hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
2mo ago
People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level. A thousand things had to go wrong to get to this point, and if people want to harp on it—let them. But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue.
This is, of course, a blatant lie. I understand why that lie is getting made here, of course- TW is trying to get liberals to pay attention instead of ‘lalala anti white discrimination isn’t a real thing in the real world affirmative action is just undoing prior discrimination I can’t hear you’. But it is still a lie, and it’s a lie that won’t work.
Obviously, we can imagine if the roles were reversed. But I think it’s more reasonable to imagine a different cultural group, and a specific one, that isn’t favored by TPTB. Let’s go with Mormons; they’re an actually unpopular group that probably does suffer from some light discrimination, and it’s readily imaginable to think that they could do something like that. Do you really believe that an officially-unofficial Mormon whisper network gaming resume acceptance in a meritocratic-for-good reason field like aviation would go unnoticed? How about requiring you to have lived rough in a foreign country(mission year) to sit for the exam when it’s totally irrelevant? Prioritizing applicants from a not-highly-regarded program at BYU because of probably technically illegal collusion between the LDS aviation association and the FAA?
Nobody will ever get punished for this and it’s all who/whom, and that’s a damn shame for the smart, capable blacks who already made it. It also sucks for whatever white applicants lost out. But it sucks even more for the people affected by the accidents.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
This could just as easily be ‘men who participate in polls run by prostitutes have lower relationship satisfaction’.
hydroacetylene
8mo ago
There is a political quote which says that "the Right thinks the Left is stupid while the Left thinks the Right is evil".
While this quote gets repeated, I don't think it's quite true. Instead I think at the level of running a society there is no difference between stupid and evil and the right doesn't quite get why the left doesn't get that.
Granted that Mao was not a good person, he didn't set out to kill 100 million people. He made some bad decisions that inexorably led to a famine which killed 100 million people. But that wasn't his goal, his goal was to do what Deng would wind up doing. He simply happened to be incompetent at it. And from a right wing perspective, the results speak for themselves- Mao's incompetence killed more people in a war against sparrows than Hitler did in a war against a continent spanning superpower. The lesson if you're a right winger is pretty obvious- pick the cold and competent guy even if he's a little bit evil. That's probably why the right bet so big on capitalism in the later 20th century- capitalism is not very nice, but it works better than anything else anyone has ever tried and there's no getting around that.
The left, on the other hand, doesn't seem to grasp that right wingers see no practical difference between stupidity and evil in running a society. The trying to help people is what's important, that's why the political left doesn't like arguments about tradeoffs and side effects and whether or not their climate change and gun policies work. It's easy to write this off as a bit, or virtue signaling, or whatever, but I think a lot of them really do inhabit a world where as long as the people in power are willing to commit strongly enough to solving whatever problem it will inevitably be solved through the power of positive thinking. Maybe that's uncharitable, but my experience has not been that, say, gun control activists consider "whether assault weapons bans actually prevent mass shootings" to be a particularly relevant factor in whether there should be assault weapons bans to prevent mass shootings, more like it's a distraction from the broader issue of whether mass shootings are a tragedy.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
I’ve heard before from the sorts of people who do domestic work and related(high end hotel concierges and the like) that old money red tribe adjacent people- think the country club crowd, or oil executives, or exotic game ranch proprietors- are preferable to work for because, although their security tends to be jumpier and better armed, unlike the blue tribe money(celebrities and rich lawyers) they understand what servants are, are used to having them, and know how to maintain boundaries with them, while also being friendly enough.
This seems like the closest American division to the royal family/Meghan markle clash.
hydroacetylene
9mo ago
I mean I think what gets me about it is Nate silver and his team were liberals, they didn’t try to pretend they weren’t, but they felt like liberals who were trying to get at an accurate reflection of reality. Sure, they had biases. But for all their faults they came reasonably close to an accurate reflection of what was actually happening and they seemed like some people I could sit down and have a reasonable discussion with, despite our many disagreements.
Then ABC gets rid of him and turns his brand into partisan hacks because it’s not enough to be reasonable liberals seeking the truth.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
Phrased differently, it seems to me South Korean's may be too realist and grounded in their evaluations of things. Again, having children is hard. If you analyze all of the realities of child rearing, you are going to find thousands of reason not to do it. Without a faith-level "Yeah, but fuck it!" decision making mechanism, it makes sense that a highly educated and highly rational community would not see many kids.
I'll conclude by asking the Motte to chime in on anything about the above, of course. More specifically, however - To what extent are the Judeo-Christian roots of the United States responsible for cultural attitudes of "hyper optimistic belief" around things like child rearing, entrepreneurship, scientific frontier-ism (space travel, moon landing, AI). I worry that on the Right, Judeo-Christian ethics are mostly touted as ways to keep social order and cohesion and, on the Left, they're derided for a lack of acceptance and as an inhibitor to full self-expression. That's one axis, sure, but I don't think it's the entire problem space. Moreover, is much of the rising Western trouble with pervasive anxiety, sexlessness, poor family formation, etc. partially due to a loss of a quasi-faith belief structure.
I’ve said this before, but birthrates in the post-contraceptive world depend on whether people expect to enjoy raising kids. South Korean childhood seems legitimately awful for everyone involved; of course a realistic thinker opts out of doing it a second time!
If you look at groups with the pill that have above replacement fertility rates, by contrast, you see people who want to have kids. Rednecks really look forwards to going to their kids’ sporting events and taking them fishing and teaching them to work on cars, and have an entire genre of very popular music about how wanting to be a mother turns otherwise plain-looking women phenomenally beautiful.
And it’s not necessarily that one is clear eyed and the other is hopelessly romanticized; South Korean childhood is legitimately much more unpleasant than redneck childhood, for both parties. But you don’t have to go to South Korea to see the impact of attitudes towards Natality; blue tribe fertility is on the lower end of average for the developed world and blue tribe culture is full of fretting about how awful motherhood is. You contrast that to red tribe culture and it’s obvious.
People want kids when they expect to enjoy parenting. I’m not saying there aren’t economic or structural issues going on. But remember the study of teenaged girls who had to take care of a baby doll like a real baby, discovered they liked it, and then went and got pregnant? Wanting kids is a pretty big factor and people on the motte underrate it significantly.
hydroacetylene
3mo ago
Texas Border Flareup... Again
Border Patrol’s normal access to the border through entry points in the federal border barrier is likewise blocked by the Texas National Guard installing its own gates and placing armed personnel in those locations to control entry. See id. at 4a. And the Texas National Guard has likewise blocked Border Patrol from using an access road through the pre- existing state border barrier by stationing a military Humvee there.
Texas has seized a public park in Eagle Pass to take control of a 2.5 mile stretch of the border(https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-blocks-federal-border-agents-processing-migrants-eagle-pass-shelby-park/). This is a bigger deal than it seems; the only boat launch and main surveillance point for miles is located there, effectively preventing border patrol from operating over a relatively wider frontage.
Context
The State of Texas has long been adding concertina wire to the border to prevent crossings, and has been accusing the federal government of cutting it to allow migrants to cross. Recently Texas won an injunction in court blocking the federal government from doing this, and the federal government has of course appealed, but the injunction includes an exception for if cutting the wire is necessary to assist migrants experiencing a medical emergency.
So Texas seized the main surveillance point and boat launch(in this sector) for the border patrol to prevent them seeing migrants experiencing a medical emergency. For the record, I don't trust the federal government with this "medical emergency" exception either, but this is flatly illegal in, well, pretty much every way you approach it.
Of course the border patrol union is siding with Abbott, which would make it awkward for fedgov if they cared. Although Abbott's justification has nothing to do with the border patrol union's:
Texas has the legal authority to control ingress and egress into any geographic location in the state of Texas, and that authority is being asserted with regard to that park in Eagle Pass
And anecdotally his fundraising emails are talking a lot more about state sovereignty than normal. It led to a twitter breakdown by Gina Hinojosa(head of the Texas democrats) accusing him of being a secessionist, and the admittedly low chance of Gina Hinojosa of all people meming Texas independence into the political mainstream through the power of negative partisanship is kind of hilarious.
But back to the topic at hand; it's unclear what Abbott's actual game is; he's an accomplished constitutional lawyer(literally; that's how he became governor) and knows he's going to lose at court. He's also never been the reckless type and so it's unlikely he did this without thinking it through. Angling for a Trump cabinet seat, maybe? It also surprises me that he did this now; primaries are coming up in March, and Abbott endorsed a relatively wide array of candidates to try to shift the house in a more partisan republican direction; taking a political risk like this one is unlike him.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
Is the decline in teen mental health mostly about parenting?
https://ifstudies.org/blog/parenting-is-the-key-to-adolescent-mental-health
The findings are clear. The most important factor in the mental health of adolescent children is the quality of the relationship with their caregivers. This, in turn, is strongly related to parenting practices—with the best results coming from warm, responsive, and rule-bound, disciplined parenting. The data also reveal the characteristics of parents who engage in best-practices and enjoy the highest quality relationships.
A mildly interesting competing hypothesis in itself compared to "smartphones and instagram wreck teen girls' psyches". But where it really gets interesting is here:
Yet, some parental characteristics do matter. Political ideology is one of the strongest predictors. Conservative and very conservative parents are the most likely to adopt the parenting practices associated with adolescent mental health. They are the most likely to effectively discipline their children, while also displaying affection and responding to their needs. Liberal parents score the lowest, even worse than very liberal parents, largely because they are the least likely to successfully discipline their children. By contrast, conservative parents enjoy higher quality relationships with their children, characterized by fewer arguments, more warmth, and a stronger bond, according to both parent and child reporting.
That paragraph actually understates the findings compared to the chart just above it, if you click on the link- just look at the stark discontinuity between 'very conservative' and everyone else. In fact the order by political ideology, on parenting quality, is 1) very conservative 2) blank spot 3) conservative 4) moderate 5) very liberal 6) liberal. And I would hazard a guess that this is majorly correlated with the other two, quality of parents' relationship, factors.
Now there's a couple of hypotheses as to why this is- it could be that parenting has just been getting shittier recently, that more conservative types are somewhat insulated from the trend by being, well, conservative, and that there's some population discontinuity between 'liberal' and 'very liberal'. This could be red tribe-blue tribe ethnogenesis manifesting itself in an interesting way- the red tribe adopted adaptive parenting measures, the blue tribe didn't(or alternatively, they both used to share good parenting practices but as part of ethnogenesis the blue tribe is moving away from them, which I guess is pretty close to the first explanation. It seems pretty clear that they didn't both used to have terrible parenting with the red tribe moving away because teen mental health is a relatively newer problem). It could be a regional difference. It could be that, given fertility differences by political ideology, conservative parents have more role models allowing them to more easily adopt good parenting practices. Personally, I lean towards number two, myself- I'm reminded of a section in Irreversible Damage, describing how nearly every girl with rapid onset gender dysphoria had a liberal mother, and some had country club republican/rino fathers but most of the fathers were liberal as well. The section goes on to claim that at least some parents of daughters with ROGD found success in sending their daughter to live with more conservative relatives, resulting in desistance. That's obviously not conclusive, or even particularly strong, evidence(and it's also confounded all to heck by duh), but it's a second datapoint on a trend.
In any case, it seems like the other interesting question raised by this report is, well:
Returning to the present crisis, it would appear as if this scholarship has been forgotten. No effort is being made by leading public health organizations to inform parents about what works to prevent depression, anxiety, or behavioral problems in teens. ...... Expert-led services that could heal relationships—through family or individual therapy, for example—are often not even covered by health insurance, in part because reimbursement rates are too low. Parents are disempowered and sidelined, and yet social science continues to show that their actions, judgments, and relationships are the key to their teen’s mental health.
My assumption is that inscrutable bureaucratic reasons are the main factor in that. But it's worth noting that this is probably the main explanatory factor behind why conservative teens have so much better mental health than liberal ones; after all, the competing "it's smartphones and instagram" hypothesis doesn't explain this. And even if you assume parenting doesn't matter much in the long run, it doesn't pass the smell test to say it doesn't affect kids while they're being parented.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
I’ve said before- most people have identical views on trans which amount to ‘sure, we should probably humor them most of the time, but they didn’t actually change their sex and we don’t have to humor them all the time’. That goes for both the anti-trans activists and most people who push trans acceptance.
And honestly, that’s what’s showing up here. ‘Wear a dress if it floats your boat, but that doesn’t make your concept of gender a thing that exists’ is an attitude that explains a lot of this.
hydroacetylene
5mo ago
This is anecdotal, but I spent the weekend with deep red tribe boomercons who just a few years ago would have been talking about the need to hit Iran before they can hit us- the sentiment was that the USA is fucked up and overextended with a government that’s increasingly telling lies to try to drag out their time before the music stops, foreign entanglements are mostly wrongheaded, and the government is as hostile to its own people as to anyone else. ‘Crimea is part of Russia but I don’t like Russia. Ukraine needs to admit they lost.’ ‘Israel is a wealthy country and should pay cash for their weapons.’ ‘The government and the media lie to us about race to cover up for the dysfunction in black culture, why should we take the blame for it? Without whites they’d be living in mud huts, or be someone else’s slaves.’ ‘The government is importing as many illegals as possible to make it look like economic growth so they can get away with running up a deficit.’
Just a few years ago it would be ‘the economy will get better, all this gay stuff’ll blow over, we need to hem Russia in on the world stage’. The red tribe disillusionment with the federal government is real, and since recruiting is mostly from the red tribe, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t affecting recruiting.
hydroacetylene
9mo ago
Major changes to the Vatican's org chart over the past week and a half or so seem worthy of a top level comment.
The centerpiece of the story is the appointment of Archbishop(soon to be cardinal) Victor "Tucho" Manuel Fernandez as head of the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, a hybrid doctrine chief and internal affairs head position and de facto the second most powerful man in the Catholic Church. This comes on the heels of the previous head's term having been expired for six months as Cardinal Muller threatened a coup attempt over the attempt to appoint a German ultraliberal(https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2022/12/cardinals-block-appointment-of-heiner.html). Initial criticism of Archbishop Fernandez centered on boring things like having authored a book of poetry called "Heal me with your mouth: the art of kissing" and appearing to have ghostwritten his own job offer letter, but this rapidly changed to criticism of his absolutely terrible record of handling sex abuse cases. Most of this criticism centers around his handling of the allegations against Fr Eduardo Lorenzo, which even he can't seem to defend(https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-argentina-fernandez-abuse-case-5d80d28a77290807ce762963ccb75350), but less reliable sources have stronger allegations- Argentine far left wingers claim he covered up an additional eleven abuse cases. He has also received some criticism over his theological orthodoxy, which is relevant to being the head of the Vatican's doctrine office(https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cdl-muller-reveals-vatican-doctrine-office-had-a-red-flag-file-on-incoming-chief-abp-fernandez/).
The other major story is the appointment by pope Francis of 18 new voting cardinals(https://www.usccb.org/news/2023/pope-names-21-cardinals-including-us-born-archbishop-prevost), to bring the number to 137 at the end of the year out of a canonical cap of 120 voting cardinals. This is, in itself, not unprecedented- the only pope within living memory who abided by the cap on number of voting cardinals was Paul VI, who did so by raising the cap, although Benedict XVI made significant efforts to come closer to following it(and this, as an aside, is a decent microcosm of the recent history of the Catholic Church), but the scale by which he exceeds the number of cardinals is notable, as is the relative lack of notability of many of his appointments- soon-to-be cardinal Aguiar is an auxiliary bishop(assistant bishop assigned to a diocese considered particularly large or important), and even more rarely a non-bishop has been appointed cardinal- Fr Angel Fernandez Artime. The most controversial appointments are bishop Aguiar- for claiming that the church does not want to convert young people, although he claims to have been misinterpreted- and bishop Chow of Hong Kong, who is considered close to the Chinese communist party. Also notable is Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, head of the dicastery for eastern churches(department of eastern rite Catholicism, basically), although this is mostly because eastern rite Catholicism is generally on rather bad terms with pope Francis for a variety of reasons, some of them reasonable and some of them stupid. It's also probably reasonable to point out that multiple traditional cardinal positions were snubbed this go round, and had been last go round, including the archdiocese of LA and the patriarch/major archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church.
Additionally the pope has named his delegates to the Synod of bishops on synodality(the translation from jargon is literally if uncharitably "committee meeting bishops on having committee meetings"), including such notable Americans as Fr. James Martin SJ and Bishop Robert Barron. Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who will be attending as a voting member, is also a minor culture war figure(https://www.usccb.org/news/2023/pope-appoints-hundreds-attend-synod-bishops-synodality). Another important figure is, surprisingly, Cardinal Muller.
Cardinal Mateo Zuppi's attempt to broker a peace deal in Ukraine has also wrapped up, to the surprise of no one with nothing to show for it. As Cardinal Zuppi is a top contender in the conclave everyone expects to come soon(Pope Francis has been hospitalized for major issues twice this calendar year), this is likely relevant- he has egg on his face from accepting an assignment that was forseeably a waste of time to appease the vanity of an unpopular pope. Notably the other top contender for next pope, Cardinal Erdo, refused the mission.
What's the conclusion? Probably that Pope Francis doesn't expect to live for much longer and is prioritizing a continuation of his regime after his death over things like precedent or making meaningful improvements to concrete level problems facing the RCC, in the face of significant unpopularity even among the ideologically sympathetic. Cardinal Muller continues to hold his role as de facto head of the opposition, and it's unclear what his threshold for attempting a coup is- likely there are candidates at the next conclave which would trigger it, such as the Portuguese Cardinal Mendonca.
hydroacetylene
10mo ago
Okay, my curiosity is piqued. What does this phrase mean?
It doesn’t. Or more specifically, it’s a political slogan that can mean any of 20+ things, few of which are specific to trans kids. It could mean ‘I’m a good blue triber’, it could mean ‘the lgbt+ community can do no wrong, literally’, etc, etc. political slogans don’t always have a specific meaning.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
I want to point out the cynical case- trans activists are terrible allies and abandoning them could easily be the woke coalition telling its most difficult members to know their place, not the decline of woke.
Trans activists are demanding, high drama, unsympathetic(at a basic level, they’re mentally ill people who look like either very ugly women or very weak men, which is not a very high status thing to be or something that finds it easy to garner sympathy), have no real message discipline, and tend to overextend themselves picking fights that they then expect to be bailed out of. ‘Teaching these people to be team players’ could very well take the form of letting them lose a few battles and telling them to deal with it.
hydroacetylene
6mo ago
How is this different from "You’ve put yourself in a dangerous situation because you’ve done a foolish thing by flirting with that guy wearing that dress"?
Who/whom.
You also, as walterodim points out below, have a situation where there’s no language to describe sexual bad behavior other than ‘unconsensual’. I think everyone acknowledges that making a move on a vulnerable woman when she’s a bit drunk is taking advantage of her, but it’s not rape. And feminism simply doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘it’s a scummy thing that everyone involved has consented to’, nor does it have any ability to conceptualize the need for that vocabulary.
hydroacetylene
10mo ago
I think kulak you’re overlooking a hugely relevant variable- people have kids when they expect to enjoy raising them.
The lowest fertility rates in the world are in East Asian countries where childhoods are by all accounts horribly unpleasant for all involved and middle income trapped postsoviet crapholes where grinding poverty combines with anti-natal memes to make raising children suck.
American red tribers love raising kids, being ‘fun/cool aunts/uncles’, babysitting, being youth mentors, etc. Yes, including the women- being a mom is high status and redneck girls’ instagram is basically Morgan Wallen and mom-influencers posting their kids being cute. Charities to connect at risk youth with mentorship advertise on the fishing channel for a reason, too.
I have no direct experience with Israel or much with conservative Jewish culture, I do not speak Yiddish or Hebrew, but it’s worth noting that Israel has the highest alloparenting rate in the world- parents report getting more help from friends and family. This seems like it gestures towards something similar.
hydroacetylene
10mo ago
GOP for many decades despite essentially voting against their economic interests?
The usual answer would be ‘they aren’t voting against their economic interests, but they understand their economic interests better than CNN talking heads paid to sell books about the culture wars’.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
Keisha speaks for me: She says everything I think better than I ever could
This sounds suspiciously like ‘Everything chairman Mao says is true. One of his words will overcome 10,000 of ours.’ And realistically she appears to be brainwashing teenagers(this step is not difficult) into making a power grab for her. It is a notable feature of wokeness that there is functionally no way to push back against this: Keisha might be an observable bad actor, but she is also a well credentialed black woman with appropriate ideological views, and telluride is so open minded it’s brain fell out and got replaced by woke.
hydroacetylene
5mo ago
I (very quietly)consider myself to be, well, not quite ex-gay but certainly ex-bi, and the median representative of the camp which hates conversion therapy has never quite figured out what they’re actually saying, while the median conversion therapist does less than a homeopath. There is an extremely broad range of things covered under the label ‘conversion therapy’- ranging from electric shocks while looking at gay porn to forced non-sexual same sex bonding to talk therapy. There’s a typical motte and Bailey, obviously, but the electric shocks thing is genuinely both stupid and harmful. And lots of cranks and charlatans are genuinely happy to tell you they can turn you straight, for a price. But conversely most of the opponents of conversion therapy seem to honestly not care one way or another if it works, it should be banned because fewer homosexuals is an inherently bad thing.
For the record, I used a sort of variant of courage international(the one Antonin Scalia’s son is a chaplain for) without going through courage international the organization. I certainly think it worked well enough and was probably good for me in ways other than just no longer wanting to have gay sex(which, whether or not it’s morally evil, is very definitely an unhealthy habit which is worth discouraging).
hydroacetylene
10mo ago
” There were employees who said, ‘This goes against my values, and I am upset that you would be seen as a company supporting abortion,’ ” Carter says. “A lot of clients said, ‘We thought we did the right thing. But now these people are upset.’ ”
I just want to highlight this, because it’s possibly a (partial)datapoint against the Hanania thesis that woke is just civil rights law.
The people pushing this stuff literally thought they were doing something broadly popular and were shocked when there were people upset with it. That bears repeating, because lots of us here seem to be cynical about it. This pushes towards corporate progressive platitudes originating with true believers, who might intellectually know that not everyone agrees with them but are shocked when they run into it irl.
Now obviously Hanania falls into the group of people who broadly hold progressive stances on cultural issues, he just doesn’t agree with woke, so it’s understandable that he tends towards an explanation of wokeness as realpolitik. After all, these people are his neargroup, so they must have logical reasons for doing things he disagrees with. But I think we underweight the idea that lots of corporate admin really believes in something in the general direction of this crap, doesn’t quite grok that it’s unpopular among people who aren’t literal cave trolls, and that it isn’t about a practical purpose at all.
hydroacetylene
1mo ago
First, this is utterly predictable. Patients won't read 10 pages of medspeak, especially when they've already made up their minds.
I want to zero in on that last bit; I'm pretty sure everyone who shows up at a gender clinic in 2024 AD knows what they want, when they want it. Parents who aren't sure about transitioning their kid won't take them to a gender clinic. Everyone knows the outcome of stepping into that building. And doctors know it too, and they also know that saying "no" just means the patient gets hormones anyways, just from an abortion doctor instead because planned parenthood can't resist jumping into something left coded for any reason, ever. I'm not sure what exactly that means here; I'm 100% sure that trans isn't real and the medical treatment these people need is for mental illness, but the idea that the medical system can self-regulate in a culture war heavy topic is also risible.
Second, this is utterly predictable. "The experts" tm being firmly on the left of the culture war for anything controversial and willing to misrepresent their theoretical area of expertise if not outright lie about it shouldn't be a shock to anyone who lived through Covid. Trans is pretty central to the culture war.
Third, and going for variety here, this shouldn't be a shock to anyone. Everything we know about trans people should point to them being difficult patients at the best of times; they disproportionately have additional mental illnesses, lots of them don't trust non-trans people, high percentages of them are unemployed/underemployed people who get on poorly with their families and thus have insurance difficulties which make everything more complicated, and most of them are literal teenagers who probably have a higher rate of lying to begin with. In that environment of course it's going to cause this type of problem.
WPATH is confirming things we already knew. It's a valuable confirmation, but there's not a lot of new information there other than that WPATH knew about the obvious problems and was choosing not to say anything, which was already my assumption- they're ideologically motivated, not stupid.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
If the state is supposed to be not involved in religion, who says gays can't marry?
Because that’s not what marriage was until yesterday. Ask someone in 1890 why gays can’t marry, and he’ll explain that people should be happy on their wedding days- it’s a joyful occasion. Clarify that you mean homosexuals, he’ll probably say ‘oh poor girl, her husband’s proclivities are a bit out of bounds’. Clarify again that you mean two male homosexuals marrying each other, he’ll say that marriage takes a man and a woman, you’re talking about something different.
hydroacetylene
7mo ago
By all accounts Russell brand is a scum bag whether he technically committed rape or the women technically consented. But, and here’s the but, powerful parliamentary chairwomen do not need to be personally intervening to see justice served unless he’s not being charged with the crime(s) of which he stands accused due to corruption/political interference/whatever.
He’s a garden variety scumbag who, guilty or not, I wouldn’t allow to date my daughter. He should face legal penalties in a court of law and the government shouldn’t be pressuring extrajudicial sanctions onto him.
hydroacetylene
15d 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
16d 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.
Backlash to the border bussing policies: To the surprise of no one, sanctuary cities don't actually want hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners wandering about in their backyards. New York City- which has received the largest number of migrants shipped from the southern border by Greg Abbott- is the site of protests https://nypost.com/2023/09/05/another-massive-rally-expected-outside-staten-island-school-turned-migrant-shelter/ Obviously not all of these people are democrats, but some of them seem to be. But the real story is down below, in LA.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/la-city-council-texas-governor-migrant-busing/story?id=102840424
Obviously, some of this is just hypocrisy and looking out for number one- it's fine for you to have hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers camped under highway overpasses with no say in the matter, but don't you dare dump any on me- but I'm struck by 1), the fact that the LA city council thinks injunctions and lawsuits will work
When in reality Abbott has no incentive to stop when a federal judge tells him to, he has every incentive to appeal to the supreme court and ignore the federal judge- he does after all want to win his 2026 primary- and realistically unless the federal government decides to take over the border itself, or meet his demands, they can't make him stop. Both practically- he wants these people to be someone else's problem- and politically- this makes him look tough to a base that doesn't already think of him that way- there's every reason for Greg Abbott to just keep doing this until he's lost much, much bigger than anybody seems to be talking about, or his demands are met.
And of course, 2), the decision to cast this as human trafficking
When, likewise in reality, "free bus tickets to New York/LA/DC" is quite an appealing pitch to migrants living under a bridge in McAllen and Eagle Pass Texas. After all, most of them didn't walk from Venezuela with the intent of settling in McAllen, they wanted to go further into the US. And obviously Abbott's real incentive is to get them out of his jurisdiction as fast as possible, which means offering free bus tickets to the places they actually wanted to go to in the first place. There just isn't a scenario where the migrants stayed in Eagle Pass long term; they could be deported to Honduras or wherever they came from, or they could go somewhere else in the country.
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