Voroxpete @ Voroxpete @sh.itjust.works

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I don't feel like the hyperbole defense really cuts it when a significant number of people think the hyperbole is true. You can find an example of that happening in this same thread and I've had plenty of other interactions like it. For every person who takes it as hyperbole, there's another who genuinely feels like we're staring down the barrel of WW3, and that kind of fear is dangerous and harmful.

It's never "Just a joke" when the joke is hurting people.

You're misunderstanding my point. I'm not telling anyone off for venting about the prospect of America kicking off yet another forever war, or another brutal bombing campaign. That shit sucks, and people need to vent about it. Sometimes dark humour is the way to do that.

My issue is very specifically with people framing it as "World War 3", even though a) its not, and it won't be, and there's nothing happening right now that could realistically cause it to be, and b) "War" should be bad enough. There's plenty to vent about right there. Actual real people will die for the sake of Netanyahu's political career and Trump's fragile ego. That's awful, and if you need to vent through memes to cope with that, fair play. But why do we have to add this entirely fictitious "world war" layer just to make it somehow worth venting about? Why build up this completely fictional set of horrors in place of the very real ones, in a way that convinces people already stricken with despair that things are somehow even worse?

You're absolutely correct. Shit really sucks right now. Everything is awful. So why the fuck would you (plural, indirect, nonspecific) want to convince people that its even worse than that? Seems like reality is already bad enough.

Let me add - and I should have said this in my original reply - that I completely get why it's easy to feel scared about this stuff. First, there's this constant environment of everyone talking about the looming threat of WW3, which is exactly what memes like this contribute to, creating a culture of fear for no good reason.

But, second, there absolutely is a general ratcheting up of tensions across the world. Major powers are more militarized than they ever have been previously, and the strong trade relationships that helped maintain peace are eroding. There is, absolutely, an increased likelihood that we're going to see conflicts break out, but what's missing is the specific conditions needed for those conflicts to spiral out in a mass scale escalation.

What I think we're likely to see over the next ten to twenty years is more limited regional conflicts like Ukraine. I think it's quite likely, for example, that India and Pakistan may go to war. But there's simply no reason to believe that war will pull in other major powers.

The world is becoming a scarier place. You're not wrong to feel that way. And any conflict is a tragedy. Why these memes annoy me is not because I'm on the "Nothing ever happens train" but rather because they discard very real, very valid concerns in favour of this nebulous fantasy of everyone dying in nuclear fire for vague and unspecified reasons.

Turn the question around. Ask yourself, what are the conditions necessary for this to become WW3?

First, at a minimum, you need more than one major power to become involved. For the purposes of this discussion I'll define make powers as The US, The EU / NATO (functionally indistinguishable for all practical purposes at this point), China, Russia, India.

Aside from the US, the only other major power with a serious interest in the region is Russia. You can vaguely make an argument for the EU, but they're too concerned with the war in Ukraine to really give a shit right. At best you might see some involvement from the UK, and they're no longer strongly aligned with or capable of influencing the rest of Europe.

So basically the only way this escalates beyond a limited regional conflict is if Russia decides to throw in. For Iran. While they're struggling to win a war in Ukraine that is currently cratering their economy and killing off an entire generation of young Russian men. Do you really think they have the slightest inclination to get into a shooting war with the US right now, with everything they're currently facing? I'm not even sure they have the logistics capacity to actually get troops to Iran right now.

But what if local powers get involved? They won't. No one in the region likes Isreal or Iran. They're both pariahs. No one around them wants to get involved in a war for either of their sakes.

Hell, they can barely even fight a war with each other. Rockets and bombing raids are the only real options they have, because there's a whole lot of Iraq in between them. At best the US could stage a naval invasion (something that Isreal has no capacity to do on their own), in which case what you're looking at is another Iraq style invasion followed by twenty years of bloody, costly occupation as they try to maintain order over a mountainous region containing a hundred million people.

Sure, but the button on the meme could just as easily have said "WAR" as "WW3". It's even the same number of characters. Do you see what I'm getting at? The the constant fearnongering about this turning into WW3 always suggests that what's happening right now isn't bad enough. Surely the dark humour could be directed at the actual real bad things Trump is currently doing, rather than hypothetical bad things that he might be doing?

I think the saddest part about these WW3 memes is that it really does feel like the people making them only care about the conflict being engineered in the Middle East by Trump and Natanyahu because there's a chance that it might negatively impact their own lives. The implication is that as long as this doesn't actually turn into WW3 (it won't, Jesus Christ please learn some basic history) it's fine and a bunch of people getting killed by bombs is missiles is OK as long as they're brown and way over there.

And yet, the Canadian military has absolutely no problem allowing our troops to have full beards.

Yes, it is. In fact, if your dog is showing signs of boredom (such as chewing on things they shouldn't) a lack of interesting sniffs may be part of the problem. This is especially true for tracking and hunting breeds.

We have a Blackmouth Cur, and one of the things we do for fun is hunt feeding. Basically we take a portion of her dinner and scatter it around the yard, then set her loose to go find it. Tires her out really well. She loves rooting around for all the little bits of kibble.

I think that even if every single assertion that person makes is taken, prima facie, to be completely 100% accurate and correct, it would still only modify my previous statement to "Our enemy is stagnant wages that - for the overwhelming majority of all workers - no longer rise in step with productivity."

I'm really not clear on how that's all that much of a difference. Good for the few people who lucked out I guess. The linked comment actually wraps up by saying the graph only demonstrates rising wealth inequality, which is, you know, the entire fucking point of the god damn graph, holy shit, where the fuck do they think people are claiming the lost wages went, into fucking space?!?!

God it fucking burns him so bad that Obama got one and he didn't.

Obama didn't even deserve a peace prize, the guy did more drone strikes than Bush, but just for the fact that it upsets Trump so much I say they should give him another one.

1. There are different kinds of 5.56mm ammo, they don't all have the same construction or behave the same way. We don't know what ICE are loading.
2. Even M855 green tip (which is what it sounds like you're describing, or at least some similar variety of FMJ soft core round) can pierce lighter body armour and still be lethal. That means against an unarmoured target it's going to have very little problem going in and out of a human body.
3. While I'll grant that most softer varieties of 5.56 will be stopped by brick (again, we don't know exactly what ICE are loading, but fairs fair, it was somewhat of an overstatement on my part), they will certainly have no difficulty going through drywall, wood, and other visual obstructions that could be concealing an innocent bystander. While it's certainly true that something like a 9mm can also penetrate many of these obstructions, it will not retain nearly as much lethality when doing so, and it simply makes no sense to increase your risk of injuring a bystander every time you fire for basically no gain. If you fire an AR-15 inside a building (which, y'know, is where a bunch of people doing no-knock raids expect to be spending a lot of their time) you have a very high chance of killing an innocent bystander you couldn't even see.

For more on this I consulted my wife who confirmed that she's been shown videos in training of 5.56 going through multiple layers of dry-wall and still retaining lethal velocity. You can see this in this video here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3BlRPtCj2E) but know that this is also what professionals are taught about their weapons when considering targets, over-penetration and cover.

Not only could you handle it, it's actually beneficial. Inflation - if matched with equivalent increases in wages - eats away at debt over time, because your debt is locked in at the point where you take it on, but your buying power relative to that debt continues to increase.

Our enemy is not inflation. Inflation can be our friend. Our enemy is stagnant wages that no longer rise in step with productivity.

Everyone needs to see this graph and really understand what our problem is.

For anyone curious why ripping out LiDAR was a bad idea.

That said, I suspect this is also meant to pre-empt what's been happening to Waymo recently where a small number of protestors were summoning robotaxis and either boxing them in or sabotaging them to use as barricades. With how people feel about Tesla right now, I imagine a whole lot of these would soon be summoned to remote locations to be met by a masked person carrying a can of gas and a lighter. That's also why they're demanding a credit card on file.

Also the 2001 Authorization of The Use of Military Force, which has no expiry date, and allows unrestricted military action against anyone the administration believes played a role in the 9/11 attacks. As far as I'm aware all Trump has to do is claim Iran produced or sheltered terrorists at some point (even if it was in the past) and he's more or less legally in the clear. There's already precedent.

Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the 2001 AUMF was used to justify the deployment of US forces to Afghanistan, the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, and Somalia.

https://www.businessinsider.com/a-bill-to-repeal-the-aumf-just-passed-2017-6

Again, past decisions.

A single gunshot in an indoor space can cause permanent hearing damage, not just to the shooter, but to everyone around them. Especially infants and young children.

Fuck ICE, but the suppressor is not the problem here. It's literally the only part of that image that isn't a problem.

So, in a scenario where a law enforcement officer actually has a good reason to fire a weapon indoors, should they ask the suspect to wait for ten minutes while they hand out earplugs to every innocent bystander present? Don't forget to bring extra small earplugs for any infants with their highly sensitive eardrums.

I'm not suggesting that a group of jackbooted thugs like ICE ever manages to find themselves in a scenario where use is force is actually legitimate, but if that's your issue then your comlaint is with the existence of ICE, not with the use of suppressors.

Thank you, I'm glad to see someone else making this point. Like you said, there's plenty about this that's seriously fucked up already, the suppressor is not the problem.

But most people only know about this stuff from Hollywood (not their fault, if anything I'm grateful that the average Lemmy user has little personal knowledge of firearms, the world would be better if everyone could be so ignorant), and thinks that suppressors / "silencers" are some kind of devious tool only used by people looking to do surrupticious murders, because that's how they're always portrayed.

The far better question is why they need assault rifles?

A suppressor is actually a good thing to put on any weapon. That's why they're becoming standard in the military. Guns are unbelievably loud, to the point that they can cause serious and permanent hearing damage to people around you when you fire them. If you're accepting the premise that an armed police force is a good thing (I disagree, but that's a separate discussion) it at least makes sense to minimize collateral damage. The sound of gunfire is especially dangerous indoors; if an officer was forced to fire their weapon in an environment like they could actually seriously injure innocent bystanders just from the noise alone.

On the other hand, collateral damage is exactly why a 5.56mm carbine makes no sense as a police weapon. Those rounds will go straight through a human body, straight through a brick wall, and still be lethal. You could end up killing someone you can't even see. It used to be that when law enforcement wanted extra firepower, they used submachine guns and shotguns, weapons with very little potential for overpenetration. But then police forces all started freaking out about the idea that every criminal was going to be wearing level 3 body armour and demanding to use the same guns soldiers use (not helped by the fact that cops in the US are allowed to buy surplus military equipment at knockdown prices).

This doesn't come from an operational need, it comes from the fact that every cop wants to cosplay at being military, but without all the hardships that actually come with that. That's why you see federal agents and SWAT all running around in multicam and other military camo patterns, despite the fact that those patterns really don't do much of anything in an urban environment. It's all just dress up to make their peepees feel bigger.

The friction of people rubbing off of each other for the first time creates so many wonderful opportunities for storytelling, and forming bonds naturally through play, instead of prescribing them in a clinical session 0 context, tends to make the players much more invested in those bonds, in my experience.