PierreMenard
8mo ago
it's obvious that most of the drug addicts already have access to effective lethal injections if they wanted to use them, so the ones who are alive are probably ones who don't want help dying.
Yet fentanyl is a notoriously lethal drug. It appears hard to argue that somebody voluntarily taking fentanyl or products routinely laced with fentanyl is not somewhere, seeking death.
Perhaps I just have a tendency to find slopes slippery, but a community that chooses to turn a blind eye to this type of practice seems to be practicing some form of soft MAID. If supporters of 'soft-MAID' are uncomfortable with calling it MAID, why is that? Is there something wrong with helping people end their suffering?
Portland is not quite progressive enough. Why not go all the way like Canada and have MAID for drug addicts? Now that's a compassionate way to handle social issues.
As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of.
Don't worry, there is still time for even more deaths for your buck.
PierreMenard
8mo ago
Anything that would justify fining / arresting / causing trouble / calling CPS on parents is part of the environment that makes it harder for people to have children and more children when they already have 1.
I don't know what the ratio of calls to CPS / calls to CPS for parents who are actually abusive is but it is way too high in my opinion.
Anybody who has been around in a Western country in the past three years should know that governments will come up with crazy rules that make no sense and cause way more trouble to enforce than they actually help.
PierreMenard
8mo ago
Here's my solution to whatever gender-angst people have:
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make real estate cheaper (there's a correlation between Republican-voting areas and areas where young people can easily buy starter homes). Decrease building regulations as well
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make having children easier by decreasing regulation : transform the Child Protection Services into an anti-nosy-senior-at-the-window enforcement force, somewhat in the spirit of the ACAB movement, stop regulating day-care businesses, get rid of carseat laws etc, and allow freedom of association. If the child dies he dies, but at least let them live a little.
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get rid of sex discrimination laws as well. No more wasting 10 years in med school if you're only going to stick to being a doctor for 5 years, no more maternity leave, no more 'unsafe work environment'
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relax domestic violence laws enforcement as well. Bring back some gravity to the concept of 'who you share a bed with', it's not other grown-ups' business to rescue you from all your bad choices
As a starting point (new platform for Mr 'Grab them'), mandate that any public figure or organization that publishes some kind of feminist statement, in general 'in support of women', for example this, should be labelled 'SIMP' for say a year (on their press release, any media, on their products, etc). Like a bud light halo. Any woman aspiring to some kind of important position should first be asked about her family and how she expects to continue being a mother or a grandmother while focusing on important position.
PierreMenard
8mo ago
I completely understand what you're saying and I agree, 999 times out of a thousand, any possible mistake in transcription / medication is probably not a big deal at all. And you don't need special technology to make a mistake as a human being.
Oh, and try to forget too, while you're at it, that anonymized patient case reports are regularly published in medical journals, because doctors have to learn things as well.
I'm not really concerned how the data is used, more about potential patient-related issues.
This is the kind of stuff that American hospitals sometimes do, and this one case is an extreme example.
18 yo patient was treated for brain aneurysm by hospital
patient and family decide that they've stayed long enough in the hospital (2 months)
hospital denies all transfers, tries legal motion to give the hospital legal guardianship of the adult patient, alleging insufficient mental condition to make own medical decisions
normal case would be to get guardianship to family + they had the adult patient sign a bunch of consent forms at the same time they were attempting that legal process
family heists the patient out of the hospital, get cell-phone tracked by the police and chased
police finally back off after seeing a 2nd hospital disagreed with the first
I've recently been made aware of a case of a family with 3 children. One child somehow received 3rd degree burns from a boiling pot of water, was taken to the hospital for treatment. Parents were locked up with a heavy bail, all children sent to foster care.
Here's one hypothetical case :
parent comes into American hospital with a child with a black eye / skull fracture / some other kind of injury that could come from something completely innocuous or from domestic abuse
staff follows the process of performing tests without telling the parent that they're looking for confirmation of domestic abuse
tests come back negative because the child was not abused
low-paid worker/ poor technology /??? introduces some kind of typo
parents get arrested for domestic abuse - kid ends up abused in foster care
This is all in normal times when there is not a powerful coalition of interests to prevent family members from visiting patients, decrease any kind of oversight over what happens inside hospitals and introduce some kind of hero worship for healthcare workers.
PierreMenard
8mo ago
Adding this to the list of things to forget before stepping into a hospital
- the imported doctors will use new shady technology to communicate medically-relevant information, including medication
- somehow this is still better than the alternative of relying on the regular system of poorly-trained people with even poorer technology
At some point a typo might happen... When all these horrible sci-fi predictions ('BRAIN HACKED BY CIA MICRO-CHIPS') come true we will probably be completely desensitized.
PierreMenard
8mo ago
just want the same thing that straight couples have.
What was that all about? Gay people always had exactly the same right to marry somebody of the opposite sex as straight people.
As for adopting children, why not make them? I don't know the exact cost of adoption these days, but even heterosexual couples spend a lot on fertility treatments, surely there are sex workers available for a cheaper price to get your own biological child.
PierreMenard
8mo ago
PierreMenard
8mo ago
I think there's a fair bit of context that's needed to make a decent female action character. It's easier to suspend disbelief when it's already been suspended for fantasy settings.
A female superpowered character is just as realistic as a male Hulk. In animated media, the downside of unrealistic representation (drawings) is balanced by the ease of implementing fantasy settings. An anime will never look as realistic as a live-action show, so writers may as well make full use of fantasy settings.
On the other hand, live-action shows can very easily make us believe in the reality of their settings. Real actors make us believe that we have real people on the screen, and their work (can) add a depth of visceral emotion that cannot be replicated by animated drawings.
Here the issue is also with the actors and actresses. While it is very easy to animate a badass superheroine/magical girl/ruthless adventurer etc, getting Brie Larson to look menacing/intimidating is not an easy feat. Even if the character is supposed to be fantastically superpowered, the behavior of the actress (and supporting cast) does not meet expectations. Weak punches that don't connect getting turned into devastating conflagrations by CGI does not satisfy the way a painstakingly choreographed movie like John Wick would.
Male actors themselves go through a whole transformation to embody an 'action hero'. Sadly, most of the cape movies actors are on steroids. Keanu Reeves who does not look like a great badass in real life apparently spent a long time practicing with real guns to be 'John Wick'.
What would be needed for satisfying live-action female badass movies would be a crop of actresses who would dedicate themselves to the genre like exists on the male side, and actually work on the craft, instead of feminist fantasies that neither women or men are interested in watching.
So for good live-action female action character:
- fantasy settings with internal consistency / without some feminist diatribe (in a world where women are somehow super-human strong, patriarchy-related woes are irrelevant)
for realistic settings:
- female ways of being strong (strength of character, resilience, grit, craftiness)
- some explanation for that woman even being there - ex she's exceptional, just one strong woman out of a mostly male unit of badasses, and not the main char - she's in a context where humans in general are underpowered so the male/female difference is not as meaningful (Alien)
- actress able to convince her audience that she can embody the strong character she was casted for
- supporting cast also reacting in a convincing way to the female character
I think the biggest issue with having women on the set of an action movie is that it breaks the magic, in a way. Mostly because female actresses in general seem to be bad at demonstrating violence, and nobody making these movies seems to have any issue with that.
PierreMenard
8mo ago
You seem to be under the strange impression that these things, Napoleon, the Ancien Régime, la fille aînée de l'Eglise, that these are somehow separate from the Republic and the Nation
They necessarily are, considering the Republic and the Nation came much later and are killing these other things.
Napoléon c'est la France, Robespierre c'est la France, Louis c'est la France, Gambetta c'est la France, Maurras c'est la France, la Commune c'est la France.
Not really. Why not add the soccer team to that? Or Vichy? Or Algeria? Somehow Vichy which gave current France its retirement system is not 'la France'. Nicely played!
You can't have both absolute monarchy and republic at the same time, for example.
If you're going to include everything and anything into your patriotism, why restrict yourself to some arbitrary borders from a thousand years ago or so? At least the early French saw themselves as people of God, in communion with a greater Christian community, from Rome to Byzantium.
The best you'll get is people saying the continuation of the ethnic French stock is necessary for the continuation of the French culture, and I don't even disagree with this
Why are you so triumphant about a culture that is sterilizing that very people then?
but no self respecting Frenchman would deny Alexandre Dumas nationhood.
Do you include the millions of Frenchmen that lived and died before Alexandre Dumas ever wrote a word?
PierreMenard
8mo ago
The same process happened in the US and other Western countries. German or Japanese immigrants had to learn to integrate one way or another. There aren't many French speakers left from the old Louisiana purchase either.
The France of Emmanuel Macron is a nation-state where everyone (except unassimilated immigrants) speaks French and identifies as French. This change happened because someone (mostly Napoleon) made it happen.
That France is only a couple centuries old, and it's riding on the coattails of a much more glorious past. What are the achievements of Democratic France? Colonizing sub-Saharan Africa? Getting colonized by America?
It may be that that process is currently slowing down, as much like Louis XVI, French (prospective) teachers have to first think about 'keeping' their head on their shoulders before too aggressively pushing for cultural changes.
PierreMenard
8mo ago
And while in other places you may regard this as left wing subversive nonsense, this is actually true here.
Or perhaps it's just old left wing subversive nonsense? Now French 'conservatives' herald this old subversive nonsense as the ideology they are nostalgic about, while calling 'reactionaries' or 'ultra-mecha-final-form far-right' those calling it left wing nonsense.
This has puzzled Anglo-americans numerous times, such as when we won the FIFA World Cup and some of your pundits found proper to opine that "Africa won" because a lot of the team was ethnically African, and our Ambassador had to write a letter to request that you stop trying to force your weird Anglo race obsessions on us.
That was a cope.
The French do not care much for blood.
That type of French does not seem to be reproducing much.
An ethnic Frenchman who is unable to quote from Molière, Voltaire, etc; or doesn't speak French, or speaks it with a weird accent would very ostensibly be regarded as not or less French than a sub-saharan African who can do this.
Who can quote Voltaire ?
“The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.”
That'd probably get you jailed, better not try it.
Why not the Bible? In Latin? French people used to be Catholic.
Most foreigners who care about the so-called 'French culture' don't seem to really care about the modern, left-wing stuff in my experience. Tourists come for Versailles, Le Louvre, Notre Dame... Perhaps they are interested in Napoleon's achievements.
Nobody's buying a 'French' brand of globohomo that they can get straight from the tap almost anywhere now.
The biggest cultural achievement of the 'values of the Republic' seems to be convincing a large share of the French people that they are a significant human achievement, better than their competitors, worth preserving and expanding the world over. But not by breeding. Just writing strongly worded letters about their 'diverse' sports teams.
In summary:
step1 : - spend a couple decades going to law school, join a successful law firm
step2 : - set up a bunch of CCTV in places where people might be committing bad stuff
step3 : - spend years suing people over this stuff
step4: - ???
step5: - some dude on some random website congratulates you for doing a good job
Gee-whiz, I wonder how people ever got anything done before lawyers were invented. Perhaps the Trojans would have believed Laocoön if he had been to law school.
PierreMenard
9mo ago
No, I don't have that inclination at this time.
I don't know if there any definitive evidence of conclusive fraud that would definitely convince an open-minded person out there.
I find 'vibes' are sufficient enough for me. After all, conspiracy theorists have proven themselves to be much more trustworthy than Western government officials in the past 3 years.
Here are a few observable coincidences:
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the people who are currently claiming that there were little to no fraud in the 2020 elections won by their side spent several years litigating the 2016 elections claiming among other things that foreign governments intervened, using the power of intelligence agencies to investigate these claims, create evidence and prosecute people over it
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one of the least exciting candidate of all time beat one of the most exciting candidates of all times by 10 million votes. Idk what the population growth was in between, but that's still significant.
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the people in charge of providing accurate election results in the areas that delivered the critical votes for Biden (big cities of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia...) made a bunch of changes in the election rules right before the elections, most of these changes to make it easier to have non-secret ballots (mail-in-ballots)
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these same people went on to brag in the media about their great effort to 'fortify' the elections
PierreMenard
9mo ago
My understanding is that there are entire organizations dedicated to gather votes, some of these people essentially go door-to-door to target people that would otherwise not vote, perhaps because they don't speak enough English, are too old or too cognitively-impaired to direct themselves to a polling place. Then they perform the same kind of art on these people as the door-to-door salesmen or phone scammers (2.4 millions fraud last year, a $8B business), and they make these people input their customer's information on the ballot, which they collect and then go on to drop at a ballot drop box.
Is this illegal? It may be in some places. But it should look pretty suspicious to have one person deliver hundreds or thousands of votes at once in a ballot drop-off box.
Observers are avoided through various tricks depending on the area, sometimes more obvious than others.
There is a lot of variation on how absentee votes should be processed and counted and how that process is tracked, and there were a lot of last minute changes to these rules across the country ostensibly 'due to covid'. Here is an example :
State law doesn't explicitly say ballots lacking a secrecy envelope must be discarded, and the secretary of the commonwealth advised counties to count naked ballots in the primary.
Should a poll worker discard or not discard a ballot lacking a secrecy envelope? Perhaps if it's a ballot for evil orange dictator it's okay?
PierreMenard
9mo ago
All of that bottom-up effort facilitated by media, politicians and intelligence agencies that keeps pushing lies over lies. How much harder is it to convince the average poll-worker to look the other way when somebody dumps a bunch of ballots against a candidate without a multi-year campaign to persuade them that he's a fascist who works for the Russians?
PierreMenard
9mo ago
If we believe Trump "In the end, they're not coming after me. They're coming after you — and I'm just standing in their way," then it's just a matter of time.
If they successfully manage to prevent Trump from getting elected in 2024, then that's done isn't it? The hordes of poor people wanting to move to the USA is not going away by November. Abbott is just in the way for a little bit. How much business does he even have in NY?
They can always find some guy who committed fraud in NY who talked to Abbott's wife's nephew once to get him subpoenaed and jailed for failure to appear in court etc once the proof of concept is established and everybody moved on from Trump.
There doesn't seem to be a statute of limitations on people Democrats really have a grudge against like the Charlottesville protesters.
Maybe trump should be threatening a civil war instead of ranting on Twitter.
Probably. Running a second time in a race that you claim was rigged the first time does have a certain unseriousness.
PierreMenard
9mo ago
Maybe just 'licensing body', and I agree that restricting certain activities only to licensed people is in many cases a big problem. Still, how does an 'open-border' territory work in practice?
Is Lampedusa a model for such a community? Or perhaps Mayotte? Or just the plot of the Camp of the Saints?
One can hypothesize some kind of human osmosis law.
Osmosis (/ɒzˈmoʊsɪs/, US also /ɒs-/)[1] is the spontaneous net movement or diffusion of solvent molecules through a selectively-permeable membrane from a region of high water potential (region of lower solute concentration) to a region of low water potential (region of higher solute concentration), in the direction that tends to equalize the solute concentrations on the two sides.
Where if two containers of humans are placed in contact, the humans of a darker shade (low civilization potential) will spontaneously move toward the container of lighter humans (high civilization potential) in the direction that tends to equalize the shade on the two sides.
In other words, if you want to live in Mexico, why not just move there?
PierreMenard
9mo ago
What would you call an organization dedicated to 'chasing out frauds' in the community? Perhaps by providing some kind of token to authenticate that the bearer possesses the skills they represent themselves as possessing?
PierreMenard
9mo ago
Voice + whatever history one can build up from this website + potential reddit history and in the present of AI that's more than enough for a motivated journalist to round up a list of wrong-thinkers to push whatever psyop-of-the-month or even just to keep on file in case whatever organization they associate with started making statements about Gaza or whatever in the next year. If I can allow myself to be slightly paranoid.
PierreMenard
9mo ago
Improper? Unethical? Sure. Illegal? They have expensive law degrees and lawyers (also with expensive law degrees), and they wrote the laws. Chances are they know exactly where the line is and didn't cross it. Prosecutors can't be held responsible for selective prosecution if the law hasn't actually been broken; they have no recourse even if they think lawmakers are scumbags that belong in prison.
I think that's attributing too much competency to them.
Was the Obama admin's bragging of being 'scandal-free' true because they were so good at 'knowing where the lines is' or was it just because 99% of the talking heads on TV were so starry-eyed, financially-tied, potentially blackmailed that they could not do their job and uncover scandals? Heritage.org seems to lean toward the latter. Benghazi? Not a scandal? Clinton's server? Not a scandal?
I think being a good politician is 50% knowing-where-the-line-is (which I don't think anyone can do 100% as there are thousands of potential felonies at any given time), and 50% being in the right position with the people who could potentially get you in trouble.
The magic of 'A federal criminal investigation produced no charges, but FBI Director James Comey reported that the secretary and her colleagues “were extremely careless” in handling national secrets.'. See also the infamous Steele dossier.
Here is another example. Before you exclaim 'But he did get in trouble!', people who are quite a bit on the left seem to agree with my version of things. Perhaps there needed some kind of cultural moment for the 'gay top Democrat donor' privilege to be overridden...
Family members and activists had pushed for Buck’s arrest since Moore died. They said Buck escaped criminal charges for years because of wealth, political ties and race. (...) Black LGBTQ+ activists in California had been advocating for years for Buck to be brought to justice, and accused police of ignoring their concerns and allowing Buck to continue hurting people.
Sometimes it seems that we need the police to protect black lives from Democrats.
PierreMenard
9mo ago
You sue and then what? How do you collect? What's to stop that plumber from just running away somewhere else? Is somebody going to barricade the roads, stop him at the airport, seize his assets?
PierreMenard
9mo ago
This is often the same thing I hear progressives say about diverse representation in media. "Whats the big deal? Can you not handle seeing a gay or lesbian couple and a few extra black actors."
Well I believe that progs are wrong on that, because <20% of the Western population allegedly being under-represented in media (I highly doubt it) does not really matter to the other 80%. Whatever public money goes into making movies (from the public education provided to the workers to state subventions) should surely go toward satisfying at least 80% of taxpayers, not the 1% LGBTQ lobby or whichever flavor-of-the-week. To my limited knowledge, nobody is really preventing anyone from making movies with diverse representation. There's plenty of 'diverse' movies being made, by Nollywood for example. Their 'What's the big deal?' should apply to them, who are challenging the status quo of adequately providing the majority of viewers what they want to see. Likewise, it appears to me that the onus would be on you to provide justification for getting rid of something most people historically liked, borders.
I still don't really see what the issue is for you, as if you really cared about having some random person immigrate to the US, you could spend a million dollars or less and get them on an investor visa.
The problem I see with your 'open-borders' proposition is that it has a huge cost. Satisfying 'your principle' would burden tremendously most people in the country you live in. I don't know if anybody else expressed that to you yet. In the same manner that you could theoretically want to dump heavy metals in the local river because that's just how you like it. It's your freedom to enjoy your 'seasoned' river. And then all that's left for everybody else who perhaps drinks out of that water is to install costly equipment to remove the seasoning you graciously provided at no cost to them.
Seasteaders have been working on it. I suspect the first few will get blown up, invaded, and smeared if they go and do anything too libertarian.
How do you 'invade' an open-border territory? I have my doubt that these libertarians actually want open-borders. A billionaire like Musk says he wants free-speech on his platform that is until somebody posts the coordinates of his private jet. Would the seasteaders provide refuge to Hamas, Houthis, Somalian pirates... ?
While democracy is already the rule of the rich (with extra-steps of buying major media and nudging voters that they should give legitimacy to your policies) -here is a recent example at the Superbowl.- libertarianism appears to me to be straight-up 'let people wealthier than me do whatever they want'.
I'm not against freedom of association. I wish I had it. But I don't think destroying the country I live in by opening its borders is going to get me that in the short-term. Borders are nice to have, as long as you are the ones in control of them. And that used to be the point of nationalism. Now you want a bunch of (very) rich dudes to control your country's borders, but that's not you.
PierreMenard
9mo ago
So there are people in this world like you who do not necessarily need violence to stay in line, and then there are people who do. You have personal experience of this.
I imagine that there are millions of the 2nd kind (violence-needing), and that you would get a lot of them in an open-border territory. And the more of those you would get, the less likely you would be to attract the 1st kind.
What's your plan?
I imagine it stems more from a lack of trying than an absolute technical problem, a certain carelessness perhaps, or an outright malevolence.
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