domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
This is a way of addressing the problem. If ICE stopped being masked goons who look like they came straight out of a bad YA dystopia movie, and became normal accountable government officials who behave kindly and civilly, I think this would reduce the violent sentiments against them tremendously. Don't turn your guys into Stormtroopers if you don't want people to start fancying themselves Jedi rebels.
Why would you think something demonstratably untrue?
A lack stormtroopers hardly impeded significant parts of the broader left from accusing anyone to their right of being fascists, something that has been in the political water for decades. Just in the last decade, after convincing themselves that there were multiple orders of magnitudes more police shootings of unarmed black men than were actually occuring, efforts to reduce the 'goon' surface vector by reducing police presence and proactivity saw a substantial increase in violent sentiments carried out against fellow residents and citizens.
Nor did a lack of goons or stormtroopers hinder the political left from formalizing itself as the plucky underdog rebels of the anti-fascist or Jedi variety, and years of not-actually-oppressing the opposition, rather than decrease violent sentiment, led to the Democratic Party's political-media alliance championing the fiery but mostly peaceful protests that caused insurance market warping damages.
'Accountable' law enforcement, as framed by the Democratic officials and political left opposed to ICE, has repeatedly corresponded with more, not less, violent sentiments over time when political control has enabled the removal of police who were an obstacle to executing the violent sentiments. This is not exactly the first time this has happened either, hence why
(I'm not saying the Left's "thinking everyone is a Nazi" problem is unilaterally the Right's fault or anything. But in practical terms, that problem is not going to go away until the Right stops leaning into it.)
What is practical about insinuating a standard global practice for police at risk of retaliation, by a law enforcement agency with a history even before the current administration of being subject to targeted attacks by international criminal groups and US domestic extremists, that is actively being targeted by doxing and harassment efforts after partisan media signal boosted social media apps for anonymously reporting and tracking ICE locations and movements to enable further actions, is 'leaning into' a Nazi accusation?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
10m ago
Thanks for asking, as always.
I had an opportunity to sit down for about two hours, uninterrupted and not dog tired, and lo and behold that actually let me take a good enough look at my codebase to figure out what I was doing wrong. It wasn't Unreal's fault after all. Of course not, in the end it's the world's most successfully used game engine, of course it works and it's the user's fault. I had simply botched a refactor and dropped a few lines that ended up missing entirely.
So I went on, thinking hey, now I can finally do something moderately creative! But hey, what's that, my projectiles don't collide with terrain or other geometry. Let's check...colliders look okay, meshes look okay, movement components look okay, what's going on here...
...as it turns out, it's Unreal's fault. Apparently ProjectileMovementComponent doesn't detect collisions if the collider isn't the actor's RootComponent. And I had written a custom RootComponent that I put in charge of situationally instantiating subcomponents, including said collider and the MovementComponent. Sad. So my options now are:
- Always make the collider the root. But that leaves a blank spot for actors that shouldn't have a collider, and they'd have to be treated differently. But I guess I have to do that anyways.
- Let my custom RootComponent inherit from collider. Wait, no, that won't work because there are separate collider classes for each primitive shape. And also doesn't account for acotrs that shouldn't collide.
- Write my own MovementComponent that doesn't require this specific setup.
- Attempt to fix Unreal's MovementComponent and hope they accept my changes, most likely only to learn that it has to be the way it is and I am abjectly ignorant of the many good reasons.
So I'll probably have to write a bunch of extra code to differentiate between actors with and such without a collider. Annoying.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12m ago
No, see, this week the doxing is just crazy right-wing paranoia. Democrats would never endanger law enforcement personnel for partisan advantage, or in this case revenge. The violence is really rare and just fringe wackos after all. C'mon now.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14m ago
That doesn't quite fit for me, because if you tasked me with ensuring the arrival of the Thousand Year JD Vance Reich, I don't know if I could do a better job than what the Dems are doing.
All they need to do is regroup and wait for the next recession, though I suppose "letting something slip out because you didn't want to lose grip" is a pretty old story.
SubstackNecron
33m ago
I can't imagine every ICE agent not being doxed immediately if the Democrats win in 2028. That names list is leaking within one month.
Blueberry
39m ago
But regarding Kirk:
[x] Shooter hits their target
[ ] coherent manifesto
[ ] unadorned weaponry (the ammo counts too?)
[x] captured alive
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
49m ago
Not against an armed, trained officer, who's braced for a fight.
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
58m ago
Before I do a long reply, let me ask you two questions. Are there any differences between the German, Irish, Polish, Italian, and Japanese examples you listed and the Indian and Muslim examples I listed other than just geography (i.e. one example is specific to the U.S. and the others are not)? If so, what are the differences between the examples you listed and the ones I listed, and are they large enough so that the examples you list don't apply anymore to immigration today?
If the answer is no, there aren't any differences, then we should just leave it at that.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
58m ago
I vaguely expect that a central example of "assault" would have a >0.1% lethality rate, I could be wrong about that though. Humans are pretty resilient.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I expect most of those "assaults" are highly noncentral examples of "assault"
I expect the exact opposite, I just don't think they're political, at least beyond "I don't want to go to prison".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Instead, I want to ask y’all what “the left” should be doing.
Nothing directly in your power, but aince phraaed it collectively, is it really so much to ask that the same kind of pressure that made us move offsite (and purged countless bland inoffensive communities, creators, etc) be applied to people who are actually calling for, and praising political violence?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1hr ago
FBI claims 79091 assaults on police officers and 60 officers killed in 2023. I expect most of those "assaults" are highly noncentral examples of "assault" but I'd expect the median ICE agent is at less personal risk than the median police officer in Baltimore (but probably much more risk than the median police officer in Boise).
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1hr ago
Use the following helpful heuristic to determine the partisan leanings of political shooters in the future.
Shooter hits their target, coherent manifesto, unadorned weaponry, captured alive (or surrenders themselves?) Right-winger.
Shooter misses their target, nonsensical manifesto, gun covered in stickers, kills themselves (or is killed by law enforcement)? Left-winger.
Thank you for your attention on this matter.
Dean
Flairless
1hr ago
Nah, just posturing as if he were, while letting someone else later pay the cost.
It doesn't do anything unless there's an attempt to enforce it, which Newsome won't, but Newsome can point to it for his democratic bonafides.
TitaniumButterfly
1hr ago
The killing themselves really gives me the spooks. No matter how I try I just can't imagine myself in that person's skull. Or at least it's a looooooooooooong reach. It feels so weird to me that my mind starts looking for alternative explanations. Could these be catspaws of some agency with off-market brainwashing tech? That has got to be the gold-standard assassin on at least some significant level, and if they're cheap enough maybe it doesn't matter so much whether they're good shots. The ones without that aptitude end up in one of these instead of going for the President.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1hr ago
It shouldn't be 'law enforcement personnel must accept the exposure of themselves and their families to physical harm while they're alone and exposed at their homes because they decided to work for ICE'.
I think this is a case of "if your risk tolerance is literally zero you can't do anything".
We should take reasonable efforts to ensure the security of federal employees like those at ICE. Such as prosecuting people who actually break existing laws of the land in ways that endanger those employees.
There are limits, though. If the risks are higher than people are willing to deal with for the $50k / year we pay ICE agents, we should first try paying more. There are quite a few jobs that expose you to more risk than ICE agents face, and we are able to find people for those jobs. We're a rich country, we can afford to pay people. For a baseline, cops in San Francisco make $115 - $165k / year in base salary, often much more with overtime. If we're not paying at least that much for the apparently 4 digit number of people securing our borders, we shouldn't complain that we can't find people who will tolerate the risk.
What we should not do, before we have seriously attempted "prosecute people who break the law" and "pay people what they're worth", is shred the constitution. And "pass federal laws against stochastic support of crime", if I'm understanding your proposal correctly, amounts to shredding the constitution.
TitaniumButterfly
1hr ago
We should get a drink sometime. And that's mine, by the way.
TitaniumButterfly
1hr ago
I'm just sitting here asking myself if OP's usage of "embarrassed" in the opening paragraphs was even wrong. It's been bothering me for like two days now and I want to figure it out on my own.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
top the infamous I'm A Man ad
I had never actually seen that. Damn. That's pathetic.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
2hr ago
That's not how this works. The heightened threat against ICE is removed and then their legal risk mitigation strategies can be stood down.
But yes, they absolutely should be cracking down on and arresting the doxxers if the legal means allow them to do so. If they can't for whatever reason, then the protective strategies remain. Then federal laws should be passed against stochastic support of crime.
It shouldn't be 'law enforcement personnel must accept the exposure of themselves and their families to physical harm while they're alone and exposed at their homes because they decided to work for ICE'. Clearly this will lead to intimidating people into not working for ICE. Which means border enforcement ceases to exist and Antifa achieve their political ends through the threat and use of violence (eg domestic terrorism).
Botond173
2hr ago
What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation? Does it involve public disavowals by the leadership? Cancelling any streamer stupid enough to say something edgy?
Those are pretty much the most basic level of standards the Blue Tribe routinely expects of its opponents.
ulyssessword
2hr ago
Police officers are, I imagine, more likely to be targeted for their work than ICE agents are, and police officers do not wear masks.
I've heard of two recent attacks on ICE, for a group of 6500 agents. There are about 850k police officers in the US, and I suppose there might have been 260 attacks on police officers that I haven't heard of in the same period, but that seems really high.
Even aside from those numbers, I'd suspect that ICE gets all the generic "fuck the police" in addition to the ICE-specific hate.
Thank you for the comment! Happily, these questions are easier to answer directly than your last ones. Also as you said there's some overlap and true to my word I've been processing for you, which helps.
Instead of quoting line by line let me answer in a few general ways.
- I've been having a hard time trying to figure out how to talk about my personal experiences without giving myself away, but a little anecdote (read: 15+ years of hands-on experience in excessively-well-documented conditions) might go a long way. This is going to be intentionally vague. So, there are these animals we take from the wild. They have a certain level of general quality, usually very high. They are well-aligned. They are excellent at what they do. We breed them in captivity. The next generation, maybe half of them are as good, and — it's funny to me that I've never actually run the numbers — offhand I think it's more like 35-40%. Generation after that, there are a few decent specimens. Generation after that, it's maybe one solid specimen in a sea of screwballs and even that one has some kind of noticeable flaw and possibly can't get a female pregnant. So then we go back to the wild to get more. There are some practices in which we engage to mitigate this, but they amount to extreme selection pressure and carefully-controlled breeding. It's actually pretty difficult to keep a captive population from sliding into catastrophic mutation load. Takes a gene pool of several hundred creatures and a hellacious amount of stress upon them to achieve, which is not feasible in this case for reasons I can't get into, though I've heard of an outfit in another part of the world with some strange funders which seems to be making a go of it.
-
- So from all this I would propose that there is a stat, if you'd like, which we might call 'general quality', just like there's 'general intelligence'. Which, actually, my next point was going to be about that. In rationalist communities we tend to fixate far too much on IQ. Yes, it's important. No, it's not the end of the world. We all know what it looks like when someone is very high-IQ but, shall we say, deficient in other major respects. Are the Aristocratic Horse Warriors higher-IQ than the people they're conquering? Sometimes yes I'm pretty sure. Sometimes no; definitely not. This is beside the point. What they are is aligned. Physically and mentally as well. And I'm pretty sure that alignment does tend to correlate with IQ. Which is really important, because:
- I'm saying this is an icon of male and female. On the subject of Mongols, picture a horse nomad —ah, can I say this here — having his way with the sister of the sweatiest, chubbiest, most-effete, half-infertile, most frighteningly-intelligent Mandarin you can imagine. Don't give me that look; you know the one I mean. Point is, the conquerors don't need to be higher IQ: They just need to be better. And the children of the next generation etc. etc., so ever upwards and onwards amen.
- So on balance I think it works out this way. Sometimes two tribes fight and due to externalities the 'wrong' one wins. But with enough trials over a large-enough timescale, it works out.
This mountain may be a metaphor but it is certainly a bizarre one. A 60% unemployment rate! The structure reminds me more of something like South Africa than Uruk. Where are the slaves, the working class? Only a very prosperous society could afford to keep a ”shoal” alive.
This is just a misunderstanding which is naturally upon my own head as the author.
We should probably call a lot of the people on the Shoals 'partially-employed'. That right there might answer your question. Migrant seasonal laborers. Camp followers. Part time retail jobs with food stamps. Anyone who can't afford to miss a few weeks' pay and whose options for asking for financial assistance are dwindling faster than the tide is coming in. Also full-time workers who are subsisting on such narrow margins that one bad year means curtains for them and their kids. Those higher up have the resources to weather a bad storm; some people just don't. A lot of people just don't. This can be hard for the modern Western mind to comprehend but it's the truth.
All slaves are always on the shoals unless they somehow have opportunities to mate with women of a higher class, which strikes me as unusual. A slave purchasing his freedom might secure a spot upslope. Does that make sense?
Meanwhile, I should think many of the traits and virtues highly valued in modern societies, and which you ascribe to the warrior nobility, probably ended up on the tip of a high pole.
Forgive me but I don't follow here your turn of phrase. Let me take a shot in the dark:
Refer to the 'male and female' above. Many of the best traits in the nobility do not originate in the nobility but from the matter, the, uh, indigenous substrate upon which they maintain themselves. Let me quote a snippet. (You have already read this so I must be misunderstanding you or else I just need to fix the line)
The lower classes are generally sort of dregs and less competent, and must be organized by their betters in the war of betters against betters. But lower individuals retain glimmers of value; shards of quality. A superior culture shapes these people to maximize these things. A lower-tier man may still be virtuous! Due to the particulars of his social stratum he may even be under pressure to evolve virtues which are not yet present in his betters, but which may rise to the top as such things are wont to do, at least in societies built to allow this to happen. And then these rain back down over everyone else, resulting in ever-better people living in an ever-better society.
It would be a mistake to think that, in my male-female metaphor, the mom's genes don't matter. They really do! And 'she' (proles) may have been evolving certain traits (perhaps ability to restrain aggressive impulses e.g.) which 'he' (Nobility) hasn't quite got the hang of. Some of their children will have the best, or worst, of both. Then selection kicks in. The whole system gets a little brighter. See?
Probably you asked something else but I'm tired.
My greatest thanks to you as always.
<3
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Couldn't they keep her as VP and have someone else take Biden's slot?
As far as democrats go they're the Gestapo and will probably be tried if the MAGA coalition fractures badly enough post Trump. Either that of Vance holds it together and starts imprisoning "Antifa" in mass. Someone is going to win and someone is going to lose in the next 8 years.
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