impossible to find any other financial services willing to interface with them unless they comply with all the sames restrictions the other banks are working under... which defeats the purpose of 'self banking' to begin with.
It comes down to the fact that the financial system is a tightly connected web, and the main value any bank or payment process can provide is access to the network, so maintaining that access is their primary concern.
From the moral standpoint, it bugs me when there's very little evidence(indeed, I've seen none) that digital artwork depicting heinous, illegal, or otherwise disgusting acts is actually causing harm to nonconsenting parties. The reasons we find CSAM objectionable and worthy of legally crushing are generally not present when it comes to digital art. One party or group wants some art, the artist produces it and gets paid, nobody else even need be aware of what it contains!
It'd be nice to think of our financial system as mostly as set of dumb tubes that transmit the data representing our money around without caring much about the start and endpoint... with a lot of protections in place to mitigate fraud, theft, and user error. But ultimately a financial company is operated by humans who are subject to legal jurisdiction of some country or other, and have to maintain access to the global finance system if they want to take that money to any other jurisdiction, so in reality the 'rules' are set based on what all participants are willing to tolerate.
Anyhow, this is ultimately the impetus for the protagonists in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon to create a private, heavily anonymized bank/data haven in a location outside of the U.S.' sphere of influence. And in order for them to pull it off it required a chain of events that seems even more fantastical now than it did then, such as finding an island nation that is independently wealthy yet also politically stable enough to act as a headquarters for such an endeavor.
faceh
8mo ago
Well, him and approximately 60% of men in their 20's
He is hardly alone in this particular struggle.
So his point is probably more directed at what he sees as a society-wide issue.
In short, no. he, and literally millions of other guys, are not 'ok.'
faceh
11mo ago
I don’t know why gun rights advocates don’t just admit that yes, if all guns were confiscated and a very strict licensing regime was put in place gun homicides would likely drop substantially.
Mostly because it's a truism.
Real question is how many gun deaths would occur in the process of trying to enforce the confiscations.
Estimate about 50 million gun owners in the U.S., conservatively estimate 1% of them decide to put up a fight rather than comply. Conservatively estimate that in 10% of such encounters that at least 1 LEO is seriously injured or killed.
50,000 casualties. Out of ~800,000 police officers in the U.S.
And this is assuming large-scale compliance by gun owners, and a relatively low rate of LEO injury. Granted it'll probably be spread out over the course of years.
And one cannot ignore the fact that 3D printers can turn anyone into a gun manufacturer too.
This part actually jumped out at me:
80% of the members of the cult were women, and there weren't enough men to go around.
This seems unexpected because if there were any social group that had a gender imbalance of that degree, AND all the women in question were self-described as looking for love, you'd think this would lead to men joining up to exploit the imbalance until it was wittled down some.
I notice I am confused. Even accounting for women in general being more drawn to weird spiritualist remedies.
Sure the premise that you're looking for one specific person kind of limits the playing field, but that rarely stops motivated males.
Also, the basic description of the group made it seem less cult-like than the central example of cults, but upon looking at some of their background beliefs and their youtube channel yeah, this is definitely a classic-style cult with some slick presentation.
Like, I'm actually willing to tolerate psychic matchmakers because they basically take all the standard tactics and tricks to finding a mate for someone and dress it up in some woo language to make it more palatable.
But the harms being done in the Twin Flames Universe seem pretty obvious even before the coerced transition, and most of the other hallmarks are there.
faceh
10mo ago
I think I've made similar statements before, but I certainly will add that thought next time I see a thread on it.
The dating market in the U.S. is far worse than it was even 15 years ago, and if you've been out of said market for a while you probably don't realize how the combination of women raising their standards to absurd levels while simultaneously having less to offer in a relationship... SIMULTANEOUS with (and related to) millennial white women becoming far more politically liberal than average has made it absolute hell for your average guy to navigate, and has likely killed many mens' hope of ever finding a suitable long-term partner. Not just creating incels, mind, but creating the type of guy who ends up in Andrew Tate et al.'s orbit because at least they offer a positive view of masculinity and some hope of getting laid.
And literally nobody seems to have any plans on how to improve the situation. Indeed, the not-so-subtle cultural zeitgeist instead tells women that they're doing everything perfectly and don't need to settle... ever, and telling men to suck it up and stop whining.
So my TOTALLY HYPOTHETICAL thought experiment: how might this dynamic shift a bit if we intentionally imported, say, a few hundred thousand attractive and eligible female Ukrainian 'refugees?'
faceh
11mo ago
I often find myself wondering why brands that already have complete saturation in terms of awareness and a dominant position in their respective market bother with ubiquitous marketing campaigns.
Coca Cola, for example, is so utterly ingrained in U.S. (and other country's) cultures that they could basically run a 3 second ad with the logo that said "You know who we are." and it'd have just as much impact as some Oscar-quality short film.
I do assume that marketing successes are measured on a power-law standard. Most ad campaigns won't be particularly successful, but sometimes you get one that takes off and produces crazy outsized visibility and cements the brand in the public culture for years to come.
So marketing budgets are devoted to hunting for that one big hit, even if most of the money is 'wasted' in the meantime.
One thing I've contemplated about the approach to estimating historical grievances that must be repaid later on by the nominal 'victor' at the time is that it would seemingly create some unfortunate game-theoretic implications when engaging in a particular conflict.
If you wage a successful campaign of complete annihilation/genocide, leaving behind no survivors to later complain about your past misdeeds, then you have less risk of ever being made to acknowledge or have to compensate for said annihilation. So any time you engage in conflict, you should probably go for broke and try to completely eliminate the opponent from the gene pool, assuming you can define them tightly enough to do so.
If you seize the land out from under someone, and kill any and every person who might claim to be the rightful beneficiary of the land, you're effectively shoring up your own claim to the land such that nobody can really claim to have a morally superior right to it than you do, if only because nobody alive can trace their lineage to someone who used to own the land. Granted you may have to kill thousands upon thousands of people, but if the alternative is you end up being forced to return the land or pay massive compensation decades down the line...
Or try to reduce it to an absurd hypothetical: let us say that there is particular [minority group] that experienced hundreds of years of oppression and suffering inflicted by others, and then a systematic campaign to exterminate them down to the last man. This campaign failed about 100 years back, but it came so close to succeeding that in the present there is only one (1) surviving descendant traceable to that group. Rough estimates for the rightful compensation for the pain and suffering inflicted on these peoples is 1 trillion dollars. Is it somehow appropriate to award that full amount to this one surviving descendant, thereby rendering them the richest person on the planet, by far?
Would it be bad to just wait another 50 years until that person dies with no heirs and consider the debt 'extinguished?'
If nobody survives who could seemingly make a claim for reparations, then what possible method could you use to impose accountability in the present?
Practically speaking your odds of success in going the full genocide route are likely low enough that this 'strategy' becomes VERY high risk/high reward, at best. But man, ethics seem to get spotty in these "all or nothing" scenarios, where you carry the full moral blame and consequences for your act if anyone survives, whereas if your evil plan succeeds in full you're home free.
The other thing to contemplate is the question of why misdeeds/debts should be carried forward to be paid back later by one's descendants, whilst positive achievements/credits aren't?
I've become exceedingly fatalistic about the 'outcome' of this war because it really feels like the ultimate destiny of each nation (for the next 50 years, at least) is largely baked into the cake at this point.
Ukraine may very well be able to maintain autonomy over most of its' own territory. But their population has been in decline for decades now. Now add in a few facts:
Lots of Ukrainian men are dying on the frontlines instead of starting families.
Even those men who survive have been deployed for a year+ and probably won't be starting families anytime soon.
Russia has apparently been abducting tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Children. The prospects of getting these kids BACK even if Ukraine wins are slim-to-none.
I don't see any way to slice it to avoid Ukraine entering terminal population spiral/decline, and it may as well already be there. If the war drags on for another year then even if Ukraine prevails and all the men return and start enthusiastically knocking up women it'll be 16 or so years before those kids can become economically productive in any way.
In short, win or lose I don't see how Ukraine maintains itself as a functional nation as their demographics become untenable to support economic activity. Unless perhaps all the other nations of the world commit to pouring massive ongoing support into the country.
And most other countries face a similar, though less sharp, demographic crunch.
Russia, well, they're slightly more likely to hold together as a country but it seems increasingly unlikely they'll achieve their overall goals for territorial security and so I would assume they will just continue to fight a war of attrition to their last man rather than return to the status quo ante.
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