You Know What Grinds My Gears? - Things that personally piss you off

horrorfan89 said:
probably should post this in the gun thread but it does piss me off and the last time i posted there...wasn't very pleasant anyway. living in NJ the gun laws aren't too bad...yet. But the process to obtain a firearm license is brutal. in addition to background checks and all that you gotta pay to get fingerprinted and registered and the process takes forever, and even then you need permits for every specific gun you buy. (ex a shotgun license, a rifle permit and a special permit for pistols) and of course being a blue state like nj there's not even any concealed carry law abiding gun owners need to keep their weapons in steel cases in vehicles. Ive been meaning to start the process so i could have a gun handy given how fucked up things are getting but...life and other obligations are getting in the way. and there's no telling how bad the gun laws in nj may get since phill murphy swore he'd make nj the "california of the east coast."
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If you think that's bad look at Bongland gun laws.
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
I was thinking: excess rules in the modern world can be like trying to plug holes in a boat that's like Swiss cheese. The real problem is the craziness of the modern world, and excess rules can be like trying to just treat the symptoms of it.
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There were many rules in the ancient world. It's just that technology allows them to be top-down where once they were layers starting with the family, then clan, then tribe, and upward.

If you could write down and collate all the rules everyone in an ancient society followed, you'd have a helluva text. However, people only knew the rules that directly affected them, and rules could only be as complex as what could be remembered.

Now all the rules can be written up in ridiculous documents, and enforced by a bureaucratic class. What is more, more rules can be written than can ever be remembered.

It's not that life is more challenging, but that making rules is less challenging.
 
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Not sure if this was mentioned, but I cannot stress this enough:

Mute your mic when you're not speaking in a Zoom teleconference! I try to pay attention to a lecture or meeting, only to have loud background noise from somebody's mic. A dog barking, stuff rummaging around, other people having idle conversation, a baby crying; it is distracting. It's not like you could mute them yourself if there are multiple people in the Zoom.

The host has the ability to universally disable mics, but not every host does that. With that in mind, it is a little annoying to have to mute and unmute yourself.
 
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Marshal Mannerheim said:
You could make an argument for Carthage being a genocide but I'm not sure the Romans ever went to war with the extent of exterminating an entire people.
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I'm not sure how much more explicitly you could be calling for the absolute extermination of an enemy than Carthago delenda est, or in its wordier form, Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. Other shit Cato often said was very explicit he meant the actual death of everyone in the city.
Sped Xing said:
The Mongols were also famous for systematic extermination. See also: Assyrians, Zulus, Huns, Turks-- Even the Athenians got in on the action during the Punic War, slaughtering the populations of disloyal allied states.
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Genghis Khan was actually pretty progressive as murderous, genocidal warlords went. He was actually a huge fan of religious tolerance and offered his potential tributaries (or genocide victims if they picked that path) a pretty nice deal for the time. Surrender to us, you get to keep your religion. Don't? You all die. Plus if you join us nobody else gets to attack you, or we'll fuck them up, because you're our bitch.

This was a great strategy because it not only presented the threat of immediate death, but separated the populace (including the military) of the country from its rulers, who were well accustomed to expecting religion to motivate their population to resist invasion. With Genghis, though, who was obviously about to kick your ass entirely, you had the choice of a pretty prosperous life in a successful empire, and just getting raped and murdered.

This is really the Roman model too. Look at any successful model of human society where you actually know their names even if you are not a gigantic nerd who actually read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon and know how much shit the Romans actually wiped out.

Is it any wonder he succeeded? Genghis was maybe the first multi-culti. Consider his success. Wonder why.

Also just contemplate this, cultures are dying out on a daily basis. Look up the lists of the last native speakers of some specific language. You will be amazed. Some last living speaker of a language dies every week or so. Some 100+ year old motherfucker who grew up speaking some language dies as its last speaking member. We are all dying. Every day.
 
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The Americans didn't operate on that model at all. Ours was "you are savages. Give us all of your land and we may let some of you live as wards of the state on the parts of your land nobody else wants."

That's why it's not really accurate to talk about the "conquest" of the USA. Mexico was conquered. America was ethnically cleansed to make way for white people and their slaves.
 
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Sped Xing said:
The Americans didn't operate on that model at all. Ours was "you are savages. Give us all of your land and we may let some of you live as wards of the state on the parts of your land nobody else wants."

That's why it's not really accurate to talk about the "conquest" of the USA. Mexico was conquered. America was ethnically cleansed to make way for white people and their slaves.
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I was talking about America during the Cold War.
 
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Oh, yeah. America wasn't really an Empire until the Spanish-American War. Rome wasn't really Imperial until after the First Punic War. Both countries went to shit after acquiring provinces.

It gets very hard to root for the Romans after the end of the Second Punic War, not that they were always good guys before. Their treatment of Veii Centuries earlier had a lot to do with their determination to obliterate Carthage.
 
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Sped Xing said:
It's not that life is more challenging, but that making rules is less challenging.
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So in a way, there still are more rules today - at least applicable ones, that is.

Also, there's rules that come with an interconnected complex technological world - which can be on top of any (remaining) social rules from the past, or new ones.

Like in INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS' FUTURE, an example is given of being able to walk freely before cars, then the rigid mechanistic way travel must work now.

Anyway, Homo sapiens sure like rules...
 
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Marshal Mannerheim said:
In fairness, and at the risk of sounding like a ”stolen land, stolen people” sperg, America had always had shitty relationships with non-whites within its borders.
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Did I imply otherwise? But.we didn't conquer the West to rule over the Injuns as our underlings. We murdered them and built huwite people farms on their graves.

This is entirely unlike the US treatment of the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, most of Central America, even Hawaii at first.

There was no Pinoy Removal Act. We fought them to subjugate them, rather than replace them. It's a difference in kind.
 
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Devyn said:
People (usually male) who are constantly dropping what they believe to be hilarious dirty jokes, but which are really just cringy and annoying. If you ignore the jokes they'll either accuse you of not "getting" them, or of having no sense of humour; if you ask them to lay off they'll just do it more.

Dirty jokes can be funny, but most of the time it's like listening to a particularly shitty female comedian.
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Or friends who tell dirty jokes to a female friend so they can hide their untamed lusts behind plausible deniability "Its just a joke bro relax what I even do wrong?"
 
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Sped Xing said:
Did I imply otherwise? But.we didn't conquer the West to rule over the Injuns as our underlings. We murdered them and built huwite people farms on their graves.

This is entirely unlike the US treatment of the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, most of Central America, even Hawaii at first.

There was no Pinoy Removal Act. We fought them to subjugate them, rather than replace them. It's a difference in kind.
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Makes you think at which point we draw the line between military campaign/conquest and outright genocide, whats the difference between wiping out the indians in the west and the lebensraum policy of the nazis? they also wanted to get rid of the natives to replace them with germans

Is it because the nazis were killing mostly white people in white countries? because they were at war with the major powers at the time?

Would the campaigns out west to exterminate the indians be considered as bad as the holocaust had america at the same time been in a full-out war with the brits and lost it?
 
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