Rov_Scam
24d ago
I would take this argument more seriously if there weren't a similar set of traffic laws that most drivers assume don't apply to them. A friend of mine, who is a retired engineer from PennDOT, said of speed limits that "they aren't suggestions; they're requirements". I've since decided I wouldn't exceed the posted limit if I could help it, though I admittedly often can't. This often results in such behavior as tailgating, honking, flashing brights, and passing in a restricted area, all because I have the tenacity to comply with the law. How many vehicles actually come to a full stop at an intersection when they don't expect to be waiting a while? How many people run red lights because they automatically gun the accelerator every time they see a yellow light, even if they can easily stop in time?
I hear a lot of excuses for this behavior, from the practical ("9 you're fine") to the absurd ("speeding is actually safer because a vehicle that isn't keeping up with traffic causes more accidents when people try to pass'). But people keep doing this shit and then complain about a cyclist who doesn't stop and dismount at a lonely intersection. I don't ride in the city regularly, and when I do I'm not going to blow through a red light or switch from the road to the sidewalk depending on what's more convenient. But I'm also going to coast through intersections with stop signs if I'm going slowly enough to see that there isn't any traffic coming and I can easily stop if need be. There's a general social compact that we're willing to tolerate certain rule-bending when it comes to traffic laws, and if you're going to insist on strict enforcement for me then I expect the same of you.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
I guess that explains why straight white males have such low incomes and high unemployment compared to minority populations.
Rov_Scam
22d ago
Iran has been weeks away from having a functional bomb for the last 20 years. It may sound like a joke, but I'm guessing it's their actual policy. There's currently a fatwah against nuclear weapons, and while Western ears may hear that as a half-hearted "we really mean we aren't developing nukes", the Iranian government violating its own fatwah would cause a loss of credibility that could be fatal to the regime. The goal appears to be "nuclear capable", meaning that if there were some existential threat, like a full-bore invasion, they could quickly produce a nuclear weapon, because at that point the benefits clearly outweigh the costs. Unless Israel seriously ratchets up these attacks, I doubt we'll ever see Iran openly testing nuclear weapons or making public announcements that they have them. Because if they do that apropos of nothing, what do they have to gain? People get even more pissed off than they already are, and Saudi Arabia starts its own nuclear program.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
Amusingly, black people saved NYC by electing Adams who arrested the Floyd crime wave by allowing the NYPD to do their jobs.
I wouldn't give Adams too much credit here. Pittsburgh crime statistics are as follows:
2018: 58 homicides, 103 non-fatal shootings 2019: 38 homicides, 113 non-fatal shootings 2020: 50 homicides, 147 non-fatal shootings 2021: 56 homicides, 170 non-fatal shootings 2022: 71 homicides, 137 non-fatal shootings 2023: 52 homicides, 118 non-fatal shootings 2024: 42 homicides, 83 non-fatal shootings
So far in 2025, as of May 31 there were 11 homicides and 33 non-fatal shootings. I don't want to project that out since crime usually goes up during the summer, but so far it looks like the downward trend is continuing. Of note is that Ed Gainey became mayor in 2022, and was elected largely as a response to perceived heavy-handed police tactics by Bill Peduto during the 2020 protests. He was supported by all the lefties, though his record from his time in the state house suggests he's more of a mainstream Democrat.
In the meantime, the police department has been in complete disarray. One of Gainey's first moves in office was to replace the retiring police chief with a veteran of the Pittsburgh force who had since moved to Florida, chasing a promotion. This lasted exactly 18 months, at which point the chief retired because he wanted to ref NCAA basketball. Compounding the problem was that it came to light that he had made a deal with Gainey upon being hired that he'd be allowed to ref basketball 18 months on the job. As critics pointed out, it would be ridiculous for a full-time police chief to be on the road 100 days a year, and the mayor should have known that. Worse, the 18 months was calculated because that was the point at which he could retire with a chief's pension. Basically, Gainey got played. A new chief from out of town was soon named, but he withdrew his name from consideration shortly thereafter, presumably because he found out how dysfunctional the administration was. There's zero chance a permanent chief will be named before the new administration takes over next year.
Even before the chief left, things weren't exactly going swimmingly. Officer shortages have led to dramatic reductions in service. Police stopped responding to alarms, and reduced their response time to "within 24 hours" for anything that wasn't an active emergency. Precincts are no longer manned overnight. Foot patrols have been increased Downtown and on the South Side, but this is due more to political pressure than any initiative on Gainey's part (crime aside, Gainey's entire modus operandi was to not do anything until a bad news story or complaints from the politically connected forced his hand). His response to criticism has been to publicly call out local journalists he doesn't like for only focusing on the bad things, citing overall crime reductions, and ham-fisted cheerleading. "Who here doesn't think our police are doing a good job? Don't we have a beautiful city! Why don't you guys ever report on how much Downtown has come back since the pandemic?" In other words, stuff that takes about three minutes and zero effort, all of it in the same MLK tone of voice that he uses ad nauseam, wherein he acts like the new road paving schedule is a monumental achievement in civic governance.
I'm not going to blame Gainey for all of the police department's woes, since most of them are downstream of a nationwide officer shortage over which he has no control. But I'm also not going to give him credit for reducing the crime rate, which seem to have also gone down as part of a nationwide trend over which he has no control. To my knowledge, no one has ever done an analysis on whether "tough on crime" mayors have any statistical advantage over "defund the police" mayors when it comes to lowering the crime rate, and it seems like the biggest argument against the defund mayors is that the crime rate didn't go down as much as in other places. So I'm not giving Adams any credit here, and I wouldn't expect a sharp rise in the crime rate if some lefty gets elected.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
If you're not modifying existing plans, the architect should go through all that with you. Some architects are hacks, but those ones don't generally do custom builds. Assuming you want an architecturally correct Southern style and not some ersatz version, an architect excited to dive into the details of the exterior will be more than competent to guide you away from making the kinds of mistakes that end up in builder designed houses.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
This was the same argument that Virginia made in Loving and the court rejected it then. Black people are free to marry other black people and white people are free to marry other white people so what's the problem?
But marriage, at least from a legal perspective, is a privilege the state recognizes for people to incentivize the formation of healthy and stable families, which gay people do not do.
Well, at least that's the conservative fantasy. If you look at the way the laws surrounding marriage actually operate, and have historically operated, it's pretty clear that the legal purpose is to regulate property transfers among family members. The only historical precedent which has to do with natural children is the legal presumption that a woman's husband is the father of her children, absent other evidence. While this may be a useful feature these days, it's no longer a necessary one, as states have been keeping records of these things for over a century, and technology has allowed paternity disputes to be resolve fairly easily. Beyond that, historical laws relating to marriage were based on the presumption that women couldn't own property in their own name, that wealth was basically synonymous with real property, and that widows were likely to be an undue burden on society. Today, of course, we live in a property where women are more economically equal than men, where the family farm isn't the primary source of income (or, realisitically, doesn't exist), cash is more important than real property, birth control exists, Social Security exists, etc. As a consequence, the laws surrounding marriage have changed since the turn of the last century to keep up with the times.
An along the way, we've created a whole host of new rights relating to marriage, notably ones concerning medical matters like the right to make certain decisions and the right of visitation. In other words, as the circumstances surrounding marriage have changed historically, the laws have changed along with it, and if you want to figure out the legal purpose of marriage, you have to look at those laws. If you want to believe in an idealized version where the laws that matter are the ones that have "stable families" or whatever as their obvious goal, you're going to be left with very little.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
This was originally intended to be a response to a post by @faceh below where he links to an article that contains the oft-quoted statistic that the top 80% of women are contending for the top 20% of men and the bottom 80% of men are contending for the bottom 80% of women, or some similar numbers that are eerily close to the Pareto distribution. I've heard this mentioned a lot, particularly in the context of people complaining about dating apps, but it seemed a bit suspicious since approximately 100% of the friends I've know who have used them with the goal of landing a long-term partner have found one, and several of those friends are nowhere near the to 20% of guys using whatever metric you want to use to rate desirability. Not to mention that the app companies themselves are notoriously tight-lipped about their user data. So I decided to trace the source of this, and post it here so it won't get buried.
It turns out the statistic is incredibly dubious. The quote comes from a [Medium post from 2015] in which a blogger named worst-online-dater attempts to come up with the Gini Coefficient to prove how unfair Tinder is. This blog has 6 total posts, four of which weren't posted until seven years after the initial two posts (which include the post that contains the statistic) and were only created to address the increased attention he had been getting in the wake of his study being quoted online and occasionally in mainstream media. There is no biographical information provided for the author of this "study", so at best it can be said that it comes from the very definition of an "online rando", and at that, one who seems to have an axe to grind.
The actual study the guy conducted was a very informal one where he used pictures of a male model to attract likes from women on Tinder, and used his chatting privileges to ask them questions about their usage. He doesn't say what questions he asked or how many women actually answered, but he says that the women reported, on average, to liking approximately 12% of the profiles they looked at. I could comment on how the sample size is small and the methodology dubious, but that's neither here nor there because the actual research he did doesn't factor at all into the whole 80/20 statement. That seems to just come out of nowhere, without explanation as to how he extrapolated it from data he collected or attribution from another source. It's collateral to the point of the study anyway, as he's trying to calculate a Gini coefficient and uses it as a number he plugs in somewhere along the way.
Of course, that was the takeaway from the article, and not what he was even trying to say, which is that dating inequality on the apps is worse than economic inequality in all but a handful of countries. Years later, after the statistic began to gain traction, he addressed it in a followup post in which he responded to criticism of the original article. Someone sent him a link to an article that pointed out that the whole 80/20 thing was a lie. He responded to the criticisms that were leveled at him in the article, but he never adequately explained where he was getting the whole 80/20 thing from. As far as I can tell, at best he's getting it through an uncertain derivation based on data from a highly flawed study. At worst, he just made it up.
That isn't the end of it, though. Another of the responses to his original post was a separate study of Hinge data based on actual comprehensive data that was conducted by an employee of the company. He doesn't discuss the results of this study in the same terms as the 80/20 thing, but the results are similarly dramatic: Men as a whole only receive 14% of the likes sent out on Hinge. This breaks down further to 9% for the top 20% of men, 4% for men in the 50%–80% range, and just 1% for the bottom 50% of men. By contrast, the bottom 50% of women receive 18% of total likes. He claims that this Hinge data basically confirms the conclusions he drew from his Tinder data. It certainly makes it seem like even attractive guys have no chance if they're not even getting the same amount of action as below-average women.
There's one huge problem here, though, in that it takes two to Tango. I can't comment too much on the Tinder stuff because I never used Tinder and am therefore unfamiliar with its idiosyncrasies. I have used Hinge, however, and basing success on likes received is enough to make me discount the study before I even look at the data. It's my understanding that unless you're in a paid tier, with Tinder you just swipe on profiles you like with limited personal information and match with people who happen to swipe on you as well. In other words, everyone has to swipe, and there's no guarantee that someone you swiped right on will even see your profile. On Hinge, however, you can like a profile and even send a brief message, and you're like will always show up on the person's queue. So there are two ways to match: You can send out a like and hope the other person matches, or you can automatically match with one of your incoming likes.
And, like in the real world, while either sex is free to initiate, the way it usually works is that men get matches by sending out likes and women get matches by choosing from their incoming likes. While the opposite can happen, most women only send out likes because they aren't getting enough incoming likes, so it's rare for men to get likes, and when they do it usually isn't from anyone they're interested in actually dating. Likes received is a bad barometer for determining success on Hinge, and given that the author seems to have no grasp on how Hinge actually works, it leads me to question whether he understands how tinder actually works, and whether the data he is purportedly measuring is actually a reasonable proxy for dating success.
I tried to come up with some ideas on how to accurately measure success on Hinge but I came up short each time. the experience of men and women on these apps seems to be so different that it would be difficult to quantify who has it "easier". Part of the problem is that while the whole thing is seen as a grind, the statistics we use to determine success tend to celebrate the grindy aspects of it. Someone who is on for a month and only matches with one person is seen as a failure compared to someone who matches with a couple dozen people, but if the former finds a long-term partner and the latter goes on a string of boring dates, we all know who was more successful. Until we figure out exactly what we're measuring, these "studies" are all useless. It's all bogus information based on proxies for other proxies, and a set of assumptions that amount to nothing more than a house of cards. And with no shortage of people willing to complain about online dating, I don't think these dubious statistics are going away any time soon.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
this conditions the availability of a constitutional right on knowing exactly how to frame a matter for the tastes of whatever judge or judges he was unlucky enough to pick months or years before seeing the court room, having the funds to hire lawyers (and since the guy isn't pro se, instead being represented by this guy, having the funds and knowledge to hire 'competent' lawyers), having the capabilities to act well as an effective witness at trial, and come off nicely-enough presented while sitting in court for a New Jersey judge to like him, (and don't know about a community services organization offering low-cost outpatient services). Few of these matters could be verified without a time machine; none are in the public record to even make sure that the judges are properly summarizing it.
I hate to break it to you, but the same applies to any other area of the law, including whether the state can revoke your own liberty for a period of years. Yes, there's the added protection in that case that you will be entitled to an attorney if you can't afford to pay for one, which attorney will probably do an adequate job but might not, but in any event, all the other concerns you raise still apply. If you have suggestions on how we can idiot proof the legal system so that any moron can act pro se and get similar results to those that lawyers get now, I'm all ears, but a more realistic approach is to do more to ensure access to legal services for those who can't afford them.
As a side note, while that attorney was on record for the appeal, it isn't clear that the guy was represented at the initial hearing. Based on the available record, I'm inclined to believe that he wasn't. It's clear from the appellate record that the guy wasn't prepped to testify, probably hadn't looked at the records he was using to make his case, and relied on the report of a regular treating psychiatrist rather than a forensic psychiatrist who would have testified in court. There are attorneys in Pennsylvania who specialize in this sort of thing and no, it isn't cheap, but it's what you have to do.
The main point I want to make, though, is that you're treating this as though these hearings are prerequisite to exercising one's Second Amendment rights. But they're not; this is the case of someone who was already adjudicated ineligible to purchase firearms based on a separate proceeding, at which the right to own firearms was collateral to the determination. To the extent that he has any right to the expungement of that record, the burden of proof is on him, as the state already met theirs. The procedural posture here is no different than that of a convicted felon petitioning the court for an expungement so he can buy a gun legally. The judge denying that petition isn't revoking any right, she's merely declining to reinstate a right that was already revoked in a prior proceeding.
There is no right to an expungement; it's entirely a creature of statute. New Jersey could just as easily make expungement unavailable in any circumstances, or have a process to restore some disabilities involuntary commitment results in but retain the prohibition on owning a gun, or only allow expungement in circumstances that don't apply here, and the guy would have been SOL from the start, and this case wouldn't exist, and no one would be bitching about how his rights are being violated.
This whole matter is complicated by the fact that we are dealing here with expungement and not an alternative process for restoration of gun rights. Most other states have some process for this, but an expungement is much easier to get in New Jersey than in other states, the standards are similar to those the Feds use, and it's ultimately a stronger system since an expungement's ability to remove the disability isn't reliant on whether the process is compliant with the Federal guidelines. Whether or not there's a constitutional right for there to be some mechanism to restore gun rights to those with a history of involuntary commitment is an open question. The Sixth Circuit ruled that the Second Amendment prohibited the permanent revocation of rights just because someone was committed at one point in his life, but it didn't elaborate with regard to what was necessary to restore those rights.
In any event, it's hard to see what the court did wrong here. The guy has the burden of proof to show he should get an expungement, and he provided very little evidence beyond "I'm not nuts and you should take my work for it". He lied to the court about the circumstances surrounding the commitment. He admitted to intentionally misrepresenting his mental health to the doctor whose opinion he was relying on. How is the court supposed to base a determination on a bare-bones statement made by a doctor whom the applicant admits didn't get an accurate assessment? The applicant's testimony lacked credibility, the doctor's report lacked credibility, so what's left? Even if you can pick your way through the weeds and offer some basis upon which she could have granted the expungement, that's a long way from saying that she made the kind of error that the appellate court would reverse, and the two Republican judges who wrote the opinion seemed to understand that.
Rov_Scam
26d ago
If you're trying to analogize based on yesterday's event's, it's unclear what crimes, if any, were committed, besides normal low-level protest crimes like failure to disperse and whatever charges you can levy against people throwing objects at police. Getting someone for interfering with an investigation or official duties would require showing both that the agent were actually engaged in official duties and that the person took a specific action to interfere. Realistically, this would look like ICE trying to make an arrest and the protestors physically impeding the officer from doing so. The reports I've read suggest that ICE was merely staging for a raid (which is itself just an interpolation from the authors; there's been no official word that I'm aware of) so there's no official duty at this point to interfere with. At this point it looks like there was a raid that was about to go down but got called off because of the protests. Charging everyone present because their protesting made it inconvenient to undertake a planned future action is already stretching the law beyond anything it's been used for in the past, but it comes with the additional complication that actions that you are claiming are obstruction are core First Amendment activities. So even if you could show that the elements of the crime were satisfied, you still might not be able to get a conviction due to constitutional issues.
Rov_Scam
25d ago
Color isn't making a comeback any time soon, for the same reason that wallpaper and wall-to-wall carpeting aren't making comebacks any time soon. Millennials are old enough to remember to eerie feeling of walking into a house that hadn't been updated since 1977 that had orange carpeting in one room and yellow wallpaper in another and harvest gold kitchen appliances on top of a fake brick linoleum floor. We're old enough to remember bathrooms with pink tile and no one thinking this was something that needed to be changed. It didn't help that these houses invariably smelled like cat piss and cigarette smoke. When people started tearing this shit out in the 90s, everything seemed so much cleaner, even if the result would still be dated by today's standards. It also didn't help that all of this stuff was deteriorating by the time we saw it, so it didn't have the same look that a recreation or picture in a magazine has today. This isn't to say that nobody uses color, but it's really easy to fuck up if you don't know what you're doing. When I was in college a lot of people convinced their landlords to let them paint and a lot of times they'd pick something really bold that wasn't pleasant to be in for long, and it looked like the color was chosen by a college student.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
There are no legal tricks to protect your assets, unless you put everything in a trust that you have absolutely no control over several years ahead of the conduct that led to the lawsuit. And there better not be any evidence that you actually control the money. Aside from that, there is no reason to default on a lawsuit. Even in credit card collection cases where you'd think there would be zero case I tell people to file the necessary paperwork and show up for the court date to avoid a default. Why? Because there's a 50/50 chance the creditor's attorney doesn't show up. When I was doing bankruptcy a few years ago I'd get calls from people who were getting sued but had no other debts, and I'd represent them for fun. One credit card company was using a small law firm in Harrisburg to essentially collect default judgments. I knew they weren't going to pay for someone to come to Pittsburgh for a $4,000 debt. Even if the firm is local, the attorney is often unprepared. I've gotten out of a few cases because the Plaintiff couldn't produce the original signed credit agreement. This can be a serious problem when the plaintiff is a collection agency that doesn't actually have the original agreement and would have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it. And then there's the fact that a bank representative needs to appear as a witness, again a serious problem if the plaintiff is a collection agency who can't testify to any relevant facts about the agreement or about the bank's recordkeeping procedures. And then there was the case where the lady from the credit union had everything and showed up without a lawyer, not realizing that companies can't appear pro se. The point is that even in hopeless cases, there are defenses that can be made and can be successful.
In this case, he filed an answer shortly after the default judgment was entered, and courts will usually give you a little leeway.
Rov_Scam
30d ago
Unless she worked something out with the father, it's doubtful she'd get primary custody after moving to another state. About ten years ago a friend of mine decided to dump his wife after she caught him running around on her. At the time of the divorce, they were both teachers in the same school system who made similar money and lived a couple miles away from each other in the same district in North Carolina, so it was a pretty simple case of shared custody with minimal child support. Around the time the divorce was finalized, he quit his job in North Carolina and accepted a position as an assistant principal at a school in West Virginia. That is, until his attorney found out and informed him that if he moved out of state the custody agreement would disappear.
That much he expected; what he didn't expect his attorney to tell him is that if she ended up with primary custody after him moving out of state, there would be no downside to her moving out of state. His ex was originally from northern Minnesota, and he knew she'd move the kids back home with her if there were no repercussions. He got incredibly lucky and was able to take a different teaching position at the school he had just left, despite his old position having been replaced, and was eventually able to find a principal job down there. That being said, he's still an asshole who got what was coming to him after running around on a perfectly fine wife who desperately tried to keep the marriage together. I can't believe I went to his second wedding.
Rov_Scam
24d ago
tl;dr I need to get to work on time or pick up food for dinner, I'm not interested in being delayed or inconvenienced to accommodate some bum or some stranger's vanity hobby.
I can count on one hand the number of minutes per month I'm delayed by a cyclist. On the other hand, every time the Penguins or Pirates play a weekday home game I'm treated to at least ten minutes of extra sitting in traffic so a bunch of suburbanites can treat themselves to a night of overpriced disappointment. And I'm just trying to get home or the grocery store; I'm sure there are other people out there who have jobs at the hospital to get to, or something even more important than my convenience. So if people's recreation getting in the way of convenience is the standard to set, then cyclists on public roads should be way down at the bottom of the list of things we need to get rid of.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
Because disparate impact suits don't have the magic powers people on this board think they do.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
The skyrocketing price may infuriate China, but the Chinese won't do anything about it. More importantly, it will cause the price to skyrocket in the US, which give the Iranians leverage. Not much leverage, but the narrative could become that Trump made an unnecessary strike on Iran that he acted like was a one-off but that caused gas prices to soar and necessitated US naval intervention, escalating the war.
Rov_Scam
26d ago
Newsome is a clown whose chances of winning the presidential nomination are approximately zero. Ironically, he's generally making the same mistake you are wherein moderation is confused with accommodating and/or praising the Trump administration. While I believe that a moderate is going to win the nomination in 2028, it's going to be a real moderate like Shapiro or Beshear who has show that they can govern moderately and give pointed criticism toward the administration when it does something bad for the state, as opposed to governing like a lefty and trying to compensate for it by schmoozing with Republicans. That, and Newsome has no record of outperforming Biden/Harris is red districts.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
The unemployment rate for blacks with a bachelor's degree is a few points higher than the overall rate for similarly situated people. This cohort also only makes about 80% of the income. These numbers hold at every education level. So yes.
Rov_Scam
30d ago
It means they serve mediocre wedding-at-a-country club dishes in a venue that has the ambience of a funeral home.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
It's been around longer than gen z has. It's probably more well-known than the Toastmasters, as that Moth Radio Hour has been on various NPR stations for over 15 years, and while I'd never make a point of listening to it, late on a Sunday afternoon it's often the only thing on the radio worth listening to.
Rov_Scam
28d ago
If Musk had simply acquired Twitter and quietly relaxed the moderation policies, I don't think it would have been seen as a big deal, and would have probably led to a better outcome overall. But between the explicitly political motive, the drama surrounding its acquisition, the Twitter Files, and the obvious boosting of favored viewpoints, to someone like me who was neutral through all of this it looks like he just swapped one ideological bent for another.
Rov_Scam
19d ago
- 1984 — within 2 years, according to Jane's Defence Weekly
- 1984 — 7 years, per West German intelligence
- 1992 — 3 years, per Netanyahu
- 1995 — less than 5 years, per Netanyahu
- 1996 — 4 years, per Shimon Peres
- 1998 — within 5 years, per Donald Rumsfeld
- 1999 — within 5 years, per the Israeli military
- 2001 — less than 4 years, per the Israeli Minister of Defence
- 2002 — capability on par with North Korea, per the CIA
- 2003 — by 2005, per Israeli military
- 2006 — 16 days, per US State Department
- 2009 — 6–18 months, per Ehud Barak
- 2010 — 1–3 years, per Israeli government
- 2011 — within months, per IAEA
- 2013 — by 2016, per Israeli intelligence
- 2013 — 1.9–2.2 months, per Institute for Science and International Security
- 2014 — 6 months, per Arms Control
- 2015 — 1.7 months, per Iran Watch
- 2015 — 45–87 days, per Bipartisan Policy Center
- 2015 — 3 months, per Washington Institute
Then the nuclear deal was put in place, and estimates seemed to be in agreement that the breakout time would be weeks to months with out the deal, a year with the deal. Then COVID happened and nobody cared.
- 2021 — a matter of weeks, per Antony Blinken
At this point I'm too lazy to keep checking for additional estimates, but you get the idea.
Rov_Scam
26d ago
If they're actively in the process of arresting him you'd be interfering. If they were gathering across the street in preparation for a raid, and a group of protestors gathered on the sidewalk in front of your neighbor's house, the police would have to ask them to move before they could be arrested for interfering, and at that they'd only have to move enough to let the police through. In the 7-11 raid the guys would have to let the cops in, but they couldn't be arrested for just protesting outside. The rock throwing would be covered by assault, and may also be impeding, but it would depend on the circumstances. Suppose for a moment that the protestors in LA knew nothing of the ICE raids, didn't know ICE was there, and were having an unrelated protest about environmental policy or something else totally unrelated to ICE. It did, however, make it difficult for ICE to execute the raid. Should all of the protestors in that scenario be charged with impeding official duties?
I don't blame you for this mistake (for lack of a better term), because I didn't notice it until the second time I read your post, but I think our tendency to allow the present to inform out perceptions of the past can lead us toward explanations that don't make sense. At no point in 2015 was any of the smart money convinced that Trump was a viable political candidate. The perception of him before the 2016 primaries was that he was an unserious candidate who tapped into the resentments of a certain kind of person who typically didn't vote. Given the amount of vitriol he received from pretty much everyone in the Republican establishment and his questionable standing among Evangelical Christians, it was assumed that he was good at getting headlines and winning in too-early-to matter polls but as soon as the people who actually mattered started paying attention his standing would drop like a rock.
It seems pretty clear to me that Lana's personal problems have nothing to do with Trump, or the culture war in general. By the time Trump announced his candidacy, her marriage was pretty much over, she was making intimate details of her relationship with her husband semi-public, and she was burning bridges in her social circle—I'm hesitant to conclude that gay marriage disagreements had anything to do with that; if she was oversharing with people such as yourself who barely knew her, you can only imagine what she was telling people from church.
I had a friend in college who grew up relatively poor in a wealthy suburb. He always had this outside fixation on status and success. He majored in business, and read books by Donald Trump and other motivational people that he took literally as business advice. He wanted to go to law school and be a sports agent, and he interned with a sports agency and got to meet Barry Sanders. But his obsession was entirely superficial. For example, he'd read in his popular business books about the importance of budgeting time, so he'd block off time in the evenings to do homework and study. But this consisted of him watching television with a book open, which he'd close at 9pm or whatever and say that he'd already done his studying for the night and was keeping on schedule. When I told him I didn't much like scotch, he told me I should develop a taste for it because that's what the big dogs drank. When his aging Volvo got totaled after a drunk driver rear-ended him at a traffic light, he started test driving cars like the Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer Edition (new, of course) rather than buy whatever the insurance payout would get him.
At some point he got the idea that taking prescription opiates recreationally was a high-status thing to do. When he first mentioned that he liked painkillers, I thought maybe he was just finding a silver lining in dental work or something. When he started talking about it more, I tried to disabuse him of the notion that it was cool by noting its nickname of "hillbilly heroin" and pointing to a bust in West Virginia that had been on the news. He assured me, though, that top businessmen and all the hip young Wall Street traders and attorneys used it to unwind. I never actually saw him take anything, but he came into my dorm room one day junior year asking if I had any painkillers. I pulled a bottle of gin out of my desk and told him that was the only painkiller I needed, and he laughed but said, no, seriously. When I informed him that I didn't (which wasn't entirely true because I had most of a Percocet prescription left over, though I wasn't about to commit a felony for a few bucks), he asked my roommate, who was a bit of a stoner but not a junkie and also someone he barely knew. My roommate seemed taken aback that he would make such a request, and I was inclined to agree.
The problem became more serious later that year, when he started stealing from his roommate. They had been together since Freshman year without incident, and there was enough trust between them that the roommate would leave his wallet out on his desk when in class. This guy would then fill his gas tank and be back before his roommate returned (this was in the days when most credit card purchases required a signature; gas stations didn't if you paid at the pump). After the roommate found out he informed the administration and this guy was banned from the dorms. He still attended the school, though he had huge gaps in his day with nowhere to go, and he was embarrassed for other people to find out what had happened, so he'd hang around the dorm entrance and wait for somebody to go in, and since everyone recognized him as a resident he'd usually be let in, and he'd find a not-too close acquaintance to hang out with until his next class. I let him in once after he supposedly forgot his keys and he decided to hang out in my room for a couple hours, which I thought was odd since that never happened in the preceding two and a half years, but whatever. By this point, my roommate had withdrawn and I had a single room, and a day or so later this guy asked my if I'd mind letting him stay in the extra bed for a couple nights. By this point, I knew what was going on and asked him what was wrong with his own bed down the hall, and he gave me some bullshit answer about not some unspecified problems with his own roommate, and in the spirit of malicious compliance I told him that if it was that bad I'd be happy to have him for the rest of the year so long as he put an official request in, which in my experience would be approved by the end of the day. But if there was something he wasn't telling me then absolutely not or I could get in serious trouble. After I informed the rest of our friends of this exchange it was agreed that the administration had to be informed, and everyone in the dorm had to know that they weren't to let him in under any circumstances. After we reported him, he was expelled.
For a long time, I've had a personal policy of not getting involved in other people's drama, and it's served me well. What I mean by that is that if two people I know are having a dispute and one confides in me I tell them that I can sympathize but since I'm not involved I don't know everything about what's going on and, he (or she) hasn't done anything to me personally, so I'm not going to take sides in a matter that's really none of my business. That being said, if I am involved, and the offense is serious enough, I'm not going to pull any punches, even if it ends up destroying your life. I was friends with this guy, but we weren't exactly close; we hung out a lot, but I primarily was friends with him through other people. As all his other friends dropped off, I tried to remain aloof and neutral. When he asked me to do something that could land me in serious trouble so he could keep up the facade of still living in the dorms, that was the last straw. He seriously thought I didn't know he was a thief and would have no problem letting him live with me; for all I know, he had plans to steal from me had I been sucker enough to let him stay.
I don't know if the drug use was a way for an insecure guy to try to look cool, or if the claims that it was cool were justifications for his using it to cope with insecurity, but I really don't know that it matters. What I did learn from this, as well as from every situation similar to this that I've witnessed, is that people who are intent on destroying their lives aren't going to listen to reason, and are going to continue alienating everyone around them until there's nobody left and they're forced to face God alone. I understand the virtues of loyalty, but it's a two way street, and patience runs out if the other person doesn't show loyalty in return and tries to take advantage of you. To my friend's credit, as far as these things go, he never tried to guilt trip anyone or talk crap about anyone or intentionally create drama. The numerous times we told him that his behavior was unacceptable, that narcotics addiction wasn't cool, and that he'd never achieve his goals by going down this road, he wouldn't get angry but just roll his eyes and tell us we didn't know what we were talking about, or just say "okay" and then keep doing what he was doing.
The good news is that this story at least appears to have a somewhat happy ending. I lost touch with this guy as soon as he was expelled, and haven't talked to him since. A year or two later I heard he had gone to rehab and was back in some kind of school, though this may have been community college. All of this info comes from a friend who was closer to him than I was and who I used to talk to on the phone regularly. When the subject came up, he said he didn't know much but the situation while we were in school was worse than I realized at the time, though he either didn't provide details or I don't remember them. About a decade ago I found out he was selling industrial supplies for some company in the exurbs. More recently, I found out he married a girl who did the kind of low-level bookkeeping someone with an associate's degree in accounting does and they were living in a fairly nice area with a kid or two. The friend didn't know if he worked for the same company or what he was doing now.
It's certainly a decent life, but it's a far cry from what he wanted to be. Sales guys can make more money than I do, but money does not equal status. The best he can hope for on that front, where he is now, is hanging out with local contractors and small-town bank managers at steakhouses housed in strip malls, and a couple times a year taking his wife out to one of the restaurants with dazzling views of the city that attract the kind of people who say "ooh, classy" when they walk inside but that no one with any kind of real status would be caught dead in, not least of which because they serve overpriced "funeral food". Then again, maybe had he been more mature he'd have realized that this was a life worth pursuing, since those of us who ended up working in Downtown offices with floor to ceiling windows and personal secretaries realized that all that gets you is invitations to impossibly boring parties hosted by judges and politicians that everyone attends out of obligation and no one actually enjoys. Then again, maybe the whole status thing was a phase he would have grown out of, or maybe he would have just been to untalented or lazy to ever have a shot at the big leagues to begin with.
Circling back to Lana, I'm guessing that she had a personal crisis that she couldn't handle, and for whatever reason she found herself looking more for validation than practical advice, and when the people in her life started telling her things she didn't want to hear, she lashed out and cut them off. It's not like her family and friends were all Republicans who supported Trump and she couldn't take them anymore; it seems like she alienated people on all sides of the political spectrum. And when you cut yourself off from everyone in your life, what's left? It's not just you and God alone now, because there will always be internet message boards where the friendless will always be able to receive unconditional validation for their poor choices or get endlessly berated, depending on which board it is and who's logged on at the time. Something tells me that neither is what this woman needs. I hope she gets help and can lead a happy, productive life again, but I don't think politics has much to do with it.
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