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The Old Hack

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Posts posted by The Old Hack

  1. Posted

    15 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

    And to listen to a lot of Democrats talk, anyone who isn't pushing substantially identical policies (sometimes with the pointy bit in a different group's chest) in the name of anti-fascism is lurching uncontrollably to the right.

    Well yes but they have been doing that for decades now without actually bringing the US close to socialism so it isn't really comparable.

  2. Posted

    I feel very tired.

    Trans visibility day always falls on March 31. Easter happened to fall on March 31. Certain Republican douchevolcanoes decided to pretend to be angered by this and demanded an apology from trans people in a blatant attempt to stir up outrage among their voters.

    This is offensive in so many ways. Just to mention a few:

    1) They are demanding that trans people apologize for existing. They know perfectly well we won't and plan to use our refusal to further outrage their befuddled and frightened voters.
    2) Their pretense that it is somehow the responsibility of trans people that a holiday that falls on a different day EVERY YEAR happens to coincide with an unrelated holiday this year.
    3) Their use of a holiday meant to honour a man who preached tolerance and acceptance as a tool to further promote hatred and intolerance.
    4) Their assumption that their voters are so blisteringly dim-witted so as not to know how calendars work.
    5) The possibility that a number of them actually are that dim offends me personally.

    Sigh.

    Don Edwards, ChronosCat, ProfessorTomoe and 1 other reacted to this

  3. Posted

    On 3/30/2024 at 0:44 PM, ijuin said:

    I do not think that there has been a Presidential/Vice-Presidential nominee for the Democratic Party since JFK whom the Republican Party has NOT screamed is unpalatably left-wing.

    Currently their stance seems to be that anyone who is not an outright authoritarian fascist is lurching uncontrollably to the left.

  4. Posted

    10 hours ago, ijuin said:

    First of all, shooting from the hip instead of using the sights is dumb unless you’re at point-blank range—and that optical sight appears to be out of alignment with the front and rear iron sights. Also, the forward grip on that thing is terrible.

    To be fair to the shooting from the hip thing, perhaps the shooter though they might as well because the sight was so awful. :danshiftyeyes:

  7. Posted

    "Project X" sounds kinda like something Elon Musk would come up with so yeah.

    How about something less impenetrable like "Fire At Will"?

    (I never did get why so many people seem to hate poor Will.)

  8. Posted

    3 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    I'm at odds with 'everything is negotiable' - to the dark side this path leads.

    Well, from a certain point of view it is. For example, traditionally when you negotiate with Nazis you do it with, say, thirty-ought-sixes fired from an M1. (You are allowed to upgrade to more modern negotiation methods today, of course.) By the time they are finally tired of that you can move on to negotiate their surrender with words. (Give up or we go back to previous methods.)

    I loved the 'Edwardian' joke in the comments. Possibly because I am like that myself. I have a friend named Elizabeth whom I once cited as the ideal source with whom to consult about Elizabethan English. :danshiftyeyes:

    Darth Fluffy reacted to this

  10. Posted

    22 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    There are legitimate concerns about a reasonable level off assimilation, perhaps often taken too far. If I understand correctly, in Europe, teen Islamic refuge offspring sometimes molest and rape host country girls who in their mind 'dress like sluts'.

    Oh yeah, like Brock Turner.

    Oh wait, he was a solid American Christian white boy of a good family. My bad, no reason to mention HIM. I mean if we started to consider people like him worthy of note they might never be able to be appointed to the Supreme Court.

    22 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    If you are going to be a refuge, it seems that being a good guest and not harming your host would be in order, no?

    Obviously, but it also depends at least a little on the hosts treating their guests properly. I daresay stuffing them into ghettos, treating them like trash and not giving them decent schooling might be factors that could aggravate teenagers and make them more likely to act out even to the point of serious crimes.

    Once while I was riding a bus I witnessed an immigrant innocently approach two Danish girls who told him off. He then left them alone. They, on the other hand, spent the next ten minutes swearing at him, cursing him and insulting him. I tried to soothe him down but finally he had had enough and attacked them. I and another passenger tried to intervene but at that point he broke off and threw a beer bottle at them and fled. I know exactly what the headlines would have read if the tabloids had gotten hold of that one. "DRUNKEN <slur> ATTACKS DANISH GIRLS WITHOUT PROVOCATION."

    As an aside, I told the driver of the bus to call the police (this was pre cell phone days) but he was himself an immigrant and he was afraid to call the cops. I told him that I would take responsibility for the situation and speak to the cops and then he finally called them. That whole experience spoke volumes of what a minefield immigrants have to navigate here in happy little Denmark.

    Yeah, you need to show good manners when you are a guest, but it really makes it a lot easier to behave nicely if your host doesn't treat you like trash.

    22 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    By the Darwin criteria, she made the right decision. You are here to discuss it. Doing everything by the book, you might not be. I think there is much to be said for this as the ultimate arbiter.

    With all due respect to laws and customs, I am a lot less motivated to follow them if in doing so I am likely to become a Darwinian example.

    22 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    I wouldn't say the people in Sweden that didn't want Jews to immigrate were exactly wrong; both concerns were valid (not saying correct)

    Oh, that was never in question as far as I am concerned. All I was saying was that if they had had their way my family would shortly after had been en route to a fun little holiday camp and I myself would never have been born.

    22 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    Back to this; language can be weaponized, and often is, especially if you don't want people to think about a matter clearly.

    Which was my whole point.

    22 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    Did you know that war crimes during WWII are still being prosecuted? In the remaining cases, it is often a race to prosecute before the elderly accused passes away.

    Meh, I am unworried. The people doing that are in no risk of being out of work. Still lots of genocidal fascists running around murdering queers Jews illegal immigrants whatever flavour of people they have been told not to like. Once WW2 is finally left so far behind that it is no longer practical to track down its offenders, there will be plenty of new material to work on.

  13. Posted

    Discussion moved here from military thread:

    Why do you think the German government

    can give permission to immigrate into Sweden? Getting out of Germany probably would have been tricky, but to then legally be in Sweden they'd need approval of Sweden's government, not Germany's.

    My apologies. I allowed anger to goad me into sarcasm and lack of clarity. Two strikes against me; I will try to avoid a third. I am sorry.

    I was talking about Denmark in early October, 1943. My family was in hiding, having only a few hours before learned that the Nazis were moving en masse to arrest all Danish Jews and move them to internment camps in Germany or eastern Europe. My grandfather was at the time quite ill and unable to reliably make major decisions and my grandmother decided that the family had to flee to Sweden. After barely dodging Nazi patrols on the eastern coast of Zealand they managed to cross the Sound in a leaky rowboat that almost sank before making it.

    And it can be gotten after the fact - go there,

    promptly notify local authorities that you're there and why.

    And here, unfortunately, we arrive at the crux of the matter. My grandmother had no way of knowing whether the Swedes would actually welcome her family or not. She was caught in the refugee's dilemma: flee from horrible danger to an uncertain future. No, it would be the decisions of Swedish politicians and officials whether her family would be welcomed as deserving refugees or arrested and rejected as 'illegal immigrants.' As already mentioned there was a sizable faction in Sweden that wanted to refuse Jews admittance to the country whether for reasons financial or out of fear of offending the Nazis. My grandmother could have done everything right and still faced expulsion on arrival.

    The difference between a refugee and an illegal immigrant is out of the hands of the people fleeing. They cannot be certain of their welcome or absence thereof. The only surety they have is that their home is no longer safe or even survivable in some cases. They then leave everything they know behind bringing only what they can carry. They go elsewhere in the hopes that they will find better in the end. That these hopes are all too often dashed is hardly anything to blame them for.

    Using such language as 'illegal immigrants' and them being 'rewarded' for a 'crime' they had no idea they could even be committing is loaded language, and to be frank, it made me lose my temper. It is common propaganda to dehumanize these people as 'being too lazy to work' and also somehow 'coming here to steal our jobs' (I am not sure how these two work together. The logic escapes me, I fear.) Especially since what distinguishes the 'illegal immigrant' from the refugee is an all too often purely arbitrary distinction applied by politicians based on whether they come from 'shithole countries' or are Jewish or of the wrong skin colour/religion.

    I feel that naming someone 'an illegal immigrant' and then punish them for having this definition applied to them might not be very just.

  14. Posted

    20 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

    Why do you think the German government can give permission to immigrate into Sweden? Getting out of Germany probably would have been tricky, but to then legally be in Sweden they'd need approval of Sweden's government, not Germany's.

    And it can be gotten after the fact - go there, promptly notify local authorities that you're there and why.

    Following up on this in politics thread.

  16. Posted

    4 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

    The people you're referring to here don't need to enter the country illegally - they can claim refugee status and ask for asylum.

    You mean my grandparents could just have gone to a presumably Nazi-controlled immigration office and asked for permission to legally flee to Sweden, awaiting an answer? I wish they had known that. They could have avoided fleeing across the Sound in a leaky rowboat that almost sank before they reached Sweden.

    It is also worth mentioning that there was serious discussion in Sweden as to whether allow Danish Jews to claim refugee status, by the way. A sizable political faction wanted to deny them that. After all helping them cost money so it would be cheaper just to shove them aboard a boat and sail them back to Denmark where the Nazis would give them a nice camp for housing. If that faction had won, my grandparents and father would have arrived illegally and then it would be RUDE of them to try and stay.

  17. Posted

    10 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    I don't doubt that. I don't think many of the voters in the US could pass the citizen test.

    On the plus side I am a child of such immigrants to Denmark, and I actually did manage to pass the test. (I was curious so I tried it.)

    Maybe that is why the Danish People's Party are so scared of people like me. They know I am a better Dane than them just a generation or two after arriving here.

    Darth Fluffy reacted to this

  18. Posted

    9 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

    But I doubt that a completed wall, even with adequate security patrols, would have had sufficient effect to be worth the expense,

    That puts you miles ahead of a great many other Republicans.

    9 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

    as long as we continue to reward people for entering the country illegally.

    Yes, how horrible, offering people a safe place to live when they could just stay home and be killed instead.

    Speaking as a child of a refugee family, you will not garner much sympathy from me with that argument. After all, my grandfather and grandmother could just have stayed in Denmark and be sent to the concentration camps instead of illegally going to Sweden.

  19. Posted

    12 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

    The surprising thing, though, is how many people who claimed that Trump's proposed wall would do no good, live in properties with walls around them.

    Well I live enclosed by walls. I use them to keep wind and weather out.

    Anyway, can you cite figures for how much good Trump's wall fragments have done?

  22. Posted

    3 hours ago, mlooney said:

    Yeah, he has strategies, just none of them will work.

    Building a wall to solve a territorial migratory issue is a strategy. It just happens to be one that is centuries out of date. Also even when they worked, walls needed to be manned with well-equipped and trained soldiers. But that would cost money so Trump never even considered it. This is why Nancy Pelosi suggested a beaded curtain as an alternative; it would be cheaper, prettier and hardly any less effective.

  23. Posted

    14 hours ago, mlooney said:

    Latest Ruzzian seige system.

    I have to admit, that would have scared the shit out of me if I had been a defender on a castle wall a dozen or so centuries ago. Imagine a siege tower approaching at like 20 mph.

    I admit I am less sure how much good it will do in an age where principal defences consist of stuff like minefields, defensive artillery and high power automatic weaponry, and walls are at best just an afterthought.

    13 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    Do the big empty wooden horse next.

    Please. Russians are more modern than that. They would do a big empty wooden T-34.

    12 hours ago, mlooney said:

    I suspect that Ukrainian forces would not take that in.  Now if it goes the other way, it's possible.

    Well the problem is that once again the Trojan Horse was a vehicle for getting past walls. The real value of the soldiers inside was that they could open the gates for the rest of the Greek armies. In order for a Russian Horse/T-34 to be applicable, the Russians would first have to successfully construct a huge wall that could actually keep Ukrainians out, and good luck with that.

    Mind you I would not like to guarantee that the current Russian leadership isn't considering the idea. I mean building a big wall is what Trump's strategy was, so there is a modern precedent.