LC Thread 2020: What the PUNK? ROCK.

i’ve done that more than once while drunk

oh look one of the girls that’s supposedly missing isn’t even missing

https://twitter.com/___evelynf/status/1281646323821944842?s=20

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The q people in that thread in that thread…

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https://twitter.com/anastasiakeeley/status/1281799026195804161?s=19

Profile of St. Louis gun toting lawyer couple. Shockingly, they are the nut low.

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Reminds me of this

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It really pisses me off that they haven’t (to my knowledge) been charged. They’ve been terrorizing their neighbors with litigation for 20 years and basically getting away with it and now nobody is willing or able to give them a taste? People like this HAVE to be humiliated and disgraced.

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Read the article, and while some of their issues and suits seem somewhat reasonable on the surface, they are clearly very wacky but also highly skilled at weaponizing the legal system to punish those who have the misfortune of crossing their path. So I get why someone would be fearful at taking them on at a game in which they are adept and can afford to play.

IANAL obv

It’s really a great illustration of how broken our legal system is. Time and time again, they’ve been rewarded for being absolutely awful human beings. You’ll note that every time they come up against someone with the resources to fight, they lose, but without any consequence to themselves.

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The fact that contributions to the LLC aren’t deductible doesn’t prove that it’s a for-profit. Only donations to 501(c)(3) organizations (i.e., actual charities) are deductible. SuperPACs and similar entities are 501(c)(4)'s, which are exempt from income tax but can’t receive deductible contributions.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s not a grift, but if you make a donation to any “legitimate” political group, you’ll see the same message. A lot of genuine charitable organizations actually have separate political arms that receive non-deductible contributions but are allowed to campaign for candidates and do more lobbying.

Last year, there was a kerfuffle when The Baffler had to retract a piece stumping for Bernie because it flagrantly violated the rules for 501(c)(3)'s. Same basic issue.

Mrs. SpiderQrab, more like.

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The worst things those St Louis douches have done are buried towards the end of the article:

The McCloskeys also evicted two tenants from a modular home on their property in a period of just over two years. The first, a single woman with three children and her boyfriend, had lived there six months in January 2018 when the McCloskeys filed for eviction, claiming one rent check had bounced. The woman moved out and did not appear in court, and the McCloskeys got a $6,247 default judgment against the couple, which included attorneys fees and rent for the remaining months of the lease.

In an interview with the Post-Dispatch, the tenant denied she had missed a rent payment. She said she had showed up in court for the eviction hearing and that Mark McCloskey told her she had no chance of winning, so she left. She said she had no idea she owed them that much.

The second tenant signed a lease for $950 per month last November, and failed to pay rent in April and May. The McCloskeys filed an eviction suit on May 12 and Mark McCloskey filed an affidavit stating that he was not barred by federal law from evicting someone during the COVID-19 pandemic because the unit was not part of a federal housing rental program.

The tenant did not appear in court. A judge gave her until July 1 to clear out, and the McCloskeys got an $8,299 judgment against her for attorneys fees and the remainder of the lease.

This is literally ruining peoples’ lives. The repercussions of a default judgement on low income people will be significant and last decades.

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How can you be responsible for paying the remainder of the lease but still getting evicted? In a sane world this should be either/or.

It didn’t happen in a sane world, it happened in the United States where this sort of shit is completely standard. One financial misstep or bad break immediately cascades into an avalanche of compounding penalties and consequences that can be near impossible to dig your way out of.

Even inside the US it is poorly understood how widespread and significant these issues are for low income people.

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The thing that I can never square in my head is that inside the US a LOT of poor people will read that passage and agree that the evicted tenants got what they deserved. Hey, they should have pulled up their bootstraps and did what it takes to make the rent. Put their nose to the grindstone. Until something like this happens to them, they have absolutely zero empathy.

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It’s shocking how effective the propaganda associated with the concept of bootstrapping has been. This is how cults work. A leader or leaders do something to their followers and then their followers take it upon themselves to do it to each other, completely brainwashed into thinking that it’s the right thing to do. They remain unaware or uncaring of the fact that each time they harm others they are also harming themselves in the process.

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I just can’t with the bootstrapping anymore. As someone who the bootstrap brigade would absolutely try to claim as evidence for their side I can definitively say that it was a lot of luckboxing. Even the places that look like they weren’t luckboxing were really luckboxing.

The weird thing for people in my shoes though is that we can NEVER EVER EVER let ourselves admit that it was all luckboxing, because one of the things we luckboxed on was a strong internal locus of control lol.

This really is one of those spots where your attitude about your own personal life has to be diametrically opposed to how you think about other people. It really is hard to get right.

I gotta say it’s really really hard to be the kind of person who is good at holding themselves accountable, and also have empathy for what’s happening outside yourself when people are doing dumb shit. This is extra extra true when you’re seen as the stable/smart person who everyone comes to for advice… because you tell them it’s dumb and not to do it, and then they go ahead and do it anyway… because the problem isn’t that they are stupid, it’s that they have poor impulse control.

In general it’s very hard to have empathy for flaws in other people that are strengths of yours I guess. It seems easy to us, so we can’t understand why other people can’t do it.

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If you’re born in a first-world country, you’re a luckbox. The vast majority of the human race doesn’t live in an OECD country. You started your life outdrawing a higher pocket pair with a lower one. Born white in a predominantly white first-world country? More luck. Born a white man in a predominantly white first-world country run and built mostly by men? More luck.

Sure, that doesn’t mean people didn’t work hard to get where they are. It does mean that they started life on second base compared to the have-nots and that should be acknowledged. I tell people all the time that much of what I’ve done is definitely luck-related because it’s the truth.

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I tried to explain this to a guy at my last job during a company happy hour and he had to be physically restrained from punching me.

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Because it implies that since a white man’s success is more expected that it’s less commendable and worthy of respect. Hurts the ego to hear that after telling people how successful you’ve been.

https://mobile.twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1281932320321294338

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