hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
26d ago
Hooking up with a girl who's too drunk to say no is, in fact, very bad behavior.
hydroacetylene
16d 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
12d ago
If a kind fairy made you absolute ruler of your country, what batshit crazy out of left field ideas would you implement? We’re assuming that you can’t be overthrown or stymied by the deep state, but have only the normal powers of the government and other actors for your country’s coordination problems don’t necessarily listen to you.
As for me, a few ideas-
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declare that police racism is caused by angry confederate ghosts and that by appeasing them we can prevent police racism. To this end have sweet tea, Marlboros, fried chicken, etc left on confederate graves and monuments and put all of Dukes of Hazard in the library of congress. Trumpet anything and everything that could be considered improvement in race relations as a victory of this policy. This is because ‘hey, police shootings are actually nothing to worry about’ is simply not a narrative that will catch on, but an outlet of superstition can make intractable problems seem acceptable.
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Ban federal funds from supporting university education for anyone without an associates degree from a community college first, including by guaranteeing debt- most people who obtain student debt without a degree drop out in the first two years, so forcing people who would otherwise borrow to complete community college will minimize the amount of new pointless student debt.
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Pay already-canceled celebrities to go on racist rants using foreign racial slurs like ‘preto’ and ‘kafir’ so the n-word will lose its racial connotation as it morphs into a general very harsh swearword(which it kind of already is) similar to the c-word. This way future controversies caused by this use can avoid harming race relations.
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Require any school getting federal funding to give equal time to any gender, sex Ed, or civil rights lessons to curricula designed by popular boomercon figures like Mike Rowe and Dave Ramsey. Either the schools teach things the kids could stand hearing, or they stop teaching stupidity like what actually gets pushed in the former category. Win-win.
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Repeal Marbury v Madison to take the federal government out of hot button issues(which, let’s be real, are very rarely passed by congress).
hydroacetylene
26d ago
'Rape' isn't a natural category. It's a term for having sex with a woman who doesn't or shouldn't want it in a way that's sufficiently bad. That's why the term 'statutory rape' exists uncontroversially despite generally not referring to any use of force.
So this is really an argument about whether hooking up with a drunk out of her mind girl is bad enough to be considered rape. Now, I presume that we agree that giving a girl valium to hook up with her is bad enough to be justifiably called rape, just because most people do in our culture- there's a specific word for that kind of it. I presume we agree that if a man bought an eighteen year old woman- so old enough to consent to sex with him, not old enough to drink in the US, and not old enough to be presumed to know her limits with alcohol- alcoholic beverages until she was too drunk to say no, then took her back to his hotel room, we would agree that this qualifies as rape.
So is the difference the idea that getting taken advantage of is a natural consequence of sufficient public drunkenness? Because although there's a sense in which it obviously is, it also seems to be sufficiently horrendous that using the term rape is at least founded, if non-central, and if referring to it that way reduces the incidence thereof(which is entirely possible) then I'm all for it.
hydroacetylene
28d ago
I think you’re leaving out that everyone wants services from a ‘big state’- stable currency, long range security, access to markets on favorable terms, etc. And America has, quite helpfully, lots of medium sized governments with major economies attached which can fill the void- bigger state level governments.
The median outcome for the federal government’s decline into irrelevance is federal assets defecting to Texas, California, etc which then become regional hegemons and solidify into major countries on their own right by cannibalizing nearby smaller communities. The ‘civil war’ then looks like conflicts defining the edge of each SOI. In the long run this is probably likely enough that it would be foolish for bigger state governments not to have specific plans to capitalize on it. But it being particularly likely in the next decade or so as opposed to the US being in for a rough couple decades? Maybe. I think we probably have enough assabiyah to pull together through another major crisis or two, and if rural areas have increasing control by non-state actors the system can deal with it in practice. I wouldn’t count out balkanization when the social security bill comes due either, but I still think you’re looking at regionally hegemonic empires which happen to be smaller than the current expanse of the USA.
hydroacetylene
12d 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
23d ago
University of Texas Austin Fires dozens of DEI-related employees
https://president.utexas.edu/organizational-changes
The University of Texas is, notoriously, much more liberal than the state for which it is the flagship, and in light of the frequent motte discussion about how conservatives can make whatever laws they want, and progressives will just ignore them, I thought it was worth sharing the abovelinked letter. I guess you need more of a submission statement than that, so I'll begin with picking out a few highlights.
For these reasons, we are discontinuing programs and activities within the Division of Campus and Community Engagement (DCCE) that now overlap with our efforts elsewhere. Following these changes, the scale and needs of the remaining DCCE activities do not justify a stand-alone division. As a result, we are closing DCCE and redistributing the remaining programs. This means that we will continue to operate many programs with rich histories spanning decades, such as disability services, University Interscholastic League, the UT charter schools, and volunteer and community programs. Going forward, these programs will be part of other divisions where they complement existing operations. We know these programs and the dedicated staff who run them will continue to have positive impacts on our campus and community.
Additionally, funding used to support DEI across campus prior to SB 17’s effective date will be redeployed to support teaching and research. As part of this reallocation, associate or assistant deans who were formerly focused on DEI will return to their full-time faculty positions. The positions that provided support for those associate and assistant deans and a small number of staff roles across campus that were formerly focused on DEI will no longer be funded.
Now I would prefer it if those deans focused on DEI were offered the opportunity of becoming janitors or being summarily terminated, and called the RINOs representing me to the state requesting that change to SB17, but it's, undeniably, an effect, and a fairly significant one given that my impression is that academics really resent having to actually teach classes and prefer to do either pure research or at least focus on passing asspulls off as research, and also that DEI programs seem to have providing comfortable employment as a primary goal over actually doing anything. I'd also like to point towards teaching and research being the actual functions of a university, and even if these people could be replaced with less odious professors requiring them to be mission focused is a major improvement.
And, to note, this is an effect began with the state legislature banning DEI, and not for some other reason, or at least that's what the letter opens by assuring us.
Soon after the passage last year of Senate Bill 17 — which prohibits many activities around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — the University embarked on a multiphase process to review campus portfolios and end or redesign the policies, programs, trainings, and roles affected by the new law. Our initial focus was to ensure we made the required changes by SB 17’s January 1 effective date, but we knew that more work would be required to utilize our talent and resources most effectively in support of our teaching and research missions, and ultimately, our students.
Since that date, we have been evaluating our post-SB 17 portfolio of divisions, programs, and positions. The new law has changed the scope of some programs on campus, making them broader and creating duplication with long-standing existing programs supporting students, faculty, and staff. Following those reviews, we have concluded that additional measures are necessary to reduce overlap, streamline student-facing portfolios, and optimize and redirect resources into our fundamental activities of teaching and research.
It's worth noting the UT's endowment is literally the size of Harvard's, and so 'money problems' is not the secret real reason. I haven't crunched the numbers on this, but I suspect that the endowment is big enough relative to operating expenses that UT could just ride out any measures imposed by the state as a noncompliance penalty short of "send in the state troopers and haul faculty out in handcuffs". Not that I'd put the latter past the state, but UT would be extremely reasonable to think that that particular measure is not a step one in the event of a noncompliant university and so they'd kind of have a while to drag their feet.
CNN is reporting that the total number of staff cut is unknown(https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/us/university-texas-austin-cutting-dei-jobs-reaj/index.html)
Brian Davis, a university spokesman, declined to provide the number of jobs that are being eliminated. Davis told CNN in an email that the university would not comment beyond Hartzell’s letter.
And that same article also gave me material for a minirant:
One student said Tuesday she was saddened by the news of staff jobs being cut. Aaliyah Barlow, president of the university’s Black Student Alliance, said she feels discouraged by the disinvestment in DEI-related jobs and programs.
“Me personally, I cried,” Barlow said. “The fact that I am going to come back here next year and all the staff members I know and all the programs I value are just going to be gone, it’s very disheartening. I feel like my college experience is ruined.”
Ma'am, you going to college is not about the experience. It's not about enrichment or programs you value- it's about you getting an education. Now I suspect that the president of a university black student alliance is getting an education in something extremely low value, but still- the government isn't funding college to make students feel valued and empowered and grant them a fun experience. The need to offer more fun, luxurious experiences to students seems like a part of cost disease in higher education that makes life worse for everyone who can't afford the ludicrous pricetag. Honestly, if I had my way, students at government-funded universities would be required to live in the same conditions as enlisted members of the military, with barracks and early morning calisthenics, for at least the first year, and barred from using loans or government funding to finance any lifestyle improvements or extracurriculars past that.
Rant over. Discussion prompts- is this a falsification of the narrative, so popular on the motte, that it doesn't matter how conservative a government is, it can't stop the cathedral from doing whatever it damn well pleases? Is this evidence of the cathedral being less monolithically progressive than commonly believed? Is it some Texas specific factor?
hydroacetylene
10d ago
Older people don't care so much and are happy to see their property values rise (property values have risen far out of proportion to incomes in recent decades)
Is this actually true? Where I live the boomers are mostly upset about how the increase in housing costs is affecting young people, with blue tribe boomers thinking it’s unfair and red tribe boomers thinking it delays growing up, and there’s a near universal consensus that taking the hit to property values is worth it to reduce housing cost.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
I think they want to return to pre Christian Germanic paganism, aka a remnant of the time of living in mud huts like the Africans they love to hate.
Like it or not, Europe broke out of those conditions from 1,000 years of Catholic theocracy. Asia modernized by copying them. This is a well-known, historically supported story that’s perfectly compatible with reactionary ideas about things like the place of women.
I think some of these DR types are too racist for actual Christian reactionaries in real life, or find that their autistic NEET edge lord behavior is otherwise unwelcome in IRL Christian reactionary communities so try to go further back. Twitter edgelordism is escapism whether it’s on the left or the right.
hydroacetylene
15d ago
Non-battery based energy storage(like pumping water behind a dam) seems like it fills the niche, albeit with efficiency losses, does it not?
hydroacetylene
7d ago
I believe the answer from a leviathan shaped hole perspective is that the local baron is a face to be appealed to directly who can solve the coordination problem leading to arbitrary tyranny directly.
I've met elected officials, I've met aristocrats(well, pretenders to the same- individuals with the bloodlines to call themselves nobles but without the state recognizing their title). Honestly I can't tell you whether the graf von whatever or the representative for bumfuck wherever is more of a reasonable person on average- I suspect they come from basically similar social strata and are basically similar people. But an aristocrat at the very least has a bigger bully pulpit to get bureaucrats to back down on their vogonity and probably has legal privileges in a monarchist society to effect the same.
Now in practice I think it's more complicated; 'if only the tsar knew' is a meme for a reason. But- formal one man rule seems to incentivize anti-corruption drives at the very least.
hydroacetylene
22d ago
If you are an American and want to only live around white people, Maine exists.
Very nice and extremely white places(Maine, Iceland, Denmark) aren’t hard to find. If you’d like to maximize your purchasing power I hear Argentina is like 90% light skinned, unlikely to go to war anytime soon, and eager for American dollars to be spent there.
If you’re looking for the actual literal whitest country in the world, it’s probably Latvia or something- absolutely no one moves there(unlike Russia, the US, Germany, etc) and there’s no native non-whites unlike in the US or Russia.
If of course you want a place to live that’s upper 90’s percent red tribe white, that’s West Virginia.
White nationalists mostly don’t live in or move to any of these options, although a few move to Orania I think all of those already lived in South Africa.
hydroacetylene
4d 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
20d ago
and yet black men have no trouble attracting white women in the west
Yes they do. Miscegenation in the USA is overwhelmingly white man/minority woman and blacks are less likely to miscegenate than other races anyways.
There’s lots of black men who claim to have slept with white women, but I think that AADOS culture is big on promiscuity as a male status symbol and sleeping with white women as a particular example, so this is probably lies.
hydroacetylene
18d ago
While criticizing Islam might be more controversial, westerners generally regard Islam as a distinctive civilization, and I’m also wondering why the criticism doesn’t apply to Japan.
Japan is rich. It’s safe. Most of its problems are attributable to low birth rates, but they’re more lower end of average than exceptionally low the way Taiwan’s or South Korea’s are. It’s distinctly not-western culturally.
hydroacetylene
18d ago
abuses of electroshock therapy
Uh, correct me if I’m wrong- @self_made_human feel free to chime in here- but I thought that electroshock therapy was actually an effectual and not-painful technique that was abandoned for complicated reasons including safetyism?
hydroacetylene
16d ago
I don’t think looking at ammo online is ipso facto unreasonable, but given the blue tribe paranoia about school shootings it seems trivially obvious that in class is a time and place that is at the very least highly inappropriate.
hydroacetylene
21d ago
In the US, no, I don’t get the sense of Islam as being a common ‘get religion’ thing at all. Most Americans still think of Islam as uniquely predisposed to violence and savagery, converts to Islam mostly come from prison, and Americans who want to make the sacrifices required by Islam can join Mormonism for something 10,000X more appealing and less foreign.
Now I don’t think the dogmas of Islam are the reason- people bring up female submission and the like but the fact remains that women immigrated to join IS from first world countries. That doesn’t happen in any other case, ever. You don’t have women immigrating to Iraq and Syria unless they plan on joining IS. Likewise Mormons have no problem getting converts who are willing to give up alcohol and caffeine.
Instead Islam is just foreign and a refuge of losers. American Islam has an uphill battle to overcome its association with criminals, barbarians, and lunatics. The Islamic terms in online discourse come from MemriTV, well known for its general insanity, after all.
hydroacetylene
5d 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
23d ago
I don’t particularly want HBD to be true, either, but it doesn’t actually say you, personally, are low in intelligence. It says black people are more likely to be low in intelligence compared to other races. That doesn’t mean we think George Washington Carver was secretly a white man pulling a Black Like me. It means that on average there are fewer George Washington Carvers than Henry Fords. I mean this is the motte; our average is a white guy 3 standard deviations smarter than the average White guy.
Nor do I think American blacks are performing near their intellectual limit given America’s context- cultural problems are a bigger factor. And nor are American blacks that badly off right now either. They have a standard of living similar to the average in Western Europe instead of much higher like white Americans. Obviously I think they’d prefer to have a higher one, but having a standard of living similar to France or Germany isn’t a catastrophe. And most of the other problems they face are either hallucinated(many of the claims about police violence) or culturally self-imposed.
hydroacetylene
7d ago
It's a reference to hlynka(RIP) and also to Leviathan, the 'somebody's gotta do it' defense of monarchism.
hydroacetylene
12d ago
Russia will probably not treat Ukraine particularly well in victory, certainly much worse than Britain would treat us.
A shame that's not a choice actually offered me...
While the USA will likely be minority white in our lifetimes, South African demographics are simply not in the cards. I honestly thought my grandfather was the only person who worried about the US being majority black.
hydroacetylene
25d ago
she is under very little threat from men like Chris Brown
Celebrities?
I mean I know what you mean. African American culture’s poor treatment of women is, for wealthy white women, trivial to avoid. But Mike Tyson and Chris Brown never have presented themselves as progressive Allies, and they don’t have any intention of starting. Sean Connery also admits to being a woman beater unashamedly, did you know that? Most don’t. Woody Allen is a progressive heretic, that’s why he’s in such contempt, same for Harvey Weinstein, and Brett kavanaugh had an obvious culture war dimension.
Now, obviously, avoiding the depredations of Woody Allen or Harvey Weinstein is also very doable. Your mother could tell you how to avoid a casting couch.
So why the fixation on those men- the progressives- when non-outspoken progressives get ignored unless it helps politically? Because it’s the horror of falsifying the progressive project- that adopting a particular ideology can protect young women from the depredations of men in power, without those women needing to listen to their parents. There’s a sense in which this shows the failure of consent based sexual morality- when consent is the only variable, it undermines the traditional ways to protect the ability of women to consent.
Ross Douthat once ended an editorial by saying that modern progressives need an alternative to traditional sexual mores, and they do not have this alternative figured out. I’ll go further; sex is not a private matter even if you don’t let other people see you doing it. It’s a matter of concern to the entire community because it just is, and the obsession with abolishing traditional structures which both limit the sexual options available and protect against depredation in an attempt to privatize sexual decision making cannot develop a meaningful alternative to sexual norms, no matter how well developed the idea of consent becomes.
hydroacetylene
25d ago
The UK is closer to the US on the “pace of being destroyed by mass immigration” scale than worse-off countries elsewhere in Western Europe, and more likely to end up Brazilified than Lebanonified.
Uh, the US’s largest states are white minority, gen z is the last white majority generation, there’s no functioning border, and we have more immigrants than births every year.
Now I don’t think a Hispanic majority- or plurality or whatever- is a death knell, but ‘control of immigration’ is not an American strength.
I mean, what do these people hope to accomplish? Like what are their demands?
Surely they know that Columbia university can’t actually affect any Israeli policies.
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