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I have no idea what you guys are on about, every operator type guy I ever met had tons of bad tattoos on the forearms and legs that were visible in normal casual clothing. They don't get face, hand, or neck tattoos because of military regulations, not because they are squeamish about showing off.
If anything, these guys are less likely to get into stupid fights for no real reason than the average guy because of their ability to easily keep their cool in stressful situations.
I just read American Sniper and like a good 10% of the book is dedicated to describing in great detail the bar fights that Kyle and his SEAL colleagues got into. There's an extended story about a townie bar in, I want to say Arizona?, where SEAL teams kept going for training and getting into wars with the yokels. Actually right next to the part where he talks about getting tats after his deployment.
Which again pretty much matches my real life experiences with such guys.
An important ingredient here is that the overwhelming majority of tattoos are just hideous. Aesthetic harm. Visual downgrade. I know of a grand total of one person whose tattoos actually look good, and I think the secret sauce is that he has only a few, and they're perfectly sized to be clearly visible and framed on his body as you would normally look at them. Most people look like either a toddler slapped stickers on them, or like a derelict wall in a shit part of down.
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Because up until that point, they think it's hot that he could attack other people with a samurai sword, but he could never do that to them because he just loves them that much / they alone have the power to tame him / he's so emotionally dependent on them that his world would collapse without them / insert-their-preferred-framing-here.
So the hotness can win out over prudence and risk aversion.
Scott’s cultural barber pole. When you were growing up tattoos were only worn by sailors, gang-bangers and punks. Then upper class youth started doing it and it filtered down to the respectable middle class. You still remember back when tattoos were mostly the domain of scumbags so unfortunately you end up being the old man yelling about President Kennedy’s disrespectful Brylcreamed hair. I personally don’t mind tattoos but the Zoomer broccoli haircut has me convinced that Sitting Bull Did Nothing Wrong.
I'd certainly agree that I bet the average guy with knuckle tattoos is more likely to get into a fight than an average SEAL, and that a SEAL is unlikely to get into a fight he doesn't want to get into.
But I think they're much much much more likely to want to get into a fight than the true average man.
I don't think the 'true' upper class ever really started wearing tattoos, is the thing.
Celebrities, athletes, maybe some actors, but rarely anyone with real 'power.'
I would defy you to find any tattoo worn by an actual human being that actually signals "I am a higher class than you."
I just did a cursory google search and I can tentatively say that ZERO billionaire business magnates have a single tattoo. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Dorsey, not even Palmer Luckey. Wait, Jensen Huang apparently has one, but I can only find the one photo and he clearly states he won't get another.
Not even Steve Jobs back in the day had one.
And these are guys that could hire the literal best artists alive to create absolute masterworks for them. And, goes without saying, couldn't easily be fired for getting one.
I actually kind of like this interpretation.
Incidentally, this all implies that almost all of the character actions in Blindsight are irrelevant to the plot, and even actively counterproductive, because the single most important thing occurring is the Captain making sure that Big Ben never susses out that there is another super-intelligence in the mix.
The crew in Blindsight even without this interpretation are mostly irrelevant to the Captain's plan - they spend most of their time following Captain's orders or being manipulated by Captain, and even then much of what they do doesn't end up directly contributing to the resolution of the story. Most of the events in the story were planned by Captain long beforehand. I actually think this is a theme of the story - your amount of actual agency in the plot inversely correlates with your level of consciousness.
Susan James is probably the most conscious individual on Theseus, and Rorschach easily turns her against herself and co-opts her for its own plans. Isaac Szpindel, who boasts a huge amount of augmented senses that elevate his sensory world far beyond an average baseline, gets unceremoniously killed early on in the book. Amanda Bates, the combat "specialist", is pretty much entirely useless and is just a glorified safety-catch to make sure her automated drones aren't as effective as they could be without her. Siri Keeton, the famously un-self-aware protagonist who does his job without realising how he does it, ends up being one of the least co-opted or affected by Rorschach, and ends up being a surprisingly relevant part of Captain's plan when it turns out his role is to play stenographer and relay all the information to the public (And how do they get him to do this? They break him to make him more human and more manipulable).
The critical revelation that the aliens are not conscious and are hostile was made by the vampire, who has a reduced level of consciousness compared to your baseline human - or Captain itself, depending on how you interpret their neural link. Literally everything else was planned by Captain, an automaton that likely operates in a manner not too dissimilar to how Rorschach itself does.
The fact that very few of the characters actually had any agency at all in Blindsight is a feature, not a bug. You're not reading about plucky oddballs making decisions and saving the world, you're reading about an extended game of 4D chess between two non-conscious gods in which the humans are a footnote at best. Theseus itself is an analogy for how the book says the human brain works, with the conscious actors being irrelevant at best and actively harmful at worst, and the non conscious actors being responsible for almost everything in spite of the fact they’re usually backgrounded in the plot.
Yeah, I don't know, chalk it up to small sample size I guess. I only know a couple of these guys and they're both pretty relaxed and have no tattoos at all. I'm obviously aware that plenty of soldiers have tattoos, but I get a completely different impression than I do from the face and knuckle tattoo guys on that front as well.
I get unreasonably angry that our justice system doesn't have exponential escalators such that by the time one is convicted of a 10th criminal charge over distinct incidents they arent sent to the gallows or an effective lifw sentence. No one needs an 11th chance, you've told us who you are by then.
There's a major difference between:
"The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."
and "Americans are willing to do unspecified jobs that illegal immigrants do (at some unspecified but presumably higher wage)"
The former is basically an insult. The latter is vague politician opportunity and positivity speak. It's not deliberately and specifically picking out the lowest status roles. Hauling equipment, what is this, a Simpsons episode? https://youtube.com/watch?v=zTK_5Xz6X8Y&t=195
Likewise with 'skilled, up-skilled'. That's the future they envision. Some kids will be picking fruit as a summer job at a good wage - while not defrauding benefits like illegals. Then farmers will get some Made-in-America machine to scoop the tomatoes out of the ground. The kids will move onto more productive labour like making or maintaining machinery or building good houses... Whether this will actually happen is unknown but that's the idea.
And tariffs aren't even relevant here, the quote you find is about illegal immigration. Tariff 'industrial policy' may be ill-conceived and poorly executed but the goal is not to develop the lucrative ditch-digging sector. Trump and co want a revitalized US industrial sector - steel, semiconductors, assembly, machine-tools, rare-earths, manufacturing generally, petrochemicals... They dislike being dependant on foreign countries for anything and want everything made in America, even textiles and similar. Ideally in some high-tech, very productive factory like in the golden age of American industry but if not, they probably still would prefer low-tech industry to HR and 'professional services' industries or NGOs they think are working against them.
Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:
This is exactly why we have the rule,
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.
Making top level posts "responding" to specific users without using the "reply" button instead is kind of obnoxious, but this is downright antagonistic:
I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim
Don't do that. Ideally, unless you think someone would like to get an alert from you, don't @ them.
If you want to talk about what Lori Chavez-DeRemer thinks and why it is stupid, or not stupid, or whatever, like... have at! And really, there are contexts where referencing "Left" and "Right" is fine, where it would be stilted or misleading to speak differently. But you have been moderated several times in a fairly short period, mostly for antagonism, and you seem to be making kind of a hobby horse of weak manning "the Right" or some portion of it you perceive as worthy of scorn. I don't know if you're subtly pursuing a kind of consensus, or if you're just trolling, but you don't seem to be here to move past shady thinking and test your ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.
Do better. Next time I see you pulling this, you get a ban.
Many men are just as stupid, or worse. OK, obviously this guy's lady friend is a moron, but at least she's emotionally invested in the circumstance and is unable to recognize what absolute garbage this individual is. What excuse does anyone else have? Why would anyone's reaction be anything other than advocating a swift and clean execution?
The longer I'm alive, the more straight up antipathy I feel towards addicts. Some people seem to develop more empathy for them over time, but I am pretty well fresh out of it. Guys like this will predictably make life worse for everyone around them, they're much worse than simply worthless, and it's absurd that they just keep getting to make the world around them worse every day.
AlexanderTurok, You claim that you are "anti third-worldism", but if that is true, why have you consistently aligning yourself with those who are trying to make the US more like a third-world country against those who want to make it great?
It wasn't MAGA that turned San Francisco into a fecese-strewn open-air drug market. It wasn't MAGA that worked behind the scenes to put a dementia patient in the Whitehouse. And it is not MAGA that has been marching in solidarity with HAMAS, shooting at federal officers, or trying to put a Communist in Gracie Mansion. It is your "Elite Human Capital" doing all of that.
The whole "Immigrants are just doing the jobs Americans wont do" is a blatant lie. There is no industry in these United States where the majority of workers and illegal/undocumented. Not even seasonal agriculture during the height of the Biden surge. The truth is "American don't want to do those jobs for those wages" and that is what this is (and has always been) about, wages.The Plantation owners don't want to pay the help, and once again the Democrats (who have always been the Party of the Plantation Owners) are once again threating civil war if they are not allowed to continue importing and exploiting thier non-citizen underclass.
Company I was at made the mistake of hiring a fat woman with tattoos. She gave me a bunch of work but didn't get her side of things done and they fired her after a few months.
While it may be hard to avoid tradesmen with tattoos it's still a bad sign IMO. Tradesmen are notorious for not showing up on time. Or with Hegseth, ideally you want some kind of efficient manager in that role, not a Fox News presenter. Trump seems to be loyalty-maxxing which is understandable but not ideal for efficiency.
You're right. I can't type for crap tonight. I meant III, which is rated for 7.62x39
Escape from Tarkov just wiped, and I had previously been somewhat interested in playing again, after a prolonged break due to lack of interest and circumstance. I already had about 1700 hours in it over a few years, so I'm hardly a newbie.
Yet, as usual, BSG managed to screw up royally. The game already started out immensely grindy, and only got worse. Half of the actually good guns, gear and ammo was locked behind ball-busting quests. Back when I used to play with a group of buddies from Singapore and Malaysia, we'd cheese the worst of them, 5 or 6 of queuing up at the same time but separately, in the hopes we'd spawn in the same match as 'enemies' and then kill each other for the sake of quests.
And yet, like many things in Tarkov, it got worse. The new patch is supposed to be a "hardcore" one. What does that entail?
Removing 90% of the progression, in the sense you literally can't progress. You don't have access to quests, unlike before, where you could directly queue into maps, now, you have the choice of about 2 or 3 by default, and need to travel within a map to find an exit leading to the next one.
This works... terribly. The game already had abysmal queue times, now you can easily spent 30 minutes waiting for the sake of entering and running through a map for the sake of getting to where you actually want to go.
The game has a feature where you could pay to insure your gear. If your killer didn't loot you, anything left over would find its way back to you a few IRL days later.
Nikita, the owner and lead dev, in his infinite wisdom, made it so that insurance is so exorbitantly expensive that it costs more than buying an entirely new set of gear.
You can't access the player-run market. The sell price to NPCs was gutted, and the price to buy inflated.
There's hardly any actual new content, and you can't access 90% of the old one.
A change last patch made it so that you couldn't use items you didn't personally find in game for upgrades. So if you bought a pack of screws and a drill to upgrade your shelter, now, unless it came with a special found in raid status, it's next to useless.
At one point, they'd finally added a feature that had been teased for years, and which I'd looked forward to - realistic armor hitboxes. Armor plates were modeled, with proper coverage and weak spots. Then they rolled that back next patch.
I could go on and on, but the game has gone from a diamond in the rough to a lead pencil in the shit, aimed at your butthole.
The only good news is that their decisions are being absolutely roasted, with an immediate exodus of the player base. They're starting to roll back some things, but it's too little, too late. Good, fuck them, maybe someone can make a hardcore milsim extraction shooter that respects the player's time and energy.
Can you trust the Soviet investigators who "investigated" Auschwitz?
More than the Nazis who built the place I'd say. But notice that nowhere did I cite Soviet-only information as far as I can tell.
The authors of the Soviet investigation of the Katyn massacre, which falsely blamed the Germans for a crime that they had actually committed,
Funny, that episode is I believe a major reason why the Nazis wanted to burn evidence.
Can you trust the confession of someone that was extracted through physical torture, under duress with no access to legal representation and no access to documentary evidence?
Frequently, yes actually. Especially if corroborated with other forms of evidence. Especially given what Hoss wrote after his interrogations. He never admitted guilt, only following orders.
It's not about trust, it's about weighing the quality of the evidence against the nature of the claims being made.
Ok, sure. Let's agree on that.
Himmler's denial is relevant because Himmler's explanation for the conditions on the Eastern Front aligns with an enormous body of documentary evidence
By default, one expects a criminal to deny the accusation. By default, one expects a clever criminal to tell a lie that is plausible. By default, one expects a coverup if the circumstances allow it.
whereas the documentary evidence for gas chambers disguised as shower rooms performing executions of millions of people is completely nonexistent.
So you just don't understand how coverups work and deny the numerous witness accounts and artifacts? There were public accounts of the Holocaust in like 1942, Allied intelligence collected indications of it (which was not used at Nuremburg), and quite a bit of physical evidence for the whole shebang, including soil readings finding the relevant chemicals.
He also claimed there were gas chambers at Dachau and Mauthausen, which is known not to be true.
Is that known? https://www.ushmm.org/search/results/?q=dachau+gas+chamber+door
Best I can tell, there was a gas chamber at Dachau, but it was not used for extermination. The crematoriums did seem like they got some use though.
https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/en/historical-site/virtual-tour/crematorium-area/
Seems the mainstream disagrees with you about Mauthausen, too: https://www.mauthausen-memorial.org/en/News/Concerning-Doubts-about-the-Existence-of-a-Gas-Chamber-at-the-Mauthausen-Concentration-Camp
You've demonstrated to me that I cannot trust anything you say about even the simplest of facts, including representing the "mainstream," so you'll excuse me for wanting you to at least make an attempt prove your assertions by default when you say things like "which is known."
According to mainstream historiography, there were no gassings at all, ever, in Treblinka I, which was a penal/labor camp.
Oh, so you do know what Treblinka I was? That's nice. You know, it is entirely possible one account gets any given detail wrong. As someone with some background in the interrogation business, I definitely agree that's an issue. But here it seems like you're trying to pull a stunt of "well if he got some things wrong the entire testimony is out" as if there isn't evidence the Nazis were using gas chambers for one thing or another since like 1939. Or other confessions. Or other material evidence. The general history seems to be that in the summer of 1941, mass killings started by the SS and they decided to switch to gas instead of bullets. More efficient that way. Cleaner. Thereafter, they built out the extermination program for the Jews in 1942.
We'll never know, but it's entirely possible Hoss witnessed some experimental gassings at Treblinka I. Or his mind was addled and he mixed up the sites (there were three in Operation Reinhard: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka). Or, actually, his statement need not be read as his visit taking place in June 1941 either. Given the rest of his statements about the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews at Treblinka II, that aligns with July of 1942. Of course, that seems to conflict a little bit with Hoss also saying that his subordinate Fritzsch came up with the whole Zyklon B idea in August 1941. Hoss also says that at Treblinka the victims knew it was coming, whereas Auschwitz fooled 'em, which conflicts with at least later accounts of Treblinka also trying to fool victims. (But what did happen to all those hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto?)
Here's a historical analysis of Hoss's memoirs: https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/hoess-memoirs/
That's an impressive level of corroboration from multiple other accounts for a conspiracy this large, and over some decades too. I love that Hoss got the estimate of the exterminated at Auschwitz down to merely 1.1 million later on. Weird way to be a coerced witness. "Yeah it was mass murder, but less massive."
There's no documentary record or physical evidence to corroborate the claims of millions of people gassed in secret extermination facilities.
How, on earth, can you say this if you're even remotely aware of the mainstream evidence on the matter? It's all made up? Multiple nations, thousands of witnesses? Hoss is just a total liar, as are the other confessors telling similar stories? The showers with airtight doors are just an outcome of German over-engineering and commitment to hygiene?
Where did all the Jews in those Jewish communities in Europe end up then? Spirited to Heaven? What were these trains doing? https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau7292
Your view is something like:
The real conspiracy isn't that the Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews, it's that the Allies and Jews created the appearance of the Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews. Which was believable, given how much Hitler and the Nazis seemed to have it in for the Jews. Yeah, sure, the Nazis really didn't like Jews. But the "Final Solution" didn't involve mass murder, let alone with gas chambers and ovens. Just some forced labor. Deaths from disease. Actually, it's better to trust the Nazis denials over any confessions, or eyewitnesses--Jewish or otherwise--or intelligence reports, or aerial photography, or soil samples. Instead, this was all a massive concoction to ...
... to do what exactly? The Nazis had lost the war. No one needed to execute them just for fun.
Reminds me of my favorite antisemitic sentiment (common in the Middle East) is: "Obviously the Holocaust is a Jewish myth; sure would be cooler if it wasn't though."
There have been no excavations of any mass graves on the site. The ground radar has not "found evidence", or any more evidence than the same ground radar evidence at Kamloops Indian Reserve found evidence for the mass graves of children.
I was hoping you'd mentioned the Canadians.
So this is fabricated? https://www.livescience.com/44443-treblinka-archaeological-excavation.html
Last I checked the Canadians hadn't found anything or even pretended to. Also no corroborating evidence.
Frankly I trust the NSA and CIA on this analysis. Would be weird if they, decades after the fact, were still really committed to the bit using previously unpublicized information.
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305894?objectPanel=transcription https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-quarterly/sigint_and_the_holocaust.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209/pdf/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209.pdf
You really gotta admire the competence of the international, multigenerational commitment to this fabrication across so many information sources.
Do you have any evidence there was intent and planning to construct such a false narrative?
Honestly, I used to be able to discriminate against anyone with visible tattoos, and you just...can't anymore.
I couldn't really hire contractors in some fields if I refused guys with tattoos, though I did once lose the number of an HVAC guy because he had swastika tattoos on his hands. That was a bit much. I can't really rock climb or do BJJ or crossfit comps without interacting with people with tons of tattoos. I can't get a decent cup of coffee without trusting someone with tons of tattoos. It's just not possible for me to run my life while avoiding people with tattoos, and most of them are pretty normal. So, you know, exposure therapy.
But to @ABigGuy4U 's point, there was a time when the same was said of a man without a hat.
There was a time when a wall street wealth manager could say "I'll never invest in a company if I haven't seen the head of the corporation at the Astor's ball or at the opera." And that was a pretty good, or at least a fine enough, investment strategy: only people in that sphere ran companies worth investing in, so following that social prejudice worked as a barometer of a worthwhile company. Then that time ran out, as less socially suave men ran great companies, and a manager who hung on to old social prejudices lost out.
There was a time not long ago when a wall street wealth manager could say "I'll never invest in a company if the CEO doesn't wear a tie." And that worked pretty well for a long time! Then the tech boom happens, and if you followed that social prejudice as your rule of thumb, you would have fallen way behind your competitors.
Tattoos are just another example. I used to be able to avoid anyone with tattoos. Now I can avoid people with "job-stopper" tattoos, or particularly offensive ones. But I imagine for people a step below the social ladder from me, it's tough to even avoid those people, and it becomes normalized.
don't know why some women are so stupid
Society shelters them too much. Women are raised as 'sweet princesses'. Men are dropped into the deep end and expected to figure it out. This has always been true, but now women can vote. With great power comes great responsibility.
It's not just women. It's a rift between idealists and pragmatists. Let idealists wield soft power. Men of the arts & academia. Idealists shape culture. John Lennon imagines. But hard power should be left to the pragmatists.
The extremely dangerous men of special forces military units have no desire to signal their extreme dangerousness to the general public when they're out for some drinks with the boys. If anything, these guys are less likely to get into stupid fights for no real reason than the average guy because of their ability to easily keep their cool in stressful situations.
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
As a middle-aged curmudgeon with zero tattoos or piercings, I agree completely.
I had wondered how these two knew each other:
[the defendant] had previously sent [the victim] a text where he threatened to chop off his fingers because of a drug debt which he at one point claimed amount to E2500.
[the victim] had texted him back insisting that he only owed him a couple of hundred euro
A horrible tragedy, yet there may be a lesson present about engaging in drug transactions with someone covered in face/neck/head tattoos.
Honestly, women tend to do that because they generally are protected from those kinds of situations. It’s true of anyone so sheltered, without the lived experience of “drug dealers are violent and crazy” you don’t develop the sort of mental habit of saying “people who are like that are crazy and to be avoided.” Add in the social virtue of being “nice, forgiving, and open-minded” and you get a toxic mix that results in toxic empathy.
There is a crazy amount of stupid on both the victim's and the murderer's part.
First off, why would anyone buy drugs in the physical world when darknet marketplaces exist.
Then, what kind of moron decides to buy drugs on credit, or extend credit to their druggie customers. If you want to play loan shark, perhaps don't start with a transaction which will put you in prison if discovered.
And if you have to use violence to collect debts, then recognize that while it is advantageous for you if your customers/victims see you as a violent madman, there is an art to playing that role (I suppose). You might get away with breaking a few fingers here and there (especially if your victims are reluctant to go to the police), but the amount of murder you can get away with is very likely zero.
Why am I (and others of an older generation) so horribly prejudiced against perfectly normal people covered head-to-toe in tattoos and piercings? Why do we cling to our outmoded beliefs that tattooing of that extent reveals low-life trashiness?
Well, cases like this, for one. Add in drugs (but of course drugs were involved) and it's a mess. Why, how can I look at the photos of this productive member of society and think to myself "that's a crazy dangerous person?"
Because he is a crazy dangerous person.
Also, while I'm at it, let me give out about the members of my own sex who hook up with crazy dangerous guys and still persuade themselves that this is the human equivalent of a velvet hippo cuddlebug pitbull who won't ever bite their own face off:
Jurors took just over four hours last month to unanimously convict Mr Scannell of the murder.
He struck Mr Baitson from behind the left knee with a sword at the Eurospar car park on Newtown Road in Cobh, Co Cork on the evening of March 15, 2024. Medical evidence revealed that such was the ferocity of the attack, the samurai sword cut through muscle, artery and bone and partially severed the leg.
... A letter from his partner, Alison Roche, was read to the court which said he was a devoted and loving father and partner.
She said her partner had battled alcohol and drug addiction issues but that everyone deserves a second chance at rehabilitation.
"Addiction is horrible," she wrote.
Mr Scannell has 11 previous convictions, one from July 2016 for assault causing harm in which he received a two year suspended sentence from Cork Circuit Criminal Court.
So let me get this straight: he's covered literally to his head in tattoos, he sells drugs, he's a drunk and a junkie, he's violent with the criminal conviction to back that up, and he just straight-up violently murdered a guy with a samurai sword over a disputed drug debt. But he's such a loving partner and father!
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
One might think that but the guys that go in for special forces are amongst the most violent and aggressive. Fort Bragg has crazy high death rate because of the drug use and violence.
While I am confident US special forces are trained differently to Spetsnaz one can see a little of the 'operator mindset' here: https://x.com/XiaoVilin99/status/1937922190005178389
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