gattsuru
1yr ago
There's some Weird Stuff in fairly well-respected mainline TTRPGs. I've got the Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Exalted textual examples (aka "fuck this wolf or the earth will die"), but they're honestly pretty tame compared to what people came up with for Black Spiral Dancers, Malfeas, or the Neverborn to do, since they're all basically different flavors of corruptively invading your very soul. Unknown Armies was better-known for its magical bum fights, but one of its more serious mechanical advances was a system for measuring and applying how traumatized your character had become, and while some GMs were just got in the oceans-of-blood wackiness, there was a lot of space for really subtle attacks that could be really innovative and/or strike to the bone.
That said, the toolkit's not really meant for that purpose, as evidenced by the fairly conventional material in the topic checklist, so it's not a huge surprise a lot of the motivating incidents were less 'extreme' or 'taboo' and more the conventional array of cringe. The Far Verona scandal lines up with the release of that specific safety toolkit (though is almost certainly not the sole motivation), and it's less kinky than the classical Pissard's 'magical forest'; it's simply not something most players signed up for. X-cards were something people brought up in response to the 2019 UK Games Expo snafu (which is a little worse than the mainstream media coverage: the game was Tales from the Flood, and this means probably-mid-teens characters), and I'd heard about the cards back as early as 2015.
There's probably some acceleration due to the BlackhattMatt scandal from White Wolf and to a lesser extent Zak S, both early 2019, but that's more political realignment in general rather than their behaviors specifically.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's a little bit of that, where midwits (myself included) tend to think of MDF- and plywood-heavy designs as fake or insufficiently sexy. It used to be more popular for entry-level projects about ten years ago, where the price difference between MDF and S4S softwoods was much greater.
For the complete beginner, MDF does have its place. It's mostly flat, incredibly dimensionally stable, and accepts paint well so long as you prep the edges correctly. You have to be trying aggressively to get any tearout, and the stuff sands almost embarrassingly well. If you want to learn about dados and rabits joins, especially by hand, it's an excellent option. You'll have to buy a number of good drill bits because predrilling to exact sizes is so important, but that's not an awful habit and these days you can get some decent HarborFreightium drill bits for cheap.
But MDF does have a lot of awkward tradeoffs: you're really limited in joinery, the material is both brittle and has little stress resistance, the dust is slippery as ice and almost as bad as walnut for your lungs, the material is very abrasive on cutting blades, and even small amounts of water or high humidity before it's got some finish on it will turn it into sludge. These aren't big deals at smaller scales or with starter tools, but as you start to do bigger projects they can exceed a lot of the savings you might have gotten from the raw panels. Meanwhile, once you have a real planer, you'll find that you're often going to want to plane down (non-pre-primed) MDF to get rid of shipping marks (and sometimes to get a more precise thickness for a project); if you want an MDF-heavy project to stay stable and rigid you'll start supplementing it with hardwood edge banding. You'll start looking at finish quality, and for MDF you're pretty much restricted to sand-and-prime-and-sand-and-paint or veneer, and when working with hand tools those are a lot more tedious than varnish or polyurethane or Odie's oil.
But there's also a specific place where those tradeoffs are extremely worthwhile, and that's bulk cabinetry. You buy planer blades in bulk and have a resharpening contract, so the tool wear matters but it's a line item. You're going to be using an airless or HLVP gun, not a thousand paint rollers, so painting is a lot easier and you can get a uniform coat in minutes, not days. You and your employees are totally wearing those mandatory safety masks cough cough, and if you don't have a big dust collection system your shop will literally explode. Obnoxious and complex glue-ups. The cabinets are going to be permanently installed once (and the installation itself will lend a ton of strength), so it doesn't matter if your fixtures will tear themselves apart if moved. In return, you basically can ignore dimensional stability, and the extent that simplifies your project when you're trying to keep 1/8th inch accuracy over eight or twelve or sixteen feet is a big deal.
And bulk manufactured wood cabinets are not-so-coincidentally also a big money maker for large-business wood shops. (These same forces also drive flatpakable furniture, though the margins there are smaller and a lot of it's overseas stuff.) Not the only one, and if you have the buyers have the cash for conventional wood you'll definitely try to upsell them. But it's as close to a reliable demand as it gets.
There are still some places for MDF (and to a lesser extent, OSB) for hobbyist and small businesses. It's excellent for CNC work you intend to paint later, for example, and sometimes you can do things there that real lumber won't tolerate. If you're installing into drywall, not having to care about seasonal movement can be really convenient. There's a few situations where the extra weight and heft is enough of a bonus you'll throw a bit of MDF paneling in even when using real wood for the framing.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm more a generalist, but I run into both fields a good bit.
The first thing I'll caution is that, same as entry-level C++ courses that spend hilarious amounts of time teaching people to convert from hex to binary to octal, without teaching them what bit-shifting does, a lot of what you're trained for in entry-level infosec is not always going to be something that comes up at the job. If anything, that's truer for infosec than programming, simply because the field is so much broader. ErrataRob is a more stereotypical and typical infosec guy on the technical side, with some non-trivial code work behind him, but his summary of the field as having a nontechnical side, and the technical side being more about understanding code than writing it strikes me as correct for at least some portion.
((Intro-level network engineering stuff like CCNAs are more consistent, but mostly because the intro-level stuff is tedious everyday work; there's nothing impressive about terminating an ethernet cable, but the day you don't check for crossover vs straight-through is the day you'll plug a rollover cable into a passive power injector. A lot of people never look back at RIP except to flip it the bird, though.))
There's a lot of potential space for busywork: server admin, laptop provisioning, log management and configuration, so on. That discrepancy between the full breadth of the field and some operations is a good part of why these fields tend to develop a small industry of hobbyist projects. But in turn, not everyone does that extracurricular work, and even those who don't can't always publish. Even if you don't want to get into the office politics side of infosec, it can sneak up on you.
((Although in turn, F3Zinker's right that there is a lot of consultant creep, and a lot of benchwarmers/box-checkers present too. I've had more than my fair share of CISSPs that think throwing up a LDAP server with an aggressive password policy was the entire job. Like normal coding, it's hard to filter technically strong candidates from those who merely have the credentials, and it can take a while after they're hired to find out the hard way.))
The second warning is that it's useful to have people in a field that aren't, or at least don't present, as deep experts. There are people in the embedded systems world for whom this is light and even insufficiently precise reading, and I'd like to eventually be one of them. For most people, going directly to that, or even eevblog levels is waaaaaaay too deep to start swimming. By contrast, someone like GreatScott is less-than-101-level, but that doesn't necessarily make his demos worse or even easier for him to produce; it just means the projects are smaller and presented for less adept readers.
For really obvious versions of that distinction, I'd compare 3x3 Custom or Matt Estlea vs. RexKruger or StumpyNubs. They're all writing for hobbyist or small business readers (hence the lack of MDF), but where 3x3 and Estlea are clearly more focused on exploring new unusual concepts while only occasional touching on fundamentals, Kruger and Nubs -- despite Nubs in particular clearly having massive amounts of professional experience -- are about those fundamentals or basics even as they use them for harder or more complicated tasks.
I basically never see any such men (or maybe it is just my stupid ass only noticing the attractive women).
I think the big difference is that most of the men don't get that large follower counts, and when they reblog they're less likely to have their personality as a part of the reblog. There's a lot of guys writing well-south of SwiftOnSecurity's level; what's different is that these accounts are only a magnitude or so of SoS's follower count, rather than the mag-and-a-half of some of their coworkers (a NotSheNetworks coworker with a slightly more impressive git history, but not much greater twitter emphasis on deep tech stuff).
My gut check for the four you provided:
-
TracketPacer's pretty open that her specialty is electrical signalling and local area comms for ethernet in an aviation/space context, and she's got a number of comments that only make sense in that context (ethernet PHY means something entirely different if your field wasn't stuck with ARINC for eternity). I don't get the follower counts given that -- even with NASA and all the airbus fuckery, this is a tiny field -- but she's got enough side-along content that's more generally useful for embedded systems work that maybe real-ish? Still a pod person, but if that's engagement farming it's coming from inside the house.
-
NotSheNetworks's twitter feed is more obnoxious politics than anything specific to the field. Black Hills Information Security has more realish-focus, some of it her posts and not obviously trivial, but she feels like the one who's either done the hardest to boost her follower count, whether that be by drama farming or otherwise.
-
InverseCos looks like the real deal for the application layer. That obnoxious level of gruntwork over tiny details is absolutely the sort of thing that you'll do as often or more often than hexdumping a questionable file.
-
Cybersecurity Meg looks like a fairly young and not especially technical cert jockey, and the YouTube interviews emphasize interviews of more experienced people. I've got mixed feelings about this space -- there's a lot of i-crossing and t-dotting that happens to hit requirements rather than develop a serious security plan, or marking off a thousand 'vuln detections' in code that don't have anything to do with actual vulnerabilities -- but it's absolutely a lot of infosec as a field today and even if you want to work the technical side you'll get stuck dealing with it. Possible that she's working as / being promoted as a recruitment technique (women's fitness and "how to get started" is a convenient combination), but still better than being sponsored by RAID SHADOW MANSCAPE VPN.
gattsuru
1yr ago
How mainstream is her view? My impression is that a lot of Israelis/Israel supporters implicitly think that ultimately there’s no long-term solution other than the killing/displacing all the Palestinians, but aren’t willing to bite the bullet and explicitly advocate for genocide (or know they should be more circumspect about it.)
A two-state solution was moderately popular just a few decades ago, but it's largely considered a lost cause at this point among Israelis at this point, and polls among Palestinians show it unacceptable or undesirable for them as well (for whatever extent you trust polls on this). But that does not mandate genocide or a lack of political rights (or ethnic cleansing), nevermind presuming such a position would be popular: indeed, even early in 2023 a two-state solution polls higher than a single-state one with privileged status for Jews.
The Netanyahu government seems like it’s on her side at least through benign neglect. Why does her cause have so much political power?
A lot of it's less political power, and more the Israeli equivalent of the deep state. A lot of the positions and perspectives favoring Israeli expansionism into the West Bank has been a philosophical goal of the Israeli government for long enough that changing who's in office doesn't necessarily change what happens, it just changes who reports on it. And there were military and tactical reasons in the 70s, even if using those reasons as justification for military confiscation to later hand over to individual civilians is utterly abominable. Beyond that...
The settlers in the areas illegal under Isreali law, and their more activist branches in specific, are often assholes (price taggers regularly deface Israeli or even IDF property!). But there's another large class who played by at least Israeli rules, and are not so readily opposed. And the former groups exist in no small part by exploiting the ambiguities, there, and they're regularly assisted by international groups that take anything less than the Green Line borders as Israeli perfidy.
While I think the religious role is overplayed in American or international contexts, among Israelis and Palestinians there's a very serious concern that each side will dynamite the other's religious sites the second anyone's back is turned, and they matter a good deal more for internal reasons.
Does a settler/activist like her count as an enemy combatant? On one hand she operates under the colors of being a civilian. On the other hand it seems a little unfair for someone who is actively working to conquer your land to declare rules like “no sorry you’re only allowed to shoot at the guys who have rifles and body armor otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
Combatant doesn't mean 'bad person' (an Israeli defending their Kibbutz on 10/7 is a combatant!), and non-combatant does not mean 'good person'. We have the "you're not allowed to shoot someone unless they're trying to kill you, or at least part of a military trying to kill you" for the very good reason that if you start allowing military strikes on anyone who has actively wrong political positions, there's nothing without a target.
A more difficult question is whether she'd count as a valid military target, and that's complicated. Ideally, trespassing and unlawful occupation are not themselves the sort of thing that would justify military or personal self-defense, but COGAT's enforcement and implementation of the law is a joke, so I have more sympathy for some of that. That said, mere advocacy or past actions are not themselves military justification -- there's a difference between fighting someone who's actively invading your house from breaking in to beat up someone who did a year ago.
For moderate pro-Israel people, is “kick all the settlers out of the West Bank” something you’d be willing to accept as part of a broader peace deal?
I'm not the person you'd need to persuade, but it's been considered at times.
A lot depends on what, exactly, you mean by "West Bank" or "settlers": there's a risk of certain if-by-whiskeyism, here. Area A is already effectively off-limits for Jewish (and Israeli-friendly non-Jewish) people, rather famously. But that's a bunch of small cities and towns without a land bridge, which doesn't even include all West Bank Palestinians. On the other hand, turning over Area C and going back to the 1967 Green Line would involving moving almost a 400k Israelis and give the West Bank a fully-uncontrolled border with Jordan; that was a difficult ask in 2000 and there's no way it'd be acceptable now. Whatever extent 'land for peace' might have seemed a reasonable trade in the 1990s, it's clearly danegeld now, if the rumors that Arafat was planning the Second Intifada during the 2000 talks weren't enough, the recent problems made it obvious. And a lot of Palestinians, the Arab states, and the academic left consider all Israelis to be settlers, which beyond all the other problems, given the number of Israeli Jews that were ejected from Muslim countries nearby, is the sort of thing you bring to end negotiations, rather than to start them.
On the gripping hand, I think Israel should dismantle the settlements that are a violation of Israeli law anyway, so 'conceding' to remove them is conceding nothing at all.
I dunno. Before October, some large scale-down of Area C, in exchange for significant concessions elsewhere, might have been the best option. And maybe the PA pulls some sort of hat trick here that makes puts that back on the table again, if only to cut out Hamas and its affiliates as competition. But the last 'significant' (and it wasn't much, or even that honest!) pull-back resulted in a swath of suicide bombings, and I'm not sure that Abbas could commit to non-hostilities if the IDF gift-wrapped the entire Green Line borders for him, and any attempt to remove Israeli settlements requires them to believe they're getting peace out of it.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's defined as emoji codepoint U+1FAC3 as of Unicode 14.0, shows up on search for an (admittedly old-model) iPhone for me.
I have a number of examples of practices, which I've referenced at length, and you've responded by saying things like "I really don't understand what Grosskruetz has to do with anything", or by separating how each and every one fit into some newly constructed category that makes it impossible to compare and contrast.
What I don't have is a deep statistical analysis of every possible homicide in the United States, because it's a ridiculous demand -- much of the data just doesn't exist to start with, especially for non-prosecutions by definition! -- and the overwhelming majority of examples would be in such different classes that it would be meaningless.
You raise some interesting questions about where this would fall on the line between second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter if the available details are true, and if you tried to engage seriously I'm sure you could probably make a more serious argument why the lack of arrest or likely prosecution is reasonable here.
What you've not done is present a meaningful separation from this case and others: we do, in fact, arrest and prosecute cases that would 'just' be accidental killings or 'just' have one set of witnesses claiming one thing and another set claiming the other, with (astonishingly!) no video contradicting either.
A repost from late in the last thread. Reuters Reports:
International news organisation Reuters denied on Thursday any suggestion it had prior knowledge of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians and soldiers, in a statement responding to a report by media advocacy group HonestReporting.
"We are aware of a report by HonestReporting and accusations made against two freelance photographers who contributed to Reuters coverage of the Oct. 7 attack," Reuters said. "Reuters categorically denies that it had prior knowledge of the attack or that we embedded journalists with Hamas on Oct 7.
"Reuters acquired photographs from two Gaza-based freelance photographers who were at the border on the morning of Oct. 7, with whom it did not have a prior relationship. The photographs published by Reuters were taken two hours after Hamas fired rockets across southern Israel and more than 45 minutes after Israel said gunmen had crossed the border. "Reuters staff journalists were not on the ground at the locations referred to in the HonestReporting article."
The AP has a similar statement.
In case you're thinking that 'My staff reporters were not involved in planning or executing a mass murder of civilians' T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt", you're not alone. The HonestReporting summary if anything manages to undersell it, which is quite an accomplishment for a news story that involves the phrase 'lynch mob': people have since found on a photographer's facebook page a video of the man on a motorbike where the camera-holder or one of the other riders waves a grenade in-hand.
Journalistic ethics are a hard problem, and a harder one during wartime. It's typical for wartime embeds with conventional military forces to submit to often-onerous restrictions, sometimes to the point of requiring all releases to undergo pre-publication review (which should raise a number of Constitutional questions in the United States but mostly doesn't). There was a pretty major controversy in the mid-2000s after a Paris Match reporting team was on-scene at a missile strike targeting a mail carrier aircraft (Vernier-Palliez claimed that the militants had "set them up" and had no idea that they were going to commit a violent attack... though I think her claimed surprise is more than a little self-serving). And 'journalism' that's really just repackaged press releases from active members of a particular side are common enough outside of combat; the rewards are, if anything, simply greater for politics-by-other-means.
On the other hand, if your war reporting is little more than repackaged press releases from a group that slaughtered and raped civilians, while the reporting papers over all of that, this raises more than a few questions for that reporting's accuracy, as critics of journalists embedded with the IDF have long held. And that doesn't seem to be sinking in, here:
That'd be the guy with the grenade and cheerful embrace from Hamas leadership; CNN remains certain, among other things, that this summary is tots accurate and that the photographer's ties to Hamas' military arm tots don't leave any room for suspicion. Mahmud's main remaining photos on the AP database have at least been corrected to note that the dead 'Israeli soldier' was in fact a pacifist Israeli-German dual-citizen.
Okay, but these people weren't exactly weekly bylines. Indeed, they're just one of countless on-the-ground randos that various press agencies sent money and lent legitimacy. They're also just the ones dumb enough and unlucky enough to get caught, but let's leave that aside for now, just as we're gonna carefully ignore questions about how illegal it might be to provide cash to someone who's moonlighting as a journalist and also a member of a foreign terrorist organization. One bit of that legitimacy is people believing the repackaged press releases, but a deeper one is the ability to wear and mark press credentials, a matter that has historically been considered worth protecting. There's even been clear cases where the IDF has wrongly killed journalists, and been criticized at length for it.
That just became far more difficult to maintain as a norm.
gattsuru
1yr ago
This continues to be a long description of incredibly low standards that someone applied aggressively in other cases, and has not, so far, applied here, while they could readily do so.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with the principle that a motivated prosecutor can charge a ham sandwich, just as a motivated police officer can form an arrest for a fallen tree trunk. I even recognize that it's possible if unlikely for clearly exonerating video to come out, and back in the op, "I don't want to extrapolate too hard from this case yet because it could end in a hard conviction next month."
Do you want to make a bet?
gattsuru
1yr ago
And that is why Grosskruetz was arrested for brandishing, right? We had video evidence of him aiming at a retreating man, he spoke both before and after at length about how he opposed what Rittenhouse was standing for, and it later turned out his concealed carry permit had been revoked -- he actually was breaking the law, and given the limited legal avenues to revoke CCWs in the state, probably not just in carrying concealed.
Or... that didn't happen, no one cared, and you can't even get media coverage of the whole "armed ACLU 'observer' nearly shot a teenager who was defending himself."
You've gotta recognize how naked this salami-slicing looks. We can't have someone walking the streets after they TOOK A GUN ACROSS STATE LINES because despite clear video evidence of self-defense because it's possible that he was really guilty. Meanwhile, applauding terrorists as heroes, we really have to give the benefit of the doubt until and unless specific evidence that he "acted very violently" because it might just be involuntary manslaughter.
Which, last I checked, was still pretty damned illegal.
I'm not making a statement for which way justice should go -- there's tradeoffs each direction! -- but come off it. It's clearly not the same standard for each case.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I don't. But I'm not the person who just said "ended up shooting his political opponents" was evidence of not just murder but premeditated murder!
gattsuru
1yr ago
Hm.
I don't think 'he opposed their political position' is very strong evidence of murder, but maybe that's just me. He said he didn't mean to, and what the suspect claims is what really matters.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Would you like to try again with a more serious argument about the facts of the case as available to the police at the time of Rittenhouse's arrest, or do you want me to rip through the various procedural problems and literal threats (and one high-profile attempt to identify the jurors by newscasters) aimed at that?
gattsuru
1yr ago
No one is “redefining a public space” here, we are using the limited information we have to make preliminary judgments on who is likely the instigator.
...
(2) the altercation took place on the Palestinian side, which greatly increases the odds of the Jewish man having instigated the conflict (what was he doing “encroaching on their land”? There’s clear borders put in place by the authorities, the yellow tape);
gattsuru
1yr ago
And the New York Times article I've linked did not rest solely on who fired first.
gattsuru
1yr ago
International news organisation Reuters denied on Thursday any suggestion it had prior knowledge of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians and soldiers, in a statement responding to a report by media advocacy group HonestReporting.
"We are aware of a report by HonestReporting and accusations made against two freelance photographers who contributed to Reuters coverage of the Oct. 7 attack," Reuters said. "Reuters categorically denies that it had prior knowledge of the attack or that we embedded journalists with Hamas on Oct 7.
"Reuters acquired photographs from two Gaza-based freelance photographers who were at the border on the morning of Oct. 7, with whom it did not have a prior relationship. The photographs published by Reuters were taken two hours after Hamas fired rockets across southern Israel and more than 45 minutes after Israel said gunmen had crossed the border. "Reuters staff journalists were not on the ground at the locations referred to in the HonestReporting article."
The AP has a similar statement.
In case you're thinking that 'My staff reporters were not involved in planning or executing a mass murder of civilians' T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt", you're not alone. The HonestReporting summary if anything manages to undersell it, which is quite an accomplishment for a news story that involves the phrase 'lynch mob': people have since found on a photographer's facebook page a video of the man on a motorbike where the camera-holder or one of the other riders waves a grenade in-hand.
Journalistic ethics are a hard problem, and a harder one during wartime. It's typical for wartime embeds with conventional military forces to submit to often-onerous restrictions, sometimes to the point of requiring all releases to undergo pre-publication review (which should raise a number of Constitutional questions in the United States but mostly doesn't). There was a pretty major controversy in the mid-2000s after a Paris Match reporting team was on-scene at a missile strike targeting a mail carrier aircraft (Vernier-Palliez claimed that the militants had "set them up" and had no idea that they were going to commit a violent attack... though I think her claimed surprise is more than a little self-serving). And 'journalism' that's really just repackaged press releases from active members of a particular side are common enough outside of combat; the rewards are, if anything, simply greater for politics-by-other-means.
On the other hand, if your war reporting is little more than repackaged press releases from a group that slaughtered and raped civilians, while the reporting papers over all of that, this raises more than a few questions for that reporting's accuracy, as critics of journalists embedded with the IDF have long held. And that doesn't seem to be sinking in, here:
That'd be the guy with the grenade and cheerful embrace from Hamas leadership; CNN remains certain, among other things, that this summary is tots accurate and that the photographer's ties to Hamas' military arm tots don't leave any room for suspicion. Mahmud's main remaining photos on the AP database have at least been corrected to note that the dead 'Israeli soldier' was in fact a pacifist Israeli-German dual-citizen.
Okay, but these people weren't exactly weekly bylines. Indeed, they're just one of countless on-the-ground randos that various press agencies sent money and lent legitimacy. They're also just the ones dumb enough and unlucky enough to get caught, but let's leave that aside for now. One bit of that legitimacy is people believing the repackaged press releases, but a deeper one is the ability to wear and mark press credentials, a matter that has historically been considered worth protecting. There's even been clear cases where the IDF has wrongly killed journalists, and been criticized at length for it.
That just became far more difficult to maintain as a norm.
Good thing I linked to a New York Times article that made the self-defense arguments completely obvious!
gattsuru
1yr ago
Redefining a public space into "their land" where putting a phone at someone face is unacceptable is a good part of what I'm criticizing.
gattsuru
1yr ago
And perhaps his head just did that.
As I said in the post, which describes those details along with videos that the Forward seems to have missed, "still possible that Kessler's death had some complications, if extraordinarily unlikely". My point is a bit broader. I can remember a certain situation that was far more in favor of the homicide suspect and yet resulted in not just the suspect being arrested and jailed but having to post a multi-million-dollar bail.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm hoping this is insufficiently charitable -- I'm not just talking dyed-in-the-wool groups like Unicorn Riot, Distributed Denial of Secrets, or the SLPC, but a lot broader a group of communities including some pretty close to the ratsphere -- but worse I think it's insufficiently cynical.
Even if all these groups are organizationally scheming political operations, what's really fascinating is that they normally don't manage to retain very strong message discipline outside of their core focuses, and sometimes not even there. It's actively difficult to not pick up a true believer or two eventually, if only by mistake. So is this the area where they're focusing message discipline, or are these the true believers?
gattsuru
1yr ago
Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say. Witnesses said Paul Kessler fell and struck his head during a confrontation with protesters Sunday in Ventura County, the sheriff's department said. He died Monday.
Authorities in Ventura County, California, are investigating the death of a Jewish man who was injured during a confrontation at dueling rallies over Israel and Gaza died Monday, the sheriff’s department said. Witnesses said Paul Kessler, 69, "was in a physical altercation with counter-protestor(s)," the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. "During the altercation, Kessler fell backwards and struck his head on the ground,” it said.
What a horrible freak acci-
Paul Kessler, 69, died at a hospital on Monday, a day after he was struck during pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations at an intersection in Thousand Oaks, a suburb northwest of Los Angeles, authorities said.
Witnesses said Kessler was involved in a “physical altercation” with one or more counter-protesters, fell backward and struck his head on the ground, according to a statement from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. An autopsy Monday said Kessler died from a blunt force head injury and it was homicide, according to the Sheriff’s Department, which said investigators hadn’t ruled out the possibility that the act was a hate crime.
Well, it's unfortunate and tragic to have a real-world example of the eggshell skull rule, but (ed: cw, video of a man dying)-
A witness to the pro-Palestine protest that led to the death of Jewish man Paul Kessler today railed against local police for not arresting the man Kessler argued with - as new video shows the protest continued on even after police arrived at the scene... Witnesses say he and an as-yet unnamed Palestine supporter started arguing, and that it led to the man hitting Kessler in the face with his megaphone.
A police officer is seen on video asking an unidentified man, who is unconfirmed if this is the suspect, 'So you tried to hit his phone?' With law enforcement in the background, protesters are heard chanting, 'You will burn in hell; Israel will burn in hell.'
Another anti-Semitic chant can be heard, 'Hitler didn't want you, Hitler didn't want you, Hitler didn't want you, Hitler should've smashed you.'
Oh.
Nor does the potential for things to get out of hand seem like it was a surprise (ed: cw, video of a man dying):
The man holding the flag in the photo above allegedly lifted up his shirt to show that he had a pistol in his waistband during the October 29 protest at the same corner (Thousand Oaks Boulevard and Westlake Boulevard, just north of the 101 Freeway). Police were called to the scene, but the man left before they arrived.
It's still possible that Kessler's death had some complications, if extraordinarily unlikely. This is Ventura County rather than LA proper, so I think there's at least a chance that genuine prosecution could happen should the death be clear manslaughter or negligent homicide. The suspect has at least been stopped and questioned and is supposedly cooperating, though the amazing lack of any video of the 'confrontation' itself seems to be a complicating factor.
There's no outrage from the conventional sources, or the Biden or White House twitter accounts. There's nothing from the various ACLUs; quite a lot of people who I respected and had strong feelings on political radicalization must not have heard of it. The communities that spent a lot of time hunting down fascists and Nazis to punch and dox don't seem particularly interested by literal invocations of Hitler. And the lack of any arrest despite a clear suspect makes a bit of a mockery of all the people who in the Rittenhouse era proclaimed that any death required a prosecution and a trial. I guess to their credit (if damning with faint praise), the ADL has posted.
I've written at length about the extent and efforts pushing speech and speakers out of the public square have gone, and it's difficult to see this outside of that context. Worse, the lack of backlash seems a justification and legitimization of that behavior.
Which seems noteworthy in a few ways. There's no shortage of right-wing or Red Tribe examples, but Kessler, notably, was not. I'm not a fan of perspectives where only the cleanest hands make acceptable figures to bring forward -- to borrow from Mencken, defending freedom sometimes means defending scoundrels -- but I'll spell out when even that does not seem to be enough. It's not about X as a principle goes to this.
And at a deeper level... @FCfromSSC did a very good tactical analysis of the situation around violence at public protests in the context of the De Oñate Statue shooting. I don't want to extrapolate too hard from this case yet because it could end in a hard conviction next month. But it's looking, if anything, too rosy.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's not a formal rule or anything like that, and there are a number of subspecies where the trend reverses (such as reptile-like interpretations of kobolds). More just the sort of stereotype that arises from a bunch of coincidences.
Prosaically, most reptile and dragon species have connotations of being physically strong, socially domineering, heavily built, and moderately possessive, whether in gay or het spheres. A number of formative works (Spyro the Dragon, , older versions of D&D, Digimon, to a lesser extent Pern) either reinforced that or feed narratives that worked toward it (The Jungle Book is... a very awkward way to find out that you like older men with sibilant voices, but in addition to spawning a genre of hypno subs, it also ended up with lot of people specifically looking for reptilian tops).
More pruriently, and with the caution that you probably don't want to know (cw: nsfw):
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's not so much time spent sucking dick directly, so much as the availability of new partners that's a pretty significant limitation, especially if you aren't extremely open in your standards and preferences and/or living in a gay mecca. It's not my thing, but the amount of effort involving in setting up mushes, orgies, or just convenient conventions where there's going to be a lot of room parties is kinda surprisingly difficult! Other just redirect their career around opportunities, like working in a travel-focused field with a lot of on-location downtime.
At least part of the stronger argument is not specific to utilitarians. The fuller text from the article doesn't dwell at length on it, but it does bring up that we're perfectly fine with industrialized animal-rape, whether that be make sure the next generation of cows exist, or to maximize horse race lineages, or to avoid possible complications for more esoteric dog breed combinations, sometimes in especially gross ways: the only rule is that the practitioner can't (explicitly) enjoy it.
((Mike Rowe famously described turkey farming as the grossest job he'd ever done, and he's not wrong!))
There are more serious arguments available even within a utilitarian framework. Ultimately, though, making any run prey to the problem that you've now that far too much and far too in-depth about animal-fucking.
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