lollol
1d ago
unironic* depictions of conventionally attractive, sexually alluring, non-girlboss female characters have become taboo in the eyes of normie women**
I'm just scrolling through the recent female contestants on female-coded shows like Love Island, The Bachelor, Too Hot To Handle, Love is Blind, etc. and I'm not sure what kind of normie women TV you are watching.
lollol
1d ago
You mean "whether David Hearn is a vandal guilty of damages more than a $1000, that's a question for the jury". Just as much as the worst possible case against Hearn can be waged, the best most charitable interpretation of Hearn's actions can be offered. And if we follow that broken window analogy, to me it was the Trump administration that led to the broken window in the first place, seems like that is more worthy of investigation and prosecution.
Anyway, Pirro made the mistake of backing down and admitting defeat. Trump would never.
In the Small-Scale Sunday of June 21, 2026, there was this thread talking about the possibility of vandals being the cause of the debacle with the Reflecting Pool and its 2026 renovations. To summarize the various positions of mottizens:
- Some think there was vandalism by people who are against the Trump administration.
- Some thinks this isn’t vandalism but just the typical problem that would already typically plagues the Reflecting Pool
- I assume the implication is that public media is just having TDS
- Some thinks this is incompetence at preventing vandalism
- I personally thought it was incompetence driven by corruption though concede there are other clear cut case of vandalism (“8647” on the National Mall).
The only person that was ever indicted is former olympian David Hearn, with the grand jury indictment announced by Jeanine Pirro on July 2:
Today, a grand jury has returned a felony indictment against a defendant, David Hearn, for felony destruction of property for which he faces 10 years in prison. The indictment is in response to an incident that occurred on June 19th of 2026 in which the defendant Hearn ripped a piece of recently installed sealant on the bottom of the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial. The evidence shows will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hearn willfully destroyed property at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. This was a deliberate act to damage the reflecting pool at the National Mall that members of the National Park Service actually have worked hard to restore and have witnessed. By Hearn's own admission on June 19th, he reached down into the pool. Our evidence further shows that the National Park Service employees observed Hearn actually forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands. According to witnesses, Hearn damaged approximately two square feet of sealant from the bottom of the pool. A parks employee actually told Hearn to stop to stop his behavior and stop what he was doing. Hearn reacted by shouting at that park's employee, saying that she cared too much about the reflecting pool. And why did she even care since it wasn't her pool? Now, Mr. Hearn's behavior was characterized by witnesses as belligerent, rude, and disrespectful according to National Park Service employees that witnessed the event.
In the same press conference Pirro had this to say when pressed:
Question: Was this part of the pool, you know, there has been some damage. Was this part of the pool specifically if some of the was the uhsealant already partially removed? Can you [garbled] it back and just describe in detail? Because he [garbled] that it looks the same as it did before he arrived. That's his position.
Pirro: You know, I'm not going to get into the evidence, but what I told you is what our witnesses saw and experienced. There was an effort, a violent effort to rip up the sealant from the bottom of the pool. And irrespective of whether or not you know we think that you know there there is some situation needed it we can state and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he caused damage and that damage is over $1,000.
Well, on Friday, DOJ has moved to dismissed the indictment:
Based upon the initial reports provided by the Department of the Interior (“DOI”) and the USS. Park Police (“USPP”), the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia (“USAO-DC’) presented the grand jury with evidence that damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn. However, it was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional documents to the USAO-DC indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026. It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI. Indeed, USAO-DC could only rely (on the information provided by DOI that the damage was entirely caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn. Because these recently-produced materials significantly undermine the evidentiary basis for the indictment initially supplied by the DOI and U.S. Park Police, the USAO-DC respectfully moves to dismiss the indictment without prejudice.
I highly recommend reading the motion to dismiss, it’s hilarious to see how Pirro’s office is trying to cover their ass by repeatedly pointing fingers at Doug Burgum’s DOI for giving them incomplete information.
My takeaway from this is that my position is correct regarding incompetence. Incompetence at planning the renovations. Incompetence by the contractor and overspraying. Incompetence by DOI officials and personnel in protecting the Reflecting Pool (or at the very least chase down the vandals if they exist). Incompetence by DOI officials in not giving Pirro’s attorney office complete evidentiary information. In fact, I give points to Pirro and her office for approving this dismissal, she must have known that Trump wouldn’t like it:
I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS! President DJT
[attached image of the 8647 on the national mall]
As for corruption, well I think it’s very likely but it’s also unlikely that Trump’s government or the Republicans would investigate themselves.
I also had the following few thoughts:
- Pirro is another female member of the Trump administration that is floating into his crosshairs. Burgum doesn’t when it should be said both the Reflecting Pool and the National Mall are on his watch.
- My personal theory is that all the corruption (the government-doled contracts) would be under Burgum so why attack your personal money-maker.
- I was researching on no-bid contracts under Obama and Democrats are the one who investigated him. This is reinforcing my thoughts that even if “there is corruption on both side”, the magnitude is different.
- Current republicans in Congress are spineless.
- Republican voters don’t mind corruption as long as their cultural objectives are satisfied.
- Regarding the above, I personally think they’re willing chumps.
- Regarding above, I suppose Republicans would call it acceptable tradeoffs.
- I still have yet to see video and images of the cuts in the reflecting pool. I’m sure Trump would have loved to “truth” it out.
- If there is Trump Derangement Syndrome, there is growing evidence of Reverse Trump Derangement Syndrome where genuinely bad things done by Trump and his administration is downplayed and excused by his supporters.
- Which I suppose is what we do for our tribe.
Edit 1: Looks like Trump got some more words today about how much Pirro "folded like an umbrella" and "choked" on this case.
Edit 2: David Hearn was the only one indicted, there were at least 3 others also charged and publicly named but their cases were also dropped. Earlier I said David Hearn was the only one charged.
lollol
5d ago
work less, live longer and have higher median wealth.
Sounds pretty good to me actually.
lollol
13d ago
The older I am, the more I realize everyone is not normal in their own way. It's like how "the world's most typical person is male, Han Chinese, speaks Mandarin, is right handed and is 28 years old". But how many of us are like that really (the article says only 9 million people are like that). I suppose yes there is some kind of overton window of behavior, but how big does this overton window cover? If we pick the "middle 50%" there are still 50% of the people outside of this overton window. "I am large, I contain multitudes", many anime fans are "normal" people, you might not even realize they are anime fans, I personally was surprised at how many guys on the sales team watch anime (the dev team I wasn't surprised, I would be surprised if a dev isn't into anime).
lollol
14d ago
I think an equilibrium will be found (effort, human attention, bug fixes, value delivered, etc.). At my workplace, I did an analysis (after the VP of Ops blew up at the number of bugs since Claude adoption on my team) and I discovered the number of bugs introduced per release (bugs found after and due to release) has remained the same if not less, but because devs are so much more productive, we are releasing faster (+ delivering more features) and so the total number of bugs increase.
AI bears are too bearish, AI bulls are too bullish. And delivering immense value does not mean immense (or any) profit either. Buffet famously wrote "if a far-sighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down" because of how airlines famously destroy investor money.
Personally, AI means I can split up my time and participate in this forum instead.
lollol
14d ago
Might interest you and others that 3 weeks there was the Freakonomics Radio 679. "Why Does Vanderbilt Keep Winning?" where Diermeier sat down for a long interview about this.
lollol
22d ago
sounds similar to the transition from senior software engineer to staff engineer, and at a lesser level from SWE to senior SWE. I highly recommend https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes/ to anyone to see what kind of staff they would be, if your company support you being even better at problem solving and there's a career path for that, "The Solver" archetype is not necessarily bad.
As for the distinction between "problem solving" vs "problem setting", I think it's just opening your mind up to the kinds of problems that can be solved and that one would have agency on, problems are problems no matter whether they are technical, social, or political. https://www.noidea.dog/glue (Being Glue) might give you some insight on the direction of this.
Personal anecdote, I think one moment in which my boss noticed that I am senior SWE and not just SWE was once in a meeting when my boss boss (so my skip) was essentially harshly criticizing someone else, I stepped in and pointed out that the person was ill-equipped to handle the situation, and seeing as there is lack of time and resources to get them up to speed, the problem should be handled by someone else, namely a different senior SWE or me and that we can work on the post-problem docs afterwards. The temperature dropped almost immediately. My boss did a 1-1 with me afterwards and was especially thankful of how I was able to gracefully handle that. This is obviously not a staff-level contribution (it was more just matching the right technical person to the right problem and the comfortableness to speak up), but that's the kind of direction in which I am growing.
Ehhh, I'm ok with asking a bit more of public figures in terms of a "clean image". I suspect it's true that politicians are more "consensually clumsy" than the average person, and I also suspect that different tiers of politicians have different tiers of "consent clumsiness" (like what, 7 of the last 10 presidents have had some kind of sexual assault allegations?), but the mass majority of active politicians aren't getting accused of sexual assault. Maybe yeah what we need is a national conversation about how to attract better people into politics. But politics being what it is and what it's for, we're always going to get more dark triad personalities, so it's a cultural thing of how much a society tolerates vs the objectives it wants to achieve. It's like how Americans do not like adultery but the French are very tolerable of it.
PS: consent clumsiness is a spectrum, the other end is active consent disregard.
lollol
26d ago
Well, it's more important to understand what Platner thinks of himself. You are absolutely correct that a certain group of Democratic operatives/consultants went and find Platner specifically to be anti-Democratic-establishment and appeal to blue collar workers. But I believe that individuals can take responsibilities for their own actions. Platner decided to enter the race, Platner decided to drop out of it, all the consulting was at best just influence. I do believe Platner believes in himself as anti-establishment, I do believe Platner thinks he is the kind of anti-establishment that is not like Trump, I do believe that Platner feels a modicum of guiltiness or "for the cause" or shame or whatever that led him to drop out. It's the fact that he drops out led me to believe he is not non-guilty/shameless. I don't want to conflate being anti-establishment with non-guilty/shameless, they're two different things.
And by extension, yeah, you are also correct that Trump is an anti-establishment figure (with, to me, establishment being the old Republican side that was phased out between 2018 and 2022). That is only related, but not foundational, to whether he is guilty of anything (which I think he does) and also of whether Trump himself feels guilty of anything (which I certainly think he doesn't). To me, they are all related together. Trump is shameless, thinks himself non-guilty, and therefore never back down from establishment attacks. To me, Trump is has been unethical on many things, and where is the line between unethical and illegal I don't know but I would suspect he crossed it before on some of those many things. But being anti-establishment and then won, Trump also has high amount of political power (like you said about how Republican establishments are afraid of impeaching him), so maybe figuring out whether he stepped over the line or not becomes unclear. It's like "Mao was 70% correct and 30% incorrect", the 30% incorrect was pretty bad, but for now he's still revered for the 70%. And maybe in the long river of history the public opinion on these two figures might change, but for now it is what it is.
lollol
27d ago
My belief is that theoretically, Platner could have survived this, he just needed to be convinced of his own non-guiltiness (or shameless enough) like Trump to keep saying the same thing "the establishment is pulling all the tricks in the book to stop me"/"these are all lies by the same people already lying to you"/etc.
Dropping out of the race is not an admission of guilt in a court of law, but it's certainly an admission of guilt in the court of opinions.
I do like to comment on your use of the word "democratic establishment". Like all big groupings of people, there are always intra-group divisions. Which each new scandal, the amount of people within the "democratic establishment" willing to actively and vocally support Platner becomes only nominally silent support (for solidarity, out of group loyalty, etc.), and a certain amount of nominally silent support became actively and vocally opposed to Platner. The process in reverse is just called momentum. Like Obama, like Trump, like Mamdani, successful politicians are able to get those "in the base" that actively and vocally oppose them to become nominally silent support, and those that used to nominally silent support becomes actively and vocally support.
So anyway, when you're surrounded by people who tell you how bad you are, at some point, somebody breaks. Or maybe someone close to you break, or whatever. If he was wrongly accused, or believed he is completely correct in what he did, it still certainly does take a certain amount of self-conviction to stay on your path.
lollol
1mo ago
I mean, it has a net -4 rating, which is hardly mass downvoting.
Relative to other AAQC, anything below 5 is surprising.
lollol
1mo ago
Ehhh, I really don't think Howard meant aliens the way we now understand aliens. And this is assuming he meant aliens as a separate category rather than as explanatory of what he meant by "families of ambassadors or foreign ministers".
I did some research on this and this is a good summary: https://old.reddit.com/r/asianamerican/comments/1i6pbh1/from_1866_when_the_senate_was_debating_the_14th/
I read the debates itself as well: https://www.congress.gov/congressional-globe/congress-39-session-1-part-4.pdf
Really wished someone transcribed the whole thing for easy search and copy paste but Howard had no objection to the comment by Conness:
The proposition before us, I will say, Mr. President, relates simply in that respect to the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that they shall be citizens. We have declared that by law; now it is proposed to incorporate the same provision in the fundamental instrument of the nation. I am in favor of doing so. I voted for the proposition to declare that the children of all parentage whatever, born in California, should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States.
And Howard had plenty of objections when others say things he didn't agree with during that debate (such as on the matter of Indians untaxed or not taxed, etc.)
lollol
1mo ago
agreed. I personally don't think this is Dredd Scott level of bad, I don't think people will secede. I also haven't read the thing yet but Kavanaugh left it open for Congress to make some laws.
lollol
1mo ago
Someone here earlier this week or last week said that this decision will be our generation's Dred Scott regardless of how it is decided, and that it will tear the union apart in similar fashion. Demographic changes in the West generally are leading to ever increasing tension and dysfunction, and I fear this decision will ensure that a breaking point is reached soooner, rather than later.
Sounds to me like the there will be increasing tension and dysfunction regardless of whether your stated position was affirmed or struck down. The decision is just another signal/marker of the continuing trend that you're describing. Dredd Scott can be viewed as a bad decision that made things worse, but one can also see that even if Dredd Scott ruling was reversed (that Dredd Scott became a free man by staying in the free Missouri territory), there would still have been a Secession. Congress (and by extension the People) punt on something long enough then yeah it will come crashing down on them. This is exactly what the People deserve.
lollol
1mo ago
To add more information gleaned from scotusblog live chat:
- West Virginia v. B. P. J decides that states may segregate sports by biological gender. And already working through the lower circuits are lawsuits asking that states must segregate sports by biological gender.
- National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission. I will be interested in the first and second order effects of this.
- Trump v. Barbara. Kavanaugh concurred on the ruling but dissented on the opinion, so it's more like 5.5-4.5 . And Thomas has a 91 page dissent.
lollol
1mo ago
unimportant technicality of election law
election law technicalities are important, case in point: In Elections, Timing is Everything - Power Politics where "Today, we look at one of the biggest factors in determining the outcome of elections: when they are scheduled."
Anything worth a fight is important to somebody somewhere.
lollol
1mo ago
Yeah, with how much attention is being brought to it, I think there will be more attempts at vandalism, which would distract from how there really is probably incompetence involved (how much was the damage? "a caulk over the foam sealant that was cut with a sharp knife or razor" might or might not actually create the algae bloom problem)
lollol
1mo ago
Thanks. How was the ROI in terms of a law degree for you even though you're not on that path? Did you pass the bar?
lollol
1mo ago
I personally think it's incompetence. And even worse, it's incompetence due to corruption.
But in an effort to be charitable: somebody certainly made "giant ‘8647’ markings on National Mall" and that's vandalism, so can't rule out the same for the pool as well.
lollol
1mo ago
Inspired by this comment from @magic9mushroom . What is TheMotte's preferred political compass survey? I assume it's not https://www.politicalcompass.org/
lollol
1mo ago
yeah, seems like the plan is at least try the LSAT once but if I don't get above 170, there's no point.
Thanks @Rov_Scam, as an aside I'm always looking out for your comments because I know you're a lawyer and have a particular viewpoint on whatever is being discussed.
Don't get me wrong, I like my job, to the point where I don't even mind Mondays, but I also don't have any expectations that every case is going to be a corker. The thing that separates mediocre attorneys from good ones is that the good ones pay attention to the details of the case and treat everyone as if it has the potential to be a corker. Instead of going through the motions, they'll find something to argue about, and don't mind if things don't work out in the end.
So weirdly enough, as you were discussing the job of practicing law, it keeps reminding me of similarities to the job of a SWE. "Hours of going through the contents of a filing cabinet" on the face of it doesn't feel boring to me. It would be similar to when if I change something in an upstream service, I would be responsible to go check on how my change affects all the downstream services. Or I suppose a better analogy is if my boss or higher made a change then tell me to go clean up for them. I suppose the reminder here is every job needs you to be masochistic in particular ways to be successful and you need to choose the flavor of pain you can grind at for years.
it doesn't sound like you want to practice law, but to do something exceedingly specific
You are right. I don't want to just switch from the SWE-ladder to the Lawyer-ladder like some kind of class-change. I also understand that with regards to the default allure of a career in law, the goal is to have a lucrative career. Well I kinda already have a lucrative career (in a relative sense, my household income barely reaches big law starting salary atm, but that's still pretty good compared to the median American household) so "doing something with law" has to really fulfill something else in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs (so to speak), AND justify the opportunity cost (time honing my SWE career path, law school costs, SWE less stressful working environment).
The allure of law personal to me are:
- It's an intellectual pursuit of building shared understanding (akin to how "software design is knowledge building"). edit: I realized this is very appellate law specific.
- I keep running into problems within the context of law. Politics, culture war, "China is run by engineers, America is run by lawyers". I figure it's better for myself personally to be more than just a layman.
- Prestige bonus like you mentioned.
- Fuse my SWE background with Law to somehow unlock opportunities that either SWE or Law can't achieve by itself.
I do wonder what you think of all that. If you have any more advice or opinions, I would welcome it.
Younger Woman
Take these numbers with grain of salt though, the median numbers don't make sense with the age distribution as presented.
Anyway, I only hear about these shows because the normie and liberal women I know (30 and below) talk about them and so I can assure you these are not consumed just by Boomer/GenX women.
products that are mainly male-oriented
I'm not really sure what you're saying, are you saying that recent Western/US male-oriented products are made with less "conventionally attractive, sexually alluring, non-girlboss female characters"? I think this is going to depend on your definition of "non-girlboss" and "male-oriented products". Maybe can you present an example that you can think of? I can, on the top of my head, think of Penelope (Anne Hathaway) in The Odyssey, Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) in the Spiderman movies, Nikki (Inde Navarrette) in Obsession from the movies just this year.
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