domain:asteriskmag.com
celluloid_dream
16m ago
As I understand it, the purpose of ICE is to make a big theatrical show of removing a few unfortunate illegals pour encourager les autres, and, even if that doesn't actually do anything on a large scale, at least make the administration look like they're taking a hard stance.
With that in mind, what better target than this guy? To others overstaying their visas: if they can get him, they could get you too. To the voting base: "Look, this guy thought he could get away with blatantly flaunting the rules for two decades. Oh, and in case you thought he was an upstanding citizen, pillar of the community, Olympian, etc. He had weapons charges and was fleeing the law"
Zephyr
34m ago
I think the way that it works is that it provides an outlet for sexual frustration. Imagine that the old paradigm worked something like this:
- Be a teenaged boy; think of sex pretty much 100% of the time.
- Be sexually frustrated because you are single.
- Be unable to relieve this sexual frustration (because masturbation is a sin, and the best pornography you can get is like, a swimsuit magazine).
- Become more desperate and try harder to get a girlfriend, until it eventually succeeds.
Whereas the current framework is more like:
- Be a teenaged boy; think of sex pretty much 100% of the time.
- Be sexually frustrated because you are single.
- Look at pornography online; we have very hardcore pornography available now, so it satisfies the sexual frustration you are feeling.
- Repeat.
I think it's fairly easy for someone to be using a pornographic website to get their rocks off, and see something in the sidebar that is like, 90% of what they like, and something they don't know if they like or not; they 'try' it, and if it works, it starts featuring more and more in their sexual interests.
To take a (very) simple example; there are a large number of men who enjoy being dominant in bed; this is fairly normal. In a normal relationship, this looks like taking the lead, and a bit of dirty talk. In the world of internet pornography, this can involve things like semi-rape behaviour, inflicting pain, using bodily fluids to degrade, etc. The underlying desire is still the dominance; but the ways of seeking it are out of whack with what someone would do in real life. There's also a degree to which people aren't really that aware of their desires; they know they find it hot when the woman is in pain, but they don't necessarily get that the part they're fantasizing about is the woman submitting to their sexual desires.
You then run into the 'toaster fuckers' problem; whenever there is a large community online dedicated to a sexual fetish, it becomes easy to identify it as a legitimate orientation, which makes becoming involved in it much easier. If you aren't aware, the 'toaster fuckers' originated from an old meme (I want to say a 4chan greentext, but I'm actually not certain); the gist of it was that back in the day, if you wanted to fuck toasters, you were on your own; society would condemn it, and you'd never find another person who would admit to liking it. Nowadays, you can go online and find people who are telling you that it's okay and they're just another persecuted group. But say you're the person from my example: you go online and discover that there is a huge community dedicated specifically to inflicting pain as part of their sexual expression; and further, they actively want more members for their group. You now don't have to deal with lots of women rejecting you; you have a group that wants you, and your mind is already oriented towards the 'inflicting pain' as being the important part of the sexual experience. In that sense, it may matter less that you have a physical woman in front of you, as your brain is saying to you 'pain is sexual'.
So the reason that obtaining a girlfriend short circuits the whole process for a lot of people is that the original fetish is something that they can explore with a partner without getting all the weird extra stuff that the algorithm is pushing on them. Before I got a girlfriend, the above is actually super similar to what I went through; I didn't 'get' that my underlying desire was for a woman to submit to me, all I knew is that I found some of the more degrading pornography to be super hot. When I managed to get a girlfriend, what I realized was that I found her wanting me, and being willing to do whatever I wanted to be even hotter; it meant that paradoxically, all the things I thought were true about my sexuality were wrong, and what I really liked was just having someone who desired me.
If I'd been a bit less of an antisocial curmudgeon, I could easily have seen myself falling into this sort of community (probably the BDSM community instead of the furries, but I think it applies there). Sexual frustration can make you do weird things, because it's hard to be lonely.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
45m ago
Non-commandeering says otherwise, with respect to public officials.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
54m ago
communist pamphlets
IIRC they were anti-draft pamphlets.
its quite possible Des Moines Public Schools has an unofficial policy of not complying with immigration law. there is presumably a lot of this going on in the private sector i guess it should not be surprising if its happening in the public sector as well. also this seems to be a failure of the federal government. the federal government is able to coerce banks into acting as policeman for all their crazy money laundering laws. if the federal government were seriously interested in cracking down on immigration then they could just coerce private and public employers in a similar manner.
My experience with school districts is that anything Principle-level(and sometimes Assistant-Principle) and above are pure political appointees.
Old-style politics, in the form of whom you know. And if you're lucky, they're somewhat competent at thier job. If not...
So it doesn't really surprise me that he got hired. He knew the right people, and they didn't care about his bona fides.
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