Virdea

The problem with this idea is that the US is absolute shit at empires. Which I would cheer you for, except for the fact that there are other, smarter actors out there and they will not be fun to live under or be around if they ever get their empire on.

 

Basically; you guys generally tend to fuck things up in an ignorant, pig-headed way rather than a malicious, calculating way.

 

 

 

 

 

Quite a few scholars have said the same thing.  The problem that Russia always had with the US and pinning Imperialism on it was that they barely were Imperialistic, and when they were they tended to be naive, hopeless, and idealistic at the same time.  Look at the Iraq war.  32 days to conquer a huge nation, and we had no idea what to do afterwards, or even had a clue that there would be an afterwards.  Aguinaldo said that the most frustrating thing about Americans is that it was really hard to convince people to hate them when they are running around building roads and schools for you.  

Nations that are good at empires are ones whose nation is in fact an empire.  The UK, Russia, and China each have distinct nations inside of them that are far more rigidly controlled than the US does to PR or the First Nations.

Kurdistan is one of the entities that I see as a natural for the region.  

Israel, despite the crescendo of stupidity on the subject, has a degree of legitimacy - there were Jews living in Palestine for thousands of years.  In 1948 none of the big Arab powers were talking about an independent Palestine, but instead talking about which chunk they could take for themselves.  In 1949 there were 900,000 Jews in displaced person camps and 900,000 Arabs.  Israel resettled its refugees in a decade without a dime of recompensation from the countries who expelled them.  The Arabs are still in their camps to this day.  From 1948 to 1967 no one in the Arab world who controlled the West Bank or Gaza was all hot to form a nation even though they could.  And for two decades the Arabs could have had the West Bank and Gaza back for peace and recognition.  So from an existential point of view I am in favor of the existence of Israel, and think that if you attack someone and get your but handed you repeatedly then loosing a little land is the least you should pay for the pain.  

And Eban is right when he said, "The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."  

However, as an American who is a Republican it makes my stomach churn that Israel has stuck its nose in our politics.  Now support for Israel is political, and someday the political football will be in the hands of a quarter back who won't keep VETO of SC resolutions.  Eban also said "If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions."  In that situation do you really want to bait one of your allies?

So if we support Israel, then a Kurdistan is a no brainer.  Like the Jewish state there is land which is lived on by Kurds, they have a cultural identity, and they are a despised minority in many countries where that can lead to genocide.  And since Isis or Syria are the alternative government models that we have been shown, I think Kurdistan is a no brainer.

In the old days the standard practice would be a pair of police officers respond to a scene where a criminal complaint takes place. Maybe a pimp has beat up his ho. Maybe someone did a smash and grab. Or whatever. While proving criminal intent of a known badguy and gangmember who has beat up his girlfriend and kids is difficult, the fact that he was in possession of drugs or paraphernalia wasn't when he was frisked by the cops isn't.

This is called a pretext prosecution and is based upon selective arrests and a scientific measurement of human behavior known as psychographics.  Done right it is a god send for getting bad guys put away.  Done wrong and it is a racist trap that does little to stop crime.

However, just arresting people is not the only answer.  Here is my own story.  Not exciting Miami Vice stuff, undercover is not what you think - it is mostly buying drugs or letting chicken heads come on to you.  You do get a good understanding of the world though.

Drive someday into Bluff Estates, a blighted black community in Columbia, South Carolina.  When you drive in there will be three or four school age children not in school near the entrance.  They are the drug lookouts.  Their mothers get 20 bucks a day or so in drugs to rent their kids out to yell about police.  If you are in civilian clothes, and fit a profile, they won't yell, but maybe the old lady two doors down makes a call.

You are now on borrowed time.  If they make you as a cop you are safe, except people will stand out and yell at you, and they will have their kids run in front of your car hoping you will hit one.  If not then you are probably buying. 

As a drug user you take your life into your hands each day you buy.  You either buy from a friend with low risk but with a jacked up price, or you go to Bluff estates where the stuff is cheap but where you might draw the wrong attention and make someone decide you are better off dead.  

The first thing you realize about the neighborhood is - no older men.  You have very old men, and boys, but nothing in between.  

To understand why this is so weird you have to drive through an impoverished neighborhood where drugs are not a major issue, and they exist. These communities form around 30-40 year old men who are often veterans and usually hard working and blue collar, who provide cultural glue to the younger men.  Younger men are often unemployed, but take day work.  Criminal activity is part of the southern black experience, but black communities draw pretty serious lines between property crime and outright violence.  Beat your wife and ten guys from the neighborhood will come by and talk with you often lead by the pastor of the church. No one, even in the honest communities, talks to the police, but everything in the community is public knowledge.  Older black women are placed on a high pedestal, and motherhood is the route to respectability.  This is not a white suburban community but it works - and if the issue of educational access and job access would be solved, then these communities easily become middle class.

Bluff Estates though has no young men.  In the past decade forty are dead.  Four hundred are in prison, half never to return.  There is no statistics for fathers raising children because none are - most children meet their "baby daddies" when they are themselves first incarcerated.  Unlike the poor black community I described above, this one has most women having babies before they are 15 because literally, their men will be dead or in prison soon afterwards.  And addiction runs 50%.  

So I drive to the back of Bluff Estates, to a house where twenty men stand.  Only they are not men.  There are 10 old men - 50 plus, and 20 boys, and maybe two men around 20.  The kids are jumped in at 15 after having worked as lookouts.  Several of the kids will be carriers - they will have the guns - the young men never touch drugs or guns.  You look the kids over closely because the week before you had a kid accidentally shoot himself in the leg with a gun and bleed out.  The month before a kid was proving how fearless he was - on video he racked the slide of a Tec-9 he was told to hold, ejected the magazine to make sure it was empty, and then put the gun under his chin and laughing pulled the trigger.  People called it a "malfunction" of the gun and tried to make a case to sue the company that made the gun, but I argue it did exactly what it was told to do.  The gun was purchased by the girlfriend of a drug dealer - most of the weapons are stolen or are straw purchases but the DA is under pressure from the NRA not to prosecute straw purchase deaths, so it won't be a prosecution.  At the local NRA meeting I argue for a change of policy, but everyone is worried that it may happen to them so no prosecution for the gun buyer.

There is three cars in front of the drug  house in front of me, about normal - the drug sales is like McDonalds and Bluff Estates has only two entrances, so people tend to queue up.  I am buying an eight today which is five old twenty dollar bills.  If they are new from the bank you may get your ass beat - so be careful about that.  I run my twenties through a washing machine after signing them out because that mistake will get you dead.  You are not suppose to buy with a gun on you, but I have a MAS49 in my trunk and a GP 35 under the seat.  That way if I have to defend myself the department can deny they sent me in, because officially I am not cleared for the work, but the crew at Bluff estates knows all the full-timers so a lot of undercover is done with constables and deputies with part-time tickets.

An old guy comes up and I hand him $100.  He puts up five fingers, which means five twenties - everyone does it different but you learn how your dealer works.  If he puts up anything else I will get mad because I am a junky after all and if I let him cheat me to easily I will be in trouble.  He does not because if they think he held out on them they will kick his ass.

I drive down the street and a kid runs out with two tweens in a zip lock for me.  It is usually yellowish rock.  I smell it - it needs to smell acid.  If it smells base then I will flip my shit because they are treating me like some college kid and I am dressed like a chubby redneck in a wife beater which I have stained with motor oil.  White guys buying direct are either country or college, and I do not look college.  

One of those five twenties will go into the pocket of one of the young guys, and we will have PC to get him, usually in a traffic stop.  He will almost always have a small amount of drugs on him, and a gun.  He is the kingpin of Bluff Estates but we end up only getting him on a weapons and a drug charge.  However we get him, ignore the old guys and the kids.

Someone on TFR posted it. Either someone cut down one of the wooden furniture G3s, or were at least inspired by them.

A company makes wooden furniture for the M16 and G3, and MP5.  The M16 is the only one they make now.

I love that a simple observation made about changes in existing technology has been blown into this quasi-religious belief in ever-exponentiating computer power. 

 

And by "love" I mean hate.

However, as theory goes, it has worked for now.  The trick is making it work when Kuhn raises his head and you have a paradigm shift.

And everyone knows what you get when you have two sets of paradigms.  40 cents.

There's this idea of WWI being a sort of strange historical anomaly: 10 years earlier and it would have been a mobile war that ground into a stalemate only towards the end due to trains, telephones and artillery. Ten years later and it would have been a mobile war based around horse logistics, aerial reconnaissance, radio communication and armoured cavalry, probably resulting in the belated development of the tank only when armoured cars hit terrain they have trouble with.

If we consider the French to be the #1 Allied power, then ten years before would place them out of the tragic reliance on élan vitale and Germany into an era of cumbersome set-piece battles that they lacked the force structure to carry out.  The next guy after Joffre was not a savior, but he was a socialist who believed in using bullets to save lives, and was in favor of heavier artillery and "mechanized warfare" (although he did not mean tanks and trucks - he meant actually machine guns and cannons).  

The Ottomans and the A/H Empire were on their last legs.  10 years and they might not have existed.  Russia likewise was in a race to find a modern bases for being or blowing itself apart.  So they are the wild cards.  

Kurds are starting to get some interesting help.

 

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/private-surveillance-drones-take-flight-over-iraq-811d0f5f2a8f

 

It's kinda disappointing to me that there are so many issues with helping the Kurds properly.  They've been a pretty strong ally over there for a while.

The Turks absolutely HATE the Kurds.  They supported Isis for a while as a better alternative!  The Turkish SF soldiers who were captured by the US were running around aiding AQI (now Isis) - which put them into a place and time to be mistaken as nefarious people.  

The Turkish people are some of the most admirable in the world.  They are tough, interesting, and cultured.  The current Turkish government and some of the people pulling the propaganda strings are pretty nefarious themselves though, and Turkey - who could be a real mover and shaker in the region, plays so many games that they end up handing victories to their enemies anyway. 

5 years for a first offender on manslaughter charges would not be totally unheard of. More likely here in Canada would be a 7-10 year sentence.  But a 2-3 year sentence with mitigating circumstances would also be possible.

Manslaughter charges here have a pretty broad range of consequences with variance based on circumstances.

 

Edit: Also, length of sentence has very little relation to actual amount of time served.  With 2nd Degree Murder+ and sexual assault cases being one of the few areas where 20-life actually means you'll probably server 5+ years.

Canada and the US are often compared as they are close, but have three different systems of justice (a joke because it is said Canada has two).

Karla Homolka is the most written on of the subjects.  A triple murder / rape in the first degree in two cases, and criminal negligence in the commission of a felony is case 3, would be the end for the person in the US.  Susan Smith who killed 2 children barely escaped lethal injection, and then only because Judy Clarke did a good job of showing mental disease.  Karla Homolka spent very little time in prison despite the case being a slam dunk and the crime the worst on the books.   

I might be, given that apparently locking up violent crims for violence is really hard.

 

You know, on my end of the world we actually tried the jury system for a while before giving up in disgust. Are there any serious proposals to do the same in the U.S.?

 

Edit: Oh god, I just had a terrible realisation: the whole Oscar case, where a first-time offender was locked up for 5 years with parole for culpable homicide, was seen as a sign that our justice system was too easily swayed by wealthy defendants able to afford top-notch legal council. Are you guys seriously saying that this would be seen as an unusually strict sentence on your end?

No.  In the US conviction is MUCH harder than in French or British systems that dominate the rest of the world.  And although now rare, the properly functioning Sha'ria system is also an easy system to gain conviction in.  Throw in the Chinese system which is easy to convict and easy to sentence and sentences is Draconian, and those four systems are most of the world.

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In the British system the court is non-adversarial since everyone is technically a subject rather than a citizen (a difference that means little in day to day life, but is an underpinning of the system).  Truth is a group event.  The solicitor gathers evidence and builds a case, working for both the crown and the accused.  While technically US lawyers are officers of the court, solicitors are truly working for the court.  You can have a lawyer, and people with a lot of money get one, but they work with the solicitor.  

Barristers are the ones who work the court.  They get handed the case.  There are two barristers and then the judge(s).  Unlike the US the barristers may be defending, or they may be seeking a conviction.  The judge decides that before the trial and you can end up with anyone here.  Your lawyers and solicitors keep their butts on one side of the bar and keep their mouths shut, but are constantly being updated by the barristers who run the whole show with the judge.  

Conviction is easy - much easier in the US, but the up side for the accused is that the barristers and judge are all buddies and they put their heads together and rarely throw life plus sentences around.  It is said innocent people do better in the US, guilty people do better in the UK.  Not strictly true but if you are guilty and all the signs point to conviction, your sentence will be much shorter in the UK.

Juries, when used, have no voir dire and they offer opinions on fact - making them less important to the system than US juries.

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The French system

You have lawyers here, but only one court has juries, and the juries are empaneled.  There is a line where a jury must be sat, and when it does the French system works like the US system.  I think the term is serious felony in France, so if you face ten years in prison you won't get a jury.  Lack of a Jury again lessons the sentence but makes conviction easier.

So you could cut your prison population by 20-25% solely by decriminalising trafficking?

Depends on what you mean by trafficking.  No one in their right mind is considering decimalizing cocaine.  All of the talk is marijuana and simple possession of other substances.  25% might be high, but it might not.  It would certainly reduce prison populations for people serving under 60 days.

How many of these crimes are trafficking, possession or similar?

Possession and trafficking come out to 75/25 split for convictions.  However these numbers are soft.  Nearly every person we catch with a kilogram of cocaine claims it is for personal use, while a lot of people get caught selling dimes to friends in their frat house because they are congenitally stupid.  Plus a lot of captures are mules.  Plus possession is rarely prosecuted to its fullest while trafficking related to organized crime is prosecuted to its fullest and then some.  So a problem everyone has is finding out what the numbers mean.  

One of my students OD and died a few years back and I decided to get his family answers (at their request) that no police agency would.  The kid had purchased drugs from a man in Yakima, who received them from a connection in the local Hispanic gang.  They got the drugs by capturing the children of immigrants in Mexico and torturing them until the men agreed to mule for them, then holding them in camps.  From there I had no way to trace it further but those gangs actually have close connections with South American governments who support trafficking through Central America - that is published and not personal knowledge.  The amount of culpability in the system is variable, some of the people in the main supply have no culpability, but if caught will spend two decades in jail.  

Again, it seems like just, you know, not bothering to prosecute or lock people up for having or transporting drugs in the US would cut the total prison population by an enormous amount. Given that this would also make it much cheaper to get high (reducing second-order things like robbery), I can't really see a downside. I mean, it's not like the current approach seems to be doing much to stop people from becoming addicts in the first place.

You are right and wrong I think.  We can selectively decriminalize possession of a wide range of narcotics.  I even put forward an idea to the Washington Legislature that addicted people could apply for and receive a card permitted them to purchase and use narcotics, but which would also prevent their ownership of guns, automobiles, living with children under 15, entering a school or park, or holding license for some jobs.  We do something similar with people who are insane, and for nonviolent sex offenders who are under court mandated treatment.

The main objections to all of this come from the basic foundation of the United States legal system.  The first is that people who use narcotics cause a lot of damage in society.  That damage must be paid for either by the person who does the damage (who is a drug user and has no money), by the person who allowed the user to use (suits against the government for the acts of drug users are becoming more common based on failure to prosecute) or by insurance companies.  So any legalization scheme has to figure out how to pay the bill for the drugs.  Marijuana is easy - the bill is small and the users mostly non-violent.  

Other drugs are harder because while you say they would become cheap with legalization they might not.  An unlimited supply of some drugs (cocaine and opiates) only increases the addiction rate.  The resting addiction rate for communities that stop enforcement for these drugs is around that of the resting addiction rate for alcohol!  

Turkey is the main problem for the Kurds.  Turkey has a love / hate relationship with Isis.  Turkish special forces and the US butted heads numerous times as US teams hunting AQI operatives discovered those AQI people having coffee or tea with Turkish soldiers out of uniform in Iraq.  And when Syria went mad, AQI became Isis and Turkey supported their efforts in Syria as long as they also fought the Kurds.

Turkey routinely denies supplies to the Kurdish fighters and arrests fighters moving into the region from Iraq.  Isis supplies and fighters often move unimpeded.  Although 60% of the Turkish people hate Isis and religious extremism, the current government quotes passages from the Protocols and talks over coffee about the return of the empire.  Kurdish chances are better elsewhere. 

Unstable aerodynamic shares make stealth planes work, and unstable on one axis projectiles are much more maneuverable since their detent is to use all of their maneuver capacity to remain on steady course.  

As for cost, you are basically talking about launching an iWatch worth of gadgets attached to two model rocket engines and a rifle grenade.  The big cost is the sight, which is not expended.  

Now imagine 6 squad members firing grenades all at once.  Each grenade is smart, can self target, recognizes the human form and shape, can choose alternate targets, can disarm if its IFF detects danger close fire, and is stealthy because it is coming in from outside of threat axis.  That is the same as 21 M443 grenades except these land either where they are fired or can freelance.  Plus each of the riflemen can still engage with a full magazine for the mad minute suppression.

I suspect that the test was intended to check for degradation issues.  My body armor issued to me in 2003 did not certify IV after the first impact as the ceramic plates would get obliterated.  It was issued to me after I passed active shooter.  My armor was 9 kilos, the helmet was 1.5, all of it would stop the first couple of 7.62, but after that all bets were off.  Of course that armor listed is full-out combat armor, and mine was law enforcement issue that had to strip down for street use.  

Those are beautiful rifles.

By the way

Archduke Ferdinand did not wear his vest on the day he was shot.  It did not work because it was not on his person.

The narrator of that TV show wears Command Sergeant Major rank.

The issue is that the moderate elements in Iran want the deal, but the hardliners do not, so they'll be constantly pulling shit to derail the deal and hopefully discredit the moderate stance of rapproachment with the West. It's the same reason why the US constantly doesn't say anything about the Armenian genocide; despite Turkey being an awful actual ally, they're a mighty fine airbase and it's an airbase we really need so don't piss off and feed the hardliners in Turkey who want to break from the US.

It is funny that Turkey has a pretty strong majority in favor of western ties - but to get to the psych of the new Islamic ruling class in Turkey one has to watch the TV shows and movies.  I mentioned it in a another thread but in one movie a Turkish team is captured by US and bags placed on their heads (a real event) so the team leader and I think (the narrative was iffy - maybe just the leader) every member of the special operations team commits bloody suicide in shame over their humiliation.  In retaliation a Turkish team goes to capture the general who ordered the bags and proceeds to be present when British and Americans massacre a Palestinian wedding, along the way they stop a Jewish doctor from harvesting organs from babies to sell in the US, and they are present when an Islamic Mullah of a conservative guerrilla faction (ISIS / Al Qaeda) rescues Daniel Pearl from getting his head chopped off although he really deserved to have it done.  Thankfully those conservative Mullahs running freedom fighting groups know right from wrong.

In one of the sequels the team goes and kicks serious Armenian ass to head off a planned Armenian genocide of innocent Turkish peoples, and in another they go to Palestine and do something that involves kicking more ass.  I thought I was lost in episodes of The Unit.

I remember seeing Rambo III at the second run theatre when I was a kid.  It was terrible on all sorts of levels.  Personally, my favorite part is when he magically is able to operate a tank all by himself and use the main gun to shoot down a helicopter.  

They tried a Rocky / Rambo crossover, but after reading the script Stallone was hospitalized for a week.  

Can I nominate every alien movie ever? Not Alien or Aliens because they strangely get it close to right, but just movies with aliens as an antagonist period.

 

If we accept that intelligent life is possible, or greater than likely, then there is nothing special about humans whatsoever. They have no reason to care or be interested in us, the realities of space travel makes connecting in fellowship with a strange alien species a wasted endeavor. Earth is not only a terrifing gravity well, but resource extraction cost is huge regardless of how you slice it (or pulverize it). Easier to simply plunder the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt effectively forever.

They want our water!!!!

Doubt many said Death to America, but I did find a picture of a FEB Sherman with a translation of the word on the side of the tank that said, "a small bus."  The word was NOT small bus!

Reefer Madness.  I have been involved in dozens of pot parties (well, as the guy who was busting it) and never have I seen anyone injury themselves by rapid piano playing.

Sturgeon. It goes like this.

 

In the 1969 movie Easy Rider, southern rednecks are portrayed as the film's bad guys, showing intolerance and bigotry to the film's protagonists, Wyatt "Captain America" (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper). For those of you not in the know, Easy Rider is probably the first mainstream "counter culture" movie which romanticizes hitch-hiking, drug use, hippy communes and features Jack Nicholson in his break-out role as George Hanson, an ACLU attorney.

 

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Could not have been better said.  Easy Rider is a prime example of stereotyped evil taking over for the reality that is harder to show in screen.

State AG charged the officers with 2nd Degree Depraved-Heart murder.  The big surprise, she did it after only 10 days of investigation which means she either has a huge smoking gun or she will soon be dropping that charge.  To get that charge to stick you basically have cause injury to someone, then wait for them to die, then drag their body into a park and bury it, and then brag about what you did afterward in a manner that would lead people to believe you could care less it happened (why the call it depraved heart).  Simply failing to render aid in a timely manner won't cut that.  

I always cringe when I watch bad movie making, and a friend recently made me watch Rambo III because he was trying to get me to include it in a history of film class I teach (he considers it a classic).

About the time Marc de Jonge starts to torture Stallone I flip out and cannot watch any more.

A Turkish friend likewise shared his example of the finest movie ever made.  I sat through like twenty TV episodes and two movies of what amounts to a bunch of guys who travel around taking revenge on people who spit on the Koran, Jewish doctors who harvest baby organs, and American Red Cross workers who run secret de-virgination services and rape factories protected by "International immunity."  Gary Busey is particularly hilarious playing an over-the-top organ harvester.  

So what movies can you think of made in the last 20 years or so get the "enemy" wrong in a humorous way?

You can make money doing it - except a lot of people do not care.  I always cringe when I hear some actor butcher Portuguese - or worse simply speak Spanish as a substitute.  

That is why the model builders making Westeros have it easy...