Arctic Dementor

wow i wonder what the video shows

... yeah i can see why the cops don't want that getting around, holy shit

There is an enormous markedness problem here that could get its own essay. This "anti-racist" Race Action Plan is favoring one race, Curse of Babel be upon them, their speech is confused.

The words I want to highlight as relevant to @isaacsapphire's question are "disproportionate" and "inequalities" and "Equality Impact Assessment". These are linked to the UK Equality Act which borrowed the US Civil Rights Act model of disparate impact: policies that are in principle race-neutral can still be illegal if those policies in practice affect one race more than another.

As a teenager (M15) my grandmother (F71) and I attended a speech by the Prime Minister (M55). Just as it started, terrorists (M21, M28, F22) opened fire (M14) but they were quickly gunned down (MP5k) by the Prime Ministers bodyguard (M38). On the way home (M1) we were silent. The memory still makes me wake up at night (1AM) feeling too hot (100F). I need to change because I sweat all through my pajamas (1XS).

Which was why SO MANY offramps to avoid tyranny were built into the American system.

And the Billionaires have blown past every. Single. One.

And I hope an election can staunch the bleeding, but the compromised Supreme Court ended that hope pretty well this week.

So it's Balkanization or Guillotines (which is America is the time-honored "Second Amendment Solution I fear so much).

Or it's live under tyranny.

.

It sure is…interesting that you joined a thread pointing out how a famously left-wing government killed an innocent man, contrary to leftist claims…to change the subject to more leftist claims, barely even acknowledging the original point.

The US's built-in checks and balances are on the government, not people with 10 or more digits of net worth.

You know "tyranny" almost always refers to government actions, right?

wow i wonder what the video shows

... yeah i can see why the cops don't want that getting around, holy shit

Skulldrinker: Is there an element of convenience here? It's much easier to arrest the one guy (who's, let's be real, more likely to respect police authority) than the three guys who'll go all tribal. It still has the effect of ending the altercation. The three guys will process cop and guy= white, two us = black, three, therefore, attack I think that's behind a lot of two-tier policing; not hating white people, but enforcing the laws that are easy to enforce on the people who will capitulate. nomenym: This may offer a less malicious explanation for the behavior, but it doesn't really deny the problem. In fact, it makes the problem more intractable, since they will never admit to this explanation. It also incentivizes even more tribalistic behavior to dissuade law enforcement actions. If the purpose of the police is to manage relations between ethnic groups to prevent large scale public disorder and inter-ethnic conflict, then they cannot also treat people as individuals before the law. Every law enforcement action must be first evaluated by the likelihood of it undermining "community relations", and so the ethnicities of the people involved should be at the forefront when deciding when and how to enforce the law. Because whites have lower levels of ethnic solidarity, the trade-off will almost always be to target the whites. This makes a lot of good sense given the new priority to manage ethnic conflicts. The question is how stable this strategy is longer term. Presumably, these concerns are also driving the abolishment of juries. It allows judges to concern themselves not with individual actions but rather balancing competing ethnic resentments to maintain public order. Quietly, the entire tradition of British law is being repealed and replaced by merely changing "guidance" documents.

So for the past ten years or so in Iowa there's been this song and dance ever since the governor put his foot down and told the school districts that they were not allowed to have the start of school until after the end of the state fair. Like most school districts, they had been moving the start of school up by a week every year or two for a long time, and it had, for a long time, started during and even sometimes before the state fair.

Now Iowa is obviously made up mostly of farming communities, and the state fair is The annual event, especially for kids on small, family run farms, who are learning how to run the farm, and things like livestock handling and the like. These things are not taught in school. There are some college courses you can take about it, but the vast majority of the next generation to own small farms are learning how to run them on farms belonging to their parents or friends. And for these kids, the state fair is like graduation. It's essential for them to be there, to show their proficiency in different fields, make connections with their peers and in the various industries they will need to work with, and to take advantage of workshops and resources that are only available once a year during the state fair. (Also, the state fair is just a massive part of the culture here and kids should be allowed to attend and be a part of it, even if they don't plan on going into farming.)

With school starting during or before the state fair, this was obviously a problem. Kids were forced to choose between the first weeks of school and the state fair. If they chose school, they lost out on essential education and name-taking that would pave the road for them further down the line if they chose to go into farming. If they picked the state fair, it put their general education at risk, and there's not a lot of forgiveness going around for kids who miss the first week of school.

The governor told the school districts that they weren't allowed to force kids to choose anymore. The state fair has been at the same time every year for a hundred years, that's their cutoff point for how early school can start. This means school can start on the last week of August, which is more than reasonable IMO. (Edit: I went back and googled it and the exact cutoff date is the 23rd of August. This was signed into law last year -- I'm not sure if there was a specific date prior to that or if the actual law is new.)

This worked for a couple of years, and then the school district tried to move the first week of school up again and were firmly told no. And ever since that's happened every few years.

Now I believe this is happening in more places than just Iowa, but it was called out and stopped in Iowa because of the strong cultural weight of farming here. It goes unnoticed in most other places because it's just not as important culturally.

And it's important because pushing school back to before these essential farming events is pushing future generations out of small farming. I.E. when the people who currently own small farms die or become too old to run the farm anymore, they won't be able to pass it on to younger relatives or friends, because those people won't have the skillset to actually operate the farm. They'll end up having to sell their land to -- mostly Google and Facebook, who loooooove to buy up farmland around here to build datacenters, but also to larger corporate farms, who are going to do everything more shittily and less ethically.

The post was years old at this point. It was a relic from a bygone era, like that post from 2015 about our favourite science girlboss Elizabeth Holmes that people keep reblogging as a joke.

Except it wasn't a joke, and nobody in the notes had corrected anything. OP was still actively policing the notes, and some comments had been hidden/deleted.

The post wasn't only about something that had already been debunked. It was also about something that people still care deeply about. Let's take the famous "A Rape on Campus" hoax. The reporter who wrote the article wasn't in on it. She also got hoaxed. At the time, people felt really strongly about it, and even if it wasn't literally true, many said, it hints at a deeper truth about college campuses, which are especially dangerous.

Now I don't want to get bogged down in the object-level of the issue, but claims like "women who go to college are more at risk of sexual assault that woman of the same age who start working right after high school" are often thrown into the conversation, and if you tried to interrogate such claims, or the "A Rape on Campus" story, people would often find it distasteful. At the time, Jezebel wrote: 'Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?' Asks Idiot.

Similarly, you can find a surprising number of people who remember the name "Kyle Rittenhouse", and when you ask them what he was notable for, the answer is often "Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a loaded gun to defend a used car dealership and shot three people" or "Kyle Rittenhouse killed three unarmed black protesters". The falsehoods are this time not something repeated by the media, like in the "A Rape on Campus" story, but something repeated over and over on social media, where many users insist that correcting the falsehoods is nit-picking irrelevant details. These same people will often continue to repeat these irrelevant details on social media – the incorrect version.

These two stories aren't all that similar. In the first story, journalists circled the wagons and doubled down. Some journalists implied (and some feminist activists stated outright) that the truth of this story should have been suppressed for the greater good. In the second story, the source of the distortions is much more nebulous. In both cases, it was about much more than a single incident, it was supposed to be emblematic of a bigger problem.

Often when there is an identity-politics element to a debunked story, the people who continue perpetuate the story will see the attempts to set the record straight as attacks, or they will try to protect themselves and attack the debunkers by opportunistically painting the debunking as politically motivated. A lot of pseudohistory that claims Native Americans came from Africa or that Cleopatra was black fits into this pattern. Even if they know that the story has been debunked already, many people somehow would find posting a link with the receipts distasteful. If you post receipts, you sound like you don't get the "emblematic of a bigger problem" part, or like you are on the other side of that bigger problem.

All this is a long-winded way to say I know why – if I reblog that post and add a correction – I will likely be blocked. I understand that this story is supposed to be emblematic of a bigger problem, and even if it didn't happen, it still says a lot about society, and if you debunk this story, you make our side look bad and give ammo to the wrong people.

But I also know that OP had posted that thing years ago, and is still policing the notes.

The thing that makes me write this vent post goes beyond that. OP had carefully screenshotted and cropped news articles. Somebody added screenshots of tweets, and links to "sources", but the sources were more tumblr posts. The main content of the post was a tumblr text post early in the reblog chain, with some screenshots of tweets. And then everybody in the reblog chain completely misrepresents the accusation and mixes it up with a different story. It was a mix of circling the wagons because this is a Very Important Topic right now on the side of OP and vaguely misremembered version of the story in the notes. It's both, in sequence! And it's still happening. People are still reblogging this post.