FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
29d ago
Liara Tsai, “a 35-year-old white transgender woman”. Body found in crashed car, ex-girlfriend (who, again, likely has mental health issues) was convicted for the stabbing.
In at least this case (and probably several others), the perpetrator was also trans, which in a sane world would rule out "anti-trans animus" as a motive:
An autopsy determined that Tsai died from multiple sharp-force injuries, though it’s unclear when she died. Lewis, an acquaintance of Tsai’s who was visiting her from Boston, has been taken into custody in Olmstead County and charged with a felony count of interfering with a dead body and second degree murder, according to local outlet KTTC. Olmstead County Sheriff Kevin Torgerson told MPR that there was no indication that the killing was motivated by anti-trans bias, as Lewis is also trans.
About one-fifth of the way through Cryptonomicon. The setting and tone make me want to re-read Catch-22, which I last read over a decade ago.
I watched a few episodes of The Sopranos and it didn't really grab me, just seemed like Goodfellas fanfic, a reaction unaided by the huge overlap in the respective works' casts (David Chase even originally intended to cast Ray Liotta as Tony).
I only got around to watching season 1 of The Wire earlier this year, and while it's definitely a slow burn and the huge cast of characters can make plotlines difficult to follow at times, I can confirm that it lives up to the hype. Watching season 2 as we speak.
I was so powerfully underwhelmed by Breaking Bad that I have zero interest in watching anything else Gilligan is involved in. I was intrigued by a column suggesting Pluribus can be read as a metaphor for the Great Awokening, but watching a show I don't enjoy just because I agree with the underlying politics is pretty antithetical to the way I consume media. Weird to think that the entire life cycle of this generation of wokeness – initiation, peak and recession – all took place since the Breaking Bad finale.
FtttG
1mo ago
there has been a curious rush to publicize that the offender was a second or third generation immigrant, usually a British citizen. This is apparently motivated from a desire to push back against anti-migrant sentiment: "See! He grew up in the UK. He wasn't an immigrant! You can't hold this terrible event against immigrants".
I suppose the argument makes a certain amount of sense if you're operating from a tabula rasa, nurture-over-nature perspective. If we're all blank slates with no predisposition towards violence or criminality, it stands to reason that any crime committed by a person raised in Britain logically points to a deficiency in British culture.
What I find frustrating is that very few woke or progressive people actually believe that we're all blank slates who are entirely the product of our social environments, a view which obviously contradicts the claim that sexuality is innate and that everyone has an innate "gender identity" knowable only to themselves.
Right, so ultimately all they really want is a maximally redistributive (read: socialist) state, in which the police force will wither away and become unnecessary. (Even if they rarely say so in so many words, acutely aware that people will look at them like they have two heads.) Kind of makes me wonder why they even bother criticising the police when their only actual beef is with capitalism.
FtttG
1mo ago
As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the underlying flaw in these debates is that what progressives want from a police force (assuming they want a police force at all) is fundamentally incoherent.
Either the police can adopt an aggressive, proactive and hands-on approach to policing African-American (and Hispanic, to a lesser extent) communities, which means more COCs (criminals of colour) getting shot and/or being sent to prison; or they can adopt a hands-off, laissez-faire approach, which means more people of colour getting victimised by the criminals in their communities. There's pretty much no way for police officers to cut down on the rate of violent crime in a community without arresting the perpetrators, and there's no way for police officers to be more hands-off without a huge spike in crime victimisation.
I'd like to believe there's some hypothetical point on the thermostat that would keep the majority of progressive activists happy most of the time, but it's hard to envision what this might look like. American progressives have been complaining about over- and under-policing in black American communities for as long as I've been alive, and indeed many decades prior.
FtttG
1mo ago
No, it's not the same thing. But it's the same kind of weird deflection. What makes you think the most effective means of combatting anti-immigration sentiment is to point out that the perpetrator of a horrific violent crime was a legal immigrant? That's even worse than if it was committed by a refugee or asylum seeker!
Yeah. I'm similarly baffled when I see people mentioning that the perpetrator of the latest mass stabbing incident was a British (or in one case, Irish) citizen (by which they mean someone who secured citizenship as an adult), like they're laying down a trump card.
So you mean our processes for immigration and naturalisation are so lacking that they can completely fail to identify and weed out a deranged knife-wielding lunatic (never mind a garden-variety rapist or thief)? Way to tell on yourself.
FtttG
1mo ago
It would be interesting to find out what proportion of these murders were committed by first-generation migrants.
FtttG
1mo ago
I've tried to think of ways to take advantage of my appearance
Go into sales?
FtttG
1mo ago
The unserious gotcha is that I am skeptical of this kind of "strong revealed preference" argument, because you might say the same about doing heroin.
Why are you sceptical? Many people who do heroin do so more than once, from which we can infer that they have a strong revealed preference for doing heroin. Many women who have one child have more than one, from which we can make the same inference.
FtttG
1mo ago
There is at the very least no reason, by your logic, why confirmed lesbians and asexuals couldn't be allowed to serve.
I'm confused by the implication that being a lesbian or asexual means you don't want to be a mother, or can't find fulfilment by so doing. Many lesbians get pregnant via sperm donor.
FtttG
1mo ago
On Sunday morning my girlfriend and I left our apartment building, which opens on to a little pedestrian lane. Directly opposite the entrance is another apartment complex and a shisha café, and standing outside was one of the most gopnik-looking Slavs you've ever seen: navy tracksuit, white sneakers, baseball cap. We assumed he was waiting for someone, although he'd incongruously placed two full canisters of nitrous oxide on the path in front of him.
We leave to do some shopping, and when we come back a few hours later he hasn't budged. Watching him from the window in our flat, he starts openly huffing the nitrous. I'm a bit put out by someone openly huffing nitrous oxide in broad daylight in a pedestrian thoroughfare with small children walking past with their parents, so I call the police, who never show up.
However, a few minutes later, the proprietor of the shisha café (an Arab man) comes out of the building and tells the gopnik to get lost, which he does immediately. Problem solved.
This little encounter inspired me to invent a new game I'm calling Ethnic Rock-Paper-Scissors. As we can clearly see from the exchange above, Arab beats Slav. Slav, of course, beats Jew. And who does Jew beat? Why, Arab obviously.
When I explained the concept to my brother, he proposed that Roman > Anglo, Anglo > Celt, and Celt > Roman. His friend suggested that Pakistani > Bangladeshi, Bangladeshi > Indian, and Indian > Pakistani.
What others can you think of? Note that I'm specifically looking for ethnic groups, not nationalities ("Vietnamese > American" doesn't count, because the American soldiers in Vietnam were multi-ethnic).
The proposition that the Wachowskis could make another thought provoking Matrix movie is unfounded.
Interestingly, while the original trilogy was directed by the Wachowskis, The Matrix Resurrections was solely directed by Lana. I'm not saying that Lilly's involvement would have improved the experience, but strictly speaking the Wachowskis have not made a Matrix movie together since Revolutions. (Lilly is, uh, otherwise occupied.)
FtttG
1mo ago
Take the internet historians video about the sinking of the Costa Concordia, i was barely aware of it having happened but the story of how crazy the disaster was was interesting on its own without any investment in the actual real world event.
I hardly knew anything about Costa Concordia before watching that video, and I've since watched that video about five times.
FtttG
1mo ago
I heard once that someone wanted to make a movie of it, and I'd be interested to see how the hell they would try.
James Franco has attempted to adapt at least one of McCarthy's less cinematic works, and my understanding is that the results left a lot to be desired.
FtttG
1mo ago
It's the only McCarthy book I've read from start to finish, and I remember sobbing for literally hours when I got to the end. Not sure if I could put myself through it again.
I don't know why I mentally associated Cormac Mcarthy with abstruse James-Joyce-style "literary" fiction
I've heard that this is true of Blood Meridian, but that his style became more accessible the older he got.
I presume it tracks the murder rate by ethnicity among US population as a whole.
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