mozz

mozz, 26 minutes ago (edited 3 minutes ago)

CHARGES

It's fine if you want to open an inquiry, but there is not the slightest shortage of things that it's been demonstrated that Trump did wrong

Have the sergeant at arms go and fetch some people who contempt of congress'd and lock them up under the Capitol until they agree that they were wrong and they'll answer questions now

Make a habit of finding a new crime every day that no one's done something about, from Trump or one of his allies, and recommend charges to the DOJ for it, whatever the terminology is. Give Matt Gaetz a subpoena because the house wants to investigate him paying underage girls for sex. Tell Boebert that giving handies in a theater is an ethics violation, and give her a fine, and have someone who's armed physically block her path trying to come into congress until she pays it.

IDK, I still fully agree with the reasons why political people shouldn't be telling the DOJ who to prosecute, I'm not saying do that. But surely a fact-finding mission to find out whether or not Trump and his friends are crooks is no longer necessary at this point.

mozz, 18 minutes ago

Yeah, I get it. You're not wrong. I wasn't even really thinking in terms of the details of how it does need to happen. I'm just saying it's crazy that we're still investigating. Y'all (meaning congress) are going to investigate your way along right up until the Oathkeepers come into congress armed and tell you who goes and who stays, it sounds like.

mozz, 1 hour ago

There is actually a crisis at the border, just not the kind that Fox News thinks is going on.

The rate of people coming into the country has shot up, which means there's this massive amount of people either waiting in sort of open-air camps on the Mexican border, just living in a crowded, dusty field for months and months waiting for their turn, and a massive amount of people already in the country in overcrowded detention centers awaiting their chance to be heard for asylum by a judge or to be processed out and sent home. Just typing it out like that maybe doesn't sound so bad, but it's grim. Some are families, some are sick (like real sick), all are with no jobs or money or a lot of times no civilized infrastructure like water or like that. Some are stuffed into overcrowded detention centers with racist, violent guards and no real rights of any kind.

Part of the Democratic immigration plan is to boost resources for ICE (more detention centers i.e. less overcrowding) and increase the number of judges to clear the backlog, which will decrease that side of the misery. Part of the plan is to deliberately increase the cruelty in some parts of the system (e.g. make it harder for people to get asylum even if your home is objectively unlivable, give ICE more aggressive tools to be racist with, things like that), so that the Republicans will make a deal and actually pass the thing. I honestly don't know what proportion is for each part, but there's some of both.

I honestly don't know that much about it, except that it's weird that people are so eagerly blaming the Democrats both for the present levels of misery in the system (which are substantial), and for their attempts to get something passed which will take some steps to alleviate the worst of the misery (how dare you give ICE more resources, etc). But since the Republicans have been rejecting any change no matter what its nature, it seems like maybe kind of a moot point.

mozz, 7 hours ago

Fun fact: The 40% figure is based on one single study that was a self-report study from the early 1990s, asking police whether a disagreement with their spouse had ever gotten “physical.” A follow-up study found a rate of 24%, also from the 1990s. It’s actually hard to find numbers since then (partly because it’s just inherently a hard topic to study), but assuming that every one of those self-reports was a wife beater, and that nothing has changed since 1992 (0% change in the culture of policing or the handling of domestic violence) seems unlikely.

TL;DR I don’t know what percent of police officers are wife beaters but it isn’t 40%, and claiming that it is is gleefully misrepresenting the truth; using the very outlandishness of it to claim that the cops are outlandishly and cartoonishly evil

More on this

I realize that this information will be unwelcome, and I eagerly anticipate your downvotes. Why are you booing me I’m right

mozz, 5 hours ago

That's actually a really good question

I think generally it boils down to an "enemy" mentality. If you're a cop, a decent fraction of your job is getting violent with people who are resisting what you're doing because they don't want to go to jail. I think once someone slots into that "enemy" category, then it immediately becomes comfortable to do something horrendous to them; even if, like this woman, they didn't do a damn thing wrong. So the end result is lending strength to state oppression.

I don't think the solution to that is to get rid of all the cops. What are you going to do if someone tries to murder you? Any city in American that wanted to get its city council together and just disband the police force is able to do that; I don't think it's a unanimous capitalistic plot that they don't; it's that they genuinely fulfill an important function.

I also don't think the solution is to have cops, but make them the enemy and be hostile to them all the time and defund them to punish them and decide that they're a part of your city's infrastructure that's just always the enemy all the time. That's part of what I don't like about this meme -- it's like, who cares if it's true, I just know these are always shitty people so any shitty thing I want to believe about them becomes a good thing to feel and so let's get busy on hating them.

I do think strong oversight of the police is a good thing. I think bodycams and the culture of charging police with a crime (sometimes 😕) when they commit a crime changed policing in a massive way that isn't really recognized. There are still big problems for sure. I also think sending people who aren't police to e.g. mental health calls, places where the "let's catch the bad people" model isn't going to be what is needed, is a really good thing.

But I think in general, exactly the same mentality that leads this cop to drag this woman around by her hair ("well fuck it, she's a suspect, she's coming with me and who cares whether it gets done in a humane fashion, because that type of person is always the enemy") actually roots back at the core to a very similar mentality to that that says "I'm going to bitch at the cop on this traffic stop and be antagonistic for no reason" or "all bad statistics about cops are true, all good statistics about cops are false" or etc etc, you know that type of person is always the enemy, you get the idea.

mozz, 5 hours ago

Theerre's the hostility I was trying to bait into existence 😃

Honestly I apologize tho

mozz, 4 hours ago (edited 3 hours ago)

There's a lot there but I read the cited 2015 paper. From it:

Officers knocked on the door; when no one answered, they kicked down the door and took Diggs, who was bleeding from a small facial wound, outside

, according to Prince George’s County, Maryland prosecutors.

When asked about the recent increase in arrests of District of Columbia police officers, Chief Cathy Lanier noted that

Ninety-eight officers were arrested more than once on domestic violence charges between 2007 and 2010

And then:

Part IV asks why, in contrast, police officers are able to abuse their partners with impunity

Kinda sounds like literally every single example in this paper involves some sort of prosecution of the cops who were involved, i.e. not with impunity. No?

This is part of what I was saying -- I think back in 1992, the culture that if a cop beat up his wife or drove drunk, his co workers would look the other way was almost universal. I know it's definitely not universal now. Is it still common? I honestly don't know. But getting a honest answer to that question seems like a vital step in stopping it from happening in the places where it is still happening. Right? Or no?

There are actually much much worse and more systemic stories than these. I'm just saying that it's good to want to arrive at an actual measurement of how often it happens (because it's way different if it's 40% versus 10% versus 4%), and that it's bad to just pick the highest number you can and say that that's obviously what's going on because cops are terrible people. How do we know they're terrible people? Because 40% of them beat their wives, that's how.

mozz, 3 hours ago

One thing I like to do is ask people for examples of police misconduct, and then point out that the overwhelming majority of the examples they cited involved the cops getting arrested or prosecuted by their fellow officers for what they were doing. Not all, obviously.

The person elsewhere in this thread who cited domestic violence among police conformed exactly to that pattern - they cited a 2015 study that went over a bunch of different examples of domestic abuse by cops, and in pretty much every one the cop was being prosecuted for what they'd done.

You don't have to agree with me of course, but I think this is part of the big change that's gone unnoticed in the culture of policing even in the short time since Eric Garner and that era -- it used to be that cops would protect each other even for very major crimes; I think that that's becoming a lot less true now.

mozz, 3 hours ago

Yeah, agreed. There are tons of valid reasons to criticize the police (or, I would say, demand accountability from them in keeping with the amount of power they're granted by the legal system). But just framing something deliberately slanted because you want to make them look as bad as possible doesn't seem like a good addition to that list though.

mozz, 2 hours ago

Yeah probably so

mozz, 6 hours ago

Honestly I set out to make again the point about “asking people how they feel like things are going isn’t actually a good way to measure economics, especially when 50% of them (you know the ones) are programmed by the news they consume to be in a state of constant frothing panic about inflation, crime, and immigrants” - but I looked at the report itself and its charts and I actually really like them. They seem like they ask enough very specific things to get down to brass tacks of how people are doing on a month to month survival level in a way that seems like it’s exactly one of the key things that the Fed should be tracking. So yeah fair play.

Idk if I would have led off with all the worst possible things you can find - like take a report that says, 72% of adults say they’re doing okay or better financially, and find the highest statistic that you can find that can be paired up with something bad, and then put that in the headline instead - but the actual report seems really good.

mozz, 1 hour ago

Yeah, 2022 was a shit show. That’s when all the Covid inflation hit, that ate up the gains in wages at the top of the scale and then some. The fact that even with that having happened, wages at the bottom have been beating inflation by quite a bit, is a damn miracle. But yeah I’m a little surprised it went down by only 6% in 2022.

Health care is a good one yeah - the number of uninsured people has been dropping steadily the last few years, to where now it’s lower than it’s ever been. Enrollment in ACA-sponsored plans shot up when Biden started unfucking some of the things that the Republicans had done to try to kill it. Idk how health care spending looks, but there’s like 20 million people who have health care now who didn’t before, I know.

mozz, 12 hours ago

Chroma is supposed to be able to import a ton of information into a vectorized format that lets you search through it in a way that's semantically meaningful, so you (or your tool) can sort of pick out the stuff from a huge batch of source material that you need to pass to the LLM for any given query.

I played around with it a little bit and I wasn't able to determine if it was a real thing or just a weird AI hype thing, but people seem to take it seriously. I would bet that someone's attempted to make a little system on top of it that lets you do stuff like what you're wanting to do (since that's what it's made for), but IDK how well it would work... might be useful to search for stuff adjacent to Chroma or vector databases to see if there are tools like that, though.

mozz, 16 hours ago

They reached out to her a couple days before they launched, and said hey do you want to maybe reconsider that thing where we asked you about this a couple times, and both times you told us to go fuck ourselves

And then they told the media that they were in discussions with her, when the discussions were her lawyer telling them to go fuck themselves

And then Altman tweeted "her"

And then when it launched, it was according to her so freakishly similar that her friends were weirded out by it

If it was some different actress saying hey this sounds a lot like me, that wasn't the one that they clearly had in mind when they were making their plans about it, then I could see a pretty strong argument to say hey relax buddy sometimes different people just sound similar

I don't really know and I don't care enough to listen to samples for myself and see what I think. But just based on the above set of random facts I feel like probably she has a fairly strong case.

mozz, 17 hours ago

we need to go out and defend democracy

My man you need to be endorsing one of these candidates, then

I'm not tryin to start the same argument we always have, because we've had it before, so I'll simply say that the options are:

• Biden is trash but I'm voting for him anyway
• Biden's actually not trash, here, look at this chart

There is no third option that's within the bounds of objective reality, and the fact that that's not where our media is located doesn't change that.

mozz, 16 hours ago

I mean I probably will at some point; just based on that little snippet below the headline, maybe he is saying something general principle based and sensible. The both candidates are trash just got my hackles up 🙂

mozz, 15 hours ago

I wasn't trying to put words in their mouth; just saying how it sounded to me if they were upset that when they took up arms against the SDP in 1919, what came back to them was violent and unfair. There's also the issue (which is maybe why I'm so unsympathetic in general) that it's silly to still be upset in 1932 about something that happened in 1919, when the way to stay alive and keep alive a whole bunch of people who had nothing to do with either SDP or KPD, would have been for both of them to let it go and start fighting the bigger enemy.

But yeah, maybe I picked an unkind / unfair way to make the point, you're right. And like I say, we're into the detail points that I really don't know about, so I am learning also from you about all of this for the first time.

mozz, 14 hours ago

And for the germans their leadership was summarily executed by paramilitary groups sent by the government.

(Assuming you meant in 1919)

Yeah, but wasn't that after the KPD did an uprising and was doing battle with the SDP?

I'm genuinely asking; I'm just not familiar with it. If you want me to read up and get back to you I can do that too.

mozz, 13 hours ago

I think I got irritated and just abandoned the conversation, but we can continue.

What you just said actually made a lot of sense and as far as I know the history, I agree with it more or less completely (and would allocate blame for Trump at most of the Bill Clinton / Nancy Pelosi type Democrats in exactly the same way for exactly the same reason)

So if it sounded like I was exonerating them I was not. My point was, once Hitler comes around it doesn't matter; if you're still running a 13% spoiler candidate to weaken the alternative to Hitler, and then blaming the ones who won the election because they didn't do a good enough job of compromising with you... I mean, you may have a case, but you'll still be dead if Hitler wins. Surely that is relevant?

They sure didn't get the real material relief to the German people by not supporting Hindenburg; definitely not until 1945 and even then it came with some caveats.

mozz, 16 hours ago

I think proactively committing to voting for a morally abhorrent candidate (a candidate promoting a morally abhorrent position, if you prefer) is less than submissive, it's actually giving up the only possible leverage you might have had in order to accept a reality that hasn't happened yet.

I talked about this - withholding your vote to put pressure on Biden and communicating to him effectively that that's what you're doing makes perfect sense to me. I linked to the Ralph Nader article where he talks about doing that.

If I thought Biden read Lemmy and would read my comments and react differently in Gaza, would I do my comments differently, so as to avoid taking the pressure off him that he's currently feeling? Yeah, maybe. Probably. I don't think that's the reality, but if I thought that, I probably would do my comments differently.

I'm just saying how I look at the election. Unless Biden had some sort of mental break that made him start acting worse than Trump in terms of what he'll do with power, I'm planning on voting for him. If I thought lying about that would create a positive impact in some way, then yeah, maybe I might. IDK. Maybe not. I definitely wouldn't be as vocal about how ok a job he's doing, yeah.

Proactively committing to not voting for preservation of American democracy and prevention of catastrophe around the world, because Netanyahu started a genocide and Biden hasn't caused a revolution in American statecraft by opposing it for the first time in history, doesn't make a ton of sense to me, though. Why is the genocide in Gaza a red line but preventing a genocide in Ukraine, or saving a million American lives from the next pandemic, or mitigating climate change (to whatever extent we even still can) moving the needle away from billions of lost lives in the not-too-distant future, why aren't those red lines?

It's absolutely a choice you are making, and even if you'd feel better if that didn't make you guilty of 'supporting' genocide, i think it's kind of self-evident.

It seems kind of weird to get all amped up about how great a job you're doing at not supporting genocide, by doing something that endangers Palestinians specifically but also apparently makes you feel better. I think I linked somewhere to a comment from someone who claimed to be Palestinian American who actually specifically asked Americans not to do this (use his dead relatives as justification for their political stance which was going to endanger him much more along with many of his still living relatives). It's on bestof if you didn't see it.

mozz, 16 hours ago

Or, not inside the US

mozz, 14 hours ago

I don't get it man.

The Republicans are calling for more and more cruelty (e.g. raising the bar for aslyum). Biden is trying to alleviate the exact conditions you're describing, in addition to compromising with them some of the cruelty you're asking for, and you're giving him shit for it.

What in your world should he do? Magic a bill into existence that will fix the conditions you're talking about, without getting it through congress or needing the support of the Republicans?

Why are you saying that weakening his position against the Republicans until things get better is the way for you to solve that problem? Are you happy with the babies waiting outside in the hot sun for months and months until your plan bears fruit, should he withdraw the current bill and go back to the drawing board and them just wait outside until your plan comes through?

mozz, 13 hours ago

Biden does not need an act of congress to not treat asylum-seekers like shit

In this case, he actually does.

Just like it was a deliberate choice to split up arms shipments to Israel into 100 seperate lots so he didn't have to report them to Congress.

Yeah, that one was some bullshit, 100% accurate.

mozz, 17 hours ago

Saying it has "nothing" to do with it is wrong; they're so deeply connected that you might as well use either or both, since racial disparity is fundamental enough to the American economy that they give the same answer.

But sure, it's fair to ask for something specifically about income level instead of by race; here's one by percentiles and here's the GINI coefficient over time.

mozz, 7 hours ago

Those are already inflation adjusted dollars - gains on the chart represent gains above inflation. The source is here with more explanation, and looking over it actually will show some important / upsetting caveats to what I said - just bear in mind that for some confusing reason, it is showing percentage change in a lot of its charts, instead of the raw underlying number.

And yeah I get that - I feel like I am becoming humorless and just yelling at people all the time good things about Biden. My feeling on it is more or less, why are you guys making me stick up for the Democrats I don’t even particularly like them. But it seems to me like people are spreading very specific malicious bullshit about them in this election, which is upsetting to me (because of the “bullshit” part and its potential impact on the US and the world if it swings the election, not because of the “Biden” part, if that makes sense).