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Notes -
10+ arrested after a rifle ambush of security at Prairieland Detention Center near Alvarado, TX on 4th july.
Shortly before 2300, some of the arrested fired fireworks at center to draw out a response, when it arrived at least two of them started shooting at the responding officers from a distance of 100-150m. Soon after, a driver (trans, seems the only one) with a van that had 2 ARs was stopped by a responding cop (map & times)
The shooters fired about 30 shots at responding cops, hitting one in the neck, suffered a jam, probably faced return fire and then started running. Shortly after cops arrested 9 of them in a field 300 m away, armed and in body armor in addition the driver in the van. At least one got away. $25k reward.
Total equipment recovered so far on the spot: 4 AR rifles, pistols, 12 sets of body armor and several helmets.
NYT article: https://archive.is/CBvms Unusually big ambush, usually it's just one guy.
Here's a twitter thread with more details. Can't vouch for the veracity of it. It seems logical - we've been hearing for years how antifa can organise and has people. These people look too clean though, antifa protesters usually look much scruffier.
This looks very.. amateurish. Sure there was a plan but it seems they underestimated the difficulty of hitting anything at night. Or just chickened out.
If I were to try and make a fancy title for my opinion on the Texas anti-ICE attack, I'd call it 'How I Had To Figure My Way Out Of A False Flag Suspicion.'
I was hoping to do a writeup on this incident, since the Antifa attack has some ties to a post last month on how the Democratic civil war will give the Trump administration a lawful basis to go after parts of the background Democratic coalition. Antifa is a fringe part of that coalition, but still a part, and this certainly counts as a basis to go after a network. I was holding off because Ngo's article- while informative- had several 'weird flag' indicators that had me raising an eyebrow and waiting for information to dispel a possible false flag / misattribution.
One of the weird things was the mix of preparation and self-affiliation. Preparation is usually a sign of competence, but self-incrimination is usually incompetent, unless it's intended for a false-attribution, in which case incompetence can be explained by even greater competence.
On the preparation side, there was clear material preparation for first, second, and even third order consequences. From the Ngo article, the plan was to use fireworks and graffitti as a flashy / damaging, but low danger, way to bring out the ICE agents. Then the responders would be ambushed by the gunmen with, well, lethal guns, even as the team had personal radios for their own communication. At least a limited firefight was prepared for with body armor. An electromagnetic blocking device, i.e. a jammer, could then be used to frustrate the secondary response units, any ICE-Police coordinations, and otherwise help with the escape. The assailants appear to have fallen back and retreated through the immediately adjacent woods. They had a getaway car plan as well.
This is a multi-step plan that supports a level of sophistication and prior thought. This is competent, dangerous, and effective small-unit tactics that comes from training and deliberate preparation.
But then you have some of the incompetent aspects that suggest the planners were going for tacti-cool rather than tactical advantage. At least seven of the militants dressed in all black, as opposed to useful camouflage or even clothes to help blending in with normal people on the escape. Pure-black 'looks good,' but it's more a uniform for official police teams to distinguish or play to light contrasts in overt contexts- it makes as much sense in a guerilla force as thinking that historical ninjas actually dressed in all black, as opposed to the black uniform being the stage-show theater dress to make it obvious. They used AR-15s, which are not, despite years of anti-gun campaigning, particularly good rifles for waging war (or insurgency). They discarded their AR-15s, leaving evidence behind in literal walking distance of the target. Some of the discarded AR-15s were found jammed, suggesting poor weapon handling... or, reported later, weapon modification attempts to increase rate of fire. This theory of 'more bullets = better' is not actually better in general, since a good part of the value of a semi-automatic rifle for small teams is that the slower rate forces better shooting fundamentals for reliability per shot, rather than wasting ammo faster for less gain.
And then there's the backpack with antifa literature. Just... why?
This, more than anything, got my 'is this a trick?' allergy going, because this is the sort of thing someone could do to try an inflame political tensions for its own sake as a false-flag action.
Leave behind left-coded Antifa literature to feed the initial view of a blue tribe attack. The right-coded AR-15s as a symbol of red tribe means. The mix of high-competence (a group who knew what they were doing) and low-competence (a group who were making incredibly basic mistakes) that could in and of itself be used to dismiss / deflect initial attributions. 'Of course it's Antifa- the literature matches the motive matches the target in attacking ICE!' could be deflected with 'Of course it's not Antifa- Antifa would be more competent, it's obviously a fake by a red tribe domestic extremist. Right wing extremists are obviously military competent, and look- they used the scary AR-15!'
This is the sort of narrative motivation that could support a broader variety of 'true' actors. Anyone with a 'maximize for heat, not light' could want that sort of recrimination spiral. It could be right-wing accelerationists. It could be the Antifa actors seeking to maximize (in)famy while invoking a circle-the-wagons effect of their left-tribe brethren. It could even be foreign agitators. If you want to accelerate a conflict in another country, the ideal false flag is to do something that elements in the target country would plausible want to or even try to do. It's not like this would be the first Antifa attack on a ICE facility.
To be clear, a false flag is not the assessment I would make from the initial information. But it's not a scenario I would rule out either. One of the most effective ways to do a false flag attack is to do something that non-trivial parts of an existing political coalition's fringes wishes (someone else) would do. And with the recent Democratic politician accounts in the (increasingly visible) Axios "Democrats told to "get shot" for the anti-Trump resistance" article, there are certainly people who think fighting ICE and Trump is the good fight.
Which is why another of the really weird things about Ngo's initial big post was how it didn't support that this was an actual Antifa cell in the first place, particularly when the initial government accounts didn't make that claim.
Ngo didn't actually provide evidence that these people were Antifa in the original article. Ngo makes the claim, but his supporting evidence in his post is that there was Antifa literature in a backpack of one of the caught shooters- aka, the sort of very easy thing to do if one wanted to insinuate Antifa. Ngo also cites fundraising by Antifa-linked people in support of the shooters... but the political tribal sympathy nature of tribal fundraising is also well established, and doesn't rely on prior association. Ngo does not actually cite any Antifa organization / social media / group that claimed the shooters as their own, or cite any of the shooters self-identifying as Antifa.
One reason I'd been holding off posting on this was hoping that follow-on media reporting would clarify the affiliation. It largely did not. The Washington Examiner released an article repeating the claim, but they did not really justify it either. The WE article did include a reachout to the FBI, but didn't attribute any Antifa attribution to the FBI. Then again, the FBI is often mum with ongoing investigations. The New York Times article does not make the antifa attribution... but this could be explained on partisan grounds of omitting politically unfavorable context. (Another weird(?) thing of the NYT article- no comment section. Not all NYT online articles get to have comment sections, but enough do that sometimes it can be seen as a choice not to.)
So I was waiting for yesterday's Department of Justice charging statement. I would imagine that at least some in the Trump DOJ would like to emphasize an antifa connection if they could. But there is no mention of Antifa in the DOJ statement.
So, not Antifa?
Well, not quite. Not only has there not been the sort of firm denunciation/separation that would be expected if a group was not affiliated with the broader political spectrum (as with other politically-sympathetic but unaffiliated political violence attempts over the years), but there's also Benjamin Song.
If you don't recognize his name from the OP article, that's because he was not one of the ten identified in Ngo's initial article, or the NYT article of the incident, or in the initial DOJ statement of charges.
The Dallas Express has published a much more extensive look at a specific (but still at large) suspect, which gives more compelling evidence of a specific connection via one (still wanted) suspect: Benjamin Song.
The Dallas Express writer is not entirely neutral- the left-skeptical political bias of which was probably why they got the presumably FBI-supported information for the article- but it provides a bit more specific claims that are contestable by others. So far none seriously have been, but these are at least falsifiable. To quote-
This, at least, is falsifiable. And elaborated upon, with a history that suggests a clear pattern of 'helping others with violence.'
And, of course, where he got his skill set-
For those unfamiliar, 'other than honorable discharge' is the 'you are being kicked out for causes that don't necessarily raise to the level of a felony' that typically accompanies the dishonorable discharge. 'Up to 60 marines' in turn scales to between a larger-than-normal platoon or a smaller-than-normal company. 'Managed' insinuates, but does not imply, a platoon leadership position- rather, when mixed with the inventory metric, suggests an administrative role. This does not imply he was not also tactically proficient, but would explain additional skill sets in organization.
And with this, some of the earlier discrepancy falls into place. We are not talking about a group of an average consistent quality that must be competent or incompetent. We can be looking at a cell with a more-competent organizer, a former Marine who taught tactical skills, and less-competent line members.
Which also helps explain another weird flag in the initial report, of how 10 suspects were arrested... but 12 sets of body armor were recovered.
And why Song is still at large.
From the Dallas Express-
This, if true, could be a result of a particularly competent technique. Two, possibly. One way to hide something valuable is to hide it in relation to something extremely visible and attention-grabbing, so that to observer's attention is drawn away. Another is to use a sacrifice play, so that the person who searches finds a first, and expendable, asset, but doesn't know to keep looking for the more valuable, and better hidden, asset.
If immediate police response finds 10 suspects fleeing a scene... what are the odds there is another still hiding for the attention to drift further away, to depart under better conditions once the initial surge of attention starts drifting and looking further away?
Of course, there are limits to this level of competence- limits that are explainable by the limits of Song and of chance. If he was a small-unit-tactics focused Marine for only 6 years, that would suggest limited exposure to the sort of investigation/exploitation awareness that might have led him to plan better on the evidence disposal. He didn't know what he didn't know, and thus didn't prepare for them, which is how investigators could unravel things relatively quickly afterwards. He might have typically-minded his Antifa cell members and not overseen them.
And, of course, the rapid capture of specific members- especially the get-away driver- allowed a rapid exploitation of evidence / safe house / etc. while he was still in his hide-and-escape phase. This was not part of the plan, and was an issue of chance, probably. If that getaway driver hadn't been caught, then the members might not have been captured, the staging base might not have been identified, and so on until Song could get back, clear out, and cover his tracks before the police found it.
Or maybe those preparations wouldn't have been enough either. Point is- the police response that found the getaway driver, something that might have been pre-empted by the jammer or if the police car had taken a different route or any number of things, created a vulnerability in the getaway plan. That's not necessarily incompetence on his part.
Song specifically has since appeared in more reputable, mainstream, and Democratic-Party-respected media like ABC, Newsweek, and CBS. This is consistent with standard media industry practice to support government requests to publicize criminals to increase their profile and make it easier to solicit tips to lead to their capture.
None of the above media sources mention Song's antifa affiliation.
They're cheap, good, and half the world's nations actively use them to wage war in some capacity. If that is not a good rifle I'm not sure what is.
Yes it is[1].
But when we're actually fighting- we're shooting at targets that are actively trying to avoid being shot at, and trying not to be shot ourselves- and not just trying to score bullseyes on a static range, we want it to be as easy as possible for us to make hits. So we're going to use the lightest feasible caliber that will defeat the target over the distances at which we expect to engage (usually less than 100 yards), and carry the most bullets both in the gun and on the person in extra magazines (traditional rifle ammunition is quite heavy and is quickly self-limiting in how much you can carry).
5.56 is special in that the cartridge weighs about the same as 9mm does (as in, the standard pistol cartridge), recoils the same as 9mm loaded to its maximum potential, but is significantly more effective than 9mm is at longer ranges because ballistics magic[2]. And its magazines are shorter so you can have more bullets in the gun without making it unwieldly.
This is in contrast to, say, 7.62x39 (the AK round), where it weighs twice as much as 9mm, recoils twice as much, magazines with comparable ammunition quantity to a 9mm rifle make the gun relatively unwieldly, and isn't appreciably more effective than 5.56 given those things because of a lack of said ballistics magic.
Note that hunting doesn't have these constraints. Neither do specialized military applications like sniping. You want overkill in those circumstances because you're not going to get another shot- the fewer holes you put in the animal the more of its tasty body is preserved (in the hunting case), and for both of them, the ranges over which you need to shoot a target that's going to spook and disappear after the first shot mean you want something that's going to give you the easiest time of that at ranges further than those typical for combat (200-400 yards).
[1] The US Army's take on "we need a rifle to shoot 800 yards" reminds me of the time the British did that. Both nations invaded Afghanistan (and lost) before adopting a rifle like this- a nation whose geography lends itself to long-range ambush-style engagements will proceed to teach militaries that fight there they need weapons with that kind of range to be standard-issue.
And to be fair to the Brits, just like the Americans, perhaps they envision future conflicts against Near/Middle Eastern or African nations will benefit from a rifle like this- places that are scarcely urbanized, with an enemy whose dominant form of mechanization is the Toyota Hilux. Against peer nations in urban warfare, though, this is not a great plan. Of course, the Americans tend to be very good at expedient engineering; the AR-15 got issued in record time while the US was at war so if they need a new rifle they'll have one quick.
[2] The faster a bullet is going the more likely it's going to fragment or change course sharply when it hits the target. Getting a similar ballistic effect from a large cartridge means a heavier projectile [not getting into why] means a heavier cartridge means heavier recoil, so you get less of the things that make the rifle good in typical combat distances.
7.62x39 is a WW2 round. Every single non-vestigial military has moved on to rounds similar to .223 (which, by the way, didn't pioneer those ballistics). The British were pushing for a .280 cartridge in late '40s but Americans insisted on .308.
It's remarkable how bad Federal Americans are when it comes to guns. After WW2, it should've been obvious intermediate is the way to go, but not only did Feds refuse to that, or failed to copy the MG42 despite trying to, they proceeded to compromise their entire's bloc small arms procurement for the next 30 years.
The US was trivially correct to reject this cartridge and the British were out of their fucking minds here. In fairness, the fact they had lost WW2 [and their Empire with it] hadn't really dawned on their people yet and wouldn't come to a head until the Suez crisis.
The thing about .280 is that it's not a good GPMG round (and it's also slightly too heavy to be that intermediate- its initial loadings were more powerful than 7.62x39 is too). 6.5 Japanese had similar ballistics to what .280 would eventually have and would be ultimately replaced on the grounds of insufficient GPMG performance- and for a US-led alliance that needed to have a logistics train that much poorer countries could support (read: one caliber for everything) the infantry rifles would need to remain in the same caliber as the machine guns.
Hence a full-power cartridge, that could be retrofit to replace both .303 and 8 Mauser (7.5 French was too fat, wouldn't have worked), was required. Yes, it'd compromise the infantry rifles somewhat, but infantry rifles weren't expected to win a war with Russia whereas American logistics was.
Note also that the Russians didn't really figure the AK out until the early 1960s, and the SKS is not better from a tactical standpoint than a Garand (or M14, or FAL) is anyway. The Russians didn't need to hurry, since they already had plenty of quasi-intermediate SMGs in inventory (the PPS-43); neither did the Americans, who used the M1 Carbine for that.
30 years is an acceptable timeframe over which to replace equipment. And it really didn't hold the [mostly useless] allies back: remember, the bloc consisted of Britain (who never fought a war -> didn't matter), other militarily insignificant European nations (a good chunk of whom stuck with Garands), Britain's soon-to-be-dispossessed colonies (never fought a war beyond the ones the US also fought with 7.62x51 -> didn't matter), West Germany (conquered), and France (who stuck with 7.5 French).
Most militaries are now using two rounds, an intermediate one and a full rifle one. Why would switching to a .280 or something a little smaller wouldn't have made sense then? Manufacturing 5 million rifles is really not that big of a deal, especially if you did sensible things like looked at the Stg.44 and derived the appropriate lessons.
How many rifles or machineguns were re-barelled to use .308 post war? Some Garands. PPS-43 isn't really 'quasi intermediate', the effective range tops out at about 150m, maybe. It's also a relatively small and light bullet. Even the strongest loadings top out at under 1000J from an SMG barrel.
...what? 90,000 British fought in Korea. They also put down the communist insurgency in Malaysia and then in Brunei. I guess that doesn't count, right?
Because it's not sufficiently intermediate and it's not just the rifles (which only form a minor part of the equation). It's worth noting that both France and Switzerland both flirted with intermediate caliber rifles (in .30 Carbine), but ultimately rejected them; if you want to go "7.62 bad because fat burger country", fine, but then why did every other Western nation that was looking to change calibers and was capable of indigenous weapons development also reject the idea? They all should have been aware of the StG-44.
We have the benefit of hindsight, and the Americans had the 'benefit' that the first war in which intermediate caliber weapons were being used against them in large numbers was one of the two terrain types in which submachine gun-type weapons utterly dominate (the other being urban warfare).
Note also that the first commercially-viable .22-caliber cartridge that wasn't an overpowered meme (sorry, .220 Swift) was a 1950s invention. It's far more difficult to make a viable bullet that small; your manufacturing tolerances have to be much better than they do with the .30s or with the .264s (which appear to be the lower limit of this, considering that other than the US adopting a bleeding-edge 6mm rifle that one time in 1895, no other military would adopt a smaller cartridge until 5.56 NATO). That's feasible with 1960s manufacturing technology, but not necessarily with 1920s or 1940s (and the Russians would take into the 1970s to figure it out).
NATO adopted what it did at the right times and nobody really got screwed over. European nations used their 1950s equipment until it wore out, then unloaded it on the Africans as military aid then developed indigenous 5.56 rifles around 1980. Not really a setback.
It's not just the rebarreling, it's also to facilitate easy manufacture of already-existing designs. Britain did this with the Enfield and the Bren, Germany did it with the MG3 (and some MG42s), Spain did it with the FR7/FR8, the Italians famously did it with the BM59, and the US did it with the M1919 (as well as the M14).
Converting an existing design, especially one that had seen significant and continuous improvement due to actually being used in warfare, is generally going to produce a better product than a clean-sheet design. This is one of the reasons the FAL lost in the US' rifle trials, by the way (the other is that it's just a bad gun lol).
A war they fought with Brens and No. 4s in .303. And honestly, no, the other ones don't really matter.
They were largely not sovereign nations and forced to do so by Americans due to NATO. I'm sure that e.g. had the Germans been left to their own devices they'd have kept making Stg.44s post war as the rifle's superiority was recognized during the war.
Sure, buddy. Sure. A communist Malaysia is okay, sitting straight on an important trade route and providing oil.
Japanese adopted 6.5mm in 1897.
The Swiss and Spanish were (almost like that's why I mentioned them). The French remain relevant simply because they never adopted 7.62 NATO in any meaningful way until after the FAMAS.
The Czechs are also an interesting case, having fielded a service rifle in 7.62x45 in 1952 (more powerful than the existing 7.62x39 cartridge). So clearly the 'intermediates are the future' case isn't as clear-cut even when you have weapons available to you that are already in intermediate cartridges, but intermediate cartridges are limited in their usefulness if the gun you're using isn't a carbon copy of the StG-44 (the Czechs even had some of these actively lying around that the Soviets used to deniably arm some of its allies in North Africa).
And the StG-44 is a legitimately expensive gun to make especially if you're not well-versed in German space magic- you need magazines (and they need to be completely interchangeable; it's easier to do that with 9mm), the gun itself is more complicated (it needs to fire from a closed bolt to be viable at range), you need to supply it with enough ammunition to work (and you go through more rounds with these than you would with a full-power rifle round), and it's just as heavy as a full-power rifle is. The Czechs would eventually do the vz. 58, which is still a milled gun 15 years after it theoretically could have been made with stampings; Germany was legitimately that far ahead with the technology.
Another interesting example is Yugoslavia; they bought up most of the German surplus and were still actively using StG-44s (and AKs in 8mm Mauser, of all things) into the 1980s to supplement copies of Soviet equipment. Of course, they were and remain a relatively poor part of the world, so that wasn't as much by choice.
There was nothing stopping other countries from fielding two weapons or even to adopt it in the first place if they had sufficient logistics to do something different (or had already adopted something in large numbers re: France- who I will remind you was in possession of the future-HK engineers in charge of the StG-45); the US was doing that themselves (.30 Carbine) in the first place anyway.
So no, I'm not interested in the "stupid burger country intentionally screws up procurement" story. I will happily say that about the XM7 but in that gun's defense the US doesn't have any usable 7.62 NATO small arms in inventory aside from stuff at the end of its service life, so if they're going to switch to a more efficient (and more powerful) cartridge for a rifle and machine gun now is indeed the time.
Which is why I said
for plenty of nations fielded rifles and machine guns in 6.5mm and 7mm (the 6.5mm cartridges all use .264 projectiles, except for the Italians who used .268). The two largest ones that actually used them in combat all dumped them for something in .30 during WW2 for reasons I already stated.
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