There are just way too many people involved in this story and all of them seem to be acting in ways that are completely inexplicable (except this guy's kids who seem like normal humans). If I had to live in this sort of environment I would seriously start to wonder whether I had some sort of mental issue to do with empathy or theory of mind, because I would be surrounded by people whose actions made no sense and whose inner lives were a complete mystery.
Since I live next door and work in Cambridge, this is a must-read for me. This comment from the MeFi thread (not Reddit! Bad Heebie!) sums up my initial reaction, though: "Who the hell picks people up at Tags Hardware? Who the hell gets picked up at Tags?"
Tags is probably best-known for giving away, with medium-large purchases, a particularly distinctive reusable shopping bag that you see people using all around the greater area. It's a definite marker of a local.
Let's all list the oddest place that we've ever picked someone up.
Whoops. I should know better. I'm going to fix that.
If I were going to make sense of it, I think it's a "You can't cheat an honest man" situation. That is, the two women seem to be some complicated form of con artists, who are in it for a combination of money and pure insane enjoyment of drama and chaos. Hay, on the other hand, looks to me as if he initially got sucked into their orbit for emotional reasons, and then started doing things to move his assets and those held jointly with his ex-wife and mother of his children out of his control, which looked as if he thought he was setting up a fun new life for himself where he could minimize financial responsibility for his kids. And then that went bad, because the two women were conning him.
But that's pure uncharitable speculation and it's hard to tell from a story told from his angle.
It's just safest to assume anyone who wants to have sex with you is trying to steal a kidney.
"You can't cheat an honest man" - that is a very silly and false aphorism.
The only thing that makes it work a lot of the time is that very few people are completely honest. Nonetheless, it is very common for gullible, fairily honest people to get cheated.
It's why the missionary position is the only safe way to have sex. Never let anyone get in a position where you can't see if they're holding a knife.
You can have metal detectors at your house.
7: Sure, the more gullible the victim is, the more honest they're likely to be. But for a competent well-educated adult to get into that deep of a mess, I think it's a fair bet that they were intending to pull something shady.
9: Have Two-Minute Mysteries taught you nothing? There's not a metal detector in the world that's going to protect you from an icicle.
The real mystery is the ex-wife. That is, there's no indication in the article that she's a primary source of the insanity, she's highly professionally accomplished in a real-world-competence kind of way (that is, she's an AUSA, or at least was at some point in the sequence of events). What on earth is she doing enmeshed with a train-wreck like Hay? Ex-husband, sure, anyone can screw up and marry a weirdo, but getting divorced from him (which would indicate having figured out that he, to put it mildly, had issues) and then continuing to live with him and having another kid? That I find incomprehensible.
I've been reading Encyclopedia Brown mysteries with Pokey lately - he's totally hooked - and I remember as a kid that I virtually never solved them. Occasionally I'd be in the right ballpark, but never quite nailed down the motivation, etc.
As a grown up, you have such an instinctive ear for such things, it's really amazing. Leaving aside those that I outright remember, you're reading along, reading along, and then there's a sudden cloudburst, or a necklace that shatters, or someone puts a baby on the hood of a car, and it is just a certain kind of detail that sticks out like a sore thumb for you to use it as your launching off point. It's kind of hilariously easy.
There is definitely a class of con in which it is true that "you can't cheat an honest man" because that class of con relies on the mark a) not going to the authorities and b) not asking too many questions about how the fake deal is supposed to work. You could call this the "killing the golden goose" type; the mark suspects that the reason he's making such great returns on his investment is that the con artist is doing something a bit underhand, like insider dealing, so he doesn't ask too many questions or look into it because he wants to preserve deniability when the con artist gets caught. In reality of course he is not making great returns, the con artist is simply stealing his money and lying to him, and if he dug into it a bit he'd realise it.
But that's only one sort of con.
But for a competent well-educated adult to get into that deep of a mess, I think it's a fair bet that they were intending to pull something shady.
On the other hand, competent well-educated adults (even academics) can be really startlingly good at deceiving themselves. Remember that Stubblefield case with the facilitated communication? She managed to talk herself into thinking it was perfectly OK to rape a severely disabled patient under her care.
13: Doesn't that just imply that she's also a mess? Sure, marry any kind of immature person once, especially when you're young, but to go back for more makes it seem like you lack much perspective on how to solve problems.
13: yes exactly. When I was writing 1 I initially wrote (except this guy's ex-wife and kids who seem like normal humans) but then I thought, no, I don't even understand why she acted like she did.
(She may be a mess, but she is innocent in this whole disaster, so I feel a little bad about voicing that opinion.)
Ah well, surely the subject of discussion wouldn't show up twice in a row.
Surely one can be both a hopeless mess in one's personal life and an assistant US attorney.
It would not be "in a row" because of the health care post.
Probably, if you want to have sex but not lose a kidney, your ex is a safe bet. Otherwise, you have to delay sex long enough that you know they aren't after a kidney because you held them off long enough that kidney theft isn't profitable based on reasonable assumptions about the value of their time and your kidney.
What she's probably not factoring in properly is that the older you are, the less your kidney is worth, so you can be more promiscuous.
13: That is very weird to me, too. She seems so competent in every other way. Maybe Hay's issues with women were mostly harmless or ignorable previously, and this is just a combination of midlife crisis and some truly spectacular grifters?
Apparently, Maria-pia is also her mother's name, and two of her three sisters also have "Maria" as a name element.
I want to call bullshit on the "I just really hate the patriarchy, that's it" line. Or at least, they're being incredibly irresponsible to other women. Yes, they're totally pwning this gullible idiot, but she's also directly hurting Zachs. Fake rape stories hurt real rape victims. They're enmeshed in a culture that constantly thinks about how actions have systemic effects, and they don't think or care about the consequences of what they're doing? This legal equivalent of the vagina dentata story doesn't hurt the patriarchy as a whole at all, it just makes it marginally shittier towards real victims of sexual assault. Good job, assholes.
I will say that that line comes through Hay. Not that it's impossible that one of them said it, I can't see any way to read the story that they're not incredible wrongdoers, but I wouldn't take his version of anything at face value.
16.last: I would say that calling that innocent self-deception, as opposed to at least culpably motivated-reasoning-based self-deception, which is the kind of thing I'm talking about, assumes facts not in evidence.
25: True. Reading the MeFi thread now; I should be more cynical of the details not in the public record.
It's hard to think of what Shuman and Haider's motivation was besides wanting to ruin some man, though. Shuman seems to be set monetarily, unless she was actually cut out of the inheritance and the house she bought, etc. were all just financial slight of hand.
16: Then there's the con where person A tells the mark they lost a wedding ring or gold watch or something else valuable and offers a reward of e.g. $5,000, person B tells the mark they found this nice thing and they're planning to keep it, so the mark offers person B a finder's fee of $100 for it, thinking they're going to be ahead $4,900 in the end, only it turns out the watch is brass and person A never returns. If the mark were really honest, they'd tell person B about the big reward, but depending on details the deception might be so small none of us would think twice about it.
16: I love this story of scammers scamming themselves.
"It's hard to think of what Shuman and Haider's motivation was besides wanting to ruin some man, though. Shuman seems to be set monetarily, "
I guarantee there has never been a greed driven sociopath who thought to herself "you know what? I've got enough money now, I don't need any more."
Hay had a broad reputation at the law school as painfully awkward and missing cultural cues. Taking one of his classes, I found it to be accurate. Apparently he used to be the head or faculty advisor of the student drama club, and cast himself in a production of The Crucible.
He graduated top of his class back in the day, and was one of the youngest professors ever granted tenure there. Lots of signals that say "not neurotypical." I wasn't surprised at all to read about this super tangled, highly intellectualized relationship where he seems to exhibit no common sense.
30: Sure, it's a fools game trying to figure out what's going on in their minds, but it's fun to, so I'll continue. It just seems like a lot of effort for what they were going for relative to what she was able to afford otherwise. Trying to scam him out of the home loan and what not. The thing where they (supposedly) trick him into forcing his family out of his house*, although it has a financial component, seems to be more about establishing control and wrecking him.
* I'm leaning towards believing this, because $1500/month for that house, in Cambridge, is far too low to be a legitimate market-rate rental and probably too high for a sweetheart deal to a weird sorta lover who has emotional control over you.
I think there's room for him to have no common sense and also be kind of culpable, though. Like, a sensible person would know not to get involved with people acting as weird as Shuman and Haider. But an ordinarily decent person, gullible or not, wouldn't be still interacting with them on a non-hostile basis once they were fucking with his ex and kids.
Useful abbreviation from AITA on Reddit: ESH, Everybody Sucks Here. (Not the wife and kids, obvs.)
24: As I kind of said over on metafilter, I know people like this - I mean, in general less rich and less successful, but exactly the kind of relatively intelligent people with various issues who get enmeshed in intellectualizing their relationships until they can't tell whether it's day or night.
I think I've mentioned this before, but I broke with a lot of people over the abuse of a friend by a very "woke" partner and the complicity of their social circle in the abuse. Everyone in this story is fairly intelligent; one of them, not my friend, has tenure. My friend was in a very bad financial and social situation for a while - teetering on the brink of homelessness, health condition flaring up, couldn't sleep, trouble affording enough food, etc. One of the results of this was panic attacks and crying. The woke partner, who had tenure and came from a comfortably-off and connected family, said that my friend was "abusive" and was staging the panic attacks and crying in order to "manipulate" the woke partner, and that it might be necessary to, eg, make a Facebook post denouncing my friend to our community as an abuser. (In social justice warrior circles, that would be very bad - it would mean that many people in our extended social circle would be unwilling to rent to or work with my friend, and that there would be a lot of whispers and freezing-out.)
Now, my friend, who none the less is no slouch intellectually, was about 80% convinced that they were in fact "abusive" and a bad person and was under tremendous stress because of this threat of being denounced to our community.
Someone in good health with enough to eat and a non-SJW friend-group in the background can easily see that my friend wasn't abusive, that the woke partner and friends were extremely messed up and that the whole thing was a sign of a really terrible extended social network.
Anyway, my friend is doing better and has a realistic perspective on their now-ex and now-ex-friends and I no longer feel like a bubbling cauldron of rage when I think about it, but it was a disturbing thing to witness.
This story pushes a lot of buttons for me because the people who tried to convince my friend that they were an abuser didn't do it out of conscious cruelty or even, IMO, cruelty at all. As near as I can figure, they did it out of a sort of cultish sensibility - they had set up a series of perverse, inflexible rules about behavior and what it meant, and one of these rules was that if you cried and had panic attacks and this upset your partner, you should either stop crying or you were an abuser. They had this whole weirdly individualistic set of ideas about relationships, like it was okay to share your feelings but you should never, ever upset anyone, and if someone was upset by your behavior that was violence on your part.
I find it very easy to believe that smart weirdos could set up a mixture of self-justifications and theories about behavior and relationships which explained and justified the whole thing and which completely overwrote everything else about the world.
the people who tried to convince my friend that they were an abuser didn't do it out of conscious cruelty or even, IMO, cruelty at all. . . They had this whole weirdly individualistic set of ideas about relationships, like it was okay to share your feelings but you should never, ever upset anyone, and if someone was upset by your behavior that was violence on your part.
I don't have a full perspective on the situation, obviously, you know about it directly and I'm just reading your description. But how did the woke partner let themselves off the hook for acting in a way that upsets your friend? I can't see how those rules lead to the result you describe without being applied asymmetrically (When you upset me, it's violence, when I upset you, it's just self-defense), and that seems to me to be where cruelty comes in.
Oh, never mind. The initial problems for your friend didn't come from the woke partner: the sequence was 1) friend has problems; 2) friend has panic attacks; 3) woke partner calls friend an abuser for having panic attacks, and doesn't take any responsibility for the situation because woke partner wasn't the initial cause of the panic attacks. I can see that working how you described.
35: Your MeFi posts were very good, and helpful to think about. (And I thought this before I saw your name on them.) I didn't mean to claim that I don't think this can occur, but it's just very aggravatingly self-serving when they should know better. But it seems like it's a not uncommon failure state in social-justice-aware communities.
I find it very easy to believe that smart weirdos could set up a mixture of self-justifications and theories about behavior and relationships which explained and justified the whole thing and which completely overwrote everything else about the world.
I guess when you put it that way, "smart weirdo is very good at self-justifying whatever they want" has been how things have worked since at least Crime and Punishment.
As for the friend and partner, as described, if we transpose the woke partner's behavior to the man in a cishet relationship, I think it'd be called emotional abuse (and done in a fairly typical way) without reservation.
24,35: Right. I was a bit disappointed (but not really surprised) to see some commenters at MeFi framing this a s some sort of blow for social justice/against the patriarchy as opposed to just a bunch of sociopaths sociopathing.
39: Pretty typical online now that one's only response to a story will be "this supports my political beliefs" or "(ignores story)".
All I saw on twitter about it was either
1) "This is weird, read it"
2) "So typical that a middle aged white man falls for something that feeds his incredible ego"
3) "So depressing that this guy fell for this, it shows how lonely and desperate for attention men are"
39: Was there much of that? I should reread the thread, but I didn't think so. People going after Hay as part of the problem, but not so much saying Shuman was anything other than a nightmare.
In all the Alex Cross books, the serial killer could have sex but not ejaculate. That's not proof of anything, but it's probably important to consider.
41: I wouldn't say "much". I just wasn't expecting anything other than "Holy crap, what a train wreck".
Maybe the ex-wife was talking about a home renovation that would result in digging up the wrong part of the basement and he needed to get her out of the house or be sure there was no money for that?
The real mystery is the ex-wife... What on earth is she doing enmeshed with a train-wreck like Hay?
It's possible she has a different understanding of her husband's behavior than what one gets from online sources.
Maybe the ex-wife was talking about a home renovation that would result in digging up the wrong part of the basement
The lack of dead bodies is why I only give this story 4+1/2 stars out of 5.
44: maybe the scammer needs access to the house's basement so she can dig into the bank vault next door.
40: There was a recent (now thoroughly moderated) Metafilter thread on Hikkomori that was flooded with commenters arguing that men with those symptoms are not worth discussing except as examples of male privilege.
47 is the basis of my short story, "The Very Attractive Male Harvard Law Professor League."
45 cont.: I mean, I'd still bet on her just trying to manage the train wreck until her children are grown but perhaps she thinks his mental health claims have merit and she's, like, superhumanly understanding.
50: Right -- fond of him enough to put in a surprising amount of risk and effort managing life with him is a possibility, it's just a surprising one. I mean, divorce and then another kid suggests that she's thinking something along those lines: feels strongly enough positively about him to have a kid with him, while feeling strongly negatively enough about him to limit his legal rights over their joint lives.
Maybe he pulled the "don't worry, I can't ejaculate" on her too?
Which is why he believed the other woman when she said it was his.
I read the story when it first came out a few weeks ago, and the thing that made me sure the women were scammers is that Shuman repeated exactly the same script multiple times: meet guy, have sexual encounter with zero to low likelihood of pregnancy, announce pregnancy, claim guy is father, big profits, etc. Drama ensues. (We used to call these stories "Cambridge Soap Operas.") This not to excuse Hay, who is clearly a scammer in his own way. Zachs appears only as character in a story Hay is telling about himself as victim/doing the reasonable thing, so she is portrayed for a long time as going along with it all: unlikely. One child was shown by DNA test to not have been fathered by the victim (I forget which victim). My suspicion is that Haider may be the father of Shuman's children. That would complete the weirdness.
46: Don't say anything until they're finished with the basement.
My suspicion is that Haider may be the father of Shuman's children.
The article seemed to be trying to imply that she was the other parent, yes. "Father" is probably the wrong word.
If you claim any of the kids are Dershowitz's, he'll sue you.
49: You could do better than Doyle. That story always bothered me.
56: I thought the article was weirdly stepping around the possibility that Haider was the sperm provider, especially when Hay says that it would be presumptive/insulting to assume that lesbian-identifying Shuman had slept with other men than him, the special one. Very weird thing to say given there's somebody right there who could have sex leading to pregnancy, is in a relationship with Shuman, and isn't a man. The only guesses that come to mind are that the author is being coy for legal reasons, or it's known to those involved that Haider is for some reason a biological impossibility but they don't want to get into it.
It read like coyness -- that is, the article weirdly stepped around that possibility in such a manner as to draw attention to it.
Hang on, did I mix in the mental health claim from that story about the pedophile psychologist?
I think this guy is claiming some kind of undiagnosed neuroatypicality? And Elle Woods above suggests that that's a reasonable lay description of him in person?
No, I just searched the article and I don't think it does make that claim explicitly, actually.
"Billie Jean" has been stuck in my head all day and I just now figured out why.
"The Title IX committee always told me, be careful who you love. Don't go around breaking Tags shopper's heart."
63: He suggests it.
"Jennifer and I are the opposite -- she's very skeptical. And I'm very gullible," he says. When we met for pizza at his Sunday-night hangout one evening, he wondered aloud whether he might be "on the spectrum."
There it is, I searched for neuroatypical and autis! but didn't think of spectrum.
Is 59 possible? I mean, would Haider still have all the required, um, paraphernalia?
You can buy paraphernalia at a head shop.
I took a class from Hay and I would have gone with "neurotypical but eccentric." But who knows?
A trained therapist who has met with him?
There's a difference between being on the spectrum and being a somewhat socially clueless person. Does he have a diagnosis? He's got some of the world's best hospitals and clinicians within easy reach. Those actually on the spectrum really resent people who use "on the spectrum" as a lay diagnosis that excuses shitty or stupid behavior.
I don't know about the assumption that Haider is the parent - very often, when you're a trans woman on hormones your fertility is pretty darn low or nonexistent. I had assumed that there were just a variety of men in the picture, each convinced that he was the only one, and some of them using less reliable methods of birth control.
68: That's part of why I thought the article was coyly hinting in that direction -- there's a reference to planned gender affirmation surgery that seems completely pointless and intrusive unless intended to make the point that gender affirmation surgery had not yet taken place, and that she might therefore be able to biologically parent children with Shuman. I mean, it was still intrusive even if that was the point, but it seemed to be the point.
72: but then again presentation can vary wildly. Old friend of mine was just diagnosed as autistic and he is about as far from the cliche autist as you can imagine. Cheerful, outgoing, talkative, self confident, sociable... much more of all of those than I am. And yet, autistic.
Now I want a Tags shopping bag. The "I find you very attractive" line(s) made me laugh.
Crossed with 73 -- yeah, I have no idea what's actually true, I'm just talking about what the article seemed to be making an effort to imply without saying.
"Hot for Massachusetts" is now a thing.
I was in Northampton last week and it was pretty hot for Massachusetts.
76 In their cases, ridiculous. If a young woman came up to *me* in the Ace Hardware and said such a thing, I'm sure I'd wonder about her taste, but would consider the statement to be totally believable.
I rely on my lack of appeal as a partner (physical, financial, etc) to keep me out of this kind of trouble -- no younger (or older, for that matter) women are showing any interest in me. This makes fidelity really easy. If, however, women start trying to seduce men they're not interested in because they want to fight the patriarchy, then there may be a bunch of us that could be in trouble.
Jennifer Zacks was in my kingergarten class! My family moved away the Summer before first grade, and I never saw any of the kids there again. Her name stuck in my mind because when the kindergarten teacher read Dr. Suess' "The Zax" to us, she made a point about how names don't always mean people are related, which was an epiphany to me. Also I may have had a crush on her. So when google was invented 30 or so years later, I looked the name up, and she was a very impressive Harvard lawyer. Didn't try to get in touch. Now her google results are thoroughly effed up by this story, most of the image search results are of the other players.
if my family hadn't moved on, I presumably would have acted on my crush sooner or later, and in the fullness of time we would have married, reproduced, and divorced, and this article would have been about me. Dodged a bullet.
Why did you capitalize "Summer"? Because of Larry?
I once heard Viva Las Vegas, so I'm part of the problem.
73: Thanks, that's useful info. It still strikes me as weird that the article didn't explicitly rule it out, but there are potentially a lot of possibilities here. I was surprised that she tried to scam multiple men with the same child, but I guess she's efficient.
81: You can time-bound Google searches to avoid changes from recent news, like so. If you click through to image search, that'll also be time-bound.
The "pick up at the hardware store" brings to mind a completely unrelated incident. An attractive woman approached him in the home renovations section, and talked him up long enough to find out that his house needed repairs and get his phone number. She was working for a home renovations company that used his number for relentless telemarketing, even though he was on the do not call list. The home renovations company apparently had hundreds of young women collecting phone numbers in hardware stores, and we got a nice settlement. Consent to be called by a hot chick is not consent to be telemarketed to.
Compared to the professor, my client go off easy.
87:That just doesn't seem like a viable business plan. Paying attractive young women to hang out at hardware stores just to get phone numbers of men that might be customers for home repair?! I guess it's not that more stupid than hiring someone to stand beside the road and play with a sign for your store.
I think we might be running low on duct tape.
We're going to the Jackson Browne concert tonight. Ought to make us a target for something -- what, I'm not sure.
I'm so baffled by this story, I can't even pretend to guess at the motives of anyone involved.
Maybe I don't know the difference between Jackson Brown and James Taylor?
I was surprised that she tried to scam multiple men with the same child, but I guess she's efficient.
See Bonnie Lee Blakely, Robert Blake's second wife whom he likely murdered. She appears to have been looking to finagle a celebrity into either marriage or payouts (after decades of lonely-hearts scams) and told both Blake and Christian Brando a baby was theirs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3SDkZL0w4g
Is it even OT?
Last I heard, attractive women almost never approach strange men in the home improvements section of a big-box hardware store, but I am old and cranky and out of the loop (and therefore baffled).
I am struck by how much money/property these people seemed to think was just normal. Shuman tells Hay she's just purchased a $1.9 million mansard Victorian in Cambridge for she and her kids and her grad-student friend to live in, just until, you know, said friend has completed her graduate work ... yeah okay, sure, just an everyday transaction, typical living arrangement for a graduate student, totally normal.
To be fair, the official concept was to hire sales associates to go to ardware stores and ask shoppers if they would like to be contacted by telephone about home repairs. The sales reps were paid by the number of legitimate leads generated, bonuses for any revenue ultimately generated. It didn't take long for the managers to figure out which kinds of reps generated the most numbers, and for those reps to figure out the easiest way to get phone numbers.
I spent several years learning about the telemarketing industry for these cases. While it doesn't make sense that annoying people during dinner could be profitable, it most definitely is.
A woman approached me in a strip mall parking lot once to give me a business card to recruit me to her modeling agency. Reasonably fearing for my kidneys, I threw the card away. So I feel confident I wouldn't be taken in by these hardware store pickup cons.
But would you even want to sleep with someone who lacks the initiative and grit to steal a kidney? Obviously youd prefer it wasn't your kidney.
If you're a man who must sleep with strange women who hit on you, only do so with ones who aren't wearing lipstick. If they don't have lipstick, how would they scribble "call 911" on the bathroom mirror? Of course, this requires men to actually be able to judge if a women is wearing makeup.
As I finish my coffee, it just occurred to me that "that kidney theft story from the 80s/90s" is somebody out there's kink, god bless them.
I don't have to get in the bathtub full of ice, but there has to be one.
100: Wow! I've never heard of that happening to a man. You must be one good-looking cactus!
There aren't modeling agencies where you live because the cops tried to send Stormy Daniels away on a boob-touching charge.
They forgot to shoot her and then say she was going for a gun.
Speaking of shooting....
Imagine a link to a story about the El Paso shooting.
LB's 5 & 8 are awesome.
As far as "The real mystery is the ex-wife. That is, there's no indication in the article that she's a primary source of the insanity, she's highly professionally accomplished in a real-world-competence kind of way (that is, she's an AUSA, or at least was at some point in the sequence of events). What on earth is she doing enmeshed with a train-wreck like Hay? Ex-husband, sure, anyone can screw up and marry a weirdo, but getting divorced from him (which would indicate having figured out that he, to put it mildly, had issues) and then continuing to live with him and having another kid? That I find incomprehensible."
I chalk that up to even incredibly bright and competent people have weak spots, and then get screwed when they show compassion instead of ruthlessness for the weak person around them.
Always good to have subject matter experts in the community.
Yeah. And maybe most of the train wreck stuff is either in his head or otherwise offstage. I would imagine that very little of what students say to each other about the guy gets onto the ex-wife's radar. Her attention is likely to be completely taken up with being a lawyer in a big office, a mom, and someone dealing with the extent of the train wreck that's on stage.
(14 or 15 years ago, I heard that some folks at my place of work had told other folks I was having an affair with my secretary. It was silly, and I guess it would have been surprising if anyone who knew me believed it, but then people like a story against type. I'm sure no one talked to my wife about this -- I sure didn't. Would they have if they thought it was true? Probably not.)
Imagine a link to a story about the El Paso shooting.
A John Lennon song for the Trump era.
105: Thoroughly ordinary, hence the worry about kidneys.
Still below one mass shooting a week in 2019, on average.
I don't doubt the American people will rise to the occasion.
119: The numbers here have more than one a day. While for the rest of the first world, they're at about five total this year.
I don't know what to say that hasn't been said.
Indeed, it would seem they have risen already.
Seven across a mostly rich somewhat eclectic group of countries, given an unsourced Twitter post.
There was a recent 538 (maybe Vox?) post about how Trump isn't making America any more racist--maybe even less racist over all, given one reading of the statistics. But Trump is emboldening the violent fringe. He had a hand in the Texas deaths. This is awful.
121.1: I think they must have been using the stricter definition where they don't count the perpetrator in the death toll plus older numbers from before this past week.
125: Probably. The definition on Wikipedia is what I usually see elsewhere: at least four people who are not perpetrators shot. Deaths don't factor into it. That we need a standard definition so we can measure how many of these happen sure is something.
But when I want to inflation-adjust Qing-era megadeaths you're all like "OMG guys this just to horrific to contemplate".
127: You're mixing me up with somebody else, I like talking about Qing (or even better Tang) megadeaths. But I'm perverse that way.
I think the metric needs to be gun deaths. So you can count lots, but not all, of the Qing stuff.
Have I mentioned recently how weird it is that I have a mental picture of Clown Goebbels as a sixth grader?
Straka denied to TPM that he was referencing QAnon. "The entirety of my speech was a message of unity and about unifying Americans," he said. "I cannot say in any stronger terms that I am not a Q supporter, I was not supporting the Q movement," he told TPM.
That's not a denial.
QAnon is some weird shit. Has JFK Jr. risen from the dead, yet?
Wasn't he just an off-screen character from Seinfeld?
So the Liberal Democrats took a Tory seat in rural Wales?
This ritual of childhood is not a betrayal of "who we are" as a country. It is what America has made of itself, how it worships itself, and how it makes itself real.
116 is well worth reading.
116 was obviously heartfelt, but what fraction of these events occur in schools these days? If it's a ritual like communion, we are all taking the sacrament now.
136: The ritual isn't the shooting, it's the preparation against shootings, which serve to normalize them. I don't know, but would guess the majority of that preparation is still in schools, and that's where most of the normalization gets done.
@134 A seat which the Tories and Lib Dems had traded between them for the last 45 years. Brecon and Radnorshire isn't Mythir Tydfil
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Critiques of the Spanish treatment of native Americans was a leitmotiv in French writings at the time. In the early 17th century, France pursued a more humane (albeit deeply paternalistic) policy of "francization" -- or assimilation -- in its American colonies, seeking to comingle colonial and native peoples as a means of adding demographic weight to the sparsely populated new French territories. Interestingly, Richelieu was a strong proponent of this relatively enlightened approach.|>
Some tour guide in Quebec City mentioned that.
I didn't get the chance to ask why he became the bad guy in The Three Musketeers.
Speaking of French history, I wonder what happened to Chris O'Donnell's career.
142: Because it was written in the mid-19th century. Overall the pre-1789 regime was unpopular at the time. The book leaves no one in court looking good except for the musketeers and their commanding officer, just bad and smart vs. bad and stupid, and Richelieu was the former.
143: Looks like a slump after Batman & Robin. What a strange coincidence. But Wikipedia says he's been on NCIS since 2009, so he's still alive.
If you call working with Mark Harmon "living".
145: He's on the other NCIS, so he hardly ever works with Mark Harmon. His partner is LL Cool J.
I swear I've read 116 before this, after a previous mass shooting. Maybe he's just expressed similar thoughts before but not in longform. This doesn't make it any less moving.
It reminded me of an E B White essay, "The Age of Dust," about reading instructions for evacuating after a nuclear war and imagining schoolchildren carrying them out. Maddeningly, it doesn't seem to be online anyplace -- anyone who has a NYer subscription who wanted to search for it in the archives and send me screenshots (I think it's only a page or two), I would be indebted forever. Not being able to find it is driving me nuts.
Current politics makes much more sense if you figure that a certain percentage of people out age and younger spent their childhood being taught that they would need to be ready to shoot people trying to enter their fallout shelter.
There's a followup article on other men who have run into the two women in this story: https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/bruce-hay-paternity-trap-maria-pia-shuman-mischa-haider-follow-up.html#_ga=2.210737493.1752376571.1565041110-752829124.1565041110
So... surely there have been enough laws broken that the police are getting involved? Have the two women vanished yet?
laws allegedly/potentially/implicitly broken, that is. Apologies for the extremely dismal commenting streak, my brain is fried this week