REDACTED Culture Cast

Talk Back to Me Even during the 2020 Black Lives Matter Summer of Love, news agencies hesitated to report on the destruction taking place in Minnesota. Few poeple outside of Minneapolis know that the rioting continued well into 2021, and few people who live there are willing to admit it. To this day, the city of Minneapolis suffers the consequences of what took place and what followed soon after....

Talk Back to Me Might Makes Right. No Truth but Power. History is written by the Victor. These phrases often say one thing, but try to communicate another. When we casually say that might makes right, we aren't typically saying that morality comes from greater strength. When it comes to disputes, it often sounds like a shortcut to some form of solution, or a criticism of inaction. But what if...

Talk Back to Me When it comes to gear, play the long game. When it comes to training, get what you can, when you can get it. When it comes to practice, it's better to start with what you have, than wait for the perfect opportunity. Gear, Training, and Practice are three sore subjects when it comes to gun culture. How is this the case for a community that is centered on the use of firearms as...

Talk Back to Me The difference between what can be called the Gun Culture, the Industry, and those in support of the Second Amendment isn't a single overlapping circle of a Venn Diagram. Instead, we have disparate groups of Gun Culture, a market space of the Firearm Industry, and the broadest term of 2nd Amendment Supporters. Peter Ildefonsa brings all of this to the table in a grand conversa...

Talk Back to Me In violence, as in war, two concept stand in tension with one another: proportionality and utility. McMahan identifies one understanding of proportionality as "a constraint on action that causes harm." (Killing in War Pg 19). Utility, on the other hand, often functions as the context for informing one part of strategy, tactics, and techniques. We prioritize actions of the...

Talk Back to Me Self Defense isn't what it used to be. Jiu jitsu has become mainstream. But what if you were to discover that no-gi training wasn't as realistic as you wished? Ruben Alverez traces a tale of growing up in the world of Jiu Jitsu, only to discover it wasn't all that he needed. ECQC or Extreme Close Quarters Concepts takes the idea of a violent encounter to a more perso...

Talk Back to Me What if the true LARP is the assumption that we can be credited as being part of the community without participation? When the term LARP (Live Action Role Playing) is used as an epitaph, it accuses the target of living in a fantasy. With analysis, we look at what it is that is considered dishonorable about so-called LARP-ing. What we find out is that many of us may be LARPing even...

Talk Back to Me Rudyard Kipling's poem "If" often finds home on the wall and in the minds of great men. It leads the reader through a series of character traits that make a man, opening with the line  "If you can keep your head when all about you        Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,     But make allowance for their...

Talk Back to Me There's more to being a warfighter than shooting. On the US Army webpage it is stated that the Ranger Battalions encompass the "Big 5 Philosophy" of Marksmanship, Physical Training, Medical Training, Small-Unit Tactics, and Mobility. Breaking down each of these, we look at what they might entail. In order to put to rest the cultural conversation in modern gun culture...

Talk Back to Me The George Floyd Riots were a strange time. On the ground, the narrative level politics fell to the wayside. Information Warfare was not about which political party was effectively harnessing the energy of the street, but about if their house was going to be looted or burned down in the next few hours. We live in the post information age, were it's no longer about access to in...

Talk Back to Me Which is better? To Bug Out or to Harden Your Position? Which is better? Train in Recce or CQB? Which is better? A DMR or a MK18? Which is better? 9mm or 45acp? These questions represent different decision that go awry when we attempt to answer them at the wrong level of analysis. There is a strange hope that, if it were to come to brass tacks, the good men would do what is right....

Talk Back to Me Sure, we all hate name dropping and clout chasing, especially in Gun Culture, but why? what is it about this kind of activity that we find so distasteful, and should we? It's not good enough to complain about the subject, and although it takes a little time to get into it, in this episode we compare it to writing an academic paper. It's not good enough to simply cite well...

Talk Back to Me Decentralization might sound good on paper, but how does it work in the real world? When we look around, from media to the news to politics to culture in general, it looks like things are falling apart. And the just might be. But what happens when you shift your mindset away from the doom and gloom of how corrupt our politicians really are, and start building your own robust commun...

Talk Back to Me What makes someone a pseudo-intellectual? If we treat philosophy like a trade, what does it look like when done poorly? In this episode, we review two arguments by public intellectuals who present two different arguments regarding God. Žižek compares God to a video game developer, and Neil deGrasse Tyson brings up the Problem of Evil. Some arguments are useful for identifying pseud...

Talk Back to Me While it can be fun to try to analyze Gun Culture at the 20,000 league above view, Kaleb Irving brings the conversation down to earth. We look at what Gun Culture looks like on the ground level, and then rise higher into moral frameworks, and discuss what it might mean for the Church to repent. Gun Culture isn't so much politically aligned to moral philosophy, but dependent on...

Talk Back to Me Don't like a guy? Say he can't shoot. Although this will not put the argument to death, it will bring context to move past the ego game and into a professional approach. Shooting is a skill, and fighting requires a collection of skills. One of the most uncomfortable scenes in A24's Civil War is the firefight between men in Hawaiian shirts and uniformed soldiers. The...

Talk Back to Me Gypsy Walters rejoins the show to talk about the movie "Civil War" by A24 Studios. The spoiler-free beginning covers tone and politics of the movie. After that, we dig into key scenes and take them apart both tactically and culturally. A surprisingly apolitical movie, with references to multiple sub-cultures present in America. Follow Ethan "Gypsy" Walters on In...

Talk Back to Me With Suppressor Form 4 wait times measuring in mere days, we are witnessing the further normalization of owning a silencer. Huxwrx brought a fresh take by presenting suppressors as safety equipment. Beyond sound and flash reduction, flow through cans help reduce the amount of gasses in the shooter's face. Brett Kleypas joins the show to talk about both the science and presenta...

Talk Back to Me Few debates within gun culture draw more ire and passion than whether a person should or should not open carry in public. The arguments back and forth, tribal and otherwise, rarely produce the satisfaction of solid victory, but why? In this episode we look at the rhetoric and logic behind two of the loudest arguments, one for each side, and see where they match up. This sets the st...

Talk Back to Me Although not a hard and fast rule, a heuristic can be applied to both stolen valor claims, and individual violence. Stolen Valor, when a person claims to have held a position in the military that they never achieved, comes in a few different forms. However, in Gun Culture large cases often explode into a witch hunt for similar offenders. The amount of self-aggrandizement is inverse...

Talk Back to Me Two events in recent history share a common thread. The White House loudly declares the 31st of March to be the Transgender Day of Visibility, and on Easter nonetheless. Not long before, an Obama appointed Judge adheres to the Second Amendment, but for a man who entered the United States Illegally. What do these two events have in common? Strategy. The news that a Judge appeared to...

Talk Back to Me In this conversation with Marcus Singletary of Cloaked Entry Co, we start with inconsistencies in the culture when it comes to Chinese Optics and using your job as an excuse to act immorally. The scathing first half is contrasted by a conversation about community days, with Marcus providing an after-action review of their most recent community event, lessons learned, and how to go...

Talk Back to Me John Lovell, former Ranger and founder of the Warrior Poet Society has produced a book, but is it any good? After reading The Warrior Poet Way, some arguments fall flat, where others stick the landing with effective writing and a strong thesis. John Lovell is no philosopher, or at least that's what a reader might take from his chapter on philosophy. At the same time, he presen...

Talk Back to Me Calling it a review wouldn't be sufficient, and besides, there's plenty of places to go for that, some of which I may have even had a hand in. The SABRE-10 by Palmetto State Armory deserves recognition for presenting itself as two very different concepts, pulling each of with relative success. The first for a Sub-$2000 rifle, you get quite a bit. From Mags and a bag, to a...

Talk Back to Me The history of training can be depicted like a spiral. While back and forth it looks like a flat circle with what was popular 30 years ago once again in vogue. Pull back a little, however, and that circle is going somewhere. Tim Selbrede returns to the REDACTED Culture Cast to talk about lessons learned from Night Vision instructor courses and DARC to go beyond the memes about how...