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The guy let people fucking freeze to death for a buck. He's PAYING people to snitch on someone who will get an abortion, but will do nothing to prevent children from being shot. That isn't political, that's fucking evil.

That's what police reports are really intended to do: tell as much truth as they can afford to, with the underlying goal of covering their ass and deflecting blame or responsibility for anything that went wrong, and massaging the message as needed to achieve that. At its core, the police report is an exercise in establishing favorable narrative, much of it driven by FOP considerations to protect what they see as their members' rights. I'm not saying anything like "all police reports are a pack of lies." That statement on its face is not true. I'm sure they occupy a spectrum that includes telling the actual unvarnished truth about whatever happened. What I am saying is that we've learned so much about how some police reports have doctored the truth or even flat out lied about what really happened, I believe we should never trust a police report prima facie as being the unimpeachable truth.

At some point the people complaining too hard about reasonable gun control doth protest too much. Makes me think they have something in their past that may show up in a background check...

and frankly I don't give a damn if it hurts the legal gun owner. The legal gun owner needs his guns a lot less than kids in American need to live.

I've been thinking more about what Abbott said, that he considers the shooter to be "pure evil". "Evil" is a handy term to use in cases like mass shootings because for a lot of people, "evil" is code for "Satan". That's because evil, like its antithesis "good", is a religious concept, not a behavioral concept. The religious people who still make up the strong majority in this country believe that "good" and "evil" are personality traits endowed by supernatural beings which control our behavior. God makes us do good; Satan makes us do evil. So those people who believe this was an act of evil, specifically, seek to portray mass shootings as a spiritual failing, not a physical or social or policy failing. This has huge and obvious implications for gun policy in America. If we have a strong belief in the presence and power of "evil"—if we believe that there is some supernatural being who is the source of all evil, a being who influences evil and leads people to act in an evil manner—well, then, there's nothing we can do to stop it. Whatever power we might have must pale against the power of this supernatural being. So, all we can do in reaction is to wait for the evil to happen, and then shoot down or lock up the bad guys driven by the evil, and trust that those bad guys will eventually receive their truly just punishment after they die. That is, in fact, the exact policy that civilizations have been following for centuries, and which many—including the United States of America—still employ today. On the other hand: if we believe that people act in a certain way for a reason—whether it is a physical problem such as brain damage or mental illness that leads people to do really bad things for no apparent or logical reason; a systemic failure that creates an incentive to behave badly; and /or a policy failure that makes such weapons so easy and convenient to obtain—then we can fully embrace the idea that we can do something to stop this behavior by changing the systems, and then actually undertaking the hard work to do so. The key difference is that in the former case, the only way to combat the problem of mass shootings is to petition really hard to the Supernatural Being of Good to defeat the Supernatural Being of Evil, and to touch the hearts of men to be good. You know—thoughts and prayers. With the latter case, the way to combat the problem is to apply scientific rigor and analysis to understand the physical problems that lead to inexplicable bad behavior, to understand the systemic problems that lead to warped incentives, or to understand how policy failures enables one to easily carry out this act, and then test and improve the methods to combat these things that lead to the behavior. In the former case, we push off the responsibility of change to beings we trust but cannot interact with, and simply wait and hope for results. In the latter case, we take on the responsibility for change unto ourselves and undertake the hard work to make results happen. That's the policy consideration at hand, as it relates to mass shootings. So what's it going to be? Do we carry on with the traditional policy of reacting to acts of evil with thoughts and prayers? Or should we try something else for a change?

The sad thing that occurs to me is that it might be only foreign journalists who can effectively ask this question and stick with it when the politicians deflect. I think part of it might be the access issue. Deflection works on American journalists because they have to think about a long game in which they have to protect access to Washington insiders for themselves and their news employers. Access is a must-have for them: If access is withheld from them, their effectiveness as political journalists reporting to Americans is severely damaged, and their employers have to mend fences to regain that access. Foreign journalists don't have really to worry about that: access is a good thing for them and a strong nice-to-have, but in the end, they can always report on American politics back to their country without having access to Washington insiders.

This is what happens when the American flag becomes a politicized object. The hijacking of the American flag for political advertisements of any persuasion pisses me off. So here we’ve got the American flag being used, simultaneously mind you, as a prop for a back and forth on police support and police critique. It’s stupid and disrespectful. My comment is not directed toward the person posting the picture here.

The Uvalde response can’t get enough scrutiny. It was a total cluster. It has been reported that a father that was trying to move toward the school perimeter was tasered. One of the moms trying to go beyond the police line was cuffed. All while a massacre was in progress.The parents were pleading with the cops to please act. WSJ is reporting the killer stood outside for 12 minutes shooting at a funeral home located across the street from the school prior to entering the school building. In days and weeks to come I have a pretty good feeling this is going to be a really ugly conversation around the response to this travesty. It needs to be.

Right down there in the front right corner, those are lupins. "Stand and deliver! Throw down your lupins ", cried Denis Moore the highwayman.

Harsh, but maybe Archie should internalize that when he worries about the poor gun owners, to a lot of folks, that comes across as complete disregard for the rights of kids to be able to go to a school without fear.

Also, IIRC, the majority of guns intercepted in crimes committed in Chicago were acquired outside of both the city and the State of Illinois. Chicago/Illinois cannot control the gun laws in other jurisdictions

The rest of the season.

lol. go home pfife, youre drunk.

lol. yeah youre right, i never post anything in the political forum that might remotely be in disagreement with the board consensus. i'm just surprised you knew where the sports forums were! next thing you know you'll actually watch a game...and comment on it! nyah, why do that when you can troll archie with something you saw on twitter?

Because Sandy Hook, Parkland, Buffalo and, and, and, weren't enough for them?

And after you read that book, read "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" by Christopher Hitchens, which presents Kissinger's involvement in a series of alleged war crimes in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus and East Timor.

I see that Stan Papi found the new board.

Faygo Red Pop.

No. He's unable to connect his bat to a baseball at an acceptable level. He has Reynaldo Rivera'd.

I will not speak about abortion on this board anymore, everyone here has their convictions and I respect them. I do feel in the U.S. a child is not safe in the womb or the classroom that should bother everyone.

For people that truly believe abortion is taking the life of a baby, it's not that much of a deflection. That said, funny how the only way to deal with abortion is to make it next to impossible to get one, even if a mother's doctor believes it could kill her. Yet when it's 9-10 year old's lying in a pool of their own blood, there is simply nothing we can do.

Does he like Jerami Grant? (that's the only question I have to ask...)

Always deflection. Because no answers for the issue at hand.

They do but the effect is more like Buford T Justice.

My idle thought watching the police press conference,,,if you want to look like a total idiot in the aftermath of another massive slaughter, wear a fucking cowboy hat as part of your police uniform. Did you hear Abbott say that gun laws have been relatively the same for 60 years without this type of problem having occurred? He chose 60 carefully so that he could conveniently overlook the granddaddy of them all, Charles Whitman.

yesterday it looked horrible but little by little it's looking better. I have tickets so was monitoring. Yesterday it looked like 80% chance throughout gametime. Now it's under 50 but also says "Scattered T Storms" so the thunder portion could be an issue.

ok, the end got to me. i might have teared up just a little bit. maybe. just sayin.

You guys are being too gentle. They aren't merely doing nothing while these things happen. The GOP is actively making policy that make these atrocious acts easier to commit.

Somebody posted a stat on Twitter yesterday that the Tigers are 15-7 in games they score 3 plus runs and 1-21 when they don't, so maybe now we just need to ask before the game "wheres my 3 runs?"

this is great post Chasfh, nailed it right on the head. Evil is always invoked as an excuse for abdicating responsibility. People act out what they believe, and what they believe is what their environment has mirrored of back to them. That may be faulty either because their environment was faulty or because mental illness prevented reality from being mirrored back to them accurately. Either way it's an excuse to pass things off to the metaphysical realm while passing on our own responsibility to create a society that will reflect a better environment in people's minds or care for those whose minds are not capable of it. Don't these believers in Satan's agency ever wonder why he seems so content to sleep on all those secularists everywhere else in the world? You'd think they would figure out they must be praying to the wrong God by now. But yeah - I know, being attacked by Satan must surely be a sign of one's piety. So many lost/misled people in this country....

I dislike it too. I also dislike American flag clothing. People think it makes them look patriotic, but it seems disrespectful to me.

Very well may be right, but he's kinda lost the plot as of late.

Why did you go hall monitor on me? All I did was link to another post from this website. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. There's a "share" link on every post, and it's commonplace for content from other websites to be posted here. I'll remember that in a string of clearly immature posts from him, you literally laughed, and only called out me. You made the choice to display that judgement. You can use it as proof of how drunk I wasn't. Reap/sow. You think it's good for this forum that people lie right to your face and say that Steve Kerr's presser was about basketball? You think it's good for this forum when people lie and say you went to lunch with them when you've never seen the MF'er before in your damn life? Go ahead. Love it. But I know that you know it's fucking hot garbage.

C'mon man you are a good dood. I just don't know why you went all hall monitor on the Buddha.

A state with a near total ban on abortion, unfettered access to guns, voter suppression, unstable power grid and lack of funding for health care is not well run.

I sure hope you're right but I think absolutely none of them are going to pay anything.

almost there. god, i hope youre not driving...

i dont think youre home yet.

and yet many people think the only solution is more of the police there. We need more of them to stand around and not do anything while parents go in and get their kids, without any armor or guns. or maybe that kind of thing only happens to "mexican schools"

WTF pfife? Grow up man...

Miggy, last 15 games: .364/.390/.527

I recall people suggesting that he was the worst hitter in the lineup preseason. We'll know they're going places when that is actually the case lol

If the plan is to tank and draft, they’ve got to hit on the picks. Because otherwise they’ve had awful seasons with the big club, and they didn’t get the dividends that they were hoping for.

why are we even considering that either Mize or Manning might be a bust? players get injured and often come back and can be productive. Even if either requires a significant surgery, it's not a death sentence for their career. Sure, it would be a setback and defer their contributions, but until we learn that they can't be productive contributors to a winning team, I'd encourage some healthy cautious optimism. Meadows is the one I'm concerned with--I really hope whatever he's going through is temporary. I was excited about adding him to the roster for at least the next couple of seasons.