News Shutting Current Events / Politics section down Oct - Dec

[couragewolf]

Save the shaming and the virtue signaling. Liberal gun owners who vote for liberal politicians create the very problem that exists in this state in regard to the destruction of gun rights for everyone, regardless of political persuasion. Regardless of where you stand on any other issues, if you vote for Democrats today, you are voting for gun control and the unconstitutional infringement of gun rights. Unless Democrats who own guns can somehow convince their own party to stop the never-ending assault on our rights, there is nothing “pro-2A” about supporting the Democrat party.

In today’s world, saying that a Democrat who owns a gun makes them part of the “pro-2A movement” is like saying an axe with a wooden handle makes it a tree.

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To quote yourself, “You're either part of the solution or part of the problem, brother.”

lol implying the start of gun control in America didn't stem entirely from Reagan and right wing nationalist forces attempting to stamp out undesirable americans fighting for their own freedom using arms. It's wild that you think that proverb doesn't apply anywhere else other than the place you're applying it

 

[ikeo1]

What's the deal with not being able to access the site with VPN? Is that going to be a permanent thing?

Shame about the current events section closing we're just starting the war on american cities and satanic democrats, atheist terrorists, antifascist librarians and considering people who are brown effectively detainable based on their ethnicity things are just getting interesting

If you’re affected by the VPN thing, then that was used by a scammer who burned the entire ASN. This is a local site for CA so we have a strict perimeter around it. If your VPN uses Datacenters or Foreign locations to access the site isn’t likely to be available.

If we’re starting then there’s still plenty of time in the future, for now holidays are coming and I’d like to focus on some of the other cooler things coming vs arguing debating. There’s plenty of places to do that online.

 

[couragewolf]

Shutting it down will certainly pander to the people on the right because their side is currently in charge and whenever their confirmation bias is challenged, they lose it.

In reality, just shutting down this section is not going to eliminate political discussion. You are still going to have political comments being made in threads and as long as they are right wing, you will (based on observation) probably allow those to slide. The comments opposed to authoritarianism will likely be deleted.

When the roles are reversed and when the left is in charge again, the right wingers and the "neutrals" will desperately want to discuss and attack how horrible things are and more than likely, they will be pandered to again.

The CE / Pol sections would probably be more manageable if none of the mods / owners participated but simply policed the forum without interjecting comments but instead conducted the policing by sending DMs to participants who actually violate established rules. This means you would actually have to establish and publish rules at least rules that adhere to your sensitivities, e.g. no strident comments, etc. Seriously, just how many referees play in the game they are actually officiating? Hint, the answer is "None".

If you really want to "shut this down" you should consider making a rule that completely forbids all derogatory political remarks, period. Anyone calling names like Newscum or ler or lefties or s (among dozens of other kinds of comments) is simply going to ignite the fuel, once again.

You cannot expect to run a site devoted to firearms, in California, and not create a highly charged political environment unless you establish firm, not wishy-washy rules and stick to them. You seem to think you can be all things to all people and run this like a kindergarten where everyone keeps their mouths shut for the sake of peace and harmony. You can't possibly do that without a huge investment in time and you've made it clear, you want to grow your web business, not manage the people who frequent it.

PS. You should also implement strict rules against direct and indirect personal attacks and abusive comments to and about other users. All these rules should apply to users, mods and owners alike.

This entire forum is a database being mined and presented to US government law enforcement agencies without warrant, is that a political statement or just a fact?

 

[ikeo1]

One might win here running as a phony Democrat. Get in and vote with the republicans. It could work for one term. Then the dems would primary you out of office. The Republicans would not try to save that seat, they are dysfunctional here.

Our best chance is a mass exodus out of California. That won't happen unless our generous welfare programs are ended and most voters taken off the dole.

I don't remember a permanent "protester" class here years ago. They had a job.

Plenty of democrats are wealthy with good jobs, just look at Trump .

There’s a reason this state is blue and prosperous. I would challenge anyone to point to a red state that comes close to CA in overall status that is run better.

 

[ikeo1]

This entire forum is a database being mined and presented to US government law enforcement agencies without warrant, is that a political statement or just a fact?

The current event section was protected. The other areas are not

 

[couragewolf]

Plenty of democrats are wealthy with good jobs, just look at Trump .

There’s a reason this state is blue and prosperous. I would challenge anyone to point to a red state that comes close to CA in overall status that is run better.

After running 11 years of startups in Texas I wouldn't drag my family back there for double my current income. Triple I'll consider it.

 

[couragewolf]

Politics and gun rights are so entwined in this state it's impossible to separate them.

Like a horse and carriage you can't have one without the other.

I posted a thread the other day about newish ballistic improvements to some cartridges I thought were neat and got a lecture about needing to vote for people I despise and derided for challenging whether or not there was even any sense in such a thing.

As far as authoritarians go Americans seem to prefer red authoritarians to blue presently, but I'm sure we'll all get back on the same page as the authoritarian pendulum starts to swing blue once again and possibly we can return to openly discussing the dangers of big government comfortably without race or religion intertwined into the discussion right?

 

[CalgunsMothershipAwayTeam]

There are even a few examples in this thread of why shutting those sections down is a good idea.

Also, when it comes to political threads, nobody really ever changes anyone else's mind. No MAGA or progressive person ever listen to the other and said, 'you know, you make a really good point, perhaps I will reconsider my beliefs'. LOL

It's all just Trump sucks, Newsom sucks, stupid libs this, MAGAts that, if you don't believe what I do then you suck, etc. All that happens is a downward spiral of both side ranting. All that's accomplished is angry people unloading their emotions through insults, and repeating their dogma over and over.

 

[couragewolf]

There are even a few examples in this thread of why shutting those sections down is a good idea.

Also, when it comes to political threads, nobody really ever changes anyone else's mind. No MAGA or progressive person ever listen to the other and said, 'you know, you make a really good point, perhaps I will reconsider my beliefs'. LOL

It's all just Trump sucks, Newsom sucks, stupid libs this, MAGAts that, if you don't believe what I do then you suck, etc. All that happens is a downward spiral of both side ranting. All that's accomplished is angry people unloading their emotions through insults, and repeating their dogma over and over.

I actually disagree with this. People are often influenced away from previously held beliefs by virtue of discussions.

In reality you see that more often than ever now people today advocate for things even a few scant years ago they boastfully would state they deeply disagreed with.

I mean, I can't be the only Jade Helm survivor in this forum. What you're advocating is that people should only be exposed to algorithmically derived discussions of social media and internet attention engines, rather than the more organic discussions of actual people that occur in an old format like this geographically limited forum.

 

[ikeo1]

I actually disagree with this. People are often influenced away from previously held beliefs by virtue of discussions.

In reality you see that more often than ever now people today advocate for things even a few scant years ago they boastfully would state they deeply disagreed with.

I mean, I can't be the only Jade Helm survivor in this forum. What you're advocating is that people should only be exposed to algorithmically derived discussions of social media and internet attention engines, rather than the more organic discussions of actual people that occur in an old format like this geographically limited forum.

We're just putting the section on detainment, i mean pause, for the holidays...

Bring a little quiet area to peoples mental space. Plus, I have some things I'm working on that will be released in the next couple of months. We have a few events Grid Iron Arena, PCSL West Coast Championships and Several Classes. And a couple of new sections for the site...

Once these things are done, we'll try this social experiment again...

The site continues to grow so I'm choosing to focus on some of the cooler aspects of the site.

We'll be brining in newly crowned world champ and more coming up. I'm working on a new scheduling system and we'll try to do some online dry fire instructions for newer shooters. Same deal, we'll start off with free for the basics since everyone should have access to structured safety basics then move to paid instruction from high level folks around the state.

It's good to have discussions, I think its important to provide 2A resources as a foundation... We'll get back to this later, once that's setup... If anything, I need to prove my intention to continue building out 2A resources so that people understand politics is secondary to the individual behind the screen here.

I'm closer to the people here, then I will ever be to a politician.

--white mamba

 

[couragewolf]

We're just putting the section on detainment, i mean pause, for the holidays...

Bring a little quiet area to peoples mental space. Plus, I have some things I'm working on that will be released in the next couple of months. We have a few events Grid Iron Arena, PCSL West Coast Championships and Several Classes. And a couple of new sections for the site...

Once these things are done, we'll try this social experiment again...

The site continues to grow so I'm choosing to focus on some of the cooler aspects of the site.

We'll be brining in newly crowned world champ and more coming up. I'm working on a new scheduling system and we'll try to do some online dry fire instructions for newer shooters. Same deal, we'll start off with free for the basics since everyone should have access to structured safety basics then move to paid instruction from high level folks around the state.

It's good to have discussions, I think its important to provide 2A resources as a foundation... We'll get back to this later, once that's setup... If anything, I need to prove my intention to continue building out 2A resources so that people understand politics is secondary to the individual behind the screen here.

I'm closer to the people here, then I will ever be to a politician.

--white mamba

Respect.

If you're looking for some good training materials and resources the folks at Yellow Peril tactical are pretty great. There's a pretty big community building around pro 2a people who want an escape from the black hole of more traditional 2a politics so your intuition is right, but I do think considering the influx coming this way you're gonna have a fight on your hands.

If I can't even get a ballistics thread going without receiving a lecture on needing to vote for republicans I think the brainworms are going to be persistently spreading.

Atleast with an exhaust hatch you could try and geofence it

 

[ikeo1]

Respect.

If you're looking for some good training materials and resources the folks at Yellow Peril tactical are pretty great. There's a pretty big community building around pro 2a people who want an escape from the black hole of more traditional 2a politics so your intuition is right, but I do think considering the influx coming this way you're gonna have a fight on your hands.

If I can't even get a ballistics thread going without receiving a lecture on needing to vote for republicans I think the brainworms are going to be persistently spreading.

Atleast with an exhaust hatch you could try and geofence it

You know how it goes, I can't eliminate it entirely, but I can reduce it...

There's a phrase going around lately... There's a signal to noise ratio here and we're going to reduce the noise to work on the signal.

 

[Glassmtn]

I would be happy to see politics removed permanently. There were three things that caused me to stop supporting the site financially.
1) not allowing sold posts to be deleted
2) the political BS that kept showing up in threads and on the main page
3) off topic comments and threads not being “moderated” aggressively enough.

I come here to read up on firearms not the politics associated with them. They are two separate things.

 

[compulsivegungrabber]

I’m glad to hear this kind of thing.

I’m trying to support local CA sport shooters as they rise through the ranks in the hopes that we can turn the mindset behind shooting. With everything going against us , we can still develop kickass shooters

Duncan will be repping CAguns at the PCSL West Coast Championship. We’re trying to add more diversity to our line up so we can cover shotgun and rifle

View this content on Instagram

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And another one of our guys was at world shoot..

View this content on Instagram

View this content on Instagram

Not to mention all the backend work and other things we have going on. I’m planning and working to make 2026 a strong year for us.

Thank you for not grammar policing my typo.

 

[GoldensRule]

This entire forum is a database being mined and presented to US government law enforcement agencies without warrant, is that a political statement or just a fact?

Between the CDN, Alma Linux and docker, he should be able to block the government bots by analyzing traffic for behavioral anomalies, looking for high request volume from a single IP range and many requests from .gov and or .mil domains, abnormal traffic spikes and suspicious user agents.

Editing his nginx.conf or the .htacess and robots.txt files and using a web application firewall like cloudflare, along with some other basic techniques, he should be able to keep the government baddies and AI's from crawling the site. It would be great if he were to encrypt all user related data with at least AES-256 and to stop logging IP addresses.

Site security is a morass of ever evolving threats and it requires concerted effort and constant learning to stay ahead of the bots. Now, if the government really wants to get the information, they will just uncover the domain registration info and or the CA LLC registration information, send a couple of goons, hit him over the head with a wrench and I'm pretty sure everyone's private information would be toast.

 

[couragewolf]

Between the CDN, Alma Linux and docker, he should be able to block the government bots by analyzing traffic for behavioral anomalies, looking for high request volume from a single IP range and many requests from .gov and or .mil domains, abnormal traffic spikes and suspicious user agents.

Editing his nginx.conf or the .htacess and robots.txt files and using a web application firewall like cloudflare, along with some other basic techniques, he should be able to keep the government baddies and AI's from crawling the site. It would be great if he were to encrypt all user related data with at least AES-256 and to stop logging IP addresses.

Site security is a morass of ever evolving threats and it requires concerted effort and constant learning to stay ahead of the bots. Now, if the government really wants to get the information, they will just uncover the domain registration info and or the CA LLC registration information, send a couple of goons, hit him over the head with a wrench and I'm pretty sure everyone's private information would be toast.

I suspect agentic crawlers are now sophisticated enough all the measures you've described are easily and constantly circumvented on modern web traffic, never mind the point of presence surveillance.

I think it's unrealistic to imagine anything on the "web" isn't fully indexed, tagged and ETL'd out against a bunch of pattern recognition systems.

The very processors themselves in all of these systems are long known to have been backdoored with non secure execution environments so it's hard to fathom computational privacy of any form.

Your choice is between Chinese government surveillance and western surveillance, not whether or not you are surveilled. Even raspberry Pis are compromised.

 

[ikeo1]

Between the CDN, Alma Linux and docker, he should be able to block the government bots by analyzing traffic for behavioral anomalies, looking for high request volume from a single IP range and many requests from .gov and or .mil domains, abnormal traffic spikes and suspicious user agents.

Editing his nginx.conf or the .htacess and robots.txt files and using a web application firewall like cloudflare, along with some other basic techniques, he should be able to keep the government baddies and AI's from crawling the site. It would be great if he were to encrypt all user related data with at least AES-256 and to stop logging IP addresses.

Site security is a morass of ever evolving threats and it requires concerted effort and constant learning to stay ahead of the bots. Now, if the government really wants to get the information, they will just uncover the domain registration info and or the CA LLC registration information, send a couple of goons, hit him over the head with a wrench and I'm pretty sure everyone's private information would be toast.

Not quite, they don't scrape from those kinds of domains. That would also only assume that its domestic. There's actually a lot of foreign countries, RU, China, IR, VN, SG, Bosnia, etc. We leverage permission based systems to block certain content, while at the same time allow friendly bots to scan the site for SEO.

This site has grown in Google Search and in AI search queries. A lot of thought goes into how we want the algorithms to view the site and present it. This is a key consideration why the political section is hidden/muted from that kind of stuff.. We don't want spiders and AI to build profiles on people's political beliefs but do want them to refer to us when there's a question about CA firearm or roster question... We want people to find things that they are looking for.

We don't ask a lot of information for this reason. However, we do follow the law and want to build a lawful system for the community based on previous experience in compliance. I don't specifically have compliance experience as an FFL, but record keeping is a vital point for us to CYA. After a period of time, we'll remove data.

You'll notice our bots levels here are managed... We have a responsibility and duty to help law enforcement in case there's any type of serious event. This is another consideration why we want to keep the political tone down. I assume everyone here owns firearms. This isn't the place to be really outspoken about who you consider political enemies, etc. I think it's important to keep that elsewhere.

 

[ikeo1]

I would be happy to see politics removed permanently. There were three things that caused me to stop supporting the site financially.
1) not allowing sold posts to be deleted
2) the political BS that kept showing up in threads and on the main page
3) off topic comments and threads not being “moderated” aggressively enough.

I come here to read up on firearms not the politics associated with them. They are two separate things.

We're still working on archiving after a specific time period, but again, that wouldn't be removed entirely until a specific date.
The politcal section was sectioned off as of last week so that this would be the last post for this kind of thing, top of the fold.
Moderators are a bit more aggressive now that we have a few more.

Overall, we'll continue to adjust.. I appreciate when you supported and also the feedback. There's some things we have to do and totally understand either way.

I think in the future you'll dig some of the changes coming.

 

[GoldensRule]

I suspect agentic crawlers are now sophisticated enough all the measures you've described are easily and constantly circumvented on modern web traffic, never mind the point of presence surveillance.

I think it's unrealistic to imagine anything on the "web" isn't fully indexed, tagged and ETL'd out against a bunch of pattern recognition systems.

The very processors themselves in all of these systems are long known to have been backdoored with non secure execution environments so it's hard to fathom computational privacy of any form.

Your choice is between Chinese government surveillance and western surveillance, not whether or not you are surveilled. Even raspberry Pis are compromised.

If I had to make a choice, I would choose foreign enemies surveillance of this site over US government surveillance. For end user security, there isn't much the PRC, DPRK or RF can do with our information. As long as his payment systems are secured correctly, the overseas people can't do much to us short of invading the homeland and confiscating weapons. If that happens, our problems are FAR greater than any of us believe.

 

[ikeo1]

If I had to make a choice, I would choose foreign enemies surveillance of this site over US government surveillance. For end user security, there isn't much the PRC, DPRK or RF can do with our information. As long as his payment systems are secured correctly, the overseas people can't do much to us short of invading the homeland and confiscating weapons. If that happens, our problems are FAR greater than any of us believe.

You really don't have a choice... Google indexes the site, so the US Govt has access to everything they do. Not only that @couragewolf alerted people that there is a system being built to actively scan this kind of info with AI. That said, foreign governments, its not just surveillance. We have people who sign up and try to do propaganda, whether they are bots or people. You can see this a lot on Youtube & X They'll have conversations like one of our other members brought up, trying to invoke an emotional response from people.

We accept that there's both monitoring, but we gate specific information. This has to be the basic assumption for a site like this. There's LEO, MIL, and Lawyers here already. We try to keep this place clean. The politics section wasn't even online for that long and people giving me grief for it. Moderated too much, not moderated enough, etc. And causing some friction with other mods. All noise and not signal to our purpose here and brings unwanted eyes.