What You Wish For
Via pst314 in the comments, some intersectional complication:
The company’s founder, Brandon Anderson, is alleged to have embezzled a quarter of a million dollars to fund a “lavish” lifestyle, including an extensive designer wardrobe, international travel and glamorous holidays, and the renting of several mansions. Evidence of which was proudly uploaded to Facebook.
Bling, as I believe they say.
Masculine-presenting black people. Which perhaps tells us something about the company’s employees and the mental landscape they inhabit.
No laughing at the back.
The company in question, Raheem AI, is a chatbot app launched in 2017 with a stated mission to abolish the police and to replace them with “community-based crisis teams” and “liberated dispatchers” – namely, anti-police activists and likeminded social workers – who would respond to emergencies armed with bottles of water and lots of “social justice.”
I know. You’re tempted to invest.
And should this particular cake require icing, Mr Anderson was named “one of 100 Black LGBTQ Leaders to Watch” by the National Black Justice Coalition.
Leaders to watch, indeed.
If the trajectory above sounds a little familiar, readers may be thinking of this saga here, in which Ms Xahra Saleem, co-founder of the activist group All Black Lives Bristol, and an applauded statue-toppler, decolonised a charity’s bank account to the tune of £30,000. A sum subsequently put to use enabling Ms Saleem’s appetite for cosmetics, hairstyling, and takeaways.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
They deserve it good and hard.
[ Looks under sofa cushion for crumb of sympathy. ]
From the post on Ms Saleem:
And again, it’s curious how so many of these activist organisations, the ones shouting about how oppressed they are, and how downtrodden their demographic is, are run by people whose own behaviour suggests an alternative explanation.
Try sending them the pickled eggs.
Brains trust.
For Mr Anderson, I’m guessing vanity trumps discretion. Or basic foresight. Or, well, pretty much anything else.
He’s oppressed, you know.
Suckering wokies?
In their minds “masculine-presenting” and “psychopathic” are synonyms. Which reminds us of the grim truth that the anti-civilizational black gangsta culture can be found even among middle class blacks. (And I have seen statistics showing that the children of black middle class parents commit crimes at a much higher rate than the children of poor whites.)
Conspicuous display. A stereotype going back to the 60’s: The hood rat on welfare who drove a big luxury car.
Armed robbery in progress! Bring bottled water!
I am willing to bet that Nancy, the one worried about masculine-presenting Black people, is White while Jasmine, who turned his sorry ass in, is Black.
Well, it’s a nonprofit whose employees gratuitously announce their pronouns, and who regard as some kind of injustice the fact that criminal activity often results in arrest, or as they put it, “police terror.” And so, they’re “building a life-affirming world where police are obsolete.”
Hence the bottled water, obviously.
I think it’s fair to assume there’s quite a bit of unrealism and credulity to exploit.
In the end, everyone got what they deserved.
According to Google image search, this is Nancy. A slightly brown woman with teal hair. It’s possible that the slightness of her brownness – her proximity to pallor – may explain her hesitation.
A life-affirming world where criminals don’t get arrested?
It’s still not clear to me what, exactly, the organisation is supposed to do, or how their imagined utopia would be brought into being. It’s all rather woolly and glib, and oddly short on specifics. Even the links on the website are weirdly circular. But judging by the focus on those deemed sufficiently “black, brown, and indigenous,” I suppose it’s possible they don’t mind if white burglars and white carjackers continue to be apprehended.
So there’s that, I guess.
Indeed. For instance: There was a case in 2021 of a carjacker getting shot dead in a gunfight with the police. BLM expressed outrage until it was revealed that the carjacker was white, at which time they dropped the subject. (Habitual thug Bradley Michael Olsen, shot dead in Burnsville MN. Good riddance.)
The anti-police left in general wants all criminals to be immune from punishment, but their chief and ruling passion is shielding black scumbags from consequences.
And despite the woolliness and lack of specifics, and the implausibility of the stated mission, note the funding from the Skoll Foundation, the California Endowment, the California Wellness Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation, among others.
Better: Because criminals are dealt on the spot by victims and bystanders.
And criminals’ protectors are dealt with in a similarly strict fashion.
I’m trying not to, I swear.
Doesn’t that run up against the Chemical Weapons Convention?
Any fad dressed up in the garbs the of social justice is prime hunting ground for psychopaths. There are so many well-intentioned idiots who will take these predators’ words at face value.
Ooh, kinky….
Almost as if we should reject certain categories of behavior as a priori evidence that we’re dealing with a bad person. Loud claims of group victimhood, quick setup of a “charitable” org, calls to tear down the existing order, emotional dysregulation, and any other persistent Cluster B characteristics.
In this Jordan Peterson interview with Logan Lancing, they lay out the fundamental assumptions of the Left and explain in clear terms why it’s as toxic as it is appealing to certain people. I’ve been observing all this stuff for a long time, but Logan articulates it better than I’ve ever heard.
Note the doggie-bone pride flag.
Slightly related.
With a knick-knack, paddy whack . . .
Speaking of what you wish for, and a break from the usual insanity, and getting a jump on tomorrow, you know you want one if for no other reason than it pisses PETA off.
As a wee seedling, I kept an ants nest in one of those large sweet jars that were once ubiquitous in small corner shops.
Ah, simpler times.
When not watching ants crawling about in a sweet jar full of dirt, we passed the time with other traditional British fun-time activities, like Whose Shoes Are These?, Rattle The Box, and Jigger-Ma-Hoop.
Ah, simpler times.
Simpler times indeed, before Jigger-Ma-Hoop was banned by Health and Safety and Whose Shoes are These? banned for being racist against illegal immigrants who either had no shoes, or wore sandals. Sad.
Yes, in the lucrative stolen goods market.
It’s a shame. It really, truly is a shame that this opportunity is being exploited and the resources are being diverted from funding more of these social worker responses to the more difficult, potentially violent situations. Unlike many conservatives, I was looking forward to seeing social workers being sent into the breach as cannon fodder. What to do with all this popcorn?
From the post on Ms Saleem:
From the PostMillennial article:
It’s always bigger in the US of A….
While I wouldn’t want to encourage criminality, in general I am more than happy for hand-wringing liberal morons to be fleeced by chancers like Anderson. They might even learn something (although I am not holding out much hope).
IIRC without checking, a paddywhack is a ball of gristle that only a dog would eat.
I have no idea what that is, and an internet search returned zero hits. Does it date back to when Fred Flintstone was young?
[ Muffled laughter. ]
I wondered whether anyone would take the bait.
You bastard! I learned to refuse any food you offered, but now I must be wary of mere allusions which turn out to be illusory? [ Grinds teeth. ]
Hey, I’m up to my nipples in submenus and social media settings. Tormenting you heathens is keeping me sane.
Notable, although unrelated to the OP except in the most expansive sense:
Marine Corps study says units with women fall short on combat skills
I do not recall how many liberal women I tangled with over this issue, but it was more than a few and nothing I have heard about their current lives suggests that they are likely to have changed their views: What was it David wrote recently about progressives viewing ordinary people as mere toys to play with?
(found via the great Charles Murray.)
I’d offer you a glass of chilled wine and fruit juice, but I’d have to get out of this warm bath, put on clothes, and leave a trail of wet footprints all across your
nice cleanfloor.For those who missed it, somewhat related.
He’s a piker. BLM normally stands for Buy Large Mansions, not rent them.
Although these grifters are obviously fleecing their employees, it’s actually difficult to feel overly sorry for the poor deals. As P.T. Barnum put it, “it’s immoral not to separate a foolish man from his money”, and these nonprofit organisations are magnets for fools.
And not just fools, but self-loathing fools. You may feel conflicted about them being taken to the cleaners, but they aren’t.
People like Anderson pray on the gullible, and in social justice circles, gullibility isn’t merely a requirement, it’s held up as a virtue.
Somewhere the ghost of George Wallace is laughing.
What, no Dead Rat Conkers?
Heh. I’m now resisting an urge to devise rules for a game called Jigger-Ma-Hoop.
Just borrow the rules from Calvinball.
I mean, Whose Shoes Are These? and Rattle The Box seem fairly self-explanatory.
Once Around The Mulberry Bush Then Twixt The Wind And Water? That one was always fun.
We preferred tortoise conkers in my day
I was in Belgium last weekend and while wandering around a park on Sunday afternoon came across a group of these ‘puppy players‘. Definitly comes under the ‘do what you want in the privacy of your bedroom, but don’t frighten the horses’ category
“Rattle the Box” was the first track on “Whose Shoes Are These” by The Dead Rat Conkers.
As a connoisseur of table games from a variety of cultures, I assumed all three games existed and were variants of Shoe Relay, Shut the Box and Cock-a-Hoop.