Thess vs the World

This is what's so fucked up about "nothing that requires the labor of others is a human right".

The labor is already being done under capitalism. The laborers are already being underpaid under capitalism.

When you propose removing the greedy profiteers and paying the workers a reasonable wage, people call that "slavery" while they have no problem with the current system.

Ownership meant a physical copy. Now you own nothing and can't find what you want across multiple streaming platforms.

-Replacing his vitimens with poision

- getting her brother to invite him out onto his boat and then killing him and dumping him in the ocean and saying he got drunk and fell off.

- get tboned with him in the passenger seat and then once he was in the hospital theres all kinds of easy ways to kill him like not washing my hands after a poop and then touching his wound casually.

-replacing his drink of choice with moonshine!?

- take him on a hike thats locally notorious for a rapid otter attacking hikers and once he had rabies I could just kill him any ol way and say self defense.

Theres this thing that happens with a few too many franchises, where the constant need to one-up and raise stakes makes each entry slightly more unhinged than the last. Until you reach a point where what started as a fairly simple/grounded concept has become completely ridiculous(see Dragonball, Fast and Furious).

Travis: Yeah. It well--but it's seventeen feet tall divided by twenty-four months means that every month he crafted point seven--so like about three-quarters of a foot. Right? So, nine inches. So yes, I could say that just statistically speaking, there was a wiener month.

Griffin: Okay. "So how was your September, Michelangelo?" "It was, it was intense."

…only to be followed by this amazing message.

The roller coaster ride started.

With a happy ending…

…and a sweet poem to finish.

Delicious Shiny Secrets...

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I get a lot of versions of this question, and I answer it seriously every time, because it’s both important and not important at all. Anyone who asks respectfully gets my whole ass answer.

It’s just not really about that. My job isn’t about defending the idea of hurting someone else. It’s about stopping the state from inflicting further hurt, torture, pain. It’s about pushing back for some fairness against a monumentally stacked system. And it’s about stuff that’s normal human stuff that counts as crime for some reason.

Yeah, it’s hard to do a sex abuse case. Sometimes the images stick around and it bothers me. But honestly? Mostly those cases have real plausible theories of innocence or they’re cases that I will lose because the evidence is there, and the question is not whether the perpetrator will go to jail but how long.

Those cases are so rare, though. I get so much pointless bullshit. Felony of a teen taking mom’s car without permission. Two kids that try to break into a car and get so scared by the alarm that they run away. Trespassing on dad’s house because his new girlfriend wants you to stop coming around. It’s just human stuff, and the violence of the state is not necessary or helpful.

I also reject the idea of punishment completely. The state has a responsibility to stop people from hurting other people again. But inflicting pain doesn’t do it, we know this by now. So I argue for mercy and for real solutions to real problems. I’m here to build a future, not get caught up with doing violence to someone because of the past.

So yeah, sometimes it’s hard, but mostly my conscience is dead clear: I’m not responsible for the crime. The damage has been done. I want to start the healing process, and I want it for everyone involved. When that’s not possible, I just want to tell the authorities they don’t get to just Do What They Want.

The more I do this job, the more I am a genuine pacifist who is against violence in all forms, and actually I don’t see a contradiction between that and what I do for a living. State violence is a pervasive evil that tears apart families, communities, and countries, and it’s far more damaging and awful than any individual crime. The average prosecutor has more blood on their hands than a serial killer, but it’s invisible: people who died in jail, who froze to death on the street, who were shot in a drug deal. Their violence begets violence.

When I get blood on my hands, it’s because I put my hands over the wounds and try to stop the flow. I’m okay with it.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

eyes hit serious diminishing returns wrt resource costs vs vision quality as they get bigger, so the question became: what the FUCK do giant (and colossal) squid need to see so badly that they couldn't see with swordfish-sized eyes that's justifying that massive energy cost? that nothing else in the deep ocean needs to see so fucking badly??

turns out the one strength eyes that big really have over much smaller eyes is: seeing large glowing objects in water deeper than 500 meters from an appreciable distance.

sperm whales are the primary predator of giant squid. sperm whales don't glow. BUT! water that deep is full of bioluminescent creatures-- these creatures light up when bumped into. something a sperm whale's size is continuously bumping into those critters, it's just surrounded by a glowing field all the time when it's swimming at those depths, visible from a distance-- if you have the right eyes-- as a massive glowing shape. so basically the only reason to have eyes the size of soccer balls is if you live in the deep ocean and your life depends on having a heads up when a hungry sperm whale lurking around

Books are precious, but not to the point you can't deface them or reuse them in ways that you want/need, especially not a dime a dozen copy of a popular series.

I've destroyed books. Dozens of books. Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and The Hobbit and Dog Man and Avatar: the Last Airbender and and and...

They're not precious irreplaceable artifacts, a lot of them are printed on shit paper bound with shit glue and they fall apart after enough readings. I used them for art projects and library decor and cut them into bookmarks. We bought more copies.

Outdated medical and child-care books.

so many responses of “its nice that you’re privileged enough to be able to steal from Target willy nilly!” and that’s not at all what this is about. like, yeah, shoplifting and loitering and graffiti and breaking the rules is, obviously, part of “do crime”. but they’re not parts you have to do.

would you help someone get an abortion where it was illegal?

would you help a trans friend get healthcare that had been criminalized?

would you shelter someone fleeing persecution, even if the law said not to?

would you help a gay couple stay together when the state decided their relationship was unlawful?

instead, would you report someone else for breaking the law? will you snitch on your hungry neighbors for stealing food? on your homeless neighbors for sleeping where they’re able?