The article has a pull quote: “Bulldozers were as important to the Allied victory as the jet engine, the radar or the atomic bomb.”
That's a strange statement since the jet engine had approximately zero impact on the Allied victory; the P-80 Shooting Star was produced too late to be useful.
The P-80 might not have seen any action but the Gloster Meteor was introduced into service in July 1944 and saw a fair bit of combat through to the end of the war in Europe. Not a massive impact and wasn't really that important in the grand scheme of things, but it's still an allied jet powered plane that made some contribution to the war effort.
NoahKAndrews 4 days ago [-]
It says "aircraft engine" for me
jsheard 4 days ago [-]
You're both right, it says aircraft engine in the article body but jet engine in the pull quote. They caught the error but forgot to update the latter.
4 days ago [-]
out-of-ideas 4 days ago [-]
great catch - deff seems inaccurate of a statement (more like lack of jet engine used against)
Bulldozers can be used to grade surfaces prior to buildings being constructed... Buildings in which crimes are committed, from financial fraud to outright murder.
thijson 3 days ago [-]
Something interesting I read about building a foundation for a structure is that the soil below the foundation should be undisturbed. So can't grade below the surface for the future foundation.
Doxin 3 days ago [-]
A church which owns land, much land. Land on which houses have been built. Houses in which it is statistically probable that private acts of lesboid love have been committed![0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVRODdXVI3Q content warning: extensive presentation of lesbianism as some sort of crime. I do believe the sketch is however poking fun at people who do seem to think that way and not promoting it as a valid viewpoint itself.
QuercusMax 3 days ago [-]
Stephen Fry has been out as a gay man for a very long time. It's very hard to believe he could be promoting homophobia.
aprilthird2021 4 days ago [-]
Bulldozers themselves have been used to murder. There were examples given in the article? Not sure the point of this comment?
Qem 4 days ago [-]
> Bulldozers themselves have been used to murder. There were examples given in the article?
Relevant to the part about the brown tree snake on Guam, the inspectors for Hawai’i just had their building lease canceled by GSA/DOGE and barely kept their jobs:
I was stationed on Guam for a bit, on the aviation side. We had to do quite a few inspections for those snakes, and worked with the people in the article I linked. In three years we found 7 on birds I inspected (a few hundred I imagine), all just before deployment overseas. Those snakes got into the oddest places.
tedunangst 4 days ago [-]
What kind of safeguards are we imagining the bulldozer should have? Should we attach an AI camera to the engine to prevent bulldozing the wrong things?
dullcrisp 4 days ago [-]
It sounds like the article is advocating something more along the lines of, buy a copy of a newspaper and if the front page has a picture of your customer committing war crimes with your product maybe ask them about it.
thorncorona 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
CoastalCoder 4 days ago [-]
The night is young. Perhaps better comments will show up still.
pdfernhout 4 days ago [-]
I'll put in my two cents. The issue could be seen as a variation of my sig (and related writings): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
Bulldozers are made with the technology of abundance (like metal and other advanced materials, engines, supportive repair infrastructure, international delivery methods, GPS positioning, and so on). But because the owners and users of bulldozers probably mostly don't understand the irony mentioned in my sig yet, they use bulldozers from a scarcity perspective, using them more to destroy biological diverse miracles like Amazonian Rainforest (or social diverse miracles like old New York City neighborhoods) and then create precarious biological or social monocultures or other problematical things, often supporting artificial scarcity in how the new products are distributed (compared, to, say, just picking fruit off trees in the jungle while living there, or having affordable housing in a city) as the owners and users of bulldozers privatize gains while socializing risks and costs (which in aggregate might greatly outweigh the privatized gains, as a net blight on human society and the rest of Nature). An alternative is to use those same technologies of abundance differently to build a world that overall works better for everyone.
So, the "safeguard" for bulldozers is ultimately a transcendent shift in perspective spreading outward from people who have an "aha" moment about this to others some of whom own and use bulldozers and who also become similarly enlightened. For a fictional example of this happening, see James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
Or, for another fictional story, coincidentally by the same author who wrote the 1944 short story "Killdozer!", Theodore Sturgeon, see his later 1956 short story "The Skills of Xanadu" (a story which envisioned nanotech and mobile wirelessly-networked wearable computing, and also inspired Ted Nelson's work on hypertext and "Xanadu" and so indirectly helped inspire the World Wide Web):
https://ia601205.us.archive.org/22/items/theodore-sturgeon-/...
This same sorts of transcendent perspective shift as a safeguard applies to things like nuclear energy use and AI, as I discuss here:
https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce...
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Also related on global mindshift (a bit simplistic perhaps compared to imagining overlapping fields of agency and priority, but still encouraging):
"The Wombat (All is One)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHyH3MPgZDo
This is off the top of my head, not having thought about the bulldozer theme much. Maybe I will have a better analogical idea on this later.
Totally tangential, but today I just saw a blurb about a new book on Abundance:
https://newrepublic.com/article/192061/ezra-klein-derek-thom...
"Klein and Thompson’s vision for more effective government is something like an anti-DOGE: They imagine a future United States where careful and informed elected officials find ways to strip back the barriers to effective policy and allow the government to invest efficiently in underdeveloped pockets of society. They call for an “abundance agenda.” Abundance here does not mean the greater access to disposable money and goods for which twentieth-century liberals fought. For Klein and Thompson, abundance means a government that is capable of building things, capable of innovation, and capable of implementation at scale."
zafka 3 days ago [-]
Hi Paul, thanks for this! Also thanks for popping out ( into my perception ) . I saved some of the links you point to in your hn bio and plan to come back multiple times. It gives me some hope to see that there are folks working for sanity.
karaterobot 4 days ago [-]
We have to keep bulldozers out of the hands of criminals. Honestly, the only protection against a bad guy with a bulldozer is a good guy with a bulldozer.
mandmandam 4 days ago [-]
The author pointed out that commercial machinery can be fitted with a kill-switch, which would have been easy to activate had Caterpillar decided that genocide was against company values.
> What enabled this remote disabling was a practice known as “VIN-locking,” which manufacturers use to prevent unauthorized repairs to their products ... When it suits their purposes, then, the technology exists for heavy machinery companies to monitor, control and even disable products. Human rights abuses against Palestinians and Indians apparently don’t rise to the level of violating company values, let alone cause enough concern for the company to brick their machines
You can imagine more complicated safeguards if you like, but there's a simple solution sitting and waiting right there. All that's requires is for Caterpillar to decide they have any principles other than money...
> In 2017, an investigation by The Guardian and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that after the conclusion of the Corrie case, Caterpillar hired the corporate espionage company C2i* to spy on the family and report back on any subsequent actions they might be planning.
... Not fucking likely though.
* Think this was actually the Increment Group, Intelligence Company. C2i were in the same investigation for spying on environmental 'activists'.
fc417fc802 4 days ago [-]
It's surprising to me that the conclusion reached here is "they should use the kill switch more" instead of a horrified "kill switches and remote monitoring in purchased products shouldn't be a legal practice".
mandmandam 3 days ago [-]
That was not the conclusion, in either the article or my comment.
Hypothetically - if you learned that your product was being used to run over people "dead and alive, in the hundreds", so that "everything squirts out", would you shrug and fob off responsibility? Even when you already had the technology to shut down those machines installed, and major human rights orgs are warning of genocide?
... Or would you just argue that your machines shouldn't have had that capability in the first place? ... Do you see how far that's missing the point?
Tbh even that would be better than Caterpillar's likely response, which was probably to try and book even more sales based on the 'success' of their machinery and the pending reconstruction.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4 days ago [-]
More regulation, of course. It's worked so well for guns, after all. Because making more laws prevents people who disregard laws from breaking other laws.
Really, we should just cut to the chase and outlaw murder.
CoastalCoder 4 days ago [-]
I have mixed feelings about outlawing concealed bulldozers.
awesome_dude 4 days ago [-]
It has worked for guns - the countries where guns are a problem either have very lax regulation, or very lax enforcement (because of a breakdown of government)
coffeecantcode 4 days ago [-]
Well, there are also countries like Switzerland where there is a substantially higher amount of gun ownership compared to that of the rest of Europe but very few of the same issues of other countries with similar ownership per capita. Though, that’s probably due to the required service training and the screenings that come along with it. And it being a relatively small country.
fc417fc802 4 days ago [-]
There are areas of similarly low crime in the US, depending on how you go about drawing lines on your map. Probably it is a mistake to treat any country as a single unit in such an analysis.
coffeecantcode 4 days ago [-]
Fair
azernik 4 days ago [-]
So... not lax regulation
coffeecantcode 4 days ago [-]
Lax is relative.
4 days ago [-]
fc417fc802 4 days ago [-]
I think there are several serious issues with such a claim. However I'll limit myself to pointing out that at absolute minimum you'd need to define "problem" and "working".
For example, I'd observe that organized crime pretty much everywhere in the world possesses weapons. The extent to which they resort to them varies of course, but it seems unreasonable to blindly dismiss that as being due entirely to regulation.
awesome_dude 3 days ago [-]
You're right defining problem and working is tricky
Protesting Israel and getting murdered at the protest is one of those "sticking your hand into a lawnmower" situations. Do not anthropomorphize lawnmowers, Larry Ellision, or the state of Israel.
As someone who lives now in Louisiana and with someone born here, we did not know that the term was used to describe mostly white Democrats attacking black Republican male voters.
I wonder if there's any historical markers to that effect.
Also interesting is that "bullpup" to describe a type of firearm comes from this usage of bulldozer.
aerostable_slug 4 days ago [-]
> Also interesting is that "bullpup" to describe a type of firearm comes from this usage of bulldozer.
It does? Can you point me to more information on this topic? I thought the etymology of "bullpup" was far from settled.
genewitch 4 days ago [-]
it's in TFA - "bulldog pistols" and "bulldozer" rifles or whatever. bulldog -> smaller -> bullpup.
if there's some other etymology i'd be curious how convoluted it is, since this makes practical sense. Sorry i have no more information than that.
drjasonharrison 4 days ago [-]
Bulldogs: dogs with short snouts?
Bulls: temperamental male herbivores?
From bull + pup. The firearms sense originated from firearm designers in the United States during the 1930s. The unconventional configuration of bullpup rifles was compared by analogy to bulldog puppies, which were considered "squat, ugly, but still aggressive and powerful"."
genewitch 4 days ago [-]
The article says Bulldozer was a gun, then bulldog was a pistol. bullpup is the obvious evolution for a smaller rifle.
but since we want to argue etymology with genewitch:
> Bulldog, also known as ‘Bulldozer’. An angular cartridge derringer patented by
Henry Hammond in 1866 and made by the Connecticut Arms Co. until
1868 in chamberings ranging from .22 Short rimfire to .50. The barrel was
released by a catch on the breech top and pivoted to the left to expose the
chamber.
> Bulldog A five-shot double-action swing-cylinder revolver designed by Douglas
McClenahan, and made in the U.S.A. by the Charter Arms Corporation in
.357 Magnum or .44 Special. Barrels may be 2.5 or 3 inches long, the latter
being discontinued in 1988. Finish may be blue or stainless steel, and some
guns (usually with ‘P’ suffix catalogue numbers) may be obtained with the
snubbed ‘Pocket Hammer’. They also have wraparound neoprene grips instead
of wood. See also ‘Police Bulldog’, ‘Target Bulldog’.
Bulldog Pug Introduced by Charter Arms in 1986, this is a variant of the
Bulldog with a 2.5in barrel, fixed sights, a shrouded ejector and a broad
hammer spur.
>Bulldog Tracker Another variant of the Charter Arms Bulldog, dating from
c. 1982–6 and 1989 to date, this .357 Magnum revolver has adjustable sights,
hand-filling wooden grips and barrels of 2.5–6 inches.
> Bulldozer A cartridge derringer patented in the U.S.A. by Henry Hammond,
better known as the ‘Bulldog’ (q.v.)
Lammy 4 days ago [-]
It usually really bothers me (not joking) when people use “sinister” when they actually mean “nefarious” or “odious” or whatever, because it perpetuates old superstition about left-handed people being evil even if does so unknowingly.
> “bulldozer” […] popped up in […] an Illinois court case to describe a manufacturing machine that had ripped off a worker’s left arm.
…but this time I guess I have to give it a pass :) Hug a lefty today!
CoastalCoder 4 days ago [-]
That's hysterical! (geddit?)
But more seriously, there's a number of words like that, IIUC.
E.g. cretin, barbarian, slave, hysterical, lesbian. Probably other terms as well, I'm guessing.
I'm not sure it's worth getting too worked up about the original usages of those terms, if most people using them aren't making the connection.
robocat 4 days ago [-]
Too many words have gauche secondary meanings: we can't sidestep every nuance or there'd be no words left. I love me some wry leftfield connotations. Although I think maladroit and dextrous can rightly be left out.
Gigachad 4 days ago [-]
I've never heard this, and I doubt many others have. Feels like this level of word policing is digging up long forgotten previous uses which don't have any relevance today.
dale_glass 4 days ago [-]
Eh. This all seems very backwards to me.
It seems to be a human tendency to want to oversimplify problems. It seems very wrong-headed to me to concentrate on one particular machine than for instance on that one influential guy had no appreciation for the jungle, plus whatever politics surrounded that, plus the desires/needs/etc of the surrounding communities, investors, etc.
Because yeah, the right machine sure helps get wrong things done faster, but it's not like we've ever lacked means to be inventive when we really want to, or just sheer pigheadedness to do it even if it was hard. If it's not a bulldozer it might be flamethrowers, defoliants, repurposed tanks, chainsaws, etc.
If enough people (or a few rich enough people) want a jungle gone, then they'll probably get that done sooner or later with whatever means they can. It's this bigger and more complex issue we should be looking into solving.
hot_gril 4 days ago [-]
I just took it as poetic, not that bulldozers are actually a problem. Innocent-looking machine can be used for grotesque things, which is creepier in a way than regular weapons. That's about it. Idk if that's what the author intended.
hot_gril 4 days ago [-]
ISIS also used bulldozers, notably to destroy ancient cities like Nimrud.
thaumasiotes 4 days ago [-]
> The bulldozer we know today took shape in the first quarter of the 20th century. In 1917, the Russell Grader Manufacturing Company advertised a bulldozer in their catalog: a huge metal blade pulled by mules that could cut into the earth and flatten the land.
Isn't that just a "plow"?
We had horse-drawn plows well before the 20th century.
sfilmeyer 4 days ago [-]
I thought plows were more about tilling than flattening, but I'm no expert.
mikequinlan 4 days ago [-]
A plow cuts furrows into the soil; a bulldozer just flattens it.
moron4hire 4 days ago [-]
It's kind of like a sideways plow
metalman 3 days ago [-]
This means I have to start calling my lucky bulldozer charm, something else, oh well, it's not like it didn't cause befudlement and awkward moments, I missed the sinister bulldozer thing somehow.
ourmandave 4 days ago [-]
Every time the Machines Become Self-Aware and Murderous a dozer is going to show up eventually.
It just takes a while since they top out around 8 mph.
That's a strange statement since the jet engine had approximately zero impact on the Allied victory; the P-80 Shooting Star was produced too late to be useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jet_aircraft_of_World_...
tangentially, had to dig up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37945006 as it triggered the ol brain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVRODdXVI3Q content warning: extensive presentation of lesbianism as some sort of crime. I do believe the sketch is however poking fun at people who do seem to think that way and not promoting it as a valid viewpoint itself.
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/israelpa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer
https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/local-news/2025-03-10/brow...
I was stationed on Guam for a bit, on the aviation side. We had to do quite a few inspections for those snakes, and worked with the people in the article I linked. In three years we found 7 on birds I inspected (a few hundred I imagine), all just before deployment overseas. Those snakes got into the oddest places.
Bulldozers are made with the technology of abundance (like metal and other advanced materials, engines, supportive repair infrastructure, international delivery methods, GPS positioning, and so on). But because the owners and users of bulldozers probably mostly don't understand the irony mentioned in my sig yet, they use bulldozers from a scarcity perspective, using them more to destroy biological diverse miracles like Amazonian Rainforest (or social diverse miracles like old New York City neighborhoods) and then create precarious biological or social monocultures or other problematical things, often supporting artificial scarcity in how the new products are distributed (compared, to, say, just picking fruit off trees in the jungle while living there, or having affordable housing in a city) as the owners and users of bulldozers privatize gains while socializing risks and costs (which in aggregate might greatly outweigh the privatized gains, as a net blight on human society and the rest of Nature). An alternative is to use those same technologies of abundance differently to build a world that overall works better for everyone.
So, the "safeguard" for bulldozers is ultimately a transcendent shift in perspective spreading outward from people who have an "aha" moment about this to others some of whom own and use bulldozers and who also become similarly enlightened. For a fictional example of this happening, see James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
Or, for another fictional story, coincidentally by the same author who wrote the 1944 short story "Killdozer!", Theodore Sturgeon, see his later 1956 short story "The Skills of Xanadu" (a story which envisioned nanotech and mobile wirelessly-networked wearable computing, and also inspired Ted Nelson's work on hypertext and "Xanadu" and so indirectly helped inspire the World Wide Web): https://ia601205.us.archive.org/22/items/theodore-sturgeon-/...
Radio theater version: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08
This same sorts of transcendent perspective shift as a safeguard applies to things like nuclear energy use and AI, as I discuss here: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Also related on global mindshift (a bit simplistic perhaps compared to imagining overlapping fields of agency and priority, but still encouraging): "The Wombat (All is One)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHyH3MPgZDo
This is off the top of my head, not having thought about the bulldozer theme much. Maybe I will have a better analogical idea on this later.
Totally tangential, but today I just saw a blurb about a new book on Abundance: https://newrepublic.com/article/192061/ezra-klein-derek-thom... "Klein and Thompson’s vision for more effective government is something like an anti-DOGE: They imagine a future United States where careful and informed elected officials find ways to strip back the barriers to effective policy and allow the government to invest efficiently in underdeveloped pockets of society. They call for an “abundance agenda.” Abundance here does not mean the greater access to disposable money and goods for which twentieth-century liberals fought. For Klein and Thompson, abundance means a government that is capable of building things, capable of innovation, and capable of implementation at scale."
> What enabled this remote disabling was a practice known as “VIN-locking,” which manufacturers use to prevent unauthorized repairs to their products ... When it suits their purposes, then, the technology exists for heavy machinery companies to monitor, control and even disable products. Human rights abuses against Palestinians and Indians apparently don’t rise to the level of violating company values, let alone cause enough concern for the company to brick their machines
You can imagine more complicated safeguards if you like, but there's a simple solution sitting and waiting right there. All that's requires is for Caterpillar to decide they have any principles other than money...
> In 2017, an investigation by The Guardian and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that after the conclusion of the Corrie case, Caterpillar hired the corporate espionage company C2i* to spy on the family and report back on any subsequent actions they might be planning.
... Not fucking likely though.
* Think this was actually the Increment Group, Intelligence Company. C2i were in the same investigation for spying on environmental 'activists'.
Hypothetically - if you learned that your product was being used to run over people "dead and alive, in the hundreds", so that "everything squirts out", would you shrug and fob off responsibility? Even when you already had the technology to shut down those machines installed, and major human rights orgs are warning of genocide?
... Or would you just argue that your machines shouldn't have had that capability in the first place? ... Do you see how far that's missing the point?
Tbh even that would be better than Caterpillar's likely response, which was probably to try and book even more sales based on the 'success' of their machinery and the pending reconstruction.
Really, we should just cut to the chase and outlaw murder.
For example, I'd observe that organized crime pretty much everywhere in the world possesses weapons. The extent to which they resort to them varies of course, but it seems unreasonable to blindly dismiss that as being due entirely to regulation.
Here is a very coarse overview of what I would term "problem". It's the list of countries by firearm related homicide rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
Sorting the second table (Homicide rates by firearm per 100,000 inhabitants. Latest available year.) by rate is rather eye-opening.
The USA is four times as high as Canada - and almost forty times as high as Australia
Jamaica * 44.706 2022
Saint Lucia * 30.580 2022
Honduras * 28.721 2021
Bahamas 28.538 2022
Saint Kitts and Nevis * 25.207 2021
Ecuador * 22.565 2022
Belize * 22.454 2022
Trinidad and Tobago * 20.551 2020
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 20.128 2021
Puerto Rico * 18.382 2016
Colombia * 18.127 2022
Mexico * 17.497 2022
Brazil * 15.945 2020
Barbados 11.717 2022
Panama * 10.227 2021
Antigua and Barbuda * 8.532 2022
Costa Rica * 8.304 2021
Uruguay 6.807 2022
Dominican Republic * 6.724 2022
Paraguay * 4.803 2021
El Salvador * 4.782 2022
Bermuda 4.674 2021
United States * 4.054 2020
Chile * 3.637 2022
Guatemala * 3.436 2021
Suriname * 3.398 2022
Guyana * 2.983 2021
Peru * 2.937 2020
Argentina * 2.305 2022
Egypt * 2.062 2011
Nicaragua 2.000 2021
I wonder if there's any historical markers to that effect.
Also interesting is that "bullpup" to describe a type of firearm comes from this usage of bulldozer.
It does? Can you point me to more information on this topic? I thought the etymology of "bullpup" was far from settled.
if there's some other etymology i'd be curious how convoluted it is, since this makes practical sense. Sorry i have no more information than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Bull_Dog_revolver
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bullpup
"Etymology
From bull + pup. The firearms sense originated from firearm designers in the United States during the 1930s. The unconventional configuration of bullpup rifles was compared by analogy to bulldog puppies, which were considered "squat, ugly, but still aggressive and powerful"."
but since we want to argue etymology with genewitch:
https://www.archivingindustry.com/Gunsandgunmakers/directory...
> Bulldog, also known as ‘Bulldozer’. An angular cartridge derringer patented by Henry Hammond in 1866 and made by the Connecticut Arms Co. until 1868 in chamberings ranging from .22 Short rimfire to .50. The barrel was released by a catch on the breech top and pivoted to the left to expose the chamber.
> Bulldog A five-shot double-action swing-cylinder revolver designed by Douglas McClenahan, and made in the U.S.A. by the Charter Arms Corporation in .357 Magnum or .44 Special. Barrels may be 2.5 or 3 inches long, the latter being discontinued in 1988. Finish may be blue or stainless steel, and some guns (usually with ‘P’ suffix catalogue numbers) may be obtained with the snubbed ‘Pocket Hammer’. They also have wraparound neoprene grips instead of wood. See also ‘Police Bulldog’, ‘Target Bulldog’. Bulldog Pug Introduced by Charter Arms in 1986, this is a variant of the Bulldog with a 2.5in barrel, fixed sights, a shrouded ejector and a broad hammer spur.
>Bulldog Tracker Another variant of the Charter Arms Bulldog, dating from c. 1982–6 and 1989 to date, this .357 Magnum revolver has adjustable sights, hand-filling wooden grips and barrels of 2.5–6 inches.
> Bulldozer A cartridge derringer patented in the U.S.A. by Henry Hammond, better known as the ‘Bulldog’ (q.v.)
> “bulldozer” […] popped up in […] an Illinois court case to describe a manufacturing machine that had ripped off a worker’s left arm.
…but this time I guess I have to give it a pass :) Hug a lefty today!
But more seriously, there's a number of words like that, IIUC. E.g. cretin, barbarian, slave, hysterical, lesbian. Probably other terms as well, I'm guessing.
I'm not sure it's worth getting too worked up about the original usages of those terms, if most people using them aren't making the connection.
It seems to be a human tendency to want to oversimplify problems. It seems very wrong-headed to me to concentrate on one particular machine than for instance on that one influential guy had no appreciation for the jungle, plus whatever politics surrounded that, plus the desires/needs/etc of the surrounding communities, investors, etc.
Because yeah, the right machine sure helps get wrong things done faster, but it's not like we've ever lacked means to be inventive when we really want to, or just sheer pigheadedness to do it even if it was hard. If it's not a bulldozer it might be flamethrowers, defoliants, repurposed tanks, chainsaws, etc.
If enough people (or a few rich enough people) want a jungle gone, then they'll probably get that done sooner or later with whatever means they can. It's this bigger and more complex issue we should be looking into solving.
Isn't that just a "plow"?
We had horse-drawn plows well before the 20th century.
It just takes a while since they top out around 8 mph.
Case in point: Shake Hands with Danger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v26fTGBEi9E
Obligatory RiffTrax version: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_nqa6e6WV2o&si=d9eX8-vrPEZmd2de
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer
The documentary “Tread” is something I recommend if available.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ehI9Fvbz7Y