Friday Ephemera

Meh,
In the episode, alien time traveller the Doctor (and her diverse companions) arrive in Alabama in 1955, and find themselves seeking to stop time-travelling criminal Krasko (a white male) from preventing Rosa Parks influencing the American civil rights movement during the Montgomery bus boycott

On a happier note Galaxy Quest is currently on TV.
I never tire of it.

Yeah. This is the second time I have had police “correct” my thinking in regard to people trespassing on my property. It’s really disturbing. Especially when they go into that robocop mode. I almost, to some degree, feel sympathy or at least understand why people do violence against cops. The superior look on the guy’s face as he condescendingly instructed me on the proper behavior to take when dealing with people trespassing…jeebus. I can’t imagine what would become of someone taking physical force against the kind of vandalism like people deflating car tires on public property. The bloody cops would probably be more likely to arrest the car owner.

WTP:
And yet the next time the Usual Suspects complain about a “diverse” person being the victim of violence at the hands of a Policeman of Pallor, almost everybody here is going to reflexively defend the cops.
It’s one of the things that makes the whole “you’re only allowed to discuss state violence in terms of race” metacontext so enraging.

But to your point, I do think some of the pullback on policing is needed. Social workers could handle a lot of this stuff far more effectively and decently than cops. Partly due to the robocop mode thing. Which itself is lawyer driven. I really don’t think the supposedly bad old cops of yesteryear were worse than this mess we’ve created today. In some manner, yes. But on the whole, especially when factoring in getting the job done, not so much.

Here are some actual problems with cops: civil asset forfeiture; petty ticketing like for a lawn chair in your yard (this is the fault of the city gov, but they enforce it); arresting people for filming them; escalating a minor infraction into a beatdown.
Some things they need training on: how to recognize that someone is deaf or no english or that someone is having a stroke instead of drunk. It would also help to train them to be patient: a drunk is incapable of responding quickly to your commands. What is the rush?
Someone with a knife should not be shot if he is many feet away from anyone. In SE Asia I have seen vid of cops with a long pole with a Y shape at the end. Two or 3 cops can use these poles to capture and force someone to the ground. No need to shoot them.
The DAs who are letting criminals go are a big part of our current problem. The black public who refuse to talk to cops is why so many major crimes go unsolved. A big deterrent to crime is not how long the prison time but the probability of getting caught.

Akshually…as I’ve been thinking about this (probably too much) I would rate my interactions with the police when I was doing something wrong, traffic tickets and a few get-my-drunk-friend-out-of-trouble-while-I’m-drunk-tpp episodes in college, much more favorably than when speaking with them in any other “concerned citizen ” or such regard.

The DAs who are letting criminals go are a big part of our current problem.
Two chief motives: (1) Criminals are merely victims. (2) More criminals on the streets means more crime. More crime means more fear. More fear means an excuse to demand draconian gun control laws.
The black public who refuse to talk to cops is why so many major crimes go unsolved.
Remember the “activists” (many of them black) who pushed the “stop snitching” campaign in the 90’s?

She is a real cool person, but needs some friends.
Only 27 cents a day can help people like this find friends, so please give generously to the St. Bethlehem’s Foundation.

I will not use female pronouns for Lavery because of the sheer amount of willy in the book.

Lavery was exasperated that there remains a group of women that do not believe “woman” includes a subclass of women that have penises.

A Berkeley academic and ex-paramour of Penny Red, so you can the exasperation is not altogether surprising.

Where are the black people in Old Master paintings?

Those who had their portraits painted were traditionally the wealthy: emperors, royalty, statesmen, landowners, rich merchants. And the flip side of this is that poorer people, people of colour, who were often slaves and servants, were either unimportant in those works or simply invisible.
I spend a lot of time in the National Gallery, and when I’m looking at those beautiful paintings, I’m looking for me — how we are represented, how we are viewed — and to understand our journey. Often the black figures are in the corner or with their backs turned to us. The viewer sometimes doesn’t see these individuals. But I’m making them high-definition and bringing them to the forefront: here, they are not just props.

Quite modest sounding compared to the “we wuz kings” or “if there were white Leonardos, then by Axiom 1 (all races equally gifted) there must have been black Leonardos, and Axiom 2 (omnipresent omnipotent white racism the cause of everything) these black Leonardos must have been thwarted and erased from history by racism” or “Leonardo da Vinci was black” standards that we’ve come to expect. But it sneaks in an assumption that blacks were a normal part of the everyday scene in Europe at the time, as opposed to the odd black sailor in Naples, black ambassador in Rome, or black servant in a grand seigneur’s collection of exotic novelties.
It jumps between the individual and the group, and between class and racial dynamics. White servants of course are background figures in these paintings, and types rather than individuals. She’s trying to extend the analogy to blacks, that they were servants and marginalized and treated as types. But the truth is that at a first estimate, there were no blacks in Europe or in European painting, and the ones that were there were visitors or anomalies or exotica. Europeans had no general policy about representing blacks or erasing blacks. What’s really hurtful to blacks is that Europeans were having a perfectly good Renaissance without any black input and without giving any thought at all to blacks.

A Berkeley academic and ex-paramour of Penny Red
For someone who calls herself “queer” Penny sure loves her some dick. Unless, of course, she has reverted to the original definition of “queer” which I’ve always considered appropriate for describing her.

“queer” and “genderqueer” seem to mean simply not conventional, and part of the in-crowd. Gay and lesbian are already perfectly good terms but in-group designations are so important to “belonging” that new terms are needed. Another one is Q (questioning)–which means what? That you’ve thought about sex that is gay/lesbian but not acted on it? By that logic we need a special term for those who have “thought about” killing that driver that just cut them off. These people ruminate too much with nothing in there to ruminate about.

The DAs who are letting criminals go are a big part of our current problem.
Soros decided that the way to overthrow American society wasn’t through Washington DC but to weaken the foundation at the local level — mostly because 1) most voters are fixated on national politics, not local 2) The impact is slower and not as easily identified
Hence, we get people like Frisco’s Boudin and Los Angeles’ Gascon. They are 100% dedicated to the progressive cause of keeping as many criminals as possible OUT of incarceration and pushing for the abolishment of prisons. A lot of these Soros acolytes were a bit more circumspect than Gascon and have implemented their criminal-coddling a spoonful at a time. What really got the Angelinos attention was that Gascon decided to gut all the rules from day one and declare no dissent would be brooked. He has rarely backtracked, even in this infamous case (he has made a couple of noises that he’s sorry, but talk is cheap).
Having worked for 18 years for the DA office of San Bernardino, there are things a local DA can control and cannot control. And the DA does set the tone for much of the law enforcement agencies in their jurisdiction. If the DA office puts out they will refuse to file on misdemeanor property crimes, then agencies won’t waste resources responding to such calls. And VOILA “crime goes down”.
Heh.
We had no choice over things like Jerry Brown’s AB109 (Prison realignment) or Props 47 and 57. But at least the elected DAs I worked for were NOT at all ignoring crime.
Also, while DAs are a county agency, the court system is the province of the state. Courts can and do tell DA offices how things are to be conducted.

Lavery was exasperated that there remains a group of women that do not believe “woman” includes a subclass of women that have penises.
Found this phrase Gender Goblin Laurie Penny and tucking it away for future use.

I gave up one episode into S02 of Picard
As I said during season one:

The inconsistency and contradiction of what Dahj and Soji are meant to be – from one episode to another, and even within the same episode – is a measure of the series’ standards more generally… Why does this happen, why this choice? Why does this character behave in this way, despite what we know, despite what they know? Because the script says so and this is the best we can do. Basically, the thing stumbles from one clumsy contrivance to another, leaving behind (and promptly forgetting) a jumble of glib and bewildering narrative choices. Which may explain why the particulars of each episode are often hard to recall.

So much of Kurtzman’s zombie-Trek has the same signature – lots of ‘member-berries and inept retconning, and not-quite-right references to older, more popular iterations, and lots of half-written story threads stapled together with little if any relevance or thematic coherence or adequate resolution. It’s often just a pile of unrelated ideas, many of which are almost immediately forgotten about, or which quite literally go nowhere. It’s as if the thing were written via a game of Chinese whispers, with the writers seemingly unsure of what happened in previous episodes.

What’s really hurtful to blacks is that Europeans were having a perfectly good Renaissance without any black input and without giving any thought at all to blacks.
I question whether it is hurtful to blacks at all. The people concerned are inevitably white with a fairly obvious agenda.
There are similarities to the famous case of Beachy Head Lady, an ancient skeleton from the 2nd century AD found on the south coast of England and pronounced to have been of sub-Saharan ancestry thereby causing considerable excitement to the likes of the bbc.
It transpired that this was based solely on the opinion of a certain Caroline Wilkinson from Dundee University, one of the country’s foremost reconstructors. “Straight away on seeing this girl’s skull, Caroline said, ‘oh my, you realise you’ve got a sub-Saharan African here?’”
DNA analysis proved that the lady came from Southern Europe, probably Cyprus.

“The claim that Cleopatra was black, and that the Greeks stole their philosophy from the (black) Egyptians?” from Alexander the Great (died 323BC) to Cleopatra’s death in 30BC (ie 300 yrs), Egypt was ruled by Greeks and Alexandria and its famous library were greek. So when one reads that some greek philosopher visited “egypt” and learned something…he was still in a greek domain and speaking greek.
So much easier for radicals to make shit up when they are ignorant of history.
Soros and the dems hate america, and hate civilization. They favor mob rule and destruction. It is a death wish. Not clear how or if they think they will come out ahead from all this. An indication is how they cheered when rioters were burning down mostly black neighborhoods in 2020, 2021.

Soros and the dems hate america, and hate civilization.
Nihilism.

FFS.
“When babies are born the dr looks & makes a guess…”

While we’re on the subject of orcs…

The latest release of Firefox changed the default monospace font (used in comment boxes on many sites) from Courier New to Consolas.

Thank you. I made the change back. Far easier on the eyes.

Someone with a knife should not be shot if he is many feet away from anyone.
I’m guessing you’re not familiar with the Tueller Drill.
Police have an unenviable job: they must simultaneously be soldier and social worker, in an environment not entirely unlike a VC-infested village. They’d have to be paragons to square that particular circle, and they aren’t. The result is that they err on the side of (their own) safety, and treat everyone as a criminal, either potential or realized. That’s not good for policing and it’s not good for the citizenry.
the ham-fisted, obnoxious, and immoral politics has been brought to the fore
Despite being only 13% of the population, Cheronians with black on the left side of their faces commit 52% of crime against Cheronians with white on the left side of their faces.
The only difference between old Star Trek‘s ham-fisted, obnoxious and immoral politics and Picard’s ham-fisted, obnoxious and immoral politics is that they’re not even trying for allegory any more.

Polymorphous perversity ! To say nothing of the Exporto Grass. Shades of Sellar and Yeatman.

“The result is that they err on the side of (their own) safety, and treat everyone as a criminal, either potential or realized. That’s not good for policing and it’s not good for the citizenry.”
There’s a very good podcast called Writer’s Detective Bureau, run by a California police officer, who answers questions about police procedures. He did one episode in which he discussed how officers are conditioned to sit in restaurants facing the door for their own safety. He’d been on dates when he asked the woman to switch seats, even though he’s in plain clothes, because he was uncomfortable feeling so exposed.
(He also went into the various conditions of awareness, from white when you’re at home, to yellow which you should be everywhere else, to black when you’re hyperfocused on the perp to the exclusion of all else.)
The point, though, is that police officers have to behave in a certain way in public, and expecting them to risk their lives otherwise is unrealistic.