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OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
I disagree with your definition of Individualism, the word is usually meant to describe something more like "every man for himself." I do agree with the statement that "every man should be judged for his own capabilities and qualities." I also agree on the Meritocracy front - we should have the best people in the toughest jobs getting the biggest compensation.
I suspect JD Vance would agree with these two statements as well.
Where I disagree with you is the idea that this would apply to membership in a nation. It's really odd to me that you see the two as connected so I will try to make analogies and you tell me where you think things are dissimilar.
Membership in a family is not based on meritocracy. There aren't game shows where kids compete against each other to have the best parents. There aren't quarterly reviews of a child's grammar school progress lest it turns out a child is not good enough for their current last name and have to move down the road to join the Johnson's.
For most people, membership in their family is based on happy accidents of their parent's geographical proximity and how well they got along.
People can join a family without without genetics, too. There's adoption of young kids. There's adoption of older kids. There are people who declare themselves brothers as adults because they enjoy similar interests and look out for each other. There is marriage.
Within a family there is a hierarchy and meritocracy to an extent. Parents are usually the most competent members of the family and are rewarded with the majority of decision-making. But being a member of a family is not a measure of merit. For most people it's something that just happens to them and even if they are disabled and need extra help they usually don't run the risk of getting disowned.
A nation is like a family in this way. Membership in a nation is generally an accident of geography and family tree. There are ways of getting adopted in, but this requires agreeing to conform into the nation's culture/mindset and should be a very limited, personal, and slow process. A child can't just crawl in through your window and declare they are your child now. Adopting a child is deliberate, adopting a new citizen is also deliberate.
Within a nation, there should be merit. The best people should be governing, doctoring, etc. But I strongly disagree with any conception of American citizenship that perceives it as a reward.
It's utterly ridiculous if you take it to the logical conclusion. Every year, let's send our bottom 20th percentile to Mexico and let in their top 20th percentile! No, there just isn't a hierarchy among nations like that.
American citizenship is not a prize, is not fungible, is not tradable. American citizenship is an identity. American citizens are the group of people who elect American leaders who in turn make decisions to prioritize the well-being of American citizens over everyone else. There are smart Americans, stupid Americans, lazy Americans, hard working Americans. Our leaders represent us all. Or at least, they should.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I'm sure the USA thought the Vietcong were too weak to have a chance of victory.
And the viet cong didn't win. The north Vietnamese Army did, yes, eventually, against South Vietnam(not the US; the USA had actually withdrawn after assurances that North Vietnam would respect the sovereignty of the south and then chosen not to intervene when they predictably broke that promise), but not the viet cong.
Or the British/Russians/USA vs their flavor of Afghani opposition.
Of course what actually happened was getting tired of propping up the local puppet government and withdrawing to leave it to its fate, which was to get overthrown by militant groups which had consistently lost to the imperial army.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
Israel exercises all the power over Palestinians that a national government would,
I can only assume this is a joke statement. So, holding the power of government over Gaza, Israel decided to redirect all of the resources there into a total war with...themselves?
I feel like this series of events has culture war implications.
SIG has absolutely been trying to leverage the fact there is a culture war to shout down people who now believe their guns are unsafe.
SIG lost two of those cases because they shipped a trigger shoe that did not have a Glock-style trigger safety, which would have hypothetically prevented an uncommanded discharge that occurred due to an undescribed mechanism.
The ultimate problem with the P320 is that it's a case study in extreme cost cutting.
Once upon a time, there was the P250. It was a very modern handgun, with a very mechanically simple firing mechanism. This mechanism is inherently extremely safe for the same reason it's safe on revolvers: the trigger pull is heavy, long, and even if the hammer let go and hit the firing pin somehow it couldn't hit the bullet hard enough to fire it. You don't need any other safeties[1] on a gun like this.
But the same things that made the gun safe and simple to manufacture also made it basically dead on arrival- the trigger pull is long and heavy. Not great for accuracy, or shooting all that quickly, or particularly usable by people who don't have a strong trigger finger. Understandably, sales weren't great.
Now, because modern guns cost far more in tooling to make than non-modern guns, SIG might have been in a bit of a hole financially. The plastic grips and triggers[2] for the P250 may be dirt-cheap to make on a per-unit basis, but the moulds for that plastic are incredibly expensive. To a lesser degree, this is also true of the barrels and slides (when you consider the CAD work for the outside and everything forward of the magazine would need no changes).
So SIG's engineers set to work designing a new firing control mechanism to fit in the same footprint as the old one[3]. By doing that, they could sell it as an upgrade for P250 owners, and recover the costs of that tooling- so they reused the maximum number of parts they could get away with and off it went to consumers.
It's at this point the problems start showing up:
[1] The new firing control mechanism is fundamentally less safe than the old one- they went from a gun that's completely incapable of firing a bullet at rest to one that is intentionally designed to do so (which in a vacuum is a perfectly valid thing to do: it makes the trigger pull much better than it is on competing pistols). So, design decisions that were fine on the old gun are all of a sudden not fine on the new gun- now they need a bunch of additional safeties to make sure the firing pin absolutely can't let go when the gun is dropped or when you pull the slide back a little.
This is what the second recall did- they milled out a bit of the slide and added another safety to it so the striker couldn't drop unless the trigger was pulled.
[2] The new firing control mechanism only needs a fraction of the trigger pull force, and a fraction of the total travel distance, to release the striker. Because inertia means things in motion stay in motion, a heavy enough trigger may have sufficient inertia that when the gun stops (by hitting the floor at a particular angle after being dropped) it still has enough potential energy to release the striker on its own. Now, in a vacuum, having a heavy trigger is a perfectly valid thing- if your gun can't fire until the trigger travels a great distance back under 10 pounds of force, there's no problem- but it stops being fine when the trigger no longer has to come that far back and must have much less force applied to it to activate.
This is what the first recall did- they replaced the heavy P250 plastic trigger with a much lighter one.
[3] The new firing control mechanism makes engineering compromises to stay within the footprint of the old gun. Those compromises include things like the effectiveness of mechanical safeties, as well as requiring certain parts be held to much more exact tolerances (because the size they'd normally be isn't possible on a retrofit like this). Now, if SIG kept making those parts to the initial standard, that's fine- but more exact tolerances cost more money. So, if you tell your subcontractors they can take shortcuts, and they do, a design that was just barely safe if made to those initial tolerances is now no longer safe, so the guns fire on their own.
This is why they're fucked now. They've sold so many, at so low a price (enabled both by being able to reuse tooling and aggressive subcontracting), that doing a recall is likely financially infeasible. SIG doesn't know which guns had parts made by which contractor or when they were made, so they can't guarantee that any gun is safe, and taking them all back to put parts made that are actually to standard in the first place is conceivably going to cost them more money than they ever made from the guns in the first place.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Uh, who told you ethnic cleansing is in the 'never again' category? As long as you don't seek to actually wipe out the losing side, it's ignored unless you're a US adversary. The soviet union carried out ethnic cleansing regularly within its own borders, and that trend continued with its breakup. Azerbaijan is being allowed to ethnically cleanse territory captured from Armenia. US backed forces ethnically cleansed parts of Iraq and Syria.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
in all likelihood apolitical and religiously moderate, if not irreligious
X to doubt. Not just because it's Gaza but because intemperate religion and radical politics are very appealing to the greatly distressed.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
we can finally stop sending them massive amounts of direct and indirect aid.
Aren't you Turkish?
birb_cromble
1d ago
Doesn't the service variant have a manual safety?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
How much more suspicious activity and lucky coincidences would there need to be to convince you (if you're a current denier) that Epstein was murdered/"allowed" to kill himself?
Because from what I see there's a lot of weird things already. The cameras for in front of his cell are down, guards apparently failed to check in on him (apparently both of them fell asleep despite this being their job), his roommate he's supposed to have for suicide watch is moved out earlier that day without replacement, and two staff members get accused of falsifying records only for the charges to get dropped silently two years after over new years.
Now the one camera that was working has footage released from it only for it to be likely edited video that doesn't even provide a meaningful perspective even if it wasn't edited (so why is it changed and had parts removed? Was something incidentally caught on one of the cameras they didn't shut down?) and a full minute missing along with the other smaller possible cuts, a cut that was completely unmentioned in the inspector general's report but suddenly shows up now. With an excuse that the "missing minute" is a standard reset and the recordings aren't operating at that time yet it now appears to exist according to government leakers.
That same day Epstein was also allowed to make an unmonitored call on a line intended for attorneys only to a non-attorney, with the regional director saying "We don't know what happened on that phone. It could have potentially lead to the incident, but we don't - we will never know" which is another oddity. He claimed he was calling his mother ... his mother has been dead almost two decades before then.
Then afterwards, Epstein's own lawyers contested the official finding and hired their own pathologist who said the injuries were more indicative of homicide by strangulation than normal self hanging.
Then of course we have things like Epstein's sweetheart deal maker Alex Acosta being a literal high level member of the government stepping down only a month before the suicide. Was he distancing himself? Cause that's a mighty odd coincidence too to leave right around that time.
And we get told all sorts of things about having files ready for release, only for them to apparently not actually exist like all the files sitting on Pam Bondi's desk. We have leaks of multiple high level politicians (including the current president refusing to release the records who also resigned over the federal government when Epstein died and hired Acosta earlier) with close connections to him. We have intelligence operatives and high level officials trying hard both directly and indirectly as anonymous sources to deny accusations he was working for them which many powerful people are trying to tout as evidence. Which fair, I expect them to deny if it's not true. But also I expect them to lie if it is true.
Like oh really spy agencies, half your job is to be skilled liars and we're just supposed to take your word for it. People can't be this lacking in self-awareness right? So why do so many of the powerful people with connections to Epstein apparently lack this understanding and think it's compelling counter evidence by itself?
Like obviously none of these things in their own are proof by themselves. If they were, we wouldn't be having a discussion like this we would just say "look at the 100% proof it happened". But a lot of truthful things don't have 100% proof. I'm pretty sure OJ Simpson is a murderer despite not having seen it myself and him being found not guilty. I'm pretty sure Casey Anthony killed her daughter. There's a really strong likelihood Micheal Jackson molested some children. Carole Baskin (although a bit weaker of a suspicion) might have been involved in the disappearance of her husband. None of these have hard conclusive evidence, yet none of these are odd to believe.
And just like those examples, there's a whole lot of weird oddities and coincidences and suspicious behavior around Epstein, his death, and the information on him and his connections that it seems pretty reasonable to suspect his supposed suicide wasn't entirely legit. Outside of 100% proof, how much more would be needed before it stops being "just a conspiracy theory"?
birb_cromble
1d ago
If somebody can show me a set of manipulations that can set off the primer without touching the trigger, SIG should face criminal charges.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
There is a moral universe of difference between ambushing patrols in the jungle versus using your children as human shields, or holding a gun to the stomachs of your own pregnant women to threaten your enemy into compliance. The latter in particular literally assumes that your enemy is morally superior to you.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
Look man, turning out to have been my own mom and dad because I mixed up the time-travel and gender reversal devices is hard enough, I don't need the accusations of plagiarism. Just consider your own username, are you looking for a complaint to the RSPCA?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
Does Gaza produce anything besides death cultist mouths to feed?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
1d ago
Going back in time to create your own cloning and quick aging vats is deeply respectable commitment to your transhuman philosophy, and, if you’re looking for literary criticism, a bit of a ripoff from Warhammer 40K.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
Of course there are vanishingly few self made men
Ahem. I would think my precise gender identity is irrelevant, but just about everyone knows who I am here.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
1d ago
Fast forward to now. A US Airman has died, allegedly because the service pistol fired a round while it was sitting in a holster on his desk.
You spent a considerable amount of words digging away at the foundations of “The Gun That Goes Off For No Reason,” but if it turns out this is true,* would you consider it a gun that goes off for no reason?
*One hopes that everyone discussing this understands that “no reason” means “without purposeful human input.” The guy bumping his desk as he stood up is a reason in the causal sense, but obviously not the sort of thing you want your holstered gun to do.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
Wow, it really sounds like that doctor should call for Hamas to surrender. Unconditionally, even. Has he?
Or is he a regular member of his death cult, like the old women in Palestine who weep with joy that their children were killed trying to murder Jews?
I feel like, especially in this community of mostly atheistic high decouplers, that everyone posting on this topic should have to specify if they grasp the concept of what true belief in a warrior's afterlife would entail.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
No one but a mod should have been able to see it or reply to it before it was unfiltered.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
Again, everyone (apart from you) claiming that people are dying of starvation now has been claiming this since the end of 2023.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
America should focus more on making things like working in all aspects of chicken farming/processing less terrible, not on importing desperate Guatemalans who will work until their fingernails rot off.
There are some jobs so terrible that they can only be done by the desperate or by forced labor. There's fewer of them than there used to be, but picking strawberries is still a job that really sucks, and there's no improvement on the horizon. There can be people doing certain jobs because the carceral system forces them to work full time and they can't get a better job, or there can be people doing it because they're desperate third worlders.
yunyun333
1d ago
There's been widespread malnutrition and hunger of course, but few actual deaths directly from starvation until recently.
And if the debate centered around how people's views of your aunt depended on her belonging to a specific outgroup, such as women, whether or not she had balls would be pretty relevant.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I acknowledge that there is a place for handguns without in-built mechanical safeties. But that place is not as service weapons.
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
How are a bunch of dudes in pickup trucks and paragliders ever, EVER going to credibly threaten one of the most sophisticated armies on planet earth?
You say this like we didn't just have the Afghan war, with the US military fighting dudes in pickup trucks and with AKs and jerry-rigged IEDs.
Also, Israel is tiny It's literally about 9 miles wide from the border to the sea at one point, and it's only 20 miles from Tel Aviv to the border. How many people with AKs running around Boston would it take for the whole city to freak out and panic?
I too am convinced that that many 3rd parties reporting on Israel are lying (outright or by omission). However, the information blackout from Israel makes it hard to defend them.
Hamas has lost. Israel's existential threat comes from Iran, which has temporarily been rendered sterile. There is no plausible reason for fighting a war with medieval siege tactics. Not anymore. Sure, many who're accusing them of genocide are antisemitic. But, it should not be that hard to refute it. The burden of proof is on Israel. There's little indication that the majority of Israelis want a final solution to the Gaza problem. Israelis haven't so much as articulated an endgame, let along enacted it. In this framing, Israel's current actions don't make sense, unless viewed as Netanyahu's actions.
IMO, Netanyahu's interests and Israel's interests stopped coinciding after the attacks on Iran's nuclear sites. Hamas's leaders were dead. Iran's nukes were gone. Hezbollah was over. Gazan supply lines were wiped. Israel was safe. So what's next for Netanyahu ? He's a dead man walking. He was thought to be on the way out in 2020. He swindled (all is fair in love and war) Benny Gantz into a 1 sided coalition and through morbid luck got a national emergency handed to him. His approval ratings are on a slow decline in 2025 after a post-tragedy resurgence. Democracies have a track record of ousting wartime leaders as soon as the war is over. Netanyahu won't be an exception.*
Netanyahu wants his problems to be Israel's problems. As long as the conflict remains, he can keep finding exceptions to stay in power. Global anti-semitism pushes Israel to the right, strengthening him**. He is the only one who benefits from a protracted conflict. Even today, there is sufficient internal pushback against Netanyahu within Israel.
Yet, the loudest detractors steer the conversation towards the existence of the state of Israel instead of Netanyahu as the leader who oversaw this response. To me, that's the difference between credible detractors (Tech elite, European centrists, American Jews) and antisemites. (Progressive left, Muslim leaders). Antisemites are tempted by maximalist claims and their hate makes up for the lack of due diligence. "All Israelis are evil, always have been. All Gazans are being killed. All kids are being shot in the dick. No one is getting food." No nuance. Only hate.
Either way, their detractors have served. The ball is now in Israel's court. Sympathies are wearing thin. Netanyahu better show proof refuting it, or his time might be up. Hopefully, the Israel's people are able to pin the stink of genocide onto him. Otherwise, this will cement the end of Israel's post-holocaust sympathy.
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