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Thread: COVID19 Factors We Should Consider/Current Events

  1. #3571
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    Quote Originally Posted by wiigelec View Post
    See how easy it was for the media to change the topic of discussion, even in this thread?

    And y'all think you're not being controlled...
    We're aware.

  2. #3572
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    But make no mistake: Cop Shit is the problem in this particular situation, and Racism gets the blame, because Racism is more useful across a much bigger political spectrum. Noah is right when he says that Racism is not just a Southern thing, but the United States is the least racist place on earth, and if you don't believe that you have not traveled and you don't know Asians, Blacks, Mexicans, or anybody different from you. You may have noticed that people like to be around people who are like them -- this isn't "Racism," the problem, it is human nature, the fact.
    I can confirm this. When I was over in Asia I walked by Chinese kids on the playground calling each other "Japanese dog", listened to my Korean friends talk about how much he hated the Japanese, and read news articles about how the Japanese were snubbing their Korean immigrants.

    Three closely related people groups who all look very similar, but they've been fighting each other for hundreds of years. Throw the Vietnamese, Hmong, Laotians, Filipinos, etc into the mix and it becomes pretty obvious the concept of "race" as it's taught in the media is a gross over-simplification of what's actually going on.

  3. #3573
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    But it's very useful politically, and that's why it's always the first argument.

  4. #3574
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    Quote Originally Posted by Gerald Boggs View Post
    It's not unreasonable to believe Jeronimo Yanez is Latino, every newspaper article I looked at yesterday and a quick check today, list him as such. And for what it's worth to know, Jeronimo is a Spanish name, as is the origin of Geronimo's
    I agree completely, which is why I was careful to call out Yngvi's sources and not Yngvi him or herself. This distinction, as important (or not) as it is, doesn't alter the substance of my argument at all.

    Quote Originally Posted by Nicholas Laureys View Post
    Such an erudite and wordy post, all to justify the unjustifiable position that is at the heart of the Conservative/Liberal divide: criminals are victims and not at fault for their actions.

    Defending indefensible looters and hoodlums?

    How unfortunate and pathetic a position to hold!
    Not sure what part of that you read as justify anything. The argument I made is simply that looting is a consequence of unemployment--in this case unemployment caused by irresponsible and reckless government actions. I shouldn't have to point out that just because the actions of the masses are predictable doesn't mean they're justifiable. For the record, I defend my businesses with a rifle, not a sword.

    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    This is a silly article, because it completely ignores the individual personalities involved, and it assumes that all Policemen are just empty vessels waiting to be filled with the latest LE Psychology wisdom emitting from some bullshit Criminal Justice professor operating under a federal grant. Here's the actual deal: if you look at the totality of police relations with the public, you will see that the most dangerous situation a law-abiding citizen will ever find himself in is a Law Enforcement Contact. Doesn't matter if the cop is white or black, or the contact is white or black (Australian women get murdered too), the issue is what we call Cop Shit. Not Racism.

    If cops pull over black people disproportionately, it can be more logically explained by the fact that young black men commit a higher percentage of crime than young white men in urban areas than it can be by Racism, and this is just the fact, sorry. The reason for that fact is largely cultural, i.e. a bunch of young assholes start hanging around together and encouraging criminal behavior. Like MS13 -- remember them? Not black, just vicious animals from a different culture. Different cultures generate different forms of behavior, and you know this to be true even if you have a political agenda that prevents you from agreeing with the observation. The Swiss behave differently than the Kosovars. This is merely Pattern Recognition, and is learned by everybody, cop or not, if they're paying any attention while they grow up.

    Yet law enforcement as a whole has millions of productive contacts with taxpayers every year, because most of the cops are not prone to Cop Shit. Cop Shit is what happens when the wrong individuals become LEOs. Training is not the issue. If the kids we all went to school with -- the one who got beat up in gym class, and his buddy, the one who beat him up in gym class -- decide that they are going to get even by beating other people up, or that they really like beating people up, and they figure out that being on the Police Department is a perfect way to indulge themselves at very little personal risk, then that Police Department has a problem than cannot be solved after the guy is hired. They now have a Bad Cop. We all know them, we've all watched them operate: power mad and thirsty for blood, perfectly willing to shove people around who don't need shoving, the guy who writes for 6 over, and the guy who beats your ass into the back seat of the car after you're already handcuffed. And they're not particularly concerned about your race.

    That guy puts all the rest of the people in the department in a terribly shitty position, like the 3 guys who stood around watching Chauvin with his knee on the neck of a face-down handcuffed man for 8 minutes, doing nothing about an obvious problem. These guys may well have thought, "Fuck, Derek, do you need to do this to the guy??? We're on video, you know!" But they stood there anyway. They should have intervened, and that is a very bad problem, but Chauvin is the real problem. And he can't be trained out of that.

    He should have been screened out. He wasn't. Screening procedures are flawed. He should have been fired after about the 5th complaint several years ago, but he wasn't. Personnel retention procedures are flawed. His fellow officers should have sorted him out with HR or the Chief of Police, ("He's gonna fuck us up, Chief. He's gonna kill somebody who doesn't need killing. The man is out of control. You gotta fire him!") but they didn't. Peer review procedures are flawed. In essence, the Bureaucracy under which Police Departments operate is the problem, because Bureaucracies are carefully designed to prevent accountability for bureaucrats.

    But make no mistake: Cop Shit is the problem in this particular situation, and Racism gets the blame, because Racism is more useful across a much bigger political spectrum. Noah is right when he says that Racism is not just a Southern thing, but the United States is the least racist place on earth, and if you don't believe that you have not traveled and you don't know Asians, Blacks, Mexicans, or anybody different from you. You may have noticed that people like to be around people who are like them -- this isn't "Racism," the problem, it is human nature, the fact.

    Now, imagine being a small business owner in a city where you were locked down for a couple of months, you lost your means of making a living because of your local government, your employees are suffering, your landlord is breathing down your neck. And now, Cop Shit in one fucked up metropolitan area triggers the frustrations of millions of people in a similar situation to yours, local government fails to control a riot (arguably one of the very few legitimate uses of force from government, and certainly more legitimate than measuring 6-foot spacing between people standing in line to pay for what little toilet paper they can find), even though they were perfectly willing to arrest a barber for cutting fucking hair, and what remains of your business is burned to the ground. Frustration is a woefully-ass inadequate term here.
    I don't disagree with your critique and, honestly, I don't think you and the author of the article disagree about the problem of cop shit either. You also both appear to agree that the solutions that have thus far been proposed to address the problem of cop shit have been woefully inadequate. If I'm reading everyone correctly, where you disagree is on the question of the role that race plays in the propagation of cop shit. On this issue, I agree with you insofar as Europeans and Brits, generally speaking, are entirely clueless about the complexities of race relations in the United States (Full disclosure, for the record: I've [white male with an income and a PhD] been on the receiving end of cop shit more than once, in more than one state, and can confirm that black people aren't the only ones who get "the treatment" from shitty police officers and their bureaucratic superiors). Fascinating, then, that the same author (a sociology professor in Brooklyn) reissued the same exact argument a few hours later in The Nation, this time largely shorn of the racial element. In the later article, the author even goes so far as to call out prominent black leaders for doing nothing to curtail police violence in their representative districts.

    Quote Originally Posted by Satch12879 View Post
    Rip, don’t forget the media loves these kinds of situations, too and will inflate them to epidemic proportions, pun intended.
    Killer Mike's comments on the culpability of CNN in this regard were inspiring.

    Quote Originally Posted by wiigelec View Post
    See how easy it was for the media to change the topic of discussion, even in this thread?

    And y'all think you're not being controlled...
    You are either dead wrong or woefully ignorant if you can't see that what's happening right now in cities across the country isn't a 'factor that should have been considered' when those in power decided COVID was reason enough to cancel the economy for three months.

  5. #3575
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    Quote Originally Posted by Noah Ebner View Post
    The argument I made is simply that looting is a consequence of unemployment--in this case unemployment caused by irresponsible and reckless government actions.
    But looting occurs in a wide variety of economic circumstances. The social frustration and, more importantly, the lack of respect for government created entirely by the government over the past 3 months set us up for this, and was entirely predictable, true. But looting appears to be a crime of opportunity, not unemployment. It has been going on for millennia, and there is one way to stop it: your rifle.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Noah Ebner View Post
    You are either dead wrong or woefully ignorant if you can't see that what's happening right now in cities across the country isn't a 'factor that should have been considered' when those in power decided COVID was reason enough to cancel the economy for three months.
    I remember talking with my dad a few days after the lockdowns started. We both quickly came to the conclusion that if the economy didn't open back up in a hurry people would start rioting. If a couple simpletons like my dad and I could figure that out, Cuomo and Friends knew exactly what they were getting into. They weren't wrong or ignorant, they're just evil.

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    In other news, our entire town centre is now festooned with thousands of 12” circular stickers on every piece of pavement warning everybody to stay 2m apart. Fuck this shit. I hate shopping, but might as well have put land mines on the pavement as far as I’m concerned.

    It struck me today that essentially the state has requisitioned private property in a Britain as it now controls numbers of customers and the opening times. Welcome to IngSoc. Atlas must shrug.

  8. #3578
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    But looting occurs in a wide variety of economic circumstances. The social frustration and, more importantly, the lack of respect for government created entirely by the government over the past 3 months set us up for this, and was entirely predictable, true. But looting appears to be a crime of opportunity, not unemployment. It has been going on for millennia, and there is one way to stop it: your rifle.
    Indeed. Fair point. I should have clarified by saying looting on this massive of a scale (they're looting from San Diego to San Francisco in California, don't know how the rest of the country is fairing). The points you make about social frustration and lack of trust in government are paramount: one can never accurately predict what the outcome of such conditions will be.

    Quote Originally Posted by ltomo View Post
    I remember talking with my dad a few days after the lockdowns started. We both quickly came to the conclusion that if the economy didn't open back up in a hurry people would start rioting. If a couple simpletons like my dad and I could figure that out, Cuomo and Friends knew exactly what they were getting into. They weren't wrong or ignorant, they're just evil.
    ^This. Thank you. I forgot to include that latter component of intentional and malicious economic destruction for the purpose of perceived political gain.

  9. #3579
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    Now, imagine being a small business owner in a city where you were locked down for a couple of months, you lost your means of making a living because of your local government, your employees are suffering, your landlord is breathing down your neck. And now, Cop Shit in one fucked up metropolitan area triggers the frustrations of millions of people in a similar situation to yours, local government fails to control a riot (arguably one of the very few legitimate uses of force from government, and certainly more legitimate than measuring 6-foot spacing between people standing in line to pay for what little toilet paper they can find), even though they were perfectly willing to arrest a barber for cutting fucking hair, and what remains of your business is burned to the ground. Frustration is a woefully-ass inadequate term here.
    Consider:

    -1A is limited by Big Tech in through its subjective censorship, despite being a platform (that behaves like a publisher)

    -1A is limited by arrests of peaceful protestors violating curfew ordinances

    -1A is unequally enforced as violent protestors breaking many other laws concurrently are NOT arrested until after the violent law-breaking is completed.

    -2A is severely restricted, in that you really only have this right ON PAPER (consider Zimmerman and countless others who tried to express this right)

    -1A is severely restricted by employers discriminating on the basis of political beliefs (has anyone EVER heard of a coinciding rural employer whose Left-Leaning employees missed out on promotions or had to keep quiet due to their political beliefs?)

    -unlawful search and seizure rights are essentially suspended thanks to the Patriot Act and its clones

    - my friends on the ground in the States (people's republic of Maryland) tell me they don't violate the unlawful mask rules out of fear of arrest (they've seen YouTube videos), losing their jobs, and all the consequences that come along with that.
    Multiply that by the millions across our great country who "showed their bellies" over this crisis and maybe it's over-leverage on credit and hyper-reliance on the income from one's job just to barely make ends meet that causes us to act like farm animals?

    My big question, which arises when my friends chortle that I've chosen to live in Russia for now, is:
    Which freedoms do we really have remaining that our once great country still allows us to exercise in a mostly limitless (within the confines of our Constitution) way?



    Quote Originally Posted by Noah Ebner View Post
    Not sure what part of that you read as justify anything. The argument I made is simply that looting is a consequence of unemployment--in this case unemployment caused by irresponsible and reckless government actions. I shouldn't have to point out that just because the actions of the masses are predictable doesn't mean they're justifiable. For the record, I defend my businesses with a rifle, not a sword.
    You're justifying the looting in the "logic" sense that <<if B then C>>, where C is looting and B is unemployment, then the unemployment justifies (or causes, or, fine, your word, "is consequential to") the looting.
    And that's ludicrous, or disingenuous at best, because your equation omits other factors that have always been leading to rioting. Or do you have examples of most communities responding to their chronically high unemployment with rioting?

  10. #3580
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nicholas Laureys View Post
    Multiply that by the millions across our great country who "showed their bellies" over this crisis and maybe it's over-leverage on credit and hyper-reliance on the income from one's job just to barely make ends meet that causes us to act like farm animals?
    Quite likely the case.

    My big question, which arises when my friends chortle that I've chosen to live in Russia for now, is:
    Which freedoms do we really have remaining that our once great country still allows us to exercise in a mostly limitless (within the confines of our Constitution) way?
    Depends on where you live. Texas is more free than Maryland. I assure you that Texas is more free than Russia.

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