domain:nunosempere.com
KingOfTheBailey
3hr ago
Sailors' tattoos were also earned e.g. a swallow meant you'd sailed 5000 miles. It wasn't all just covering yourself in random pictures.
Arnaud
3hr ago
In fairness, SEALs have something of a reputation of being the idiot frat boys of the special forces world. Pretty much every negative story I've heard about US special forces was about the SEALs.
Probably comes from them being able to walk in off the street and sign up, rather than the more usual system of only allowing applicants that are already in the military.
Browser
3hr ago
I feel like the social filtering of casual violence also means that to get the 'woah badboy' experience and vibes you've got to go to people who almost totally reject the social contract since the current legal and professional moment makes it hard to be only partway rebellious
Browser
3hr ago
Yeah I'm not against a tattoo for a valid lifelong commitment of great personal importance but even then execution is key to make it look good. Covering yourself in random pop culture references is the act of a lunatic with no long-term consideration
Browser
3hr ago
Can stabilize somebody at a point that's essentially at death's door but ultimately not be able to achieve sufficient resuscitation
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
This part:
This is exactly why we have the rule,
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.
Is ridiculously selectively applied, e.g. basically any time people use "the establishment" as a foil they're guilty of this, but they don't get modhatted. As it stands, the rule is merely another cudgel to use against people making left-leaning arguments, although in this case I don't think an unbiased application of this rule would be particularly good either. It just makes it clunky to talk about subsets of a group that believe in specific ideas that might not be shared among the whole group.
Though I do agree the "I expect that RandomRanger will withdraw his claim" is fairly presumptuous here.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
Some of this seems a little unhelpful - a growing number of incursions into Taiwan's Air Defence Identification Zone sound a lot worse than 'Chinese aircraft flying over mainland China', since the ADIZ extends like a rectangle up into China proper. The Chinese air force probably does more training and exercises these days and it's not unreasonable that they should do so in the south of their own country.
Crossing the median line in the straits is more relevant.
Nevertheless it's interesting and I don't disagree with the main premise/vibe.
faceh
4hr ago
i.e. people who got them unwillingly.
I'd say soldiers and sailors who were putting their life on the line and thus could never really be sure if they'd make it back to respectable society would also get a pass, although that also kind of falls in my "symbolic of something meaningful" exception.
Oh, and its worth mentioning how it seems like now full sleeves are kind of the default for Cops, Soldiers, even firemen these days. Like its functionally part of the 'uniform'!
ulyssessword
4hr ago
Bystanders desperately tried to assist the injured man as emergency services raced to the scene.
Mr Baitson was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery.
However, he died four days later.
Stranger things have happened, but dying four days after a leg wound is certainly up there IMO. I'd think you would either die in a few minutes or get enough help to recover, but maybe there's a middle ground.
Pigeon
coo coo
5hr ago
I don’t know how to interpret chasing off famine relief with gunboats… it far exceeds any of the evidence for the intentionality of the Maoist famines.
Not sure about this one as IIRC starving people were killed when trying to access grain in warehouses during the Great Leap Forward, and one of the reasons why the famine was so horrific was because Mao and co. continued to export food for political gain and refused foreign aid for at least a year or two.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
The galaxy is only 100,000 light-years in diameter. Starships moving at a mere 0.1 c could get from one side to the other in only a million years.
That's peanuts in astronomical time. If you can make a 0.1 c starship you need not worry about biological lifespans. 'Aliens exist but are too far away' doesn't make any sense. They could've shown up 100 million years ago and still be here. There are centuries old engravings of weird shapes in the sky, recordings from egypt, footage from modern jets and sensors.
Furthermore, our understanding of the universe is extremely limited, bordering on pathetic. 95% of the universe is 'dark' to us, we have no clue about it. Logically, that's the most likely place for the bulk of the aliens to be. Not only is it the vast majority of the universe's mass and energy, it provides a simple explanation for the apparent absence of aliens in the tiny portion we understand.
It makes no sense to play around with Dyson Spheres or largescale structures we might be capable of observing, it's not cost-efficient compared to 'dark' enterprises.
We prank the North Sentinel Islanders with drones and occasional plane/helicopter overflights, some missionaries showing up and getting killed. The real estate they control is so small it's worthless. Nobody wants to live on a crap jungle island. It's probably the same with aliens but instead of crap jungle island it's 'entire visible universe'. There's no real serious intent, more like casual observation. The only thing interesting on Earth is us.
My late grandmothers position on tattoos was that the only respectable people who had them were concentration camp survivors.
crushedoranges
5hr ago
Let me demonstrate how irritating you're being.
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Sam Brinton."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Anthony Weiner."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Jasmine Crockett."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask AOC."
You are not strawmanning. You are weakmanning. You are not giving your political opposition the benefit of the doubt. I have a whole list of leftist politicians, intellectuals, and academics that have said embarrassing and stupid things I'd like you to defend, if you'd care to play at this particular joust.
Tiber727
5hr ago
Adding onto this, this is an example of the real stupidity of this. For boardgames, it requires making lots of different little pieces. China outcompeted in manufacturing so hard that the only manufacturers left only want to deal in volumes significantly higher than most games would sell. The margins aren't there to set up manufacturing in the U.S., so the boardgame industry will likely collapse or stop selling in the U.S. before it ever does what Trump seems to want people to do.
That's the real stupidity of the tariffs. Even if you think tariffs are good, a blanket tariff doesn't care about the reality of the industries it targets.
The leg has massive arteries to power those big running muscles. Despite what various war and action movies might tell you, you slice one of those and you bleed out fast. That’s also why the arguments that police should be shooting to wound are laughable.
ThenElection
5hr ago
I think Tony Hsieh of Zappos (barely) broke into the billionaires club, and he had a tattoo and threw tattoo parties for employees.
Not sure if that's a strong recommendation.
falling-star
5hr ago
The average hard (cocaine or worse) drug consumer generally doesn't have the patience to wait a few weeks for an order to ship. They likely also lack the IQ, agency, or tech ability to figure out how to use the dark net market and crypto.
eee
5hr ago
Why do you think it makes sense to say that the views of some random politician are emblematic of the "online racialist Right"? During the Biden administration, could I quote some random official and say that their position is the position of online radical leftists?
People accuse you of unfairly representing other groups opinions... because you don't understand their positions and represent them unfairly. And when people point out that you have done this you throw a big hissyfit. Then, you go right back to doing the same thing.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
5hr ago
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, and this is where I will defend Watt’s writing in these two books, where Blindsight is his masterpiece and will probably go down as a classic of 21st-century science fiction. Sure, his characters are frequently more like plot coupons, but they’re not really the story. The story is about titanic forces moving around in the background, between the lines on the page, which is pretty cool when he pulls it off and the reader figures it out.
I think that’s basically the theme he’s always writing about, even his early Rifters series was like a first stab at that idea.
He killed the guy simply by hacking his leg? That's unexpected. Guessing he just wanted to horribly mutilate him but he took too much of the leg off and help took too long to arrive?
Shocking that he had the nerve to call the guy his friend in his court statement. Naturally he was sorry and regretful but not enough to kill himself. Couldn't even take the samurai larp all of the way and disembowel himself.
I'm going to go a step further, for controversy's sake, and say that close to zero tattoos truly look good in practice.
Human skin is just not a great medium for artistic expression. The ones that are hyperdetailed kind of look okay if you look from the right angle, but get up too close and they tend to betray imperfections and from further away they all look like jumbles of random shapes and generally don't look like intentional art pieces.
The ones I might grant as appealing tend to be simple designs or patterns that emphasize the underlying physical features. But most people don't have good taste, and someone willing to permanently mark their body is probably even less likely to have good taste about it.
And time ticks by a few years, colors fade, clean lines get washed out, skin deforms and wrinkles and whatever trendy design you had falls from popularity (mileage may vary by how you care for them).
I make some exceptions for tattoos that genuinely symbolize something meaningful or important in the person's life. It is actually interesting to see a unique tattoo, ask about it, and get an actual story about its significance! That serves a 'useful' social purpose. But then, the signalling value is not in the aesthetics of the tattoo itself!
faceh
6hr ago
Yes, but drill it in a little deeper, the demonstrated ability to wreak havoc on your enemies is catnip for women since in the ancestral environment that was a major signal for genetic fitness, that you would produce strong children and could protect them to adulthood.
That's why I don't quite think that its a failure of risk-aversion (I mean, after the first time he hits her, sure), since on an evolutionary level, there'd be a larger risk to pairing with a guy who was physically incapable of defending you.
But it is bonkers that once they feel attraction the prefrontal cortex isn't able to project the longer term consequences of pursuing the guy. Not just that he might beat her, but that he's got no real prospects for building wealth or raising a family in a stable environment. This is so fucking primal that you see fashion Heiresses getting knocked up by sexy felons and a literal Rothschild leaving her husband to date a rapper.
And yeah, there are counter stories about wealthy men blowing up their lives and leaving faithful women to pursue or marry a stripper or even literal prostitute. No doubt. But far as I can tell that's never socially celebrated or sanctioned or really excused.
I think about this video constantly ever since I first saw it.
The stated admission (that I do not think is a joke!) that even a literal villain who slaughtered her people can instantly win her over by... pointing a sword at her throat.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6hr ago
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
You're broadly correct here: the anti-immigrant right (or "racialist Right") definitely don't regularly push back against claims that legal Americans would be willing to do those types of jobs. If they did, it would undercut their position that we should do mass deportations, so they either ignore it (like Catturd and friends) or they say legal Americans would do it if the price is right. The people claiming you're strawmanning Republicans in this specific post are hard to take seriously.
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