I have just linked to a long criticism of one of Unikowsky's previous spiels, from before your current sockpuppet joined this forum, in the post you're responding to.
To be explicit: yes.
EDIT: and, yes, I read the rest of this particular stupid substack. And his previous one, because someone thought it was useful in an X argument. And the one on McMahon. (I didn't and am not going to bother with the 'ai go foom for legal arguments'). The man's got one form.
gattsuru
1d ago
Was the order to kill everyone issued after the first strike, or before it? Was the order to initiate the second strike to kill survivors, to destroy remaining parts of the boat, or to prevent recovery of drugs? Were the survivors showing clear signs of surrender such that they could be easily captured without any risk or serious cost to other military goals, or were they trying to coordinate over radio for a pickup by their compatriots? These things all matter, and as far as I can tell, none of them are even considered in the original Post reporting so far.
I don't know what the situation is. I don't trust The New York Times any further than I trust WashPo, and I don't trust any politicians further than I could throw their house, and somehow admin members speaking anonymously managed to be even less trustworthy.
And I'm very far from an expert on the laws of combat. But I notice the certainty of others, and how little they argue for how they know what they 'know'.
gattsuru
1d ago
Necessary starting caveat: Unikowsky is an absolute putz when it comes to anything Trump-related, and his analysis should be recognized as on the "ought" side of any is-ought divide, and, more damningly, an "ought" that will not apply to any case where he doesn't like the victim.
gattsuru
1d ago
I will caveat that the Second Geneva Convention only applies between contracting parties by its own terms, so unless Venezuela wanted to do the funniest thing, it's not clear how binding it would be here. But the United States tends to flip back and forth about whether it wants to apply the same rules regardless, and it'd probably be a good idea.
gattsuru
1d ago
Most of the concern is whether or not they're even carrying drugs, something that the admin has not been forthcoming with evidence for...
There's not a ton of quad-outboard motorboats using that style of travel and large numbers of garbage-bagged wrapped cubic containers, as shown in the videos the administration has provided, and other countries have claimed to recover cocaine from the aftermath, but even if you don't trust either administration's assessments, from that Right-Wing Rag:
to the extent that they even send back survivors instead of prosecuting them.
I'd be a little interest to understand what, exactly, that would work like.
Is the response to that calling them terrorists and murdering them anyway? People who sell drugs are not killing people, because drugs can not kill people in the same way guns can not just kill people.
The United States government ventilates the skulls of American citizens in predawn raids, while wearing masks and without clear 'police' markings and without any of the 'blaring messages saying to turn back' bullshit. I can't promise that absolutely every single person who suddenly cares about drug traffickers seems to have found their conscience, here. But if you've got an example, I'd like to see it.
Until then, that argument holds no water. That ship has sailed, exploded, and sunk to the seabed.
((That's doubly true given the common mix and mislabeling of various drugs by illegal sellers. Someone who decided to do cocaine only 'decided' to do fentanyl in the revealed preferences sense of not finding a better drug dealer.))
An easier way to think about it is with a lesser harm, like if someone were to proclaim we should start rounding up Nestle and Coca Cola shareholders for victimizing poor Americans with obesity, because offering high sugar snacks and drinks is damaging their health. It's the same logic, they provide an addictive product that Americans use to hurt themselves with so are they not corn syrup terrorists?
gattsuru
1d ago
It depends very specifically on the exact orders, to far greater detail than available from current reporting even if you trust it. From 7.3.3.1 of the same document:
Incidental Harm Not Prohibited. The respect and protection due to the wounded, sick, and shipwrecked do not prohibit incidental damage or casualties due to their proximity to military objectives or to a justifiable mistake. Combatants who are wounded, sick, or shipwrecked on the battlefield are deemed to have accepted the risk of death or further injury due to their proximity to military operations. Although the presence of the wounded, sick, or shipwrecked on the battlefield does not serve to exempt military objectives from attack due to the risk that such personnel would be incidentally harmed, feasible precautions must be taken to reduce the risk of harm to the wounded, sick, or shipwrecked.
gattsuru
1d ago
(Hegseth is joking about it)
Direct link. I don't think this supports claims that he's joking about the second strike.
((Also, new Turing Test: how do RPGs work.))
it looks not only like the US killed some shipwrecked survivors of an attack (which is generally considered perfidious, right?)
I am very far from an expert in this topic, but perfidy is stuff like attacking while under a flag of surrender or parlay, or the use of protected symbols for that purpose. Double-tapping survivors of an attack might be a violation in other ways, such as violating the concept of hors de combat, but that gets a lot more complicated; even attempting to escape can leave a combatant as 'in', and being incapacitated does not mean that you act as a human shield for other nearby legitimate military targets.
That's separate from whether it's good: it's possible for something to be a war crime and tots not a big deal (eg, the famous Doom health pack examples), and it's possible for something to not be a war crime and still show a significant moral lapse.
gattsuru
1d ago
If you're arguing in favor of cisheteronormativity, you probably should be at least aware of the Freedom of Form-style arguments. It, and a thousand weirder variants, are each individually too uncommon to be really necessary to counter or even counterable, but they or stuff like them underlies a lot of the nonbinary and what-you're-probably-seeing-as-ROGD stuff.
I don't know of any good summary articles, but there's also a bit of a will-to-power one: what Defense Distributed's 3d printing and Cathode_G's DIY nitration mixture said to gun control exists for hormonal modifications. You don't really have the ability to make things weird, just difficult. Never underestimate minor inconveniences, perhaps, but it points to policy limitations.
gattsuru
1d ago
The book (series) is an incredibly grimdark. It's mostly notable now as a culmination the trend of other fantasy retellings, but I can't really recommend it, for a lot of the same reasons. A lot of the people going to read it after seeing the movie are going to be pretty disappointed. That said, the characters are pretty well-explained and have clear motivations: they're just universally petty and selfish motivations. It's very much an exploration of the cycle of harm and motivations of evil.
Popocatepetl's got a Bulveristic take that works for the movies, but for the book, it's a Carrie story. It's not about how you could get everything you could want, and how it's just bad people's faults you didn't. It's about that anger and outright hatred burning in you, and having just cause in your targets, and it not really being your fault, even if your methods are wrong. I don't like it, but I'm not outside of the appeal.
gattsuru
2d ago
Part of this is the standard stuff. Among mainstream publishers, and mainstream awards, there's a ton of pressures against recognition of new male authors (and, increasingly, even previously well-recognized ones); the male authors who are successful tend to take a cult following approach that leaves them less benefit from begging for reviews, or write in ways that don't really pull reviews, or not be willing to play the social media game.
((for a low culture war example, I will defend literally every Timothy Zahn book, even the kinda-trite Quadrail series. But the well-received and genuinely strong pieces get low-double-digit reviews. If you've read one of his books, what is there to say that doesn't detract other readers from the story?))
An increasing emphasis on novella-length novels by standard publishers at higher prices on one side and Kindle Unlimited on the other has also put some weird pressures into the mainstream system. I don't have a very complete mental image, but from what I have seen, a lot of conventional ways for workday authors to make a living publishing conventional stories that can take off been smothered or at least greatly reduced, the remainder have increasingly become the domain of the greats, while most of the novices and introductory writers -- even within the -- have gone to edistribution approaches that make it hard to get mainstream applaud or concentrate a large number of readers. The few who can tend to be Jemisins, as skilled at handling the social side as they are at writing character play, and that's traditionally not an area men have focused.
There's also just the flow and the fixtures; you're seeing the detritus accumulating at points of friction, rather than the motion of the waves. The Puppies tend to call them SFWAs, but there's a decent amount outside of that set, and a lot other other incestuous interactions (how many Goodreads-Top-Tens would you expect to be LA Times Critics At Large? Might surprise you!).
gattsuru
3d ago
Yeah, this is one of those Universal Human Experience things; having post-puberty children of the same gender (and sometimes even opposite gender) sharing rooms is either unspeakably verbotten or absolutely normal, sometimes within the same social class just fifty miles away from each other.
It was kinda awkward for me and my brother, even (maybe especially) because neither of us had come out, but it's also just something you deal with and it's not that big a deal.
gattsuru
3d ago
I'd also consider bringing prosecutions that would be incompatible with active executive orders, for acts committed while those executive orders were active, to be a bad escalation. Not an unprecedented one, but because such a modification doesn't count for ex post facto stuff a space that has a lot of There Be Dragons.
gattsuru
3d ago
Leaving aside a specific fandom that has other reasons to favor original art, KendricTonn on X Twitter has been able to make it work, and he's part of a non-trivial circle doing so just to a degree that's visible to normies.
((And also woodblock printing, which is kinda in a complicated place on the 'is it original, or is it a print' thing.))
I don't think the economics make easy sense at scale, but there's enough of it that it could in a fully-automated-world.
gattsuru
3d ago
Drawing as well, here. I never was going to be able to enough time to be good, but I took lessons, read a lot of books, and practiced quite a decent amount in both traditional and digital forms, and I've either gotten worse or learned to notice the flaws in what I was doing more. There's some really fundamental skill related to taking the visual composition of something apart into its components, and I can do that mechanically, but whatever's necessary for art just isn't something I've been able to grapple with. I can trace fine (or at least not so bad as to be actively painful to watchers), so I've started using some of those resources for other tasks, like woodblock or airbrush work, but that first step is just beyond me.
I'm not very good at woodworking, either -- I'm too afraid of the tools -- but I've kept at it, since it's useful even if you're awful. Will admit I haven't made anything like a full furniture set, though, either.
Stained glass was one I thought would be fun, and I can do it, but was never really interesting enough to keep my attention after three or four pieces.
gattsuru
3d ago
Cancelling executive orders are an escalation cycle, but not a very serious step. Biden entered office bulk-cancelling Trump's executive orders, and I would expect to see the same thing happen again the next time the White House changes hands regardless of Trump's actions here.
Pardons are more serious, if he tries to prosecute someone with a pardon, for behavior clearly covered by the pardon. The courts will, absolutely unsurprisingly, boot such an attempt very early in the process; there's zero votes to review the pardon power at SCOTUS, and not many in the 5th Circuit. That's a kinda bad, because there's some evidence available that people used the power of the pardon without Biden's direct acknowledgment and maybe without even having been delegated that power, and that can go into some really bad (and Nicholas Cage movie-) tier problems. But it's not really resolvable this way, and it'll encourage and invite new and innovative attempts in retribution that have courts willing to rubber-stamp wrong Blue-Tribe opinions on this matter.
If it's just making sounds that could cover that, but not acting on it, it's a step in the escalation spiral that was crossed over a decade ago.
Trying to argue that autopen'd signatures on full legislation is void would be a massive escalation. Not as big as I wish it was, since there's been a few other cases where Presidents stopped defending or enforcing laws that they didn't like, but still huge and with a wide variety of downstream effects, some of which would be so bad that I don't want to talk about them publicly.
... but even with that, I can't think of an equivalent on the left to this.
There's been a pretty wide array of counterexamples. I'm a big fan of The Saga Of Defense Distributed, because it culminated in the courts specifically accepting the argument that a previous court-recognized settlement wasn't worth the toilet paper it was written on, but see for example Bank Pause Letters for a space where I don't have a lot of sympathy for the victims, or this mess for just a wide variety of examples.
gattsuru
3d ago
That's fair, but I'd caution about stereotypes. I work with a different sort of mechanic than, say, hydroacetylene, but there's a lot more overlap between the techie side of things and the automotive maintenance bro these days, just because tech stuff is much harder to avoid these days. I've helped hunters make a psuedo-shot-spotter tool for their range, traded some car advice for tips on hooking neopixels up to an offroad atv, and maybe half of the mechanics have or have access to a 3d printer.
((That said, they'd probably have at-best-mixed feelings about helmets on adults for leisure biking.))
gattsuru
4d ago
WhiningCoil's had multiple woodworking projects, dr_analog's project was focused on hardware but to support biking, and we've had a couple DIY car repairs (or people like me complaining about car repairs: I'm actually fighting with door power window repairs again myself). My rant about FIRST and STEM outreach is the geekier side of physical handicraft, but it's still more about assembling and greasing gearboxes or running CNC machines than it is about the comparatively entry-level code side of things. As, more prosaically, was the war on dandelions.
There's some genuine drop in interest and development along those lines, especially post-COVID, but it's also hard to talk at length about it, especially here.
gattsuru
5d ago
Surprisingly, no.
Trivially, there are levels of armed conflict that would be acceptable and even laudatory. If New Yorkers could accept self-defense or defense-of-others by innocents against illegitimate threat to life and/or limb, we'd be in a much better place. Just as trivially, there are levels of endorsement I can give that are hundreds of miles short of what is not just common but already mainstreamed to the point of being room temperature; endorsing Rittenhouse is not going to give any genuine sanction to Jay Jones.
These aren't without their risks. There are definitely progressives willing to hallucinate that the knife-waving meth addict who broke into someone's house at midnight tots wasn't gonna hurt nobody, and that the police officer considering a speeding ticket was a dire threat to life; there are people who were already drooling over the shooting the children of political opponents now and did respond to the Rittenhouse defense by doubling down. But those are concerns in the same sense that a schizophrenic legitimizing a murder because the radio waves in his teeth told him it was okay, and sometimes by the same biochemical pathways.
At a deeper level, the Litany of Tarski wins. If you're arguing game theory and utilitarianism, it's not just enough to believe that pacifism is the best behavior with the best outcomes. Most advocates aren't even willing or able to pretend.
Within 24 hours of this post, two National Guard members were shot and killed in Washington DC, by a shooter that alleged targeted and ambushed them.
I'm willing to give another 24 hours from now before speculating on the motives of that shooter. The shooter has been capture and is expected to survive. I'll note, however, that nationally syndicated television did not wait to see whether the man was a gangbanger or schizophrenic before giving justifications for the shooters actions.
It's possible that Dilanian is fired in a week. Would you like to make a wager?
Because I'd wager that your lefty college buds can get all the justifications and friendly tongue-washing from broadly published news media that everyone treats with far more respect than it deserves; the wig-wong waggling here doesn't really matter.
Edit: I shouldn’t trust politicians. “conflicting reports”
gattsuru
6d ago
Oof. Do you have similar issues with other USB devices in the same physical ports? Keyboards, mice, usb thumb drives, especially anything with higher power draw or running in faster USB modes? Or is it just controllers, nothing else?
Do you know your motherboard? If not, grab CPU-z and check the mainboard tab, then check for BIOS updates from the manufacturer. Especially AMD motherboards have had sometimes-very-weird issues with specific USB modes in early BIOS releases.
The problem occurs regardless of whether I use a front USB port (belonging to the case, connected indirectly to the motherboard) or a rear USB port (belonging directly to the motherboard).
It's a bit of a hail-mary, but try unplugging the connection from the motherboard to the front side panel (they're keyed, so it's pretty easy to reinsert the right direction when you're done testing). In humid environments, I have seen bad connections there cause problems all across a hub. PCI(E) expansion cards are cheap as another try if you've got the available slots, but unfortunately most physical stores that stock them will charge an obnoxious premium.
Both because, yes, it's easy for you to whine about what you're not allowed to say when you're not the one who would get visited by the FBI,
There's a really morbid joke here, because on one hand, yes, we have very specific test cases on this very specific hypothetical, and back in 2013 I had some sympathy for the state's concern even if some of the actual actions were clearly overkill response to hyperbole. From Zorba's position, that's clearly the correct calculus...
For conservatives.
When an actual assassin got within inches of doing a Gallager to the then-Presidential Candidate and now-President, and someone started talking about aiming better next time, the fascist brownshirts didn't break down her door at midnight and the FBI or Secret Service weren't knocking on every message board she'd been to; she got fired from Home Depot and every progressive in the country started taking cancel culture seriously for three seconds before promptly finding an asshole they wanted to fire again. When a major political activist got shot in the throat, with audience members dancing in glee while he bled out on livestream, I gave you, specifically, a long list of people who weren't going to suffer after it, and not only did I manage to guess right in almost every case, it was only going to surprise you if they all turned out to be true. It's actually kinda impressive how direct and explicit the threats have to be before this FBI -- this administration's FBI -- is going after anyone.
And, of course, there's no FBI investigation after WhiningCoil's very specific example of Jay Jones saying worse than Corcoran said, when Jones sent his texts directly to one of his political enemies. Like, duh, obviously, that's not something that's even worse considering as possible.
That's not the joke. The real fun is that convention isn't limited to calls to assassinate political rivals. Indeed, there's a lot of other reads to WhiningCoil's position that aren't assassinating political rivals.
But we know that this rule applies to a wide variety of other matters -- whether it be advocacy of lethal force for the specific case of defending yourself from a man trying to beat your head in, or saying mean things about teacher's unions or school boards. There's a very specific post about a number of recents -- and about countless other prominent events -- that I will pointedly not make, here, because as you're very clearly saying, it's not allowed. Doesn't matter that isn't specific, hell, doesn't matter that it's advocacy of something that's legal.
What's the penalty for being late?
gattsuru
7d ago
Weird. Are you seeing anything change in Device Manager when you plug in or unplug the controllers? If there's no sound or tree reloading behavior, that points to an issue with the USB hardware on the motherboard. If there are changes, set up an event manager filter to track down what they are; unknown device IDs can also point to hardware issues (usually a past short-from-D+-to-5V). If it's a desktop, switching to different USB ports or to a PCI(E) motherboard might be a cheap way to get back up and running.
That's the most obvious problem:
and
Are not completely incompatible, but they're very far from confirmation, and in some ways very specifically in contradiction ("ensure the boat was destroyed"). And Hegseth's specific denial isn't much reason to be generous -- he's a politician! -- but it by definition can not be confirmation.
More subtly, "double-tap" has a specific meaning. While no one's using the strict 'hitting a bomb site to hit first responders' bit, here, it matters very heavily whether the second shot was solely targeting survivors or targeting material; this distinction would be a major difference in between a war crime and a legitimate (if not necessarily ethical) strike. This, likewise, wasn't confirmed by the White House.
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