myrmepropagandistWhat in the name of EDC nonsense is a "defense ruler" ?
UPDATE: Clearly I need to show ya'll some photos of this nonsense
digital luciferase@futurebird equal parts FOMO and disposable income
the EDC world isn't very subtle, it plays the 'real men are prepared for everything, you're a real man aren't you' card right alongside the 'cool guys have this' and 'it's made of the strongest best most prestigious materials, others will envy you'
and it's all performative is the thing, it's done to be seen. you get these boy-men tryna carry the contents of a Batman utility belt in their pockets, and after a while they mostly stop doing it except to take the pics
@futurebird (after seeing the edit picture)
oh, now i see. This is actually a different sort of pathetic insecurity that ends up being adjacent to self defense laws and weapons control restrictions.
Dunno how much of this you already know so if it gets splainey, please forgive it -
there's a whole class of things people carry because they're now afraid to go anywhere without some manner of self defense weapon. They feel naked and exposed unless they can strap up but some places won't let them. And of those weapons there are a subset that are designed to get around restrictions on carrying weapons around. most of those are designed to look like something with a peaceful purpose.
for example, if you are stopped by the cops and searched and they find a pocket knife, that could be bad. pbut if they find a pocket knife with an emergency glass breaker on the hilt, ah, you could have a peaceful reason to have pocketed it and taken it.
if you get in a road rage fight and you pull out a bowie knife from under a seat, there will be questions of premeditated violence. But with something like this doohickey there's room for doubt that you had it in the car for some other reason and just grabbed it when you thought you were in danger.
It's all this grey area thinking applied to the insecurity of young men... some of whom are worried about being hassled by cops, which is unfortunately a little easier to understand than when the college kids with disposable income buy the same thing 'just because'.
You will see things like 'emergency seatbelt cutters' marketed like this. If you look at them carefully, they're meant to be something you can clutch in your fist like brass knuckles or a kubotan. The intention is self defense in places where their preferred weapons would be prohibited. Of course some buy them without ever knowing.
This is kind of what I suspected. I was kind of hoping that maybe there was some movie about IDK a badass bricklayer who fought a ninja fight with a ruler and that what this was about...
Not that it would be that much better.
@futurebird yeah.
insult to injury it's usually not that well made, this stuff. Sorta thing you find in a flea market and at that one store in the mall. No discerning bricklayer ninja would be caught dead with it, is what i'm saying -- they have pride.
Well I do run a mall ninja kiosk on here:
We will add all "weapons of math instruction" to our stock.
Flipper 🐬🏳️🌈🌹@futurebird @resonancewright i could've done with that emergency usb cable on my last trip. Not for any reason, just because I left all my other cables at home
Inga stands with 🇺🇦 🇵🇸@resonancewright @futurebird
> for example, if you are stopped by the cops and searched and they find a pocket knife, that could be bad. pbut if they find a pocket knife with an emergency glass breaker on the hilt, ah, you could have a peaceful reason to have pocketed it and taken it.
Probably should be "but if they find a pocket knife with an emergency glass breaker on the hilt _and_ you're white"?
wish i could tell you you're wrong. Part of me wants to say it's more class than race but when racists are in power it's a pointless argument to make.
when you look at a map of the nation and see where the most restrictive knife rules are applied, they're usually in places where rich white folks are surrounded by minorities that frighten them so.
@resonancewright @futurebird here in Berlin we have very strict knife control laws because of some knife hysteria a couple of years ago (a couple of widely published incidents is all it took).
All knives are absolutely forbidden on public transit stations, and cops are given too broad and tbh unconstitutional powers to just stop and search people to check if they have a knife in their bag.
Guess who they are frequently stopping and who not at all.
(But then it's the same bias with unlawful border controls in Germany.)
@IngaLovinde @futurebird i've seen the chainmail and quarterstaff thing that was part of what you're talking about. It was surreal to see a Deutsche Polizei with a mail suit and an honest to god staff and reading that this was a response to knife crime.
So much right now in both Europe and the US has just become a proxy for racism. Most all border control talk is a proxy for racism anymore even if it needn't be. Even as a realist and a pessimist regarding the human condition it has been an unpleasant surprise to see how much behavior we thought we had extincted, come roaring back, every bit as slaphead stupid as before.
@resonancewright @futurebird border controls in Germany are simply ridiculous.
Most highways aren't checked, no local roads are checked, only some highways were checked but I'm not even sure they still are.
Foot trails are of course not checked at all, there are thousands of them, anybody can go in or out the country without risking an encounter with a border cop.
But crossborder trains? Most of them do get boarded by a bunch of heavily armed cops who walk through the train and check the IDs and residence permits or visas specifically of people who don't look white, delaying trains by 10-30 minutes, while everybody white enough gets completely ignored (had they checked everybody, that train would have to stand there all day).
Board a local train from Strasbourg (France) to Offenburg (Germany) and it gets checked. Take a tram from Strasbourg to Kehl (first station of that train in Germany) and switch to the same train there: nobody checks you even if you have wrong skin color, because trams aren't checked and train was checked before you boarded it.
And of course none of these checks is lawful.
Most highways aren't checked, no local roads are checked, only some highways were checked but I'm not even sure they still are.
Foot trails are of course not checked at all, there are thousands of them, anybody can go in or out the country without risking an encounter with a border cop.
But crossborder trains? Most of them do get boarded by a bunch of heavily armed cops who walk through the train and check the IDs and residence permits or visas specifically of people who don't look white, delaying trains by 10-30 minutes, while everybody white enough gets completely ignored (had they checked everybody, that train would have to stand there all day).
Board a local train from Strasbourg (France) to Offenburg (Germany) and it gets checked. Take a tram from Strasbourg to Kehl (first station of that train in Germany) and switch to the same train there: nobody checks you even if you have wrong skin color, because trams aren't checked and train was checked before you boarded it.
And of course none of these checks is lawful.
so i know a few folks over there and honestly i was surprised to see how far some scary thinking had gone amongst them when it came to people seeking to resettle in Germany. It's a mark of my privilege that it was the first time i ever had someone deny the holocaust to me, let alone try to make a case that the person just knows that his countrymen just couldn't have done such a thing, that there's something wrong with that story.
This is to say that i unfortunately am not surprised to hear what you are reporting. Just disgusted.
In America, the dialogue has gotten frightening. We haven't very much of the consciousness of what it's like to live through war over here, because the only Americans who've done it are soldiers and immigrants. For the rest of us war happens on one's phone, perhaps their television if they're older. It happens on a screen. Likewise for huge swathes of America, the activities of ICE and other components of DHS are seen via media, not by being present for them. But it can be very upsetting for Americans who haven't seen it to see ICE paramilitaries trying to shake entire neighborhoods down for people they could arrest for a $30K bonus in pay.
American conservatives depict the European resettlement crisis as a problem of Islam and Muslims, in that order. to them this is potent medicine to invoke, rather stronger than the comparatively weak justifications ICE gets to peddle.