domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
anon_
1d ago
Sure. I just think there is far more incompetence at government contractors than your initial post let on.
anon_
1d ago
Because they are the folks with guns that have a near-monopoly on violence. Or at least were on 10/6.
Who does Israel themselves recognize as the rightful government of the Gaza Strip? At the moment only themselves.
No, they have been casting about for a responsible government for years.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I’m not an expert on the prison system. But I know prison guards and they do not consider the lives of pedophiles particularly valuable. They are not murderers themselves, mind, but allowing people who have done bad things to die- whether allowed to kill themselves or murdered- does not seem like something they would object to.
They are also generally quite straightforward that they, personally, totally don’t take bribes but most of their coworkers do.
Prison guards letting him kill himself for a small bribe from his lawyer seems really plausible. So does letting someone else kill him for a small bribe from the Clintons/mossad. Them personally killing him sounds like a bigger conspiracy theory.
Sunshine
1d ago
Maybe they found it easier to kill him when he was trapped in a prison cell unable to escape, than when he was free to move around at will? Contra to the memes, I don't think Hillary Clinton actually has an organization of John Wick style super-assassins at her beck and call ready to hunt down inconvenient witnesses wherever they may hide. Killing someone and making it look like an accident or suicide isn't exactly easy.
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
Additionally, a lot of Sig's manufacturing has been outsourced to India of all places recently, and India and Indians have been the subject of a lot of enmity (deserved or not I won't get into here) in recent years. What I will say is that as a gun guy the only gun of Indian manufacture that I'm familiar with is the INSAS, and it doesn't have a good reputation at all. If you were going to offshore gun parts manufacturing to some cheap country Turkey would be a far higher pick on the list, they have a decent existing gun industry.
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
The thing is that Trump's style is Turbo folk divas. He likes women with big plastic boobs and more surgery than brains. His type is Jenna Jamison in her prime. Nothing in his public dating life even hints that he is attracted to the types of poor Florida girls that were hauled on the Lolita express.
Honestly I think that the whole thing is to protect Andrew - probably UK has threatened to make a big stink. And some nice blackmail materials on all levels of USG and titans of industry.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
No one actually considers Hamas to be the actual governing body of Gaza at the moment. Why on earth would they be responsible (under your contradictory logic)? To say nothing of the fact Gaza wasn’t self sustaining food wise even before the war, or the fact that Israel controls the borders. Common sense clearly says Israel is the de facto group responsible. Who does Israel themselves recognize as the rightful government of the Gaza Strip? At the moment only themselves. They certainly have no problem ordering around the populace (and they have, many times, see the various evacuation orders at a minimum)
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1d ago
people are usually more frugal with their own money.
Sure. The pressure you talked about initially sounded more like a hard deadline approaching, but of course money isnt free.
Point taken about the "key enablers", though I couldnt say how important they are. Yemen for example seems to have been more of a problem for the rest of the world, without US involvement it either wouldnt be a problem, or else the US would deal with it for its own reasons.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Sounds simple but comes across as a bit ignorant of the facts.
2 is kind of wrong. The IDF controls a ton of the territory, and I think if it wanted could make that 100%. This from April says they control over 50% and its way more now.
3 also ignores the biggest and most universal problem of all armies: logistics. Hamas barely even counts as an army anymore, they are full on hiding. When was the last time they launched an offensive action? It happens but is rare. 456 in two years is not a lot. Most of them are IED deaths like the linked example. Sometimes you get ambushed. Here is a recent one. 5 soldiers killed. They were attacked by under a dozen Hamas members.
There are two million people in Gaza. Civilians! Hamas is in some sense more like a rounding error. Let that sink in. Some math here about Israel can’t make up its mind about how much Hamas is left, but not much… unless they recruit starving people which they will obviously. Thus no clear end state.
However the point I want to make more was about your claim 3. Hamas will indirectly obtain aid. But directly? By force? Seems doubtful for a group in hiding. Logistics! If the IDF were to try seriously, they could distribute food to civilians themselves. And if so Hamas could hardly take large amounts without being noticed. In fact most of the hard reporting we have indicates that gangs, here formed somewhat as a mutual survival pact, are the ones stealing some food, when it happens!
And let’s call it like it is. I’d say 20k Hamas are left on the high end like IDF sometimes thinks, and 2 million civilians, that’s literally 1 in 100. If 100 hostages are barricaded somewhere with a gunman (who isn’t even trying to kill them, just human shields), do you starve the 100 because maybe 1 will get some food? Obviously not. The wartime thing is an excuse and doesn’t fit the facts on the ground overall. It’s literally not a siege, what’s the last siege you heard of where the besieges control three quarters of the city already?
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
I think even the worst 2020 wokeness was better for getting skilled people into positions
Indeed, irreconcilable differences of opinion here. The FAA scandal, nominating a Supreme Court justice who can't even say what a woman is, choosing a VP on similar grounds who failed hard at everything she tried, and countless other attempts to put identity over skill or even mere humanity, like highly-credentialed psychotic freaks that suggested teachers deserved to die for "health equity"? Lipsitch and Schmidt should be scourged and sent to the salt mines.
The worst of 2020 wokeness was violent psychopathy and promotion of the unskilled, unwilling, and in some cases just plain evil. While I do not approve of much that Trump has done, he has not done and I predict will not do even 1/10 the damage.
Whatever you think got skilled people into useful positions, it was due to whatever liberal remnant that hadn't completely rotted its brain out with wokeness.
the stories like this that keep coming out every few weeks and the chilling effect they create.
These individual cases are quite bad, though I suspect there's a major attention component to your noticing. I continue to think they are nothing in comparison to the vast racism propagated by wokeness against whites and Asians, and Jews on alternating weeks.
They can pull back, but they'll be fighting again when Hamas starts another war in a few months or years. There is no losing interest and giving up against an enemy that threatens your homeland.
If the Viet Cong had done 9/11 we would have turned their jungle into a parking lot.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
That's a lot of words to not specify if you've ever spent even 30 seconds considering the rammifications of a sincere belief in a warrior afterlife paradise.
On a very related note, the NYT just walked back their expose on the dramatic starving kid. Apparently they never bothered to check any of the details, just believed what his mother said at face value. In the new reporting he "suffers from a “muscle disorder” for which he receives specialized nutrition and physical therapy." and has “cerebral palsy, hypoxemia, and was born with a serious genetic disorder”.
I think Hamas are terrible and should disappear if at all possible.
And yet you believe everything they say, even though they blatantly lie all the time and have for decades. Good grief man, look at the extreme disparity between those two strawmen you constructed up there.
What I'm reading on here is awfully like all the commentary about problems in red states, with gleeful gloating about "natural disaster/economic crash serves them right for voting for Trump".
No, it's not. Military action you deliberately provoked by acting like Dark Eldar is not "bad luck" now matter how much mindkilled Manichaens want to think it is.
roystgnr
1d ago
this person is important, don't fuck this up
Have you never seen a cascading failure caused this way? You see a potentially-serious problem, so you rush to fix it before it bites someone, and whoops, your rushed fix to the problem nobody had encountered yet breaks something else that people continuously rely on. If you're well-prepared then your "fix" just gets caught in testing, but I've never heard of a security installation with two independent redundant camera systems for testing purposes.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
As I've just said, the point wasn't about jews in particular but the phenomenon of outside population groups reaping the harvest and then leaving when it's time to till the field.
Well, that's a bad thing to do, agreed. Glad you didn't mean Jews, since all your other posts sure looked like you were talking about Jews, until I pointed out to you that this is not and has never been true of Jews, and suddenly you aren't talking about Jews anymore. Very odd, but glad that's straightened out.
Some people feel like jews have a special case to plead regarding this, but I disagreed. Noting how many different people suffered in WW2, not just jews. Meaning jews don't have a special case to plead. You try to ignore this point by asking about jews in Germany, when in reality my point stands regardless of those particular circumstance, as the suffering of jews in Germany does not trump the suffering of Europeans elsewhere. Whose governments did plenty to get them into an early grave.
Well, yes, I'd argue equally that you could hardly condemn German Catholics, Gypsies, Slavs, etc. for being "unpatriotic" for failing to serve the Reich when they were being put in camps. You're absolutely right, this didn't only happen to Jews!
Not everyone is equally patriotic, not everyone shares the same understanding of what a nation is. But there is a very visceral line drawn in the sand that demonstrates that at some point you don't really qualify as a national.
I suppose this is true. Still a little confused about who you mean, since you're not talking about Jews.
You claim I made arguments that jews aren't real citizens and that's just a lie.
Not a lie, just confusion since, you know, you keep talking about Jews until when pressed and your examples are shown to be specious, you inform us you didn't mean Jews. Still a little confusing, but I'll take your word for it that you were in no way implying that Jews are less patriotic, loyal, or entitled to be considered full citizens and fellow nationals as anyone else.
Maybe you feel the need to police any potentially negative connotation relating to jews, for whatever reason.
This is a very odd thing to accuse me of, since I talk about lots of things besides Jews, whereas I'd say the vast majority of your participation in any thread anywhere is about Jews. So unsurprisingly, when we interact, it tends to be about Jews.
But since we've cleared up that misunderstanding about what you think of Jews, I look forward to seeing what else you can contribute!
bicameral_mindset
1d ago
I'm just a lurker, but I'm very happy this place exists. It provides a model for how I should behave in other communities as well.
AfterEpictetus
1d ago
I don't think you're wrong, exactly, but I think you're ignoring an important dimension of the disagreement. That being the distinction between positive and negative rights (freedom from vs freedom to).
The traditional American view of rights is almost entirely negative, and each of the amendments in the bill of rights that grants a specific right frames it as a negative right (generally the right to be free from some government action).
Rights during/post FDR tend to be framed as positive rights (new deal/great society), or possibly "entitlements".
Your distinction is important, but I don't think it can be understood properly without examining the underlying disagreement about rights.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Weirdly modern war might make peace less likely. I’ve been thinking about this theory recently. Many past major compromises, treaties, peace deals etc all benefit from having a well known, somewhat trusted individual who can both negotiate and then sell it to their own people after. Who negotiated peace after the Revolutionary War? Ben Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay. Many such cases, a definite Great Man Theory thing. But Israel and other modern states are in the habit of killing any famous leaders who begin to pop up before they get famous. Thus, no one left to bargain with. Afghanistan, Iraq too.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1d ago
For politically high profile cases I would expect someone, somewhere inside or outside of the prison system would have had a quiet word and said 'this person is important, don't fuck this up'. For all of these unlikely cascading failures to happen? It's very suspicious.
What I'm also saying is that there should be logs kept as standard in western countries for high grade security systems and the whole 'whoopsies everything just happened to not work' doesn't fly. Even making allowance for podunk bad installations, operations and oversight.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1d ago
Hey I was thinking of posting something similar. I really like this place and I’m glad it seems to be flourishing and getting good new folks.
Tanista
1d ago
These mistakes are not that hard to correct
This then raises the question of why these mistakes are so pervasive. This is somewhat understandable for the average, random wokie, but why is it also true for the intelligentsia of this movement, who are presumably paid to know how to bring about individualism?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Huh you preempted my post, I was coming here to essentially say the same thing:
On the rare occasions I wade back into reddit these days, I'm reminded how much lower quality the discourse there is in general. Arguing to win is the default, instead of arguing to understand. People will happily and uncharitably pounce on any minor mistake or misunderstanding they can in order to get a rhetorical edge. I've gotten old enough at this point that I just don't care anymore, as soon as I get the impression that someone is arguing to win I just nope out and let them have it.
There were no "golden days" of reddit either (aside from when TheMotte was there lol), I've been on reddit essentially since the very beginning and although it's had its ups and downs it's never reached the heights of TheMotte.
So yeah, this place is amazing, and I hope you guys keep doing what you do.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
Somewhat tangentially, I can't find any evidence that anyone involved in prisons has ever been fired or disciplined for recording issues alone.
On the other hand, major Wall Street firms are routinely disciplined for record keeping failures even if there's no case of fraud or other misconduct being examined.
To me that means shitty record keeping in prisons is actually the norm while on Wall Street it's something firms are constantly anxious about fucking up.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
The "word on the street" among the conspiracy crowd is that the "most requested" age range at Epstein Island was 14-16. That was typical. It was mainly Epstein himself who had the more, well, "unusual" preferences.
Completely unverified rumors! Make of it what you will!
It's as simple as giving a briefing and saying 'give extra attention here' in a daily briefing. It's not 'lets change everything'.
They should have said 'who is Epstein bunking with? Is that the right guy? Why don't we put him in with a known element rather than Bubba-three-kills?'
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