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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • There’s SCOTUS precedent saying that pornography–but not obscenity–is covered by 1A. (Obscenity isn’t very well defined, but it’s generally understood to mean pedophilia/anything involving minors (including drawings), certain acts of violence combined with sex, bestiality, and possibly necrophilia. Other extreme sexual acts–such as crush fetishes–might also fall under obscenity.) You can’t pass laws to unspool constitutional rights; your only legal recourse is either stacking the court with people that want to change precedent, or amend the constitution.



  • Your side hobby isn’t a PhD program

    And yet, none of the people writing laws can understand these things. Nor do cops, most people in the military, or–in all likelihood–you. But by golly, they’re going to write laws about them, even if they have no idea what the laws they’re writing will actually do!

    And I notice a conspicuous lack of “patriots” reacting at all.

    Yeah, it’s almost like what passes for a “political left” in the USA is a completely watered down, neutered version of the left, and is more interested in circular firing squads than actually doing something, huh?


  • Lots of cops and ex-military in favor of gun control.

    Cops and ex-mil are not usually people I’d say know guns. When I say “know guns”, I don’t mean just that they know how to shoot–which most cops and mil people can’t do for shit----I mean know how they work, and why they’re designed the way that they are. I mean, how many cops or military people can tell you exactly what the difference is between, say, a direct impingement and a piston system? Or what the different kind of delayed blowback mechanisms are? Or what the technical differences are between and AR-15 that’s capable of being select fire, and one that isn’t?

    And, even more than that, when you look at history, it’s clear that the second amendment was intended to ensure that the people had access to militarily-suitable arms. We’re right at the point of gov’t tyranny right NOW, and Dems want to disarm people? So, what?, we can have a King Trump I?


  • I would not ever call a 1911 “reliable”. You need to keep up with the spring replacement (500-2000 rounds for the recoil spring), and you need to make sure that you’re keeping them very clean. I’ve had the slide stop walk out on mine in the middle of a stage, which created a stoppage that couldn’t be fixed on the clock.

    It would not be my first recommendation for a carry gun.

    For reliable, I’d go with a major-name striker-fired polymer framed pistol. And by “reliable” I mean a gun that you can forget to clean for 2000+ rounds, and it still works well.

    That said, my carry gun is a CZ Shadow 2 Compact. It’s also not ‘reliable’; it’s going to take a lot more work than a Glock 19. I’m okay with that. And I knew that going in.





  • Unfortunately most commercial farms aren’t putting in what they’re taking out, even with the industrial fertilizers. Most of the industrial fertilizers are just nitrogen, potassium, and phosphates, often as a liquid. You are absolutely right that you can’t take and never return; that’s why in pre-industrial revolution times, people would rotate fields between crops, and lying fallow/being used for grazing (where sheep, cattle, etc. were leaving free fertilizer) You also ended up with fewer years where all your crops got wiped out by a single pest, because you weren’t farming just one thing. Efficiency in farming–esp. monoculture–is great for profits, not so great for the land itself.

    Good news is that good water treatment plants will pull phosphate out of the waste water.

    Eh. High levels of phosphates end up running off fields into waterways, and then you get things like algae blooms. Waste water treatment plants will clean up runoff that goes into the sewers and storm drains, but it’s not really cleaning up entire rivers. IIRC, that used to be a much more significant problem; I remember water in rivers near where I grew up–which was all surrounded by farms–often had white, sludgy scum anywhere that the current was forming eddies. If I remember correctly the high levels of that white shit was due to worse regulations governing agricultural run-off.