Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
Anyway, how many Mexicans were launching rockets at El Paso and San Diego?
Not quite rockets, but the cartels are absolutely using drones to track the Border Patrol, and electronic warfare devices to disrupt our own, signalling quite sophisticated capabilities.
Of course, the reason they're not shooting rockets at us is because the cartels have no interest in trying to destroy the U.S., because we're the cash cow they milk their money out of, whether in the form of smuggling fees for migrants trying to gain access to our labor markets, or sales figures for drugs they supply to our hedonism markets. If October 7 had been a coordinated drug-smuggling operation instead of a violent attack, I somehow don't think the Israelis would have responded with bombs.
Was there some operation where an organized group directed by the Mexican government (or whatever group controlled the territory) came in and killed and kidnapped a bunch of random Americans?
Yes. Pancho Villa's attack on the U.S. Army garrison and nearby town of Columbus, NM. Militarily, it was much less effective than 10/7 - the attackers suffered far more casualties (over 100) than they inflicted (17). It still provoked a months-long US invasion that reached hundreds of miles into northern Mexico by U.S. troops and several small pitched battles against both rebel and Mexican government forces that resulted in several hundred casualties. The only reason it wasn't bloodier was that the terrain of Northern Mexico was so inhospitable and so lightly-settled that all belligerents were limited to small cavalry (or automotive) patrols. So there's actually a parallel here.
How many people would tolerate what's happening in Gaza if Gaza were located in South Africa? Depends on who was doing it and who was getting it done to, naturally.
There was an actual genocide perpetrated by U.S. backed "rebels" against arab religious minorities such as the Yezidi during the Obama administration, complete with the taking of women as sex slaves (at least one of whom "wound up" - three guesses as to how - in Gaza and was recently rescued by the IDF, actually). Barely anyone gave a shit.
The Arab world is currently engaging in a "near genocide" of Christians which is definitely an ethnic purge. I don't see any breathless news coverage of this.
During the recent civil war in Ethiopia a couple years ago, the Tigray people in the north of the country appear to have been subjected to an attempted genocide. Don't remember any huge news coverage about that - we were too busy freaking out about the end of the Trump Administration.
South Sudan appears to be undergoing yet more hideous racial violence between arabs and black african tribes which has displaced more people than the fighting in Gaza, and is being characterized as an attempted genocide. Don't see that leading headlines in U.S. papers, or causing protest movements on U.S. campuses.
There were plenty of war crimes committed in Myanmar's counterinsurgency/anti-drug fight in the Shan during the last decade or so - here's a few from an Amnesty International Report. This one made a bit of a splash because one of the groups being repressed were the muslim Rohingya group, which dovetailed well with reflexive American senses about who is oppressed and thus is an appropriate target for pity. But I don't recall it generating nearly as much vitriol as the Gaza war.
This was just 30 minutes of Googling by a semi-aware person. I'm sure I could find more...there's no shortage of suffering in the world.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
You're neglecting the other dynamic among high-participation GOP voters (the ones most likely to turn out for the primary, as well as to volunteer, donate, etc.) - that of the "former partisan who took his institutional role and oath of office seriously" once installed, i.e. discovered a strange new respect for the status quo once he actually faced the prospect of having to implement his prior policies on a disapproving department he now ran. The formerly rock-ribbed conservative jurist who suddenly is desperate to find any way to avoid actually implementing the positions he enunciated before being put on the bench. The bright firebrand Jim Hacker getting sabotaged by suave Sir Humphrey Appleby and immediately caving.
There was, and remains, a desperate hunger for conservatives who can credibly signal they will actually do the things they campaign on instead of just getting absorbed into the DC liberal borg.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Yeah, that kind of grasping behavior is not virtuous of the acquaintances. Asking a friend of means if they are able to help is not wrong; implying that you are owed it is bad manners.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
My grandfather taught me to solve chess puzzles with him from old magazines, kicked a soccer ball and threw a baseball with me, took me to the local small community college's football games and tried to explain what was going on (in retrospect he failed mostly because the gameplay was so sloppy it defied normal football analysis). Took me to local small-town orchestra concerts, went on small hikes in the hills, etc., talked with me about my favorite books, dinosaurs, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
It would be virtuous and convey a positive incentive for you to significantly reward the person who leant you their charger. We want people to cooperate and help others, even strangers, and reaping a (presumably highly-publicized) windfall reward for doing so would be a good model. The gesture also is virtuous in that it demonstrates the billionaire's acknowledgement of social, civic, and reliance ties with others in the community, and sets a standard of expecting people to treat those who render them aid well, if they have the means to do so. This is in line with other morality tales from western culture with similar themes, such as the fable of Androcles and the lion's paw.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
People do not universally experience the same relations in the same valence.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Many things are true, but which truths we emphasize is all the battle. Yes, families can be a drag. They can also be tremendously-joyous sources of shelter and respite. Parents can be idiots. They can also be wise and protective. Whether the positive or negative aspects of a particular social relationship get highlighted often follows resource generation and self-interest.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Look at just about anything on television or any movie, music, etc. The resounding themes are family is a drag, parents are idiots or don’t care, and that the point of life is hedonistic pleasure which things like family and religion are drags on
Yeah "liberatory" culture and increasing wealth definitely work hand-in-hand on this.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Bowling For Soup
Even there, songs like "Highschool Never Ends" and "Come Back to Texas" clearly have a core of molten sincerity beneath all the jokes.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
But then again, parents have gladly, like good conservatives, sat back and had their rights stripped from them over the past 50 years, and that was pretty negligent on its own…
I strongly suspect this is downstream from increasing individual wealth, which makes the family unit less and less necessary as a locus of economic production and coordination.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
I think my culture war angle on this is that most safety enforcement is too easily weaponized against ordinary people to be actually effective in preventing the worst excesses.
It's not just "safety" enforcement - enforcement of any standard is easier against the ordinary than against the willfully noncompliant. The battle against anarcho-tyranny is constant, and the temptation to slide down is extremely high on multiple axes.
OJ Simpson was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages. Adjusting for number of victims and inflation, our hypothetical Alex Jones would have been ordered to pay $922.41 million - far short of the $1.48 billion the real Alex Jones was ordered to pay.
That's not how this works. First, the civil suit divvied up damages in a non-intuitive manner. OJ was found liable for $8.5 million in compensatory damages to the parents of Ron Goodman, and for $12.5 million in punitive damages each to the estates of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. (Rufo v. Simpson (2001) 86 Cal.App.4th 581, 614). The compensatory damages for a single victim's murder, adjusted for inflation, would be $16,717,408.10 today. Multiplied for the 26 Sandy Hook victims, that's $434,652,610.60 in compensatory damages in a hypothetical Sandy Hook case.
However, there's significant reason to think that the Sandy Hook per-victim compensatory damages would be significantly higher than the California damages awarded against OJ. compensatory damages, per the California standard at the time, reflected the "loss of love, companionship, comfort, affection, society, solace, or moral support suffered as a result of the death, but not for their grief or sorrow or for the decedent's pain and suffering." Notably, "pain and suffering" are two concepts which routinely factor hugely into the size of jury verdicts in tort cases. There also was no reference to "economic damages" like lost wages, which are also a large driver of compensatory damage awards. I'm not a CT lawyer, and none of this is legal advice, but a quick google turned up these civil jury instructions which, on page 121 (Instruction 3.4-7) lays out the types of damages permissible in wrongful death cases:
Wrongful Death Damages We have a statute that governs damages in cases such as this where there is a death. It allows for just damages which includes:
Economic damages of :
- the reasonable and necessary medical and funeral expenses and
- the value of the decedent's lost earning capacity less deductions for (his/her) necessary living expenses taking into consideration that a present cash payment will be made, and
Noneconomic damages of:
- compensation for the destruction of the decedent's capacity to carry on and enjoy life's activities in a way that (he/she) would have done had (he/she) lived and,
- compensation for the death itself, or
- pain and suffering.
The inclusion of pain and suffering and economic damages (if accurate) indicates to me that the per-victim award of compensatory damages would likely have been much higher in a hypothetical Sandy Hook wrongful death suit than in the OJ case, let alone the increased sympathy a jury would likely feel for the parents of murdered children versus the elderly parents of a middle-aged adult victim.
As regards the punitive damages, $12,500,000 in 1997 dollars is worth $24,584,423.68 today. Thus, a hypothetical Sandy Hook case awarding the same amount of per-victim punitive damages as the OJ case would have awarded $639,195,015.68. However, Connecticut handles punitive damages oddly, and in common law counts appears to restrict them to the prevailing party's attorney's fees, less taxable costs. (CT Jury Instruction 3.4-4). In other cases CT statute appears to mandate double or even treble damages. Frankly I'm too lazy to dig into what amount of punitive damages would have been available in this case, but this should demonstrate that calculating damages really is not as simple as just extrapolating from a different case in a different jurisdiction.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Gaetz immediately resigned from his house seat...maybe this is a bureaucratic poisoned chalice for the senate, which has the choice of either confirming Gaetz as AG or facing a potential appointment of Gaetz to Rubio's vacant seat?
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Government jobs (at least the ones with policymaking discretion) are highly sought after.
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
On a practical level, in a city like Seattle, a driverless taxi would become a toilet pretty quickly.
I wouldn't trust a fully-autonomous car in any location where there's a reasonable chance of any exterior disturbance in the vicinity of the car. Anything from wildlife to protesters to squeegee men - it's too easy to blockade the car (either intentionally or unintentionally) and harass the passengers.
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
The most famous version of this kind of attack that I can think of was the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice that left 80+ dead after a guy drove a dozen-ton small semitruck down a beachfront promenade.
Edit - whoops, sniped by @ArjinFerman
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
Move a department to the heartland. Move the Department of the Interior to... the interior. Build a new "Joseph Robinette Biden Building" for its HQ. This shows his commitment to the common people and sticks a finger in the eye of the DC insiders who shanked him. It also might take the wind out of the sails of the Republicans who would be more loathe to axe jobs in Kansas than in DC.
This can't happen - particularly the construction of a new federal building - in less than like 3 years. No way on God's green earth a lame duck president could do it.
Supah_Schmendrick
13d ago
The problem I have with social constructions is that virtually everything in society is at some level a social construct.
I once heard this problem neatly solved with the saying "a house is a social construct, but I do rather prefer to live in one"
Supah_Schmendrick
13d ago
He's not perfect - his reading of statute in Bostock is strained and sophistic at best. But I'll trade that for getting the Nondelegation Doctrine and the other big constitutional questions right.
Supah_Schmendrick
14d ago
Trump is likely to replace the two most conservative justices with ACB types.
I hope for more Gorsuches.
Supah_Schmendrick
14d ago
Will this resume again in Trump pt II
This is in large measure a legal question. An aggressive, competent, and creative Trump DOJ could throw many monkey-wrenches in the works, to say nothing of tax legislation changing the rules around philanthropic foundations and non-profit status.
Supah_Schmendrick
14d ago
summer Olympics (in 2028)
This is going to be in Los Angeles, and so likely will be a mild disaster.
Supah_Schmendrick
14d ago
RDS (clearly the party will be JD’s after this term though I could obviously see RDS as a running mate)
how so? DeSantis has thoroughly flipped the ur-swing state crimson, and has no rivals as the most efficient and effective governor in the country both on ordinary, non-partisan QoL issues (disaster response, infrastructure condition, etc.) and highly-partisan culture war issues (fighting higher education, voting reform, etc.) JD Vance is no-doubt a major winner here; he's done a fantastic job on campaign. But I would be shocked and saddened if DeSantis was marginalized in the GOP moving forward. Competence like he's displayed has got to have a seat at the table because it's not enough to have good optics; you have to deliver.
Supah_Schmendrick
15d ago
But this potentially feeds into the larger possibility of Trump winning the popular vote
If this happens it'll chiefly be because Trump narrowed his margins in places like NY and CA by 10+ points
Not directly, but we sure backed a lot of "moderate" Sunnis in Syria that turned out to be Al Qaida wannabees or even affiliates. To say nothing of what we did indirectly through NATO via the Turks (who, to be fair, were mainly focusing their special hatred on the Kurds)
It's actually worse than that, somehow. I'd post the substance of it here, but it's really quite NSFL; if you want the gory details, go to the link. TL;DR - she was captured by ISIL, had horrible shit happen to her, was sold at least five times as a child sex slave before finally being forcibly "married" at 15-ish to a Gazan fighter. He was captured by coalition forces, but then smuggled through Syria and Turkey to Egypt, from whence he took her back to his family in Gaza. There she was kept as a sex and domestic slave for the family - she was at one point married a second time to this guy's brother. The children of rape she bore them are still in Gaza, being raised as Arab muslims.
More options
Context Copy link