They tried. There's a scene where he's handing out nuts or chocolate or something to troops as they walk by him. There's a scene where he does the Henry V thing of rallying his troops on horseback right before battle. There's a scene during the Hundred Days where he talks a detachment of Royalist troops pointing guns at him into switching sides and supporting him, but by then you've either bought into him as a charismatic leader of fighting men, or you're as mystified as the reviewer you're quoting.
That's not to say there aren't interesting personality shifts! There are! But they have to do with Josephine, which is why I think this movie is trying hardest to be a love story.
Saw it last night. My initial impression was being overwhelmed by the spectacle of the battles and the palaces and the costumes. Scott is very good with those sorts of things -- you can dig in to a Ridley Scott film frame by frame on your Blu-Ray and zoom in and find fantastic details. (My favorite example of this is the inscription on the hilt of Oliver Platt's ceremonial sword in Gladiator.) But I largely agree with this review and Rufus', upon reflection. The story lacked focus.
They could have narrow-focused on Napoleon's military prowess -- go on a walk with him from Austerlitz to Waterloo. They could have told an epic love story.* They could have told a story of a man who was ultimately destroyed by his own narcissism, the same force that built him up.** They could have done a cradle-to-grave biopic that taught us new facets of Napoleon's life the way, say, Rocket Man taught us not-so-well-known things about Elton John. Instead they tried to do all of these things and didn't really succeed at doing any of them.
It's a big movie, technically well-made. It's too big for its own good.
* Narrow-focus on The Hundred Days. Napoleon returns from Elba, re-takes power. Weave in flashbacks of their tumultuous relationship. Only after hastily assembling the greatest army France has yet fielded does he learn that the great love of his life has died. Inconsolate, distracted, and questioning the value of his own life with her gone, he is dashed to destruction at Waterloo. There's a story for you.
** And you wouldn't even have to say a word about any modern cognates to such a story.
I believe this with zero difficulty, it seems so intuitively obvious as to be inevitable. A switch to single payer is exchanging one set of headaches, frustrations, failures, and stresses for a different set of headaches, frustrations, failures, and stresses. As would any other system someone might care to proffer.
The question is whether one system offers marginally less headaches, frustrations, failures, and stresses. And picking between two bad systems to identify which is less bad is not something people generally do very well.
Legalizing marijuana was once a fringe platform too. It takes a generation or more of pushing at the margins of culture, changing a few minds out at the margins. And then, like all cultural change, years and years of gradual work suddenly result in attitudes shifting all at once. For sex work, maybe that'll happen when we're all in our golden years.
Or maybe not; Puritanism runs deep in this country.
Something similar is underway in Portland, where there is a significant challenge to the progressive DA from within his own office; the challenger is running on a platform of explicitly "rebuilding" the prosecutor's office's relationship with police. An odd sort of thing for a person seeking the votes of homogenously-liberal Portlanders to campaign on, but people are frustrated with the prevalence of property crimes and visible homelessness.
IMO the police union threw a hissy fit when the progressive DA won four years ago and seemed to start slow-walking everything but response to violence. Which has left a lot of property crimes all but un-responded to, particularly vandalism and theft of cars. The homelessness results from the cartels flooding our streets with fentanyl. How much of that is the DA's fault? What is the DA supposed to do about either of those things? And there are groups of people, who appear to have downtown land developer money and organization, spearheading what purports to be a grassroots campaign against the DA. Maybe it's grassroots, maybe it's astroturf. It's hard to say in an effectively non-transparent political system.
But the general public doesn't get to express their dissatisfaction with the general state of affairs by voting on criminal organizations' strategic marketing decisions any more than they get to vote for police union leadership. So our DA seems to be in a bit of trouble: there's no other real way for Portlanders to express their frustrations but voting.
So it's no surprise to see evidence of similar sorts of frustration in the Bay Area, and many other cities too. I'd look for a lot of municipal turnover this election season, whether it's fair to the incumbents or not.
Okay, I think I get it. Bear with me while I rephrase to see if I have successfully understood.
What it seems like is going on is a randomizer is inserted somewhere into the algorithm and the AI makes decisions about what to do based in part on that randomization. This is perhaps analagous to non-rational impulses in a wet human brain, things like emotions or spiritual experiences (which may be the same thing but that's a different debate) or evanescent states of experience like hunger or sleepiness -- so that just as I might decide to do X when well-rested and emotionally content, given the same decision when deprived of adequate sleep and emotionally agitated from some recent but unrelated experience, I might do Y.
And given that like the human brain, an algorithm can be made heuristic, such that it adapts its future decision-making criteria in response to the accumulation of past experiences somehow identified as similar, the algorithm effectively re-writes itself over time and with the accumulation of experience, with the different experiences having been created through the influence of the random number generator carefully placed somewhere in the original programming.
At least, I hope I've got understanding of self-programming algorithms right. It's not my area of specialty but I appreciate the breakdown.
So like Two-Face in the Batman comics, the flip of a coin rather than the use of a rule or the application of reason governs decisions and resulting actions. The chaos, then, ultimately comes from that random number generator.
Lock him up with nothing to eat but boiled potatoes, fish, and steamed vegetables, and he’ll fill up just fine on 2,000 calories per day, maybe less.
This may be true, it may not, but it doesn't matter -- in most cases, even locking up someone isn't effective at restricting their dietary choices. A percentage of the workers at "fat farm" retreats get overwhelming incentives to smuggle in things like candy bars and potato chips and disrupt the carefully-structured diet because a corresponding percentage of the self-sentenced inmates quickly become driven to bribe them for these goodies.
But most of the time, for most people, getting locked up to restrict dietary choices is something so undesirable that no one will voluntarily do it and of course imposing that on someone without their consent would be monstrous. So nearly everyone is free to navigate their world on their own and that means constant temptation by purveyors of fast food (debatable quality, but high in fat and carbohydrates, generally calorie-dense, and comparatively inexpensive and easy to access), junk food (same), and dessert foods (same, except moreso). We are free, not confined, and for all the reasons stated when we are free our willpowers all eventually fail and we succumb to making bad choices. A small number of people can get back on the wagon quickly but it turns out that most of us don't.
Willpower just isn't going to do it. I've tried willpower and good food choices, I've tried ketogenic diets, and the social and biological forces described in the OP overwhelm me every time. I'm hopeful that Ozempic or some similar drug eventually becomes affordable and maybe that will supplement my willpower enough that I can stay on a weight loss journey for enough time to change the shape of my body in the direction that reason and logic and aesthetics tell me I ought.
They're legal to possess and consume here, and I think to grow for personal use, but not to sell commercially. Our "full legalization" is only for microdoses in a a clinical setting, with the theoretical clinics subject to a licensing scheme to be devised later.
How can a computer, controlled by algorithms, be anything but Lawful? It might be Good, Neutral, or Evil, but it is inherently subject to and controlled by pre-programmed codes from which it literally cannot deviate. Seems like the very definition of Lawful.
Also it seems he was suffering major depression. That can induce suicidal ideation. Compound a depressive episode with narcotics like psilocybin, and maybe the dude decides checking himself out is the least bad option he's got to resolve whatever problems look bigger than they actually are. Maybe the drug makes him, for lack of a better word, sort of forget that there's eighty-three other lives on the plane he'd be taking along with his own. Or something like that. I've never used psilocybin to experience what it does to cognition.
I was going to disagree with this, citing the fact that GOP lawmakers who have discretely admitted they have nothing actionable on either Joe or Hunter Biden nevertheless loudly crow about "New Evidence!" every week or so get amplified by the FOX and leave people like my ConservaBoomers quite convinced that the President is corrupt and his son is the money mule.
But upon further reflection, no, some sort of deal that brought those Nothingburger Inquiries to a close would be cited by those same not-beholden-to-facts lawmakers and amplified again by the FOX into "A corrupt deal to protect themselves and their corrupt leader!" and then it would just be more proof that the Democratic party (strike that, it'd be "Democrat Party," no "-ic" at the end to turn it into an insult) is all in on the grift. So yeah, I think just leave those open now, and await the hoisting upon the petard.
Let me walk back the "claimed" remark, lest it imply disrespect. You encountered difficulty, and I don't blame you at all for not wanting to wade through Trump's Twitter feed.
I'd prefer that Presidents not publicly comment on most individual law enforcement matters at all, precisely because a President's influence has so much potential to sway public opinion and alter the administration of justice. To the extent that there's pressure to comment on a matter under Federal jurisdiction, something like "I've spoken with the Attorney General about this, and urged her to see to it that justice is done in this matter," that seems fine. But getting in to the nuts and bolts of evidence? It's dangerous and problematic, for the reasons you note regarding Biden's comments about Rittenhouse's trial.
If I recall, the consensus we more or less settled on was that Rittenhouse's not guilty verdict was the right legal result; there's a reasonable doubt that in the moment he may well have been in legitimate fear for his life. I'm less inclined than several of you to cut him a lot of moral slack (differentiated from legal doubt) for that because it still seems to me that Rittenhouse knew he'd have a good chance of being put into that sort of situation, and continued to seek it out. And this is the sense in which I see a very substantial similarity to Reinhoel (whom I've condemned, not defended), and I hasten to underline that I'm making a proposition on a moral level, not a legal one.
While I realize a compare-and-contrast debate is inevitable having raised the example, I roughly agree with Jaybird: it's very interesting how the people who have offered moral exonerations of Rittenhouse, moral condemnations of Reinhoel, and undertaken to fact-check to poke holes in my condemnation of Rittenhouse (or to further condemn the undefended Reinhoel) are the more rightward members of our commentariat. (For instance, Pinky claims difficulty in finding evidence that Trump called for Reinoehl to be hunted. Here you go, Pinky, I refer you specifically to the last substantial paragraph of the transcript.)
Which is fine! There are arguments to make that Rittenhouse's case is different, on a principled level, from Reinhoel's; many have been made here. I've staked my claim for what I see as the substantial similarity.
The exchange sure suggests to me that Jaybird is on to something when he points out that the way we react to (among other things) the Israel-versus-Palestine conflict is powerfully lensed by our preferences. (Call them "priors" if you wish. At some point, Jaybird used the word "aesthetics.")
Preferences aren't logical, reasoned, or principled. But they're real and we all have them. Perhaps the way human beings actually operate is we pick our preferences first for non-rational reasons, then lens the evidence that we see to conform as closely as possible to that preference, and finally back-fill in reasoning and principle to back up the preference using lensed data. That's not a liberal or a conservative thing, it's a human thing. It's difficult for anyone to extricate their thinking from this tendency.
I'm almost certainly as guilty of this tendency as anyone else here. And if you're going to hold yourself out as making objective, reasonable, principled responses to things, it's useful for you to be aware that you're as human as anyone else and therefore subject to this sort of internal bias, a bias founded not on principle but rather upon preference.
The OP struck me as a 1,700+ word festival of precisely this sort of preference lensing on full exhibit. The pushback I'm getting seems to come from exclusively those with preferences different than my own. That's evidence that indeed preference is at play here.
Remember Portland Antifa member Michael Reinoehl who shot and killed a Trump supporter?
Yes. Yes I do. I also remember volunteer hunter-of-humans Kyle Rittenhouse. Not the same, of course, but there are some significant parallels. Both voluntarily inserted themselves into a tense and dangerous situation, with guns, claiming to have done so for the purpose of protecting others, and wound up killing other people.
One of the differences between them is Rittenhouse was captured by police alive, given a trial, and after visibly pretending to cry in remorse over what had happened, given every benefit of the moral and legal doubt in his favor. He is alive and a free man today, and now works the conservative lecture circuit bragging about the very deeds that he claimed to have tear-jerking remorse about during his trial. Reinhoel, on the other hand, killed half as many people, but was called out to be hunted by the then-President of the United States before any substantial investigation into the incident had taken place, and shot to death mere hours after his arrest warrant was issued. There's reason to doubt the police's story that Reinhoel attempted to shoot his way out of being surrounded by more than a dozen U.S. Marshals, Washington State Police, and local sheriff's deputies, including factually inconsistent police statements and third-party witnesses who said that the officers shot first and without provocation.
Another difference between Rittenhouse and Reinhoel is that Rittenhouse, at least by his own words, took it upon himself to go be a vigilante in defense of property. Reinhoel, at least by his own words, took it upon himself to provide security for BLM protestors, and according to his adult children who have filed a wrongful death suit against the police agencies who killed him, he'd received multiple personal death threats from Trump supporters before the fatal confrontation on Southwest Third Avenue.
Not a word of which morally exonerates Reinhoel. I say, even if he was provoked during a very sharp argument with a Trump supporter in a highly tense atmosphere he should have withdrawn from the confrontation. Instead, he shot the Trump supporter and that was absolutely 100% morally wrong. I don't write here to suggest otherwise. I write to suggest that Reinhoel's moral wrongness does not mean that other people are free from moral blame themselves, both before and after Reinhoel's bad act.
It's well and fine to point out that some people and even some press institutions view and judge current events through lenses of their prior assumptions and preferences, even when not all of the relevant information is available. (Come to think of it, a lot of us do that here too.)
But if you're going to condemn Michael Reinhoel, and not so much as mention Kyle Rittenhouse (even to attempt distinguishing them), then I think you're as guilty as the people you accuse of picking and choosing the bad things you want to condemn and the other, different, but also-bad things you prefer to ignore. And perhaps that's based upon, as @jaybird says above, aesthetics rather than morals, fashion rather than principle.
Fox News polls released Thursday show Biden narrowly beating Trump and narrowly losing to any of the other Republicans, at the national level. All within the margin of error. State-by-state polling isn't nearly good enough to take a 538-style forecast. And it's twelve and a half months until the general election.
But primary polling suggests Republicans are hellbent on re-nominating Trump despite this fact and Biden has beat Trump once already, and Trump is even less popular generally than Biden. Any Dem who is panicking right now is doing so without good reason.
No, it's not what he was on trial for (it was a murder that he admitted that could likely have been portrayed as self-defense). But because he didn't deny the murder, the prosecution focused on his lack of public expressions of emotion, most particularly when he didn't cry at his mother's funeral. This was used as evidence of his lack of remorse and compassion for other human beings. The result was where the defense attorney expected a light sentence, the court instead imposed a sentence of capital punishment. The distinct impression is that had the protagonist participated in the expected set of public emotions, he'd not have been sentenced to death.
It's great to see a lurker come out of the woodwork and join in the comments. Especially someone like you who really gets the spirit of the site. Glad to see you here!
RFKJr's vaccine denialism (you are too polite to call it "skepticism") has so overshadowed his prior liberal bona fides that while I know at least ten Trump-weary conservatives (most of them senior citizens) who have expressed attraction to him, but I know not a single liberal person who considers him with anything but contempt. He might be a Kennedy, but that doesn't mean Democrats will automatically like him.
On “Napoleon And The Spasmodic Lamb Chop of Destiny”
They tried. There's a scene where he's handing out nuts or chocolate or something to troops as they walk by him. There's a scene where he does the Henry V thing of rallying his troops on horseback right before battle. There's a scene during the Hundred Days where he talks a detachment of Royalist troops pointing guns at him into switching sides and supporting him, but by then you've either bought into him as a charismatic leader of fighting men, or you're as mystified as the reviewer you're quoting.
That's not to say there aren't interesting personality shifts! There are! But they have to do with Josephine, which is why I think this movie is trying hardest to be a love story.
"
Saw it last night. My initial impression was being overwhelmed by the spectacle of the battles and the palaces and the costumes. Scott is very good with those sorts of things -- you can dig in to a Ridley Scott film frame by frame on your Blu-Ray and zoom in and find fantastic details. (My favorite example of this is the inscription on the hilt of Oliver Platt's ceremonial sword in Gladiator.) But I largely agree with this review and Rufus', upon reflection. The story lacked focus.
They could have narrow-focused on Napoleon's military prowess -- go on a walk with him from Austerlitz to Waterloo. They could have told an epic love story.* They could have told a story of a man who was ultimately destroyed by his own narcissism, the same force that built him up.** They could have done a cradle-to-grave biopic that taught us new facets of Napoleon's life the way, say, Rocket Man taught us not-so-well-known things about Elton John. Instead they tried to do all of these things and didn't really succeed at doing any of them.
It's a big movie, technically well-made. It's too big for its own good.
* Narrow-focus on The Hundred Days. Napoleon returns from Elba, re-takes power. Weave in flashbacks of their tumultuous relationship. Only after hastily assembling the greatest army France has yet fielded does he learn that the great love of his life has died. Inconsolate, distracted, and questioning the value of his own life with her gone, he is dashed to destruction at Waterloo. There's a story for you.
** And you wouldn't even have to say a word about any modern cognates to such a story.
On “231 BPM”
I believe this with zero difficulty, it seems so intuitively obvious as to be inevitable. A switch to single payer is exchanging one set of headaches, frustrations, failures, and stresses for a different set of headaches, frustrations, failures, and stresses. As would any other system someone might care to proffer.
The question is whether one system offers marginally less headaches, frustrations, failures, and stresses. And picking between two bad systems to identify which is less bad is not something people generally do very well.
"
Will I'm immensely happy to hear you came out of that okay and that Daughter #2 is healthy and with her whole family. Including her dad.
"
Dude's my hero.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/30/2023”
Legalizing marijuana was once a fringe platform too. It takes a generation or more of pushing at the margins of culture, changing a few minds out at the margins. And then, like all cultural change, years and years of gradual work suddenly result in attitudes shifting all at once. For sex work, maybe that'll happen when we're all in our golden years.
Or maybe not; Puritanism runs deep in this country.
"
It is! It just doesn't feel that way!
"
Something similar is underway in Portland, where there is a significant challenge to the progressive DA from within his own office; the challenger is running on a platform of explicitly "rebuilding" the prosecutor's office's relationship with police. An odd sort of thing for a person seeking the votes of homogenously-liberal Portlanders to campaign on, but people are frustrated with the prevalence of property crimes and visible homelessness.
IMO the police union threw a hissy fit when the progressive DA won four years ago and seemed to start slow-walking everything but response to violence. Which has left a lot of property crimes all but un-responded to, particularly vandalism and theft of cars. The homelessness results from the cartels flooding our streets with fentanyl. How much of that is the DA's fault? What is the DA supposed to do about either of those things? And there are groups of people, who appear to have downtown land developer money and organization, spearheading what purports to be a grassroots campaign against the DA. Maybe it's grassroots, maybe it's astroturf. It's hard to say in an effectively non-transparent political system.
But the general public doesn't get to express their dissatisfaction with the general state of affairs by voting on criminal organizations' strategic marketing decisions any more than they get to vote for police union leadership. So our DA seems to be in a bit of trouble: there's no other real way for Portlanders to express their frustrations but voting.
So it's no surprise to see evidence of similar sorts of frustration in the Bay Area, and many other cities too. I'd look for a lot of municipal turnover this election season, whether it's fair to the incumbents or not.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/23/2023”
Okay, I think I get it. Bear with me while I rephrase to see if I have successfully understood.
What it seems like is going on is a randomizer is inserted somewhere into the algorithm and the AI makes decisions about what to do based in part on that randomization. This is perhaps analagous to non-rational impulses in a wet human brain, things like emotions or spiritual experiences (which may be the same thing but that's a different debate) or evanescent states of experience like hunger or sleepiness -- so that just as I might decide to do X when well-rested and emotionally content, given the same decision when deprived of adequate sleep and emotionally agitated from some recent but unrelated experience, I might do Y.
And given that like the human brain, an algorithm can be made heuristic, such that it adapts its future decision-making criteria in response to the accumulation of past experiences somehow identified as similar, the algorithm effectively re-writes itself over time and with the accumulation of experience, with the different experiences having been created through the influence of the random number generator carefully placed somewhere in the original programming.
At least, I hope I've got understanding of self-programming algorithms right. It's not my area of specialty but I appreciate the breakdown.
So like Two-Face in the Batman comics, the flip of a coin rather than the use of a rule or the application of reason governs decisions and resulting actions. The chaos, then, ultimately comes from that random number generator.
On “The Weight of Society”
This may be true, it may not, but it doesn't matter -- in most cases, even locking up someone isn't effective at restricting their dietary choices. A percentage of the workers at "fat farm" retreats get overwhelming incentives to smuggle in things like candy bars and potato chips and disrupt the carefully-structured diet because a corresponding percentage of the self-sentenced inmates quickly become driven to bribe them for these goodies.
But most of the time, for most people, getting locked up to restrict dietary choices is something so undesirable that no one will voluntarily do it and of course imposing that on someone without their consent would be monstrous. So nearly everyone is free to navigate their world on their own and that means constant temptation by purveyors of fast food (debatable quality, but high in fat and carbohydrates, generally calorie-dense, and comparatively inexpensive and easy to access), junk food (same), and dessert foods (same, except moreso). We are free, not confined, and for all the reasons stated when we are free our willpowers all eventually fail and we succumb to making bad choices. A small number of people can get back on the wagon quickly but it turns out that most of us don't.
Willpower just isn't going to do it. I've tried willpower and good food choices, I've tried ketogenic diets, and the social and biological forces described in the OP overwhelm me every time. I'm hopeful that Ozempic or some similar drug eventually becomes affordable and maybe that will supplement my willpower enough that I can stay on a weight loss journey for enough time to change the shape of my body in the direction that reason and logic and aesthetics tell me I ought.
On “The Alaska Airlines Attack”
They're legal to possess and consume here, and I think to grow for personal use, but not to sell commercially. Our "full legalization" is only for microdoses in a a clinical setting, with the theoretical clinics subject to a licensing scheme to be devised later.
But if you subscribe to the model of "What's legal is determined by what the cops actually do on the street, not what's written on the books," here's the reality: a company from BC came to NW Portland and opened up a storefront selling actual magic shrooms and had lines around the corner for a solid week before the cops did anything about it. Pretty brazen.
But yeah, especially if you're going to be in the cockpit of an airplane in the very near future, don't do drugs.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/23/2023”
That's fascinating! I wonder if you could maybe explain that in English, though.
"
How can a computer, controlled by algorithms, be anything but Lawful? It might be Good, Neutral, or Evil, but it is inherently subject to and controlled by pre-programmed codes from which it literally cannot deviate. Seems like the very definition of Lawful.
On “The Alaska Airlines Attack”
Also it seems he was suffering major depression. That can induce suicidal ideation. Compound a depressive episode with narcotics like psilocybin, and maybe the dude decides checking himself out is the least bad option he's got to resolve whatever problems look bigger than they actually are. Maybe the drug makes him, for lack of a better word, sort of forget that there's eighty-three other lives on the plane he'd be taking along with his own. Or something like that. I've never used psilocybin to experience what it does to cognition.
On “So, Now What House GOP?”
I was going to disagree with this, citing the fact that GOP lawmakers who have discretely admitted they have nothing actionable on either Joe or Hunter Biden nevertheless loudly crow about "New Evidence!" every week or so get amplified by the FOX and leave people like my ConservaBoomers quite convinced that the President is corrupt and his son is the money mule.
But upon further reflection, no, some sort of deal that brought those Nothingburger Inquiries to a close would be cited by those same not-beholden-to-facts lawmakers and amplified again by the FOX into "A corrupt deal to protect themselves and their corrupt leader!" and then it would just be more proof that the Democratic party (strike that, it'd be "Democrat Party," no "-ic" at the end to turn it into an insult) is all in on the grift. So yeah, I think just leave those open now, and await the hoisting upon the petard.
On “Of Course They Cheered The Murders”
Let me walk back the "claimed" remark, lest it imply disrespect. You encountered difficulty, and I don't blame you at all for not wanting to wade through Trump's Twitter feed.
I'd prefer that Presidents not publicly comment on most individual law enforcement matters at all, precisely because a President's influence has so much potential to sway public opinion and alter the administration of justice. To the extent that there's pressure to comment on a matter under Federal jurisdiction, something like "I've spoken with the Attorney General about this, and urged her to see to it that justice is done in this matter," that seems fine. But getting in to the nuts and bolts of evidence? It's dangerous and problematic, for the reasons you note regarding Biden's comments about Rittenhouse's trial.
"
If I recall, the consensus we more or less settled on was that Rittenhouse's not guilty verdict was the right legal result; there's a reasonable doubt that in the moment he may well have been in legitimate fear for his life. I'm less inclined than several of you to cut him a lot of moral slack (differentiated from legal doubt) for that because it still seems to me that Rittenhouse knew he'd have a good chance of being put into that sort of situation, and continued to seek it out. And this is the sense in which I see a very substantial similarity to Reinhoel (whom I've condemned, not defended), and I hasten to underline that I'm making a proposition on a moral level, not a legal one.
While I realize a compare-and-contrast debate is inevitable having raised the example, I roughly agree with Jaybird: it's very interesting how the people who have offered moral exonerations of Rittenhouse, moral condemnations of Reinhoel, and undertaken to fact-check to poke holes in my condemnation of Rittenhouse (or to further condemn the undefended Reinhoel) are the more rightward members of our commentariat. (For instance, Pinky claims difficulty in finding evidence that Trump called for Reinoehl to be hunted. Here you go, Pinky, I refer you specifically to the last substantial paragraph of the transcript.)
Which is fine! There are arguments to make that Rittenhouse's case is different, on a principled level, from Reinhoel's; many have been made here. I've staked my claim for what I see as the substantial similarity.
The exchange sure suggests to me that Jaybird is on to something when he points out that the way we react to (among other things) the Israel-versus-Palestine conflict is powerfully lensed by our preferences. (Call them "priors" if you wish. At some point, Jaybird used the word "aesthetics.")
Preferences aren't logical, reasoned, or principled. But they're real and we all have them. Perhaps the way human beings actually operate is we pick our preferences first for non-rational reasons, then lens the evidence that we see to conform as closely as possible to that preference, and finally back-fill in reasoning and principle to back up the preference using lensed data. That's not a liberal or a conservative thing, it's a human thing. It's difficult for anyone to extricate their thinking from this tendency.
I'm almost certainly as guilty of this tendency as anyone else here. And if you're going to hold yourself out as making objective, reasonable, principled responses to things, it's useful for you to be aware that you're as human as anyone else and therefore subject to this sort of internal bias, a bias founded not on principle but rather upon preference.
The OP struck me as a 1,700+ word festival of precisely this sort of preference lensing on full exhibit. The pushback I'm getting seems to come from exclusively those with preferences different than my own. That's evidence that indeed preference is at play here.
"
Yes. Yes I do. I also remember volunteer hunter-of-humans Kyle Rittenhouse. Not the same, of course, but there are some significant parallels. Both voluntarily inserted themselves into a tense and dangerous situation, with guns, claiming to have done so for the purpose of protecting others, and wound up killing other people.
One of the differences between them is Rittenhouse was captured by police alive, given a trial, and after visibly pretending to cry in remorse over what had happened, given every benefit of the moral and legal doubt in his favor. He is alive and a free man today, and now works the conservative lecture circuit bragging about the very deeds that he claimed to have tear-jerking remorse about during his trial. Reinhoel, on the other hand, killed half as many people, but was called out to be hunted by the then-President of the United States before any substantial investigation into the incident had taken place, and shot to death mere hours after his arrest warrant was issued. There's reason to doubt the police's story that Reinhoel attempted to shoot his way out of being surrounded by more than a dozen U.S. Marshals, Washington State Police, and local sheriff's deputies, including factually inconsistent police statements and third-party witnesses who said that the officers shot first and without provocation.
Another difference between Rittenhouse and Reinhoel is that Rittenhouse, at least by his own words, took it upon himself to go be a vigilante in defense of property. Reinhoel, at least by his own words, took it upon himself to provide security for BLM protestors, and according to his adult children who have filed a wrongful death suit against the police agencies who killed him, he'd received multiple personal death threats from Trump supporters before the fatal confrontation on Southwest Third Avenue.
Not a word of which morally exonerates Reinhoel. I say, even if he was provoked during a very sharp argument with a Trump supporter in a highly tense atmosphere he should have withdrawn from the confrontation. Instead, he shot the Trump supporter and that was absolutely 100% morally wrong. I don't write here to suggest otherwise. I write to suggest that Reinhoel's moral wrongness does not mean that other people are free from moral blame themselves, both before and after Reinhoel's bad act.
It's well and fine to point out that some people and even some press institutions view and judge current events through lenses of their prior assumptions and preferences, even when not all of the relevant information is available. (Come to think of it, a lot of us do that here too.)
But if you're going to condemn Michael Reinhoel, and not so much as mention Kyle Rittenhouse (even to attempt distinguishing them), then I think you're as guilty as the people you accuse of picking and choosing the bad things you want to condemn and the other, different, but also-bad things you prefer to ignore. And perhaps that's based upon, as @jaybird says above, aesthetics rather than morals, fashion rather than principle.
On “An Anxious Man’s Advice to Dems: Don’t Psych Yourself Out”
Fox News polls released Thursday show Biden narrowly beating Trump and narrowly losing to any of the other Republicans, at the national level. All within the margin of error. State-by-state polling isn't nearly good enough to take a 538-style forecast. And it's twelve and a half months until the general election.
But primary polling suggests Republicans are hellbent on re-nominating Trump despite this fact and Biden has beat Trump once already, and Trump is even less popular generally than Biden. Any Dem who is panicking right now is doing so without good reason.
There's work to do, that's all.
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11371.It_Can_t_Happen_Here
On “Brief Aside On Cancel Culture”
My imagination is quite enough, thank you.
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You know, I never thought of that!
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No, it's not what he was on trial for (it was a murder that he admitted that could likely have been portrayed as self-defense). But because he didn't deny the murder, the prosecution focused on his lack of public expressions of emotion, most particularly when he didn't cry at his mother's funeral. This was used as evidence of his lack of remorse and compassion for other human beings. The result was where the defense attorney expected a light sentence, the court instead imposed a sentence of capital punishment. The distinct impression is that had the protagonist participated in the expected set of public emotions, he'd not have been sentenced to death.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/9/2023”
It's great to see a lurker come out of the woodwork and join in the comments. Especially someone like you who really gets the spirit of the site. Glad to see you here!
On “Can RFK Jr Actually Help Joe Biden?”
RFKJr's vaccine denialism (you are too polite to call it "skepticism") has so overshadowed his prior liberal bona fides that while I know at least ten Trump-weary conservatives (most of them senior citizens) who have expressed attraction to him, but I know not a single liberal person who considers him with anything but contempt. He might be a Kennedy, but that doesn't mean Democrats will automatically like him.