Blog Archives

sigh

2/18/2017

... and then my eyes come across yet another punching Nazi wannabes thread punctuated by this little gem:
"These people (wannabe Nazis) need to be driven into the sea. Making them feel unsafe in public will help speed that along."
... Driven. into. the. sea.
For those not up on their middle eastern history, this was a battle cry of the Arab world used with the intent of wiping Israel completely off the map and slaughtering every inhabitant. They've failed miserably so far, but haven't completely stopped for the last 70 years.
I can't decide if the speaker is just that historically ignorant, going for a world championship in Irony, or simply choosing to treat the moral high ground as some sort of ideological Lover's Leap.

0 Comments

Docs vs Glocks ruling

2/17/2017

0 Comments

- Doctors in Florida are allowed to ask patients if they own or posess firearms, as well as make recommendations vis a vis locks, safes, and the like.
- Doctors in Florida are neither mandated nor provided with any additional training to ensure they know what they're talking about re: firearms.
- Patients in Florida are free to tell their doctors that its not their business to know or say.
- Doctors (and insurers, for that matter) are forbidden from discriminating against firearms owners as patients.
I'm gonna call this one a win by freedom default. While attempts at backdoor firearms restrictions by reframing them as health issues is annoying (and yes, I remember what happened the last time the Cdc tried to "study"), we can fight that without restricting the 1st amendment rights of doctors in the process.

0 Comments

"Don't bro me if you don't know me."

2/17/2017

0 Comments

I've been pondering the phrase, "don't bro me if you don't know me" lately, as a sign of how our ideas about social circles are changing.
Evolutionarily, we're wired to be in continuous units of about 150 people or so throughout our lives (any more and it splits into differing groups, any less and you have to interact with opposing or at least different ones). Changes in that group came from births and deaths (with the occasional disappearance or captive).
Then we get into the industrial era and we find not only larger groups, but layering groups. Family shrinks down to maybe a first-cousin extended unit at best, shrinking down to the single individual in many cases. Then we have an education group and a workplace group. Now each group has differing levels of loyalty and obligation, with conflicts arising between them.
Then more circles crop up. From education we find activities and sports, then universities and from them fraternal organizations. The military changes from every able-bodied man in an area to an individual choice, adding it's own circle. They have different names and natures up and down various socio-cultural-economic scales, but they all operate in similar ways.
But less conflict kicked in (between members of the same circle, anyway) because there were only so many circles anyone was in at any given time. One started with just family, then added education and activities. Then most of those circles went away as you added university or military service or the workplace. Each change in life filtered away members of old circles and introduced new ones.
Now, maintaining connections from former circles was possible, but required effort (letters, reunions, and so forth). Usually, that kind of effort was only viable for those you'd had signifigant experiences with (childhood best friends, war buddies, fraternity/sorority mates who became business contacts, ect.)
But then social media kicked along, specifically facebook. Now, all of these circles coexist not only in space, but in time. Which means the entire spectrum of connection, intimacy, loyalty, and obligation are all lumped under the banner of "friends."
More and more, I'm seeing "friends" being held up as the be-all, end-all of connection and circles, because it's the default setting for many of them ~through time~.
Where that gets wacky is where the ultimatums start.
"If you don't believe in ( X ), then unfriend me now!"
The question being, how strong is your connection to all those in your wide, flat circle?
How many are going to see such an ultimatum in the first place?
How many are going to bother to act, and stay until you kick them out like the last couch potato at the party?
And how long before you find another purity qualification worth a purge?
Are you, in fact, Bro'ing without knowing?
And by how much?
A while back I got one that boiled down to "shun the deplorables!"
And while I didn't voice it, my immediate thought was, "well, I got a handful of deplorables here. Unfollowed onesies and twosies, though that was mostly because they wouldn't shut up, more than anything political. But among them are people who went to war with me.
Your ass, on the other hand, was on set with me for a day. And while you were nice enough and did your job at the time, since friending, you've done little but self-promote and gripe about privledge."
In other words, they bro'd me without knowing me.
Let their bro's write checks their know's couldn't cash.
The waiter ain't quite cutting up their Bro card in front of them, but they are looking at them funny when they swipe it through the Know reader again.
I'll let that metaphor settle back into it's original condition.
But yeah, I think a lot more people would be chill if they stopped and made sure they know before they tried to bro.

0 Comments

My personal range rule #3

2/17/2017

0 Comments

My personal version of Range Rule #3 is "Never trust a safety."
The extended edition is, "Never, ever trust a fucking safety."
Here's why.
In terms of raw engineering, you only need a grand total of four parts to make a gun that can fire. Four, that's it. Everything else is a bonus feature.
That said, a few hundred years of tech later, and we've gotten about as far from the base four as an SUV is from a horse cart. A Glock has about 30 parts. (A 1911 or Sig P226 has about 50 and a Beretta 92 has about 70, just for bar trivia purposes). Damn near all of these parts are designed to make it easier to fire.
The safety, on the other hand, is designed to make it harder to do so under certain circumstances.
So not only is this tiny piece of metal designed to work in opposition to proper function (and therefore as prone to malfunction as any other mechanical device), it's outnumbered by an order of magnitude by parts that are designed to work in conjunction.
Just to translate the five-dollar words so we're all on the same fucking page, with everything else designed to make shooting easier, it's all alone in trying to make not shooting easier.
So yeah, use it if you choose it.
Use it if your facility or agency is making you use it.
But for the love of winks and smiles, never fucking trust them.

0 Comments

sigh

Docs vs Glocks ruling

"Don't bro me if you don't know me."

My personal range rule #3

Jay Peterson

Archives

Categories

Certa Bonum Certamen

*sigh*

Docs vs Glocks ruling

"Don't bro me if you don't know me."

My personal range rule #3

﻿Jay Peterson﻿

Archives

Categories

Certa Bonum Certamen

sigh

Jay Peterson