domain:mattlakeman.org
DTulpa
2hr ago
+1 for Antz superiority, and fond memories of my father helpfully pointing out to me that Gene Hackman's character was a Nazi.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
I literally do not know anyone who has been to jail. Or if they have, they've never told me about it. So your dichotomy isn't accurate, because I don't fall into either group.
faceh
2hr ago
Perhaps it's a class thing or it's just that me and everyone around me has somehow filtered out the crazy.
That's the one. Its a class thing AND you've also filtered out crazies.
I worked as a public defender specifically on a domestic violence docket for about six months. EVERY single horror story you can think of, both in terms of loved ones beating on each other (not just spouses, mind!) and false accusations ruining lives are true, and indeed are happening daily.
Yet... I know of literally nobody in my personal circle of immediate friends and family who has had to deal with that situation.
The level of dysfunction required for someone to actually physically beat someone they care about, or to falsely accuse someone of same, is actually QUITE high. But, there's the bottom, lets call it quartile of the population in terms of impulse control who will absolutely pass that threshold at times.
So if you're drawing most of your social circle from the top two quartiles, with some dipping into the third quartile, then by sheer selection effects, you probably won't know anybody who actually ended up arrested and in court for DV-related reasons.
And be happy for that, in Florida at least the Court system is NOT optimized for helping ensure domestic tranquility, it is there to throw down barriers and inflict punishments and it is very heavy-handed when applying both, so it is a very unpleasant system to interact with whether or not you're guilty of what you've been accused of.
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
There's a plaintiff's counsel I deal with frequently who will occasionally send out exhibits ahead of a deposition, and all the points she wants to emphasize will be highlighted, and I very quickly learned two things: 1. It's really easy for your eyes to go straight to the highlighted portions, and 2. It's just as important that you read what isn't highlighted. If you're trying to create right-wing ragebait for a targeted audience, it helps if you can not only direct readers to the most inflammatory sounding parts of a document but also omit 3 of the 5 pages included in that document, lest some smartass actually reads the whole thing and comes to the incorrect conclusion. It also helps that the document wasn't intended for the public but for a specific audience and thus omits crucial context that the target audience would be familiar with, though I can forgive Ms. Collin for that because I doubt that she took the time to familiarize herself with that context either.
Getting down to the nitty gritty, as Ms. Collin so helpfully highlighted, the policy provides that:
Hiring supervisors must provide a hiring justification when seeking to hire a non-underrepresented candidate when hiring for a vacancy in a job category with underrepresentation. Hiring justifications must be submitted to and approved by DHS Equal Opportunity and Access Division (EOAD) prior to an offer of employment being made.
She did not, however, highlight the following definition:
Underrepresented: when the FTE (full-time equivalent) representation of one or more protected groups is less than that group’s estimated availability in the relevant geographic area and labor force.
In other words, this isn't a wide-ranging justification requirement for hiring white men; it only applies to job categories in which there is underrepresentation. And underrepresentation isn't based on the minority population as a whole, but on the estimated number of qualified minority applicants in a particular geographic region. To see what this actually means, though, you would have to look to the DHS Affirmative Action Plan, which the document's intended audience would almost certainly be familiar with. There, you'll find that there are seven job categories, that protected groups are divided into three broad categories: Women, disabled people, and minorities. This gives us 21 data points for determining whether there is underrepresentation, of which four actually show it as such; Minorities are underrepresented in three categories (supervisors/administrators, skilled crafts, and service maintenance) and women in one (paraprofessionals). There are no categories that underrepresent disabled people. There is no underrepresentation in the technician, professional, or administrative support categories. When you look at the statistical breakdowns, it is clear that these targets are dispassionate and completely unidealistic. There are approximately zero women currently employed in the skilled craft category (plumbers, electricians, etc.), but since the estimated number of qualified women in this category is zero, there is no target, and you thus don't need to justify hiring a man. For the service maintenance, on the other hand, there is a minority hiring target, even though these are the kind of low-level service jobs that minorities were historically relegated to in the past. The upshot is that you need justification for hiring a white janitor over a black one but not for hiring a white attorney over a black one.
And this says nothing of the fact that the justification involved doesn't even have to be that persuasive. If you look at page three of the document (which Ms. Collin didn't provide), it provides a laudry list of acceptable justifications, with the caveat that the list isn't exhaustive. The point of the process isn't to force the issue of hiring more minorities in jobs where they can't cut it, it's to to make hiring managers take a second thought about why they're hiring one candidate over another. The canonical conservative argument against AA is that it substitutes racial preferences for merit, but such arguments are always made without any understanding of how AA works in practice. All this policy does is say that if you think the white guy is the best man for the job, in the limited cases where AA even applies, you should be able to explain why he's the best man for the job. If you're incapable of doing that, then one wonders why you picked the guy in the first place.
You can feel free to disagree with the merits of the policy; I was merely pointing out that it's much different than the Tweet you posted implies. But that's all collateral to the real point, which is whether such a policy is evidence of a wokeness epidemic. The key here is page five, which Ms. Collins did not provide for us, though even if she did it's unlikely that anyone would recognize its significance. It well within the references and statutory authority and all the other housekeeping stuff that appears at the end of these kinds of directives, and contains but one item before the signature line:
Supersession:
DHS administrative policy 4100.005, “Affirmative Action Implementation,” effective 05/06/14 and all policies, memos, or other communications whether verbal, written, or transmitted by electronic means regarding this topic.
If one actually examines the referenced document, they will discover an Affirmative Action Implementation Policy implemented in 2014 that contains the following provision:
Following the completion of interviews with all candidates, if a candidate from the protected group for which there is an underrepresentation is not selected, the supervisor must submit a Justification Form to the Equal Opportunity and Access Division, explaining the reason for the decision to offer the position to someone who is not a protected group candidate.
In other words, this NEW policy that goes into effect next month is actually just an elaboration of a policy that's actually been around for over a decade. It gets even better, though; the 2014 Affirmative Action Implementation Policy is the third revision of a policy that initially went into effect in 2002. I couldn't find a copy of the 2002 policy so I don't know if it contained the above language in it, but I suspect it contained something substantially similar, as I was able to find an Affirmative Action Plan from 2004 from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic development that contains a documentation packet with a form asking substantially the same questions as are required in this "new" plan, i.e. asking the hiring manager to justify hiring a non-affirmative candidate. And those requirements appear to have been stricter, as they indicate that the non-affirmative hire must be substantially (emphasis in original) more qualified than the minority candidate, while the new guidance contains no such provision.
To this effect, it's hard to see how you've given any evidence that "wokeness" has increased in any meaningful way in recent years. And yeah, I know the Biden's EEOC filed a bunch of diparate impact suits. But that doesn't say much; the EEOC has been doing that for decades. And before that they were filing pattern discrimination suits whose effects were much more severe than making a police department use a different test. In 1974 nine steel companies entered a consent decree by which they would grant minority candidates practically automatic seniority when it came to bidding into skilled positions as compensation for past discriminatory hiring practices. What this meant in effect was that if you were a white guy working in the labor pool for years with the hope that you'd eventually be able to bid into an apprenticeship to be a pipefitter or something, you'd get stepped over by a black guy who had been there for a year and got first priority. I don't hear many people talking about the wokeness of the Nixon Administration, though.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
2hr ago
Define "we"
Trump's executive order purporting to deny United States Citizens their birthright citizenship is, yet again, enjoined nationwide. Judge Joseph Laplante issued an order certifying a nationwide class under FRCP 23(b)(2) and enjoining enforcement of the executive order as to that class.
The nationwide class consists of:
All current and future persons who are born on or after February 20, 2025, where (1) that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
Essentially, every child who would be denied citizenship by the executive order. Notably the plaintiffs in this case asked parents be included in the class but the judge found that would create issues of commonality. All the children share the same facts and harm (exclusion from United States citizenship) but the way that harm manifests to parents may be diverse. Also answers some questions I had about whether class litigation can include future class members (it can).
This is probably going to be the template for nationwide relief post-CASA.
TheDemonRazgriz
2hr ago
I haven’t seen either in a very, very long time but if memory serves Antz was also more interested in using actual facts about ants to set up its world. Building tunnels and fighting with termites and all that.
I do remember preferring Antz as a kid, or at least I have a stronger memory of it, probably in large part because of the action scenes.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
"Jesus wasn't a Jew" is at least more likely than the "St George and Santa Claus were Turks" gag I see from SJWs.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
Some minor coding, preparations for future "features", but nothing visible.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3hr ago
I am 4 beers in on an empty stomach and this is beginning to sound convincing. Next thing I know, you'll tell me that Christ was a Jew.
faceh
3hr ago
Might I make a suggestion:
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
Galaxy brain: the Israelis are indigenous to Palestine, because they never left for Europe and then left Europe to escape antisemitism, because there was no antisemitism to escape. The diaspora is a myth, Jews are just native to Israel and new York.
Ioper
4hr ago
I have friends and family working in law enforcement and the general legal system so they talk about this stuff somewhat regularly.
Pretty unsettling, but on the other hand I don't know of anyone, at all, for whom this has happened IRL. It's like some sort of parallel horror world where people act like monsters as soon as there is a disagreement.
Perhaps it's a class thing or it's just that me and everyone around me has somehow filtered out the crazy.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr ago
Unretarding the import queries is going quite well, though it seems to be coming at the cost of the complexity in the code. Hopefully I'll be able to clean it all up once it's done, but I'm eager to move on to something showoffable...
How are you doing @Southkraut?
TheDemonRazgriz
4hr ago
Nowadays even most SAHM’s send their kids to it for some reason or other, I’m not sure why.
My understanding is that this is because studies have been done that show the early socialization outside the home is beneficial for early childhood development in some way. I don’t know the details (not yet quite old enough to be worried about kids beyond a passing interest), and frankly I’m not really convinced about the benefit of getting the kid out of the house earlier than, say, preschool age, but there definitely is some kind of developmental-based backing for why it’s become a Thing.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4hr ago
I expect John Wick, Chapter 5: Head Cannon to come out. Featuring Keanu Reeves, and a .22lr pistol strapped to his skull. That's about the only uncharted territory left.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4hr ago
Hold up, new type of person just dropped. If they don't exist, I'd like them to, it would break up the boredom of bog-standard antisemitism.
ABigGuy4U
4hr ago
It’s also strategically inadvisable in a genre that relies on the character’s large expressive eyes.
wayfarer
4hr ago
Well, and some numbers deflated and some claims turned to be lies like that story about soap made out of human fat.
I have no problems with investigating Holocaust and looking into claims, but if someone starts claiming that millions of Polish Jews all just migrated somehow to USSR and similar "explanations" then I am going to interact with them like with flat landers and moon landing hoaxers.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
Reading this I was thinking to myself, well if you're Jewish whether the Holocaust happened or not, of course your ancestral memories will be of the oppression of Jews, it's pretty much their entire history other than the reigns of like three or four guys in the Old Testament. Which made me imagine a guy who isn't just a Holocaust Denier but an Antisemitism denier: the Pogroms never happened, the Blood Libel never happened, the expulsion from Spain never happened, the Second Temple never existed so it was never destroyed, etc.
I am pretty sure that Great Depression was not intentionally engineered to murder people
No, but if I had a political axe to grind against Roosevelt and was looking for any excuse I could to discredit him, the fact that his administration was seizing and burning thousands and thousands of tons of food in the service of his unworkable extremist economic ideology could be presented to make it look pretty damn intentional.
wayfarer
5hr ago
Well, Hitler and Stalin were not murdering people in person either.
I am happy to blame both for murders they caused.
The same in Congo. You can be responsible for murder in indirect way (at some point it stops counting, or responsibility is greatly diminished but large part of deaths in Congo has not reached this).
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5hr ago
Jew-haters can dig up (and you must have noticed how strong the overlap between people who hate Jews and people who deny the Holocaust is),
I pretty much reject the idea of Holocaust Denial without Antisemitism, because a faked Holocaust is pretty much a concrete open-and-shut case for a world Jewish conspiracy. It requires not only that Jews have had the power to force the story on everyone, to force schools in the United States to make me read five novels about the holocaust in the course of my public education and force half of Europe to throw you in jail if you don't believe in the holocaust; but also that every individual Jew who attests that they lost a family member is a liar. It pretty much positions Jews as a uniquely powerful and evil group. If you don't hate the Jews after confirming that they faked the Holocaust hard enough to sell 30 million copies of Anne Frank's diary, then you're a little looney tunes yourself.
That said, having personal experience as the center of Holocaust proof is rapidly running out of runway:
I don't think it's hyperbole to say that most people in Europe have family or personal stories that interact with the Holocaust in some way. My high school history teacher had German grandparents who were housed in an apartment that had been forcibly vacated by its Jewish inhabitants the very same morning (the coffee was still warm). I have Jewish friends whose family trees are full of lives cut short. I have personally spoken to a woman whose entire extended family was killed except her and her father, and who saw her mother get shot in the head by a Nazi soldier.
In 2000, there were close to 6,000,000 WWII veterans alive in the United States; in 2024 there were around 66,000. And worse, in 2000 when I was a kid there were still WWII veterans who were active scoutmasters or deacons or worked actively, I interacted with them as vigorous active guys; in 2024 they are mostly just pushed around senior living centers in wheelchairs. The family stories I pass down to my kids about WWII will be no more meaningful or inherently accurate to them than stories about the Civil War were to me.
Given these facts, it seems unwise to hinge an entire societal worldview on the Holocaust's exact details, or occurrence at all.
I’ve long suspected that early daycare and full day preschool is at least partially driving the change in attachment. Thinking about it from an evolutionary perspective, in the very early stages of development, a baby needs to fully attach to his parents. The baby needs to know that his needs will be consistently met by parents who are always close by and who care about him/her. Modern parents basically have kids that they only see after work and on weekends (after the 8 weeks of maternity leave). Most actual child care is done by low paid hourly workers who might have 7-10 other kids in their care. The child thus often finds that he needs or wants attention and to attach but the adults around him don’t have the ability to give one kid their undivided attention. So the kid can’t learn to fully trust an adult and fully attach to them.
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