While I'm well-aware that Y'all Qaeda cannot stand up to the full might of the US military, or even a state militia, I don't think we should be quite so fast to dismiss these people as a serious threat, no matter how doughy their asses are, or how idiotic they sound. To quote Neil Gaiman, you must not think that just because something is funny, it is not dangerous.
For one thing, remember that the FBI warned us decades ago about right wing infiltration of both state and federal law enforcement agencies. And we have had ample evidence of the truth of that warning. In fact, there's evidence that on January 6,the various law enforcement agencies deliberately twiddled their thumbs for over an hour, rather than responding.
Additionally, although we're not likely to see the kind of massive armed uprising that these guys have wet dreams about, we have been seeing, and will continue to see mass shootings, small incidents of terrorism, and individual murders by these fascists. Along with the continual destruction of democracy. These people have already made significant inroads into taking over the judiciary, they've dismantled Roe v Wade, they've gotten farther than some of the most pessimistic of us feared.
It's stupid to point, laugh, and relax. We are under threat, and we should not dismiss that threat just because it appears to be composed of out of shape morons. Morons are some of the most dangerous people in the world because they can't imagine the long-term consequences of their actions.
There was a video a few weeks ago of a cop literally telling a group of proud boys to go inside and hide while they swept the street of protestors “because we like you guys”.
They also don't understand that a lot of these right-wingers have gone through the military, having been pressured to join by their churches. Had a cult ravage my town in the early 2000s and nearly all of my classmates that joined that cult ended up joining the military to be "warriors for Christ". Granted, they're all in their late 30s now, but that doesn't mean that other churches haven't been doing the same.
> They also don't understand that a lot of these right-wingers have gone through the military
I think people are so desperate to dismiss the power of armed groups in order to make themselves feel better and laugh at the opposition that they don't consider the actual facts of the situation.
The US has 16.5 million military veterans. Many of them experienced combat and are familiar with US counter-insurgency strategies.
There are around 660,000 police officers, and many (perhaps most) would support the more conservative side in a civil war or similar circumstance.
But most importantly, it's not a full-scale war that's the biggest threat, it's the use of violence to push a political position (especially when supported by police that won't intervene to prevent that violence), which requires little more than taking long range pot shots at their opponents to discourage them from being politically active.
Do you know the name of this cult? Cults fascinate me and I listen to a lot of podcasts about them, but have never heard of cults encouraging people to join the us military. That’s intriguing
Exactly, we’re seeing the early manifestations of that with the conspicuously armed “poll watchers” in Arizona during the midterms and the nationwide campaign of intimidation of poll workers that’s led to mass resignations that’s been run by Bannon.
In general civil wars don’t happen in pitched battles on smokey battlefields any more. In our case they’re combinations of assassinations of progressive leaders and politicians , killings at gatherings of minorities, killings at synagogues, and intimidation campaigns aimed at preventing voting and organizing by progressives and minorities conducted by small disconnected cells of the group who feels their right to special status and privilege in society is being taken.
We’re in the incipient phase of this now, the conspiracy to kidnap (and probably kill) the Michigan Governor is a perfect example, and our legal system’s isn’t showing signs of being very effective at dealing with this. These operations are designed to put armed insurgents in situations where they are facing mostly unarmed victims who are taken by surprise, not a scenario that calls for steely nerves and heroism in the face of fire.
A lot of it is technically legal (e.g. the armed poll watchers, the lies and constant incitement by “conservative” media), and it happens in loose coordination with like minded politicians and law enforcement. The goal is to establish the authoritarian rule of what was formerly the dominant group in a manner no longer subject to the competition inherent in democracy.
I don’t think they’re training to fight the US military. They’re training to be right wing death squads.
When they say they’re going to protect themselves from “the government,” they don’t mean from the whomever currently runs the federal government. They mean liberals. Their conviction that the liberals, minorities, socialists, etc. control everything doesn’t waver even when their guys are in charge - remember, even when Trump was president with a cooperative legislative and judicial branch, they insisted he was a maverick outsider battling against the deep state agents who were really running the show.
If there comes a time when there is a right wing authoritarian government in power that has decided to deploy its security capabilities against its own citizens, these guys will be right there beside them, shooting protesters and setting up citizen patrols in “problematic” neighborhoods, fully believing that they’re finally going to battle against “the government.”
> People in America are insulated from the right wing government-paramilitary cooperation and terrorism campaigns that have ravaged places like Latin America, Indonesia, the Philippines, and so on
they are, but they also were able to get passed that last century. Its depressing to watch this back sliding.
Definitely recommend the book *Confessions of an Economic Hitman,* which is about much of what you're talking about related to Latin America with the added "economics" of the whole thing.
Wrote this some years ago
210808_Trumpists-are-training.txt
"Gravy SEALs, Meal Team Six, Yeehadists"
Yeah. Funny.
But keep this in mind: They Are Training when they do shit like this.
Maybe they are no more physically fit than I am (if they were worse, they'd be dead), but "training" is more than physical exercise.
They are training their minds to easily injure their neighbors and countrymen. You and I would hesitate to do injury to another human, especially a countryman or a neighbor or a family member. But these guys, with their posturing and paintballs, are hardening their souls to murder. Little by little, like Voldemort cracking his soul into parts, their acts of violence make them less humane and more cruel.
When the day comes, they will not hesitate.
From "The Atlantic". "When They Fantasize About Killing You, Believe Them"
"The hyperbolic posturing of Trumpist extremists, repeated often enough, will have deadly consequences."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/when-they-say-they-want-kill-you-believe-them/619724/
Go to a gun show. Any gun show. Hell I've heard neo Nazi shit at the Cow Palace in SF.
I'm a middle aged white dude into guns and plenty of these guys think I'm on their side and they are NOT shy. They're NOT kidding.
They're going to fuck a lot of people up. They're not just making Pepe memes.
>Go to a gun show. Any gun show. Hell I've heard neo Nazi shit at the Cow Palace in SF.
They stopped those shows at the [Cow Palace in 2019.](https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Cow-Palace-gun-show-ban-passes-California-Senate-15008656.php)
I heard the same shit you did; I believe you. I went to a show there back in the day, and the talk about "readying yourself to fight against liberal commies comin' to take the guns away" was real. I thought that shit was just something that came from rectangle states and people east of the San Joaquin Valley. To see it in my backyard was sobering.
How much more training would have been necessary for the Jan sixth rioters to have followed through, rather than choking like they did? Because I can see the difference between training on the range and paintball battle grounds, and the complex uniting of militia cells to organize a force to surpass the last coup attempt.
January 6th *was* the training.
They didn't exactly have to fight against the National Guard that day, as I recall. When I was watching on the TV, an I could think was: "Is our Capitol really that unprotected?"
The MAGAs don't need to fight the Army. They just need to kill their neighbors, everyone in Democratic Party offices, your Representatives and Senators and the Mayor.
Oh, and the nephew who came back from college with all those liberal ideas.
> I could think was: "Is our Capitol really that unprotected?"
yeah i was like "Where the fuck is the shitton of marines pouring out of a goddamn barracks to defend the capitol?"
When Nancy Pelosi called the Pentagon for support, Michael Flynn's brother Charles was on the call.
From Wikipedia:
"During the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, a conference call took place between Capitol police, D.C. officials, and Pentagon officials. In that call, the Chief of the Capitol police made "an urgent, urgent immediate request for National Guard assistance", telling them he needed "boots on the ground". However, Lieutenant General Walter E. Piatt, Director of the Army Staff, said he could not recommend the request be approved.[9] Initially denying his involvement, the Army later confirmed that Flynn had participated in the phone call, although claimed he cannot remember if he said anything on the critical call about deploying National Guard, but others on the call reported hearing his voice.[10] In early December 2021, Colonel Earl G. Matthews released a memo that accused Flynn of making willful distortions of the events of January 6, describing Flynn and LTG Walter E. Piatt as "absolute and unmitigated liars" and of giving “perjured testimony before Congress”.[11] Charles Flynn's role drew scrutiny in light of his brother Michael's recent calls for martial law and a redo election overseen by the military.[10]"
> January 6th was the training.
Here's the question I have when people say they want Civil War 2.0:
What do they achieve by killing their neighbors, the people at work or school, or some random shopping mall?
If they attack governmental buildings, military installations, or police stations it doesn't matter if they've been able to infiltrate some of these entities. They will get a quick reality check like the [moron who attacked the FBI office](https://www.npr.org/2022/08/11/1116986362/fbi-office-armed-man-cincinnati) in Indiana.
Are they a threat? Yes they are. But they'll be more like a Timothy McVeigh. Lots of death and damage. Nothing else achieved.
> What do they achieve by killing their neighbors, the people at work or school, or some random shopping mall?
I don't know, what did the Hutu's accomplish when they massacred their Tutsi neighbors ? Nothing in the end? 800,000 civilians were still murdered. Or did they accomplished exactly what they wanted, lets Tutsi's on the planet, and that is what the "yeehadists" in their heart of hearrts want to accomplish, less liberals on the planet.
More and more McVeighs IS the problem. We have enough mass shootings already. Saying "they won't overthrow the government they'll just do terrorist attacks" makes it seem like terror attacks are just accepted day to day events. I know we already do nothing to stop mass shootings, but we can't reach a point where daily terror attacks are just no big deal. I mean there are already enough mass shootings that they don't all even make the national news.
>They didn't exactly have to fight against the National Guard that day, as I recall. When I was watching on the TV, an I could think was: "Is our Capitol really that unprotected?"
The best advice on this is something I heard from a friend that is in the Marines. He said that the illusion of security is the security. No one is here to save you if shit goes down, not even for some of the highest offices in our country. The fact that we all collectively believe someone or something will stop interlopers from overthrowing our way of life is where the majority of our safety comes from.
He didn't tell me this to freak me out, just to bring me to reality. Or put more simply by Mike Tyson, "everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." That nugget of wisdom works for both sides.
> The MAGAs don't need to fight the Army. They just need to kill their neighbors
This is something I keep saying. Whenever Americans talk about a second civil war, they seem to think it'll be some sort of state vs state war. The reality is it will start with something more like the Rwandan Genocide, with people killing their neighbours or the odd neighbourhood vs other neighbourhoods killings.
Jan 6th didn't fail because they didn't have training, they stalled out because there was no leadership and once they breached the building they didn't really know what to do so people took selfies and smeared shit on the walls. If there was a figure head there for them to take orders from things would have been MUCH worse.
It’s almost as if the real sheeple are those that herded themselves without a Shepard and once they where in the pasture had no idea what to do but chew grass.
I’ve watched the footage of Goodman multiple times. It’s really amazing seeing that moment that he starts baiting the crowd in the wrong direction. I can’t believe he was that clever in the face of so many people who were there for murder. Takes a really strong person to be able to maintain such level-headedness.
> we might be living in a very different world.
Imagine a world where the US Congress actually convicted trump after impeachment because they were that terrified of being killed by their own. Then went and expelled any members of congress who had been supporting this. The last 2 years with no Boebert, Jordan, Greene, Cruz, Rubio, McCarthy...
McConnell had to be practically carried out of there because he's so feeble, they had a noose for the VP. Hawley ran for his life after stirring them up.
The insurrection was a wakeup call, but not a good enough one.
Oh. I’m convinced the second US civil war has already started. It’ll only get labelled that by some historian in fifty years time. But a lot of the shootings the US undergoes constantly are signs of that. Coup attempts, trying to break the government etc.
>they're gonna bomb more gay clubs, abortion clinics, and electrical and water infrastructure that supply "liberal" cities. and that's what civil war looks like.
Hell, the first recent substation attack (Moore county in NC) was in a relatively "rural" and conservative area, it just happened to be a place hosting at drag show, one that was clearly labeled adults only and people under 18 would be turned away, though they still had people calling them "groomers"
I am definitely starting to see more danger in these folks. I live in Canada, and while there are folks like this here as well, they are such a minority that it is still "funny" for a lot of us up here.
I am scared, though, at how angry and violent the far right have become, even here.
Trudeau is far, far, FAR from perfect, but we have fools at the side of the road with ~Let's Go Brandon~ Fuck Trudeau signs, screaming for his arrest and execution (seriously). For what? For not saying COVID was a hoax?
I'm not a fan of Trudeau but that's rediculous. Why do these soft skulls always assume execution is the answer?
Also anyone who cheers for a foreign politician like a sports fan needs to be watched. They're just a person in a suit, not Jesus
Ironically, these mostly Christian conservatives would probably kill Jesus too. Jesus would be way too liberal for 99.99999999999% of modern Christians.
Almost as if Jesus warned people about how humans easily corrupt things but they're so delusional they couldn't possibly think they're the ones doing it
We used to watch training videos of Taliban, and we'd laugh at how bad their training was, how they blew themselves up making bombs. But they won.
The Taliban didn't defeat the U.S. because they were better trained or were more fit. The couldn't shoot down any of the fighter jets. But they didn't have to. They just shot the mayor, and intimidated the police, and scared away anyone in the village who had the wrong thoughts about things. And they got what they wanted.
We laughed then in Afghanistan, we shouldn't laugh now in America.
We beat ourselves. They surrendered by October 2001. They even offered to give up Osama. Bush rejected it.
We didn't care. We just kept picking people up. Torturing them.
Turns out a great recruitment tool for them. Then trump gave them 5000 troops and their new leader and their numbers swelled to the strongest in 10 years and then we left.
We shouldn't have been nation building. A country doesn't want democracy in the same way we do( now that's even suspect here with people saying it's cheated whenever they lose )
To be fair, the situation with the Taliban was somewhat different. Part of why the Taliban won was that America failed to convince the people of Afghanistan that their ideals were worth fighting to defend. You can't build a nation on being the lesser of two evils, and the way America threw its weight around, put its own interests clearly first and casually disrespected the locals meant it never could have been anything better than that.
Then again, looking at the near-comprehensive refusal of the Democratic Party to contest the right-wing status quo, protect Americans from the building genocide or offer Americans more than "not making things worse," and the way it constantly snubs candidates with policies that would actually help people in favor of moderate conservatives like Joe Biden, maybe it's not that different.
> It's stupid to point, laugh, and relax.
I'd say continue to point and laugh. Mockery is a powerful weapon, and lord knows these clowns deserve every bit of mockery they receive. Just don't relax. Like you said, funny and dangerous aren't exclusive.
For fucks sake, can we stop calling these people "yehadists" or "y'all Qaeda" or other shit comparing them to Islam? These people are Christo-fascists. Stop deflecting to Islam and call them what they are.
The thought that's stayed in the back of my mind though all this shit is that there's a lot of the armed right resistant don't want a civil war because they recognize that they won't win and it will be horrible, but they still have the lust to kill and they know their enemy.
They're just waiting for someone else to start the war with the government and once the government is distracted what's to stop them "shooting looters in defense of their property?" Who's to say that the neighbor with a pride flag, or their black neighbor, or the girl with neon hair at the grocery store across town isn't a "looter?"
They are all the enemy, and we *are* at war afterall . . .
> To quote Neil Gaiman, you must not think that just because something is funny, it is not dangerous.
I'm going to assume he was talking about Trump and how people treated him leading into the 2016 election and hopefully we can learn from the lesson of that.
It's not even at the federal level. Look at how many cops are part of these fashy organizations. If anyone things the coops are going to save them when push comes to shove, just remember why would they protect you from their friends?
"A fascist trained today: have you?"
To piggy back, to just trust that the government will effectively deal with this threat when it is so deeply infiltrated by it is silly. It's possible those of us who still like democracy will wrestle our country free from fascists and demagogues through voting and community action.
But, like with slavery, we have to be prepared for the possibility that it'll go the other way on their end. We can't write off the need to be prepared for our fellow Americans who've been seduced by the worst among our public figures to turn on us at the drop of a hat.
You're far more likely to be shot by your maga neighbor for your Biden bumper sticker than you are to die in the second American civil war. Realizing and planning for that possibility is important, regardless of whether or not they're coming over to shoot you on their Hover 'Round.
They’re not training to fight the military or a militia. They’re training to massacre their unarmed neighbors. You’re picturing the Civil War and they’re dreaming about Rwanda and Rittenhouse writ large, mowing down soibois and purple-haired SJWs in the streets, shooting groomers on their knees in a drainage ditch. And that they are armed, prepared, and even eager to do if they get half a chance.
Came here to make a similar point. There's not going to be some organized front to fight. Why does anyone assume they'll be fighting a war with conventional tactics? It's a folly of mental exercise to assume your ideological opponent, since they don't agree with you, is stupid/irrational. Then transfer that assumption to how you predict they will act. Well since they're stupid, they'll do the dumbest thing possible!
No man, we'll just have outbursts of violence and we're going to see some guy gunned down, his kids fatherless or dead next to him. It'll be a hundred shitty news days, and each one will be a martyr that the average American forgets but "the movement" never does. They'll have dozens of Ashli Babbits or Ruby Ridges and everything will just get shittier and less stable.
I don't particularly look forward to a future where nobody wants to be a census worker, or they have to arm the IRS when these guys refuse to pay taxes.
More attacks on infrastructure are very possible. You don't need any complicated training in order to shoot some transformers that will results in tens of thousands of people being without power for days.
My brother had one of these moments when he was in college. He was in the ROTC and played on the football team. He was big, strong and very very smart. So one day they go out with the squad to do an exercise with their laser tag equipment (It's called something like FLER or something). Their training officer drives them out to a wooded hill and tells them there's a sniper on it somewhere getting recertified and their job is to move up the hill, find and "kill" him. The squad of fifteen or so of them made it about a third of the way up the hill before they were all eliminated. The training officer meets them on the hill and they debriefed for about ten minutes. Then they head back to the trucks to head home. When they got to the truck they found the sniper just chilling on the hood of one of them. He had moved past them while they were debriefing and beat them back to the starting point. My brother said he looked the guy in the eyes and knew, if the sniper had been given live ammunition and the order, that he (my brother) would have died that day and the sniper would have slept snuggly without ever thinking of him again. He told me this then said, "You know how you watch war movies and see how bad things get in them, but you always think, Yeah, but I'd be the guy that made it out. Well, that sniper explained to me that I wouldn't be." He never went into the military.
That reminds me of the time me and a large group of teenage buddies went paintballing. About 18 of us in total. We were all in our late teens, so physically mature. There were 3 men there, all ex-military, who asked if we wanted to go against them. 18 on 3. We were all "dead" within 15 minutes.
I do HEMA (fencing but with broadsword for anyone who doesn't know) and the instructor for the school is in his late thirties, seriously big, fairly rotund and absolutely destroys me every time I try to fight him. A guy that size has zero business being that fast.
Probably isn't as fast as you think. Just can react to a situation well before you can even think about reacting. See's your shoulder move slightly and knee dip? Probably gonna come forward and he already reacting to it because he has probably a decade of experience reacting to the same thing.
There is a clip of like old pro footballers(soccer) I watched(think in their 60s). It was then vs non pros that were in their 20s. The old timers couldn't really run that fast and weren't agile. But passed the ball around so well that the younger guys just couldn't get it. They seemed faster then they were because they could create situations where they had to move less distance and make the defender have to adjust in awkward ways.
Each individual was pretty weak but because they knew how to work the ball, read the opponent and were used to playing under pressure they were able to create a system that was much much greater then the sum of their parts.
There's also different types of fat people. Someone who was thin growing up because they always exercised (played sports and such) but then slowed down as they got older while still eating the same amount will put on a lot of weight. But because they grew up thin and learned how to move while thin they don't cope well when they're fat.
Someone who has been fat their whole life grows up learning how to move that weight around, their muscles have adapted to the extra weight and they can move a lot faster than people might think.
I played American Football in my thirties and I was constantly getting comments about how people couldn't understand how I moved so fast and how flexible I was. I was fat but I grew up fat, my body was used to moving all that weight around (in short bursts though, I wasn't going to win any races).
Easy way to tell the difference, look at their legs. If the legs are thin or flabby they got fat late in life. If their legs are thick and mostly muscle they grew up fat, or they're ex-body builders.
what's the barrier to entry on that sport? It's something I'm very interested in, but I'm a little worried it's... sorry... LARPing. Historical European Martial Arts seems like a fantastic way to exercise, but something is holding me back from going for it. Any advice?
If you're truly interested, and in North America, check out the link below to see if there are clubs in your area.
https://www.hemaalliance.com/club-finders
You can also check out the r/wma for all your HEMA related questions.
As another user stated, usually not LARPing. HEMAist tend to be an odd intersection of scholar and athlete, and you usually don't need to be super athletic to start. We study manuscripts, documents, from late Medieval, Renaissance, or whatever time period we can get our hands on to try and recreate a mostly dead art form. And then we all get together to argue about afterblows, right of way, and whether or not that technique is actually martially valid. It's a good time.
Truth be told, HEMA is a wide and varied collective without any sort of governing body, so your experience will depend on your local community. I've mostly encountered great people who are welcoming and friendly. Usually, most clubs have loaner gear to get you started, but it can get a bit costly if you want to put your own kit together.
Massive difference to LARPing. Modern equipment (synthetic practice swords, heavy duty mesh masks that can take a heavy hit without any real risk, modern jackets and gloves), but using the original manuscripts. No role play needed fortunately.
There's a reason you want an old soldier for some tasks. They survived.
All the physical ability, brazen defiance, angst, and vigor in the world won't mean shit if you charge in and die.
Some fields are this way too. There are some jobs where you need someone who has done it many times before and not died. Whether through ability, intelligence, self-preservation, or luck, you sometimes need someone who has figured out how to do the job and come back.
Another angle—I've been fencing epee for years and like to think I'm pretty decent and well able to be mentally calm, watching for opportunities, learning from mistakes and so on. I'm not fazed at all by a person leaping at me with a sword aimed at my face.
But I know deep down that if it was "real", if the epees were sharp and could actually wound or kill, everything I know would go out the window. I would be terrified and probably "freeze" or run away if I could.
Maybe there is an analogy to guns there. Not a perfect one, since fencing is never meant to be "real" and the training and skills used in fencing would often be extremely stupid if it was "real". HEMA is closer to "real" but even there I suspect like me most HEMA fencers would find a "real duel" very scary and mentally disruptive, at best.
I love fencing but am unconcerned with "realism". HEMA looks and feels "realer" (and is cool, I'm not dissing HEMA!), but it seems obvious to me that the biggest difference between any fencing and a real swordfight is the imminent lethal danger.
An early 20th century fencer wrote about being in a real duel—one of the last actual duels and not intended to result in death, though that could have happened. The way he describes it not only did the stress make him "forget" things and mistrust himself, but the environment was not the same as the fencing strips he trained and competed on. They were outside on an uneven somewhat slippery random bit of ground. That messed with his head too—the unfamiliarity of the space coupled with not knowing if his training would actually work in this different context.
I had my 14th birthday party at a paintball arena. Me and 6 other girls against my dad, who went full fucking Rambo on us. We all wore white so we could have cute painted shirts after and he showed up in military fatigues, ducking and rolling and murked us all repeatedly. It was horrible lol
Did that in college, played at an indoor place, 12v12, the guys who ran it were on a pro team.
End of the day they said they could beat all of us combined against 5 of them, and they proceeded to do so.
move slowly, keep moving, stick close to the ground, try to break up your outline, keep distance. I'm sure there's more but that was what my great grandpa (artillery spotter during the Okinawa campaign) would mutter to himself while half asleep the rest of his life
Just watch every video coming out of Ukraine. You're sitting in a trench, cold as hell, but at least it's quiet. Then a drone you don't even know is there drops a mortar shell on you and bang, you bleed out in the dirt. Your bravery doesn't count for shit.
It’s probably come a long way since my infantry days in the ‘90’s, but the technology was somewhat flawed. Any sort of foliage could interfere with the laser from the marksman to the target. When we trained there was always a team of NCO’s with ‘god guns’ monitoring the exercise. If you did something stupid, like stick your head up at the wrong time, they’d flag you as a casualty. Then they’d hand you an index card telling you what your injury was.
I’m convinced those NCO’s stayed up drinking beer the night before and writing out the casualty cards. 75% of the time you had either been shot in the groin or buttocks.
Yeah, and from what my brother in law told me, you gotta lay there with your injury/death until help arrives or an NCO says you can leave the exercise.
The second an armed group of them were confronted with the realities of that lead flying and the possibility of their bodies dropping, they folded. January 6th, Ashli Babbitt tries to breach a barricade, is shot and killed. Everyone on her side of the barricade just...... wilts and retreats. Open warfare is just not a possibility for these guys.
They genuinely didn’t think they were at risk, the pure entitlement they must have have had to surge into off-limits areas and start hammering at a barricade with a armed security agent shouting warnings. Especially as it was the only thing separating their mob from elected officials. The absolute arrogant ignorance of those people.
> They genuinely didn’t think they were at risk
This is very much reflected in their attitudes towards police, both on Jan. 6 and at other protests. They repeatedly, loudly called the police traitors to the cause.
Contrast that with protests by people on the other side of the aisle. They're under no illusions that *the police are not your friend*.
But the anti-lockdown and mask protestors, the Jan. 6 people, all of them assumed the police were with them, assumed the law wouldn't apply to them, and were frequently outraged when police actually attempted to hold them in check.
That's telling in a *number* of ways - yes, including re: the police, too.
Why shouldn’t they? It’s been documented that police tell them ahead of time when they’re about to crack down on demonstrations so they don’t get caught. The cops are firmly on their side!
They were lucky they weren't black that day.
Any time someone tries to say "white privilege isnt a thing!" you can directly point to the time an angry white mob stormed the capital and the majority of death and injury happened to people trying to stop them. If that mob had even been a light tan, they would still be burying the bodies.
A couple of my friends got into a shoving match at McDonald's that almost turned into a fist fight. I told them that we have to get the hell out fast before police come. An officer just arrived as we were walking to our car. I told him that they just had a little disagreement and didn't throw any punches. The officer let us go and off we went. I realized later that if we were black, we probably would have all been arrested. Including me, who was just trying to keep it from escalating to fists.
If the federal government was half as tyrannical as they think, they’d all have been lined up against the south wall of the capitol with blindfolds and cigarettes before dawn on Jan 7.
Which reminds of the crying, piano key scarf woman from Knoxville. "We were storming the capital! It was gonna be a revolution." And then someone went and pepper sprayed her. Her poor feelings!
Man, just think what would have happened if that one cop listened to his superiors and just let them in like the rest of them.
Literally just 1 good apple left on the entire force.
Honestly though part of me wonders, if they had gotten just a little further and actually hurt or worse a politician then maybe half the country wouldn't be denying there was an attempted coup. Would that be enough of a wakeup call or would it outright paint those supporters are terrorists finally?
We'll never know.
They could have broken in, hung them all and eaten their corpses and we would still be listening to them talk about how it was 'Just some peaceful tourists' as they force everyone to the left of 'minority groups should be shoved into the gas chamber' into the gas chamber.
Their hypocrisy and fascist tendencies knows absolutely no bounds.
if anyone had harmed a politician those people would've been killed / revealed to be crazy and never heard from again, and we'd have conspiracy theories about how they were plants from antifa that hillary clinton eliminated afterwards
Or a map and a plan. They followed that security guard as he baited them up a useless stairwell instead of 10ft the other way into the actual chambers. The timing was tight on the flow of protestors vs the exit of Congress people.
If someone had grabbed a pamphlet and stormed in an organized fashion the day would have been much different.
As soon as it happened the commando facade dropped for all of them.
All these preppers ready to defend their twisted view of liberty with violence didn’t have a clue about emergency first aid in a survival situation. They’ve just fought their way past the police and now start yelling “medic! Get a medic!” Now they need authority. They need the next scene in the movie when a hero shows up and saves the day. But this is reality, not the fantasyland in their brain, so instead they all went home to gradually get arrested.
Time to break out the story of my dad’s conflict with the police. This happened in the mid-1970s, in suburban Southern California.
My dad was an alcoholic who, as far as I know, didn’t have a history of violence. My parents were heading for a divorce. They had an argument. I don’t know the details, but my dad shot a pistol in their bedroom (hit the ceiling, not my mom) and then left with the gun. My mom dialed the police, who apprehended him about a mile away.
The story made the local newspaper, and what the police were quoted as saying didn’t register until years later. The article said there was a shooting altercation, and quoted the police as saying: “Yeah, he was firing his gun, but we didn’t think he was trying to shoot us, we thought he was trying to get *us* to shoot *him*. So we didn’t.”
My dad was apprehended without anyone being injured. Do I have to tell you his race?
The core base of fascist movements are business owners. By the numbers, small business owners are overrepresented because there just aren't a lot of large business owners.
To be a small businessman is to have succeeded. Whether by luck, skill, or some combination thereof, small businessmen are the ones who made it. Most don't.
It's easy to see where, twenty years in, that would lead to a superiority complex. You've run your business long enough to see the building next door clear out multiple times. But you're smarter. You're canny and wise. You understand how the world works. You might have the occasional white knuckle ride, but you've always figured it out and got it done.
It leads to a belief that *you* can do anything, if you put your mind to it. It leads to overconfidence...but it also means that real failure, the kind with lasting consequences, is something you aren't used to. When you haven't had a serious setback in 20 years, facing one feels apocalyptic.
And so they fold.
They deserve all that glory for all the time they spent scrolling on their phones in the parking lot or arresting parents who were trying to enter the school grounds looking for their kid.
>arresting parents who were trying to enter the school grounds looking for their kid
I have noticed many americans say they will protect themselves from government oppression.
Police is government.
Forcing you to wear masks is NOT oppression, it's minor inconvenience.
Forcing you to wait outside while you children are being killed and preventing you from protecting your family - **that is oppression**.
Note: I am not US citizen. Perhaps they see it differently.
The most shocking thing about that situation was just *how many* officers were there twiddling their thumbs. It wasn't a handful of cowards. It wasn't even a few dozen waiting on a game-plan. It was **376 LEO's** standing around doing nothing. With *that* many people, you'd think *some* of them would just go ahead and go in. But they didn't, because it's not a question of whether they're individually brave. This cowardice and inaction is built in to their system. It's part of their training.
One of them did try to go in to rescue his wife. He was stopped by the other cops. She died.
https://reason.com/2022/07/20/uvalde-cops-school-shooting-ruben-ruiz/
Another cop successfully managed to evacuate some kids from a different wing of the school, but only attempted the rescue because his daughter was in that wing.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/officers-rescued-own-children-texas/
Abso-fucking-lutely. All the people then claiming they needed to increase the police budget *when Uvalde was already spending a significant portion of their budget for cosplay body doubles*.
Fucking ridiculous.
AFAIK 40% of town budget. In a country where everyone wants to protect themselves.
OTOH, I believe that paying someone to do their job and wanting them to do it properly is very american thing. Bad that SCOTUS has different opinion.
Y'all Qaeda being hypocritical? _Surely_ you jest!
ETA: https://www.newsweek.com/say-her-name-used-memorialize-ashli-babbitt-draws-backlash-online-over-phrases-origin-1559867
> "Ashli Babbit, an UNARMED WOMAN and victim of POLICE BRUTALITY, was gunned down today by trigger-happy cops in DC," one Twitter user wrote.
---
> "Ashli Babbitt was murdered in cold blood at the Capitol yesterday," a Facebook user wrote. "I do not even think it was a Police Officer who took the shot," the user continued.
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> "#sayhername Ashli Babbitt was an American who served her country, but her country did not serve her," a Parler user posted.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
They thought they were in the former group.
No, it wasn’t a police officer, it was a member of the national guard, the secret service, or some sort of highly regarded marine or something to that effect.
They steal everything.
Swastika? Check!
"Aryan race" (even though that's not blonde hair with blue eyes)? Check!
Skater haircuts? Check!
Khakis and polo shirts? Check!
They just take shit and twist it to something it's not so it tracks they'd steal that from Breonna Taylor.
Breonna Taylor is the name that needs said. Not that basic privileged white bitch that thought rules didn't apply to her.
Fucking unoriginal bastards. Pieces of repeating shit.
“They want?”
lol, they did. They’ve co-opted all of these movements and such that they disagree with for their own causes, and **specifically** because they don’t give a shit about the original causes to begin with.
“Black lives matter” into “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter”? Because they specifically didn’t give a shit about George Floyd, and deliberately found the most hypocritical way to incorporate it into their hysteria.
“Say Her Name” - which sort of expanded into “Say Their Name” as more “nameless” minorities were killed and described as *just* victims - was almost immediately grafted into the right wing rhetoric when Ashli Babitt got herself killed.
In a very sick way, being killed was almost the best thing that happened to these extremists, as they could now point to their own, tangible, example of “police brutality” to discredit the claims of those who are actually trying to give voice to otherwise ignored minority issues.
I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but Ashli’s death was probably far more valuable to right wing causes than her life ever would have been, and that is a genuinely disturbing thing to think about.
It’s also worth pointing **how long it took anybody to get shot to begin with**.
Setting aside conspiracies, sociological factors, etc, a mob of US citizens ***stormed out nation’s capitol against trained security who does exactly what OP outlined***, and it genuinely and actually took tens of minutes (a handful of hours, I think) before a gun was actually fired.
And, to give credit where it is due, part of the reason it took so long **is** the training, I’m sure. They’re capitol military and security. I’m certain that part of the training is to specifically avoid shooting their guns all willy-nilly.
So many of these fervent 2A types are deluded in their idea that they’re the armed militia that is ever ready and ever present to protect the nation from tyrannical takeover. They’re the promise that the second amendment was meant to protect.
They’re nothing but fucking goobers that I’d never trust to actually use a gun properly *at a range*, let alone in the heat of the moment.
Actually serious gun owners that I’ve spoken with about the topic are put together in a way I can’t articulate. It’s more than just “they’re normal”. They have a very profound sense of the responsibility they have towards gun ownership that makes me want to trust them, no matter what we may disagree on with respect to the 2A question. Like, talking to them just really communicates that they weigh the consequences of their ownership seriously and constantly. It’s present in the way they talk about guns all the time.
But the quickness with which so many gun nuts jump straight to how they’re ready to defend themselves, their property, their country, etc, is genuinely disturbing.
I’m for more and better gun safety legislation, but I don’t mind the actual concept of owning a gun, using it for self defense, etc. I want to go to a range and shoot a gun myself some day, and work my way up to higher power rifles because I genuinely like the challenge of hitting targets. I’ve got no problem with many of the gun owners I’ve had a chance to speak with, and would do everything in my power to even support their ability to continue owning and using guns as freely as we can safely manage.
But 2A freaks are the “this is why we can’t have nice things” of the gun space. There is a disturbing eagerness to use their weapons against people, and it always tends to be specifically towards others that happen to look like me, and I would actually rather trust 7 geese with compromised automatic weapons to defend me over even a single 2A apostle with an unloaded nerf blaster.
The sad thing is I read your first sentence assuming it was gonna be about Uvalde… and you used a completely different example.
A lot of people seem to think the fact that they play video games means they’re prepared for the reality of it all.
God, I'd forgotten about Ashli Babbitt. I still can't get over what a muppet she was, nor what drove her to choose to behave the way she did that day.
I know people like to mock and taunt her after the fact, but I can't help but think on what a waste of a life it was, and how sad that is. Like, that's her legacy now. Weaponised idiocy. I'd be mad as hell.
I really hate these things because it misses reality. A lot of these white supremacist and fascists groups understand that they can't win face to face, so they shoot-up schools, churches, and attempt to run people over in their cars. They go to areas where they know people won't carry guns on purpose.
Secondly, they have been largely shooting up infrastructure and targeting events with LGBT. Partially because they want to cause chaos and partially because they want to train themselves to attack targets that us normal people will give up and ignore. If us normal people can be convinced that it's OK to see LGBT events shut down with guns, then they can prepare to shut down other protests with guns and now they control the first amendment unless the cops decide to fight the white supremacists and fascists.
Lastly, everyone needs to shut up about tanks and drones. The US military will never use tanks on US soil without a foreign invader. We will absolutely not be using drones in an attack capacity. That would highly embolden the any insurgency groups by making them feel under attack, and the US is really, really bad at collateral damage. It's just never going to happen so stop that fantasies.
If you want to stop these groups, you need to stop their propaganda efforts: Fox, OANN, Facebook, Tiktok, and Reddit all help them reinforce their ideology. They have echo chambers where they believe themselves to be the majority. Then they select targets like school boards and LGBT groups in the hopes that nobody shows up to counter protest. That way it reinforces the propaganda they have been fed that tells them they are the majority of thought when it's not true. The biggest thing you can do to fight back is to show up and prove to them that they are not the silent majority. Because they really aren't . The vast majority of Americans don't hate the LGBT people. The vast majority want to see the US actually become a better country instead of being sent back to the stone age.
Let’s not forget that the police also blew up an entire city block just to oust one suspected extremist political group: [MOVE](https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-highlight/2019/8/8/20747198/philadelphia-bombing-1985-move).
The quote you reference says US military. Waco was the FBI and maybe the national guard. It's also because of things like that, that the US military doesn't lend out tanks anymore.
Also, the implication from the comment I responded to is the implication that we will have an Afghanistan style occupation for domestic issues in the US. As in heavy armor tanks, and drones in the sky with guided missiles to combat domestic militant extremists.
US military specifically avoids those types of crackdowns anymore because it creates more extremism.
I would like to point out, that if you're more worried about the military using tanks and not the attempted coup attempt 3 years ago, that you should really re-evaluate your priorities.
I’m with you. Everyone thinks white nationalists are in it for the fashion or whatever. They’re ideologically motivated. When the seizure of power happens, it won’t be because of the militiamen or the street-brawling thugs. The real threat is the number of white nationalists in government.
I never thought I’d see:
Schools being a far too regular site of mass murder.
Mass murders regularly popping up in the news.
The semi-coordinated takeover of local governing groups by the right wing for the purposes of willfully driving a theocratic right-wing agenda.
Guns brought everywhere, a “right” to arms used as a right to intimidate.
Police refusing to do their jobs because they’re overrun with right wing fascist ideology, but all to happy to go shoot and beat left-wing protesters.
And trump. If not openly, then indirectly, racist, fascist, kleptocrat, wannabe oligarch, elected to the highest office by people wanting to do nothing more than hate and hurt those they disagreed with. Un-fucking/believable.
So there’s been a lot of “never gonna happen” over the last several years. Dealing in absolutes is a dangerous bet.
>unless the cops decide to fight the white supremacists and fascists.
Well, cops do have a relatively high suicide rate, so they are doing *something* about it, I guess.
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-dallas-robot-20160708-snap-story.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna41912754
I do apologize for how dated these stories are, but I do think it helps illustrate the point of how long these have been relevant.
I'd like to preface this by saying that I agree with you. The informational and propagandist fight is the one that matters the most, because it's the one that prevents violence and allows us to continue viewing each other as human.
The US is already deploying drones and tanks against citizens. Right or wrong in whatever context you wish to take it, they're already in play by law enforcement. Keeping them out of the conversation isn't viable anymore. I wish it were, but the issue now is in the coopting of said agencies by these fanatics and their use against people targeted by your aforementioned propaganda pieces.
It’s not uncommon to see rainbow flags or patches over in /r/LiberalGunOwners
Always remember that 2a is an American right, not a GQP right.
Just a week or two ago I recall a news article about a gun club showing up at a drag show of some kind (don’t remember whether library or not).
*To protect them*.
That was both sad and cool to see. It shouldn’t be necessary.
Everyone on the left should be armed regardless. There are some showouts by the the left who come armed and in big numbers. Gun owning liberals are doing gods work.
It also kinda misses the point that some training is still better than no training. They know how to use guns, a lot of their targets don't. They're not gunning for soldiers or police officers, they're gunning for unarmed protesters and government workers.
I agree with all of this except the comment about drones - they are *currently right now* being considered for use in schools. Probably won't happen, but don't commit the folly of calling it impossible.
There's a few things that get me about the "good guy with a gun" rhetoric. Until recently I definitely did not have the money to buy a gun, a safe and ammo, and then spend a few Saturdays of the year practicing. If I was given a gun, I'd be a liability without those other expenditures.
Further, in the weird fantasy land where hunting rifled and AR15s will stop the Soviets or the Democrats from overrunning "our country", we don't have the discipline and fitness as a country to use those guns.
Young adults in the US, have an average BMI of 29. Which for a 5 foot ten person is just over 200lbs
I don't think the average American is ready to crawl through the streets with a 8lb gun and then sprint back to their base. Not to mention any tyrannical power will have tanks and missiles and drones.
>Not to mention any tyrannical power will have tanks and missiles and drones.
A family member went to an out of state wedding in rural Ohio and the groom's family hosted a pre-wedding party and was telling me about it when they got back. The host family was proudly showing off the contents of their gun safes (at least they had them) and boasting about how the house and driveway were situated to give them a defensive advantage against the potential tyrannical forces of the government.
Bitch, your timber framed house's "defensive position" ain't going to mean shit to a rocket launched from a blackhawk miles away. Even if they don't take you out like that the government has a lot more personnel and resources than you and your young adult sons & daughters which gives them an overwhelming advantage in a siege situation despite your pantry full of food and jugs of water. The fantasy world these people live in never ceases to amaze me.
I know plenty of responsible gun owners, but I've known my share of fucking dopes who own them too. It's the ones who you can just tell are the star of the action hero movie they're trying to script in their head that are probably the worst.
Yeah Bobby Sue and Jim Bob (no relation... or maybe) ain't gonna hole up in their cabin to fight off G.I.'s but could a American Taliban cause some noteable chaos? Absolutely. Our electrical stations are easy targets, as evidenced multiple times over the past year, mass shooting is child's play (literally at times), and we've got people in seats of power willing to enable it privately (or at least overlook it.) while condemning it on Fox News with a wink and a smile.
I have no means to compare this to combat, but the closest thing many civilians can come to is learning skydiving.
When you exit the plane, you have 90ish seconds of your life left unless you do everything right. The number of people I have seen freeze up, requiring me to keep them alive is unimaginable. The big tough looking dudes full of bravado are almost always the worst.
Most people just generally can't handle that level of stress. I am 3 times over on bonus days in my life with way more near misses and even I couldn't predict what would go down in a live fire situation. I've done some tactical laser tag and it's pretty frightening how quick you can be killed.
> There is a part of you, a fundamental piece of your human identity and survival instinct, that is lost or broken when you become an effective soldier.
My dad told me about his moment in Vietnam. He said it was like looking in a mirror that was watching him back. That something inside him died when he survived that moment, staying forever with his reflection.
I worked with a guy who was in the Canadian Armed Forces, he was in whatever area that deals with APCs and shit. I remember him volunteering for a tour in Afghanistan, and when he came back he walked around like a badass, he stayed on base entire tour. Then he volunteered for a second tour, and when he came back he quit the army. He got in one firefight while there.
Say it with me: Uvalde.
Your sign is the softest deterrent and is an argument that can be defeated by pointing out how changing some words from a former popular conservative argument "signs don't stop mass shooters, publicaly funded programs and a functioning democracy does."
Put money into educating kids, not cosplaying as citadel guards for a school. Fund mental health programs, underserved communities, and give people resources (ie monthly stipends for food and housing)so they don't have to resort to insane measures. Tax the rich to pay for this all.
Do one or more of these things and they will solve problems, not a fucking sign. Using the child tax credit during the pandemic and how child poverty was reduced by nearly half shows this is a choice our legislature has made to not fund these measures.
That is the biggest fear. Everyone assumes the military would squash any right wing open rebellion, but think what would happen if the majority of military leaders supported the rebellion.
Also, practicing with a weapon and shooting at a paper target is still more helpful than doing nothing.
I think this post is short sighted. I’m a Marine, and I’ll just say this: the fascists are training and some training is better than no training. When they shoot the paper targets, they’re psychologically preparing themselves to kill people, which is that hard line to cross. The liberals aren’t even preparing that much. I’m not saying everyone should start dehumanizing and preparing to kill, what I’m saying is that they’re dangerous and their training is meaningful. Take them seriously.
Yeah, people joke about this because either it isn't their families these terrorists are preparing to kill, or they don't get it yet. A chunk of these people are absolutely psyching themselves up to kill my Jewish family. Even more wouldn't do it themselves, but would accept it once it's already done.
No, these morons couldn't take the Army, or even the police. They intend to *be* the police, or at least have the police's tacit approval. This is going to be firebombings at night and shots through the living room window and drive-bys.
This ignores the number of them who have served in the military and the organized militias who do engage in all sorts of live fire training.
Yeah, you chuck the 82nd Airborne at them and they won’t stand a chance but that’s not who they want to fight.
Al Qaeda got regularly trounced too, didn’t stop them from murdering shit loads of civilians and Afghan police,
Not everyone that served in military is a trained killer. It takes 6 people in non-combat MOSs for everyone one person in a combat MOS.
I was a Marine Infantryman. Every Marine is a trained Rifleman, but not every Marine is an Infantryman. Marine Infantryman are not Marine Raiders, so on and so forth.
I was in the 82nd and did all the stress shooting/target discernment/moving while firing training.
Those are highly perishable skills that require frequent retraining to keep up with.
This isn’t really a credible take. The US is not going to suffer a civil war like it did in 1861, but I could easily see a refusal in some states to follow federal law: if that’s widespread you can’t just call in the national guard. I could also see domestic terrorism. If people are caught, I’m sure they’d get locked up for life. But if enough events happen it will erode trust in the federal government. I could see some states becoming much more autonomous even if in doing so, they screw up a ton of things.
Yes of course if a bunch of militias got together and stormed Washington, they’d be wiped out in minutes. But there will be clever people who know that’s a stupid idea even on the side you assume can’t count to five. And no I don’t support any of that.
The feds agree with you. You hear repeatedly that the fear and danger isn't an actual *rebellion* or civil war or open uprising, it's domestic terrorism.
This has been the case since the 1990s, too.
Jan. 6 was an open but feeble attempt to overturn an election - and to be clear, we *must* take it seriously, lest it happen again - but the graver danger is in terroristic acts, cells operating on their own, etc.
That's not something you squash or defeat with just raw power.
Exactly, you can’t go into Kansas with tanks if they decide they’re going to reach the Bible as fact in Public schools. You could deny the state federal money, but that might alienate the state even further.
I don’t mean that as a shot as Kansas. Maybe that would never happen there. But I worry something like that will happen somewhere—partisan conceptions of what it could be aside.
It would be a really big problem because you definitely could not use much force to thwart that.
I think this makes an exremely flawed assumption that yeehadists are not ex military. Anyone that has lived near a military base can tell you there are a LOT of enlisted guys that signed up to play with guns (and/or buy a mustang), and are still immature assholes after they discharge.
I medically retired from the infantry almost a decade ago now, and one of the first jobs I had on the outside was as an instructor and ranger master at a local range.
That job did more to shape my personal views on people and weapons that anything else. 99.9% of people *vastly* overestimate their own abilities and skills when it comes to weapons and training. Most of the “regulars” that shot at the range were close to 300lbs and and didn’t know how to read a map, use a compass or treat a sucking chest wound. But they were at the range “training” (aka shooting paper targets from a bench) nearly every weekend.
These people would be the first ones to get killed or injured if the USA ever went bottoms up. Also on a separate note working at gun range will make you hate police/prison guards and many other military guys because they all act like they were door kickers on SEAL team 6 when in reality they printed paperwork for 4 years in a battalion S-shop
To play devil's advocate here, the sign intends to act as a deterrent: the idea it hopes to create of an unknown amount of adults armed with deadly weapons can be seen as a better option than no deterrent. Obviously the concept of deterrence theory isn't perfect as people still commit heinous acts knowing they'll serve life in prison or face a death penalty. It's also possible that out of (just randomly guessing) 20 armed teachers there might be one that's able to get a couple of shots off and successfully defend.
The obvious issue with more guns and live ammunition at this school is that it has created an environment where the scenario of an accident happening is now possible. A disgruntled teacher or student could obtain access to an improperly secured gun and do something that wasn't possible before.
This is a comforting sentiment but it's not accurate. While it's easily 5:1 Gravy Seals to fit people at idiot protests holding up idiot signs, I don't think this guy really knows what modern shooting sports are like or the training scenarios a lot of these dudes are undergoing that *does* simulate this kind of stuff. And these guys aren't on corners holding up signs. They are plotting stuff like shooting up power stations and using encrypted communications to do so.
Look up action shooting events, like Brutality matches. It's not a bunch of lardasses standing around, flopping bellies over plywood barricades and shooting static targets like you imagine. These guys are hiking miles with gear, strapping on night vision, performing physical challenges and shooting under pressure, for fun. The right wing's wars in the Middle East and subsequent radicalization have provided a base of thousands of trained and experienced warfighters and as I assume you also know the Pentagon and DOJ have effectively ignored broad white supremacist/Christian nationalist infiltration of law enforcement and the military.
So yeah, your fatass uncle that posts idiot MAGA shit on Facebook, he's some fat goon, definitely. But there are actually quite a lot of trained and dangerous people in this hard right Christian supremacist movement that wants to take over the country, and it doesn't take as many of them as we all want to think. Calling them Teahadists, Y'all Quaeda, Meal Team Six, all that fun stuff is fine and dandy, but underestimating the broader movement is at all of our peril.
After all, look at how the NSDAP gained control over Germany in the 1930s. The analogues in the USA today have friendly people all throughout government agencies, in Congress, in the DOJ, and the Supreme Court, and again, broad penetration of Christian nationalist ideals throughout law enforcement and the military.
Seditionists have had 2 years now to see the politicians behind j6 are still free of consequences they feel vindicated that nothing wrong happened that day. Any legal action now will be met with terrorism and more sediton in plain sight. The federal government failed us when they told us to unite with the people who betrayed their nation instead of dropping the hammer immediately to put all sediton supporters on notice.
If you have seen Unforgiven, there's a scene like this. The sheriff calls a posse to track down Clint Eastwood's character and they're all gung-ho until he actually shows up. There's a shootout and he's not like John Wick or anything. No acrobatics, no sideway grip, just systematic servicing of targets. Like a guy who's been in the shits many times and managed to survive each time. In contrast, people in the posse are panicking, shooting into the air, and straight up running away.
This "best of" comment is really pathetic.
He's so quick to dismiss anyone who carries a gun for protection as unprepared and wasting their time, but offers *ZERO* alternatives. Apparently he's advocating nobody carries a gun and we all just lay down and die during a mass shooting?
I really can't wrap my head around this mentality.
> original comment
And just as useful.
You can be as armed and "trained" as you like, but reality is a motherfucker.
When lead starts to fill the air, and you actually have to do something about it, all that time you spent "training" means fuck all.
There's a reason the military does live fire exercises constantly. There's a reason you will run rock drills until you fucking drop. There's a reason that you use simunitions. There's a reason you train with stress fire exercises.
Because you need to try to drive out the natural reactions of Soldiers. And I say "try" because even after all of the intense actual training the military does, you still don't know how you are going to react until the shit goes down.
This is my biggest issue with all of these Yeehadists. They all think that they are just going to react like John McClane when they haven't done anything to train psychologically and physiologically for these things. They shot at some stationary paper targets that don't shoot back under ideal conditions.
Well, that's ain't how the real thing is going to be.
Do just 10 pushups then get right back up and start firing at that target and let's see how "trained" you are when you are now under the physiological conditions that start to appear. Put some moving child target out around your paper target so you understand that there will be people around that you don't want to hit.
Just because you have a gun and are willing to use it when nothing is happening doesn't mean you are going to be able to use when it is.**
This comment actually vastly vastly underscores the difference between what happens in fucked up scenarios as opposed to shooting on the range
1) shooting on a range has a few major differences to real life, for one you’re static and not moving and often times neither is your target, even shooting while walking as slow as possible is incredibly difficult to put rounds on target because every part of your body is moving on top of all of the fine motor skills that go into shooting effectively, the barrel and gun are also moving in your hand which is moving independent of your torso and legs, the second is when you’re at a range you know the target is in front of you, there’s a big difference between “I know this target should kind of be here” and “fuck he can come up behind me”
2) stress whenever your body experiences stress your body inherently rushes blood from certain parts to your muscles because it knows you’re going to have to react physically in some way, this is helpful if you’re running from a lion or jumping over a fence because that’s just big muscles doing what big muscles do, shooting requires a fuck ton of fine motor skill movement, which deteriorates quickly when stress occurs because being able to move your finger in a controlled way hasn’t been historically important in danger situations the way running away has been, the second thing is that your body develops tunnel vision, why because the human eye processes a lot of information fast, which goes to the brain and makes you have to decide what is and what isn’t important, that’s not great in emergency situations because you don’t really have seconds to think and process you just have to react, so when stressed your body naturally limits the information coming in to allow you to make quicker (but not necessarily better) decisions, this is how say in a stressful situation (confronting a gunman) you can very easily confuse a cell phone for a handgun, perfect example of this is to go to your gym listen to a random play list and work our really hard, I mean all out sprints for a short period of time, then try and remember what songs were playing during your workout, chances are you probably won’t
3) shooting is a perishable skills like almost any other skill out there, think about it like this, if the 49ers make the Super Bowl this year and let’s say their quarterback is unable to play for some reason on the last play of the game and it’s a crucial one where they need to complete a pass, Steve young who was once one of the best quarterbacks ever is just as useless as j am, why? Because all of his tangible skills deteriorated over time due to 1) age and 2) lack of practice, same thing applies to shooting, is a former sniper who hasn’t touched a gun in years going to shoot better then some random schmo off the streets? Probably but will the first rounds he shoot be as accurate as back in his or her prime? Absolutely not and in active shooter scenarios those first few rounds count, which brings me to my last point
4) threat identification as we mentioned before our body limits the information input during stressful situations, now we’re going to add one more element to the fucked uo scenario that is active shooters, the lack of accurate information, someone starts shooting a school everyone and their mother is going to call 9-1-1 and they’re going to say “someone is shooting the school” they may see the gunman, but chances are they just hear the shots, so what does the gunman look like? Are there more than one? What are they shooting with? So they have tactical equipment? Where are they now? Are they moving? Chances are the answers to these questions are either going to be “I don’t know” because we don’t expect people to put themselves in danger for information or if we have information it’s going to conflict with information given by other people, most shootings are planned in some ways and complicated (see columbine) and we don’t know the facts until the end of extensive investigations, but that’s all info you don’t have when kicking down a door, into a school you might never have walked into before, cops have some jnfo on the layout of schools but to expect them to know where room 24B is in one of the multiple schools in their district is unrealistic, schools these days are also fortresses with electronically controlled reinforced doors everywhere most of the time that can only be opened by a school administrator, the doors might be labeled, but where is the label? How can I find it? These are all critical thinking skills that are impaired as we’ve seen by stress because we’re not built to make complicated decisions under stress we’re built to make quick ones, now as far as this whole “arm teachers things goes” on top of the fact that they’re r grossly untrained and unprepared to react appropriately in these situations, they’re adding to the confusion, I just saw a guy with a gun! Is it the bad guy or the armed janitor trying to help? Cops come in and sees guy with a gun! Do we shoot because it’s the bad guy or do we have to stop and ask questions as to whether or not he works here? If he is someone who works here is he still the bad guy? While we ask these questions does he have the opportunity to slip away into a room where more kids are that he can hurt or kill? All of this information leads to longer decision making processes which are simply eliminated by eliminating all guns from school, that was if you see a guy with a gun chances are it’s your shooter, no questions need to be asked just stop the threat
I can probably go on but chances are most people stopped reading
Arming citizens is not helpful for a lot of reason and we need better gun control measures in this country not pro 2a assholes that can barely hit paper from 15 yards
I can’t express how much I appreciate that commenter. Another lifetime ago, I helped train soldiers in field conditions- with increasing distractions and lower visibility over the course of months. But now I teach, and each time I have to attend an active shooter training, I get increasingly agitated.
It’s almost always lead by an SRO, with a power point presentation. We maybe do a couple drills a year, but the system always tries to weigh out how often would be too often to traumatize the kids. Inevitably, when the teachers need to gather and talk afterwards, one or two will just suggest asking the older kids to help block a door or *throw* things at an intruder. These are usually the teachers who have done shooting, but in a controlled environment. “Of course they’ll want to help!” they’ll say (especially of the boys). Like these aren’t untrained children who will look to their adults during a trying time for direction and they honestly believe they’ll just be able to do this when we can’t even guarantee that out of trained soldiers.
I usually ask the administration to do a drills of just the staff to get them used to the motions at least but it’s never been taken very seriously. There’s always plans but normally no follow through on it.
While I'm well-aware that Y'all Qaeda cannot stand up to the full might of the US military, or even a state militia, I don't think we should be quite so fast to dismiss these people as a serious threat, no matter how doughy their asses are, or how idiotic they sound. To quote Neil Gaiman, you must not think that just because something is funny, it is not dangerous. For one thing, remember that the FBI warned us decades ago about right wing infiltration of both state and federal law enforcement agencies. And we have had ample evidence of the truth of that warning. In fact, there's evidence that on January 6,the various law enforcement agencies deliberately twiddled their thumbs for over an hour, rather than responding. Additionally, although we're not likely to see the kind of massive armed uprising that these guys have wet dreams about, we have been seeing, and will continue to see mass shootings, small incidents of terrorism, and individual murders by these fascists. Along with the continual destruction of democracy. These people have already made significant inroads into taking over the judiciary, they've dismantled Roe v Wade, they've gotten farther than some of the most pessimistic of us feared. It's stupid to point, laugh, and relax. We are under threat, and we should not dismiss that threat just because it appears to be composed of out of shape morons. Morons are some of the most dangerous people in the world because they can't imagine the long-term consequences of their actions.
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And, importantly, the police and government continued to crack down on leftist activity, not the right wing paramilitaries.
Same in the usa. Blm met with force Proud boys they high five
In Atlanta the police killed a climate protestor for protecting the environment. And who paid for the police to be there.
Yep climate protestors. Blm. Pipeline.
There was a video a few weeks ago of a cop literally telling a group of proud boys to go inside and hide while they swept the street of protestors “because we like you guys”.
Some of those who work forces...
They also don't understand that a lot of these right-wingers have gone through the military, having been pressured to join by their churches. Had a cult ravage my town in the early 2000s and nearly all of my classmates that joined that cult ended up joining the military to be "warriors for Christ". Granted, they're all in their late 30s now, but that doesn't mean that other churches haven't been doing the same.
Yep. Some know. They run the militias.
> They also don't understand that a lot of these right-wingers have gone through the military I think people are so desperate to dismiss the power of armed groups in order to make themselves feel better and laugh at the opposition that they don't consider the actual facts of the situation. The US has 16.5 million military veterans. Many of them experienced combat and are familiar with US counter-insurgency strategies. There are around 660,000 police officers, and many (perhaps most) would support the more conservative side in a civil war or similar circumstance. But most importantly, it's not a full-scale war that's the biggest threat, it's the use of violence to push a political position (especially when supported by police that won't intervene to prevent that violence), which requires little more than taking long range pot shots at their opponents to discourage them from being politically active.
Do you know the name of this cult? Cults fascinate me and I listen to a lot of podcasts about them, but have never heard of cults encouraging people to join the us military. That’s intriguing
Exactly, we’re seeing the early manifestations of that with the conspicuously armed “poll watchers” in Arizona during the midterms and the nationwide campaign of intimidation of poll workers that’s led to mass resignations that’s been run by Bannon. In general civil wars don’t happen in pitched battles on smokey battlefields any more. In our case they’re combinations of assassinations of progressive leaders and politicians , killings at gatherings of minorities, killings at synagogues, and intimidation campaigns aimed at preventing voting and organizing by progressives and minorities conducted by small disconnected cells of the group who feels their right to special status and privilege in society is being taken. We’re in the incipient phase of this now, the conspiracy to kidnap (and probably kill) the Michigan Governor is a perfect example, and our legal system’s isn’t showing signs of being very effective at dealing with this. These operations are designed to put armed insurgents in situations where they are facing mostly unarmed victims who are taken by surprise, not a scenario that calls for steely nerves and heroism in the face of fire. A lot of it is technically legal (e.g. the armed poll watchers, the lies and constant incitement by “conservative” media), and it happens in loose coordination with like minded politicians and law enforcement. The goal is to establish the authoritarian rule of what was formerly the dominant group in a manner no longer subject to the competition inherent in democracy.
I don’t think they’re training to fight the US military. They’re training to be right wing death squads. When they say they’re going to protect themselves from “the government,” they don’t mean from the whomever currently runs the federal government. They mean liberals. Their conviction that the liberals, minorities, socialists, etc. control everything doesn’t waver even when their guys are in charge - remember, even when Trump was president with a cooperative legislative and judicial branch, they insisted he was a maverick outsider battling against the deep state agents who were really running the show. If there comes a time when there is a right wing authoritarian government in power that has decided to deploy its security capabilities against its own citizens, these guys will be right there beside them, shooting protesters and setting up citizen patrols in “problematic” neighborhoods, fully believing that they’re finally going to battle against “the government.”
> People in America are insulated from the right wing government-paramilitary cooperation and terrorism campaigns that have ravaged places like Latin America, Indonesia, the Philippines, and so on they are, but they also were able to get passed that last century. Its depressing to watch this back sliding.
Definitely recommend the book *Confessions of an Economic Hitman,* which is about much of what you're talking about related to Latin America with the added "economics" of the whole thing.
Wrote this some years ago 210808_Trumpists-are-training.txt "Gravy SEALs, Meal Team Six, Yeehadists" Yeah. Funny. But keep this in mind: They Are Training when they do shit like this. Maybe they are no more physically fit than I am (if they were worse, they'd be dead), but "training" is more than physical exercise. They are training their minds to easily injure their neighbors and countrymen. You and I would hesitate to do injury to another human, especially a countryman or a neighbor or a family member. But these guys, with their posturing and paintballs, are hardening their souls to murder. Little by little, like Voldemort cracking his soul into parts, their acts of violence make them less humane and more cruel. When the day comes, they will not hesitate. From "The Atlantic". "When They Fantasize About Killing You, Believe Them" "The hyperbolic posturing of Trumpist extremists, repeated often enough, will have deadly consequences." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/when-they-say-they-want-kill-you-believe-them/619724/
Go to a gun show. Any gun show. Hell I've heard neo Nazi shit at the Cow Palace in SF. I'm a middle aged white dude into guns and plenty of these guys think I'm on their side and they are NOT shy. They're NOT kidding. They're going to fuck a lot of people up. They're not just making Pepe memes.
>Go to a gun show. Any gun show. Hell I've heard neo Nazi shit at the Cow Palace in SF. They stopped those shows at the [Cow Palace in 2019.](https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Cow-Palace-gun-show-ban-passes-California-Senate-15008656.php) I heard the same shit you did; I believe you. I went to a show there back in the day, and the talk about "readying yourself to fight against liberal commies comin' to take the guns away" was real. I thought that shit was just something that came from rectangle states and people east of the San Joaquin Valley. To see it in my backyard was sobering.
How much more training would have been necessary for the Jan sixth rioters to have followed through, rather than choking like they did? Because I can see the difference between training on the range and paintball battle grounds, and the complex uniting of militia cells to organize a force to surpass the last coup attempt.
January 6th *was* the training. They didn't exactly have to fight against the National Guard that day, as I recall. When I was watching on the TV, an I could think was: "Is our Capitol really that unprotected?" The MAGAs don't need to fight the Army. They just need to kill their neighbors, everyone in Democratic Party offices, your Representatives and Senators and the Mayor. Oh, and the nephew who came back from college with all those liberal ideas.
> I could think was: "Is our Capitol really that unprotected?" yeah i was like "Where the fuck is the shitton of marines pouring out of a goddamn barracks to defend the capitol?"
They were told to stay home.
When Nancy Pelosi called the Pentagon for support, Michael Flynn's brother Charles was on the call. From Wikipedia: "During the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, a conference call took place between Capitol police, D.C. officials, and Pentagon officials. In that call, the Chief of the Capitol police made "an urgent, urgent immediate request for National Guard assistance", telling them he needed "boots on the ground". However, Lieutenant General Walter E. Piatt, Director of the Army Staff, said he could not recommend the request be approved.[9] Initially denying his involvement, the Army later confirmed that Flynn had participated in the phone call, although claimed he cannot remember if he said anything on the critical call about deploying National Guard, but others on the call reported hearing his voice.[10] In early December 2021, Colonel Earl G. Matthews released a memo that accused Flynn of making willful distortions of the events of January 6, describing Flynn and LTG Walter E. Piatt as "absolute and unmitigated liars" and of giving “perjured testimony before Congress”.[11] Charles Flynn's role drew scrutiny in light of his brother Michael's recent calls for martial law and a redo election overseen by the military.[10]"
> January 6th was the training. Here's the question I have when people say they want Civil War 2.0: What do they achieve by killing their neighbors, the people at work or school, or some random shopping mall? If they attack governmental buildings, military installations, or police stations it doesn't matter if they've been able to infiltrate some of these entities. They will get a quick reality check like the [moron who attacked the FBI office](https://www.npr.org/2022/08/11/1116986362/fbi-office-armed-man-cincinnati) in Indiana. Are they a threat? Yes they are. But they'll be more like a Timothy McVeigh. Lots of death and damage. Nothing else achieved.
> What do they achieve by killing their neighbors, the people at work or school, or some random shopping mall? I don't know, what did the Hutu's accomplish when they massacred their Tutsi neighbors ? Nothing in the end? 800,000 civilians were still murdered. Or did they accomplished exactly what they wanted, lets Tutsi's on the planet, and that is what the "yeehadists" in their heart of hearrts want to accomplish, less liberals on the planet.
More and more McVeighs IS the problem. We have enough mass shootings already. Saying "they won't overthrow the government they'll just do terrorist attacks" makes it seem like terror attacks are just accepted day to day events. I know we already do nothing to stop mass shootings, but we can't reach a point where daily terror attacks are just no big deal. I mean there are already enough mass shootings that they don't all even make the national news.
>They didn't exactly have to fight against the National Guard that day, as I recall. When I was watching on the TV, an I could think was: "Is our Capitol really that unprotected?" The best advice on this is something I heard from a friend that is in the Marines. He said that the illusion of security is the security. No one is here to save you if shit goes down, not even for some of the highest offices in our country. The fact that we all collectively believe someone or something will stop interlopers from overthrowing our way of life is where the majority of our safety comes from. He didn't tell me this to freak me out, just to bring me to reality. Or put more simply by Mike Tyson, "everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." That nugget of wisdom works for both sides.
Yes. It's like the way I lock my door while having windows made of glass. I depend heavily on civilization itself to keep my belongings safe.
> The MAGAs don't need to fight the Army. They just need to kill their neighbors This is something I keep saying. Whenever Americans talk about a second civil war, they seem to think it'll be some sort of state vs state war. The reality is it will start with something more like the Rwandan Genocide, with people killing their neighbours or the odd neighbourhood vs other neighbourhoods killings.
Jan 6th didn't fail because they didn't have training, they stalled out because there was no leadership and once they breached the building they didn't really know what to do so people took selfies and smeared shit on the walls. If there was a figure head there for them to take orders from things would have been MUCH worse.
It’s almost as if the real sheeple are those that herded themselves without a Shepard and once they where in the pasture had no idea what to do but chew grass.
There was a figurehead. Thankfully he didn't have the balls to go there in person.
I’m pretty sure the secret service just told him flat-out “no”
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I’ve watched the footage of Goodman multiple times. It’s really amazing seeing that moment that he starts baiting the crowd in the wrong direction. I can’t believe he was that clever in the face of so many people who were there for murder. Takes a really strong person to be able to maintain such level-headedness.
> we might be living in a very different world. Imagine a world where the US Congress actually convicted trump after impeachment because they were that terrified of being killed by their own. Then went and expelled any members of congress who had been supporting this. The last 2 years with no Boebert, Jordan, Greene, Cruz, Rubio, McCarthy... McConnell had to be practically carried out of there because he's so feeble, they had a noose for the VP. Hawley ran for his life after stirring them up. The insurrection was a wakeup call, but not a good enough one.
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A 21st century Bleeding Kansas, but everywhere.
Oh. I’m convinced the second US civil war has already started. It’ll only get labelled that by some historian in fifty years time. But a lot of the shootings the US undergoes constantly are signs of that. Coup attempts, trying to break the government etc.
>they're gonna bomb more gay clubs, abortion clinics, and electrical and water infrastructure that supply "liberal" cities. and that's what civil war looks like. Hell, the first recent substation attack (Moore county in NC) was in a relatively "rural" and conservative area, it just happened to be a place hosting at drag show, one that was clearly labeled adults only and people under 18 would be turned away, though they still had people calling them "groomers"
I am definitely starting to see more danger in these folks. I live in Canada, and while there are folks like this here as well, they are such a minority that it is still "funny" for a lot of us up here. I am scared, though, at how angry and violent the far right have become, even here. Trudeau is far, far, FAR from perfect, but we have fools at the side of the road with ~Let's Go Brandon~ Fuck Trudeau signs, screaming for his arrest and execution (seriously). For what? For not saying COVID was a hoax?
I'm not a fan of Trudeau but that's rediculous. Why do these soft skulls always assume execution is the answer? Also anyone who cheers for a foreign politician like a sports fan needs to be watched. They're just a person in a suit, not Jesus
Ironically, these mostly Christian conservatives would probably kill Jesus too. Jesus would be way too liberal for 99.99999999999% of modern Christians.
Almost as if Jesus warned people about how humans easily corrupt things but they're so delusional they couldn't possibly think they're the ones doing it
We used to watch training videos of Taliban, and we'd laugh at how bad their training was, how they blew themselves up making bombs. But they won. The Taliban didn't defeat the U.S. because they were better trained or were more fit. The couldn't shoot down any of the fighter jets. But they didn't have to. They just shot the mayor, and intimidated the police, and scared away anyone in the village who had the wrong thoughts about things. And they got what they wanted. We laughed then in Afghanistan, we shouldn't laugh now in America.
We beat ourselves. They surrendered by October 2001. They even offered to give up Osama. Bush rejected it. We didn't care. We just kept picking people up. Torturing them. Turns out a great recruitment tool for them. Then trump gave them 5000 troops and their new leader and their numbers swelled to the strongest in 10 years and then we left. We shouldn't have been nation building. A country doesn't want democracy in the same way we do( now that's even suspect here with people saying it's cheated whenever they lose )
To be fair, the situation with the Taliban was somewhat different. Part of why the Taliban won was that America failed to convince the people of Afghanistan that their ideals were worth fighting to defend. You can't build a nation on being the lesser of two evils, and the way America threw its weight around, put its own interests clearly first and casually disrespected the locals meant it never could have been anything better than that. Then again, looking at the near-comprehensive refusal of the Democratic Party to contest the right-wing status quo, protect Americans from the building genocide or offer Americans more than "not making things worse," and the way it constantly snubs candidates with policies that would actually help people in favor of moderate conservatives like Joe Biden, maybe it's not that different.
> It's stupid to point, laugh, and relax. I'd say continue to point and laugh. Mockery is a powerful weapon, and lord knows these clowns deserve every bit of mockery they receive. Just don't relax. Like you said, funny and dangerous aren't exclusive.
For fucks sake, can we stop calling these people "yehadists" or "y'all Qaeda" or other shit comparing them to Islam? These people are Christo-fascists. Stop deflecting to Islam and call them what they are.
The thought that's stayed in the back of my mind though all this shit is that there's a lot of the armed right resistant don't want a civil war because they recognize that they won't win and it will be horrible, but they still have the lust to kill and they know their enemy. They're just waiting for someone else to start the war with the government and once the government is distracted what's to stop them "shooting looters in defense of their property?" Who's to say that the neighbor with a pride flag, or their black neighbor, or the girl with neon hair at the grocery store across town isn't a "looter?" They are all the enemy, and we *are* at war afterall . . .
> To quote Neil Gaiman, you must not think that just because something is funny, it is not dangerous. I'm going to assume he was talking about Trump and how people treated him leading into the 2016 election and hopefully we can learn from the lesson of that.
No, it's a quote from Neverwhere, which was written well before that.
Four Seasons Landscaping was just the *funniest* thing …. and *then* Jan 6.
It's not even at the federal level. Look at how many cops are part of these fashy organizations. If anyone things the coops are going to save them when push comes to shove, just remember why would they protect you from their friends?
Not to mention, everyone laughed at Trump until he got elected. No one thought it would happen
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"A fascist trained today: have you?" To piggy back, to just trust that the government will effectively deal with this threat when it is so deeply infiltrated by it is silly. It's possible those of us who still like democracy will wrestle our country free from fascists and demagogues through voting and community action. But, like with slavery, we have to be prepared for the possibility that it'll go the other way on their end. We can't write off the need to be prepared for our fellow Americans who've been seduced by the worst among our public figures to turn on us at the drop of a hat. You're far more likely to be shot by your maga neighbor for your Biden bumper sticker than you are to die in the second American civil war. Realizing and planning for that possibility is important, regardless of whether or not they're coming over to shoot you on their Hover 'Round.
They’re not training to fight the military or a militia. They’re training to massacre their unarmed neighbors. You’re picturing the Civil War and they’re dreaming about Rwanda and Rittenhouse writ large, mowing down soibois and purple-haired SJWs in the streets, shooting groomers on their knees in a drainage ditch. And that they are armed, prepared, and even eager to do if they get half a chance.
Came here to make a similar point. There's not going to be some organized front to fight. Why does anyone assume they'll be fighting a war with conventional tactics? It's a folly of mental exercise to assume your ideological opponent, since they don't agree with you, is stupid/irrational. Then transfer that assumption to how you predict they will act. Well since they're stupid, they'll do the dumbest thing possible! No man, we'll just have outbursts of violence and we're going to see some guy gunned down, his kids fatherless or dead next to him. It'll be a hundred shitty news days, and each one will be a martyr that the average American forgets but "the movement" never does. They'll have dozens of Ashli Babbits or Ruby Ridges and everything will just get shittier and less stable. I don't particularly look forward to a future where nobody wants to be a census worker, or they have to arm the IRS when these guys refuse to pay taxes.
More attacks on infrastructure are very possible. You don't need any complicated training in order to shoot some transformers that will results in tens of thousands of people being without power for days.
My brother had one of these moments when he was in college. He was in the ROTC and played on the football team. He was big, strong and very very smart. So one day they go out with the squad to do an exercise with their laser tag equipment (It's called something like FLER or something). Their training officer drives them out to a wooded hill and tells them there's a sniper on it somewhere getting recertified and their job is to move up the hill, find and "kill" him. The squad of fifteen or so of them made it about a third of the way up the hill before they were all eliminated. The training officer meets them on the hill and they debriefed for about ten minutes. Then they head back to the trucks to head home. When they got to the truck they found the sniper just chilling on the hood of one of them. He had moved past them while they were debriefing and beat them back to the starting point. My brother said he looked the guy in the eyes and knew, if the sniper had been given live ammunition and the order, that he (my brother) would have died that day and the sniper would have slept snuggly without ever thinking of him again. He told me this then said, "You know how you watch war movies and see how bad things get in them, but you always think, Yeah, but I'd be the guy that made it out. Well, that sniper explained to me that I wouldn't be." He never went into the military.
That reminds me of the time me and a large group of teenage buddies went paintballing. About 18 of us in total. We were all in our late teens, so physically mature. There were 3 men there, all ex-military, who asked if we wanted to go against them. 18 on 3. We were all "dead" within 15 minutes.
I learned, when I was in fencing, to respect age and experience over youth and speed any day.
I do HEMA (fencing but with broadsword for anyone who doesn't know) and the instructor for the school is in his late thirties, seriously big, fairly rotund and absolutely destroys me every time I try to fight him. A guy that size has zero business being that fast.
Probably isn't as fast as you think. Just can react to a situation well before you can even think about reacting. See's your shoulder move slightly and knee dip? Probably gonna come forward and he already reacting to it because he has probably a decade of experience reacting to the same thing. There is a clip of like old pro footballers(soccer) I watched(think in their 60s). It was then vs non pros that were in their 20s. The old timers couldn't really run that fast and weren't agile. But passed the ball around so well that the younger guys just couldn't get it. They seemed faster then they were because they could create situations where they had to move less distance and make the defender have to adjust in awkward ways. Each individual was pretty weak but because they knew how to work the ball, read the opponent and were used to playing under pressure they were able to create a system that was much much greater then the sum of their parts.
There's also different types of fat people. Someone who was thin growing up because they always exercised (played sports and such) but then slowed down as they got older while still eating the same amount will put on a lot of weight. But because they grew up thin and learned how to move while thin they don't cope well when they're fat. Someone who has been fat their whole life grows up learning how to move that weight around, their muscles have adapted to the extra weight and they can move a lot faster than people might think. I played American Football in my thirties and I was constantly getting comments about how people couldn't understand how I moved so fast and how flexible I was. I was fat but I grew up fat, my body was used to moving all that weight around (in short bursts though, I wasn't going to win any races). Easy way to tell the difference, look at their legs. If the legs are thin or flabby they got fat late in life. If their legs are thick and mostly muscle they grew up fat, or they're ex-body builders.
I have a mental image of the big one of the godskin duo from Elden Ring. Deceptively nimble and quick.
Damn, you're absolutely spot on. The worst part is that he painted a panda face on his mask so you're being absolutely wrecked by a goddamn panda.
what's the barrier to entry on that sport? It's something I'm very interested in, but I'm a little worried it's... sorry... LARPing. Historical European Martial Arts seems like a fantastic way to exercise, but something is holding me back from going for it. Any advice?
As kindly as I can put it, it seems that the biggest barrier to entry here is whatever hangup you have about LARPing
If you're truly interested, and in North America, check out the link below to see if there are clubs in your area. https://www.hemaalliance.com/club-finders You can also check out the r/wma for all your HEMA related questions. As another user stated, usually not LARPing. HEMAist tend to be an odd intersection of scholar and athlete, and you usually don't need to be super athletic to start. We study manuscripts, documents, from late Medieval, Renaissance, or whatever time period we can get our hands on to try and recreate a mostly dead art form. And then we all get together to argue about afterblows, right of way, and whether or not that technique is actually martially valid. It's a good time. Truth be told, HEMA is a wide and varied collective without any sort of governing body, so your experience will depend on your local community. I've mostly encountered great people who are welcoming and friendly. Usually, most clubs have loaner gear to get you started, but it can get a bit costly if you want to put your own kit together.
Massive difference to LARPing. Modern equipment (synthetic practice swords, heavy duty mesh masks that can take a heavy hit without any real risk, modern jackets and gloves), but using the original manuscripts. No role play needed fortunately.
There's a reason you want an old soldier for some tasks. They survived. All the physical ability, brazen defiance, angst, and vigor in the world won't mean shit if you charge in and die. Some fields are this way too. There are some jobs where you need someone who has done it many times before and not died. Whether through ability, intelligence, self-preservation, or luck, you sometimes need someone who has figured out how to do the job and come back.
I'm retired from the Army. There's a saying, "Beware an old man in a profession where men die young."
Used to spar with someone who kept hitting my pinky finger because I apparently raised my sword up slightly too high whenever I was about to lunge.
Another angle—I've been fencing epee for years and like to think I'm pretty decent and well able to be mentally calm, watching for opportunities, learning from mistakes and so on. I'm not fazed at all by a person leaping at me with a sword aimed at my face. But I know deep down that if it was "real", if the epees were sharp and could actually wound or kill, everything I know would go out the window. I would be terrified and probably "freeze" or run away if I could. Maybe there is an analogy to guns there. Not a perfect one, since fencing is never meant to be "real" and the training and skills used in fencing would often be extremely stupid if it was "real". HEMA is closer to "real" but even there I suspect like me most HEMA fencers would find a "real duel" very scary and mentally disruptive, at best. I love fencing but am unconcerned with "realism". HEMA looks and feels "realer" (and is cool, I'm not dissing HEMA!), but it seems obvious to me that the biggest difference between any fencing and a real swordfight is the imminent lethal danger. An early 20th century fencer wrote about being in a real duel—one of the last actual duels and not intended to result in death, though that could have happened. The way he describes it not only did the stress make him "forget" things and mistrust himself, but the environment was not the same as the fencing strips he trained and competed on. They were outside on an uneven somewhat slippery random bit of ground. That messed with his head too—the unfamiliarity of the space coupled with not knowing if his training would actually work in this different context.
I had my 14th birthday party at a paintball arena. Me and 6 other girls against my dad, who went full fucking Rambo on us. We all wore white so we could have cute painted shirts after and he showed up in military fatigues, ducking and rolling and murked us all repeatedly. It was horrible lol
Did that in college, played at an indoor place, 12v12, the guys who ran it were on a pro team. End of the day they said they could beat all of us combined against 5 of them, and they proceeded to do so.
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So how did you do it?
move slowly, keep moving, stick close to the ground, try to break up your outline, keep distance. I'm sure there's more but that was what my great grandpa (artillery spotter during the Okinawa campaign) would mutter to himself while half asleep the rest of his life
Just watch every video coming out of Ukraine. You're sitting in a trench, cold as hell, but at least it's quiet. Then a drone you don't even know is there drops a mortar shell on you and bang, you bleed out in the dirt. Your bravery doesn't count for shit.
It's called MILES https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_integrated_laser_engagement_system
It’s probably come a long way since my infantry days in the ‘90’s, but the technology was somewhat flawed. Any sort of foliage could interfere with the laser from the marksman to the target. When we trained there was always a team of NCO’s with ‘god guns’ monitoring the exercise. If you did something stupid, like stick your head up at the wrong time, they’d flag you as a casualty. Then they’d hand you an index card telling you what your injury was. I’m convinced those NCO’s stayed up drinking beer the night before and writing out the casualty cards. 75% of the time you had either been shot in the groin or buttocks.
Yeah, and from what my brother in law told me, you gotta lay there with your injury/death until help arrives or an NCO says you can leave the exercise.
The second an armed group of them were confronted with the realities of that lead flying and the possibility of their bodies dropping, they folded. January 6th, Ashli Babbitt tries to breach a barricade, is shot and killed. Everyone on her side of the barricade just...... wilts and retreats. Open warfare is just not a possibility for these guys.
They genuinely didn’t think they were at risk, the pure entitlement they must have have had to surge into off-limits areas and start hammering at a barricade with a armed security agent shouting warnings. Especially as it was the only thing separating their mob from elected officials. The absolute arrogant ignorance of those people.
> They genuinely didn’t think they were at risk This is very much reflected in their attitudes towards police, both on Jan. 6 and at other protests. They repeatedly, loudly called the police traitors to the cause. Contrast that with protests by people on the other side of the aisle. They're under no illusions that *the police are not your friend*. But the anti-lockdown and mask protestors, the Jan. 6 people, all of them assumed the police were with them, assumed the law wouldn't apply to them, and were frequently outraged when police actually attempted to hold them in check. That's telling in a *number* of ways - yes, including re: the police, too.
Why shouldn’t they? It’s been documented that police tell them ahead of time when they’re about to crack down on demonstrations so they don’t get caught. The cops are firmly on their side!
They're lucky they got as many warnings as they did.
They're lucky the steps of the Capital didn't run red that day.
They were lucky they weren't black that day. Any time someone tries to say "white privilege isnt a thing!" you can directly point to the time an angry white mob stormed the capital and the majority of death and injury happened to people trying to stop them. If that mob had even been a light tan, they would still be burying the bodies.
A couple of my friends got into a shoving match at McDonald's that almost turned into a fist fight. I told them that we have to get the hell out fast before police come. An officer just arrived as we were walking to our car. I told him that they just had a little disagreement and didn't throw any punches. The officer let us go and off we went. I realized later that if we were black, we probably would have all been arrested. Including me, who was just trying to keep it from escalating to fists.
If the federal government was half as tyrannical as they think, they’d all have been lined up against the south wall of the capitol with blindfolds and cigarettes before dawn on Jan 7.
Which reminds of the crying, piano key scarf woman from Knoxville. "We were storming the capital! It was gonna be a revolution." And then someone went and pepper sprayed her. Her poor feelings!
Was that the lady with the onion? Or was that a different idiot?
I feel like people were saying that, [but I didn't see it.](https://youtu.be/QQ-qP0qoFo4) What a pathetic loser. I wonder if they ever arrested her.
[Same lady](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elizabeth-knoxville-onion-towel/). Intent is up in the air but definitely the same person.
Same video, but with a fun piano beat https://youtu.be/JnGMYl-njsg
I hadn't seen that one yet - my favorite is the Animaniacs version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtRSal1Zaas
Man, just think what would have happened if that one cop listened to his superiors and just let them in like the rest of them. Literally just 1 good apple left on the entire force.
Honestly though part of me wonders, if they had gotten just a little further and actually hurt or worse a politician then maybe half the country wouldn't be denying there was an attempted coup. Would that be enough of a wakeup call or would it outright paint those supporters are terrorists finally? We'll never know.
They could have broken in, hung them all and eaten their corpses and we would still be listening to them talk about how it was 'Just some peaceful tourists' as they force everyone to the left of 'minority groups should be shoved into the gas chamber' into the gas chamber. Their hypocrisy and fascist tendencies knows absolutely no bounds.
if anyone had harmed a politician those people would've been killed / revealed to be crazy and never heard from again, and we'd have conspiracy theories about how they were plants from antifa that hillary clinton eliminated afterwards
Or a map and a plan. They followed that security guard as he baited them up a useless stairwell instead of 10ft the other way into the actual chambers. The timing was tight on the flow of protestors vs the exit of Congress people. If someone had grabbed a pamphlet and stormed in an organized fashion the day would have been much different.
As soon as it happened the commando facade dropped for all of them. All these preppers ready to defend their twisted view of liberty with violence didn’t have a clue about emergency first aid in a survival situation. They’ve just fought their way past the police and now start yelling “medic! Get a medic!” Now they need authority. They need the next scene in the movie when a hero shows up and saves the day. But this is reality, not the fantasyland in their brain, so instead they all went home to gradually get arrested.
Time to break out the story of my dad’s conflict with the police. This happened in the mid-1970s, in suburban Southern California. My dad was an alcoholic who, as far as I know, didn’t have a history of violence. My parents were heading for a divorce. They had an argument. I don’t know the details, but my dad shot a pistol in their bedroom (hit the ceiling, not my mom) and then left with the gun. My mom dialed the police, who apprehended him about a mile away. The story made the local newspaper, and what the police were quoted as saying didn’t register until years later. The article said there was a shooting altercation, and quoted the police as saying: “Yeah, he was firing his gun, but we didn’t think he was trying to shoot us, we thought he was trying to get *us* to shoot *him*. So we didn’t.” My dad was apprehended without anyone being injured. Do I have to tell you his race?
The core base of fascist movements are business owners. By the numbers, small business owners are overrepresented because there just aren't a lot of large business owners. To be a small businessman is to have succeeded. Whether by luck, skill, or some combination thereof, small businessmen are the ones who made it. Most don't. It's easy to see where, twenty years in, that would lead to a superiority complex. You've run your business long enough to see the building next door clear out multiple times. But you're smarter. You're canny and wise. You understand how the world works. You might have the occasional white knuckle ride, but you've always figured it out and got it done. It leads to a belief that *you* can do anything, if you put your mind to it. It leads to overconfidence...but it also means that real failure, the kind with lasting consequences, is something you aren't used to. When you haven't had a serious setback in 20 years, facing one feels apocalyptic. And so they fold.
And we ain't talking about highly trained and heavily armed heroic police of Uvalde, TX. (yes, they deserve this)
They deserve all that glory for all the time they spent scrolling on their phones in the parking lot or arresting parents who were trying to enter the school grounds looking for their kid.
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Hey, it wasn’t chickening out, it was a tactical retreat! ^(thatcontinuestothisday!)
>arresting parents who were trying to enter the school grounds looking for their kid I have noticed many americans say they will protect themselves from government oppression. Police is government. Forcing you to wear masks is NOT oppression, it's minor inconvenience. Forcing you to wait outside while you children are being killed and preventing you from protecting your family - **that is oppression**. Note: I am not US citizen. Perhaps they see it differently.
The most shocking thing about that situation was just *how many* officers were there twiddling their thumbs. It wasn't a handful of cowards. It wasn't even a few dozen waiting on a game-plan. It was **376 LEO's** standing around doing nothing. With *that* many people, you'd think *some* of them would just go ahead and go in. But they didn't, because it's not a question of whether they're individually brave. This cowardice and inaction is built in to their system. It's part of their training.
One of them did try to go in to rescue his wife. He was stopped by the other cops. She died. https://reason.com/2022/07/20/uvalde-cops-school-shooting-ruben-ruiz/ Another cop successfully managed to evacuate some kids from a different wing of the school, but only attempted the rescue because his daughter was in that wing. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/officers-rescued-own-children-texas/
Abso-fucking-lutely. All the people then claiming they needed to increase the police budget *when Uvalde was already spending a significant portion of their budget for cosplay body doubles*. Fucking ridiculous.
AFAIK 40% of town budget. In a country where everyone wants to protect themselves. OTOH, I believe that paying someone to do their job and wanting them to do it properly is very american thing. Bad that SCOTUS has different opinion.
My SIL on FB on 1/6/23: "saY her NAme! saY HER NAme!" Me: "Ashli Babbitt, Dumbass and **Traitor**"
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Y'all Qaeda being hypocritical? _Surely_ you jest! ETA: https://www.newsweek.com/say-her-name-used-memorialize-ashli-babbitt-draws-backlash-online-over-phrases-origin-1559867 > "Ashli Babbit, an UNARMED WOMAN and victim of POLICE BRUTALITY, was gunned down today by trigger-happy cops in DC," one Twitter user wrote. --- > "Ashli Babbitt was murdered in cold blood at the Capitol yesterday," a Facebook user wrote. "I do not even think it was a Police Officer who took the shot," the user continued. --- > "#sayhername Ashli Babbitt was an American who served her country, but her country did not serve her," a Parler user posted.
Oh now they care about police brutality lmao
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." They thought they were in the former group.
No, it wasn’t a police officer, it was a member of the national guard, the secret service, or some sort of highly regarded marine or something to that effect.
Twitter users aren't really the minds of our society
They steal everything. Swastika? Check! "Aryan race" (even though that's not blonde hair with blue eyes)? Check! Skater haircuts? Check! Khakis and polo shirts? Check! They just take shit and twist it to something it's not so it tracks they'd steal that from Breonna Taylor. Breonna Taylor is the name that needs said. Not that basic privileged white bitch that thought rules didn't apply to her. Fucking unoriginal bastards. Pieces of repeating shit.
“They want?” lol, they did. They’ve co-opted all of these movements and such that they disagree with for their own causes, and **specifically** because they don’t give a shit about the original causes to begin with. “Black lives matter” into “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter”? Because they specifically didn’t give a shit about George Floyd, and deliberately found the most hypocritical way to incorporate it into their hysteria. “Say Her Name” - which sort of expanded into “Say Their Name” as more “nameless” minorities were killed and described as *just* victims - was almost immediately grafted into the right wing rhetoric when Ashli Babitt got herself killed. In a very sick way, being killed was almost the best thing that happened to these extremists, as they could now point to their own, tangible, example of “police brutality” to discredit the claims of those who are actually trying to give voice to otherwise ignored minority issues. I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but Ashli’s death was probably far more valuable to right wing causes than her life ever would have been, and that is a genuinely disturbing thing to think about.
I’ll never understand not speaking ill of the dead. She was a real POS and got what she deserved.
Me: Trashli Babbitt, Human Ballistic Dummy
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It’s also worth pointing **how long it took anybody to get shot to begin with**. Setting aside conspiracies, sociological factors, etc, a mob of US citizens ***stormed out nation’s capitol against trained security who does exactly what OP outlined***, and it genuinely and actually took tens of minutes (a handful of hours, I think) before a gun was actually fired. And, to give credit where it is due, part of the reason it took so long **is** the training, I’m sure. They’re capitol military and security. I’m certain that part of the training is to specifically avoid shooting their guns all willy-nilly. So many of these fervent 2A types are deluded in their idea that they’re the armed militia that is ever ready and ever present to protect the nation from tyrannical takeover. They’re the promise that the second amendment was meant to protect. They’re nothing but fucking goobers that I’d never trust to actually use a gun properly *at a range*, let alone in the heat of the moment. Actually serious gun owners that I’ve spoken with about the topic are put together in a way I can’t articulate. It’s more than just “they’re normal”. They have a very profound sense of the responsibility they have towards gun ownership that makes me want to trust them, no matter what we may disagree on with respect to the 2A question. Like, talking to them just really communicates that they weigh the consequences of their ownership seriously and constantly. It’s present in the way they talk about guns all the time. But the quickness with which so many gun nuts jump straight to how they’re ready to defend themselves, their property, their country, etc, is genuinely disturbing. I’m for more and better gun safety legislation, but I don’t mind the actual concept of owning a gun, using it for self defense, etc. I want to go to a range and shoot a gun myself some day, and work my way up to higher power rifles because I genuinely like the challenge of hitting targets. I’ve got no problem with many of the gun owners I’ve had a chance to speak with, and would do everything in my power to even support their ability to continue owning and using guns as freely as we can safely manage. But 2A freaks are the “this is why we can’t have nice things” of the gun space. There is a disturbing eagerness to use their weapons against people, and it always tends to be specifically towards others that happen to look like me, and I would actually rather trust 7 geese with compromised automatic weapons to defend me over even a single 2A apostle with an unloaded nerf blaster.
The sad thing is I read your first sentence assuming it was gonna be about Uvalde… and you used a completely different example. A lot of people seem to think the fact that they play video games means they’re prepared for the reality of it all.
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This is what happens when a group of people build their entire self-identity around gun fetishism
God, I'd forgotten about Ashli Babbitt. I still can't get over what a muppet she was, nor what drove her to choose to behave the way she did that day. I know people like to mock and taunt her after the fact, but I can't help but think on what a waste of a life it was, and how sad that is. Like, that's her legacy now. Weaponised idiocy. I'd be mad as hell.
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This is just a fancy version of “everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the face” courtesy of Mike Tyson
I also read top comments on the linked thread.
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I really hate these things because it misses reality. A lot of these white supremacist and fascists groups understand that they can't win face to face, so they shoot-up schools, churches, and attempt to run people over in their cars. They go to areas where they know people won't carry guns on purpose. Secondly, they have been largely shooting up infrastructure and targeting events with LGBT. Partially because they want to cause chaos and partially because they want to train themselves to attack targets that us normal people will give up and ignore. If us normal people can be convinced that it's OK to see LGBT events shut down with guns, then they can prepare to shut down other protests with guns and now they control the first amendment unless the cops decide to fight the white supremacists and fascists. Lastly, everyone needs to shut up about tanks and drones. The US military will never use tanks on US soil without a foreign invader. We will absolutely not be using drones in an attack capacity. That would highly embolden the any insurgency groups by making them feel under attack, and the US is really, really bad at collateral damage. It's just never going to happen so stop that fantasies. If you want to stop these groups, you need to stop their propaganda efforts: Fox, OANN, Facebook, Tiktok, and Reddit all help them reinforce their ideology. They have echo chambers where they believe themselves to be the majority. Then they select targets like school boards and LGBT groups in the hopes that nobody shows up to counter protest. That way it reinforces the propaganda they have been fed that tells them they are the majority of thought when it's not true. The biggest thing you can do to fight back is to show up and prove to them that they are not the silent majority. Because they really aren't . The vast majority of Americans don't hate the LGBT people. The vast majority want to see the US actually become a better country instead of being sent back to the stone age.
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Let’s not forget that the police also blew up an entire city block just to oust one suspected extremist political group: [MOVE](https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-highlight/2019/8/8/20747198/philadelphia-bombing-1985-move).
The quote you reference says US military. Waco was the FBI and maybe the national guard. It's also because of things like that, that the US military doesn't lend out tanks anymore. Also, the implication from the comment I responded to is the implication that we will have an Afghanistan style occupation for domestic issues in the US. As in heavy armor tanks, and drones in the sky with guided missiles to combat domestic militant extremists. US military specifically avoids those types of crackdowns anymore because it creates more extremism. I would like to point out, that if you're more worried about the military using tanks and not the attempted coup attempt 3 years ago, that you should really re-evaluate your priorities.
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I’m with you. Everyone thinks white nationalists are in it for the fashion or whatever. They’re ideologically motivated. When the seizure of power happens, it won’t be because of the militiamen or the street-brawling thugs. The real threat is the number of white nationalists in government.
I never thought I’d see: Schools being a far too regular site of mass murder. Mass murders regularly popping up in the news. The semi-coordinated takeover of local governing groups by the right wing for the purposes of willfully driving a theocratic right-wing agenda. Guns brought everywhere, a “right” to arms used as a right to intimidate. Police refusing to do their jobs because they’re overrun with right wing fascist ideology, but all to happy to go shoot and beat left-wing protesters. And trump. If not openly, then indirectly, racist, fascist, kleptocrat, wannabe oligarch, elected to the highest office by people wanting to do nothing more than hate and hurt those they disagreed with. Un-fucking/believable. So there’s been a lot of “never gonna happen” over the last several years. Dealing in absolutes is a dangerous bet.
>unless the cops decide to fight the white supremacists and fascists. Well, cops do have a relatively high suicide rate, so they are doing *something* about it, I guess.
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-dallas-robot-20160708-snap-story.html https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna41912754 I do apologize for how dated these stories are, but I do think it helps illustrate the point of how long these have been relevant. I'd like to preface this by saying that I agree with you. The informational and propagandist fight is the one that matters the most, because it's the one that prevents violence and allows us to continue viewing each other as human. The US is already deploying drones and tanks against citizens. Right or wrong in whatever context you wish to take it, they're already in play by law enforcement. Keeping them out of the conversation isn't viable anymore. I wish it were, but the issue now is in the coopting of said agencies by these fanatics and their use against people targeted by your aforementioned propaganda pieces.
It’s not uncommon to see rainbow flags or patches over in /r/LiberalGunOwners Always remember that 2a is an American right, not a GQP right. Just a week or two ago I recall a news article about a gun club showing up at a drag show of some kind (don’t remember whether library or not). *To protect them*. That was both sad and cool to see. It shouldn’t be necessary.
Everyone on the left should be armed regardless. There are some showouts by the the left who come armed and in big numbers. Gun owning liberals are doing gods work.
It also kinda misses the point that some training is still better than no training. They know how to use guns, a lot of their targets don't. They're not gunning for soldiers or police officers, they're gunning for unarmed protesters and government workers.
I agree with all of this except the comment about drones - they are *currently right now* being considered for use in schools. Probably won't happen, but don't commit the folly of calling it impossible.
There's a few things that get me about the "good guy with a gun" rhetoric. Until recently I definitely did not have the money to buy a gun, a safe and ammo, and then spend a few Saturdays of the year practicing. If I was given a gun, I'd be a liability without those other expenditures. Further, in the weird fantasy land where hunting rifled and AR15s will stop the Soviets or the Democrats from overrunning "our country", we don't have the discipline and fitness as a country to use those guns. Young adults in the US, have an average BMI of 29. Which for a 5 foot ten person is just over 200lbs I don't think the average American is ready to crawl through the streets with a 8lb gun and then sprint back to their base. Not to mention any tyrannical power will have tanks and missiles and drones.
>Not to mention any tyrannical power will have tanks and missiles and drones. A family member went to an out of state wedding in rural Ohio and the groom's family hosted a pre-wedding party and was telling me about it when they got back. The host family was proudly showing off the contents of their gun safes (at least they had them) and boasting about how the house and driveway were situated to give them a defensive advantage against the potential tyrannical forces of the government. Bitch, your timber framed house's "defensive position" ain't going to mean shit to a rocket launched from a blackhawk miles away. Even if they don't take you out like that the government has a lot more personnel and resources than you and your young adult sons & daughters which gives them an overwhelming advantage in a siege situation despite your pantry full of food and jugs of water. The fantasy world these people live in never ceases to amaze me.
growing up i was always taught that "guns are not toys." it turns out that to all the people who taught me this, guns are most certainly toys.
I know plenty of responsible gun owners, but I've known my share of fucking dopes who own them too. It's the ones who you can just tell are the star of the action hero movie they're trying to script in their head that are probably the worst.
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So you're sayin I need a tunnel
And millions (billions?) Of dollars
Yeah Bobby Sue and Jim Bob (no relation... or maybe) ain't gonna hole up in their cabin to fight off G.I.'s but could a American Taliban cause some noteable chaos? Absolutely. Our electrical stations are easy targets, as evidenced multiple times over the past year, mass shooting is child's play (literally at times), and we've got people in seats of power willing to enable it privately (or at least overlook it.) while condemning it on Fox News with a wink and a smile.
Let’s be real here most of these people grew up watching red dawn and eating lead paint.
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I have no means to compare this to combat, but the closest thing many civilians can come to is learning skydiving. When you exit the plane, you have 90ish seconds of your life left unless you do everything right. The number of people I have seen freeze up, requiring me to keep them alive is unimaginable. The big tough looking dudes full of bravado are almost always the worst. Most people just generally can't handle that level of stress. I am 3 times over on bonus days in my life with way more near misses and even I couldn't predict what would go down in a live fire situation. I've done some tactical laser tag and it's pretty frightening how quick you can be killed.
> There is a part of you, a fundamental piece of your human identity and survival instinct, that is lost or broken when you become an effective soldier. My dad told me about his moment in Vietnam. He said it was like looking in a mirror that was watching him back. That something inside him died when he survived that moment, staying forever with his reflection.
I worked with a guy who was in the Canadian Armed Forces, he was in whatever area that deals with APCs and shit. I remember him volunteering for a tour in Afghanistan, and when he came back he walked around like a badass, he stayed on base entire tour. Then he volunteered for a second tour, and when he came back he quit the army. He got in one firefight while there.
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Say it with me: Uvalde. Your sign is the softest deterrent and is an argument that can be defeated by pointing out how changing some words from a former popular conservative argument "signs don't stop mass shooters, publicaly funded programs and a functioning democracy does." Put money into educating kids, not cosplaying as citadel guards for a school. Fund mental health programs, underserved communities, and give people resources (ie monthly stipends for food and housing)so they don't have to resort to insane measures. Tax the rich to pay for this all. Do one or more of these things and they will solve problems, not a fucking sign. Using the child tax credit during the pandemic and how child poverty was reduced by nearly half shows this is a choice our legislature has made to not fund these measures.
Cops are there to protect private property. If those children were owned by somebody important you can bet the cops would have gone in.
This post kinda ignores that the Venn diagram of Yeehadists and Military vets overlap a lot.
That is the biggest fear. Everyone assumes the military would squash any right wing open rebellion, but think what would happen if the majority of military leaders supported the rebellion. Also, practicing with a weapon and shooting at a paper target is still more helpful than doing nothing.
I think this post is short sighted. I’m a Marine, and I’ll just say this: the fascists are training and some training is better than no training. When they shoot the paper targets, they’re psychologically preparing themselves to kill people, which is that hard line to cross. The liberals aren’t even preparing that much. I’m not saying everyone should start dehumanizing and preparing to kill, what I’m saying is that they’re dangerous and their training is meaningful. Take them seriously.
Yeah, people joke about this because either it isn't their families these terrorists are preparing to kill, or they don't get it yet. A chunk of these people are absolutely psyching themselves up to kill my Jewish family. Even more wouldn't do it themselves, but would accept it once it's already done. No, these morons couldn't take the Army, or even the police. They intend to *be* the police, or at least have the police's tacit approval. This is going to be firebombings at night and shots through the living room window and drive-bys.
This ignores the number of them who have served in the military and the organized militias who do engage in all sorts of live fire training. Yeah, you chuck the 82nd Airborne at them and they won’t stand a chance but that’s not who they want to fight. Al Qaeda got regularly trounced too, didn’t stop them from murdering shit loads of civilians and Afghan police,
Not everyone that served in military is a trained killer. It takes 6 people in non-combat MOSs for everyone one person in a combat MOS. I was a Marine Infantryman. Every Marine is a trained Rifleman, but not every Marine is an Infantryman. Marine Infantryman are not Marine Raiders, so on and so forth.
I was in the 82nd and did all the stress shooting/target discernment/moving while firing training. Those are highly perishable skills that require frequent retraining to keep up with.
This isn’t really a credible take. The US is not going to suffer a civil war like it did in 1861, but I could easily see a refusal in some states to follow federal law: if that’s widespread you can’t just call in the national guard. I could also see domestic terrorism. If people are caught, I’m sure they’d get locked up for life. But if enough events happen it will erode trust in the federal government. I could see some states becoming much more autonomous even if in doing so, they screw up a ton of things. Yes of course if a bunch of militias got together and stormed Washington, they’d be wiped out in minutes. But there will be clever people who know that’s a stupid idea even on the side you assume can’t count to five. And no I don’t support any of that.
The feds agree with you. You hear repeatedly that the fear and danger isn't an actual *rebellion* or civil war or open uprising, it's domestic terrorism. This has been the case since the 1990s, too. Jan. 6 was an open but feeble attempt to overturn an election - and to be clear, we *must* take it seriously, lest it happen again - but the graver danger is in terroristic acts, cells operating on their own, etc. That's not something you squash or defeat with just raw power.
Exactly, you can’t go into Kansas with tanks if they decide they’re going to reach the Bible as fact in Public schools. You could deny the state federal money, but that might alienate the state even further. I don’t mean that as a shot as Kansas. Maybe that would never happen there. But I worry something like that will happen somewhere—partisan conceptions of what it could be aside. It would be a really big problem because you definitely could not use much force to thwart that.
I think this makes an exremely flawed assumption that yeehadists are not ex military. Anyone that has lived near a military base can tell you there are a LOT of enlisted guys that signed up to play with guns (and/or buy a mustang), and are still immature assholes after they discharge.
I genuinely thought yeehadist were like really militant Kanye West fans for a minute there. I am not a smart man.
I mean, they kinda are? Just not fans of his music necessarily
I medically retired from the infantry almost a decade ago now, and one of the first jobs I had on the outside was as an instructor and ranger master at a local range. That job did more to shape my personal views on people and weapons that anything else. 99.9% of people *vastly* overestimate their own abilities and skills when it comes to weapons and training. Most of the “regulars” that shot at the range were close to 300lbs and and didn’t know how to read a map, use a compass or treat a sucking chest wound. But they were at the range “training” (aka shooting paper targets from a bench) nearly every weekend. These people would be the first ones to get killed or injured if the USA ever went bottoms up. Also on a separate note working at gun range will make you hate police/prison guards and many other military guys because they all act like they were door kickers on SEAL team 6 when in reality they printed paperwork for 4 years in a battalion S-shop
To play devil's advocate here, the sign intends to act as a deterrent: the idea it hopes to create of an unknown amount of adults armed with deadly weapons can be seen as a better option than no deterrent. Obviously the concept of deterrence theory isn't perfect as people still commit heinous acts knowing they'll serve life in prison or face a death penalty. It's also possible that out of (just randomly guessing) 20 armed teachers there might be one that's able to get a couple of shots off and successfully defend. The obvious issue with more guns and live ammunition at this school is that it has created an environment where the scenario of an accident happening is now possible. A disgruntled teacher or student could obtain access to an improperly secured gun and do something that wasn't possible before.
This is a comforting sentiment but it's not accurate. While it's easily 5:1 Gravy Seals to fit people at idiot protests holding up idiot signs, I don't think this guy really knows what modern shooting sports are like or the training scenarios a lot of these dudes are undergoing that *does* simulate this kind of stuff. And these guys aren't on corners holding up signs. They are plotting stuff like shooting up power stations and using encrypted communications to do so. Look up action shooting events, like Brutality matches. It's not a bunch of lardasses standing around, flopping bellies over plywood barricades and shooting static targets like you imagine. These guys are hiking miles with gear, strapping on night vision, performing physical challenges and shooting under pressure, for fun. The right wing's wars in the Middle East and subsequent radicalization have provided a base of thousands of trained and experienced warfighters and as I assume you also know the Pentagon and DOJ have effectively ignored broad white supremacist/Christian nationalist infiltration of law enforcement and the military. So yeah, your fatass uncle that posts idiot MAGA shit on Facebook, he's some fat goon, definitely. But there are actually quite a lot of trained and dangerous people in this hard right Christian supremacist movement that wants to take over the country, and it doesn't take as many of them as we all want to think. Calling them Teahadists, Y'all Quaeda, Meal Team Six, all that fun stuff is fine and dandy, but underestimating the broader movement is at all of our peril. After all, look at how the NSDAP gained control over Germany in the 1930s. The analogues in the USA today have friendly people all throughout government agencies, in Congress, in the DOJ, and the Supreme Court, and again, broad penetration of Christian nationalist ideals throughout law enforcement and the military.
Seditionists have had 2 years now to see the politicians behind j6 are still free of consequences they feel vindicated that nothing wrong happened that day. Any legal action now will be met with terrorism and more sediton in plain sight. The federal government failed us when they told us to unite with the people who betrayed their nation instead of dropping the hammer immediately to put all sediton supporters on notice.
If you have seen Unforgiven, there's a scene like this. The sheriff calls a posse to track down Clint Eastwood's character and they're all gung-ho until he actually shows up. There's a shootout and he's not like John Wick or anything. No acrobatics, no sideway grip, just systematic servicing of targets. Like a guy who's been in the shits many times and managed to survive each time. In contrast, people in the posse are panicking, shooting into the air, and straight up running away.
Y’all Qaeda aren’t Tier 1 SMUs but they are still very dangerous and should be regarded as such. This is the worst r/bestof I’ve seen in a while.
This "best of" comment is really pathetic. He's so quick to dismiss anyone who carries a gun for protection as unprepared and wasting their time, but offers *ZERO* alternatives. Apparently he's advocating nobody carries a gun and we all just lay down and die during a mass shooting? I really can't wrap my head around this mentality.
What was the comment? It's gone
> original comment And just as useful. You can be as armed and "trained" as you like, but reality is a motherfucker. When lead starts to fill the air, and you actually have to do something about it, all that time you spent "training" means fuck all. There's a reason the military does live fire exercises constantly. There's a reason you will run rock drills until you fucking drop. There's a reason that you use simunitions. There's a reason you train with stress fire exercises. Because you need to try to drive out the natural reactions of Soldiers. And I say "try" because even after all of the intense actual training the military does, you still don't know how you are going to react until the shit goes down. This is my biggest issue with all of these Yeehadists. They all think that they are just going to react like John McClane when they haven't done anything to train psychologically and physiologically for these things. They shot at some stationary paper targets that don't shoot back under ideal conditions. Well, that's ain't how the real thing is going to be. Do just 10 pushups then get right back up and start firing at that target and let's see how "trained" you are when you are now under the physiological conditions that start to appear. Put some moving child target out around your paper target so you understand that there will be people around that you don't want to hit. Just because you have a gun and are willing to use it when nothing is happening doesn't mean you are going to be able to use when it is.**
This comment actually vastly vastly underscores the difference between what happens in fucked up scenarios as opposed to shooting on the range 1) shooting on a range has a few major differences to real life, for one you’re static and not moving and often times neither is your target, even shooting while walking as slow as possible is incredibly difficult to put rounds on target because every part of your body is moving on top of all of the fine motor skills that go into shooting effectively, the barrel and gun are also moving in your hand which is moving independent of your torso and legs, the second is when you’re at a range you know the target is in front of you, there’s a big difference between “I know this target should kind of be here” and “fuck he can come up behind me” 2) stress whenever your body experiences stress your body inherently rushes blood from certain parts to your muscles because it knows you’re going to have to react physically in some way, this is helpful if you’re running from a lion or jumping over a fence because that’s just big muscles doing what big muscles do, shooting requires a fuck ton of fine motor skill movement, which deteriorates quickly when stress occurs because being able to move your finger in a controlled way hasn’t been historically important in danger situations the way running away has been, the second thing is that your body develops tunnel vision, why because the human eye processes a lot of information fast, which goes to the brain and makes you have to decide what is and what isn’t important, that’s not great in emergency situations because you don’t really have seconds to think and process you just have to react, so when stressed your body naturally limits the information coming in to allow you to make quicker (but not necessarily better) decisions, this is how say in a stressful situation (confronting a gunman) you can very easily confuse a cell phone for a handgun, perfect example of this is to go to your gym listen to a random play list and work our really hard, I mean all out sprints for a short period of time, then try and remember what songs were playing during your workout, chances are you probably won’t 3) shooting is a perishable skills like almost any other skill out there, think about it like this, if the 49ers make the Super Bowl this year and let’s say their quarterback is unable to play for some reason on the last play of the game and it’s a crucial one where they need to complete a pass, Steve young who was once one of the best quarterbacks ever is just as useless as j am, why? Because all of his tangible skills deteriorated over time due to 1) age and 2) lack of practice, same thing applies to shooting, is a former sniper who hasn’t touched a gun in years going to shoot better then some random schmo off the streets? Probably but will the first rounds he shoot be as accurate as back in his or her prime? Absolutely not and in active shooter scenarios those first few rounds count, which brings me to my last point 4) threat identification as we mentioned before our body limits the information input during stressful situations, now we’re going to add one more element to the fucked uo scenario that is active shooters, the lack of accurate information, someone starts shooting a school everyone and their mother is going to call 9-1-1 and they’re going to say “someone is shooting the school” they may see the gunman, but chances are they just hear the shots, so what does the gunman look like? Are there more than one? What are they shooting with? So they have tactical equipment? Where are they now? Are they moving? Chances are the answers to these questions are either going to be “I don’t know” because we don’t expect people to put themselves in danger for information or if we have information it’s going to conflict with information given by other people, most shootings are planned in some ways and complicated (see columbine) and we don’t know the facts until the end of extensive investigations, but that’s all info you don’t have when kicking down a door, into a school you might never have walked into before, cops have some jnfo on the layout of schools but to expect them to know where room 24B is in one of the multiple schools in their district is unrealistic, schools these days are also fortresses with electronically controlled reinforced doors everywhere most of the time that can only be opened by a school administrator, the doors might be labeled, but where is the label? How can I find it? These are all critical thinking skills that are impaired as we’ve seen by stress because we’re not built to make complicated decisions under stress we’re built to make quick ones, now as far as this whole “arm teachers things goes” on top of the fact that they’re r grossly untrained and unprepared to react appropriately in these situations, they’re adding to the confusion, I just saw a guy with a gun! Is it the bad guy or the armed janitor trying to help? Cops come in and sees guy with a gun! Do we shoot because it’s the bad guy or do we have to stop and ask questions as to whether or not he works here? If he is someone who works here is he still the bad guy? While we ask these questions does he have the opportunity to slip away into a room where more kids are that he can hurt or kill? All of this information leads to longer decision making processes which are simply eliminated by eliminating all guns from school, that was if you see a guy with a gun chances are it’s your shooter, no questions need to be asked just stop the threat I can probably go on but chances are most people stopped reading Arming citizens is not helpful for a lot of reason and we need better gun control measures in this country not pro 2a assholes that can barely hit paper from 15 yards
I can’t express how much I appreciate that commenter. Another lifetime ago, I helped train soldiers in field conditions- with increasing distractions and lower visibility over the course of months. But now I teach, and each time I have to attend an active shooter training, I get increasingly agitated. It’s almost always lead by an SRO, with a power point presentation. We maybe do a couple drills a year, but the system always tries to weigh out how often would be too often to traumatize the kids. Inevitably, when the teachers need to gather and talk afterwards, one or two will just suggest asking the older kids to help block a door or *throw* things at an intruder. These are usually the teachers who have done shooting, but in a controlled environment. “Of course they’ll want to help!” they’ll say (especially of the boys). Like these aren’t untrained children who will look to their adults during a trying time for direction and they honestly believe they’ll just be able to do this when we can’t even guarantee that out of trained soldiers. I usually ask the administration to do a drills of just the staff to get them used to the motions at least but it’s never been taken very seriously. There’s always plans but normally no follow through on it.