domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has issued a full pardon for U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry.
Perry was convicted last year of murder in the shooting death of Garrett Foster, a USAF veteran and BLM protestor. Foster had attended a downtown Austin protest armed with an AK-pattern rifle, and joined his fellow protestors in illegally barricading the street. Perry's car was halted by the barricade, Foster approached the driver's side door, rifle in hand, and Perry shot him four times from a range of roughly 18 inches, fatally wounding him. Police reported that Foster's rifle was recovered with an empty chamber and the safety on.
Perry claimed that the shooting was self defense, that the protestors swarmed his vehicle, and that Foster advanced on him and pointed his rifle at him, presenting an immediate lethal threat. Foster's fellow protestors claimed that Foster did not point his rifle at Perry, and that the shooting was unprovoked. They pointed to posts made by Perry on social media, expressing hostility toward BLM protestors and discussing armed self-defense against them, and claimed that Perry intentionally crashed into the crowd of protestors to provoke an incident. For his part, Foster was interviewed just prior to the shooting, and likewise expressed hostility toward those opposed to the BLM cause and at least some desire to "use" his rifle.
This incident was one of a number of claimed self-defense shootings that occurred during the BLM riots, and we've previously discussed the clear tribal split in how that worked out for them, despite, in most cases, clear-cut video evidence for or against their claims. The case against Perry was actually better than most of the Reds, in that the video available was far less clear about what actually happened. As with the other Red cases, the state came down like a ton of bricks. An Austin jury found Perry guilty of murder, and sentenced him to 25 years in prison.
Unlike the other cases, this one happened in Texas, and before the trial had completed, support for Perry was strong and growing. That support resulted in Governor Abbott referring Perry's case to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. A year later, the board returned a unanimous recommendation for a pardon to be granted. Abbott has now granted that pardon, and Perry is a free man, with his full civil rights restored to him. He has spent a little more than a year in prison, and his military career has been destroyed, but he is no longer in jail and no longer a felon.
So, now what?
It seems to me that there's a lot of fruitful avenues of discussion here. Was the shooting legitimate self-defense? To what degree did the protestors' tactics of illegally barricading streets, widespread throughout the Floyd riots and a recurring prelude to tragedy, bear responsibility for the outcome? How should we interpret Perry's comments prior to the shooting, or Foster's for that matter?
Two points seem most salient to me.
First, this case is a good demonstration of how the Culture War only rewards escalation, and degrades all pretensions to impartiality. I do not believe that anyone, on either side, is actually looking at this case in isolation and attempting to apply the rules as written as straightforwardly as possible. For both Blues and Reds, narrative trumps any set of particular facts. No significant portion of Blues are ever going to accept Reds killing Blues as legitimate, no matter what the facts are. Whatever portion of Reds might be willing to agree that Reds killing Blues in self-defense might have been illegitimate appears to be trending downward.
Second, this does not seem to be an example of the process working as intended. If the goal of our justice system is to settle such issues, it seems to have failed here. Red Tribe did not accept Perry's conviction as legitimate, and Blue Tribe has not accepted his pardon as legitimate. From a rules-based perspective, the pardon and the conviction are equally valid, but the results in terms of perceived legitimacy are indistinguishable from "who, whom". As I've pointed out many times before, rules-based systems require trust that the rules are fair to operate. That trust is evidently gone.
This is what we refer to in the business as a "bad sign".
ThenElection
45m ago
I got a wife by changing my strategy, and we make each other extremely happy, so the outcome was definitely net good for us. And I'm 90% confident that continuing on my previous path would have ended in actual suicide.
In the end, I'm not going to martyr myself, or advise anyone else to martyr himself, to satisfy an imagined set of rules the vast majority of women don't even themselves follow. Make it even 25%, and I'd reconsider.
100ProofTollBooth
23m ago
The r/K selection theory has pretty much confirmed what you're skeptical of.
Human women have a very long and difficult pregnancy and an extremely long child rearing period. They have a massive incentive to mate with a mate who is going to stick around.
Playing hard to get is a filtering mechanism for a man's ability to stick with an effort despite initial failure or hardship. It's as simple as that. Phrased differently, "if I make it easy for him to come (that's an unintentional double entendre! hahaha, nice), it will also be easy for him to go...Therefore, I have to make it a little hard up front to test out if he's going to see it through"
We can't and don't want to hack our own biology. The "hack" is the social norms and culture that we build to compensate for our biology. In sexual relations, ambiguity is a real problem. Playing coy is intentional ambiguity. We used to deal with it by creating more obvious courtship milestones - she's playing coy, so you ask her to "go steady" or go to the dance or whatever, that's an obvious next step with some built in commitment by both parties. Nowadays, however, literally sleeping with someone is ambiguous. "I know we fucked, but I'm not sure I like like you" is in the head of hundreds of thousands of men and women right now.
This is all a way of saying that we shouldn't ask women not to play coy and start announcing their intentions in a legalistic format upfront (that's autist level 4000 thinking). We should, however, provide the social pressure to hold them accountable for crossing various milestones as well as general honesty with partners. Likewise, on the male side of things, we should be coaching young men on what a good courtship looks like, penalize them for cad-ambiguity behavior, and harshly socially penalize them for abandonment, absentee fatherism, etc. Fortunately, male coercive sexual behavior is still universally recognized as abhorrent - at least in the west
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
33m ago
While Nike was named after the Greek goddess of victory (and came out of a company called Blue Ribbon Sports, referring to victory in another way), Budweiser was not named after the concept of being a buddy, nor after a flower bud.
2rafa
36m ago
Not wanting to seem too easy is probably a feature of all monogamous societies. Whether you think civilization is downstream of biology is, I suppose, up to you.
SteveKirk
4m ago
http://www.wsj.com/articles/look-whos-getting-that-bank-settlement-cash-1472421204
Most of the deals give double credit or more against the settlement amount for every dollar in “donations.” Bank of America’s donation list—the only bank to disclose exactly where it sends its money—shows how this benefits liberal groups. The bank has so far given at least $1.15 million to the National Urban League, which counts as if it were $2.6 million against the bank’s settlement. Similarly, $1.5 million to La Raza takes $3.5 million off the total amount of “consumer relief” owed by the bank. There are scores of other examples
https://rtp.fedsoc.org/paper/improper-third-party-payments-in-u-s-government-litigation-settlements/
https://www.judicialwatch.org/doj-give-leftist-groups-cut-b-settlement/
Obama is a Chicago politician, and US politics is now Chicago politics. Trump ended the policy rather than using it to find the right, and now Biden has restarted it to keep leftists swimming in cash. As if they didn't get enough of it from the billions handed to them in 2021.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
Maybe. If all you are trying to do is get as much sex as you can, fine. But this happens in other context too.
This happens after you've been getting to know a woman for a few weeks, and there is some ambiguity about whether this is going to be friends, or more. You feel like you click on every level, and one night you get your shot to take things to the next level. But you mistook her playing coy for earnestly saying no, and you failed your audition. Now she has the ick and you are permanently friendzoned.
Is it fair? No. But, and I don't have statistics here, if you decide to cut off every woman who does that from your potential partner pool, you've probably just axed 90+% of otherwise well adjusted women. Because in the experience of everyone I've ever spoken to, some degree of overcoming resistance to prove how attracted you are to a woman is expected by both sexes.
I spent my 20's raging at the banking system post 2008 bank bailouts, refusing to participate with my money in a corrupt and fraudulent investing markets... only for nothing to happen. In my 30's I decided I wasn't going to be the only chump not getting mine, and now I have a seven figure net worth. Likewise, I spent my 20's expecting women to be honest, straight forward, and exercise agency. I had zero success. Needless to say in my 30's I changed strategies.
Some systems just aren't worth raging against. The rules may not be fair, but unfortunately we don't get to change them.
pigeonburger
27m ago
Yeah, I saw that news too; someone I had never about before pinging on my radar twice within less than a month is a sure sign to me something is up. Someone is trying to market that person to me. It could be her marketing herself succesfully as it got the attention of two sites where I get linked to news, or a third party powerful enough to have it pushed past the filters to make sure people like me heard about her.
Lizzardspawn
2hr ago
A person with the same name is having onlyfans. And recently it seems that she made claims that biden admin paid her to support Ketanji Brown
OnlyFans star Farha Khalidi claims she was paid by Biden administration to spread 'political propaganda' to her thousands of social media followers
My bullshit detector is ringing that this is someone that tries to become a right wing grifter.
ThenElection
1hr ago
The "some people miss sex they could have had" direction is understating that error. It's more like "some people miss highly meaningful, mutually respectful relationships that massively increase the well-being of both parties." It's not merely a matter of someone not getting their dick wet enough.
So the question, then, is how we create the social conditions so that women feel empowered to give that "no" and men feel compelled to respect it.
You've got to create a consent culture. If most women positively responded to very fastidious requests for explicit consent and respect for hesitance or rejection, men would go for it, every bit as much as they would start walking everywhere on their hands if that's what women wanted.
But, having spent too much time in the wild, women generally hate it when you ask for explicit consent; I've been told multiple times that I ruined the mood by asking if it was okay if I kissed her. Instead, there's a set of implicit rules that men are never explicitly taught but are expected to learn through repeated failed attempts. Underlying all of that is still the goal of discerning real consent, but obscured by social games. (This isn't something that comes up nearly as much in gay culture; if you want to fuck, you can ask someone if they want to fuck, and it won't affect your chances either way.)
So long as that's the landscape that heterosexual men have to navigate while dating, there will still be "consent accidents" where the man mistakenly misreads a signal, and there will still be men who take advantage of the ambiguity to get what they want but excuse it by feigning confused signals.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
32m ago
You can do that, but it's rare. Therefore, as in Scott's Be nice at least until you can coordinate meanness (which I only partly agree with), it doesn't really do much unless it's a norm. The curve of behavior as a function of consequence is highly nonlinear, and a rule which is enforced in 0.1% of cases might as well not exist, since people will just ignore it. A world in which each instance of hooking up under false pretenses carries a 0.1% chance of getting beat up or having to go to court leads to basically no change in behavior and just increases violence to no benefit. It's only if men seeking to take advantage of women expect to actually face consequences, and have either had it happen to themselves in the past or to people they know, that they will factor those consequences and rethink their behavior.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
Maybe with respect to my gripe about financial markets.
The dating market is downwind of biology. There is no changing that.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
7m ago
I'm sorry, but here at The Motte you need to write like everyone is reading. Your bigoted comment would have made me feel unwelcome and emotionally unsafe had my masters not seen fit to also make me a Zensunni master at peace with life. We need you to Do Better.
4doorsmorewhores
13m ago
I'm also confused by this. She has an onlyfans which she advertises on her twitter and instagram, which are both just full of normie talking-point debates
100ProofTollBooth
16m ago
you obviously can't stop some man eerily similar to you from acting in hardcore pornography
This seems .... oddly specific. And an epic humble brag if so.
WhiningCoil
3hr ago
Witnessing what my friends went through, as well as living through my own batch of lackluster dates, I wondered if I should just wait to have sex.
The idea felt odd. And boring. I wasn’t religious, nor did I have my sights set on a diamond ring. So I wasn’t scared of hell, nor a future puritanical husband. “What are you waiting for?” people would ask me. I’d ask myself as well. I didn’t have the gall to admit that I was sort of waiting on my gut to tell me when. It felt like a cop-out. I knew gut feelings were wonky moral compasses– afterall, that semester we were reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in class, and learning how Huck’s gut feeling of guilt for abetting a runaway slave is shaped by the social mores he’s been exposed to. That was also the year the media littered the term “implicit bias” in basically every headline,27 to unmask rampant racism and sexism in institutions. Suffice it to say, gut feelings were not in season.
Now estranged from the sex-positivity I once adored, I do believe there is a right and wrong time to have sex. I also believe that your sexual footprint does affect you, for better or for worse. And I think a lot of girls are having sex at the wrong time. All these beliefs are fundamentally at odds with the principles of sex-positivity, which beats out any notion of right or wrong sex, other than via the consent-yardstick.
A proper feminist should make prescriptions not off some optimistic blank-slate, but from these basic phenomena: girls are more agreeable, more susceptible to manipulation, cognitive-sexual overload, and sexual blueprinting. They are more likely to be pressured into the receiving end of violent porn fantasies, lied to about STDs, addled by sexual regret, and victim to partner violence.
Anyone who turns a blind eye to this epidemic and eggs on young women to carelessly leap into bed with guys in the name of female liberation, is grooming girls with a flashy, pink glove.
Instead of working against the culture of rampant sexual coercion, pop feminism basically just serves as a bottom-bitch.
Everything old is new again, isn't it? It's fascinating watching someone think out loud, going round and round and found in a neurotic spiral for 30,000 words.
When I tell people that I’m opting out of having sex, I get told a lot of things. That I’m prudish, wasting my “prime,” overthinking it, a control-freak, or even pathological.
I mean, both can be right.
It's fascinating, going through this bizarre, alternate reality hellscape of sexual relations. Absent is even a single person in a monogamous relationship. Not even a single one. How is that even possible? You don't know one single person in a relationship? You don't even know of one? This reads like some sort of speculative fiction where relationships have been outlawed.
Then again, I'm married. I've been with the same woman 15 years. Apps were brand fucking new right when I met my wife, old school dating websites being the standard. In my 20's I remember a lot of people in turbulent relationships. Or the weird friend groups where it seemed like everyone had tried a relationship with everyone at some point. Those were bizarre to me. It was rough. I know a few guys who opted out, and just couldn't take women's high expectations, sociopathic behavior and imperious attitudes anymore.
Maybe there really are just two breeds of men. The ones depicted in this article, who somehow get these broken women to throw themselves at him, and everyone else who these broken women take their trauma out on.
I can imagine how the experience of dating has deteriorated greatly since I was active. But the reality of this article where a monogamous relationship is literally not an option for anyone, and doesn't exist at all, seems a bit extreme. It seems more like cope to justify sex work and/or trying to rebrand as some sort of "intellectual" e-girl.
She'd be better served deleting her entire internet presence.
WhiningCoil
2hr ago
Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds.
Including women! And to go a different direction than the poster below me, women expect men to ignore their "no". Say no and then being pursued regardless makes them feel desired. You hear anecdotes all the time of women who said no, the man respected it, and they thought less of him for not just going for it. Like that's not how a "real man" is supposed to act.
This is further confused by the fact that girls who say "no" but are timid or nervous, and girls who say "no" but are just playing coy can sound exactly the same. Grinning ear to ear, giggly, clingy.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
just now
Because said surrounding countries are majority Muslim, majority Catholic, or far less tolerant of individual differences (usually called "poor and Communist")?
I don't think it's more complicated than that- the only outlier in that case is Japan and... they pretend to have Christian values mostly because of inertia from having lost the war in '45.
there's no backlash to transgenderism
Their men and women are world-famous for looking the same and... have been for some time now.
YoungAchamian
2hr ago
"I don't want to." "No" is a complete sentence, as they say. Related to the first, many men apparently feel no compulsion to respect that "no." Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds. So the question, then, is how we create the social conditions so that women feel empowered to give that "no" and men feel compelled to respect it.
This isn't exclusive to men. Many Women don't respect a Man's no either. Both genders don't like it when you turn down their offers of sex. Badgering men into sex by calling them gay, questioning their masculinity, and suggesting impotence are classic Women variations of this playbook. This is anecdotal, but I and many of my close male friends, have experienced it both in serious relationships and casual ones. We realistically need to create social conditions where everyone feels not only empowered to say no but people have empathy for that no and can respect it. Not just in the Women: Good, Man: Bad sense
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
I think you’re pointing out, correctly, that she’s going at it from the perspective of ‘this is how patriarchy works in goatfuckerstan’. It’s worth emphasizing for the audience- goatfuckerstani patriarchy is legitimately a worse deal for women than modern or historic Christian purity culture. Pagan primitives patriarchy is possibly an even worse deal.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1hr ago
I get that you hate Sam Altman and believe he is a sociopath. I don't understand where that hatred or conclusion are coming from, but I also don't particularly care. What I don't like is that your "fuck that guy" attitude seems to be motivating accusations of wrongdoing on other flimsy and pretextual grounds. It diminishes us to engage in that.
2rafa
2hr ago
Modernity culturally has a lot to answer for, but in this case I think it’s also urbanization and the atomization that followed limiting traditional familial and community matchmaking. One sees the same phenomenon in big cities even in comparatively trad countries, where urban areas often have lower tfr than more rural communities in ‘lib’ nations. 2024 Tehran is less socially conservative than most Americans probably think, but it’s still more socially conservative than rural America and yet has a lower birthrate.
U-Visas, or Visas for illegals who suffered violent crime in the U.S. has recently come into the news as a gang in Chicago did fake robberies to help illegals get U-Visas. The program was originally designed to help sex trafficking victims. But had already expanded.
https://cwbchicago.com/2024/05/chicago-fake-robbery-visa-scam.html
If I had to guess this gang was probably not the originator of these schemes. And there are immigrant attorneys and NGO’s spreading the loophole.
https://www.injusticewatch.org/project/u-visa/2022/chicago-police-u-visa-denials/
Leftist piece detailing two Chicago cops who were known for denying U-Visa claims. One case in particular caught my eye of an illegals son being murdered in Chicago and then using it to apply the entire family for U-Visas. Basically if you let the gangbanging families into the country eventually junior gets killed and everyone is legal. A lot of the cases sound like antisocial illegal behavior making them eligible for getting U-Visas.
What started out as a nice way to help sex-trafficking victims then turned into a whole institution for getting immigrants legal. And then it turned into let’s just fake the crimes.
Of course this is a prime example of perverse incentives and the cobra effect. Once you start measuring something people find a way to get the incentive in a way that does not accomplish your goal.
It’s also an indicator for why America is becoming a low trust society. As a Republican I see no reason to ever compromise with the left. If you try to do something reasonable like U-Visas or Asylum or money for terrorist attack victims (turning into massive student loan relief) the left will abuse your reasonableness.
It’s also why the right with some help from Trump was wise to shutdown the immigration bill. That which is written on paper isn’t important. It will be abused. Controlling the executive, beauraucracy, and the process is where the power lies.
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