I am no expert in this period but that is my understanding as well. The stereotypical Middle Ages nobility with its kings, lords, and knights basically grew out of various warlord-led tribes that roamed around Europe fighting each other during and after the collapse of the Roman Empire. I do not know how much actual genetic descent the average noble of, say, 1200 AD, would have had from a successful warrior of 600 AD, but in any case it was the same sort of principle across the connecting centuries. Feudalism was partly based on the fact that almost no number of peasants could realistically consistently defeat a even a small army of nobles and their retinue. Partly this was caused by the limited military technology of the time and how expensive it was to obtain the good stuff. Partly it was caused by the fact that the nobles and their retinues could spend a lot of their time practicing war-related skills.
Despite ostensible connections of blood, culture, and religion between noble and peasant, if push came to shove the reality was that each group of nobles was basically a warlord gang camped in the middle of and exploiting a certain territory filled with productive peasants. Like Sparta, but probably a bit less brutal I would imagine. Of course it was not all fun and games for the lords. Much as during certain periods in ancient Greece and Rome, the flip side of the benefits that the nobles had was that the very core essence of their lives underneath everything else was that potentially, at any moment, they would need to go risk those lives fighting either against other bands of nobles or against a peasant rebellion. In that they were significantly different from modern elites, who virtually never have to personally risk battle.
The fact that modern elites can convince large groups of commoners to fight on their behalf probably would not have shocked a feudal lord. Similar things sometimes happened back then, too. But the fact that modern elites can do it without ever risking battle themselves may have been a bit surprising to feudal lords, even if it probably would not have been surprising to some of the Roman Empire's leaders (though far from all, since a very large number of Roman Emperors personally commanded armies).
Goodguy
2mo ago
I would not be surprised if the near-assassination was a contributing factor. Events like that can cause some non-trivial psychological trauma.
What I don't understand is, what in the world is the Trump campaign doing? I feel like Trump supporters have been on the back foot for a whole month now without being able to effectively counterpunch. This includes the Trump supporters on social media, both the genuine believers and the astroturf accounts. They have been spending too much energy on things like transgenders in sports, which I think mainly the highly online care about. I'm not convinced that the average swing state voter sees that as a big issue.
Meanwhile Trump himself has been spending too much time talking about minor ideas like getting rid of taxes on tips or the right to try. And I think that the right to try is a great thing, but is it really going to shift the needle much as far as the campaign goes? There's also the whole matter of the seemingly pretty large resources the Trump campaign has put into trying to swing black voters. But how much difference will it make to shift 13% of the US population a few percentage points pro-Trump? I just don't understand what they are doing.
I think that Trump's big problem is simply that Harris seems really young compared to him, and the average voter knows almost nothing about her, so it is easy for the Harris campaign to effectively present her as a young, dynamic force for hope and change similar to Obama in 2008, when his campaign attracted an essentially religious fervor mostly because of the symbolism of electing a young handsome eloquent black man to replace the architect of the Iraq War, rather than because of any policy ideas. Trump is old, quite visibly old at this point, and he has been so prominent in American political discussion for the last nine years that I think many people are simply bored of him at this point.
Trump is no longer the fiery, fun maverick of 2016. He is still entertaining and charismatic, but he has noticeably slowed down and he can no longer present himself as a dynamic outsider who is capable of changing everything if elected. I think that needs to emphasize crime, the economy, immigration, and the positive aspects of his first term as president. Real, substantial issues. Whereas Harris is largely running a fluff campaign based on youthfulness, momentum, and Democrats' joy at having a fresh face to vote for, meaning for the top seat this time and not just for the VP position, which almost nobody really cares much about.
But even though I think that Trump would benefit from hammering hard on his core issues, I do not think that is enough. Trump also needs a new emotional, symbolic narrative of some sort to counter the ceaseless waves of the highly energized and quite effectively organized Harris narrative. Obviously much of the Harris support is organic, but the astroturfing I have seen online so far is also quite skillful and persistent. What is the new Trump narrative? It would be hard to make it about him being an outsider this time around simply because at this point he is much more familiar to the public than Harris is.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I would have more intellectual respect for some pro-choice activists if they came out and said "Yes, I support killing the unborn child on the mother's request even if it is a child and not just a fetus, because I value the mother's choice over the child's life". And I would have more intellectual respect for some pro-life activists if they came out and said "Yes, one of the main reasons why I am pro-life is because I am against female promiscuity and/or I am religious, not just because I actually care about the life of the child". Alas though, we are where we are.
Goodguy
2mo ago
That might mean that on some level, you actually respect women on average more than I do. If I prefer to think that women are stupid and naive when they disagree with me, and I find it hard to get angry at them for their politics, perhaps that means I am looking at them as if they were children.
To be fair, I also intellectually do not respect the overwhelming majority of men, and there is a small handful of women whose intelligence I actually do respect.
Still, food for thought.
This might be uncharitable of me, but after extensive experience with 4chan I suspect that the greentext, at bottom, is just the common 4chan theme of "I wish I could just use force to get women to have sex with me", but dressed up in an intellectual argument.
Notice that the author jumps immediately to the idea of war and never thinks about a much less violent way in which men could potentially persuade women to shift their politics. Which would be to simply deny women male assistance unless they have shown that their politics are friendly to men. No giving or selling of goods or services to women if they seem to have anti-male politics. Of course, in the US that would be illegal for a business to do due to various laws and how those laws are interpreted in practice. My understanding is that it is technically legal for a business to refuse service due to a political disagreement, but in practice it is hard to imagine such a decision being ruled legal if it overwhelmingly affected women. But it is much easier for me to imagine men flouting those laws in mass than it is to imagine men literally going to war against the woman-coded side.
I doubt either would happen, though. I think that it is hard for most men outside of a small group of true misogynists to really truly and deeply hate a woman for her politics unless she directly screws you over in some way. If she is your family member, it is hard because she is family. If she is a lover, it is hard because she is a lover. If she is just some random woman, it is hard because women are not as intimidating as men and so they don't push the deep-seated buttons that make a man want to deeply resist the other side.
It is a strange situation because it is true that many women vote for policies that are objectively bad for me, even to the point of endangering my life. Such as soft-on-crime policies. And that is very bad. Yet despite the fact that I know several women who very much are hard-core Democratic supporters, it is hard for me to really feel personally angry at them for it. Instead I generally just feel that they are being naive or stupid, or that they are letting their views about things like abortion override other factors, and I feel that I want to persuade them, not coerce them, into looking at things differently.
I guess in some ways that is a good thing for the same reason as why it is a good thing to not rage at your family and friends over political disagreements. I don't know. Maybe I should be angry at them for voting for policies that I consider total shit. Not sure what that would help, though. Some man being openly angry at them would do the very opposite of moving them closer to my politics. And in any case, while in some cases these women are quite vehement at disagreeing with my politics, I would not say that they have ever done it in an angry way. Just in a vehement way. I have had a few women actually get openly angry at my politics in the past, but their number is relatively small compared to the number of all the women that I have disagreed with about politics. And I have had men get openly angry at my politics in the past too, as I myself also have with others.
This all reminds me of the famous quote, "Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy."
Don't get me wrong, I probably do have a breaking point. If like 90% of all women voted to literally open up all the prisons and then put a reparations tax on men for centuries of patriarchy, at that point I am pretty sure that I would just pull a reverse Lysistrata and stop fraternizing with the vast majority of them. There is such a thing as too much. I am not there at the moment though. And I am lucky enough that at least the women I am close with are either politically moderate like me or are hard-core Democrats but are capable of having a conversation with me about politics without yelling.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Well, one big difference is that cigarettes only play a very minor role in hurting anyone other than the people who use them, as opposed to guns.
As for the NSA, I am not convinced that it does much that is good to curtail violent crime in the US. What they ostensibly mainly focus on, other than spying on foreign countries, is trying to prevent terrorist attacks in the US. But terrorist attacks in the US are a relatively minor problem compared to random street crime.
Would I support a version of the NSA that spies on everyone and tries to pro-actively prevent wrongthink? No, clearly I don't even support the current version.
I think that there is a lot of space between "do more to prevent random anti-social idiots from getting guns" on the one hand, and totalitarianism on the other.
I question whether the 2nd Amendment in its current form does enough to be a bulwark against tyranny to make it worth while, given that it has also meant that the country is so flooded with guns that it is trivial for any anti-social idiot to get one.
Again, keep in mind that I am not calling to get rid of the 2nd Amendment, just potentially to modify it. I have gone from leaning pro-2nd Amendment in its current form, to leaning anti-2nd Amendment in its current form. I am not calling for getting rid of all privately owned guns, just for a rethink of the 2nd Amendment in its current form.
My new perspective is that maybe there is no good reason to allow citizens in general, with few exceptions, to have guns. Maybe there is a way to keep whatever deterring-the-government force that the 2nd Amendment has without also making it so easy for apolitical, anti-social psychopaths to get guns?
Ben Franklin famously supposedly said "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Ben Franklin also supported a revolution that resulted in large numbers of people who supported the previous government in fleeing the country even though they had done nothing particularly wrong. Where was those people's liberty? My point is that these things are complicated.
I am still very libertarian when it comes to free speech. But I believe that broadly free speech is essential to the kind of society that I would want to live in, and I am no longer necessarily convinced that the ability of almost anyone to buy a gun is also essential to it.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Agreed, but it seems to me that empirical evidence shows that letting people make more of their own economic decisions clearly leads to much better economic outcomes, in general, than centralized economic control. I agreed with that ten years ago and I still agree with it today. To me the evidence for that seems overwhelming. However, when it comes to guns I am not so sure. Is it really the US' gun rights that are a major factor for why it, for example, the US government does not suppress free speech as much as England's government does? Or is it the explanation for that more of a cultural thing?
Also note that I am not advocating for the government to make all decisions for people. My attitude about the 2nd Amendment is more that I no longer believe that it is necessarily the best idea of gun ownership to be available to basically everyone except felons and people who have been proven to be mentally unstable. I think it might be better to revise the 2nd Amendment so that gun ownership is restricted to a significantly smaller subset of the citizenry that it is today. Not along lines of "what politics do they support", but more along the lines of "how likely are these people to be likely to use these guns purely for defense rather than in an attempt to obtain profit". Not necessarily saying that it is realistically possible for any laws to make such delineations well, but I am just trying to explain my current thinking.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Mixed. We need some level of gun control, but I do not support total gun control
I think most 2nd Amendment advocates agree with this, so this aligns with what I said, which is that I leaned pro-2nd Amendment in the past.
And in general your record on guns is to try to use gun rights as a lever to get conservatives to accept progressive arguments
Progressive arguments like what? I doubt that the vast majority of progressives would consider me to be progressive after an honest conversation with me, and this was as true a year ago as now. To be fair, I don't remember most of the things that I wrote here a year ago off the top of my head, I would have to look at my previous posts.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Yes, at least as long as the government doesn't become totalitarian and use their guns to commit violence. But as I said in my original post, I'm increasingly having my doubts that our government in the US is seriously deterred by all the public gun ownership from becoming totalitarian, as opposed to having other reasons for not being totalitarian. Not necessarily altruistic reasons, but other reasons at least.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Both. The two are connected because 2A rights have contributed heavily to making it so that the US is flooded with firearms, some of which are used to commit violent crime.
After some of my recent rethinking about violent crime, I have realized that while before, I leant towards a pro-2nd Amendment position, I am now leaning against the 2nd Amendment, at least theoretically (I will explain more about what I mean by this further below). I could be into a more narrow version of the 2nd Amendment that restricts gun ownership to only certain highly vetted groups. However, I think that too much of American public is simply too stupid, impulsive, and/or antisocial to be trusted with guns. For a similar reason as to why I would not give children in general guns even though a certain fraction of them are capable of using them properly, I do not trust the American public in general with guns.
The main reason why I have had a pro-2nd Amendment position in the past was because I believed that the 2nd Amendment is a bulwark against government overreach. However, while the US is to me unquestionably more free when it comes to civil rights than, for example, Europe, I am not sure how much this has to do with private gun ownership. I have also seen the class of people who share my attitudes about the 2nd Amendment being a bulwark against government overreach repeatedly fail to actually use their guns even when they believe that such overreach exists. When I hear that something like half of Trump supporters claim to literally believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, yet I also see that basically none of them used guns to do anything about it, it gives me some doubt about this whole "bulwark against government tyranny" train of thought. And almost needless to say, widespread public gun ownership did nothing to stop NSA domestic surveillance or, long before that, things like the WWI-era Espionage Act. Or, for that matter, slavery.
Now, I do believe in the argument that "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns". Hence the part about "theoretically" in my first paragraph. Changing the 2nd Amendment now would likely be a bad idea for the simple reason that there are already so many guns in the US that there is no plausible way that simply getting rid of the 2nd Amendment would lead to any outcome other than a bunch of pro-social people handing in their guns while a huge fraction of anti-social people keep them. And that would be very bad. Hence I mean, I still support the 2nd Amendment in practice as a defense against anti-social people. But I am questioning whether it might not be better now if the US had gotten rid of the 2nd Amendment say, a hundred years ago or so.
I should make clear that I am not clearly against the 2nd Amendment even theoretically. Like I said, I am just beginning to lean against it. I am no longer convinced that its supposed upsides are worth the downsides.
It is clear to me that the modern Democratic Party is essentially an enabler of violent crime, and that is one of the main reasons why I cannot imagine myself voting for a Democrat. However, I also see how the Republicans' pro-2nd Amendment position has contributed to the problem, and I cannot let them off the hook.
Edit: I should note that I would vastly prefer a hardcore crackdown on violent crime that does not take away pro-social people's guns, as opposed to taking away most people's guns. I believe that only a very small minority of Americans commit violent crime. However, I am not sure how likely it would be for such a crackdown to work in America to reduce the level of violent crime to what I would like it to be (not zero, but something like Japan levels), given the sheer size of the country and the sheer number of guns that exist here.
Goodguy
3mo ago
I am just questioning the idea that there are a lot of stable, reliable guys out there today who are incels. To be fair, what is an incel? The term is poorly defined. Are you an incel if you have not had sex ever? If you have not had sex in the last year? Pretty obviously some Chad who got laid yesterday but went out tonight and didn't get laid, and is frustrated about it, is not an incel by any reasonable sense of the term even if he is technically speaking involuntarily celibate today. I think that probably most stable, reliable guys at least get laid occasionally in random hookups, or they are in long-term relationships, even if they are not getting laid all the time with new women when they go out. Like I said on the other post, I could be wrong, though.
Goodguy
3mo ago
I figure that most stable, reliable guys at least participate in the workforce. The fraction of them who are independently wealthy or have joined a monastic order is very small. So if there is a large number of stable, reliable guys who are incels I figure that I would be encountering more of them in the workforce, at least in Zoom calls, and in the work-tangential world like at the kind of upscale-ish or trendy bars where people tend to go after work. I could be wrong, though.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Aren't many corporations basically this?
A modern corporation in the liberal West, and even more so in illiberal parts of the world, is basically a highly hierarchical organization with military-style chains of command, and frequently strong top-down control and one key leader, that is embedded inside larger society.
This might just be small sample bias on my part, but most of the stable reliable guys I know are getting laid, usually in long-term relationships. And it is usually with attractive women.
I think the underlying problem might be not so much that women find stable reliable guys unattractive, it's that largely because of economic changes, it's become harder to become a stable reliable guy than it used to be. It is hard to be stable and reliable if you are struggling just to get a decent job and pay the rent. These days you can't just go to the factory and shake the foreman's hand, now you kind of have to either become a white collar guy or really succeed in the trades. In my experience of observing incel forums, it seems to me that being an incel is highly correlated with also having economic problems. The two share some common underlying causes, like mental illness and shyness. Hence the stereotype of the incel who lives in his parents' basement. Of course, physically attractive people also find it easier to get good jobs, which does not help the truly physically unattractive subset of the incel population.
Our society obviously values stable reliable guys less than it did several decades ago, but stable reliable guys still do get pretty consistently valorized in pop culture. Most commercials target stereotypical suburban family units, just more racially and sexually diverse than the ones of decades ago. Of course they do this mainly because those people have money to spend, but still. And the movie industry still churns out plenty of movies that have conventional nice guy heroes who do what they do not because they are adrenaline junkies, but because they decide to put aside their self-interest for what they consider to be a higher cause.
I totally get that. When I was a teenager I was a sexually very frustrated person, the idea of actually flirting successfully with a woman seemed alien to me. One time when I was about 17, I literally cried after seeing a picture of a beautiful woman in a bikini online, I cried because I felt like there was no way I could possibly ever have sex with a woman, I felt miserable. It took me years to get over my shyness. It took a lot of effort, I forced myself to go out and interact with people in general and women specifically, and a lot of it was scary, but I was deeply motivated... back then, to tell the truth, it wasn't even that I was necessarily so motivated by my sexual urge. I could have alleviated most of my sexual urge with porn. It was more that I was motivated by hurt pride. I was like, "no, fuck this, there is no fucking way that other guys are having sex and I'm not". Which was part of my own problem... having my ego bound up with it. Once I started getting laid, that ego-driven thing started to cause me problems, and it took more years for me to address it and actually get to a place where I'm fully driven by erotic desire rather than by any semblance of wanting to ego-fix the insecurity I remember from when I was a young man. And it is so so much better that way, to not have the ego thing. But the ego thing did help drive me to force myself to go from a frustrated virgin to a guy who was competent at getting laid, so I guess I have to thank it for that even though overall it's not something you want to have in your life. Like a rocket stage, useful to propel you into orbit, but should be discarded afterward.
I have been on both sides. I remember being a frustrated guy who wasn't getting laid, and I understand what it's like to be a guy who gets laid. I totally understand that there is some fraction of the male population who have extremely hard issues getting laid for no faults of their own. If you are really short or fat or disfigured, obviously it's fucking tough. If you are average-looking, on the other hand, it's only your mind holding you back. I'm just a bit above average looking at best, I am average height and have a decent face, but not Brad Pitt or anything like that. There is an element of modern online culture that tells men that if they're not 6'5" with a six-pack and $1 million in the bank, they have no sexual future, and that is complete nonsense. How am I getting laid if that was true? Cause I'm no Brad Pitt and I don't have $1 million in the bank. What I do have is a willingness to try to shoot my shot, to try to flirt with women, won through long successful struggle against my shyness, and also a level of experience with women that I have developed because I succeeded in that struggle, so I have a certain sense for what turns women on, a sense that I have largely developed because of the experiences that I have had with women once I overcame my original brutal shyness.
Out of all the issues in our world, "women around me are showing me more of their breasts" is not one that I personally consider a problem. I have some disagreements with women on average - for example, while I am pro-choice and so to some extent understand why women are reluctant to vote right, I also do not understand women's tendency to vote left despite it leading to some policies that are to both their own detriment and mine, such as when it comes to law and order. But overall, I do think that in some ways women are wonderful. They really do tend to be nice and gentle, at least to men. I have heard some horror stories from women about how other women treat them, but as a man I can say that the vast majority of women I have encountered have been very nice to me. And no woman has ever punched me in the face, whereas some men have. Some my closest actual friends are women. So my attitude towards women is more or less that for the most part they are like men in terms of the kinds of qualities that I value, but with the added benefit that I am also sexually attracted to some of them. Experiences of being intimate in bed with women, both sexually and emotionally, have been some of the highlights of my life. Obviously the vast majority of "extreme right end of the bell curve" intelligent people in history have been men but oh well, while I wish that I was, I really doubt that I am in that extreme right end myself as a man. It's not something to hold against women. And I have known a handful of women who are as intelligent or even more than I am.
This is all a long-winded way to say that overall, I tend to love women, and part of that is that I love enjoying women's erotic company. Female modesty seems rather pointless to me. One could make an argument that immodesty from both genders contributes to a chaotizing of society, a focus on hedonism instead of on the often-boring tasks of upholding a decent society, such as raising families. And that could be an interesting argument to make, but I am not sure how much truth there is to it. Overall, I would say that immodesty is extremely low on the list of our society's problems, if it even is a problem to begin with, which I doubt. It is not half-naked women in the streets that are causing Walgreens to get robbed left and right or politics to be ruled by corrupt incentives. And an extreme focus on female modesty has not stopped Islamic societies from being shitholes. Victorian England, from what I understand, despite all of its prudity was not some pinnacle of social order, it had a higher violent crime rate than modern England.
This is a bit of a tangent, but why do women tend to lean left? I say this as a moderate who dislikes both the left and the right. So I am not coming at this from a right-wing perspective, I just am sometimes baffled why so many women are actually left-leaning rather than being a centrist like me. What is the appeal? Is it mainly the fact that the right is associated with socially conservative prudes who favor patriarchy-coded social structures and are not pro-choice? Is it some higher degree of empathy from women that makes them feel more bad for the so-called oppressed of the world than men do? That is a common argument, but in my personal interactions with women, while I have found that the vast majority of women are nice to me, I have not found women to be more sympathetic to others abstractly than men are, on average, so I am not sure. Women do tend to be much more pro-social than men are on average, mainly because there is a small fraction of men who do the vast majority of both genders' anti-social activities. But do they really tend on average to be more "naive bleeding-heart liberal" than men are, and if so, why?
Goodguy
3mo ago
I started reading this without looking at your username and at some point I was like "wait, why is this guy turning this topic into a man/woman thing?" Then I saw the username and I was like "oh yeah, it's a Sloot post, he does that with 99% of all topics".
I used to think like you, but after enough experience with antisocial people, I ran out of fucks to give. Personally, I don't have anything against drug users, indeed I am very libertarian on that issue. For me it's not about the drugs. My attitude is, if you can do hard drugs regularly and still be a nice person, more power to you. Probably would be better to stop doing the hard drugs, but as long as you don't cause other people problems, I have nothing against it.
Basically no-one in the US is poor enough that they actually have to steal or commit violence in order just to survive. Poverty is not what is causing our crime problems. People in the US who steal or commit violence do it not because of socioeconomic factors or even necessarily because of their drug use. You can do hard drugs and still not be a thief or a violent sociopath. Obviously hard drug use does degrade the brain, but it is still the individual who decides to continue to do the drugs even if it turns them into an asshole.
The main thing causing people in the US to steal and commit violence is that they have bad character. Some more, some less, but at the end of the day they have bad character. Which is not to say that your brother was fundamentally or essentially a bad guy, and I am very sorry for your loss. But the thing is, the people your brother hurt by stealing matter as much as he does. We have a bad tendency in this country to focus most of our attention on the antisocial person instead of on his victims. But the victims are important, in fact they are much more important than the antisocial person. Remove the antisocial people from society and society will be just fine. Remove the pro-social people and society would collapse instantly.
Should we call anti-social people "dysfunctional scum" or "biowaste"? Well, it depends on just how anti-social they are. I am perfectly happy with calling thieves and violent people biowaste, human garbage. Is it the best way to have the conversation? May be not, but the terminology is not simply insulting, it is also accurate. At some point it is good to call a spade a space. Some people really are human trash. Your brother at least did some good things, but there are people out there who do nothing good that even comes close to making up for the damage that they cause. The people who are like that, yes, I will happily call them biowaste. I am sick and tired of people like that. The world would simply be much much better if they did not exist. They are worse than literal shit. At least literal shit just sits there, it doesn't hurt anybody unless they step on it.
I am no longer interested in rehabilitation. Due process? Sure, I'm into that. If we remove someone from society, I want it to be for actual reasons, not because some cop made a mistake. But rehabilitation? No. My attitude now is, just remove them from society as soon as possible and if they really want to rehabilitate, they can do it on their own time and using their own resources. I am not interested in giving them a single second of my time or a single penny of my money. There are so many good, kind, genuinely wonderful people in the world that I could give my time and resources to instead. Those are the people who actually deserve it. They are the people who make the world a beautiful place. And in this society, we should talk more about them, and we should valorize them, but as for the anti-social assholes, screw them. I owe them nothing other than my contempt, and the only thing I want to give them is a ride to a cage where they can be kept away from hurting nice people.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Why "anyone"? There are plenty of people who think that both of those conquests were illegitimate.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Personally I disagree with the notion of race guilt and I also disagree that stolen land remains stolen no matter how much time passes. I see no morality in judging the innocent descendants of conquerors for what their ancestors did. It's another matter, I suppose, if the descendants revel in the actions of their ancestors and plan to continue acting in a similar fashion themselves. But that does not apply to most modern Europeans.
Goodguy
3mo ago
A much simpler explanation is that Paddock was simply a psychopath who relished the idea of killing people. Getting the guns into the hotel room was trivial, they do not inspect people's bags. As for whatever security was present at the venue, it did nothing to stop Paddock, so was it really more security than average in any meaningful way? The large number of guns that he brought is a bit weird, but can be explained simply by him having a gun fetish or him overestimating how long he might be able to hold out against police forces.
The idea that there are actual psychopaths who hurt people simply because they enjoy it is disturbing, but it is obviously true. I do not see why it would be so unlikely that Paddock was simply one such person, whether he had always been that way or whether something turned him into one.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Many of the native Americans who died or were displaced as a result of the European conquest had never personally conquered anything, they simply happened to be descended from people who had conquered the land earlier. Should an entire ethnic group be held responsible for the actions of some of its members, many of whom are not even members of the present generation?
Well for one thing, an award like that would have very powerful totalitarian connotations, since both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR did very similar things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_Mother
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Heroine
Closer to the modern day, Putin's Russia is also doing things like this: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/18/russia-offers-mother-heroine-medal-and-16800-for-having-10-children.html.
It is worthwhile, I think, to note that even though Putin's Russia has been trying to encourage the fertility rate to go up for many years now, the fertility rate has been recently slumping after hitting a peak around 2014: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010528/number-of-live-births-in-russia/. Perhaps not coincidentally, that slump coincides with a slump in GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=RU.
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