Lowering Costs of Families’ Everyday Expenses. More People Are Working Than At Any Point in American History. Making More in America. Rescued the Economy and Changed the Course of the Pandemic. Rebuilding our infrastructure. Historic Expansion of Benefits and Services for Toxic Exposed Veterans. CHIP Act
You’re not wrong, but the comparison I like here is Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She wasn’t just doing her job well, she was one of the best Supreme Court Justicies EVER.
She didn’t resign when the time was right, and as a result she died under Trump, a republican got her seat, and all the great things she did were swiftly demolished, wrecking decades of work over one single mistake: Not knowing when to step down.
Now I know the situation isn’t perfectly comparable. But if Trump gets in, then every good thing Biden has done will be swiftly undone. This was a hellish dilemma, but if Biden wants to do his job well, he needs to do that by not letting Trump into the White House again.
My mom doesn’t like when I talk about how badly RBG fucked the people she legitimately worked so hard to uplift and protect, in my opinion because of her ego. I hold very little resentment because I understand wanting to personally preserve your legacy, but that motivation seems to fail more often than allowing someone else to preserve it for you.
Except he was failing at the most important job - stopping another 4 years of Trump. And yes, that’s partly the media’s fault, but it’s mostly Biden’s fault. Trump’s debate performance matched what could’ve been predicted pretty closely, and Biden failed to rebut Trump effectively and often seemed to help Trump argue against himself. For example, they should’ve easily foreseen that Trump would do the weird brag about his cognitive test scores. Why was there no response to that? Why not demand that Trump produce the results instead of just brag about them, or point out that nobody asked or is impressed by his ability to read a clock? There were like 50 opportunities during that debate for Biden to end Trump’s whole campaign, he missed each one.
Clearly this was unacceptable, and I hope the next candidate dispenses with the vast majority of Biden’s election team.
IMO, as an outsider, he has done a great job.
Among many successes that have drifted across my news feeds, he has also excelled past the really low bar of “not making a mockery of the US”.
That statement is not exclusive from the statement that “Biden should not run again”.
It’s 4 years later. And he would have to do another 4 years if he won.
I know presidents are more than just a person in the same way a ship can’t sail with only it’s captain. But strong leadership is going to make everything easier.
And Biden is old.
It’s really a good move. At this point any person under 70 could mop the floor with trump, he’s still the worst possible candidate from any position, and the GOP has had zero time to poison whoever gets the nomination.
Yup. Kamala is also not a bad pick because republicans are almost certainly going to start with racism/sexism as their first attacks “Oh, she’s DEI”. Given trump has been trying to court the black/Latino vote, this will play against him.
Further, Kamala will be able to excellently push him on abortion. Biden really sucked at advocating for women’s rights even though that’s been a winner pretty much every time it’s been the focus of a campaign (there’s a reason Rs have backed away from mentioning it).
It’ll still be close and there’s still a lot of unknowns. However, I for one think this is the right move.
It’s pretty hard to argue against the same reasoning that pushed Biden off the ticket. He IS too old, and clearly struggling, you put someone in their 40s and 50s across from Trump, he will look as badly as Biden did.
Dosen’t matter, if you convince people to say a old candidate who can’t speak reasonably well is absolutely a danger to the country, you aren’t unconvincing them of that now that Trump is the old confused rambler on stage.
Election law expert Richard Hasen wrote that there is “no credence” to the notion that the Democratic Party could not legally replace Biden on the ticket, as he is not the nominee yet – the nominating process generally takes place during the Democratic National Convention.
Fuck yes you mean! I’m joking, I can see how this is scary and it is risky to an extent( although way less than Biden staying in imo). Here is what I would consider about this though as a positive:
I think this will at least partially reinvigorate the voting population
I don’t know this of course but personally I haven’t been excited about pretty much anything happening in politics in a while. I am actually excited and they haven’t even picked a new nominee yet. Harris would be my least popular pick but if they pick her I will be way more happy/motivated about voting. I hope this pumps some blood into voter turnout.
The St. Joseph Police Department, meanwhile, ignored evidence pointing to Michael Holman — a fellow officer, who died in 2015 — and the prosecution wasn’t told about FBI results that could have cleared Hemme, so it was never disclosed before her trials, the judge found.
Evidence presented to Horsman showed that Holman’s pickup truck was seen outside Jeschke’s apartment, that he tried to use her credit card, and that her earrings were found in his home.
So a cop was suspected in the murder but the PD framed an innocent woman?? Jfc.
I’m generally opposed to capital punishment. But in cases where cops or prosecutors are involded in committing a murder or covering it up, there should be an exception.
I have a problem with the state executing its citizens to exert control through violence.
I don’t have a problem with those inside of our government being killed as a show of good faith to the citizens when someone decides to use the power given to them by the government to violate other people’s rights. If we’re going to fight wars to protect our society from foreign enemies, we should be willing to use the same level of force to protect it from domestic enemies.
No ordinary citizen, including most government employees, should ever be subject to capital punishment, no matter how heinous their crimes. Police, military, politicians, and other government officials on the other hand should face that possibility when they abuse their power and violate the rights of citizens. The government should show exactly how little tolerance there is to the government being misused for criminal ends.
Of course, this is all too late. American society will never work this way.
I’ve witnessed this first hand from the hiring side for an IT position. I was going through resumes with my boss and he straight up said, “I don’t want any hispanics, I want a white guy.” while tossing anything with a hispanic name to the side without even looking beyond that. This was in Orlando in an area with a large hispanic population. The kicker is that my boss was actually hispanic himself!
I wasn’t expecting that. I would understand that there a slight positive involontary bias towards candidates with a familiar-sounding name, but such shameless behavior is astonishing
That’s not that surprising, if their Hispanic boss was from Cuba, they’re probably a conservative and consuming a lot of right wing propaganda. I know a conservative Puerto Rican who’s afraid of the ms13 gang. He lives in rural NJ.
The kicker is that my boss was actually hispanic himself!
In the UK we call that racist taxi driver syndrome. A lot of immigrants come to the UK and because it’s a good money earner, or at least because they think it’s a good money earner, they tend to buy a taxi.
Anyway you get in and suddenly they start telling you about all their world views, usually it’s along the lines have there been too many immigrants. Even though they are an immigrant themselves.
Very much a case of shutting the door behind themselves.
Haha so true. I remember some my friend’s family going on about how we should all vote leave because of all the immigrants.
Mate, you were born in Napoli. You’re as Italian as spaghetti. I’m not that kind of British person and, as far as I’m concerned, you’re more than welcome here but you’re the “immigrant” you hate so much. Not only that, your that being that person while banging on about how bad immigration is to a group of very obviously white native British people. It was just the most bizarre thing ever.
He still has an accent.
I genuinely wanted to be like “but we like you.” I don’t think that would have gone down very well though.
I’ve spent too much of my life not speaking up at all. Then, I finally achieved speaking up by summoning anger and fear to motivate me. But my presentation is harsh and unfriendly.
My challenge now is to learn to disagree, when it needs to be done, but in a friendly and respectful way.
This is actually really fascinating to me, the idea that citizenship/nationality is a bigger factor in how you feel and that race isn’t a key factor. It tells me maybe society (globally, generally) is getting less plainly racist, but anxieties around nationality (and what that could indicate about individual attitudes and intentions) is obviously rising and taking its place, so racism ends up being obliquely adjacent to the more direct fear of the state. In other words, general society is making progress with being comfortable with people of different races, whereas country of origin becoming more worrying and slowing down progress.
What a strange disconnect there. We don’t fear individuals, we fear what they represent.
(I ate a gummy an hour ago tho sooooo I feel like I’m just stating the obvious so … Maybe?)
Exactly, that’s why I qualified that statement with the terms “generally” across the globe and also distinguished being plainly racist (which I view as hate because of race itself, stereotypes at individual level) from racism that seems to primarily precipitate from fears of or for the state (hate because of the larger stereotyped idealogies or propaganda of that person’s race, whether or not an individual espouses them).
I am not Black, this is true. I primarily worked my hypothesis out from a purportedly Chinese person saying they wouldn’t trust the hiring of people from China. Now, their comment does seem to have a racist component. I don’t know to what levels internalized racism is related to geopolitical fears, but if we consider that this Chinese person is likely not racist to themselves, e.g. hating their individual attributes, we can assume that they are not wary of the Chinese person for being Chinese. Their mistrust in the state makes them so wary they can’t even be supportive of hiring people from China, in what I assume is the US. It seems like racism is only secondary to the primary fear of the state (or some geopolitical facet), the racism coming from a position of self-preservation rather than overt hate of the race.
Fear is going to be the death of us.
Also, I am high and pretty sure I just took the scenic route in describing xenophobia. Shit tits.
And it sounds like you are still overlooking all of the qualifiers and nuance in my nonscholarly, inebriated statements. In neither post did I assert “society is not racist.”
Just when you are a member of a minority, communicating to others of the same minority feels weird.
Along patriotic lines - either you are a bit less real than them, or they than you, first.
Second, more importantly, among certain minorities some people trust “their own” more for business, employment, anything, and thus there are scams based purely on that.
Third, with people of a bit different background you are more eager to give some benefit or doubt or something when they show their personal downsides, with people of “your” group those downsides are much more infuriating and there’s a fallacy of presuming you understand them better.
There absolutely are. The ownership of the company I work for is of a particular nationality, and every single time we have been given counterfeit bills as payment it has been from another member of said nationality, which the owner thinks is one of his “buddies.”
Every time.
And it’s usually those same guys trying to rip us off in other ways, too. I keep telling him that these motherfuckers are trying to take him for a ride about 75% of the time and it’s plainly visible from an outside perspective, but he won’t hear it. They’re his countrymen. (No, I won’t say which nationality.)
You won’t, but being Armenian (EDIT: by heritage, but not so much by immersion, so especially prone to meeting such attempts), I’d guess they are either Armenian or Georgian or maybe Jewish.
Are Latinos over represented in your company with respect to the population? That would be a defensible position for your boss on this. I mean if you had 85% Latinos that could be taken as evidence of some sort of ethnic bias in favor of Latinos.
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
-1 Timothy 2:12
This is why I hate the “these aren’t real Christians” no-true-Scotsman dismissals.
The Bible is a toxic book full of misogyny and racism. Sure it has some good stuff in there, but when the founder of Christianity* is so clear about his thoughts on the subjugation of women then these are Christians following the teachings of their religion.
Christianity is only compatible with the modern world when it is so diluted by humanism that it would be unrecognizable by its founder; that’s why reactionaries are working to change the world instead of updating their morality. They want power over people, and enforcing their backwards ideology is their path forward.
And Paul was the founder of the religion; Jesus didn’t expect the world to last longer than the lives of his disciples
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship questioned the authenticity of the letter, with many scholars suggesting that First Timothy, along with Second Timothy and Titus, are not the work of Paul, but of an unidentified Christian writing some time in the late-first to mid-second centuries.[5]. Most scholars now affirm this view.[6][7]
It turns out that most of the NT passages that have been used to repress women use grammar and vocab that suggest they did not actually come from Paul. And in fact they are a hundred years newer than the letters that do appear to be authentically from “Paul”.
And Paul was the founder of the religion; Jesus didn’t expect the world to last longer than the lives of his disciples
Paul expected the world to end too. That’s why he suggested that everyone should be celibate. No point in getting married and having children if the world is just going to end anyway.
That is a great point about pseudopaul. I had forgotten that this letter’s authenticity was questionable.
However there are practically no evangelical groups who would agree with modern scholarship on the subject, so my larger point holds: they believe that Paul instructed women to be subservient and silent.
Also, as far as I can tell, Paul was one of the ones who shifted Jesus’ prophecy about his coming kingdom from that of an imminent apocalypse to a prediction about the rise of the Christian church. While he did believe that the end of the world was near, so do a huge swath of Christians today.
I’m not sure about the value of questioning the authenticity of something that has been canon for almost 2000 years. It’s like quibbling about how the Latin translation of the Old Testament doesn’t match Hebrew sources.
Who cares which misogynistic jerk wrote that passage? It’s been part of the bedrock of the faith of countless generations of misogynists since then.
All I’m saying is that, for Christians, the text of the Bible has been mostly locked down since the Vulgate Bible at around 400 AD. The content is what it is, and is the basis of the faith.
At this point it doesn’t matter if someone mistranslated the Hebrew, misquoted Jesus, made Jesus up entirely, or forged an epistle. It’s been in there for 1600 years and it’s authenticity or accuracy is moot.
Arguing about the origin of 1 Timothy is like arguing about the colour of the wings on the fairies that live at the bottom of the garden. It’s all made up rubbish anyways.
I’m just an ex-Mormon agnostic atheist, and you’re absolutely right, and trying to say that the hardliners are not “Christian” is overlooking a well-established tradition of Christianity being shitty. They are perfectly within “scriptural authority” as they understand it and as their ancestors have understood it.
On the other, there is room in the historical record and scholarship of the Bible as historical text to make a case for an evolving faith that can forge a kinder path, and I think many of the remaining protestants in Europe and “mainline” Chritian churches in America try to to this to one degree or another. Unfortunately, they are all much too content either to humor the fundies, maybe because many in their own congregations would pick that theology if forced to choose explicitly, or else they “No True Scotsman” the hard liners and count themselves done with it.
If you are a Christian who believes that your God is kinder than he is described, then assert that confidently. Make a place in the world. Assert that your Bible is a flawed documentation of an evolving faith tradition. If you can’t do that, and most of them can’t because they fear the Southern Baptist Convention might be right, then you have to live with being conflated with those who think Iron-Age nonsense and cruelty should be the basis for a modern society.
Besides, that isn’t even an appeal to tradition, because they aren’t arguing that something is correct because it is traditional, but rather specifying that the tradition is de facto practiced and accepted.
The existence of Project 2025 makes all of the “which candidate is better?” discussion completely irrelevant. If you support the people that support Project 2025 then you’re a bootlicker who wants to end popular representation in the government and replace it with authoritarianism. If you are vocally against the people who oppose Project 2025 then you are collaborating with the enemy.
Not wanting biden to commit genocide isn’t collaborating with the enemy, that’s what you’re doing by shutting down discussion of that. Republicans want more Palestinians dead, and you’re helping to give them what they want. What’s so cool about genocide that you think people should shut up and just take it? What a cool smart moral guy you are, calling people bootlickers if they don’t quietly accept genocide
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pressure biden to not support genocide ffs. How are you all so on board for sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending thousands of civilians aren’t being slaughtered by weapons provided by our president? I’ll probably still vote for him, but you can go fuck yourself if you’re telling me I should stay silent about ethnic cleansing
You know what op was saying, them not specifically mentioning Israeli genocide doesn’t change that it’s clearly a response to that, telling people to shut up and stop complaining. Pretending to be sly about it doesn’t make it any less reprehensible
Your argument would be completely sound, if not for the fact that anyone who gives a shit about preventing genocide is trying to help Biden win the election. You, on the other hand, want to complain about genocide and use the awfulness of the genocide as an excuse to go ahead and make the genocide even worse. If you get Trump elected, he’s going to go after the West Bank too.
Very cool and convenient how you ignore me saying we should vote for biden bc otherwise it doesn’t fit your narrative of apathetic leftists not voting to own the libs. If you have nothing to say in good faith then fuck off, genocidal cunts like you are a waste of time to talk to
You hadn’t said you wanted people to vote for biden yet when I left that comment. Look at the comment history, it hadn’t happened yet in this subthread. Don’t hide your intentions and then get mad when people misread them. Be honest about your position from the beginning. And don’t start lying about other people in the same breath you actually start being honest about yourself.
What’s your tone going to be if talk like this is what gets tRump the win and speeds up the genocide? Since he’s the one calling for it and will do nothing to prevent it.
Still waiting for your answer. I’ll go out on a limb and guess you won’t answer, you’ll come back with some whataboutism or some other insult further proving you’re just a troll.
Biden doesn’t want to do anything about gaza, but Trump wants to bomb the west bank too. That means I support less genocide and you support not doing anything to prevent more genocide. That makes you a racist traitor.
I support voting for biden (barely) and I support telling him to stop supporting genocide. All you wanna do is pretend there is no genocide. That makes you a genocidal reactionary, and whatever I am it’s a fuck of a lot better than that :3
So you do oppose genocide? I thought you wanted people to shut up about it until after the election? If genocide is so bad you should try protesting it instead of telling people to be quiet about it
I am protesting it. I attended a rally last week, went to a meeting to schedule future actions yesterday, and have generally been very proactive about creating pressure on organisations to divest from Israel. I’ve been putting time and energy into actual solutions. You know what’s not an actual solution? Trying to make Trump lose by a narrower margin. There are no solutions in electoral politics, there is only choosing the lesser evil. Then you go out on the streets and you fight the lesser evil, and thank your lucky stars you don’t have to fight the greater evil.
You originally said ‘Biden is committing genocide,’ man.
Israel is acting unilaterally, there are no US troops on the ground nor US planes in the sky.
Biden is one of the people trying to get the situation under control. Someone else pointing out that trump says ‘finish the job’ is just adding context.
Who would people choose, the guy who’s trying to do something or the one who wants more killing?
Biden is literally sending money and weapons to Israel, while also sending aid. It’s hypocritical and dumb. You can’t do both and act like you’re doing the second one in good conscience.
Biden isn’t “committing genocide” and saying he is amounts to simple propaganda.
The conservatives want to take aid away from Ukraine to deliver it to Israel. If Trump wins, far more weapons will be going to Israel than they are now. Repeating propaganda like this is not helpful for the Palestinian people.
Lastly, Israel is an important ally from a strategic perspective. Not only are they our closest ally in the Middle East, but they have a number of important resources like intel semiconductor facilities. Cutting ties with Israel would be bad for America, and the role of the US government is to put America first. It’s more complex than simply supporting one side or the other and Biden is attempting to balance aid for Palestine with preserving our relationship with Israel. That’s exactly what a good president should be doing.
Biden is complicit in genocide, so much so that he should be tried in court with the rest of the people in the Israeli state. You can’t get much more complicit than sending weapons and aid to an apartheid state that is carrying out a genocide, without which they would not be able to carry out said genocide as effectively. A good president would divest and sanction Israel, not write a blank check for their crimes against humanity.
The claims of genocide are colored by propaganda and misinformation. Academic researchers are split on the issue, at best. The fact of the matter is that Israel could swiftly end all life in Gaza through overwhelming military force if that was their goal, and this has not happened.
I’d agree that Israel’s actions in Gaza are unethical but there is a stark difference between acting without regard for civilian casualties and outright ethnic cleansing. The evidence doesn’t seem to support the latter.
A good president would divest and sanction Israel
A good president would prioritize what’s best for America, which means preserving the favorable relationship America has with Israel. Meanwhile, a good president would provide humanitarian aid for Palestine and help negotiate for peace.
That’s exactly what Biden is doing and refusing to vote for him harms almost every party involved, including Palestine. Really, the only groups who would benefit are the far right and Russia… makes you wonder where comments like this come from, doesn’t it?
The claims aren’t colored by propaganda and misinformation… You can literally read the genocidal intent of Israeli government members and Knesset members. Some of them tweet it and say it out loud for the world to witness.
Just because they’re capable of doing genocide “better” doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it. That’s not an argument to say the thing we’re literally watching them do isn’t happening.
I think that your priorities are fucked if you care more about preserving this country’s relationship with an apartheid state than stopping a genocide by said apartheid state.
Also, quit implying that my comments are right wing or Russian just because they have opinions that don’t align with yours. That’s such a tired trope. I could imply the same of you, but I’m choosing to engage in good faith.
The claims aren’t colored by propaganda and misinformation
They sure are. A great example would be the videos making the rounds recently about the Israeli drones supposedly making “crying baby noises” to lure people out. This is a classic propaganda technique, the videos are literally just a black screen with some background sound, the Israeli government could kill those people far more easily without such tactics, and anyone who has spent time around drones regularly knows it’s extremely implausible at best.
It’s a blatantly obvious piece of propaganda that was widely accepted because people can’t pause for five seconds to apply a bit of critical thinking to their conclusions.
Just because they’re capable of doing genocide “better” doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it.
It means exactly this. “Genocide” implies a certain intent and this is a very strong argument of the absence of the requisite intent.
Also, quit implying that my comments are right wing or Russian just because they have opinions that don’t align with yours. That’s such a tired trope. I could imply the same of you, but I’m choosing to engage in good faith.
Well maybe you shouldn’t be pushing an agenda that benefits the Russians and far-right at the expense of the Palestinian people?
Honestly, you’re either a badly intentioned troll, lacking in some basic critical thinking skill, or simply willing to see far more Palestinians die for your ideals while you sit back in safety and watch it happen.
I’m done responding to you if you’re going to keep insulting me. Have fun continuing to deny genocide.
Edit: I am going to leave this here though for anyone who happens to come across these replies. This outlines some of the genocidal intent evidence from Israeli officials and soldiers. apnews.com/…/israel-palestinians-south-africa-gen…
And here’s a summary of the conclusions of a recent UN report regarding war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas. news.un.org/en/story/2024/06/1150946
Republicans have a shitty pre-election plan in the run up to every election. This isn’t any different than every other election cycle, from the perspective of “Bad Republicans promise to do bad things”.
Any other option is better.
The illusion of electoral choice is choking the life out of any actual democracy in this country. Time and time again, we’re told which party is The Worst and that Anyone Else Would Be Better. That’s how Trump won in 2016 ffs. Republicans doomed themselves to a decade of this manic fascist bumblefuckery by whipping themselves into an “Anyone but Hillary!” feeding frenzy.
If you are vocally against the people who oppose Project 2025 then you are collaborating with the enemy.
You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists!
The illusion of electoral choice is choking the life out of any actual democracy in this country.
Ok so what’s your plan to fix it? Because I have one: vote for people that want to improve the electoral system and against those that want to prevent it from improving. As much as Democrats are “part of the problem”, they’ve also been open to runoff voting, switching to a national popular vote, easier voting mechanisms, and other changes that would allow for third parties and better representation. Republicans, meanwhile, have been trying to prevent those changes, as they’ve done in 5 states now where they banned ranked choice voting.
To be fair though, Trump is more open to changing the electoral process. The only problem is, he wants to get rid of voting entirely and remove any option we have to prevent rule by wealthy oligarchs like himself.
I mean yes, the people who are pushing 2025 are literally using threats, violence, and the threat of violence (legal and extra-legal), so you are correct.
I’m getting tested for autism as an adult next week. If it turns out I am, who do I contact from the Autistic community? Or does a representative contact me? I don’t want to mess this up and I have a costume ready and everything.
I tried to think of a witty response to your funny joke but I’m apparently too tired for that, so instead, I’ll wish you good luck for next week, and the weeks that follow it; getting a diagnosis as an adult is often cathartic in the short term, liberatory in the long term, and in between those points is a long period of introspective untangling a web of messy feelings and possibly internalised ableism. I wish you the strength to endure and to emerge with a better understanding of who you are, regardless of the outcome of the assessment.
Jesus fuck, you need kinder people in your life. I hope you find affection at every level of your needs. Proud of you for seeking growth and self awareness. I have high hopes for you and best wishes.
Can you tell me your secret? I’ve been waiting 8 years for an adult diagnosis. It doesn’t really matter in the sense that I know I’m some flavour of ND, though. And I work in education, and people around me have been pretty accepting.
Secret? I don’t even know if I am neurodivergent, I am getting tested to figure it out, I have taken a dozen online tests of various efficacy and they all come up “borderline” so I am getting a professional diagnosis. It may also be a very strong case of CPTSD mimicking the effects of autism and/or ADHD.
Otherwise, I have been struggling my whole life with things that should be a lot easier for me, and if I DID have a secret, all my best successes and largest achievements have been a result of pushing myself out of my comfort zone and pushing into more challenges, not listening to my reasoning because my reasoning is flawed, our brains just tell stories to explain how we feel and those stories don’t necessarily have to make sense, it’s just stories to make you feel like the world makes sense. It doesn’t.
Understanding nuance of people’s feelings and emotions was always hard for me, so I pushed myself to lead more, to be a team leader or a project leader, and put an emphasis on instead of retreating from giving everyone personal attention, I leaned in harder always and have always made a policy to listen and genuinely be compassionate to others and exercise empathy.
I also pushed myself to do more public speaking and leading lectures, MC’ing social events, and giving speeches when appropriate.
In my last job I was afraid of failure because I have been laid off so many times in the past, so I paid careful attention to that worry about messing up, and every time I had that worry I did the exact opposite of what my gut was telling me. I got laid off from that job as well anyway, because that’s how business is now, but not before becoming a general manager and well-liked by hundreds of people.
The number of times I’ve put myself in trouble by resisting the “Safe” route is not insignificant, but each of those times has been easily navigated and more than rewarded by the successes which were a result of speaking up when I would normally keep quiet.
So your secret should be to value yourself. Even if you don’t feel it, act like it. Pretend you are valuable and important and people will treat you like you’re valuable and important.
This is a great comment but I think by “secret” they meant in terms of getting an appointment for a diagnosis, since they’ve been unsuccessfully trying to get one for a while.
Gotcha, remains to be seen… doctor hasn’t been very affirmative with me about what exactly we’re doing next week, I assumed from his language it would be a diagnosis/test but they say frequently it’s all “more complicated” than we tend to think, so the reason some people might have a hard time getting a diagnosis is because particularly as you get older a lot of conditions and symptoms kind of blend together and make certainty much, much harder, and it is sometimes more efficient to just focus on managing the symptoms no matter what the underlying cause may be.
I guess I’ll find out and try to update others as I go through the process.
I’ve got an appointment in a few months. No idea if you’re in the US but, if so, the secret is the same as everything in American health care - money, debt or navigating insane bureaucracy to get insurance to cover it. And, in my case, also traveling a long way to a place that does adult evaluations and scheduling the appointment nearly a year in advance.
Same thing could have happened to us, except we kept our 90 lbs GSD the fuck away from our newborn. “It could be any dog at any time” uh… no shit? Genetically it’s a fucking wolf. Use your fucking brains people.
If this sounds insensitive, well it is. A license should be required to possess both dogs and children.
I have both and agree with your statement. I had a paragraph typed up but it’s a lot to edit and it’s late. Call me lazy. The tl;dr version is supporting evidence for the dogs portion, and outlines that people need to have access to abortion, and/or screening on if they’re responsible enough to have kids. And now it’s a paragraph again. Ugh.
Yeah I love dogs and I really miss having some, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t glad we didn’t have one when the kid was born. Not only for the safety aspect and not having to deal with making sure the dog and baby were safe, but also one less layer of having to care for another being.
Fired after stating her empathy for the victims of genocide in Gaza, while accepting an award for her professional excellence. I think she might have fairly good grounds to sue.
No no, you’re wrong. The problem is taxes are too high and the people on the absolute top don’t get enough money. If we just make them a bit richer, the wealth will finally start trickling down on us.
Yeah, Florida just did it wrong. They're not having major farming and trucking issues because they scared away a bunch of immigrants. It'll work this time everywhere else.
The problem is that we aren’t sending enough money to the wealthy … we need to send them more money because they haven’t been able to trickle some back to us.
/s sarcasm, this is sarcasm if anyone is wondering
We had this happen in my town a couple weeks ago. Cop got called for a mental health check because a 19year old with a knife was acting erratic. Cop pulls up and gets out the car, the kid runs at him yelling “shoot me! Shoot me! Shoot me!” so the cop pulled out his gun and shot him. Didn’t go for the tazer or the his mace, just right to deadly force despite being called over specifically to prevent the kid from dying.
Cops should neve, under any circumstances, be called in for a mental episode. All they will do is escalate the situation and cause harm.
Cops should neve, under any circumstances, be called in for a mental episode
Yea I’m gonna have to disagree with you hard on this one. Just because you dislike police or have had bad experiences does not mean you should let someone having a crisis subject others around them to a very real possibility of imminent danger because “cops bad”.
Do police need more training? Sure. Do they need major reform in many areas? Of course. But are they all bad? No.
The mere presence of a cop, even without a visible weapon, will escalate any situation regarding mentally unstable people. Period.
If you don’t understand why a person going through a crisis would freak out when a figure of (ultimately violent) power appears right after they picked a weapon you have a serious problem with basic empathy.
For the record, I haven’t had any bad experiences with cops, in fact every interaction I’ve had so far has been either neutral or actually pretty nice. I’ve had my fair share of breakdowns as a teenager tho, and I can assure you that a cop would’ve never helped a single time. Even the nicest one.
The officers met with DMH personnel outside the residence who indicated that the DMH were called to the scene due to Yang’s erratic and threatening behavior. The officers were also advised that Yang did not live at the location, and had attempted to assault one of the DMH employees when they attempted to speak with him. Based on their assessment, DMH determined Yang was a danger to others.
In their efforts to assist DMH personnel, the officers requested additional units, a supervisor, and notified the Department’s Mental Evaluation Unit. Several attempts were made to communicate with Yang and encourage him to exit the residence; however, he refused. After formulating a plan and obtaining a key to the residence, the officers ascended a narrow staircase leading to the front door. The officers announced their presence and then utilized the key to open the front door. As they did so, Yang was observed standing in the living room several feet away, armed with a large kitchen knife. Moments later, Yang advanced toward the officers and an Officer Involved Shooting occurred.
Here’s the singular question:
What was the rush?
They needed to take him in, but they are afraid of him acting erratic and wielding a knife.
Why the fuck do they push to enter the building? There was no one in there. He could not hurt anyone while he remained hold up inside other than himself.
Why couldn’t they just wait him out?
By pushing to resolve the situation immediately and forcing their way in, they *exacerbated the situation.
I think they should have been called, but they should be there as backup in case someone is getting attacked. But no one was in danger here until they entered. There was no reason to push this. All they did was create a reason to kill him in self defense.
Because when someone is rushing at you with a deadly weapon, you may only get one shot, and not all ‘less lethal’ options are effective, especially on someone in a mental health crisis.
I agree that the cops never should have entered the premises in the first place, but in this instance they did and the victim had already been a direct threat to others. This one instance really isn’t a case of cops murdering an innocent person for absolutely no reason.
That really depends on how you look at it. They did murder an innocent person exactly because they made the wrong decision to engage in the first place. You can’t put yourself in harms way when it isn’t necessary then blame the danger you knew about in advance.
My opinion would be different if there was someone else in the apartment for them to defend, but there wasn’t.
One of my biggest complaints with police and why things escalate unnecessarily is because they are fucking impatient. They give “orders” and if you don’t comply immediately you are met with force.
They are insecure, poorly educated bullies. Everything makes sense once you realize this about police in the US.
In my town having gone and served in Afghanistan basically allowed you to become a cop once you returned states side. No degree or special training needed.
TBF, I’d rather a soldier show up at my door than a cop. At least soldiers are usually better trained in discipline, situational awareness, and appropriately evaluating threats. They are also trained on rules of engagement and usually aren’t terrified about every single engagement they find themselves in.
Maybe our police would be better if they received the same level of training as soldiers. And maybe that’s it. Soldiers are more confident in their abilities because they’ve received adequate training.
As someone who has been on the receiving end of one of these sorts of calls, please for the love of everything holy, shut the god damn fuck up. Truly you have absolutely no idea what the fuck you are talking about. Calling the cops in a situation like that is so incredibly dangerous and stupid and harmful, you should feel ashamed for defending it. Please rethink your beliefs.
Cops should never be called for mental health episodes
According to the report, the dude had already attacked a mental health worker with the knife. Yeah, it sucks that they were in a mental health crisis, but they were absolutely a threat to others.
The cops absolutely should have been there, but they should have only been there protecting the mental health workers instead of entering the premises and confronting him. .
According to the report, the dude had already attacked a mental health worker with the knife.
That’s interesting, because it’s not what the health worker said.
“He just tried to attack me and the father,” a clinician, whose face is blurred, says in the video as Min Yang, whose face is also blurred, walks into the conversation. “He became very aggressive. He tried to kick me. I walk away. He had some physical altercation.”
Also of note is that his father disputes that even that happened:
Min Yang added that he was standing between his son and a clinician and never witnessed any kicking or physical violence, only shouting.
Exactly how much training do you think someone needs to not unload a gun on someone within 10 seconds of seeing them? Somehow every other non-cop present managed to not use him for target practice.
The bastard in question is even a repeat offender:
Lopez had been involved in a 2021 nonfatal shooting of a man who had a replica firearm.
Cops are bastards because the non-bastards either get fired, harassed out, or murdered. Being nice to people while you turn a blind eye to the shit your coworkers do is still being a bastard.
At the same time you can call social services and you end up with them being dead instead because someone having a psychotic episode slashed/shot them…
Edit: Thanks for the downvotes, you can now take the time to go two replies down for a bunch of examples
Didn’t know Illinois and Kansas are Canadian provinces… Also I’m in Canada so not surprising that Google would provide Canadian results for the most part.
Cherry picking data does not a compelling argument make.
According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics in 2022 the total number of deaths for community and social services in the US was… 19. (That’s on page 8, in case you want to check.)
I found a CBS article from 2017 that cited another BLS study which said that social workers were the 20th most dangerous job category in the US, with a fatality rate of 1 per 100,000 people. That’s fewer deaths than architects and engineers, which was the 19th deadliest job.
On the other hand, American police have killed more than 1000 people . To put that another way, the police killed more people last year than social workers died of job-related causes in the past decade.
It’s really funny that by almost every metric you can think of, policing in the US is systemically flawed and needs major oversight.
You should compare the number per 100k for the people killed by the police if you want to make a comparison that makes sense
1000 out of 330 000 000, that’s 0.3 per 100k, looks like police officers are less deadly to the population than the population is to social workers!
Also very funny that you would accuse me of cherry picking data when only situations where officers kill people during mental health checks get reported on, right?
So you’re trying to normalize your ass-pulled estimate of the entire population of the US to compare it to the normalized full-time equivalent workers (which obviously isn’t the entire US population)? You can understand why using people who had no interactions with the police would be an inaccurate comparison, right?
My dude, until you get a better understanding of statistics I’m not going to engage with you further.
I never claimed it never happened. It’s just not something I ever recall hearing of. I spent 20 years in the medical industry and a few of those in the mental health space. I’ve heard of a lot of violence on mental health professionals but the characterization that the people I replied to didn’t fit with my understanding. I haven’t made it through all the articles but I’m still not convinced it’s a thing that happens enough to consider it anything but rare.
There are some police departments with salaried social workers and “community specialist” officers that are employed explicitly to deal with issues like this. The problem is that a change to law enforcement in this direction must come directly from each individual community and must be supported by those in charge of the local department.
This is tough. If it was just a sicko who generated the images for himself locally… that is the definition of a victimless crime, no? And it might actually dissuade him from seeking out real CSAM…
BUT, iirc he was actually distributing the material, and even contacted minors, so… yeah he definitely needed to be arrested.
In that case probably the strongest argument is that if it were legal, many people would get off charges of real CSAM because the prosecuter can’t prove that it wasn’t AI generated.
You suggested a situation where "many people would get off charges of real CSAM because the prosecuter can't prove that it wasn't AI generated." That implies that in that situation AI-generated CSAM is legal. If it's not legal then what does it matter if it's AI-generated or not?
That’s not quite what I was getting at over the course of the comment thread.
It one scenario, AI material is legal. Those with real CSAM use the defense that it’s actually AI and you can’t prove otherwise. In this scenario, no innocent men are going to prison, and most guilty men aren’t either.
The second scenario we make AI material illegal. Now the ones with real CSAM go to prison, and many people with AI material do too because it’s illegal and they broke the law.
This comment thread started with you implying that the AI was trained on illegal material, I'm really not sure how it's got to this point from that one.
To be honest, if it prevents that one guilty man from carrying out such high degrees of abuse to a dozen children, I can’t say I’d say no.
I want to stress that this isn’t sensationalist grandstanding like wanting to ban rock music or video games or spying on all digital communication in the name of protecting the children. It’s just the pragmatic approach towards preventing CSAM in an age where the “know it when I see it” definition of pornographic material is starting to blur the lines.
Why is that? I’d consider this equivalent to the (justified) banning of Nazi imagery in countries like Germany, Austria, Norway, Australia, etc.
No one is harmed by a piece of paper or cloth with a symbol on it, but harm happens because of the symbol’s implications.
“Authorized” AI-generated or illustrated depictions of CSAM validate the sexualization of children in general, and should not be permitted, in my opinion. If it enables real CSAM to continue, then AI-generated content is not victimless, and therefore I don’t think these hypothetical individuals going to prison for it are necessarily innocent.
It's not the specific thing being made illegal, it's the underlying philosophy of "Better a dozen innocent men go to prison than one guilty man go free" I'm arguing against here. Most western justice systems operate under a principle of requiring guilt to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and if there is doubt then guilt cannot be considered proven and the person is not convicted.
The comment I'm responding to is proposing a situation where non-AI-generated images are illegal but AI-generated ones aren't, and that there's no way to tell the difference just by looking at the image itself. In that situation you couldn't convict someone merely based on the existence of the image because it could have been AI-generated. That's fundamental to the "innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt" philosophy I'm talking about, to do otherwise would mean that innocent people could very easily be convicted of crimes they didn't do.
I guess we disagree on the criteria for innocent. I don’t see possession of such images as an innocent act, especially now that it is impossible to verify what is real or fake.
We aren't disagreeing because that's not what I was addressing in the first place. The comment I'm responding to, from Dave, reads:
In that case probably the strongest argument is that if it were legal, many people would get off charges of real CSAM because the prosecuter can't prove that it wasn't AI generated.
Emphasis added. The premise of the scenario is that possession of such images (ie, AI-generated CSAM) is not illegal. Given that, for purposes of argument, it follows that this would indeed be a valid defense. You'd need to prove in court that the CSAM pictures that you're charging someone with possessing are not AI-generated, in that scenario.
If you want to have a wider discussion of whether AI-generated CSAM images should be illegal, that's a separate matter.
AI can compose novel looking things from components it has been trained on - it can’t imagine new concepts. If CSAM is being generated it’s because it was included in it’s training set which is highly suspected as we know the common corpus had CSAM in it: …stanford.edu/…/investigation-finds-ai-image-gene…
If it has images of construction equipment and houses, it can make images of houses that look like construction equipment. Swap out vocabulary as needed.
Is a kid just a 60% reduction by volume of an adult? And these are generative algorithms… nobody really understands how it perceives the world and word relations.
It understands young and old. That means it knows a kid is not just a 60% reduction by volume of an adult.
We know it understands these sorts of things because of the very things this whole kerfuffle is about - it's able to generate images of things that weren't explicitly in its training set.
But it doesn’t fully understand young and “naked young person” isn’t just a scaled down “naked adult”. There are physiological changes that people go through during puberty which is why the “It understands young vs. old” is a clearly vapid and low effort comment. Yours has more meaning behind it so I’d clarify that just being able to have a vague understanding of young and old doesn’t mean it can generate CSAM.
But it doesn't fully understand young and "naked young person" isn't just a scaled down "naked adult".
Do you actually know that, or are you just assuming it?
Personally, I'm basing my assertions off of experience with related situations, where I've asked image AIs to generate images of things that I'm quite sure weren't in its training set and that require conceptual understanding to create "hybrids." It's done a decent job of those so I'm assuming that it can figure out this specific situation as well, since most of these models have a lot of examples of naked people and young people in their training sets. But I haven't actually asked any AIs to generate images of naked young people to test this one specific case.
My opinion here is that “naked young person” isn’t as simple as other compound concepts because there are physiological changes we go through during puberty that an AI can’t reverse engineer. Something like “Italian samurai” involves concepts that occur at a surface level that it can easily understand while “naked young person” involves some components that can’t be derived simply from applying “young” to “naked person” or “naked” to “young person”.
Well, I haven't gone to any of my image AIs and actually asked them to generate naked pictures of young people. So unless you want to go there this will necessarily involve some degree of theoretical elements.
However, according to the article it's possible to generate this stuff with Stable Diffusion models, and Stable Diffusion models have a negligible amount of CSAM in the training set. So short of actually doing the experiment that would seem to settle it.
I think a lot of people don't appreciate just how surprisingly sophisticated the "world model" that these image AIs have learned is. There was a paper a while back where some researchers were trying to analyze how image generators were working internally, and they discovered that if you were to for example ask one to make a picture of a bicycle it will first come up with a depth map of the image before it starts doing anything to the visual output. That shows that the AI has figured out what the three-dimensional form of a bicycle is based entirely on a pile of two-dimensional training images, with no other clues telling it that the third dimension even exists in the first place.
It’s interesting your bring this up. Not long ago I was having basically this exact same discussion with my brother. Baring you second point, I honestly don’t know how I feel.
On the one hand - if it’s strictly images for himself and it DOES dissuade seeking out real CSAM (I’m not convinced of this) then I don’t really see the issue.
On the other hand - I feel like it could be a gateway to something more (your second point). Kinda like a drug, right? You need a heavier and heavier hit to keep the same high. Seems like it wouldn’t be a stretch to go from AI generated imagery to actual CSAM.
But yeah, I don’t know. We live in an odd time for sure.
Except in the case of pornography, it’s an open question if viewing it has a net increase or decrease in sexual desire.
With legal pornography, it’s typically correlated with higher sexual desire. This tracks intuitively, since the existence of pornography does not typically seem to line up with a drop in people looking for romantic partners.
There’s little reason to believe it works the other way around for people attracted to children.
What’s unknown is if that desire is enough to outweigh the legal consequences they’re aware of, or any social or ethical boundaries present.
Studies have been done, but finding people outside of the legal system who abuse children is exceptionally difficult, even before the ethical obligation to report them to the police would trash the study.
So the studies end up focusing either on people actively seeking treatment for unwanted impulses (less likely to show a correlation), or people engaged with the legal system in some capacity (more likely to show correlation).
Holy strawman, Batman! Just because someone uses the term “gateway” doesn’t mean they think that games and weed are going to turn all people and frogs gay and violent.
First off, this is obviously a sticky topic. Every conversation is controversial and speculative.
Second, I don’t really see a lot of legitimacy to the “gateway” concept. The vast majority of people use some variety of drug (caffeine, alcohol, nicotine), and that doesn’t really reliably predict “harder” drug use. Lots of people use marijuana and that doesn’t reliably predict hard drug use. Obviously, the people who use heroin and meth have probably used cocaine and ketamine, and weed before that, and alcohol/caffeine/nicotine before that, but that’s not really a “gateway” pipeline so much as paying through finer and finer filters. As far as I know, the concept has fallen pretty heavily out of favor with serious researchers.
In light of that perspective, I think you have to consider the goal. Is your goal to punish people, or to reduce the number and severity of victims? Mine is the latter. Personally, I think this sort of thing peels off many more low-level offenders to low-effort outlets than it emboldens to higher-severity outlets. I think this is ultimately a mental-health problem, and zero-tolerance mandatory reporting (while well-meaning) does more harm than good.
I’d rather that those with these kinds of mental issues have 1. the tools to take the edge off in victimless ways 2. safe spaces to discuss these inclinations without fear of incarceration. I think blockading those avenues yields a net increase the number and severity of victims.
This seems like a net benefit, reducing the overall number and severity of actual victims.
Thanks for being honest and well-meaning. Sorry you’re getting downvoted, we both said pretty much exactly the same thing! A difficult subject, but important to get right…
“Does exposure and availability to CSAM for pedophiles correlate with increased or decreased likelihood of harming a child?”
If there’s a reduction effect by providing an outlet for arousal that isn’t actually harming anyone - that sounds like a pretty big win.
If there’s a force multiplier effect where exposure and availability means it’s even more of an obsession and focus such that there’s increased likelihood to harm children, then society should make the AI generated version illegal too.
How they’ve done it in the past is by tracking the criminal history of people caught with csam, arrested for abuse, or some combination thereof, or by tracking the outcomes of people seeking therapy for pedophilia.
It’s not perfect due to the sample biases, but the results are also quite inconsistent, even amongst similar populations.
I think the general consensus is that availability of CSAM is bad, because it desensitizes and makes harming of actual children more likely. But I must admit that I only remember reading about that and don’t have a scientific source.
I’m fine with it just being illegal, but realistically you could just ban the transmission and distribution of it and then you cover enforceable scenarios. You can police someone sending or posting that stuff, it’s probably next to impossible to police someone generating it at home.
Agreed. And props for making a point that isn’t palatable. The first one is complicated. Not many folk I talk to can set aside their revulsion and consider the situation logically. I wish we didn’t have to in the first place.
I taught in Louisiana in an open enrollment charter school. The charter system there might as well be legal segregation. We were around 90% black students, while the much bigger nicer test-in charter school that we were right next to and could see through our windows all day was like 95% white. Guess what school got all the money, athletic fields, etc. our school didn’t even have a gym in the decrepit 120 year old building that was falling apart around us. The two schools were supposed to share the athletic field between them when they transitioned from public schools to charter (post Katrina). The white school built a fence around it blocking access to our students.
The whole charter system was a mess the entire time I worked with it.
I want everyone to know the pain of seeing young black kids playing on our shitty little blacktop court yard with two broken ass courts like a fucking prison yard. And them being stuck behind that fence watching white kids run track, play football, soccer, just having a field. Before Katrina the two schools were a public middle and highschool that shared a sports field in-between them. Then the rightwing and left and everyone of them ghouls took advantage of a city crying for help and they murdered it. Fuck anyone that says a charter, private, or religious organization should take the place of our public schools, and get public funding. Instead of ranting I’m gonna type RANT🤬😤😠😥😮💨😢😞🤬🤬🫤😡🙄😥RANT RANT and y’all get it. I’ve been to the border wall between San Diego and Tijuana and it felt like that, people so close and completely shut away from me, and an oppressive presence watching over keeping you from taking those few steps to get close and talk through the barrier. I was young and naive still and thought that the civil rights movement won. I learned I was so wrong. Felt like Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider totally out of my element in a world I didn’t understand and about to be beat down by the realities of the deep seething malice under every action of the local and state government against the good and benefit of the people. Latoya Cantrell is a fucking criminal fucking off in Germany or some where that’s done nothing but criticize and mock and ignore the citizens of new Orleans while enriching her self through the office. She should be following trump in a corruption trial.
District I worked in has a “magnet school” - still public but you have to test to get in and it’s fairly nice - the rest of the schools are falling apart and literally violate fire codes with how packed they are. State policies let you transfer to whatever district you want.
So what happens is that (white, upper/middle class) parents will transfer their kids into the district to try to get into that school. If they don’t, they transfer to their home district. So the best funded school in the district doesn’t serve kids who live in the district. Only HS with a substantial white population.
Sleeping rough is eye opening. But the folks closest to the atrocities are inevitably the ones who have the least power to stop them.
Only remedy for that situation is the kind of mass organizing of the lumpen proles that hasn’t seriously happened since the 70s/80s. Thanks to mass surveillance, brutal policing, and a corporate state increasingly run by algorithms, its harder and harder to see a world in which a mass movement can emerge again.
Doesn’t mean folks shouldn’t try. After 40 years of digging our own graves, we’re in one hell of a hole. But the only way out is to start climbing.
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