Remember Kids...if You're Going To Sell Out, Sell Out Hard.

Rodrigo A. Branco

Purposefully targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Purposefully using civilian infrastructure to shield military infrastructure is a war crime. Destruction of civilian housing without immediate military necessity is a war crime. Targeting civilians for killing and kidnapping is a war crime. Collective punishment in any instance is a war crime.

People need to quit it with these simplified, asinine shit takes on an extremely long running and complicated situation. It doesn't boil down to simplistic slogans fed to you by some blood and soil types hiding behind leftie platitudes or dipshits that still read the Protocols of Elder Zion and masturbate to it. There is no binary good guy/bad guy here. It's a proxy war, and in a proxy war the people who suffer are civilians just trying to live.

Do yourself a favor and if you're a fucking anti-semite, just be honest about it. If that makes you uncomfortable, why? Using a war thousands of miles away as an excuse to join the tiki torch crowd is an eleven on the asinine scale.

Back in the Dim Times, when the only thing digital was our fingers and toes, I used hospital corners on a flat sheet to cover the mattress. There are YouTube videos on it, I dunno how to be explain without a visual aid.

I just assumed nobody really used the non fitted sheet that came in sheet sets and it was just in there so we could all pretend to be more adult than we are but everybody KNEW no one used it but @thelawfulchaotic thinks I am actually insane:

They went with something even more groovy...the Guns-a-gogo project ACH-47. It was a conversion from the regular cargo model where they stripped out all but 5 seats and the lifting winch, added over a ton of armor, fire suppression system, cross engine fuel transfer/cutoff, an intercom system and all the guns. Intended to clear LZs, they worked in pairs with rockets, 20mm cannons and 40mm automatic grenade launchers.

Weapons engineers were better when they dropped acid and did coke. Behold the 105mm Huey. In the 60’s Rock Island Arsenal wanted to modify UH1s to carry a 105mm howitzer with a box magazine.

Reading through "manliness" discourse and websites, and I'm wound up dumbstruck.

So the takeaway from more left leaning wisdom givers seems to be the Alan Alda style of manhood, and is definitely geared towards the mythical Millennial tech worker. Bits of advice like "don't learn to fix things, learn to code" or "don't learn to defend yourself, learn to meditate" along with the assumption that you can always hire someone with these "outmoded" skills to do stuff for you. Not only is that classist as fuck, but why would you want to purposefully helpless in a good portion of your life? Sure, cars are getting more complicated all the time. Doesn't mean that you couldn't do basic repairs and maintenance with a basic tool set and some five minutes of YouTube. I personally saved us around $5k in repairs on the Vic with basic tools and videos. I changed out the whole cooling system-new radiator, new water pump, new hoses, new serpentine belt, even changed out the oil cooler with aftermarket because it was leaking into the coolant. I certainly couldn't have afforded that paying someone to do it for me. But I've got a running car that I only paid for parts on.

The flip side of this is the right leaning adviser that basically want to turn you into Heinlein. "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects". I'm perversely proud that I can do almost all of that, but I've led a weird life and I'm almost 50. Mix that mentality with the prevailing streak of neo-Victorian thought, toss in a soupçon of anti-intellectualism, and yearn for the magical time of the imaginary 50s that has no basis in reality.

I'm kind of the mind that all knowledge is good, and you never stop learning. Over the years, I've taught myself stuff that runs the gamut from picking locks to sewing, to formal table manners. Because I found them useful and interesting, not because of what manly men do.

There's another contributing theory that the large brim, pointy hats of the stereotypical witch closely followed the hat worn by alewives. Not the stinky fish that washes up on the shore, but women who were the brewing industry from medieval times until about the 18th century. These women would brew up batches of ale and beer at home, and then sell them come local market day. They wore the hats to stand out in a crowded market. Women ran brewing until it started to shift from a cottage industry towards industrializing, and the dude brewers started a whisper campaign to impugn the quality of the alewives' product. Alewives were also known for their herb knowledge, necessary for things like hopping beer or using germander if hops weren't available.

speaking as a Jew, i’m extra-super dubious of all that stuff that talks about cartoon witches being an antisemitic stereotype. I can get where the thing with the nose is coming from, but the claims about the hats are based on flimsy claims that require a lot of mental reaching. The hats that Jews were forced to wear were not a universal thing, and I’ve yet to see any evidence that they were part of the cultural consciousness by the time the image of the pointy-hatted witch became common.