I will never understand why war thunder of all things attracts all the leaks.

A DCS or even that indie HEAT game is high fidelity realism. This shit is balance numbers.

I think the only politician we can truly rule out is ted cruz since absolutely nobody likes him enough to do anything for him.

But yeah. republicans have increasingly been calling for the lynching and execution of their political opponents and took glee in the brutal assault of Nancy Pelosi's husband. It is not at all a stretch that one flavor of republican would realize a different republican is their political opponent. Especially since it has been made abundantly clear that nobody in the party can run against trump but also that trump can't garner support for any downballot candidates.

It was kind of a perfect storm that is going to change how basically every protective force maintains security.

The shooter was (allegedly?) 130 something meters away.

Snipers are generally focused on distances greater than 150 meters. So it would be the guys with assault rifles who are responsible for targets within that radius. Their optics are going to heavily favor closer ranges and people (who play call of duty) very much overestimate just how good of a view you get through those optics. You have more than enough clarity to aim for a center mass shot or even a headshot but you aren't making out fine grain details.

So you have someone who has a large "something". Maybe you are hearing "it is a gun" from eyewitnesses but eyewitnesses are morons. So you have people squinting and trying to get a clear picture through fairly close range optics and trying to figure out if that is a rifle or a camera on a tripod or what. Because the people with "sniper scopes"? If they pivot to look at the shooter then they are now ignoring what they are ACTUALLY supposed to be watching and... that is a known tactic.

So you have secret service squinting while people are sprinting to go storm the building. Because even if it is a gunman, the best case scenario is to capture them alive so that the speech is not disrupted and you have zero risk of executing a civillian.

The secret service are cops and ACAB holds as true as it always does.

But if the secret service had shot first it would be a VERY different news story. And while all the youtubes about how amazing the secret service are from former SS officers who now run private security firms talk about their training and planning... politics is their first priority. An SS officer who pulls out an uzi to protect a fallen president is one thing. An SS officer who pulls out an uzi to unload on someone who "might have a gun" is a very different story.

A lot of that is less the algorithm and more the creators.

I Did A Thing/Boy Boy are as (obnoxiously) tankie as it gets and they literally did a "let's shoot some kids with a drone" video using herrera's guns*. Which means that basically an entire chunk of maker youtube now has an actual palpable connection to herrera.

Everyone wants to blame the algorithm and... it is fucked. But the reality is that these youtubers (and twitch streamers and so forth) are all businesses first and most have zero problems collaborating with a known evil if it makes them money.

I suspect it is why people like Simone Giertz and Xyla Foxlin have basically stopped all collaborations with people who aren't part of their "inner circles".

*: Well worth looking up the "drama" around that. On Boy Boy, Aleks (?) tore into the gun fetishism and basically painted him as a kid with toys who got made if anyone even thought of taking them away while highlighting how fucked it is that some of herrera's favorite guns are literally what drove Aleks and his family out of his home country. The response was herrera throwing a shitfit and insisting that anyone who enjoys shooting guns can't be pro gun control and they are liars.

Non-lethal shots are a fantasy.

You have plenty of blood vessels in your limbs and it is very easy to bleed out via the femoral artery or whatever else. This is literally why tourniquets exist

Assuming it is an actual threat and not a black kid with a toy train: Shoot to kill and then, when it is safe, have EMTs try to keep them alive.

Basically every single gun nut youtube is inherently right wing. Any content creator who actually gives a shit about humanity would have made MASSIVE changes following... ANY school shooting.

The best you can hope for is channels like Forgotten Weapons where Ian actively refuses to "be political". He still lets his biases show any time he talks about legislation but he also has very clearly mocked a lot of the "loophole" devices and mostly comes across as a rich jerk talking about engineering. Or (funny enough) Carl at InRange who is 100% in the "useful idiot" category but seems to have a good heart.

Any time you apply for a driver's license or whatever, you are asked if you want to register with a party. That is the party that you will vote for in the primary elections. Some (many?) states offer same day registration which, in my opinion, is how it should be. It puts you in a database in case voter fraud ACTUALLY happens (insanely rare) where they can check to make sure Ur Quell only voted once and investigate what happened if they see multiple votes.

As for the primaries: This is how the US handles our version of Ranked Choice and... I kind of prefer it (with some major caveats). The general idea is that all right wing politicians should run for the republican seat and all sane people for the Democrat seat. You campaign at the tail end of the previous year and the party members vote on you in the spring. There is definitely some sketchiness with super delegates (although, that is not overly dissimilar from how many parliament systems pick a Prime Minister), but this creates a unified front come November.

Yes, two party systems are bad, but that is what things tend to converge on when push comes to shove. Just look at France where the Left more or less unified to stand a chance against fascism.

Like almost every aspect of the US government: it is a fundamentally good system that needs to be iterated on and better taught to the populace. It is just that republicans know that education hurts them and want to take advantage of all the loopholes that Tommy Jefferson obviously intentionally wrote while he was raping his plantation full of slaves.

Anyone independent at this point is a moron.

Facts won't matter. Facebook posts about deep state false flag operations will.

Doit.gif

Martin Luther King was successful in large part because of the acts of people like Malcolm X. Talk softly but point at the person with a big stick

When we are dealing with good faith actors Speak

When we are dealing with violent insurrectionists who have never won a popular vote and are actively talking about how they will remove the ability to ever speak again?

Shit is already escalated

We had a violent fucking insurrection in 2020. The fallout is a corrupt supreme court saying that was legal because it was an official act

Shit is already fucked. Either bury your head in the sand and hope the Nazis will respect your integrity or act