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Luigi Mangione shouts at media as police rush him into court
  • His family proved in court that the government killed him, but every judge in criminal courts refused to let the case go to trial, so it was only a civil court case. But the judge was convinced by the evidence and found the government guilty and dues were awarded.

  • Luigi Mangione shouts at media as police rush him into court
  • Nowadays, you can print guns out of basic PLA. At least in .22 caliber, I don't know about anything larger, though I do know 3d printed Glock frames are definitely a thing. A 3d printed suppressor is definitely feasible, as I've seen at least 1 design for PETG.

    Now, as to whether or not that's what can be seen in the video? Who knows. I certainly can't tell.

  • Bad Ports
  • Fun fact that may or may not be true: The left side of a ship used to be called "larboard" (to go with starboard) because that's where the larder was - where the food was stored, and this was supposedly changed to port because that's also where the wine was stored and it was both easier to say and easier to identify as being different from starboard.

    Another fun unverified nautical fact: The word shit originated as an acronym for the storage of cow manure during transport at sea - Store High In Transit. Dried cow pies apparently have...violent reactions to salt water.

  • Politics venn
  • Where did I ever say otherwise? No need to be so defensive. The extremists are obviously the priority, and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or a patsy, but we can't forget those who spread their message. The cultists today, the enablers tomorrow. Gotta keep the big picture in mind so we don't lose momentum or get complacent after the short-term victories.

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  • Every accusation is an admission.

    Stop deflecting by pretending that there's no greater issue than just the extremists. The rot's just gonna come back if we don't stop it at the source after we deal with the cancer in front of us.

    Or are you incapable of thinking about what happens after the extremists are dealt with.

  • Politics venn
  • Which wasn't a revolution, Jan 6th or the Civil Rights Movement? The Jan 6th was definitely an attempted coup (unless you ask the MAGA cultists), but the Civil Rights was definitely a revolution of some form. And the Kent State Massacre is just an example of the violent suppression often used by the US government (though we usually prefer it to be in other countries).

    The US isn't a dictatorship (yet, who knows where we'll be in 2 years time), but you look at how militarized our police force is and how many US citizens are gunned down by them every year and tell me we that we aren't a militarized police state. Our cops are buying surplus IFVs from the army to drive around in. Palestinian protesters at colleges were having their belongings seized and thrown out by police and administration both - including things like medications. During Bush Jr's administration, you could only legally protest against the Iraq war in areas cordoned off with concrete barriers and fences (sometimes with barbed wire on them). Several studies were done years back by some Ivy League schools looking at laws that were passed or not and their popularity with the 1% vs the majority of Americans, and their conclusion was that the US cannot be considered a democracy and is in fact an oligarchy.

    Dictatorships are usually brought down by their own incompetence, but resistance groups speed that up and help keep people from dying. The point isn't open warfare against guys with tanks and beyond visual range missiles, but asymmetric warfare meant to cripple the government's operational capacity for oppression and community support for the population. Like in Myanmar, where resistance groups are fighting against the ethnic cleansing being done by the military using 3d printed guns because not a single nation in the world cares enough to send them aid. They can't get guns, but they can get hobby 3d printers and bullets, and that's good enough to kill a soldier and take his gun.

    Like George Washington said when he opposed the Second Amendment, "Farmers with guns will never win against a professional army." But you don't need to, you just need to be annoying enough that the government falls on their own knife trying to catch you. Rambo getting gunned down in a blaze of glory will be remembered as an idiot. The black militia put together and trained by a black WW2 veteran who put down sandbags and machine gun emplacements on people's porches to protect them from retaliation by the KKK are remembered as heroes. Just like the people who showed up for MLK's show of force in D.C. that we call The Million Man March today. That wasn't just a protest. It was a threat that terrified every white suburbanite across the country. If he could mobilize a million people to the capital just to march, what else could he do?

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  • Don't misunderstand me, I agree the extremists are responsible for their actions and the extremism. But there are other factors that led to those views being pushed into mainstream politics. The Democrats didn't help things by funding extremist candidates for the easy win in the same way that the Republicans breeding their core voting block of "I'm a Republican, I vote for the nominee" cultists didn't help when Trump stole them from less extremist candidates in the primary. Like how TV channels choosing to air 30 minutes of Trump's empty podium instead of Bernie's speech during the Democratic primaries didn't help run a fair primary that year.

    Extremists are responsible for their actions, but those who help to push their views aren't spotless.

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  • If they had had guns, they probably would've succeeded. What kept them from executing Senators was basically a single locked door in a hallway and one or two police officers holding it while the politicians were evacuated through the tunnels.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

    I don't think you understand how a military police state works. The government's monopoly on violence keeps the population in line. It wasn't until after MLK was killed and over 2 billion dollars worth of damage was done by rioters burning down entire sections of cities that civil rights laws were passed. Years of protests led to nothing. A week of riots had the laws written, drafted, and signed into law. Look at what's happening right now over the death of a certain CEO of a major health insurance company.

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  • The Democrats did spend years funding the most extremist opponents in their elections to set up easy wins for themselves. A lady even wrote a book about how she won her election this way.

    And then she lost to that extremist the very next election.

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  • It's an effective strategy, up to a point. "Vote for me because I'm not the guy you hate" is one of the oldest political strategies around. And Democrats have even openly said that they've been funding the most extremist right-wing candidates on the ballot for years to set up easy wins when people think their opponent is a nutjob. There was a lady who even wrote a book about how she won an election doing this. And then she lost to that same extremist in the very next election. Because what they've actually done is push the Overton Window further and further into extremism.

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  • The Republicans have bred a cult that makes up the core of their voting block, though. This is how Trump originally got into the primaries and then elected. He pulled the cultists away from their masters and they couldn't control the new MAGA cult.

    Both my grandfather before he died and my first boss had the same exact reaction if you asked who they were voting for. They'd look at you like you'd grown an extra head and reply, "I'm a Republican. I vote for the nominee."

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  • They didn't need guns on Jan 6 because there were traitors in major government offices - namely the White House and the Pentagon - who withheld the National Guard from mobilizing and reduced the number of police in the area that day.

    There were soldiers ready and waiting, guns in hand, who were told to standby.

  • Bumper sticker
  • How long you've been taking hormones is the important part. How long you've lived as amab only really matters until a certain point, as it's very difficult to maintain muscle mass from before you started hormones. And afab people have to build up muscle mass even when they start taking testosterone.

    And yes, not every trans person is taking hormones or even will. But I have yet to hear of a single example of a trans person in regulated sports who wasn't competing in the division of their gender while on HRT. Even the preteen kids were on puberty blockers.

  • But my favorite single digit billionaire pop star is one of the "good billionaires"!
  • I mean incentivizing them to invest it into things like public works and other beneficial things, but I also expect that that would go about as well as the current tax incentives do. It would be the thing that requires the least effort possible from the government, though, which I think makes it the most likely to actually occur. Actually taxing them more is pretty much a pipe dream.

  • steal his look! [update]
  • That article disagrees with the second part of your comment. It says that the Welrod replicas are rare and mostly used by veterinarians, and looking them up, they've only been available for import to the US since 2021.

    I don't know where you got your 300 million figure from. Wikipedia puts the total number of civilian firearms in the US at about 393 million, and that includes shotguns, hunting rifles, etc. The most popular pistol in the world I think is the 1911, and I imagine that holds true for veterans as well, and there have been about 4.3 million produced in the past 110 years. The most produced handgun is the Glock, estimated between 10 to 20 million guns.

    It's also not confirmed that that was the pistol he used, just suspected. I saw people talking about how you'd potentially have to manually cycle a regular semi-auto pistol like he did if you were using a suppressor and subsonic rounds because they wouldn't produce enough force to cycle the gun on their own.

    Edit: You fixed your comment while I was writing this, but I'm gonna leave it unedited for the info.

  • Bumper sticker
  • Fun fact, a recent study reported that cis women have an advantage over trans women in sports due to their higher testosterone levels allowing them to build more muscle mass.

    You know, the same argument transphobes use against letting trans people be athletes because of their supposed "biological advantage."

    Which is the same one that's been used for almost a century now to ban black women from women's sports due to their naturally higher testosterone levels when compared to white women.

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    EldritchFeminity @lemmy.blahaj.zone
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