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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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On one hand he runs a very interesting and fun channel

Unfortunately, in my opinion they (well, I guess just really Karl at that point) stopped producing anything particularly interesting around 2019 or so. They were exploring interesting things, but they slowly stopped over time; they peaked at WWSD and then the channel broke in two. They had a few more videos on their 2020 version, but to me it came off as padding out the fact the channel was winding down (and a bit more sponsored-content-y).

I honestly find it's more just the Sinistral Rifleman show these days to try and recapture the early days of "how does thing X do in a match environment?". And that's fine, but if half your content is functionally just sponsored content I won't pay for that.

For fuck's sake, Karl, you have access to an SOT now; could you at least have an opinion about that?

could also behave like such an idiot at times puzzles me

It puzzles me that he drank the establishment propaganda on "muh oppression" considering most of his Old West stuff is a chronicle of the disaster that results when you make people with chips on their shoulders deputies in law enforcement, and that he styles himself as specifically counterculture. It's inconsistent with what I understand of that brand of Satanism in general- if one is anti-institutional-religion it naturally follows one would be anti-institutional-race and anti-institutional-sexuality but I guess that's what who/whom's for.

At least it hasn't managed to really make it into his videos, not that he even makes videos these days- though his refusal to use Odysee and/or Utreon for moral grandstanding reasons doesn't help the fact he shut himself out of being able to do what Ian's been gradually trialing with "go watch the full version of this over here".

At least Ian has the professionalism not to embarrass himself with this sort of online drama.

Ian has enough professionalism to only embarrass himself in the ways I would expect from someone trying to advance the state of the art more than his own ego.

The Azov book didn't really go over well with his Russian contacts; in particular, Max Popenker "broke up" with him after that- I would have liked to see it specifically because, if its billing was accurate in that it shows how wars are actually fought now, it would have been informative insofar as the field of modern weaponry and its use in a fight against a neer-peer adversary. (Note: this was pre-invasion.)

For fuck's sake, Karl, you have access to an SOT now; could you at least have an opinion about that?

Wait, when did that happen?

Also, re: Max Popenker and the Azov memoir thing, it's darkly funny that that happened literally like a week before Russia invaded, though it also sucks that we lost Max's book on Avtomats because of it. I wonder if that Azov guy ended up getting a publishing deal elsewhere.

That might be the one, I remember hearing that the author was a Swedish volunteer.

Wait, when did that happen?

Since Sinistral joined the channel (he posted match footage of a full-auto KP15 he made).

It would almost certainly be trivial for him to get access to proper machine guns for a video; I want to see someone seriously analyze the vz. 61 and P90, revisit that P&S collaboration where they tested ergonomics of full-power rifles and see whether or not 3-round burst really was ever a valid training tool, and maybe other stuff along those lines I'm not thinking about.

InRange has the technical capability to explore a lot of interesting stuff; Karl would rather argue on Twitter than use it.