REDACTED Culture Cast

Talk Back to Me If entrance into the military counts as initiation into Gun Culture (it doesn't, but work with me here), then I have spent 15 years in various parts of this community. What are the lessons to be learned from it? First, we all enter naive, whether into a job or a discipline or a skill tree. As we learn where we need to correct our way of thinking, we are faced with options for...

Talk Back to Me We don't talk about gear too much on the REDACTED Culture Cast, but when we do, we do it with a flair of the unorthodox. Cody, the man behind Bargain Bin Tactician, tells his story of entering into Gun Culture, searching for community after moving, and how he has approached gear from the outside looking in. The curse and cure of gun culture is how much it is centered around it...

Talk Back to Me If war is simply conflict between Governments or states, and the use of armies targets the politcal, which economic warfare attacks a people's market or access to resources, what would it look like for a hostile country to use culture as an attack vector in a warlike fashion? Define it too broadly and innocent people will suffer as they get swept up alongside insurgents, produ...

Talk Back to Me Putting community building into practice, Brent built a community through volunteering his time and experience to put on events for those who wanted to attend. Instead the basic Pistol and Rifle classes, they went well beyond including shooting from and around vehicles, to a version of a foreign weapons day. An antidote to the pessimism that hangs over Gun Culture, this conversatio...

Talk Back to Me Three methods of approach, three subject that produce the context for our lives. We take a look at three different subjects: Politics, Economics, and Culture to consider what we are working with when it comes to either side of the Is-Ought divide. Politics deals with governing systems, whereas economics deals with markets, but how to people formulate how these systems should functi...

Talk Back to Me Now that the holidays have breached your calendar with a flash bang and a flame-thrower, we've got Paigeosity back on the show to talk about cultural momentum. Don't forget to steamroll your family members when it comes to Gun Culture while eating the meatbird. For all the bluster Gun Culture blows about being elite, or an elitist, or an expert, it rarely takes the time t...

Talk Back to Me Those who encounter violence and war will be tempted to see themselves a combination of the light and the darkness in this world. Various forms of religious iconography, as well as cultural keystones mimic this concept as if a person can be servant to two masters, wrestling between them.  But the source of light has no equal. The concept of dichotomy as a form of identification bec...

Talk Back to Me In the mind of Clausewitz wars had a beginning and and end, or at least they should. But when we look at the ways peoples have waged war against each other, the timelines more often reveal a long fringe on either end of the conflict. These blurry edges may manifest on a timeline, as well as in the use of irregulars to wage unlimited warfare.  In today's culture war, as it is d...

Talk Back to Me As the Levant once again gathers the attention of the world, we have an opportunity to learn about not only how wars are fought, but how those similarities are repeated the world over. Israel, being considered a nation-state, is expected to engage in regular warfare, against an opponent not held to the same standard in political discourse. The importance of this war remains immense...

Talk Back to Me It can be quite funny to watch fools opine grandly about how they are, themselves, a free thinker, without a single consideration for what that means other than a cookie-cutter-counter-culture to the presumed status quo. The phrase has rotated through the decades, including free-thinker, critical thinker, independent thinker, or someone who thinks for themselves as an intellectual...

Talk Back to Me Two guests join the show today, both with former appearances on the REDACTED Culture Cast, and both with a strong take on the grime and grit of both this culture and the industry. At the table, we have three voices: an Active Duty Soldier, a Veteran, and a Citizen. And in good faith, we bring more than more complaints to your table. - The difference between the Culture and the Indu...

Talk Back to Me The argument is made, time and time again, that if we could just get rid of religion, we would be able to end all wars. Yet that belief requires a willing ignorance to what religion is and how, at the core of each and every philosophy, is a fundamentally religious idea.  The idea that we could eliminate war from taking place wherever there are men reveals more about the person who...

Talk Back to Me At the beating heart of this community and culture is the idea that all men are created equal. That there is no distinction between citizen and soldier when it comes to rights. That there is no difference between free man and party member when it comes to using logic and reason to regulate ourselves and our country.  Or at least that is the ideal. This scathing criticism of Gun Cul...

Talk Back to Me By now, most of us are familiar with the trope of the hyper-alert, hyper-aware veteran who's level of situational awareness often looks like a display. In that grey space between the white picket fence and war on an industrial scale, this posture will not only make you a target, but one that is easy to predict.  You will often see people concerned with self defense identify th...

Talk Back to Me Much of how we describe ethics in war comes from a tradition that was born relatively recently in comparison to the history of warfare. In premodern times, before the renaissance or the enlightenment, the scale of warfare often extended well beyond the warfighter, even as different creeds and belief systems set limitations on the man wielding the sword.  During the enlightenment, a...

Talk Back to Me Another Ranger joins the show, this time one with the capability to pass the high standards of the Ranger Regiment when it comes to functioning as a Medic. We discuss the credibility of recent terrorist threats, and go so far as to take a shot at the golden question: what is terrorism. Tim Selbrede both stands out and fits into a cohort of men like him who have gone out into the wo...

Talk Back to Me How much of this community consists of freeloaders, riding on the coattails of those putting in the work? How many people in this community coast on the free subscriber level, but complain when they are not granted access to the small, tightly knit circles that make up the Gun Culture?  1. Freeloaders, and Mooches. No one likes a Sandbagger.  2. The trouble with sponsorship in this...

Talk Back to Me Everywhere we look, it appears that the world is falling apart. The institutions have been corrupted, and not by crafty tyrants whose strength we could at least respect, but by petty despots, who used subversion and slimy tactics to undermine the very thing which upholds them. The great academies have been consumed by illiterates. Politicians beg and steal to enrich their own pocke...

Talk Back to Me Hailing from a family with an adventuresome past, Peter Ildefonse joins the show to argue that our Rights reside downhill from our responsibilities. When we talk about worldviews, he addresses a problem: while many of us take effort to define and understand our worldview. Yet he raises the question, how many of us see ourselves as the exception to the rule which governs everyone el...

Talk Back to Me We're hearing politicians and pundits wax poetic about the threat of sleeper cell terrorists attacking America. All attention is then directed at the idea of an illegal alien entering the United States through a porous southern border, to then integrate into a community keeping nefarious plots and abilities under the floorboards until they receive a call from a foreign command...

Talk Back to Me OPSEC, short for Operation Security is Military Jargon for keeping information vital to the security and success of an operation out out the hands of those who would use open source intelligence gathering tools to gain leverage against one's unit, people, or community. Maintaining a clear control of OPSEC is difficult to measure unless you are actively capable of discerning wh...

Talk Back to Me The idea of the news is a fascinating one. Somehow, the individual who's job it is to give you the news is supposed to accomplish it without including his or her own bias. As an ideal, this would be useful, as people bring their own worldviews into consideration when they consume media. But in our world, in the post-information age, it's just not that simple.  We've...

Talk Back to Me In the movies, the bad guys willingly target women and children. The good guys fight with honor, even when faced with chaotic situations, and show great remorse whenever there is collateral damage on their operation. This is only the pop culture way of distinguishing between limited and unlimited warfare. However history is a much deeper, darker tale. The idea of limited war as we...

Talk Back to Me The Bible makes many references to war, some of them as if they were already history to the penman of the Old Testament, some of them yet to come, and some which illuminate a grand narrative, a cosmic war. The evil we face in this world does not always evade detection, and we would be fools to believe that it does not influence the ways of men.  Paul's letter to the church in...

Talk Back to Me As we consider the consequences of decentralization, we look to history to consider what the past has to show about different types of combatants. As part of this year's Moon's Haunted Series, we dig into some of the important foundational concepts when considering the rules of engagement and what it means to act ethically in a war, and what serves as justified causes for...