Interestingly, the US military did some stress-testing on the Arisaka rifles after the war, along with other common bolt-action rifles such as the US M1903 Springfield and the German Kar98K Mauser. They found that the Japanese Arisaka was by far the STRONGEST and most robust bolt-action rifle ever made, in terms of being able to handle very "hot" (over-loaded with gunpowder) bullets. A testament to early 20th Century Japanese engineering.
Some of my earliest memories are of growing up in small-town
Philadephia, Mississippi, where we moved when I was a year old (I was born in Tacoma, and my father was transferred from Weyerhaeuser's Tacoma HQ to run a sawmill in rural Mississippi). If you ever saw the movie "Mississippi Burning," it took place literally in the small town where we lived. One of the
Neshoba County sheriff's deputys who was guilty of Federal crimes lived just a few houses down the street from us. He was in
Federal Penitentiary while we lived there, but my folks knew his wife, and my older sister played with his son. We lived there until I was six years old, in 1973, when we moved BACK to
Federal Way, WA, where I grew up and into the home where my mother still lives.
This was just a few years after the South was de-segregated. We were Yankees living in the Deep South, and as such deeply suspect. We were not particularly welcome among the natives, though we were white, of course. I remember as a very young boy that when my mother and I would walk down the street, that people of color would cross the street and walk on the other side (or in the middle of the street). I remember asking my mom why that was. There were Klansmen who worked in my father's sawmill. The bodies of the civil rights workers who were killed in
Mississippi Burning were found in an earthen dam, on Weyerhaeuser property (before we moved there, of course).
It is a fact of life, that life does not treat everyone equally. I am not as rich as Bill Gates or my boss Larry Ellison. Or even a fraction as rich as our resident high-tech tycoon
@Jlaa or our investment genius
@maw1124. Not all of us have 170 level IQs. I accept that. I also did not work as hard as I could have, to get into a prestigious taxpayer-funded University such as the US Naval Academy, located just 1.5 miles from where I sit. I am OK with that. My grandfather grew up on a farm in rural Fruitland, Idaho (not too far from the
@gsxr global headquarters), quite poor, but yet my grandfather qualified for and attended the USNA, MIT, and University of Washington (where he met my grandmother).
That said, I am also not ashamed of, and will NEVER be cowed by, people who say that I am the beneficiary of "white privilege" and do not deserve what I have rightfully earned in my life. Nor that I should be mandated to give some of what I have, or what my parents and ancestors rightfully earned, to others less fortunate than I as "reparations." Nope. If some people want to do this, fine. Do we see Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Steve Ballmer, Barack Obama, and others giving their earned fortunes away as "reparations" to minority communities? Perhaps they give to some charities, perhaps to some organization who create cures for nasty diseases, perhaps to fight the global pandemic, but they do not give their fortunes away as reparations because they feel guilty to be well-off.
As I said, I will give away what I want to, to organizations I want to, to causes I care about and/or that are impactful. But I will NEVER NEVER NEVER part with money as a mandated "reparation" or as a "guilt payment" to something that I had nothing to do with. Do folks like Gates and Bezos and Obama (remember that Obama is the son of a privileged Kenyan father and American mother from a relatively wealthy white family, not a descendent of African-American slaves) pay reparations to descendents of Southern slaves? As a present-day German, should you feel direct guilt for something that happened generations before you? As a present-day American, should you feel direct guilt for something that happened many generations before you?
Only you can answer this question, in a very personal sense. But for me, I will not feel guilt about something that I had nothing to do with, that is for sure.
Does the fact that person A has a 170 level IQ, and is able to make a good living with it, make him "liable" to pay reparations to someone with a 100-level IQ? The 170 and 100 IQ people didn't have control over their IQ -- they were born with it. But where does it say that someone who is naturally advantaged should "owe" something to those who aren't.
What about someone who has MS, or Alzheimer's. Should people who don't get these diseases "owe" something to people who do? Or what about drug addicts, or alcoholics. Does someone who has an alcoholic gene, get "owed" something from those who don't? It's a damned, slippery, slope.
We all struggle to understand the perspectives of those who have opposing viewpoints to ours. That is human nature.
The key, is to LISTEN, to ACKNOWLEDGE, and to try to find common ground. As opposed to a blanket "shut you down" attitude of invalidity and dismissal as the enemy.
And that is the problem. It used to be that people could find common ground. But the media and social media echo-chambering have caused people to self-insulate into their own bubbles, and reinforce the concept that if you want to try to find common ground, you are basically equivalent to the opposing side....you are just as bad as the other side. And in some circles, they will reinforce this with physical violence, looting, rioting, property destruction. Driven in large part by fomented jealousy and envy.
And this is what some Americans cannot and will not tolerate. And why, if this attitiude spills out of the cities, that there will be a literal Civil War — unfortunately a bloodbath — in this country.
