It’s rednecks all the way down!
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“An armed society is a polite society…”
Hmmm… I think Heinlein might have been a little to ‘absolutist’ in his thinking, there.
Unless First Angry Old Hermit happened to get caught off HIS property with HIS weapon…
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Oh you think so? That line is classic Heinlein, but none of his characters were the bat shit crazy gun owning psychopaths who seem responsible for gun crime in the US. They didn’t exist in Heinlein books.
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Sorry, bumblefuck nowhere is not the right term and is probably offensive to some. I recently moved to the 'burbs from the city and I feel like I’m living in bumblefuck nowhere. I guess what I was trying to say was that if you have that much space, who cares if a delivery truck is parked in front of your house. Unless one really has a thing against Amazon or delivery trucks I suppose.
There’s a rifle range about a mile from my new 'burb house and I hear shots, too. There’s also a train about the same distance without signs so it blares it’s horn every 2-3 hours. There’s a flock of wild turkeys that roams the neighborhood which I thought was funny at first…until I heard what they sound like at 5am. I inquired to my chef wife how easy it would be to pluck one and she said “don’t”. Space is great, but it’s an entirely different world than inside the city limits.
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Never understood the “I’m gonna get my gun” threat. Is it just a smooth transition from “I’m gonna get my mom” ? If you expect to be credible when you make such a threat, then the obvious outcome is the person threatened will act first, i.e., before he gets his gun. So the guy expects not to be taken seriously
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“The Admiral” himself was somewhat sympathetic to such types. It’s been years since the last time I cracked open a Heinlein book, but I seem to recall his characters were always armed pretty heavily, and only rarely “threw down” with others who were likewise armed and armored.
He gets a lot of credit for ‘radical’ ideas, which apparently mostly stem from his earlier writings. As he got older (and divorced his ‘progressive’ first wife to shack up with his ‘conservative’ second wife), I believe that his politics have been described as hardening into what made him fit in comfortably with the Republicans during the Reagan years.
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Either that, or the person’s SOLE example of how to assert dominance over ‘the other’ comes from a none-too-mature father-figure. Who, in turn, could ONLY fall back on “this is my house, and I make the rules, so if you disagree with me, I WILL punish you for disobedience”. Never mind the validity of the other’s arguments, never mind the applicable laws for the situation. The threat of gun-violence ends arguments, in the minds of such people.
Which may go a very long way toward explaining the desperate need for “Muh freedumzzz an’ muh ghunzzz” exhibited by too many MAGAcaps…
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“…but it’s an entirely different world than inside the city limits.”
Yes, yes it is. My cranky old neighbor used to blast rabbits out of his garden, which just happened to be about 30 feet from the back of my house, with a .410 shotgun. It’s legal here. On weekends he regularly began working in said garden at 5:00 am, running his tractor that used a piece of straight galvanized pipe for a “muffler”. His garden was awesome. When I first moved in he was always trying to give me potatoes the size of footballs, but the neighbors warned me off, as he would go out under the cover of darkness and pump raw sewage from his septic tank onto the garden. A different world indeed.
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Yeah, I’ve spent time in several “armed societies”, and my general impression is that they’ll tolerate virtually any sort of rudeness that doesn’t rise to the level of justifying a firefight.
I enjoy much of Heinlein’s work, but his polite, cultured needle-gun duellists are an exercise in wishful thinking, a naively libertarian fantasy completely detached from the real world.
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Im not sure why i expected the lady to show up with a bat … like the noctunal flying mammal. With a boingboing post you never really know. How would a lady and bat combo be any weirder than a penis mold making porn star smokin toads with people till they die?
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You don’t live in Bumblefuck, you live in outer Suburbia.
Bumblefuck is where your cell phone doesn’t work.
Bumblefuck is where you aren’t sure if you are driving on a road or someone’s driveway.
Bumblefuck is where you can see the Milky Way in full bloom because there isn’t a streetlight for miles.
Bumblefuck is those places you fly over and think to yourself, man, there is a house out there all by itself (from 35K feet).
Perhaps you are a Bumblefuck, but you certainly don’t live there.
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It looks like a scene from a Coen brothers movie. I was laughing so hard when the lady with the bat casually slung over her shoulder showed up.
Completely absurdist.
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I kind of got the impression this wasn’t the first time neighbors had had trouble with this guy.
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Was there supposed to be sound? I didn’t get any sound.
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Ug. It seems like a lot of /instantkarma on reddit right now is videos of peacefully protesting people receiving “instant karma” from the police. 
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Yeah, my wife composts. But it’s all food that hasn’t passed through the digestive tract. That’s friggin’ hilarious.
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I guess it depends on your definition of Bumblefuck.
Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park was the firs time I ever saw the Milky Way in full bloom. They let you drive up to the top even after dark. Laying on the grass with my fiancé and watching it was a defining moment. I envy those who get to see it nightly.
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Lots of Dark Sky communities around the world. Here’s a location finder:
(Ignore the warning: works fine for me.)
There are 4 locations within a short driving distance of Chicago, for example. In fact, I have friends who LIVE in one of those communities and drive to work in Chicago every day…that’s how close.
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I’ve been in this scenario before. I’ve turned to my wife and said, “We need to turn around and leave, now.” Her parents didn’t grow up in rural areas like mine and she didn’t have that exposure. I told her it was a gut feeling and we didn’t need to be there and if we continued it was likely that we would end up in a situation like the one depicted here.
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