quiet_NaN
10hr ago
The way Donald Trump won the primaries was basically by outrage-baiting the liberals.
This seems like Bad Bunny adopting the same playbook. The more Trump tweets about how horrible the halftime show was, the less he spends on issues where he can actually do damage.
Edit: Empire which America is should never degrade itself especially on the big stages.
There are important differences between Westeros and the US, though. A liberal democracy will always have to tolerate that someone is degrading the country.
The US had always a bit of its own style in displaying power. Where the USSR or China would have big military parades, the US had nothing of that sort.
A basic rule of social classes is that if you need to conspicuously advertise your class, you are not very secure in your class. A well-established member of the upper class can just buy food from a hot dog stand, because he does not need to fear being mistaken for one of their usual customers by other members of his class.
The US did not have military parades because its military power was not in doubt. It did not need to bedazzle visitors with opulent presidential palaces (the White House mostly being from an earlier era).
Also, no halftime show can match the self-degradation of the US displayed during the 2025 presidential election and the presidency which followed, where any responsible top would long have used their safe word to stop the scene. Between Biden's dementia and Trump being Trump, it definitely turned the US into laughingstock. Clinton's Oral Office sounded straightforward respectable in comparison to Trump's toddler tantrums about not getting a Nobel or Greenland. He could spend half the federal budget on rebuilding the White House out of gold and it would not change a thing in the international perception of the US.
quiet_NaN
11hr ago
But the part that actually got to me the most was the plantation imagery. Not because of any sort of recapitulation of slavery or classim, but because of the bizarre romance around manual agricultural work. Such work was the occupation of 95% of humanity for 95% of human history. And it sucked. It was indescribably awful.
Agreed. I would like to add that while subsistence farming is quite bad, sugar cane is even worse from the implications. It is not a staple food, but a luxury item for trade (in the forms of sugar and rum), generally overseas. If you are searching for the perfect image of evil exploitative European colonialism, you could do worse than a cane plantation.
The chances that a manual plantation worker will make a decent fraction of the profits from these goods is basically nil. Either they are enslaved, or they are part of a large pool of unskilled labor and thus easily replaced if they get any ideas about striking, or if they hack off half their ankle by accident.
So picking that as a theme for a show seems to be in somewhat poor taste, just like 'underage slum sex work' would be a branch of Latin American economy you would not want to use to celebrate your country.
quiet_NaN
12hr ago
If you say to the unjustly convicted man that his trial was only somewhat unfair, most people will realize you're talking nonsense.
I think your binary justly convicted vs unjustly convicted only covers a minority of cases, generally the ones where there is a dispute of fact -- did he do it or not to the act.
For more cases, there is some sliding quantity differentiating legal conduct from criminal behavior. Having sex with someone who can not consent due to being blackout drunk is illegal, having sex with someone who had half a glass of wine is legal, so there is some grey area in the middle where you are less than 100% guilty but also less than 100% innocent, and a jury might reasonably reach either verdict. Likewise for killing someone while going over the speed limit.
I do not believe that. A Minneapolis jury will absolutely convict. Both in the Pretti case AND the Good case.
That does not mean that it is unfair. If the jury would also convict if Pretti had shot first, injuring an ICE officer, then I would grant you that there is no justice to be found from them.
As it is, the shooters -- particularly in the Pretti case -- are not clearly innocent. "We heard a gunshot and then we put ten rounds into some nearby person we thought was armed" is a pretty big fuckup. Even normal cops might go to jail for that if it was caught from multiple cameras. Regular citizens or gang members will definitely go to jail for it. The case against the Good shooter is weaker, but also something where I would not call it a miscarriage of justice if it a guilty verdict was delivered for a similar case in resulting from a neighborhood argument.
"A jury will absolutely convict [for particular cases]" is not an argument that a trial is unfair. Few people were surprised when Charles Manson was found guilty of murder -- the known facts would have made any other outcome unlikely. The test is if they would also have convicted him of unlikely charges like invading Poland, shooting Lincoln, or using witchcraft to cause stillbirths. If jury would have been willing to convict him of these, then I would concede that he did not get a fair trial.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Certainly there is no John Adams type in Minnesota willing to ensure the ICE agents would get a fair trial there.
I think that the fairness of a trial is a sliding scale rather than a boolean quantity. Juries have their own sentiments and are made of humans, not of personifications of the abstract concept of justice.
Say that unfairness is a quality between zero and one. At zero, judges and jury are perfectly impartial. At one, they are willing to disregard conclusive evidence to get the outcome they want -- convict someone of crimes they clearly did not commit, just because they hate them.
There are a lot of examples of trials where the unfairness is significantly more than zero. A black man standing accused of raping a white woman in Texas in 1952. A violent jihadist in NYC in 2003. An open Neo-Nazi accused of tax fraud in SF in 2020.
However, this does not mean that justice is better served by not having them tried, though I concede that there exists some level of unfairness where a guilty verdict is assured, and I would not want to send anyone to such a court (at least if I was not very much convinced of their guilt).
For the ICE shooters, I think the biggest difference from SOP would be that they would not get the cop bonus from prosecutors and juries. This does not automatically mean that they are found guilty.
I imagine that the verdict would be similar as if Pretti had been shot during a funeral procession of the Hell's Angels he was disturbing with other protesters. In the end, it depends on the details more than how sympathetic the defendants are. I could totally see circumstances where a jury would rightfully acquit the Hell's Angels or ICE (e.g. if the other person drew his gun and pointed it towards them). Sadly, from the facts we know of the Pretti shooting, this does not seem to be such a case. From what I have seen in the footage so far, I would even convict normal cops who were out in the streets stopping drug dealers or whatever. To excuse such trigger-happiness, I would have to assume that Minnesota is also a war zone and every day ICE agents get blown up or something.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Germany
The age of consent in Germany is 14, as long as a person over the age of 21 does not exploit a 14- to 15-year-old person's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination
So it would be more accurate to say that the ages 14 and 15 are a grey area. (Arguably, that grey area extends further (probably all the way to infinity) if alcohol is involved, which likely covers the majority of new sex partners. A judge might view the ability of a 16yo to consent after two beers lot differently than that of a 26yo. And of course sex work is 18+ only.)
To be honest, I was not even aware of the AoC being 14 in Germany. When I was 25, the thought to try to find an underage girlfriend genuinely did not even cross my mind. I strongly suspect that a man who decides to groom 15yo's does not have their best interests at heart. However, I also acknowledge that things do not always go according to plan, and sometimes people just fall in love over age gaps most would consider inappropriate.
I think just handing the power to the younger partner to decide if they want to press charges rather than investigating ex officio is probably a good compromise.
For the sake of completeness, I should also mention that I do not see a good reason to apply different AoC's for different combinations of sexes, so your proposal would also legalize gay men grooming 15yo boys, which I intuitively find as unacceptable as straight men grooming girls of a similar age.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The real "not-loser" will be the one that can recover better,
I disagree. It is perfectly possible for two belligerents to both lose as opposed to the counterfactual of not fighting a war. Ukraine will most certainly be worse off than if they had just written of the Crimea and the two 'rebel' oblasts. Russia will most certainly be worse off than if Putin had never invaded.
that's why Trump with his "let's just all make more money together" approach to diplomacy is so vital for Russia, Europe has whipped itself into a frenzy and keeps sabotaging peace talks by insisting on terms that ensure Russia will have a harder time recovering from the war, knowing full well that this only prolongs the fighting.
If the West had simply wanted to stop the fighting, we could just not have supported Ukraine, thus allowing Putin to win decisively. We supported them both for moral and pragmatic reasons: punishing defectors to the international rule-based order when we can is good, and weakening a big NATO opponent by making the wars they are waging disastrously expensive in people and materiel is sound strategy.
Last time I checked (which is a while ago), the main obstacles to a peace deal were that Russia wanted territory it does not currently hold and Ukraine wants some security guarantee so that it does not find Russia coming for the next slice in a decade.
At the end of the day, the people who need to be convinced of a peace deal are Zelenskyy and Putin. If they want to make peace, there is little the US or Europe could do to stop them. Europe being more willing to support Ukraine than Trump is hardly feels like 'evil EU thwarting Peacebringer Trump's visionary plan for peace'.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Of course this dovetails nicely with our discussion of another winemom-cum-podcaster, Jennifer Welch and her open calls for Republican blood. In all seriousness, psychologically speaking, what on Earth is going on with 50 year-old women right now? Have Democrats effectively weaponized Karenism?
One of the most scathing critiques of Social Justice is that the same kind of busybody middle class older women who would report young women to their landlords for having a male visitor in their room in 1950 are now ostracizing people for doing a racism or whatever.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I'm also happy to acknowledge that acquittal doesn't necessarily mean a lack of guilt, but I don't think the British judicial system is so corrupt that it represents null evidence.
If you are using judicial verdicts to update your world view as if they were unbiased (in the statistical sense) estimators of guilt, you are doing it wrong.
Suppose a parent shows up at a hospital with a non-verbal, injured child, displaying injuries of a type which is generally thought to be caused by violence in 85-95% of the cases and accidents in 5-15% of the cases, as estimated by different domain experts. Suppose that there is no further evidence to be found either way -- the parent denies using violence, and there is no video of how the kid got injured.
The way I have constructed the example, there is only one possible outcome in a fair criminal trial: acquittal due to reasonable doubt, as the courts would rather let ten guilty go free than sentence one innocent.
A guilty verdict is very strong evidence of guilt. A verdict of 'not proven' is very weak evidence of factual innocence (as opposed to legal innocence).
I imagine this can lead to cases where two people who had a gunfight can both get away with claiming self defense. If we try A and find we have to acquit him because it is plausible that they acted in self defense, we obviously can not base a trial on B around the finding that A was innocent as far as the law could tell.
For the Braveheart thing, I do not really have a horse in the race. On priors, I would find it more likely that young men harass some underage girls than that some underage girls get out of their way to threaten some young immigrant men, but stranger things than the latter have happened.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
This is what suggests to me that the situation is pure power politics. The reason for the face coverings is targeted harassment, doxing, stalking, and even violence.
Last time I checked, ICE was in the lead 2:0 as far as the body count in Minneapolis was concerned. To the degree that the SJ left is coordinated, it certainly has not picked a strategy of grievous bodily harm. Sure, there might be outliers, but city cops deal with that every damn day -- with the additional kicker that the people they antagonize are much more likely to live a chill 20 minute drive from their families' homes.
I think that the main reason ICE agents hide their faces is not that they fear violence. Instead, the SJ left has plenty of ways to ostracize people which they do not like which are legal. ICE agents might find themselves getting kicked out of blue area bars, or their dating prospects reduced to the women who do not have SJ girlfriends they want to keep, which seems perfectly fine to me. Plus some harassment which is not fine, of course.
OTOH, having ICE agent act like masked stormtroopers is not only terrible optics, is also removes one of the few remaining checks on them. When ICE shoots someone, the Trump administration declares that shooting justified and praiseworthy within hours. ICE will not help with any state investigation because federal forces enjoy immunity. And the federal investigation will be lead by the very same administration who already decided the outcome before the victim's corpse was cold. If the shooters are never identified publicly, (which clearly was the idea of the Trump administration), then that is the end of the story, unless you get a Democrat administration in three years and Trump does not bother to shred the FBI report.
With the shooters identified on video, the loved one's at least know who fired the shots, and even if the shooters do not face criminal consequences, they can at least be punished by ostracism similar to OJ Simpson.
Part of applying violence on behalf of a democratic government is that you are willing to do so openly. If you believe that something is morally right and the will of the people, you should be willing to show your face. I am sure that the 101st Airborne was not particularly popular in the South when they escorted the Little Rock Nine to school in 1957. Yet they did not cover their faces, even as they knew that their countrymen might consider them race traitors.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Apparently the only way they're allowed to determine someone is illegal is being told by a higher power.
That is a strange thing to call Palantir.
Seriously, there might be some illegals where the government is not even aware they exist, but I was persuaded by others here that they might actually be a minority of the illegals. In particular, any illegal who was convicted of a crime will likely have left a paper trail in the court system. Probably most illegals are on facebook, too.
I generally dislike cops going on fishing expeditions. Facial id technology makes it much more feasible to find illegals without violating anyone's rights -- take pictures of people in public, check them against the database, then go after the ones which come up positive.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
ice killed two people in situations which were arguably (though not definitely) self defense
I will grant you that for Good, that argument can be made.
For Pretti, I just don't see it. Shooting someone who was at that time unarmed in the back because you thought they were armed looks bad. Likely there are thousands of gang members doing time for murder or manslaughter for cases which had a better claim to self defense than the Pretti shooters. They certainly had more reasonable doubt because their actions were unlikely to be filmed from multiple angles.
Are you advocating to pardon all of them, or do you advocate that cops should be held to much lower standards ("if the cop plausibly thought he was in danger, that's self defense")?
Anyone who is claiming that as of this moment, the US is a fascist dictatorship is obviously full of shit. I have no idea if the people in the video are making such claims, or if that is a straw man, and refuse to watch video arguments out of principle -- literate people should use text.
The ICE deployment to MN is not in itself a milestone on the path to fascism. Nor is them killing two people in error. The fact that both of them were slandered as domestic terrorists by Trump officials is much more concerning.
If you want to steelman the rise of fascism thesis, you could instead focus on Trump undermining elections, as he did in 2020 when he flat out denied the outcome. If his J6 crowd had been more successful and forced Pence to certify his election based on his alternative electors, do you think Trump would have refused if he had thought he could get away with it?
Likewise, Trump's recent call to nationalize the election seems dangerous. I have never seen Trump being willing to admit defeat in his life. I am certain that an election under his control would find the votes he wants, this time. This is different from Biden or Obama or W, none of whom I could imagine to end the American democracy experiment to stay in power for a few more years. All that is standing between Trump and kinghood is the SCOTUS, and to be fair, that is a substantial check on him. But that is the guardrail of democracy -- if everything was running well, you should not depend on the guardrail.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
The general public does not care about statistics. Both sides of the CW play that game. MAGA wants you to think of the median illegal as a rapist, murderer and gang member, while SJ wants to think of them as a 6yo wearing a Pokemon hat.
The protesters breaking the laws more frequently than cops is to be expected. They are not getting paid by the taxpayer, though. There have been two people killed in MN. Both were protesters who were objectively (with the benefit of hindsight) not going to kill ICE agents. There are certainly situations where I would expect that outcome. If protesters had also murdered three ICE agents in MN in the same time span, that would justify ICE having a high prior that someone wants to murder them, making their snap judgments more understandable.
The other problem is that the Trump administration by trying to take control of the narrative and slandering the victims before their bodies were cold effectively endorsed the killings. SOP for a shooting which looks bad would be to say that the agent involved has been put on paid leave and that it is under investigation, and that it would be premature to comment on it. The Trump admin message to the ICE agents seems to be "if you need to break a few eggs to make our omelette, that is fine. We will shield you from consequences and tell bald-faced lies in our press conferences to provide cover for you."
quiet_NaN
4d ago
This would lead to fun implications if coupled with the SJ definition of a woman. "Yes, Bill has a beard and a cock, but what if he secretly identified as a woman in his heart of hearts? Might cause our ship to sink just by fantasizing about lingerie."
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Do Moon landings benefit humans? Obviously, as a step toward extraction and colonization.
Haha, no.
We had humans on that rock 50 years ago. Did fuck-all to step us towards extraction and colonization.
Let's do some math. Let us take the ISS as a LEO habitat. It has a crew size of perhaps seven and weights 450 tons, for 64 tons per person, offering a comfort level in which specifically selected and trained astronauts have survived for a year without going insane. (Yes, you could also go for the Moon or Mars, where you will in theory have more material to build habitats. However, it also takes 5x as many launches to transport anything there. To build a practically self-sustaining habitat would be a massive endeavor -- you would have to copy a good fraction of the supply chains of the world economy.)
Take the Falcon 9, one of today's best rockets. It gets 22 tons tons to LEO, so we need about three launches to get a one person habitat up there.
The commercial price for a launch of the Falcon 9 is 70M$. Even if internally, SpaceX could launch at 10%, that is still 21M$ per colonist for the privilege of spending years encased in a habitat which would concern animal rights activists.
The fuel of a Falcon 9 is about 400 tons, which yields about 300 tons of CO2, generously assuming that Musk invents a catalytic converter (!) for his rockets so that CO2 is the only thing which we need to worry about. That is about the CO2 an American might produce in a lifetime. If you want to colonize space, getting controlled fusion power is the first (and one of the easier) steps.
Now, if there was Unobtainium in space, that might still be worthwhile. If Moon rock was the perfect material to build tension cables for a space elevator for, then I would be all for mining Moon rock (preferably by robots) and shipping it to Earth. Sadly, the rest of the solar system contains nothing we don't have on Earth for cheaper. This includes He-3: Earth price is 20M$/kg. If Moon regolith was 10% that stuff, that would be great. As it is perhaps 15ppb, so you need to go through hundreds of thousands of tons to get a kilogram.
The sad fact is that we will all die in the gravity well we were born, PRNS.
I think having the ISS to study the effects of microgravity on humans (and do all kinds of other experiments) is a great idea, if we find a material for a space elevator tomorrow, it would be embarrassing not to have done our homework beforehand. I also generally like space missions advancing our scientific knowledge, but that is a matter of taste, if someone wants to argue that the JWST will never teach us anything relevant for human life and we should therefore not fund it, that is a perfectly coherent position.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Trump highlights the core of the problem.
I do not see the problem, literally. Housing as an investment is merely a curiosity, if the prices of houses crash, that will not affect the people living in their houses (unless they got terrible mortgage terms, in which case you can legislate to make them unenforceable).
I might as well argue that a breathable atmosphere will permanently ruin the market for bottled air, or that eradicating smallpox permanently reduced the demand for medical treatments.
Good things are good. Anyone arguing that actually fifth order effects actually dominate and make things net negative is, on priors, very likely full of shit.
Of course, a well-meant intervention like a rent cap will unleash the terrifying and incomprehensible alien deity that is kept barely contained by a complicated and humanly meaningless ritual, which only cares about prices being the supply-demand equilibrator. But this does not mean that high housing prices are moral, just that we must pay respect to the alien god and not mess with housing prices directly.
Establishing a land value tax is a good way to fix housing costs. Land has a supply elasticity of just about zero, high land prices serve no practical benefits. Tax it so much that owners will become indifferent towards owning land.
Of course, this will fuck over people who invested their pension fund in real estate. Great, I don't care. Investing in a supply-limited good of which people need a certain amount to survive is not an ethical activity. I am sure that when the French revolution came around, quite a lot of people went bankrupt from deals and marriages which they had been sure would be highly profitable. And when methamphetamine became prohibited, that likely also destroyed some people's life savings. Just be glad if there will not be beheadings, this time. (If you want to ethically invest in a product with a limited supply, buy bitcoin instead. People can live while using zero BTC. They can not live while using zero square meters.)
quiet_NaN
5d ago
CRUD is definitely at the core of almost every piece of software that is sold from one company to another (business-to-business or b2b) and most software sold to customers (business-to-customers or b2c). There are exceptions, of course, some of them quite large.
I would not call it at the core, generally.
I mean, take Dwarf Fortress. Of course, you have CRUD on savegames, but the purpose of DF is not to create savegames. If you squint your eyes hard enough, you might also find CRUD in-game (make crafts, look at crafts, encrust crafts with gems, sell crafts). Or even any work with OOP objects. But looking at the game through that lens seems rather artificial. I might as well look at a computer through the lens of gates or RTL.
Or take something completely different, Google maps. There is certainly CRUD involved somewhere. The client reads (and displays) map data. It sends information on traffic back to Google. It also might request a route, which I guess you could model as creating an route_request object, which then gets resolved by the server (reading data on traffic in turn) and returned as a route object (which can then be updated by the server as traffic conditions change). CRUD would be involved for certain, but more like cellular respiration is involved in a human flirting with another. You are unlikely to learn much of interest for the outcome by looking at mitochondria performance (unless one of the participants has an abnormally high blood concentration of cyanide ions).
If I want to build a Google maps clone, the CRUD would be the easy part. There are protocols for that. The interesting part is all the rest -- in what format is your map data, how do you use it for routing and for displaying and so forth.
I will grant you that some B2B applications are indeed mostly CRUD, though. If you have a company internal procurement system which displays items from an external vendor, and lets a user place orders with the vendor, then that may well be just a thin layer gluing two APIs to each other. Just like sometimes mammals might primarily engage in cellular respiration and do little else.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Can I just throw in my opinion that this is a totally uninteresting and pointless case?
Seconded. This seems pointlessly stupid on both sides. The law, in this case, seems to treat parents the same whether they are mothers or fathers. A court should just decide that the parent is indeed a parent and thus their kid gets the citizenship.
If some crazy wants to use the terminology of budding to refer to their relationship to their offspring, that does not change the fact that they are a parent.
In any case where the gender of the parent actually matters, the answer is of course haha no. You get maternity leave iff you are carrying your unborn child in your uterus, however you got that organ. Likewise, if your body is capable of producing sperm, you can be ordered to provide DNA for a paternity test.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think that the Trump administration displays unique characteristics which were not displayed by recent other presidents.
There is his utter inability to even understand that some people use language to communicate information about the state about that hypothetical generalization of human perception we call reality, sadly imitated by his underlings. If he is making noises which might sound to the initiated like factual claims about how many dog sleds defend Greenland, anyone who has followed him for more than two tweets will notice that he is utterly incapable of making anything which is a factual claim. Presumably, if he were to call 911 to report that the White House was on fire, the operator would simply wonder what political message he would want to transport with that.
Likewise, he seems dangerously removed from a common understanding of the upper classes how things are done, the informal rules on how society is conducted. When Biden pardoned his son, that was noteworthy, scandalous. With the Trump administration, pardons of political allies, people who bribe him by buying his shitcoin etc is not a scandal but a Tuesday.
This also makes him certainly more unpredictable. A sane-ish, elite ruler might certainly make decisions which are terrible for the country, but will likely fail in predictable ways, like some king starting a stupid war he can't win. A ruler not bound by elite expectations is much more likely to find novel and exciting failure modes, like le terreur or WW2. Sometimes out-of-the-box thinking is useful, but often the box was placed there intentionally. GWB and his cronies, for all their many faults, would not have tried to dismantle free trade or dismantle the alliance the US had build under the banner of the polite fiction of the international rule-based order.
Lying about the law to make people believe that ICE is breaking it (specifically that ICE needs to show random people warrants, ICE cannot arrest a US Citizen, ICE cannot detain an immigrant while their immigration case is being processed.)
While I am sure that a lot of the grassroot left is lying, I think their leadership is a bit better. OTOH, from the WH you will get plenty of takes on laws which are just plain wrong.
ICE can arrest an US citizen for disrupting their work illegally, sure. But detaining someone on the suspicion of them being an illegal immigrant seems to be a-ok only if the arestee is not a citizen. The government rounding up people and IDing them, effectively forcing their focus groups to carry proof of citizenship on pain of being hassled for a few hours feels very Unamerican.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
In some US states, it would be legal (if unseemly) for Trump to have sex with a 16 year old.
Sure, as long as he is not paying for the sex, and has no reason to believe that anyone else is paying her to have sex, either. Epstein's Island is Florida IIRC, and there AoC seems to be 18, so the excuse "I thought Jeff had just invited some teens who just liked to fuck older guys" will not fly.
Also that despite legal ages of consent, the de facto acknowledgement seems to be "teenagers are going to have sex before that age, so teach them about contraception, abortion, and sexual health".
AoC is the age at which you can have sex with anyone without your consent being considered violated. If multiple people of a common age have consensual sex, most legislatures recognize that this is not a problem which needs fixing, no matter if they are 11, 15, 17 or 99. Locking up two 11yo's for statuary rape of each other hardly seems very worthwhile.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
The days of the Old West are gone, and they are not coming back.
Nor is shooting someone fleeing (without your property) in the back considered self-defense anywhere.
I think even in the US, only a small fraction of churches would be willing to worship with their AR-15s by their side, waiting for some interloper to make their day. On the other hand, every criminal gang would declare their headquarters a place of worship.
If you legalize individual violence, you are selecting for people willing to commit violence for their own benefit. Generally speaking, these are not the people a civilization wants to select for.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I think Don Lemon should be charged with trespassing, maybe criminal mischief, etc, particularly since he remained in the church after the pastor asked him politely to leave and told him that he was contributing to the disruption of their worship service. But I don’t know if it’s appropriate for him, personally, to be charged with civil rights offenses.
There is a trope of journalists standing in front of some perfectly innocent-looking building reporting on some Breaking News while the news is happening somewhere within that building. They generally do that because they are not allowed to enter the building and get footage of the event itself.
If Lemon had been reporting from the street outside the church, reasonable people would not blame him for anything, even if he had been tipped off by anti-ICE rioters.
Entering together with the rioters makes him look like what is called an "embedded journalist". While I am sure that embedded journalists will claim that they are actually totally neutral and independent an in no way beholden to the party in whose unit they are embedded and who sponsored their kevlar west (and whose PR people possibly get to sign of any publications they might write), I am equally sure that their opponent will not be very inclined to buy that if they are captured and instead treat them as PoWs.
Lemon being a TV person, I presume that he was recording video from within the church. Here in old Europe, we believe that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Now that is not an absolute thing, if your worship involves sacrificing kids to the Outer Gods, then there would be a public interest a journalist fulfills in violating your privacy of worship.
Frankly, I fail to see any public interest for life video coverage here. If schoolchild A is bullying schoolchild B, and then schoolchild C pulls out their mobile and openly lifestreams that to the internet, I am much more inclined to call C a bully than a journalist. I do not need to see the footage to know that some of the anti-ICE protesters are total assholes, a textual summary of what happened suffices for that. There is no Pulitzer to be won here.
So I am fine with letting the jury figure out if he was intentionally violating civil rights or not.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Using Paul Fussell's nomenclature, there are two very different classes near the top.
The upper middle are the ones who generally use their brains to pay for their lifestyle. Professors, lawyers, doctors, engineers and so forth.
Above them is the upper class, which as a class does not value education (especially not education in things which allows you to earn a living, like some pleb).
It seems to me that Epstein was really successful at passing as upper class, and that this was how he made money. Some of the filthily rich trusted him with their money not because he was the most brilliant quant in New York, but because they perceived him as one of them.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I do not think there is a huge overlap in guys who bang Daniel’s (big breast) and into underage girls.
I think that Stormy Daniels (and his wives) do put to rest any claim that Trump is an exclusive pedophile.
However, knowing one of his sexual tastes does not rule out the possibility of him having additional sexual tastes. If you know that someone restaurant critic is famous for his love of Italian seafood, do you conclude that he will never eat an Argentinian steak, but have seafood for three meals a day?
From an evo-psych PoV, the obviously advantageous path for a man is to fuck any fertile-looking woman his society lets him fuck. Being exclusively into teens or MILFs would really limit reproductive success, especially in monogamous societies where your marriage partner will likely start as a teen and age into a more mature woman later on.
We know that Trump was big time into running Miss contests (and allegedly walking into their dressing room). To my knowledge, he did not run any Mister contests, so it seems plausible to conclude that sexual attraction was one of the things which got him into that. Now, I am very much not into these contests, but it appears to me (starting from the label, a 'Miss' is a woman on the marriage market) that they are rather about young, nubile women than mothers with big breasts. A 16yo selected to appeal to Trump would be much closer to a Miss winner than Stormy Daniels is.
If the allegations were that he had sucked off underage boys, then I would be with you in finding that implausible, bisexuality seems to be relatively rare and there is no indication that Trump likes dicks.
And of course, there is Trump's creepy birthday message to Epstein. It could be about the both of them enjoying hunting federally protected birds on his island, but somehow I doubt it is.
Legally, it does.
What other definition do you propose? I know one when I see one? I think most people would have problems telling apart a Canadian who has worked in the US for a decade from a US citizen.
And what are the American values, which were shared by quasi-aristocratic Chevaliers, unruly Borderers, strict Puritans, French Southerners, German and Irish immigrants, Texan Hispanics, descendants of slaves, and so forth? I mean, besides "don't have dances with copulation movements in them"?
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