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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

But if you can't have your rifle pointed down, because that threatens a person seated below you, then that means the general freedom to open carry a rifle is severely circumscribed. In a city there will always be cars around.

In fact in the hours that Rittenhouse was walking around we have images him of gun angled down walking past an occupied car. If that is enough to trigger threat then the occupant could have shot him!

My point is that on its own should be ok. If it is ok to open carry a rifle then we must accept some people will have it angled towards them. Rittenhouse in the image has his gun pointed at the legs of the man next to him. Unless you are always pointing your gun directly vertically down, its just a statisical certainty. So if open carrying rifles is legal, then that cannot be the standard.

You can legally in Texas walk up to a car with a rifle open carried. The question is does that mean when doing the safe thing, and pointing it down, you are automatically threatening the occupant because you could shoot them in seconds? I say the answer logically has to be no, in order for the legal carry right to make any sense.

Now to be clear that does not mean Foster wasn't actually threatening Perry! He may well of been and certainly previous testimony might make that more likely. But it can't come solely from walking towards an occupied vehicle with your gun angled down. Because that is I am given to understand (and as Rittenhouse did!) the safer way to point it. Is he supposed to raise it? Because that seems more likely to trigger a response. If open carrying is legal you can walk towards people legally, you can walk past them, you can ealk up to their car window and knock on it. You can ask them for the time or pet their dog.

My point is not that Foster was not threatening Perry, but that the description of WHY it was a threat seems biased. If Perry was threatened it was not because the gun was simply angled down and he is lower, it has to be because it was actively pointed at him. That was the determination in the Rittenhouse trial, that merely turning with your gun angled down such that it is passing a trajectory where you could shoot someone can't count as being actively threatened so Rosenbaum could not have been defending himself. Whether the gun is pointing at your leg or your body because you are sitting down doesn't matter.

If we want to claim that Perry was legally threatened then it has to be because Foster was aiming at him. Not just holding the gun in his general direction. And the problem is, from the images we have we can't see that, which is why Nybbler has to fall back to the gun being angled down being a threat because that is all we can make out. He is inflating the level of evidence we have. Again to be clear it is entirely possible Foster was pointing his gun right at Perry. And if so Perry would be justified in seeing that as a threat. Likewise in a state where open carry of rifles is not permitted maybe the walking towards you carrying a rifle pointed close to you might be a threat. But if you are going to legalize open carry of long arms, they WILL be angled towards people at some point (seriously go watch the pre-shooting footage of Kenosha, particularly when some of the "militia" are standing and walking together, their barrels are angled down but pass trajectories of peoples legs all the time) and if that legally counts as a threat, there is a serious mismatch, that risks inciting incidents. (Assuming we are allowing open carry, I don't think it should count for the record.) That is true even if Foster was about to shoot Perry in cold blood (and he might have been!).

I'm not complaining that people are defending Perry. More that they are pitching certainties or potentially reasonable things as absolute proof. Such that there is no chance the jury was actually correct.

To be clear, just as I think it was dumb of Rittenhouse to be wandering around a protest with a rifle regardless of whether he did anything legally wrong, then Foster was just as stupid, possibly more so. I don't think its a huge loss he got shot. Though I am sure as it always is it is a loss to his family. Attending protests has risk, attending openly armed inflates the risk that someone will take exception. Possibly Rittenhouse is only alive because Rosenbaum was not armed. And in the US, that is not a good gamble, as Foster perhaps learned...well briefly.

Also I keep typing Genosha instead of Kenosha, so if any made it through, I apologise.

confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.

I think indigenous people have far more children than any of those groups.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

?He's set for a jury trial in 2025!? Nice problem to have if you're out on bail, but what the ever-living fuck.

There looks to have been some process stuff -- what looks like a pretty questionable police-tossed-my-evidence back and forth that took a several months, and a judge recusing because his brother-in-law turned out to be involved in analyzing the case -- but that's still nearly New York City levels of delay.

confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.

The girls on Coffee Meets Bagel a very disproportionately Asian in my experience.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

I would agree with you. Though I think Rittenhouse did himself no favors in his testimony because he said as Rosenbaum charged him, he did point the gun at him to try and scare him off. Then ran, when he kept charging, then shot him when he was getting close. Had the jury felt he HAD initially threatened Rosenbaum, the second (admitted) threat might have been viewed to show that Rosenbaum might have believed Rittenhouse would have got more distance then turned the gun on him again. A podcast I was listening to at the time was concerned he had just given them a reason to convict. Though that turned out not to be the case of course.

Rosenbaum was i think unstable, and looking for trouble, so whether Rittenhouse did have his barrel angled somewhere near him was probably the excuse he was looking for.

confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.

Women are looking for a good-looking, confident but humble, respectful and unconditionally loving confidant who earns more than them...

Men are looking for a harem of sweet, nubile girls who'll provide stress-free sex on tap. Or perhaps a nice, pretty, forever-loyal tradwife who'll stay at home and raise children.

Nobody is going to get what they want unless they're very lucky or high-value. There are trade-offs. The tradwife probably isn't going to be that good looking. The harem girls are probably most interested in your wealth. The good-looking men are hard to lock down. The 'nice guys' aren't so attractive, physically or socially.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 19, 2024

It's English. Or at least ebonics haha. I don't think I've ever used Bengali over here.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

Alright, so what would be a “good sign”?

Assuming that the evidence was genuinely unclear, I don’t see how the scissor can be avoided. Either the initial conviction was unjust, or the pardon was. This isn’t new to Current Year.

I suppose I find it a bit premature to say people aren’t accepting his pardon. On Twitter, sure. Until someone denies him a job as if he were still a murderer—or until Jack Ruby shows up to launch a conspiracy theory—I’d say law and order are holding together.

confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.

Sounds like good reasons not to be a lawyer

confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.

Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds.

To move away from drunk hookups into committed relationships, there is this kind of issue where libidos don't always match and as such some accommodation must be reached where either:

  1. The low-libido partner (usually but not always the woman) agrees to have sex more in exchange for some consideration,
  2. The high-libido partner (usually but not always the man) agrees to have sex less in exchange for some consideration, or
  3. Both agree on some middle ground.

One issue I've seen with a decent amount of feminist thought (including, to some extent, the article under discussion) is that it declares agreement #2 exploitative and defends women's right to outright renege on agreements #1 and #3 without consequence (as consequences are a form of coercion). That doesn't leave any zone of possible agreement.

I'm not saying it's alright to ignore a "no", but... there are circumstances where "no" is an arsehole move.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

That was the focus of the prosecution that he was cauding people to feel hreatened, which was the contention on why Rosenbaum may have felt threatened and c harged Rittenhouse and thus had a self defence claim.

The problem is the link you're smuggling in between "feeling threatened" and "charging." Not "shoving someone away from you" or "running away" or "hiding" but "charging". Actively running towards the person who you think is threatening you.

confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.

What struck me about this article was how completely different her university experience was to mine. I never had sex in university. I never even went on a date, though did occasionally get drunk at parties and make out with girls.

I never talked about sex with my parents and only very rarely with my friends, and certainly not in any detail. I didn't even watch porn. The university didn't lecture us about consent. I didn't read about it on the internet. I didn't have a well developed theory (sex positive or otherwise) about how consent, dating or sex were supposed to work. Most of what I knew came from TV and movies. I only had vague ideas about how things were supposed to work, and I struggled to form a coherent understanding of courtship by piecing together conflicting clues. The whole subject was a mystery to me, and seemed almost fantastical, something which on some level I didn't really believe would ever be relevant to my life.

I did start dating and having sex in my late twenties and tried to educate myself by reading the internet, but nothing like the craziness this girl describes took place. She is really describing an alien world to me. It might be because I am ten years older than her, but I wonder if something equally crazy was taking place at my alma mater while I focused on studying. I certainly would never have guessed that anything like this was happening.

Also, my friends who did date mostly had a series of monogamous relationships. There wasn't that much hooking up, at least that I knew of.

confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.

she happily took an OF career over a law career.

This doesn't tell you anything. I graduated with decent grades from a T-15 law school in a major US metropolitan area and didn't crack $80k/yr for several years out of law school. Lawyer pay is extremely bimodal, and there's a lot of people who get their newly-minted JD only to find themselves with 5 or 6-figure debts but making significantly less than the Assistant Manager at the local Panda Express.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

Below someone said that because Foster had his gun angled down, but could have pointed it directly at Perry and fired in an instant that Perry was correct to have felt threatened. But we have video of Rittenhouse wandering around gun pointed low where he also could have brought it up and fired at any of the people around him.

I'll point to Cornered Cat for a summary that's focused on a not-lawyers-not-legal-advise, but the tripod of ability-opportunity-jeopardy is common to a much broader ethos among Red Tribers. Someone being physically able to harm you can't be a threat on its own, or everyone from a police officer to a car driver to a stick holder is cause for justifiable self-defense. Someone who says they'll hurt you can't be a threat on its own, or a trash-talking Call of Duty player would be justifiable self-defense. It's the combination of both that make for justifiable self-defense.

I think the situation for Perry is a lot more unclear, not least of all because of the low quality of all available video. But having people beating on your car doors and windows is a lot closer on jeopardy than a rando giving out bandaids (as, importantly, was Perry's driving!). Maybe not enough, and I'm disappointed that neither Abbot nor the parole board seem interested in explaining the evidence they found so compelling. But enough that it seems to be a big missing factor in a lot of the discussions and comparisons.

((That said, in turn, Rittenhouse is an obscenely good shoot for reasons that have been covered elsewhere; he set a standard that is wildly above the minimum for lawful self-defense.))

confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.

I got about halfway through before I called it quits because it got repetitive.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

I like the comparison of the spotting plane to the drone. One thing that exists in this war that didn't in World War One is the possibility of deep strike (cruise missiles, ballistic missiles) which means that massed assaults (cut down in WW1 by machine-guns and tube artillery) can be defeated before even reaching the lines.

On the topic of good sources, in my very limited experience, I'd recommend the Royal United Services Institute, they actually sent some guys over to Ukraine to talk to the Ukrainians. RAND probably remains one of the best places to read the rough draft of history before it happens.

I don't read this stuff religiously, but I've found what I have read on the Russo-Ukraine War (something like one paper from each source!) to be interesting.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

I've got more written but this is taking quite a bit of research to do the way I want to do it and I've been unusually busy for the past month so my apologies for not getting the installments out sooner. In the meantime, I owe you answers to your questions.

Does CMU being the best CS university in the world affect the day to day of the average person in Pittsburgh? For example, the JHU's excellence at Medicine or Clemson at Automobile Engg. defintely seems to affect the economic makeup of their respective cities.

Not unless you live near campus, but I doubt that's the kind of influence you're talking about. I have a friend who works at the robotics lab but his place of employment makes no difference in my life. The so-called city fathers hype up our tech prowess all the time, but I'm guessing that all cities with any kind of tech industry do that, and Pittsburgh is still like 18th in number of tech jobs, so I'm inclined to say that any influence is minimal. The one exception may be in East Liberty; it gets a lot of hype for being recently gentrified and having a Google office near there, but for all the housing they're building I've never heard of anyone actually living there, and normal people don't hype the area up like they do other trendy areas. That's more of a discussion for the installment on East Liberty (there's certainly a lot to unpack there), but off the top of my head I'd guess that all the apartments are rented by techbros without social lives, which is why I haven't heard of anyone wanting to move there.

Does Pittsburgh ever feel like a college town? Upitt + CMU makes for 50k students not that far from downtown.

And Duquesne just outside of Downtown, and Point Park in Downtown, and Carlow right next to Pitt, and you get the idea. So yeah; any remotely trendy part of the East End with decent bus service is going to have a relatively high number of student renters, particularly grad students. I've never heard of any of them wanting to live in East Liberty, though. The only part that feels like an actual college town, though is Oakland, where you're right on campus, but being in the city makes it qualitatively different than if you're in a town that revolves around a huge state school in the middle of nowhere. I'll go into greater detail in the section on Oakland.

I've seen Pittsburgh compared to Seattle wrt weather, hilliness, whiteness and having tech. How fair is the comparison ?

I've never been to Seattle so take my response with a grain of salt, but I think it's reasonably fair. The climates are probably comparably dreary, but here we actually have 4 seasons with hot summers and cold winters. Our climate is mild compared to places like the Rockies and interior New England, but we're quite cold and snowy for a major American city. Culturally, though, I don't think that Seattle has the working class industrial history that gives Pittsburgh its sense of grit. I'd also wager that they're a lot less "ethnic" than we are; everybody here is Catholic and has names like Bob Schlydeki and Larry Deldino and you can still smoke in bars here. People I've know who moved here from Seattle are surprised by the amount of industry that still exists and the fact that working class people actually have accents. Most had assumed that the mills had died completely and that accents were an affectation from television that nobody had anymore.

confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.

simp/soyboy/nerdy men (perjorative terms used to denote an archetype succinctly)

The problem is that this archetype (because less attractive) includes lots of men with low social skills, and (because inexperienced romantically) badly wrong ideas about women. Women aren't looking for a grubby and immature man-child either. There's no quick fix here.

confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.

The point of this piece is just to push back against toxic sex positivity without back sliding into toxic purity

"toxic" aren't traits of impersonal "sex positive" or "purity" cultures - they're attitudes and actions of individual people, which are going to exist no matter the "culture" or "norm" you set up. There's no systematizing your way around human imperfection and failure, including but not limited to shittiness and evil.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

Foster was in a mob of angry people surrounding Perry's car. He wasn't just off in the distance with a gun at the time he was shot.

Each of these cases really needs to be examined on its own merits.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

The Provo case was discussed on the Motte. Somehow or another the shooter seems to have avoided a trial.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

You're assuming that Trump is actually behind the compilation of these lists. From what I've read, it's all conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that have proven in the past they don't give a shit so much about loyalty to Trump as they do advancing their own agendas. Using these outside lists when he didn't have a clue himself is a big part of what got him in the position he was in during his first term. Asking them to come up with more names isn't going to change that. And competence does matter. At a certain point you're getting less into people whose job consists of making policy decisions and more into the realm of everyday managerial functioning. For instance, say that Trump thinks the ATF's FFL application review process is too strict and wants to make it more liberal, and he fires the guy responsible for this process with a gun nut who's dedicated to making sure practically anyone who applies gets an FFL with minimum hassle. That may be great in theory, but if the guy in question has no clue about how the review process works and ends up bumbling through his job to the point where delay times are so long that applications that would have been a breeze under the old guy are suffering inordinate delays, the exact constituency he's trying to appease isn't going to be very happy. I can just see the article in The Atlantic now: "He thought Trump would make it easier for him to run his gun store; instead it's become a nightmare."

confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.

"Date rape" drugs are largely an urban legend, except for one: alcohol. And it's still absolutely true that men will encourage women to drink to excess, particularly through a ratchet where each successive drink lowers judgment, leading to susceptibility to another drink, etc, to the point of being black out drunk and having no judgment at all.

This is pretty messy: each step is consented to, and there's no deception about what's being consumed. Sometimes it's even innocent, particularly when both people are getting trashed. But enough women regret it that I'd be a fan of stigmatizing and punishing this behavior, particularly when the alternative is encouraging women to never have a single drink on a date for fear of falling prey to this ratchet.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

Even if that were so, and I can find no evidence it is the case, then by running away Rittenhouse terminated the confrontation and any justification for use of force against him.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

I hate to do this but you did the math wrong in the earlier post. You said:

Presumably the first 1,000 were selected basically at random and showed a 9.5% voting rate among people that had been deemed mentally incompetent and weren't allowed to vote. If that rate held, that would be over 2,000 votes from ineligible, mentally incompetent voters, just in Dane County.

The article says that there are about 22,000 voters on the incompetent list in Wisconsin. A random sample of 1,000 taken showed that 95 people had cast ballots at some point since 2008. Without numbers specific to 2020 there's no way to estimate how many improper votes were cast. That being said, if they want to implement a system to catch this I'm all for it. If they want to prosecute the people who voted illegally, I'm all for it, though going after incompetent people probably isn't a good look.

The same is true for the indefinitely confined. If you want to go after these people that's fine, but you'd better be prepared to investigate all 250,000+ instances and prosecute each one that doesn't meet whatever strict reading you want to give the law. You can't just go into Milwaukee and find a few black people or bleeding heart liberal activists who violated the law and use them as an example of "Democrat voter fraud"; you have to be willing to go into rural areas and ask MAGA hat guys detailed questions about whether Grandma is really indefinitely confined when she still has an active driver's license and was seen at the grocery store walking around the day before submitting her application. That isn't going to sit well with anybody, which is why nobody is ever going to suggest such a thing.