JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
JTarrou
8mo ago
A motte for the term: The deep state
Without endorsing any particular theories here, perhaps the best way to think about the deep state is that it is simply parts of the government that have developed their own distinct political goals and capabilities, and are involved in the political process in ways that may or may not be visible, legal or proper. In some vague sense, a "deep state" may simply be a function of a government. Any government that remains stable for long enough will develop capabilities that do not require a given person at the top, since the leaders change over time. Those abilities will then be put to use in service of whatever political goals unite that part of government.
This becomes more open and more contentious in a democracy when parts of the government revolt against elected leaders.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Just as follow on, and in the spirit that everything related to Trump is culture war:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/19/politics/trump-voters-of-color-analysis/
Pull quotes:
The fact that Trump is doing considerably better among Republican voters of color than White Republicans flies in the face of the fact that many Americans view Trump as racist. I noted in 2019 that more Americans described Trump as racist than the percentage of Americans who said that about segregationist and presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968.
This fact should be the smoking gun that we're not talking about the same thing that we used to with the term "racism". The american public pretends to believe that Trump was more racist than Wallace.
Indeed, the Republican Party as a whole has been improving among voters of color. The party’s 38-point loss among that bloc for the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms was a 5-point improvement from 2020. Its margin among White voters stayed the same in exit poll data.
This is political realignment from the inside. It's slow, it could reverse or it could continue. I believe very strongly that the political coalitions are going to change composition quite a bit in the coming decade. I don't know what the issues will be, but the separation between the working class (see our discussion in last week's thread) and the middle class is becoming big enough to win elections on. The question is which party will get which side, and in what quantities.
As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?
JTarrou
1yr ago
The Devil in the Definitions:
We talk about class a fair bit, but it's hard to define many of them. Most of these terms are relative, and the exceptions numerous. I've been thinking about what the "working class" is, and how to distinguish it from the middle classes. It can't just be money, a successful plumber might make four times what a librarian or a teacher makes, but he is working class and they are some sort of middle class. An artist might be much poorer than most working class, but they are not working class.
My current formulation is something like this: In the west, the Working Class are those workers whose jobs do not require any college, and which do not raise their social status among the educated middle classes.
What do you think separates the classes? Am I off base here?
JTarrou
3mo ago
Technology as politics.
Feminism is more a product of the washing machine, the pill and air conditioning than it is political organizing. It is less an ideology than it is a set of opinions enabled by a certain level of technological advancement.
Anti-racism is more a product of the steam engine than it is of any moral progress. All of human history no one thought to free the slaves, until one day from out of nowhere.....the richest and most technologically advanced society on earth invented a way to turn fossil fuels into energy and all the sudden slavery and the racism that supported it isn't strictly necessary. Hence "moral progress".
Today, we all benefit from less-than-free labor in third world nations making us cheaper consumer products. In the most technologically backward parts of the world slavery still exists. That is not because those are worse people than those of us who can afford to pay for the labor that supports our first world lifestyles.
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
What this means for the age of AI is anyone's guess.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Naming conventions as class signifiers with implications for discussion of race, wealth, sexuality etc.
I had a form come across my desk today with a really bad name on it. Very stereotypically ghetto black, badly spelled, four middle names (one of which was “Mykween”). The name is too long for the name box on a federal form, so I had to file a supplemental sheet for it. Which got me thinking about why people name their kids stupid and stereotypical names, and what that means for the larger conversation about social divisions.
I live in a majority-minority city, I work with black people, we have lots of black customers etc. etc. There's more than one sort of black person, just as there is more than one sort of every group.
I look around my friend group and co-workers, not a one of them has a name like that. Eric, Dom (Dominic), Reggie (Reginald), Hezzie (Hezekiah), etc. Most of my black friends and co-workers have either very normal “white” names, or old fashioned/religious names. A few have african names, but that's because they're from Africa.
This is because the stereotypically “black” names are more specifically black underclass names. The working class' most serious social problem is distinguishing themselves from the underclass. So they name their kids very differently. And, in turn, if you see a black person with an african (or even better, fake african) name, a political portmanteau or a double-barreled last name, that's a middle- or upper-class thing. Hannah Nicole-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Edna Kane-Williams etc. We see similar patterns in other races, most Cletuses do not attend Harvard and the hyphenated last name is similarly an aspirational middle and upper class affectation. In addition, naming conventions change over time, so what is signalled by a name in one decade may signal something very different later. The name “Isis” dropped off pretty severely after about 2014.
This all brings to mind Scott's parable of the colored togas.
JTarrou
6mo ago
I smell statistical bullshit.
My normal standard of living has taken a noticeable if not disastrous turn. My pay is roughly the same, my costs are a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries etc.). My rent is up 30%, the value of my savings is down 20%, and the cost of buying a house is up 50%.
Three years ago I had a lot more disposable income. Now, all that might fit fine within the "economy is doing fine" narrative, but it doesn't feel fine to me. What I hear from posts like this is "economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies". I am noticeably poorer today than I was in 2020. All the statistics in the world aren't going to change that.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I know some people here are concerned with national demographic shifts, but there's a larger and more esoteric question. Epistemic status: Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey.
If we assume that our current state of understanding the physical laws of the universe are mostly correct (especially with the feasibility of FTL space travel), it seems to me that in the medium to long term, Malthusian limits are a foregone conclusion.
At some point the lines of human population, possible food/power/water resources and our technological advancement will intersect. Could be ten billion, could be a hundred billion, could be much more, but without FTL travel, we get there someday. The obvious answer is to have less people, and there's any number of horrific ways to achieve that, and one painless one. Given our assumption, and further assuming that we want to do this the most moral way possible, zero population growth is the way to go. We don't have to kill anyone or stop fighting disease and starvation, we just have to limit everyone to two kids at a global scale. Failing FTL travel, there is a maximum number of humans that are physically, practically, and politically possible to keep alive, and we don't know what those numbers are until we hit them.
Now we're stacking assumptions, which is always a bad idea. If we accept these two basic propositions: No FTL leading to someone someday having to stop people from breeding too much. This brings us to the issue that the demographics of the world change over time, so when this event takes place will have a huge impact on what sort of humans are represented in this hypothetically fixed future population. There will be a lot more africans in ten years than there are now, and fewer europeans, but in a hundred years, or a thousand? Who knows? If the decision is outside the next few decades, it's very hard to say what the population trend lines will be. People tend to slow production as they develop economically, so the whole thing may be solved organically.
This brings us to the questions, if it happens and isn't solved organically: How long do we "hold the door" for more people at the cost of the resources available to each? Does the shifting demographic composition play any role in your decision? Should we aim for maximum diversity? Maximum resources per person? Maximum people?
Bonus question: Do you feel strongly enough about the moral correctness of your current socio-political unit to want the decision? Every day the resources get less and the people more. Someone will make the call at some point. If we defer, someone else makes it. We have our own concerns, but the Chinese have different ones, and the Russians still different ones to that. Or some future superpower nation (or group of nations) not yet in existence. Do we put the decision off as long as possible because people are getting better over time? Or do we act as soon as is possible because we think we're the best possible people to do the moral calculus? And can we trust anyone who thinks that?
JTarrou
11mo ago
Historical injustice depends a lot on where you start the clock.
I'll try to keep this mostly general, because much of history is under debate, especially about culture war issues, and litigating ancient history for current politics is a fool's game (if potentially entertaining). This phenomenon is not relegated to any particular side, it is rather the method by which fact and fiction become myth. It is how partially-understood history becomes dogma, and drives our current politics and society.
The history of humanity is a history of injustice, conflict and strife. When we look to history to explain our modern world and inform our modern politics, much of the divide between us can be discerned by where we start our "clocks". One notices that, for instance, in the Jewish/Palestinian arguments, one side likes to start the clock in the 1970s and one starts it in the 1930s. Real history, of course, is not divided artificially. Every conflict leads to the next, every injustice to the next. Progress happens on a long enough timeline, but there are enough reverses along the way to outlive any of us.
This is something to watch in ourselves, as much as in others. To think about where we're starting the clock, and whether something important might have happened before that to produce that situation.
To take a silly hobby-horse theory/hot take of mine as example, I think the british fought on the right side of WW2, but the wrong side of WW1. I think the historical context WW2 is completely dependent on WW1, and that of WW1 is inextricable from the Franco-Prussian war, the countries, borders and alliances it produced, and thus the clock should start in 1870 rather than 1913. Anyone who starts the clock in 1913 is a Francophile.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I don't. It just got conflated with anti-white racism for a few decades, but if we can ever end that shit, I think police reform is a real possibility.
JTarrou
7mo ago
This sensible advice will always founder on the rocks of female sexuality. Women do not want to be safe, they do not want safe men, and if the literature they consume is any clue, practically every "romance" novel has a positively described rape scene in it. Rape is simultaneously a hideous crime and the central sexual fantasy.
Gay guys don't want to catch HIV, but they want to do all the stuff that produces that outcome. Straight dudes don't want to get stabbed by a crazy girlfriend, but they definitely want all the stuff that produces that outcome. We are all enslaved by our own sexuality to a greater or lesser degree. Some people don't have much trouble with it, but it's a reliable failure mode of humanity.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I think any analysis that focuses on the internal mental states and thoughts of other people is doomed. It's a mistake I made myself just prior to this conflict, in which I could not envision what could possibly motivate Putin to invade Ukraine. Suitably chastened, I'll restrict my analysis to the best facts we have, which at current point are:
1: Ukraine has held. You can blame western weapons and aid if you want, but the point is the Ukrainian people have used that aid to hold off the Russians. All the military aid in the world didn't do shit for the Iraqis or Afghans, because they had no nationalistic impulse to bind them together. Ukraine is finding and founding their national myths for the future, if they survive.
2: With the recent offensive, the Ukrainian military has proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that they can run a competent conventional military offensive operation, which isn't nearly as simple as civilians might think. What's more, it has worked at least to some significant degree. Once again, you can blame western weapons or badly trained Russian troops, but both those things are realities.
Early on, I was fairly pessimistic about Ukrainian chances in a stand-up war with Russia, and I think the fundamentals do still favor Russia. But we are seeing the cracks in this consensus idea. Yes, Russia could mobilize fully, but will their economic and political system withstand the strain? Yes, they could nuke, but that doesn't solve their problem. They're trying to annex this territory, after all. What is becoming clear is that without committing significantly more resources to the fight, Russia is not on track to defeat Ukraine outright. We don't know if Ukraine can continue their offensive, or repeat their success, but the idea that Russia can ignore their military capability is now dead. Beyond that, speculation can take a man anywhere he wants to go.
JTarrou
6mo ago
you never hear about
Quite the opposite, I hear about it roughly six times a day. It's the most widely publicized attack on the US shipping since Pearl Harbor. Why? This seems strange, until you remember Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos!
JTarrou
1mo ago
Let me illustrate by talking about a game that I was very interested in, bought, and turned out to be shit. This has nothing to do with SBI directly.
For those who don't know, the Payday series is co-op crime shooters, think first-person GTA without cars and with friends. You get heists, objectives to complete, you can do stealth or go loud etc.
Payday 2 was excellent, it still has a strong playerbase despite being released over a decade ago. I played quite a bit of it.
So they announced Payday 3 and I was ready. The initial guff I got from beta testers was that teh game was a bit janky (somewhat to be expected) and the female models had gotten ugly. There were a couple people whining about "diversity" and shit, but nobody really cared if the game was good.
Narrator voice: The game was not good. They made it permanently online, meaning you had to be connected to their servers, even to play alone. You needed a new launcher and a special Starbreeze account. And their servers didn't work. And the whole structure of the game was just......bad. It wasn't fun or engaging. Just a joyless grind-fest with no rewards. If you could even get in to play it, which you couldn't for the first three weeks of release. The relative fatness of the female characters was the least of anyone's worries. Frankly, the models weren't that bad.
The playerbase cratered after an initially decent start. Within a few weeks, the number of people playing had dropped 99%.
According to SteamDB, Payday 3 has a 24-hour peak of just 378 players compared to Payday 2's 31,866
The CEO of Starbreeze just lost his job for his role in this abortion.
And yet, lots of people who didn't play the game defend it against people who did by claiming that they just hate diversity.
It's not about the uglier female models. That's just a symptom of a deeper problem. When you see that in a game, it indicates that the game wasn't meant to be good, it was meant to tick the DEI boxes. IDGAF about the female models in isolation, but I have a very strong association between obvious political choices in games and shit games. I gave the game a shot, ignoring the trolls whining about unimportant things like how fat the females are now.
Now I'm out forty bucks and I have a game that is worse in every single playable way than its predecessor. Because the studio decided that chubbing up the female models was more important than making sure the servers were functional for a permanently online game.
DEI, not even once.
https://www.ign.com/articles/starbreeze-ceo-out-after-payday-3-disaster
JTarrou
1yr ago
Chapter 47 in the Warren Files
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/mary-ellen-turpel-lafond-indigenous-cree-claims
CBC discovered that some of Turpel-Lafond’s claims about her Cree ancestry, her treaty Indian status, the community where she grew up and her academic accomplishments are inconsistent with publicly available documents.
The hilarious combination of white hate and white guilt combines to push affirmative action programs to benefit the "marginalized" but resists categorizing who exactly that is. The result is this sort of thing, a pile of rich, privileged white twits cosplaying Injun to the seal-clapping of the morally righteous class. While we beat our breasts about blackface at a Halloween party, these jackasses are appropriating the affirmative action slots of the people they claim to be supporting with their "activism". These are the people who style themselves the moral superiors of "deplorables".
JTarrou
6mo ago
A big set of questions that much of the Israel/Gaza and many other conflicts revolve around is the use of violence in the international sphere. For this, I will postulate one basic prior that informs all subsequent ones. The international order is fundamentally anarchic. Nation-states do not answer to other states, except by greater power of one over another. They cannot be tried by any court, they can only be defeated by a rival. This is part of what national sovereignty means. Might may not make right, but it does often make facts, and facts that remain factual long enough become "right" over time.
Sovereignty, in turn, implies both the right to engage in collective violence against both one's citizens (policing, putting down rebellions, civil wars etc.) and foreign powers. Sovereignty is the corporate structure of the people, and thus they bear some responsibility for it, to the degree of its legitimacy of a government. The key aspect of any government that makes it a government rather than just a claimant, is the monopoly on violence. No government can claim legitimacy if they cannot substantially police the actions of their citizens, and direct the organs of state violence. Power and responsibility are entertwined. Who is and is not a nation has large implications for who we think is legitimate in waging war.
When we map this onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we begin to see why the problem is so intractable. Israel is a conventional nation-state. They have all the powers, legitimacies and crimes of a normal government. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are not (yet?) a nation. They currently have two separate territories semi-governed by two separate and mutually hostile terrorist organizations. They have never been able to unite enough to form a government, or declare independence, or most crucially, stop other internal groups from launching military and terror attacks at Israel (and a few of their neighboring countries). Fatah doesn't even fully control their own military wing, much less Hamas. Hamas does not speak for the PLO or the West Bank. Who exactly is Israel to make a deal with, even if that were their goal?
Ordinarily, if the power differential is large enough and the terror group small-scale enough, we can use the police power rather than resorting to warfare. But the Palestinians are bigger and more organized than a simple terror organization and they control territory. They largely provide their own self-government at the internal level, even if it is fractured by faction. The Palestinian people have been formed by their resistance to Israel into a political compact that they never had historically. It may yet produce a nation.
This does not currently alter the fact that there has never been a Palestinian state. This is a part of the world traditionally ruled by Egyptian or Mesopotamian empires. In the more recent years, power passed from the Ottoman empire to the British. The british followed their usual book and partitioned the territory between Jordan and Palestine, then tried to partition the remainder before giving up and pulling out. There are strong similarities here between India/Pakistan and the middle east. The bloodletting from that split was far greater in the subcontinent, but for other reasons it is the Israel/Palestine scuffle that has drawn so much more attention.
These reasons range from anti-semitism to the large constituency of educated jews and arabs in the west. But it is also because both India and Pakistan are nation-states. They fought several wars, and state-funded terrorism is ongoing, but fundamentally this is all within the international order. Palestine, neither fish nor fowl, is more confounding. Too weak and fractured to be a country as of yet, they are too big and powerful to be policed by others, and too violent to be tolerated without response. Much of the controversy is because the nature of Palestinian quasi-statehood creates vagueness over who exactly is the legitimate representatives of Palestine, and who exactly is responsible for the actions of (Hamas/IJ/PLO etc). We can hold Israel responsible for the actions of their military, and their citizens, and we should. We seem to differ on how much we hold Palestinians and Palestine responsible for the actions of their elected governments. In my view, because they are not governments at all. At least not yet.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, they have no right to attack a foreign country on behalf of those people.
JTarrou
11mo ago
If by "democracy" you mean the pro-forma elections held with ever increasing participation from the organs of government and the commanding heights of the economy, I agree.
If by "democracy" you mean real mass participatory politics with the people consulted at least about major decisions, I disagree. If that ever existed, it will not for some time now that power is coalescing. None of us alive today will ever see a more participatory government.
JTarrou
1mo ago
'Cause life is a game that no one wins
But you deserve a head start the way your life's goin'
So throw in the towel, 'cause your life ain't shit
No take that towel and hang yourself with it
Life's short and hard like a body-building elf
So save the planet and kill yourself
If you're feeling down-and-out with what your life's all about
Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
(Lift your head up high and blow your brains out)
Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
(Lift your head up high and blow your brains out)
Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
Suicide rates and murder among teens and the power of memes.
For those old enough to remember, these will be familiar times. Let me ask the '90s teenagers in the room, what was the dominant feeling of the age?
I would say that it was mostly a decade in which the youth aesthetic was of depression, sullen expressions, heroin chic, and underpinning it all, suicide. Suicide was in the air from the minute Cobain suck-started a shotgun. The music had song titles like “Hey man, nice shot” and “Lift your head up high and blow your brains out”. Subtle stuff. On the black side of the culture, gangsta rap was big. Drugs, murder, drugs, murder, booty. Still lighter than the white side.
Would it surprise anyone if I told you that the '90s were the only improvement in the teen suicide rate since the Depression? Murder rates peaked in '92 and dropped for twenty years.
Let's consider more recent history. The teen culture from 2010 to 2020. I'm not sure how those in it would classify that era, but to me it seemed like a decade of social media, politicization and gender. The Z discovered a giant pool of suicides (the lowest rate in decades) that they could save with hormones and surgery. They were the first generation to tackle racism and really make black lives matter. The aesthetic of the age is chipper, smug, vague, androgynous. Black culture has moved from the ghetto to the antiracism seminar. The result?
Suicide rates rose swiftly throughout the decade among teens, bringing them back into line with the already high rate before the '90s reversed course for twenty years. Murder rates started rising in 2013 and shot up in 2020. Mostly among young black men.
Death has a way of clarifying things, as it's tough to fake.
One cannot go back to the past, but we would do well to consider what sociopolitical norms and policies might have contributed to that massive achievement, and we absolutely must be extremely clear about which ones lead to the reversal. And no, I'm not talking about Lupus and Jimmy Pop.
JTarrou
9mo ago
There's a lot of equivocation between words like "Talent", "Merit", "Virtue", but those are all vague terms that are not operationalized. And we're talking about a circular set of definitions when it is. As I've said before, because we use academics as our social sorting mechanism, the ability to do well in school is generally what we're talking about when we say things like "talent" or "merit". And the ability to do well in school is pretty well measured by IQ tests.
But is IQ really "merit"?
Wild aggression and physical violence used to be "merit". Religious devoutness used to be "merit". Having an illustrious bloodline used to be "merit". IQ is no better or worse.
All systems think of themselves as "meritocratic", it's just a matter of what they're optimizing for. To the degree that meritocracy gets at something real, it will by necessity fill the lower ranks of society with those who are low in whatever that characteristic is. And this will be in some cases unjust and counterproductive.
To structure society such that intelligence is privileged over every other human trait is to create a very dumb underclass, and to reduce the average intelligence of the working class as many of the smart kids are siphoned off to the middle classes. It also naturally creates a social division between those who meet the arbitrary and changing benchmarks for "education", and those who do not.
I think universities should be required to choose their student body by setting a SAT cutoff, and having a lottery among applicants who meet the minimum score. Completely blind, random selection. I also think that the university system should be radically smaller than it is, and no more than ten percent of HS graduates should attend. It should also be illegal to use academic information in hiring.
Two things are true:
1: IQ really does measure academic potential and should be used to cull the group trying to get into academia.
2: We overemphasize academics and could do a lot better socially in promoting definitions of merit that are not so limited.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Epistemic status: cherry-picked predictions for ego stroking.
We are now nearly four years past the beginning of the George Floyd era of BLM activism, so I wanted to check my initial impressions and positions, to see how I'd done in retrospect. This is from the old site, in the immediate aftermath of the Minneapolis riots, and it was interesting to see how people's concerns and predictions played out. Must have been in a cautious mood that day.....
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gq50mo/comment/fsbmtje/?context=3
Core here:
what has been the result of all that anger and destruction? Black people in Baltimore are worse off, their neighborhoods are less safe, and something like five hundred additional marginal murders have been committed in their communities. This is sad, it's a tragedy, but it's also entirely self-inflicted. It will be no different in Minneapolis unless the authorities come down hard on rioting. Businesses will leave black areas, or close down. Crime will rise, employment will drop. And the people who will suffer most will not be whites or cops, but the very communities the protesters come from, or purport to support.
JTarrou
12d ago
Let me take an aspect of this: Regardless of what any other internet rando says, Christianity is the organizing principle of western civ. It is also indisputably a slave religion of slave morality for the sort of people who aspire to slavery. As such I find it practically, morally and metaphysically ridiculous.
I also think that the shift in the sixties was the beginning of a new version of the old religion adopting the skin of academia in an end run around the establishment of a state religion.
"Wokeness" is just the latest christian heresy, with state backing. Nor will it be the last.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I was reading this article and made a possible connection to the culture war.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-05-11/disney-star-wars-writers-of-royalties
It details a series of conflicts between writers of various properties and Disney, but I suspect the basic phenomenon (trying to avoid paying creators of IPs) is industry-wide.
It made me wonder how much of the specific Hollywood brand of "wokeness", radically altering or combining characters etc. is more about avoiding royalty payments to the established authors, shifting the writing to a writers room, where the product is the property of the corporation. Were these dumb fucking writers so happy to be allowed to doll up their creations with the latest political fashions that they were overjoyed to participate in the destruction of both the IP itself, and also the legacy authors, and for a lot less money than real writers cost? Ironic if true!
How much of this push to "diversify" is being run by the companies themselves to get cheaper creative labor? I don't know the answer to this question, but it would be enlightening to find out who actually owns the intellectual property of a lot of these "woke" shows/movies, and whether that differs structurally from the "classic" or just better made shows.
As the media model of television shifted to the streaming age, I would theorize there was a lot of structural changes that needed to happen. The companies didn't want to pay people on the old model, but young people, new people, cheap people from good colleges would work for relatively little money (well paid staff positions are far cheaper than royalties if your show hits it big). Because they're taking a shotgun approach to content, they need a lot of cheap writers. And if you doll it up in social justice, the kids will cheer for and demand their own economic subjugation.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Existential risk is a hack job for human psychology. Once you can convince someone (especially yourself) that something is an existential risk to all life, why you can do goddamned anything you can convince yourself has even a tiny chance of preventing it. It's "Deus Vult" for atheists. The further into the future this dystopia lies, the less likely you'll ever have to deal with the fallout of your failed predictions. We've been on "ten years to save the world from global warming" for a good forty years now.
My stupid moron religious parents think the world is going to end because people are sinful and God is vengeful. Really smart people believe the world is going to end because.......people are sinful and (AI) gods are vengeful. Environmentalists believe the world is going to end because......people are sinful and mother earth is vengeful.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Ok depressives, hop in.
For once on this forum, I'm really going through it in my personal life. Been a tough winter. Grandparents are dying in slow motion. Marriage is imploding. PTSD is acting up. Even broke down and went to the VA to see a therapist. That was back in January, they've scheduled me to see someone to evaluate whether I should talk to a therapist sometime in May. You know, normal bureaucracy.
I'm in my mid forties and my life is coming apart at the seams.
But lads, this is my year. One way or another, it's going to end better than it began. As bad as things are right now, I am entirely confident in my ability to turn it around.
To psych myself up a bit, I want to talk about my luckiest day. The real hinge point in my life. The reason I'm talking to all of you, or to anyone at all. A dummy-rigged IED just outside Iskandaria nearly twenty years ago.
Just wasn't injured badly enough. Hadn't planned on living. I was clawing my way up the ranks of the pointy bit of the US imperial project. The whole point was to get as high as possible before my luck ended and I bled out in some dingy alleyway or Afghan hillside. My luck though, was even better.
By a combination of the vast sums of money America spends on protecting its troops, and the inferior grade explosives used by the Iraqis, the rocket that should have killed me by any rights instead fizzled. I was left “disabled”, but not enough to feel sorry for myself about. Given the options, of course.
A lot changed that day. My career was over, and with it identity and status. I wasn't going to get to die. I was going to have to live, broken. And be a civilian. Took me a few years to get my head around it. The plan was always live fast, die young.
I had to change. Adapt. Re-orient. Re-motivate. Learn new skills. I spent twenty-five years becoming someone, and then I had to become someone else.
I gotta say, it's been excellent. Even with current troubles, I've had another twenty years with my grandparents, reconciled with my parents, seen my siblings grow up and grow families of their own. Met a great woman, and we had ten good years. I've been happier (and sadder) than I ever thought possible at twenty-five.
This is all bonus round for me. I should have died a long time ago. I've been hurt worse, I've rebuilt from less.
Yes, it sucks right now. Currently at “forcing myself to leave the house” stage, and started crying in public at my boot guy's place yesterday. It's gonna be a long year, but I'll get there.
Life is pain, anyone tells you different is selling something.
Let's talk shitty policing!
The story starts back in August, when police (specifically, Adams County Sherriff's Department of Ohio) raided the home of Joseph "Afroman" Foreman on a warrant for narcotics and kidnapping. Perhaps they thought that the author of "Because I got high" would be a slam dunk, but they walked out with a couple roaches and a few grand in cash.
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/adams-county/rapper-afromans-ohio-home-raided-by-adams-county-sheriffs-office
When they discovered a grand total of jack and shit, they were forced to return most of the money, except the stuff they stole.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/adams-county-sheriff-comes-up-400-short-returning-cash-to-afroman-after-home-raid/ar-AA14IJPa
Reason covered the case here:
https://reason.com/2022/12/05/cops-return-cash-seized-from-afroman-in-bogus-drug-raid-with-400-missing/
And the man himself has weighed in with a music video that is all security footage of the raid titled "Will you help me repair my door?"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
Down with qualified immunity, the legalized piracy known as civil asset forfeiture, and the self-funding militarized security state.
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