|
VanSandman posted:In the entirety of human history, things have started lovely and have stayed lovely. Our lives now are nasty, brutish, and oh so unmercifully long. How's life with all that edge?
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2015 07:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 08:39 |
|
|
theultimo posted:He's using full auto/burst on an AR 15, which is only used by military legally. Odd. Fully automatic firearms (or full auto sears for AKs and ARs, which are legally the same thing) are legal in the majority of US states. The only restrictions are that they were built before a certain date in 1986 and that a stricter background check and $200 tax stamp are paid by the owner. Plus, you know, they can own guns in the first place. Fully automatic AR-15 and AK-pattern firearms are actually not at all unusual. They're rare and very expensive (even a cheapo MAC-10 is $4000 or more to buy legally), but he's not carting around an illegal assault rifle or anything.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2015 20:02
|
|
|
Fried Chicken posted:But compare what has gone on with improvements in cars with improvements in firearms. The difference is stunning. *coughRemingtonR51cough*
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2015 21:15
|
|
|
Government class is vital as long as we allow any random citizen to vote once they turn 18 regardless of their education and with no need to pass a knowledge exam to vote. However, I can attest that my own school's economics class was practically worthless. It focused more on teaching the theories of economics and the stock market more than teaching the soon-to-be adults how to handle their finances. I came out of that class knowing the difference between bull and bear but not knowing how to open a bank account or what a mortgage was, and no idea how to file taxes.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2015 21:53
|
|
|
Nintendo Kid posted:I'm still finding it hilarious that someone seriously suggested "firearm safety" as part of a life skills course. Don't touch a gun that ain't yours ever, done. In all honesty, speaking as an experienced shooter with years of interest in firearms, there isn't a whole lot that a mandatory safety class can really teach. The vast, vast majority of negligent shootings with guns has to do with violating the core safety rules: 1. Always Keep The Muzzle Pointed In A Safe Direction 2. Firearms Should Be Unloaded When Not Actually In Use 3. Don't Rely On Your Gun's "Safety" 4. Be Sure Of Your Target And What's Beyond It 5. Use Correct Ammunition 6. If Your Gun Fails To Fire When The Trigger Is Pulled, Handle With Care! 7. Always Wear Eye And Ear Protection When Shooting 8. Be Sure The Barrel Is Clear Of Obstructions Before Shooting 9. Don't Alter Or Modify Your Gun, And Have Guns Serviced Regularly 10. Learn The Mechanical And Handling Characteristics Of The Firearm You Are Using Outside of these rules, learning about firearms is almost entirely marksmanship and other skill tests rather than anything that would improve your handling. And the first four are the ones most likely to cause damage when violated, and thus the ones most often repeated. A firearms safety class in school would probably last a month at the most, unless the rest was marksmanship and cleaning practice.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2015 00:19
|
|
|
Evil Fluffy posted:Calling it a raid implies it wasn't actually a setup to kill him, which it was. The cops with him knew what to expect which is why they made sure to leave as he tried to get in the door where someone with a gun just happened to be waiting to shoot him immediately. The cop that did respond later mentioned if they realized who they were helping they'd have let him die instead. A few pages back but gently caress it, this thread goes too fast to care. I was reading Tales from the Stakeout Squad, about Jim Cirillo and others who were part of a controversial NYPD unit of the 60s and 70s. They were placed in the back of stores, banks, etc. that were repeatedly robbed and would jump out and confront attempted robbers; I can't comment on their efficacy, though as far as I know they didn't shoot any unarmed people (though they gladly shot armed people who ran, and there was one story of the clerk at the pharmacy they were staking out shooting someone who just had his finger sticking out of his coat and the officer on duty told him that they'd stage it so the clerk wouldn't get convicted for it). Cirillo commented on the Serpico case, and his opinion is quite damning for the NYPD at the time. He and other officers viewed Serpico as essentially a tattletale who had gotten officers in trouble for breaking regulations in the past, and said that "if he didn't want to get involved, he shouldn't have asked to transfer to Narcotics." Cirillo even painted the theft of drugs by the vice squad in a positive light, as they used the drugs to bribe junkies to snitch. Accounts of Cirillo don't paint him as a bad cop and he apparently negotiated and talked to people instead of abusing them and to make them more reticent to arrest, but he certainly wasn't the kind to let regulation stand in the way of what he viewed as justice. And even though initially he was aghast at the idea of killing other people and almost didn't volunteer for SOU, he and his partner eventually got so eager to experiment with their custom handloads that they were nicknamed "the two ghouls" for rushing into the morgue to examine the remains of their victims to see how the bullets performed in soft tissue. Don't think he ever enjoyed killing, but he seems to have rapidly desensitized.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2015 23:09
|
|
|
JT Jag posted:I think it's time that we asked the important question: is Hillary Clinton prepared to lead this country or will she just bleed all over Washington DC? I read someone making a point about all the "Women can't lead our country! What if she gets on her period and nukes Russia?" misogyny by pointing out that during menstruation, women's hormones are at their closest to the typical male levels. As such, using their logic, post-menopausal women like Hilary Clinton are the only people suitable to govern the United States.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2015 21:34
|
|
|
Venom Snake posted:
The reason drones get people riled up is because their relatively small size-to-firepower ratio and lack of a pilot to endanger makes them cheap and easy to stealthily insert in an area to make precision bombardments. You can assassinate and strike point targets (as long as conditions are right) without needing to commit an entire $65 million aircraft and its necessary support crew, all without a single life being put at risk except the targets'. Making airstrikes cheaper, easier, and less risky in both lives and materiel means that the door can be opened for using them more often. This is already being seen with how often they're being used in countries like Pakistan to strike terror suspects and how many innocent lives have been turned to ground beef by them in such a short time span, with the ACLU filing a lawsuit after American citizens outside of a conflict zone were killed by them.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2015 01:16
|
|
People are using remote control planes to kill people instead of regular planes
|
No poo poo they're new technology. Surprisingly, you have to change your ideas about the world and the capabilities of governments as technology changes! And you need to recognize when new technology provides a different kind of threat and opening for abuse than old technology! That's why we're concerned today about the NSA reading our emails and the government demanding secret warrantless access to everyone's smart phones instead of accusing them of wiretapping our telegraph lines. It's pretty factual that unmanned drones provide a new threat and a new way for the government to abuse and kill people than the days when the only ways were actually sending soldiers/assassins or committing extremely expensive aircraft and their pilots to airstrikes.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2015 01:25
|
|
|
computer parts posted:All of the features you mentioned about drones are applicable to previous technology (cruise missiles). The newness is a significant and distinct part of the outrage. A single Tomahawk cruise missile costs over $1 million and can only be used once, while a Reaper drone is $13.77 million (not including munitions, fuel, and other added costs that can be spread across multiple drones). One drone can be used for dozens or hundreds of strikes in its lifetime, making it far more cost-effective, and is capable of performing its own reconnaissance and loitering over an area rather than needing additional observers to locate targets (which eliminates that cost and risk).
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2015 01:31
|
|
|
BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:The bulk of leftists aren't really about total demilitarization, but more about not wasting money/lives on fools' errands and loving with random innocents. Outside of the absolute pacifist circles, most of the complaints with drones aren't that they efficiently scale up military intervention, but that the human cost is completely depersonalized because you don't have Americans at risk. If you had perfect intelligence and perfect targeting — a total dream, of course — then I'd say bring on the drones. Ideally, the things could eliminate unnecessary losses on both sides, but instead we're blowing up weddings. "Total demilitarization" is a pipe dream of massive hippies who just think everyone will be happy and do drugs with them if they just give peace a chance, bro. But it's hard to deny that the US couldn't do with lowering its spending in favor of fixing up domestic problems and improving international relations, and that we've spent a lot of decades loving around and doing violence in ways that we really shouldn't be doing.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2015 01:49
|
|
|
haveblue posted:What is that mounted on the technical in the last panel? It looks like a WW2-vintage AA gun. It's based on the ZU-23-2. Really common to put those on pickup trucks to give them more firepower than just a machine gun on a tripod.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2015 19:19
|
|
|
ReidRansom posted:One of my grandfathers was born in 1875. I'm in my 30s. I'm 22 and my maternal grandparents died over 10 years ago when they were in their 80s. They had my mother very late in life, a good 10 years after their 7 sons and shortly before menopause would have kicked in. If my mom had me at the same age that her mom had her, I'd still be in school a century after my grandmother was born.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2015 21:22
|
|
|
Duke Igthorn posted:I'm just trying to imagine Lindsey Graham howling for the blood of gyro copter pilots in his gentle Southern drawl He got bit by a snake last time he messed with a gyrocopter and has never forgotten it since.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2015 00:57
|
|
|
Asians count as honorary whites, I assume? [/quote] In all seriousness, that's basically the state of Asian-white relations in the United States.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2015 01:23
|
|
|
SedanChair posted:I don't think there was time to shoot him down, it looked like he was coming in pretty drat hot. I have a sneaking suspicion that the AA defenses of the White House may be no more impenetrable than the rest of it. As far as I know the anti-air defenses of the White House are predominately NASAMS and similar SAM launchers. They're really good if you need to shoot down an incoming military aircraft or hijacked 747, but they're not exactly designed for taking down craft the same size as the missile itself. Especially if he was flying as low as gyrocopters tend to do, he was probably on his way to the ground before any defenses could be scrambled.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2015 02:58
|
|
|
SedanChair posted:Well they do have anti-air. I think they would be ready to make that trade-off, if it came down to it. Just like the motorcade has that Suburban with a minigun. There might be a few stray .308 rounds (or 2000) causing some collateral damage if they ever had to use it. The minigun is probably a mixture between wanting to seem cool and show off our power and people with little understanding of collateral damage being the ones in charge of deciding on presidential defense weaponry. The most likely thing to attack the White House that would actually cause damage (so not including random naked men scaling the fence or someone ramming a coupe into the gates and getting shot a dozen times) would be an aircraft crashing into it, so any defenses outside of the Secret Service and solid barriers should best be tailored for that.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2015 04:40
|
|
|
MaxxBot posted:What? "The only reason you're not a CEO literally rolling in dollar bills in a pool is because you're just too stupid. If you don't want to be poor, stop being stupid."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2015 19:28
|
|
|
Zelder posted:But ten dollars isn't a livable wage. Surely we can agree that, no matter how "easy" a person's job is, they still deserve a living wage right? If you don't have a doctorate, you don't deserve to live!
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2015 21:04
|
|
|
TheOneAndOnlyT posted:I imagine that if I were on food stamps, I'd be pretty happy to start getting a wage where I didn't need them anymore. There's really not. People who aren't on food stamps always think that they're basically "all the free food you can want, and also you can exchange them for drugs and liquor and porn if you're a selfish Instead, the poor get vilified as scammers who get luxury for nothing.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2015 21:49
|
|
|
Accretionist posted:Vermont's new motto: Stella quarta decima fulgeat* Only way to keep those drat Romans from assimilating our jobs.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2015 06:28
|
|
|
SedanChair posted:Is this like an art project or what? rehost your images Pretty sure it's satire.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2015 08:42
|
|
|
quote:“Most people don’t know that halloween is German for ‘night that girls with low self-esteem dress like sluts,'” one, now-deleted tweet read. “When I burp in the gym I feel like it’s my way of saying, ‘sorry guys, but I’m not gay,'” said another. In what context do these look good? At least to anyone except the GOP?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2015 01:46
|
|
|
Star Man posted:I don't think Cheney gave a poo poo where there was a war, just as long as there was one. I really think that he just wanted to kill as many people as he could. The recent interviews with him regarding torture are downright terrifying. The guy comes off as legitimately a maniac who would probably personally pull your balls off with pliers if he thought it could get him what he wanted. I don't think human life even factors into his world view.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2015 23:59
|
|
|
Fried Chicken posted:Petraeus sentence handed down: 2 years probation, $100,000 fine So...effectively no punishment.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 23, 2015 20:48
|
|
|
Boon posted:Apparently it's gotten pretty bad. Vice keeps popping updates on my screen and the Gov has declared a state of emergency. Supposedly a bunch of gangs have "banded together" to hunt down cops. Can't say I blame them for their sentiment, though it's going to suck if cops start getting shot. I haven't heard any "We're gonna hunt down whitey cops" from anyone except the police tearfully crying about how that's what will happen. I think gangs even stayed peaceful in Ferguson as a way to unite against a common enemy, but they weren't hunting anyone or sniping the St. Louis PD lines. There were even gang members protecting stores. When you get Bloods, Crips, and the Nation of Islam to all give up their rivalries to band against you....you done hosed up.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 01:40
|
|
|
Stultus Maximus posted:Baltimore and St. Louis have a lot of similarities. I wonder what Baltimore's race story is. A very long history of police brutality, almost entirely directed against blacks. quote:The funny (sad) thing is the use of MLK to talk about "peaceful" protests. Two things: blocking roads is nonviolent but by modern cops not considered peaceful. And while MLK was sitting around with a sign there were tons of other people doing stuff like firebombing police cars and guess who got the blame. Peaceful protests haven't tended to get much better results than violent ones. Peaceful chanting and sign waving tends to get ignored.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 02:46
|
|
|
Jerry Manderbilt posted:The pepper spray incident was all over my feed, but that was because I have dozens of acquaintances at Davis. Aside from them, it was some "GET A JOB YOU HIPPIES" bullcrap. Also, at no point were the protests taken as being harmful to the entire white community or "poor community" as a whole.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 04:22
|
|
|
Also I think the lack of photos of Baltimore police pointing AR-15s at unarmed people and openly firing rubber bullets and tear gas at CNN reporters during their live coverage (and in one case, arresting a Fox reporter live on air when they caught him in the Forbidden Zone [TM]) has helped the police narrative, as there's fewer displays of open violence and oppression by the cops for people on the fence to criticize. If anything, at least the BPD seems to have learned from Ferguson not to just drag out the Operatin' Operator gear and live ammunition at the first sign of uppity black people.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 08:09
|
|
|
Ron Jeremy posted:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3059840/Anarchists-year-s-violence-Ferguson-active-Baltimore-claim-social-media-experts.html Do we have a source that's not the Daily Mail.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2015 01:32
|
|
|
Good Citizen posted:Also if the military was planning to take over Texas then I doubt attending a town hall holding a sign with 4 different slogans on it is going to make them withdraw. Maybe one extremely poignant slogan It's how conspiracy theorists work. They posit that the next big news thing is REALLY a planned takeover of the government and martial law will be enacted, so they raise a huge fuss. When nothing of the sort happens (because, obviously, it was never what they thought it was), they pat themselves on the back for "defending freedom" as if they personally scared the government away from doing anything. That said, the whole "You can't beat the government because they have nukes and jets and tanks" deal is still kinda stupid because it ignores the general history of modern armed rebellions and assumes that the US government would be willing to just nuke small towns and that soldiers will indiscriminately blow up their own country when told to.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2015 00:22
|
|
|
Friendly Tumour posted:It's a thing that I keep wondering about as an outsider. Looking at America, you seem perpetually on your way towards a civil war that never quite, as you say "kicks off". Remember that the United States is barely over 200 years old and was founded through violent riots, protests, and criminal disobedience that eventually evolved into a full on rebellion (which was heavily aided by the French, though we'll never admit that). The result of this is that rebellion and discontent are lauded as means of fixing a problematic government and the Founding Fathers are recent enough to be drat near worshiped. Our revolution is so glorified that many people (predominately right-wingers) advocate armed rebellion if the government ever becomes unbearable and impossible to fix through peaceful methods. While a coup might be a decent idea somewhere like North Korea or Syria, Americans start making veiled threats about sniping politicians as soon as they think a 1984-style dystopia is going to start. Of course, this only applies to white people. Black people who fight back against government and police oppression are merely unemployed thugs who need to pull up their pants and learn their place.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2015 00:31
|
|
|
Alligator Horse posted:A reminder that for the first time in basically forever we have a chance to compile statistics on how many people die in police custody, who they are, how they die and why, but only if the Attorney General decides to meaningfully enforce the bill (HR 1447) that was signed into law in December. The AG has full discretion when it comes to sanctioning States that do not meet the guidelines set by the bill. We've actually been attempting to make up for that with Killed By Police. It uses news articles as sources to generate a database of everyone whose death can be attributed to police action. Along with the disturbingly common shootings, there's also things like vehicle impacts (or car crashes during a chase), bad reactions to a taser, pepper spray, or beating, K9 attacks, and people who mysteriously die of "excited delirium" or vague medical crises during an arrest. As of yesterday, we're at 384 deaths this year. If a terrorist group were responsible for this many deaths in America, this would be a national tragedy. In fact, at this rate we're liable to hit a good 1200 deaths by the end of the year. American cops literally have as many deaths of American citizens that can be attributed to them as 9/11 every 2 years.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2015 01:38
|
|
|
mlmp08 posted:Ah, yes, the US has survived only 200 years on its constitution, making it the second oldest government on Earth, IIRC. Descendants of Europeans haven't been here as long as they've been in, oh, Europe, but the US government is very old and has been very stable when compared with other state governments. We're just younger in the ehtnic "nation" sense, given that we effectively wiped out the Indian nations. Are you counting constitutional changes or governmental changes as technically "new nations"? Because when I speak of the US as being very young, I mean in its actual existence. The United Kingdom was formed from separate British and Irish nations in 1707, but those nations that united had all existed for centuries beforehand. The European-based nation that now takes up a big chunk of North America didn't even start to get off the ground until 17th century colonies and didn't become independent until about 230 years ago. The modern nation of France can trace its history to before the year 1000 CE.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2015 02:40
|
|
|
On Terra Firma posted:Then they should come right the gently caress out and say it. Carl Stokes had it right but these assholes don't have the balls to admit it. The thing is, a lot of the worst racists in modern America don't think they're racist. They think racism is hanging black guys for looking too closely at white women and burning crosses. Instead of hearing black people complaining about systematic oppression, they brush it off as a bunch of lazy whiners who can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps like grandpappy used to. When they don't call back a guy named Tyrone for a job, they don't make a conscious decision "I will not hire a friend of the family." They subconsciously find reasons to toss out the resume, many of which are related to stereotypes they have about black people but won't actually talk about. The problem with this kind of racism is that you can't get rid of it easily. You can take guys who talk about how much they love being in the KKK and lynching thugs and vote them out of office or fire them or toss them in jail when they snarl racial epithets while zapping a guy with a car battery. But if you go up to a guy who does racist poo poo and call him a racist, he's probably immediately going to react with horror and anger. He doesn't view himself as a racist, so none of his actions are, which means that calling him racist just comes off as bullshit slander to him. Unless he takes the time to be introspective and look at his own actions, chances are he's just going to tune you out when you talk about race. Hell, he might call you out for "playing the race card".
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2015 03:13
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 08:39 |
|
|
Ralepozozaxe posted:Yeah, money isn't the problem. Any situation where it's okay for a white person to have or use a gun will get a black person arrested and/or killed. Just go find the numbers on when black people try to use the stand your ground defense. They get denied it's use like 99% of the time (also the same for women oddly, only white men can stand their ground) Thankfully we finally released from jail the woman who fired a warning shot and was facing 20 to 60 years in prison for it. Because only white people are allowed to fire guns even close to black people freely.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2015 16:23
|
|