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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31669 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Sam Brinton Warrant Issued—Biden Official Accused of Stealing Luggage Again

A felony arrest warrant has been issued for Brinton, who is non-binary, after accusations they stole luggage from the Harry Reid International Airport, Las Vegas TV station KLAS reported.

The charge is for grand larceny with a value between $1,200 and $5,000, the warrant states.

Grand larceny is a category B felony in Nevada and punishable by one to 10 years in prison and a fine up to $10,000.

So I think it's safe to say I believe that that Tweet thread that accused him of having a continually escalating fetish was right. IIRC there was some criticism of the Tweeter's objectivity and credentials, but I guess even a broken clock..

I suppose my reaction could be called bigoted but I'm not surprised by this, nor was I surprised by the initial charges or even the claims that he was playing out a sexual fetish. In fact, I found it highly more plausible than the alternative given his bizarre behavior and reported lies when confronted.

Taken as a whole, I am more likely to distrust someone who shows such suspect behavior while also apparently being hellbent on signaling deviancy. Not a good combination.

EDIT: Strong language edit.

This story's continued popularity seems to be a combination of "man bites dog" (and it is funny), and specifically claims that "wokeness" degrades the quality of government, and that LGBT people are weird fetishists. From twitter, searching "Brinton": "Raise your hand if you knew Sam Brinton was mentally ill before any luggage was stolen", Re. Sam Brinton, let's call it what it is: a person clearly unfit for a high-level national security role was hired because the Admin prioritizes wokeness over competence. (not cherrypicked, those and paraphrases of them were the top results). While Brinton is being retarded, taking this as something bad about 'wokeness' or 'lgbts' is about as bad as taking every base-rate sex crime by a republican as evidence for pedocon theory. There are many LGBTs in the government, at least a dozen of which have been in the R news cycle in the past few years. Many casual politics observers hear these random events and say "wow, those libs are fucked up, man" - all that does is confuse one and make it harder to pick out serious trends. And people with power having strange proclivities isn't new. (and as usual, this isn't a point about how LGBTS are good and all evidence against them is BAD, but a point about good and bad evidence for broad political points)

edit: removed jinx doublepost of LGBTQnation article

Now then, if Hallock had been caught stealing women's luggage (twice), would it be as popular in the news? I think it would be close, but I can't confirm that

I don't think it would be? There are hundreds of deputary assistant undersecretaries, and at least one of them will have committed some wacky crime statistically, but I haven't heard of it. We heard about Sam not just because they were trans, but because Sam had media interest before the thefts both for being a brave LGBT person on govt from the center-left and for being a biden nominee while looking like that from the right.

Just how broad or narrow are we talking before we can generalize at all

"generalizing" is fine because lots of people have things in common, e.g. jews having high IQ. But it's better to grasp that jews have high IQ by reading a list of nobel prize winners or a page on the history of mathematics or physics, instead of because a few "smart" talk show hosts are jewish. I'm not saying "dont make negative generalizations that is bigoted".

Would you be more agreeable if instead of using Brinton as a sledgehammer on "LGBT writ large," it was narrowed down to, say, "public advocates of dehumanizing kinks"?

no because it's still dumb, there are millions of people who like disgusting kinks, you can read about thousands of them online. more here.

All sorts of things that are bad ideas aren't new; not sure of the point here.

Such proclivities (compare to random politicians doing sex crimes) were still common before trans people were appointed to offices, or even before gay marriage was allowed, or even before gay sex was legal, suggesting none of those are causative.

and we would've heard about if it had happened

Do you think "Joe Smith, Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of HUD in a republican administration, stole a woman's purse" would end up on either CNN or Fox?

Yes. It would be a top story on CNN. The talking heads on the weekend shows would go on about how this showed the failure of the administration to properly vet its people.

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