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DarkCrawler posted:There is absolutely no focus on leftist gun owners outside the frame of these forums, and most people don't even know they exist. And for all the talk of leftist preparation for threats, leftist community gun ownership and the upcoming civil war, it is not like leftists are really doing that stuff either. Right-wing gun.owners are, which honestly mostly makes me wonder why leftists aren't, but they aren't. You go to a lot of American protests? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 28, 2022 19:08
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Fister Roboto posted:Usually what people mean with "better things aren't possible" is the kind of capitalist realism of "this is the best possible world, so just lie down and accept the status quo". That's different from accurately pointing out that our current form of government cannot deliver the changes that we need, and more radical action will be necessary to achieve them. Where does the crowd who say "we have to wait for old people with incurable brainworms to die before we can have better things" fall? They basically say better things aren't possible now, but eventually will be in some unknown and constantly changing future date.
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May 28, 2022 19:09
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I've been involved with leftist stuff, gun stuff, and leftist gun stuff locally for years now and I've literally never had someone whose first concern was the otherthrow of the government or whatever. Most people haven't even actually read theory yet at the point they're considering getting a firearm for self defense. Most are LGBT in my experience, at least in our local chapter, and used to be as anti-guns as anybody calling for whatever the next piecemeal and suffocated by process bill is next up in the pipeline to get voted down. Many believe, correctly in my opinion, that people who define themselves by causing violence to others are on an uncontested path to complete control and that these people view them as prey, and believe that terrorizing them is their right and one of the spoils of their impending victory. Most have also spent most or all of their adult lives in the End of History "the job of the Senate is to stop stuff from happening, and all progress must run through the Senate" philosophy being hammered into our heads endlessly and, surprise surprise, they've internalized it because it's obviously (in part) true. So in the absence of anybody near the levers of power willing to take any action on their behalf, the choices become capitulation or evolving to kick the predator really hard. There is also a Liberal Gun Club that I am pretty sure even predates the SRA but I have no idea what their whole deal is. Online rhetoric tends to be completely unhinged as a rule when compared with like, real life, especially on this subject. The NRA is a shell of its former self and the SRA is harmless, and so anarchist in its organizing philosophy that it is literally incapable of doing some revolution people are worried they're spinning up for. I don't think a guy who does custodial work overnight and got a CC permit and LCP because reactionary dominionists who have declared them to be pedos and subhuman are taking considerable power in their city or state is on par with the Bundies and anybody who'd tell them as much is going to be immediately dismissed as someone who just wants to hope this all goes away on its own. If anybody is actually interested in getting gun control passed, arming leftists and minorities is a great way to get that done and should be encouraging this sort of thing, especially since anything passed to crack down on that isn't going to apply to any of the thousand kinds of cops in this country. It wouldn't actually FIX anything but it'd be solid progress that could be pointed to, the lack of which seems to be driving people insane from the ever building anxiety. The good news is that as soon as the center does the job it has claimed is its top priority, a lot of the left will happily disarm.
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May 28, 2022 19:10
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Gumball Gumption posted:You go to a lot of American protests? There is this thing called cameras and the internet, you should check them out. If you have reports of mass protests of armed leftists, I might have missed them, but I don't recall more then individual armed people even at the height of BLM.
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May 28, 2022 19:20
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Epic High Five posted:If anybody is actually interested in getting gun control passed, arming leftists and minorities is a great way to get that done and should be encouraging this sort of thing, especially since anything passed to crack down on that isn't going to apply to any of the thousand kinds of cops in this country. It wouldn't actually FIX anything but it'd be solid progress that could be pointed to, the lack of which seems to be driving people insane from the ever building anxiety. The good news is that as soon as the center does the job it has claimed is its top priority, a lot of the left will happily disarm. It should be noticed that anytime gun control legislations was passed it was when leftists and minorities publicly armed themselves. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act Which is why it is smart to push from both ends (a consistent reading of the second amendment / disarming of the police).
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May 28, 2022 19:22
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Total Party Kill posted:This is just as silly. You're not gonna be in a Jurassic Park scene as Jeff Goldblum shouts MUST GO FASTER The average cop is a fat loser bully that will only 10 v 1 an unarmed black child, and when faced with a single 18 year old with a rifle will hide in a corner with his buddies pissing on each other until an entire SWAT team shows up. And the SWAT team isn't particularly competent either. Where the gently caress do you imagine these high speed low drag operators are coming at you from?
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May 28, 2022 19:23
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Mulva posted:The average cop is a fat loser bully that will only 10 v 1 an unarmed black child, and when faced with a single 18 year old with a rifle will hide in a corner with his buddies pissing on each other until an entire SWAT team shows up. And the SWAT team isn't particularly competent either. ...in a guerilla war? Probably the U.S. Army/Air Force. I mean I expect things go SS pretty quickly in hypothetical fascist takeover. Fat cops can still hang out in the cities.
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May 28, 2022 19:26
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Not to be dismissive of anti-gun arguments but 1. Leftists movements in the US have successfully used the display of weaponry AS WELL AS OTHER TACTICS, to fend off cops* and 2. While individual or even multiple groups "rebelling" against the US can be easily crushed, the USG is loathe to act do so (unless they are left-wing and thus demonized in the media). 3. A more widespread rebellion, especially a long-term one, would strain local and federal authorities' resources even with military support (which likely would not happen or would break down faster than you think). That's not even with local authorities or portions of the rank-and-file of the military refusing to act or even joining in. Think of the national guard deployed on the border in Texas. Think of anti-abortion terrorist groups continuing to be allowed exist, function and act. Think of how feckless the civilian governments and authorities are reacting to such violence, stochastic or otherwise. Think of how such violence is often mislabelled as lone-wolf or as leftist/anarchist. *until the feds get involved and leaders start being outright assassinated with the help of local authorities a la Fred Hampton. This is not even getting into how much easier it is to make and disperse wrqponry these days and even the most stringent laws can be circumvented amd remain largely unenforced by authorities, local and otherwise. Think of how bad the ATF is at it's job.
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May 28, 2022 19:36
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I would like to point out that places like the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch make decent arguments for leftists and marginalized communities having guns as a collective. I do support full ban of guns in general, but there’s not really going be a safety break there until you can get them out of the hands of the supremacist militias. Opening Arguments made a point about repealing liability protection from gun manufacturers and stores which would be a good step in the direction of getting some people to start self-regulating even if we can’t get full gun control passed.
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May 28, 2022 19:38
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:It should be noticed that anytime gun control legislations was passed it was when leftists and minorities publicly armed themselves. The Mulford act specifically as it relates to this is a very complicated and mixed bag, it's not what I would consider to be a victory if only because it was Reagan and NRA approved and so included plenty of loopholes to ensure the right sort of people could still get the guns they wanted. So much of this involves things that are not current events and with so much more horror re: guns looming in the near future, I think it's getting to the point where a dedicated thread would be best for this subject. If anybody would like to spin one up I'd be happy to reward them with a forums upgrade. I like this discussion despite wishing people wouldn't treat this as ideological and righteous combat with their posting enemies, but it's really starting to feel like it's outgrowing this space
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May 28, 2022 19:38
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In some rare good news, it turns out that one of my favorite politicians, Danica Roem, had her Twitter account hacked and that's why her account was spamming NFT poo poo all last night and not that she suddenly converted to being a crypto-gal
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May 28, 2022 19:39
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Getting a bit ranty but I forgot to mention that governments, local authorities, the media and usually white suburban middle to upper class individuals being far more concerned with gangs that do not impact their lives, vaguely left protestors and "antifa." Most antifa are actually just regular local people who want to stop far-right groups from attacking people in and destroying their neighborhoods. They realize the cops often don't help and need to protect their identities because they WILL be targetted. But drat they are a scary bugaboo used to equivocate and scare people. A good gun law would be federally preventing the gun show loophole and actually enforcing the straw purchase rules. That would help with "gang violence" and certain actors from obtaining guns but lol
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May 28, 2022 19:56
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DarkCrawler posted:...in a guerilla war? Probably the U.S. Army/Air Force. I mean I expect things go SS pretty quickly in hypothetical fascist takeover. Fat cops can still hang out in the cities. There aren't enough soldiers to cover the United States. They aren't going to have enough drones and helicopters to lock poo poo down, and they could only come close by pulling literally every single overseas soldier we have. Even then that gets you.....maybe 3 or 4 of your more contentious states? Maybe? Also they are super loving obvious. If you learned nothing from the last 20 years of military involvement in the Middle East it's that an actual occupation of hostile territory is loving miserable and challenging, and we didn't even do that good a job at it. So yeah, there is not going to be some omniscient fascist army putting boots to the neck of every soul in the United States. We aren't talented enough to pull that off. Also the usefulness of things like tanks and artillery is practically nil in a situation like that. Yeah, the military could just level your house from a hundred miles away. Who the gently caress are you that they'd bother? The point at which they know that you are a problem is the point at which you already did something, and if that happens here's a protip: Don't go home again. I know the site has plenty of young'uns, and it was a little before my time too, but the only reason Ronald Reagan wasn't taken out by a loving rando that liked jacking it to Jodie Foster is dumb luck. That's it. Hinckley had no particular training in....anything to speak of, no real plan, he just sort of walked up and started blasting [With a dinky little .22 revolver] and.....that was about all it took. The forces that you imagine arrayed against you are just as stupid and incompetent as you are, and they die just the same.
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May 28, 2022 20:01
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DarkCrawler posted:There is this thing called cameras and the internet, you should check them out. If you have reports of mass protests of armed leftists, I might have missed them, but I don't recall more then individual armed people even at the height of BLM. There was the whole NFAC protests. But, predictably, it ended up with fellow protesters getting shot due to an accidental discharge: https://abcnews.go.com/US/members-armed-militia-shot-breonna-taylor-protest/story?id=71990031 E: virtualboyCOLOR posted:It should be noticed that anytime gun control legislations was passed it was when leftists and minorities publicly armed themselves. This is 100% false. Obviously, some gun control legislation has been passed due to minorities publicly arming themselves. But lots of gun control legislation has been passed outside of that context too. Easy example: federal assault weapons ban of 1994 Kalit fucked around with this message at 20:22 on May 28, 2022 |
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May 28, 2022 20:07
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Herstory Begins Now posted:my point in raising those is look at who is dying because of the current gun laws. See anything in common? Its not *just* the current gun laws that are causing them to die though. Would those people be dying like that if they has guns and weren't fighting over limited resources due to being piled into ghettos? People are approaching all of this mutually exclusively. Multiple things can be happening at once. Guns can be protecting black neighborhoods from white nationalists going in and intimidating them with guns in open carry areas, while at the same time be killing deeper ghetto dwelling black people fighting over resources for instance. Everything in this conversation has nuance and some give and take on how it can be handled, especially with hundreds of millions of guns already out there. My only stance is that something like "banning AR15s" is silly and counterproductive and solves absolutely nothing. People would just move on to the SCAR platform or any number of infinite other semi-automatic rifles, and if you banned those, it becomes glocks or infinite other semi auto handguns (which are a much bigger problem than ARs). Hearing politicians with that silly posturing just makes them look out of touch and doesn't help anything.
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May 28, 2022 20:34
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Hello. I request anyone who has specialized knowledgeable about gun control (history, legal issues, other countries' policies, etc), or a particular interest in it, to please PM me.
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May 28, 2022 20:34
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Rigel posted:Where does the crowd who say "we have to wait for old people with incurable brainworms to die before we can have better things" fall? They basically say better things aren't possible now, but eventually will be in some unknown and constantly changing future date. It's disavowal of their own personal need to engage in action and/or a refusal to confront their own lack of agency Basically a reheated demographics as destiny argument, and completely fails to engage with the fact that these old fucks became the dominant political force not out of happenstance, but because the were favored by capital
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May 28, 2022 20:36
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Mulva posted:The average cop is a fat loser bully that will only 10 v 1 an unarmed black child, and when faced with a single 18 year old with a rifle will hide in a corner with his buddies pissing on each other until an entire SWAT team shows up. And the SWAT team isn't particularly competent either. Even today. This day. Have you watched police chases? People don't just park inside an auto body shop and come two seconds later with a new coat of paint to confuse the cops. This isn't GTA. They do, can, and will run your car off the road, lay down spike traps, follow you from the sky and radio your every move to people on the ground
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May 28, 2022 20:37
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Mulva posted:There aren't enough soldiers to cover the United States. They aren't going to have enough drones and helicopters to lock poo poo down, and they could only come close by pulling literally every single overseas soldier we have. Even then that gets you.....maybe 3 or 4 of your more contentious states? Maybe? Also they are super loving obvious. If you learned nothing from the last 20 years of military involvement in the Middle East it's that an actual occupation of hostile territory is loving miserable and challenging, and we didn't even do that good a job at it. This is literal pure fantasy. You will die. When the United States has lost, like Afghanistan, it has lost 3000 troops, and opposing side lost hundreds of thousands. The casualty numbers are equally whack and completely out of proportion. in Iraq and Vietnam and Somalia. Just because the US military behemoth fails to achieve all its goals doesn't mean the irregulars somehow "win". This is freeper level gun fantasy and in reality you will eat the bushmaster cannon of off a Bradley that sees you on the thermal imager, or you catch a bomb from a drone. Jesus.
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May 28, 2022 20:38
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To reiterate, I believe that the coherent argument about leftist gun ownership states that it provides protection from non-state actors and violent reactionaries, and holds no pretensions about the ability to resist the full might of the state.
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May 28, 2022 20:42
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Total Party Kill posted:They will have helicopters, drones, night vision, and infrared. You won't lose them in a car chase, you won't lose them in the woods, you won't disappear in the sewer system. You will be dead and your guns will be in their hands. Are they armored military helicopters or civilian helocopters?
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May 28, 2022 20:43
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Calibanibal posted:Are they armored military helicopters or civilian helocopters? Yes (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 28, 2022 20:44
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:It should be noticed that anytime gun control legislations was passed it was when leftists and minorities publicly armed themselves. That's a common argument, but I wouldn't really say it holds up - it commits the sin of haphazardly applying modern political views to historical events without fully understanding the context of those events. For much of the 20th century, gun politics was very different from how it is now. The powerful pro-gun movement we know of today only really emerged in the 1970s, more or less coinciding with the larger conservative realignment around that period. Before then, even the NRA was happy to support gun control, and actively supported it in the 1930s. As late as the Gun Control Act of 1968 (which passed the Senate with a supermajority vote, 70-17), the NRA had only tepid opposition, as it was still mostly concerned with protecting hunters and sports shooters. It was only in the late 70s in that it was taken over by hardliners and began to pursue the idea of totally unrestricted rights to private gun ownership. While gun control legislation was still typically spurred by prominent instances of violence, it's flat-out false that this was exclusively due to leftist violence. For example, the GCA of 1968 was spurred by the assassinations of JFK and MLK, among other things. And the gun control laws of the 1930s were a response to the escalating violence of organized crime. Mulva posted:There aren't enough soldiers to cover the United States. They aren't going to have enough drones and helicopters to lock poo poo down, and they could only come close by pulling literally every single overseas soldier we have. Even then that gets you.....maybe 3 or 4 of your more contentious states? Maybe? Also they are super loving obvious. If you learned nothing from the last 20 years of military involvement in the Middle East it's that an actual occupation of hostile territory is loving miserable and challenging, and we didn't even do that good a job at it. While you're right that the US doesn't have the capability to enforce control over a distant hostile populace that hates it, I think you're vastly overestimating the size of any hypothetical leftist resistance in the US if you think comparisons to colonial occupations are even remotely meaningful.
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May 28, 2022 20:45
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Yeah it was the Mulford Act Reagan signed in California that was directly in response to the Black Panthers, because he got scared of black people open carrying and demonstrating. Then when guns became a wedge issue in the 70s, the NRA straight lifted the Black Panthers community protection/open carry rhetoric. The federal stuff was more due to assassinations.
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May 28, 2022 20:50
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A big flaming stink posted:To reiterate, I believe that the coherent argument about leftist gun ownership states that it provides protection from non-state actors and violent reactionaries, and holds no pretensions about the ability to resist the full might of the state. I understand that point more than the "we need to fight the government" stuff but the question there becomes... Why does anything we know about the usefulness of guns in self defense suddenly change because it is someone left leaning with a gun? Guns are provably more likely to be used by a child to kill themselves or someone else than to stop a violent crime, and extremely more likely to be used in suicide. Having a genuine fear instead of Fox-stoked paranoia doesn't mean you're different. The myth of a "Good Guy With A Gun" doesn't suddenly become real because it isn't a right wing nut saying it. I stress this because it isn't just a case of "Well, having a gun is better than nothing." Having a gun is a danger to yourself and your family just by existing and considerably more so if you have a gun in a position where you can access it quickly in the event of a violent crime. There is no particular reason to believe that the lives saved by a Good Leftist With A Gun would outnumber the number of people who take their own life or children who kill themselves by accident or even the owner themselves making some horrible mistake. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 20:57 on May 28, 2022 |
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May 28, 2022 20:53
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ImpAtom posted:I understand that point more than the "we need to fight the government" stuff but the question there becomes... Right, as I have said before, there are costs that come with gun ownership that must be carefully weighed. My hope is that by using community organizing as a foundation these costs can be alleviated, but I freely admit this easily could be cope on my part I also think there is nuance to be had when vulnerable groups resort to gun ownership because of genuine fears based in reality of becoming a target by reactionaries. I'm sure you can easily see that telling them they shouldn't own guns because they will be victimized regardless is, uh, not the most persuasive argument, yeah? A big flaming stink fucked around with this message at 21:00 on May 28, 2022 |
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May 28, 2022 20:57
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ImpAtom posted:I understand that point more than the "we need to fight the government" stuff but the question there becomes... The part that isn't or really can't be measured is aversion. Knowing someone may be armed creates aversion to trying to take advantage of them. This is why all my prior generations were armed - being black and in the deep South, they always wanted to make white people wary of trying stuff on them in their homes and being able to at least attempt to defend themselves. Knowing the black community was armed was an aversion in cases to drunk racists pulling crap. It's also the logic that the best gun for home defense is a shotgun, not for killing anyone, but hearing it cocked is a recognizable sound that can make someone retreat. The vast majority of gun violence, and what should really be focused on is handguns. Most gun deaths are suicides, by far, although they are not as headline grabbing as mass shootings. Most gun suicides are probably averted if you didn't have something that could just be done on a whim. It's a lot harder and takes thought to do the same with a rifle or shotgun, but the immediacy or handguns is the biggest problem.
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May 28, 2022 21:04
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Any one really serious about resisting a state wouldn’t be into guns, I think they’d be into drones. Edit : based on some of the things happening in Ukraine.
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May 28, 2022 21:04
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No resistance against the state power will be fought with legally procured weapons.
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May 28, 2022 21:06
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A big flaming stink posted:Right, as I have said before, there are costs that come with gun ownership that must be carefully weighed. My hope is that by using community organizing as a foundation these costs can be alleviated, but I freely admit this easily could be cope on my part I absolutely am 100% in favor of any and all community organization dedicated to helping out people nearby and doing what you can to support them, but I think that runs into the issue that if you have that support structure and such your actual odds of needing guns in a non-Government Deathsquad situation go massively down. That's part of why these things are so important. This isn't to blame Mental Illness because I know that's a lovely thing, but an invasion of Proud Boys is way more unlikely in a unified and well-supported community guns or no guns. A big flaming stink posted:I also think there is nuance to be had when vulnerable groups resort to gun ownership because of genuine fears based in reality of becoming a target by reactionaries. I'm sure you can easily see that telling them they shouldn't own guns because they will be victimized regardless is, uh, not the most persuasive argument, yeah? I don't think it is "you don't need guns because you will be victimized regardless." I think it is "Having a gun is actually a poor method of self-defense and if you focus on it or think it protects you then you may be more likely to investigate other methods or more willing to put yourself in dangerous situations while also increasing the risk to your family." Like I genuinely get the idea of wanting a gun because it gives you the closest thing you have to undeniable power in the world besides Absurd Wealth. When you are scared and terrified and hopeless having something that you know can let you fight back is a genuine thing that can put you at ease. I've been there. I will probably be there again. But it is a tchotchke. The odds of it helping you vs the odds of it hurting you and your loved ones are immensely weighted towards the latter, especially if you're so scared and depressed and terrified by events that you think you need a gun for protection, because Trump 2024 or whatever horrors await us in the future is absolutely going to make some people want to take their own life and a gun makes that very easy.
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May 28, 2022 21:09
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Vahakyla posted:This is literal pure fantasy. You will die. When the United States has lost, like Afghanistan, it has lost 3000 troops, and opposing side lost hundreds of thousands. The casualty numbers are equally whack and completely out of proportion. in Iraq and Vietnam and Somalia. Just because the US military behemoth fails to achieve all its goals doesn't mean the irregulars somehow "win". This is freeper level gun fantasy and in reality you will eat the bushmaster cannon of off a Bradley that sees you on the thermal imager, or you catch a bomb from a drone. Isn't this implying that the people of Afghanistan and Iraq were wrong to resist since their deaths were inevitable, and they should have just meekly gone to their graves? That's not better.
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May 28, 2022 21:10
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Darko posted:The part that isn't or really can't be measured is aversion. Knowing someone may be armed creates aversion to trying to take advantage of them. This is why all my prior generations were armed - being black and in the deep South, they always wanted to make white people wary of trying stuff on them in their homes and being able to at least attempt to defend themselves. Knowing the black community was armed was an aversion in cases to drunk racists pulling crap. I admit this is my own experiences talking but one of the absolute most common stereotypes I hear with regards to black men in particular is that they are all armed and gun carrying. It's a very common trope which is why "he was reaching for a gun" or "He had a gun" are so commonly used as defense by police because it plays right into that stereotype. They are already treated like they are armed and dangerous no matter the situation and it hasn't stopped the racists from attacking them. Its sole purpose these days seems to be giving more empathy to the Zimmermans of the world because a black man had some candy and it could have been a gun. My experiences are largely in large cities and lovely All White Pennsytucky Towns so I freely admit that what I see might not be the same anywhere, but I just know that the moments that I've seen people the most tense and the most prone to violence is when they think a black man might have a gun and because racism they fuckin' think it if he's going for a wallet. (Like no poo poo I've seen a lovely cop draw on a friend while I was standing right next to them because they were getting their wallet to pay for a drink. Then he just laughed it off like he hadn't just loving pointed a gun at an innocent person. And this was in Philadelphia so you couldn't even justify it as Old Country Hick racism.) Handguns are absolutely the most dangerous but I think focusing on them exclusively will be hard when all the mass shootings involve other kinds of weapons. Handguns would help reduce suicides/misfires/accidental shootings for sure but the public will seems more focused on shootings than suicides because of course it is.
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May 28, 2022 21:19
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I’d like to point out that when you’re willing to sacrifice thousands of lives, including but not limited to ten year old school children, in the name of a violent fantasy it doesn’t make you less lovely if the fantasy is “communist revolution” rather than “turner diaries RaHoWa”
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May 28, 2022 21:27
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Total Party Kill posted:Even today. This day. Have you watched police chases? People don't just park inside an auto body shop and come two seconds later with a new coat of paint to confuse the cops. This isn't GTA. They do, can, and will run your car off the road, lay down spike traps, follow you from the sky and radio your every move to people on the ground And? They'll also gently caress up those chases, kill some innocent civilians, and not catch the person they were chasing. There's a reason a lot of places moved to strict pursuit guidelines, or even no pursuit guidelines. They are crazy stupid dangerous for relatively little to no gain. Again, you have this image in your head that doesn't match the reality or capability of the forces you are describing. The police are loving useless at every aspect of their job, universally, and it's only the generally well meaning nature of humanity at large that has kept them as coddled as they have been to date. As for the military Vahakyla posted:When the United States has lost, like Afghanistan, it has lost 3000 troops, and opposing side lost hundreds of thousands. Afghanistan barely broke 50k after 20 years, where the gently caress are you getting "hundreds of thousands"? Even adding Iraq to that list doesn't break a hundred thousand combatants. Christ, Afghanistan is the worst example. "Yeah the US only lost like 3,000 troops! I mean sure, the Afghan security troops lost 70,000, and so the total *actual* allied deaths in Afghanistan was way more for our side than the Taliban.....but that doesn't count. They weren't American deaths.". Ok, great, well in the US there wouldn't be a helpful scapegoat local force of foreigners to soak up most of the attacks. The corrupt incompetents that would be dying en masse would be....the police I guess? The military is super great at just leveling things and indiscriminately murdering tons of people, but you can't actually do that and have a functioning country that makes money. Which leaves some level of restraint, and at that point all the heavy poo poo becomes wildly useless. This isn't handjobbing Clancy bullshit, it is the reality of modern occupations you've been witnessing for decades straight. "They can drone strike your house!". Motherfucker I can drone strike your house, it's 200 dollars and some duct tape. Scale up the price for how much damage you want to do and if you want the drone to be reusable, but you can absolutely get a civilian drone that can carry 60 pounds. Everyone can drone strike everyone's house, welcome to the future.
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May 28, 2022 21:32
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i believe vahakyla is talking about the totality of people killed, not merely people actively involved in fighting? Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 21:45 on May 28, 2022 |
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May 28, 2022 21:34
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ImpAtom posted:I admit this is my own experiences talking but one of the absolute most common stereotypes I hear with regards to black men in particular is that they are all armed and gun carrying. It's a very common trope which is why "he was reaching for a gun" or "He had a gun" are so commonly used as defense by police because it plays right into that stereotype. They are already treated like they are armed and dangerous no matter the situation and it hasn't stopped the racists from attacking them. Its sole purpose these days seems to be giving more empathy to the Zimmermans of the world because a black man had some candy and it could have been a gun. There is a double edged sword there, which is why it's so nuanced. Random white dudes are a little more scared to jump or threaten singular black guy from the city but at the same time, random police dude is more scared of random black guy from the city. Only way you can offset that is wealth. I have the worst gun ever locked away and hidden away far from my ammo in my place because I used to hunt and sport shoot (and would easily sell it back in a buyback), but nobody assumes I have a gun when pulled over or whatever because of what I drive and how I look. At least not yet. 15 years ago when I was younger and barely surviving week to week, I was approached with super caution at every turn. There is a thing going on there that has to do with race and class.
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May 28, 2022 21:34
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Darko posted:There is a double edged sword there, which is why it's so nuanced. Random white dudes are a little more scared to jump or threaten singular black guy from the city but at the same time, random police dude is more scared of random black guy from the city. I suspect you are 100% right there. We have plenty of examples of well-off black men and women still being targeted but it certainly isn't anywhere as common. The gods of Capitalism are depressingly strong.
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May 28, 2022 21:40
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ImpAtom posted:I suspect you are 100% right there. We have plenty of examples of well-off black men and women still being targeted but it certainly isn't anywhere as common. The gods of Capitalism are depressingly strong. Yeah for us, it's those super clueless cops that pull over black dudes in lambos or whatever asking why they're driving that car because they're particularly bad at targeting. But even still it's nothing like when I was a teen and got randomly followed or pulled over 50 percent of the time going to the adjacent suburb - in those cases it's cops being too dumb to realize nobody is stealing those cars because GTA isn't real life as opposed to figuring they'd hit quotas by finding something wrong with the black kid driving. In the case of guns, I definitely know I don't need a gun personally. It's a relic of when I used to hunt that I use as a sport from time to time and that's it. And it's not a danger to anyone because it's locked away and I don't have kids. Which is also why I don't care about getting rid of it in a buyback or something. But I'm still sympathetic to my family history, some of whom were Panther adjacent, and understand the fear of being defenseless against random racists going after them and such. Back then, nobody ever thought they'd "win" against the cops, either, they just wanted a way to try fighting back and maybe making them less likely to go after the next person if they were going to get taken out anyway. Darko fucked around with this message at 22:03 on May 28, 2022 |
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May 28, 2022 21:59
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Herstory Begins Now posted:i believe vahakyla is talking about the totality of people killed, not merely people actively involved in fighting? Well, those aren't the 'opposing side'. Those were innocent civilians who did loving nothing to nobody. And part of that doing nothing to nobody was not being a threat to the armed forces, which kind of makes using their deaths to boost the idea of American effectiveness kind of ghoulish. "Look at how good the US is at fighting, there's like a mass grave worth of dead infants over the course of the war!". So actually I'm going to hope that wasn't what they were going for.
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May 28, 2022 22:00
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| # ? May 28, 2024 03:35 |
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A big flaming stink posted:It's disavowal of their own personal need to engage in action and/or a refusal to confront their own lack of agency Yeah it's just a cynical xennial left-lib way to acquiesce while still getting to be mad at your dad and it's always cringe when I encounter it in the wild. Big neon sign that someone is politically clueless
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May 28, 2022 22:05
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