FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Forget about the whore - Kony embraces God and he's alright?
Part of repentance is confession and taking responsibility for what you've done. If Kony is truly repentant, he should confess his crimes, make restitution to his victims, turn himself in to the authorities and submit to punishment willingly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
I was raised a Conservative Christian. I ditched the Conservativism in 2002/2003, and the Christianity around 2004, and went atheist and deep blue on pretty much everything but guns; I actually left the country for Canada under Bush because I was deep into blue tribe conspiracy theories about 9/11 and stolen elections, among other things. I came back to the states in the Obama years, but stayed deep blue. When the Feminist blast-wave hit my position in ~2013 IIRC, I was initially very concerned and highly engaged and all gung-ho for Social Justice. It took a couple months of actually paying attention for that bubble to pop.
"SOCIAL JUSTICE NOW!"
"Social Justice is vitally important, but some misguided people are doing it wrong, they need to stop that!"
"They aren't stopping, they need to be stopped, guys this isn't the way"
"Wait, why are all the people around me cheering the bad people on and shouting at me, this is crazy, what the fuck is going on"
"Either I'm going crazy, or 90% of my social class has gone abruptly crazy, and I can't tell which"
"Nope, it's them. They're betraying True Liberalism, which we must fight for."
That played out over about three or so months, and I came across Slate Star Codex while trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. I started limping my way back to Christianity around then, but still identified as deep Blue for another couple years, thinking that Social Justice was just a temporary aberration which could be rolled back or corrected. I spent a long time arguing against the Zunger thesis and in favor of Scott's niceness, community and civilization, until eventually I realized that I was losing those arguments because Scott was wrong and Zunger was straightforwardly correct. That destroyed what was left of my allegiance to Blue Tribe, and I've been moving Red ever since.
That doesn't really answer either of the questions. Sure, I can imagine that some people genuinely would enjoy it, for some definitions of "enjoy".
The Rationalists had a phrase I admired, "I notice I am confused". They realized confusion was useful, and an opportunity to seek deeper understanding. For those who hold that sex is harmless entertainment, this seems like it ought to be confusing. Why did she expect to enjoy doing this, and why didn't she enjoy it?
And this is the thing, really. Back in the 90s, the sexual revolution was unassailable, because those of us arguing against it were killjoy puritan tyrants who just wanted to spoil everyone's fun. So we were pushed out of the way, and it was declared that anything went. And that's well and good, but it turns out that there do indeed appear to be consequences, and those consequences do indeed appear to be woeful in at least some cases, and the side that won the fight has no room for either the consequences or their woefulness in its model. The license they argued for is observably making people wretched, and the only move available to them appears to be to play dumb.
@Primaprimaprima - I never had time for replies to the art discussion, but IIRC your position was that art cuts, takes away from you, is incisive, yes? Was this art, in your view? Do you think her choices have made her life better?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Hence "this specific carnal sin", ie banging a hundred dudes in one day. Interpretations of "The sin against the Holy Spirit" vary wildly, but I've never heard of a version that claims this specific obscenity would qualify.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Does it seem to you that her lack of enjoyment surprised her?
Does her apparent lack of enjoyment surprise you?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
It's true that there's a ton of denominational drift, but I don't think you can find a central example of Christianity that claims to be able to observe this specific carnal sin, and conclude that the sinner is therefore straightforwardly damned without hope of redemption. I'm pretty sure even the Calvinists would claim that it's at least theoretically possible that this girl might be one of the elect, that despite her recent behavior she'll be saved by God.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
I hate to say it, but if we're assuming that we have to have either the mass shooting of children or assassinations of well-paid executives, I'll take the latter every time.
My argument is that the latter will inevitably lead to much, much more of the former.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Do religious people actually genuinely believe that those who willingly perform such stunts are capable of having all their sins washed away?
If you have to ask, you fundamentally do not understand Christianity, or its concept of repentance or grace. You appear to be using a model where forgiveness is for lesser sins, but too much sin means that this forgiveness is overwhelmed. In the first place, there are no lesser or greater sins; all sins are alike in that they all involve rejection of God, his nature and his creation. In the second place, what prevents forgiveness from working is not the amount of sins committed, but rather the refusal of the sinner to repent, leading eventually, one way or another, to an inability to repent.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
No, not like your father's time, because your father's time was fundamentally unlike our current situation in a number of crucial ways, foremost among them the steep decline in trust and social cohesion, and the steep increase in polarization and tribalism. Our present system almost certainly cannot survive the kinds of hits society took through the 60s and 70s. We are at much, much higher risk of self-sustaining fratricide than they were.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
I have kids, plural, and it sounds more or less correct to me. I would be interested in hearing what "costs" you believe homeschooling imposes on the kids involved. My wife and I have zero interest in our kids attending public school, ever.
I was assuming ten Glock 19s, but it would be interesting to see how far out you could push it. The toolmark analyst claim is that these marks can identify specific weapons, not just a class of weapons.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
I think this is a very bad trade. With spree killers, we at least had massive social opprobrium against them, such that the tactic was a resort only for the most nihilistic, dysfunctional and despairing among society. This new evolution is something different: killing for a cause, for an ideology, killing tribal enemies. The old sort of spree killing was a problem that was vexing but survivable, like wildfires or famine or organized crime; we could collectively band together to oppose it and to mitigate its effects. This version is corrosive to the very concept of society in the way that the old form was not, because the violence is fundamentally popular, and at the same time polarizing.
What this is leading to is more killing, not less. The killing will not constrain itself to such broadly unpopular targets as health insurance CEOs, nor to CEOs or senior politicians generally. It will most visibly start there, certainly, but some of the victims will be popular with one tribe or the other, and that tribe will then be motivated toward partisan revenge. Escalation will continue along this new axis, and people will realize that CEOs and senior politicians are increasingly hard targets, whereas it's much easier to just go for their supporters directly.
This is how peace and plenty goes away and never comes back within your (very possibly abbreviated) lifetime.
If you look at who supports/doesn't support him, it's not on clear party lines at all. It's about the legitimacy of institutions vs individuals with respect to violence.
I'm seeing professors and mainstream journalists openly supporting him and celebrating the murder. I would bet that both those specific people and their social classes generally would come down solidly on the "legitimacy of institutions" side in the last several societal conversations we've had on the issue: Donald Trump and Daniel Penny, for instance.
his actual manifesto isn't the sort of self indulgent dramatic political thesis you might expect
Do we have his actual manifesto? I read a manifesto that talked about his mother suffering chronic pain and getting screwed over by the insurance and medical system, but I thought that was the fake one.
No argument on the rest, you seem straightforwardly correct.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
For those desirous of that old flavor of classic internet degeneracy, may I suggest Sliphantom:
The Unicum Guide to the T26E4 Super Pershing
Tank Autism 2: Revolutions
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
A case fired from a semi-auto is going to have a firing pin strike, extractor/ejector strikes, and possibly extraction markings on the case wall. The article gives a series of images of firing pin strikes, with the implication being that these are unreliable as well. My guess is that if rifling isn't a reliable "fingerprint", then firing pin and extractor/ejector markings aren't going to be either. If the components are in good condition, they're within a very small tolerance range across all copies of the model, and random variations of impact angle, strength, fouling, etc etc are going to swamp any signal derived from one copy to another.
This should be a stupidly easy thing to test as well. Fire off ten rounds each from ten different handguns. Provide a toolmark analyst all hundred cases, numbered randomly, and have him sort out which ones came from the same gun. My assumption has always been that someone actually did this in the past; if they have, I'd be interested in seeing the data.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Agree on all accounts. Back when it was assumed the killer was some sort of leftist class warrior, he was getting praise heaped on him.
It is by no means clear that the killer is not some sort of leftist class warrior. Certainly other leftist class warriors are quite visibly lining up to support him in significant numbers, while rightist culture warriors are lining up to condemn him. If nothing else, how the wider public perceives the act is quite informative.
As a user: Culture War is not unique to America. We welcome contributions from other countries, and have had a number of long-running contributions from England, Ireland, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Nordic countries, etc. I see no reason why Indian concerns should not be welcome here, nor any benefit to concerns about rate or volume of contributions by nation of origin generally.
The OP in particular seems directly relevant to both sides of the general debate over Feminism as an ideology. It seems obvious to me that the situation they're describing arrived through attempts to solve valid, legible problems identified by feminism, and is a demonstration of how Feminist solutions aren't sufficient in and of themselves.
motherFUCKER. I've written a number of times about how forensic science isn't actually science, about how bite-mark analysis, burn pattern analysis, criminal profiling and lie detectors are all examples of pseudoscience, but I thought stuff like rifling pattern analysis would have been "one of the good ones".
However much I hate our knowledge production apparatus, it never seems to be enough.
[EDIT] - ...In fairness, though, the police can say "we caught him with a gun that matches the make and caliber used by the assassin". They just can't say "we caught him with the specific weapon used in the assassination." He's still much better not being in possession of the gun at all.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
A consistent harm reduction-ist would say yes_chad.jpg; if a junkie robs a convenience store to get his fix, the crime is the robbery, and the drug addiction is irrelevant.
People care about cause and effect. If junkies commit wildly disproportionate amounts of crime, people are going to converge on the explanation that they commit crimes because they are junkies, and they are going to recognize that preventing people from becoming junkies is clearly consistent with harm reduction.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
That seems like a plausible motivation, but goddamn is it stupid. Disassemble the pistol, douse the pieces in gasoline and burn them. Take a bus somewhere near the coast, walk to the beach and chuck it into the ocean. Either of those would be more than sufficient.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
"Ballistics" means how fast the bullet is moving, in what direction. Most silencers have negligible effects on ballistics; they change point-of-impact and can increase velocity slightly due to freebore boost, but nothing that would be forensically relevant. What would really get him would be the rifling pattern on the fired bullets, which would match the barrel of his gun and which the suppressor has no effect on.
Otherwise, much agreed. ditching the gun seems like such an obviously good idea that I can't understand his not doing it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky.
....and all the externalities caused by strung-out junkies are just an unrelated random happenstance? Like, the part where they are using drugs is entirely unrelated to all the other stuff they do because they're a person addicted to drugs?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
My plan would be use low-key Golden Retriever mode, channel humility, vacuous attentiveness, and moderate excitement to be involved in this novel experience: a wide-eyed, gawking tourist enjoying their guided walkthrough of the famous American Justice system. I'd be interested in hearing how or why this would fail.
run the numbers and find out. My understanding is that Sweden's underclass is (or was, before mass immigration) much, much smaller per-capita, so filtering it out wouldn't change the outcome much. By contrast, the US underclass is very large, and so it swings the numbers. This matters because the standard claim is that Swedish policies would fix things, but there's no reason to believe that Swedish policies made the underclass small rather than not having an underclass being what allowed Sweden to adopt its policies.
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