Iconochasm
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Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
22hr ago
They can also just be headcount inflators to make the manager seem more important.
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1d ago
In fairness to the "Elon is unique" theory, he does seem to be a locus of "I don't care what problems you encountered, we're doing sci-fi shit, so shut the fuck up and figure it out" energy. This doesn't always work out, but it appears to be a load-bearing reason for why SpaceX is SpaceX instead of "failed aerospace subsidy farm #28".
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2d ago
I wonder if the plan (to the extent that any of this can be called a plan) was to throw the nitro, and then remotely ignite it with the thermite-tipped bottle rockets.
That's something I might have come up with when I was 10.
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2d ago
Another incident of political violence happened on Sunday. A man attempted to bomb members of the Supreme Court while they attended a traditional start-of-term Mass at St. Matthews Cathedral in DC. We can quibble a bit about his motives, but it's being reported that his manifesto included animosity towards the Supreme Court, Catholics, Jews and ICE.
Now, you may be wondering if I posted this in the wrong thread, but I did not because this plot was so utterly fucking stupid and inept that I'm not even mad about it. It's just hilarious from start to finish.
The Gang Bombs the Supreme Court
Louis Geri of New Jersey, on the morning of Sunday October 5th, set up a tent outside the cathedral, because he was already banned from the cathedral. I have never heard of someone being banned from a cathedral, and can't find any reporting about why he was banned, but I maintain high hopes that the story is delightfully stupid.
The police, attempting to clear the area ahead of a mass that was to be attended by sitting SC justices, told Geri he had to leave and remove his tent. Geri replied, “You might want to stay back and call the federales, I have explosives.” Quoting that article,
The affidavit said the officer notified a bomb technician with the Metropolitan Police Department’s Bomb Squad of Geri’s actions, and they approached him together. After the bomb technician told Geri that he needed to move because of a special event, he said, “I’m aware of that.”
The affidavit said Geri then threatened to test an explosive in the street.
“Do you want me to throw one out, I’ll test one out in the street? I have a hundred plus of them,” he said.
After being told he would be removed against his will, Geri said, “Several of your people are gonna die from one of these.”
Geri later handed the bomb technician a manifesto consisting of nine pages torn from a notebook with the title “Written Negotiations for the Avoidance of Destruction of Property via Detonation of Explosives," according to the affidavit.
A review of the manifesto “revealed his significant animosity towards the Catholic church, members of the Jewish faith, members of SCOTUS and ICE/ ICE facilities,” the affidavit said.
From another article:
The sergeant opened the tent flap fully after noticing a butane lighter and another object in his hand, which outraged Geri, who then reached into a bag and told her, “All right, if you want to do it, we’ll do it now.”
He proceeded to pull out multiple capped vials containing yellow liquid with explosives taped to them and told her to “step away or there’s going to be deaths.” Police retreated and formed a perimeter.
He was handcuffed after a brief tussle shortly afterward when he got out of the tent to urinate on some trees.
Friends, this is some actual Charlie Day level shit right here. "Officer- no, officer, you can't arrest me! I called time out pee break! You can't- you can't arrest a guy after he calls pee break! What am I supposed to pee in my tent?"
He had "200" "explosive devices", but many of them were just fireworks he rolled in thermite, and others were just vials of nitro rubber-banded to what I'm guessing were the most ghetto detonators ever built.
I am just in awe of this mans dedication to executive disfunction. I honestly think I could have planned, built and executed a better attack when I was twelve. Pitting Geri against the DC Metropolitan police is just unfair; as a foe, he's more in the range of being an antagonist for a Wolf Scout den. But that would cause it's own nightmare scenario, because Geri is a sex offender:
Geri was at a Scottsdale doughnut shop in May 2021 when a woman and her daughter, 4, noticed he was standing in line behind them with his genitals exposed, according to court documents.
The woman asked Geri why he was exposed and Geri told her that she “can’t tell (him) how to dress,” court documents said.
Geri left the shop and walked down Hayden Road with his boxer shorts tucked underneath his exposed testicles, said court documents.
An officer, responding to complaints, arrested Geri, according to court documents.
Geri, who represented himself at trial, admitted he did expose himself but said he did not do so with the intention of offending anyone, court documents said. He said his intention was to “exercise a perceived freedom of attire,” according to court documents.
Geri was convicted by a jury in September 2021 of two counts of indecent exposure, with one of those being a felony because it involved a child, court documents said. He was sentenced to three years of probation.
Geri appealed his conviction, again representing himself, saying Arizona had no law against public nudity and that being nude was a constitutional right, according to court documents. The Arizona Court of Appeals rejected his argument and upheld his convictions in June 2022.
Again, not even mad, this guy is just amazing.
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2d ago
The meat of the disagreement is what constitutes a "bad reputation". At best it's scissor statements, my "efficient law enforcement" is your "brutal tyranny" but you started this with adjectives like "chaotic" that are pure outgroup messaging, and far from anything ICE is promoting about themselves. Seriously, go look at the @ICEgov twitter feed. The message they want out is "We are always getting bad guys, and if you act like a baby about it, we'll still get you and make fun of you for it, too."
That's a far cry from "chaos marauder stormtroopers".
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3d ago
This topic is difficult to break down because people will use "spanking" to refer to both "fifty lashes with a switch to a 12 year old for sass" and "quick swat on the bottom to tell a toddler to stop being suicidal".
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3d ago
It's called code-switching, and it's actually very brat.
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3d ago
see all the hubbub about their (supposed?) lack of respect for due process.
AFAICT, thus hubbub is just bad faith lies. We had a month-long national meltdown over a single missed piece of paperwork that had no material effect on the outcome. When progressives say "due process" what they mean is "continue the process until we win".
I think if you're a legal immigrant, or indeed a birthright citizen who looks superficially foreign, you aren't currently going to have absolute confidence that ICE will leave you alone - or even let you go with an apology, if they should get you by mistake.
No, I actually talk to immigrants, including illegal ones, every day. Legal immigrants think ICE is snatching anyone, legal/illegal/citizen who happens to be brown and black-bagging them to never be seen again. I have had multiple strangers tell me they believed this. This is not an even slightly justifiable belief, but it is the natural result of the relentless propoganda being pushed by progressives.
To an even greater extent, if you are an illegal immigrant, I don't think you're going to be confident that ICE will guarantee you all the protections and legal counsel that you're entitled to.
And for the last time, this is not a justified belief. All data I can find says ICE error/failure rates are lower than almost every other government agency. Maybe instead of relentlessly hammering how understandable it is that innocent people are believing these lies, you could try correcting the lies.
I get the vibe that these are, if not objectively justified fears, then at least fears that ICE are happy to encourage, presumably because they feel like it enhances their intimidation factor.
Then please justify that claim.
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3d ago
"Collins" is an Irish name that fought in the Revolutionary War.
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3d ago
8-10. Most parents put considerable effort into the appearance of "Christmas magic". There's an adorable age where they're old enough to question, but afraid of what they might find out. They'll test their parents and gossip among themselves. But my own were afraid that if I knew that they knew, then I might not bother with the presents ritual, so they pretended to believe longer. And once it was explicit, they solemnly accepted the responsibility to not break the kayfabe for their younger cousins.
If it's something you've been told since before you can walk, it takes a decent bit of development to get to the point where you notice the fact that it's completely incongruent with everything you know about the rest of the world. In a way, it's a method of gently teaching children that the only real magic is what we do ourselves.
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3d ago
I am actively working on finding a spouse with whom I can raise a family;
I swear I've thought you were married with kids for years.
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3d ago
I hurt myself doing hammer curls. Just too much weight after too long a time of not having that particular motion in my routine. My problem is that after an initial crappy couple of weeks, the issue has lingered for a few months now. It's not terrible; I can do about 70% weights on my gym routine with no extra pain, but there's consistent low-level pain to it that occasionally flares up when I try to do things like one-handed pull a bag of cat litter out of a shopping cart.
I think the problem is one of the extensor muscles, on the outside of the forearm near the elbow. During previous elbow injuries, I've had great success working it out with exercises, either flexing the wrist against tension using rubber bands or getting a Tyler bar. But nothing I've found has really helped with this one.
Any advice or suggestions?
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3d ago
Telling kids about Santa is actively good. On the most basic level, it is super fun and memorable. It gives them a shared experience with other kids, and a useful way to offload some of the authority strain of parenting (Yes, sweetie, I am here and can be tantrumed against, but Santa is a cold and merciless god who cares not for your tears, but judges you for them.)
And on the deeper level, it teaches kids that some things they are taught about the world are not true.
And on the deeper level, it teaches them that some of those lies are useful.
Now, telling my daughter that if she went into the basement then the Krampus would kidnap her in a sack and take her to Spain... that one might have done a touch of damage.
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3d ago
I like to think I might do that, but it's much more likely that I would autistically lock in and just deliver the right answer according to the rules of the game.
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3d ago
I think the "chaotic" you slipped in with no justification there is doing basically all the work in holding up your position.
They're projecting themselves as competent, efficient, confident, inevitable, and actually having a great time doing it.
All of those things seem pretty fine for law enforcement.
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3d ago
So, literally nothing you can point to. Thanks, you made my point abundantly clear.
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3d ago
No. And I don't think they need to - to a degree that is honestly remarkable. The barrel scraping people have to go to to find examples of ICE fuckups is amazing. In the videos of confrontations I've seen, it's almost always been ICE agents showing commendable restraint in the face of unhinged provocation, occasionally capped by swift bursts of force when the unhinged protestor escalates to assault.
The simple fact that protestors feel safe and confident physically standing in front of ICE vehicals, doing Karen harassment of ICE officers, and going on psychotic, spittle-flecked rants directly in the faces of armed federal agents tells me that every one of those protesters is a LARPing retard who knows perfectly well that nothing Nazi-like is going to happen to them. In the absolute worst case scenario they get bruised comparable to getting tackled in a game of football. I find their behavior vastly more anti-social, and I lowkey hate the fact that their actions make me desire stricter laws against their bullshit.
tl;dr: Anti-ICE protestors look far more reprehensible and contemptible than the officers do.
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3d ago
I’m willing to accept that I’ve been too flippant over the past week. Maybe that really is a newfound streak of partisanship. But I’ve never been shy about my distaste for Trump’s strongman governance. I’d like to think my position here is its natural extension.
FWIW, I'm not particularly judging about the change. You're becoming more like me, if with a different valence. But one of the things I've learned over the years is that, even for topics that fill me with molten-veined partisanship, there are going to be incidents where my side just has to take the L (even if I think it doesn't change the overall conclusion). And when I see people talking about some new Happening, it's worth at least finding out what they're on about before coming in hot with a take. In the worst case, where it's something that goes strongly against my priors and makes my side look awful, I can always just not talk about it.
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4d ago
Even if it was that severe of a break, a month in the hospital is an extreme outlier. I've known kids who all but destroyed an entire leg or hip socket in football who were home sooner than that.
"A couple hours in outpatient then follow up with an ortho" is actually the overwhemingly most common response to a broken leg, in my experience. It's what I literally did when I broke mine.
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4d ago
Consider the possibility that you are in a bubble. Twitter will show you what it thinks you want to see. When I look at the last "cruel" ICE post on twitter, it shows 161k likes and 10k comments, almost all of which appear to be positive on the logged-out, incognito-mode mirror I'm checking.
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4d ago
The optics suck, you can tell they suck because they're terrible. You can tell they suck because people are shooting at ICE officers. You can tell they suck because city mayor's think they'll score political points by making it hard for ICE agents to do their jobs.
"Yeah, ok, you didn't actually do those things, and I'm just describing normal policing like a total asshole, but doesn't the fact that I could believe you would do something so horrible say something terrible about you?"
No. It says something about you. As does your eliding that, per your own link, immigration is still Trump's best polling policy.
Sorry, you were lying?
A solid majority of Americans still want every illegal deported. The relentless propaganda you are cheerfully participating in hasn't actually changed that. I wonder what the polling would look like if people were asked to choose between an ICE agent doing his job versus one of your trantifa insurrectionists trying to kill his family over it?
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4d ago
Ah yes, how could I forget all the wonderful government benefits that illegals most definitely qualify for. The rest is quite frankly a parody of how other people think and what motivates them.
They explicitly do in blue states. I tangentially interact with the process on a daily basis. And deeper than that, there's a thriving market in fraud and fake SSNs. Things like "free healthcare for illegals" are fucking budget items in California. NY and other states spent billions on free housing, free benefits and free money for illegal immigrants. This was widely covered. The relentless playing stupid about this is honestly kind of breathtaking and intellectually damning.
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4d ago
Oh, that looks like obvious malicious clown garbage. He has a broken leg. Why is he in the hospital for over a month with a broken leg? Unless that is understating his injuty to a hilarious extent, a broken leg is a couple hours of outpatient care and then getting released. Obviously this is a ploy to evade deportation, which ICE was trying to counter with the surveilance, and which this midnight Biden appointee, Hispanic activist judge is trying to shut down on ideological grounds.
You're right. It is a trravesty that that woman is a federal judge, abusing her position to subvert the rule of law for her ethnic nationalism.
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4d ago
We had this argument repeatedly during the "Maryland Dad" fiasco. The best example people could come up with for malfeasance was a missed piece of paperwork before quite properly deporting a human smuggling, wife-beating gang banger.
Napkin math suggests ICE is the most properly functioning government agency of all time. I'm honestly kind of shocked that there hasn't been any proper travesties.
The one I can't get over is Sam Altman going "Yeah, this is probably going to destroy the world, but in the meantime there's going to be some great companies!"
Bro, this is Captain Planet villain rhetoric.
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