HereAndGone
6d ago
I don't think Trump is aware of doctrinal differences between denominations, and he was just throwing red meat out there in the wake of the Kirk assassination.
Well, whatever the reason as to why the guy attacked the church, it was a terrible thing to happen.
HereAndGone
6d ago
To be cynical, and invoking Freddie deBoer here, because there haven't been movies and TV shows and books all about how TB is ackshully a really wunnerful thing, not an illness, it's quirky! creative! unconventional! cool! people thing and it's only Big Pharma Medical Complex trying to force people to stop having TB. Nobody's made "One Flew Over The Magic Mountain" about wicked nurses torturing TB patients with mountain air and health regimes:
The crisis narrative always wins the news cycle. If someone takes an antidepressant and gradually feels a little better, regains the ability to get out of bed, makes it to work on time, and starts seeing friends again, that’s not much of a story. It certainly doesn’t get shared a million times on Twitter. If someone becomes convinced that they were abducted by psychiatry against their will, forcibly drugged, and psychically violated by an evil pharmaceutical conspiracy - well, that’s content, baby. The former story is true of millions and millions of people. But how often do you hear from them?
HereAndGone
6d ago
I know this is a big problem, but why does it happen?
Combination of "I feel perfectly fine, I don't need this" plus the side-effects can range from not great to terrible, plus there may be a dash of "I'm not crazy, why are they giving me pills for being crazy?" denial in the mix.
Same general area as "why do people stop taking antibiotics half way through the course?" Because the immediate symptoms are gone, they feel way better, so why would they need medicine when they're not sick anymore?
HereAndGone
7d ago
Yeah. Mormons are not Christians. But to pop up with that point of doctrine in the immediate aftermath of "people attending a Mormon church were shot and burned to death" is not the best time. I wouldn't do it, and I'm as Torquemada as the next inquisitor.
HereAndGone
7d ago
Re-reading that, it really does reflect badly on Trace. A bunch of people did everything they could to make this fake story as realistic and convicting as possible; then when LoTT did try some fact-checking they made up more plausible explanations as to why they couldn't give exact details.
Having lied as hard as possible, Trace then piously lectured about not fact-checking, conveniently forgetting he had worked to subvert the fact-checking they did. Yeah, sure: "on the face of it, it was dumb; nobody could possibly believe this if you know anything about furry sub-culture". But if you don't know and you're hearing true stories of equally crazy shit happening, how do you mystically intuit "ah yes, this tale must be fake but this one about 'let's change language to chest-feeding and inseminated person' is true"?
HereAndGone
7d ago
It seems like bad choices all the way down when it comes to the question of when should these individuals lose their rights.
Exactly. To treat them, you have to drag them in against their will, medicate them against their will, and keep them locked up until they start responding to the medication. That's a horrible thing to do, but you might have to do it.
Then you let them out, and hope to God they maintain the medication regime instead of dropping it the second they're released and ending up back in the same rinse and repeat cycle.
HereAndGone
7d ago
I mean, yeah. Back when I worked in social housing, we had a client the same way (and same kind of delusions about the government spying on her). On her meds, she was perfectly functional. Off her meds, she gradually slid all the way down to 'can't hold down a job, is delusional, is talking a mile a minute in that stream of consciousness way'.
It's sad. Luckily she never got into any physical harm, but turn the delusions about the neighbours up a notch, add a gun into the mix... and the outcome probably wouldn't be great.
And it is exactly at that intersection of "should there be intervention or should this person be left alone?" Because intervention would probably mean - for Hassan as well - involuntary commitment and being made to take the meds. And Hassan does not sound like he'd take well to people trying to force him to take drugs. But without the meds he's dangerous - or is he?
That's the big, troubling question here. He's functional enough to be able to look after himself, and he hasn't gotten into trouble yet. The problem is the "yet". So long as talk about getting a gun is only talk, it's not at the point of "yeah he needs to be taken in". The problem is, how do you judge when he hits that point?
HereAndGone
7d ago
It reminded me so strongly of Belloc's riff on The Nordic Man that I had to quote it.
Now, he may be playing us all for fools and in the last instalment he'll reveal all - "what, you thought I was serious? and you guys think you are so smart?"
I hope so. I would rather be thought a fool than a knave.
Look, I'm not blind, and this is the Motte, where you are allowed to just speak plainly. It just feels like needless pussyfooting.
I've flat-out called this guy a racist and sexist, and that's what I think he's getting at. He's trying to tip-toe around all that by "ha ha, you dummies fell for my cunning ploy! No, I will reveal the real meaning in a later chapter!" but uh, so far, it's "the real meaning is racism and sexism".
I think I have established my "no I am not a progressive" credentials enough that if this reeks of 19th century racist anthropology to me (and I've read cheap mass-market reprints of old texts so I can say that with some confidence), that is what is going on.
HereAndGone
7d ago
Hajnalis aren't 'white people' and Tropicals aren't 'blacks'
Could have fooled me with all the bullshit about melanin in the skin etc. Are you going to edit that out for your oh-so-important book that will solve all our cultural and societal problems when you remind white men that they are white men and should reawaken to their ancestral superiority?
HereAndGone
7d ago
Oh and if you are just now dropping in and find something objectionable in the post below, ha ha, despair, for you have fallen for my devious and excessively-elaborate device
Oh, phew! Because it sounded way too near to "I am White Aryan Race of Kings riding around on horses waving swords conquering lesser nations Guy and I am sneaking up on A Modest Proposal: The Final Solution for all those pesky brown and black people Tropical Islanders" crossed with "The White Man's Burden, and boy do I mean White and Man".
But lucky for us, all the "them violent, dumb, criminal Tropicals, huh?" content is only a cunning fake.
HereAndGone
8d ago
I think it's a big step from "want a girlfriend, can't find one" to "have a boyfriend who is going to transition to female". One of these things is not like the other. If I want to cook chicken for dinner but there's none in the fridge, I'll cook something else. I won't go "You know, I think I'll drink some petrol instead, it's all fuel, right?"
HereAndGone
8d ago
The seeds of something interesting are there, but it does need a lot more development.
The start actually reminded me of a Cordwainer Smith story, again about having humans in the loop and how that can go wrong in unexpected ways, The Dead Lady of Clown Town.
The headquarters of the People Programmer was at An-fang, and there the mistake happened:
A ruby trembled. Two tourmaline nets failed to rectify the laser beam. A diamond noted the error. Both the error and the correction went into the general computer.
The error assigned, on the general account of births for Fomalhaut III, the profession of "lay therapist, female, intuitive capacity for correction of human physiology with local resources." On some of the early ships they used to call these people witch-women, because they worked unaccountable cures. For pioneer parties, these lay therapists were invaluable; in settled post-Riesmannian societies, they became an awful nuisance. Sickness disappeared with good conditions, accidents dwindled down to nothing, medical work became institutional.
Who wants a witch, even a good witch, when a thousand-bed hospital is waiting with its staff eager for clinical experience ... and only seven out of its thousand beds filled with real people? (The remaining beds were filled with lifelike robots on which the staff could practice, lest they lose their morale. They could, of course, have worked on under-people—animals in the shape of human beings, who did the heavy and the weary work which remained as the caput mortuum of a really perfected economy—but it was against the law for animals, even when they were underpeople, to go to a human hospital. When underpeople got sick, the Instrumentality took care of them—in slaughter-houses. It was easier to breed new underpeople for the job than it was to repair sick ones. Furthermore, the tender, loving care of a hospital might give them ideas. Such as the idea that they were people. This would have been bad, from the prevailing point of view. Therefore the human hospitals remained almost empty while an underperson who sneezed four times or who vomited once was taken away, never to be ill again. The empty beds kept on with the robot patients, who went through endless repetitions of the human patterns of injury or disease.) This left no work for witches, bred and trained.
Yet the ruby had trembled; the program had indeed made a mistake; the birth-number for a "lay therapist, general, female, immediate use" had been ordered for Fomalhaut III.
Much later, when the story was all done down to its last historic detail, there was an investigation into the origins of Elaine. When the laser had trembled, both the original order and the correction were fed simultaneously into the machine. The machine recognized the contradiction and promptly referred both papers to the human supervisor, an actual man who had been working on the job for seven years.
He was studying music, and he was bored. He was so close to the end of his term that he was already counting the days to his own release. Meanwhile he was rearranging two popular songs. One was The Big Bamboo, a primitive piece which tried to evoke the original magic of man. The other was about a girl, Elaine, Elaine whom the song asked to refrain from giving pain to her loving swain. Neither of the songs was important; but between them they influenced history, first a little bit and then very much.
The musician had plenty of time to practice. He had not had to meet a real emergency in all his seven years. From time to time the machine made reports to him, but the musician just told the machine to correct its own errors, and it infallibly did so.
On the day that the accident of Elaine happened, he was trying to perfect his finger work on the guitar, a very old instrument believed to date from the pre-space period. He was playing The Big Bamboo for the hundredth time.
The machine announced its mistake with an initial musical chime. The supervisor had long since forgotten all the instructions which he had so worrisomely memorized seven long years ago. The alert did not really and truly matter, because the machine invariably corrected its own mistakes whether the supervisor was on duty or not.
The machine, not having its chime answered, moved into a second-stage alarm. From a loudspeaker set in the wall of the room, it shrieked in a high, clear human voice, the voice of some employee who had died thousands of years earlier:
"Alert, alert! Emergency. Correction needed. Correction needed!"
The answer was one which the machine had never heard before, old though it was. The musician's fingers ran madly, gladly over the guitar strings and he sang clearly, wildly back to the machine a message strange beyond any machine's belief:
Beat, heat the Big Bamboo!
Beat, beat, beat the Big Bamboo for me...!Hastily the machine set its memory banks and computers to work, looking for the code reference to "bamboo," trying to make that word fit the present context. There was no reference at all. The machine pestered the man some more.
"Instructions unclear. Instructions unclear. Please correct."
"Shut up," said the man.
"Cannot comply," stated the machine. "Please state and repeat, please state and repeat, please state and repeat."
"Do shut up," said the man, but he knew the machine would not obey this. Without thinking, he turned to his other tune and sang the first two lines twice over:
Elaine. Elaine, go cure the pain!
Elaine, Elaine, go cure the pain!Repetition had been inserted as a safeguard into the machine, on the assumption that no real man would repeat an error. The name "Elaine" was not correct number code, but the fourfold emphasis seemed to confirm the need for a "lay therapist, female." The machine itself noted that a genuine man had corrected the situation card presented as a matter of emergency.
"Accepted," said the machine.
This word, too late, jolted the supervisor away from his music.
"Accepted what?" he asked.
There was no answering voice. There was no sound at all except for the whisper of slightly-moistened warm air through the ventilators.
The supervisor looked out the window. He could see a little of the blood-black red color of the Peace Square of An-fang; beyond lay the ocean, endlessly beautiful and endlessly tedious.
The supervisor sighed hopefully. He was young. "Guess it doesn't matter," he thought, picking up his guitar.
(Thirty-seven years later, he found out that it did matter. The Lady Goroke herself, one of the chiefs of the Instrumentality, sent a subchief of the Instrumentality to find out who had caused D'joan. When the man found that the witch Elaine was the source of the trouble she sent him on to find out how Elaine had gotten into a well-ordered universe. The supervisor was found. He was still a musician. He remembered nothing of the story. He was hypnotized. He still remembered nothing. The sub-chief invoked an emergency and Police Drug Four ("clear memory") was administered to the musician. He immediately remembered the whole silly scene, but insisted that it did not matter. The case was referred to Lady Goroke, who instructed the authorities that the musician be told the whole horrible, beautiful story of D'joan at Fomalhaut—the very story which you are now being told—and he wept. He was not punished otherwise, but the Lady Goroke commanded that those memories be left in his mind for so long as he might live.)
you go online and discover that there is a huge community dedicated specifically to inflicting pain as part of their sexual expression
Oh man, this reminds me of way back in the day, an infamous court case about a bunch of (I want to say gay but I'm not entirely sure) guys who got put up on charges for nailing their dicks to planks of wood, and the judge thought this was evidence of craziness, and there was some condemnation afterwards of him for being so judgemental towards adults doing consensual stuff in the privacy of their bedrooms. Because thinking that nailing your dick to a plank is not normal behaviour is so small-minded and homophobic, yes?
Yep, here's the case. Operation Spanner is even funnier when you know what spanner means in British/Irish slang:
R v Brown [1993] UKHL 19, [1994] 1 AC 212 is a House of Lords judgment which re-affirmed the conviction of five men for their involvement in consensual unusually severe sadomasochistic sexual acts over a 10-year period. They were convicted of a count of unlawful and malicious wounding and a count of assault occasioning actual bodily harm (contrary to sections 20 and 47 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861). The key issue facing the Court was whether consent was a valid defence to assault in these circumstances, to which the Court answered in the negative. The acts involved included the nailing of a part of the body to a board, but not so as to necessitate, strictly, medical treatment.
The court found no direct precedent for sadomasochism among the senior courts (those of binding precedent) so applied the reasoning of three indirectly analogous binding cases and others.
The case is colloquially known as the Spanner case, named after Operation Spanner, the investigation which led to it.
EDIT: Oh my gosh, Keir Starmer was even involved back then, as one of the critics!
There was immediate criticism of the investigation and trial in 1990, with the Gay London Policing Group describing the sentences as "outrageous" and Andrew Puddephat, general secretary of Liberty, calling for a "right to privacy enshrined in law". Keir Starmer said the judiciary had "effectively imposed its morality on others" and argued the "unrepresentative make-up of the judiciary makes it ill-equipped to do this". The Pink Paper branded the case a homophobic "show trial" designed to "get a clear ruling on the illegality of S&M sex, especially amongst gay men".
If he was running for election in the USA, I imagine the attack ads would write themselves: "So, Keir, you still in favour of guys nailing their dicks to planks of wood?" 'Unrepresentative makeup of the judiciary' - "Starmer wants more judges who are out-and-out perverts on the bench". It would make Kamala's "government-funded sex change ops for illegal immigrants" seem like small potatoes 🤣
HereAndGone
9d ago
He wasn't a school dropout, he wasn't (previously) in trouble, and he wasn't ugly. Guy who's doing an apprenticeship, is reasonably smart and averagely good-looking can find a girlfriend (I would say "particularly in bumfuck nowhere Utah") if he wanted a girlfriend. No, he's not going to get hot liberal college chick, but "conventional Mormon girl from lower middle-class background" is not out of his range.
If he was living with a boyfriend-turned-transitioning male to female, then he's gay or bi and not looking for a (cis) het girl.
HereAndGone
9d ago
having his deer rifle on his seat still loaded
Sounds like the kind of Stupid Human Trick that ends up with "and the guy was shot by his own rifle" that may engender amusement in those who think hunting is immoral.
Even more surprising for him to be hired; the district claims to have done a background check on him; you would think this would result in them finding out he was not authorized to work and not being hired.
Depending on how well the vetting was done, I guess. There was a story about someone working in a crèche here who had all the relevant clearance for working with kids and still got caught on CCTV being physically abusive. And I remember years ago when I was in third level education where the college hired someone who later turned out to be on the run from charges of assault in Sweden.
So even good checks can have someone slip through the cracks, and maybe this guy used the fact that he was an immigrant to cover up any gaps in the background check? (e.g. "Yeah, I am waiting for the government office back home to get that paperwork, you know the kind of delays that happen").
The story sounds odd, though. Wikipedia has a scanty article up, and it says that he was working as school principal back in 2012. So he was in the US presumably on some kind of sports scholarship, graduated, got (it would seem) a fairly high level of education - and then started work? But he was supposed to be finally deported in 2024? I don't understand what was going on there.
HereAndGone
9d ago
Also, maybe I am dumb but I still don't understand why it helped the AI that there was a manual override.
Yeah, this seems to be the pertinent part:
It can select an hour when an operator will press a key because their relative sits on a boat that will move through a strait the next morning.
But, uh, Dan didn't? Or at least that didn't seem to factor in to his actions about going for manual override? What the system seems to be doing is "how far can I push? what are the triggers that will move this up to real human control? and then will the humans stop me or just accept the bullshit I give them as an explanation?"
And that seems to be what Elaine is doing, out of selfishness, self-preservation, and not wanting to admit to "I fucked up, I gave the system too much leeway way back when we were training it".
But definitely Dan did not press any keys because 'muh sister' but he went to manual override because "hold on, whoa, never saw this response before, this is above my pay grade". So either make the ferry more important and have Dan explicitly do something because "I want the ferry to get through because muh sister" or drop that bit altogether. This way, he could just ring the sister back and say "Sorry sis, ferry won't be running tomorrow because there's a technical screw-up" because there's no sense of bad outcomes if she's on the ferry.
HereAndGone
9d ago
Several pundits and outlets liked making little lists of "possible VP picks".
Politico's list included a gay woman (if we're talking about why Kamala felt she couldn't pick Pete), so I do think picking Kamala was due to some internal politics in the party. For example, again from Politico's list:
Bass, 66, has said it is “very important” that Biden pick a woman of color for the VP spot. She was the first Black woman in the country to lead a state legislature after being chosen as speaker of the California state Assembly in 2008, after serving as an assemblywoman for three and a half years. Before entering public life, Bass was an emergency room physician assistant at the outset of the AIDS crisis and a civil rights activist.
Hmm, that wouldn't be you throwing your hat in the ring as "I will serve my country if selected", now would it, Karen?
HereAndGone
9d ago
Yeah, but that's "have a guy suck my dick or get nothing at all" sort of situations. If the guy gets out of jail and still prefers having a guy suck his dick rather than a girl do it, you can revise your estimates of "really gay" upwards.
HereAndGone
9d ago
Yeah, but it didn't seem to generate that much stress. That's the part I would have liked more development on: so, which of the squabbling AI got to make the decision as to the fate of the tug? Did it really matter? Was the tug doing something naughty, or was it an accident?
Your guy Dan freaks out not because "oh my gosh, if this isn't sorted, my sister will be - " (what? delayed? her ferry won't be allowed sail? it will be the declaration of World War Fourteen and Three-Fifths and any vessels will be burninated and she will be on that vessel and ARGH ARGH ARGH?) but because "Foxglass? what the hell is that?" So far as we can see, nothing happens the tug, the ferry, the sister. Life goes on, the world turns, Dan is back drinking bad coffee.
You need to make it a bigger deal that HIS SISTER is on THAT PARTICULAR FERRY and not tomorrow but RIGHT NOW oh the stress my nerves what do I do what do I do and then FOxGLASS pops up and starts demanding access codes he doesn't have and then he makes a stupid mistake decision and then we need the dual manual over-ride turn the keys at the same time.
Otherwise, why the need to bump this all the way up to Elaine "my beauty régime comes first" Ford? Technical hitch, yeah it's rare but it can happen, put another page in the training manual.
HereAndGone
9d ago
The moral of the story seems to be "Ambitious broad is too happy with her comfortable lifestyle and illusion of power where she gets to boss people around to be a whistleblower even though (apparently) she is the only one who recognises the real threat, because her job is the only thing she's got going in her life" and the AI/AIs/whatever Sinister System in the mode of Colossus this is and the system knows that about her:
Elaine is 50, but the anti-aging treatment she throws thousands of your taxpayer dollars at every year makes her look 30, maybe 26, in the right lighting conditions. She likes how it tricks people. They look at her face and decide she couldn’t possibly have the authority to cancel their program with the click of a button. That’s one of the reasons why she loves her job enough to let DoD mess with her brain.
Gosh durn them agin' wimmen, this is why a Man should have been in charge from the start! (No, I'm not serious, though I did have to roll my eyes over '50 year old woman will toast the world on a stick over the bonfire of civilisation so as to retain her reeeeellly expensive anti-wrinkle creams that are a job perk').
HereAndGone
12d ago
it will prove God doesn't exist (because if he did I wouldn't have been able to predict the end).
I can only admire your steely determination.
HereAndGone
12d ago
Somebody assure me this was a parody. I cannot believe this is real, not even if it was some over-enthused and over-medicated squirrel somewhere who thought this was just gonna do it for Kamala and the elusive male vote.
"I eat carburettors for breakfast". You look like it, friend, and you definitely need to cut way back on them. Try a salad now and again.
(I can fat-shame, I am a Person Of Amplitude myself).
HereAndGone
12d ago
This is why Newsom is trying to emulate Trump on social media. That tone, if you can pull it off, has a certain brash appeal. "Look, I know you're not dumb, despite how the rest of this shower talk down to you. You know and I know we politicians are a bunch of chancers. But lemme put my cards on the table here: you vote for me, I won't screw you over. Some shit won't fly, you gotta accept that, and I can't do it for you. But listen, bud. Those elites hate you and they hate me. So together, we can give those fancy-pants elites a poke in the eye, and don't you wanna see that happen? C'mon, I know you do!"
Yes, the conclusion (whenever he gets to it) is going to be interesting, let's say. I suppose I'm irritated because "Tidus" isn't even a figleaf, oh the Race of Kings all live on a cold island in the far North and the Tropicals are all dark-skinned and live in the hot lands around the equator? You don't say? Gosh where have I heard that before?
Plus extra irritation at the use of Earendil as a pen-name, when he's writing this guff. A quote from a 1941 letter of Tolkien to his son Michael:
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