mach01-1.bsky.social
114 posts
17 followers
54 following
Discussion Master
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you shouldn’t be “armed security” at an event if you get jumpy
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there's so much incredible stuff that can be done with real theopolitics but authors are terrified of it because they don't really understand what religion is or how it works anymore.
one of my favorite fictional settings is a web original i saw: "what if fantasy!1800s but theocracies everywhere"
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it really is shocking how many NLG observers there are in the world. you’ll go to a protest of a couple hundred people in a lesser midwestern city and there’ll be a swarm of green hats even there.
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he isn't saying it's not a political assassination, he's saying it's not about 'flipping the majority' because the special elections will happen long before the next session of the legislature.
they shot the speaker because she's important, not because she's a vote in the house.
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is there a world where Iran could practically buy and operate enough to defeat a US SEAD campaign?
Iranian doctrine (asymmetric defense, deterrence through ballistic missiles) seems sensible for an outgunned country, it’s just the question of whether they landed the implementation imo.
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“this risks bringing the military into partisan politics”
no it doesn’t brother, you already live here! it’s happened!
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if an english class steps back and becomes about getting what the teacher is saying instead of direct engagement with the book, you end up with a situation where kids neither learn the basic blocking and tackling of textual analysis nor all the stuff about symbolism and interpretation.
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yeah this is the root problem with the "the curtains are blue because.." style that gets everyone fired up. symbolism is supposed to be uncovered as you read, but someone who thinks it's imparted by the instructor is kinda spoiling the book when they say "this character is about depression" on day 1
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at this point i'm reminded of this bit from thomas paine basically every single day
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really impressive that he was able to get cuffed. it'd be a tenth as big a story if they'd just pushed him out into the hallway and closed the door, but that picture of him on the floor is already everywhere.
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this is a street march, not people locking down a single intersection.
preventing a thousand people from marching because ~100 motorists will lose the handful of minutes it takes the march to clear the intersection only makes sense if you think streets aren’t public spaces
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every time you get a good look the face of one of those launcher cops it’s the creepy empty grin of that one cop in Dog Day Afternoon. every time.
“he wants to kill me so bad he can taste it!”
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yeah i was thinking when i saw the first part, “Vader completely unaware that he’s seen as this bureaucratic angel, casually approving requests and removing bad officers” would be a pretty solid short story.
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columbus PD use of force is a real rabbit hole because every number is the most insane number you've ever heard. image on the left is CPD, image on the right is LAPD.
also, re: protests long history of loving pepper spray, including the famous incident in 2020 when they got a bunch of politicians.
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looks like it’s about time to put “california dreamin’ slowed and extremely reverbed” back in the playlist huh
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on the whole sure, it’s better to take whatever measures you can to make that framing a little bit harder, but in the end it just comes down to whether social media videos of rubber bullets upset enough people or not.
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yeah i think this argument is somewhat pointless because the root problem is not what the protesters do or don’t do but what the media shows. even in the early afternoon yesterday, when the crowd was like <200 and the feds were pepperballing over nothing at all, the commentary was “agitation”.
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the primary 'optics' problem of any US protest isn't the protesters doing something that'll look bad but the media pretending police violence isn't real.
that simple. the local news not showing footage of people being shot with rubber bullets is 20x more damaging than them showing a burning car
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there is room for barricades and paving stones and things of that sort, but only if the general public thinks that they're acceptable as a response to prior violence or escalation
even if you're on the 'violence' side of the non-violence vs violence debate, your job is still to get teargassed on TV
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i think the key thing is that this doesn't require renouncing confrontation or even (low levels of) violence, it just means thinking about how justifiable those things are.
does throwing that brick mean fewer people will protest tomorrow? does it mean the public will turn against you?
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if they are police provocateurs, sending a video of them to the cops will do nothing.
if they aren’t, you’re (99 times out of 100) helping put one of your own people in prison.
doesn’t make sense to me.
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okay but making peter beck into the next elon musk would be pretty funny.
"woke mind virus" said in a kiwi accent.
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if they really are planning to do this i don't think there's any clean/legal way to do it without hitting the insurrection act button tbh, but i'm not a lawyer.
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the obvious move would be to ask red state governors to fly their guardsmen to california, but without newsom's assent that'd be just as unconstitutional as federalizing the CA guard and deploying it domestically without invoking the insurrection act. states aren't allowed to invade each other.
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I was a little sad at how overwhelmingly hostile the reception to that NYT op-ed ~a week ago was. At its core it really did seem to have a valuable insight: a staggering number of social ills ultimately trace back to “parents and parenting have become way, way too involved”
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but the imperium is failing, though! you don’t even have to go to the ‘it’s feeding chaos’ angle necessarily- just look at how badly it wastes resources!
that galaxy spanning empire loses unthinkable amounts of materiel, manpower, psykers and such to internal fighting, corruption, dysfunction
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yeah i think 'musk leaving is just a trick' was more believable before he called trump a pedophile lmao.
like at a certain point the public downsides of the 'ruse' are just so much greater than whatever distance/deniability is gained, right.
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isn’t this the point of the show? that he’s making bad decisions and constantly digging himself deeper into the hole? like it’s stated pretty explicitly: he could just sell some shit and be fine, but he refuses to do so. whenever he’s given an escape hatch he refuses to take it.
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they're spiritually incapable of leaving a weapon holstered. power has to be used. they have to see what's in the box, which is why Belloq has such an easy time convincing them.
but the Americans have the humility and restraint and such to put them all down and never touch them again.
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yeah I never saw the warehouse ending as a negative, i always figured it was right in line with Indy surviving/triumphing as a result of his humility, his ability to overcome the urge to look into the ark.
the nazis are incapable of resisting because they worship power.
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the smug superiority of the Dunning-Kruger case is the blood of all internet discourse
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excellent comeback, person who doesn’t even try to understand what position they or their interlocutors hold
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you understand that what’s being discussed is like, the connection of capsules and landers ala the Chinese moon program, or the connection of a capsule and a hab module ala NASA’s Mars Transfer Vehicle proposal, right.
that’s <100 tons of payload max, not millions.
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cool. how is that relevant to what you just said about “millions of tons of material”.
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you do not need millions of tons of material to build a space station capable of orbital assembly of spacecraft. we’re talking connecting modules together here, not bending metal.
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and whether that support would really appear if the initial move is successful is never tested, because the logistics of the initial attack just sorta fall apart and the people in charge decide that it’s easier to death ride to glory than back down.
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i think the best analogue to the more reasonable of the Rising planners is, say, John Brown - a little nuts but not absurd.
“the army i need already exists (Irish Volunteers/abolitionist paramilitaries) and if i just pull off a big fiat accompli demonstration, they’ll be forced to rise up too”
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obviously the show needs to slim things down for runtime, but still. many people have pointed out that it doesn't depict unionist paramilitaries but it doesn't even really show unionism at all after the first episode or two. civil society vanishes. we don't get a lot for IRA internal politics.
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my big annoyance with say nothing (both book and show) is how disinterested in that messiness it is. it's very quick to focus in on the core cast and depict everything as a head-to-head IRA vs The Brits fight, instead of the tangled intersection of all sorts of different angles.
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kinda funny (both in the show and in real life) how the most hawkish wing of IRA/ex-IRA people latched onto his denials of membership as a sort of betrayal when even they had to acknowledge that publicly admitting IRA membership was a crazy thing to do, even years after good friday
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because artists generally depict what they know. European artists made Jesus white for the same reasons Ethiopian artists made him Black, or painters would depict ancient warriors using medieval/early modern weapons and armor.
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yeah we have surveys on this sort of thing, people speaking to German POWs or demobilized troops post-war or whatever. “the wehrmacht was largely non-Nazi” is true if you’re just talking party members, but much less true if including people who supported Eastern conquest + “anti-Bolshevism”
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"family members try to avenge vigilante killing, shoot entirely random person" is the most extreme downside imaginable but that's just the tip of the "traumatizing and deranging everybody involved" iceberg
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i get it but i mean, the aftermath seems like a great example of why vigilantism isn't victimless
even in a best case scenario where someone clearly did something horrendous, you really want to have a public process of proving it. and you want the state to be responsible, because nobody shoots them
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one of my peeves about the Scarif battle is that there’s that whole saga of Melshi’s grunts fighting their way from one side of the base to the other, and it gets about 30 seconds of screen time.
it’s a good 30 seconds, but I want more
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I’ve seen this argued as one of the reasons TIE fighters go from fearsome to X-Wing bait post-ANH. the loss of the Death Star wipes out a huge chunk of the Starfighter Corp’s top flight and leaves them institutionally paralyzed, lacking instructors, etc.
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an ABCT has 80 of these (img 1) and 150ish of these (img 2). an MBCT has ~300 of these (img 3)
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also I feel like there’s a Tolstoy element here - in the ACW especially, with non-professional armies, how much freedom did generals really have?
no Grant figure could’ve gotten 1864 grit out of the 1862 AotP - how many confed generals could’ve resisted the urge to invade the North - etc.
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Yeah Lee wasn’t a genius but he was better than people think. Even his strategic thinking was somewhat justified. The war was ultimately won in the West, yeah, but that’s because of the lack of a decisive victory in the East. Losing Richmond would’ve been even more crushing than Vicksburg.
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incredible how many people in that thread really believe that it’s impossible that devs could see any benefit from raising prices because “all the money will just go to the C-suite”
I’d think that maybe a more profitable industry could see fewer layoffs and more jobs all around. Just maybe.