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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35636 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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There's a level of theft that I think is immediately disqualifying from this level of a federal job, but I'm skeptical this is it. From a quick look at MN state law, this is technically chargeable as a felony, but it's an incredibly bad fit for it and really should get plead down just because the value estimates are going to be janky.

Lying to investigators is the more serious problem. I'm not a fan of the increasing drive to treat every lie to investigators as a chargeable offense itself, but even the lower levels of security investigation are specifically looking for evidence of past dishonesty, and while this probably reflects overclassification, a lot of nuclear reprocessing stuff is classified. Maybe could see some excuse if a work and travel was going to leave them that sleep-deprived, and the law enforcement questioning was done so soon after that they were still sleep-deprived, but I'm not buying it. There's always some room for 'interpretation' on the edges, and I'd expect the Biden admin is going to be willing to put some thumbs on the scales for that evaluation, though.

I'm... skeptical about the fetishist arguments. It'd be a hilarious excuse explanation for the awful fashion sense, but gay lingerie fetishism -- even the sort that emphasizes taking -- doesn't really work like that, and the twitter thread is about as far from a dispassionate analysis as possible (eg, the guy's bio links to a 'task force' news page with shocked headers about a Canadian PM's appearance on Ru Paul; his twitter proper is filled with Chinese Cardiology and bad grammar) short of trying to get NPR's take on things. I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt for this argument and act as if the twitterer's being somewhat near honest, but finding out that 100% of severe sexual offenders who steal panties are severe sexual offenders doesn't tell you much about the more general population, as distasteful and creepy as it still is for 'mere' anime-level hijinks. That doesn't make some deeper and vile motivation impossible, but I think there are other more plausible explanations.

At the most obvious level, Brinton's public personae can be paraphrased as 'homophobic conversion camp torture made me quirky.' And there's people who can pull that off, and sometimes it's a more appropriate way to handle trauma. But like a lot of approaches that center abuse, it can also turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, not just in finding homophobia everywhere, but also where the weird behaviors start being done for their own sake, and become increasingly unmoored from the merely strange. You see it more often with people who hid food or money in a very poor home and then turn to kleptomania in an adulthood that's no longer facing the same pressures, but there's both kink and non-kink variants in broader spheres.

There's a level of theft that I think is immediately disqualifying from this level of a federal job, but I'm skeptical this is it. From a quick look at MN state law, this is technically chargeable as a felony, but it's an incredibly bad fit for it and really should get plead down just because the value estimates are going to be janky.

What? This is clearly insane behavior.

Stealing a bag an easily identifiable bag at a place with hundreds of cameras is objectively insane. If you said perhaps they should be sent to a 12 month rehab instead of prison, perhaps. But left in an important federal job? You might as well appoint Bubbie to the fentanyl taskforce.

At the most obvious level...

No. The most obvious level is that we are dealing with a kleptomaniac or a compulsive fetishist. Neither is suited for a job other of a higher level than shelf stocker because of the compulsion.

I don't think that's a norm that we established very widely. There's individual jobs you can lose for an individual thefts on this scale (or even more severe crimes like DUIs), but they're things like 'police chief'. I expect that's why you're moving to the psychological profile, but in addition to the limitations and risks of remote psychological diagnosis, the above poster's specific question was "First, should he be fired for stealing?"

((That said, I also think the position is a benchwarmer's benchwarmer's job; anyone following nuclear science knows nothing's going to actually happen when it comes to nuclear waste policy. So I may be evaluating it differently.))

Lying in a panic is understandable, but at the end of the day - what happened to the contents of the suitcase? Did the woman ever get those contents back, or compensation for them? And going around using the suitcase as his own on trips is the part that makes it worse, makes it seem like a deliberate act rather than an embarrassing mistake. If I took someone's case by mistake, was too embarrassed to give it back when I realised and left it too late so that it would all be a public show if I took it back now, then I'd dump the case or leave it behind in a hotel room somewhere. I wouldn't empty it out and go "my suitcase now, bringing it with me on my next trip to Washington".

Yeah, there's a lotta red flags for at least bad judgment, here.

There's a very weakly possible case where these have acceptable answers -- say, where Brinton was sleep-deprived, jet-lagged, and spending so little time at home that the woman's stuff was dumped immediately into Brinton's laundry service, and immediately offered full compensation when the police asking finally shocked a bolt loose. I've had seasons where I was living out of a suit case, with the contents dropped into laundry when I got home, traded for another set of clothes, and not looked at again til I finally was home for a weekend over a month later to actually hit the laundromat, so these aren't impossible. They're just incredibly unlikely to have all happened here, without some third-act twist like 'oh, left an identical bag on the plane as a carry-on'.

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