domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
Normal people don’t usually make memes about murdering their political enemies.
ffbtaw2
1hr ago
I still think the risk of ending up permanently maimed but alive is significantly higher than from taking a bullet to the brain or a hail of bullets.
jkf
1hr ago
You might be thinking of Darrell Edward Brooks Jr -- you will note that there is not a picture of him in the Wikipedia article, and For Some Reason nobody has heard nearly as much about him deliberately driving his own SUV into a Christmas parade and killing several as they have about the Charlottesville guy. (who killed one person in a hostile crowd of counterprotestors, arguably semi-accidentally)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Turn off airbags, unfasten seatbelts, enjoy.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
I would guess they’re into light rail and even buses.
jkf
2hr ago
I've got a framework that has served me well in which:
- cultural generations are 20 years
- the first and last 5 years of these generations exhibit notable similarities with the adjacent generation, but not quite to the point where they may be usefully considered a separate identity (Xennials = not a thing)
So:
- people born from 1940-1945 are most like standard boomers, but depending on their specific peer group may have more of a pre-war outlook
- people born from 1955-1965 are on a spectrum from boomer --> X outlook (basically optimism --> feeling shafted); 1960 is a good inflection point
- similarly, 1975-1980 exhibits a clear X outlook, and as you move past 1980 you people become much more earnest and hipsterish -- by 1985 you are into core timid millenials by and large.
My test for this hypothesis will be "is 2005-2015 core Zoomer, and what are these people like" -- I've got one in the house, and he & his peers do seem to have a different outlook from his older cousins so far -- COVID will clearly be a defining event for these guys, but it remains to be seen exactly how.
yofuckreddit
2hr ago
Do they really do no advanced filtering before donation? I guess I thought they would for some reason.
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
3hr 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
3hr ago
why doesn't this happen more often?
Gwern asked the same question years ago: https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror
Folamh3
3hr 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.
It's hilarious how some websites light up his picture as much as possible in an attempt to make him seem white.
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