After Jacinda is hung from a light pole and the Chinese driven in to the sea hopfully they free my homie who dindu nuffin
His looks haven't changed much, it's all lighting, angles, and his sad "the dopamine hit wore off a week after the shooting and now I've fully processed the fact I'm going to prison forever" expression.
It's important to the kabuki dance that he look really defeated before he gets memory holed forever.
Which is probably why they have almost certainly got him on hardcore suicide watch (which is one of the most depressing places to be imaginable.) Can't let him martyr himself.
Gotta say, "my problem with the Christchurch shooter is that he didn't die during his massacre and is therefore a pussy" is one hell of a hot take.
His looks haven't changed much, it's all lighting, angles, and his sad "the dopamine hit wore off a week after the shooting and now I've fully processed the fact I'm going to prison forever" expression.
Likely had something to do with a threat of placing him with the Maori, who, despite being only 15% of the population, make up 50% of New Zealand's prisoners.
The virus thing is pretty much a solid example of why accelerationist "shoot up a place full of random people" ideology is a failure. The only impact his livestream and shooting has had a year later is that he created another banned shock video for edgy trolls to offend people with and caused a bunch of New Zealanders to lose even more of their rights. The copycats who tried it became laughingstocks instead of starting Race War III. Then there's the obvious "why didn't he attack some government official who enabled migration instead" question as well, and that would have had a much bigger long term impact outside the internet because his copycats would have likely been bigger threats.
Meanwhile the virus has given every fringe group online their dream scenario of society collapse. People are stuck inside and conspiracy theories are flourishing about people losing their rights. Racism has made a comeback but towards the Chinese instead of Muslims as solidarity campaigns like "hug a Chinese person" backfired extremely hard. Gun sales are spiking harder than even the biggest mass shooting panic buys. People are out of their jobs and angry at corporations/the government, and others are predicting it's only going to get worse in the next few months. Oh and even Tarrant's greatest achievement (tech companies overplaying their hand regarding censorship) has been eclipsed by how tech companies have "fought misinformation" regarding the virus in a way that normies can see.
The coronavirus has accelerated things far faster than any mass shooting in a Wal-Mart ever could have.
Kazynski is a mathematics prodigy that has some startlingly original ideas. Tarrant is just a meathead. Doubt he'll get much interest from the outside and in a couple years he'll probably become the girlfriend.reminds me of what Ted Kazynski wrote about being in prison, "I am afraid they will break my spirit". However, Ted Kazynski also had lots of people writing him. Which included a lot of women. He published a few books while in prison, and also aided in the construction of Ivey university courses. Absolute mad lad. I hope Brenton has some pen-pals
I be they threatened him that if he does talk they will make his conditions worseNot even going to give us a shout out.
It's like he doesn't know we've been there for him since the start.
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1. Biological attacks. Like we have seen with the Chinese Flu, a virus can cause enormous socioeconomic damage, even without killing all that many people. They also are not really all that hard to get hold of compared to things like nukes. Small countries and terrorist cells could make new weapons if they have smart people dedicated to the task. I estimate a few PhDs in virology and biotechnology, with the funding of 911, could do it. It is for this reason I think that sometime between 2030 and 2050 we will see a virus that is designed by terrorists, and kills at least 1 million in a single year.
You obviously know a little more about this than the average person.Really? You don't think that the major powers haven't anticipated this? The USSR had weaponised smallpox at its lab in the Aral Sea. Ditto weaponised plague (Yersinia pestis.) Us bongs had similar agents at Porton Down (we developed VX gas there and traded it to the US for thermonuclear know-how in the 1960s.) The first thing you do when you create a biological weapon is make sure your side has the gear to treat or prevent it, otherwise it's no better as a weapon than any old global pandemic.
Also, someone giving large sums of money to biotech PhDs and fitting out a super secure lab (an expensive endeavour) and attempting to acquire the gear that would be needed to produce such things (CRISPR-Cas9 is not enough)? That's gonna end up with them on a watch list very quickly.
As regards custom viruses that only infect a subset of the population, that's science fiction. The South Africans were attempting something like that at Project Coast in the 1970s and 1980s, but they concluded that if they wanted to keep the black population down by clandestine means, it was easier just to stick contraceptives in the water supply rather than genetically modify something that whites are immune to.
It's only a matter of time, whether by accident or intent, someone's going to do something extremely stupid and we won't have a defense against it.
There's reasons for optimism, starting with the fact no one actually wants everyone to die. We depend on each other as a species and there's strong biological instincts never to act on desires to wipe out others entirely.I am genuinely surprised that as a species we got through the Cold War.
1962 - during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine with nuclear torpedos couldn't contact Moscow, and believed they were under attack from US depth charges. They had to determine amongst themselves whether to fire a tactical nuclear weapon. There were three officers whose job it was to decide, and two of them were in favour of the nuclear option, and but for the commissar persuading them to surface and confirm it with the Politburo first we probably wouldn't be here by now.
1979 - NORAD threw up an alarm stating there were 250, then 2,200, Soviet ICBMs on their way to the US right then. Strategic bombers were put on cockpit readiness (as in, fuelled up, nuclear armed, crews ready to launch and in the planes to drop big ones on Russia), missile silos told to stand by. After 6 minutes it was confirmed to be a false alarm by satellite reconnaissance. The cause of the error? Someone put a training drill program into the true and honest defence computer.
1983 - The Soviet Politburo, who were all paranoid geriatrics who remembered Operation Barbarossa and had convinced themselves that NATO was just itching to wipe them off the map, assumed that the Able Archer military exercises were a cover for a build-up of a conventional invasion of Eastern Europe. The West was also increasingly convinced that with the Soviet Union looking increasingly unstable what with the deaths of Andropov and Chernenko and the upper echelons of the Party looking increasingly like a deadly decadent court, some headbanger would take charge and invade the West. This was the time of KAL 007 and the Stanislav Petrov incident.
And those are just the ones that we know about.
I suspect that the reason we seem to be alone in the universe is that most sentient species kill themselves within a few years of developing nuclear weapons.
Really? You don't think that the major powers haven't anticipated this? The USSR had weaponised smallpox at its lab in the Aral Sea
Also, someone giving large sums of money to biotech PhDs and fitting out a super secure lab (an expensive endeavour) and attempting to acquire the gear that would be needed to produce such things (CRISPR-Cas9 is not enough)? That's gonna end up with them on a watch list very quickly.
As regards custom viruses that only infect a subset of the population, that's science fiction. The South Africans were attempting something like that at Project Coast in the 1970s and 1980s, but they concluded that if they wanted to keep the black population down by clandestine means, it was easier just to stick contraceptives in the water supply rather than genetically modify something that whites are immune to.
What is all the struggle against suffering for if we're going to render ourselves a vanilla version of a species focused on being cozy instead of adventure and discovery?
I don't understand the urge to flee. Would rather figure out who I can get along with and make a stand.Arguably we have already done that, at least in the West. We're so fucking risk averse it is sickmaking. I wish Elon Musk would hurry up and develop affordable (comparatively) commercial space travel because given the state of Clown World right now I'd prefer to take my chances on the moon. Whatever happened to "we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
But, no. Apparently Saturn V rockets are giant phallic symbols that fuck the sky and are loaded with human beings to impregnate other planets and make them sick with toxic masculinity, and the act of living on and colonising other planets is an act of rape. Or something.
100% wrong. Any biotech startup would have the equipment to do it. Really all you need is a few enzymes, a few pg of a starting virus, an oligonucleotide synthesizer, and PCR equipment. Also tools and for cell culture. You can buy all of the hardware online for a few hundred thousand good-as-new.
Someday, Rainbow 6 (the book) will be used as a blueprint for resetting the world. I hope they are no more successful than in the book, but even if they manage an Al-Qaeda-level adaptation of a Clancy plot, shit will suck.Of course this was 25 years ago. The technology is only going to continue to become more accessible. There are probably NGOs currently capable of doing this, but the combination of one competent to do it while also being insane enough to want to do it isn't very common.