Now of course some will say that you do not search for la migra, la migra searches for you. However, it is possible to put “la migra” into google, which among its links provides a helpful “People also ask…” section of natural language questions you might be trying to answer.
Apparently two white supremacists shot bullets, at least two shots, at two bi-racial siblings (16 yo and 12 yo) who were walking on a footpath that is property of a local church and intended and maintained for public use. The evil white supremacists arrested for those shots are James Reidnauer and Brent van Besien. They don’t claim that the fired no shots, but they do insist that they fired the shots because the children were “meth heads”.
There’s little mystery about their future defense: they can claim erratic behavior on the part of the children that scared them, then invoke stand your ground. We know that Zimmerman claimed he thought Martin might have been high. We know that Zimmerman, despite being a violent, horrible jerkface ended up being found not guilty at trial. Why should the white supremacists neglect a winning strategy?
This. This is the evil that your government encourages when it passes a stand your ground law. Every single such law should be opposed in every single jurisdiction that has passed or considers passing such a provision. Do not retreat from this fight. Go on offense. The mere existence of stand your ground laws is a threat: treat it as such and never back down.
Over on a post of PZ’s, zenlike has a particularly insightful comment. The OP is criticizing some bullshit commentary on Fox News about how trans folk are destroying the entire species of Homo sapiens:
We’re not talking about people who want to simply do a bit of reform here and there, add a new category. They want, they must, in fact, destroy whatever is in order to replace it with what they think should be.
…
[T]he trans people have taken it one step further because by abandoning gender altogether, not simply re-writing it, they’re basically trying to use social engineering to create a new species.
[presented out of order, because I think it’s easier to follow the logic that way – cd]
From the department of Books That Aren’t Books That Should Be Books
All good days are alike; each terrible, horrible, no good day is very bad in its own way.
-Alexander Tolstoy
So, in the grand tradition of never having done this before, I offer you this quote of the day. In large part because I don’t want to lose track of it again:
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
– James D. Nicoll
My BFF just asked me about Nicoll a minute ago, so later today I might read some about him and add that here, but for now I ask you to simply enjoy the beauty of a well-turned metaphor.
PZ, as is his wont, has a post up about higher ed jobs and the outsourcing to adjuncts and guest lecturers of work that used to be done by the professoriate. It’s a good problem to highlight, but the article he quotes leaves me cold:
SyFy has a brilliant piece about the feminism in Captain Marvel and how her antagonists’ tactics recapitulate anti-feminist tropes. What makes Captain Marvel bad? She’s too emotional:
Carol, like so many women, is told repeatedly throughout the film that she must “fight fair.” And “fair,” in the case of the men she encounters both human and alien, means “void of emotion.” … [W]e’re led to believe that detachment is necessary for any Kree warrior. … Nobility, honor, these are the things that matter most. That might be true, but it’s also a guise for a more sinister reality, one in which a man in power tries to stifle the abilities of a woman by equating her emotions with something negative, something shameful.
There are very minor spoilers, but I doubt, as vague and/or peripheral as they are, that they would actually ruin anyone’s enjoyment of the movie. So I recommend that everyone read the piece. Following Jessica Toomer on general principles isn’t a bad idea either.
Oy.
There’s a new paper out by Marissa Harrison (of Penn State) et. al. collected historical data on the crimes of 112 murderers who killed 3 or more people with at least one week between each murder (killing more quickly did not disqualify one so long as there were at least 3 periods of single/multiple murder that were separated from all other periods of single/multiple murder by a full week on each side). 55 of the killers were women. This is the all but 9 of the women serial killers in the US from 1821 to 2008 – at least that they could find. From the men serial killers during that period they selected “matches” of the women subjects. “Matches” here means that they were approximately equivalent to their women counterparts on certain variable which the researchers wanted to control.
Then they ran some criminological statistics on the gender-separated populations & looked for differences. The resulting research was published in the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology. NewAtlas, reporting on the study, tells us that:
That’s rights, transfolks and boring people, it’s another post about everyone’s favorite lawsuit, Devin Nunes’ US$250 million defamation complaint against Twitter, Liz Mair, Devin Nunes’ Mother, and Devin Nunes’ Cow. One of the things I plan to dive into later is that US$250 million figure. It’s all compensatory damages, and it is a major violation of every bar association’s code of conduct to file anything with the court that a lawyer knows to be false. In certain circumstances it can also be a violation if a lawyer should have known something to be false. There’s a case to be made here that Nunes’ lawyer should have his license suspended or revoked.
But what if you’re not the lawyer. What if your day job is a mere member of congress? Should you really be expected to know the law as a member of congress? Probably not all the law, but maybe a bit of constitutional law? Is asking our legislators to know a bit about the constitution asking a wee bit too much?
Oh, probably. But I’m in an asking mood.
So my very first post on the topic of Devin Nunes extremely stupid suit against Twitter and 3 of its users was not actually on this blog. It was actually a comment over on Wonkette. Forgive me, but knowing Wonkette’s obsession with its own Love Cow joke, I thought first of them as soon as I read the news.
In that comment I began with something I didn’t include here. For completeness I reproduce my introductory remarks here: