100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
30m ago
Great comment and on an original subject.
I'll share a personal anecdote as a means of homage.
I once worked, in IT, on what's called an infrastructure team. These are the hardcore, hands-on-servers guys who actually wire up all of the servers running in data centers and similar installations. I was not actually a hardcore hands-on-guy, but a dude who was empowered, via our bureaucratic overlords, to buy stuff. This meant I spent a good deal of time inside server rooms and data centers not as a technician, you know, doing stuff, but observing the technicians and logging all of the necessary purchases to complete the project. I passed the time mostly with idle chitchat and, for those Infra dudes who really were anti-social, by reading content on the old longform.org website before it 1) woke-ified and 2) closed down.
There was one particularly odd project that had a team of three (me and two other guys) in a totally windowless server room (they are mostly this way) for over a week. We had a deadline and so we were in there for 12+ hours daily. Because of the logistics and time of year, we would enter the larger site / building when it was dark and we would leave when it was dark. We'd then carpool to the hotel we were staying at, usually have dinner at the hotel restaurant, retire to our rooms, and do it all again the next day.
You can tell that this definitely put me in an odd headspace by the end of the week. I was definitely a little friend and wigged out.
On the final day of our work, the two guys were working on something when they (well, all of us actually) got an e-mail from back at our home office. The two other dudes were needed for a conference call about some other project. TollBooth, you are not (sad junior employee sounds).
The two guys can't take the conference call in the server room because it's actually pretty loud. Servers have to be aggressively cooled, especially when you have dozens or hundreds of them in close proximity to one another. This is done (well, at least it was then) by having cold air blasted up out of the floor on one side of the servers (the "cold aisle") and then, on the opposite side, the hot air is aggressively vaccummed down into the floor (the "hot aisle"). The result is a constant hum of fans and other circulation equipment that probably sits around 50 dB or so. You get used to it after a while and it doesn't cause hearing damage, but you can't have conversations more than about 10 feet apart. On a conference call, the other listeners would think you were in a wind tunnel.
So the others leave to take their conference call and I pull up longform or something. For about five minutes, I'm content. Hanging out on the company dime, more or less. Then, in an instant, I am filled with a palpable sense of dread. There is no proximate cause. Nothing was on fire or damaged. No e-mails foretelling doom had entered my inbox. But I was on the verge of legitimate panic.
I believe this was an episode of real life liminal horror. I was alone in a windowless computer cube with an omnipresent inhuman sound that actively suppressed basic human conversation. I had been in this room for a week, but only exited to darkness and yet another kind of liminal space (the hotel). Nothing in this space was human. No running water, no food, no bathrooms (not technically true as they were just down the hall outside of the server room, and we had been using them all week, but still). It was blinky lights, copper wires, the knowledge that an absolutely turbo-lethal amount of electricity was flowing over every inch of the room, and the sound, the sound, the sound.
Fortunately, I bravely endured got my fucking shit back together. I think I got up and used the bathroom and just that 20 seconds of movement shook me out of the headspace I was in. Other dudes finished their conference call, came back in with a pair of shrugs, and we finished up the day and the project.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
Unnecessary antagonism aside, this is actually a pretty good scissor statement.
Because my answer is an unqualified "Yes."
If someone hit me with a car twice, I would view that as 2x assault with a deadly weapon. In terms of the next course of action, reasonable people can disagree over whether or not they would flee or try to "de-escalate" (whatever the hell that means), but the justification for self-defense - up to and including lethal force - is now, in my mind, undoubtedly present.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15hr ago
self_made did share links as well.
Continuing downthread, there are actually a bunch of video links. Shame on me for not reading more before posting and the re-editing. But now, it's all a little messy, so I'm just going to send out a blanket "Great job, everyone. Terrrrrr-ific!"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15hr ago
(Branching off the main debates about good shoot / bad shoot).
Viral Verbal Videography
I watched this entire video: https://x.com/JoshEakle/status/2008970977699639681.
The most relevant bits to the shooting are in the first thirty seconds. Then it is almost four additional minutes of nothing in terms of actual events, but a lot in terms of both literal and figurative background noise in the culture war context.
This is four minutes of high volume emotionalization and righteous indignation. The principal videographer here literally goes through cycles of yelling "What the fuck / what the actual fuck?", "Shame! Shame!" (I mean this literally), and "Do you have a conscience?"
Another common motif is someone, definitely male, elsewhere in the background doing a primal scream of "MURDERERS!" every so often. It's impressive in its sensationality.
I don't know just what to make of this. My immediate reaction to this was one of insufferability. When a person's vocalized response to these kind of events is "what the fuck? what the actual fuck?", it betrays a kind of chronic online-ness that I used to think was somewhat apocryphal. The origin of "what the actual fuck" is a bit obscure but we know that it definitely originated in a highly online context and was almost certainly intended to be sarcastically hilarious in its usage. I can remember videos of 9/11 where people are repeating, without full awareness, "oh my god" again and again. That kind of honest emotional reaction actually still hits me hard because, well, it's coming from somewhere genuine, isn't performative, and uses a vocabulary (religious) that really is mostly reserved - when earnest - for "big" moments. Turning "what the actual fuck" into a kind of emotional war cry cheapened the whole thing from the get go.
My nucleus of a theory is that this kind of outrage is some proportion of performativity and some proportion of a kind of programmed earnestness. The principal videographer knows that in this context she is not only permitted but expected to dial the histrionics up to 11. Maybe even 22 because she is recording everything with the foreknowledge that she'll post this to social media later. It seems to be she had a kind of emotional impact and righteous indignation checklist - shock and horror ("what the (actual) fuck"), public shaming ("shame! shame!" combined with off-screen guys "murderers!" yell), and finally moral grandstanding ("do you have a conscience?").
In the social media world, it isn't so much about you being present at an event so much as recording that you were present at an event and pre-rendering what you think should be your future reactions to that event in real time. The benign version of this is simply taking a video selfie and some concert or major sporting event with something like a caption reading "is this actually happening?" Your "disbelief" is actually a kind of self-effacing professional of modesty paired with a "highest of highs" in terms of transcendental enjoyment. But, on the dark side, you have videos like the one linked at the top of this post; Immediately turning the death of a human into an opportunity to demonstrate Right Think (at the loudest possible volume).
Part of me did think, at one point, that this is all in my own Turbo Autist head. I'm just over indexing on linguistic things because of a nerdy interest in that field. But the spell was broken just seconds before the video ends when the principal videographer says, to someone off camera;
"You okay, mami?" In a drastically different tone of voice. The spell was broken. She knew she had done her duty to The Cause and captured it on video, now, it was back to hanging out with her best girlies.
She just forgot to stop recording.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15hr ago
"We should look to interactions with the mentally unwell as a gauge for our evaluation of police conduct" is a hell of an argument.
Certainly, for serious crimes like murder or even robbery, there's enough of a problem with a successful escape that the outcome preference should be capture > death > escape.
And then an explicit recommendation against due process. Huh.
So, okay. Take that situation and make me a better runner, so that I could outrun the police. Is it warranted for the police to shoot me?
No one is making this argument. Not even implicitly. This is strawman and conflation dialed up to 10.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15hr ago
I don't think a lot of people understand how dangerous vehicles are due to being around cars all the time. Due to their size, even at a small speed it can do significant damage to the human body.
Yep.
Although it's rough to watch, you can check out videos of things like "trailer hitch fails" to see just how dangerous a "slow moving" SUV / truck can be. Knees folding like car tables, multiple surgeries type of things.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
I think that you will be hard-pressed to find a demographic less likely to shoot a person than middle-aged urban white women. Also
+1 for constant profiling by law enforcement. I am not being sarcastic.
Fuckwit B, having previously been hit by a car driven by another suspect in the line of duty, decided it would be a great idea to again stand in the path of a suspect's car, thereby turning any escape attempt into an assault with a deadly weapon. Rather than brandishing his weapon and making his threat explicit, he waited for her to move the car forward. At that point, he drew his gun and shot her, an act which would not have saved him if she had aimed for him. By the time he fired his shots, he was already out of danger.
Again, this falls into the trap of "why didn't the cop just have 100% perfect awareness of the entire situation, perfect emotional control, and ninja like reflexes!"
When someone fails to obey repeated police commands, police have to default to treating them as hostile. When that same person them, immediately and without hesitation, engages in dangerous behavior, lethal force is now on the table. When all of this happens within ~ 5 seconds, it's just a dice roll of who ends up injured or dead.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
We can't just go around shooting women if they can't make K-Turns quickly enough.
My High School driving instructor would like to respectfully disagree with you.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
Where gay men have deviant sex with one another, straight men are balls deep in weirdo niche porn and gooning for hours.
Degeneracy finds a way. There's still a case to be made that solo, self-destroying degeneracy is Less Wrong (lulz) than inducing others to degeneracy with you.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
See also: Taliban fighters complain about having to work in an office instead of waging jihad.
Bro.
I feel their pain.
A final question: will the shooter be charged with a state crime in Minnesota and will he be able to avoid that charge? Could we run into a Chauvin type situation here?
No. The Chauvin example is actually the wildly unlikely scenario. As it always has been.
1. Can we get some links to full videos that aren't on Mass Media website? Navigating those with all of their ads and popus - even with AdBlocker - is a nightmare. The first one I saw, also, was only a clip of about the final ten seconds.
Here are good links to multiple angles of the video. @self_made_human posted them downthread:
Angle 3 (Emerged as I was writing this)
- Hard disagree on your assessment of the culpability of the shooter. When the car starts moving (i.e. the driver doesn't kill the engine and present their hands), this is pretty much brandishing a deadly weapon. At point blank, the cop is justified 100%. I've posted before about how people really overestimate the ability to "think rationally" in situations like this. You default to a lot of training / muscle memory / self-preservation instincts. Again, go watch some police bodycam videos on YouTube to understand how quick things can turn from ho-hum traffic stop to shots fired.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
100% Agree and Simon is the kind of "lefty" that I will spend extra time and effort trying to engage with because of his own self-discipline and refusing to adopt the easy but wrong (and, worse, intentionally deceptive) sentiments of the woke / progressive sphere.
But the class lens is still a difficult circle to square because of its high dependence on chronology. In Season 2 of the Wire, we're exposed to the plight of the dying dockworker industry in Baltimore. These are quite literally the almost mythical "working class" of the 1950s and 1960s who, on one high school education level income, could buy a home, a car, raise 3 - 5 kids (the Polish are Catholic!), enjoy BBQs and little league etc. They did this through comically illegal political patronage, state sanctioned segregation, and, following that program's demise, strongly self-enforced neighborhood segregation. If ever there was something like "systemic racism" and an "oppressor class", it was boldly exemplified by just these sort.
But in the early 2000s, they're so economically displaced that a major subplot of Season 2 is how the younger generation (Nicky and Ziggy) involve themselves willingly in the drug trade in order to (again, literally) move out of their parents' basements.
So, where exactly is my sympathy supposed to lie with these classes? Sure, rich people are always generically evil in some sense or another. But where does one class begin and end? Where does one single group of the same people (i.e. Frank Sabotka) stop being oppressor and become oppressed (or vice versa?)
This is one of my macro problems with the broadest possible "left" - despite their professed hatred of hierarchy and social group demarcation, they explicitly base their worldview on a static grouping of people based on criteria that is inherently dynamic! They even build wild hacks to get around this by creating mental "concepts" like "poverty mindset" and "whiteness is a state of mind."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
This is an excellent point! If the insider doesn't have knowledge of a fait accompli already, then it still is somewhat probabilistic. Here, I guess, it depends a LOT on how the market resolution mechanism is built - i.e. "Attempt to depose Maduro" versus "Maduro actually deposed."
Still in all, broacasting insider info too early or too broadly may defeat its value!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
Markets only exist if you have enough buyers are sellers. There is no one forcing people to bid into the Maduro strike market.
It's a little trite but it's also rite right; don't play in markets that have a strong "insider-ability"
Except that she knew they were ICE agents.
In the longer videos, you can see her hand "waiving through" the ICE vehicles before she is approached. She knew who they were and knew what she was doing. Perhaps she did freak out and panic when she realized the ICE agents weren't going to play nice anymore, but it's not possible to plead ignorance and "scary masked men."
More generally, a reasonable reading of the context suggests almost beyond doubt that these are cops. It's the middle of the day, they have lights on, there's a bunch of people with cameras filming what the guys with guns are doing. If this was actually some sort of impersonation of an officer or actual bad masked men (terrorists? chechens?), it seems less than likely they'd be so nonchalant about their terroristing being filmed by bystanders.
The "I got scared so I ran" defense is one of the most commonly trotted out by those that are the most comically guilty - and aware of the guilt. It's a retreat to infancy and a desperate spasm designed to cast of any and all responsibility whatsoever. It's not quite as bald faced as a temporary insanity plea, but it's in the same ballpark.
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