chooky
1d ago
I think of moving your car back and forth across the street as putting your car in other people's way, with the obstruction being not just physical but also that the other driver (ICE, in this case) can't reasonably choose to just ram your car. (Though this would have been a better outcome than what actually occurred.) Although I suppose you could also enforce your blockade by attempting to ram cars that try to go around your blockade, in which case your car would indeed by weaponized, that does not seem to be what was happening in this case.
When the ICE officers were on foot around the car yelling at the driver, I'm willing to say that the driver was weaponizing the car, treating it as an equalizer that would allow them to drive away even if the on-foot ICE officers didn't want them to.
chooky
1d ago
At that point you are probably weaponizing the car, yes. My complaint is describing her as initially having been at the scene with the intent of weaponizing her car.
chooky
1d ago
What about just using a car's physical mass, and NOT the threat of it, to intentionally obstruct others? Moving your car back and forth to block someone else's car is just using the physical mass, not threatening.
chooky
2d ago
Good went to a protest with the intent to use a deadly weapon (a car) to obstruct police officers in their duty.
I can't get on board with setting the scene as "intent to use a deadly weapon (a car)". I use a car all the time, without any intent to use it is as a deadly weapon or for it to have any function as such. Sure, it is probably reasonable that if I murder someone with a car, it can be classified as murder with a deadly weapon, just as a baseball bat also seems like a deadly weapon if I swing it at someone's head. But I can bring a car or a baseball bat to my kid's school, and I have a lot of doubt that Good brought her car to the scene in order to take advantage of the car's potential function as a deadly weapon (i.e., to harm or to threaten). Mostly, it seems like they wanted to use the car's large mass to impede the path of the ICE vehicle, and also that the car was their transportation.
Let's say someone hits somebody with a car at a school. Should the lede really be that "The driver brought a deadly weapon (their car) to an elementary school?"
chooky
3d ago
The Motte discourse is also missing the possibility of considering both to be bad shoots, with a potential argument being that LEOs escalate to lethal force far too quickly. (In the case of Babbitt, for example, surely tear gas and tasers could be reasonably expected by a rioter to come before lead bullets.)
chooky
4d ago
My problem with "hostile" is the vague degree of hostility. Did she think the ICE officer was doing bad things? This seems obvious since she was clearly purposely impeding them. But was she hostile as a driver of the car such that she would be seeking to or accepting of running them over? This would go far beyond what we can reasonably infer, so I can't describe her as "hostile" unless we are very explicit that it makes no claims about bodily harm. (And she would indeed face severe criminal charges even just for running over someone's foot, so I would really be inclined to not think there to not be intent for bodily harm.)
chooky
4d ago
I would quibble with what I see as some excessively loaded language. "Hostile" is very vague and very loaded. I would replace "intent on evading arrest" with "seeking to evade arrest". (Again, "intent" is far too vague - are they so intent they are willing to kill someone?)
As far as "instantly" goes, I think the converse is that a well-justified shooting would require him to instantly judge that shooting would eliminate threat.
But yes my position is that the guy could have easily dodged the car even if the driver had intended harm and thus was not fatally threatened.
The actual outcome of the officer not being hurt would seem to support both of our positions: that no real danger ever actually existed or that the shooting prevented the danger from harming the officer.
chooky
4d ago
I would say "should have known" rather than "knew", but yes because of initial starting positions.
chooky
4d ago
I would personally be pretty confident that I could get out of the way from the position he was in. Being able to get to the side while still holding both cell phone and gun and also not getting injured at all seems to me like it easily qualifies as "getting out of the way" even though there was some contact. My previous post probably should have been more precise in describing an "initially" unmoving car. I think it is excessively generous to frame the officer as actually being in danger, though I acknowledge that it probably qualifies as legally being in danger.
chooky
4d ago
No, I am saying that has was positioned such that in the event the car did start moving, he could have easily moved out of the way, as indeed he did.
chooky
4d ago
But we have the ability to assess the officer's assessment. In my view, something is going quite wrong if the officer assesses a currently unmoving car that he is standing not centered in front of as a potentially fatal threat.
chooky
6d ago
From the videos, it seems implausible that the officer would have died if he had not shot her, though. It seems like the appropriate response is just to send her plates to the cops and arrest her for fleeing/reckless.
chooky
24d ago
Can you explain how you carried this task out? I thought that I had a very simple data cleaning task (a column had very non-standard date formatting that I wanted to very straightforwardly just change to year), and the LLM (copilot) just told me to write a formula that obviously wouldnt work. How do I make it just go row by row and write down the very obvious year?
chooky
30d ago
I don't think you are completely wrong about Story of a New Name, which was mostly just a continuation of MBF. But I found book 3 and, especially, 4 to be existentially gripping and, the latter, devastating.
chooky
1mo ago
The centrist opinion seems like it should just be that both Israel and Palestine suck. Normies seem like they wouldn't have much of an opinion either way and just default to pro-Israel.
chooky
1mo ago
Sure, but my guess of what grade that teacher would give other essays of similar quality is based on what I think the essay deserves. In my opinion, it is for sure not a passing essay, which is why I disagree with other commenters' guess of an approximately 60 for essays of similar quality. (And I would argue that my standards are possibly too low given that LLMs can definitely, trivially spit out at least an 85 for this assignment.)
chooky
1mo ago
I think D is quite generous for that essay, even for a low tier state school. It is occasionally nonsensical and essentially never gets past rambling. For an essay of this length, this os very damning. I have read a lot of high schoolers' writing, and this is not very good for high school. Yes, probably not a 0, but the range of numbers is more like 30-40, not 60-70.
chooky
1mo ago
Piranesi is a totally different genre than Norrell. Though the latter is also good, it is more of a tome like Neal Stephenson novels.
If you want more like Piranesi, I would strongly recommend Madeline Miller's novels based on Homeric classics.
chooky
1mo ago
Ermm, also, the whole racism thing. Surely it is not controversial to suggest that part of the reason for a well-to-do white family on TV's ability to have a maid is that this maid is almost always black.
chooky
1mo ago
But coffeemaking technology, winemaking, etc, have not changed that much. You might not have your aeropress, but a sufficiently motivated person (not very much!) could very easily make great pourover or even cappucino in the 50s, use a garden or farmer friend to supply great ingredients for classical french cooking, etc. Camping gear, miuntain bikes, etc, might not be as light or as good as today, but many natural areas were potentially much better in the 50s.
chooky
1mo ago
Good point on the Biblical Ruth, but that is supposed to mean friendship or friend, right? I think "ruthless" has to be a slant of "rue-less". Surely we dont have people out there naming their kids "Regret" as a desired virtue! (Well, actually maybe Hunger Games fans...)
chooky
1mo ago
Hmm, I do think that "to rate" implies accuracy, even if a rating does not necessarily imply the same, perhaps a controversial take in performance review season, but I think of that as "giving ratings" rather than "rating".
But then this gives us the prefix issue of that it being clear that an undercooked dish has not been cooked enough and that an overcooked dish has been cooked too much, a common sense application of over/under. What, then, does it mean to do insufficient/excessive accurate assessment? (Since this was all still very common sense with cook, perhaps over/under are just not good prefixes for us to do this with at all.)
chooky
1mo ago
"Rate" seems to me like it is indeed used as you describe. Someone's accoplishments can "rate", or properly deserve, praise. A work of art can be "rated highly". There are plenty of industries in which saying that someone's job is to rate, or grade or assess, quality or purity would be perfectly logical.
I believe that "rueful" is both the true antonym for "ruthless" (not scrupulous) and actually a word for which the suffix change is fairly normal. Not sure why this one is slightly irregular... "faithful" exists, as does "shoeless", so the problem would appear to be with "ruthless". Perhaps "rueless" is just too wimpy a collection of sounds for this idea.
For abuse, I have always thought of it being the opposite of disabuse in that an abused person's thought process, etc, is being abused by incorrect notions. Thus, to disabuse is to free someone from a figurative abuser.
A fun example to add to the list (possibly) is inchoate, which means not fully formed. Apparently, lawyers do use the implied antonym choate, but Scalia has long criticized this because the "in" here is not in fact a negative prefix, so creating the implied antonym is nonsenical. Personally, I have always thought of coalesced as a good opposite. https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/law_dictionaries_accept_choate_although_scalia_has_long_disagreed
chooky
1mo ago
It is kind of hard to continue with these duties in the context of modern economies. Setting aside how realistic it is for middle class/working class families to have only a single income, male physical superiority doesn't necessarily mean much from an earning power perspective anymore. Why must the male be the one that takes on responsibility/authority?
Waving a knife or gun around in public is not inherently dangerous the way that moving a car back and forth is; the gun and knife really present no danger at all beyond their function as weapon. Sure, a knife has physical properties that could make waving it or even holding it quite dangerous in a sufficiently crowded space, but it is also the case that restaurant kitchens, for example, exist. Although I am going the direction here of saying that waving around a weapon is less physically dangerous than driving a car, it suggests to me a lack of equivalence. At a protest or political event, I would completely agree that a gun has zero functionality except as violence or threat of violence, but a car clearly has lots of functionality. A car perhaps becomes much more of an inherent weapon/threat at a primarily pedestrian event, but this was a car moving back and forth on a street to block the way of another car.
Frankly, a car has lots of danger to pedestrians and other drivers even when used only as transportation. Think of heavy traffic. In a traffic jam, if I refuse to let someone in, I am effectively blockading them with a potentially deadly piece of mass. My threat is that they cannot run into me with their car without creating paperwork and financial consequences. I am using a similar threat if I aggressively force my way into their lane, as is someone who cuts me off. Some of this is happening at pretty low, non-fatal speeds, but some of it is pretty dangerous - none of it is brandishing a deadly weapon.
If we look at the Charlottesville protests, I think it is fairly obvious that the person who ran people over did not "bring a deadly weapon to the protest and then assault people with it." They were driving their car (a transportation device) away from the protest and found themselves crossing the pedestrian mall on an unfortunately crowded one-way street in which they encountered opposing protestors from what had been a heated event; bad things happened. (I used to live in Charlottesville and know the location of the incident well; I don't think it would have happened had the driver not had the bad luck to turn onto a street that was guaranteed to have these conditions.) Probably, in the case of both Charlottesville and Minnesota, the drivers had major errors in believing their cars to insulate them from interaction with pedestrians.
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