Friday Ephemera (707)
Incoming. || Incoming 2. || Incoming 3. || Early Chinese typewriter – with over 5,000 characters, not an easy thing to master. (h/t, Things) || Volcano tourism. || Dress in layers, they say. || Just in case you should need them, Controlled Demolition, Inc. (h/t, Things) || Daylight robbery. || Meanwhile, at Davos. || On being “educated,” a thread. || Or you could just press ‘defrost‘ on the app. || Pretentious guilt, level ten. || Our betters, perturbed. || Upside detected. || Today’s words are learning environment. || All-terrain wheelchair, built from scraps. || King of the jungle. || “Live who you are,” or rather, aren’t. || The thrill of duty-free. || It’s a family rave, for parents who can’t let go. || For fans of feet. || And finally, being a robot, she does not experience human emotions.
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Which isn’t to say that the 1964 Civil Rights Act itself doesn’t have problems that we suffer from today. Though to be fair much of those problems stem from the abuse the Federal Government has done to the Commerce Clause as a function of greater federal power grabs that accelerated after the Civil War. The whole thing gets so bloody messy whenever I dig into it, I get lost in the weeds but I generally end up blaming the railroads and Rutherford B. Hayes…Somehow. Wickard v. Filburn should have been a where things got worked out but that SCOTUS decision coming as it did in that sweet spot (foul spot?) between the New Deal era and early WWII doomed us.
I thought WASA Crackers were the guys who put men on the moon? No?
I was thinking about valorizing “feelings” and “lived experience”. One’s feelings can be terribly wrong in terms of the facts. Fat people often think others are looking at them with disapproval, whereas strangers generally don’t care. So their feelings are hurt for a factually incorrect view. Same with people who see racism everywhere. We see lots of posts here of people who think it is “unfair” that they have to work or don’t get praised, when IRL everyone has to work and most of us rarely get praise. Based on “feelings” there are so many running around angry and resentful for objectively BS reasons. Feelings are not a measure of truth.
Your truth or mine?
[ Ducks ]
Heh. I wonder if Terry Pratchett’s dwarf bread was inspired in part by those crackers (not to mention hard tack) or entirely by the varieties depicted in The Lord of the Rings.
I confess that I liked Ry-Krisp much more than Wasa, as the latter is rather bland. Come to think of it, there is very little real variety and character in the crackers found in most supermarkets.
Should there be a special correction booth for the “woke”?
Little Ease , Tower of London
Certainly a just punishment, but I was hoping for something comically appropriate.
Is our children learning?
More details:
“[Sahara Dula] mentors kids to stay off drugs” and “graduated from New England College in 2022 with a major in criminal justice and communications.” but “admitted to smoking marijuana” before the road rage incident.
She is known to the police, with a prior hit-and-run and an assault in a hospital, so it is guaranteed that she will never become a good citizen but will always be a danger and a detriment.
She boasted “F*** these cops – it’s a lesson to him and hopefully he doesn’t want to be a cop anymore.” Well, I hope she doesn’t want to be alive anymore: The world would be better off without her and everyone like her.
It turns out that if you have a primary source of pain, such as being abused as a child or sexually assaulted, then all of the little things hurt disproportionately.
Imagine that your humerus is broken, and your arm is not in a cast but a sling. Someone barely bumps up against your arm as they walk by.
That pain is going to put you on the ground, yelling. So you lash out at People Bumping Into Arms as the great evil in the world that must be conquered.
Strangers witnessing the encounter would wonder what your problem is that you’d collapse onto the ground over a little bump. They’d likely think you’re some idiot drama queen.
But the degree of pain you experienced was 100% real, and it would put anyone on the ground. It’s just that the real problem isn’t the bump, it’s your broken bone. You’re misattributing the cause of your pain as the behavior of others rather than recognizing it’s your own injury that’s the problem.
A lot of people complaining about microaggressions are people who have a broken bone (or three) that has not yet healed, so they are unable to handle the little things. They experience pain disproportionate to the offense, so they look ridiculous to us, but at the same time, they are blaming the wrong thing for their pain. They really do need to heal their insides, but that’s a project of years, and it’s hard to pull off, so it’s not like we can just pop off with “You need to look to your own problems,” and have it be effective.
ALSO.
The language of injury and harm is intensely useful for manipulative Cluster B types. Accusing their opponents of causing harm, thereby cowing normies into submission, lest they be thought monsters, is effective and also a lot of fun. When dealing with people one-on-one you can counsel them about how it only hurts because of a primary wound, but if it’s “sensitivity training” at the office, it’s probably not coming from the best of impulses.
I detected an urban accent among the students, who had adult voices. I suspect they weren’t so much confused as they were incredulous, and not at all interested in participating in her psychodrama,
In the interest of fairness or perhaps clarity, we have this: https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/1749062910188425262
Meh. I’m not convinced so much. I still smell a honey pot.
Another interesting little point about the “Patriotic Front” marchers, is that when they finished their march and loaded up their flags and banners and hoped into vehicles, those vehicles had blank number plates ! If you need a bigger pointer for “here be feds” I’m not sure where you will find one…
OTOH, if Patriot Front is real, everyone insisting that they’re feds is a good way to mess with them.
Something real needs to be connected to them. Arrests with convictions, like I say above, a fight or something with real consequences. Another possibility would be for some reporter type or undercover person (ooh, didn’t we used to have government agents who did this?) try to join their organization. Haven’t heard from any of James O’Keef’s sting operations in a while.
It’s the pain they can inflict, not a purported experience of pain, that motivates them.
They still need to be told that they must not lash out at good people. I’ve had some experience with supposedly traumatized people, and learned that being nice only brought abuse.
Hence my frequently expressed view that the “progressives” who exploit and weaponize these people–and criminals–are the greater danger and greater evil.
Once they get past a certain point, the pain crystalizes into a personality disorder, and then all sympathy is wasted.
More proof (as if you needed it) that the Supreme Court can be filled with cowardly fools. Another way to phrase that would be it’s filled with human beings who can, and sometimes will not, fail to do their duty. There’s a very recent decision from our current (2024) Supreme Court around Texas and the southern border of the US that fills me with the similar disgust that I felt when I learned of the Wickard v. Filburn decision.
Almost like owning a cat.
I would point out the differences between the handling of American citizens of German and Italian descent versus those of Japanese descent during WW2. I’ll point out that Japan (as was Italy) was an ally in WW1.
As for Emperor Hirohito, his insistence that the war was lost and that Japan should surrender meant that all of those Purple Heart medals that were created for the expected casualties for Operation Olympic and Operation Coronet weren’t needed then and have been available for use until ~2008 (https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176762 was my source, although it’s rather coy about the numbers).
OTOH, the Japanese are current removing themselves from the human race by not replacing themselves, so you may view that as justice delayed.
I’ve had some experience with supposedly traumatized people, and learned that being nice only brought abuse.
As a psychiatrist friend of mine used to say: it’s not a rabid dog’s fault that it’s rabid, but that doesn’t make it any safer to be around.
The grifting and riots have turned white attitudes from being very very accepting to being rather…less so
Well, that’s the entire point. There’s a reason every yt-injustice-to-black-ppl cause involves a white person who is behaving rationally and within the bounds of the law. There are plenty of actual abuse of police power cases with a racial dynamic out there, but when revealed they’re universally condemned. They can’t be used to stoke resentment between the races by getting people to choose their side based on a false narrative. Cultural Marxism isn’t about making anything better, it’s about destroying social cohesion so the violent revolutionary phase can’t be effectively countered.
Indeed.
Furthermore: Glenn Reynolds and other bloggers have been reporting for many years on abuses of police power, and suggesting solutions, but the left has largely been uninterested in rational solutions because they do stoke racial resentments, do not make it impossible for the police to do their jobs, and do not put more power in the hands of leftists bent on tyranny and societal destruction.