domain:mgautreau.substack.com
Rov_Scam
5m ago
It includes more people than you think it does. I can recall the following instances from high school where I was either aware of or partially complicit in theft:
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One friend of mine would steal practically anything he could out of museum gift shops whenever we were on field trips. I don't even know that he necessarily wanted the stuff he was stealing. He was a good kid who got good grades and came from a good family. He's currently some kind of engineer for General Electric.
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A group of us decided to whitewash the local graffiti tunnel just after all the seniors in our graduating class painted their names on it. A friend who worked at Wal Mart put several hundred dollars worth of white paint on the loading dock for us to steal. We kept joking about it being a heist. I wasn't there for the actual heist, but I participated in the whitewashing.
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Two friends of mine were convicted in juvie court for stealing plants from a local nursery that they intended to give as Mother's Day gifts.
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On the band trip junior year my roommates and a few other friends did a grab and run of beer cans out of the cooler in the hotel bar. My role was to create a distraction by trying to get served underage and getting into an argument with the bartender.
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I was at a Halloween party and a bunch of us piled into a Dodge Neon and drove to a farm field nearby where we proceeded to grab pumpkins and throw them in the back of this one kid's El Camino. This fat, black cop who was the local fuzz showed up and started chasing us while running with a flashlight. I remember I had to jump a fence at the edge of the field and I actually stopped to let him catch up because I wanted to see how he negotiated it; he was trying to wriggle his fat ass underneath it and I started laughing before continuing running. We all had to walk back to the party, and when the officer showed up and saw all the pumpkins my friend's parents said that they told everyone to bring a pumpkin to the party.
I'm not aware of any of the people involved in the above incidents having any contact with the law whatsoever as adults. I also spent 4 years working for the Boy Scouts and dealing with kids all the time who, while I don't have any specific knowledge of criminal activities, they were the kind of jackwagons who I wouldn't be surprised if they stole something. The entitled rich kid brats who are bound and determined to see how close to the line they can get before I have a talk with their scoutmaster about my ending their participation in my program.
When people say shit like this I always get an image of the naive mom who says "well certainly my David would never do anything like that!" Kids are idiots, and if you think that the impact of harsh punishments for petty crime among teenagers would be limited to minorities and poor people, well, I have some swampland in Jersey for sale.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
16m ago
I got out to see the local college do a production of Pierre, Natasha, and the Great Comet of 1812. It's a sort of rapid mishmash of an episode in War and Peace, fun in that it's one of my favorite books, and the music was enjoyable. The college kids did a fair job, especially for a fall semester performance with several obvious freshmen in key roles.
Dolohov and Anatole were great, as was Ellene, who commanded every scene.
But like Hoffmeister, the casting disappointed me. Pierre, while a talented singer, was ruined by woke casting. He was skinny. Pierre MUST be fat. The entire character is based in his size. He should ideally be noticeably tall while also being chubby, the kind of guy that looks harmless when he slouches but when he rears up you realize he's a bear of a man.
The ginger cast as a Pierre did his best, but his efforts to emote and over-act being drunk and sad didn't work because it made him seem frail, where if he were fat moving awkwardly could still portray robust strength. This interacted poorly with the script, which did a poor job communicating age when using a student cast. Anatole and Dolohov refer to Pierre as "old man" sarcastically, despite being his age, but frail skinny Pierre just seemed ancient. The communication between mid twenties Pierre and teenage Natasha is meant to be more intimate and frank than that between Natasha and Marya Akhrisimova, but that's not clear in the casting. Pierre's confrontation with Anatole was confusing, in the book it's clear that once roused Pierre tosses the young rake around and roughs him up, even though he'd been a genteel cuckold to that point.
Andrey was also cast weakly, but that's a tough one in the script, especially at school: he only gets one real scene, but he needs to be charismatic, upright, and dream hot for the love between him and Natasha to work.
Overall I had a great time. One of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite works. I think if I were reworking the script I'd try to make economic relationships clearer, but that's probably tough. But the driving aspect behind a lot of the plot is Natasha Ellene and Anatole all need to marry rich.
IguanaBowtie
18m ago
I read Scott's piece as about as Straussian as he ever gets.
He lays out a long and detailed takedown of the Democrat Industrial Complex, then adds a relatively wishy-washy 'but Trump does these bad things too'. I don't think he's a secret MAGA by any stretch, but I do think that Scott has come a long way from his railing against feminism days & not because he ever had a 'come to Jesus' moment - he's just very politically canny now, and cares about what happens to his (grey) tribe. My guess is that he's predicting a Trump victory and wants to avoid himself, his family and his tribe from being targeted by anti-Trump backlash, living as they do in the heart of Blue culture. Again, I don't want to accuse Scott of dishonesty as I think he's a top 1% scrupulosity person - I think he won't be voting for Trump and doesn't particularly like the guy. I just think that the piece should be read with an eye for realpolitik.
sun_the_second
29m ago
I'm sure civil war will respect all of those fine details you specified.
If you want to discuss, then discuss. "DAE just start shooting is the only choice here?" is only technically discussion.
2rafa
35m ago
I don’t know about ‘woke’ (although various aspects of the culture, language, attitude towards vice, sin, sex, therapy, relationships and so on of people in this Norse mythology are seemingly identical to those of progressive game writers in 2010s and 2020s California). But certainly the affect, style, tone, seriousness, language and so on was pure Marvel Whedon CW-show quippiness.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
38m ago
I'm not a Trumpist, nor did I even say I wanted to murder them all. Even if I had said it was time for open war (I did not; I said that given his premises, open war made perfect sense), open war does not imply genocide.
Stop trying to stifle discussion.
pigeonburger
40m ago
This cements my thought that the “Vance is weird” campaign is a fully enclosed propaganda ecosystem, as in, it isn’t exaggerating some aspect of Vance (eg “Trump lies”), it is just totally made up. And that’s really spooky, because there’s a section of the public that will believe whatever the DNC wants them to believe. If they can make you believe Vance is weird they can make you believe anything.
I dunno, to me it kind of makes sense that a normal guy would seem weirder as a politician than an average politician would. It's up to what people expect of a politician. Normal people don't methodically control their actions and words to make everything fit into a neatly packaged personal narrative, so it's easier to cherry-pick examples to craft a different narrative.
MiddleAgedMan
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
45m ago
They aren't actually forced to work. They may be granted certain privileges if they do work (along with the meager stipend) but no one is forcing them to work. That's the deliberately misleading part.
cjet79
54m ago
This isn't really the right place for this kind of thing. We are a discussion forum, not a place for organizing political action.
If you want to discuss that website, or discuss who you prefer for president, or discuss why we need approval voting all those are fine.
Rov_Scam
56m ago
I mean, yeah. Boost pay for prosecutors and hire more of them. Same for public defenders. Expand the courts. Give police enough money that they can actually investigate all of the crimes that are reported to them. Make juror compensation $500/day so people will stop trying to get out of it. I don't have any problem with any of this. But that's not the world we live in. the point I was making wasn't that you can't make changes to fix these things, but that the reason for this goes beyond woke prosecutors deciding they don't want to charge shoplifting.
Highpopalorum
1hr ago
It's useless for them.
Elaborate. I don't think the militarization of police is intended to prepare them with better tools for giving tickets and responding to DV calls, it's adopting tools that suck for actual policing but have blatant counterinsurgency applications.
You said that- not me. PISA scores and results speak for themselves. Arabs underperform.
Some circles debate whether [whatever your demographic is] even qualify as homo sapiens.
Probably, but that's not bad. Fallout decays fast.
Speak plainly about whatever you mean. All I can piece together is that whatever it is includes something about a war involving China.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
To be fair, I didn’t see it at first.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
The surge in the 70s depends on Supreme Court jurisprudence which probably couldn’t have occurred before the New Deal. But I think capital punishment advocacy does date back to the 1800s. States like Michigan banned it early with explicitly Christian arguments.
Today’s split probably has more to do with partisan habits than with religion.
gattsuru
1hr ago
Aw, I specifically wrote up Wise To The World because it wasn't about the Presidential election or national politics. Guess I could see it being read through that lens, though.
Poultice
1hr ago
Deiseach is definitely an older, Irish woman.
It actually makes TequilaMockingbird's comment all the funnier as it would in fact be the funniest answer.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
...unless they're confident that the USA won't intervene, or that they can avoid escalation to nukes like they (barely) did in Korea.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
Squeaking in on the last day with a post that I would personally not categorize as "quality" is kind of interesting. We talked about this before, that certain sorts of highly partisan speech get lots of upvoting and AAQC reports, and I think it's probably not very healthy for the ecosystem. This isn't to say that I think my post is bad or that I don't stand by the position, but I really don't think it's particularly insightful.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
There is a long-running fake Curtis Yarvin account, which may be what Stellula is referring to. I believe it only posts links to Yarvin's writings as they're published.
Yarvin joined twitter about a month ago, using his Urbit handle, after he rejoined the Urbit foundation - it's basically a work account where he posts near-exclusively on matters of Urbit design.
I’m playing Dragon Age and enjoying it. I don’t really disagree with the criticisms of the game from some reviewers. There is indeed a lot of peak millennial YA woke cringe dialogue…but the same was true of Baldur’s Gate 3 and both God of War reboot games, and many people enjoyed those; this doesn’t seem any worse.
I appreciate that this is an RPG with the filler removed, much needed after both Inquisition and Andromeda were ruined in large part by barren open zones that were unnecessarily created to try to attach the studio to some kind of perceived open world trend.
I quite like the new gameplay. Good RTwP will always be my preferred system, but Inquisition already ruined Dragon Age 2’s sublime and hugely underrated RTwP-action-hybrid combat, and this is definitely better than what we got in 2014.
People complain about facial animations, but they’re much less distracting than in Mass Effect Andromeda or Star Wars Outlaws / AC Valhalla (for non-facial-capture scenes, obviously). You can’t do much better than this without either hand-tuning facial animations like CDPR or capturing them directly like Larian, and it’s clear Bioware didn’t have the budget for that.
Choice and consequence is pretty good so far, better than some recent RPGs. I like the world and level design. The game has a nice, breezy pace. I will keep playing for now. I am more concerned about Obsidian’s Avowed, which looks like it might turn out like the Outer Worlds, which was passable but very dull.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
I let myself get talked into getting Factorio: Space Age last week. I just got my space platform going. What do I have to look forward to now?
"Bayesian" has been the hot new word in my part of the internet for the last few years!
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