bsbbtnh
1yr ago
What I would like to see is a harm tax put in place that adds onto every unhealthy item the cost per item of its societal harm: the projected healthcare costs, the loss from intelligent citizens working for corporations that poison us, the projected loss of productivity.
This is regressive and will just make it so the lives of the poor are even worse. The amount of money some poor people spend on smoking and alcohol, most of it going to taxes, is likely enough to buy a house.
Further, most vices aren't increasing healthcare costs. Smoking doesn't. Most people will get cancer in their lifetime. Smokers will usually get it around the age of 65. In a few years they croak. We save on their future nursing home costs, their social security, etc. Similar with the obese. They are unlikely to make it much past 65. Old age is the most expensive period for healthcare.
Honestly, smoking should be encouraged, maybe even subsidized. It barely impacts productivity during one's work life, and it kills when people are more likely to retire and start hoovering up resources.
There seems to be no actionable plan, ready for implementation, to halt the rising tide of ill health. The numbers are steadily increasing adjusted for age, with some numbers rising faster in the young than in the old.
I'm cynical. I believe the plan is to get people so fucked that they need the government, and specifically a nanny-state, far-left, socialist government. It seems to me that activists push to make problems worse, so they can claim they are the solution. Find a thing you want to eliminate (single family homes, meat, cars), attribute everything bad in the world to it (climate change, cancer, inequality, racism, etc), and then work make those things worse (endless bureaucracy and permitting, dysfunctional layouts, taxes) so that eliminating it looks like a viable option. When it's gone, you apply all the bad things to a new target you want to eliminate.
Having a grand plan is antithetical to this.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Wouldn't phonics eventually wipe out regional dialects?
AAVE seems like it wouldn't survive long under phonics.
And if more liberal areas tend to go with whole word learning, and presumably conservative areas with phonics, could this be why (it seems) that southern dialects are disappearing?
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
"slavery was a choice"
What he said was basically paraphrasing Bob Marley's Redemption Song (which was basically lifted from a speech by Marcus Garvey).
“We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”
-Marcus Garvey
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds.
-Bob Marley
Kanye was saying that 400 years of slavery is a choice, not that chattel slavery was. 400 years leads up to today. He's saying that people are mental slaves today, and you can choose to set your mind free.
Recall also that Nick Cannon eventually was forced to apologize not for racist, Scientology-esque pseudoscience about white people, but specifically for annoying Jews.
Nick and Kanye are basically parroting a lot of Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam, Black Hebrew Israelites, and similar black supremacists. Did Malcom X have some controversial statements about the Jews that were in a similar vein?
Anyways, I think the root of this is that black people moving up in society start 'noticing' how many Jews there are at the top. When half of Hollywood and the media are Jewish, half the white people in Ivy league institutions are Jewish, and Jews only make up ~2% of the population, then it seems logical to a black person to wonder if maybe it isn't the 'white man' keeping them down, since whites are under-represented in the media, in Hollywood, in academia, etc.
And with how connected we all are, now black people (and gentile whites) can peer much further than before. Even the poorest, most oppressed black person in the US can pull out their phone (lol) and quickly discover that half the famous white people he's ever heard of are Jewish.
It's only going to get worse. This is an extremely popular and pervasive topic in the black community. Throughout 2020/21 there were a few organizations that ran into turmoil as the black activists tried pushing out Jews. I think the Woman's March was one. I think the attempts to censor Kanye, assuming he doesn't back down, will lead to more support for him in the black community. This could end up like when Morgan Wallen (country singer) got cancelled for dropping an n-bomb, and then became even more popular. I guarantee most black people hearing Kanye talk about Jews will think every institutional action taken against him is proof he's right.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Zionism (right) vs Bolshevism (left).
Also, Jewish space lasers are as true as turning the frogs gay.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
"The signals do not resemble signals from earthquakes. They do resemble the signals typically recorded from blasts,"
Is it possible to determine what type of explosive was used from the seismic data? I'd imagine different types of material would have a different pattern.
And best of all, the US had mine-planting/explosives forces right on Bornholm island in June! The bombs we're talking about detonated just off the coast of Bornholm island!
Which, if we know about, then Russia would have known about it as well. I've read UK ships were in that area, too. This could have been done with an underwater drone filled with explosives. The area could have been chosen because of the activities of the US/UK and others in the area, in order to create doubt.
For all we know the mine-planting/explosive force was there because of concerns about explosives being placed on the pipeline, or intelligence about a possible attack on it.
mine hunting technology
Seems plausible that they were there based on intelligence. But it's also possible they did it, released this story, and can now simply say "why would we publicly announce that if we were going to blow the pipeline?" And then pull out some vague, uncorroborated, anonymous, top secret intelligence that suggested a threat on the pipeline. Yellow cake.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Anybody see Top Gun Maverick? Biggest movie of the year (so far, it could get dethroned by Avatar or Black Panther). Made over $700m in the US and Canada, and like $1.4b worldwide. I think this is the first weekend it has fallen out of the top 5.
Anyways, I was excited to see it and finally went a couple weeks ago. But it seems like absolute shit to me. Beautifully shot, the flying scenes are great. And yet the story seems bland. The graphics used when they are discussing missions and stuff seemed like some shit out of a Command & Conquer cutscene. A lot of transitions between scenes felt a bit sudden, like something was cut. I've seen celebrities gushing over this film, Quentin Tarantino was fanboying over it. But I honestly think it's one of the worst Tom Cruise movies I've ever seen.
And despite being the biggest movie of the year, I've barely seen a peep about it online (other than it's box office success). Despite seeing it a coupe weeks ago, I never ran into a single spoiler for it. Never saw a single meme. So obviously not a movie that appealed to those who very online. On YouTube I'd been putting every Top Gun video I saw in my Watch Later playlist, to binge after I saw it. And even those videos, going over how great the film was, really had no substance. All the interviews I found with the cast were just the same stories about flying in a jet or meeting Tom Cruise.
The bits James Corden did with Tom Cruise were more satisfying than the actual film.
I'm definitely not a film buff, so maybe I'm missing something. I have seen the original, quite a few times. But something just felt 'off' throughout this film.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Could also being leading to soft disclosure. Now, when conspiracy types talk about soft disclosure with UFOs, they are usually talking about the government basically priming the public so they won't be shocked to find out aliens exist.
But we've soft disclosures before, but usually they make the thing more farfetched than the truth, so that the truth looks mild in comparison.
A good example is chemtrails. This conspiracy popped up around the early 90s, and quickly went into the mainstream, with cable networks having all sorts of 'documentaries' about it. It would later turn out that congress was secretly investigating the use of chemicals, sprayed from airplanes, over the US (and other countries, like Canada, the UK, Mexico, etc). Also the spraying of chemicals on the military, predominantly US Navy ships.
By the time a report was published publicly, around 2000 iirc, it made little impact. Chemtrails were a 'crazy' conspiracy, 'debunked' by the media, and had largely been framed as being about mind-control (and the spraying on the Navy being connected to time travel). I believe the real purpose of the spraying was to test fallout patterns. But they were using chemicals (and bacteria) which may (or may not) cause cancer, and sprayed it over American citizens (primarily the west coast) for a couple decades (which coincided with the rise of crime and serial killers, though I doubt they are related; but maybe the chemicals/bacteria could trigger violence in certain folks? Though I doubt it..)
Operation LAC (Large Area Coverage) was one of the largest.
But if you mentioned to someone that the US government was secretly spraying potentially harmful chemicals over American citizens for 30+ years, most would connect it with the chemtrail conspiracies and immediately consider you to be a crazy loon.
So my feeling is that the UFO/UAP thing is simply a soft disclosure. People have aliens and craft that break physics in their minds. A few years from now congress will publish some random report that fully explains UFO/UAP (though the report will likely not contain ANY terms related to that), it'll be so dry and unexciting that the media will barely be able to stomach giving it a blurb, and the public will remain largely unaware of its existence. If you ever brought it up to a random person, they'd label you crazy and think you were talking about UFO/UAPs (which will get 'debunked' over the same time frame; it'll fill the public discourse and inoculate them against the truth, keep conspiracy theorists focused, instead of snooping into other shit looking for something; and basically get 'believers', particularly ones with an ounce of credibility, to take positions that they will be unwilling to abandon for a less tantalizing truth - and even if they do change their position, the machine can simply point to their old positions to discredit them among most of the populace, especially those in the media and academia).
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
It's also very unlikely that Russia is responsible in this light -- the pipelines were already not being used via their equivocations over the turbines with Canada. Throwing Germany's steering wheel out of the window for them is not likely to yield them any concessions in the gas standoff, or poke at any weak points to unravel European solidarity over sanctions.
Depends if they ever really planned on providing gas to Germany again.
Russia had made some rather large agreements with China on oil & gas prior to the Ukraine invasion. Russia has been ramping up construction of pipelines east.
If Russia had planned on cutting off these pipelines all along, it'd make no sense to cut off the flow on day 1. That would give a bit of pain to Germany (and the EU), but it would lead to an actual solution in short order, with spring/summer giving a decent buffer to prepare for winter. Also, if Russia cut gas day 1, then the EU (and particularly Germany) would have likely gone all in behind Ukraine. Maybe even boots on the ground. There surely wouldn't have been hemming and hawing about whether to send weapons, which ones, how many, etc.
A big sticking point for me is that I do not believe there was an actual issue with the turbines. I believe the particular compression station has 4 to 6 turbines typically installed, with 4 needed for operating easily at full capacity. There's another ~4 turbines that were spares, iirc. One was off for maintenance in Canada.
So how does Russia go from a full set of turbines, pumping at full capacity (I think they were actually pumping over capacity for much of the past few years), down to just 1 that's barely useable? It seems like a story they are telling. If the turbines were an issue, and they actually wanted them back up and running, Germany was willing to give them full support. But Russia refused, adding obstacles to it. And Russia was really only asking for a pretty narrow exception to the sanctions, not lifting of all sanctions. And from what I understand, Germany was happy to provide them.
So there's obviously more going on. Maybe Russia was leveraging the flow in order to prevent arms transfers? If Germany (or other EU states) were sending weapons, Russia throttles it. So Germany delays sending lethal/military aid to Ukraine.
But I think Russia is simply taking these turbines and tossing them on their eastern pipelines to accelerate construction, which is why they denied all offers to fix the things. Now this incident gives Russia the opportunity to begin peeling down the NS2 pipeline, and probably ripping whatever else they can get from NS1.
This will be the end (for awhile, at least) of cheap energy for the EU. But it will bring a ton of cheap energy to China.
I think Russia's actions are largely done at the behest of China. This is China's moment to make the multipolar world they've been talking about. Though I believe the multipolar world is simply a transition to a unipolar world with China at the top. And somehow we in the west continue to sit on our hands, and I fear we'll respond far too late.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
I don't think this is going to be that big of a bane on the average artist. In fact, I think this will be much like other digital tools, which have allowed below-average artists to punch above their weight. AI will be quickly adopted by these folks. Their overall art will improve, and they'll be able to pump out a lot more content. But they'll likely suck at doing revisions, as the AI probably isn't going to be built with that in mind. So the average artist will be able to step in, using AI to create ideas and starting points, and then build off of that. AI will be the go to for reference images.
And you'll have AI whisperers who are incredibly good at constructing prompts to get great results from AI.
I think artists largely fall into two camps. One are people who produce things that appeal to others, and another is people who produce things that appeal to themselves. Sometimes, in rare cases, the people who do their own art are able to appeal to the masses; and truly great artists can influence what appeals to the masses. When it comes to dealing with clients who are commissioning a work, some artists are trying to shove their vision on their client, while others are able to take what their clients want and replicate it perfectly. But the great artist is able to take what a client wants, filter it through themselves, and produce something the client didn't explicitly ask for, but really wanted. Or something like that.
Anyways, over the course of the next few years, I imagine there will be a few scandals, from niche to mainstream, of artists using AI but representing it as human-made. What I'm really looking forward to is a scandal of a web personality turning out to be a complete fabrication, and all their art/work being produced by AI. Because at the end of the day, most of the artists online are only popular because of the work they put into creating a name for themselves, cultivating an audience. It's largely marketing, with a small amount based on skill. Some of it, to be honest, is a woman having a pretty face and a prettier body. And so the real threat isn't a computer that can make great art; it's a computer that can connect with an audience in the same way an 'influencer' or 'content creator' can. The social skill needed to amass an audience, and retain them, is something that is far more valuable than drawing or any other skill. An AI that can replicate that is a direct threat to every 'influencer', whether they be an artist, streamer, Twitter journalist, etc. Though that will open the door for people with fewer social skills to do well, since they could leverage AI to create a social identity, but even if not, their inept social skills will come across as more 'authentic'.
Imagine if that happened with acting. Movies in a couple decades, the ones made with actual human actors in front of a camera, could end up with atrocious acting just so it seems more authentic..
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Hopefully the province enforces all the fines, especially the ones against the union. It'd set a very bad precedent if people who aren't legally allowed to strike receive no punishment if they do.
Anyways, it's my personal opinion that public sector unions should not be able to strike. They have too much power.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
In England you have that red bus copyright case. Someone took a photo of a classic red doubledecker bus, turned everything else black & white. Another person later did this with their own photo, got sued, and lost because of the similarity.
So how could someone in England be sure that AI art wouldn't violate copyright? I'd imagine AI art would be more likely to violate copyright there (especially with some examples I've seen posted on twitter, where the art is almost identical to some of the stuff it was trained on).
And how can we be sure courts in the US won't go down this line of thinking, especially when it comes to AI art? US copyright case law is all over the place.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
The blonde white woman is clearly the hero of the engagement. It's
It looks like she's the first person to attack, throwing a coffee carafe at the black lady.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
The consent framework in the west precludes those in positions of power from being able to engage in intercourse with someone under their control. Teachers and students, police and suspects, prison guards and prisoners, etc. Those are typically outright illegal. Many professions don't allow it, like professors and students, doctors and patients. Some are iffy, like a boss and employee.
There seems to also be a push, at least culturally, to label other power dynamics as invalidating consent. Like a celebrity and a fan, an older guy and a younger (but legal age) woman.
Anyways, many people who are very 'progressive' on power dynamics and consent seem to also subscribe to the idea that only white people can be racist, because racism = prejudice + power. If we accept both positions, that unequal power structures undermines consent, and that there's an unequal power structure between whites and minorities (predominantly blacks), then this should mean that all interracial sex between a black person and a white person is rape.
This sort of popped into my head over the story about some folks in California being concerned that white people may qualify for reparations, because they may have been a descendant of a rape baby. It got my thinking about how interracial relationships are typically portrayed in the media; a white male slave owner sleeping with a slave is a rapist, since the female slave obviously cannot consent due to the power dynamics. Whereas a white female slave owner (or someone adjacent to the slave owner, who still holds power over the slave, like a wife or daughter) and her male slave are portrayed as having equal ability to consent.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
My parents have a wireless phone charger. Problem is that it basically doesn't work when they have a case on their phones. Is there a solution to this (other than removing their phone case)?
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Other options;
-
purchase a gun and a bullet
-
purchase a small tank of helium from Walmart or Amazon
-
try and meet a serial killer online
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
And the stock price sure seems to indicate the belief in the latter. More than half of the value gone, YOY, as of the time of this writing.
Tesla was always bound to drop. It's been wildly overvalued for some time. A big benefit for Musk is that there weren't many shares floating around, which propped up the price, and consistently undermined short sellers. This also helped him reach his targets and earn billions.
With the economy the way it is, Tesla's share price was bound to drop. So Elon 'diversifying' by picking up Twitter might be the best thing to happen, even though he wildly overpaid. (Though it seems like a good chunk of people rolled their shares over, so I wonder how much he actually had to pony up to get Twitter). Anyways, cutting costs at Twitter is dead easy. It doesn't take much to run a social media site. Most social media sites seem to just shovel money into a bottomless pit, most of which does nothing to raise revenues or improve the average user's experience. They simply find ways to spend the money that comes in. It's the Wikipedia cancer thing. Revenues go up, expenses go up.
The core product of Twitter won't change. They don't need to spend $5 billion/year 'improving' it. Most of the jobs at Twitter are useless and can be safely cut. Twitter should be able to run for a tenth (or less) of the cost. Their revenue might drop a bit as premium advertisers pull out. But there are going to be plenty of companies who are happy to swoop in. So Twitter should have no problem making a few billion in revenues. It should be making an easy billion in profit each year (and probably more).
The real money maker for Twitter would be to allow shit like allowing people to subscribe to users (for $x/month), allowing people to 'tip' or give a 'super like' (for $x), allowing users to send subscriber-only tweets. Hell, I'd make twitter users pay to be able to take tips and get subscribers (basically make it so only 'verified' people can get paid subscribers/tips). You'll have lefties falling over themselves to pay Elon the monthly membership fee. And I'd have a premium level that includes a bunch of stats and analytics about followers, engagement, etc.
That could easily bring in a billion. The real money maker is all the people who get memberships thinking they'll convince people to subscribe, and then never getting any subscribers.
Social media (and most tech) sites are bloated as fuck and can withstand a lot of cuts. Most can be monetized to a much greater degree than they currently are. I think one of the most inefficient websites is probably YouTube. The amount of video uploaded everyday, 95% of it that will never get more than a couple views. You could eliminate the vast majority of it by introducing a paltry cost to upload, and you'd make money off those who continued. Imagine the billions YouTube spends on storage each year, especially redundancies. 95% of that cost going to scanning and storing videos that literally nobody will ever watch. YouTube could probably be more profitable than the rest of Google if it weren't for that.
We watched Facebook burn billions on their Metaverse. Companies pouring billions of ad dollars into Facebook, to put ads on people's timelines, and Facebook shovels that into a pit, rather than to their shareholders. Facebook's main source of revenue is the same thing it was 10 years ago. They'd be one of the most profitable companies if they just stuck to the timeline, sold ads, and collected the profits. But for some reason they'd rather shovel money into projects that go nowhere. Just like every other social media company. Most spending is a waste and won't produce value.
Social media companies are ripe for being bought out, stripped down, and turned into profit engines. Especially with the billions in losses on the books which add some value.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
- Back when communities were actually tightly knit, criminals were hanged.
Back when communities were tight knit, there were informal processes to deal with crime committed by your family or neighbours. Hanging criminals is the point where people are using the power of the state to punish people (usually it starts with outsiders; you wouldn't do this with your in-group). It's a failure of community, and it usually ends up falling out of favour once enforcement comes to the point that your in-group is liable for the same treatment.
In many tight knit communities, justice was dolled out by the church. Since outsiders tended to not be a member, courts provided a great system for punishing them. Even when courts pushed out the church as the main arbitrator in a community, it still relied heavily on church officials' opinions. 30+ years ago, having a priest testify about how great you were was all but a get out of jail free card (where the judge was religious, at least).
We still have tight knit communities these days. They aren't region locked, though.
Anyways, restorative justice was more akin to what your average church would have done in the past (and many continue to do to this day).
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Maybe smaller animals have more efficiently evolved so their brains don't have much 'unnecessary' space. If you google about human brain sizes, it seems many sources say they've been shrinking for 3000+ years (though some sources say otherwise). If human brain sizes are shrinking, and presumably we've been getting more intelligent over the past 3000+ years, then maybe we're getting rid of 'unnecessary' space. Though maybe a large brain with 'unnecessary' space is necessary for having the excess capacity needed to develop higher level intelligence. But as we evolve and converge upon the most efficient brain size (which might be 400g?), we'll essentially become frozen as a species. We might even be more prone to devolve than anything else, as various groups don't 'use' particular parts of their brain.
Maybe a lot of our brain capacity was geared towards surviving in the natural world, used for religious/spiritual connections, socializing at a level beyond our comprehension, being connected to our environment. In our modern world, as we see the breakdown of families and people becoming more and more introverted, maybe we'll see the part of our brain that deals with socialization begin to shrink. Maybe it already has. Notice how the average Very Online type seems to be incapable of understanding sarcasm (even in person), they take entertainment media and jokes literally, they need to express their feelings vocally and require others to, seemingly unable to pick up on subtle cues.
Maybe westerners are going to lose that, our brains will shrink in a few more generations as we 'evolve'. We'll feel really smart since we can use our words to communicate, while the savages in far off lands read facial expressions like tea leaves. "lol, these idiots think they can tell when someone is angry, lying, happy, just from looking at their face. Just like bigots think they can tell who is a man or woman by sight. How can anybody possibly know what's going on in my head without me specifically telling them? Mind reading is pseudoscience." Then when those savages seem to be able to actually read minds, the enlightened will get spooked, call them witches, and burn them at the stake.
Kind of like how psychopaths seem to be able to manipulate people, as if they can see things the average person cannot. They can play people like an instrument. But maybe they just have an older brain, with a capacity to socialize at a higher level, and to them the rest of us seem like retarded children crying over spilled milk. We call it lack of empathy, but from their perspective, our ordinary problems are far below their horizon.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
im having the worst cold/flu of my life (not covid). I swear im border line hallucuinationg for past 25 hours. every hour feels like many. i sweat without blanket. cold with. but temp normal. unproductive cough easily treated with suppressants, thank god/
any tips for feeling better? i've lost my glasses.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
But this union's raises in the past decade combined were less than inflation last year.
Though the union seems to be asking for annual wage increases of 11.7%. I'd imagine this is a 5-year contract. So the average will go from $48k to $80k. And this would be what every other union asks for. Basically doubling Ontario's expenditures.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Some questioned whether marketing the movie as an important milestone in gay cinema made it less enticing than marketing it as a funny comedy.
When I was watching the trailer, I was really enjoying it. I got a really 90s/early 00s feeling from the dialogue. But then it got to the blowjob scene, and that was extremely off-putting.
Anyways, I wouldn't describe this as a RomCom, but instead as a SexCom. It's produced by Judd Apatow, and most of Judd's work is SexComs labelled as RomComs. SexComs are raunchy, typically aimed at younger dudes, usually peppered with attractive women, lots of sex jokes and innuendo. You're getting horny guys to come out and see hot chicks and comedy. Judd Apatow has slowly blended more romance into his sexcoms, and let off the gas a bit on the sex, too, making them a bit more palatable for general audiences. But there's a reason we're seeing Megan Fox get her tits massaged by another woman, and it isn't 'romance'.
With Bros, this formula isn't going to work. You're not going to draw in horny straight guys. Your average woman isn't going to be sexually attracted to the idea of this. Horny gay guys don't need to see a movie, they can just go and get a blowjob. So there's no real audience here.
And it's not really a romcom. Not for a general audience. You could swap the sex of the leading person in most romcoms and have to do almost no rewrites to the plot or dialogue. Maybe the odd joke won't make sense. But for the most part RomComs are completely neutral on sexuality. But you can't even do this with Bros. The film would not make sense if the lead was a woman. The story is so tied to sexuality that it cannot be romantic for the majority of the population.
I can imagine why Eichner is so pissed about this. He's seen woke/gay shit getting pumped up and celebrated for the past few years, and he saw this as his ticket. Bet he had a piece of the pie on this and was expecting it to do $60+ million, and he'd be getting a chunk of that. Probably thought he'd be collecting awards, the media would be fawning over him, and he'd be the gay Apatow. And in one weekend that was blown out. Like getting 6 out of 7 numbers in the lottery, and then finding out a dozen other people did, as well. Birthday numbers. lol
As for the incest thing, I don't know how many would think that. I find the title a bit weird, but presumably it's based more on 'bros before hoes'. But even then I think many would be put off by it, as usually people see their 'bros' as being in the friend zone. Maybe Eichner, being a YouTuber, spent too much time online, and sees 'bros' in the context of "BROJOB BROJOB! CHOO CHOO"
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
There are greener options for vehicles these days. I don't think climate change is the existential risk that it's made out to be; I think it's made out to be an existential risk to further policy goals.
Poor urban planning really comes down to the government meddling and trying to create 'livable' neighbourhoods that fall apart. Housing is inaccessible because meddling bureaucracies have made it that way. If you can build what you want on your land, suddenly housing becomes really accessible and very affordable.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
She tried committing suicide twice and failed. Suicide isn't difficult. A couple helium balloons and she'd have had a painless death. Maybe she wasn't intelligent enough to use google? Maybe she wasn't rational enough? Or.. maybe she was crying out for help, but kept getting the wrong answer. Maybe, deep down inside, she hoped that the 'official' route would have some actual pushback. We'll never know.
I have a strong suspicion that this woman is dead because we live in a society where we put victims on a pedestal. She was a legitimate victim, and that led to heaps of attention and sympathy and pity from people around her. They likely did everything for her. Her PTSD became an excuse for everything. Soon people got tired of feeding into her victimhood. She became a burden. And she could recognize this. But she's basically been trained to see victimhood as a way to get attention. So she does a cry for help and has a lame attempt at suicide. This likely happened when someone pushed back on her just a bit. And then she got more and more attention, and it became a shield. For awhile. But how long can you really put up with someone like that? So she does it again. And eventually she's led down this path, having been rewarded every step of the way for being a victim. Maybe she saw this as the ultimate reward. The pinnacle of victimhood.
Who knows, I'm probably wrong.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
I always wonder what it must be like for cis-women that look sort of like transwomen. I've known a few women over the years that have sort of a 'trans' look about them, particularly as they got older. I wonder if it is tougher to be in that position these days.
About twenty years ago, when I was in high school, there was a new student. I didn't know jack shit about transgenderism, and neither did anybody in my school (that I know of; it was a rural school). The student looked like a girl, talked like one, walked like one. But there was always something off about her. Then the school year ended and I never saw her again.
Anyways, years later (actually just a few years ago), I was flipping through my yearbook and saw her. And I immediately recognized that she was trans. Googled her, and it turns out she's still trans, openly so, and streams (to an extremely small audience) on Twitch. Heard her voice, and it sounded just like it did when we were younger, but I could recognize that it was a trans voice. It was pretty interesting to me how, not knowing the concept of transgenderism, I viewed her as female. And it was also interesting how something in my subconscious picked up that something was awry. She was 'passing' simply because I knew of nothing else. Today, with transgenderism being taught at such a young age, I imagine the younger generations will be able to decipher between trans and cis people at younger ages, and much more accurately, despite the fact that many young trans people seem to be much more passable to me than 20 years ago. It'll be more and more difficult for 'passing' transwomen to actually be mentally categorized as women.
I think it's just generally bad policy to use minor crimes like that as a pretext for finding people with active warrants. It is detrimental to society as a whole.
First, you're mostly just going to catch the stupidest criminals this way. The smarter criminals will be able to evade capture for much longer. So we're only catching people who would have eventually been caught, anyways.
Second, stupid criminals will make stupid choices. They'll make the decision to run/fight more often than not. This means cops could get injured, or some dumb criminal (and many criminals are legitimately mentally retarded) will get hurt/killed. And today that could lead to city-wide protests that cause hundreds of millions in damages (from looting, vandalism, and just lost economic opportunity from businesses being closed and consumers staying away).
Third, as a political consequence, we end up with police pulling back, and stupid policies saying not to enforce quality of life crimes, and even some non-violent crimes (primarily drug and property crimes). And that's just going to make life worse for everyone.
Here's what a better system would be. We get a bunch of lowly paid people who issue small tickets to people who violate simple laws. Traffic and parking violations, fare evasion, jay walking, littering, etc. We put these people in stupid, non-threatening uniforms. They are instructed not to chase people, not to look for warrants, not to arrest people. If something goes wrong, they run. If a citizen ever lays hands on these individuals, we send in the real police to do a summary execution. Otherwise cops aren't involved in anything to do with those stops or enforcement of those laws.
We take cops, and instead of paying them $100k+/year to hopefully catch people with warrants and guns while enforcing petty crimes and civil violations, we send them to catch people with warrants by actually looking for the people who have warrants. And they can do things like respond to burglaries, stolen property complaints, things like that.
And this way, if cops end up killing someone, it likely won't be over some petty shit. And if riots do break out over that, politicians and citizens won't be targeting the quality of life enforcers. They can still operate and continue a constant level of enforcement, so that cities don't fall to shit.
It's absurd to pay police officers to be stopping people for broken traffic lights, or for littering, or for evading fares. Because then everybody becomes guarded in their interactions with police. You'll always worry that a stop is about something more. It's unhealthy to have a populace that is constantly worried when police are around, especially if crime is high and you want police around more.
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