I don't disagree that weapons don't necessarily make anyone more free. I also can't say people are wrong to observe in a civil war level of unrest, a dissenting party armed with fully automatic weapons has more leverage than one armed with knives.

Freedom to practice religion is not 'fairly safe' without guns, unless you want to ignore attacks with cars, trucks, IEDs, and, historically, civilian airliners.

I am mostly pointing out that restricting laws on gun ownership to protect people is not so terribly different from limiting freedom to practice/express idealogies. It is readily demonstrable that BOTH those freedoms have directly contributed to civilian casualties.

The difference between say, banning automatic weapons, and the banning of affiliation with extremist groups like the KKK or ISIL is mostly divided along partisan lines, logically they are pretty much two sides of the same coin, with democrats and republicans each decrying one as necessary and the other as evil.

It's PR for the community and its spirit really.

To be honest it's not the average civilian i'd be worried about in any modern town, even in deprived areas. It's the pickpocket gangs, and drunken louts that can be more prevalent at night. I think the average every day civilian would at the very least be fair to the man in those circumstances, if not make some attempt to help him.

A firefighter has no idea what he's getting into when he's doing his job and rushing into a burning building. He wants to go home after work, see his family, make it to another day of life. If he feels the need to pull his gun until he confirms the situation is safe, then do it!

You see what I did there? In both instances, ignoring protocol and going in with a loaded weapon is far more likely to create a dangerous situation than it is to save their own life.

Offering cops a blank check has resulted in many thousands of unnecessary civilian deaths. Meanwhile it's actually increased the danger cops face, because many black men (correctly) assume they're going in to a life-or-death situation.

In summary, do you hate the police and want to see them die? Because that's the only logical end-point on the path you've chosen to defend.

I don't see what her crime is for the cop to start the arrest?
If she's initially arrested for running her mouth then why is the cop even on duty if that's all it takes for him to escalate the situation.

All I see in this video is a cop who oversteps his mandate, fails to de-escalate the situation and ends up assaulting a civilian when he should have just let them be.

And the cops wonder why they aren't trusted by the community!

@Fairbs

look at what i wrote.

i totally agree with you,and the mounting evidence that:

russian intelligence may have attempted to influence our elections,but name a first world country whose intelligence agencies do NOT try to influence elections,or unduly influence legislators to implement legislation favorable to their interests?

the argument isn't that russian intelligence did what every ..single..intelligence agency does on a global scale,with US intelligence agencies being the biggest offenders.

the narrative being shoved down our throats is that the trump campaign COLLUDED with russian intelligence to install trump as president,of which there is NO evidence..zero..zip..nada.

is there evidence that trump may (and let us be frank,most likely)have engaged in some suspicious and possibly illegal financial and business dealings with russia?

considering that no american financial institution will touch trump with a ten foot pole,and his global credit is in the shitter.also considering his blatant abuse of his son in law to garner financial loans from china with the promise of "presidential favoritism" (which is soooo fucking illegal).

i think it safe to say that trumps business and financial dealings with russia are,how shall i put this?
colorful and inventive?(and possibly illegal).

but does this translate to collusion to install trump as president?
nope..just a crooked car saleman abusing his status to broker deals with crooked russians.

you mentioned the 13 intelligence agencies.
do you mean the SAME agencies that were POSITIVE that saddam had WMD's?

the same agencies who were CERTAIN that assad had used sarin gas on civilians?

the very same agencies who were 100% proof positive that gadhafi had killed his own people?

THOSE agencies?

the very same agencies who are making the argument that russian intelligence colluded with the trump campaign and have not provided ONE lick of evidence besides:"trust us,we know".

sorry mate,you know i love ya,but i am gonna need some proof,because THOSE fuckers have lied to me more often than not.the term DEEP state is referring to the very agencies that have lied to us time and time again.

and i ain't buying it.

and for CNN to get pantsed in public by the likes of a slimeball such as james o'keefe and breibart..FUCKING BREITBART..they need to just walk out into traffic and end themselves.

not that i gave CNN much cred to begin with,but now they are just dead to me.a pimple on a syphillis infected rhinocerous's ballsack.

so much fail...but corporate bobbleheads do not experience shame,or guilt.

cuz they get paid to lie,obfuscate and gaslight you,and me.
despicable human beings...the lot of them.

The A7S II is an incredible piece of hardware but it maxes out at a little over 400,000 effective ISO while the X27 can do 5,000,000 effective ISO. Of course, the A7S II is much more accessible for mere mortals/civilians.

We really don't have sufficient driver's ed to be throwing down spike strips for cars going over a hundred while driven by the typical pleb.

Typical pleb should be a much better driver before this is a policy.

Otherwise it's more risk of harm than letting the typical pleb speed with his tyres in one piece.

That is, if public safety is a priority. Not saying that it is. Maybe this is a good use case for civilian uav air strikes. A mini hellfire would work well. (sarcastic/cynical comment, yet would not be surprised if in 20 years it becomes reality. "lol").

-scheherazade

@newtboy,

No, it's about law. Warren Jeffries people did all that, on a smaller scale. They weren't their own country, even though they got away with it for decades. Law.

Forgive my lack of familiarity with him, but your telling me he (on a smaller scale than Texas), stopped paying taxes, and instead collecting them. Started up his own legal and justice system. He created his own borders within which the police would not dare set foot because it would be a death sentence for them. And after he'd done all this the US military itself failed to remove him as well?

Or are you meaning not just scale, but severity and all the other rather meaningful extremes of sovereignty that the Taliban and Al Qaida achieved? It's the same then in the sense that me punching you is violent just me killing ten people is violent, but in another sense they are nothing alike...

No, but they couldn't indiscriminately bomb Houston and any large gatherings either....not even if Spencer might be there. The first American civilian they kill will start a war...a real, legitimate war.

Your not embracing the analogy. Spencer's terrorists are still killing American civilians every week, outside of Texas borders. The American military is just corrupt enough that as long as its democrats/republicans dying,(whomever we choose to not be in power) they let it slide because it shows the need for the military to 'protect' the country.

You need to take a harder look at Pakistani politics to see just how powerful Al Qaida and the Taliban's control over the tribal areas has been.

More over, all of the above definitions of state within a state violence and jihad doesn't require war as the response to acts of war. To invade Afghanistan to prevent another 9/11 is dubious at best. Even the Kissinger's of the world wouldn't count the value of that trade off, losing a couple thousand Americans to an attack each decade or so is 'acceptable' loses.
Call it the price of freedom and carry on. The real trick was that if the Taliban and Al Qaida were so tight with Pakistan's military and intelligence services, how concerned should America be that the Pakistani proxies in their tribal regions and Afghanistan are so keen to target Americans. That lead directly to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal being a big enough concern with that pairing that maybe it was time to tell Pakistan they had to end their little dance with terrorists hitting Americans and they had better make a choice who they are going to side with in the Jihad that was already being waged for 2 decades.

No, it's about law.
Warren Jeffries (EDIT: that's Warren Jeffs) people did all that, on a smaller scale. They weren't their own country, even though they got away with it for decades.
Law.
No, but they couldn't indiscriminately bomb Houston and any large gatherings either....not even if Spencer might be there. The first American civilian they kill will start a war...a real, legitimate war.

P.S.. Holy Crap, you might be interested to know that Trump threatened the Mexican president with exactly that logic, your army can't get the bad hombres, so he might send ours there to do it. Lucky us, Mexico decided to not be a nuclear power.

@enoch,

neo-conservatives
I've said in a couple other threads if I was American I'd have(very sadly mind you) voted for Hillary. Not sure, but that should really lay the neo-con thing to bed right there. Doesn't mean I won't agree with them if they notice the sky looks rather blue...

the MCA of 2006 and the NDAA of 2012
I don't base or form my morality around American law, so when and how it's deemed lawful or not for an American president to order something doesn't change my opinion one inch on whether the act is good or bad. Sure, it deducts a lot of points when a President breaks laws so that factors in, but if it's legal for a president to shoot babies we're all still gonna call it immoral anyways, right?

you find that it is the region,the actual soil that a person is on that makes the difference between legal prosecution..and assassination.
Between act of war, or peace time legal prosecution with proper due process.

this is EXACTLY what happened with afghanistan in regards to osama bin laden.
and BOTH times,the US state department could not provide conclusive evidence that either bin laden,or awlaki had actually perpetrated a terrorist act.

Sorry, but regarding Bin Laden that's a lie. The US state department held a trial and convicted Bin Laden already back in the 90s. The Taliban refused to extradite him then, and demanded they be shown evidence. They were shown the evidence and declared that they saw nothing unIslamic in his actions. Clinton spent his entire presidency back and forth with them, even getting a unanimous order from the UN security council demanding Bin Laden's extradition.

Smugly claiming that the US refused to provide any evidence to the Taliban because they were being bullies is ignoring reality. after spending several years getting jerked around by the Taliban claiming each new act of war launched from their territory wasn't their fault nor bin Laden's fault left a less patient president after 9/11...

now,is hannity guilty of incitement?
should he be held accountable for those shot dead?
by YOUR logic,yes..yes he should.
Can't say I'm very familiar with Hannity because I avoid Fox news at all costs.
Did he praise the killings afterwards and declare the shooter a hero like Anwar?
Did he council before hand in his books that killing those people was moral or just or religiously blessed like Anwar did?
Did he personally meet with and council/mentor the shooter before hand at some point as well, like Anwar did?

I have to ask just so we really are comparing apples to apples and all. If the answers are yes(and from Fox I suppose I can't completely rule that out just out of hand), then yeah, he's as guilty as Anwar.

now what if hannity had taken off to find refuge in yemen?
do we send a drone?

If he goes to Yemen we just laugh at our good fortune that he decided to kill himself for us.

To your point, if he finds a similar independent state to continue promoting and coordinating attacks as part of an effective terrorist unit killing new civilians every week then yes, bombs away.

Now if either he or Anwar remained in the US you arrest them and follow all due process. Oh, and to again shake the neo-con cloud you don't get to torture them by calling it enhanced interrogation, it's still a war crime and you should lock yourself up in a cell next door.

My whole thing is that setting up a state within a state and waging war shouldn't just be a get out of jail free card under international law. Either the 'host' state is responsible for the actions or it is not. If responsible, then like in Afghanistan it initiated the war by launching the first attacks. If not responsible, then it's declared the state within a state to be sovereign, and other states should be able to launch a war against the parasitic state, as has been happening with Obama's drones in tribal Pakistan.

Yes, I agree, Assad would be replaced tomorrow if he went against Putin, but he won't. He knows who butters his bread.

I don't think a targeted assassination was what Obama meant when he drew his red line in the sand over Assad gassing civilians. I expected, say, a no fly zone or US bombings of Assad's troops and headquarters, assisting the rebels without arming them. Agreed, that would be NO guarantee that another despot or worse wouldn't fill the void in power.
Perhaps the 'democratic" alternative would be separating Syria into 2 or more countries with local rule? That seems like it would have been better in Iraq than what happened.
Best would be if we could just stay out altogether and let them sort it out themselves, but that seems an impossibility for numerous reasons.

I'm wondering if that noise is a design feature. I would assume that the ideal would be silent, if for no other reason it implies greater efficiency. Since they only have the one electric prop, I can't see why they would have to make that noise.

I think the props are either intentionally designed to make that whine or there is another bit on there making noise like the siren on a Ju-87 dive bomber. If so, that would imply that they are intended from the outset to be used as terror weapons.

In this case I don't think I have an issue with that. If you have a bunch of hostile folks holed up somewhere, and you can put the fear in them with these and thus make them surrender, that's fine. I just don't like to imagine the future when they have hours or days of endurance and they're used on civilian population centers, and that's surely the long term goal for little drone swarms like these.

@enoch, you seem to be under the impression that you or I or anyone else has some kind of right to say whatever the fuck we feel like saying on the sift.

We don't. This isn't some public forum, it's a privately run website and @dag or @lucky760 have the right to decide if they don't want @gorillaman calling Obama a "nigger prince".

The sad thing is, I mostly agree with his post, but that one stupid epithet undermined his whole point and made him look like an ignorant fool.

And yeah, I'll fucking say it, calling Obama a "nigger" offends me, and not in some sensitive snowflake way. It should fucking offend you too, and frankly, I have no problem whatsoever with either dag (in his Siftler guise) or us as a community deciding that that's not cool and we don't want it here.

Free speech is not absolute, and anyone who thinks it is is deluding themselves. There are well-documented limits to free speech (yelling "fire" in a public theatre, joking about bombs at airports). Once you accept that something is not absolute, you then simply have to argue the degree to which limits apply (same as gun control, if you accept that civilians can't have nukes, then you're already in favour of gun control, you're just arguing over the extent).

They did take steps to prevent that, but given the number of these things deployed and their tiny size it would need to be foolproof to be ethical to use them.


When a Skeet finds a target it fires an explosively-formed penetrator to destroy it. If a Skeet fails to find a target, it self-destructs 50 feet (15 m) above the ground; if this fails, a back-up timer disables the Skeet. These features are intended to avoid later civilian casualties from unexploded munitions, and result in an unexploded-ordnance rate of less than 1%.

@bobknight33
why is @newtboy a dumb fuck?

for pointing out that historically suicide bombers have not been exclusively muslim.newt is not disagreeing that radical islamic suicide bombers exist,he is simply pointing out that the practice of bombing in the name of religion is not an exclusively muslim practice when viewed through the lens of history.

the problem is NOT exclusively the religion of islam,the problem is fundamentalist thinking.so while at this point in history it is islam that is the theology that is twisted for a sinister and destructive purpose,the same justifications can be found in ALL religions,predominantly from the abrahmic:judaism,muslim and christianity.

this is not a simple issue,there are many factors to be considered on why people will strap a bomb to their chests and walk into a crowded cafe and blow themselves up.

factors such as:education,employment,community,family structures and most of all...hope.we need hope.all of us need hope but when conditions for normal people are so oppressive and hopeless,people will seek to find hope anywhere,which can be in the form of religion.

look,
words are inert,they are meaningless until someone reads those words..and then interprets them.

this is particularly true when addressing religion.
if you are a violent person,then your religion will be violent.
if you are peaceful and loving,then your religion will be peaceful.

no matter which sacred text you adhere to,be it the quran,the bible or the torah.you will find justification for any and all acts you choose to engage in,be it violent or peaceful.

and THAT is what sargon is addressing!
sargon is dissecting the apologetics of those who are just not getting the plot.radical islam is a problem,a big problem,and attempting to dismiss the underlying factors in order to make a more "palatable" explanation is wading into dangerous waters.

so we can understand the politics and motivation of a young man from palestine who straps explosives to his chest and blows himself up taking innocent civilians with him.we can look at the events that led up to that grievous choice.we know,because there is historical record,how badly the palestinian people are being treated,and have been for decades.the young man was stripped of hope,and the only solace he found was in the quran and so began his radicalization.

it is the politics that always,and i mean ALWAYS,sets the stage but it is the religion that lays out the justification.

which is what newt was basically talking about.
we can use the exact same calculus for fundamentalist christians,or zionist jews.

think about it,how many radicalized muslims live in america?
how many?
deerborn michigan has the largest muslim community in america.now go look at how many suicide bombers are born from that region.
notice anything?

politics is the fuel,religion is the match.

some here may take issue with sargon's take on this situation,but he is making valid points in regards to how some people (mainly on the left) engage in apologetics,while ignoring the larger implications.

if we,as a species,wish to curb the tide of religious fundamentalism and the radicalization of whole communities.then we need to address the politics first and foremost.otherwise this "war on terror" will become never-ending.because the "war on terror' is actually on "war on ideas",really bad ideas,predicated on even worse politics.

today it is islam.
tomorrow it may be christianity,and there is a whole army of fundamentalist and dominionist christians just waiting to be called for their "holy war".

or should i just call it "christian jihad".