Links - 28th October 2019 (2)

Group steals an estimated $30,000 in merchandise from North Face store - "A group of close to a dozen people stole an estimated $30,000 from a Wisconsin North Face store in under 30 seconds."
Comments: "They’re just misunderstood, let’s see their kindergarten photos to prove it!"
"Their families must be very proud of them"
"Their mothers should be so proud ‘cause they are such good boys! Ha ha"
"I had a dream...."
"So frustrating to see this. Can't they at last taze or paper spray them while the authorities get there??? Oh wait...they'll probably sue for "injuries.""
"And they ran right past the belt rack! Go figure.."
"I hope they stole some belts too.#nobodywantstoseeallthat#pullyourpantsup#gross"
"Ugh! Just have to be a stereotype, hope they get caught."
"I’m waiting for liberals to argue that shoplifting is a cure for income inequality"
"I didn't see any white people, but I was amazed they could run with shorts down to their knees.... Lol"
"Let's just DEFLECT and talk about police brutality being the cause of this, lol!!"
"And black people wonder why police racially profile them."
"MSNBC will spin this somehow to be Trump’s fault."
"Climate change, police abuse and the Betsy Ross flag must have caused this."
"This is the crap that causes decent black men like my sons to be profiled and harassed !"
"And then when the mugshots appear it becomes the cry of there is a high percentage of people of color in jail...and it is so unjust and unfair. Uh huh. This certainly isn't helping the numbers."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "At 4pm on December 2nd, 2015, a man by the name of Mario Woods was walking back and forth talking to himself in front of a San Francisco apartment building. A man and his girlfriend were sitting nearby in a car eating when Woods reaches into the car, unprovoked, with a knife. The man opened the door to push Woods back and stepped into the sidewalk. That’s when Woods slashed him with the knife.The victim was bleeding heavily and took himself to the hospital. Police showed up at the location and spoke with a witness that saw the knife attack. Other officers entered the area looking for the attacker and found Woods nearby waiting to board a bus.When he saw the officers Woods stepped back and pulled a knife out of his pants while telling the officers “you’re not going to take me today”. The two officers pulled their firearms and told Woods to drop the knife. He responded by saying “You better squeeze that motherfucker and kill me”.As this standoff continued, other officers arrived with less-than-lethal weapons. Three beanbags were fired from a 12-gage shotgun and Woods refused to drop the knife. Then a beanbag was fired from a more powerful gun. This dropped Woods to one knee but he didn’t let go of the knife. Then one officer tried pepper spray, which had no visible effect.Woods then started walking toward a crowd with his knife. An officer stepped in between the crowd and Woods then ordered him to backup. It was then that officers fired at Woods to protect the policeman, who stepped between Woods and the crowd, that was just 10-feet away. Woods died at the scene.The autopsy reported that Woods had methamphetamines, THC, and antidepressants in his system. In addition to the fatal gunshots Woods had five injured from the less-than-lethal weapons.The end of the encounter was captured on two students cell phones and sparked protests. The officer’s were found to have followed official protocol. The city settled with Woods’s mother for $400,000 and altered the use of force protocol.The victim was severely injured and lost his job. Over two years later he was homeless and living out of his car.This was the police shooting that started Colin Kaepernick on his path of protesting police violence."

Why the Dems Will Never Win Back Trump Voters - "The polls were wrong in 2016 because there was, essentially, a reverse “Bradley effect.” And it probably still skews the polls, even after Trump has been president for well over two years. Trump’s supporters are routinely slandered, in the legacy news media and on social media platforms, as morally repugnant reprobates or just too stupid to understand how to vote in their own best interests. There is no easier way to render a room silent at a social occasion or start an altercation at a family gathering than to praise President Trump or anything he has accomplished — no matter how benign.In other words, supporting Trump simply isn’t the done thing in polite society. To do so is to risk loss of social status — if not outright ostracism — and open conflict with friends or family. Trump supporters mislead pollsters or simply refuse to answer their questions pursuant to similar psychological and social incentives. All of which leads to a lot of confusion concerning who it is that supports President Trump and precisely why"

Tiers of Pride and Shame - "a drunk Columbia undergraduate student named Julian von Abele was filmed outside the campus’s main library delivering a passionate ode to whiteness. “White people are the best thing that ever happened to the world,” von Abele declared to a group of students, many of whom were not white. “We invented science and industry, and you want to tell us to stop because, ‘Oh my God we’re so bad.’” In an ill-fated attempt to pacify the collection of students surrounding him, he added the caveat, “I don’t hate other people, I just love white men.”... Many argued that von Abele’s tirade should be understood not as an isolated event, but as a symptom of the university’s ongoing complicity in white supremacy—a systemic problem calling for a systemic solution. Columbia’s Black Student Organization led the charge with a list of demands including extra time for affected students to complete their final exams; increased funding for minority faculty recruitment, on which the university has already spent $185 million since 2005 to little apparent effect; and an unfortunately phrased call for “the incorporation of scientific racism into the Frontiers of Science syllabus.” (Surely they meant the incorporation of information about scientific racism.) But an isolated event doesn’t indicate a systemic problem. Like so many things nowadays, extrapolating from a single event to a crisis is only wrong when your opponents do it. Just a few months ago, many commentators on the Right extrapolated a supposed crisis of illegal immigrant crime from the murder of a single American by an illegal immigrant. At the time, progressives recognized this for the irrational fear-mongering that it was. Yet it is the same flawed logic that extrapolates an alleged crisis of campus racism from a single racist incident.Besides, there remains the question (nearly unaskable in polite company) of whether von Abele’s drunken diatribe was actually racist to begin with. Sure it was narcissistic, self-pitying, and belligerent. But was it an expression of bigotry? At a glance, it’s hard to reconcile the belief that von Abele’s comments were bigoted with the fact that black activists routinely get praised for making similar statements. Von Abele’s remark, “I love myself and I love white people” sounds eerily similar to “I love my blackness and yours,” the Twitter mantra of Black Lives Matter leader Deray McKesson. “We’re white men, we did everything,” nearly echoes a statement made in a commencement speech by Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter: “Without black women…there would be no me, no you, no us, no civilized society of which we speak. We—I, you, and me—we owe everything to black women.” Von Abele’s monologue, universally condemned, took lines straight from the scripts of America’s most celebrated racial justice advocates. On the prejudice-plus-power conception of racism, von Abele’s position in the racial privilege hierarchy as a white person renders his comments racist, whereas McKesson and Garza’s positions as members of a historically marginalized group renders theirs permissible, if not enlightened... does the fact of anti-black racism, whether past or present, overt or systemic, prove that it’s okay for a white person to be banned from a campus for saying things that black people get ovations for? Decent, ethical people are supposed to vigorously nod “yes”—or better yet, not ask the question at all. Yet the view that black people cannot be racist would have been alien to the civil rights leaders and activists of yesteryear, who experienced far more anti-black racism than the leaders of Black Lives Matter do today. Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr.’s strategist and the chief organizer of the March On Washington, was arrested no less than 23 times during an era of profound racism. He nevertheless considered it obvious that blacks could be racist just like whites, and he vocally opposed such racism wherever he encountered it. The same is true of Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Panther party. But, more to the point, if we decide to give black activists a free pass to express racial pride because they face racial slights, why not allow von Abele the same pass? After all, Columbia’s campus is no stranger to anti-white rhetoric. Take, for instance, the criticism, commonly heard in Columbia dorm rooms, that the Western canon is deficient because it’s filled with “dead, white men.”... In my two and a half years on Columbia’s campus, I can count my experiences of anti-black racism on one hand—indeed, one finger. By comparison, I could fill a small diary with the anti-white comments (some intended in jest and others in earnest) that I’ve heard. I sometimes wonder how I would feel if I had to hear Frederick Douglass, Bayard Rustin, and James Baldwin dismissed in casual conversation not as bad writers but as “dead, black men.” I wonder whether I would have the presence of mind to dismiss such statements as harmless nonsense, or whether the experience of hearing my heroes derided in explicitly racial terms—terms that linked their inadequacy to my own racial identity—wouldn’t awaken a sense of grievance within me. I wonder, moreover, how I would feel if I couldn’t complain... if collective pride makes sense, then collective shame makes sense too... the progressive logic that encourages modern-day whites to feel shame for slavery and colonialism should also lead them to feel pride for their ancestors’ achievements. Both white chauvinists and white progressives dogmatically reject one half of the pride-shame binary. Both factions should go one step further and reject the concepts of collective pride and collective shame altogether."

Meme - "If...
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Equals...
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
Then...
Knowledge = 96%
Hardwork = 98%
Both are important, but fall short of 100%
But ATTITUDE = 100%"
"Laziness = 105%
Negativity = 132%
Procrastination = 192%
Selling your soul to Satan = 314%"

Meme - Woman: "White Men Need to Stop Being Repressed and Start Honestly Expressing Their Emotions"
Men: "We're Deeply Frustrated by a Society That Constantly Seems to Be Emasculating and Undermining Us While Delegitimising Any Complaints We Have Because of 'Privileges' That Do Nothing to Reduce the Frustration of Living in an Isolating, Sedentary and Self-Destructive Culture Increasingly Devoid of Age-Old Sources of Happiness Like Community, Religion, National Identity and Family"
Woman: "No Not Like That
Fragile Bigots Smh
I Bet You Have Small Dicks"

Brandon Metheny - "25 years ago today, a jury in New Mexico announced its verdict in one of the most infamous and misunderstood cases in recent memory: Liebeck v. McDonald's, also known as the "hot coffee lawsuit." This case is held up as one of most egregious examples of frivolous lawsuits. The story goes that a woman bought coffee from McDonald's, drove with it between her legs, spilled it on herself, sued McDonald's because it was hot, and took a cool $1 to $5 million (depending on who's telling the story) off of them. "Wait, she sued because coffee was hot? And she was driving with it between her legs? What did she expect? Anyone can sue for anything these days."
Guess what? That story is almost completely false. I mean, Stella Liebeck did have hot coffee spill on her. That part is true... The spilled coffee wasn't just unpleasant; it was served at nearly 190 degrees, which caused 3rd degree burns over 6% of her body, required multiple skin grafts, necessitated further care after she left the hospital, and left her permanently disfigured. She originally tried to settle with McDonald's and asked for $20,000; they responded with an offer of $800.
At that point, she hired an attorney who discovered that 1) McDonald's required franchisees to serve coffee between 180-190 degrees 2) no other coffee in the city was served at more than 160 degrees 3) 190 degree liquid causes third degree burns in less than 3 seconds and would burn the mouth if consumed at that temperature 4) 160 degree liquid takes over 20 seconds to cause third degree burns and 5) McDonald's had been sued over SEVEN HUNDRED times in the prior decade for coffee being too hot and had settled up to $500,000 in cases and been told to lower the temperature...
McDonald's knew the case was going poorly, so it looked to the one thing it had that Liebeck didn't: a bully pulpit. They started a massive PR effort that was basically a smear campaign, painting Liebeck as some irresponsible scofflaw trying to take their hard-earned money. And it worked, to the point that the annual "awards" for frivolous lawsuits are known as "The Stellas.""

Sydney Watson on Twitter - "Feminists: We want equality!
Me: Okay.
Feminists: And the vote.
Me: Sure.
Feminists: And sexual freedom.
Me: That's fair.
Feminists: ...and we must EXTERMINATE toxic masculinity!
Me: Wait, no-
Feminists: But men must still pay for us on dates!
Me: That's not equ-"

Meme: - "Jim:
Bachelors Degree in Philosophy, 100K student debt, Can't find a Philosopher job, Believes people without college degrees are stupid
Joe:
4 year paid apprenticeship, 0k student debt, earns 80k annually, Disconnected Jim's electricity for non-payment"