Voroxpete

You're wrong and you're right.

I have a very direct knowledge of military marksmanship - much moreso than probably 90% of the people in this thread - but in all fairness my hands on knowledge is with the Canadian military, and I'd forgotten that since we're talking about zombie movies, we are of course talking about US soldiers. So not really the same thing.

The war on drugs only failed if you truly believe its goal was getting rid of drugs.

To quote John Erlichman, one of its architects:

“The Nixon Campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

By the strandards of what it was created to do, the war on drugs was fantastically successful.

The war on porn will be successful in exactly the same way, because Republicans have already spent decades redefining all LGBTQ content as "pornographic". This is will be a tool for disrupting queer and trans communities, for erasing queer and trans resources and tearing down queer and trans rights activists. Stopping porn isn't the point, and it never was.

And to be clear, this isn't supposition, it's already literally happening in Florida.

Florida is the model for what they want to do everywhere.

Two years.

No, they didn't. And when you tell yourself that, you make yourself a sucker.

Because when we tell ourselves that people who do terrible things cannot be human, we forget the logical implications of that; that only the inhuman are capable of doing terrible things.

And we're human. We know this for sure. So therefore whatever we do, cannot be terrible. Because we'd know if we crossed that line, right? Our friends, our family, our coworkers... None of these people are inhuman. We know them, we talk to them, we care about them. So, logically, they could never be capable of anything truly monstrous. Because only monsters can be monstrous.

The Nazis were human. That's the worst, and by far the most important lesson of the Holocaust. That humans did those things. That every single person you know is, under the right circumstances, capable of the most monstrous acts imaginable.

That's why so many people cannot bring themselves to believe that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide; because they believe that only inhuman monsters can commit genocide, and they cannot call every person in Isreal an inhuman monster, can they?

It's not our humanity that keeps us good. Goodness is not inherent, or God given, or born into us. It's a choice we have to make, every single moment of every single day.

Every time you tell yourself that the worst people in the world aren't really people, you make it just a little bit easier to cross those lines. To do something truly monstrous. Because the one thing you know for sure is that you are not a monster.

The Dem establishment will obviously blame anyone but themselves. That's what establishments do. That's why, assuming there are still free and fair elections in America in two years time, left wing voters in the US need to start planning now how they're going to primary out every last establishment Dem who thought that leaning right was the answer, and replace them with people who do believe in real progressive politics.

It won't work everywhere. It can't. And some of those people will inevitably get caught up in the machine, or turn out not to be what they claimed. Reality is messy. But get enough of them in and you can make a real difference. The mid-terms are the American left's opportunity to do what the right did in 2010.

But at the end of the day none of this matters, because we're just two outsiders pontificating over another country's politics. Despite how deeply those politics affect the whole world, there's nothing we can actually do about it, other than focusing on what we can do in our own back yards.

Here's one of my own (its a minor variation on this; https://youtu.be/nEQjcLZ-DaE?si=Ug4CMykM_RDjPdTa)

I call my variation a Northern Soul.

• 1.5oz rye whisky (I reccomend the Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye)
• 0.5oz Cointreau
• 0.25oz Maple Syrup
• 1oz Half and Half Cream

Shake over ice, strain into a chilled coupe. Dust the top with burnt cinammon (take a pinch of cinammon between your fingers, sprinkle it through the flame of a blowtorch and onto the surface of the drink. You can also use a match or taper as long as you're careful not to get ash in the drink, and this can be done in front of the guest for added showmanship). Optionally, express an orange peel and rub it on the rim, to really amp up those orange notes.

This gives you the Christmassy feel of ice cream and cinammon, but without the heaviness of egg nog. The half and half sounds like a lot, but with the dilution from the ice it becomes more like drinking chilled milk, and orange brightens up the taste and keeps it from being over bearingly sweet. Well, in my opinion anyway, but obviously I'm biased.

Never underestimate the "fuckton of playtime" option. Some people just get really into a game.

Oh yeah, that list is going to be an absolute goldmine for scammers.

And honestly, if crypto people had any self reflection at all, the fact that being overtly a crypto person makes scammers flock to them, because they have hard data showing, statistically, how gullible they are should really make them reconsider being crypto people.

They actually do... Or at least, the government as a whole does. If you look back at the great depression, WW2 and its aftermath, and the radical actions that the US government took to solve the cost of living crisis then, you can see that it absolutely is possible.

Would it have been possible for Biden in 2020? Technically, yes. The Dems held two branches, and with an end to the filibuster rule and court packing they could theoretically have secured control in the third. A razor thin margin in the senate would have required some very clever, and possibly very ruthless backroom dealing to get things done. But the possibility did, technically, exist.

Buying into the narrative that radical solutions are impossible is exactly why people are sick of the Democrats. Yes, obviously Trump will only make things worse, but the average person doesn't see that. They only see that they tried handing the keys to the Dems, things only got worse, so now they're going to try handing the keys to the other guys.

Yes, they are morally culpable too. Even more so than the people who refused to vote for them.

That's the thing about ethics when you actually apply it in reality; someone else being wrong doesn't mean you're right.

So, it was worth Trump getting a second term in order for you to maintain your moral purity?

Listen, fuck Harris and every other Dem who failed to condemn the war in Gaza, they all deserve to burn in hell for that.

But did you really get what you wanted out of this?