Rottcodd

What the fuck are you on about?

It’s not necessarily the case though that fewer crimes are being actually “solved,” in the most precise sense of the term.

It could be that the current heightened interest in police oversight and focus on investigation of (and huge lawsuit payouts as a consequence of) wrongdoing by the police has made it less likely that people will be railroaded/framed for crimes they didn’t actually commit, so the rate at which crimes are marked as solved has declined, even as the rate at which they actually are solved hasn’t.

That’s everything I said, right there. What part of it are you not understanding?

evidence is necessary. otherwise, it’s just speculation

Of course it’s fucking speculation! What the fuck else did you think it was?!

i didn’t expect equivocation

It would be equivocation if there was a disjunct between the intended meaning of what I said at one point and the intended meaning of the same thing at some other point.

But I’ve been entirely consistent in what I’ve said. The disjunct is between what YOU thought I meant and what I actually said, and that’s your fucking problem - not mine.

Eh?

I said that it’s “not necessarily the case that” one thing and “it could be that” something else.

Logic and plausibilty are all that’s necessary.

It struck me after I posted that that modern technology and investigative techniques would also contribute to such a decline.

It’s undoubtedly more difficult to falsely convict someone (whether deliberately or not) in the era of GPS, cell phone records, video surveillance and DNA tests.

It’s not necessarily the case though that fewer crimes are being actually “solved,” in the most precise sense of the term.

It could be that the current heightened interest in police oversight and focus on investigation of (and huge lawsuit payouts as a consequence of) wrongdoing by the police has made it less likely that people will be railroaded/framed for crimes they didn’t actually commit, so the rate at which crimes are marked as solved has declined, even as the rate at which they actually are solved hasn’t.

What the fuck?

Even setting aside the cultural/religious issues, didn’t the US outgrow this ludicrous obsession with boys’ hair like 50 years ago?

I saw in another article too that after they admitted that it had in fact happened, they claimed that the problem was that Media Matters had made it seem to be more common than it in fact was.

The reality of course is that MM just reported that it had happened. And used-to-be-twitter has already admitted that much.

So yeah - they’re going to get their asses handed to them in this lawsuit.

The problem though is that we’re now in a timeline in which the fascism-adjacent demagogues who support Musk are so invested in their narrative that they’re going to view the failure of the lawsuit as some sort of contrarian proof that it was justified. To them, it’s not going to fail because MM’s accusation was in fact legitimate, but because “blah blah blah deep state something something great replacement yadda yadda woke mob.”

…launched what he called a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters, which accused it of artificially manipulating the social network’s algorithms to achieve the contentious juxtapositions (while admitting that they had in fact occurred).

This is my favorite part of this whole story.

It’s like the narcissist’s prayer directly translated into a lawsuit.

I prefer “used-to-be-twitter.” I think it captures the context better, and it’s clunky, as it should be.

Of course they are - they’re psychopaths.

They’re each and all people who, in a sane society, would be institutionalized in order to protect others from the harm they inevitably do as a consequence of their complete lack of principles, morals, empathy and remorse. But instead they’re allowed to run free, and this is what we get.

Of course they did - that’s the point.

And it doesn’t matter in the slightest that there’s no substance to any of their allegations, because the entire purpose is just to get the idea that there’s something there to investigate out into the world.

And it’ll likely work, no matter what, because Republican voters are angry morons, so all they’re going to get no matter what is “investigate the Jan. 6 investigators because [words],” so it really doesn’t matter if those words make sense or not.

Money wins, every time.

And right there, you answered your own (presumably rhetorical) question.

The money people jumped on AI as soon as they scented the chance of profit, and that’s it. ALL other considerations are now secondary to a handful of psychopaths making as much money as possible.

The “why” is certainly that someone in the state beef industry gave him a pile of money.

This whole thing is just creepy as hell. This guy has some serious and disturbing psychological issues.

And he’s a fucking politician. People actually decided that they wanted him to represent them in government.

More all the time, I feel like I’ve somehow been trapped on an alien planet, surrounded by a bizarre race of inexplicably stupid lunatics.

So at this point, I’m just wondering - traitor, lunatic or moron?

He’s obviously at least one of the three, but which one(s)?

Ah… the venerable old “make a ‘loan’ then forgive it” strategy for paying bribes.

At this point Thomas might as well have a tattoo across his forehead that says “I am corrupt.”

If he had even a speck of integrity, he’d resign.

Well yeah - it’s not an evil product. As an inanimate object, it can’t possess a moral quality.

Moral qualities are only rightly assigned to conscious beings - like, for example, corporate CEOs.

I don’t really blame them, or at least not primarily.

They’re just desperate and frustrated and looking for someone or something to blame for the fact that what should be a great nation is instead a festering cesspool of greed, corruption, violence and stupidity. Like most, they won’t or can’t consider the part they play in that, so they look for some “other” to blame.

There is actually an “other” to be blamed - the wealthy and politically powerful few - but most of American history, and human history for that matter, has been built around establishing and protecting the privilege of those few, most often by manipulating public sentiment in such a way as to direct anger and frustration away from them and instead towards others of the common people.

So they’re really just the latest in a long line of people feeling wholly justifiable anger and frustration that’s been misdirected by self-serving shitheels. I guess they’re rightly faulted for failing to recognize that they’re mad at the wrong people, but really, that’s true of far too many people.

Now all that said, on a personal level there’s almost nobody that fills me with more rage and disgust than the bigoted right.

Still though…

Not that it makes any real difference, but I wonder how many of them are so stupid and/or blinded by ideological bias that they voted that way because they sincerely believed that the election was invalid and how many of them voted that way because they’re cowards with no principles or integrity who were trying to suck up to Trump and his army of violent morons.

At this point, that’s one of the only things that provides even a hint of interest about an American right-wing politician - wondering if they’re an actual delusional psychopath or if they’re just LARPing as one to get votes and/or not get death threats.

Again, not that it makes any real difference…

It’s also the reason that religious people can contentedly do horrible things - because they have no ability to make moral judgments on their own, so if their religion tells them that something that anyone with even a minimal ability to reason morally would recognize to be obviously wrong is actually right and proper, they just slavishly believe that it’s right and proper.

This is such a deeply disturbing viewpoint.

When someone says that a lack of religion leads to a lack of morality, what they’re necessarily really saying is that they’re so deeply sociopathic that they not only can’t reason morally, but can’t even envision the possibility of doing so. They’re effectively stating outright that they can’t even imagine arriving at sound moral judgments through the application of reason, empathy and concern for others, and that the only way they can even conceive of morality is as a set of rules laid down and enforced by some enormous daddy figure who’s going to punish them if they break them.

It’s astonishing really. And sobering.