because it’s way more convenient

isn’t a slur more than that?

Not really. I could provide actual specific examples, but I don’t really want to start saying like, slurs, so. I think maybe if you think that you couldn’t make a slur out of almost any word, then you’re not being creative enough, or, you haven’t acclimated to how creative some of these other guys can be.

Here, I’ll come up with a theoretical example. You could probably make a slur out of, say, calling someone a banana-eater, right. I can even imagine two ways to do that.

You could have it be, okay, well, monkeys eat bananas, so, the banana eater is like a monkey, and then obviously comparing people to monkeys is gonna be a little bit of a red flag, is maybe racist, especially depending on whether or not you’re using it to be racist, or applying it disproportionately to one group of people. I’ve seen people just throwing out, like, the specific lego number piece of the mass produced lego monkey, whenever they see a black guy online. I think, at that point, that’s basically a slur, in how they’re using it, and that’s like, just a sequence of numbers.

Or, you could say, okay, well, bananas are kind of a phallic type of food, right, like hot dogs, or whatever, so, people eating bananas are gay, as a kind of substitute for a cock. So, it could also be a homophobic thing.

This is all dependent on the context of use, too. If you’re exclusively calling one group “banana-eaters” based on their intrinsic traits, that’s gonna turn that expression into a slur more. It could also be a statement of fact, right, oh, chuck over there, he’s a banana-eater, he eats bananas, sure. It depends entirely on use. If you need evidence for how this shit can progress then you need only look at websites like 4chan or some other such nonsense.

On top of all this you kind of have the complications of, say, slurs only really applying to particular intrinsic traits that people have rather than others. Slurs can apply to black people, but calling someone a “cracker”, despite being still based on an intrinsic trait, of white skin, isn’t really a slur. Neither is, as upthread, calling someone a “boomer”, because we all age over time, where it’s sort of used generically just to refer to anyone older than you, or because it’s usually applied as a reference to a very specific class of people that have a specific socioeconomic context, more than just being based on their age. You’ll usually only hear people call, say, american boomers “boomers”, in that context, but you won’t hear that in, say, china, or africa, or most of south america, or whatever. It’s a reference to the post-war boom years, explicitly.

There are also certain subcultures which re-appropriate slurs, which basically means that those words aren’t really slurs in how they’re being used in that subculture. I’m sure you can think of examples of that.

Sorry, you gotta upgrade everything every 5 years, because otherwise there’s a security vulnerability! Sorry, looks like there will be no new updates on your software, no compatibility! Surely, things have become so much more efficient in the last 5 years as a result of processing gains, and surely that will be passed onto the consumer rather than eaten up in the middle, and surely we need that increased processing power so you can run the increasingly dwindling number of social media sites that are actually relevant!

Sorry, looks like we got rid of the headphone jack because it takes up too much space and it’s too hard to make the phone water resistant! The IR blaster isn’t relevant anymore because everyone has unilaterally switched to wifi operated smart TVs! Surely! Sorry, the micro SD card slot took up too much space, we need to use that space for processing power! Same with irreplaceable batteries! Sorry, the 16:9 aspect ratio we used to have for phones isn’t available in any phone anymore, because we decided to replace the physical buttons and ugly bezels with basically unusable screen space! But we’re still gonna have a hole punched in the screen for the camera!

I dunno. Modern phones are fucking dogshit now, I hate them so much it’s unreal. Even the software is progressively getting worse year over year. Shit used to be so basically functional and it’s become so horrible.

I think maybe it’s naive to think that if the cost goes down, shrimp jesus won’t just be in higher demand. Shrimp jesus has no market cap, bullshit has no market cap. If you make it more efficient to flood cyberspace with bullshit, cyberspace will just be flooded with more bullshit. Those great lakes will still boil, don’t worry.

I think a lot of people would cut contact with their family at times like this due to the ways in which these kinds of beliefs often intersect with massive amounts of interpersonal abuse and broadly dysfunctional and unhappy relationships. I think this is most especially true of people who are queer, neurodivergent, disabled, or a member of some other minority, who are easily going to be subject by that abuse from their family more and more, especially as they may be more dependent on them and as they’re more noticeably going to see that abuse well up as a result of those narratives. You know, people who get to see the “ugly sides” of their family.

I would say that if you’re not actively dependent on your family, and you’re not part of an actively hated minority which they will more easily discard, disrespect, and abuse, then that makes it easier to cut them out of your life, but that’s also definitely a time at which you will counterintuitively be in the best position to sway them, since you’re at your most secure.

So I would say that this is, in some part, a decision which you should probably make in reflection of your current material circumstances, the current state of your life. This also isn’t a decision which you need to make right now, really, to cut him out of your life or decide to blow this particular one up. You said he’s already married, and that your other two brothers aren’t going, so one more probably won’t hurt things that much even if you invent an excuse.

I’m like 90% sure if I showed my dad the picture of elon musk hitting the five knuckle shuffle live on stage in 4k 60fps three times in a row, he’d probably flee to the “my heart goes out to you” comment, right before trying to find some sort of talking point he could throw down the hopper in order to justify this shit, which is really to say nothing of the fact that he basically just fundamentally agrees with elon’s actions on basically every level if he was to actually sit down and think about it for long enough. There’s some people which cannot be helped, because they will repeatedly choose not to be. There isn’t exactly a correct answer, here, I think the major thing is that if it goes sideways because of your decisions, you shouldn’t beat yourself up or crash out over it, or become overly callous.

This is probably why the tech industry has been hardened against that sort of thing, and is, say, famously hard to unionize.

And… a great example of that is Palestine. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call what Hamas did “attacking a target”. What was the outcome of that? Israel had “justification” to engage in mass ethnic cleansing for over a year.

You put justification in quotes here, and I think you clearly understand why. Netenyanhu propped up hamas as the de facto government specifically in order to ensure a more militant party would give israel the necessary “justification” to attack the people there. So, even their governance, and that attack itself, is traceable to israel’s state violence. A minor note, but an important one, I think. And I think one which requires more thought than just like, pointing to that and then saying “See, I told you, violence doesn’t work, and is bad, and israel wants it!”, because israel’s obviously not an overly rational state which is actually functional, either for it’s people or for it’s goals.

More broadly though, it’s not necessary at all for people to have guns, in order for cops to kill them. Cops can invent any number of reasons to kill someone in their day to day. The gun is something you just see in the news media a lot because it’s incredibly common in america, and especially common in the hoods where cops go out and kill people in larger numbers. Again, we can see that as an extension of a context, created by the state, which has naturally created violence. Partially through the valuable, and illegal, property, mostly in the form of drugs, which must be protected through extralegal means, i.e. cartels and gangs, but also just naturally as a result of police violence in those places as an extension of that, which is an intentional decision to create by the ruling class. It’s a way to create CIA black budgets, it’s a way to incarcerate and vilify your political opponents at higher rates, etc. You can’t be intolerant to the idea of guns as a blanket case, in that context, because it’s a totally different kind of context, and is one which is created by the state.

I would maybe also make the point that a protest is incentive enough against killing people, because it would be widely known and televised as a massacre in the media. You know, just gunning people down in the street, en masse. That line is sort of, becoming less clear over time, as the government seems to be more and more willing to condone that, if not outright do that, but I don’t really think that if, say, everyone in the BLM riots was armed, the cops would just start randomly firing into the crowd. They’d be hopelessly outnumbered, for one, so that’s a pretty clear reason for the police not to just start sputtering off rounds like a bunch of idiots, but you’d also probably see a protracted national guard response over the course of the next several weeks, which nobody really wants to deal with, both in terms of the media response and just the basic type of shit that would happen.

You also have several extrapolations you can make from just that happening in the first place, even though it never would. Like, the kind of city which could get up to that, in america, would maybe reveal something incredibly uncomfortable to the ruling institutions about that particular city and its political disposition and potentially that could be extrapolated to the entire country. Most places don’t get to that point because they reach civil war before that, which is kind of more along the lines of what the preceding commenter is talking about. More along the lines of, say, IRA tactics.

Which is all to say, that this is something which is shaped entirely by the government’s intentional responses and the contexts that they create. When they decide to escalate, that should be seen, naturally, as being on them, and not on your average person. I think what the previous commenter is trying to say, with a good faith reading, is that we are probably due, in the next 4 years and perhaps beyond, for an escalation. I don’t think that’s really a morally great thing, or a good context, but I do think they’re potentially right based on how things shake out, and I think that people should probably come to terms with that even as we try to avoid it.

Edit: Also I forgot to note this, but this isn’t really a disagreement in core ideals, but just of tactics. Dual power isn’t so much a deliberate choice of tactic so much as it should just be a certainty, being that both sides of this debate are mutually beneficial to one another. If you have, or can place, a more reasonable politician in office, either through violence (highly unusual, but does happen occasionally if the dice reroll lands well enough), or through the political system itself, then that reasonable politician is just that, more reasonable. i.e. more likely to accomplish goals which are desirable to any violent guerillas. Likewise, the pressure that violent guerillas exert can be seen as a kind of abstract economic cost constantly being leveraged against unreasonable political powers, in favor of reasonable elements of that political system.

The main point against this, is that the united states is currently so unreasonable, politically, that it’s functionally impossible to bargain with in really any way. Any violence, under such a political system, one which refuses any attempt at change, is seen as kind of ultimately meaningless. But I think that’s maybe also part of a broader point about how people just generally feel, understandably, incredibly pessimistic about the future, and are sort of retreating back into a kind of survival mode. Especially, I think, because they’ve been made to feel totally responsible for the weight of the world, when ultimately the decision of the political power to retaliate and do mass violence is, as previously stated, both inevitable, and entirely their own decision, that they must be held responsible for, rather than the people.

I say all that in my comment, but, it’s not just that this guy is a techbro, there are some other factors that make it so he’s probably guy. With those, I just think that it’s probably more likely that this is the guy, than that it isn’t. I don’t really see a need to theorize that this isn’t the guy based on how the guy in the video is some sort of crazy criminal mastermind, when he also hits up a starbucks right before, as well as a bunch of other evidence in the video itself that this is probably a somewhat average, if maybe uncommon, guy. i.e. it easily could just be a techbro.

From what the news has told us, which is really all we have, this guy fits the bill pretty solidly. We’ll see with the dna, ballistics, and fingerprint, but we also know that’s historically not really conclusive evidence either. The best you could do is that this guy fits the specific timeline, which we’ve heard less about relative to everything else, though from what we have heard, he does seem to fit pretty well. This entire issue, the issue of being able to conclusively tell who’s done a crime at what time, that’s part of why the justice system needs reform, because it’s very likely that you could just get this all wrong. I can acknowledge that reality, and also acknowledge that, based on what is publicly available so far, this guy is probably the guy.

I dunno, the idea that this random guy, who’s reading and posting shit about the unabomber’s manifesto on his goodreads, and happened to be passing through new york via hostel and then greyhound at this time, is just some random guy, I dunno. With modern social media, I think we really start to strain credibility that this isn’t the guy. You would have to have a very convenient fall guy for that to be the case. It probably would’ve been easier to just catch any random schizo techbro inside of new york and then throw a gun and prewritten manifesto at that guy, to be honest, if the nypd or fbi just wanted some random dude to bag and throw away to pretend like they’re capable. Like you said, you could find them by the thousands.

The crazy part about jury nullification is that if I was someone who was wanting to engage in it I probably wouldn’t be posting my opinions about the case online in a public fashion because that could easily be used as something to dismiss me from the case. That’s like a step away from bringing it up to the judge in the courtroom. They’re probably already gonna select a bunch of random boomers who have no idea what’s going on to comprise the jury anyways, since they can just do that if they want to, in the same way that the jury can just decide someone’s guilty or not. So that whole conversation is kind of moot.

Yeah, it’s been really crazy. People have been trueanoning on this one just like people did with the trump shooting, even though that one was obviously also a pretty clear cut case. I think partially, it’s because people are wanting to be half-funny, and are basically just iterating on the joke of “oh, I saw him at bible study at the time! that couldn’t have been him!” and then sharing photo edits, right.

I think part of it is that everyone has been trained by true crime and fiction to think of all of these events as though they’re living in a tom clancy book, or something. They’re enraptured by the spectacularization of this event, and of all of the past of history, enraptured by the transformation of this event into a spectacle, so they get the feeling that, oh, oooh, something’s off, but I just can’t tell what. It always has to be some sort of increasingly more dramatic escalation, until there’s some sort of release of tension, because that’s how things work in fiction. In fiction, a guy isn’t allowed to just pull off a hit on a random unprotected CEO, ride his bike to central park, leave a backpack full of monopoly cash because he’s kind of cracked, get on a bus, and then go to a shithole in pennsylvania and then get busted over a mcdonald’s hash brown. That shit doesn’t happen in fiction, so it’s not allowed to happen in real life.

I think part of it is also some sort of idiot idea about, somehow, if they just question the narrative on this enough, it will cause the guy to be innocent, somehow just them being conspiratorial on social media will cause that if they cook on it hard enough.

Most of all, though, I think it’s sort of this desire to have the guy who shot that CEO get away, or be a different guy because, in the mind of your average person, that guy is some agent 47 super CEO hitman, that’s going to liberate us brokies from our shitty healthcare problems, when obviously that’s kind of a delusional escapist fantasy.

Basically, none of this is allowed to be actually real. This isn’t a real event, in the mind of your average person. This is a media event, it’s being treated like one. Much like that, you can cook up fanfictions, but it doesn’t change the base media product, and you have to know that you can’t do anything to affect the thing itself, it’s set in stone and it’s unchangeable and it’s totally ethereal and out of your grasp.

That’s sort of partially why I think this isn’t going to change anything, and, though I think maybe a repeat might happen, I’m not holding my breath. Because while everyone can recognize the problem, everyone, in classic american style, wants some superman to come and save them, and is willing to do nothing, or put anything on the line, in order to really save themselves or others.

I really find it to be quite absurd that people are still thinking this isn’t the guy. This is probably the guy. My basis for that is basically just that the shooter had a 200 dollar peak design redditor backpack and a uniqlo packable jacket when he shot that guy, and those are both heavily techbro-coded fashion items. That’s on top of all the internet history of this specific guy pretty much indicating that he’s the guy. Back problems, leading to a several month long disappearance, after he turns 26, and is no longer on his parent’s healthcare plan.

We can also look at it through the lens of just the assassination attempt itself. The news is saying they found either a 3d printed gun, or more commonly, a ghost gun (which I have not been able to find a consistent account of). In either case, that involves buying a mostly unregulated firearm upper, and then either finishing an “80%” pre-assembled lower with a drill press, or probably even a regular cordless drill, or just wholesale printing the entire lower of the gun yourself. Both of those, are also techbro-coded methods of obtaining a firearm. Compared to just buying a somewhat common firearm in a state where it’s pretty easy to get a gun a couple months before, and then shaving the serial numbers off the gun, or just getting a gun off the black market, or stealing one from someone, which all seem maybe easier than going the ghost gun route.

In the video itself, we see him struggle to cycle the gun manually, due what is probably a combination of using subsonic ammunition, and his suppressor, which I’m assuming did not have a nielsen device, or, a booster. Those are devices that are meant to help browning-style tilting barrel designs cycle much more reliably. They also tend to cycle less reliably with heavier baffled suppressors compared to much lighter, quieter, disposable, and easier to produce wipe-based suppressors.

His research and meticulously planned operation also consisted of shooting this guy in the back, in front of a camera, while this guy walked to his hotel. That’s a plan that has a high percentage chance of success, it’s the same way that you’d see many mob hits happen, but does it strike me as something which is particularly complicated or out of character for this guy, if he had a couple months to cook something up?

Based on the entire description of that chain of events, that would probably indicate that this is a somebody that’s had some amount of preparation but wasn’t some kind of professional or overwhelming genius. It could be the case that they dug around online for thirty minutes, happened to find a guy that had both disappeared for a couple months, had medical problems, was a little bit more conspiratorial, or rather, had incoherent politics, and would be the kind of guy who would dress in a peak design backpack and in a uniqlo jacket, and was ALSO a guy which was exiting new york at that time via bus. They would then have to plant evidence on him, which cops are known to do, but that’s all, legitimately, entirely possible. Is it more likely than this being the guy, based on everything we’ve seen from the video?

I would say no, probably not, this is probably the guy.

I mean, this shit should probably just be banned as spam, right? I don’t think it would be acceptable to make posts that are majority bot content under really any other circumstance, and I don’t see why this is really any different. In fact, it would’ve been more effective, and more helpful, to go to, say, google maps, and then just link to where the photo was taken, or maybe go to the wikipedia page for that particular building, or this lakefront, or what have you. That’s on top of how we already have contributors who are able to actually say what this is on firsthand knowledge, rendering this redundant on top of potentially being totally inaccurate.

Because for the majority of the world, the average American is a selfish bourgeois with a big house and two cars, who thinks oppression is when the gas price rise.

I mean I fucking live here and that’s pretty much my assessment as well to be honest. Maybe not your average american if we’re working on like, who’s right just based on home ownership statistics, but certainly, that’s not really an invalid perception.

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little removed? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.

it could be the combination of the two. suppressors commonly induce failures to eject in tilting barrel designs without the use of a nielson device, and if he had used subsonics, that would also be a contributing factor to a failure to eject.

The guy used a silencer and when his gun jammed he cleared the jam and got off a couple more shots.

that’s something you could do with about five minutes of training. if he was a “professional”, he probably would’ve used a nielson device, or, if he just had some shitty turkish oil filter, a non-tilting barrel design, like a hi-point, so the suppressor doesn’t induce malfunctions. he also probably would’ve waited a little bit further down the guy’s path. he pulled off his hit in broad view of a camera which was directly behind him, and he stopped for starbucks and a couple protein bars down the street, and left his garbage on site. none of these things matter too much since the police are pretty bad at their job, but if the feds get involved, things might take a different turn, and little mistakes like those add up. if his gun had jammed more severely, he might not have been successful at all. no, this speaks to me as a kind of amateur endeavor.

now, it’s still somewhat unlikely, but it is, I suppose, possible, that he was still hired. actual hitmen would probably tend to be so professional that you will basically never see them, like the guy that probably killed the boeing whistleblower, or part of some obviously state sanctioned special forces unit. The can also be unprofessional schmucks that are willing to just eat the sentence for an organized crime syndicate, and in less high profile cases, they can just be random people down on their luck who are willing to kill for a couple thousand dollars and know someone who’s willing to pay that fee, which never really works out too well.

bait used to be much harder to do back in the day

this is potentially true, though if there’s any flexion or breakage in the 3d print material, you’d probably some underpressure in the cartridge, not that such a thing would matter much, or a more troubling lack of accuracy, which may be significant even at this distance, but probably not. both especially if you’re not using hardware store parts. at a certain point, you do just kind of get into shinzo abe doohickey territory, with that sort of a thing, maybe easier just to use a couple pipes. on that note, you could also conceivably use a wipe-based suppression system with a classic hardware store four winds shotgun, OR a contained gas firing system, if you’re going the probably over-complicated 3d printing route, especially if you avoid some larger pressures which are probably unnecessary.

you really don’t need any advanced rifling or superior ballistics or anything, at the distance this guy was at. he could’ve even just used a knife, or a brick, or his hands, to be honest, especially since the CEO was not dressed in ballistic armor or protected in really any way. though I imagine the public would be somewhat less sympathetic to those methods since they’re seen as kind of brutal or psychotic, even if they have the same end result.

you can use alcohol to eliminate those, and there’s really no reason to retain those or even the uhhh. bunny cage? if they’re properly cleaned, because caliber can be determined just by forensics and is totally useless for most LE to know, unless you’re getting really weird with it. yeah. bunny caliber, the caliber of bunnies.

as a hobby, it’s basically just another form of consumerism, and the culture surrounding it is not unlike that of car culture, with the same purported values. freedom, agency, maintaining control over your own life, it’s all just marketing speak to drive customer traffic, and ends up being politicized only really insofar as everything must exist inside of a political context.

there are definitely advantages to having guns for certain populations, certainly, marginalized populations that are already at risk, but those populations already have more prevalent firearms use for obvious reasons, and would probably maintain higher firearms use rates regardless of legality as a result of their marginalization, where more strict gun laws won’t really factor in, or rather, would be just another meaningless slap-on charge to extend sentencing.

most of your other actual pro2a people are gonna by random hobbyists, hunters, and fudds, who can’t really be expected to put up any organized resistance against anything, and the other half are people who would already be a fan of any plan to march around and take away other people’s guns, because they’re ex-military chuds, or cops, or what have you.