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IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
9hr ago
That's just not true. There's many examples of gun legalization lobbies in Europe with variable degrees of success.
And what about Brazil, or any of the other countries where people straight up run on gun legalization so you can shoot back at the criminals and win elections?
Policy waxes and wanes, but to say personal ownership of arms is directionally unpopular is patently untrue.
oats_son
9hr ago
The bullet itself might not do anything, but the explosion would be enough to do something. I saw a photo of some guy's finger that got mangled after he struck a .50 cal bullet with a hammer. That should work on any part of body...
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
9hr ago
No, but coming up with a way to direct a bullet that will work for a shot to the head isn't rocket science.
Actually, come to think of it, it pretty much is rocket science. But very simple rocket science.
WandererintheWilderness
9hr ago
If you want to achieve this in the real world, you need to lock some people up for the rest of their lives on those grounds alone, and I think letting them kill themselves might well kinder in some cases.
Holding out for a miracle cure is a gambit at the best of times, but still - I think "how likely is it that we'll have unprecedentedly effective antidepressants by, say, 2050" has to be considered. There is a difference between locking people up for life as the stated goal, and locking them up indefinitely until we help them better. If you think there's a decent chance of a cure being developed within the patient's lifespan, I think it's worth the chance.
TIRM
9hr ago
Appeal to popularity. America is outlier in many ways. That is not evidence that we are wrong and would benefit by emulating other countries.
Won't work, you'd just get peppered with brass shrapnel and suffer horribly, but you won't die because the energy isn't concentrated enough to pierce your skull. The polymer coated buckshot would do even less.
Maybe you'll get lucky and hit an artery and bleed out, but at that point it's a lot cleaner to just use a blade.
You need pressure for a good powder burn. That's why we have the brass in the first place: it seals up the breech and allows the pressure to build up during combustion so the energy has nowhere to go but heat and increasing the velocity of the projectile. Blowing up cartridges without a breech lets the energy tear the cartridge and vent gas in all directions instead of speeding up the brass.
Youtube is full of videos of rednecks blowing up .50 BMG on its own and they're always amazed how underwhelming the performance is.
aeqno
9hr ago
Could you elaborate on the difference? The armed forces personnel back then were more virulently racist and reflexively anti-Washington than probably most people alive today. And yet they didn't hesitate in turning their guns on their fellow Southerners in the name of racial equality.
You think some infantryman with a Lebron jersey in his barracks room is going to counter this trend?
TIRM
9hr ago
Without the barrel directing it, bullets don't go anywhere. The case will split open and the bullet will not shoot out. There's no viable path to suicide based on holding a hot frying pan to the backs of rounds held against your head.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9hr ago
Heh.
I always just thought of it as the Napoleon diagram.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9hr ago
You said that getting a concealed-carry permit is trivially easy, and in support of that first statement you said that sheriffs aren't allowed to contact the references provided by an applicant for that permit. My point is that your second statement appears to be incorrect, so your first statement is weaker. (Though a different lawyer says that your second statement is correct and Columbia County is violating the law.)
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10hr ago
I think eventually that these kinds of drugs will be shown to have extremely negative consequences for anyone who’s not extremely morbidly obese (or at least in bad enough shape that the side effects are less serious than the obesity). Of particular concern is the number of people who are using this product for aesthetic reasons rather than as medically necessary treatment. Women have used this stuff to fit in their wedding dresses as an example.
Long term, given that this substance acts like a hormone, I think that homeostasis will eventually strike leading to the body becoming less sensitive to semiglutide and therefore the person cannot feel full. And there have been some reports of things like stomach and intestinal issues, so I’m not sure about that either.
There have been lots of these pills in the past starting with fenfen in the 1990s. Most of them overhyped or have serious side effects (fenfen worked, but since it was basically an amphetamine, it caused a lot of heart problems and was withdrawn). The thing I keep coming back to is that people are so desperate for something like a skinny pill to be true that the public and doctors pounce on it without thinking about the long term effects. So that’s why I’m shorting it. I’m expecting wrongful death or serious injury lawsuits to kill it in all but the most serious cases and thus limit the profit from it.
Rov_Scam
10hr ago
I'm not sure what your point is. The original argument was that it was harder to get a CCL in purple states like PA than it was to get a driver's license. My argument was that it's significantly easier, even in liberal areas like Pittsburgh. I don't know what pointing to the discretion of a sheriff in one of the most conservative areas of the state is supposed to prove.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
10hr ago
I think the argument is worth having.
I don't want the state killing people. I don't care if people suffer or even die to make sure that power is very securely under control. Because I've seen what happens when it is not.
I'm willing to eat some murders happening because we don't execute murderers even though they deserve it. All because it should be a Big Deal when institutions take a life. I don't see how this is any different.
Ha. In all seriousness, though, you're aware that a bill was put forward at the end of last year to legalise it in the UK, right? And that it was basically bounced through the Commons as a private, unscheduled bill with no preparation and is now waiting for approval from the House of Lords, after which it will become law?
And I do remember that the first few times 'assisted dying' was floated it was about really quite specific scenarios, and that even now a lot of the 'pro' polls about it are still quite specific. For example
A poll of more than 7,000 people this month found that almost three-quarters agreed that adults “who are intolerably suffering from an incurable condition and who wish to end their lives” should be allowed medical help to do so. It was conducted by Electoral Calculus for Humanists UK, a campaign group that supports assisted dying.
And yet when it comes to the actual law:
An attempt to block access to assisted dying for people suffering mental health problems or because they feel "burdensome" was defeated by a majority of 53.
whereas if you look at actual public opinion you see support for a much narrower version, with:
More than half of Britons (57%) would support doctors assisting non-terminally ill patients in physically unbearable conditions with life-ending medication. However, support declines to 35% when considering mental or emotional suffering. (emphasis mine)
and
63% of adults think that assisted dying should not be allowed for those whose primary reason is that they feel like a burden on their families or the NHS.
https://www.salvationarmy.org.uk/news/survey-reveals-publics-fears-about-assisted-dying-bill (yes, biased, but the poll was carried out by YouGov)
I've thought a lot about this issue for the last ten years, as many have, and it's hard to escape the feeling that public consent has been laundered by keeping the spotlight firmly on rare, sympathetic cases while the intent of campaigners has always been significantly more far-reaching. Even the chosen term is very obviously a marketing gambit - 'assisted dying' where in reality they aren't dying in any sense other than the philosophical and the point is to legalise deliberately injecting them with something that will kill them. My memory is that these words were originally justified twenty years ago by limiting discussion to the near-death cases I describe, though I admit I can't back that up.
I'm not trying to lay this on you, you're honest about your opinions. But the way the whole thing has been handled leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.
celluloid_dream
10hr ago
I'd say it's also the legal restrictions where you can't have them in public - can't be transporting them in a vehicle unless they're unloaded/locked/stored - definitely can't carry them on your person outside of wilderness areas or a gun range.
The downstream cultural effect of these laws is that most Canadians don't see or think about firearms. They only come up in conversation related to sporting uses (hunting, range shooting). They're just not much of a cultural thing.
Browser
10hr ago
Yep that's the one I was thinking of, thank you. Afaik Scott linked it in one of his articles?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
10hr ago
A bit ago I finally pulled a box off my shelf of shame and played Hands in the Sea, a game about the first punic war. I kickstarted it forever ago, then kickstarted the second edition upgrade kit, then I moved, then I lost touch with the friends I usually played those sorts of games with. I marked this game as received on Kickstarter in October of 2016, and it finally hit my table July of 2025. Jeeze.
I originally took an interest in the game because a respected wargame youtuber, I think Judd Vance, was going around saying it was one of the best games he'd ever played during playtesting with the designer. It takes the deck building system from A Few Acres of Snow, widely but perhaps unfairly panned for having an unfixable OP strategy, and fixes that as well as improving on it in nearly every way. I never played A Few Acres of Snow on account of it's poor reputation, so I can't attest to that personally. However, I did greatly enjoy it.
If you've played a deck building game, the central mechanic might not be alien to you. You have a starting deck of cards, you draw five, and you get to take two actions. Where it gets wargamey is that the actions are all printed on a player aid, there are about a dozen of them, you can pick any action you want, and the cards mostly provide resources to accomplish them. Broadly there are two types of cards also, territories which you either start with or conquer, and then also personnel like legions, commanders, traders, etc. I won't bore you with a detailed rules breakdown, but generally you'll be conquering territory, trying to fuck up each others lines of supply through naval fuckery, and racing towards a set of military and economic victory conditions.
I played the game with my brother who is back in state. It went well, and I couldn't help notice how differently we try to learn a game. He wanted to try each different action and learn how it worked. I just learned a subset of them that I thought would make a good strategy, and clobbered him. He kept trying, and failing, to ask AI rule questions, I looked them up on BoardGameGeek. That said, it probably would have been a close game if the random events didn't hand me several absolute coups.
Yes there are random events. You roll a dice to see which player they effect, and some are weighted more towards Carthage or more towards Rome. Unfortunately this provided no assistance, and my brother playing Carthage just got absolutely hammered. The first few random events cost me some money and cards. Then for the rest of the game my brother ate shit. He lost his entire fleet to a storm, losing his singular advantage over me that he was really beginning to punish me with. Then he lost a heavily fortified town that was holding the line in Sicily to a rebellion. A town I quickly scooped up before he could react.
He tried to pull his game out of the tailspin it was in. But curiously enough, the game's length is determined by how many times Carthage goes through their deck. So the more he tried to optimize his deck to combat my strategy, the quicker he was running out of time to execute, as the game can only go 12 turns. Also, I was scoring way more points than him during the scoring phase of each turn, which was pushing me faster and faster to an absolute victory. In a way, it was a mercy killing the way that accelerated his loss.
So, all in all, I really enjoyed the experience. But I did win a crushing victory, so of course I would.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
10hr ago
Look dude, you're the one who said that whatever's disclosed while sobbing in that 'Spoons stays in the Spoons.
At any rate, I wasn't around when the PR push you're talking about for euthanize took off (which jurisdiction are we talking about?) It's not legal in the UK, and I am part, albeit only at a very junior level, of the bodies putting forth policy proposals and considering whether to make it legal. I can tell you that we use simultaneously more careful, and more broad, language. It is definitely not being sold as something for those who are in maximal agony and only at the very last minute.
Browser
10hr ago
Yeah but Antifa are essentially given soft handling veering on explicit carte blanche by the powers that be.
Browser
10hr ago
Also active guerrilla warfare success tends to rely on pre-existing networks of ethnicity, religion, family or whatever else. Plus significant foreign support. You can red/blue tribe all you want but these are ideological causes and not literal tribes.
Americans are not for the most part built like that. Red Dawn arguments are generally a spurious circlejerk.
Damn, how horrifying. I always thought that I would prefer not to be hanged if I had to be executed, glad I was right. Guillotine is far more humane, though my real preference is for the firing squad.
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