domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
Supah_Schmendrick
2hr ago
The most famous version of this kind of attack that I can think of was the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice that left 80+ dead after a guy drove a dozen-ton small semitruck down a beachfront promenade.
Edit - whoops, sniped by @ArjinFerman
TitaniumButterfly
2hr ago
It can definitely lower your iron levels, which is usually a good thing.
TitaniumButterfly
2hr ago
Bus drivers recognize them and - oh yeah no way would violence be allowed.
But with municipal-uber, presumably access cards could be issued to people very cheaply and deactivated temporarily or permanently if abused. Sure someone could use someone else's card but then the person loaning it is putting themselves on the hook which seems fine to me. And all of this is before facial recognition.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2hr ago
Trump is supposedly pro-choice as well. It's not really relevant if the Republican majority and think tanks that select the legislation and judicial appointments for him aren't and he just goes along with whatever they want. It may very well be the case that gay marriage is in less danger from Trump than it would be from a different Republican president, but it seems unlikely to make a big difference.
SkoomaDentist
2hr ago
It looks like this classic low budget Finnish comedy skit from the 90s was really more of a documentary.
Lewis2
2hr ago
The Amish don’t believe that they are the only ones who will be saved, though. Also, perhaps unexpectedly, many of the Amish are very much into genetic testing and diversifying their gene pool. Even though they have historically been careful not to allow marriages between remotely close relatives, enough generations of marrying their fourth and fifth cousins have resulted in a noticeably higher birth defect rate.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2hr ago
Go search "Obergefell" in the text of the decision and you'll see multiple instances of asserting that sure the same arguments work just as well against contraception and gay marriage, but they pinky swear to only use them against abortion.
And if that's not strong enough evidence that the Dobbs decision threatens gay marriage, here's David French arguing it doesn't. But, more seriously, searching Dobbs and Obergefell found a news article on a recent dissent by Sotomayor on the topic in addition to multiple analysis articles pointing out that the Dobbs decision threatens those other rights.
Stellula
2hr ago
Are you thinking of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waukesha_Christmas_parade_attack?useskin=vector
I think there was a case of this in 2020, guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade.
First case that brought this tactic into "public consciousness" I'm aware of is the Nice truck attack of 2016, it triggered a bunch of copycats to the point where, for a while, any European hearing "vehicle drives into crowd" would have "oh, another Islamist terrorist attack" as his first thought.
Partially it has to do with urban design and crowdedness.
For you to really kill a lot of people you need people who either incredibly packed together or otherwised trapped in some kind of mixed use area where you can get with a large car (preferably a truck). Street festivals are a good target for this kind of thing.
Getting an automatic weapon into some sort of enclosed space where you can gun down trapped people is often easier and enables you to better target some specific group of people, making it a much more attractive option IMO.
cjet79
2hr ago
I think there was a case of this in 2020, guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade. There was also the Unite the right rally in Charlottesville where a guy drove his car into a crowd. So it does happen sometimes.
Maybe people who go on these killing rampages often want to make it a murder suicide event. Guns make the suicide part easier at the end, whereas the car murderers tend to get caught.
Mass car murder also seems like a crime of opportunity, you need the right circumstances to actually pull it off. Most sidewalks are full of hard things that will wreck a car, including up to concrete barriers that are specifically designed to stop a car. Larger vehicles are necessary. And crowds of people in a flat non barrier area that are not so dense that the vehicle will be immediately stopped, and not so sparse that they can easily see what is happening and move out of the way.
It's a messed up person in the first place that wants to commit mass murder. But I think they usually want more choice in their targets, they want to be dead afterwards, and while cars and trucks are ubiquitous they are actually more expensive than guns and ammo. There are ways to get large vehicles, like theft or working a job site with them. But those are still a little harder to pull off than just buying guns.
I think there is a steady supply of crazy and crazy mixed with the wrong meds that if we magically banned all guns in the US you'd probably see more car based killing rampages. But guns have a specific purpose and they are good at that purpose, so I think they will remain in use.
Folamh3
2hr ago
why doesn't this happen more often?
Gwern asked the same question years ago: https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror
Folamh3
2hr ago
Day 12 of NaNoWriMo, and I've just crossed the 20k mark. I'm really enjoying the whole process, I forgot how much fun it is to get into that creative flow state where the ideas are just pouring out of me.
My initial understanding of NaNoWriMo was that one had to write a complete novel of at least 50k words in the month of November. To that end, when mapping out the structure of the story in October, I'd envisioned it being made up of 5 "acts", each roughly 10k words. But of course, I quickly found that I had much more to say than that: act 1 is already 14k words and it isn't even finished yet, and at this rate a complete first draft will be more in the range of 70-80k words. Fortunately, the rules of NaNoWriMo stipulate that you can use the month to write a 50k-word novel or the first 50k words of a novel, so I'll still win the competition even if I don't have a finished first draft by December 1st.
aardvark2
2hr ago
That Greenland shark with "negligible senescence" has so slow metabolism (and correspondingly swims so slow) so after correcting for it its lifespan not meaninhfully longer than that of humans. Some parrots, however, rival human life expectancy while having faster metabolism
faceh
2hr ago
Probably a lot, if they are pursuing actual promising ideas and not spending time on crypto scam #4192.
Real question is how many people, if they weren't trying to "live life while they're young" would actually be able to switch into hardcore productivity mode for that long.
I think part of the reason Johnson is able to do such absurd things to regain youth is because he's already the type of person with the ability to commit to very hard, very uncomfortable, almost psychotically meticulous projects.
THAT'S the part that will stump most people.
My understanding is that this sort of mass killing is actually fairly common in China though targeted at schoolchildren as often as not. However my source is "a bunch of youtube videos I watched on the subject last year" so I can't be of much help there.
Particularly I remember that vehicular mass-killings are on the rise and that some schools are training their staff and equipping them with mancatcher devices (sort of polearms) to take down knife-wielding assailants.
The gist was that these attacks are being perpetrated by young men who have failed economically and want to 'get back' at kids with futures ahead of them and society in general.
How true any of this is, I don't know.
George_Costanza
2hr ago
Danger of killing yourself with a Car is very high
SerialStateLineXer
3hr ago
Some guy in China killed 35 people by driving a car around a running track.
Not that I'm complaining, but why doesn't this happen more often?
Much is made of the fact that US has more guns and many more mass shooting incidents than other wealthy nations, and this is commonly attributed to the fact that guns make it easy to kill a lot of people. But so do cars, and those are widely available in most wealthy nations.
So why is it that the US has a lot of mass shootings (yes, I know that they're a tiny percentage of total homicides), but running cars into crowds is fairly rare in countries that don't have such easy access to guns? Are Americans just especially prone to running amok? Are mass shootings a meme? Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?
I don't have any good theories; I'm just noticing my confusion.
oats_son
3hr ago
It is unusual for a Christian group to not let someone join them, since they usually believe that their way is the only path to salvation.
From what I've seen of the Amish, they could probably use some more people in the community who don't share DNA with them. But that's not realistically something people would think about. I agree with the rest of your points.
jeroboam
3hr ago
Discussed below. I think this is unlikely given that Uber has not reduced car ownership at all.
Rov_Scam
3hr ago
The impression I got from OP was that he was referring to the benefits of privately owned autonomous vehicles and not necessarily a subscription model. In that case, you can't just eliminate parking and replace it with a dropoff area. And while that may work for something like a Wal-Mart where there's a lot of space, I don't see how you'd implement it in an area like a downtown where the nearest parking structure could be a block or more away from the destination. A business district where I live has a four lane road running down the middle, and with disturbing frequency I'll be stuck in a traffic jam because an Uber driver making a pickup has effectively eliminated a travel lane. I can't imagine a situation where this becomes the usual mode of travel.
No_one
3hr ago
It is a great answer, I'll give him that.
See, you say a lot of things that are helpful, which probably explains why religion spreads. None of it seems remotely plausible or truthful to me.
Inferring a benevolent creator from this vast bloody altar is just too darn odd. And various gnostic shades of shit, where you posit an actual great deity behind an evil one. (sigh). Even worse outcomes, even more preposterous.
Do they really do no advanced filtering before donation? I guess I thought they would for some reason.
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