FarmReadyElephants
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User ID: 2869
FarmReadyElephants
6d ago
I’m an Orthodox Christian and I’m not allowed to leave a man to die, even if his existence is an annoyance. That said, I resist all attempts of people to use my faith to blackmail me to support suicidal empathy as a national policy. I’m firmly in the deport them all camp.
It’s called “the middle way” or “the royal road”.
FarmReadyElephants
6d ago
I do have a bit of feeling of disgust at the sight of a homeless man in the park. Hostility even. It offends me as a sign of lack of public order and I resent the inconvenience I’ve undergone throughout my lifetime on their behalf. But I’m also a Christian and I’m bound to help a fellow man, even if I resent his presence.
FarmReadyElephants
6d ago
I’d absolutely save a man’s life and send him back to Guatemala without much hesitation. Although to get to the point that both decisions are obvious to me took a lot of life experience and thought
FarmReadyElephants
6d ago
Pennsylvania
FarmReadyElephants
6d ago
I don't think that is very likely in this case. I live 3 blocks from the hospital and the ambulance times are very short. This man was not taking up an ambulance spot for much time.
Anyways, I'm morally obligated to make the right actions given the information I have. I didn't have any information about this being the last available ambulance and someone else needing it more. So I did what I did.
I keep voting for the most immigration restrictionist candidates, as I'm concerned about the same externalities of mass migration that you are.
FarmReadyElephants
6d ago
I guess I don't think it is a "decision" to save a dying man. I would gladly report him to ICE if I knew he was in fact illegal and I had any contact details for him. But "hey, raid the hospital in my local Pennsylvania town, I'm pretty sure there's illegals there" isn't a great tip.
FarmReadyElephants
6d ago
As I looked out my window, I saw the park across from my house. But something was wrong. There was a man sleeping in the park, by the playground fence, in the middle of winter.
I’ve been tracking the weather closely because our fridge went out and we are keeping our cold stuff in the garage. It’s a constant struggle to make sure food doesn’t get too warm or too cold. Lately the outside temperature has been getting down into the single digits at night and while the garage stays a bit warmer it has been hard to keep our food from freezing.
I knew it was under 10 degrees outside and no one can sleep on the ground in that cold. At least, not without a lot more equipment than he had on. This man didn’t even have a hat. So I worried that he might be dying.
As I got myself ready to go outside and check on him I imagined how the interaction might go. I know vagrants can be volatile, unpredictable, and dirty. I thought I would talk to him, tell him he needed to go, maybe offer to take him to a shelter in my car. I could give him my extra winter hat and one of my coats. I was loathe to invite him into my house with my wife and child but my car could be okay. I toyed with the idea of just calling 911 and not interacting with him at all. But I figured I would first observe up close and make a judgment call.
With my winter gear donned, I stepped out the door and walked to where he was laying. I spoke to him, “Hey man, it’s too cold out here. Can I take you somewhere warm?” or something like that. It was quickly apparent that my fears of him were misplaced. He was breathing and shivering slightly. His eyes were open. There was a pain in them, animal-like. Sadness without language. His fingers were curled and stiff. He was in far worse shape than I had imagined him to be.
I called 911 and moved my car closer to the park as a potential warm haven for him. The ambulance was on the way, and we live very close to the hospital so I knew it wouldn’t be long. Approaching the man again, I saw that walking would be out of the picture and to move him would require that he be physically carried. I wasn’t confident in my ability to do so. He was breathing heavily and his eyes were darting around. His limbs looked frozen and stiff.
He appeared to be of Hispanic background, about 50 years old, short with a slim build. And as the ambulance was coming in a few minutes, I decided to do what I could to keep him warm. I put my coat over him and placed my hands on his cold skin. I said whatever little prayers I know from the liturgy in Spanish - “lord have mercy” and “the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit”. I played the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish on my phone and I lay next to him, covering us both with my coat to warm his body with mine. I reverted to praying in English since my Spanish is so limited.
Within a few minutes I heard the ambulance approaching. Still laying next to him, I waved the paramedics in. My hands felt like they were freezing, being outside only 10 minutes or so in the 8 degree weather. His fingers had a grey hue to them and seemed frozen stiff.
The paramedics parked and approached with a stretcher and I gathered my coat and walked off. They didn’t say much to me. One asked me if he had spoken (“not a word”) and one said thanks for calling. The four of them easily lifted him onto the stretcher and took him away.
I didn’t know how much my interventions mattered, besides calling the ambulance. Perhaps someone else would have called the ambulance if I had not. But it’s easy to get used to vagrants sleeping on the ground in an urban area and not put the facts together that given the weather and his dress it was an emergency situation. When there is a crisis, it’s easy for everybody to assume that someone else will handle it. I felt there was a chance that had I not called 911 then the next time my family went outside we would have been greeted by a corpse.
Later, trying to make sense of the incident, I asked Grok about the details of hypothermia and found it was a somewhat less urgent situation than I imagined. The man likely had been outside for 1-2 hours and likely would have been dead in about 3 more. Grok gives a big range of 2-12 hours for death by exposure in similar situations, varying based on the size and health of the person and whether or not they had any alcohol and drugs in their system.
I don’t know anything about the man but I can guess given the circumstances he found himself in. It’s likely that he was new to town and unfamiliar with the homeless support system. He had no friends or family nearby that cared about him. It’s quite possible that he was an illegal migrant — there are quite a few in my city, and my city has declared that it will not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts.
Politically, I am an immigration restrictionist and fairly onboard with MAGA. I don’t see a contradiction in saving a migrant’s life in a tragic situation, and advocating that there be fewer such tragic situations, thousands of miles from home. I am in the party that insists on following the rules, because after a complicated calculus of plusses and minuses I think they make the world a better place. Had the man been picked up by ICE and sent back to Honduras or Ecuador or wherever he came from, I don’t view that as an inhumane outcome compared to a lonely death in a strange land.
The more extreme people on the political left, the kind currently protesting ICE in Minnesota, call people like me “nazis”. Well, if I am a nazi, I am one with a soft heart.
But I’m just guessing about the man’s circumstances. Perhaps he is a legal resident with mental illness or a drug abuse problem who somehow fell through the cracks.
Grok thinks the man will make a full recovery. Probably today, he will be released from the hospital. To go where, is the question. Who will take him in? Where does he belong? Who cares for him? Will he find himself in the same situation again? A blizzard is coming tomorrow.
May the Lord have mercy on us in this deep winter.
FarmReadyElephants
7d ago
Struggling with the cops while armed is a terrible idea. If I struggled with the cops while armed and was shot (while not agitating for a popular cause with media backing) , I wouldn't expect anyone to give a damn.
The proper thing to do if you are looking to obstruct police officers while exercising your second amendment right is to peacefully and respectfully submit to arrest. Guns make people jumpy, even if they shouldn't be, even if it's a mistake, you're still dead.
FarmReadyElephants
12d ago
I remember a few years ago, a lot of "based" trads were saying similar things about Russia: sure, maybe its kind of a little bit corrupt and run by oligarchs and Putin is a dictator who has people who displease him thrown out of ninth floor windows, but he cosplays as a Christian and they don't put up with woke nonsense.
It's not quite your point, but it's fairly incontrovertible that today's Russia is the best Russia there's ever been. And it's even quite liberal by historical standards.
What you don't have is fair elections or genuine political competition, combined with somewhere between 40 - 200 political murders over the last 20+ years. But name one Tzar or Bolshevik with a better track record.
FarmReadyElephants
22d ago
I'd like to recognize an example of epistemic virtue amidst all the noise, from Tom Homan of all people
Interviewer: You say you can't comment on the video which many Americans are seeing and reacting to
Homan: I'm not going to make a judgement call on one video when there's a hundred videos out there. I wasn't on the scene. I'm not an officer that may have bodycam video. It'd be unprofessional to comment on what I think happened in that situation. Let the investigation play out and hold people accountable based on the investigation
Interviewer: I think many members of the public are calling for the same thing and so they're confused how the Department of Homeland Security could conclude so swiftly that is a quote "act of domestic terrorism" that this woman quote "weaponized her vehicle"
Homan: That's a question for Homeland Security
I liked Homan from the beginning when clips started circulating of him during the campaign, though I viewed him as a bit of a thuggish, unapologetic warrior for "my side". But this gives me new respect for him as a level-headed, honest broker, despite his rhetorical bombast.
FarmReadyElephants
23d ago
Do you have a link to precisely what Babbit did? My impression was that she got shot as she came through a window, along with many others, unarmed and some distance from the officer who shot her. But I could be wrong. Was she trying to break through a barricade put in place to keep congressmen safe?
FarmReadyElephants
24d ago
I think the reason why the officer stepped in front of the vehicle was because they intended to arrest her. Blocking the road with an apparent intension to prevent the work of ICE officers is a crime. They didn't want her to get away. They wanted her in custody.
FarmReadyElephants
28d ago
There's also a China angle here. China is planning naval war games around Taiwan in advance of a planned meeting with Trump in April. Stealing Maduro while Chinese diplomats are meeting with him in Venezuela is kind of a tit to their tat.
FarmReadyElephants
1mo ago
Beats communism, probably.
FarmReadyElephants
1mo ago
The fact is that both dictators failed to actually halt the tide of rising leftism in their countries.
Franco absolutely succeeded in halting the tide of rising leftism in his country!
I’ve never had the problem of uncertainty around whether the cost of winning is worth it. I just reflect on MartyrMade’s “The Anti-Humans” episode and I am quite sure that winning is worth it.
I wish every right-wing politician kept a “momento mori” of the pitest prison experiment, the holodomor, the murder of the Romanovs, and the massacres of clergy by the Spanish communists and the French Revolutionaries. Worst case scenario, you watch your loved ones resort to cannibalism, then die anyway, then you are sent to a prison where you are anally raped while performing demonic parodies of the Eucharist with feces while not being allowed to sleep and coerced into torturing others. Worse case scenario, everything and everyone you care about is morally corrupted, then raped, then killed and erased from history in that order.
So I’ll allow some rude memes, thanks.
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
My understanding is that the Muslim/Jew blood feud goes back to the Zionist project (A Jewish diaspora was more-or-less tolerated by most Muslim kingdoms/empires until then). So we're talking 1920s or so, after Mr. Hitler was an adult
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
Perhaps the best example of this mentality from the great Ye
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
I started a wiki, Memory Whole (https://memorywhole.tv/), inspired by the idea that a lot of the analysis and events on twitter is useful to know, but too fleeting and drowned in noise.
I currently have signups enabled, but I have to manually add people to the editors group. I'm planning to do a big announcement soon
FarmReadyElephants
4mo ago
My understanding is that Mormons also believe in an always-existing material universe which predates the existence of any sort of God figure. It's much more of a Hindu/Samsara model of the cosmos than anything Christian. For Christians and Jews (and maybe Muslims?), God is the source of being, eternal and preexisting. It's a very different metaphysics.
FarmReadyElephants
4mo ago
The industrial society and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race...
But seriously, I can relate as someone that got sucked down the AGP rabbithole for 18 years. Now I'm detoxed, a normal heterosexual father, and a militant anti-porn guy. Older generations don't understand the effect weird porn ("toaster fucking") has on the younger generations, especially since they get squeamish if you discuss details.
FarmReadyElephants
4mo ago
I only know Harris from recent years, but she doesn’t seem super ambitious and I wouldn’t be surprised if she rode off into the sunset. She’s happy to play the role of the party’s anointed, but she’s not going to Bernie Sanders her way against the Democratic Party
FarmReadyElephants
4mo ago
When a lower class white behaves in an antisocial way, an upperclass white corrects him.
When a lower class black behaves in an antisocial way, everyone stares at their shoes and tries not to get in trouble or get hurt.
Two quick anecdotes. When I lived in SF, I biked to the Caltrain to commute down to the South Bay. The last hundred feet or so you have to walk your bike on the sidewalk to the train station building. I was feeling lazy and rushed, and there was little foot traffic that day. So I decided to ride my bike on the sidewalk for a bit. An older white man said to me sternly "no riding bikes on the sidewalk!", and I apologized and dismounted.
Still in SF, I was taking the subway at rush hour. The norm on the escalators is that you stand on the right and walk on the left, so that people who want to move faster can move faster. Some of these escalators are long, some people are connecting to other transit, there are reasons for wanting to move quickly. Two young black teenagers, pants sagged, stood side by side on the escalator, blocking the whole thing. They were playing rap out of a bluetooth speaker. Lines of hundreds of professionals stood behind them, unable to move, saying nothing. They seemed to be enjoying the display of dominance.
FarmReadyElephants
4mo ago
Imagine that kind of attention span from a zoomer
I appreciate the compliment about my writing. For what it’s worth, I have a history of leaving right wing spaces that become too harsh. It just became too dissonant to be dating my now wife and open my group chats to see TND spelled out and applauded.
It’s an odd position to be in. I’m full-right. Deport them all, pro capital punishment, hell I could be convinced to support a military coup. But I’m an extreme right-winger because I want to preserve what is good and beautiful in this world. I want to live a beautiful life with those I love. I want to feel like I’m fighting side-by-side with Aragorn, not sniggering in a cave with a bunch of imps reciting the word “nigger”.
I’m thinking I need to be a little slower about leaving though. If I leave, the places just become more harsh. I love the motte, I think it is one of the best run forums on the internet. But I have noticed an increase in harshness lately from people on my side.
I appreciate what the mods do here to tend the garden and I hope to provide the tone and perspective that I want to see in the world
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