Yeah… people tend to forget that modern artillery is actually in the 10-20 mile range to begin with. But that is really no different than “begin the invasion”. It isn’t like South Korea (and North Korea) aren’t watching the other side 24/7.
It is just that people usually use nukes as the exigent circumstances in a time like this. And I am going to specifically not speculate as to whether a nuclear bomb could be launched from behind the DMZ.
Your politics mod is batshit insane “pro military” and I’ve increasingly noticed political topics on dot world and the like getting shared around your /c/conservative and so forth mostly lining up with swarms of pro military rightwing jackasses.
Very much seeming like it is a right wing dot ml. Not everyone is part of that crowd but… yeah.
No I didn’t. Because I don’t think that has been a significant source of recruits for… probably closer to two decades than not now. Kids know the military is a joke. They know they are going to be deployed to fight Wars For Oil ™. NOBODY believes we did any meaningful good in Iraq/Afghanistan (which is actually a much more complicated discussion but…).
So the kids who genuinely think they can change their lives with a college degree? They aren’t the kids spending years of their lives killing other kids for a chance. If they are “smart” enough to think that then they are “smart” enough to realize all the consequences and how likely it is that the recruiter is going to lie to them.
“I joined the military to go to college” is very much a Desert Storm and MAYBE early 2000s “trope”. As we continued what was closer to a two decade forever war than not, the vast majority of people who would have come down on that thought process realized why it was a bad one.
Which gets back to “I joined the military so I can learn to be a mechanic” and all the implications of that. Or “the army made my father the man he is today” and so forth.
That said: I have worked with a few “skilled workers” who went the military route. And one or two of them are genuinely geniuses. They are also fucking terrifying the moment topics get even slightly “political” and it is very clear they fell into category 1 and 2 if you catch my drift.
And just before (probably the shit.justworks crowd…) come in to say this was an important thing to do and the reward outweighs the risk and blah blah blah:
What actionable intel would have come out of this? North Korea is already a nuclear power. Any attempt to “remove that capability” is going to trigger China and Russia and World War 3. Seoul is only 15 miles from the DMZ, so about 17 or 18 miles from where North Korea can do whatever the hell they want. Finding out about a dirty bomb or even plans to rush the DMZ and lob a proper nuke isn’t going to change anything.
Which is a recurring theme in recorded history when it comes to Intelligence. I forget the phrase experts use, but it is the idea that, consistently, the highest risk and most “daring” efforts tend to provide the least actionable intel. Whereas just slipping someone a couple thousand bucks to tell you what they know is consistently the most effective method.
Its just the reality of a modern standing military. The people who are going to sign up are a mixture of:
And “real” special forces (so not Rangers which are mostly just a badge they give anyone dumb enough to volunteer for an infantry combat role) kinda inherently have to be long term contracts/lifers. So not even the “I am gonna shoot a brown kid to get my college paid for” crowd.
One of my guilty pleasures are the Insider “military expert rates BLAH” videos. And most are complete and utter bullshit from what is obviously a larper who had a desk job. But the more legit people consistently say insane shit like “Full Metal Jacket made me want to join the marines” or “The moment I watched that shower scene in The Rock, I knew I had to be a Navy Seal”.
Pilots were one of the last holdouts where it genuinely made sense for the best and brightest to do a tour or two to get the hours they need to get licensed. But even that is long gone as people realize the good jobs are still going to go to nepotism and the best they can hope for is to haul cargo to places nobody wants to actually go.
But the military still insists on doing these high risk super low night flights with pilots who are inadequate and maintenance crews who “learn by doing” and so forth. Like, you know that mechanic who forgot to put the cap back on your buddy’s oil filter? These are the people who didn’t even think they could get a job doing that.
And he won’t. And in another six months judges will rule he was in violation of the court order saying he had to. And then he still won’t.
But it gets back to “what am I going to do when this show is over?”.
Which is why I referenced David Schwimmer and Band of Brothers. His portrayal of Sobol was spectacular (and wildly disrespectful but that is what happens when you make a miniseries based off someone’s memoirs). But he was basically in 3 episodes and was arguably more background than not in 2 of those. But there is a reason that every few months you have a “Holy shit, So and So was in Band of Brothers?”. That was basically a production where anyone whose agent knew the right people could get a bit part.
But it gets back to the “problem” with the old TV model. Signing up for a TV show was basically admitting you were going to “cap out” at that unless you got INCREDIBLY lucky. Versus staying flexible and potentially becoming a great.
Yes, it was a guaranteed paycheck… until the show ended. And doing a movie in the off months basically only worked for a Clooney level talent where anyone who ever interacted with him realized he was a generational talent that guys and gals would swoon for. Everyone else MAYBE could get a bit part if they knew the production crew (see: The Schwim on Band of Brothers). And then, if you were lucky, you were basically typecast by the time the show ended and stuck either playing the same character or needing to find a company that wanted to take a chance on you reinventing yourself… which lined up with the weinsteins of the world.
And all of that assumes that you aren’t in a role that requires you to spend most of your off time staying in shape and having more or less the same appearance in case pick-ups are required. Otherwise you have entire VFX teams working to… remove a mustache.
That is why there is increasing pushback to Marvel Movie contracts from a lot of actors. Yes, it is a guaranteed paycheck (although those get smaller and smaller with each geneartion) but it is also the only thing you can really do for however many years in case you get called up that you just got one of your appearances added to a TV show everyone will hate.
Which is more or less where we are at. Sure you sometimes have something like a Zendaya where the Disney Channel actress you got for your lead suddenly becomes the most popular actress on the planet and you have to work around her schedule AND all the supporting actors who became high B listers. But mostly you are just dealing with talent who care more about their careers than making sure they are available for the one episode you want them to come back next year.
Its why so much of the Game of Thrones fandom (and original creator…) clearly don’t have much production experience. Yes, it would have been cool to have arcs like Lady Stoneheart. But the chances of Michelle Fairley being interested in coming back four years later for two episodes is nigh zero AND would have given her way more negotiating power than studios want. Same for all the other one off characters who come back two books later.
Its the idea that not every character should be likeable and not all media should be without friction.
I… generally think stuff like that in the first few episodes is really stupid. Mostly it just turns things into misery porn and is a great way to alienate your audience. I think a much better approach is to lure the audience in so that they don’t quite realize when Walter/Saul/Kim became truly irredeemable monsters… even if that tends to lead to people never realizing it.
And I think it is extra disingenuous to pretend that House of Cards was some daring show that bucked all the norms. It wasn’t HBO levels of sexposition but they definitely were playiing up the “you can’t watch this on network TV” from the first episode.
Print, not TV, but one of my favorite authors is Harry Connolly and his Twenty Palaces series had a pretty infamous chapter that was all one long run on sentence (I forget how many pages but I want to say 5-10?). You don’t necessarily realize it in the moment but it is a hard read that is mentally tiring and it perfectly suits the contents of the chapter. Apparently basically every single beta reader hated it and he has alluded to it being why his Agent and Publisher dropped him and… I probably would too. I loved it but it very much hurt the overall pacing of the book to a large degree.
But that was also 3 or 4 books in. Not the first chapter of the first book (which was a child burning to death horribly… Yup. Connolly definitely got a hold of some incriminating photos or something).
Why would that be so ludicrous? It is meat and cheese with a lubricating sauce on bread.
That said, I would actually argue the distinction there isn’t the form factor but the cooking method. For pizza/“pizza”, you start with raw dough and add toppings to it and then cook. Rather than adding toppings to a cooked dough (i.e. bread). Although I want to say there is a style of pizza that actually cooks the dough first for some reason? I am inclined to blame Chicago just because they are usually the food criminals. Also I’ve never actually made one but I assume at least some of the chain store sausage rolls (?) the Brits like are also starting from toppings in raw dough but… let’s just say Chicago learned their food atrocities from somebody…
But, regardless: The point is that all of these are mostly just regional/cultural equivalents of the same meals. Tacos and sandwiches mostly fulfill the same role of being a way to eat leftovers without getting your hands too messy and were popular with “lower class” workers. Soups, chilis, and curries are mostly a way to get a bunch of ingredients into an easy to cook (and leave in the pot) format that can also be stretched pretty far with stuff like rice and bread. And so forth.
And, again, once you actually start cooking you realize this and realize how easy it is to translate skills from one cuisine to another. Flavor profiles are very different but you rapidly realize you are doing mostly the same motions when you are making a Japanese or Indian curry or a British stew and so forth. And… you can then consider different cooking vessels and the like and how that might actually work better than the traditional style (just make sure you call it “fusion” so people don’t get pissy).
Just like chili is a stew (which is a very thick soup) and hot dogs (and tacos) are open faced sandwiches and so forth.
Pretty much all of these memes fall apart if you at all know how to cook. Which is probably why they are so lasting.
3d printed guns/ghost guns are a whole different mess that can be trivially solved by controlling the barrels. People underestimate how much material science goes into making a gun barrel and can just look at any documentation on The Troubles for how often pipe guns exploded in the hands of those who use it.
Also, people don’t like it but that can also be more or less trivially solved through simple (basically computer vision but) AI/ML that can detect if you are printing a glock or if that cavity is the perfect size for an AR-15 fire control group. And companies like Bambu are already doing everything they can to lock down slicers to proprietary software that will make this easy.
but in taking that obvious step, one would create a situation where acquiring guns through less traceable and safe means becomes easier than the ways that can be tracked, which is rarely a good thing if you want rules to actually be followed.
Which sounds like a good thing to me. I would much rather people have to have technical know how (because printing that STL you bought on the fun site is not as easy as you would expect. Old Vice had a great video on this) rather than just buying a gun at walmart or one of the many “untraceable” guns that “fell off the back of a truck” on their way to said walmart.
I am also a fan of controlling ammunition (buy as much as you can shoot at the range but you need to keep it there) but it really doesn’t take much ammo to wipe out a kindergarten class.
I think an evaluation is just unreasonable considering how overworked mental health professionals are. I would genuinely hate it if someone who wants to get better and work out some issues can’t because there is better money in talking to the gun nuts.
Nah. I am a firm believer in chains of liability. Kid shoots up a school? Whose gun was that? Dad? Dad is now liable for a pretty major charge. Oh? He didn’t keep it locked up in a safe? Who sold Dad that gun? Herman? He better have ALL his paperwork in order and he better have followed every single required step to make sure Dad knows how to store a gun properly and has a gun safe and so forth. He didn’t? What distributor did he buy that gun from? And so forth.
Obviously US biased, but we put more effort into making sure someone buying a car has insurance than we do making sure someone buying a gun even understands why keeping “one in the chamber” is one of the dumbest things you can do.
So pass that on. Because if that guy who wants a people killer gives bad vibes? That isn’t just your license mister gun store man, that is potentially your freedom if he goes after the woman who turned him down for coffee. And if you are a gun company and you sell to sketchy stores that “lose shipments” all the time? You might not be a company the first time a serial number is run. Suddenly EVERYONE starts caring about actually doing due diligence.
And obviously that model is incredibly prone to racism and bias. But that also matters a lot less if the guy who will sell a gun to any white man with a swastika on his neck goes to prison after the first murder.
You’ll understand if I honestly don’t care if a fundamentally hateful and harmful org broke up.
If “maybe we should stop supporting transphobia and rape and…” will kill an org… that org probably shouldn’t exist at all.
Friendly reminder: Progressive for a pope is still a transphobe who actively facilitated the rape of children. Not to mention all the horrific colonizer shit.
Rest in piss Frankie boy.
They were just karma farming by posting whatever would get the drive by up-buttons.
That said: I don’t know if these are special Swedish cops or normal Swedish cops, but the gear is more or less the same as our “normal” patrol cops. Bullet/stab resistant vest, pistol, and quasi-military uniform. Ours tend to only wear the high visibility vests when they are newbies disrupting all traffic because they want to play traffic cop rather than just control the lights at an intersection.
Again, I don’t know what the baseline in Sweden is, but most civilized countries tend to have a distinction between patrol cops and the ones that have special training to handle armed suspects and the like. Ours… we theoretically have that but also basically every patrol car has an AR-15 and a shotgun in it and our cops love to grab those any time they can even half attempt to justify it.
That said, I assume your special response cops more or less look the same (full tactical gear). You just tend to not see those unless there is an actual meaningful threat.