HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
9d ago
Apart from the complete inability to politically maintain this situation, it's a good plan.
That's my beef with the left and with Caplan on this: let's import a permanent serf class to do the low-grade labour it would be too expensive to pay natives to do, forever!
The left is just less upfront about what this means in practice, and more self-deluding about 'and I guess we can let their kids go to college? just so long as there is a never-ending supply of replacement serf labour from their home countries so I get my tomatoes picked for cheap!'
HereAndGone2
9d ago
Also, HP did describe the Elder Things as Men of a different age, they were ultimately people and more a subject of awe and fascination than horror.
Yeah, that's one thing I like about "At the Mountains of Madness". Narrator starts off with "these horrible alien things attacked us and maybe even ate some of our dead" and ends with "they're people like us, we have much more in common than with the true monstrosities".
My highly tentative suspicion is that at least some of the political division over immigration is downstream of genetic differences related to the Big Five personality trait of Openness to Experience.
Oh, how nice that we can explain away opposition to illegal immigration by "the right-wingers are just mentally deficient".
And yet, I find myself living in an apartment in a city, surrounded by black and brown people, not far from a bunch of Korean and Japanese law firms and restaurants, and with a largely LGBT friend group, and I'm generally pretty happy with my life, and I feel safe and good about where I live most of the time.
Don't you feel it's somewhat slightly colonialist to have the attitude "foreigners exist to provide me with tasty food from their cultures"? More seriously, how much interaction do you have with those black and brown people, how much are they part of your life and not just the scenic backdrop to "my fun time in the Big City"? Though I guess congratulations on being the Token Straight in your friend group! You are providing them with the same validation as the Korean restauranteurs are providing for you: "Hey, I know an actual straight guy in real life!" "No way!" "It's true, we even hang out sometimes, just ask DeShawn and Chasten!"
HereAndGone2
9d ago
It could only prevent Good from going full Carmageddon on the rest of the team, which is not what she was trying to do.
Which is an assumption as to intention on your part. We don't know what she would have done, which is the problem. Even if she didn't intend to run down other ICE agents, she could well have done so as part of her efforts to flee the scene. This happens in such situations; the Charlottesville guy hit people when trying to get away (after deliberately driving into the crowd), it's what contributed to the murders of two British Army corporals after they drove into an IRA funeral:
Wearing civilian clothes, both armed with Browning Hi-Power pistols and in a civilian car, the soldiers drove into the funeral procession of an IRA member, seemingly by mistake. Three days before, the loyalist Michael Stone had attacked an IRA funeral and killed three people. Believing the soldiers were loyalists intent on repeating Stone's attack, dozens of people surrounded and attacked their car.
The ICE guy was not a mind reader. "Well she's trying to knock me down, but that's not intentional, that's panic, and if I get out of the way she'll just drive off and not go after anyone else" was not something he could know for sure, especially given that she was demonstrably there using her car to block ICE and to get in the way (see @Blueberry's post above).
HereAndGone2
9d ago
While you're not incorrect, for the low-level peasant the roving gangs are more dangerous. Big Warlord in the distant city can send his tax collectors round to seize your crops or pressgang your sons, but that's only every so often, like a bad harvest or a plague. It's part of life that bad things happen.
Unrelated gangs of thieves and small local chieftains who sweep through on an unpredictable schedule, and may happen several times in a row, are much more dangerous since they have no interest in leaving you anything until the next time. This is why people may and do prefer the Strongman who cracks down on the roving bands and then levies his tithes. It's why people could be nostalgic for Stalin or the hey-day of the USSR etc.
HereAndGone2
9d ago
it’s clear that she was pulling back and forth in the car, to variously obstruct and allow passage
If that is so, it should knock on the head the narrative that "she was only an innocent passer-by, driving home with her wife after dropping her kid off at school, a stranger to the city who wandered into the middle of this by mistake".
This entire situation was a mess, but this does sound like "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". She's moving around with the car, blocking and unblocking, and clearly putting herself into an adversarial position. Doesn't mean she should be shot dead, but she's making herself seem like a genuine risk.
Every time I read some reference to a thing I think "That cannot possibly be true, this person misunderstood or is exaggerating or the likes" and I go to search out the original - well, it's not always true, but the majority of the time yes it is, and sometimes it's even more nuts than the reference.
I swear, I thought the Racist Truck was simply a first season so-bad-it's-good episode of Supernatural and then we got a 2017 attack ad featuring nice POC kids having nightmares about racist trucks, and then going through the Transgender Murdered List for the recent Day of Remembrance, I found reasoning about "we include car accidents because in a transphobic society even getting knocked down by accident counts as murder" (I can't remember the exact wording, my brain refuses to retain the idiocy).
HereAndGone2
9d ago
Doesn't even have to be parking her SUV. Silently praying outside an abortion clinic is reproductive coercion and violence! That is the UK, though, so I think even the USA hasn't reached that level as yet due to robust freedom of speech rights.
HereAndGone2
9d ago
Also the queerness. Can't find the tweet, but someone was very exercised that earlier reports were referring to her "partner". 'No it's her wife, she was a queer woman, this is erasure' type of outrage. Especially outraged that there were references to the ex-husband (father of two of her kids) but then "partner" instead of "wife".
Even with the prospect of a newly-minted martyr for the cause, they can't help all pulling in different directions.
HereAndGone2
10d ago
The middle-class white liberal protesters seem to have two contradictory ideas firmly entrenched:
(1) Cops, ICE, all such federal agencies broadly, are fascist racist [fill out the reset of the bingo card yourself] MAGA murder squads and will disappear innocent refugees/asylum seekers to torture in jails abroad and are killing brown and black people in the streets with impunity, because the fascist dictator Cheeto Hitler has no regard for law and is grabbing power for himself and using the Constitution as toilet paper, abetted by his far-right packed Supreme Court who have declared everything he does legal
(2) I am a nice, middle-class, white liberal who is protesting the Fourth Reich in the USA, so the murder squads have to obey the law of the land and give me all my rights and when I get my day in court the judge will inevitably see the rightness of my actions
The idea that if (1) is true, then they themselves are gonna get murdered with impunity in the streets by the jackbooted thugs doesn't seem to compute for them. The only way I can imagine they make sense of this is that they believe "Ah, but I have White Privilege and since society is Systemically Racist and set up to support White Privilege, nothing bad can happen to me, white person, so I can use my superpower for good!"
HereAndGone2
11d ago
People still do it. Yes, often authors do write from their own experiences and yes, we often don't realise the influences things have had on us. But I think if he clearly said "This is not about the war (except insofar as my physical experience of marching etc. went towards plotting out routes and how much ground the Hobbits could cover in a day)", then it's no good to go "Okay, he said it's not about the war, but it's really about the war".
We like interpreting things which strike a chord with us as "ah, this must be about the thing it reminds me of!" even if the author says "No". I remember in Stephen King's "On Writing" he talked about how people were always trying to get at the hidden motivation which caused him to be a horror writer, and after one session of such "but surely there must have been some traumatic formative experience?" questioning by an interviewer, he dredged up a memory of his mother telling him that when he was a kid, he had seen a railroad accident (I think). King said he didn't remember this and only was going by what his mother told him, and it honestly never affected what he wrote, but the interviewer was delighted because aha! now we have the real reason he writes horror!
HereAndGone2
11d ago
Oh sure, trying things. But there has to be reciprocity; one partner can't be the one always asking "do this for me" but then refusing when asked the same on the grounds "ugh, that's disgusting/nah not interested in that/too much work".
And if you hit a hard limit, then pushing too hard gets messy because suddenly you're blowing up your marriage and your settled life over "if I don't get this one particular thing, I'll be miserable and unhappy forever and it's not like ordinary sex is pleasurable, and I really really really need my partner to indulge my piss-drinking kink".
HereAndGone2
11d ago
Except all the commentary from the pro-protest side is that she was there as a Legal Observer, or otherwise intentionally. The ex-husband quoted in news articles says she and her wife were both in the car after dropping off her kid to school. So it doesn't seem like "Wifey was at protest, Good just turned up to collect her".
The more statements issued, the more confused I am.
If she was just trying to drive home with her new spouse after dropping off the kid at school, and she's new to the city, I could buy that "oops, turned down the wrong street and drove into the middle of a protest".
In that case, though, why was New Wifey outside the car? If this is "two women driving the wrong way by mistake", then both women should have been in the car when Good tried to park/turn/drive back.
From other places, I'm seeing them identify her as deliberately being there for the protest:
...Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison told NPR she was acting as “a legal observer on behalf of her immigrant neighbors.”
ELLISON: You know, these are some important legal questions that need to be determined. And I can tell you that there are a number of parallel prosecutorial authorities that could be employed here, including the county and the state and even the federal government if - but, you know, we're looking at the reality of - the Homeland Security secretary has already said, we did nothing wrong, even though there's been no investigation, which is really disturbing. You know, you would think that the Homeland Security secretary would be the first to say, let's suspend judgment and look into it. That's not what we saw. We saw the Homeland Security secretary defame, you know, Miss Good by calling her a domestic terrorist. She was anything but that. She was a compassionate neighbor trying to be a legal observer on behalf of her immigrant neighbors. That's what she was doing at the moment of her death. And she was a poet. She was a mom. She was a daughter. And I'm deeply saddened by what happened to her and her family. And so I think that it is important for us to investigate this matter thoroughly. We need to keep our legal options open, and we must have transparency and accountability from the government.
I don't know what exactly a legal observer is or what they do, but both stories can't be true. She can't be just someone who got caught up in an event she had no idea about and there to observe ICE for the sake of immigrants.
Also, it's probably ironic that "domestic terrorism" became a standard definition in 2020 when Biden was president.
HereAndGone2
12d ago
At the very start, I saw reports or comments that the Charlottesville guy had been caught in a crowd of protesters, was trying to get clear, and accidentally ran into people. That seems to be not the case, but there's also some element (I think) of genuinely panicking and trying to get away which resulted in unintended harm. Or at the very least, he wasn't mentally all there. That makes no difference to the narrative around the entire affair, though.
After backing up at a high speed for several blocks, Fields then turned left and sped down Market Street. A Virginia State Police Bell 407 helicopter, which crashed about three hours later, followed the car and relayed its route to ground units. A deputy stopped and arrested Fields on Monticello Avenue, about 1 mile (1.6 km) from the attack. The deputy waited for backup to arrive, and detective Steven Young came from the police department. According to Young, Fields kept apologizing and asked if anyone was injured. When Young told him that a person had died, Fields appeared shocked and started to cry. Young said that the Dodge had holes in the rear window and heavy front-end damage; Young said that the car was "splattered" with blood and flesh. A reusable water bottle was lodged against the windshield and a pair of blue sunglasses were stuck in the spoiler on the car's trunk.
What struck me most about the difference in coverage was the way the Waukesha Christmas parade car-ramming was reported. In that, at first it was all "a car ran into people" as though it were the vehicle deciding to do it, and no human agency was involved at all.
HereAndGone2
12d ago
Would you care to bet on how much we'll hear about "but guys, she did cross state lines" from the people currently calling her an innocent martyr?
I agree with everyone saying her actions should not have been a death sentence. But with the whole mess around ICE and people turning up to protests and co-ordinating doxxing etc., this is the sort of heated, stressed, 'these people will try to injure or kill me' attitude on both sides that gets people into these situations and ending up hurt.
If you're going to turn up to a protest that has a good chance of being a "peaceful protest" (i.e. somebody is going to start smashing windows, throwing stones at the cops, setting things on fire, etc.) then you are putting yourself in a position of risk.
I don't think Rittenhouse should have been in Kenosha, but I also think he acted in genuine self-defence. I don't think this lady should have been in Minneapolis, and I do think the ICE guy acted in what he genuinely believed was self-defence. There's no winners here. She shouldn't be dead, and this guy shouldn't be vilified as the new fascist racist murderer.
HereAndGone2
12d ago
the guy that will still be a Republican but won't have the media shriek constantly about
Tell me when you find that unicorn, I'd love to know!
HereAndGone2
12d ago
Bullet to the leg easily could kill you. Major vein there.
From "Till We Have Faces" by C.S. Lewis:
"Then my life shall end with it," said I. I flung back my cloak further, thrust out my bare left arm, and struck the dagger into it till the point pricked out on the other side. Pulling the iron back through the wound was the worse pain; but I can hardly believe now how little I felt it.
…She bound my arm. The blood came seeping through fold after fold, but she staunched it in the end. (My stroke had been lucky enough. If I had known as much then as I do now about the inside of an arm, I might not — who knows? — have had the resolution to do it.)
HereAndGone2
12d ago
Why do men have affairs? I think there's a certain element of "have the domestic life where someone runs the house, cooks the meals, we have a comfortable life together, then for the hot kinky sex I hit that sexy co-worker/neighbour/woman I met while on a work trip" for some guys.
One is the support structure of ordinary life, one is the no-strings attached, no responsibilities, we just meet up for sex and maybe some romance and then I go home to my wife and don't have to have discussions about taking out the bins or whose turn it is to cook dinner with my mistress.
I imagine some MSM men are "yeah of course I like having my cock sucked, everyone likes that, it's just way easier to get guys to do it on a casual basis but that doesn't mean I'm gay".
HereAndGone2
12d ago
How hard is it to grab a coffee at Costa's after work???
That sounds like what Mr A wanted (if we can believe his varying accounts) but Dr S wanted "sex first, don't talk to me ever again after". So the loo was maybe a compromise choice. It sounds like a really bad idea all round, but equally clearly neither of them were thinking with their brains.
I've said female and male sexuality are very different, and I think this is one more grain of sand on the evidence pile. Yeah, most women would indeed hit you with a rock if you suggested meeting up for a first 'date' in a toilet. (Some would not! There are stupid/horny women out there, too!) But gay men seem to operate on "this is what 100% male sexuality is like without women to soften it down".
HereAndGone2
12d ago
Probably he is trying to come up with post-hoc explanations, but Dr Stefan seems to have wanted to get straight down to it, Mr A wanted to take it slower, so "meet me in the loo" was the compromise choice. Private enough that they could, as you say, size each other up; public enough that Dr Stefan can't just jump his bones immediately. At least, that would be the idea, looks like Dr S was ready to get to the jumping right away even so.
HereAndGone2
12d ago
I guess I might buy this if he's young and this is his first attempt at "okay I am gay, I want to do it with guys, how do I meet guys, okay there's an app for that" and he didn't know the rules of how encounters off Grindr are supposed to go.
Yeah, maybe he's stupid, but being socially awkward and stupid in that way can go along with "smart enough to become a medical doctor".
HereAndGone2
12d ago
Okay, but if this really was "innocent bystander got caught in the protest", why didn't she stop the car? Why be "fleeing the officer trying to arrest her"? Maybe she panicked, but that's a really bad decision as it turned out.
HereAndGone2
12d ago
starting with deciding to drive from Missouri to Minnesota to harass federal law enforcement.
You mean she...CROSSED STATE LINES???
I remember a huge deal being made out of this in the Rittenhouse case; he had no legitimate interest to be there because it was in a different state so him crossing state lines to go to the protest site was evidence he was up to no good.
Sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander here. If Rittenhouse should have stayed at home whatever his feelings about the protests or wanting to do something to help, then so should this woman.
Not particularly, this seems to be following the usual trajectory of "in five years time" for all claimed World-Shattering Advances. As we get nearer to 2032, I wouldn't be surprised for more 'updated' timelines about "well we mean by 2036" and so on.
I'm not saying AI won't happen, I'm saying the fairytale AI won't happen. No superhuman ASI better at everything than the best human. AI integrated into our work lives the same way email and the Internet became integrated, and for once a shakeup in white collar jobs first, but no "now we have AI running the economic planning for us". Robot factories supervised by four or five humans cranking out cars? Yeah, that's plausible. AI working out how to colonise the light cone? Come off it.
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