Zephyr
7d ago
I think there may be too much of an inferential gap here on what you are seeing versus what I am seeing - your description of the situation does not at all reflect what I can see in it.
There's also pursuing legal changes that would make it vastly harder to employ illegal immigrants.
I would agree that this should also be done, to hopefully end this on a non-sour note.
Zephyr
7d ago
So you know how it's popular on Instagram to post about how women are taught to "never let them take you to another location, piss yourself, etc." to avoid sexual assault, and men don't have an equivalent of that? This is that equivalent.
Zephyr
7d ago
I read a joke once that every war is started by the defender; if they'd just rolled over and let the attacker take what they want, then there wouldn't have been a war (in case it wasn't clear, I'm agreeing with you).
Zephyr
7d ago
This is the slippery slope I mentioned, where "we require certain authority to do our job" becomes "we can do whatever we claim is necessary." ICE has a specific job that doesn't really them to send out masked goons like this.
Okay, so what would you suggest instead? ICE's goal is to remove illegal aliens from the US. The people involved are unwilling to listen to the government saying "you need to leave now" - or they'd have left. Short of physically apprehending them, what would you suggest doing to remove said illegal aliens?
If people have evidence of this, they should present it.
The first video has the car physically in their way; ICE tells the woman to "[get] Out of the car" twice, then says "Get out of the fucking car" once. Another woman screams "Nooooo!!!" as the first car begins to back up, then accelerates forwards amidst other cries of "Noooo!!!". I think the evidence that the car is impeding ICE officers is that the first video shows the car impeding ICE officers.
Zephyr
8d ago
Which of the following would you disagree with?
- This woman used her vehicle to impede ICE officers.
- It is legal for the federal government to enforce immigration and borders.
From my perspective, if both are true, then innocent is not an accurate description of this person.
Zephyr
8d ago
Intent does matter, which is why it matters whether it's someone who has the legal right to keep me there versus someone who does not. If two large men with guns come to my (home) door and ask to "have a chat," I'd be justified in stabbing them to escape if they're randos, but not if they're cops.
Zephyr
8d ago
As far as I'm aware, entrapment has a much more narrow scope that I think you believe it does. Entrapment is meant to encompass actions where the police convince someone to do a crime when they would otherwise not. For example:
- Masked men show up to your house and take your spouse hostage, and threaten to shoot her unless you rob a bank - if the masked men are undercover cops, this is a very straightforward example of entrapment.
- You walk by a store, and see something you very much want in the window, but continue by. An undercover officer asks you why you don't get it, and you go back and steal the item - definitely not entrapment, as the officer did not suggest the illegal activity, even though you wouldn't have committed the crime without the suggestion (I believe in some jurisdictions it wouldn't be entrapment even if the officer had suggested it - usually the standard for entrapment is that the officer put an unfair amount of effort into convincing you).
- You join a club to complain about how badly your state is run, and part of the grousing is people wishing death on your governor. If the undercover cops are the sole individuals responsible for planning an assassination attempt against said governor, it's entrapment - however, if someone else was actually planning to assassinate the governor, and they merely assisted them, then it isn't.
Presenting an opportunity to do a crime is definitely not entrapment; otherwise, hitting someone crossing the street would not be a crime (as they presented you with the opportunity to commit vehicular assault).
Zephyr
8d ago
Just because they don't block your car doesn't mean you got away scot-free. They can follow you, block roads, use spike strips or PIT maneuvers to make you lose control in a way that's unlikely to be lethal, and so on.
Sorry if I misunderstand, but isn't this just high-speed chases again?
Zephyr
8d ago
Sorry, I was exaggerating for comical effect.
Here's a bit more elaboration on what happened:
- Christina Freeland was the former finance minister of Canada (if you aren't familiar with Canadian governmental practices, that means she was serving as an elected MP in our house).
- She acted as finance minister during the tenure of Trudeau, and resigned after being asked to present a budget that he tabled.
- When Trudeau resigned, there was an election where she was elected again, but this time she's in Carney's government.
- She was appointed to a role that is basically "Special Envoy to the Ukraine."
- She accepted an unpaid offer to go work with Ukraine as a financial advisor to Ukraine in December last year (word on the street is saying it was on the 22nd).
- She told Carney on the 24th.
- Canada gave a $2.5B loan guarantee program to Ukraine on the 27th.
- She initially did not announce that she was resigning from her MP position, but only did so under pressure.
- There is supposed to be a 2 year "cooling off" period between being an MP who administers a file, and taking on a position in that industry. X link from a former ethics minister Conflict of interest act Canada.
Basically, I was calling it a "defection" as Freeland has always been a bit of a Ukraine activist in government, and was working directly with Ukraine (as a Canadian MP, which she still is today) when she decided to swap over. It's fairly blatantly a conflict of interest, but I figured very few people would care to know all the details.
Zephyr
8d ago
your senator would be risking his job and reputation for a measly low 5 figure payout.
Nah, Canada is corrupt, they'd be fine - we just had our former finance minister and special envoy to Ukraine defect to Ukraine, and we still don't know the list of individuals who are compromised by foreign governments.
Zephyr
9d ago
I think it also creates perverse incentives, especially if you're in a position to choose how to resolve the bet. For example, let's say there is a market for whether Canada will send over $1b to the Ukraine between January 1st - April 30th, 2026. If I'm a Canadian MP, especially one of the ruling party, I can choose how to resolve the market - which means if I decide I earned a bonus, I can look at whatever position has a better payout, bet on that, then delay/accelerate sending aid to make my position true.
The issue becomes that "making money" is a much stronger incentive than "doing the right thing" - so you could take even outlandish positions and bet on them.
"But not everyone has that much power! Most people only know a little bit!"
Well, yes, true, but most people have areas of influence. Not everyone can know whether NVIDIA's new chip will make it to market before Intel - but the employees at NVIDIA could delay, find "faults", etc. in an effort to push the date back.
Insider trading is bad when the people betting on it are also the people who decide which direction it resolves in.
Zephyr
9d ago
That's cause you're not a crazy person, unlike me, who is verifiably insane.
So I'm going to talk a bit about my parents' style of parenting, while trying to avoid enough specifics to give away exactly who I am - so you can hopefully kind of get why it made a difference to me.
I was the oldest child of several; my parents were very clear on how little they wanted to be married or have kids (my mother, specifically, told me that having kids was the worst decision of her life, and she actively encouraged me to be kidnapped - her advice for if a stranger tried to abduct me was to go with them). An overriding theme of my childhood was that I had to earn my right to exist; I wasn't allowed to listen to music, spend time with other kids, or any number of other specifics that would certainly give me away. I was forbidden from inconveniencing them in any way (so like, I was "allowed" to go to a friend's house, but only if I could get there on my own; when I was 8 and my friend lived 30 minutes away by car, this was obviously a challenge).
With my siblings, the situation was a lot more about sacrificing for them; my parents loved to buy enough food for all but one of us to eat, and then would guilt me into giving up meals for them (my father was an extremely wealthy man, and his take-home pay was over $300k a year). They did the same with other things, like school trips or clothes or whatever else. Although I was nominally allowed to "take" any of the offers made, if I did I was told it would make my siblings suffer, or I'd be depriving the family, or whatever.
As a result of this upbringing, I was a horrible nervous wreck when I graduated from high school; I took an adult job as a programmer which I worked while I did my degree, but I felt so guilty about the amount they were paying me that I literally only cashed half my paycheques from the job, and burned the rest (for reference, they were paying me around $500 a week). I couldn't make or maintain any sort of friendships at all because I felt that everyone was tolerating my presence because I was useful, so I spent years in therapy over it - actually, for the first 3 years of therapy, I literally couldn't say a word to my therapist at all because I felt so much like I was ungrateful and deserved it.
My mental model of myself at this point was that I was someone who'd had a good upbringing, but that there was something horribly wrong with me that made me too tainted to be around other people.
So at around this age, one of the book series I was reading was Terry Goodkind's "The Sword of Truth." (Yes, yes, I know - don't judge me, I was like 18-21). One of the books in the series (called "Faith of the Fallen") follows a woman named Nicci who expressed the exact same emotions that I was - she saw herself as a bad person. The book itself was not great - but it resonated with me. I remember that this was around the sort of time that you could go online and like, talk about books with other people, so I looked up the book to see what people said - and on top of everyone criticizing it, they mentioned it was like "Atlas Shrugged" (which, from reading Atlas Shrugged, it absolutely is - like, it's literally at the fanfiction of it level). Reading that was a huge revelation for me - before, I'd felt like I had to do everything that other people wanted, because I could do it and I had to pay back my upbringing, and because I was only tolerable if I was doing everything for others.
I am not the person mentioned in all debates are bravery debates, but the same sort of thing happened to me.
Zephyr
10d ago
It also doesn't matter; my experience with parents (who actually love their kids) is that they'll do anything to avoid the risk of losing them.
Having it happen just once is enough for parents to rule out the risk forever.
Zephyr
10d ago
Atlas Shrugged is a great book screed set of words put on paper if you suffer from very specific forms of people pleasing type behaviours. One thing I struggled with being raised by parents who were less than ideal was the feeling that my life was all for other people; I had to do what my parents wanted me to do, including giving them the money from my job; I had to accept that I deserved to be alone because I wanted a girlfriend; I had to accept that my destiny was to work 80 hours a week in a tiny shoebox to pay for other people, then die alone and unloved when I was no longer economically useful.
I'm not kidding when I say that Atlas Shrugged was one of the most useful things I ever read; the willingness to just say "no, it's okay to be selfish" was huge to me. I'm not going to say it's a masterful work of literature - but it was exactly what I needed to hear when I read it, so I will always defend it.
Zephyr
10d ago
If I had to choose between spending 12 hours a day with my kid and 10 minutes a day working, or spending 12 hours a day working and 10 minutes with my kid (assuming all other things, including income, remained equal) I would certainly choose to spend 12 hours a day with my kid.
I would agree 100% with this - kids are lots of fun. However, that caveat is a big one. The trade-off isn't 12 hours of play vs 12 hours of work; you have to include all the other things you don't get to do in order to hang out with them. As someone who is childless (but has a niece and nephew who I adore spending time with), my schedule looks something like:
- 7:30-8 wakeup/shower
- 8-12, 1-5 work
- 5-6 cook dinner
- 6-11:30 whatever I want.
If I were parenting my niece and nephew instead, it would look more like:
- 6:30-9 wakeup, shower, make kids breakfast, get kids ready for school, drive kids to school.
- 9-12, 1-6 work
- 6-7:30 cook and eat dinner (convincing kids to eat is definitely worth at least half an hour and you can't convince me otherwise).
- 7:30-9 bedtime for the kids
- 9-10:30 whatever I want (probably spending time with my spouse)
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there definitely isn't as much room for deviation in it. If I wake up and I've got a migraine, I still have to do the morning routine. If I get off work and I'm super stressed because my boss is hinting at layoffs, I still have to prep and cook dinner. I can't decide I'd rather go out to the bar with my wife for drinks; we have to put the kids to bed or they'll be hell the next day.
(Before anyone asks; I'm assuming both parents are working in the above, and that some of the time blocks (like dinner) could be done by either parent, but the other parent is almost certainly in charge of managing the kids during this time. I didn't schedule pickup from school, for example, because I did dropoff and presumably my wife is doing pickup in this hypothetical).
Zephyr
12d ago
I think that the perception is that extremely long occupations (or similar) tend to be corrupted by the bureaucracy, and end up spending hundreds of millions of dollars on doing nothing. It's a very common pattern (at least in Canadian politics, but I imagine that it occurs in American politics too) that something like the following occurs:
- There is some outrageous news story (let's say the Minnesota fraud case mentioned below); people are not happy.
- The government proclaims loudly that this is unacceptable, and it is opening a committee/beginning investigation of how this could've happened.
- 6-24 months pass, and the committee basically says "no one could've possibly predicted or stopped this, no one is to blame, and we're going to do some superficial reforming (so for example, in the Minnesota fraud case, they could mandate that all government employees take a course in recognizing fraud). They also have a bunch of recommendations that are completely stupid (like, adding land acknowledgements to all daycare subsidies) that are supposed to help by decolonizing the space or some such stupid nonsense.
- Meanwhile, the fraud or whatever else has continued, and now we're also paying for the cost of the committee, which did less than a 5 year old could've worked out.
There's a major problem with government accountability where any solution to the problem seems to be "sink more money into it forever." Something that meets the criteria of:
- Fast;
- Intuitive; and most importantly
- Done
Earns a lot of goodwill towards the policy.
It needs to be Fast because the problem is happening now, not later - I've mentioned before that fixing housing prices in 5 years is better than not fixing it in 5 years, but from my perspective, it may as well not matter; I only have one life in which I can start a family, and if I can't buy housing for 5 years, that's 5 more years in which I can't have the family I want to.
It needs to be Intuitive (or at least, more intuitive than the other solutions) for the same reason that we don't introduce more complicated voting methods; because there is a lot of space for people who are good at lying to grift off of it. It is easy to understand "each person gets 1 vote, most votes wins" - it's trickier to understand a situation where one candidate gets 45% of the "I want this guy" votes, a second candidate gets 35%, and the third gets 20% - but the second candidate ends up winning after "shenanigans." (I'm using Instant-runoff voting as an example here).
And it needs to be done because anything that is a process ends up costing way too much money and perpetuating itself for all eternity. After 2 decades in Iraq, the establishment that the US had set up had collapsed within a month of the US pulling out - that extra effort and process was worth literally jack and shit, and all it did was cost more money.
Zephyr
13d ago
To speak to the work hours specifically - one reason behind it is because a huge amount of medical issues arise specifically on the switch between shifts. I’ve heard it discussed with regards to nurses - but it’s things like “shift changes at midnight, pills are due at 11:55pm, did the previous nurse give them or does the new nurse?” You’d assume it’s obvious, but if the previous nurse was dealing with a patient coding next door, then…
Zephyr
15d ago
I would agree except that it’s exactly the opposite for female authors - like, another Trudi Canavan book (Priestess of the White) has the exact dynamic of young girl raised by an elderly man in her village, and ends up with him in the second book.
It’s just not something men think about putting in their books in the same way women do. It’s hard to describe the exact difference, but a while back, I read a bunch of books that ranged from “romance” to “kind of smutty” to “basically just pornography” by both male and female authors (with the goal of comparing and contrasting how men and women approach the genre). With male writers, a dynamic like that is more of a “sleep together once,” while with female authors, it’s presented as a healthy relationship.
Seriously, it is very very easy to tell - the male smut novels were honestly kind of hilarious in how they immediately presented exact measurements of every female character who appeared - the female ones were much more likely to focus on how well dressed or wealthy they were.
Zephyr
15d ago
Sabriel (and Liriel/Abhorsen) were really good books - I stayed up way too late reading Sabriel when it first came out, and the scene in the reservoir was so creepy that I didn’t get any sleep at all that night.
Zephyr
15d ago
There is a saying that men are the more romantic sex, masquerading as the more pragmatic one, while women are the more pragmatic sex, masquerading as the more romantic one.
From speaking with my female friends, vs my male ones, there are dramatic differences in how they talk about their partners/potential partners. My female friends, specifically, tend to literally talk about how much the man makes, how good of a partner he appears to be (as in, if they were out in public, how well would he make them look), and how high status he is (expressed as what would their parents/friends think about him); whereas my male friends tend to be a lot more about how their partner makes them feel (some of which is appearance, but it also includes things like how she thinks about them, or does them little favours, etc). A book I read by a female author (The Black Magician, by Trudi Canavan) had a line in it that was something like "People in the slums tried to find a man who could provide, but often married for love instead" (in the context it was in, it was presented as a contrast to the well off people in the city, who married specifically for providers).
Actually, come to think about it (and it's a little bit of a tangent), one of the things I've noticed from reading a number of books is that you can always tell from how the romance is presented whether it was a female or male author, even if the rest of the book passes fairly well for either gender of writer. Off the top of my head:
- Male writers tend much more towards smaller age gaps between men and women, and try to avoid power differentials; female writers definitely do not. It is extremely rare for a male author to have a male character date his students, proteges, trainees, etc. - whereas I'd almost say it's the reverse for female writers. There was a period of time in the fantasy genre where every single book being written was "male assassin trains younger man, and ends up dating him" - which were all written by women. There's a series by Tamora Pierce in which the main character is raised by a man in his twenties, and when she's 16 ends up dating him which seriously squicked me out when I read it.
- Male writers often have the man doing all of the work to set up the relationship - with women it tends to range from the woman being actively seductive (see Tamora Pierce, above), to being closer to equals (Robin Hobb has this with Fitz and Molly in Assassin's Apprentice). Even in examples written by male authors where the woman is much more seductive in nature (I'm thinking here of Shade's Children, by Garth Nix), the actual 'event' tends to have the male character taking more of the lead.
(I do realize all the books I mentioned above are both YA and fantasy - I'm trying to maintain a tiny bit of opsec here, even if I've basically given everyone enough info to identify who I am with even a trivial amount of work).
Zephyr
16d ago
So the reasoning behind it in my eyes is that the government keeps doing things that (almost) no one wants. Like, I don't doubt it's popular with the actual people in office, but most people would be very happy to cut off a large amount of foreign aid (especially to Israel).
Up here in Canada, we had a recent bill (C-12 I believe, but it may be C-2) which was basically "close down the borders, but also give warrantless search powers to cops." Our most recent budget included lines that basically said "our government can arbitrarily exempt any business it wants from following the laws." I think a bit of stalemate when the government tries to spend money is a good thing.
Zephyr
16d ago
I will admit, I've wondered before about the feasibility of making the people into the "fourth house" of government. I feel like introducing an app where the people get a veto on all bills, budgets, etc. and make the margin for blocking a flat 50% of those who vote on the bill. I guess the major problem is that it introduces a bias to inaction, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.
Not to address anything else in your post, but I will say that a lot of people, especially blue-tribers, claim that brandishing a weapon is an automatic escalation (see all the accusations of how Rittenhouse was provoking people by being armed).
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