• 11 Posts
  • 202 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 18th, 2024

help-circle
  • Sure let’s go ahead and restart the pointless argument, that sounds fun.

    The mentality “Why did this person punch me, all I did was steal their wallet, how dare they” is indeed extremely unhinged. There’s a lot about American society that considers property “rights” of the wealthy to be sacred and personal safety of the normal people to be optional, and sure, that’s fucked up on a systemic level. But none of that applies to street pickpockets. Fuck 'em.

    (I sort of suspect that there’s a lot of overlap between then “there is NEVER a reason to assault a person over your property” contingent and the “there is NEVER a reason to call the cops” contingent, too. At least when they are talking in internet fantasy land, I sort of suspect that if someone came in their house and started rifling through their belongings they wouldn’t have this turn the other cheek stance about it.)

    Also:

    Shit one had fake elctric wallets to shock the shit out of thieves and only got em confiscated

    Lol fuck yes


  • Honestly this is a great and perfectly realistic outcome. Of course, assuming ICE doesn’t just seize all the voting machines for the next election and Trump wins by 104% (which I think is a lot to ask at this point).

    If, somehow, we have free and fair elections coming up, then a splintered right from the bullshit Musk and Joe Rogan put together or whatever, and a splintered left because their constituents want them to stop making it legal to hunt Palestinians for sport, makes it perfectly sensible that the dinosaurs who run our government could declare that some form of post-19th-century voting system that would enable a little bit fairer outcome than FPTP is what’s needed. And, when the dinosaurs want something to happen, it usually actually happens, without all this molasses speed when it is merely because of people dying or whatever the problem the regular people are having is.



  • The problem is that with any type of FPTP system, any compelling leader outside the existing power structure will produce the opposite effect as their stated policies are.

    Something like Bernie Sanders trying to drag the Democrats over to some kind of human policy matrix is actually a realistic possibility, but it’s definitely an uphill battle… but there is plenty of precedent on the right for a successful leader just hijacking and overriding the existing power structure and taking it in his own direction, it’s definitely possible.





  • Gee, I wonder why it might be important to have working OPSEC in the highest levels of your strategic decision making. Well, that ship has sailed, and probably cannot come back.

    (Not that I’m in favor of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, I’m just saying shit happens when you are incompetent. There is a deliberate confusion between saying “nuclear program” to mean nuclear activities like medicine which are perfectly normal and which lots of countries do, which is all Iran was doing with their uranium throughout all the middle of the 2010s, and nuclear activities trying to build a bomb. I don’t know how much of what they’re doing is the second thing, although it seems likely that it’s nonzero, but I know that some is the first thing and Obama was able to talk them out of all of the second thing, and they agreed.)




  • Going through brutal things will destroy your empathy. I am fine with this guy standing trial for his crime but I don’t think it was really “his fault” at the end of the day after how he grew up.

    Some people have strong character and they can turn out fine no matter how you treat them. Some people, you can give every opportunity in the world to, and they’re still going to turn towards the dark. For most people, it’s down to circumstances.

    That’s why it is important to create good circumstances. The schools, the police, the meeting places where people hang out, the shops and the structure of the economy. It all has to serve the good, it has to be alive with life. Because the people who are in it will be molded.



  • No idea about tools although I hope you find something.

    Two related suggestions that will change your life:

    1. Grunt Fund if you are making decisions about equity
    2. Have people estimate the total time for a task, rigidly enforce that every man-hour spent on a project has to be allocated to one of those tasks (including the elusive but vital “oh shit we forgot” task), keep track of the coefficient between the two. It’ll be different for different people sometimes. When estimating a project, have people come up with estimates and then multiply by the coefficient. Be transparent with everyone about this system. It’ll revolutionize your project management life once people get used to it. I tried to find a blog post which explains more detail, but honestly, it’s not complicated, and Google is too shit now to find it.


  • Yeah, or just find some grad student. Watching 1000 videos to get a quick sense of how it can be categorized as “justified” vs “not” vs “debatable” would take some time, but it wouldn’t be all that hard. Lots of research things take time. Requesting all the footage would be hard, dealing with all the holes in the database would be hard, basically the biggest of the underlying problems is that no one really cares enough to try to make any of this easy. But yes, having the reality to base the conversation on would be a very nice thing to have.


  • I think that’s more of a cultural thing. The cops who were faced with the Boston bombers were still chasing them when they were throwing homemade explosives out the window trying to blow up the pursuing cruisers. It was mostly just city cops in the big gun / explosive / car chase battle, it wasn’t like some kind of elite FBI counterterrorism force, and they did fine. Some of the reporters who were following along said they actually didn’t realize how much danger they were in because of how calm the cops were about it. I have seen cops on YouTube react with far more fear and takes-hours-to-approach-the-car caution to one random unlicensed driver who refused to stop than cops in the Northeast will generally do for genuinely life-threatening situations.

    Small-town Texas cops from conservative areas, yes, they’re cowardly bullies as a rule in my observation. That actually applies to a lot of parts of the South / Midwest of the US. I mean it is hard to generalize but here are my stereotypes of regional variation in US cops based on observing bodycam videos on YouTube which as we all know makes someone an expert:

    • Deep South, Midwest, Southwest: Authoritarian, often react with extreme almost comical levels of caution to any threat real or perceived, also tend to be low-level violent once the perceived threat doesn’t materialize and it’s just some hapless person they can be violent against. Putting the cuffs on after a tense situation? Better grab that person’s wrist and fold it hard so they’re in a lot of pain, that’ll help make the whole process go smoothly.
    • California: Just poorly trained, just in general a shit show if anything real is happening.
    • Florida: Unfazed by fairly extreme levels of wildness or violence, fairly qualified at dealing with it, also often dicks but not to an extreme level
    • Northeast (urban): Unfazed by anything and generally qualified, often pretty humane and reasonable, although NYPD is an exception
    • Northeast (rural / suburbs): Mostly as for urban, but some are more as in the Deep South

  • This is one among a few different problems with this data. To some departments, “armed” means a firearm. To some, it means a bottle or a stick nearby. To some, it means the officer lied and put something in their report and no one follows up to make sure it’s accurate.

    The mishmashing together of all the different incompatible datasets (which do not cover all of the shootings that actually happen) and then the presentation as if it’s a complete picture is just a big lie to make it look like people can make sense of what’s going on. The total lack of even the slightest attempt to disambiguate justified shootings from unjustified is probably an even bigger problem. Pretty much all this chart can tell you is roughly what the total number in an average year is, which isn’t real useful.


  • I’m not actually sure this is true. There is no complete national tracking of police shootings, and if you look at the supposed data before this graph starts, it’s basically all just flat year by year, which seems pretty suspect. I highly suspect that people are processing the unknown percentage of incomplete and inconsistently-parameterized data that they have, basically a whole bunch of incomplete bullshit, into a single magic number, which suddenly blesses it with the illusion of comparability year by year which it does not have.

    I suspect that the sudden rise in killings starting in 2020, which coincided with near-universal bodycam adoption, heavy pressure from the feds to reform bad departments, serious efforts by the FBI to actually track complete data or as near to it as they could gather, was a result not of increased killings but an increase in the proportion of police shootings that went into the graph.

    I could be wrong. That’s just my feeling.

    Also, yes, holy shit these are some bad colors to choose.


  • Even if you accept the scriptures as credible

    I do not. They include some direct contradictions between different sections about factual events, never mind even the spiritual inconsistencies, which are massive. If you study the history and where things got translated into other things, you can actually see where some of the mistakes got introduced and why, and how particular people introduced particular self-serving parts into “canon” at different points for particular reasons. So no, definitely not credible.

    I’m just saying that, when I read the story of Jesus’s life specifically, the way he’s described sounds exactly like how a real holy man would behave and how I think society as a whole (very much including the church) would react to him: With mistrust, hostility, and eventually with assassination. It’s very different from both the Mike Johnson supply side Jesus version and the Sunday school version that is common in American religious upbringing. In fact they are so different that those three are all simply mutually unrelated to each other. American Christians are just telling the story they’re trying to tell, making the point they’re trying to make, just like you apparently are here.

    I’m not taking a position about whether any of it is true and I don’t plan to. I have no idea what argument you’re trying to start, but I want no part of it.