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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   37686 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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This is how I know the Trump assassination attempt was done by a rando. He tried going for a headshot. You never go for a headshot, you aim for center mass. People who think a headshot is what you do get their ideas from games and tv shows.

I'm seeing online (so let's take a grain of salt) that this shot was from 130 or more yards away. Maybe this is just how good this guy's aim is. Bullets flying wide. We don't know where he was aiming.

I think after seeing he missed his initial shot realized he only had a few seconds left, so unloaded as fast as he could

trump was wearing body armor . Given that Trump had medical staff within feet, the killer's only choice was a headshot which would have been instantly lethal. even aiming for the upper torso could have been survivable with armor and rapid medical attendance.

Trump wasn't wearing some fancy battlefield armor with ceramic plates. Meaning any rifle round apart from (maybe) hollow point small rifle ones would have gone right through.

Also, he was being shot from the side, which is a direction where soldier armor doesn't have ceramic plates so rifle rounds are lethal.

Really, had the shooter used a better gun, practiced more and went for center of mass, he could have killed him easily.

Odds are cca 50% that a torso hit with a .30 rifle kills a person. And he's a spring chicken only when compared to Biden.

Odds are 50% that the shot would have splattered Trump's brains. And it's not a non-zero probability the body shot would have missed as well.

Apparently the shooter missed because Trump turned his head at the last second pointing at the poster that was there..

The reason that you shoot for COM is not that it's a bigger target, it's that heads bob around a lot and centre-of-mass does not. (as anyone who's done defensive line in hockey, soccer, or football knows perfectly well)

Trump's (20"x20" or so) torso is surely not a killshot -- but the 10-12 inches around his heart definitely is, .223/.308/doesn't matter. This is kind of a textbook case against headshot efficacy -- Trump literally moved his head just after the guy decided to pull the trigger; if he'd shot for the heart with the same accuracy we would be living in a very different world today.

but the 10-12 inches around his heart definitely is,

Theodore Roosevelt not only survived being shot at torso, but even continued his speech for 1.5 hours after being shot.

.223/.308/doesn't matter.

of course it does, size of bullet and whether it rotates on impact makes different size hole, .22LR might fail to reach heart vs. vest + rib at that distance.

Here's what cheap-ass .223 ammo does to soft armour:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T71ku4Fjn3w&t=479

Note all the action in the ballistic gel -- this is not something you want going on anywhere in your torso, and absolutely makes you D.R.T. if your heart is in that area.

Yes, .22LR or whatever bullshit pocket pistol cartridge was used on Roosevelt are quite a different thing -- these are literally an OOM less powerful than centrefire rifle rounds, even .223.

Sorry if ".223/.308/doesn't matter" was unclear -- the 'doesn't matter' refers to centrefire rifle rounds; any of them (with very limited exceptions; .22 Hornet maybe?) will go through soft armour like butter at this range, and retain enough energy to create a hydrostatic wave which will shred/explode one's heart given a true COM hit. Other parts of the torso (eg. lung shot) might be survivable with prompt medical heroics, but would still have been a pretty bad time for Trump.

I don't think you need to penetrate body armor at all. You just need to pump enough kinetic energy into the heart area. And at trumps age chances of it being fatal are not low.

Fat standing between unpenetrated vest and heart area would distribute kinetic energy pretty much

This article makes the same argument.

It's always funny to see these blogs where some random nobody (or at least, nobody with any credentials relevant to the case) gives a detailed argument in support of a definite claim that turns out to be entirely and utterly wrong.

Yeah true.

photos and eye witness describe it it being a riffle

it instantly killed one of the audience members after being hit to the head

snipers regularly aim for the head ,as the secret service had done for example. they didn't shoot his torso

Shooting from an elevation into a crowd, head hits are more likely.

Snipers aim for whatever's showing.

To be fair, his head was probably all they had to shoot at if he we peeking over the peak of the roof from prone.

Thank you for using the right word. I see everyone using "peaking" nowadays and it's driving me crazy.

"Sniper peaking on the roof" like damn, he really enjoys his work

Exactly, they watch too much TV instead of looking at the actual data. The reason assassinations like Kennedy and Lincoln were unsuccessful were because the assassin went for the head, whereas in successful attempts like Roosevelt and Reagan, they aimed for the body.

Ah yes, point blank and multiple shooters. Really, it's all the same thing.

Multiple shooters?

Referring to Kennedy. I don’t know if I like the grassy knoll theory, but several of the alternatives still have a second shooter (including my personal favorite, accidental discharge by adjacent Secret Service officer).

Mary Todd double-tapped Abe while Booth was distracting everyone by jumping on stage.

and shouting "sick simping trannies"?

Too early for irony, only one cup of coffee in this a.m.

I am inclined to believe that a modern combat rifle round would have gone straight through Roosevelt, assuming he were not equipped with tougher armor than his speech and glasses case.

why? late 19-20th early century rifles (e.g. Mosin) used more powerful cartridges than later assault rifles ("intermediate cartridge")

Roosevelt was shot with a .38 Special, which is like 250J when shot from a short barrel, almost half the energy of a 9mm Luger cartridge, another handgun round, or about the same energy as a high-powered .22 LR cartridge.

You are right that any rifle round would've gone straight through Roosevelt, though.

I thought it was a .32-20. basically the same really

He's just comparing the 32-20 black powder carbine/pistol round with a modern smokeless rifle cartridge, which is <300 joules to 1800 joules.
(I know Roosevelt wasn't shot with a blackpowder version, but the original loading still limited chamber pressures, and the non-expanding semi-wadcutter bullet is much less lethal than modern hollow points, let alone engineered-fragmentation rifle bullets)

before the advent of modern medical care and decent body armor , aiming for the torso would have been better . infection would have been lethal if initial bleeding/trauma wasn't

From what I’m seeing a direct torso hit only had a 62% death rate in the civil war era. If you have a better than 62% odds of hitting their head, you would have been better off aiming for the head. Doubly so if the person is particularly healthy and hardy, given it was usually days or weeks till they actually died, and those with robust immune systems had much better odds.

On the other hand Trump is in his late 70's and if the objective was 'Trump can't be President' that'd likely be accomplished by even moderately wounding him considering recovery timelines at his age and needing to campaign.

How do you know he wasn't aiming for center mass?

You don't know whether he went for a headshot.

It's a common joke really. "1: nice shot, you got him right in the head." "2: I wasn't aiming for the head"

You don't aim for center of mass if your target is wearing body armor. I don't know if Trump was (probably not, it was too damned hot), but the shooter had to consider that possibility.

Can't rule out that line of thinking, but no normal soft ballistic vest will protect against rifle rounds. They're certainly not strapping up presidents with ceramic plate armor these days, right?

Correct. A soft vest wouldn't stop rifle rounds.

Not at short range, but this was a pretty far shot. The bullet would be going much slower than muzzle velocity when it hits.

556 at around 100 yards easily goes through soft armor. Velocity should be at or a bit lower than 3000 ft/s. Let's call it high 2000s ft/s depending on barrel length and ammo.

this was a pretty far shot.

This isn't a far shot for the cartridge (5.56 is effective out to 800ish yards, but 450 is about the practical maximum if you're not fiddling with the sights) and it'll still defeat soft armor at those distances provided you're using the appropriate ammunition. It won't defeat the cutting edge of body armor, though (the newest-gen UHMWPE stuff).

It put a hole in a hydraulic lift, so I suspect it would easily penetrate a soft vest (unless that shot was really lucky and actually hit a hose). But I think a sniper wouldn't want to count on that with a .223.

I would assume hydraulic hoses are significantly easier to penetrate than any armor, soft or otherwise.

They're pretty hefty actually, I wouldn't be so sure -- hydraulic fluid is at like 5000+ psi, there's several layers of steel/rubber/fibre in there.

Anyways unless he was using some frangible coyote round .223 absolutely does penetrate soft armour at 150 yards, this is not even a question.

agree. this center of mass rule is for police shooting at ordinary civilians who do not have body armor

Basically. There's various youtubes and articles out there about the difference between military (1000 yards/meters+ center of mass) and police snipers (<200 yards/meters head shots) and what they aim for. Assassins are in the later category. Today's events is a case in point. Look how close the shooter got.

It could "make sense" if your goal was not necessarily just to shoot him, but to explode his head on national television so the Internet could be flooded with 4k celebratory videos.

Sure, we wouldn't think of that as a rational calculation compared to aiming for center of mass, but I'd go out on a limb and suggest that people shooting at Presidents are not gruff sober Operators concerned with eliminating the target and nothing else.

FWIW, I regard the whole idea of assassination by medium-long range gunshot at a well-known public event to indicate a crazy rando. Someone seriously experienced or some sort of elite intelligence operative would work on acquiring and leveraging specialized intelligence for a much simpler and more certain kill, and good chance of the assassin surviving and escaping.

Especially for someone with a little less protection like a former president and candidate, it's likely that at least a dozen times a week he's just walking around in some random public place with a bunch of random people nearby who haven't been checked for weapons or inclination, with a few USSS bodyguards around. This is mostly reasonably safe since it's highly secret and hard to predict exactly when those encounters will be. If you were super-elite, you'd try to learn about some of these ahead of time, choose one where you're reasonably likely to be able to get away clean after you shoot, and take the shot. Get away clean, and it's a super-mysterious event. It'd be hard to prove afterwards whether it was a crazy rando that just got lucky or really was some kind of elite operative acting on masterfully-obtained evidence.

Depending on the connections, certain randos can roll their own shaped charge.

Randoms being the same as the Stasi, now.

I'd note that that incident wasn't exactly randos - it was the work of Red Army Faction, which was backed by the KGB and likely receiving training and materials from them. I don't think any randos are going to be constructing a precisely timed shaped charge IED to take out a target in an armored car.

It's possible to get away with murdering a high-ranking official even with a sloppier and more opportunistic approach; just have a clean record to avoid being identified by your DNA, wait until a reasonable opportunity presents itself and then take the shot. Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated more or less this way in the Eighties and the killer still hasn't been conclusively found, though one Christer Pettersson was put on trial (but acquitted in the Court of Appeals) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Olof_Palme

The real give-away of a nutjob amateur is indeed choosing a time, place and method of execution which only guarantees one casualty: that of the gunman.

There's nothing inherently stupid about going for a headshot. It's obviously a high risk, high reward strategy relative to center mass, but there is no guarantee of a death with a center mass shot and the medical care a President would receive. We don't know the caliber of rifle being fired, but if speculation that it was a small caliber is accurate then going for a body shot would risk failing to even defeat light body armor.

The reason I would tend to think the competence level wasn't particularly high is the apparent choice of weapon. As near as I can tell, he didn't have any sort of optics. While that distance is absolutely a makeable shot with an AR platform rifle with iron sights, it's a hell of a lot more assured with a simple hunting rifle and good glass.

It is the thoracic triangle from what I read. Shooting him from beneath the chest would not have been lethal given rapid care . He was wearing armor

Also wouldn't the principal have body armor of some sort on?

From 1/6 one thing we have never been given any information on is the alleged pipe bomber. Zero. Nada. The only planned terrorist activities on that date.

I have no idea what happened here. Was it the CIA. A lone wolf Democrat activist trying to paint maga as terrorists? Some smart maga extremists crazy enough to do the strategy but smart enough to do it right?

person of interest https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-identified-person-interest-capitol-pipe-bomb-case-jan-10-2021

Conspiracies do hide in plain site. Eipstein being a pedophile and getting a sweet deal was well known. Hunter Biden laptop to a lesser extent.

The left also hasn’t tried to hammer the right on the issue of a pipe bomber being there. And the left often tried to play up things that weren’t done/known like Trumps covid disinfectant drink bleach thing, Ivermectin as dewormer, or the fine people hoax. Maybe it’s not enough of an edge case to get people to fight over it or the powers that be knew not to publicize it because if people looked into it more it would be bad.

Edit: I guess you could argue Russia/State Actor did it. Saw that America had gone crazy. And wanted to escalate. Could have their Michael Westen whose good enough to do it right without being caught.

I think it’s worth pointing out that pipe bombs were placed outside the nrc as well. Which makes this whole effort to assert that it was some sort of false flag operation seem ridiculous https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/seeking-info/suspected-pipe-bombs-in-washington-dc

I don't follow. Why is the presence of a second pipe bomb evidence against, rather than evidence for, or irrelevant evidence?

I think his take is wrong.

It can be argued it was a maga because the GOP didn’t properly fight for him etc. I don’t believe both getting pipe bombs tells you anything.

"can be argued" is a poor standard here.

The point is that if this was a false flag operation to make the right look bad, it would have been more effective had there only been a DNC bomb.

At the very least it's off narrative, although it's in somewhat of a subtle way. The media and "deep state" don't like to publish things that make people get ideas. The idea that someone could do this and get away? Big no no. Emphasizing all these stupid Trump supporters who were stupid and got stopped by the majesty of the security state? Big yes yes.

So they probably don't want others to remember this and get ideas. Which is also kinda fair?

99.99% an op IMO. DC is the most recorded place in America. You don’t enter or leave it without being recorded. The full weight of intel might would be on finding the planter. It would be a trivial project for deep state to determine the person’s vehicle, the direction of the vehicle, how they obtained the vehicle. I do not believe that a planter could have the sophistication to steal a car, sufficiently hide his appearance while driving, hide the car (dna / prints) somewhere our of sight of video recording and vehicle photographs (no highway) where a different vehicle is waiting. Doing this on a day in which security would be increased makes no sense.

This is as suspicious as the Seth Rich murder, which for some reason has been memoryholed from my own memory — didn’t they find his probable Reddit account pointing to his leak or something?

Do you realize what that would mean?

If the pipe bomb was an OP assuming CIA. Besides the huge abuse of power etc. What were they covering up? You start going down a path that gets very crazy.

The mildest version would be Biden legitimately won the election but the CIA wanted to permanently ruin Trumps political future.

Technically, the mildest version would be some variant of the Curtis Culwell Center attack. If the malefactors in that case hadn't gotten shot red-handed on-site in a way that shut down the center of a small city, they'd have been incredibly embarrassing for the feds to pursue in court: encouraged toward attacks and their specific target by a federal undercover agent, armed with a Fast and Furious gun, and literally tailed by FBI agents who were apparently dressed up like Team America extras but did not provide aid to those under attack.

We don't, tautologically, know of any situations where this sort of embarrassing attack happened and the feds just shrugged their shoulders about it (... probably), and I'd like to think that 'found the pipe bomber' would outweigh the 'took an embarrassing and hard-to-solve case' bit, but it's at least plausible that they exist.

That said, I think the null hypothesis is still more plausible than most people think. DC police and surveillance just aren't that good, and while opsec is harder than a lot of people think, sometimes even mediocre opsec won't necessarily drop a case into your lap. There are some details that leave me suspicious enough that the more dire options aren't implausible, but follow enough crime investigations and you do occasionally see people caught on HD video with no masks, who drove past a couple LPRs in a bright painted weird car, and who left ammo cases at the scene, and months later no one can find or ID the fuckers.

For the 16th Street Baptist Church scenario that would seem to strongly point towards an antifa or otherwise identifiable leftist group as the perpetrator. That would be a reason the FBI would bury evidence on who did it.

Since after 1/6 Trump was a very bad man and the primary target you would not want it to come out that on 1/6 day there was also a leftist trying to do a frame job on Maga as very bad people by planting some pipe bombs. That would lead to a mixed narrative that gets Trump off. If it was a Maga guy who did it then they would use it to hang Trump.

It could still be a Russian op, or something. It doesn't necessarily have to be CIA. Although I guess if it was a foreign intelligence operation I would expect the FBI to accuse someone of it.

Can we be sure he brought a vehicle into DC rather than walking the last 10 km or so (possible if you're determined enough, and pipe bombers are usually pretty determined)? Can we even be sure he doesn't just live in DC?

Even assuming that DC is so well recorded that it is almost impossible to not notice, it doesn't need to outright be an op. It can simply be someone inconvenient for whatever story the CIA wants to push. Which in this case would probably mean somebody who is openly and obviously anti-trump. But again, that would just be damning in a different way.

the cellphone data from one provider that law enforcement usually has access to was also corrupted. but don't worry it was not on purpose and we don't want any conspiracy theories.

We did a complete geofence. We have complete data. Not complete, because there's some data that was corrupted by one of the providers, not purposely by them, right. It just – unusual circumstance that we have corrupt data from one of the providers. I'm not sure – I can't remember right now which one. But for that day, which is awful because we don't have that information to search. So could it have been that provider? Yeah, with our luck, you know, with this investigation it probably was, right. So maybe if we did have that – that data wasn't corrupted – and it wasn't purposely corrupted. I don't want any conspiracy theories, right. To my knowledge, it wasn't corrupted, you know, but that could have been good information that we don't have, right. So that is painful for us to not to have that. So we looked at everything.

https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/republicans-release-new-information-january-6-pipe-bomb-investigation

though, maybe these warrants that the government is using are unconstitutional. i guess in this case maybe if the location and time were precise then it is kind of similar to accessing CCTV information.

I expect anything they get out of a telecom is fine by the Third Party Doctrine.

Note that I at all support that doctrine, I would probably pare it back to say that anything an individual shares/discloses to a third party with the recognized and reasonable expectation that the party would not further disseminate it is protected by the Fourth Amendment. That language is stolen directly from Katz vs US.

Alas, that ain't the law today.

Peterson vs Fuentes twitter drama

The entire story is shown in this thread. Someone is asking why something is 'like this', Fuentes predictably answers 'Jews', Peterson swoops in to condemn, and then the rest follows.

The AmericaFirst/Groyper movement seems to have finally found another 'gatekeeper' to poke. After Charlie Kirk rather expertly adjusted his rhetoric to fall outside the AF/G firing line.

To avoid doing another dissection of Peterson: he certainly seems to have been bitten by the Zionist bug. For all his posturing as a rational and reason minded clinical psychologist when talking to feminists about feminism and the difference between the sexes, the merits of individualism and focusing on immediate short term goals and family, he seems completely unhinged when it comes to semitism.

Bullies thrive on weakness, and whilst it might not be nice to push peoples buttons like this, I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite. The trolls can only do what you allow them to get away with, as Charlie Kirk demonstrated by defusing the avenues of attack. Peterson seems to be doing the opposite of that.

As a further question, is this part of the right wing sphere dying? I'm not sure how Peterson is doing. Last I heard he did a rather big media deal with Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire. Whilst the AF 'conference' or whatever it's called, didn't do so well.

  • -10

Quick compilations:

It's amazing watching these figures collapse into a deluded schizo-philosemitism. These figures used to represent the "Right of mainstream" perspective but that is falling apart as this nauseating Israel worship gets exposed to increasingly skeptical audiences.

As a further question, is this part of the right wing sphere dying?

What do you mean by "this part of the right wing sphere" here? I wouldn't consider Peterson and Fuentes part of the same sphere. I also wouldn't consider the AF 'conference' being canceled an indicator of that sphere dying. Engagement on X is probably the biggest indicator for the growth of those spheres. And Fuentes was able to ratio the Petersons handedly. And yes, ratios matter- they are the memetic fitness signal among the genetic algo of X discourse.

There also appears to be an enormous proliferation of DR engagement on X. It's quaint to imagine not too long ago where the most "radical" decile of the right wing youth would be listening to Glenn Beck or something. But now they are on X signal-boosting DR talking points and engaging in WWII revisionism. The engagement is huge and appears to be growing.

Another area in which X discourse seems to be changing is Holocaust Revisionism. I am increasingly seeing posts alluding to or outright endorsing Holocaust Revisionism and WWII Revisionism with high engagement and high numbers of likes. The ranks of "Holocaust Deniers" are certainly bigger than they have ever been before and appear to be growing judging by the number of accounts I am seeing endorse it on X. The taboo is collapsing, and it is largely because of the actions of Israel and the collapse of the credibility of the Jordan Petersons and Glenn Becks unable to corral young right-wingers any longer.

"Western civilization would die without Israel"

It's takes like this that are utterly baffling to me. And I say this as someone who's very pro-Israel and who generally likes Jews (even though I generally hate their political leanings). Like Nikki Haley saying Israel doesn't need us, we need them, it just strikes me as a completely delusional way of looking at the relationship between Israel and the West. I'm more than happy to sell Israel all of the weapons they need to glass Gaza or replenish the Iron Dome or bomb Iran or whatever tickles their fancy, but I'm not happy to be the one paying for them via our foreign aid. Israel has clearly been very dependent on us for both arms and the funding to buy those arms, and it's completely insulting when people like Shapiro and Haley suggest that we need them and not the other way around.

After Charlie Kirk rather expertly adjusted his rhetoric to fall outside the AF/G firing line.

What did he do? I mean in general Trump is moderating so hard that he’s repudiating even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, it’s clear he’s in another dimension to the whole AF wing.

Trump is moderating so hard that he’s repudiating even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025

The impression I'd got from this article in Unherd was that Trump doesn't like Project 2025 because:

a) He's the big boss and nobody tells him what to do (in his self-conception). He's not interested in being some pencil-neck's sockpuppet.

b) He thinks that small-state conservatism is stupid and electorally unpopular.

How accurate is that? I don't really know much about the Heritage Foundation.

Trump didn't write it and hasn't read it. Reporters keep asking him questions about it and he doesn't like how those questions hijack his messaging strategy.

More or less, with a side of project 2025 being way overblown and not coordinated well enough with Trump.

It’s funny that JP’s own hero Solzhenitsyn, who he quotes and praises endlessly, wrote a ~1000 page tome on the influence of Jews in Soviet Russia, criticizing Jewish Russians as well as gentile Russians. Yet Peterson is unable to discuss the topic as it applies today. As if Judaism today is somehow different from the Judaism in 1900 or 900. I think this is just part of his boomer programming. Remember that every boomer westerner has been circumcised with the holocaust narrative: consciously traumatized at a young age in a way that reduces their sensitivity while inculcating a definitive story about Jewish suffering and redemption. Not far from the original circumcision-exodus narrative, just applied to gentiles.

is this part of the right wing sphere dying

Nick Fuentes continues to grow in popularity, he is literally ratioing the Petersons and getting shoutouts from the Tate brothers. Fuentes-adjacent Sam Hyde is sitting down with zoomer influencer Matan and KillTony regulars, and also has a bizarre inroad to underground rap through Joeyy. They sorely lack IRL infrastructure but their influence is expanding I’d say.

As if Judaism today is somehow different from the Judaism in 1900 or 900.

But it is. No way in heck would any Jewish community in either 1900 or 900 have outmarriage rates nearing 50%, for one.

Antisemitism is rising in popularity among younger people in the west. I don’t think that Fuentes is the story- he’s too much of a dweeb- but it’s definitely a thing.

Remember that every boomer westerner has been circumcised with the holocaust narrative: consciously traumatized at a young age in a way that reduces their sensitivity while inculcating a definitive story about Jewish suffering and redemption.

I like this metaphor even if I disagree with lots of the specifics. The overall thrust is definitely true in the sense of boomers thinking Jews are special perpetual victims.

The west can’t solve antisemitism because the west isn’t a fact based society. Maybe no societies are fact-based. The left can’t deal with antisemitism because oppressed-oppressor ideology makes the Jews look like the bad guy because they’re the most successful society on earth. The right is probably more aware of the reasons but they still can’t have the honest debate on the Jewish question.

Is the reason “evolution doesn’t stop at the neck”?

they’re the most successful society on earth.

The Jews are America now?

Most successful group in the most successful country

We probably lose WW2 if the germans just wanted to dominate Europe and were pro-Jewish. They get the bomb when we did and you just have to guess their intellect is enough to delay D-Day.

That quite clearly didn't work for them the first time they tried it, although I suppose the treaty of Versailles was a better deal than the end of WWII.

Truth there. Taking France so easily completely tilted it. I guess that was the difference. Even Oppenheimer was a NY born German Jew. It’s not hard to imagine the scenario if they got the nuke first if they somehow were friends.

We probably lose WW2 if the germans just wanted to dominate Europe and were pro-Jewish.

Who is "we"? Maybe we never get into a war with Herr Schicklgruber; he nukes Moscow and unites Europe under a 6-armed swastika, and the US just deals.

Point being that a WWII Germany that's pro-Jewish is so different that you can't really assume anything will be the same.

What did Charlie Kirk do?

Started using the term 'anti-white'.

He used to get 'invaded' a lot by AF/G, both online and in real life. He could hardly hold an event without the open question line being filled with AF/Gers asking about his stance on immigration, demographics and the relationship between Israel and the US. Most notably asking him over and over about the USS Liberty incident.

Charlie, to his or his handlers credit, changed his tune a bit. Becoming more aggressive against anti-white rhetoric. There's a layer of irony here, but there was definitely a change. But if there's lore here I'm missing I'd be happy for someone to correct the record on this. I'm not as tuned in to politics as I used to be.

You know, I forget the interview I was watching. Maybe it was Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith. They stumbled onto the topic of Worlds War II history, and how "infected" it is. Which is to say, you can question the facts, the narrative, the scholarship, the normie understanding of virtually any other historical event. "Well actshually..." to your hearts content. "Just asking questions..." all you want. But you do that with World War II and people lose their god damned minds, as though you were poking an infected wound.

Now in the interview, they mostly take this framing, and talk about how WW2 was the dawn of the American Empire, and all the stories we tell ourselves about how America is a force for good in the world. This despite losing virtually every engagement we've fought since, not achieving any publicly stated foreign policy goals through said conflicts, and spending massive amounts of blood and treasure doing so. And it all goes back to the story we aren't allowed to question at all about how we were the good guys in World War II.

Now they don't go down this rabbit hole, but I will. Wrapped up in our unquestioning moral superiority that gives us the right to intervene anywhere in the world we want, is that we stopped the holocaust. And so philosemitism is baked into that story that is holy to our civic religion. Jews are our chosen people, and protecting them gives us the moral standing we need to bomb brown people for any reason what so ever.

This is an example for how X discourse influences the Tucker Carlson's and creates a feedback loop. Carlson will wade further into WWII Revisionism as it continues to gain ground on X. These twitter Spats actually matter.

This despite losing virtually every engagement we've fought since...

When did this idea become so popular? Korea was a stalemate that has sharply bettered the lives of many people in the long run. The US won in Grenada, in Panama, in Kuwait, in Haiti, and so on. Maybe the results suck anyway or maybe these are just too lightweight of opponents to be treated as serious, but the United States does win military conflicts. Iraq was a stupid idea, but Saddam Hussein is emphatically dead. Muammar Gaddafi doesn't think he kicked the Americans out of Libya, notably because we came, we saw, he died.

When did this idea become so popular? [...] Maybe the results suck anyway

When figuring out what someone is trying to say in a compound sentence, it helps to read the part after the comma

not achieving any publicly stated foreign policy goals through said conflicts, and spending massive amounts of blood and treasure doing so.

Yes, you have correctly restated my point that even when we "win" on the field and have a great big "Mission Accomplished" celebration, we are worse off for it.

Perhaps you didn't intend to use "and" to join those clauses, but there it is, clear as day. Many of these conflicts were won militarily. In fact, many of them even achieved the publicly stated foreign policy goals.

I suspect that in two to twenty years we will have retroactively lost the Korean War.

Can you explain?

In other words, I think North Korea will probably successfully invade South Korea and the peninsula will be united under the hammer and sickle. If that happens, it will be difficult to look back at the 1950 Korean War and call it a victory, even if it really was a mostly successful military operation at the time. A similar thing happened with the first Gulf War, which is now much less rosy in the American memory after the 2004 Iraq war and the current state of Iraq now.

I think North Korea will probably successfully invade South Korea and the peninsula will be united under the hammer and sickle.

That is certainly a bold prediction. I don't see it going quite so well for the Norks. Say whatever you will about the US military's ability to deal with insurgent groups, if you give them a stand-up fight against an organized state military it'll be Christmas at the Pentagon. Generals who cut their teeth as butter bars in Desert Storm will weep tears of pure joy.

I suspect that any scenario in which Kim goes for it will involve the US military being tied down elsewhere.

The US Military is highly effective. The US State Department is completely unable to do any of the "establishing a peaceful liberal democracy" tasks that it thinks it's capable of.

But the State Department is also where people who study international policy dream of working, so they push it's failures back onto the military.

That sentence also stuck out to me as very strange. I generally think of it the opposite way. The US has generally won every specific engagement its been in. They seem very good at winning battles. The rare times they do lose become rallying cries for the improvement and betterment of the armed forces.

The US achieving its foreign policy goals seems heavily related to just how realistic and specific those goals are. If the goal is something specific like "kill that guy, or destroy that small country's military" then they do well. If the goal is more nebulous like "spread democracy, or prevent the spread of communism" then they seem to consistently fail.

Did Vietnam result in meaningful improvement? Judging by Iraq our counterinsurgency skills were still lacking.

South Vietnam didn't fall to insurgency. Both the Ngo family and the later variants of kleptocracy were able to handle the VC. South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese tanks, and the US military is quite good at conventional warfare- both in 1975 and today. In actual fact, US involvement did prolong the life of the South Vietnamese kleptocratic minority-rule dictatorship(which is what it was) meaningfully- the ARVN couldn't have stopped the Tet offensive on its own, and required US air support and political advisement to stop the 1972 North Vietnamese offensive.

I thought the general goal with Vietnam was to prevent the spread of communism. They failed at that.

Vietnam seems like it's in a good place nowadays, my guess would that the Vietnam war made that happy ending take longer.

Fuentes is charismatic but not very intellectual. I'd guess that he's been embarrarassed in public a few times by being unable to compete with Ashkenazi verbal ability.

Also there are a bunch of Middle Eastern groups eager to fund anti-Isreali speakers on the right, so I imagine that plays a part.

Whenever left wing activists hear someone on the right complain about powerful rich New Yorkers, they immediately respond with "Oh, so you hate Jews?!?" I think that Fuentes has embraced that to a certain degree.

If you come from a working class background and have a non-HBD world model, it's easy to assume that it's Jews who are making decisions that negatively affect your community. If he was a bit more worldly he'd realize that upperclass gentile blue tribers also hate him.

He's been attacking Steve Sailer recently because a bunch of the more intellectual groypers read "Noticing" and were discussing it's contents. Previously Sailer's work was scattered over decades of posts on different sites, it was suddenly more accessable.

Fuentes couldn't really engage so he started attacking Sailer as a secret Jew. Sailer is adopted and despite his interest in genetics has never done a DNA test, I think he feels it would weaken his connection to his adoptive parents.

But fundamentally Fuentes is reactive not reflective. He caters to lazy anti-intellectuals.

The default low-IQ tradcath take(which Fuentes either is or pretends to be, even if he’s more of a racist than anything else) is some kind of antisemitic conspiracy theory. Fuentes being not that intellectual…

I think it's because JP spend a lot of time thinking about evil, and he seems to have learned about the human capacity for evil by studying WW2 and concentration camps. He knows how easy it is for somebody to fall into an ideology like nazism and rationalize ones hatred for an outgroup, and he's quite determined to keep this from happening (again, this is just my view). Sadly, because he feels so strongly about this, he seems unable to pick up on the patterns relating semitism and wokeness.

Ethos is downstream from Mythos, it really is as simple as the boomer-internalization of the gas chamber mythos.

What's the party line today from your type, that the gas chambers weren't real, or that they were somehow exaggerated?

The Revisionist position is the same it has always been: the story that millions of people were tricked into entering gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower was wartime atrocity propaganda. This propaganda originally centered around the Western camps until those claims were proven false after Allied investigation.

The mainstream position admits the gas chamber story in the Western camps was a hoax, created by false testimony and confessions, but then they claim that the "extermination camps" conquered by the Soviet Union were all totally real. Revisionist scholars have spent decades proving that the gas chamber story was likewise a wartime atrocity propaganda hoax in the currently alleged Eastern 'extermination camps' like Majdanek.

So the Revisionist position is simply that the gas chamber story is as real in the Eastern camps as it was in the Western camps. The mainstream position is that it was a hoax in the West but totally real in the camps "investigated" by the Soviet Union, where they fabricated evidence and denied access to Western observers.

The mainstream position is that it was a hoax in the West

[citation needed] that it is mainstream position

The mainstream narrative says that the six alleged death camps were in the east. See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/concentration-camps-1942-45-maps

Notice how all the camps in the west were not death camps. So in the context of the mainstream narrative, how do you explain contemporary newspaper articles from the time confidently claiming otherwise? Obviously they are understood to be propaganda. In other words, a “hoax.”

Can you link mainstream position confirming that camps on West were described as extermination camps?

(It was claimed upthread that "western extermination camps were hoaxes" and want to see confirmation of that)

(again: it would not make big difference to me whether they gassed people to death or starved them to death in Auschwitz, but I obviously prefer to have an accurate info)

At Nuremberg, the series of Eastern camps allegedly responsible for the majority of gassing victims were barely mentioned at all in the trials. What was filmed and submitted as evidence were allegations that the camps liberated by the Western allies were the centers of extermination. Here is the Nuremberg Concentration camp footage which was submitted as evidence and shown in the trial courtroom supposedly showing a gas chamber at the Dachau concentration camp, here's a short transcript of that part:

Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners who had been suffocated in a lethal gas chamber. They had been persuaded to remove their clothing under the pretext of taking a shower for which towels and soap were provided...

Even mainstream historians admit today that the clothing hanging outside the delousing chambers was not from prisoners executed in gas chambers, but that these were real delousing chambers use to disinfest clothing to prevent epidemic typhus. Dachau was one of the camps mentioned in the document I cited earlier, admitting that this claim was a hoax created by false testimonies and confessions:

The Allied Commissions of Inquiry have so far established that no people were killed by poison gas in the following concentration camps: Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, ...

In those cases, it has been possible to prove that the confessions had been extracted by tortures and the testimonies were false.

This must be taken into account when conducting investigations and interrogations with respect to war crimes.

The result of this investigation should be brought to the cognizance of former concentration camp inmates, who at the time of the hearings testified on the murder of people, especially Jews, with poison gas in those concentration camps. Should they insist on their statements, charges are to be brought against them for making false statements.

The Mainstream position admits that this film submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trial was a lie. But it insists that the identical claims made in the camps conquered by the Soviet Union, the camps where the Allied Commissions of Inquiry were not allowed access to investigate, are the only camps where those claims were actually real.

Revisionists though have shown that likewise these Eastern camps which are currently claimed to have been extermination camps are the exact same story as the Western camps: real delousing facilities and shower rooms which were fabricated as gas chambers by Soviet propagandists, tortured confessions, and false testimonies.

Fun fact, if you review the Wikipedia page of the Nazi Concentration Camps film submitted as evidence and screened at the Nuremberg trial, the "Contents" section omits Dachau entirely and makes no description of the falsely alleged gas chamber described in this film. This is part and parcel for Wikipedia treatment of the Holocaust topic as a whole.

I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite.

I understand it to be similar to my own embrace of Zionism - I just despise Israel's enemies. If Israel's enemies weren't also the enemies of the West and free civilization more broadly, I would apply a great deal more skepticism to things like their colonization of the West Bank. As it is, I just need to pick sides and the choice is very easy. Notably, this extends to the spillover of the causes in the United States, where enthusiastic Zionists are no real problem for me, but the Hamas enthusiasts are spectacularly annoying leftists.

If Israel's enemies weren't also the enemies of the West and free civilization more broadly

They aren't. Palestinians are fighting to stay where their great grandparents lived. Assad fights to keep Syria together. Israel fights to cause a mega-refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. AIPAC and ADL want to open the borders to the west and ban right wingers off twitter. Israel financed jihadists in Syria while bombing the country. Meanwhile, israAID was shipping migrants to Europe.

We heard similar arguments for invading Iraq. The result was a giant refugee crisis, a spike in islamism and a disaster for local christians. Israel is not the anti-islam option, it is the pro Islam option.

Palestinians are fighting to stay where their great grandparents lived.

Must be a really great place. I can't imagine anyone fighting that long to stay in Jersey City or Bayonne, NJ.

the enemies of the West and free civilization

The West and free civilization seem to have led inexorably to everything you now decry. Are you sure this makes sense?

Are you sure you're thinking of me? I am quite literally proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free. Disagreeing with my fellow Americans about whether Chevron deference or Skidmore deference is the appropriate degree of license for administrative agency discretion does not shift me to wishing I had more Islamic theocracy in my life.

To avoid doing another dissection of Peterson: he certainly seems to have been bitten by the Zionist bug. For all his posturing as a rational and reason minded clinical psychologist when talking to feminists about feminism and the difference between the sexes, the merits of individualism and focusing on immediate short term goals and family, he seems completely unhinged when it comes to semitism.

He hates Fuentes for the same reason he hates the feminists.

His reaction to complaints from UofT pro-trans progressives was to liken them to Maoists. He accuses Trudeau of having a "murderous equity doctrine" for defending gender equity. Anything that blames/focuses on groups earns his ire as the revival of some murderous 20th century movement.

If feminists are like murderous communists and pro-trans activists are Maoists, how should he feel about anti-Semites?

There are absolutely philosemites nakedly driven by shared enemies (Douglas Murray comes to mind) but Peterson has always leaned towards unhinged rhetoric about people if he feels they resemble certain baddies. We don't need an explanation. What would be strange is him having any patience for Fuentes at all.

I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite.

Because your standards for being a philosemite are absurdly low such that everyone seems to be defending the Jews too much.

What is going

On with Peterson’s

Spacing, capitalization, and punctuation

In that thread

Been reading e e cummings?