hydroacetylene
No bio...
User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
3d ago
It's actually quite interesting that Christianity, to the limits of sources, never liked slavery very much, even in time periods when slavery was normal and uncontroversial, and that some of the first Christian-religiously-influenced laws ever passed were protecting slave welfare.
I'm aware that most pagans are into hippie nonsense, not racist nonsense, and that even most pagans with conservative tendencies are not particularly racist- the radical esoteric traditionalist crowd is truly fringe of the fringe- but if we're talking specifically about radical esoteric traditionalists, well, they're truly extremists and I suspect have a large fraction which just Does Not Play Well With Others, same as any other frighteningly extreme fringe of the fringe group.
The median pagan just wants to do drugs, and maybe sleep with some rebellious hippy chicks. Most racist pagans are in prison gangs. The 'ethno-conscious paganism as an ideological choice' thing is a small enough group that it's worth asking why people who claim to want reactionary social norms don't join the much larger communities which offer much more reactionary than average social norms which actually exist.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Section 8 is privately owned and in practice does a lot of discrimination on the basis of finding a spot on the sliding scale of better tenants to being able to get away with crappier maintenance. There’s nice-but-poor section 8, which in my area generally advertises only in Spanish, requires full time employment, etc. And there’s crappy section 8 which keeps the water on and does no other maintenance but is also forgiving of late payments of the tenant’s 30% of rent.
These things exist because section 8 is ordinary apartments and houses owned by people who, for whatever reason, prefer to have the government underwriting a large portion of the rent in exchange for a cap on rent. Reasons vary from the genuinely pro-social to the extremely cynical.
hydroacetylene
7d ago
It seems unlikely that the extra friction and expense of requiring kindergarten teachers who can pass even Algebra II is worth it, as long as they're literate, patient, enforce social norms, and willing to stick with the phonics and counting curriculum.
The current system of requiring a college degree with an education specialization is also extra friction and expense compared to the previous system of letting school officials hire 16 year old girls and use their judgement to pick which ones would be any good at it.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
Not to mention, of course, whites were something on the order of 10% of SA's population at the end of apartheid- total. Jews are 60% of Israel's population.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
And I think it’s worth noting- nobody is going to call their lawmaker demanding more access to porn(duh) and no lawmaker will go out on a limb to make porn more accessible, nor was Texas the first state this has happened in.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Jewish women who request a religious exemption from the draft nearly always have it granted IIRC and they’re not supposed to be in combat positions anyways.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
contemporary 'Christianity' which is just a hedonistic gay progressive with AIDS calling themselves a bishop.
This is a small minority of denominations and they are typically doing very poorly.
hydroacetylene
9d ago
I’m going to push back- everything predictable tells us that the optimal game theoretic move for dem policy priorities would be for sotomayor to resign right now. The DNC is weak in the senate and probably performing at or slightly above their ceiling right now, but manchin and tester and brown all vote for dem judicial nominees in a way their replacements, almost certainly republicans, most assuredly will not. And sixteen years is an average, not a hard rule- there’s a good chance of living less than that. Democrats shouldn’t count on being able to fix their heartland problem and our next president will probably be trump.
I also think dem justices are basically interchangeable- the current fashion is low talent partisan hacks like KJB.
hydroacetylene
7d ago
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Your mother is not very nice and she does not put her ideas into practice all that often. That doesn’t change that her ideas are usually correct. Listen to her.
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Life is a construction project, not a race. If you want something you need to put in the effort beforehand to build up to it. Yes, that often includes doing a lot of stupid and pointless things to document compliance with arbitrary milestones, but you cannot change any of it. It can only hurt you by refusing to comply.
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Just be normal. Most people do most things the best way to do them, and you probably have not found some cool life hack- you will most of the time wind up independently rederiving the normal thing to do.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
And yet the conservative elites are mostly Catholic with a few Jews and almost no mainline protestants.
hydroacetylene
18d ago
Ethan Crumbley Parents Found Guilty of Manslaughter
Ethan Crumbley is a school shooter who killed four people. This does not make him unique. What makes him unique is that his parents have been found guilty of manslaughter for it. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/16/us/james-jennifer-crumbley-trials-differences/index.html
The legal theory is that the parents were extraordinarily negligent- and, TBH, at least the mom seems to have been a shitty parent who ignored her son's obvious mental illness- and provided a firearm to their son despite clear evidence he was at least a potential danger to others. I don't think this legal theory is particularly novel even if it's rarely used; when I took my CHL class in much more firearms-friendly Texas I was told that if I provided a minor with a handgun, I could be held liable should they kill someone with it. But on to some article quotes:
That witness overlap reflects how similar the two trials were overall. Both parents were convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter for their roles in their son’s mass shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan on November 30, 2021. They face up to 15 years in prison and are set to be sentenced next month.
Despite those similarities, the trials unfolded quite differently.
The case against Jennifer focused heavily on her personal life, digging into her voluminous text messages, her relationship with her son and even her extramarital affair. In contrast, the case against James largely avoided his private affairs but more closely examined how he secured the family’s firearms.
So his father was convicted under the idea that he had a positive responsibility to store firearms in a way inaccessible to a mentally ill teenaged boy. I'm not an expert on Michigan law, but I'm pretty sure that the letter of the law says something along those lines in most states, and it would be very difficult to argue that he doesn't have a moral responsibility. But maybe he was a responsible gun owner who took measures to keep his troubled son away from household guns that a reasonable person would expect to be sufficient:
In contrast, James Crumbley’s trial more closely focused on how he stored the three firearms in the home.
In August 2021, Ethan sent a video to his friend of him handling and loading a gun just after midnight. “My dad left it out so I thought. ‘Why not’ lol,” he wrote, according to messages shown in court. Both of his parents were at home around that time, forensic analyst Edward Wagrowski testified.
Further, James purchased the SIG Sauer 9mm firearm for his son on Black Friday 2021, and he later told investigators he hid it in a case in his armoire, with the bullets hidden in a different spot under some jeans. A detective said a cable lock sold with the SIG Sauer was found still in its plastic packaging.
Nevermind. While I'm leery of the precedent this sets for obvious reasons, I have no trouble acknowledging that James Crumbley deserves to go to prison and, were I a juror, I'd probably have voted to convict. On to the mom's case.
Another major difference between the two trials was that Jennifer provided a lengthy digital trail of her thoughts and feelings, while James did not. This contrast meant the jury heard more about her personal life than about his.
As revealed at her trial, Jennifer was in text conversations with several people before, during and after the shooting, providing a running commentary of her thoughts and actions.
She messaged her boss as she realized their gun was missing and her son was the shooter, then asked her boss not to fire her. “I need my job,” she wrote. “Please don’t judge me for what my son did.” Jennifer Crumbley appears in court on January 25 in Oxford, Michigan.
She texted the owner of a horse farm on the morning of the shooting that her son was “having a hard time” and “can’t be left alone,” and then later sent her reaction to the attack. “I wish we had warnings.. Something,” Jennifer Crumbley wrote.
She also messaged her extramarital lover after the shooting, reflecting on her own parenting skills. “I failed as a parent,” she wrote in a message. “I failed miserably.”
Other online posts of hers furthered the prosecution’s case. Days before the attack, she posted on her social media about her and Ethan’s trip to the gun range and his new SIG Sauer 9mm firearm. “Mom & son day testing out his new Xmas present,” she wrote in the post, alongside a photo of the gun.
Further, the day before the shooting, a teacher left Jennifer Crumbley a voicemail saying that her son had been looking at bullets on his phone in class. “Lol I’m not mad you have to learn not to get caught,” she wrote to her son in a text.
This does not paint a picture of good parenting. Furthermore,
The major difference in the trials was Jennifer Crumbley’s decision to testify in her own defense, while James Crumbley did not.
On the stand, Jennifer Crumbley pushed blame onto her son, her husband and the school, and she expressed no regret for her actions. “I’ve asked myself if I would have done anything differently, and I wouldn’t have,” she testified.
James Crumbley, meanwhile, declined to testify. “It is my decision to remain silent,” he said in court.
The two decisions were a reflection of their broader legal defense strategies.
A pretrial ruling in Jennifer Crumbley’s trial had barred both sides from bringing up anything about her extramarital affair with a local firefighter. But midway through her trial, Jennifer waived the ruling and agreed to allow that evidence, saying she trusted her attorney’s recommended strategy change.
IANAL, but Jennifer Crumbley's legal defense strategy sounds sufficiently suboptimal that she seems to just have generally very bad judgement, maybe the mental illness runs in the family. That being said, I'm a lot less comfortable with the legal logic here- being a generally shitty parent who has bad judgement and neglects her son's mental health problem isn't illegal. I'm comfortable calling her a shitty parent and saying she should be called out for it but it kinda seems like a novel legal theory of the sort that's generally bad.
Personally I doubt this case will be widely replicated; the Crumbleys seem to have had much-more-damning-than-average facts. But let's go to the general principle; parents sometimes being held responsible when their minor child kills someone doesn't seem terribly controversial, no doubt had they left out a gun and their five year old killed someone using it to play cowboys and indians this would be a rare scenario but not a case that grabbed much attention. And it doesn't seem controversial either that Ethan Crumbley was sufficiently crazy to be less than 100% responsible for his actions. On the other hand, parents of teen murderers getting tried for manslaughter is definitely abnormal; teen murderers almost certainly suffer from distinctly below average parenting, too, although I would expect that in the median case that's due to a single mother's weird work schedule or poverty rather than a wealthy woman neglecting her kid. I think the difference is that these parents had, at least materially, the ability to do better. His mom obviously knew her son was showing signs of being crazy but preferred horses, extramarital affairs, and booze, his dad had a gun safe but didn't store the murder weapon in it(and when I was a teen with my own guns they were required to be stored in my dad's gun safe, which seems like the reasonable policy for your teen owning guns). This wasn't a single mom working a shift that made it hard to pay much attention to her kid, which is a lot closer to the family scenario for most minor criminals and for most mass shooters.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Among dog breeds, Huskies are stupid but rarely kill people, Pitbulls are smarter but kill people on regular basis.
I’m pretty sure huskies are smarter than pit bulls.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Actual historical monarchies had tons of useless parasites supported by the state, either directly or through corruption.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
BLM turned out and had specific demands of people near enough to have to listen to them. Those demands were, at first, fairly reasonable(cops wear body cams) so they were met.
By contrast the pro-Palestine protestors are demanding Israel dissolve itself. Not only is this a much bigger ask than ‘put cameras on your police’ Israel really doesn’t care and doesn’t have to listen at all.
hydroacetylene
20d ago
The problem with our Covid response was the urban/rural divide.
No, the problem with our Covid response was that it was damn stupid and full of lies, not in the sense of being mistaken but in the sense of being knowably false and told for political purposes.
hydroacetylene
9d ago
It's a reference to hlynka(RIP) and also to Leviathan, the 'somebody's gotta do it' defense of monarchism.
hydroacetylene
7d ago
I'm rereading The Human Reach series by John Lumpkin. It's a hard sci-fi Tom Clancy in space series- the atomic rockets guy was illustrator and scientific/technical cosultant- and is at the very least interesting and engaging with no glaringly obvious scientific errors. Ships have heat radiators and space battleship tactics are cognizant of Newton's laws and the tyranny of the rocket equation instead of trying to do Midway or Trafalgar in space.
One thing I think it could benefit from is introducing an economic logic driving space travel and colonization. The series takes place in a world of continued relatively low fertility and tries to use national pride as the logic behind space colonization, which in turn necessitates trade, creating enough of an infrastructure to set space battles and spy stuff against. But it's hard not to notice that the great powers could easily just... not. Not build antimatter factories or fusion fuel production operations or engage in long range exploration. Indeed, it's lampshaded in the books themselves; two of the belligerents are specifically noted for their populations being too low to fill out colonies and the sheer expense of colonization and maintaining a space navy is readily apparent. Every benefit to the homeland is drawn from things based in Earth orbit and not beyond. It's not implausible that the US and Russia and the like would maintain a single colony for national pride, but maintaining multiple and then going to war to own more of them seems to require an explanation, which is lacking in the book.
hydroacetylene
20d ago
I hate the political angle on this. It feels leftist to me that “if we just had more schools/spent more money” we would not have “maga/disinformation problem” instead of most of things being fundamental disagreements.
Ironically, right wingers in America do much better on the ideological Turing test than left wingers. There’s no actual reason for the sometime leftist assumption that if conservatives would just get out of their bubbles, they would calm down.
I’m reminded of an article a few years ago, by a progressive pointing to the 30-40% of the country which he claimed was obstinately convinced that democrats wanted to do a short laundry list of perennial conservative complaints- all of which were regularly being floated by mainstream democrats and had large support in their base. He was of course oblivious to the idea that more exposure of conservatives to people who wanted to take their guns away would not in fact convince them no one was coming for their guns.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
To be even more clear, the Catholic and Orthodox interpretation of that passage has always been that the rich young man sought monasticism and was dissuaded by the requirement of poverty.
hydroacetylene
13d ago
t will get flooded with sub room temperature IQ migrants by neoliberal NGOs and utterly cease to function in any recognizable fashion.
No, it will not. Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe for the foreseeable future- it was before the war, and getting bombed flat didn’t help. It’s poorer than South Africa. Even third worlders do not want to live there, and if forced to- well, they’re third worlders, they can walk from there to a nicer country- which is such a low bar to clear that it includes the entirety of the balkans. Notably, Romania and Bulgaria, which are both several times wealthier than Ukraine, have functionally no third world migrants.
You have to be at least as wealthy as Mexico or Russia to attract migrants. Ukraine is as poor compared to those countries as they are to the US and Germany.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
The law in question for Lawrence specifically only applied to homosexual sodomy.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Ukrainian social norms are not particularly like those of the modern west; it’s a strong candidate for the most conservative social norms of any country with a Christian majority and this is apparent from interacting with old country Ukrainians in a way it is not with old country Mexicans or poles or whatever. The idea that Ukraine does not have at least some degree of actual patriarchy to go with women being exempted from the draft is not, it appears, particularly based on fact.
hydroacetylene
15d ago
To be clear, if you are white and will be spending all day in the sun, rashguards, broad brimmed hats, and sun blocking sleeves are a very good idea even with sunscreen.
England and the Netherlands were the wealthiest societies in the world starting at their recover from the black death, and retained that title until their colonies dethroned them. Now the difference between $600/yr and $1,000/yr is probably not night and day, but Britain by the period of colonialism had a much higher standard of living compared to India, Africa, etc.
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