Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 9 Nov 2021 @ 4:26am
Re:
"...but there is a lot of public misandry to go around these days and it's generally downplayed and excused in a way that similar hate against women never would..."
Hmm. No, I think that if women had a few millennia's worth of oppressing the other gender and in modern times enough of them got away with it to keep up that practice then they too would have to start providing evidence they weren't like all the rest of them.
We men have rested on a massive privilege for centuries and our successes can be traced at least in some part to being brought up with advantages. The proper response when some of that bullshit is brought to light is not to deny that fact.
It's a bit similar to how it's pretty hard for white people to free themselves of the stigma of racism when centuries worth of generational wealth and privilege are still today providing a playing field far easier for a white person to navigate than it would be for a poc.
"Pretending the double standard doesn't exist..."
But first we need to pretend both sides started out equal and on a level playing field, amirite? Some weapons-grade bullshit along with the gaslighting there, bro.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 9 Nov 2021 @ 4:18am
Re:
"The fact is most products except cars are made in china due to low wages plus 9 6 culture Chinese work 9 hours 6 days a week how can American company's compete with that..."
I keep having to correct this; It's not that americans can't compete - because european workers are all in unions, all have way better working conditions than US ones...and we do just fine over here.
No, the real issue with China owning manufacturing isn't that it's cheap - because those days are long gone. China is not a cheap manufacturing market.
It's that over the last forty or fifty years US industry offloaded all manufacturing, resulting in the US no longer owning that skill pool at scale. As Tim Cook from Apple said it, you couldn't fill a conference room with skilled US tool-and-die engineers but in China you can snap your fingers and fill a lot of football stadiums with them.
Those skills aren't even taught in US colleges or vocational schools either any longer.
The above is half of the reason the US can't manufacture at scale, at home. The other half of the reason being that it's very convenient not to hold legal responsibility for owning a factory on US soil. Every modern western company strives to become nothing more than upper management, marketing and a finance department. Meanwhile the chinese all insist on owning land and assets. Guess which, in the long term, is more viable for anything other than providing short-term profit.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 9 Nov 2021 @ 4:09am
Re: Amazing that I manage to have a job, a wife, videogames and
"...why don't I feel attacked?"
Perhaps, and this is just a guess of mine, but just maybe you aren't a hopeless and entitled loser in life desperately looking for a scapegoat on which to blame all your failings?
The base Hawley addresses, otoh, would go to their deaths defending their privilege of looking down unto the other - including women - and blame said others for the actions they felt they were forced to undertake.
What Hawley is saying is, essentially; *"Look how women refuse to know their place. You can't be blamed for being a godless fucknut resorting to porn and faux violence when the damn ladies refuse to spread their legs and serve you a sandwich and everyone refuses to honor your courage and bravery in dancing around that burning cross with your face covered! It's all their fault! Not yours!".
And his base is eating that shit right up. Without salt.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 9 Nov 2021 @ 4:02am
Re:
"Someone might want to check and see if Josh Hawley is really a woman in disguise. Because shit like what he said is grounds to surrender your man card."
That's...pretty last century reasoning. I'm pretty sure there's no woman alive who'd take being compared to a spineless asshat like Hawley sitting down. And I'd take most women - even radical feminist TERFs - over a dipshit like Hawley, any day.
Hawley hasn't surrendered his man card. He's surrendered his Homo Sapiens card when he started catering to cavemen, neanderthals, and outright apes.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 9 Nov 2021 @ 3:55am
Re: 'All men not on my side that is.'
"...all the more so given that he follows it up by whining about how the fictional 'war on men' is somehow forcing those men into porn and gaming."
Well, to be fair the argument "Look at what you made me do!" is a fairly powerful dog whistle towards Hawley's base. Who are, of course, not misogynistic in the least - they just want women to know their place. It's not hypocritical at all once you realize that neither Hawley nor most of his base subscribe to the idea that every human has equal worth.
Thus Hawley flat out asserting that when women don't know their place men are forced to become douchebags, by which he naturally implies any form of entertainment more sophisticated than, say, baseball and NASCAR. It gets him the votes.
In the same manner Hawley asserts the protesters on jan 6 were forced to do as they did - including shitting on the floor of the rotunda and beating a cop to death - because an honest election was evicting Dear Leader.
When normal people see that famous image of the boot stamping on a human face they think it's revolting. Hawley and his base just ask the question "As long as we're the ones wearing the boot that's pretty great".
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 9 Nov 2021 @ 12:56am
Re:
"What does this mean? It sounds like you're saying that news outlets deserve government funding."
Most countries do, to some extent. There are standards in Europe at least on how tax money is funneled into independent trusts nominally removed from direct government control and used to subsidize a pseudo-NGO working as a sort of national news agency.
The US, as far as I know, has nothing similar. C-SPAN comes close in end result but functions entirely through the private sector - one of the very rare NGO's to persistently do so without corruption.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 9 Nov 2021 @ 12:37am
Re:
"Its comment section was rife with the same handful of trolls spewing false info and barely-disguised racism and misogyny, and never getting banned or punished for it."
My experience has been the same wherever a site has allowed anonymous logins. If you needed to login via verification - disqus, Facebook, Google, etc - 99,99% of those trolls all went away as if by magic.
One of the recurring shitposters on this thread, our own Baghdad Bob/Out of the blue/Jhon smith/etc. is a typical example of this. He used to shit all over Torrentfreak way back when until they forced login through disqus only. After that he gave up on even trying after his first dozen attempts at sock-puppeting failed.
This forum would have become that same morass were it not for an active community persistently flagging troll comments into hidden status. Yet even then we occasionally get a troll or two happily spamming a thread asunder - like "tp", who'll cheerfully keep posting stale gibberish in response to everyone daft enough to try to continue carrying a debate with him, well into 300 + comments.
To keep a forum a venue of debate rather than just a place where any passing asshole can squat and shit all over everyone else you need some form of entry barrier. An account. An already active and engaged community. Login credentials from somewhere.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 9 Nov 2021 @ 12:12am
Re: Psssst! We want you to be an informant
You forgot the part where, on next entry to that country, the "informant" gets picked up by whatever passes for security in that hellhole because they've made or obtained a list of low-clearance informants to The Great Satan. And after a few sessions involving blowtorches and pliers he ends up disappeared forever.
Or when the "informant" is asked to infiltrate or be part of a sting op. Once some intel agency decides you're an "asset" you'll be part of the toolset they'll want to use to meet their goals - usually involving being able to talk about mounting some major anti-terrorist OP of which you suddenly became an unwilling part.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 8 Nov 2021 @ 11:58pm
OK, so I read this part;
"...This consent decree was necessary because the Philly PD had abused the system for years, taking minute amounts of cash off anyone they arrested as part of a catch-and-release program..."
...and now someone needs to tell me how actual highway robbery became part of ordinary law enforcement procedure in certain parts of metropolitan US.
It's shit like this which gives the US conspiracy theorist nutcases credibility when they say you can't trust government agencies.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 8 Nov 2021 @ 8:34am
Re:
"My assumption is that cops have access to non-lethal weaponry and can use it to subdue individuals both violent and not."
Not really true.
Cops have access to "less than lethal" ordinance. Most of which has the drawback that they are close-range devices. if the one you need to subdue is at range and possesses a modern firearm you don't really have the option to apply said devices.
Honestly the best they could have done is drop pepper spray grenades into his house from range but once they discovered the place was on fire that was sort of off the procedural table.
"What evidence do you have for your assumption that lethal force was the only viable option for dealing with the man who was killed?"
He was firing a handgun within city limits. Generally speaking whenever someone does that outside of an actual shooting range the understanding exists that something within a thousand yards will serve as a backstop. If lucky that backstop won't be a person.
Sorry to say it Stephen, but once someone picks up a firearm and starts firing it at other people, that's when I turn and walk off that hill, because that's the point where even I'll assume the last option comes into effect.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 8 Nov 2021 @ 8:19am
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Yeah, but you have to be predisposed to believe such things."
Two things factoring into this; "Religious Upbringing". If you've been taught, through your formative years, that everything you can observe or calculate is a lie and that everything you need to pay credence to is backed only by a Big Holy Book...that's your predisposition, right there. Given the young turd-to-be raised in a sectarian religious home has also likely been taught to take it on similar faith that "liberals BAD" it's not exactly a logical stretch to understand why they will blindly consume any assertion made against the focus of their hatred.
The second part is grievance addiction. The addict will naturally be predisposed to accepting, blindly, any assertion which serves to provide them their daily dose of hatred. And anyone today in the cult of Trump, among the followers of Qanon or generic republican Karens obsessed with entitlement, have all been raised to hate whoever the current bogeyman or other is.
"Obama has been required to provide more evidence of his eligibility than any other president in history..."
...and 90 million americans found great solace in spewing bile and venom at him because he was the focus of so very many of their primary suppliers of grievance. A black man. Intellectual. Liberal.
"Similarly, most of those conspiracies are essentially variations on the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, which is literally Russian anti-semitic propaganda."
The jews have caught most of the flak through history mainly because they made such good others. A people with close-knit communities of quaint and obviously different religious and social practices, often highly educated, who also have the bad taste to often become eminently successful and prosperous? Prime target for envy and a convenient scapegoat to blame for all ills.
But they are hardly the first. The romans went after the christians for the same reasons. The carthaginians went after the romans. etc et ad nauseam.
This philosophy of scapegoating is usually the core part of the viral social meme of millennialist belief. Who the scapegoat is is as interchangeable as a smartphone casing. What matters is that it taps into making people addicted to hatred from a young age, raising humans through their formative years on a steady dosage of hate-mediated adrenaline.
The predisposition isn't about some sort of preunderstanding or preconceived notion - it's about being raised a junkie hooked on hating someone.
And that's why someone like Alex Jones or Ann Coulter just has to holler trigger words to get the audience instantly feeling that rush of dopamine and adrenaline as their anger spikes. Saner people just listen and go "What the actual fuck?" with raised eyebrows. The addicts, though, will defend their theory of "teh gay frogs" and "Cannibal Killary" to their deaths since that's what they get their current shot of natural opiates from.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 8 Nov 2021 @ 7:51am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"99% of all authors need a day job."
It's always been the case that 99,9% of would-be artists shouldn't quit their day job. Many are called, few chosen.
The problem is that so many of those who don't make it will turn as much of the world as they can managed upside down in ire over their "grand work" not being appreciated by the plebes.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 8 Nov 2021 @ 7:45am
Re: Re: Re:
"Maintained or not. They’re nature. They provide habitat for animals from micro organisms to large wildlife. "
In a drought area it's generally not a good idea to maintain what amounts to a foot tall bale of hay the size of a building plot within city limits. This realization has been slow in coming though and I'm actually happy to see that southern state fire safety regulations are including rules about this these days.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 8 Nov 2021 @ 7:40am
Re:
"Barring a situation where lethal force was the one and only viable option available for taking him down, non-lethal force could’ve and should’ve been used to subdue him."
Well, they did sit for hours with a negotiator trying to coax him out until they sent in a robot and found he'd set the house on fire. Then when they sent in firefighters he opened up on them again. Finally he stumbled out of the burning building, guns in hand.
The thing about "nonlethal" measures is that they are usually close-range and unreliable. A beanbag from a shotgun will toss someone back, likely disarming them, but has very short range. Tasers are similarly close-range weapons. Rubber bullet takedowns are essentially the equivalent of beating someone with a hammer until they stop moving.
Meanwhile the guy coming out of the house is armed with weaponry which has an effective range of between 30m and 200m depending on whether it was a handgun or a rifle. Bullets fired will, depending on trajectory, lodge in something. That something may be a bypasser.
Looking at the details as described in multiple news sources this has all the hallmarks of "suicide by cop" more than anything else.
There are plenty of examples of police overreach and brutality but this...isn't one of them. This case is about someone who held and fired a gun at officers, not a poc with a smartphone or standing in their own kitchen holding a chef's knife, or a homeless man after a vicious beating.
I'll go out on a limb here and say they'll find this turns out to be caused by yet another mental health issue caused by desperation.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 8 Nov 2021 @ 7:19am
Re: Re: Re: 12 inches !
"I know in America's mid-west, lawn care is more important than having your pants on in public."
That may be true enough...
...but in the specific case of Austin at least (and I suspect, by now, most of the midwest and south) lawn height is part of the fire safety regulations. The last thing you want in a drought is the wildfire starting within city limits, I guess.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 8 Nov 2021 @ 7:16am
Re: Re:
Following sources with timelines found;
Google - Washington Post City officials in Texas went to cut a man’s overgrown lawn. He was later killed in a standoff with police.
Google - Nbcnews City's attempt to cut Texas man's grass leads to a standoff, a fire and his death, police say
The publication "Newser" is less detailed but does have a tentative id on the homeowner - a Robert B. Richart who'd been in conflict with city authorities since mid august over his lawn violating the city code. It's my guess that if you live in an often drought-stricken region having a lawn the equivalent of dried hay more than a foot high within city limits is considered a fire risk.
Given the chain of events as described this isn't a case I'd use to illuminate police overreach.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 8 Nov 2021 @ 6:31am
Re: Re:
"If there's video of the event, showing it went down as you stated, then I'll have to retract my earlier statement about QI."
My deployment of google-fu did not turn up a video. But multiple news sources all delivering more or less the same story. There are a few police procedures there I have questions about but a few key notes stand out here;
1) Police arrived.
2) Municipal agents began mowing the man's lawn.
3) Shots were fired from inside the house, at or around officers present.
4) Swat was called. Standoff ensured
5) Shots once again fired at officers from inside house.
6) House fired from inside, man emerging, guns in hand.
7) Swat officer fired, man went down, died in hospital.
Plenty of questions to be asked but we're not talking about a child or hobo gunned down after a vicious, one-sided beating, choked to death while cuffed or shot in the back.
This story is not the hill to die on when it comes to police brutality and overreach. Plenty of other questions to be asked but that one? Not so much.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 8 Nov 2021 @ 6:21am
Re: Re: Re:
"In most of Europe, that ending would resulted in social services being asked a lot of hard questions as to why someone was left to deteriorate to such a state."
That, too. I mean, it's not as if people slipping through the gap don't exist - they do. But government agents, social workers and police can approach and speak to them without the expectation of lethal violence and even the mentally ill don't have reason to expect police approaching them means a swift funeral.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 8 Nov 2021 @ 5:19am
Re: Re: Re:
"Talk about a need to defund the police - the lawnmower brigade, coming to your town with their nifty riding mower?"
Civil forfeiture. If your local precinct decides they need a lawnmower, zamboni, big wad of cash, brand new SUV or Margarita machine for the successful execution of their duties, they can always obtain one from some random bypasser in possession of the desired object.
On the post: Josh Hawley: The War On Men (?) Is Driving Them To Porn And Video Games (Things Many Men Like?)
Re:
"...but there is a lot of public misandry to go around these days and it's generally downplayed and excused in a way that similar hate against women never would..."
Hmm. No, I think that if women had a few millennia's worth of oppressing the other gender and in modern times enough of them got away with it to keep up that practice then they too would have to start providing evidence they weren't like all the rest of them.
We men have rested on a massive privilege for centuries and our successes can be traced at least in some part to being brought up with advantages. The proper response when some of that bullshit is brought to light is not to deny that fact.
It's a bit similar to how it's pretty hard for white people to free themselves of the stigma of racism when centuries worth of generational wealth and privilege are still today providing a playing field far easier for a white person to navigate than it would be for a poc.
"Pretending the double standard doesn't exist..."
But first we need to pretend both sides started out equal and on a level playing field, amirite? Some weapons-grade bullshit along with the gaslighting there, bro.
On the post: Josh Hawley: The War On Men (?) Is Driving Them To Porn And Video Games (Things Many Men Like?)
Re:
"The fact is most products except cars are made in china due to low wages plus 9 6 culture Chinese work 9 hours 6 days a week how can American company's compete with that..."
I keep having to correct this; It's not that americans can't compete - because european workers are all in unions, all have way better working conditions than US ones...and we do just fine over here.
No, the real issue with China owning manufacturing isn't that it's cheap - because those days are long gone. China is not a cheap manufacturing market.
It's that over the last forty or fifty years US industry offloaded all manufacturing, resulting in the US no longer owning that skill pool at scale. As Tim Cook from Apple said it, you couldn't fill a conference room with skilled US tool-and-die engineers but in China you can snap your fingers and fill a lot of football stadiums with them.
Those skills aren't even taught in US colleges or vocational schools either any longer.
The above is half of the reason the US can't manufacture at scale, at home. The other half of the reason being that it's very convenient not to hold legal responsibility for owning a factory on US soil. Every modern western company strives to become nothing more than upper management, marketing and a finance department. Meanwhile the chinese all insist on owning land and assets. Guess which, in the long term, is more viable for anything other than providing short-term profit.
On the post: Josh Hawley: The War On Men (?) Is Driving Them To Porn And Video Games (Things Many Men Like?)
Re: Amazing that I manage to have a job, a wife, videogames and
"...why don't I feel attacked?"
Perhaps, and this is just a guess of mine, but just maybe you aren't a hopeless and entitled loser in life desperately looking for a scapegoat on which to blame all your failings?
The base Hawley addresses, otoh, would go to their deaths defending their privilege of looking down unto the other - including women - and blame said others for the actions they felt they were forced to undertake.
What Hawley is saying is, essentially; *"Look how women refuse to know their place. You can't be blamed for being a godless fucknut resorting to porn and faux violence when the damn ladies refuse to spread their legs and serve you a sandwich and everyone refuses to honor your courage and bravery in dancing around that burning cross with your face covered! It's all their fault! Not yours!".
And his base is eating that shit right up. Without salt.
On the post: Josh Hawley: The War On Men (?) Is Driving Them To Porn And Video Games (Things Many Men Like?)
Re:
"Someone might want to check and see if Josh Hawley is really a woman in disguise. Because shit like what he said is grounds to surrender your man card."
That's...pretty last century reasoning. I'm pretty sure there's no woman alive who'd take being compared to a spineless asshat like Hawley sitting down. And I'd take most women - even radical feminist TERFs - over a dipshit like Hawley, any day.
Hawley hasn't surrendered his man card. He's surrendered his Homo Sapiens card when he started catering to cavemen, neanderthals, and outright apes.
On the post: Josh Hawley: The War On Men (?) Is Driving Them To Porn And Video Games (Things Many Men Like?)
Re: 'All men not on my side that is.'
"...all the more so given that he follows it up by whining about how the fictional 'war on men' is somehow forcing those men into porn and gaming."
Well, to be fair the argument "Look at what you made me do!" is a fairly powerful dog whistle towards Hawley's base. Who are, of course, not misogynistic in the least - they just want women to know their place. It's not hypocritical at all once you realize that neither Hawley nor most of his base subscribe to the idea that every human has equal worth.
Thus Hawley flat out asserting that when women don't know their place men are forced to become douchebags, by which he naturally implies any form of entertainment more sophisticated than, say, baseball and NASCAR. It gets him the votes.
In the same manner Hawley asserts the protesters on jan 6 were forced to do as they did - including shitting on the floor of the rotunda and beating a cop to death - because an honest election was evicting Dear Leader.
When normal people see that famous image of the boot stamping on a human face they think it's revolting. Hawley and his base just ask the question "As long as we're the ones wearing the boot that's pretty great".
On the post: Congress Tries To Ram The Ill-informed INFORM Bill Into The Must-pass NDAA
Re: INFORM Bill
"...this is the type of thing Amazon can afford to do, while a small e-retailer will go nuts in trying to implement it..."
Or, summarized, Amazon agreeing to pay a set fee to the nice government so they'll keep viable competitors and startups out of Amazon's markets.
It really doesn't get any better no matter how many times they reformulate it. The shamelessness in this type of grift is astonishing.
On the post: Killing Website Comment Sections Wasn't The Brilliant Move Many Newsroom Leaders Assumed
Re:
"What does this mean? It sounds like you're saying that news outlets deserve government funding."
Most countries do, to some extent. There are standards in Europe at least on how tax money is funneled into independent trusts nominally removed from direct government control and used to subsidize a pseudo-NGO working as a sort of national news agency.
The US, as far as I know, has nothing similar. C-SPAN comes close in end result but functions entirely through the private sector - one of the very rare NGO's to persistently do so without corruption.
On the post: Killing Website Comment Sections Wasn't The Brilliant Move Many Newsroom Leaders Assumed
Re:
"Its comment section was rife with the same handful of trolls spewing false info and barely-disguised racism and misogyny, and never getting banned or punished for it."
My experience has been the same wherever a site has allowed anonymous logins. If you needed to login via verification - disqus, Facebook, Google, etc - 99,99% of those trolls all went away as if by magic.
One of the recurring shitposters on this thread, our own Baghdad Bob/Out of the blue/Jhon smith/etc. is a typical example of this. He used to shit all over Torrentfreak way back when until they forced login through disqus only. After that he gave up on even trying after his first dozen attempts at sock-puppeting failed.
This forum would have become that same morass were it not for an active community persistently flagging troll comments into hidden status. Yet even then we occasionally get a troll or two happily spamming a thread asunder - like "tp", who'll cheerfully keep posting stale gibberish in response to everyone daft enough to try to continue carrying a debate with him, well into 300 + comments.
To keep a forum a venue of debate rather than just a place where any passing asshole can squat and shit all over everyone else you need some form of entry barrier. An account. An already active and engaged community. Login credentials from somewhere.
On the post: Fifth Circuit Says Man Can't Sue Federal Agencies For Allegedly Targeting Him After He Refused To Be An FBI Informant
Re: Psssst! We want you to be an informant
You forgot the part where, on next entry to that country, the "informant" gets picked up by whatever passes for security in that hellhole because they've made or obtained a list of low-clearance informants to The Great Satan. And after a few sessions involving blowtorches and pliers he ends up disappeared forever.
Or when the "informant" is asked to infiltrate or be part of a sting op. Once some intel agency decides you're an "asset" you'll be part of the toolset they'll want to use to meet their goals - usually involving being able to talk about mounting some major anti-terrorist OP of which you suddenly became an unwilling part.
On the post: Institute For Justice Survey Shows How Philadelphia's Forfeiture Program Preyed On Poor Minorities
OK, so I read this part;
"...This consent decree was necessary because the Philly PD had abused the system for years, taking minute amounts of cash off anyone they arrested as part of a catch-and-release program..."
...and now someone needs to tell me how actual highway robbery became part of ordinary law enforcement procedure in certain parts of metropolitan US.
It's shit like this which gives the US conspiracy theorist nutcases credibility when they say you can't trust government agencies.
On the post: Austin Homeowners Association Pitches In To Help Cops Kill A Guy Over Uncut Grass
Re:
"My assumption is that cops have access to non-lethal weaponry and can use it to subdue individuals both violent and not."
Not really true.
Cops have access to "less than lethal" ordinance. Most of which has the drawback that they are close-range devices. if the one you need to subdue is at range and possesses a modern firearm you don't really have the option to apply said devices.
Honestly the best they could have done is drop pepper spray grenades into his house from range but once they discovered the place was on fire that was sort of off the procedural table.
"What evidence do you have for your assumption that lethal force was the only viable option for dealing with the man who was killed?"
He was firing a handgun within city limits. Generally speaking whenever someone does that outside of an actual shooting range the understanding exists that something within a thousand yards will serve as a backstop. If lucky that backstop won't be a person.
Sorry to say it Stephen, but once someone picks up a firearm and starts firing it at other people, that's when I turn and walk off that hill, because that's the point where even I'll assume the last option comes into effect.
On the post: The Whole YouTube Radicalizes People Story Doesn't Seem To Have Much Evidence To Back It Up
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Yeah, but you have to be predisposed to believe such things."
Two things factoring into this; "Religious Upbringing". If you've been taught, through your formative years, that everything you can observe or calculate is a lie and that everything you need to pay credence to is backed only by a Big Holy Book...that's your predisposition, right there. Given the young turd-to-be raised in a sectarian religious home has also likely been taught to take it on similar faith that "liberals BAD" it's not exactly a logical stretch to understand why they will blindly consume any assertion made against the focus of their hatred.
The second part is grievance addiction. The addict will naturally be predisposed to accepting, blindly, any assertion which serves to provide them their daily dose of hatred. And anyone today in the cult of Trump, among the followers of Qanon or generic republican Karens obsessed with entitlement, have all been raised to hate whoever the current bogeyman or other is.
"Obama has been required to provide more evidence of his eligibility than any other president in history..."
...and 90 million americans found great solace in spewing bile and venom at him because he was the focus of so very many of their primary suppliers of grievance. A black man. Intellectual. Liberal.
"Similarly, most of those conspiracies are essentially variations on the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, which is literally Russian anti-semitic propaganda."
The jews have caught most of the flak through history mainly because they made such good others. A people with close-knit communities of quaint and obviously different religious and social practices, often highly educated, who also have the bad taste to often become eminently successful and prosperous? Prime target for envy and a convenient scapegoat to blame for all ills.
But they are hardly the first. The romans went after the christians for the same reasons. The carthaginians went after the romans. etc et ad nauseam.
This philosophy of scapegoating is usually the core part of the viral social meme of millennialist belief. Who the scapegoat is is as interchangeable as a smartphone casing. What matters is that it taps into making people addicted to hatred from a young age, raising humans through their formative years on a steady dosage of hate-mediated adrenaline.
The predisposition isn't about some sort of preunderstanding or preconceived notion - it's about being raised a junkie hooked on hating someone.
And that's why someone like Alex Jones or Ann Coulter just has to holler trigger words to get the audience instantly feeling that rush of dopamine and adrenaline as their anger spikes. Saner people just listen and go "What the actual fuck?" with raised eyebrows. The addicts, though, will defend their theory of "teh gay frogs" and "Cannibal Killary" to their deaths since that's what they get their current shot of natural opiates from.
On the post: Publishers Want To Make Ebooks More Expensive And Harder To Lend For Libraries; Ron Wyden And Anna Eshoo Have Questions
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"99% of all authors need a day job."
It's always been the case that 99,9% of would-be artists shouldn't quit their day job. Many are called, few chosen.
The problem is that so many of those who don't make it will turn as much of the world as they can managed upside down in ire over their "grand work" not being appreciated by the plebes.
On the post: Austin Homeowners Association Pitches In To Help Cops Kill A Guy Over Uncut Grass
Re: Re: Re:
"Maintained or not. They’re nature. They provide habitat for animals from micro organisms to large wildlife. "
In a drought area it's generally not a good idea to maintain what amounts to a foot tall bale of hay the size of a building plot within city limits. This realization has been slow in coming though and I'm actually happy to see that southern state fire safety regulations are including rules about this these days.
On the post: Austin Homeowners Association Pitches In To Help Cops Kill A Guy Over Uncut Grass
Re:
"Barring a situation where lethal force was the one and only viable option available for taking him down, non-lethal force could’ve and should’ve been used to subdue him."
Well, they did sit for hours with a negotiator trying to coax him out until they sent in a robot and found he'd set the house on fire. Then when they sent in firefighters he opened up on them again. Finally he stumbled out of the burning building, guns in hand.
The thing about "nonlethal" measures is that they are usually close-range and unreliable. A beanbag from a shotgun will toss someone back, likely disarming them, but has very short range. Tasers are similarly close-range weapons. Rubber bullet takedowns are essentially the equivalent of beating someone with a hammer until they stop moving.
Meanwhile the guy coming out of the house is armed with weaponry which has an effective range of between 30m and 200m depending on whether it was a handgun or a rifle. Bullets fired will, depending on trajectory, lodge in something. That something may be a bypasser.
Looking at the details as described in multiple news sources this has all the hallmarks of "suicide by cop" more than anything else.
There are plenty of examples of police overreach and brutality but this...isn't one of them. This case is about someone who held and fired a gun at officers, not a poc with a smartphone or standing in their own kitchen holding a chef's knife, or a homeless man after a vicious beating.
I'll go out on a limb here and say they'll find this turns out to be caused by yet another mental health issue caused by desperation.
On the post: Austin Homeowners Association Pitches In To Help Cops Kill A Guy Over Uncut Grass
Re: Re: Re: 12 inches !
"I know in America's mid-west, lawn care is more important than having your pants on in public."
That may be true enough...
...but in the specific case of Austin at least (and I suspect, by now, most of the midwest and south) lawn height is part of the fire safety regulations. The last thing you want in a drought is the wildfire starting within city limits, I guess.
On the post: Austin Homeowners Association Pitches In To Help Cops Kill A Guy Over Uncut Grass
Re: Re:
Following sources with timelines found;
Google - Washington Post City officials in Texas went to cut a man’s overgrown lawn. He was later killed in a standoff with police.
Google - Nbcnews City's attempt to cut Texas man's grass leads to a standoff, a fire and his death, police say
The publication "Newser" is less detailed but does have a tentative id on the homeowner - a Robert B. Richart who'd been in conflict with city authorities since mid august over his lawn violating the city code. It's my guess that if you live in an often drought-stricken region having a lawn the equivalent of dried hay more than a foot high within city limits is considered a fire risk.
Given the chain of events as described this isn't a case I'd use to illuminate police overreach.
On the post: Austin Homeowners Association Pitches In To Help Cops Kill A Guy Over Uncut Grass
Re: Re:
"If there's video of the event, showing it went down as you stated, then I'll have to retract my earlier statement about QI."
My deployment of google-fu did not turn up a video. But multiple news sources all delivering more or less the same story. There are a few police procedures there I have questions about but a few key notes stand out here;
1) Police arrived.
2) Municipal agents began mowing the man's lawn.
3) Shots were fired from inside the house, at or around officers present.
4) Swat was called. Standoff ensured
5) Shots once again fired at officers from inside house.
6) House fired from inside, man emerging, guns in hand.
7) Swat officer fired, man went down, died in hospital.
Plenty of questions to be asked but we're not talking about a child or hobo gunned down after a vicious, one-sided beating, choked to death while cuffed or shot in the back.
This story is not the hill to die on when it comes to police brutality and overreach. Plenty of other questions to be asked but that one? Not so much.
On the post: Austin Homeowners Association Pitches In To Help Cops Kill A Guy Over Uncut Grass
Re: Re: Re:
"In most of Europe, that ending would resulted in social services being asked a lot of hard questions as to why someone was left to deteriorate to such a state."
That, too. I mean, it's not as if people slipping through the gap don't exist - they do. But government agents, social workers and police can approach and speak to them without the expectation of lethal violence and even the mentally ill don't have reason to expect police approaching them means a swift funeral.
On the post: Austin Homeowners Association Pitches In To Help Cops Kill A Guy Over Uncut Grass
Re: Re: Re:
"Talk about a need to defund the police - the lawnmower brigade, coming to your town with their nifty riding mower?"
Civil forfeiture. If your local precinct decides they need a lawnmower, zamboni, big wad of cash, brand new SUV or Margarita machine for the successful execution of their duties, they can always obtain one from some random bypasser in possession of the desired object.
Next >>