JTarrou
10mo ago
Rationalists have the flaw that they assume anyone will be well-meaning.
Fixed.
There are no well-meaning people, only cynics, liars and the self-deluded. Altruism is the first lie.
JTarrou
10mo ago
The same thing that causes all totalitarian regimes to collapse: becoming slightly less authoritarian. An edifice of such lies and violence cannot be maintained by politics. Dictatorships do not fall when they are most oppressive, but when they begin to liberalize too slowly for the populace. See also: France, the US.
JTarrou
10mo ago
Isn't .300 AAC a relative chonker of a round? I can't see how one can call it pistol tier even if it's subsonic.
With common subsonic rounds necessary for suppression, the ballistics are pretty comparable to the .45 ACP (or 10mm), a 220 grain projectile at 1k fps vs a 230 at 900. Of course, the downrange accuracy is much better, but in terms of power, we're in the same ballpark. You're not getting rifle damage at subsonic velocities.
I think you're a touch off base here. Yes, you can get a .308 with a ten inch barrel, but it's more regulated and it is going to be LOUD, and throw a fifteen foot fireball when you shoot it. Might as well fit a roman candle to your assassination gun. You're also going to lose all the power that would make you choose a .308 in the first place, because ten inches of barrel isn't going to get the round up to speed. Right about ten inches, a .308 round drops below the 2200 FPS mark at the muzzle, meaning you might as well use the .300 blackout because you've gimped the more powerful cartridge.
Now let's talk about the problems with .300 AAC. First, it's low power, essentially a pistol cartridge when suppressed. Second, suppressors are expensive and the legal process is lengthy. You can build or buy "solvent trap" cans, but those are on the police radar and they don't work nearly as well as proper cans. Third, even in the best case scenario, the noise is still significant and noticeable. We're talking 130 decibels roughly, and there is a phenomenon known as "first round pop", where the first shot in a cold can is louder than the subsequent ones. It's not hearing safe, the "whisper quiet" is more likely noticeably louder than a stadium rock concert or a jet aircraft.
Take it from someone who has a built-out suppressed.300, I wouldn't recommend it for an assassination.
FC has it mostly covered, but I thought I'd weigh in about one specific little bit, the "high powered rifle and scope". People who don't shoot guns often think hitting a target at even close distance is easy, but it is anything but. The technical skill needed is relatively high and unlikely to be present in teh sort of people who need to take out opposing drug gangs. But let's say you got a guy who grew up rural and knows how to hunt.
Ok, you go buy a hunting rifle. If you get a scope package, this whole thing becomes harder because the scopes most companies sell on their guns are trash. Or you do your research, buy a decent rifle, get some recommendations for scopes, get good rings etc. Already this is requiring a fair bit of knowledge and around a thousand dollars. You get it all put together and you go zero the gun. Here you need a range of some distance, and at least twenty rounds of ammunition, maybe more. Not a lot of shooting ranges hood adjacent, so you drive out to the country to go to a commercial range and try to keep the staff from reporting on the thugged out hood rats now practicing their marksmanship with brand new rifles. You get zeroed. Then you pack all your shit back to the hood. We're going to assume short ranges of maybe thirty to a couple hundred yards, but if you want to set up "on rooftops", the height of the roof becomes very important. Shooting at steep angles is difficult, and requires specific training to do well. It changes the range math. But let's say the range is short enough it doesn't matter.
So you pop the guy, and now there's a .308 (or comparable caliber) slug somewhere and not many people get killed with long guns. Not a lot of long guns sold in a city. Not a lot of bangers with a bolt gun. You could destroy the gun, but would you rather destroy a two hundred dollar pistol or a thousand dollar rifle? It's hard to hide, the thing is four feet long. If you use it again, the police are going to link those crimes very early. Multiple bangers ambushed with a hunting rifle? A sniper serial killer? Gonna attract attention. Unlike handguns, some 70% of which are the same caliber, hunting rifles come in a staggering array of chamberings, making whichever one you choose relatively much easier to find even without a ballistic match.
Or, you could hand a fourteen-year-old a stolen pistol that retailed for $200 and have him walk up on a motherfucker.
JTarrou
10mo ago
My take is that SJ is just a product of the temporary cultural ascendancy of the clerisy. It will end the day it finally provokes the war it is working toward. Win or lose, social justice is incapable of fighting a real war as opposed to a cultural one. It will either become the fascism it claims to fight, or it will lose to its own creation.
The light at the end of the tunnel is a bloodbath.
JTarrou
10mo ago
Maybe more modern designs account for this? Or are you using dummy training rounds?
Yes. Most modern guns can be dry fired no problem. If you're very worried about your striker or have an older/rimfire gun, a snap cap will fix you right up.
JTarrou
11mo ago
A lot of artists/authors in the colonial period were famous for running off to Morocco or some such place where pederasty was winked at. Borroughs, etc. Some overlap with gay.
JTarrou
11mo ago
gay people
Gay people or gay men?
prominent intellectuals and artists.
Aside from the problem of defining such a group, given the rank bigotry of the class of people who decide who is and is not an "intellectual" and "artist", could be selection effects as well. I suspect if you took academia's word for it, a disproportionate number of "the most prominent artists and intellectuals" would be POC as well. And communists.
JTarrou
11mo ago
The short answer is that greeks arguably don't exist in the bronze age. The language group moves down from the black sea mid-bronze age, shore hopping colonies into the Aegean onto Greece proper, but there were already people there. We can trace the language a bit, and we can trace the archaeology of various durable goods and burial practices, but we don't have a cohesive group of people we can call "greek" until perhaps late in the Bronze age, but even that is wobbly. It is not until after the Bronze Age Collapse that we get clear evidence of classical greeks (even then, half or more were in the Balkans, Turkey, Italy, etc.). Their myths (Troy, etc.) take place during the Bronze age, but at that stage, there weren't many of these people in Greece itself. At least parts of the greek migration south may have been the "Sea Peoples" of the collapse. There is a theory that the biblical Philistines were a proto-greek invasion/migration that was turned back by the Egyptians and settled in one of their hinterlands (the Gaza strip).
JTarrou
11mo ago
So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"
The minimum necessary for victory.
JTarrou
11mo ago
Not necessarily. The main states seem not to have done much sailing of their own, possible a maritime trading empire could be relatively safe to raid and slip off into the Med. One wonders exactly how peaceful Tyre was, for instance.
JTarrou
11mo ago
I'm guessing these "soft traders" were more similar to the Vikings, Portuguese circa 1600, or the East India Company. One of the main things they traded was weapons and armor.
We know very little directly, but what we do have from the bronze age in terms of written inscriptions is mostly kings boasting about how many thousands of people they killed in various inventive and horrifying ways, how many they carried off into slavery and how many they sacrificed to various deities. This was the propaganda being put out to impress the populace, which says something about the public morals of the day. And the fact that there were several empires maintaining major standing armies, all our evidence points to a time of significant, regular state violence on a mass scale. Many of our remaining bronze age-era human remains were killed, and many of the ones that weren't have healed wounds from repeated violence. Even Pharaohs were sometimes bashed in the head with a mace.
It may be the case that in the smaller societies which left much less historical footprint, violence was less than in settled cities. No way to really tell for sure. What we have says that these people were far more violent than most modern states before the collapse. Then things got worse.
A sample inscription from an Assyrian king:
In strife and conflict I besieged and conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms and hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of the heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city.
JTarrou
11mo ago
I find it hard to believe only the Allied forces had that capability.
Well, believe it, because in practical terms, only they did at that scale. The germans attempted something similar with the Blitz in London, but it came nowhere near the heights of the Allied bombings late in the war. Partly due to doctrine, partly due to better technology, partly due to the fact that by then the Luftwaffe was on the defensive and badly worn down. In greater part because the long war had hardened feelings and the Blitz/Pearl Harbor had Britain and the US spoiling for revenge.
It is my contention that the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo would not have been done or at least repeated if the Axis powers were witholding a similar threat. Germany bombed London when the Brits had no prayer of bombing Germany. Then, a couple years later, the Brits bombed Germany when they were unable to respond in kind. A few V2 rockets were all the germans could manage by then.
JTarrou
11mo ago
But we did use nukes. The difference being both sides had chemical weapons.
JTarrou
11mo ago
I doubt you can extrapolate much from a year or so of missed recruiting goals in a strong job market.
But there might be a kernel of truth that the sort of people who generally staff the pointy bits of the military are increasingly skeptical of their role as the enforcers of a world order that is explicitly hostile to them, their families, states, politics and demographics.
JTarrou
11mo ago
Is the bureaucracy with all its political biases the best place to make that call?
JTarrou
11mo ago
People don't change. Despite every generation thinking they're the first ones to ever apply intelligence and morality to the problems of the world, they are not. The people who live today are the exact moral equivalents of Salem, or Mao's China, or interwar Germany. They're just pushing their bigotries, hatreds and moral panics along different channels. It has always been this way and always will be. We cannot predict which issues will rise to salience, but we can predict with absolute certainty the psychology and behavior of the people in aggregate.
I believe the current mishmash is a religious void being filled by various cults, one of which will eventually rise to prominence and challenge "traditional" (whatever that means) christianity for the default belief system of western civilization. The "In this house, we believe...." posters are the early adherents.
Re-read your Hoffer if you want to know how it's going to play out.
JTarrou
11mo ago
Lot of projection going on here.
Perhaps you'd like to hear it from the Hamas spokesman in an official interview with the NYT?
I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times
From a member of their Politburo (an apt name, I might add)
“Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” said Mr. al-Hayya, the politburo member. “Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.”
“This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,” he added. “It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”
JTarrou
11mo ago
I would say the stereotype is broadly correct, though individuals vary wildly. I am a far less sexually adventurous person than most of my compadres, but my experience there both psychologically and training/observation of technique did vastly increase my success and dabbling in casual sexual encounters, but "vastly increase" is a nice way of saying "started from shit". Frankly, that period of my life wasn't particularly fulfilling sexually, I much prefer longer term relationships.
This will be offset in Ukraine's case by the attrition rate. Many of those violent young men are or will be dead. The average age of Ukrainian soldiers is already north of 40, I believe, so the young must not be so numerous.
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