pkirkner

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Posts posted by pkirkner

  1. Posted

    I wonder, is a part of the growing willingness for many in the police to accept escalation through violence the fact that a .38 revolver is seen as so much less "violent" than an M4, riot gear, and a MRAP? Not to mention that when you're given hammers by the government for free, every problem looks like a nail...

    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.

     

    I actually wonder what the variety of non-lethal tools has done to the psychology of police interactions (both on police and civilian sides). Non-lethal devices are still violent uses of force. Tear gas, rubber bullets, tasers, dogs, pepper spray, bean bags, batons, etc. A cop 30 years ago had a limited to non-existent supply of non-lethal tools. Thus, the options were limited to de-escalate, hit someone with a baton or pull a gun. But once you're trained to immediately fall back to violent, if non-lethal, tools, then you've been trained to go to violence much earlier than if the dominant options were de-escalation and death.

    I'm not arguing that non-lethal tools are bad, I would generally believe they are massively important. But I wonder if there has been a cultural unintended consequence of the wide proliferation of them. Police don't just have a hammer, they have a tool box full of a bunch of different colors of hammers.

    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. Posted

    This in my opinion is the heart of the problem.  The DOD gave weapons to local police departments without first ensuring they had the discipline and training to use them effectively, or the knowledge of when to use them.  I imagine this is still happening today, since we only learn about it once it gets out of hand.  I would hope the first step in remedying this problem is reviewing the process by which local departments get these kinds of resources (or if they should get them), and even taking them away from departments that have overreached.

     

    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. Posted

    All of the "evidence" is ridiculously foggy. First off, Brown didn't match the description of the shoplifter as reported by the shopowner. Also, the released police report is timestamped for a minute before the actual crime was supposed to have taken place. Does that not seem crazy suspicious? Also also, all initial statements from Ferguson PD indicated that Brown was not stopped for being suspected of a crime, which they summarily backtracked on today.

     

    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. Posted

    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. Posted

    I should also mention that the first game, Decent:Freespace - The Great War is also available on gog.com.  The series has absolutely nothing at all to do with the Decent series apart from being made by the same developer.  If story at all matters to you then you should play the first one too but I believe a recap of sorts is available in Freespace 2 and it is definitely the superior game.  Basically, if the idea of piloting a fighter or bomber in the midst of this looks fun to you, you'll probably like it.

     

    FreeSpace_2_Beam-Combat-Anim.gif

     

    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. Posted

    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.

  11. Posted

    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.

  12. Posted

    The 300i was the first and it debuted with the commercial and brochure....they were popular, so....

     

    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.

  15. Posted

    The answer is

     

    Hasbro-At-Barclays-001_1367435547.jpg

    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*

  18. Posted

    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.

  20. Posted

    Is Star Citizen going to be the ultimate pay to win game? how will an in game ship economy even work when people already have so many permanently insured ships? If someone just buys the game, on the day it finally out, and starts flying around, how far behind will they be?

     

    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.

  21. Posted

    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.

  22. Posted

    As someone who liked the idea of borderlands, but hated the world, piss poor humor, "style", and gameplay, it looks like Destiny is intended for people like me. 

     

    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.

  24. Posted

    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.

     

    Earn...citizenship? To Space America?

     

    They're trying for Space Rome.