pkirkner

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by pkirkner

  1. Ferguson

    I suspect it's in large part related to the War on Drugs. Going at least as far back as my childhood in the '80s up until 9/11, the threat of gangs and cartels involved with the illicit drug trade was always pointed to as the reason why SWAT teams needed to be established, why duty revolvers needed to be replaced with semiautomatic pistols, why no knock warrants were required (which prioritize the preservation of evidence over the lives of both suspects and law enforcement personnel), and why the police required armored vehicles. It seems like in the past decade the War on Terror and the glut of military hardware built for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sped up a process that has been going on for awhile. It definitely complicates things. I know the US Navy and Marine Corps employ a fairly complicated use of force continuum (beginning on page 26 of this pdf) that outlines when the use of different levels of force is appropriate in a law enforcement / security context. The appropriate usage of a baton actually falls under a number of categories. If used in a , it falls at one level, if used defensively or to strike non-vital areas (thighs, for example) it falls at another level, and if used to strike the head it's considered a use of deadly force equivalent to shooting someone. OC (pepper) spray is another can of worms. Deciding whether to employ it involves accounting for things like wind direction and intensity and the susceptibility of your fellow security personnel to it, all for a roll of the dice on whether or not the belligerent person or people you're employing it on will actually be affected enough to buy you time to subdue and restrain them. Those were two less-lethal tools I was issued and am personally familiar with. I'm sure once things like tasers, rubber bullets, and tear gas are introduced to the equation its an even more difficult calculus. And as you say, in addition to the complexity their presence creates, the threat or employment of any of those techniques is likely to escalate a situation at least temporarily.To that end, I think it's worth noting one other area where the footage of the events in Ferguson are way outside my training or experience. As I was trained, the employment of less-lethal force was always a temporary measure designed to buy you time to gain control of a situation and de-escalate it. For example, OC spray is intended to buy you 5-10 seconds to handcuff someone and take them into custody. A baton is intended to tip the scales in a physical altercation (often through painfully blocking the unarmed strikes of an assailant) so that you can rapidly subdue them and take them into custody. There was always an end-game in mind that involved the situation being de-escalated. I don't understand what things like the indiscriminate use of CS gas and rubber bullets are even intended to accomplish. Disperse a crowd? For what, like ten minutes then rinse and repeat with an angrier crowd? I just don't understand the thinking involved.
  2. Ferguson

    The para-militarization of the police is an issue that also needs to be addressed (as does the completely broken acquisition process for DoD hardware to which it is closely entwined), but the more fundamental issue here is the nonchalance with which firearms are handled and employed by police, particularly in poor communities. A .38 caliber revolver will kill you just as dead as an M4 decked out with all the latest 'tactical' gadgets. I suspect handguns are used in the vast majority of shootings by police despite all the surplus military hardware they've received over recent years.
  3. Ferguson

    Stuff gets confused in the moment, so I'm not sure conflicting reports should be suspicious. If it turns out that the Ferguson PD is fabricating nonsense, hopefully the Justice Department sniffs that out during their investigation. But operating under the assumption that what they've said is true, it still changes nothing. Whether or not a misdemeanor was committed prior to the shooting, and whether the victim of the shooting committed that act or matched the description of the person who did, does nothing to make lethal force appropriate for that situation. I spent eight years on active duty in the US military and spent many, many hours standing armed guard duty. Our training relentlessly beat into us that our role was to deescalate every situation to the greatest extent possible, to draw a weapon (to include nonlethal stuff like pepper spray or a baton) only when absolutely necessary and that to point a firearm at someone, let alone fire it, was a huge deal to be done only in response to the threat of death or serious bodily harm and other similarly narrow criteria specific to the mission, such as to prevent the theft of highly sensitive material like nuclear weapons. In eight years, across four deployments and countless hours of guard duty stateside, I pointed a gun at someone exactly once and never fired a shot outside of training. From the footage of the initial police response to protesters, it's abundantly clear that the local and county police are perfectly happy to point their guns at someone for no reason whatsoever. That's a huge red flag, as leveling a firearm at someone is an explicit threat of lethal force that vastly escalates any situation where that threat is not already present. That stuff needs to be reigned in immediately. The nonchalance with which police in this country threaten (and employ) lethal force is completely unacceptable and needs to be eradicated. I hope this issue is one where the Rand Paul wing of the Republican party and the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic party can actually come together to change things from the federal level, because it sure seems to be too entrenched at the local level to change.
  4. Ferguson

    Seems like they're mainly trying to deflect attention from the shooting. I'm sure the media will take the bait and quickly become distracted. Theft isn't a capital offense and police aren't judge, jury, and executioner. None of that is up for debate, but I'm sure media "experts" will waste everyone's time with that "debate" nonetheless.
  5. After Volition released the Freespace 2 source code, folks ported Freespace 1 over to the Freespace 2 engine. There's also an enhanced version of the Freespace 2 engine that is worth picking up called FSOpen. Here's a little showcase trailer for the graphical enhancements:
  6. Rektreactional

    I've watched a few of the matches on twitch and watched the Potato Day matches from the client. This has been my first experience watching amateur play with commentary and so far I like it. Beyond the fun of rooting for a Potato Day / Ayesee Slater matchup in the semifinals, it's a nice change of pace watching an organized Dota tournament that isn't being played at an intimidatingly-high skill level.
  7. Some interesting media coverage. http://wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/new-video-game-will-be-set-wyoming-wilderness
  8. Baby Animal Gif Emergency Rations

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19d4tHFxKGc
  9. I would save up the 150g to play Arena. The matches tend to be more interesting and you'll likely recoup most of that extra 50g anyway. edit: It's also a great mode for folks starting out because it gives you access to a bunch of cards you don't own, giving you ideas about what you'd want to spend dust to acquire later on.
  10. I think the grand finals should also be cause for Valve to reconsider their playoff format. A team that's incapable of having a plan B if their chosen strategy doesn't work shouldn't be able to make the final. The NBA recently changed the first round of the playoffs from a five-game series to a seven-game series, in part to have at least one more game to sell tickets and broadcasting rights for, but also in part to make it more likely that the better team advances. If VG had been faced with a best-of-5 or best-of-7 series somewhere on the road to the finals, I doubt they would have made it as far as they did. Regardless of the sport, longer playoff series require teams to make the sorts of adjustments VG proved incapable of in the finals.
  11. I hate that I know this, but they did brochures for the Constellation and Aurora prior to that. After the 300 series commercial made them buckets of money, they went back and redid the Aurora brochure (with the in-fiction explanation that it was for the new model year) and released that alongside the commercial. Presumably, they'll do the same thing for the Constellation at some point and will raise a few million dollars from it.
  12. Have the thumbs talked about the .pdf ship brochures yet on the podcast? I believe that was the genesis of the automotive industry-style marketing for the game. Here are some links to them: Aurora 300 Series Hornet Freelancer Constellation
  13. DOTA 2

    I enjoy playing Disruptor against Nature's Prophet. Glimpse can screw up his plans in lots of fun ways.
  14. That picture lead me on a little 10 minute journey: Excitement: "Wait, Hasbro let LEGO make an Optimus Prime minifig?" Confusion: "So Hasbro created their own line of LEGO knockoffs and thought Kre-O was a good name for them?" Curiosity: "Huh, they make these branded with Transformers, Star Trek, GI Joe, D&D, and Cityville Invasion. What the heck is Cityville Invasion?" Sadness: "Oh, turns out it's a Zynga free-to-play mobile game with $50 in-app purchases targeted at children." Surrender: "I can get Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream, and Soundwave minifigs together for $7 on Amazon?" *adds to cart*
  15. Idle Digging - Shovel Knight

    Specter Knight, Plague Knight, and King Knight won the vote.
  16. Dota Today 13: On the Road to TI4

    Really enjoyed this one and am now totally looking forward to The Rektreational.
  17. Idle Digging - Shovel Knight

    There should still be a fair amount of free DLC coming out to fulfill stretch goals from the kickstarter, too. I know a four-player local multiplayer mode that lets you play as the bosses and a mode that swaps the gender of all the knights are in the works.
  18. Idle Digging - Shovel Knight

    I played through the first two stages this morning on PC and I'm really impressed. It has mechanics drawn from all sorts of NES platformers and they work really well together.
  19. Supposedly, the vast majority of the ships flying around will be NPCs allowing the devs to manipulate the economy as they see fit. We'll see how that goes.
  20. While I think Polygon framing the issue from the perspective of operators of pay-to-win servers presumably targeted at children is a poor editorial choice, I'm completely in favor of a more antagonistic relationship between the video game press and the subjects of their coverage as a general rule. The cozy exchange of access for positive coverage that is the norm across the gaming press (and the press generally) doesn't serve their audience's interests at all.
  21. Destiny

    Yeah, the Borderlands series doesn't have anything that hooks me. After watching a of the Destiny alpha, I'm a lot more interested in that. I trust Bungie to deliver superb FPS mechanics and I find the aesthetics of the world a lot more appealing.
  22. Elite: Dangerous (Kickstarter)

    The E3 trailer is pretty slick:
  23. Star Citizen

    My enthusiasm for this game is mostly for the single-player campaign, where I'm hoping my second-class citizen status won't be an issue. I might try out the MMO stuff out of curiosity, but it's not the draw for me and I don't expect to spend more than an hour or two with it. They're trying for Space Rome.