1. Rape does not always involve physically overpowering someone. Someone may coerce someone else into sex with blackmail, lies, threats, or abuse of a position of power.

2. Erections are controlled by a person's autonomic nervous system. A man can get hard even when he is not turned on or consenting to what is happening.

3. Not all rape involves a penis. A woman who sticks an object into a man without his consent is committing rape. Rape is about power and control over another person, and the rapist need not be directly stimulated for rape to occur.

Carries a gun

Violently terrified of others carrying guns

This guy was never not going to murder someone.

He prayed for a TV and a gun. Clearly both were answered, hallelujah!

The RPD pointed out that an attorney for the Abbouds had released home security footage of the raid online, which the police said made releasing the body camera footage redundant. At the same time, the RPD claimed that releasing the body camera footage might expose confidential information about search warrant execution or damage officers’ reputations.

You busted in a door and pointed an AR-15 at a baby. Your reputation should be fucking damaged.

Raleigh police “wrongfully executed a ‘Quick Knock’ warrant”—meaning they kicked in the door before the Abbouds had a chance to open it[...]

This is just a no-knock raid. Let's not pretend knocking on a door a half second before pulling out the battering ram is some magical third category of warrant: no-knock raids should be banned, and whatever the fuck these cops did should be considered a no-knock.

Ultimately, guns are not very complicated machines. I'm making a semi-automatic rifle in my home office right now out of stuff you can get at a hardware store & some 3D printed parts, and I'm amazed at how simple it all is.

A lot of proposed gun control feels like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Even states with hefty assault weapon bans like California and Maryland still have plenty of legal loopholes allowing people to own semi-automatic guns, and gun manufacturers are finding more all the time. I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.

The fact of the matter is that gun control bills at the federal level will cost a lot of political capital. A federal challenge to the 2nd amendment will rally conservatives in the same way that the recent overturning of Roe caused a surge for liberals. This is to say nothing about enforcement: it's a common position among gun owners that they would simply refuse to comply with a gun confiscation / surrender, and I believe a significant chunk of them would follow through with that. See the recent ATF rules about pistol braces for an example of mass non-compliance.

So, we can fight the uphill battle of gun control for perhaps marginal returns, or we can try to address the things that drive people to violence in the first place. And I'm not just saying "muh mental health" either; we need to address housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, wages stagnating behind inflation, broken-windows policing, the war on drugs, the mainstreaming of far-right propoganda, the decay of public schooling, white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, climate change & doomerism, corporate personhood, and a fuckload of other things making people angry and desparate and hopeless enough to kill people & themselves.

I firmly believe that addressing the material conditions that create killers will prevent more murders than any gun control bill, especially in the USA.

Something you hear a lot from EMTs is that they take a lot of care not to make a medical emergency worse by adding to the number of victims. "Scene safety" is a big thing, the logic being that if you try to help someone in an unsafe way, you may end up just adding to the problem.

You'd think the same would apply to cops? Doing 75 in a 25 seems like the same kind of thing, especially in an area with pedestrians around. Doing 50 over to get to someone that needs help and hitting someone along the way isn't actually helping.

Oh, also:

Kandula’s death ignited outrage, especially after a recording from another officer’s body-worn camera surfaced last September, in which that officer laughed and suggested that Kandula’s life had “limited value” and the city should “just write a check”.

Jesus Christ, fuck the police.

The search warrant was for the Parmely Avenue residence, but it was issued for a person who hasn’t lived there in more than a year, Price said, sharing the search warrant left by police at the home.

[...]

Price said she learned police had visited the home at least five times within the past year. "The landlord even told [police] she had new tenants," she said.

This is after the article mentions that they only waited six seconds between knocking on the door and busting in.

If your police department shows this degree of incompetence executing a raid, it should have all its toys taken away. No more flashbangs, no more SWAT gear, no fancy guns. You get the wrong address, you hurt an innocent person, you fail to identify yourselves, you lose privileges. Hell, I seriously question whether they need most of that shit in the first place.

I legitimately believe that a disturbingly high number of these raids that go wrong happen because the cops want to play with with their shiny new equipment.

GET IN HERE BOYS, KONSI IS BACK

I was a weird 16 year old, staying up too late on summer vacation of 2011. I had decided that asking people their favorite dinosaur was the ultimate conversation starter, and had a working theory that the more unusual their answer was, the more interesting the conversation would be. People who said "T-Rex" were lame, but "Iguanadon" would be cool, something like that.

Well, she said "Pachycephalosaurus", which was the first one of the night I had to look up. Naturally, I was enthralled.

We talked into the wee hours of the morning, where she (being a fellow dumb teenager) sent me her Facebook profile. Before clicking, I had decided that I would look but ultimately not accept her friend request, because stranger danger and all. But when I checked out her page, it turned out we had a mutual friend! A guy we both knew had started high school with her, and moved up the coast halfway through and was currently going to my high school.

That was good enough for me, and I accepted her friend request. July 7th, 2011, around 3am.

From there, we quickly turned flirty and started talking all the time. We weren't anything official, but I told her I loved her within a couple weeks. One problem though: she was over 400 miles away, and I was still in school with no license.

To make a long story short, we were flirty on and off for the next three years until 2014, where we both decided "fuck it" and jumped into the special hell that is long distance dating together. I got to see her in person December 14th of that year after working at a grocery store while finishing up my associate's degree to make enough money for a train ticket, and she was my first kiss.

Anyway, college sucked and long distance dating sucks even when it's the right person. Fast-forward to 2020 when I finally have a car & some degree of financial stability, I moved 400 miles away to live with her & haven't looked back. Put a ring on her finger March of 2021, and married her on the beach last weekend after knowing her for twelve years. She is currently snoring gracefully in bed next to me. 🥰

End of an era. I met my wife on Omegle.

I did some numbers because it sounded fun.

Earth's diameter is 41.804 million feet. I'm not sure if you meant that or Earth's circumference when you said "Earth's surface", but I figure either one is gonna get us a really big number.

The first result I can find for string comes in a pack that weighs 2.89oz and contains 328 feet of string.

Using that as our standard, you would need 127,452 packs of string (assuming you find a way to perfectly attach them without wasting any length on knots).

127,452 * (2.89 / 16) = 23,021 lbs of string total.

So if we ignore the string stretching, compressing, or breaking, you'd only need to be able to pull 11ish tons of string to ring the bell!

EDIT:

Just for fun: Assuming the motion of the string travels at the speed of sound (I have no idea if it actually would, it just sounds right), there would be about 10.5 hours between you pulling the string and the bell ringing on the other side.

Author's website + followup comics:

https://www.nickmaskell.com/comics/

Looks like this is episode 1 of 4 so far.