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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Today in minor CW news: Naomi Biden’s Secret Service detail takes shots at carjackers thieves breaking in to a USSS vehicle. The vehicle in question was not occupied, so it wasn’t literal self-defense, but I am willing to assume it’s within protocol.

I’m bringing this up here to take predictions on the level and type of attention this will receive. My prediction is that the most vocal coverage will be conservative Twitter/substack trying to make this about Democrat hypocrisy with regards to crime. There’s just not enough material to make it personal about the Biden family. While I don’t doubt that spicy takes will exist, I’m wondering if they’ll make it to cable news.

Edit: immediately after posting, I see the next Twitter link is some guy with triple parentheses talking about how crime is so normal in DC. I swear I hadn’t seen that when I made my prediction.

To echo a sentiment from the pink site, I am surprised the would-be thieves did not notice it was a government vehicle. Even if unmarked, it's hard to miss a lightbar under a windshield if you're within car theft distance of the vehicle.

So they were on a lot of drugs. My understanding is that this is pretty common for the sorts of people who try to steal things out of vehicles.

What is the pink site?

RDrama, I guess?

Isn't a hallmark of low level criminals that they're rocking room temperature IQ?

That depends. Have you ever made a rolling stop at a stop sign for an empty intersection?

Accursed Americans, even your metaphors don't work in metric!

Now I'm imagining a comic-book world where carjackers have an IQ of 293.15.

In fairness, upper 20's IQ would be pretty dumb.

Upper 20s is also pretty bloody hot for "room temperature". Try 20-21. Of course the basic point still stands.

"Room temperature" is generally taken to mean 25 Celsius here in Australia.

This is probably a good Friday Fun topic at some point. As an American that keeps my home between 68-71 Freedomtemp (20-21.5 for People of Celsius), I was absolutely baffled to discover that most spaces in Tokyo are about the temperature you're describing, at least during summer when I was there. I don't recall a similar problem in Australia, but Melbourne and Sydney weren't very hot when we were in town anyway. Port Douglas and Cairns seemed hot, but I was also dressed very lightly, so it seemed fine.

I'm curious what other countries are like and what people's reactions are.

Too dumb for crime, at the very least.

I remember a while ago people were using a paper measuring the iq of mussels or some kind of shellfish to dunk on Trump, because they decided they had an iq of 2 somehow. So a metric room temperature iq is somewhere between too retarded to function and a bubble blowing lump of flesh.