faceh
9hr ago
Hell, the right's problem seems to be that they won't come to the aid of their 'heroes' once they've been expunged of all their usefulness and 15 minutes of fame.
As a purely strategic matter, Kyle Rittenhouse, after his not-guilty, should have been given an easy, decently paying job at a think tank or some state-level political office, keep him generally out of public eye but also comfortable enough standard of living. Instead he's working at a gun store in the Florida Panhandle.
Nobody expects that becoming a sacrifice for the right's cause will get them any material rewards or posthumous accolades. I would point out that people have already sort of forgotten Iryna.
Vance at least is making all the right signals for backing the foot soldiers. I doubt they throw their people under the bus anymore. One of the biggest signs of the changing times came when an ICE prosecutor with a blatantly racist Twitter account didn't get fired when it came out.
faceh
10hr ago
Leftists always double down has been a known thing for a while now.
The irony i'm seeing is the tacit admission that this video makes the victim look like a hostile interloper while the ICE Officer was calmly filming the interaction... and some are claiming her 'bravely' confronting him is why he wanted to shoot her.
As proof of this, they point out he called her a 'bitch' under his breath after the incident. Y'know, after she drove the car at him.
Dropped all pretense of "just some random passerby".
On twitter I was just accused of lacking empathy for simply pointing out that this video makes her look very aware of her actions and very much not a pure victim of circumstance.
I don't think the right should be holding the dude up as a hero or anything, either, but the lefty impulse to make martyrs out of their people seems to be irresistible to them.
faceh
10hr ago
Not what I said. Firing into a fleeing vehicle is one thing. But if the criminal is aware they can run down an officer without being fired upon...
Its a very perverse incentive, to say the least. "Why not add vehicular manslaughter to my array of charges in exchange for a 2% chance of escaping for a few more hours."
faceh
10hr ago
Yes. Unfortunately "Police Officers are not allowed to shoot people driving vehicles at them" is an untenable position since it basically makes it open season for any given criminal who wants to blast their way out of a traffic stop or chase.
faceh
11hr ago
I mostly see lefties sliding goalposts.
Which is to say, they are 'changing' their minds, but only exactly as much as needed to maintain the outrage.
And if I were the Defendant's attorney I wouldn't want you on my jury panel (nothing personal, of course, lol).
If you care about such things, here's a video I watched recently about self defense law in the context of shootings (based on Florida law) for my continuing legal education credits.
Tons of different circumstances came into it. Both the alleged victim and the Defendant were intoxicated, there was a group of guys against the Defendant, Defendant had bad eyesight, his glassed got knocked off, he was not legally allowed to be carrying a gun into the bar he entered...
Aaaand the decedent had a couple holes in his back. And there was a community outrage against the Defendant, complete with vigils/protests. Bunch of witnesses painted a very negative picture for the guy that was later disproven with video footage.
The Defense in that case go to the trouble of syncing up multiple video angles with sound, annotating it, recreating the scene digitally, and pulling in literal neurological experts to explain reaction times and panic reactions. Hundreds of thousands of dollars expended to give the jury a 'complete' understanding of the situation.
Except it never made it to a Jury because the Judge ruled it was justified and thus granted immunity for the homicide charges. Not the gun charges, incidentally.
So if I did my job right, the case wouldn't even make it to you, the juror.
I'm just raising the possibility.
And assuming it was the first shot that actually killed her, from a murder investigation perspective, the intentionality behind the killing shot is the only one that truly matters.
Anyway, firing off three shots reflexively is not that odd, its very possible its trained specifically that way.
Training to fire one shot and then stop would be very bad habit.
(I was out on the range this weekend actually, and the topic came up whether 3 vs. 4 shots per opponent is the better policy.)
faceh
12hr ago
Nah, he doesn't 'go down,' clearly stumbled heavily then re-orients.
This also raises in my mind the possibility that the first shot was an ACCIDENTAL trigger pull.
You said it. It pays to hold off on strong comments when you know damn well that more reliable evidence is coming down the pike.
I can still believe she might have thought she was about to get black bagged and disappeared because of all the rhetoric about these guys, but we're clearly not dealing with a passive bystander.
All that taunting and indignant commentary shows she was revelling in being a main character in the drama for a minute or two (no, that doesn't justify shooting her).
Really unclear what her goal would have been in the moment, she didn't even let the spouse get back in the car, was she going to leave her behind???
EDIT: WAIT WAIT THE other lady is literally shouting "Drive baby, drive drive!" what the hell.
Anyway, at least I know who to feel bad for in this scenario: the poor stressed out dog in the backseat.
IMO this basically exonerates him 100%
My initial opinion on legality doesn't change, I did believe he was justified in the shooting even if it was ill-advised... but this would probably be enough for a Judge to toss any criminal case.
It is worse than that, given that in one case the killer pulled the trigger after a LONG deliberation period, planning, and full awareness of the act they were committing.
The other, regardless of intent in the moment, did a real spur-of-the-moment thing.
If you're okay with someone committing cold blooded murder one and being let go to walk the streets, but asking to drop the entire book on the ICE guy, I can't do much to help reason you from that position.
I am perfectly capable of forming my conclusions without their input, and I can judge that their input will have a negative epistemic value because they are not reasoning from anything like objective, neutral standards. They will not move me or anyone closer to truth or mutual agreement.
i.e. they clearly do not believe their own arguments are 'correct' either, they just want to achieve some political outcome, and as long as their side 'wins' truth, accuracy, validity of arguments, etc. etc. are not even considered.
No point in having the argument at all, other than to make their contradictions clear.
These are people who consider political violence de facto justifiable if it is advancing their political goals. They consider 'making arguments I don't like' as grounds for violence. I don't want to share a country with them.
My most emotional response to seeing the event, before I thought through the evidence and implications was basically "Charlie Kirk was gunned down in far colder blood for far, far lesser provocation than this."
I do not think I will accept any arguments against the 'justification' of this shooting from any person who dismissed, justified, or celebrated Kirk's death.
Accepting that the 'optimal' number of police-involved shootings is not zero, this is an edge case. You can be critical of ICE and consider this a tragedy but also accept that this is what's going to happen when a significant protest/resistance movement is attempting to obstruct LEOs doing their job.
Problem is the demand will be "ICE out of Minnesota" when there's clearly extant reasons for their presence, and Minnesota law enforcement isn't going to step up to assist.
I mean, surely a decent 'compromise' would be "ICE refers warrants and arrest duties to Minnesota authorities, who bring in the suspects as peacefully as they can, and turns them over to ICE for actual deportation."
If their sole goal is to keep violence to a minimum and Federal authority out of their towns, this solves for the issue.
If the actual goal is to simply not allow the enforcement of immigration law, that gives up the game, don't it?
faceh
2d ago
Yeah, but its even happening with women I have I know from other places too. Drawn out text convos then withdrawal/avoidance when I try to get to the brass tacks.
And I'll go ahead and up the stakes to say "do not use Online Dating, its simply not worth the psychic damage."
It sure feels like whenever you enter a digital conversation with (what appears to be) an attractive woman, there's like 50-50 odds that there'll be a reveal that this is just the top of her sales funnel once you've actually engaged.
No, I will not follow your insta, snap, telegram, join your discord, or subscribe to your Patreon or Substack.
And even the ones that don't... tend to not care that the general goal of such convos used to be meeting up in person. I've heard the term "rain check" too many times in the past few months.
Yes there is the possibility of a big pay out, but it is a very small one, and the in mean time the owners of the prediction market have your money. Money that you could have spent on other things.
...same with a bank.
Incidentally, this is the exact reason Kalshi pays interest on money they hold for you, so you aren't losing out (much) by stashing cash there.
https://news.kalshi.com/p/interest-cash-open-positions
Yes there is the possibility of a big pay out, but it is a very small one,
In this case, the 'chances' of the payout and the size of it are pretty hard to miss, though.
I do not want the Bears defensive line to know what play we're going to run before i run it. Two teams is a trivial example, do we really want to unlock the weirder and more perverse incentives that might come from say allowing Judges to "bet" on which way they are going to rule in a case?
The incentives run both ways, actually.
If there's an outcome you really WANT to make happen because it pays out immensely for you, you can open up an extremely large position against it happening, in hopes that someone with the ability to influence the outcome will see the opportunity and act on it.
This is how 'assassination' markets would work, in practice, speaking of perverse incentives.
"I bet 1 million dollars on a 99% chance that [Victim] will be alive one month from now."
Potential assassin sees this, buys the other side of the bet, then goes and kills the target.
But of course, lets say [Victim] notices the bet, hires on more security (who are compensated with shares of the "Alive" side of the market, they only get paid if he lives), and bets heavily on his own survival.
Who wins the bet? Well, its the skill and motivation of the assassin vs. the skill and motivation of the security team, I guess. An extremely confident security team will buy more contracts heavily in favor of their guy's survival. Which means the prediction market should settle on something like an 'accurate' likelihood of the person being alive when the contract terminates.
But of course we probably DO want to ban these sorts of markets. Question is whether we also want to ban markets that are too close a proxy for them.
Mostly the latter.
But, for example, candidates can collude, a candidate can drop out and endorse another, there's a few ways to nudge outcomes with 'guaranteeing' them.
Hell, a candidate could bet against themselves if they know that their opponent is about to drop some really juicy opposition research but also knows most of it is provably false.
faceh
3d ago
If a standard user spends time and mental energy placing a well-thought investment in a prediction market and some inside trader swoops in and capitalizes, that's going to leave a sour taste and disincentivize them from using the site.
Hopefully that teaches them to expend a bit more mental energy thinking "hmmm, how many people might possess private information that will let them beat me in this market despite all my research?"
Perhaps this is a bit far-out, but eventually these sites could become dominated by inside traders seeking to effectively launder money with minimal involvement from anyone who doesn't insider trade.
To me that's a dream outcome. I'd like to just hook up to an API that pulls prediction market odds in real time (but doesn't TRADE on them) so I have a preternaturally accurate 'Oracle' I can query about uncertain events. Make the insiders work for me, rather than trade against them.
And eventually people will probably build 'insurance' products on top of these markets, which requires them to be more accurate and liquid. "Oh you're worried that your wedding day might be rained out? We'll sell you a contract that pays out 10x if it happens to rain on that day in that location."
faceh
3d ago
It isn't hard to look at a market and go "how much insidering could there be?" If you want to bet into it, that's fine, that's your decision.
I wonder if someone smarter than me could come up with an "insider vulnerability index" that can be affixed to certain markets to give laypeople an approximate idea of how susceptible a given market is to a small cabal of insiders shifting the odds due to private knowledge or access.
Boxing matches being obviously riggable, large weather events being unriggable (unless you're a HAARP believer), and national elections sort of being in the middle.
Does this sound insane to anyone else?
Do you want the "prediction" in "prediction market" to mean something other than "massed guessing" or do you want the price to reflect as much information as possible so users can actually rely on the market price for other things?
I can understand the urge to want everyone to be playing around with the 'same' information, for fairness' sake, and the person who can use that info to best guess the outcome wins, but there's all KINDS of private, otherwise inaccessible information out there that it would be beneficial to draw into the open by incentivizing insiders.
An Nvidia employee could make a prediction market about an upcoming chip, or an Apple employee about an upcoming iPhone.
This information can benefit people who don't even participate in the market to have, is the thing. Seeing that there's suddenly an 85% chance of a new, completely unannounced iPhone being released is potentially useful, and you're under no obligation to trade against that info.
You WANT someone who has some specific, meaningful information to trade on it ASAP so as to update the price and disseminate that info to others who may be able to utilize it in their own trades or inform their own actions.
The unfortunate fact that a lot of people DO choose to gamble against potential insiders is really the only part I find morally questionable. Pumping and dumping and wash trading and hype trains happen all the time in 'regular' markets, though. Should people have been stopped from trading GME during the short squeeze? People got a tad pissed when exchanges blocked them from trading.
A gambler made nearly half a million dollars on the capture of Venezuela's president just before it was officially announced, raising questions about whether someone profited from inside knowledge of the US operation.
The funniest thing possible would be if it was Nicholas Maduro himself, trading on his polymarket account right as his door was being kicked in.
Not really endorsing your post, but there is a REAL problem with women refusing to advertise their 'true' status in any way that might give up the game before a guy invests attention in her. Even being on a dating app isn't proof positive that she's available and serious.
Girls will have dozens of photos on Insta of just herself in various states of dress and undress, and you'll only find out she has a boyfriend after you've been texting sporadically back and forth for a month (happened to me recently).
Of course the wannabe SBs and the OF purveyors want to hide that until they think they've got you invested enough to slide down the sales funnel.
Yet even 'honest' girls will elide their current relationship status insofar as they'll neglect to mention their ongoing FWB situations or that they're still pining over a guy back home and they'd drop everything to move back there with him (also happened to me). Why not, you know, include him in some photos or at least acknowledge that he's there?
A guy might not know exactly what sort of woman he pulled until 3-6 months into the interaction. Its maddening.
When I learned that the Germans used to have a traditional method for women to advertise their availability I got kinda mad that we don't use similar systems any more.
As a result, it is utterly rational for a guy to assume there's a hidden caveat when a girl 'presents' as single but isn't really open about what that means to her. And that means withholding investment until he is reassured she's actually available and isn't about to spring the "please pay my rent this month" trap.
faceh
3d ago
Agreed.
That was the very instant they gave up any pretense of "oh yeah we had this planned since Season 1."
I also question the logic of "the wormhole creates an instant upside-down copy of Hawkins" buttt doesn't create a similar copy of the world on the other end of the portal.
And now that I'm sitting here thinking of it, the properly executed version of this could have made for a perfect Anthology series. Just have a different portal to a different world open up in a different town/time period, and the effect on the locals will change based on the nature of the world on the other side of the portal. New cast of characters, new 'monsters' or whatever, and new time period to nostalgize.
Anyway.
I guess I'm just saying, I could pay money to a hooker and then say "I banged an absolute 10/10 last night!" and be completely honest, pull out a photo showing her on my arm, and this might gain me some status points with the boys until it comes out that she is in fact a high-class hooker. Then all that bravado dissipates.
Buttttt, if I pull that same hooker with my own wiles and charm I can say "hey guys lol I banged a 10/10 escort last night without paying" then that might get me even more status because I just demonstrated value above and beyond being wealthy that can overcome even a working girl's cynicism.
Or so I'd expect. Thus its not the sex-having itself that is the flex, its the "girls find me attractive/interesting enough to give it up for free" part. Absolute social proof.
(for me, I'm genuinely at the point where sex doesn't mean much at all unless its with someone I have a true intimacy with, and so guys flexing their conquests leaves me mildly envious but not particularly threatened).
From what I understand of him, he might be hyper-autistic enough that HE won't feel like the conversion is genuine unless his condition is so bad that he has no choice but to actually take a leap of faith and call up on a higher power.
Or maybe I'm projecting my own faith experience on him.
Either way, he's written a bit of philosophy on this which suggests he's really tried to reconcile science and religion and is like, I dunno, 80% to being a believer.
This whole situation is very unique. Got a guy who hasn't rejected religion, isn't really an atheist, but clearly doesn't follow Christian rules, and is basically livestreaming his final days and stating his full intent to try to get into heaven, and is about as detached and neutral about the situation as a human can be.
faceh
3d ago
I'm convinced I'm less wrong than you are, that's the extent of my claim. I'm surely still wrong in some ways.
If you have any articulate reason to believe you're right, I would view your logic and arguments with interest.
But if not, then I will continue to present my arguments in ways that will hopefully convince the other readers that you are wrong, OR inspire one of them to bring forward an insight.
If neither you nor I are going to learn anything from this, well, I'm satisfied with some third party learning from me.
Good point, although I'd guess he actually had some merit to warrant the position.
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