This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
As opposed to the 10 people who demonstratable were willing to do a decade in prison over a non-false-flag attack?
Present culprits aside, you should probably update your sense of scale of people willing to accept severe consequences to act against their enemies. There were more than 1000 suicide bombings, which is to say more than 1000 suicide bombers, in Iraq alone between 2003 and 2011. Iraq during that period was about 1/10th of the population of the US, and hardly had a monopoly on whatever virtue/vice you think it takes to accept guaranteed death for a chance to kill the target of your animosity. Whatever your view of the relative hardiness of the average radicalized American versus the average radicalized Iraqi, finding 10 people to take much lower risks for much lower costs is not the bottle neck.
In fact, we can find far more than ten Americans willing to risk a decade in prison merely by going to the prisons where people are serving sentences of ten or more years. These prisoners are a group who are, by necessity, a smaller subset of the group of people who take risks that could result in a decade or more of prison, since the people who did the same but were not caught/convicted will obviously not be there. And the people who are actually did take the risk is a smaller subset of the people willing to take the risk, and so on.
If your formulation was meant to specify people intending to go to jail as part of the plan would be impossible to find, that would indeed be a lot harder... but it would also be unnecessary. Getting caught isn't required for a false flag any more than it would be for a non-false flag.
They could, but this would be the sort of tacti-cool that serves as an even greater indicator of cell incompetence that works against a false flag from a competent group hypothesis. It's not that modifying for full auto is something a competent could do and this group failed to do it right, but rather that modifying for full auto for the purpose of this attack is something the competent would not do, and this group thought it would be good to pursue.
Part of this is because 'fully automatic, controllable fire' is more of a video game hollywoodism than a practical advantage for this sort of attack. The physics of recoil are why the sort of squad automatic rifles that use the AR-15's 5.56mm ammo, and larger caliber automatic weapons, are braced against the ground with bipods for full auto. It's also why shoulder-braced SMGs use correspondingly smaller ammo with less kickback, so the body can more easily absorb recoil. Recoil is why militaries train both in terms of small bursts rather than, well, 'full auto.' Unlike video games, where automatic rifles put out more shots on target for more damage, in reality the role of automatic fire is far more for suppressing the enemy for movement and maneuver. You don't control fully automatic fire onto a meatbag target unless that target is particularly numerous, like a WW1 wave attack, particularly close, or both.
And part of this is that this is the google maps image of Prairieland Detention Center. This sort of image is the bare minimum you should expect the weapon-modifiers to have for their planning purposes.
Note that the closest treeline is 100m away from the parking lot. Note that the other woods- the ones large enough to be where Song hid- are closer to 300m. These are not 'close' targets for automatic weapons to effectively hit the target.
And then there's combining the role of an automatic weapon, suppressing for maneuver, to the terrain and how the attack initiated.
From the initial criminal complaint describing the attack in the original Ngo post-
An unmodified AR-15 in its purely semi-automatic function of a shot a squeeze could go through 30 rounds in about 30 seconds.
A M16 on full-auto, the military basis of the AR-15, would go through 30 rounds in about 3 seconds.
Even if you double or triple the shots fired if the weapons didn't jam- a jamming made more likely by the modification to fire faster- you still aren't having a maneuver element do a 100-meter flank assault in 7-to-12 seconds from the closer tree line. Even Usain Bolt took over 9 seconds for his world-record 100m dash, and he wasn't carrying a roughly 6 lb / 3 kg two-handed rifle while doing it.
Again- modifying for rate of fire here is tacti-cool, not tactical. It is anti-competence to expect or pursue, and this group's effort to do so is an indicator against the false flag hypothesis.
(Which is part of why I wish Ngo's article had mentioned it from the start. It would been a helpful balance against his weird flags. Ah well.)
You think you could find 10 right-wingers or just mercenary guys willing to do 10 year in federal prison, on a lie?
Go to a serving infantry soldier and tell him LMGs are 'tacticool' and 'not actually very useful'. AR rifles are fairly controllable in full auto, and with a bipod they're probably extremely controllable. Whoever they'd have been shooting at would have been dead. Swapping out mags isn't that hard either.
Laddie, you posted the incident where the American leftwing actors were willing to risk 10 years or more in federal prison for an attack on ICE agents. You have been provided a decade-long historical example of magnitudes more than 10 people were willing to suffer far worse than 10 years in jail. Are you really going to try and insist that not even 10 of their rightwing equivalents would cross the line at a lie?
An AR-15 modified for an automatic rate of fire is not a LMG. People pretending they are the same would very much fall under the tacticool coolaid.
Spraying and praying beyond effective range not being very useful is why doing so is often teased / mocked as playing Rambo.
If all you mean by 'fairly controllable' is 'in the general direction,' this would be missing the point, much like firing at full auto at the ranges of this incident.
Unless they missed because they were playing with full auto beyond the effective range of auto. Like what happened in Texas.
@Dean @No_one That attack isn’t 10 years in prison. It’s terrorism and attempted premeditated murder of a federal law enforcement officer. Plus obstruction, weapons charges, conspiracy. This is a situation where prosecutors will be going maximally hard. That’s forty years at best and probably life. In the very likely event that one or more officers had died, that would have been the needle.
More options
Context Copy link
a) Firstly, most people wouldn't think nobody would break b) there's no guarantee anyone would even care about a false-flag attack (nobody cares about this one)
So no, I don't think you could find ten rightwingers willing to pull a false flag like this.
Effective range of light machineguns fired from a prone position isn't <100 meters.
More options
Context Copy link
I'd say false flags are much, much, different from "riding out to meet them", which is what I imagine this situation would be for a left winger. "Let's do something (we consider) evil and deranged, to show how evil and deranged the outgroup is" as you're perfectly aware you're doing the evil/twisted thing, and not the outgroup, requires a much more twisted mind. It's not impossible, there have been people that talked themselves into believing that the outrgroup is terribly evil, but managed to hide their true nature from the normie, that all bets are off, and any tactic is justified. Intelligence agencies and militaries can pull it off regularly, because they can promise impunity and recruit from the pool of amoral sociopaths. An idealist with a mind so twisted is much less likely, and getting 10 of them together would require they all be part of a cult, imo.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link