cartman
5d ago
As you seem to agree then I'm confused why you used this language in the first place
Do you hint vaguely towards the idea that all people who advance convenient partisan arguments are actually infamous disgruntled ban evaders, or only the liberal/left leaning ones?
Edit: as someone who was also accused of being this individual previously, it is quite annoying that any liberal dissent from the mainstream here immediately garners accusations that we must be This One Person. I suppose it is a rare thing on this forum, but it only becomes rarer with this sort of selective hyper analysis.
cartman
5d ago
When the firing comes after public comments and criticism from the head of the FCC explicitly threatening legal action, the view that this is an "independent private decision" is pretty questionable
cartman
10d ago
You fail to mention that the majority of the top comments are actually decrying people celebrating the assassination as a dumb move.
cartman
12d ago
Would you describe a statement claiming that your side is good and peaceful and the opponent's side is bad and violent, with no evidence to back it up, as waging the culture war?
cartman
24d ago
While your odds of tripping on the rock might be about equal, it is certainly not equally disadvantageous. If I have 90 percent chance to win and I trip, Ive lost a lot of my expected value if I can then be felled by one neck chop. If they trip and I disarm them, that was just the expected outcome anyway. They start from 10 percent so a swing like that doesn't matter very much.
Like think about playing chess against Magnus Carlsen. If I can choose between both of us being well rested or exhausted, I will choose the latter, because me playing at my best does not matter one iota if he is playing at a mediocre level. I have a much better chance if we're both exhausted precisely because the disadvantage is not symmetrical based on our starting positions and expected values.
I agree their ability to kill is inferior, I don't agree with your initial comment that seemed to mock the very idea that a girl with a bladed weapon can be a threat to an adult man. 10% chance of death or maiming is quite high, as you seem to acknowledge. I also would not want to confront an unarmed and violent adult man.
Sure, if the alternative is leaving your own kids to be attacked, then seems like a good recommendation. Doesn't seem wise for a stranger to intervene as others were suggesting unless there's imminent threat to other vulnerable people
I didn't posit an alternate setting to align with my goals. I posited a setting where you could plausibly trip on a rock as you go towards this assailant to dearm them.
I just don't know what to say if you think this is a totally contrived, imaginary scenario that I made up to align with my goals. People trip on rocks or stumble or something equivalent all the time, especially in surprising, violent situations.
Can you explain why this is suddenly an alternate setting that I've contrived? What about this is so unbelievable?
The understanding of potential damage which I have already set out should be clear. I of course do not mean that every swing is equivalent in direct strength. That would be absurd.
Edit: also, 90% chance of success is a fascinating statistic. You're telling me that a grown man has a 10% chance of failing (which means what, death, being irreversibly injured, the kid escapes, what?) and yet they should be completely confident and have little qualms about this confrontation because the potential damage is negligible. Do you routinely take approximate 10% chances on your life or well-being?
cartman
25d ago
Yes, I suppose if you ignore all of the complexity and randomness that arises in a real confrontation, then I guess the risk is basically zero. Strong beats weak 100% of the time apparently.
Are you intentionally being hyperbolic or do you really not see any spectrum at all between being "a passive slab of meat" and strolling up and disarming the child with strong adult hands with absolutely zero fear or injury like a badass?
If you would like to assign numbers to your unearned confidence, what rate of adult deaths or serious injury in these confrontations would you accept as presenting a credible risk?
cartman
26d ago
Yes, no, yes.
All it takes is 1 bad swing or stab. Any bladed weapon at all is a huge equalizer.
You might say your odds of not dying are overall quite high as compared to a knife wielding adult man. Sure, but the difference in potential damage is not that significant, as differences in strength are more than made up for by weapons.
Yes, no, yes. Agree or disagree: a 12 year old can inflict a fatal axe wound in 1 swing on an adult. If the adult wasn't aware or stood still and did nothing, and the 12 year old is truly murderous, this seems entirely plausible to me. Agree or disagree?
Extrapolating from there, even if the adult is actively engaged in the confrontation, any confrontation where one bad swing at your neck after you stumble on a rock or whatever will kill you is not where you want to be, even if your odds are overall quite good. Hence why I call the potential damage significant. I see very little difference in the potential damage that can be inflicted.
Having any bladed weapon at all is the real equalizer here
cartman
26d ago
I think this is a terrible recommendation for someone who is bothered by this behaviour.
Regardless of whether the police are more armed than you or not, I think it should be fairly self explanatory why there are both legal and practical reasons why it's preferable for the police to deal with this situation, again, assuming it bothers you. They have legal authority, there may be multiple of them, and the assailant will likely respond differently to them than a random stranger.
You haven't actually explained, why "should you" deal with it yourself? You open yourself up to legal liability. You invite the risk of being harmed in an escalation of the conflict. The only benefit I can see is that you can potentially dearm the assailant faster than the authorities can get there and do so. But if they're so minor of a threat anyway in your eyes, then that doesn't matter very much. So what is the upside?
Also, you are equivocating between the damage a 12 year old can do against an adult man who is already facing and confronting her vs the absolute damage they can do. If this person is waving an axe around people in public threatening them, I think it's totally reasonable to have a valid concern they might hurt someone more vulnerable.
I also think that while you're probably right in a lot of situations it only ever takes one or two unlucky swings/stumbles for the underdog to win. I don't agree that the threat is so minimal as to be essentially ignored
cartman
26d ago
While I appreciate that you make your point fairly reasonably, this still seems like a bit of a ludicrous reaction to me. I agree that in the majority of situations, a kid waving an axe or a hammer around is not very likely to murder someone. but as a stranger and not the responsible parent of this child, it is not my job to assess how serious they are about harming me with an axe and I think it is not a realistic proposition to expect any other sane adult stranger to waive their safety in the face of someone threatening them because it's not LIKELY to turn out with them murdered. I do not have the skills to categorically determine which type of axe waving person is in front of me.
From personal experience, while a normal kid might wave a hammer around, no kid that I associated with to my knowledge ever actively threatened someone with a tool like that once they were anywhere close to their teens. This is not 'normal' behaviour to be gently course corrected imo. I think it's kinda serious.
Pulling out a phone and recording is a bit of a weird move in most situations I agree, but I could see a situation where it might seem reasonable in the moment if they started threatening to accuse you of things and you thought you had a chance to "prove" otherwise in the heat of the moment.
cartman
26d ago
Do you think the difference in the damage a 12 year old and an adult could potentially do with an axe is really so significant?That seems ludicrous to me. If I would call the police on anyone older than a toddler waving an axe and threatening people, I do it equally on a 12 year old, because they still have the strength to kill many members of society.
"Take her toys away himself". So it's not important enough for the police, but it's also somehow important enough to initiate a violent confrontation over? This doesn't make sense.
cartman
1mo ago
You've provided a map without much context with regards to population or voting demographics, so in the absence of that information the map doesn't demonstrate much of anything about the prevalence of gerrymandering
cartman
1mo ago
This is not a war and no one is participating in some holy revolution. This is not what war looks like. Social institutions do not function like militaries, nor is it wise/necessary to 'break' or 'level' the ones you don't like or which have issues. This is the same fallacy that leftists who want to defund the police engage in.
Why is this a post in the culture war thread? You went to a store that you had a negative predisposition towards, had an encounter with an employee who you considered rude and unattractive, a fact you decided to share for some inexplicable reason. You predictably were shunned because you came with the express purpose of not purchasing anything and wasting the service workers' time.
I have no idea why your insults or opinion that 'starbucks was a shit-ass place full of soulless NPCs' are at all relevant here, nor do I agree with your hastily drawn conclusions about supposed 'curiosity' not being rewarded. If you have to question the point of your post, perhaps that is a sign it does not belong.
Are all uncensored drawn images of sexual acts erotica or are you drawing some distinction between the two?
"Tom of Finland may have made many gays very happy, but if they want his material they are free to pay for it themselves." I don't know what this is supposed to be telling me; this is a fully generalizable argument against having libraries at all. If you want a math textbook, you're also free to pay for it yourself if you like math? Would you like to argue that erotic images are a special category that should be treated differently? If so, make the case.
Absent some evidence I am loath to accept your null hypothesis, just as you are clearly loath to accept mine. I will also note that you have chosen a specific slice of the argument I was making to defend by focusing solely on what you call drawn erotica and not, say, graphic images of war in history books. Do you support the latter being available in public libraries? If so, again, why the distinction?
Assuming that you were correct for the sake of argument, I think a pretty good justification for the change would be the Internet. Everyone already has unlimited free access to whatever type of content they want online, so it seems strange to put some special restrictions on an alternative service that is also available to serve the public at large (making it even less competitive than it already is with the Internet). Why would it be incumbent on the librarians to restrict their hub-of-information service when this onus is not placed on the Internet at large to do the same?
I fundamentally don't buy the arguments that children are being nefariously exposed to dangerous erotic content in some unique way through their public (not school) libraries. If their parents are so lax as to allow them to view dangerously inappropriate material in a public physical facility which has demarcated children's sections, when the system requires you to check out books for a defined length of time under a particular name, then those parents are lax enough that restricting the public libraries will have no effect anyway.
And everyone is always free to, you know, not take their kids to the public library if they don't want to. The fact that there is little necessity to do so is a load-bearing part of why the libraries should not necessarily feel obligated to cater their entire catalogue to the lowest age denominator.
And of course, there is room for nuance in all of these points. There is a great difference between erotic books being available in some clearly marked corner of the library vs. being advertised up front and loudly to all who enter.
cartman
4mo ago
This commenter's post is deeply objectionable for a number of a reasons, but the cherry on top is the dishonest framing of the evidence provided. The link to the comic which was provided displays that this book was available in a CITY'S PUBLIC LIBRARY, not some middle school where it was part of the curriculum. Of course the argument that a public city Library should contain zero material for an adult audience is absurd and I believe hardly anyone would defend it (though I'm happy to be proven wrong), which is why I believe this argument which could be defended on truthful merits was ignored instead for this dishonest framing.
Furthermore, a link to an article shows us the news that some female teachers rape their young male students. This is deeply horrible behaviour that deserves to be condemned, but I'd like to ask the obvious question, which is: what is the rate of teacher rape you are asserting (de facto by not mentioning other professions) is so much higher than other positions that come into contact regularly with children? Do we have reason to believe it's higher than the rate of priests at the hypothetical church you might join? If so, the evidence has not been provided. In the lack of that evidence, it seems a strange leap to assert that teachers are some uniquely dangerous creatures immune to societal condemnation (especially when incredibly disparate things like rape and allowing a graphic comic to remain on a public library shelf are lumped together)
cartman
5mo ago
I think it's reasonable to take this as evidence that their personal relationship maybe isn't the greatest, that they have significant problems, etc. What I don't think is reasonable is a) taking this as evidence that her concern about him is definitely performative or fake. It's quite common, even in situations where domestic abuse of some significance has occured, that the people involved still have strong feelings for each other, care about each other, and likely would not want that partner deported illegally to a violent prison. This might seem contradictory but I think it's actually more the norm than the exception, and blithely assuming that abuse victims don't care about their abusers (married with children, especially) is a bit of a miss in my opinion.
And b) denigrating a person who has been accused of this as "not elite human capital" and therefore not worth caring about. First of all, the procedure was never finished, so this is tantamount to assuming guilt before innocence in legal proceedings. Secondly, assuming he had done the violent things he had been accused of, it would make not one whit of difference as to whether his deportation was valid or not, and the government should not be able to waive correct processing because someone is sufficiently 'bad'.
cartman
5mo ago
I didn't miss it. And your pointing out that she didn't go through with the full process, I don't see how this is supposed to update my view. Perhaps she recanted her view of the domestic situation, perhaps she cares too much about him, perhaps it was too much hassle, perhaps it was a fake complaint in the first place. Perhaps she was threatened. Only the last would suggest more strongly to me that her concern about him is fake.
I am not routinely incensed at that because I don't see it come across my feed, which I am sure can be taken as evidence that I'm being a hypocrite, but if you'd like to point to an example I'd be more than happy to call it out if it seems like an egregious abuse/neglect of the system to me. I do get routinely incensed at whatever trampling of civil process I see exercised by those in power, of course mediated by the channels I follow.
You don't seem to believe that it was in actuality a private, independent decision. But then you assume that it is in this conditional without identifying it as such. That's why I was confused
More options
Context Copy link