JTarrou
8d ago
Some amount of the variance must necessarily be the heightened definitions of bad behavior when your dating pool is feminists and other man-haters.
"Sexual assault" is one of those fun terms that depending on strict definitions may be literally any behavior.
Probably easier to get caught "sinning" when you're banging nuns.
JTarrou
26d ago
Yeah, it's a fun feeling, but I don't generally want surprise to be in the mix when my gun works properly.
Now imagine you loaded your carry piece a month ago, you've been riding through the west since then, and you need to use it. What are the odds of that first cylinder going off, you think?
I imagine most gunfights were decided by who found a working load first, rather than speed of draw.
JTarrou
28d ago
I love you guy, and I get the appeal. Did a bit of trapper-convention cap and ball a few times. But fundamentally, it's a long time to load the thing, not much to empty it and an hour to clean it.
There is something to it, but it's not how I approach and think about firearms. You know, different people are into different cars for different reasons. Classic collectors and rat rodders want different things out of their machines. Guns to me are just the gear of a martial art. I do appreciate guns aesthetically as functional machines, and a lot of those old guns are pretty. In fact, those old .44 Armys of mine might be my prettiest guns. Everything else is basic bitch ARs and Glocks, plus a couple hunting guns.
If you like taking your time and shoot for sentimental reasons, you might take OP up on it. Some other positives, it's relatively cheap, recoil is generally mild (unless you're getting into buffalo guns), and those old guns are surprisingly accurate and some have quite good triggers. Cons, they're heavy, awkward, messy to load, ergonomics suck, sights are appalling, wildly unreliable by modern standards. It feels just a touch like alchemy getting the whole contraption to go off. 2/10, haven't shot my .44s in years. And just wait until you get to adjust the rear sight!
But, if we're using the car metaphor, I'm an amateur competitive driver, not a classic collector or a hot rodder.
JTarrou
1mo ago
My grandfather used to say that there's no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care about getting the credit.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Alternate headline "Meta renames its DEI program". No one will be fired, they will all be moved to new departments with boring names that continue to do the exact same thing. They'll be working hard to use technology, algorithms and AI to advantage/disadvantage whatever group their slack channel demands for the rest of their careers.
JTarrou
1mo ago
He's a censorious worm in league with the intelligence agencies.
Now that the vibe shift is making that seem like less of a good thing, he's backpedaling.
Your charity runs dangerously close to gullibility.
JTarrou
1mo ago
No, I'm not. And no, they're not.
The red wolf's taxonomic classification as being a separate species has been contentious for nearly a century, being classified either as a subspecies of the gray wolf Canis lupus rufus,[9][10] or a coywolf (a genetic admixture of wolf and coyote)
JTarrou
1mo ago
Anyone remember Red Wolves?
Pepperidge Farm remembers! Critically endangered, then died out, then reappeared because it's just what happens when a wolf fucks a coyote.
I was terrified as a kid when Ranger Rick magazine lead me to believe that their impending extinction would extend to all life on earth via the acid rain!
Yes, I get that.
But he isn't paying people what the market will bear for those skills. The only way he can keep workers is if they're legally tied to his company after they are trained.
So he isn't paying market rate for those jobs. That's how people can leave for more money. If he were paying the going rate, his newly trained ungrateful american workers would have nowhere to go.
Those other companies apparently value those workers much higher than OP does.
JTarrou
1mo ago
But how can they just leave if they're being paid market wage for those skills?
Wouldn't it be difficult to find work at a significantly higher wage?
JTarrou
1mo ago
Now they've released some of his statements, he referred to the plan as a "stunt".
I'm feeling good about the guess.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Nah mate. He just bought high-grade fireworks. Any cheese-dick E-4 could have rigged a better IED. Reads like a protest immolation more than a terrorist attack.
The "inferior substitutes available to civilians" include gunpowder. And rigging ad hoc explosives really is Green Beret bread and butter.
JTarrou
1mo ago
You're saying H1b allows you to chronically underpay native labor such that it instantly leaves the minute it can?
Might not be the argument to float here.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Nothing is fair except double-blind lottery by SAT cutoff. It would be interesting to see the student mix that creates, but it won't happen.
JTarrou
2mo ago
You're putting way too much thought into it. Social sciences are neither social nor sciences, they are sinecures for left-wing nutbags and anyone who funds it is funding their own opposition. It's politically ridiculous to spend tax money on hyper-partisan fake fields that died in the Replication Crisis, but no one has noticed.
Defund all this shit. You'd be shocked how little of the university system you need to train the very few jobs that might actually require a college degree. It's all a bloated jobs program for shitbird lefties who never want to leave the classroom, and a class barrier for the ruling elite. For the working class, it's debt slavery as the price of admission to the middle class.
JTarrou
2mo ago
Clinton was so charming that he probably could have run on a bizarro world mirror image of the package he actually ran under (protectionist, openly pro-gay marriage, doveish on the international stage etc., unlike the real Clinton) and would still have won a first or even second term.
I think this is off base. Clinton was charming, but he won his first term with a plurality because Ross Perot won 19% of the vote. And immediately he had to govern far to teh right of how he campaigned. All that "Triangulation" stuff was Clinton being a shrewd political operator and figuring out that the country didn't want his ideas, they just wanted his face and interpretations on a Republican policy platform.
The Democrats got smashed in the '94 elections (where Joe Scarborough got his start as a firebreathing Republican). Clinton made political hay out of the defeat, and it won him re-election. Welfare reform, the '94 crime bill (notice that year?) etc.
But no, there is no way in hell the people who were in power and voting back in the '90s were in any mood for very liberal policies except perhaps a narrow range of gay rights and general fun-having. If you think liberal criminal justice policies were popular the year murder peaked in the US, you didn't observe it up close.
We'd just won the Cold War, had the Gulf War and no one wanted the stern Republican daddies in charge anymore, but they certainly didn't want the policies of the seventies back. And marginal Republicans weren't as worried about the existential nuclear threat and ideological superstruggle anymore, and were willing to vote on other issues. Hence, Perot picked up a lot of people from both sides who were looking for an option to the old ideologies. Clinton was the one who wound up seizing the moment to change the policies and interest groups of the left-wing coalition, which is what is being reacted to with the current re-alignment.
Only this time it is Trump who is doing the moving around, liberalizing the old Republican doctrines that no longer serve their new political base.
JTarrou
2mo ago
The wages of success are that people with no physical wants often find life unfulfilling. Some subset of those people will externalize that inner psychic pain as various vague illnesses or socially-advantageous identities, some will choose eschatological fantasies to give their nihilism meaning.
Global Warming hysteria is just christian The End Is Nigh catastrophizing with extra steps. The bitter middle-class spinsters that would have become religious nuns five hundred years ago are now "transmasc". The Jain invocation that the most moral thing you could do is starve yourself to death without producing children or harming even a gnat is funneled into dietary restrictions, assisted suicide, and various anti-fun groups. It's all luxury beliefs, and it's why poorer countries are often much happier than richer ones. Struggle gives meaning, need creates community, which gives meaning. Only in rich countries are we comfortable enough to pretend a disability.
Underlying it all is a fundamentally pessimistic worldview that sees existence as not being worth the trouble. "That burden my father gave to me, but which I gave to no man". You see this on the internet with people talking about how they didn't ask to be born etc.
Camus said the fundamental philosophical question was whether or not to keep living. I tend to agree.
JTarrou
2mo ago
Nonono, not even that.
You still aren't even close to in the vicinity of the ballpark where cynicism once played.
JTarrou
3mo ago
Now that Twitter is 50/50 left and right, and the left isn't allowed free hand to censor, it's an "echo chamber".
Seems like there's something being missed.
JTarrou
3mo ago
Let me offer my own theory:
Trump made himself Hitler (in the minds of the left) to credibly signal to the people that he was on their side. He got the political equivalent of a face tattoo. Every hysterical denunciation, every spurious legal charge, every desperate ploy by the intelligence agencies only strengthen his position. The people want to know he won't abandon them like every other Republican. So he proves it to them, by becoming the most hated man in the country. Win or lose, Trump isn't going back.
That's what he does that DeSantis, and Cruz and Rubio and all the rest can't. Reject the Beltway, become a pariah among "polite" society. He is playing the political heel, and in so doing, cements his voting base. This is why all the attacks on him seem to make him stronger, because they do. It's all just more evidence that they fear Trump in a way that they do not fear anyone else. And that's what the party actually wants.
Oh man. Unnamed people talked about ideas?
Benjamin, get the musket.
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