Trump-voting but not dedicated-to-evil relatives I know (I have others who are dedicated to evil, they're beyond hope—incidentally, this is a whole thing in Republican circles, folks who haven't been around actual red-state Republicans since the '90s or so have no idea how common some really shocking views about the validity of state violence on people who annoy or politically oppose them are, they outright like this stuff and there are minimum 50 million people like that in this country) are mostly doing the "well both sides say different things and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle" thing about all of this stuff, and refusing to watch the videos that would quickly show them that no, only one side is saying anything at all connected to the truth.
Yeah, I know a few people like that too. In a way it’s good that the administration went with the bold “he had a gun so we were justified in executing him” claim because that went so hard against decades of 2A claims that it got people to actually do more than skim the headline.
If it's helpful the BBC have an edited video that shows the time around the shooting without the actual shooting. It makes it pretty clear that the official narrative is bullshit without having to watch someone get killed.
The validity of state violence in the minds of a lot of rural people went through a phase change after Covid.
The folks I know who were previously sympathetic the constraints on government overreach watched state and federal governments impose policies that made no sense for their communities and were actively detrimental to their livelihoods and enforce those policies with fines and even jail time in some instances.
These people would have been against the tactics ICE is using in 2019. Today they’re ambivalent. The attitude is “what comes around goes around.”
My dude, they were already beating him for no reason whatsoever. When someone showed me this video the first time, I thought the outrage was that they were beating a guy who wasn’t resisting for no reason whatsoever, which is true, but then they also killed him, again for no reason. They were already violent criminals before they murdered him. If he had been drawing it would have been justifiable self defense and ICE would still have been entirely in the wrong. Though he didn’t.
Your phrasing of the reality of democracy and voting is basically a less-polite version of where political science has been on the topic for 80ish years. The first half or so of that they spent trying to figure out some way that the stupidity and ignorance naturally balances out into… something that’s not scary. Law of averages, wisdom-of-the-crowd sorts of stuff.
They eventually (more or less) gave up, finding all their efforts at comfortable explanations unsupportable. Nope, it’s just luck, momentum, and the difficult of intentionally directing large chaotic systems keeping things tolerably sane. It’s, in fact, very scary and it’s astounding it works at all.
It’s, in fact, very scary and it’s astounding it works at all.
It no longer does. Social media was the tipping point.
Religion wasn't enough to break democracy, newspapers weren't enough, radio wasn't enough, TV was almost enough... but now, with social media as the proverbial last straw, the bug is fully exploited, completely unfixable, and likely fatal.
Oh, I agree. I think it more likely than not that we have invented a combo of technologies that produce an environment in which liberal democracy cannot exist outside maybe smallish countries with tight controls on incoming media from outside (so, also fairly tight foreign capital ownership rules).
The medium is the message, and I think the “message” of the global Web + social media + (now) generative AI may not include liberal democracy.
Valve's the main force here, AFAIK. I do think it'll make a big difference for home users. Home PC gaming, outside a handful of much-smaller niche use cases that're full of Windows-only software, was the only notable reason for a home user to have Windows at all, after the rise of Chromebooks and iPads to serve the rest of the home market. Valve's made ditching Windows for PC gaming viable for a high proportion of those remaining must-have-Windows users, which means Windows is hanging on to the home market by its fingernails. Just about all it has now is momentum, and that's fading.
I also don't think any of that matters much, because it's done nothing at all to the enterprise market, which is still full of Windows and other Microsoft stuff and that shows no sign of shifting.
This is a problem with "single-purpose" devices for kids, too. Drawing tablets, music players. They're all actually full Android phones (sans cell modem) and tablets. It sucks.
The issue isn't really Android, it's the touchscreen and the way the UX is a regression from many analog single-purpose devices.
If you gonna have a single-purpose device - make it analog (or close to analog)!
Don't give it a perceptible boot-time and all the other flaws that come with general-purpose computing. Don't make the user have to "wake up the device", let alone have to visually confirm that it is woken-up, before they can switch to the next song.
It represents a general purpose computer on your network which will accumulate vulnerabilities and never be patched or otherwise secured, making it a persistent insider threat as a launchpad for attacks on your network
No, it's literally that. It's super dangerous and the practice of performing it in any but very unusual situations is, to put it mildly, hard to justify on any actual public safety grounds. To the extent the maneuver is a "safe" version of making a car crash, it's (relatively) safe for the cop causing the crash.
A certain segment of the public, plus cops themselves (having significant overlap with that segment), love it though, because they enjoy seeing non-compliance met with life-endangering levels of force and can't understand why any of us wouldn't enjoy it unless we want more crime or something.
So a bunch of suspects who weren't, car chase aside, any imminent danger to anyone, and their possibly-unwilling passengers, end up dead or life-alteringly injured... and so do plenty of people who had nothing to do with any of it. Often over what was originally just e.g. property crime.
I would rather a cop risk a runner's life every time than let him continue to flee at speed recklessly for miles on end, usually culminating in crashing into an innocent person or their property. That's not even a question for me. Or would you rather just let criminals run away if they manage to enter a vehicle?
It takes two to tango, and the cop can stop the life-threatening chase at any time, without causing a wreck.
Causing the speeding car to go out of control is also not a great thing for public safety, and does kill and cripple people who are in no way involved in these chases. We have jurisdictions with no-chase rules and it doesn’t seem to cause some hypothesized explosion in crime. It is in-fact ok to not do them, as satisfying as they might feel.
Well, I'd rather they just get pitted. If someone is at the point of fleeing from police in a high speed chase, I want them removed from society, because nobody well adjusted and beneficial does that. Whether that's by arrest or by accidental death, I really don't mind either way. The alternative also emboldens criminals to flee as a first resort and to plan around that possibility.
Fortunately in USA we have many state jurisdictions to choose from so we can each live under the sort of laws that suit us best!
This would be precisely the divide I mentioned above. One is focused on whole-picture outcomes, the other is focused on making sure “bad guys” have a bad time (regardless of how that fits into the larger picture). Folks on either side of this divide tend to think the other is actually, factually nuts.
You are ignoring the big picture outcome of the resultant culture that develops in a society in which criminals can easily flee and not be chased. Culture shifts for the worse in an environment that is less likely to catch, arrest, or prosecute criminals. Trust and norms erode.
The factual outcomes almost don't matter; what matters is perception among the masses. For example, if people largely believe that shoplifting is not prosecuted in a city, and they see shoplifting occur, it is extremely depressing, even if they see the person arrested. It's demoralizing. It also probably leads to more attempts at shoplifting overall. I use this example because it's common enough in a few cities.
High speed chases are rare, so it's not as immediately obvious. But if people see on the news two stories, "man kills woman, cops are there, he flees in car, high speed chase, crashes into innocent bystander killing self and them" versus "man kills woman, cops are there, he flees in car, police arent allowed to chase him so he is currently at large, but they are trying to track him by other means", the latter is far more demoralizing, makes one lose faith in society and the rule of law, makes one less proud of their culture, etc etc. This is a serious effect over time.
At some level, society needs to believe that bad behaviors are punished and that good guys are trying their best to stop bad guys. This is very important to a functioning society. When people stop believing that, culture declines rapidly. Even if the utilitarian outcome is slightly better when not stopping bad guys sometimes (e.g. not prosecuting the previous president even if you could), it's usually not worth the resultant demoralization.
I broadly agree that both are important, but I think the difference lies in the level to which the person feels about the two scenarios you post. Some people are far more upset about the former than the latter (and also consider what happens if you modulate it by the crime committed).
(And of course it's not a strict either/or as well: you can have a rules of engagement for such things. e.g. in the UK the police are not blanket banned from pursuing a fleeing vehicle, but they need to have had appropriate training and do so only in particular circumstances)
They are happening. Polling places in districts with close races will even have ICE stopping suspiciously foreign-seeming people to make sure non-citizens don't vote, since that's a real, actual, pressing problem and not made-up bullshit. Since Democrats are the ones committing these (mysteriously un-investigated) criminal conspiracies to let illegal immigrants vote, naturally ICE's limited resources will focus on polling places where the demographics lean heavily democratic.
They'll be the most free and fair elections we've had since 2016, and maybe ever!
That so many people still think we're in a recoverable state for a near- or even mid-term return to "normal" is part of why we're definitely not. The fundamental fixes we need to make, and even awareness of what those problems are that need to be fixed, remain nerd-shit that normal people aren't even aware of, let alone pushing their representatives to achieve.
If you want a primer on where we're already moving into, and likely to remain for some time, this wikipedia article is the place to start:
In a decade, the year most scholars of political science will say the US slipped fully into this will likely be either 2025 or 2026.
But yes, we'll probably still have elections. Functionally nobody's talking about what those elections would need to be laser-focused on achieving to turn us from this path, though. Court reform, eliminating much of the post-9/11 security apparatus, revoking a great deal of authority congress has ceded to the president. Even the democrats won't have the votes to get a majority on most of that, even if they didn't have to worry about a veto and if they took a slim majority in both chambers. They won't get more than 90% of their own members on board with any of that, in many cases, probably not even 50%. We're toast. The very best we might get is a little push-back on tariff power and, if we're very lucky, a substantial reduction in ICE funding. No restructuring the absurd and dangerous under-the-executive(?!) immigration courts to fall under the judiciary instead. No court reform. No undoing large parts of the USA PATRIOT Act. No full abolition of our paramilitary domestic police force. We'll relieve a few symptoms, maybe, in the very best case, but not treat any part of the disease. And that's the best plausible outcome.
> I would suggest that something like "Skibidi Toilet" is just this generation's badger-badger-mushroom
Beyond the first minute or two, I'd not class Skibidi Toilet as any kind of humor. It's a serialized silent (late-era-style silent with synced foley but no dialog) sci-fi action war epic told without intertitles.
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