haversoe
7mo ago
My takeaway is that age of consent laws over 14 or 15 primarily act to felonize normal young men under 25, with very thin justification
Yes, this is troubling. The predictable consequence of taking a genuine concern and putting it in the hands of bureaucrats and law enforcement operating under perverted incentive structures.
haversoe
7mo ago
studies show most men in their twenties are attracted to 15 year old girls
Which studies would those be?
haversoe
7mo ago
He may be best known to the layman for his pop history revisionist slop, but Howard Zinn was very much an academic historian with formal training.
haversoe
7mo ago
It isn't realistic at all. It would require that we all share the same morality and mores. Essentially, a (mostly) homogeneous society. That ship's sailed. But a boy can dream of how it could have been if things had gone differently.
haversoe
7mo ago
I got the same, which makes no sense to me. If I claimed to be anything, it'd be something like Old-school New England conservative Democrat. Which in modern political speak makes me a mutt. A "swing voter" who holds both conservative and progressive views and sees no contradiction in doing so.
haversoe
7mo ago
I'd much prefer we returned to a time where people got their asses kicked for acting like an asshole and the cops wouldn't do anything if it was plain that a person had it coming.
haversoe
7mo ago
Your AI-generated images mostly make them look like patrolmen. Very nattily dressed patrolmen, but patrolmen nonetheless. Though the aiguillettes in the 3rd and 4th pictures are suggestive of general's aides de camp. I think, if you asked the average boots on the ground guy, especially the new ones, they'd prefer a badass special forces operator look.
haversoe
7mo ago
conservatives are completely allergic to any kind of organization
Rugged individualism doesn't lend itself to joining hands in solidarity.
haversoe
7mo ago
the key events are not actually backed up by the videos
I agree with this. I'm typically good at not jumping to obvious conclusions on just one data point. The world is complex and messy and no less so in the realm of law enforcement. But I'm still of the impression that the administration wants all of us to believe they are acting in an untethered way. Why that might be, I don't know, but claims that's it's an excellent way of distracting some of us from what we'd otherwise be concerned about seem plausible. And the remainder of us are the ones posting "this is exactly what I voted for" on Xitter.
haversoe
7mo ago
The Good case requires no investigation
If you're claiming it requires no investigation in order to change minds that can't be changed, I have no argument. Investigations are conducted in matters such as this because we are a nation of civilized people governed by rules and laws. That's what we conservatives are trying to conserve (among other things).
haversoe
7mo ago
summary execution
If an execution is to be characterized as summary, isn't it necessary that the execution be carried out specifically because of an (illegal) act? No one in this thread knows with 100% confidence why the ICE guys shot him, though a reasonable guess IMO is because they were scared shitless by the presence of a gun. "Because he was a criminal agitator engaging in criminal agitation" is the least likely reason, in my view.
haversoe
7mo ago
must either conclude that there is no body cam footage
According to DHS, there is bodycam footage from multiple officers.
haversoe
7mo ago
A proper investigation would settle many of these disagreements of fact. Whether everyone now performing motivated reasoning for or against ICE will accept the results of such an investigation is unknown. But the last I heard, DHS has decided to investigate themselves and assigned the investigation to an org who has no training or experience in doing such a task and also doesn't have the equipment. That's troubling.
haversoe
7mo ago
paying 28% APR on their Dodge Hellcat, which they wrecked - twice - on a 72 hour libo
If that isn't proof you've served, I don't know what is. I would also accept, "barracks/dormitory parking lot full of brand new Mustangs on a Saturday night, instead of out with their stripper girlfriends (who they proposed to after knowing them for 4 days) because the young troops don't have enough money for gas after they've paid the note and insurance. "
haversoe
7mo ago
the government is secretly controlled by the British
If we're thinking of the same theory, it's no less the British empire that controls our government and nearly every government in the world. Came across that one for the first time recently. The folks making content around that idea seem quite bright and not at all loony, which is surprising.
haversoe
7mo ago
ICE are not all psychos
I believe that ICE is still mostly staffed by career civil servants who take their duties and their commitment to the nation seriously and are both highly trained and very professional. They are augmented by a huge influx of new hires who are inexperienced and undertrained and are being thrown into the front lines. Furthermore, some of the new hires (in particular those who do not come from a law enforcement background) might have questionable motivation for seeking the job, or so the story goes (e.g. claims that everyone who was once a Proud Boy is now a federal agent; probably not the case, but may have a glimmer of truth).
haversoe
7mo ago
Sorry, the way I stated that made it unclear what I meant. If I had broken it up into multiple sentences rather than one long one it could have been clearer.
When I wrote that, I was thinking specifically about the Mexican-American teenager who was working at Target when ICE or CBP tackled him and dragged him out of the store in cuffs. Evidently he was repeatedly shouting that he was an American citizen. They ignored that, threw him in a van and drove off. They quickly figured out that he was in fact a citizen, but not before they beat the shit out of him and dumped him bleeding and crying in a Walmart parking lot a mile from where they picked him up. Evidently the person who found him posted a video of the boy shivering and weeping in the parking lot. I did not see that video, but I did see a clip from the video where he was led from the store.
I don't know what is true and what is not true about this story. Yes, there's video evidence, but there could easily be other information that would make the federal agents' actions seem less extreme. In any case, when I read the news (which is a mix of mainstream left and right leaning outlets as well as lots of twitter threads for hot takes and substack posts for analysis), I come away with the impression that someone wants me to believe that the federal government is acting with cruelty and viciousness for no damn good reason in Minnesota, except that they want to piss people off.
Whether that's because it's true or because of a concerted propaganda campaign, or a mix of the two, is beside the point. If that's the way it's widely perceived, that's all that matters. If, that is, you buy into the idea that the administration's true goals are for spectacle, an idea that makes more and more sense to me as the term progresses.
haversoe
7mo ago
Are there no more armed militias? They were a huge deal for decades. Where did they all go?
haversoe
7mo ago
how can we remove a small enough number of immigrants that it doesn't actually matter, but we still feel like we're doing something?
I really feel like that's where we are right now, except I'd remove the word "feel" and replace it with "look". Trump is all about spectacle. Miller may be a true believer and he and the president may be working at cross purposes.
But everything I've seen about what's actually happening on the ground is about (1) arresting really bad people that they were going to arrest anyway without a surge of personnel or budget and (2) treating random brown/yellow people with over-the-top cruelty and viciousness with the specific intent of horrifying and spurring to action the soccer moms and VA nurses.
The latter is the spectacle, both the action and the reaction, and it overwhelms every news cycle. Trump loves that, as far as I can tell. It's all part of his "suck the oxygen out of every room" approach to governance.
haversoe
7mo ago
I agree with your assessment of what they achieved. But why wouldn't they say that's the point of the organization in the first place? Because hurting those who look down their noses at the unwashed masses (cutting sinecures) would surely be red meat for the base. And disrupting the wasteful operation of many taxpayer funded activist organizations would have even broader appeal, regardless of political valance.
I think the reason is because Musk vastly overestimated his own intelligence, skill and worldliness. He really thought he could easily find 1-2 TRILLION dollars because he believed he knew how to run large organizations leanly and easily ferret out inefficiency and waste. And he could do it with a handful of young, techy types. Turns out he didn't understand the several orders of magnitude difference in size and complexity.
And for that reason I can't agree with you that DOGE was successful. I really wish they were. They had some great ideas.
There's also the claim that they really were successful because the entire point of the operation was simply to steal petabytes of protected information and install backdoors throughout the government. The whole cutting waste schtick was a ruse. I don't personally subscribe to that idea, but it has legs.
haversoe
8mo ago
Fair enough and you can slot that into the intangible benefits category as well.
I'd also like to see elimination of the hard cap on student count that the US government imposes at medical schools at the behest of the AMA. It benefits all of us if every young student who wishes to become a doctor has the opportunity to pursue that. And it's only fair if the doctors make less, they work less. So let's get more doctors.
When I was a child, doctors who were established in their careers didn't work on Wednesdays (in addition to not working the weekend). Now many of them work 100+ hours per week. This feels untenable.
haversoe
8mo ago
Thousands of physicians are already public servants. They work for the public health service, the veterans administration or they're members of the armed forces. Other agencies employ them too (e.g. State dept, Indian Health Service). They receive special rates and do pretty well for themselves. They certainly make less than if they ran a successful practice, but not everyone is interested in those sorts of headaches and risk. And there are other tangible (loan forgiveness) and intangible (training, travel, work-life balance) benefits to working for the government beside the pay.
haversoe
8mo ago
I had similar experiences regarding Koreans and Jews in the late 1990s. I found it very weird then (why would they even have any opinions? it's not like there are any Jews in Korea except a small handful of soldiers at Yongsan...) and I find it very weird now. But I also found them in general to be well-educated but somehow still extremely credulous people and maybe that's the crux of it. I wonder if that's still true.
I think it depends on why you're doing it.
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