The Lockdown Diaries (9)
Or, His Neck Finally Buckled Under The Weight Of His Hair.
Let us share links and bicker. I’ll set the ball rolling, via Noah Carl, with an ingenious solution.
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Update: Today’s saucy topics include crime and punishment.
For those in need of further diversion, the Reheated series is there to be poked at.
And that common set of causes are mostly known or strongly guessed at, but it is veroboten to say out loud for fear of being called some kind of -ist, or -phobe and being cancelled and having one’s livelihood taken away.
I’ll see your ‘This’, mr rat, and raise you a ‘That.’
@exdemocrat: I saw my job as an important and decent one in assuring the prosecutorial system remained clean and that constitutional rights were appropriately observed.
Indeed. My sister was a district public defender in one of the states of the United States which I will not specify.
I asked her long ago why the *bleep* she expended the effort to defend these various pieces of *bleep*ing *bleep*.
She responded with “Why wouldn’t you feel better knowing that person X, who was accused of horrible crime Y, was found guilty after a defense that provided the best possible defense? It’s MY job to force the system to reassure you that X is guilty of Y if I lose.”
I’d like to believe that our system is robust enough to filter the guilty from the innocent. I’m old enough to realize that isn’t always the case, given the humans that are part of the system.
If you are in the US, you should insist that your public defenders get the same funding as your prosecutors. I won’t guarantee that the results will be good (given what happens now), but your ass might be on the docket someday.
Or, more precisely, that their criminality and their poverty each stemmed from a common set of other causes rather than from the other.
Again, to invoke poverty or inequality as the obvious, even sole, cause of criminality is an insult to the law-abiding poor, who vastly outnumber their criminal neighbours. In and of itself, poverty doesn’t explain the existence of petty spite, a common enough motive for anti-social behaviour. Nor does it explain a mindset in which other people are little more than props in some ongoing psychodrama – essentially prey, from whom things can be taken without a second thought. These traits, in which the victim is stripped of moral reality, are not functions of being poor, or the fact that Harry earns more than Geoff.
Or, more precisely, that their criminality and their poverty each stemmed from a common set of other causes rather than from the other.
The last few paragraphs here, regarding a Guardian article by Peter Matthews, an urban studies lecturer, seem fairly relevant:
Actually, if you haven’t seen it, the whole post may be worth a squint. Despite his dogmatism, and a bizarre disregard for even basic logic, notably regarding littering, Mr Mathews is of course employed to educate teenagers.
O/T
Gen Z mocking Millenials is my new favourite genre of navel-gazing, and they’re not wrong (except about centre partings). It’s not our fault we’re so cringingly pure. But I don’t think they quite understand why?
Look, Gen Z, we were trained our whole lives to survive a future that exploded the moment we hit adulthood. We’re as fucked as you are, but we didn’t see it coming. We didn’t know how badly we were being lied to. You lot did, and our job is to help you unfuck the world.
We had none of the skills to cope with the kind of adulthood we were dealt, and we’ve had to make it up as we go along while paying down huge debts and somehow not becoming arseholes. Forgive us if we comfort read and talk to our doggos like the babies we can’t afford to have.
I bet you’ll never guess which mid-30s media pundit, author, journalist, and LA-based screenwriter (who in spite of all those boasts still somehow manages to confess to having “none of the skills to cope with the kind of adulthood [they] were dealt”) wrote this
What do you mean you knew who it was?
What do you mean you knew who it was?
Heh. I did consider taking a pop at that. Clearly, growing up is harder for some of us than others. Though I suspect that has more to do with psychology than any set of real or imagined economic circumstances.
[ Added: ]
And so far as I can tell, my own relatives of Laurie’s age – her generational peers, as it were – do not seem crippled by the same theatrical anxieties. They have lives, jobs, families. Hm. Maybe it’s a class thing, at least in part. Though perhaps not one that Ms Penny would care to admit.
They have lives, jobs, families.
Clue.
Stories like this boil my blood. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9297475/Black-student-not-victim-racism-eating-black-80k-Smith-College.html . This woman is the definition of privilege – she is either very smart or has a wealthy family, possibly both. When she graduates people will fall over themselves to employ her because of her colour to meet ‘quotas’.
She is more than happy to throw less privileged people (people who are not gifted academically or have wealthy families) under the proverbial bus so that she can claim the intersectional lottery. What a low life.
…we’ve had to make it up as we go along while paying down huge debts and somehow not becoming arseholes.
So Penny is 0 for 2, I see.
Speaking of narcissists, though, “life coach” will have an odd wedding night, probably like every other night, but odd for a wedding.
Stories like this boil my blood.
Went to a boarding school, goes to an 80K frogskins/year private college, the oppression must have been horrible.
It is always the same, unsubstantiated claim, without any hint of investigation powers that be fall all over themselves apologizing, punish the innocent and/or launch institution wide struggle sessions, truth comes out – never mind – regardless of the trail of destruction.
Every time this happens the clown in charge needs to be fired and the idiot perp punished. Of course the latter would be racism itself.
The stench, I tell you, another vital problem to be tackled.
FFS, these people have lost their tiny minds, poor bastard with the Sousaphone.
a bizarre disregard for even basic logic, notably regarding littering,
The litter thing was funny.
The litter thing was funny.
Niche humour, perhaps, but yes, it is a little surreal. And this kind of boggling evasion, which you’d think would be hard to miss, is not at all unusual for the kind of research that gets cited by leftist sociology lecturers writing in the Guardian. I mean, talk about tip-toeing around the obvious.
poor bastard with the Sousaphone
I know, right? Smart, sexy, and debonair musicians choose the trombone. An instrument, incidentally, that would be nearly impossible to operate in the bubble-people’s alternate universe pictured above.
exdemocrat: I saw my job as an important and decent one in assuring the prosecutorial system remained clean and that constitutional rights were appropriately observed.
I retired last year, but I was 18 years in the San Bernardino District Attorney’s Office as Chief Clerk and have respect for many defense attorneys – both public and private. Indeed, the current elected DA was a dda (who I had the great pleasure to work with) and then left for several years to be a private defense attorney before the election.
BOTH sides are needed for the reason you stated. I would add that right now in California that the judicial system is being up-ended in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles by turning DA offices into the county’s 2nd PD office. In Los Angeles county (pop 10 million) George Gascon has issued edicts since day one that have the majority of his office in mutiny. The latest is his bringing over PD Tiffiny Blacknell to the DA office – she worked on his campaign. The issue isn’t just the irregularity of her hiring but that she is virulently anti-prosecution and anti-cop.
Note the date of these Blacknell remarks.
An instrument, incidentally, that would be nearly impossible to operate…
The flutist in the back isn’t doesn’t appear to be having an easy time either, and that odd posture she is forced to use not exactly conducive to reinforcing good technique. Most stringed instruments other than a ukulele would be high adventure as well. It is beyond idiocy.
It is beyond idiocy.
It is an IRL demonstration of the “tax something and get less of it” phenomenon. For however many lives they believe they are saving they are most certainly killing band and orchestra as pursuits. But, like taxes and jobs, they cannot comprehend anything beyond theoretical first order effects.
The litter thing was funny.
Not entirely unrelated, the second item here:
Academia’s Clown Quarter, where the glaringly obvious must never be mentioned.
Not entirely unrelated, the second item here:
From the article:
Excellent point. Universities are well on there way to becoming unicultural indoctrination camps. It helps explain why Big Tech is shutting down its platforms to WrongThink.
Finally, at last our long national nightmare is over, Mr. Potato Head is now Woke™ and now just Potatx Head (spud/spudx).
But, like taxes and jobs, they cannot comprehend anything beyond theoretical first order effects.
Seems like this inability to comprehend things beyond the first order is something that, while starting at some lower bound greater than zero, increases in proportion to the number of women in the dynamic…Or so a friend has observed. I may in the future refer to this as the “Friend of WTP’s Postulate on the X Chromosome’s Effects on Producing Unforeseen Consequences”. I may. Probably not though.
I ask which is worse, figuratively or literally?…I think it’s both…via Ace…
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxk9a/china-anal-covid-tests-us-diplomats
“Universities are well on there way to becoming unicultural indoctrination camps”
Our host contributes at another blog, where a recurring theme is the question:
What is the opposite of ‘diversity’?
‘University’
Our host contributes at another blog
??
pst314:
??
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/
Re the above…
Predating blogs, the blog hostess of SDA had section of her website for, um, forthright commentary. She named it Small Dead Animals, with the idea that anyone venturing in there had no cause to complain after clicking on a link with that name.
This is from memory, such as mine is these days.
Friend of WTP’s Postulate on the X Chromosome’s Effects on Producing Unforeseen Consequences
One of the better ways I’ve heard it put was, paraphrasing, ‘They would climb a tree because they wanted a better look at the the lightning.’
smalldeadanimals
!! I must have started reading that blog many years ago, but have not visited in a while. Did it go inactive for a while?