domain:doyourownresearch.substack.com
orthoxerox
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4m ago
The big unspoken filter is being able to afford a sword. A peasant would have an axe or a knife tucked into his sash. Both of the utility variety.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
7m ago
It's a "lock knife", so it's illegal to carry one if you're not a tradie in the process of doing tradie things.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8m ago
I'm pretty sure if you're a low-life kid, you get the chef's knife from the kitchen and the hatchet from the shed. Maybe not YOUR kitchen or shed.
07mk
9m ago
No it it isn't. The causation is completely reversed. There's nothing in the comment to which you're replying that indicates that the commenter believes that his ability to believe something implies anything to do with anything, including how bad his enemies are. The commenter is explaining why he has the ability to believe something, and that it is due to his enemies "sources like the BBC and the UK police" having established themselves to be bad as dependable information sources. You can argue that they have not established themselves to be such, but there's nothing in the comment indicating that the commenter's ability to believe this is proof/evidence/argument/etc. for the notion that these sources are bad sources. That they are bad sources is already part of the premise, not something being argued for.
Ademonera
10m ago
The New York Times seems to have gone out of their way to have affirmed the shooter’s pronouns with the title “Suspect Knew Her Target” and calling the suspect Ms. throughout.
I feel like an odd component of the culture war on trans issues is a tacit agreement (Chris Chan, etc) that respecting someone’s gender identity goes out the window once they have done something bad. I’ve seen this in some left-wing spaces, which kinda shows that people are aware that they’re making an active choice to use pronouns - to be nice to the person using them. It seems like the New York Times position is that pronouns are sacrosanct, obviously.
I just imagine how good the writers room felt about themselves doing this - they probably feel like they’re fighting for civil rights in the 60s or throwing bricks or something in the face of public discontent with trans issues.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
10m ago
It looks like in the US, no one but the random-letter Chinese brands on Amazon calls those things a "hand axe", but in the UK, Rolson, Draper, and Kent and Stowe at least do call them hand axes.
As opposed to a felling axe, I suppose, the long-handled thing used (with a two-handed grip) to chop down trees.
I'm pretty sure it is a "Photo ID, please" ordeal to purchase a hatchet or chef's knife from the store. I do not know to what extent this is enforced. If I were to guess this is easy to work around for teens, just as getting beer as a 16 year old isn't a very serious hurdle in the US. I didn't mean this proves she is some some hardened criminal, but carrying bladed weapons in public has a well understood meaning and is a strong signal in the UK.
10 was the age where I got to own first real knife. I immediately went out and received stitches. Like, within a day. I plan to keep the your-own-knife-at-10 tradition going but hope my safety psyops are more thorough than my father's.
zoink
18m ago
Here's one of the videos. I don't know if the letter here is what people are calling a manifesto, it's more like a suicide note. He apologies to his parents, siblings, and friends says he's dying of undiagnosed cancer because of vaping and doesn't want to go out like that.
The panning over the writing on all the weapons are where things are weird.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
18m ago
Nobody cares because it seems to be a case of low-lifes tangling with other low-lifes. That doesn't mean one or the other low-life wasn't the aggressor.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
21m ago
Much as Ghostface said: "Movies don't create psychos, movies make psychos more creative"
This isn't quite the case -- they're not being more creative, but they are using better lines written by actual creative people. But you get the idea.
HereAndGone
22m ago
My immediate impressions is that this was a young person drifting through life, no particular job or engagement with anyone, and just blamed everything going wrong for them on 'society' or whatever, and decided to get fame and notoriety by this attack. I don't think there's anything more coherent behind it than lack of connections, lack of direction, and a desire that "at least this way people will know who I am and talk about me".
hydroacetylene
23m ago
I mean, yeah, I assume she’s trying to impress some teenage drug dealer because a hatchet and butcher knife is not a normal choice of self defense weapon- if this had been a folding knife, even an illegal one, it’d be different.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
31m ago
Yes, if the adult behaves like a passive slab of meat, then I suppose the potential damage is similar.
A win for semantics.
HereAndGone
32m ago
At the moment, it's looking like (1) transwoman (2) possibly attended the school, mother used to work in the parish office (3) general mental illness craziness from the very censored reports on the 'manifesto' which seems to have been a mix of everything from anti-Trump to racist to depressed to anti-Semitic to 'everybody hates me, I hate them' (we'll have to see what content is there if/when it's leaked).
So I don't think there was an agenda, just someone with access to guns and a grudge against society heading out to someplace they were familiar with as their most accessible representation of authority to shoot it up.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
33m ago
Thanks. Fire away! But there's what's probably a <1% chance of me actually going to any of them. I'm not much of a social animal.
zoink
35m ago
I hear NPR say he was born male yesterday.
Doesn't quite say that in the written story but very close:
In 2020, Westman's mother applied to change the name of her 17-year-old child from Robert to Robin. In court documents obtained by NPR, the mother, Mary Grace Westman, wrote, "minor child identifies as female and wants her name to reflect that identification."
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
38m ago
the Babylon Bee
More specifically (to avoid confusion), its non-satire branch Not the Bee.
HereAndGone
39m ago
Not precisely, although there is some overlap with social conditions (long term generational unemployment, poverty, criminality, single motherhood, drugs, and so on). There's also the modern interventions in school and via social workers which teach the baby criminals that the best defence is attack, i.e. if witnessed committing crimes or hanging around in groups likely to be up to no good, immediately start yelling about racism/you're attacking me, help help/paedophile (as here, this is the newest angle of 'turn the accusation around') and the likes.
I don't know why the guy recorded those girls. Maybe he was a paedo brown creep who was creeping on innocent white Scottish girls. Maybe they had done or said something before this and he was recording in case things kicked off. but walking around with a knife and hatchet is not "I'm defending myself in case a brown rapist paedophile tries to get me". It may well be "I'm defending myself from the other violent white girls around here" or "I'm commencing my career of petty crime by getting ready with my mate to threaten and mug a passer-by" or even just "I'm acting tough and copying the older petty criminals and feral teenagers around here".
We haven't enough information as yet to know what exactly was going on, but there's plenty of reasons not to immediately assume the girls were innocent little blossoms just pre-emptively ensuring their virtue was safe by going around with knives.
I think you're assuming quite a bit here. FWIW, I'm not especially convinced one way or the other that this was a migrant sex attack. I really have no idea. I just don't think the BBC or the police releasing a statement represents a particularly high standard of evidence against the possibility.
Lately I've stumbled on a new (to me) dark corner of the internet: VetTV.
At first I thought it was just a youtube channel, since it was showing up in my shorts feed. And I assume that's what it started as. But eventually it became a full-fledged subscripion service with its own website, which you can subscribe to for just $6 a month (not an ad, I just thought it's interesting that it's a paid service but the cost is so low).
Anyway, they do have some very funny shorts and short videos. Mostly screwball, low-brow comedy, like you'd expect from young people who just got out of the military, especially the marines. Some of my favorites were: innappropriate gunny vs young marines, high school recruiting and holy waterboarding.
Bear in mind, those are just the clips they could get on youtube, the full episodes on their site are much more raunchy. It's obviously not a big budget production, but it is a little more polished than typical youtube channels. It's a low-budget yet professional studio where absolutely anything goes. So, well... they have some promotional clips where they compare themselves to a porn sites, and that's not wrong. It's interesting to see what ordinary people can come up with on a camera when there are absolutely no restrictions.
They have a few full-length (lightly censored) episodes on youtube for free. In particular I really recommend Recruiters. I liked it because... well, many reasons.
- I've never been in the military myself, but I used to get those sales pitches from recruiters as a teenager. So it's relatable to me in a way most war movies aren't.
- Most war movies are about soldiers in the field fighting big heroic battles. This (and a lot of their content) are about normal, boring office jobs. In this case they're working a call center in a strip mall. This seems more like the actual reality for most modern military people. And it's just a new angle that doesn't usually get explored in war movies.
- There's a real moral dilemna here. How are they supposed to convince young people to join when they're going through their own mid-life crisis and feel depressed about their service? What can you actually offer a kid in peacetime to convince him? What are they supposed to do when caught between the realities of modern life and impossible demands from higher-ups? At times, they almost seem like drug dealers or con-artists, willing to lie cheat and steal to con kids into signing a contract. EG, the female recruiter is not shy about promising boys that they'll "totally get so much pussy..." right before shipping them off to all-male military bases in the middle of nowhere. Her tactics only get more extreme and unethical from there.
- Even though they're just working an office/sales job, you still get the sense that it's a real military job too. They have to wear uniforms, follow uniforms, and exercise relentlessly. They're under immense pressure to meet quota every month or... well, I'm not sure what happens if they don't, but it seems very bad. That would "fail the mission." It's just interesting to see that clash of cultures.
Their more serious series is A Grunt's Life. This one... is interesting, but it's a very tough watch.
- For one thing, they're mostly all in uniforms all the time, and often wearing helmets, so it's just hard to tell the characters apart. I guess that's part of why militaries wear uniforms. Not as good for Hollywood though.
- It's set in a remote base in Afghanistan, in Helmand province, in one of the most intense periods of counter-insurgency. The troops their seem jaded beyond belief, convinced that this mission will never work because Afghanistan is such a hellhole. Their leader, Lt Murphy, (the main character of the series) is an older enlisted man turned Lieutenant. He's an antihero who's very good at his job but very dark and twisted. His main goal it seems is killing as many Afghanis as possible and collecting body parts for his personal collection, and he doesn't much care whether they come from insurgents or civilians.
- The higher-ranking officers are always portrayed as hopelessly naive and out of touch. They have to radio in from far away, and keep telling the base to "win hearts and minds" when it's an obvious trap.
- The Afghanis are portrayed as either complete idiots who shoot their own heads off, or utter villains who push their wives to tank bullets. Admittedly the low budget plays a factor here, some stuff got obviously cut. Every so often it makes me think it's setting one of them up as sympathetic, but then he takes a heel turn. And they couldn't find anyone who actually speaks Pashtun so they just used a mix of Turkish and Hindustani for their language. Some of this is admittedly pretty funny, but cmon... it's a racist caricature.
- The marines have a weird sort of sexuality. Sometimes its just being horny young guys with nothing much to do. But it goes way past that. They seem to enjoy really public displays of sexuality that most straight guys would never do. "Marine gay" is how they sometimes describe it. The show has some really graphic, depraved scenes that honestly seem worse than anything I've seen in porn. But there's still a sense of comedy to it. I really don't know how to describe it. "Insanity" is probably the easiest word to use.
As a work of art, it's certainly powerful. It made me feel things. It sucks me in to the whole "whoo rah, kill 'em all" feeling of comeradie and bravery, and makes me curse those stupid officers who won't let the grunts just "do what needs to be done."
But then I step back a minute. Granted, I was never there, I'm just a sissy civilian who only read the news. But from my perspective... the higher up officers were correct. The grunts in the show are basically just murdering civilians, or at least going way, way past any sort of justified warfare. The Afghanis are, quite reasonably, furious that these foreign invaders keep killing them, and they have no idea why because of the huge language and culture barrier. The officers are trying to bring peace, while people like Lt. Murphy just keep fanning the flames by killing people.
It reminds me a lot of two other famous war movies, which I'm sure it was inspired by. Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse now. In both cases, there's a bad guy (the drill sergeant and Colonel Kilgore) who looks super cool and badass in the movie. People love those characters. But I think it's important to keep our perspective and remember that they're villains who caused immense harm and suffering. I wish people were more film-savvy and could see that, because I don't think those movies are at all ambiguous.
...Thoughts on any of this? Sorry I don't have an exact thesis statement here. Maybe it's a sign of how corrupt and out-of-touch Hollywood is that we need something like this to bring us "real" cinema. Maybe it's a sign of how we're all so brainwashed by porn that porn starts to influence everything else. Maybe it's a sign of how horrific military life is that it just can't be expressed in any mainstream media. Maybe now, with cellphones and social media, we can finally see "the truth" of what war and military life is really like. Maybe it's just funny to see women trying to act like men, when mainstream TV usually shows the opposite. Or maybe I'm just bored and looking for something new I can't find on Youtube.
HereAndGone
48m ago
Did you detect, here, the edges of an idea which might hurt your social status were you to accept it?
That would require me to have social status in the first place.
You describe the males as getting smarter because of all the complex political manoeuvring they have to do. Meanwhile, all the females have to do is turn up to eat the yummiest food sources and wait to be mated by the winning male.
That does not take into account female social competition: how do I ensure I am the one mating with the winner (because sometimes there is a hierarchy for females just as for males)? how do I ensure my offspring come out on top? how do I make sure my son is the next alpha (to use that clumsy term) and I have influence through/beside him?
As well as sexual selection - maybe the winner thinks he gets to mate with all the females and he alone gets this, but there's always (1) unwilling females refuse his advances and (2) cuckoldry, again for want of a better term - lower status males sneak in behind the alpha's back and some females preferentially mate with them.
Females too need to develop intelligence for politics, both for intra-female competition and to deal with the alpha and the other males.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
56m ago
That people might therefore hold practically unfalsifiable beliefs about the nature of this incident is more a reflection of lack of trust in the establishment than people desperately clinging to their priors.
That's why I explained general impressions and attitudes on the ground. Dundee has been entirely quiet, all the screaming and shouting has happened in Terminally Online circles. Funnily enough, I passed through the city today, and people do not give two fucks.
Disregard the police report, if you absolutely must (and I think this is dumb, but can't stop people), but nobody here is actually up in arms about it. That alone should be cause for update. Without naming names, certain Mottizens have, as I predicted, not updated one jot. They're lost causes, and I do not say that lightly. For the skeptical, we can disagree on the degree of skepticism warranted, but at least you haven't gone from the extreme of having a mind so open your brains fall out to the opposite, a brain so insensitive to new information that it's practically calcified. That makes us practically half-cousins.
I think the target audience is very important here, these shows strike me like exactly the kinds of stories fellow enlisted dream up and tell each other based on a mix of harsh reality, dark fantasy, but mostly just blowing off steam that you can only fully understand if you were there. By far the most accurate portrayal of modern military life in a warzone I've seen is Generation Kill, highly recommend it if you're interested in this kind of thing.
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