“Do you need to” != “Have you”

I’m not really into conspiracies, but I enjoy fantasies about the harmless “what if”'s around stuff like this.

What if there actually was an advanced civilisation before us that built the pyramids and was wiped out by some global natural disaster…

What if extraterrestrial life has visited us and exchanged technology with us, but the civilisation that received it disappeared for some reason…

What will future humans think in 10 000 years if our civilisation is wiped out in 200 years and they start finding remains of our cities and tech?

It makes for fun thought experiments and story prompts.

Bit of a mixed bag here: Reading about some of Fridtjof Nansens expeditions is absolutely wild. These are people that wintered in the arctic without support, where no local population exists.

The story I think is the wildest is when two guys got stuck on Franz Joseph’s land for an entire winter, with minimal supplies. The following summer they began travelling towards land using kayaks they built, and were found by a British expedition.

Besides being some awesome stories, I’m pointing this out to emphasise just how extremely resourceful and resilient some people can be. These guys survived for months, with very little resources, in conditions that can literally kill you in hours.

Of course, in general, the best survival tactic is probably to try to find local populations and hope for help.

It objectively is. Most people are put out of action by 1-2 whacks with a telescope baton. If you’ve ever felt one, you’ll know that your muscles basically go numb when you’re hit - it’s not just pain.

One of the major disadvantages with deploying tasers to untrained people (e.g. American cops), is that it causes them to think they can handle 1-on-1 confrontations and then panic when the taser fails (not unlikely). The safer way to deal with a single unarmed person is to overwhelm them with several people that force them to the ground with sheer volume of baton blows (to the legs/body), pepper spray, and body mass.

No one said to reason with them. Just neutralise them without using a lethal weapon. Mace, batons and manpower will put any unarmed person on the ground.

I’ve worked with people that put down much more dangerous subjects than some meth head. I’ve taken part in such operations myself as well.

For any person not armed with a firearm or bladed weapon the answer is simple: You keep them contained without committing to an engagement until you have a sufficient number of people on site (2-4 guys should be enough), then you swarm them with batons and pepper spray. Even the beefiest guy in the world will hit the ground after a solid round of pepper spray and a couple good whacks to the legs and body when they have three guys hanging onto them.

If they have a bladed weapon you do the same thing, but make sure you get vests, longer batons, and more guys. The key is that you want to swarm and overwhelm the subject from all sides in such a way that you can force them to the ground without any individual grappling with them alone.

In all cases, the subject is likely to try to single out individuals in order to attack. Use a baton, pepper spray, a frontal kick, or “running away” in order to keep them contained until you can swarm them. Treat the them like a trapped animal: You want to make sure they can never single out anyone to attack, by constantly controlling distance while you circle them in.

This shit isn’t hard. I’ve worked with 19-year olds that mastered it. These cops fucked up colossally if a meth head was able to start wrestling one of them over control of a gun. This just shows that arming the police with firearms in situations where they aren’t necessary just makes the situation more dangerous for everyone involved. If the meth head gets control of the gun… they now have a gun. An unarmed meth head can be dealt with without bringing a gun to the scene in the first place.

I don’t need any authority to say something can or can’t be an addiction in order to recognise when someone has an unhealthy addiction to something (is unable to regulate their consumption of said thing to the point where it significantly negatively impacts their life).

Just like you can recognise that alcoholism can be a problem without being a complete prohibitionist nutjob, it’s possible to recognise porn addiction for what it is when you see it without being a puritanical nutjob. I don’t have any intention of shaming anyone for watching porn, I’m just pointing out that I’ve seen for myself that it’s possible to develop an unhealthy relationship to porn. As with any other addiction, there’s usually an underlying problem that has nothing to do with the subject of the addiction.

While I’m aware that pretty much everything I do online is tracked, the stuff that’s shoved at me the rare times I open instagram or facebook indicate that they are clueless about how to get me to stick around. They throw a bunch of shit at the wall (mostly soft-porn or comic strips), but never anything that makes me look twice.

Porn addiction can be an actual problem though. Not to downplay that puritanical shitstains should shut up about porn, but I know someone who had actual problems with porn addiction.

As with all other addictions, it becomes a problem when it starts taking over your life. If you start missing out on things (dropping plans with friends/family, etc.) and/or develop economic problems because you can’t regulate your consumption, it’s becoming an unhealthy addiction.

I pretty much never use instagram, but I follow a shitposting channel there, and every now and then I go into instagram to show someone some old shitpost.

I’ve concluded that the instagram algorithm is frustrated as fuck from not understanding anything about me, because I never click or hover on anything it shoves in my face. However, it’s concluded that I’m a horny dude.

The result is that it floods my feed with a bunch of soft-porn. I have no idea where this all comes from, or who is spending their time uploading a bunch of soft-porn to instagram, but there’s an absolute shitload of it.

It you only rarely eat bread: Cut it up at put it in the freezer. Whenever you need a couple slices it’s easy to break off however many you need and pop them in a toaster for a couple minutes. If you’re packing a lunch you don’t even need the toaster, just make the lunch with frozen slices and they’ll be thawed in a couple hours :)

One might even say that dampening is making things damp!

They’re getting downvoted because they’re missing the point. It’s not about whether or not I can choose to do things the way I prefer. It’s about how newcomers exposure, and thus opportunity to get into these things, is limited. The arguments about cars or calculators don’t hold up for that exact reason: The existence of cars and calculators does not severely limit people’s exposure to the experience of walking or doing arithmetic.

Exactly! I’m sick of people being labelled as racist because they’ve said some keyword that someone has decided makes them racist, even when their intents and opinions are clearly not racist.

Saying it’s “uncivilised” to publicly beat someone to death because they <insert whatever>, cannot be racist, because you’re not concerned with “race” in any way. Going further and saying that a country that allows such practices is uncivilised is, again, inherently not racist, because the reason for calling them uncivilised has nothing to do with the “race” of the people involved.

I second this! I was in the US for a while and quickly realised that doing constant conversions was a PITA, so I learned some rough reference points in imperial.

I think it’s good to get some small and some large reference points, which make it easy to guesstimate other things based on what you know. Mine were (given in metric here):

• A glass of beer is 0.5 L.
• A big barrel is about 200L (0.2 m^3).
• My walk to work is 3 km, a long hike is 25 km.
• A very short person is about 150 cm, a very tall one is about 2 m.
• I can deadlift about 100 kg, and bicep curl around 15 kg.
• A potato is on the order of 100g, while a watermelon is around 2kg.
• 70 C is a nice sauna, 25 C is a nice summer day, 10 C is chilly, 0 C is sleet-temperature, -10 C is powder snow cold (depending on where you live the colder temps might be more or less relevant)

Figure out some similar things for yourself, and it’ll be relatively easy to think along lines like “That walk was a bit further than my way to work, so it’s probably about 4km”, or “that box was heavy, but far from 100 kg, so it’s maybe around 30 kg.”

Bonus points if you try some guessing like that and double check afterwards to tune in your feeling for different measurements.

With the current state of things in Gaza, I’m starting to dream that European naval powers some day have enough, and send an aid convoy with a heavy military escort to Gaza.

I can’t imagine anything but support for a mission that is literally escorting container ships with food, water, and medical equipment to Gaza. And I can only dream about the reaction from Israel if a combined NATO naval force told them that “We’re delivering humanitarian aid. If you try to stop us at sea we’ll sink you, and if you try to shoot us from the air we’ll wipe out your airfields. Stand back and no shots will be fired.”

It would be a so unequivocally “good guy/bad guy” situation, and NATO has the military power to pull it off. Of course, zionists have infiltrated far too much of our political sphere, so it’s never going to happen…

I honestly don’t get all these people downvoting the general sentiment that a prisoner is, in fact, imprisoned. A free person on the other hand, is not.

No one here is denying that being poor or homeless makes it extremely hard to really do anything, that’s not the point. The point is that no matter how poor or homeless a person is, they still retain the freedom of choice regarding what to do when they wake up the next morning.

There is 100% a strong culture for minding your own business and not bothering anyone here. By that I mean that approaching someone without having a good reason to do so is very much frowned upon. That doesn’t mean we’re anti-social or complete strangers to small-talk, but there are some rather subtle social cues governing when it’s appropriate to approach someone, and if you just mind your own business and don’t give any indication that you want to chat, there’s a high probability that no one will approach you or talk to you.

I didn’t mean to come off as disagreeing with you, I think we generally agree. My point was that I think there can be such a thing as a “perfect relationship”, as long as we have a realistic idea of what that entails. I definitely agree that the idea of a “perfect relationship” that a lot of media tries to sell us is completely unrealistic though.

Your english is great btw :)

Hey… are you 100% sure she isn’t playing both of us? I was with her all of last week, but she’s on a business trip this week, that doesn’t happen to match up with when you’ve been with her I hope?

_jk