NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
Not only that, Biden has derided them over manufactured outrage. There was a still shot of a mounted CBP agent in the river with people crossing the border, with the agent spinning his reins to control his horse. The media promulgated this as "border patrol agent whips migrants." Biden personally said that the agents involved "will pay" for their actions: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/us/politics/biden-border-patrol-haitian-migrants.html
So they're really not enthused about not doing the job they signed up for, to help a President that wants them to pay for things they never did.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
As others have pointed out, there's some sleight of hand in what people mean when the say "homeless" and what the causal factors in those populations are.
When people talk about San Francisco having homelessness problems, they aren't talking about people that merely lack a fixed address. They're talking about the people living in and defecating on the streets, frequently deranged. People that have defected entirely on societal norms.
Cities like Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle have much higher amounts of these total defectors than other cities. The relevant difference between these and other cities is that total defectors are more or less tolerated in those cities. You can build permanent structures on public land and nothing bad will happen. At worst, something bad like a murder happens at the camp and then you'll be kicked out and lose the materials you likely stole to construct your building. You can do drugs openly. At the moment Seattle Police aren't even legally capable of arresting people for drug possession and public drug use.
I don't know if this environment creates total defectors or merely attracts them, it's probably some combination.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
Excepting the death penalty, I've also taken a wholesale shift rightward. I used to hold a statewide elected office in the youth wing of the Democratic Party. The riots of 2020 and Democratic responses to them, COVID, gender ideology, racial politics, and a few other things have completely shifted my political outlook.
I used to be an atheist and now I'm on the path to Catholic baptism. The last few years have been an absolutely wild ride.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
I'm reading N.S. Lyon's magnificent piece, The China Convergence, and I'm reminded of one of the distinctions he makes. Rule by law versus rule of law. In the latter the law itself is the arbiter of justice. It has no biases not contained in its words, neutral parties merely apply the law to the facts and a result nearly produces itself.
In the former, rule by law, the law is a tool for the ruling class to enforce its will. Exceptions in both directions are expected. It's the ruling class that gave the law its power, and they can take it away or modify it as they see fit.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Autism is another example, women with autism/aspergers didn't match the DSM criteria which were designed around mostly male subjects, and took a while to be recognized and receive treatment at the same rates.
Tangential, but I find this strange. It's a condition that we don't know the cause of, nor is there anything like a lab test or imaging to confirm it. It's all based on observed behavior.
For males there's one set of behaviors that are used to confirm diagnosis, and for females another.
How can you make the determination that this is actually the same condition?
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
We see it now that folks on the left have a fond nostalgia for the dawn of the social movements of the 60s, and never mention where those ideas ended up: Jonestown, NAMBLA, Black Panther Party and its spin-offs torturing and assassinating one another, bombings, kidnappings, Foucault fucking little boys bent over headstones in Algerian cemeteries.
The country rejected the leftist social revolution when it elected Reagan, and that seemed to give permission to much of the left to forget the excesses, focus their hate on Reagan, and wish for another Woodstock.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
I saw on observation on Twitter that even the worst riots have about a five day lifespan. Watts, Newark, Rodney King, and so forth would all burn out as the rioters basically got tired of rioting. Something with staying power beyond that would be something worth worrying may become more than a riot.
That casts the 2020 riots in a different light. While most of the individual riots didn't have staying power, a few did. The assaults on the federal courthouse in Portland happened every night for about three months. CHAZ/CHOP lasted about three weeks.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
A Catholic news site I followed kind of posted about the same topic today. Nothign to do with Catholicism, the author is just an Anglophile:
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/a-perfect-week-ironic-invites-and
There’s scandal in the air in London.
The country’s chief spy, the head of MI6, has found himself front page news, along with the head of the British civil service, who has been hauled before a parliamentary committee to answer questions, under pain of perjury.
The scandal reaches further still into the upper echelons of the establishment, implicating members of the cabinet. Even the King has been named.
Pressure is mounting on those tainted, and the tone in the media is approaching full-blown McCarthyite paranoia.
From the outside looking in, you might well assume a dangerous threat to national security has been unearthed — a spy ring worthy of a le Carré novel, or conspiracy of McCarrick-level proportions. But, at least in the eyes of some, it’s actually worse than that.
All these men, and they are all men, stand accused of belonging to the Garrick, a somewhat famous, and famously men-only, private London club, after the membership rolls were obtained and published by the Guardian newspaper.
The Garrick, founded in 1831, is what in London is commonly called a “gentlemen’s club,” a term which I gather means something rather different and less genteel over here in America.
It’s one of a handful of such places that have survived into the third millennium, long past their heyday of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
They once flourished as places for men (yes, men) of different sections of society to meet, eat, drink, and sleep it all off in town. Each club has (had) its own core constituency, be it the military, the literary set, politics, and so on.
The Garrick has long had social cachet beyond its links to the world of theater and the arts, making it something of a target for fashionable criticism, though it’s not the first such club to come under fierce public scrutiny.
White’s, the club for properly posh chaps, had its turn a few years ago, with then-Prime Minister David Cameron having to resign his long-time membership in shame after being shocked, shocked, to discover they didn’t let ladies in.
After leaving office, “Call Me Dave” — as we used to refer to him in my time at Tory HQ — joined Pratt’s, an even posher club, where all the staff are referred to as “George” by custom. As it happened, Pratt’s let women in a few years after Dave joined, though I assume the members address all the new ladies as “Nanny.”
London men’s clubs are an object of occasional fascination and fury in the U.K.
People, and it should be acknowledged it’s usually a certain kind of lady, get very steamed up about them whenever they remember they still exist.
According to the popular imagination, clubs are dens of quiet power-broking and deal-making, shadowy old-boy networks, wood-paneled venues where favors are exchanged and patronage is doled out.
They are malum in se for their sexist admissions policies, of course, but made even worse because they are locking out ladies from the true corridors of power, where the real decisions are made.
But the sexism charge is silly, really.
That men (and women) behave differently in mixed company, and sometimes like a time and place to socialize among themselves, shouldn’t be controversial. Ladies’ nights out are a social staple for about half the people I know, and if you need convincing that dudes (or chaps) liking to hang out isn’t sinister, I doubt I’m the one to convince you.
More to the point, proper clubs for women exist, too, some of them, like the University Women’s Club, are very nice and just as old as the men’s, and they come under no political scrutiny or media ire.
The real suspicion, and the real anger against the men’s versions, is about power and influence. But that’s nonsense, too.
The reality is that clubs intended to facilitate “networking” and mutual advancement do exist, but they tend to be set up by and for women, as a reactionary move against what they imagine goes on at places like the Garrick. And thus they tend to fail — at least in London.
One such enterprise, Chief, opened a swanky London outpost last year, promising a women-only space for the senior ranks of the sisterhood to meet and mingle with like-minded “executives.” But it had to shut down last month for lack of interest, despite offering the chance to split spritzers with the likes of Amal Clooney and Gloria Estefan — or maybe because of that.
I’m not surprised places like Chief tank, since they are exactly what many people wrongly imagine London men’s clubs to be all about, and they sound awful. Real clubs continue to exist not because the members can use them to “network,” but because they’re some of the last places in Western urban life where “networking” is forbidden.
In fact, all the London men’s clubs I know have actual rules banning business talk. Full disclosure: I am a member of one such club, and used to be a member of another — neither as chic as the Garrick or as well-bred as White’s, though I’ve been a lunch guest at both.
What I love about my club is that, as I’m a socially awkward person by nature, it's a place where I am, as a matter of policy, welcome at any table and in any conversation, and always considered a friend.
While critics like to imagine hushed conversations to stitch up promotions and curry influence, I’ve instantly forgotten what anyone does for a living, if ever they told me. The banter is usually obscure, rather than topical. The finer points of trivia on my true passions, cricket and watches, are common subjects.
You’d struggle to call the atmosphere “conspiratorial,” or even especially dignified.
On one occasion, albeit several years ago, another member challenged me over lunch to recite Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussycat” from memory and I had to be gently but insistently reminded by the maître d' not to stand on the dining room furniture, after I got too into my declamation and mounted my chair halfway through the second stanza.
The truth is, the kind of people who like to “network,” rather than socialize, make for terrible company — they instrumentalize human interaction, rather than enjoy it. It makes them insufferable, even to each other.
Those people are why places like Chief fail, and it’s why places like the Garrick and the University Women’s Club won’t let them in. They are, ironically, the very people you join a club to get away from.
And their demands to be let in are probably the single greatest impediment to single-sex clubs changing their rules. It’s not that clubs like mine can’t conceive of female members fitting in around the place — or can’t think of women who’d make good company — but they suspect those aren’t the kind of women who would be applying.
The same sort of people who are offended by the idea of all-male clubs tend to be even more offended by the idea of a club that just doesn’t want them, personally, and the tendency of clubs (like the Garrick) to attract lawsuits if they just think out loud about changing their rules is quite real. Being a single-sex space provides a modicum of legal protection in this regard.
I know some women I’d happily propose for membership, and their capacity for both claret and lyrical verse exceeds my own. But in truth, they’d probably never think of applying.
Groucho Marx famously said he didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. The best sort of people usually feel that way, male or female. The trouble is that the reverse also tends to be true.
Clubs, really, are for the rest of us — the ones who just want a place that feels like home, safely away from, you know, other people.
Is that so wrong?
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
The feds have already said that via Title IX they'll strip funding from schools that don't treat transgender kids as their self-identified gender.
So, if you don't want your kid in a mixed-sex locker room, you either have to pull them from P.E., or pull them from the public schools. You're not legally prohibited from doing that, but it's costly. You either take on the burden of home schooling or have to pay tuition to a private school.
The feds have a sneaky way of using money to get their way. They held highway funding hostage to get states to raise their drinking ages. Maybe they'll threaten to withhold medicaid funding unless states adopt laws allowing CPS to treat non-affirming parents as abusers.
NewCharlesInCharge
6d ago
Remember the "don't say gay" bill? If you were being very charitable, you could say that the so-called "don't say gay" bill in Florida did prohibit "saying gay" in certain contexts, so I suppose the reporting on it comported with Scott's ideas on bounded distrust, that the media rarely concts outright lies.
But the reporting on North Carolina's HB 237 looks to consist of outright lies. Background: the state already has a law on the books that prohibits concealing your identity when committing a crime, with a consequence that the class of misdemeanor or felony commited gets bumped up by one. During the pandemic they added an extemption to the law for thsoe wearing a mask for health reasons. HB 237 removes that exemption.
News media are reporting that North Carolina is banning mask wearing in public. Some examples of those spreading the idea that this is a general ban on public masking:
- Winston-Salem Journal: Bill to end masking in north Carolina clears Senate. Health advocates say completely barring masks could hurt people who are immunocompromised
- US News and World Report: North Carolina Lawmakers Push Bill to Ban Most Public Mask Wearing, Citing Crime
- Charlotte Observer: The party of ‘freedom’ wants to ban mask-wearing for health reasons in NC
WaPo adds some more context, and describes the law as a prohibition on masking during a crime, but still lies in their headline by saying that the bill bans mask wearing at protests generally:
NewCharlesInCharge
29d ago
Lewis in heaven, looking down at mukbang, disappointed that his imagination was so limited.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
I think you may be typical-minding. Countless people on Maury have denied fathering a child for absurd reasons like “we only had sex one time.”
There’s plenty of people sleepwalking through life seemingly without ever making an informed decision. “I didn’t know I couldn’t orgasm after removing my penis” sounds absurd but I would be more surprised if it didn’t happen.
NewCharlesInCharge
4mo ago
Who are the cool kids after say, 30 years old? Writers at the NYT, Hollywood folks, tech titans. Almost universally liberals, almost universally wouldn't desire to be surrounded by deplorables.
The analogy is about group dynamics, not specifically mapping political group A to high school clique Y.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
As far as I can tell the environmental movement wants us to repent for our sins of overindulgence by dramatically scaling back our consumption. Whether or not a proposed regulation actually helps the environment is of little relevance. For an example, see plastic bag bans.
It doesn't matter that the "reusable" bags mandated for sale are far more carbon intensive and contain far more plastics than the flimsy plastic bags they've been mandated to replace. It doesn't matter if you know that none of the trash in your region is transported by barge. The true aim of the ban is to curb the sin of consuming disposable plastics. If an environmentalist were looking at a spreadsheet of plastic bag consumption before and after a ban, and they saw a 5% drop, they'd count it as a win, regardless of the fact that post-ban bags are about 30 grams and pre-ban are 5 grams. On a materials basis you'd break even when you reduced consumption to 16% of what it once was.
Google for plastic bag ban effectiveness and all you'll see supporters pointing to are bag counts: www.google.com/search?q=plastic+bag+ban+effectiveness
None are claiming a drop in consumption large enough to offset the extra materials.
They seem completely uninterested in fixes that enable current levels of consumption to continue while mitigating or eliminating environmental impacts.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
Inside of Facebook we had a group for free speech advocates. Zuck, defending the company's censorship, had no idea about the origins of "fire in a crowded theater" and so used it as part of his defense. It took employees to point out that that example comes from a controversial and overruled SCOTUS decision.
NewCharlesInCharge
4mo ago
Having skimmed the Colorado ballot decision, it looks like the strongest evidence on offer of Trump encouraging violence is using the word “fight.”
If that’s not an isolated demand for rigor, I don’t know what is. Is there a single federal politician who hasn’t promised to fight or encouraged supporters to fight?
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
I've been conditioned to be very suspicious of such accusations and entertain contexts in which the raw allegations could be benign.
Sharing a bed: booking a two bed hotel room might raise suspicion.
Sent a undies / fake tattoos photo: having some racy photos of one another could be used as evidence of a real relationship.
Showering together: maybe this happened in a context where a trafficker offered his shower for them to use together.
"How far are you willing to go": that's a benign question on its own.
The point I'm most curious about is the advantage in presenting as a couple. Is that typical of child trafficking customers? Is it the only way to plausibly have a second person around for backup?
There's also no indication that any sex or even unwanted touching took place.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
South Carolina offered free rides to voters to get their IDs, all of 22 people took advantage: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/nikki-haley-s-south-carolina-to-give-rides-to-22-voters-to-get-photo-ids
North Carolina's current iteration of Voter ID includes providing IDs to voters for free.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
I think I would be putting my career at risk if I made loud enough anti-gender-ideology in public schools statements. And my career has nothing to do with public schools.
Catholic schools were supposed to be my escape hatch for my kids, but apparently not even they are safe from this nonsense.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
The EEOC has gotten many companies to agree to settlements merely for disparate impact: https://www.google.com/search?q=disparate+impact+eeoc+settlement
Here's one example: https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/dollar-general-pay-6-million-settle-eeoc-class-race-discrimination-suit
CHICAGO - Major retail chain Dollar General will pay $6 million and furnish other relief to settle a class race discrimination lawsuit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency announced today.
According to the EEOC's lawsuit, Dollar General, the largest small-box discount retailer in the United States, violated federal law by denying employment to African Americans at a significantly higher rate than white applicants for failing the company's broad criminal background check.
Employment screens that have a disparate impact on the basis of race violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, unless an employer can show the screen is job-related and is a business necessity. The EEOC filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago (EEOC v. Dolgencorp LLC d/b/a Dollar General, Civil Action No. 13 C 4307), after first attempting to reach a voluntary settlement through its conciliation process.
The three-year consent decree settling the suit, signed by U.S. District Court Judge Andrea Wood, requires that Dollar General pay $6 million into a settlement fund which will be distributed through a claims process at the direction of the EEOC to African Americans who lost their chance at employment at the company between 2004 and 2019. If Dollar General chooses to use a criminal background check during the term of the decree, the retailer must hire a criminology consultant to develop a new criminal background check based on several factors including the time since conviction, the number of offenses, the nature and gravity of the offense(s), and the risk of recidivism. Once the consultant provides a recommendation, the decree enjoins Dollar General from using any other criminal background check for its hiring process.
NewCharlesInCharge
7mo ago
In Washington we had a judge rule that magazines aren’t firearms and so aren’t subject to Bruen.
Every time I see this kind of behavior I wonder if the judges reflect on the intended purpose of the second amendment and proceed to ignore the constitution anyway. A refreshing of the tree of liberty would surely swamp any possible deaths averted from magazine restrictions and assault weapons bans.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
I think it’s the opposite, religious folks see the parallels between wokeism and other faiths more readily.
We’d all be better off if wokeism were treated as religion and thus unable to proselytize via authority figures in schools and workplaces.
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
My first instinct was to check Wikipedia to see if the blue-footed booby is in danger. No sign on the article that a rename is afoot.
The penduline tit also appears to be safe, for now.
Though given that donglegate actually happened, I would think names such as these would scare off more people than names of human beings, especially innocuous names with no negative connotations of their own like Anna or Lewis.
NewCharlesInCharge
7mo ago
Surely the terra itself isn’t sacred?
The religious Jews would not agree.
"The Lord had said to Abram, 'Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.'" (Genesis 12:1-7 NIV)
"On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, 'To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates—the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.'" (Genesis 15:18-21 NIV)
"'So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites.'" (Exodus 3:8 NIV)
"The Lord said to Moses, 'Command the Israelites and say to them: ‘When you enter Canaan, the land that will be allotted to you as an inheritance is to have these boundaries...’" (Numbers 34:1-12 NIV)
"See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land the Lord swore he would give to your fathers—to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—and to their descendants after them." (Deuteronomy 1:8 NIV)
"'Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I am about to give to them—to the Israelites.'" (Joshua 1:2-6 NIV)
It's not the individual story, it's the statistical mismatch between stories generally and reality.
If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.
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