I’d argue otherwise. Their can be. It’s not required, but it’s the difference of using CGI or practical effects. John Wick didn’t use real guns, but it’s the perfect case for that. It’s fast action with a lot going on, so you’ll never notice that it’s fake. I would argue more intimate shots it can make sense to use a real firearm.
They shouldn’t be used where it’s possible to avoid, and even when it can’t be avoided aiming it at someone should be avoided. There should also be checks and double checks to ensure there isn’t a live round, and the actor should also be trained to handle the weapon and check there isn’t a live round before using it as well. There is no reason something like this should have been possible, but I don’t agree there is no use for using a real firearm ever on set.
The key word is functional. Make it physically/mechanically incapable of firing. I’ve been in stage productions that used non-functioning firearms working on my undergrad. They were still locked away. The professor who was the technical director and armorer was the only one who had a key to that safe. They handed it to the props master who handed it to the actor. When the prop wasn’t in use during the run, the props master had it on their person. When the performance was over, it immediately when back into the safe and locked away. If it is absolutely necessary for it to function then only blanks and only in use when needed. Not using it to play a prank. Not using it to fire rounds after the shoot is over. Baldwin and the armorer are absolutely at fault here for failing to maintain safety protocols.
If you don’t have an armorer in your production than you shouldn’t have anything remotely akin to a firearm period. If your production is too broke for one, you’re too broke to simulate a firearm practically. Plain and simple.
I agree Baldwin and the armorer are at fault. There’s no debate there. A non-functional firearm can’t fire blanks though, as you seem to mention (despite starting by seemingly saying they shouldn’t exist). It’s sometimes useful to do that, and it should be handled with extreme care and only in the cases where it’s actually useful.
There’s an entire industry surrounding the production of (often incredibly) realistic not-firing (and blank-firing) prop guns. the only time you’d need a real one, firing real bullets is if you were doing some extremely-close up shots or recording sound. Even then, you’d only need the real bullets for sound effects or close ups of actually firing. The only thing you’d really need CGI for is the muzzle flash. which is so short and so slow most people would barely even notice if it was merely ‘realistic’.
All of which, it should be said, could have been shot with no one down range of the weapon at any time, and in any case, there was zero reason to need a functional firearm at the time of the shooting. They were not actually filming. They were setting up the cameras and checking for things like glare and reflections and various other angles. All of that could have done with a non-firing prop with no danger to anyone at all.
I totally agree with everything you said. This case was handled poorly. I was arguing it can be useful, but should be handled as if it’s a firearm, not a toy, because it is. There should have been no chance (or as close to that as possible) of this happening, but it doesn’t mean there is zero use cases.
In 2024 having a real firearm on set is unconscionable. Especially without a proper armorist. This was not only avoidable, but the situation shouldn’t have even presented itself.
It also only matters at all because of people banging on about “this movie was set in 1935, but the down-bent charging handle on gun X wasn’t introduced until 1941”. Which will still happen, anyway, and it’s not a good enough reason to have real firearms on set.
My original point was that the difference in how real it looks is not so great that it is outweighed by dangers of having a functional gun.
My later point was that they can’t be all that concerned with being realistic if they are shooting 30 times from a gun with a 10 round magazine without reloading.
Ironically, I think there is a link there. I am more likely to relax my disbelief if things look real. Once I have immersed myself into a situation I believe ( because it seems real ), I am less likely to pay attention to things like shot count.
It is the same as having heros that struggle with situations early on and then later are effortlessly capable of so much more. I already believed them so now they can take advantage of that.
Unfortunately, guns are deceptively simple. Just about anything that can detonate a realistic looking blank is capable of firing an actual bullet. And even if it’s just a blank, any obstruction in the barrel can end up becoming an ad-hoc projectile by the force. Every once in a while, you have that happen in Civil War re-enactments.
Ok but that’s a separate issue and something that can happen with a regular gun loaded with a regular caliber blank, what they’re saying is fake guns for movies should use a caliber for which no bullets exist, solving the main part of the issue, i.e. the fact that someone can load a normal bullet in a gun that is to be used as a prop.
This would help avoid this specific death, but not most others where the projectile wasn’t an actual bullet from a live round, but something stuck in the barrel, like the other person says.
This situation was unusual in the sense that an incompetent armorer had live rounds on set, and the gun was loaded with one.
What I mean is that the main part of the issue is exactly not this.
… doesn’t seem relevant, since saying something doesn’t require you personally asking about it at all, second,
what they’re saying is fake guns for movies should use a caliber for which no bullets exist, solving the main part of the issue, i.e. the fact that someone can load a normal bullet in a gun that is to be used as a prop.
… answers your question, and that quote is most of the original comment, I could even have quoted the whole of it.
Maybe I’m not paying enough attention to that, but is it really something that happens that often on movie sets where it’s something stuck in the barrel?
accidentally shot and killed in North Carolina with a .44 magnum gun that was intended to fire blanks but contained a bullet left behind after a dummy round had been inserted and removed.
I don’t know why you would be opposed to taking measures to prevent one way these accidents can happen just because they can happen another way… 100% or nothing is a pretty stupid way to deal with issues.
The explosive effect of the muzzle blast caused enough blunt force trauma to fracture a quarter-sized piece of his skull and propel this into his brain, causing massive hemorrhaging.
Pressure from the explosion of the blank coming out the nozzle, so no debris involved either.
It’s not a separate issue. It’s exactly how Brandon Lee died. It was just a piece of a bullet, not even a complete one. Lots of hard objects that can get lodged in there that instantly become a lethal projectile.
Besides this person wants “realistic recoil.” That requires a lot of force. So it’s always a risk.
It’s not a common issue in general and taking preventive measures to prevent at least one risk is a good step in the right direction.
From the description of the incident it seems like Lee wouldn’t be dead if they had used a gun in which it was impossible to put real bullets in the first place.
That is exactly what we are saying. They should not use firearms that are capable of launching projectiles. Which is exactly what happened on the set of Rust.
As a camera operator I have no desire to die for somebody else’s art. Especially not just because they want a more realistic looking firearm/recoil.
Thats also how Brandon Lee died. Iirc there was a squib malfunction that they didn’t notice so when they shot a blank, the round was pushed out and killed him.
If the armorer wasn’t willfully negligent it wouldn’t be a problem. Not a problem for the vast majority of film sets. Just pure lack of professionalism from the armorer whose sole core responsibility is to ensure safety.
HGR definitely didn’t do right here but a lot more went wrong. This was a perfect storm of negligence. Multiple people could have taken minor stands to have prevented this tragic tale. So many people spoke out and zero action was taken to address their concerns.
A layered safety approach is a great idea. But it only works when at least one person in a position to do so does what’s right.
if Baldwin wasn’t waiving a gun around like a moron, a negligent armorer wouldn’t have been a problem, either.
the armorer being negligent (and she was), doesn’t mean that Baldwin wasn’t also being negligent. and lets be perfectly clear: the reason Gutierrez-Reed was hired over other more professional armorers is precisely because she was “less professional”- or more bluntly, because she was willing to not insist on proper safety protocols that caused delays in shooting.
Woah woah woah. Baldwin should be allowed to do whatever the fuck he wants with a prop gun. If an armorer gives him a gun on a set, why would he reasonably believe it was able to hurt or kill someone?
If an actor is given a prop pipe bomb, and he throws it at a cast member in jest and it explodes…because the explosive expert gave him a live explosive why the fuck is that the actors fault?
Why is is Alec’s fault he was horsing around with what effectively should have been a toy. It should have been a fancy cap gun at worst.
Woah woah woah. Baldwin should be allowed to do whatever the fuck he wants with a prop gun. If an armorer gives him a gun on a set, why would he reasonably believe it was able to hurt or kill someone?
because it’s a fucking weapon. he knew it was a weapon.
secondly, it was Hall (another producer) that gave him the weapon, not HGR.
thirdly, you don’t fuck around with even the non-firing propguns precisely because of how easy it is to mistake them. He fucked around, and Alyna Hutchins found out. Ergo, it’s negligent homicide
You cannot render a functional weapon (blank firing or “real” or whatever you want to call it,) totally safe.
Which is why you should always treat them as something that will kill you given half the chance. (It was literally made to do just that.)
And you should always treat look alikes as if they were real because a) they’re easy to mistake for real ones and vice versa and b) the other people may not realize it’s a prop. (On a movie set, unlikely, but you never know who’s around and how they will respond. Or where an active shooter is going to appear.)
As for the cartridges, usually there’s tell tales of one sort or another. For dummy rounds it’s common to press the otherwise empty cartridge with a ball bearing or two so they rattle when shaken. Sometimes they also have a small hole on the wall of the casing
Blanks are, by their nature, lacking the bullet and the top is simply crimped to hold the wadding.
All it would have taken was a proper inspection to verify that it was unloaded/loaded with dummy rounds. Or, alternatively, Baldwin not pointing it at people.
Which leads me to the final thing you should always do: check the damn weapon. Don’t trust armorers. They’re people, too. They make mistakes, they fuck up.
Can I ask what the point of this screed was? I’m aware blanks are dangerous. That’s irrelevant. There was a real bullet in the chamber. At some point, even if it was a blank, it would have been pointed at someone and the trigger pulled.
The point appears to be “check the damn weapon”, which of course you could have said without ‘educating’ me, and wouldn’t have been undercut with going on endlessly about wadding.
That point is a terrible one because the armourer is the expert, and is the one who should be signing the gun off as safe every time it is opened, not an actor who neither is required to have qualifications nor skills in clearing a gun as safe. If an actor interferes with the weapon, the armourer has to check it again.
Frist off, it is also the actors’ job to ensure the gun is safe. He should have been there when the gun was checked and verified it for himself especially when he purposely hired a fuck around and find out armourer.
Secondly, how were they supposed to know your level of knowledge about firearms and ammunition? With them explaining stuff in a simple and quick manner, we are all now operating on the same level of basic knowledge about this, so there should not be any miscommunications going on.
It’s stupidly easy to check a firearm. You don’t have to be an expert to do it. For most fire arms it takes 5-10 seconds.
A large part of the “experts” job is to know what is and is not safe protocol, and to enforce it. Part of that includes teaching everyone who’s handling a weapon how to…. Handle a weapon safely.
no question, the armorer fucked up. She’s human. Humans make mistakes. Which is why you check the damn weapon, too. An expert doesn’t mean they don’t make mistakes. An expert means they’ve made enough they should know better. (Or have learned from an older expert.)
Yeah, you would think you could just change the chambers and bullets so only a certain standard of blanks would fit in it, although I guess those guns would become more expensive than the real mass produced ones.
Either way, this is all the result of Baldwin as executive producer cheaping out on every aspect of this shoot, causing this to happen.
I know there at least used to be gas powered airsoft guns that had minor ‘recoil.’ I don’t know if there’s anything particular about them that makes them bad for filming, maybe just the lack of real force on the shooters wrist/shoulder.
Yeah the recoil is much weaker on those and there’s no muzzle flash, and certain cinematic shots just can’t be done with them like they could with an actual gun.
In Blade Runner 2049, Weta Workshop had their laser pistols set up with a solenoid that moved back and forth with a trigger pull. Adam Savage looked at them in a Tested video. I don’t know if it’s cost prohibitive, but it sure seemed like the right way to do it.
However, you don’t get smoke with that. You can definitely rig something up as they did it with a knock off nerf blaster in the 80’s or even a cap gun, but at some point I assume the level of complexity makes modifying a real gun cheaper.
You could weld shut the barrel of a gun, which is what a lot of them do, but it seems like it’s a cost cutting measure when they used real guns that would retain their value. Alec (as a producer) used a cheap setup with a cheap armorer that didn’t know what they were doing. It’s both of their faults.
Man, I am a cinema buff and I just really don’t think I care if the smoke is there at all, much less just right. Obviously botched attempts at realism are another matter entirely but this just seems like an area ripe for creativity and artistic reinterpretation.
Point is, we cede ground to the theater of the mind all the time, I don’t know why realistic gunfire can’t be treated similarly, and I think the lack of verisimilitude itself could be approached many different ways and that’s even kind of exciting.
Having seen Furiosa last night and finding out that they actually digitally manipulated the two actress’ faces playing her so that one aged into the other… there’s nothing not possible for CG at this point.
Some guns are modified in that way for movies. They are still potentially dangerous. Blanks can harm someone close enough or accidentally propel something lodged in the barrel.
I know some pistols have a co2 blow back system that you can install on your gun so you can practice drawing and dry firing without fear of damaging the gun or hurting people. The only one I know of is for glocks but I’m sure a company could make them for more models.
At that point one should should buy the gas blowback replica that the manufacturer licensed for airsoft. It’ll have identical wright and balance, the trigger can usually be tuned to match, and it’ll dry fire with about half recoil. It’ll plink on target at 40’ once the hop-up is calibrated. Should be a modest $150-250 for common Glock, Sig, etc.
If you shot a blank in a gun with a plugged barrel the gun would explode. A blank is just a round minus the projectile, it has just as much “push” from the powder as a real round does.
Brandon Lee died because in a previous scene they used bullets without a casing so the revolver wouldnt look empty facing the camera. One of them got stuck in the barrel, and in the next scene where they were using blanks it was propelled out and struck him. A blank with a bullet in front of it is essntially just a live round with extra steps. Idk what you think I’m incorrect about. That doesn’t mean filling in the barrel would be safer, it wouldn’t, the gun would explode. The energy released by igniting gunpowder has to go somewhere.
What recoil? They are shooting blanks. There is no mass leaving the gun. If you want to cycle the gun on trigger pull in a realistic yet safe way, compressed CO2 can be used. Some movie guns are even electrically/magnetically actuated.
You do know how physics works, right? There is an explosion in the chamber that moves the slide/bolt backward to rack another round of course there will be recoil. Have you ever fired a black powder gun with no bullet in it? There is still a recoil.
I agree. Anything that can be done to make it safer while also being a practical effect that looks good should be done. I get that as an actor, they sometimes want to feel the weight of a gun to get into the role, but safety should always be the number 1 priority.
I mean 5-10 grams of vaporized gunpowder leaves the barrel at fairly high speed. It’s not a lead round but it’s not nothing. Also the spent brass being ejected is not easy to CGI convincingly.
Good points. The gun would have to cycle with CO2 or magnets and feed from a magazine empty casings so that the ejector continues to do its job.
Yet so many movies just add the sound of casings hitting the ground so I wonder if the hassle is worth it except for some specific shots. I enjoy the realism but I’d rather people not put their lives needlessly at risk.
Here’s the first link I’ve found explaining the concept of recoil, and the section relating to blanks and the fact that since bullet weight is a major factor blanks have virtually no recoil conveniently uses movies to illustrate that point.
Real, sure. But functional, no. Sometimes, for authenticity's sake or just for cost reasons, it may make sense to use a real firearm for a scene. However, it should always be modified so that it cannot be loaded or fired. There are plenty of ways to do this without affecting the appearance of the gun, and skipping that is just pure negligence.
Unless it’s a revolver, just remove the firing pin. Problem solved. Revolver might be a little more tricky, but removing the pin from the hammer and putting a silicone cushion into the chambers should work.
The colt SAA and other old revolvers’ firing pin was attached to the hammer (at least most of the newer repros have updated that part for safety). That is why they used to carry them on an empty chamber, because otherwise your firing pin would just be resting on the primer and could very easily go off if bumped. If using a repro you could similarly just remove the firing pin, if using an original (just don’t do that, because what I’m about to say is an affront to history, but) you could grind that pin down enough that it’d never make contact with the primer again. Shudder.
This particular gun was an actual period gun, so it could prevent the use of the gun if it needed to be modified. But honestly, just like there wasn’t a real helicopter in films besides stock footage or military footage the production company didn’t film, because accidentally killing three actors two of whom were children being illegally treated, was enough for studios to forbid it, the people who’ve been shot accidentally on film should really make everyone unwilling to use anything but a prop that is explicitly and legally not at all a gun in any way.
It’s laziness. Automatics are modified in a way that prevents them from being fully operational as a gun, but not for safety reasons.
They won’t cycle with blank rounds because there’s no backpressure from firing a live round, so they obstruct the barrel to redirect some of the gasses back into the action.
For revolvers, bolt guns, etc that isn’t an issue because they aren’t cycled by recoil or gasses. You can just load a blank and use it.
The only reason I can see from all the comments is cost. But it isn’t about a good reason. It’s about not micromanaging what people can do from a legal standpoint. Guns are either legal, or they aren’t. After that it would be up to unions involved in these things to demand better saftey for thier people. In this case we know the standards for safely handling guns on set were not followed. Now maybe that should be a crime and not just a civil matter. I could totally get behind that.
It’s funny I recently bumped into a guy who is a gunsmith and worked in Hollywood sets before so we talked about this. There are reasons to have a fully functional gun on set and the different rounds they use on set because there are a bunch of different types depending on the scene and lighting. They use different charges for different shots and a bunch of other things. Especially if it’s a practical effects movie.
The issue is making sure live ammo is not on set or around the guns on set. If you have access to these guns you can use them after filming is done with live rounds.
Alex trusted the people around him to do their jobs and they didn’t make it a safe set. This is like flipping the keys to Dodge Hellcat to your 15 1/2 year old son with a learners driving permit and his 18 year old friend riding shotgun. It’s not a good idea. They should be driving Kia Sportage.
With all the money spent on films, I’m amazed there isn’t regulated “Hollywood” caliber firearms. Something incapable of chambering anything on the market, and only functions with the certified blanks.
Something akin to the way fake currency is controlled.
I dont know. I think there could be an inventory of replicas. You can get a 1911 in multiple calibers already, as you can many revolver frames. There’s no reason they couldn’t make custom ones.
Or just make it a chamber modification that can be applied to any gun that reduces the size of the round that can fit in it to something that isn’t a standard size.
Except my understanding is Baldwin would be the Hellcat owner in this case. He was the producer and the film hired a company to handle the guns that was known to have issues and be irresponsible. I’m not intimately familiar with the case but from what I remember he was being reckless with that choice and it sounds like he was being reckless with the gun as well.
Just a reminder that, at least as of 2020, the NYPD alone is in the top 30 military budgets in the world when compared to full countries. They spent $10,900,000,000 (that's 11 billion if you don't wanna count the zeroes out).
It's seemingly closer to $6b for that year, which is obviously a ton of money, but considering they employ north of 50,000 people, if each person costs them $75,000/yr that's already $3.75b. NYC spends $2b on just their department of sanitation. It's a city with like 8.5m people, everything costs crazy amounts of money.
Plus they gotta pay the hundreds of overtime hours “worked” by each cop every month. These guys are so dedicated that they work 26 hours a day, 8 days per week.
Yes. However, it was decommissioned. My guess is that the prototype was so successful at being large, slow, and generally unhelpful that it threatened police jobs and by extension the police union.
It’s what happens when you have incredibly rich people living right next to the incredibly poor.
Wall St investors actually have to be in close proximity with the janitors whose lives they’re ruining with maximizing profit. We can’t have the proles getting any ideas about fighting back…
So abortion being legal actually saves lives ? You don’t say !
I swear, the fact they call themselves “pro-life” while sowing death and misery is completely unacceptable. It’s like them calling themselves “conservative” while destroying nature and society…
Pacifism is a core value for protestant Christians, as it was preached by Jesus himself. Which goes to show you how many people just use their on-paper religion as an excuse for whatever bullshit.
Pacifism: a person who believes that war and violence are unjustifiable.
I suppose that implies, then, that the pro-lifers are the pacifists here, though they only really consider violence against the fetus, and not the violence of oppressing the mothers (through use of force when they dare use their bodily autonomy or trust doctors to use gasp science and medicine instead of select excerpts from an old anthology of fables).
The doctors here are really in a bind. They cannot practice medicine without fear of legal repercussions. They are put into trolley problems where flicking the switch has a significant chance of also teleporting them onto the other track, multiple times a day. The only way they can guarantee their own safety (and license, and livelyhood, and that of their family) is through inaction, not pacifism.
His star has really crashed and burned, hasn’t it? He tried to put his kids in movies and they can’t act and are also very weird, so no one went to see them. His wife cheated on him and laughed about it. On national TV. He slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars because he told a mean, but not horribly offensive joke. No wonder no one wants to give to their charity.
Judging by Jada’s book and Will’s reactions on interviews, someone definitely forgot to tell him about the open marriage arrangement. Dude found out about it on live TV.
To be fair, it sounds like it might have been a consensual open marriage.
It was only consensual in the sense that if he didn’t agree to it Jada would have run away with the children and hidden them in the Church of Scientology so he couldn’t ever see them again.
To be fair, it sounds like it might have been a consensual open marriage.
Retroactively. The dude found out the details on live TV. And he likely only gave “permission” because he knows Jada would run away and steal his kids if he protested. She could bury the kids in the church of Scientology if she wanted, and he’d never see any of them again. So at best, it was consent-by-coercion, which isn’t consent at all.
He slapped him because of HER reaction. Go look at the video. He’s laughing just as much as the rest of the audience before the camera cuts away. She 100% got on his ass about it so then he went and did that shit.
Worse. He wasn’t even actually angry. He did it because the woman who laughed about cheating on him on national TV gave him a dirty look. Threw away his entire fucking career because for her.
Does it matter? We know he can drop a stellar performance with the right production. Fact is, Will Smith isn’t going anywhere unless he retires, he can have a career as long as Morgan Freeman’s if he gets his personal life in check.
Shit man, Mel Gibson disappeared for like 10 years after going all racist anti-semite on the phone yelling at his girlfriend that one time. Just laid low, then directed Hacksaw Ridge and everyone was just like “hey! He apologized, and this film was alright!”
I hear King Richard is good. I would say that might be a bit of a sign that is career wasn’t really spiraling considering… You know… The night he slapped Chris Rock he was there to receive his very first Oscar in his entire career for his performance in that exact movie.
Yup, he liked the joke until he turned to her and saw the death glare. Jada has always been horrible, and this is just another example of it. It doesn’t excuse his behavior, but it does point to why he did it.
The true moral of the story is to not believe Hollywood PR. Will Smith has been a media darling for decades. The guy could do no wrong.
Now it turns out he's just another deeply flawed rich person.
An important lesson for people who idolize celebrities and engage in parasocial relationships with them. Whether it's Kim Kardashian or Keanu Reeves, you have no idea of what they're really like, stop fooling yourself that you do.
Will Smith has been a cocky dick the entire time — he just had charisma so people let it slide.
You shouldn’t idolize any celebrity, period. Get some real heroes for fucks sake. Your local nursing home staff are more heroic than any celebrity. One gets fame and fortune. The other gets poverty and depression. Which takes more heroism to persevere through?
What if my local nursing home staff yells at fast food workers because they accidentally put pickles on her hamburger after sitting in the hotass kitchen for 9 hours straight doing the same thing over and over as fast they can because the store is understaffed and their replacement is late? Anyone can be a dick, just remember everyone is human and has weird emotions just like you.
Well, I’m assuming poverty and depression would play a large role in someone lashing out at the wrong person (the fast food worker) while the little rich bitches get a life catered to them. They may both be human, but one group does not even remotely live in the same reality the poor and depressed experience (the nurse AND fast food worker) so really they can fuck off and wipe their little crocodile tears with their hundo bills.
Say what you want about the other kids, but I personally think Justice Smith has done some good work. He was great in The Get Down, All the Bright Places, and Dungeons and Dragons.
He seems like the only one in the entire family that doesn’t have his head shoulders deep in his own ass.
Justice Smith really is the shining star of the Pinkett-Smith family, isn’t he? Not really a fan of his acting, he kinda just seems like he’s taken one too many Xanax (don’t get me started about that fucking video game), but none of it compares to how odd his siblings are. I’m glad he turned out OK.
I mean, obviously, things are fucked. But if Forbes is calling it out, that means mainstream media is having trouble spinning it. That gives me hope
Remember, the economy isn’t real, it’s a game of numbers we made the fuck up. We can just stop and play a better game, if even a third, maybe a quarter or less, of people just refuse to play
However, due to the high immunity rate in the community, as well as the burden on families and educational costs of healthy children missing school, [the health department] is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance."
This is fucking bonkers.
We know it’s hard on you, so fuck preventing a breakout of the most contagious disease we’ve encountered, that not only is bad on its own, but resets your immunity fucking you over even more for years to come.
Everything. The adaptations your body has learned to fight other diseases are stored as T-cells. When you need more of that particular kind of thing, your body goes and runs off copies. Measles kills your T-cells, so your body can’t copy the old adaptations, only make blank-slate factory-new ones.
The Olympics was intended for amateur athletes, but they’re all essentially professionals now if they have any chance of medaling (the Turkish shooter excepted) because they get years of specialized training. And, of course, they find endless new ways to abuse those athletes’ bodies by using ever-more sophisticated ways to secretly dope them.
Half of them will be broken by the time they’re 30. I’m not at all surprised that this is what they have to resort to.
And the Olympics being for “amateurs” was a deliberate effort by the Olympic committee when the modern games were started to exclude the working classes from competing.
The whole “best of the best” is just branding. The Olympics needs serious reform.
Yeah, by “amateurs” they meant wealthy men who didn’t work and so had spare time to get good at sport. Really good Behind the Bastards episodes that touch on this actually.
Do you know why? Because rich people didn’t want to compete against the poor. If you couldn’t afford to compete, you didn’t. The rich can’t didn’t fancy meeting Gary the local bouncer in a boxing match.
Who is downvoting this? He literally said that he didn’t had a coach, yeah he was a soldier but it’s just them alone training (it was a mixed team competition)
Especially when he’ll be older in 2028 than Biden is now.
Although I’ll wager the job is harder on Biden than it is on Trump, on the grounds that Trump doesn’t actually bother to do it. He just played golf and signed shit for other people without looking at it.
I can only imagine what kind of “data” they think they are feeding this “artificial intelligence supercomputer” that is apparently counting ballots by not physically counting them? Also love that they supposedly have a “mathematician” also using some sort of “data” to somehow count ballots without counting them (and if this person exists they are almost certainly a high school math teacher that is just part of the cult).
I’m sure what they think they are doing is using one of these error filled lists created by these conservative organizations, and then using statistics to try and show how the numbers have to be in their favor. They don’t understand that garbage in = garbage out, and it’s why nothing they are using is anything but a waste of time and wouldn’t even be admissible in court.
You’re giving them too much benefit of the doubt. Most likely, the numbers were pulled from their ass. Easy enough to find since they don it like a ski mask every day.
The problem is they have all this bad data they acquire from these groups, and then use it to fuel these conspiracy’s (like 2000 mules) that their base that has been conditioned not to question, and then we get things like January 6th. And they have already begun laying the ground work to take this country by force if needed this time around. They have fake electors, and election denial people in high places all over the country. Trump has been priming the base with the whole “the only way we could lose is if they cheat” line all over again. And unfortunately, Biden doing that debate, and the fall out afterwards is only going to add gas to the conspiracy theories this go around. The Heritage Foundation president stated that Project 2025 will allow “conservatives” to take back our country without any blood shed, unless the Left does anything to try and stop them. They want to a civil war.
We need to stop brushing these people off like they are crazy and spewing a bunch of shit, which they are, but they have a cult (in law enforcement, in the Judiciary, lawyers out of the ass, and then millions of foot soldiers) ready to fight for them. When these asshats are screaming through a megaphone exactly who they are, and the crazy shit they want to do, we need to start taking them seriously.
I’m not trying to be dismissive of the incredibly real threat we’re all facing, I’m saying that most things they claim to back up with evidence are based on bullshit. They only back shit up with lies and violence.
Jesus Christ. I’m 47 and I’m an idiot and I still know that an “AI supercomputer” isn’t a thing and even if it was, it couldn’t analyze elections like he seems to think it could.
Success stories include mapping the human brain’s 80 billion neurons, high-energy particle physics enhanced by deep learning, and drug design and discovery accelerated by machine learning, among others.
Rural either breeds technological literacy that is utterly contaminated by hate based understanding of it or technological illiteracy where they think anything shiny is super advanced. I am in the former, I like old tech because it works and I prefer the design philosophy of keep it simple stupid. Ive met plenty in the latter who think that the “internet box” can be improved with prayer meanwhile its choking on dust.
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