Friday Ephemera (738)
At last, the ever-changing pronoun pin you’ve always wanted. || Loud chomping, heard from below. || The thrill of personal airbags. || Suboptimal situation. || Still a bear, madam. || Man cave, not bear cave. || He was not entirely cooperative, and then there was the business with the machete. || How to remove those whale skeletons from your ceiling. || Milky loveliness. || From 1963, a laboratory of smells and some educated noses. || She “felt God’s presence,” you know. || Unwell woman, one of many. || When you’re a little too into yourself. || A cunning use of cardboard. || At least the ducks were unharmed. || Odd dog. || Further to last week, more thrills of frog venom. || Big horse fart. The fart, I mean, not the horse. || Moths and butterflies. || And finally, in case you didn’t know, they unfold.
To be notified of new posts, you can follow me on X / Twitter.
To enable extra commenting options – including @username mentions, upvotes, and live notifications – scroll down to the black ‘Meta’ box at the very bottom of the page and click register. It’s free and quite painless.
Purple really isn’t Ron Woods’ colour.
And what’s he doing in Connecticut?
“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.” – Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
@JuliaM, who said:
You would think…
The problem is that you have two sets of people running on two entirely different scripts, based on the realities of the worlds they live in. Cop has a set of reflexes that say “This guy/girl isn’t doing what they’re told, they’re pulling something, here… SHOOT!!!” Average Citizen Guy/Girl is in the midst of this situation they’ve no reference for, and think “Oh, that nice Mr. Police Man doesn’t know who I am; I’ll just tell him, he’ll realize his mistake, and we’ll just get on with our lives…”, then promptly does something that presents as “uncooperative, threat”, and away we go with the folly.
Cops aren’t all that used to dealing with the usual run of non-criminal class citizen in high-pressure situations; such people generally only manage to blunder into those very rarely. Likewise, the average non-criminal has little to no reference or experience interacting with cops who’re in “shoot/no shoot” high-tension situations.
Criminals all do, which generally goes to explain why a lot more of them survive their encounters with police in these ambiguous situations. They know when to roll over and let themselves be handcuffed, when to follow the script. They don’t always do so, and that’s what makes policing so fun.
If you review a lot of the situations that lead to these things like the Justine Damond shooting, you’ll almost always find people from two different realities intersecting and tragically interacting. Ms. Damond had no idea that by doing what she did that she’d present as “threat” to the cop who shot her; he had no idea at all that someone with innocent intent would do what she did, no expectation. So, she tripped his reflexes as threat, and he did what he did… Which isn’t to argue that he should have done what he did, or excuse it, but to point out that what happened was due to the involved parties running on different scripts: Ms. Damond thought she was in the Andy Griffith Show, expecting Barney Fife, and the cop who shot her was thinking more the reality of Denzel Washington in Training Day. These two divergent belief systems collided, bang… Literally.
This is not a thing of right or wrong; it just is. As the cops are the ones with deadly force to hand, this is something they need to pay a lot more attention to, or they’re going to wind up with even more restrictions on their conduct and use of deadly force.
Well, you did say she’s editor-in-chief of Mother Jones so liar is implicit.
This. On my way to work one morning, in my nice, very low crime suburban, slightly upper middle class neighborhood, I make my usual left turn and my eyes were drawn to the figure of a cop, gun drawn, leaning against the corner of a garage. I can’t help but look there, it’s basic situational awareness. The cop, in his own high-pressure situational awareness gives me the dirtiest look. I just as instinctively resume my attention to the road in front of me and as obsequiously as possible GTF out of there. The cop’s reaction, in his context, was completely understandable. Given that I hadn’t even had my morning coffee yet, so was mine.
Reflecting on it, with any additional surprises that situation could have gone down real bad and in our own contexts neither of us could have been faulted for it. I often reflect on that when I read about things that have gone down in a combat infantry situation on a typical patrol in hostile territory. Especially what both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are dealing with in their ongoing urban occupations.
@WTP,
Consider the likely fate of the armed homeowner, seeing “something/someone” moving about the rear of their property, and then going to investigate…
You want to understand these situations, you have to look at the thing I always harp on about “simulation”: If your training scenarios do not include things like the odd armed homeowner showing up on-scene (which most do not…), then your training has poor fidelity with reality, and the cops are going to do what they’re trained: Identify and eliminate the threat.
Result: Tragedy.
This is a problem across society; you are seeing it now, with this story highlighting the same damn problem showing up in a totally different place in our social structure:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3168843/gen-zers-are-getting-fired-at-shocking-levels-heres-why/
This is happening because the schools do not replicate the reality that their graduates will face out in the real world. Those kids? Their parents failed them, because they raised those children in a very poor rendition of the world they’d have to live in. You wonder why those kids failed? Simple; they were products of poor simulation in their training.
You see it more clearly in the military. The US military usually does the vast majority of its training here in the continental US on these vast isolated training grounds, effectively in what we could term a “military vacuum”. This leaves people with the subconscious mindset that they’re going to be fighting on these clean, isolated and lonely battlefields, when the reality is… The actual places they fight are likely to be, at least initially, infested with civilians. This is why the SEAL team that went into Operation Red Wings in Afghanistan did not really have a plan for encountering child shepherds out in their area of operations; they handwaved the problem away, despite over a decade of people like them running into trouble because “shepherds”. Anyone even vaguely familiar with daily rural life in that region should have easily been able to foresee what they were likely to encounter on actual operational duty, but… They did not. Poor simulation at all levels led to this disaster.
Same-same with “less-special” military operations: The disaster of the 507th Maintenance Company in the opening phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom happened specifically because of, again, poor simulation. The 507th was a corps-level support asset, by doctrine. As such, the budget triage performed on their training budget was pretty harsh–The 507th and the vast majority of its members never served in a front-line divisional unit, one that actually participates in actual Army operations. The 507th’s idea of rigorous training was to set up their maintenance operation for Patriot batteries in their motor pool, also setting up tents and moving out of the barracks. They did not do “Army things” like moving in tactical convoys or performing defensive actions in such convoys; they literally did not know that such drills existed.
When they got to Kuwait, they were assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division as a part of the “corps support slice”, and the division and its staff really had not one clue that this company of maintenance geeks didn’t “do combat”. Why? Because the training simulation for divisional operations, the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, never, ever included such corps-level support pieces… Neither party didn’t know what the other didn’t know. Why? Poor and unrealistic simulation in training. The folks in the 507th meant well, but they’d never been exposed to the realities of modern war; they assumed, from the training they got and the budgeting that produced that training, that they’d never be called upon to move through an actual active combat zone. The folks in 3ID never had a clue, because they’d never dealt with such units, that the “rest of the Army” didn’t do that sort of training on a routine basis…
This is an endemic problem, everywhere in society. We run these scripts in our heads, due to our experiences brought on through training and simulation (which includes, ohbytheway…) entertainment. We then model our behavior in these circumstances on what we’ve observed in those piss-poor simulations, and then wonder how we wound up bleeding on the ground…
Oh, a catch-pole with a “soft rope”.
A good thought. However, animals don’t have hands and long arms, and they can be tricked more easily.