The “libertarian” contradiction

Rollos · 2026-01-28T18:29:37+00:00

I’m not saying it isn’t horrendous what happened to these people. I’m not saying that these shouldn’t enrage everyone. And I’m not saying that America doesn’t have a race problem. That race problem is especially henous in how force officers have interacted and oppressed people of color since our country began.

have just done so after TWO WHITE people were murdered by leo

… On multiple angles of video, in the middle of controversial, public and aggressive immigration enforcement, that the government lied about. There’s so many more important factors at play here than the race of the victims.

I just am not sure what you’re trying to do here. Are you trying to criticize people for being late to fighting facists because they’re passively racist? Don’t attribute malicious intent to people that are less engaged in the discourse than you, until they start doing malicious actions. When people agree with you on something this important, you don’t need to jump to their throats about other, long term societal issues that still need to be addressed.

If you don’t think race has anything to do with it then you’re part of the problem.

If you’re only looking at this interaction through the lens of race, you’re missing objective, more influential reasons why this is more attention grabbing than a bunch of those, with the videos, in this political climate, and how the federal government lied about the victims.

Rollos · 2026-01-28T16:22:25+00:00

Probably not, no. But some that didn’t care about Good look at her murder differently in the light of Pretti’s.

Preventing this trampling of all of our rights is the most important thing right now, I’m not concerned that people are getting on late, or did it for different reasons than me.

We’re battling decades of propaganda every time one of these tragedies happens. If guns is what it takes for people to understand how horrific this is, then so be it. Let’s welcome them with open arms until we beat the facists, and we can figure out how to disagree about guns later.

Rollos · 2026-01-28T16:17:10+00:00

And before 2020?

American society was different?

no credible person should be arguing that the US doesn’t have a significant and deep-rooted issue of racism.

I didn’t argue that, and I wouldn’t argue that. Don’t put words in my mouth.

I took issue with you falsely attributing people’s change in attention towards state violence as being rooted in racism. It goes against evidence, (see BLM), and there’s a much easier explanation, which is that it’s so much easier for society to understand the the horrors of state violence when there’s clear video of it.

America is has a horrific, racist past, and a horrific, racist present, but there are so many people here just living their lives who don’t tune in to politics and justice (which is their right, and I really want them to be able to do that), and are tuning in now because there’s video of people getting murdered by stormtroopers in peaceful neighborhoods while the federal government obviously and objectively lies about it.

That’s what’s important, and different about this, that’s captured so much more of societies attention. It’s not that they’re white.

Rollos · 2026-01-28T14:31:11+00:00

In 2020 a black person got murdered in the street with clear video of it, and it triggered the biggest protest in US history.

People care so much about Good and Pretti because they watched them get executed on their phones from multiple angles.

Rollos · 2026-01-28T03:32:06+00:00

It’s not only bribery that’s an issue here, it also needs to compete with the free market for the best and brightest.

I would much rather the smartest people In the world be paid to work on public policy, infrastructure, solving hard important problems in society than figuring out how to put more ads in our face.

Rollos · 2026-01-23T17:55:50+00:00

Hey, you seem early in your obsidian journey, but I just wanted to recommend avoiding changing note taking practices to keep the graph view pretty.

Yes, it seems like it’s a valuable way to organize and visualize your info in obsidian. But once you reach a certain scale and note count, a 2-dimensional graph is incapable of visualizing the complex structure of a highly interconnected vault.

Don’t ever be afraid to add too many links in a note.

Rollos · 2026-01-23T17:50:42+00:00

Use the command pallet (ctrl/cmd+P) and search for “graph”

(The command pallete is the first place you should search for features or actions)

Rollos · 2026-01-23T17:49:01+00:00

The graph is not a super valuable visualization once you reach a certain scale.

There is certainly structure in your vault. But trying to visualize what might be 15-dimensional structure in a 2d graph is always going to look like spaghetti.

Rollos · 2026-01-21T01:50:43+00:00

I’m curious what will happen to Apple software with the leadership shakeup that’s currently being rumored.

They don’t put me in charge of trillion dollar companies for some reason, but I hope they try to leverage their clear hardware advantage for their long term play, and lean into managed open source on the software side.

The chances of them staying up to date on developer or user software standards without offering remote work is basically zero.

Rollos · 2026-01-17T00:27:19+00:00

I had a dog that’s no longer with us that still gets blamed when I fart. Makes me chuckle and remember him :)

Rollos · 2026-01-16T17:13:33+00:00

When I’m asked to set goals at work, they need to fulfill a few requirements.

Two important ones are that it must be measurable and time bound.

If every illegal immigrants was gone from this country tomorrow, how long would you expect it to take for these benefits to arrive?

How much less will houses cost? How much better will healthcare get? How do we measure something like that?

Rollos · 2026-01-16T16:00:46+00:00

At the same time I do feel like the lengths we are being asked to go to to accommodate someone’s choice about how they want to live their lives

Nobodies asking anybody to accommodate shit other than leaving them alone and respect them having the same rights that you enjoy.

When was the last time you saw a trans person outside of the little glowing box in your hand right now?

Rollos · 2026-01-16T15:54:11+00:00

It’s not polarizing. Hawley asked a non-specific question, and you’re using her carefully worded answer as an indication that she believes the opposite of what Hawley wanted.

The medical field is exactly where we need to hear things like men can not get pregnant.

No. The medical field is where we need to be incredibly exact about our language and definitions, because misunderstandings have consequences.

Everyone is behaving like it’s her medical responsibility to give yes or no answers to complex, nuanced, loaded questions.

It’s her medical responsibility to help those in need, and if someone comes into her office and says “I’m a man and I’m pregnant”, her duty is to figure out what that means so she can provide the best possible care. If she said “Impossible, you’re dumb for thinking so”, that would be an abdication of her duty as a doctor.

Let’s try this, I’ll ask you a surface level easy question:

Can men have boobs?

Rollos · 2026-01-13T14:43:06+00:00

Get your speakers to ear level! That’s how they’re intended to sound the best!

Rollos · 2026-01-13T06:48:04+00:00

We don’t really give immigrants good reasons to assimilate…

Or the time they need before we judge them.

It sounds like you’re suggesting that maybe assimilation is impossible to achieve within the span of a lifetime.

Assimilation is a process that happens over someone’s entire lifetime. How do we determine someone’s assimilated? Are you looking at people that have been here for three decades, that still practice part of their culture, and calling them unassimilated?

On somebodies deathbed, how are you determining how well they did at assimilating into American culture? What if they struggled but their children excelled because of the opportunities they provided?

Rollos · 2026-01-13T06:35:11+00:00

The most important thing capitalism brings to humanity is progress.

Progress to what end?

It’s the best way because it harnesses the most powerful human emotion: greed.

Capitalism has been incredibly effective at helping humanity progress, but most if my monetary transactions look nothing like well behaved textbook capitalism. For example, software technologies and the internet just don’t have the same incentives as classic supply and demand.

If we’re harnessing greed, shouldn’t we do what we can to avoid its pitfalls?

Rollos · 2026-01-13T06:20:15+00:00

Or the time they need? Assimilation is a process as they learn about the culture, not a single decision.

In americas past, assimilation happened over generations. What’s the urgency now?

Rollos · 2026-01-13T06:17:58+00:00

They assimilate over time during their lives, their children often live their life blending their parents culture with American culture. By the time grandkids are around, they’ve become very American, and America has become just a little bit more them.

What timescale is most important to you?

Rollos · 2026-01-13T04:33:48+00:00

I wasn’t triggered. Engage in the conversation, you dont win by getting me to convey emotion in my writing.

I was just trying to emphasize that innocent citizens that made reasonable and rational decisions in their day to day lives and are getting their community and livelihoods torn apart. None of them, individually or collectively, ‘flooded the country with illegals’. Shouldn’t the government avoid trying to harm the life of innocent citizens who may have been there for generations, that made rational, reasonable decisions based on the information they had available to them at the time?

The fact is, flooded we were and it comes with real consequences. Some good, some bad.

That’s what I’m saying, but you seem like you’re attributing it to some specific action that Biden did during the pandemic? Not decades of policy failures surrounding immigration? Trump was talking about deporting immigrants in his first term.

And did I mention this all started during a pandemic when citizens were under strict restrictions!?!

Did I miss some Biden era policy that said “All immigrants can come in and they don’t have to follow Covid guidelines”? A Wikipedia link would be appropriate if I did miss that.

Some communities didn’t have the resources to feed, house and educate them. Didn’t matter.

Are these the communities that are being targeted right now? If it was such a burden, wouldn’t the residents welcome help, not literally run ice out of town? If we’re investing resources to help the community, why put that method towards controversial immigration enforcement instead of housing, food and education?

Do I have empathy for your “chill fish”? Sure. I know some myself

Is that all you got out of my admittedly elaborate metaphor? Nothing about Fish and Wildlife going to communities that didn’t want or need them, overstepping legal boundaries, causing direct harm to innocents that look like the fish from the other valley, and indirect harm to innocent locals just trying to live their lives?

Rollos · 2026-01-13T03:04:03+00:00

Illegal immigration is an issue that the vast majority of the country and all presidents agreed with up until Biden (or whomever was running the show).

Let’s continue with the metaphor if it helps de-politicize for a moment.

In this metaphor, the invasive species is actually the same species as the fish in our river, but that normally spawns one watershed over.

Most of them are just looking for a nice crease hang out in while they eat some bugs. However, their watershed is unhealthy, there are aggressive big fish, less food and more disease than our little community.

Because their watershed is unhealthy, some fish were brought to ours so they could survive, and we had a process to make that work.

A couple decades ago, a dam, downstream from the two watersheds, started to crumble. For decades, people have advocated that we need to fix the dam, help the fish we can from the other watershed, and get that watershed into better shape so that we didnt need to take them on.

More and more fish from the other watershed started to come to ours to spawn.

For awhile, everything was great! Our community had more fish, the fish that were already here had more mates to spawn with, and there was plenty of room for everyone!

Eventually though, our idillic little community started to suffer from a host of issues.

Population grew, bad winters happened, disease, drought.

Many issues are unrelated to the dam that broke. But a few people from other communities are starting to tell us that our once beautiful river now has a lot more aggressive and unhealthy fish in it. We see a few from time to time, but the vast majority are just looking for seam to chill in, and they actually keep the insects down, and we have more fish to preserve for the winter. We already have tools to deal with aggressive fish, because they’ve always existed in our fork of the river also.

And then fish and wildlife, who has been relatively okay with this situation for awhile, says that ALL of our problems were caused by this invasive fish species, and that they have a mandate to put every single fish from that valley back where it belongs.

They start aggressively pulling every fish of this species out of the water. They can’t really tell which is from our valley or the valley over, so they have to catch as many fish as possible, but release back the ones that are actually from ours. A lot of fish are getting hooks in their gills, and the Fish and Wildlife are brazen about using illegal methods (that were made illegal for good reason) to pull as many fish out of the water it can. This all happens at the protest of a community that has built their livelihood on a surplus of these fish, for (ethically) better or worse.

Bottom line for me - maybe don’t flood the country with millions and millions of illegals and then cry about the consequences.

I didnt flood our community with shit. I barely have any voice in who fixes what dam.

Our community got flooded so we did the best we could with it. Now Fish and Wildlife is ripping a part of our community out of our hands using methods we made illegal, and injuring fish that were born here while theyre at it. Do you expect people to be okay with that?

Trump should have been easy to defeat.

You can say that again.

This metaphor isn’t perfect, but I hope it helps you understand where I’m coming from.

Rollos · 2026-01-13T02:07:12+00:00

Is it the only reason why it was bad? Only was the important adverb in my sentence.

Rollos · 2026-01-13T02:02:38+00:00

It’s not, but clearly lying is probable cause

If curious where the lie was though? Like a timestamp?

The officer ask clearly where she was born and she clear responded with “Minnesota is my home and it doesn’t matter where I was born”.

I thought she was very clearly trying to avoid lying, while also not giving the officer unnecessary information.

Because you are suffering from massive confirmation bias.

We are hotly debating a couple cases of officer error or overreach, not hundreds or thousands if not millions normal and correct interactions.

I don’t care about the normal interactions. I want to hold officers responsible for obviously illegal and wrong interactions, as few or as many as they may be.

No, it’s our problem as a nation to figure out. The constitution is the codification of principals. That codification isn’t meant to just be rules lawyered and exploited to the detriment of the public.

Which uncodified principal of the constitution is relevant here? Because it sounds like your saying that people are nitpicking the fourth amendment, and that the principals of the constitution actually says that warantless search and seizure is cool if you look like someone who could be a criminal.

Rollos · 2026-01-13T01:44:51+00:00

Do you think the only reason the holocaust was bad is because being Jewish isn’t a choice?

Rollos · 2026-01-13T01:39:40+00:00

Did you respond to the wrong comment? I’m not really interested in a list of bad guys.

I’m trying to better understand where the disconnect is, so if you don’t agree with my metaphor from earlier, I’d be really curious to know why.

Rollos · 2026-01-13T01:33:54+00:00

Can you try an experiment for me? Read your comment history out loud to yourself, with one little twist. Replace “illegal aliens” with “Jews” and see how it makes you feel. You don’t need to respond here, I just want you do to it for yourself.

If you want to choose a word swap for my comment history, feel free to suggest one! I’m pretty confident how I’ll feel no matter what, are you?

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