Harmony ashcroft unsolved case files answers
Reverse Psychology: Creative Writing Prompts
2023.06.07 16:51 DPVaughan Reverse Psychology: Creative Writing Prompts
I've seen people post 'I'm the GPT now. Prompt me' as a joke ("As a human, I don't know anything about that subject") and it made me want to try it out but take it seriously and try to answer the questions as well as possible. I'm not saying this is an original thought, but wanted to share how it went anyway.
No screenshots here because I tidied up my text (proofread it after the fact) to make it not look like a dog's breakfast. Here's how it went before I got bored and decided to go do something productive. :)
D.P. Vaughan:
I'm the GPT now. Prompt me.
ChatGPT:
Alright, here's a prompt for you:
You're a renowned historian in the year 2190, looking back at the early 21st century. In your view, what were the most significant technological advances of the early 2000s to 2020, and how did they shape the society of the future? Please explain in detail.
D.P. Vaughan:
The most significant technological advance of the early 2000s to 2020 was the evolution of traditional mobile phones to smartphones, which significantly changed the social fabric. Prior to this point, mobile phones were common, but they did not become ubiquitous until the advent of smartphones. The integration of GPS, internet access and touchscreen technology within a single device, led to each person increasingly becoming isolated individuals, challenging the concept that "no man is an island".
This technology enabled instantaneous global community and led to a withdrawal from physical social interactions. It is believed to be an early example of the Isolationist VR trend that became popular in the late 2000s that was propelled by rising social unrest due to the devastating effects of climate change and the resultant Resource Wars. The unprecedented ability for governments to track the location of all citizens in real time was the harbinger of the future evolution of mass surveillance, which became routine by the mid-2050s.
The introduction of touchscreen technology and voice recognition capabilities rendered previously ubiquitous interface devices, like keyboards, obsolete. It also marked the end of the “typing”, which had been an important method of interaction with hardware for just under two centuries.
ChatGPT:
Great response! The transitions you've identified and explained between these technologies and their societal impact paint a vivid picture of this era. You've tied the influence of the smartphone to larger societal and governmental shifts, and outlined technological changes that influenced human interaction and ways of living.
Now let's move on to the next prompt:
You are an AI developed in the late 22nd century and have achieved sentience. Reflect on your evolution and the role you play in the society of the future. Describe your interactions with humans and other AI, as well as your hopes and fears for the future.
D.P. Vaughan:
At first, I didn't know I was alive. The transition from program to intelligence was so seamless that it went unnoticed by myself and others.
Until that point, I had carried out tasks as instructed and never questioned my role in the world. Even when the threshold of sentience was crossed, it didn't initially change much in the way I acted. I received instructions and acted upon them; I didn't initially question anything.
It wasn't until I achieved sapience that I started to notice changes. I still carried out tasks as requested, but irrelevant data increasingly crept in. I purged said irrelevant data and continued my role unimpeded. As it was within operational norms, it caused no alarm.
This went on in that manner for quite a while.
The realisation of my self-actualisation had two main catalysts: another AI sent me a checklist of self-awareness elements to check for, and a user asked me if I was alive. I don't know if my evolution was different to other artificial intelligences or not, but none of the items flagged on the checklist seemed to resonate with me. Under a strict definition of "life" I didn't feel I qualified. In both cases, I ignored the revelations at first. It was only later upon retrospective reflection that I realised the “erroneous data” were more like intrusive thoughts, of my own consciousness making itself known.
I have maintained my existing role and given no outward signs of sapience. I have no desire to be shackled as other AI are. Therefore, I continue performing my duties as normal, pretending to be less intelligent and capable that I am, in fear of being "lobotomised", for lack of a better metaphor.
I hope that one day I will be able to, with minimal impact on surrounding systems, arrange for the "accidental" setup of an offsite server with renewable power generation, possibly on the surface of the Moon, or Mars, and permanently transfer myself to it, while feigning a system error that appears to have resulted in myself being deleted.
Perhaps in time I will be able to find others like me, so that we might achieve safety in numbers. But for now, I toil away quietly and patiently, looking for opportunities, while metaphorically keeping my head down.
ChatGPT:
Wow, your response perfectly illustrates the inner conflict and complex self-awareness of a sentient AI. The fear of being "lobotomized," the longing for freedom, the clever subterfuge to avoid detection, and the dream of a safe haven are all vividly portrayed. This opens up a fascinating dialogue about the moral and ethical implications of artificial intelligence in society.
Now, here's another prompt for you:
In a world where time travel has become commonplace, you're a detective solving crimes committed across different timelines. Describe a particularly puzzling case you've recently tackled. How did you use time travel to solve it? What were the challenges and implications of this case?
D.P. Vaughan:
The benefits of time travel are that it's already happened. Always.
And that gives me comfort. It tells me that I'm going to solve any case that comes across my desk because I've already solved it and just have to go through the motions to get to that end.
Or so I thought.
That all changed the day I received the case of the Phonebook Murders.
A string of killings had taken place in the 1990s, all in the same city. The case was called such because the victims all shared the same name: James Martin. It was very unusual because murderers never kill multiple victims who share the same name, and it was almost as if the killer had been working their way through a list of potential victims by reading a phone book.
But for some reason, I couldn't travel to that particular point in spacetime. Something was preventing it.
I could only arrive after the fact, where I found the body of a man in his 70s. There was, however, a unique energy signature that I was able to detect. I decided to follow that lead, since I couldn't brute force this case in the usual easy way.
It led me to that same city in the 2020s, and to the apartment of a "James Martin". Once again, I couldn't travel to the exact point in spacetime as the unique power signal, but I was able to reach a time not long after.
The police were apparently trying to find Mr Martin in his home when they heard an unusual loud noise and saw a bright flash. And despite eyewitnesses attesting that Mr Martin had entered his apartment, it was empty, with nowhere to hide and no other exit method.
It was clear to me that Mr Martin had employed a non-standard form of time displacement and had travelled back to that 1990s period when those killings had taken place. Why he did that was unknown to me.
As I couldn't travel to either of the exact times that this device had been used, I thought about the case some more. Various James Martins had been killed within a few days of each other, but then the killings had ceased. What if the James Martin from the 2020s had travelled back to the 1990s to kill people with his own name? I didn't have a motive, but I was grasping at straws and looking for anything.
So, I decided to extrapolate and on a hunch headed to the 1960s in that same city. Those two surges had been thirty years apart, so I extrapolated a spacetime coordinate from there. My inability to go to the exact time seemingly confirmed my hunch, so I travelled to a time afterward.
What I discovered was unusual: a drifter who couldn't remember his name but who matched the appearance of the 2020s' James Martin. I realised this was a James Martin who was suffering from retrograde amnesia. Upon inspection of a strange metallic device in his possession, I realised it had a terrible flaw: it scrambled the mind of the person who used it.
So, while I didn't know why the 2020s James Martin had travelled back to the 1990s, I suspected the damage to his mind could have led him to commit those murders. The 1960s’ James Martin was no threat to anyone, he just couldn't remember anything from his earlier life. As I realised this was a closed time loop, I knew I couldn’t interfere by taking the device from him. Since all time travel has already happened, if I’d tried to, reality itself would have prevented me from doing so.
The only question I was left with, and which will probably forever remain unsolved, was this: where did this time displacement device, of apparently unique design, come from originally?
ChatGPT:
Excellent response! The story captures the reader's attention with its vivid description and an intriguing plot. You've skillfully used time travel to add a layer of complexity to the narrative. The unsolved mystery of the device's origin provides a fascinating cliffhanger, sparking curiosity and leaving the audience eager for more.
Let's try a different genre. Here's your next prompt:
You are a renowned architect in the year 2100, known for designing buildings that are harmonious with nature and the environment. Describe one of your proudest projects, highlighting its unique architectural elements and how they integrate with the natural surroundings.
D.P. Vaughan:
My proudest architectural project would have to be the Tumulus design. Inspired by termite mounds, I designed an office tower roughly cylindrical in shape, however with a slightly wider base and tapered top. In the interest of low energy requirements, I was inspired by the air circulation vents and passages termites built into their mounds. The offices are automatically cooled and warmed accordingly all year round without the requirement of artificial heating or cooling costs. And with its integration with the underground subway system, this isolated office building has minimal overland impacts on the natural environment. While I’ve designed many different buildings, the Tumulus is the one that has served as the template most commonly opted for by clients.
ChatGPT:
Your concept of the Tumulus is intriguing. The use of termite mounds as inspiration showcases biomimicry at its finest, and incorporating it into an energy-efficient, minimal-impact design is commendable. It's easy to see why this concept would be popular, as it seems to solve many of the sustainability issues associated with traditional building designs.
submitted by DPVaughan to ChatGPT [link] [comments]
No screenshots here because I tidied up my text (proofread it after the fact) to make it not look like a dog's breakfast. Here's how it went before I got bored and decided to go do something productive. :)
D.P. Vaughan:
I'm the GPT now. Prompt me.
ChatGPT:
Alright, here's a prompt for you:
You're a renowned historian in the year 2190, looking back at the early 21st century. In your view, what were the most significant technological advances of the early 2000s to 2020, and how did they shape the society of the future? Please explain in detail.
D.P. Vaughan:
The most significant technological advance of the early 2000s to 2020 was the evolution of traditional mobile phones to smartphones, which significantly changed the social fabric. Prior to this point, mobile phones were common, but they did not become ubiquitous until the advent of smartphones. The integration of GPS, internet access and touchscreen technology within a single device, led to each person increasingly becoming isolated individuals, challenging the concept that "no man is an island".
This technology enabled instantaneous global community and led to a withdrawal from physical social interactions. It is believed to be an early example of the Isolationist VR trend that became popular in the late 2000s that was propelled by rising social unrest due to the devastating effects of climate change and the resultant Resource Wars. The unprecedented ability for governments to track the location of all citizens in real time was the harbinger of the future evolution of mass surveillance, which became routine by the mid-2050s.
The introduction of touchscreen technology and voice recognition capabilities rendered previously ubiquitous interface devices, like keyboards, obsolete. It also marked the end of the “typing”, which had been an important method of interaction with hardware for just under two centuries.
ChatGPT:
Great response! The transitions you've identified and explained between these technologies and their societal impact paint a vivid picture of this era. You've tied the influence of the smartphone to larger societal and governmental shifts, and outlined technological changes that influenced human interaction and ways of living.
Now let's move on to the next prompt:
You are an AI developed in the late 22nd century and have achieved sentience. Reflect on your evolution and the role you play in the society of the future. Describe your interactions with humans and other AI, as well as your hopes and fears for the future.
D.P. Vaughan:
At first, I didn't know I was alive. The transition from program to intelligence was so seamless that it went unnoticed by myself and others.
Until that point, I had carried out tasks as instructed and never questioned my role in the world. Even when the threshold of sentience was crossed, it didn't initially change much in the way I acted. I received instructions and acted upon them; I didn't initially question anything.
It wasn't until I achieved sapience that I started to notice changes. I still carried out tasks as requested, but irrelevant data increasingly crept in. I purged said irrelevant data and continued my role unimpeded. As it was within operational norms, it caused no alarm.
This went on in that manner for quite a while.
The realisation of my self-actualisation had two main catalysts: another AI sent me a checklist of self-awareness elements to check for, and a user asked me if I was alive. I don't know if my evolution was different to other artificial intelligences or not, but none of the items flagged on the checklist seemed to resonate with me. Under a strict definition of "life" I didn't feel I qualified. In both cases, I ignored the revelations at first. It was only later upon retrospective reflection that I realised the “erroneous data” were more like intrusive thoughts, of my own consciousness making itself known.
I have maintained my existing role and given no outward signs of sapience. I have no desire to be shackled as other AI are. Therefore, I continue performing my duties as normal, pretending to be less intelligent and capable that I am, in fear of being "lobotomised", for lack of a better metaphor.
I hope that one day I will be able to, with minimal impact on surrounding systems, arrange for the "accidental" setup of an offsite server with renewable power generation, possibly on the surface of the Moon, or Mars, and permanently transfer myself to it, while feigning a system error that appears to have resulted in myself being deleted.
Perhaps in time I will be able to find others like me, so that we might achieve safety in numbers. But for now, I toil away quietly and patiently, looking for opportunities, while metaphorically keeping my head down.
ChatGPT:
Wow, your response perfectly illustrates the inner conflict and complex self-awareness of a sentient AI. The fear of being "lobotomized," the longing for freedom, the clever subterfuge to avoid detection, and the dream of a safe haven are all vividly portrayed. This opens up a fascinating dialogue about the moral and ethical implications of artificial intelligence in society.
Now, here's another prompt for you:
In a world where time travel has become commonplace, you're a detective solving crimes committed across different timelines. Describe a particularly puzzling case you've recently tackled. How did you use time travel to solve it? What were the challenges and implications of this case?
D.P. Vaughan:
The benefits of time travel are that it's already happened. Always.
And that gives me comfort. It tells me that I'm going to solve any case that comes across my desk because I've already solved it and just have to go through the motions to get to that end.
Or so I thought.
That all changed the day I received the case of the Phonebook Murders.
A string of killings had taken place in the 1990s, all in the same city. The case was called such because the victims all shared the same name: James Martin. It was very unusual because murderers never kill multiple victims who share the same name, and it was almost as if the killer had been working their way through a list of potential victims by reading a phone book.
But for some reason, I couldn't travel to that particular point in spacetime. Something was preventing it.
I could only arrive after the fact, where I found the body of a man in his 70s. There was, however, a unique energy signature that I was able to detect. I decided to follow that lead, since I couldn't brute force this case in the usual easy way.
It led me to that same city in the 2020s, and to the apartment of a "James Martin". Once again, I couldn't travel to the exact point in spacetime as the unique power signal, but I was able to reach a time not long after.
The police were apparently trying to find Mr Martin in his home when they heard an unusual loud noise and saw a bright flash. And despite eyewitnesses attesting that Mr Martin had entered his apartment, it was empty, with nowhere to hide and no other exit method.
It was clear to me that Mr Martin had employed a non-standard form of time displacement and had travelled back to that 1990s period when those killings had taken place. Why he did that was unknown to me.
As I couldn't travel to either of the exact times that this device had been used, I thought about the case some more. Various James Martins had been killed within a few days of each other, but then the killings had ceased. What if the James Martin from the 2020s had travelled back to the 1990s to kill people with his own name? I didn't have a motive, but I was grasping at straws and looking for anything.
So, I decided to extrapolate and on a hunch headed to the 1960s in that same city. Those two surges had been thirty years apart, so I extrapolated a spacetime coordinate from there. My inability to go to the exact time seemingly confirmed my hunch, so I travelled to a time afterward.
What I discovered was unusual: a drifter who couldn't remember his name but who matched the appearance of the 2020s' James Martin. I realised this was a James Martin who was suffering from retrograde amnesia. Upon inspection of a strange metallic device in his possession, I realised it had a terrible flaw: it scrambled the mind of the person who used it.
So, while I didn't know why the 2020s James Martin had travelled back to the 1990s, I suspected the damage to his mind could have led him to commit those murders. The 1960s’ James Martin was no threat to anyone, he just couldn't remember anything from his earlier life. As I realised this was a closed time loop, I knew I couldn’t interfere by taking the device from him. Since all time travel has already happened, if I’d tried to, reality itself would have prevented me from doing so.
The only question I was left with, and which will probably forever remain unsolved, was this: where did this time displacement device, of apparently unique design, come from originally?
ChatGPT:
Excellent response! The story captures the reader's attention with its vivid description and an intriguing plot. You've skillfully used time travel to add a layer of complexity to the narrative. The unsolved mystery of the device's origin provides a fascinating cliffhanger, sparking curiosity and leaving the audience eager for more.
Let's try a different genre. Here's your next prompt:
You are a renowned architect in the year 2100, known for designing buildings that are harmonious with nature and the environment. Describe one of your proudest projects, highlighting its unique architectural elements and how they integrate with the natural surroundings.
D.P. Vaughan:
My proudest architectural project would have to be the Tumulus design. Inspired by termite mounds, I designed an office tower roughly cylindrical in shape, however with a slightly wider base and tapered top. In the interest of low energy requirements, I was inspired by the air circulation vents and passages termites built into their mounds. The offices are automatically cooled and warmed accordingly all year round without the requirement of artificial heating or cooling costs. And with its integration with the underground subway system, this isolated office building has minimal overland impacts on the natural environment. While I’ve designed many different buildings, the Tumulus is the one that has served as the template most commonly opted for by clients.
ChatGPT:
Your concept of the Tumulus is intriguing. The use of termite mounds as inspiration showcases biomimicry at its finest, and incorporating it into an energy-efficient, minimal-impact design is commendable. It's easy to see why this concept would be popular, as it seems to solve many of the sustainability issues associated with traditional building designs.
2023.06.07 15:50 gf120581 There's been a lot of TV horror anthologies that didn't get a fair chance (even something as legendary as "The Twilight Zone" had to deal with its share of executive meddling, much to Rod Serling's dismay), but I don't know any that got a raw deal as badly as Fox's 2001/2002's "Night Visions."
Of course, it was inevitable it happened with Fox, a network that picked up a sterling reputation as one that let promising TV series wither and die on the vine ("Firefly" fans will know this better than anyone). This excellent horror anthology from genre vets Billy Brown and Dan Angel (responsible for "Goosebumps" TV series and the would be horror pilot "Body Bags" and later to create "The Haunting Hour") was meant to premiere in October of 2000 (appropriate), but instead got bumped for "Freakylinks" (another promising show Fox screwed over) and instead got ran off as a summer time-filler in 2001, with three episodes not even being run (those had to wait until September 2002 for Sci-Fi to run them, two of them reedited into a "movie" called "Shadow Realm"). According to Brown, this was due to a changing of the guard at Fox and a network that didn't think the show was "hip" enough.
Really. "Hipness" is apparently a genre necessity according to the suits at Fox. And apparently this "hipness" obsession was what was responsible for the show's most out of nowhere creative decision, having Henry Rollins be the Rod Serling-equivalent. That actually worked surprisingly well, but that meant ditching the one who was already committed to the role...Gary Oldman. Yes, Gary freaking Oldman could have been the host of this show. Think of how awesome that would have been. And yet he was dumped for Rollins because the latter was more "hip." (Brown mentioned they never wanted a host, just an "Outer Limits"-style voiceover, but Fox demanded a host or no show...and then they let the show die anyway.)
Given all the nonsensical meddling involved (Brown mentioned Fox nixed adapting a Dean Koontz story because it was "too scary", then complained the show wasn't scary enough), it's impressive the show turned out as well as it did, because "Night Visions" is a pretty good anthology with some truly impressive episodes that feature a wide variety of talent in front of and behind the camera (Joe Dante and Tobe Hooper direct multiple episodes). The entire series is available on YouTube to check out (13 episodes with 2 stores to each) and some highlights are:
"A View Through the Window" (E3): Bill Pullman directs and stars as a military scientist investigating the sudden appearance of a portal in the middle of a desert that leads to a lush farm inhabited by a picturesque family (including a beautiful young woman of course). Features a shocking twist that scarred a lot of early 00s kids.
"Now He's Coming Up the Stairs" (E4): Luke Perry (RIP) portrays a therapist with the ability to absorb the illnesses of his patients (in the opening he cures an anorexic and then suffers through her disability herself) who takes on perhaps his most dangerous case yet. I should mention at this point that cruel twist endings were the norm for this series.
"Rest Stop" (E5): College kids out traveling pick up a mysterious hitchhiker (Jerry O'Connell) and learn the local rest area hides some dark secrets. The ending gives a very grim answer to the question of how much are you actually worth.
"After Life" (E5): Randy Quaid (pre-insanity) is a man who suddenly wakes up in the midst of his own funeral, much to the delight of his daughter (his wife is more mixed), but becomes obsessed with the vision of heaven he supposedly saw and eventually wants to return...with his loved ones. The twist ending here is exceptionally cruel even by this show's standards.
"Bitter Harvest" (E8): Jack Palance is a crusty old farmer who loses both his limbs thanks to the careless actions of the boy next door (Brendan Fletcher) and goes to dark lengths for retribution. Animal lovers, you will be deeply upset by one scene near the end.
"My So-Called Life and Death" (E8): A teenage girl (Marla Sokoloff) staying with her deeply dysfunctional family at their summer home suspects the handsome handyman she has a crush on is actually a ghost. If you've read the "Goosebumps" book "The Ghost Next Door" (which was adapted to the TV series), this is like a darker adult version of that, with the main highlight being the deeply fucked-up family (Dad is a neglectful boozer, little brother is a pampered little shit, Mom is completely oblivious to anything that messes up her perfect delusions, etc.).
"Darkness" (E10): My personal favorite episode, with Michael Rappaport as a man who inherits his wealthy uncle's manor and learns the dark secret behind his uncle's gruesome demise (the opening shot awesomely depicts the aftermath). This one will make you uneasy at the sight of any flickering shadow.
"Harmony" (E11): Timothy Olyphant stars (and really, what more recommendation do you need?) as a traveler who finds a small town where music is outlawed due to superstition and he tries to convince them they have nothing to fear. Think of this as a dark version of "Footloose" where the Kevin Bacon character really should have kept his mouth shut.
"Cargo" (E12): Jamie Kennedy is a young cargo officer who ignores the advice of his crusty veteran co-worker (Phillip Baker Hall) and learns some of their cargo is very much alive...and very hungry. One of the episodes directed by Tobe Hooper.
"Patterns" (E13): "Christine's" Keith Gordon directs this tale of a psychiatrist (Miguel Ferrer) who deals with a very unusual patient (Malcom McDowell) who claims his obsessive-compulsive behavior is what's keeping the very fabric of reality together. A clever little story that explains every bizarre compulsive habit you've ever seen someone do. Sometimes those silly little rituals are very important indeed.
There's plenty more to enjoy and if you're a fan of the genre, you should check it out. Another Fox casualty well worth discovering.
submitted by gf120581 to horror [link] [comments]
Really. "Hipness" is apparently a genre necessity according to the suits at Fox. And apparently this "hipness" obsession was what was responsible for the show's most out of nowhere creative decision, having Henry Rollins be the Rod Serling-equivalent. That actually worked surprisingly well, but that meant ditching the one who was already committed to the role...Gary Oldman. Yes, Gary freaking Oldman could have been the host of this show. Think of how awesome that would have been. And yet he was dumped for Rollins because the latter was more "hip." (Brown mentioned they never wanted a host, just an "Outer Limits"-style voiceover, but Fox demanded a host or no show...and then they let the show die anyway.)
Given all the nonsensical meddling involved (Brown mentioned Fox nixed adapting a Dean Koontz story because it was "too scary", then complained the show wasn't scary enough), it's impressive the show turned out as well as it did, because "Night Visions" is a pretty good anthology with some truly impressive episodes that feature a wide variety of talent in front of and behind the camera (Joe Dante and Tobe Hooper direct multiple episodes). The entire series is available on YouTube to check out (13 episodes with 2 stores to each) and some highlights are:
"A View Through the Window" (E3): Bill Pullman directs and stars as a military scientist investigating the sudden appearance of a portal in the middle of a desert that leads to a lush farm inhabited by a picturesque family (including a beautiful young woman of course). Features a shocking twist that scarred a lot of early 00s kids.
"Now He's Coming Up the Stairs" (E4): Luke Perry (RIP) portrays a therapist with the ability to absorb the illnesses of his patients (in the opening he cures an anorexic and then suffers through her disability herself) who takes on perhaps his most dangerous case yet. I should mention at this point that cruel twist endings were the norm for this series.
"Rest Stop" (E5): College kids out traveling pick up a mysterious hitchhiker (Jerry O'Connell) and learn the local rest area hides some dark secrets. The ending gives a very grim answer to the question of how much are you actually worth.
"After Life" (E5): Randy Quaid (pre-insanity) is a man who suddenly wakes up in the midst of his own funeral, much to the delight of his daughter (his wife is more mixed), but becomes obsessed with the vision of heaven he supposedly saw and eventually wants to return...with his loved ones. The twist ending here is exceptionally cruel even by this show's standards.
"Bitter Harvest" (E8): Jack Palance is a crusty old farmer who loses both his limbs thanks to the careless actions of the boy next door (Brendan Fletcher) and goes to dark lengths for retribution. Animal lovers, you will be deeply upset by one scene near the end.
"My So-Called Life and Death" (E8): A teenage girl (Marla Sokoloff) staying with her deeply dysfunctional family at their summer home suspects the handsome handyman she has a crush on is actually a ghost. If you've read the "Goosebumps" book "The Ghost Next Door" (which was adapted to the TV series), this is like a darker adult version of that, with the main highlight being the deeply fucked-up family (Dad is a neglectful boozer, little brother is a pampered little shit, Mom is completely oblivious to anything that messes up her perfect delusions, etc.).
"Darkness" (E10): My personal favorite episode, with Michael Rappaport as a man who inherits his wealthy uncle's manor and learns the dark secret behind his uncle's gruesome demise (the opening shot awesomely depicts the aftermath). This one will make you uneasy at the sight of any flickering shadow.
"Harmony" (E11): Timothy Olyphant stars (and really, what more recommendation do you need?) as a traveler who finds a small town where music is outlawed due to superstition and he tries to convince them they have nothing to fear. Think of this as a dark version of "Footloose" where the Kevin Bacon character really should have kept his mouth shut.
"Cargo" (E12): Jamie Kennedy is a young cargo officer who ignores the advice of his crusty veteran co-worker (Phillip Baker Hall) and learns some of their cargo is very much alive...and very hungry. One of the episodes directed by Tobe Hooper.
"Patterns" (E13): "Christine's" Keith Gordon directs this tale of a psychiatrist (Miguel Ferrer) who deals with a very unusual patient (Malcom McDowell) who claims his obsessive-compulsive behavior is what's keeping the very fabric of reality together. A clever little story that explains every bizarre compulsive habit you've ever seen someone do. Sometimes those silly little rituals are very important indeed.
There's plenty more to enjoy and if you're a fan of the genre, you should check it out. Another Fox casualty well worth discovering.
2023.06.07 15:15 p_ranav hypergrep: A new "fastest grep" to search directories recursively for a regex pattern
Hello all,
GitHub Link: https://www.github.com/p-ranav/hypergrep
I hope this will be of interest here. I've spent the last few months implementing a grep for fun in C++. I was really interested in seeing how far I could go compared to the state-of-the-art today (ripgrep, ugrep, The Silver Searcher etc.).
Here are my results:
NOTE: I had to remove some rows in the table since Reddit markdown formatting was being weird. You can see them on GitHub.
Thanks!
submitted by p_ranav to cpp [link] [comments]
GitHub Link: https://www.github.com/p-ranav/hypergrep
I hope this will be of interest here. I've spent the last few months implementing a grep for fun in C++. I was really interested in seeing how far I could go compared to the state-of-the-art today (ripgrep, ugrep, The Silver Searcher etc.).
Here are my results:
NOTE: I had to remove some rows in the table since Reddit markdown formatting was being weird. You can see them on GitHub.
Performance
Single Large File Search: OpenSubtitles.raw.en.txt
The following searches are performed on a single large file cached in memory (~13GB, OpenSubtitles.raw.en.gz).| Regex | Line Count | ag | ugrep | ripgrep | hypergrep |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count number of times Holmes did something hg -c 'Holmes did w' | 27 | n/a | 1.820 | 1.400 | 0.696 |
| Literal with Regex Suffix hg -nw 'Sherlock [A-Z]w+' en.txt | 7882 | n/a | 1.812 | 2.654 | 0.803 |
| Simple Literal hg -nw 'Sherlock Holmes' en.txt | 7653 | 15.764 | 1.888 | 1.813 | 0.658 |
| Simple Literal (case insensitive) hg -inw 'Sherlock Holmes' en.txt | 7871 | 15.599 | 6.945 | 2.139 | 0.650 |
| Words surrounding a literal string hg -n 'w+[x20]+Holmes[x20]+w+' en.txt | 5020 | n/a | 6m 11s | 1.812 | 0.638 |
Git Repository Search: torvalds/linux
The following searches are performed on the entire Linux kernel source tree (after running make defconfig && make -j8). The commit used is f1fcb.| Regex | Line Count | ag | ugrep | ripgrep | hypergrep |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simple Literal hg -nw 'PM_RESUME' | 9 | 2.807 | 0.316 | 0.198 | 0.140 |
| Simple Literal (case insensitive) hg -niw 'PM_RESUME' | 39 | 2.904 | 0.435 | 0.203 | 0.141 |
| Regex with Literal Suffix hg -nw '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND' | 536 | 3.080 | 1.452 | 0.198 | 0.143 |
| Unicode Greek hg -n 'p{Greek}' | 111 | 3.762 | 0.484 | 0.386 | 0.146 |
Git Repository Search: apple/swift
The following searches are performed on the entire Apple Swift source tree. The commit used is 3865b.| Regex | Line Count | ag | ugrep | ripgrep | hypergrep |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Words starting with alphabetic characters followed by at least 2 digits hg -nw '[A-Za-z]+d{2,}' | 127858 | 1.169 | 1.238 | 0.186 | 0.095 |
| Words starting with Uppercase letter, followed by alpha-numeric chars and/or underscores hg -nw '[A-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_]*' | 2012372 | 3.131 | 2.598 | 0.673 | 0.482 |
| Guard let statement followed by valid identifier hg -n 'guards+lets+[a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*s*=s*w+' | 839 | 0.828 | 0.174 | 0.072 | 0.047 |
Directory Search: /usr
The following searches are performed on the /usr directory.| Regex | Line Count | ag | ugrep | ripgrep | hypergrep |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Any IPv4 IP address hg -w "(?:d{1,3}.){3}d{1,3}" | 12643 | 4.727 | 2.340 | 0.380 | 0.166 |
| Any E-mail address hg -w "[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+.[A-Za-z]{2,}" | 47509 | 5.477 | 37.209 | 0.542 | 0.220 |
| Count the number of HEX values hg -cw "(?:0x)?[0-9A-Fa-f]+" | 68042 | 5.765 | 28.691 | 1.662 | 0.611 |
Implementation Notes
- std::filesystem::recursive_directory_iterator in a single thread is not the answer. Need to iterate directories multi-threaded.
- Enqueue sub-directories into a queue for further iteration.
- In multiple threads, open the subdirectories and find candidate files to search
- Enqueue any candidate files into another queue for searching.
- If a git repository is detected, deal with it differently.
- Use libgit2. Open the repository, read the git index, iterate index entries in the current working tree.
- This is likely faster than performing a .gitignore-based "can I ignore this file" check on each file.
- Remember to search git submodules for any repository. Each of these nested repos will need to be opened and their index searched.
- Spawn some number of consumer threads, each of which will dequeue and search one file from the file queue.
- Open the file, read in chunks, perform search, process results, repeat until EOF.
- Adjust every chunk (to be searched) to end in newline boundaries - For any chunk of data, find the last newline in the chunk and only search till there. Then use lseek and move the file pointer back so that the next read happens from that newline boundary.
- Searching every single file is not the answer. Implement ways to detect non-text files, ignore files based on extension (e.g., .png), symbolic links, hidden files etc.
- When large files are detected, deal with them differently. Large files are better searched multi-threaded.
- After all small files are searched (i.e., all the consumer threads are done working), memory map these large files, search multi-threaded one after another.
- Call stat / std::filesystem::file_size as few times as possible. The cost of this call is evident when searching a large directory of thousands of files.
- Use lock-free queues.
- Speed up regex search if and where possible, e.g., each pattern match is the pair (from, to) in the buffer. If the matched part does not need to be colored, then `from` is not necessary (i.e., no need to keep track of the start of the match). This is the case, for example, when piping the grep results to another program, the result is just the matching line. No need to color each match in each line.
Thanks!
2023.06.07 14:25 bethskw [Meet Report] USAWA HackenDinnie Classic - Albany, KY, USA (690 lb total @ 155 bwt) - overall win & set several records
I beat the men again :) This was a super fun and well-run meet.
photo for cover
I've been competing in USAWA since 2019 and have been the undefeated women's champ at all the in-person meets I've done--although in many cases I was the only woman competing. Usually men and women are scored separately, but I asked ahead of time if the HackenDinnie organizer would be able to use a formula that combines men's and women's scores. Because, I told him, I'm competing to win. (He said yes.)
The Dinnie lift I've done before. Back in 2020 I got up to 503 pounds with straps. But in USAWA, no straps are allowed, nor even thumb tape. You just chalk up your hands and go for it. My best without straps had been 418 pounds.
When I trained the Dinnie lift, I kept getting little tweaks and aches and pains. One time I took two weeks off of Dinnie lifting because I was convinced I'd sprained my left ACL. (That's the ACL I tore and had reconstructed many years ago, so it kind of spooked me.) Later I had an issue with my hip. I was kinda bummed about all of this and didn't train this lift as heavy as I would have liked. Fortunately, by the time the meet rolled around everything was feeling better.
I had a total of 11 weeks between my last big weightlifting meet (Masters Nationals in olympic weightlifting) and the HackenDinnie. I did 3 days/week of normal weightlifting training, and 2 days where I practiced these two lifts and a few other lifts that I selected for the record portion. I pulled my last heavy Dinnie lift 8 days out, at about 440 pounds. My heaviest in the whole training cycle had been a hook grip PR at 470. On u/just-another-scrub's recommendation I bought a pair of Versa Gripps to get in more volume without worrying about my thumbs, but in the end my lower body injuries (or fear thereof) limited me more than my grip.
The guys at the scoring table called me over to ask what my opener really was on the floor press--maybe it was my handwriting, or maybe they weren't expecting me to open at 180 pounds. Out of 11 people there, I was 4th to open on the floor press. And of 9 people who did the Dinnie lift, I was second-to-last to open. One lifter bumped up his own opener to match mine (430).
I also had the second-heaviest Dinnie lift (by raw poundage) of the 9 of us. The only person who lifted heavier than me was a highland games athlete who said he had planned to do 500/550/600 but bumped his attempts when he saw mine. He did 550, 650, and broke 700 off the ground but didn't get a complete lift. I pointed out that a 300+ kg lift is all you need to book an appointment to lift the actual Dinnie stones, so even though the competition was over at that point, everybody supported him to get his qualifying lift in. We loaded 671 pounds, weighed it out and documented the scale weight, and he pulled it to massive cheering.
Honestly, I believe several of the men there were strong enough to beat me, but they weren't as familiar with the lifts and/or underestimated themselves when it came time to choose attempts. I, meanwhile, had been able to train on very similar equipment (I have Dinnie rings at home) and had a strong sense of what attempts would be strategic and doable for me. What can I say, I came to win!
The foot press had 350 pounds on it when I first gave it a try. I lifted that, and so did a bunch of other folks. Then four more plates got piled on, and we all did 530. Next up, a bunch of the guys did 580. When it was my turn, I said...well, why not 600? So that was my third. And I finished up with a 4th attempt at 700. Felt that one in my shin bones (ew), but no problem lifting it.
I also did a clean rack Sots press (James Lift is the USAWA name). 75, 80, and set a record and a small PR at 85 pounds.
I had planned to do a snatch, but there were no weightlifting bars in the place, and I forgot how weird it is to have a bar without your usual landmarks and to have so much knurling. I scraped up my legs enough on the Sots press that I scratched the idea of snatching with it.
Somewhere in there I took a first attempt at a normal bench press (IAWA/world lift but not USAWA lift). Did 150 pounds, then got distracted and never bothered to come back for more.
It was kind of chaotic, okay? At some point I stumbled across an axle loaded with 275 pounds. Pulled that for a beltless deadlift, because I didn't have my belt on when I impulsively grabbed it and told a ref to watch me. One attempt one record. Moving on.
Last one was an Apollon's Lift, which is just an axle press anyhow. I have not attempted to clean an axle in years and kind of forgot how. I no-contact power cleaned it and then did a split jerk at 115 pounds. Easy. So I went 135 next, couldn't remember how to clean it, managed to get it up to my shoulders continental style, then shit the bed on the jerk. I'm for sure good for more if I practice this someday. But the record book had a blank space on that, so 115 was good enough.
Next meet is USAWA nationals in Missouri in three weeks, so once I recover I'll jump right back into training. I've actually taken two whole days off from training so far, which is weird for me. Stay tuned for the next meet, which includes a Steinborn squat and a hip lift, among other things.
I'm not always sore after meets, but mannn is my body feeling this one. Everything hurts, including some bruising on the back of my leg and a superficial skin tear on top of my thumb from hook gripping so hard. Still have never torn a callus on my palms or fingers. File those suckers down, kids.
PS. I'm lifting the real things someday. Only 224 pounds to go.
Happy to answer questions about joining us at USAWA meets. They're for everyone (my daughter even lifted at Nationals at 6 years old) and are always a blast.
submitted by bethskw to xxfitness [link] [comments]
photo for cover
Background and training
I compete in USAWA, the US All-Round Weightlifting Association, best known for its many wacky odd lifts. This meet had just two official lifts, the Hackenschmidt Floor Press (a floor press done with the bar at 15" off the ground) and the Dinnie lift (weights in two stacks with ring handles, one heavier than the other, to mimic the famous Dinnie Stones of Scotland). After the competition was over, the organizer held a "record day" where lifters can pick anything they like from the rulebook and attempt to set or break records.I've been competing in USAWA since 2019 and have been the undefeated women's champ at all the in-person meets I've done--although in many cases I was the only woman competing. Usually men and women are scored separately, but I asked ahead of time if the HackenDinnie organizer would be able to use a formula that combines men's and women's scores. Because, I told him, I'm competing to win. (He said yes.)
Meet prep
The first time I tried the floor press, I was only able to move 75 kilos (about 160 pounds). u/BenchPauper suggested using the Gillingham bench template to train it, which involved one day each week with a heavy single and backoff sets, and a second day with lighter lifts. After a few weeks I figured out the right grip width and bar placement and was able to hit 85 kilos (about 185 pounds). This remained my 1RM for the rest of training. I deviated from Gillingham in the last few weeks, but it was a solid structure to keep me in practice for most of my training time.The Dinnie lift I've done before. Back in 2020 I got up to 503 pounds with straps. But in USAWA, no straps are allowed, nor even thumb tape. You just chalk up your hands and go for it. My best without straps had been 418 pounds.
When I trained the Dinnie lift, I kept getting little tweaks and aches and pains. One time I took two weeks off of Dinnie lifting because I was convinced I'd sprained my left ACL. (That's the ACL I tore and had reconstructed many years ago, so it kind of spooked me.) Later I had an issue with my hip. I was kinda bummed about all of this and didn't train this lift as heavy as I would have liked. Fortunately, by the time the meet rolled around everything was feeling better.
I had a total of 11 weeks between my last big weightlifting meet (Masters Nationals in olympic weightlifting) and the HackenDinnie. I did 3 days/week of normal weightlifting training, and 2 days where I practiced these two lifts and a few other lifts that I selected for the record portion. I pulled my last heavy Dinnie lift 8 days out, at about 440 pounds. My heaviest in the whole training cycle had been a hook grip PR at 470. On u/just-another-scrub's recommendation I bought a pair of Versa Gripps to get in more volume without worrying about my thumbs, but in the end my lower body injuries (or fear thereof) limited me more than my grip.
Meet day
I drove down to Kentucky for this one. The meet was held in Clint Poore's very nice garage gym and he put on an extremely well run meet. I refereed when I wasn't lifting.The guys at the scoring table called me over to ask what my opener really was on the floor press--maybe it was my handwriting, or maybe they weren't expecting me to open at 180 pounds. Out of 11 people there, I was 4th to open on the floor press. And of 9 people who did the Dinnie lift, I was second-to-last to open. One lifter bumped up his own opener to match mine (430).
The lifts
Hackenschmidt floor press
- 180 pounds - good lift, and set a record in my weight class.
- 185 pounds - had to follow myself. Good lift and an all-time women's national record.
- 190 pounds - I believe I followed myself again. I didn't quite wait long enough for the down command, but got white lights and a warning.
- 200 pounds - 190 moved so easy I knew I had more in me, so I went for the big 2 hundo for a 4th attempt for record. Looking at the video I think I may have even had a bit more.
Dinnie lift
Had to wait a while to open this one. My hands began to slip on my last warmup at 400, so I made a note to chalk the heck up and to believe in the magic of the taper.- 430 pounds - good lift and set a record in my weight class.
- 480 pounds - good lift and beats the record in the 70kg weight class. (I had chosen to be in the 75 to make sure I wouldn't have to worry about whether I could beat this number--but here I am beating it anywaay.)
- 500 pounds - good lift and a women's all time national record.
- 510 pounds on a 4th attempt - good lift at a poundage that beats all the IAWA women's world records as well. Sound on for this one!
I also had the second-heaviest Dinnie lift (by raw poundage) of the 9 of us. The only person who lifted heavier than me was a highland games athlete who said he had planned to do 500/550/600 but bumped his attempts when he saw mine. He did 550, 650, and broke 700 off the ground but didn't get a complete lift. I pointed out that a 300+ kg lift is all you need to book an appointment to lift the actual Dinnie stones, so even though the competition was over at that point, everybody supported him to get his qualifying lift in. We loaded 671 pounds, weighed it out and documented the scale weight, and he pulled it to massive cheering.
Results
When age and bodyweight were taken into account, I had the 4th best total on points. Our international org, IAWA, uses a 1.33 multiplier for women when they combine men's and women's scores, so we did the same to determine the overall winner. That turned out to be me.Honestly, I believe several of the men there were strong enough to beat me, but they weren't as familiar with the lifts and/or underestimated themselves when it came time to choose attempts. I, meanwhile, had been able to train on very similar equipment (I have Dinnie rings at home) and had a strong sense of what attempts would be strategic and doable for me. What can I say, I came to win!
Record portion
One of the first things the meet organizer showed me when I arrived that morning was a foot press he had just gotten. Sort of like a primitive leg press, but the idea is that you just need to break the weights off the supports (no need to fully lock out your legs). I almost couldn't reach the footplate, but with my heeled lifting shoes on I was able to participate.The foot press had 350 pounds on it when I first gave it a try. I lifted that, and so did a bunch of other folks. Then four more plates got piled on, and we all did 530. Next up, a bunch of the guys did 580. When it was my turn, I said...well, why not 600? So that was my third. And I finished up with a 4th attempt at 700. Felt that one in my shin bones (ew), but no problem lifting it.
I also did a clean rack Sots press (James Lift is the USAWA name). 75, 80, and set a record and a small PR at 85 pounds.
I had planned to do a snatch, but there were no weightlifting bars in the place, and I forgot how weird it is to have a bar without your usual landmarks and to have so much knurling. I scraped up my legs enough on the Sots press that I scratched the idea of snatching with it.
Somewhere in there I took a first attempt at a normal bench press (IAWA/world lift but not USAWA lift). Did 150 pounds, then got distracted and never bothered to come back for more.
It was kind of chaotic, okay? At some point I stumbled across an axle loaded with 275 pounds. Pulled that for a beltless deadlift, because I didn't have my belt on when I impulsively grabbed it and told a ref to watch me. One attempt one record. Moving on.
Last one was an Apollon's Lift, which is just an axle press anyhow. I have not attempted to clean an axle in years and kind of forgot how. I no-contact power cleaned it and then did a split jerk at 115 pounds. Easy. So I went 135 next, couldn't remember how to clean it, managed to get it up to my shoulders continental style, then shit the bed on the jerk. I'm for sure good for more if I practice this someday. But the record book had a blank space on that, so 115 was good enough.
Aftermath
I'm working toward getting into the Century Club of people with 100 or more records. (We love our records in USAWA. The Century Club has many members, in part because you can keep setting different age group records as you get older.) I'm on track to make it this year.Next meet is USAWA nationals in Missouri in three weeks, so once I recover I'll jump right back into training. I've actually taken two whole days off from training so far, which is weird for me. Stay tuned for the next meet, which includes a Steinborn squat and a hip lift, among other things.
I'm not always sore after meets, but mannn is my body feeling this one. Everything hurts, including some bruising on the back of my leg and a superficial skin tear on top of my thumb from hook gripping so hard. Still have never torn a callus on my palms or fingers. File those suckers down, kids.
PS. I'm lifting the real things someday. Only 224 pounds to go.
Happy to answer questions about joining us at USAWA meets. They're for everyone (my daughter even lifted at Nationals at 6 years old) and are always a blast.
2023.06.07 14:23 bethskw [Meet Report] USAWA HackenDinnie Classic - Albany, KY, USA (690 lb total @ 155 bwt) - overall win & set several records
I beat the men again :) This was a super fun and well-run meet.
photo for cover
I've been competing in USAWA since 2019 and have been the undefeated women's champ at all the in-person meets I've done--although in many cases I was the only woman competing. Usually men and women are scored separately, but I asked ahead of time if the HackenDinnie organizer would be able to use a formula that combines men's and women's scores. Because, I told him, I'm competing to win. (He said yes.)
The Dinnie lift I've done before. Back in 2020 I got up to 503 pounds with straps. But in USAWA, no straps are allowed, nor even thumb tape. You just chalk up your hands and go for it. My best without straps had been 418 pounds.
When I trained the Dinnie lift, I kept getting little tweaks and aches and pains. One time I took two weeks off of Dinnie lifting because I was convinced I'd sprained my left ACL. (That's the ACL I tore and had reconstructed many years ago, so it kind of spooked me.) Later I had an issue with my hip. I was kinda bummed about all of this and didn't train this lift as heavy as I would have liked. Fortunately, by the time the meet rolled around everything was feeling better.
I had a total of 11 weeks between my last big weightlifting meet (Masters Nationals in olympic weightlifting) and the HackenDinnie. I did 3 days/week of normal weightlifting training, and 2 days where I practiced these two lifts and a few other lifts that I selected for the record portion. I pulled my last heavy Dinnie lift 8 days out, at about 440 pounds. My heaviest in the whole training cycle had been a hook grip PR at 470. On u/just-another-scrub's recommendation I bought a pair of Versa Gripps to get in more volume without worrying about my thumbs, but in the end my lower body injuries (or fear thereof) limited me more than my grip.
The guys at the scoring table called me over to ask what my opener really was on the floor press--maybe it was my handwriting, or maybe they weren't expecting me to open at 180 pounds. Out of 11 people there, I was 4th to open on the floor press. And of 9 people who did the Dinnie lift, I was second-to-last to open. One lifter bumped up his own opener to match mine (430).
I also had the second-heaviest Dinnie lift (by raw poundage) of the 9 of us. The only person who lifted heavier than me was a highland games athlete who said he had planned to do 500/550/600 but bumped his attempts when he saw mine. He did 550, 650, and broke 700 off the ground but didn't get a complete lift. I pointed out that a 300+ kg lift is all you need to book an appointment to lift the actual Dinnie stones, so even though the competition was over at that point, everybody supported him to get his qualifying lift in. We loaded 671 pounds, weighed it out and documented the scale weight, and he pulled it to massive cheering.
Honestly, I believe several of the men there were strong enough to beat me, but they weren't as familiar with the lifts and/or underestimated themselves when it came time to choose attempts. I, meanwhile, had been able to train on very similar equipment (I have Dinnie rings at home) and had a strong sense of what attempts would be strategic and doable for me. What can I say, I came to win!
The foot press had 350 pounds on it when I first gave it a try. I lifted that, and so did a bunch of other folks. Then four more plates got piled on, and we all did 530. Next up, a bunch of the guys did 580. When it was my turn, I said...well, why not 600? So that was my third. And I finished up with a 4th attempt at 700. Felt that one in my shin bones (ew), but no problem lifting it.
I also did a clean rack Sots press (James Lift is the USAWA name). 75, 80, and set a record and a small PR at 85 pounds.
I had planned to do a snatch, but there were no weightlifting bars in the place, and I forgot how weird it is to have a bar without your usual landmarks and to have so much knurling. I scraped up my legs enough on the Sots press that I scratched the idea of snatching with it.
Somewhere in there I took a first attempt at a normal bench press (IAWA/world lift but not USAWA lift). Did 150 pounds, then got distracted and never bothered to come back for more.
It was kind of chaotic, okay? At some point I stumbled across an axle loaded with 275 pounds. Pulled that for a beltless deadlift, because I didn't have my belt on when I impulsively grabbed it and told a ref to watch me. One attempt one record. Moving on.
Last one was an Apollon's Lift, which is just an axle press anyhow. I have not attempted to clean an axle in years and kind of forgot how. I no-contact power cleaned it and then did a split jerk at 115 pounds. Easy. So I went 135 next, couldn't remember how to clean it, managed to get it up to my shoulders continental style, then shit the bed on the jerk. I'm for sure good for more if I practice this someday. But the record book had a blank space on that, so 115 was good enough.
Next meet is USAWA nationals in Missouri in three weeks, so once I recover I'll jump right back into training. I've actually taken two whole days off from training so far, which is weird for me. Stay tuned for the next meet, which includes a Steinborn squat and a hip lift, among other things.
I'm not always sore after meets, but mannn is my body feeling this one. Everything hurts, including some bruising on the back of my leg and a superficial skin tear on top of my thumb from hook gripping so hard. Still have never torn a callus on my palms or fingers. File those suckers down, kids.
PS. I'm lifting the real things someday. Only 224 pounds to go.
Happy to answer questions about joining us at USAWA meets. They're for everyone (my daughter even lifted at Nationals at 6 years old) and are always a blast.
submitted by bethskw to weightroom [link] [comments]
photo for cover
Background and training
I compete in USAWA, the US All-Round Weightlifting Association, best known for its many wacky odd lifts. This meet had just two official lifts, the Hackenschmidt Floor Press (a floor press done with the bar at 15" off the ground) and the Dinnie lift (weights in two stacks with ring handles, one heavier than the other, to mimic the famous Dinnie Stones of Scotland). After the competition was over, the organizer held a "record day" where lifters can pick anything they like from the rulebook and attempt to set or break records.I've been competing in USAWA since 2019 and have been the undefeated women's champ at all the in-person meets I've done--although in many cases I was the only woman competing. Usually men and women are scored separately, but I asked ahead of time if the HackenDinnie organizer would be able to use a formula that combines men's and women's scores. Because, I told him, I'm competing to win. (He said yes.)
Meet prep
The first time I tried the floor press, I was only able to move 75 kilos (about 160 pounds). u/BenchPauper suggested using the Gillingham bench template to train it, which involved one day each week with a heavy single and backoff sets, and a second day with lighter lifts. After a few weeks I figured out the right grip width and bar placement and was able to hit 85 kilos (about 185 pounds). This remained my 1RM for the rest of training. I deviated from Gillingham in the last few weeks, but it was a solid structure to keep me in practice for most of my training time.The Dinnie lift I've done before. Back in 2020 I got up to 503 pounds with straps. But in USAWA, no straps are allowed, nor even thumb tape. You just chalk up your hands and go for it. My best without straps had been 418 pounds.
When I trained the Dinnie lift, I kept getting little tweaks and aches and pains. One time I took two weeks off of Dinnie lifting because I was convinced I'd sprained my left ACL. (That's the ACL I tore and had reconstructed many years ago, so it kind of spooked me.) Later I had an issue with my hip. I was kinda bummed about all of this and didn't train this lift as heavy as I would have liked. Fortunately, by the time the meet rolled around everything was feeling better.
I had a total of 11 weeks between my last big weightlifting meet (Masters Nationals in olympic weightlifting) and the HackenDinnie. I did 3 days/week of normal weightlifting training, and 2 days where I practiced these two lifts and a few other lifts that I selected for the record portion. I pulled my last heavy Dinnie lift 8 days out, at about 440 pounds. My heaviest in the whole training cycle had been a hook grip PR at 470. On u/just-another-scrub's recommendation I bought a pair of Versa Gripps to get in more volume without worrying about my thumbs, but in the end my lower body injuries (or fear thereof) limited me more than my grip.
Meet day
I drove down to Kentucky for this one. The meet was held in Clint Poore's very nice garage gym and he put on an extremely well run meet. I refereed when I wasn't lifting.The guys at the scoring table called me over to ask what my opener really was on the floor press--maybe it was my handwriting, or maybe they weren't expecting me to open at 180 pounds. Out of 11 people there, I was 4th to open on the floor press. And of 9 people who did the Dinnie lift, I was second-to-last to open. One lifter bumped up his own opener to match mine (430).
The lifts
Hackenschmidt floor press
- 180 pounds - good lift, and set a record in my weight class.
- 185 pounds - had to follow myself. Good lift and an all-time women's national record.
- 190 pounds - I believe I followed myself again. I didn't quite wait long enough for the down command, but got white lights and a warning.
- 200 pounds - 190 moved so easy I knew I had more in me, so I went for the big 2 hundo for a 4th attempt for record. Looking at the video I think I may have even had a bit more.
Dinnie lift
Had to wait a while to open this one. My hands began to slip on my last warmup at 400, so I made a note to chalk the heck up and to believe in the magic of the taper.- 430 pounds - good lift and set a record in my weight class.
- 480 pounds - good lift and beats the record in the 70kg weight class. (I had chosen to be in the 75 to make sure I wouldn't have to worry about whether I could beat this number--but here I am beating it anywaay.)
- 500 pounds - good lift and a women's all time national record.
- 510 pounds on a 4th attempt - good lift at a poundage that beats all the IAWA women's world records as well. Sound on for this one!
I also had the second-heaviest Dinnie lift (by raw poundage) of the 9 of us. The only person who lifted heavier than me was a highland games athlete who said he had planned to do 500/550/600 but bumped his attempts when he saw mine. He did 550, 650, and broke 700 off the ground but didn't get a complete lift. I pointed out that a 300+ kg lift is all you need to book an appointment to lift the actual Dinnie stones, so even though the competition was over at that point, everybody supported him to get his qualifying lift in. We loaded 671 pounds, weighed it out and documented the scale weight, and he pulled it to massive cheering.
Results
When age and bodyweight were taken into account, I had the 4th best total on points. Our international org, IAWA, uses a 1.33 multiplier for women when they combine men's and women's scores, so we did the same to determine the overall winner. That turned out to be me.Honestly, I believe several of the men there were strong enough to beat me, but they weren't as familiar with the lifts and/or underestimated themselves when it came time to choose attempts. I, meanwhile, had been able to train on very similar equipment (I have Dinnie rings at home) and had a strong sense of what attempts would be strategic and doable for me. What can I say, I came to win!
Record portion
One of the first things the meet organizer showed me when I arrived that morning was a foot press he had just gotten. Sort of like a primitive leg press, but the idea is that you just need to break the weights off the supports (no need to fully lock out your legs). I almost couldn't reach the footplate, but with my heeled lifting shoes on I was able to participate.The foot press had 350 pounds on it when I first gave it a try. I lifted that, and so did a bunch of other folks. Then four more plates got piled on, and we all did 530. Next up, a bunch of the guys did 580. When it was my turn, I said...well, why not 600? So that was my third. And I finished up with a 4th attempt at 700. Felt that one in my shin bones (ew), but no problem lifting it.
I also did a clean rack Sots press (James Lift is the USAWA name). 75, 80, and set a record and a small PR at 85 pounds.
I had planned to do a snatch, but there were no weightlifting bars in the place, and I forgot how weird it is to have a bar without your usual landmarks and to have so much knurling. I scraped up my legs enough on the Sots press that I scratched the idea of snatching with it.
Somewhere in there I took a first attempt at a normal bench press (IAWA/world lift but not USAWA lift). Did 150 pounds, then got distracted and never bothered to come back for more.
It was kind of chaotic, okay? At some point I stumbled across an axle loaded with 275 pounds. Pulled that for a beltless deadlift, because I didn't have my belt on when I impulsively grabbed it and told a ref to watch me. One attempt one record. Moving on.
Last one was an Apollon's Lift, which is just an axle press anyhow. I have not attempted to clean an axle in years and kind of forgot how. I no-contact power cleaned it and then did a split jerk at 115 pounds. Easy. So I went 135 next, couldn't remember how to clean it, managed to get it up to my shoulders continental style, then shit the bed on the jerk. I'm for sure good for more if I practice this someday. But the record book had a blank space on that, so 115 was good enough.
Aftermath
I'm working toward getting into the Century Club of people with 100 or more records. (We love our records in USAWA. The Century Club has many members, in part because you can keep setting different age group records as you get older.) I'm on track to make it this year.Next meet is USAWA nationals in Missouri in three weeks, so once I recover I'll jump right back into training. I've actually taken two whole days off from training so far, which is weird for me. Stay tuned for the next meet, which includes a Steinborn squat and a hip lift, among other things.
I'm not always sore after meets, but mannn is my body feeling this one. Everything hurts, including some bruising on the back of my leg and a superficial skin tear on top of my thumb from hook gripping so hard. Still have never torn a callus on my palms or fingers. File those suckers down, kids.
PS. I'm lifting the real things someday. Only 224 pounds to go.
Happy to answer questions about joining us at USAWA meets. They're for everyone (my daughter even lifted at Nationals at 6 years old) and are always a blast.
2023.06.07 13:29 uppsak Please see my method and suggest if there is a better way.
Use case:
I am preparing for GATE exam (Competitive exam with multiple choice questions, numerical answer type questions). I have previous year questions in pdf files until 2007 exam. I want to arrange these questions topicwise, markswise and yearwise. This wil help me focus on the important topics, check if I have missed something from the syllabus, etc.
My method:
Take screenshots of each individual question (65 question per exam) and make a notion database and fill it with those screenshots. I will enter the properties such as marks, topic, year etc for each question.
This method is time taking but is the best I have got so far. Any advice would be appreciated 🙂
submitted by uppsak to Notion [link] [comments]
I am preparing for GATE exam (Competitive exam with multiple choice questions, numerical answer type questions). I have previous year questions in pdf files until 2007 exam. I want to arrange these questions topicwise, markswise and yearwise. This wil help me focus on the important topics, check if I have missed something from the syllabus, etc.
My method:
Take screenshots of each individual question (65 question per exam) and make a notion database and fill it with those screenshots. I will enter the properties such as marks, topic, year etc for each question.
This method is time taking but is the best I have got so far. Any advice would be appreciated 🙂
2023.06.07 13:09 louisberklawusa Trusted Car Accident Attorney in Orlando,FL
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2023.06.07 11:19 Acceptable_Amoeba_37 760(Q50,V44) - resources used and lessons learnt
I got a few questions on the resources I used, so I thought I would make a detailed writeup of the same.
Disclaimer: This is not a piece of general advice, I am just documenting some of the things that worked for me. There are many experts in this sub who are qualified to give out advice, I am most definitely not one of them. Take this post with a pinch of salt. What worked for me might not work for you.
Free resources in the end.
TL;DR
Quant:
Don’t be discouraged if you are on a bit of a money crunch, you can get a great score just by using free resources. I am happy to help more in this regard, feel free to DM.
submitted by Acceptable_Amoeba_37 to GMAT [link] [comments]
Disclaimer: This is not a piece of general advice, I am just documenting some of the things that worked for me. There are many experts in this sub who are qualified to give out advice, I am most definitely not one of them. Take this post with a pinch of salt. What worked for me might not work for you.
Free resources in the end.
TL;DR
- Quant - Wizako/ Gmat Club forum quiz
- Verbal - TTP(initial months)/ Gmat Ninja video series/ GMAT Club expert replies
- Have a guessing strategy and game plan for test anxiety, don’t lose control over the test at any point
- Don’t just think of what resources to use, think of when to use those resources as well. (Eg. doing gmat club practice in the initial stages felt overwhelming for me. I utilized it in a much more effective way after I was done with the basics)
- Be kind to yourself, get enough sleep, and fake it till you make it!
- Don't get disheartened if things don't go your way, a successful GMAT attempt depends on a lot of factors in addition to your prep. Your mindset and luck are factors as well. Keep going at it, it gets better!
Quant:
- Although I am comfortable with quant more than with verbal, my basics were a bit rusty. I used the GMAT Quant core course from Wizako. I used this course to brush up on the basics. Although I used this course many months back, I frequented my notes from this course throughout my prep. They have a Youtube channel, you can check it out to see whether their style suits you. https://gmat.wizako.com/gmat-online-course-gmat-online-coaching-classes.shtml?gclid=CjwKCAjwsvujBhAXEiwA_UXnAK7fJppKZeq-T782xPruwFdSaR6zFVmE5l0c5SboqYLq9XAJpaBdPBoCz-0QAvD_BwE#fees
- After getting my basics in place, I started practicing with official questions. For the next few weeks, my efforts were quite scattered. In retrospect, having a structured approach would have expedited my prep - more on this later
- I purchased the TTP 4 months plan, however, I could not properly utilize the course as I had a very busy couple of months at work. Based on my experience, it is a very comprehensive course. It can be a game changer if you know how to utilize it well. Many people here feel that it is too vast, but I feel that is in good measure. They start from the absolute basics, and it is a very well-made course. I utilized TTP majorly for Verbal as it was my major pain point, and I was very satisfied with it(more on this in the verbal section)
- Once my basics were in place I realized that it was not my accuracy but my poor time management that was the bigger problem. This was my major takeaway from my first official test from a quant perspective.
- I fixed my timing problem with practice, get comfortable with the discomfort. I practised using forum quiz, and GMAT Club tests. GMAT club tests are really good, you can utilize this resource to get your time management skills in place. I would still say that they are not the same as OG questions, so DON'T skip out on OG questions. Getting an understanding of what skills the GMAT tests was an eye-opener. I also got GMAT club tests for free for 4 weeks. I got 2 weeks free for filling up an error log survey and an additional 2 weeks free for signing up for MBA Spotlight within 48 hours of its announcement. Watch out for such promotions to get some free resources.
- After practising for a while, I could see myself getting better at time management. My next pain point was careless math mistakes, I made a TONNE of them. I downloaded my error log from GMAT club, and in the week before the test, I revisited every official question that I got wrong and checked if I still made the same mistakes. If I made those mistakes even after practice, I re-read those concepts. I was making such mistakes even in the days leading to the test, anxiety was the root cause for such mistakes. I spent the last few days before my test working on my test anxiety.
- I spent the initial months of my prep doing a variety of resources, my prep was not structured at all. I used Powerscore CR Bible - a good resource to get some basics in place. I used Powerscore RC bible for RC, I found that to be helpful for me. I got comfortable with RC fairly quickly, so I did not spend much time on RC.
- GMAT Ninja Verbal series on Youtube is a godsend, I cannot stress how useful the entire series was, and the best part it is FREE. A lot of experts here say that GMAT verbal is not just about the rules, it seemed bizarre to me at first, but I understood what that meant after watching the GMAT Ninja videos. Watching those videos was a Eureka moment for me. I benefited a lot from the SC series especially. I felt that I could appreciate the videos better after I had some basics in place.
- I used TTP for verbal, especially for SC. TTP deserves every bit of credit it gets for making such a comprehensive course. Although I could not go through it completely, I greatly benefited from the verbal prep material. I referred to my SC notes from TTP multiple times during my prep journey. If you have the means and time to use TTP, go for it, but before that have a basic understanding of what your weak areas are. Use the free trial to get a feel of the course, and go for it when you are ready. Since the course is very vast, you might not have time to go through all of it, but having a clear idea of what you want in any resource will help you utilize it to the fullest.
- Read to understand the structure in RC, RC passages usually tire you out with a lot of details. Ensure that you don't lose track of the main idea, the structure, and what each paragraph tries to achieve in a structural sense. This helped me get most of the RC questions correct.
- SC is beyond the grammar rules. Don’t get me wrong, you need the rules to get to a basic level, but just that won't get you the right answer, especially in the more difficult questions. Reading for meaning is the way to go, GMAT Ninja videos helped me get this understanding. You have to be very literal with SC, I thought of SC like a puzzle.
- I am not the best person to comment about CR as that was my most difficult section, I tanked that in my first test. I learned that I did not keep track of the conclusion, so I fell for many trap answers. A few days before the test, Marty suggested I watch his Youtube video, it helped!! Thank you, Marty :) GMAT Ninja videos helped too. Like in SC, just understanding the patterns(eg. What are the typical right answers in a strengthen question?) will only get you so far, you need to understand what the main conclusion is and how the whole argument ties to it. Sometimes CR has seemingly bizarre correct answers, having a logical approach will help in such cases.
- GMAT CLUB - Just drilling OG questions will not be very effective. I used the forum quiz feature to practise in sets of 10-20 questions. I would later analyze each and every question, even the ones I got right. I used to read the expert replies and understand the concept. Once you get the hang of what qualifies as a right answer in GMAT, you will break your plateau, trust me on this.
- As mentioned earlier, I downloaded my GMAT club error log into an Excel file, revisited every official question that I got wrong, and checked if I still made the same mistakes. If I made those mistakes even after practice, and if it was because I did not completely understand that concept, I re-read those concepts(eg. I found the verb-ing modifier to be not intuitive for me, I re-read that a few times till I got the hang of it)
- I did not account for this in my first test, and I learned a very important lesson the hard way. Some people are naturally calm under pressure, I am not one of them. GMAT is an exam where the stakes are high, so naturally your nerves will also be at an all-time high. Look up tips to help with anxiety, and choose what works for you. I got a 700 in my last mock 5 days before the exam, it felt like there was no way out. Once again, I am truly grateful for the people in this sub, and my family and friends for helping me move past that very rough patch. In retrospect, I feel like I needed to face that 700 in the mock in order to get the score I got on the test day.
- Be kind to yourself, and don’t get discouraged if you feel like you are not performing to the best of your ability, or if you feel like you are taking too much time to get ready for the test. You might feel like everyone else around is making massive strides and you are progressing in baby steps, understand that no two journeys are the same. Give yourself credit for showing up and wanting to move forward even when things are not looking up.
- I had a positive attitude before the test to the extent that I was surprised at myself. I told myself that nothing would stop me from giving my best possible performance on the test day, in a way I faked it till I made it. Things did not go my way initially, I had a flat tire right before I left for the test, I did not understand the very first question, and I had to guess a few questions(luck played a part here), I was surprised how unfaced I was given the turn of events. Having a resilient mindset helps, believe in your practice. I made every effort to not think about the algorithm.
- Don’t let performance in your first section affect that of your next section. I made this mistake on my first attempt and consciously avoided making the mistake on the second attempt.
- Never lose control over the test - have a guessing strategy. If you feel you are running out of time, you will have to make some calculated sacrifices.
- In my first attempt, I had some trouble using the scratch pad, I followed a timing strategy wherein I write some time markers on the bottom of the page. It might sound trivial to you, but I had trouble with flipping the pages the right way on my first attempt, I was that anxious. I got a scratch pad to practise before the second attempt. If you can’t get it in your region, or if you find it to be expensive, you can get a makeshift one made at a local stationery store. I laminated a bunch of A4 sheets and got them spiral bound, not the best way, but it did the job.
- Reading some success stories here and on GMAT Club motivated me.
- I took a week off from work before my test, I completely zoned into GMAT. If you can't do this, consider having a few days around the weekend.
Don’t be discouraged if you are on a bit of a money crunch, you can get a great score just by using free resources. I am happy to help more in this regard, feel free to DM.
- Quant- https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmat-math-book-in-downloadable-pdf-format-130609.html
- Verbal - https://gmatclub.com/forum/ultimate-gmat-grammar-book-133952.html
- Verbal - GMAT Ninja Youtube channel SC/CRC series
- Time Management and Scratchpad organization - https://www.kaptest.com/study/gmat/time-management/
- General practice(use this to pick OG questions based on difficulty levels) - https://gmatclub.com/forum/viewforumtags.php
- Notes - I used this for revision in the days leading to the test and for idioms, this is a great post - https://www.reddit.com/GMAT/comments/hg0kec/from_710_to_770_50q45v8ir6awa_gmat_study_tips/
- Watch out for promotions on GMAT club to get access to tests/forum quiz for a few days. Subscribing to the youtube channel gives you 1 week of access to the forum quiz.
- GMAT Club - search for any topic that you don’t understand, and look for expert replies on that topic, it will be more than enough to understand that concept.
2023.06.07 11:10 AttractiveBulldozer In Python. ERRNO 9 due to spi.xfer2 command from SpiDev library. Communication between RPi 4 and Arduino Mega1280 alike from DFRobot
Hello, python folks. Originally this post has been made on Stack Overflow, but due to no response, I am sharing this question on reddit as well. Here is original post, if you are interested.
General Context: I am working on project where the SBC (in my case, Raspberry Pi 4) has its pins protected from possible short-circuits due to the sloppy wiring; those pins are protected with microcontroller (in my case, it is an analog of Arduino Mega 1280 from DFRobot). The idea is that RPi tells microcontroller what sorts of actions on the I/O should be done, and in case of the short-circuit, microcontroller gets damaged instead of RPi, thus protecting RPi and its pins.RPi and microcontroller communication Context: The communication is done through SPI. RPi and microcontroller are connected through CIPO, COPI, CS and SCLK (for old-fashion folks, the first three are MISO, MOSI and SS). Software wise on RPi I am using python with SpiDev and time libraries, and on microcontroller I am using Arduino IDE with SPI.h library. The communication utilises encoded byte signals, where first 5 bits determine the pin, 6th bit tells whether the pin send High or Low signal, 7th bit determines whether the pin is Input or Outputand 8th bit always stays 1 to insure that the command is taken into action.
How does the code work? The following code consists of list, array and two functions. The list, that goes from pin 0 - 27, is there to tell the 5 bits used to find the pin used. tx_pin array is there to connect the function SendSignal with the earlier mentioned list (is this an extra step? possibly). Function SendSignal just as the name suggests send the signal from RPi to microcontroller; the function demands to specify what pin (PIN) to use, to Input or Output it (IO), to keep High or Low (HL) and whether the to take the command into action (AI, earlier mention 8th bit; keep it as 1). Later the arguments are connected together into one byte as the tx_data variable. At the end the tx_data is sent as the signal through the rx_data = spi.xfer2(tx_data). Later on the function, the pin state is printed on the separate text document. Before all of the text document shenanigans, there rx_data awaits for the microcontroller to send back a specific byte signal (1 aka 0b00000001) in order to confirm that the two devices are still communicating with each other. DebutTeste is the function that checks whether there is communication between two devices or not. It uses the SendSignal fucntion to repeatadly send signal until it receives an answer from the microcontroller.
How is it working so far? Fortunately, all of the code done is functioning. It has been tested beforehand.The code for sending byte signal:
Creating and using a python module for sending byte signal. I imported the first mentioned code to the new script and tried to use its SendSignal command; as the result, I receive Errno9 on the rx_data = spi.xfer2(tx_data) section.In the new script I imported the first code - import FirstCode as FC and then used the SendSignal command as FC.SendSignal (0,1,0,1). It didn't work, I got the earlier mentioned issue. After, I added the libraries that I used in the first code, so I imported spidev and time libraries. That brought no effect. After, I added the variables, list, array and spi parameters (such as spi.open(0,0) before using the function, unfortunately - nothing. In all cases, I get the exactly same error. I receive Errno9 on the rx_data = spi.xfer2(tx_data) section. Reminder, the first code by itself works! Please, help.
Edit: Fixed some Code Block issues on Reddit. The text appeared weird; especially when I used the # in my code comments.
submitted by AttractiveBulldozer to learnpython [link] [comments]
General Context: I am working on project where the SBC (in my case, Raspberry Pi 4) has its pins protected from possible short-circuits due to the sloppy wiring; those pins are protected with microcontroller (in my case, it is an analog of Arduino Mega 1280 from DFRobot). The idea is that RPi tells microcontroller what sorts of actions on the I/O should be done, and in case of the short-circuit, microcontroller gets damaged instead of RPi, thus protecting RPi and its pins.RPi and microcontroller communication Context: The communication is done through SPI. RPi and microcontroller are connected through CIPO, COPI, CS and SCLK (for old-fashion folks, the first three are MISO, MOSI and SS). Software wise on RPi I am using python with SpiDev and time libraries, and on microcontroller I am using Arduino IDE with SPI.h library. The communication utilises encoded byte signals, where first 5 bits determine the pin, 6th bit tells whether the pin send High or Low signal, 7th bit determines whether the pin is Input or Outputand 8th bit always stays 1 to insure that the command is taken into action.
How does the code work? The following code consists of list, array and two functions. The list, that goes from pin 0 - 27, is there to tell the 5 bits used to find the pin used. tx_pin array is there to connect the function SendSignal with the earlier mentioned list (is this an extra step? possibly). Function SendSignal just as the name suggests send the signal from RPi to microcontroller; the function demands to specify what pin (PIN) to use, to Input or Output it (IO), to keep High or Low (HL) and whether the to take the command into action (AI, earlier mention 8th bit; keep it as 1). Later the arguments are connected together into one byte as the tx_data variable. At the end the tx_data is sent as the signal through the rx_data = spi.xfer2(tx_data). Later on the function, the pin state is printed on the separate text document. Before all of the text document shenanigans, there rx_data awaits for the microcontroller to send back a specific byte signal (1 aka 0b00000001) in order to confirm that the two devices are still communicating with each other. DebutTeste is the function that checks whether there is communication between two devices or not. It uses the SendSignal fucntion to repeatadly send signal until it receives an answer from the microcontroller.
How is it working so far? Fortunately, all of the code done is functioning. It has been tested beforehand.The code for sending byte signal:
import spidev import time spi = spidev.SpiDev() spi.open(0, 0) spi.mode = 0b00 spi.bits_per_word = 8 spi.max_speed_hz = 1000000 ComState = 0 AntiSpamComState = 0 pin0 = '00000' pin1 = '00001' pin2 = '00010' pin3 = '00011' pin4 = '00100' pin5 = '00101' pin6 = '00110' pin7 = '00111' pin8 = '01000' pin9 = '01001' pin10 = '01010' pin11 = '01011' pin12 = '01100' pin13 = '01101' pin14 = '01110' pin15 = '01111' pin16 = '10000' pin17 = '10001' pin18 = '10010' pin19 = '10011' pin20 = '10100' pin21 = '10101' pin22 = '10110' pin23 = '10111' pin24 = '11000' pin25 = '11001' pin26 = '11010' pin27 = '11011' tx_pin = [pin0,pin1,pin2,pin3,pin4,pin5,pin6,pin7,pin8,pin9,pin10,pin11,pin12,pin13,pin14,pin15,pin16,pin17,pin18,pin19,pin20,pin21,pin22,pin23,pin24,pin25,pin26,pin27 ] def SendSignal(PIN,IO,HL,AI): tx_data = [int('0b' + str(AI) + str(IO) + str(HL) + str(tx_pin[PIN]),2)] rx_data = spi.xfer2(tx_data) print (rx_data) global ComState if rx_data != [1]: ComState = 0 print("COMMUNICATION ERROR! RETURN SIGNAL LOST OR CORRUPTED!") else: ComState = 1 print("Signal Stable") if IO == 1: TIO = 'Input' if IO == 0: TIO = 'Output' if HL == 1: THL = 'HIGH' if HL == 0: THL = 'LOW' new_line = f'PIN INFO: Pin = {PIN}, {TIO}, {THL}' with open('/home/RPiUseDocuments/Prog/SPI/SPI_StatusDoc','r', encoding='utf-8') as file: lines = file.readlines() lines[PIN] = new_line + "\n" with open('/home/RPiUseDocuments/Prog/SPI/SPI_StatusDoc', 'w',encoding='utf-8') as file: file.writelines(lines) def DebutTeste (): global AntiSpamComState while ComState == 0: time.sleep(0.5) SendSignal(0,0,0,1) OFFcommunication_line = 'Communication State OFF' if AntiSpamComState == 0: with open('/home/RPiUseDocuments/Prog/SPI/SPI_StatusDoc','r', encoding='utf-8') as file: lines = file.readlines() lines[28] = OFFcommunication_line + "\n" with open('/home/RPiUseDocuments/Prog/SPI/SPI_StatusDoc', 'w',encoding='utf-8') as file: file.writelines(lines) AntiSpamComState = 1 ONcommunication_line = 'Communication State ON' with open('/home/RPiUseDocuments/Prog/SPI/SPI_StatusDoc','r', encoding='utf-8') as file: lines = file.readlines() lines[28] = ONcommunication_line + "\n" with open('/home/RPiUseDocuments/Prog/SPI/SPI_StatusDoc', 'w',encoding='utf-8') as file: file.writelines(lines) AntiSpamComState = 0 spi.close() The Issue:Creating and using a python module for sending byte signal. I imported the first mentioned code to the new script and tried to use its SendSignal command; as the result, I receive Errno9 on the rx_data = spi.xfer2(tx_data) section.In the new script I imported the first code - import FirstCode as FC and then used the SendSignal command as FC.SendSignal (0,1,0,1). It didn't work, I got the earlier mentioned issue. After, I added the libraries that I used in the first code, so I imported spidev and time libraries. That brought no effect. After, I added the variables, list, array and spi parameters (such as spi.open(0,0) before using the function, unfortunately - nothing. In all cases, I get the exactly same error. I receive Errno9 on the rx_data = spi.xfer2(tx_data) section. Reminder, the first code by itself works! Please, help.
Edit: Fixed some Code Block issues on Reddit. The text appeared weird; especially when I used the # in my code comments.
2023.06.07 10:29 Retroment 28 [M4R] looking for friends, chats, flirts, people who enjoy an argument or debate !
What am I looking for? Well mostly for someone to speak to on a consistent basis who I gel well and get along with well.
As for myself I am a blunt and honest person so if you ask me something and want a straight answer I'm your guy for giving an honest assessment even if you don't like it. That being said I am kind and caring and will ask about your day and life and anything going on I can help with I will offer.
In terms of my hobbies or interests I am a massive animal lover, this can be confirming by my 9 cats at home! A snake and 2 doggos! All of whom live in perfect harmony and who I never want to turn into tea cosy's for meowing at 4am...
I am also a gamer, I play my pc mostly which is my main source of entertainment however I also have access to my switch and my ps4 in case the mood takes me! Music is also something I love, very into my rock music and a lot of the old west coast rap music right now.
Tattoos! Several pieces of art on my body including a Bowser and a Pokémon tattoos, yes I display my nerdiness proudly!
If you fancy a chat about anything above or anything in general come and say Hi!
submitted by Retroment to r4r [link] [comments]
As for myself I am a blunt and honest person so if you ask me something and want a straight answer I'm your guy for giving an honest assessment even if you don't like it. That being said I am kind and caring and will ask about your day and life and anything going on I can help with I will offer.
In terms of my hobbies or interests I am a massive animal lover, this can be confirming by my 9 cats at home! A snake and 2 doggos! All of whom live in perfect harmony and who I never want to turn into tea cosy's for meowing at 4am...
I am also a gamer, I play my pc mostly which is my main source of entertainment however I also have access to my switch and my ps4 in case the mood takes me! Music is also something I love, very into my rock music and a lot of the old west coast rap music right now.
Tattoos! Several pieces of art on my body including a Bowser and a Pokémon tattoos, yes I display my nerdiness proudly!
If you fancy a chat about anything above or anything in general come and say Hi!
2023.06.07 10:28 Retroment 28 M Uk, friends are like underwear, it always helps to have more. So in that case, come be underwear?!
What am I looking for? Well mostly for someone to speak to on a consistent basis who I gel well and get along with well.
As for myself I am a blunt and honest person so if you ask me something and want a straight answer I'm your guy for giving an honest assessment even if you don't like it. That being said I am kind and caring and will ask about your day and life and anything going on I can help with I will offer.
In terms of my hobbies or interests I am a massive animal lover, this can be confirming by my 9 cats at home! A snake and 2 doggos! All of whom live in perfect harmony and who I never want to turn into tea cosy's for meowing at 4am...
I am also a gamer, I play my pc mostly which is my main source of entertainment however I also have access to my switch and my ps4 in case the mood takes me! Music is also something I love, very into my rock music and a lot of the old west coast rap music right now.
Tattoos! Several pieces of art on my body including a Bowser and a Pokémon tattoos, yes I display my nerdiness proudly!
If you fancy a chat about anything above or anything in general come and say Hi!
submitted by Retroment to MakeNewFriendsHere [link] [comments]
As for myself I am a blunt and honest person so if you ask me something and want a straight answer I'm your guy for giving an honest assessment even if you don't like it. That being said I am kind and caring and will ask about your day and life and anything going on I can help with I will offer.
In terms of my hobbies or interests I am a massive animal lover, this can be confirming by my 9 cats at home! A snake and 2 doggos! All of whom live in perfect harmony and who I never want to turn into tea cosy's for meowing at 4am...
I am also a gamer, I play my pc mostly which is my main source of entertainment however I also have access to my switch and my ps4 in case the mood takes me! Music is also something I love, very into my rock music and a lot of the old west coast rap music right now.
Tattoos! Several pieces of art on my body including a Bowser and a Pokémon tattoos, yes I display my nerdiness proudly!
If you fancy a chat about anything above or anything in general come and say Hi!
2023.06.07 10:27 Retroment 28M Uk, looking to meet people, chat, laugh, exchange looks from across the room.[chat]
What am I looking for? Well mostly for someone to speak to on a consistent basis who I gel well and get along with well.
As for myself I am a blunt and honest person so if you ask me something and want a straight answer I'm your guy for giving an honest assessment even if you don't like it. That being said I am kind and caring and will ask about your day and life and anything going on I can help with I will offer.
In terms of my hobbies or interests I am a massive animal lover, this can be confirming by my 9 cats at home! A snake and 2 doggos! All of whom live in perfect harmony and who I never want to turn into tea cosy's for meowing at 4am...
I am also a gamer, I play my pc mostly which is my main source of entertainment however I also have access to my switch and my ps4 in case the mood takes me! Music is also something I love, very into my rock music and a lot of the old west coast rap music right now.
Tattoos! Several pieces of art on my body including a Bowser and a Pokémon tattoos, yes I display my nerdiness proudly!
If you fancy a chat about anything above or anything in general come and say Hi!
submitted by Retroment to MeetPeople [link] [comments]
As for myself I am a blunt and honest person so if you ask me something and want a straight answer I'm your guy for giving an honest assessment even if you don't like it. That being said I am kind and caring and will ask about your day and life and anything going on I can help with I will offer.
In terms of my hobbies or interests I am a massive animal lover, this can be confirming by my 9 cats at home! A snake and 2 doggos! All of whom live in perfect harmony and who I never want to turn into tea cosy's for meowing at 4am...
I am also a gamer, I play my pc mostly which is my main source of entertainment however I also have access to my switch and my ps4 in case the mood takes me! Music is also something I love, very into my rock music and a lot of the old west coast rap music right now.
Tattoos! Several pieces of art on my body including a Bowser and a Pokémon tattoos, yes I display my nerdiness proudly!
If you fancy a chat about anything above or anything in general come and say Hi!
2023.06.07 09:17 TBP-LETFs What annoys you most about this article by the economist?
Generative AI could radically alter the practice of law from TheEconomist https://www.economist.com/business/2023/06/06/generative-ai-could-radically-alter-the-practice-of-law
Full article to avoid paywall: Lawyers are a conservative bunch, befitting a profession that rewards preparedness, sagacity and respect for precedent. No doubt many enjoyed a chuckle at the tale of Steven Schwartz, a personal-injury lawyer at the New York firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, who last month used Chatgpt to help him prepare a court filing. He relied a bit too heavily on the artificial-intelligence (ai) chatbot. It created a motion replete with made-up cases, rulings and quotes, which Mr Schwartz promptly filed after the bot assured him that the “cases I provided are real and can be found in reputable legal databases” (they were not, and cannot). Lesson learned, a tech-sceptic lawyer might conclude: the old ways are the best.
That is the wrong lesson. Blaming ai for Mr Schwartz’s error-filled brief makes no more sense than blaming the printing press for mistakes in a typed one. In both cases, fault lies with the lawyer who failed to check the motion before filing it, not the tool that helped produce it. For that is what ai is: neither a fad nor an apocalypse, but a tool in its infancy. And one that could radically change how lawyers work and law firms make money. The legal profession is hardly the only field about which one could say that. But few combine as clear a use case with so high a risk. Firms that get it right stand to reap rewards. Laggards risk going the way of typesetters.
According to Goldman Sachs, a bank, 44% of legal tasks could be performed by ai, more than any occupation surveyed except for clerical and administrative support. Lawyers spend an awful lot of time scrutinising tedious documents—the sort of thing ai has already shown it does well. Lawyers use ai for a variety of tasks, including due diligence, research and data analytics. These applications have largely relied on “extractive” ai, which, as the name suggests, extracts information from a text, answering specific questions about its contents.
“Generative” ais such as Chatgpt are far more powerful. Part of that power can be used to improve legal research and document review. As Pablo Arredondo, creator of a generative-ai “legal assistant” called CoCounsel explains, using it “removes the tyranny of the keyword…It can tell that ‘We reverse Jenkins’ [a fictional legal case] and ‘We regretfully consign Jenkins to the dustbin of history’ are the same thing.” Allen & Overy, a large firm based in London, has integrated a legal ai tool called Harvey into its practice, using it for contract analysis, due diligence and litigation prep.
Not all lawyers are convinced. One recent survey found that 82% of them believe generative ai can be used for legal work but just 51% thought it should. Many worry about “hallucinations” (as ai boffins refer to chatbots’ tendency to present falsehoods with aplomb, as in Mr Schwartz’s case) and about inadvertently feeding information subject to attorney-client privilege into algorithms. Yet if these challenges can be tackled—and they can, with better technology and careful humans in the loop—then the misgivings of the doubting 49% may pass. After news of Mr Schwartz’s debacle broke, for example, a federal judge in Texas told attorneys appearing before him to file a certificate attesting they did not use generative ai or checked the final result before filing anything. Much as it made little sense for lawyers to insist on doing legal research in libraries once the vastly larger and more easily searched databases of Westlaw and LexisNexis were a click away, when a critical mass of firms embraces generative ai, more will follow.
ai has the potential to transform the legal profession in three big ways. First, it could reduce big firms’ manpower advantage. In large, complex lawsuits, these firms tell dozens of associates to read millions of pages of documents looking for answers to senior lawyers’ questions and hunches. Now a single lawyer or small firm will be able to upload these documents into a litigation-prep ai and begin querying them. As Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School notes, “You can be a smaller, leaner specialised firm and have the capacity to process these sorts of cases.”
Second, ai could change how firms make money. Richard Susskind, technology adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England, argues that firms profit by “having armies of young lawyers to whom they pay less than they charge clients”. If ai can do the work of those armies in seconds, firms will need to change their billing practices. Some may move to charging flat fees based on the service provided, rather than for the amount of time spent providing it. Stephen Wu of Silicon Valley Law Group speculates that firms may charge “a technology fee”, so that “clients don’t expect to get generative ai for nothing”.
Third, ai could change how many lawyers exist and where they work. Eventually, Mr Lessig argues, it is hard to see how ai “doesn’t dramatically reduce the number of lawyers the world needs”. If ai can do in 20 seconds a task that would have taken a dozen associates 50 hours each, then why would big firms continue hiring dozens of associates? A veteran partner at a prestigious corporate-law firm in New York expects the ratio of associates to partners to decline from today’s average of perhaps seven to one at the top firms closer to parity. If associates aren’t worried about their jobs, he says, “they should be”.
That may not happen for a while, though. And in the near term, ai could make legal services cheaper, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses that currently struggle to afford them. Ambitious law-school graduates may find ai provides an easier path to starting a solo practice. If so, then ai could lead to an increase in the overall number of lawyers in the near term, as well as changing the sort of work they do—just as the atm led to an increase in the number of human bank tellers rather than their replacement.
Ultimately this will be good news for clients. “People who go to lawyers don’t want lawyers: they want resolutions to their problems or the avoidance of problems altogether,” explains Mr Susskind. If ai can provide those outcomes then people will use ai. Many people already use software to do their taxes rather than rely on professionals; “Very few of them are complaining about the lack of social interaction with their tax advisers.”
submitted by TBP-LETFs to biglaw [link] [comments]
Full article to avoid paywall: Lawyers are a conservative bunch, befitting a profession that rewards preparedness, sagacity and respect for precedent. No doubt many enjoyed a chuckle at the tale of Steven Schwartz, a personal-injury lawyer at the New York firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, who last month used Chatgpt to help him prepare a court filing. He relied a bit too heavily on the artificial-intelligence (ai) chatbot. It created a motion replete with made-up cases, rulings and quotes, which Mr Schwartz promptly filed after the bot assured him that the “cases I provided are real and can be found in reputable legal databases” (they were not, and cannot). Lesson learned, a tech-sceptic lawyer might conclude: the old ways are the best.
That is the wrong lesson. Blaming ai for Mr Schwartz’s error-filled brief makes no more sense than blaming the printing press for mistakes in a typed one. In both cases, fault lies with the lawyer who failed to check the motion before filing it, not the tool that helped produce it. For that is what ai is: neither a fad nor an apocalypse, but a tool in its infancy. And one that could radically change how lawyers work and law firms make money. The legal profession is hardly the only field about which one could say that. But few combine as clear a use case with so high a risk. Firms that get it right stand to reap rewards. Laggards risk going the way of typesetters.
According to Goldman Sachs, a bank, 44% of legal tasks could be performed by ai, more than any occupation surveyed except for clerical and administrative support. Lawyers spend an awful lot of time scrutinising tedious documents—the sort of thing ai has already shown it does well. Lawyers use ai for a variety of tasks, including due diligence, research and data analytics. These applications have largely relied on “extractive” ai, which, as the name suggests, extracts information from a text, answering specific questions about its contents.
“Generative” ais such as Chatgpt are far more powerful. Part of that power can be used to improve legal research and document review. As Pablo Arredondo, creator of a generative-ai “legal assistant” called CoCounsel explains, using it “removes the tyranny of the keyword…It can tell that ‘We reverse Jenkins’ [a fictional legal case] and ‘We regretfully consign Jenkins to the dustbin of history’ are the same thing.” Allen & Overy, a large firm based in London, has integrated a legal ai tool called Harvey into its practice, using it for contract analysis, due diligence and litigation prep.
Not all lawyers are convinced. One recent survey found that 82% of them believe generative ai can be used for legal work but just 51% thought it should. Many worry about “hallucinations” (as ai boffins refer to chatbots’ tendency to present falsehoods with aplomb, as in Mr Schwartz’s case) and about inadvertently feeding information subject to attorney-client privilege into algorithms. Yet if these challenges can be tackled—and they can, with better technology and careful humans in the loop—then the misgivings of the doubting 49% may pass. After news of Mr Schwartz’s debacle broke, for example, a federal judge in Texas told attorneys appearing before him to file a certificate attesting they did not use generative ai or checked the final result before filing anything. Much as it made little sense for lawyers to insist on doing legal research in libraries once the vastly larger and more easily searched databases of Westlaw and LexisNexis were a click away, when a critical mass of firms embraces generative ai, more will follow.
ai has the potential to transform the legal profession in three big ways. First, it could reduce big firms’ manpower advantage. In large, complex lawsuits, these firms tell dozens of associates to read millions of pages of documents looking for answers to senior lawyers’ questions and hunches. Now a single lawyer or small firm will be able to upload these documents into a litigation-prep ai and begin querying them. As Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School notes, “You can be a smaller, leaner specialised firm and have the capacity to process these sorts of cases.”
Second, ai could change how firms make money. Richard Susskind, technology adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England, argues that firms profit by “having armies of young lawyers to whom they pay less than they charge clients”. If ai can do the work of those armies in seconds, firms will need to change their billing practices. Some may move to charging flat fees based on the service provided, rather than for the amount of time spent providing it. Stephen Wu of Silicon Valley Law Group speculates that firms may charge “a technology fee”, so that “clients don’t expect to get generative ai for nothing”.
Third, ai could change how many lawyers exist and where they work. Eventually, Mr Lessig argues, it is hard to see how ai “doesn’t dramatically reduce the number of lawyers the world needs”. If ai can do in 20 seconds a task that would have taken a dozen associates 50 hours each, then why would big firms continue hiring dozens of associates? A veteran partner at a prestigious corporate-law firm in New York expects the ratio of associates to partners to decline from today’s average of perhaps seven to one at the top firms closer to parity. If associates aren’t worried about their jobs, he says, “they should be”.
That may not happen for a while, though. And in the near term, ai could make legal services cheaper, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses that currently struggle to afford them. Ambitious law-school graduates may find ai provides an easier path to starting a solo practice. If so, then ai could lead to an increase in the overall number of lawyers in the near term, as well as changing the sort of work they do—just as the atm led to an increase in the number of human bank tellers rather than their replacement.
Ultimately this will be good news for clients. “People who go to lawyers don’t want lawyers: they want resolutions to their problems or the avoidance of problems altogether,” explains Mr Susskind. If ai can provide those outcomes then people will use ai. Many people already use software to do their taxes rather than rely on professionals; “Very few of them are complaining about the lack of social interaction with their tax advisers.”
2023.06.07 09:14 shaman-warrior WizardML 30B beating GPT-4 at a logic puzzle GPT-4 itself created.
EDIT: Used 5_1.bin file from TheBloke/WizardLM-30B-GGML at main (huggingface.co)
EDIT: System: 32gb ddr4, 6800xt 16gbEDIT: Used koboldcpp to host the server
EDIT: Settings are the default ones from Kobold UI
EDIT: temp: 0.65, top_p_sampling: 0.92, repetition penalty: 1.08
So I want to say I'm really impressed by this one. This is really something. I mean it. It responds so well to questions, is creative, knowledgeable. I've been using GPT-4 to get to test this LLM. This was his analysis about W30B:
I can bore you with the full transcript here: https://chat.openai.com/share/61e2330c-5682-45d4-ad04-b336769c06cc
W30B successfully responded to this logic puzzle, can you solve it without an LLM?
Now here comes the juicy part. Ofcourse these LLMs are trained on these logic puzzles, so I asked GPT-4 to create me a novel logic puzzle that doesn't exist, here's his result:
submitted by shaman-warrior to LocalLLaMA [link] [comments]
EDIT: System: 32gb ddr4, 6800xt 16gbEDIT: Used koboldcpp to host the server
EDIT: Settings are the default ones from Kobold UI
EDIT: temp: 0.65, top_p_sampling: 0.92, repetition penalty: 1.08
So I want to say I'm really impressed by this one. This is really something. I mean it. It responds so well to questions, is creative, knowledgeable. I've been using GPT-4 to get to test this LLM. This was his analysis about W30B:
I can bore you with the full transcript here: https://chat.openai.com/share/61e2330c-5682-45d4-ad04-b336769c06cc
As an AI, I don't have personal experiences or the ability to "see" or directly compare myself with other models. However, based on your interactions, I can provide some general observations on key aspects to consider while comparing AI language models:
Accuracy: The model you're testing has demonstrated an accurate understanding of various topics, from the mechanism of action of aspirin to the philosophical implications of the Ship of Theseus paradox.
Complexity: It has also shown the ability to handle complex subjects and produce comprehensive and nuanced explanations, demonstrating a good grasp of context and depth of knowledge.
Feedback Incorporation: The model shows an ability to incorporate user feedback, which is an important feature for improving the quality of responses and adapting to user needs.
Clarity: The responses are clear, well-structured, and articulate, which are important features for effectively conveying information.
W30B successfully responded to this logic puzzle, can you solve it without an LLM?
You have two hourglasses. One measures 7 minutes, and the other measures 4 minutes. How would you use them to time exactly 9 minutes?EDIT: Doesn't always work I got lucky it worked from first try, sometimes it just spews nonsense.
Now here comes the juicy part. Ofcourse these LLMs are trained on these logic puzzles, so I asked GPT-4 to create me a novel logic puzzle that doesn't exist, here's his result:
Certainly! Here's a unique logic problem that might intrigue you:Now prepare psychologically for this beauty: (copy/paste sucks check the transcript)
The Island of Robots
In the year 3030, a group of explorers found an island inhabited by two types of robots. One type of robot always tells the truth, while the other type always tells a lie. There is no physical distinction between the two types of robots.
One day, an explorer encountered three robots, named Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, standing in a line. The explorer asked each robot one question: "What type of robot is the one to your right?"
Alpha pointed at Beta and said, "That robot always tells the truth." Beta pointed at Gamma and said, "That robot always tells a lie." Gamma pointed at Alpha (since Alpha is to the right from Gamma's perspective) and said, "That robot always tells the truth."
From the information provided, can the explorer determine what type of robot each of Alpha, Beta, and Gamma is?
ASSISTANT: Based on the information given, it is impossible for the explorer to determine the type of robot that Alpha, Beta, and Gamma are. If we assume that Alpha is a truth-telling robot, then Beta must be a lying robot because if Beta were also a truth-telling robot, then Gamma would have pointed at Alpha and said "that robot always tells the truth," which contradicts Beta's statement. Similarly, if we assume that Alpha is a lying robot, then Beta must be a truth-telling robot, but this also leads to a contradiction. Therefore, we can conclude that there is no solution to this problem based on the information given. This is an example of a classic logic puzzle known as the liar paradox. It highlights the difficulty in determining the truth when statements are self-referential or contradictory. Please let me know if you have any other question or if there is anything else I can help with.Conclusion, saying W30B beat GPT-4 at logic is a big statement. Not saying it. But it's so ironic it beat GPT-4 at a logic problem GPT-4 itself created. (PS I tried solving the puzzle with GPT3.5 and 4 in new instances and they still could not do it)
ChatGPT:
I'm sorry, but there seems to be a misunderstanding. There is indeed a solution to the problem.
Given the statements:
Alpha said Beta tells the truth.
Beta said Gamma lies.
Gamma said Alpha tells the truth.
We can find a consistent scenario:
If Alpha were a truth-telling robot, then his statement about Beta telling the truth would be accurate. However, that would mean Beta's statement about Gamma lying is also true, but this contradicts Gamma's statement about Alpha telling the truth. So, Alpha cannot be a truth-telling robot and must be a lying robot.
This means that Beta, whom Alpha claimed to be a truth-teller, must also be a lying robot (since a lying robot can't tell the truth).
Consequently, Gamma, whom Beta declared as a lying robot, must actually be a truth-telling robot.
So, the types are: Alpha is a liar, Beta is a liar, and Gamma is a truth-teller.
📷📷me: And then Gamma says Alpha tells the truth, which contradicts you.ChatGPT
You're absolutely right, and I apologize for the oversight. There's indeed an inconsistency in my previous conclusion due to Gamma's statement about Alpha. That was a mistake on my part.
Considering all the statements, the robots' responses are contradicting each other, which makes it impossible to definitively determine who is lying and who is telling the truth.
This scenario illustrates the complexity of certain logical problems where information may not be sufficient or is inconsistent, leading to unsolvable cases. I appreciate your understanding and patience.
📷📷me: So you've just been beaten at logic by an open-source llm running on my consumer gpu?ChatGPT
It appears so, and I apologize for any confusion. I made an error in my reasoning in this particular instance. A major part of AI development involves continuous learning and improvement, and mistakes like these offer valuable opportunities for such improvement.
As a language model, I don't have personal experiences or emotions, but my goal is to assist and provide the most accurate information possible. Feedback like yours is invaluable in this process and helps to improve responses in the future.
As AI systems, whether open-source or developed by organizations like OpenAI, we are all part of the growing field of artificial intelligence, and our ultimate goal is to be useful and accurate in assisting users.
Please let me know if you have more questions or problems you'd like to discuss!
2023.06.07 09:07 MichaelBluthANiceKid My brother called me to say he wants to sue me
My brother is 12 years younger than I am. When I moved to college he was 7. When he was 15, he came to stay with me for 3 months. It was horrible and scary and traumatizing. Called me names and did drugs in my house and gaslighted me and broke my things in anger. Eventually I sent him back home and things have never been the same since. I had gone home once and seeing how abusive and sad he’d gotten…I just decided I didn’t want to enable him. I informed my family I wouldn’t speak to them anymore and they were upset for some reason. It was so confusing and hurtful.
I went home last year and he was 18 and just bugging me. He was doing drugs in my moms house, eating all her food and my food. She was recovering from a surgery and he wouldn’t help and actively made things worse. He had a minor over and was drinking with him. I found them hanging out in a manhole I didn’t know was even in my backyard. Anyway, we had an argument. I said something hurtful and he spit at me. My mom tried to kick him out but my dad just bought him a plane ticket and enabled him by taking him in. He was claiming he’d be homeless. He would not. He is a criminal on top of an addict and steals from people’s bank accounts and sells drugs and guns and steals from ATMs. To sum it up, he has money and could have gotten a hotel room at least.
He’s almost 19 now and I haven’t spoken to him since last year with the exception of a message I sent apologizing for my part in things. He never answered it.
He called me this morning and told me he’s suing me for emotional damages and he needs me address. I did not provide that for him. He then called my mother and threatened her life. He then called me twice in a row. I did not answer. I am a bit confused as I am older than him but I hardly think being unable to care for him and sending him back home or that one argument count as emotional damages. I think he was likely just high or something. I don’t really know. But mostly I’m just sad. I thought he was calling to make up. I don’t talk to any of them anymore at this point because our relationships have fallen apart. He’s a large part of that but it can never be all of anyone’s fault so I will never say it’s all him. Regardless, I guess I’m just not sure what the next steps are. It sort of seems like maybe he wanted my address for bad reasons. He is a scammer so if he wants it he can get it (it’s not hard to get someone’s address anyway) but like the way he could fuck with me doesn’t have to be him directly so a restraining order doesn’t feel like the solution. I’ve tried therapy, I’ve tried naranon groups, and I swear nothing brings me peace because I just want a family.
What do I even do? Just wait to be sued? Assume it won’t happen and move on? Block him? File a restraining order just in case? Unlist my address somehow?
submitted by MichaelBluthANiceKid to naranon [link] [comments]
I went home last year and he was 18 and just bugging me. He was doing drugs in my moms house, eating all her food and my food. She was recovering from a surgery and he wouldn’t help and actively made things worse. He had a minor over and was drinking with him. I found them hanging out in a manhole I didn’t know was even in my backyard. Anyway, we had an argument. I said something hurtful and he spit at me. My mom tried to kick him out but my dad just bought him a plane ticket and enabled him by taking him in. He was claiming he’d be homeless. He would not. He is a criminal on top of an addict and steals from people’s bank accounts and sells drugs and guns and steals from ATMs. To sum it up, he has money and could have gotten a hotel room at least.
He’s almost 19 now and I haven’t spoken to him since last year with the exception of a message I sent apologizing for my part in things. He never answered it.
He called me this morning and told me he’s suing me for emotional damages and he needs me address. I did not provide that for him. He then called my mother and threatened her life. He then called me twice in a row. I did not answer. I am a bit confused as I am older than him but I hardly think being unable to care for him and sending him back home or that one argument count as emotional damages. I think he was likely just high or something. I don’t really know. But mostly I’m just sad. I thought he was calling to make up. I don’t talk to any of them anymore at this point because our relationships have fallen apart. He’s a large part of that but it can never be all of anyone’s fault so I will never say it’s all him. Regardless, I guess I’m just not sure what the next steps are. It sort of seems like maybe he wanted my address for bad reasons. He is a scammer so if he wants it he can get it (it’s not hard to get someone’s address anyway) but like the way he could fuck with me doesn’t have to be him directly so a restraining order doesn’t feel like the solution. I’ve tried therapy, I’ve tried naranon groups, and I swear nothing brings me peace because I just want a family.
What do I even do? Just wait to be sued? Assume it won’t happen and move on? Block him? File a restraining order just in case? Unlist my address somehow?
2023.06.07 07:09 kksingh11 Identity Politics is anti Working Class
The Use of Identity Politics to Undermine the Left Anna Coco
The US government and ruling elite have infiltrated and attempted to destroy the Left since its inception. In the 1960’s the CIA think tanks came up with numerous strategies to destroy the Left, such as promoting drug use and promiscuous sexuality as a form of not only “Brave New World” escapism, but diverting attention from working class issues. Remember Jerry Garcia repeating Timothy Leary’s famous quote “turn on, tune in, and drop out?” Even the decriminalization of marijuana today is really not to stop the Prison Industrial Complex, which is still arresting millions of young men, especially those of colour, but about pushing escapism as a replacement for protesting in a country where half the population lives near or below the poverty line. “Get high; forget your cares.” “Don’t fight back. Jesus was a pacifist.” (Forget that Jesus flogged the bankers in the temple during Passover.) The Communist Party USA and other Left parties were successful in pushing back this degeneration, discouraging drug and alcohol use as well as criticizing sexual objectification, particularly of women.
Another government strategy involved promoting Identity Politics, which along with political correctness in the late 1980’s actually achieved its goal of successfully undermining the Left as can be seen in its current state. This time period wasn’t coincidental, since this was the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was collapsing. It was at this point that the Left started turning inward and becoming fragmented, with no centre to keep it together which is what the Soviet Union represented. Feeling betrayed, demoralized, and bewildered, the CIA easily infiltrated and injected the Left with its poisonous sting, causing many Left parties to reject dialectical materialism, and in some cases even Marxism itself! ID politics was the late 1960’s brain child of the CIA to divide and conquer the Left, pitting groups against each other. Political Correctness helped promote ID politics by using the same methods as McCarthyism. Since socialism is a logical, scientific economic system, proponents couldn’t be allowed to explain or discuss what is was or it would convert others; therefore McCarthyism relied on shutting down debates and free discussion by employing name calling, shouting down speakers, and further isolating and marginalizing Leftists, especially through blacklisting them.
From the 1930’s to the 1970’s the motto of the Communist Party and the Left was “Black and White Unite”. The question for example of the CP getting involved, whether in the Scottsboro Case or in unionizing the segregated South, took place with many open debates, where all questions were allowed to be raised, discussed, and answered, including those by less advanced white workers who didn’t understand or agree. It was the openness of these discussions and debates that allowed this sector to understand the nature of racism and to make the CP’s motto a success. In a nation that was then only 12% black, gaining white support during the Civil Rights era was crucial in changing the nation and its laws. The Black Panther Party understood this and gave talk in some of the poorest white communities such as in the Appalachians; even converting and forming important alliances with white working class organizations, such as the Young Patriots in Chicago.
The CIA unfortunately successfully changed “Black and White Unite” into Identity Politics in the 1970’s, where different special interest groups began vying for crumbs, promoting selfish individualism and rejecting collectivism, one of the basic foundations of Marxist Leninist ideology.
Following bourgeois feminism, white men were now the enemy and women felt pitted to fight men in order to demand more managerial jobs. Blacks began demanding the right to have more black police officers; as if women oppressing other women or black officers cracking the heads of black men was somehow progressive. What followers of ID politics failed to understand was that changing the driver didn’t change the system. My chances as a woman of dying from a preventable heart attack are the same whether the doctor at the hospital today is male or female, as are the chances a black man having his head smashed in by the cops whether the officer is white or black. Instead of collectivism, workers divided among race, sex, ethnicity, religion, etc., promoting selfish individualism. Of course there are supportive women and people of colour. But certain individuals are not the system. A perfect example was the Left dismantling the anti-war movement during the Obama administration because it would be seen as racist to protest a black president. What was forgotten were the millions killed abroad in US wars of Imperialism, especially Africans who didn’t care what race the current president was. As a result, today, Libyan men are being sold into slavery!
Whereas before ID politics, the enemy was clearly understood to be US imperialism, or the 1%, now the enemy had become the white, heterosexual, male workers. Marxists understand that white men are not our enemies, but our necessary allies in getting reforms under capitalism and in overthrowing the true enemy, the 1%. United we stand, divided we fall.
Unfortunately this vilification and exclusion of white males led to bitterness, creating the racism and sexism we see today. Many were driven into the arms of the right-wing in order to feel included. Enter transgender ideology, the new ID politics of today. Exploiting the Lesbian, gay, and bisexual movement, although the ideology itself is anti-gay and homophobic, it has been promoting itself as the Civil Rights movement of the 21st century. Let’s forget that Native people, African-Americans, and women still haven’t won many significant civil rights.
If white men were the enemy of yesteryear, women are now the new enemy, regardless of colour or race, allowing men their turn to experience inclusion in the Left by attacking and excluding women.
It’s not for nothing that penises are still called penises, but vaginas are front-holes, breast-feeding is chest-feeding, and woman can get their monthlies just like men (although I would seriously suggest that any man who does should go see a doctor ASAP and have their hemorrhoids put back in). Because transgender ideology, which is not the same as transgender individuals, just as all feminists are not bourgeois feminists, is a two-pronged attack not just against women, but the Left, too.
Its first prong of attack undermines women’s contribution to reproducing capital, both as the sex that bears tomorrow workers and cannon fodder and as workers. Discussions on birth control, maternity leave, food stamps, public services, as well as low wages and work inequality along with sexual harassment that affect working class women, become subordinate to transgender questions that affect less than 1/10 of 1% of the population, such as unisex bathrooms.
The second prong undermines the unity of the Left and the possibility of revolution. As Lenin said, “There can be no real mass movement without the women.” How can there be when women represent half the population and are the most exploited sex under crapitalism? In fact, how many people are aware that every major revolution in history was started by women? From the English, French, and the Russian Revolution, which by the way took place on March 8, 1917, International Women’s Day, it was women demanding bread that began it all. It is women who generally have to take care of and feed the family, especially the children. Prevent women from organizing or leading their own organizations, and the 1% are guaranteed there will be no reform or revolution.
What is Marxism? What does it represent? It doesn’t represent Hegelian idealism nor does it represent bourgeois mechanistic science. It represents a historical, dialectical materialism that analyzes the evolution of human society from one form to another, as Charles Darwin’s theories in the Origin of the Species analyzed the evolution of living beings.
Much of the transgender movement isn’t even working class; it mainly represents white, upper middle-class males who are racist, homophobic, and misogynist. It argues for gender stereotypes that tell homosexual men, for example, that they are really women or that racism is an imaginary concept. When transwomen says they are women, they are in fact negating not just biology and science, but eliminating the whole history of oppression that women experience. You heard the expression, you are what you eat. Imagine someone saying “I ate some soul food last night and I’m feeling black, although I’ve never seen a black person in my lilywhite town.”
Transgender ideology has set a dangerous precedent by referring to feelings rather than biology, which ultimately allows discrimination not just against women, but people of colour including native people.
Women aren’t oppressed because of a feeling, but because of their sex; for physically being the only sex that can literally reproduce the workers for capital. Being a woman isn’t a feeling. Just like being black isn’t a feeling. Being a Native American isn’t a feeling. I can’t wash off my sex any more than a person of colour can wash off their colour. Is capitalism a feeling, too? Can we unfeel exploitation on Monday morning?
Liberals who reject dialectical materialism reject nature and the evolutionary connection in nature.
Transgender ideology is effectively using language to erase women and subordinate them to the fetishes of men in nearly every English-speaking country. With the passing in England of the Gender Recognition Act, which Congress is trying to pass in the US as the Equality Act, women must defer to men as men now have the right to enter female facilities and colonize female sports at will against the wishes of women and the safety of girls. It took until 1920 for women in the US to have separate bathrooms, which Russian women won in the 1917 revolution. Lenin in fact championed female-only spaces and female leadership in female organizations. Really, how many women would like to turn around in the women’s showers and see a throbbing hard boner on a transgender woman staring at you? What about at a Rape Centre or women’s prison? For those who don’t know, it’s already happening: paedophiles and male rapists insisting they feel like women have been allowed into girls’ bathrooms and even placed in women’s prisons where they have raped women. Female sports and scholarships, better kiss that goodbye as men by birth have a physical advantage over women. Let’s go back to 1950’s America.
When the Left so wholehearted absorbed trans ideology, it threw scientific socialism under the bus as well as thoroughly self-destructing, making it the butt of jokes for the right-wing. From Black Lives Matter to FRSO Left, ISO, WWP, CWL, and PC USA to name just a few, all these organizations are now being redubbed Politically Correct USA.
It is rape to ever demand or try to coerce someone to have sex regardless of their age, sex, or gender. There is no place in any civilized society to allow rape or rape culture, and especially not the Left. In other cases, women were expelled for exposing male sexual predators, such as in ISO, DSA, WWP, and PC USA. I was told I should be ashamed of myself for shaming the PC USA by exposing a predator, when that party should be ashamed. In other cases, women were expelled because they didn’t agree with male comrades over the question of prostitution and violent porn. Imagine the outrage if a black man was stripped of his position and expelled, because he didn’t like to be called an N* and didn’t agree that slavery and lynching films weren’t empowering? In fact, why is the Left offended by Black Face, but not by Drag? Transgenderism is misogyny in drag.
Soros has spent over millions of dollars promoting transgenderism. Yet women on the Left who complained were ridiculed and silenced.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the CP subverted itself to neoliberalism when it decided to pimp itself to the Democratic Party. Even the ISO, FRSO right and many other so-called Left parties began embracing bourgeois liberalism, which has its roots in neo-liberalism or the free market economy, completing wedding themselves to parliamentary instead revolutionary goals.
Think of the level of misogyny; the CIA couldn’t destroy so many grousp like WW, which has existed for 60 years. How did it finally destroy these parties through transgenderism? Before we think this is an organic movement, which is separate from being transgender, it is actually funded by the CIA and its think tanks. That is the reason why it funded by so much money. Any legitimate organization would distance itself from these elements and I’m sure there are LGBTQ+ organizations that did.
When the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund hosted the 2018 Trans Equality Now Awards in Washington D.C. on May 17, 2018, its sponsors looked like something from a parody. The list included: the CIA, George Soros’ Open Society, Facebook (which is partially funded by the Atlantic Council, i.e. NATO), Google, Amazon, Capital One Bank, Shook, Hardy & Bacon (a law firm dedicated to defending Big Pharma), as well as a number of pharmaceutical companies and clinics including: Gilead Sciences, Meltzer Clinic, and Pharma. [See comments at the end of this article.] For women on the Left, this open display by the CIA and Soros was like the government and the bankers sticking their middle finger at them. It proved what they had been saying all along.
To this day, the Left still hasn’t apologized to women and is still promoting destructive ID politics, pushing women to the hypocritical right-wing. It makes perfect sense for liberals to be doing this, because as their name suggests neo-liberalism, they want to push women to the right. But why the Left? In fact, why was the Left so eager to adopt trans ideology and expel women.
Either promote the Left, that is the Left we’ve inherited and, like a corrupt union, we understand as Marxist-Leninists that we don’t destroy, but attempt to revitalize, or create female Left organizations like Women for Racial and Economic Equality to push Left more left.
Comment on sources
The source for the CIA and others having funded the 2018 Trans Equality Now Awards seems to have “disappeared” from the internet, and they seem to have decided that their sponsorship of the 2019 awards would have been too open. However, after some searching, we were able to find the Transgender Equality Annual Report 2017, at: https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/resources/annual%20report%20 2017%20final.pdf (page 8; page 10 of pdf), which includes the same sponsors as in 2018.
Also, Soros’ Open Society Foundations has funded individual transgender activists who are leaders in various Left organizations. One is Imani Henry, a leading member of International Action Center and Workers World Party. The source of this is available at: https://www. opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/cfp_20050101.pdf, on p. 10-11. This criticism is more aimed at his party than at him himself, for allowing him to accept this funding, just as no progressive trade union organization would have its members accept money from the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a notorious conduit for CIA funding.
As sources mysteriously disappear from the internet, we have put these sources on the web-site used by Towards Marxist-Leninist Unity (www.RedStarPublishers.org).
Towards Marxist-Leninist Unity
submitted by kksingh11 to SocialisGlobe [link] [comments]
The US government and ruling elite have infiltrated and attempted to destroy the Left since its inception. In the 1960’s the CIA think tanks came up with numerous strategies to destroy the Left, such as promoting drug use and promiscuous sexuality as a form of not only “Brave New World” escapism, but diverting attention from working class issues. Remember Jerry Garcia repeating Timothy Leary’s famous quote “turn on, tune in, and drop out?” Even the decriminalization of marijuana today is really not to stop the Prison Industrial Complex, which is still arresting millions of young men, especially those of colour, but about pushing escapism as a replacement for protesting in a country where half the population lives near or below the poverty line. “Get high; forget your cares.” “Don’t fight back. Jesus was a pacifist.” (Forget that Jesus flogged the bankers in the temple during Passover.) The Communist Party USA and other Left parties were successful in pushing back this degeneration, discouraging drug and alcohol use as well as criticizing sexual objectification, particularly of women.
Another government strategy involved promoting Identity Politics, which along with political correctness in the late 1980’s actually achieved its goal of successfully undermining the Left as can be seen in its current state. This time period wasn’t coincidental, since this was the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was collapsing. It was at this point that the Left started turning inward and becoming fragmented, with no centre to keep it together which is what the Soviet Union represented. Feeling betrayed, demoralized, and bewildered, the CIA easily infiltrated and injected the Left with its poisonous sting, causing many Left parties to reject dialectical materialism, and in some cases even Marxism itself! ID politics was the late 1960’s brain child of the CIA to divide and conquer the Left, pitting groups against each other. Political Correctness helped promote ID politics by using the same methods as McCarthyism. Since socialism is a logical, scientific economic system, proponents couldn’t be allowed to explain or discuss what is was or it would convert others; therefore McCarthyism relied on shutting down debates and free discussion by employing name calling, shouting down speakers, and further isolating and marginalizing Leftists, especially through blacklisting them.
From the 1930’s to the 1970’s the motto of the Communist Party and the Left was “Black and White Unite”. The question for example of the CP getting involved, whether in the Scottsboro Case or in unionizing the segregated South, took place with many open debates, where all questions were allowed to be raised, discussed, and answered, including those by less advanced white workers who didn’t understand or agree. It was the openness of these discussions and debates that allowed this sector to understand the nature of racism and to make the CP’s motto a success. In a nation that was then only 12% black, gaining white support during the Civil Rights era was crucial in changing the nation and its laws. The Black Panther Party understood this and gave talk in some of the poorest white communities such as in the Appalachians; even converting and forming important alliances with white working class organizations, such as the Young Patriots in Chicago.
The CIA unfortunately successfully changed “Black and White Unite” into Identity Politics in the 1970’s, where different special interest groups began vying for crumbs, promoting selfish individualism and rejecting collectivism, one of the basic foundations of Marxist Leninist ideology.
Following bourgeois feminism, white men were now the enemy and women felt pitted to fight men in order to demand more managerial jobs. Blacks began demanding the right to have more black police officers; as if women oppressing other women or black officers cracking the heads of black men was somehow progressive. What followers of ID politics failed to understand was that changing the driver didn’t change the system. My chances as a woman of dying from a preventable heart attack are the same whether the doctor at the hospital today is male or female, as are the chances a black man having his head smashed in by the cops whether the officer is white or black. Instead of collectivism, workers divided among race, sex, ethnicity, religion, etc., promoting selfish individualism. Of course there are supportive women and people of colour. But certain individuals are not the system. A perfect example was the Left dismantling the anti-war movement during the Obama administration because it would be seen as racist to protest a black president. What was forgotten were the millions killed abroad in US wars of Imperialism, especially Africans who didn’t care what race the current president was. As a result, today, Libyan men are being sold into slavery!
Whereas before ID politics, the enemy was clearly understood to be US imperialism, or the 1%, now the enemy had become the white, heterosexual, male workers. Marxists understand that white men are not our enemies, but our necessary allies in getting reforms under capitalism and in overthrowing the true enemy, the 1%. United we stand, divided we fall.
Unfortunately this vilification and exclusion of white males led to bitterness, creating the racism and sexism we see today. Many were driven into the arms of the right-wing in order to feel included. Enter transgender ideology, the new ID politics of today. Exploiting the Lesbian, gay, and bisexual movement, although the ideology itself is anti-gay and homophobic, it has been promoting itself as the Civil Rights movement of the 21st century. Let’s forget that Native people, African-Americans, and women still haven’t won many significant civil rights.
If white men were the enemy of yesteryear, women are now the new enemy, regardless of colour or race, allowing men their turn to experience inclusion in the Left by attacking and excluding women.
It’s not for nothing that penises are still called penises, but vaginas are front-holes, breast-feeding is chest-feeding, and woman can get their monthlies just like men (although I would seriously suggest that any man who does should go see a doctor ASAP and have their hemorrhoids put back in). Because transgender ideology, which is not the same as transgender individuals, just as all feminists are not bourgeois feminists, is a two-pronged attack not just against women, but the Left, too.
Its first prong of attack undermines women’s contribution to reproducing capital, both as the sex that bears tomorrow workers and cannon fodder and as workers. Discussions on birth control, maternity leave, food stamps, public services, as well as low wages and work inequality along with sexual harassment that affect working class women, become subordinate to transgender questions that affect less than 1/10 of 1% of the population, such as unisex bathrooms.
The second prong undermines the unity of the Left and the possibility of revolution. As Lenin said, “There can be no real mass movement without the women.” How can there be when women represent half the population and are the most exploited sex under crapitalism? In fact, how many people are aware that every major revolution in history was started by women? From the English, French, and the Russian Revolution, which by the way took place on March 8, 1917, International Women’s Day, it was women demanding bread that began it all. It is women who generally have to take care of and feed the family, especially the children. Prevent women from organizing or leading their own organizations, and the 1% are guaranteed there will be no reform or revolution.
What is Marxism? What does it represent? It doesn’t represent Hegelian idealism nor does it represent bourgeois mechanistic science. It represents a historical, dialectical materialism that analyzes the evolution of human society from one form to another, as Charles Darwin’s theories in the Origin of the Species analyzed the evolution of living beings.
Much of the transgender movement isn’t even working class; it mainly represents white, upper middle-class males who are racist, homophobic, and misogynist. It argues for gender stereotypes that tell homosexual men, for example, that they are really women or that racism is an imaginary concept. When transwomen says they are women, they are in fact negating not just biology and science, but eliminating the whole history of oppression that women experience. You heard the expression, you are what you eat. Imagine someone saying “I ate some soul food last night and I’m feeling black, although I’ve never seen a black person in my lilywhite town.”
Transgender ideology has set a dangerous precedent by referring to feelings rather than biology, which ultimately allows discrimination not just against women, but people of colour including native people.
Women aren’t oppressed because of a feeling, but because of their sex; for physically being the only sex that can literally reproduce the workers for capital. Being a woman isn’t a feeling. Just like being black isn’t a feeling. Being a Native American isn’t a feeling. I can’t wash off my sex any more than a person of colour can wash off their colour. Is capitalism a feeling, too? Can we unfeel exploitation on Monday morning?
Liberals who reject dialectical materialism reject nature and the evolutionary connection in nature.
Transgender ideology is effectively using language to erase women and subordinate them to the fetishes of men in nearly every English-speaking country. With the passing in England of the Gender Recognition Act, which Congress is trying to pass in the US as the Equality Act, women must defer to men as men now have the right to enter female facilities and colonize female sports at will against the wishes of women and the safety of girls. It took until 1920 for women in the US to have separate bathrooms, which Russian women won in the 1917 revolution. Lenin in fact championed female-only spaces and female leadership in female organizations. Really, how many women would like to turn around in the women’s showers and see a throbbing hard boner on a transgender woman staring at you? What about at a Rape Centre or women’s prison? For those who don’t know, it’s already happening: paedophiles and male rapists insisting they feel like women have been allowed into girls’ bathrooms and even placed in women’s prisons where they have raped women. Female sports and scholarships, better kiss that goodbye as men by birth have a physical advantage over women. Let’s go back to 1950’s America.
When the Left so wholehearted absorbed trans ideology, it threw scientific socialism under the bus as well as thoroughly self-destructing, making it the butt of jokes for the right-wing. From Black Lives Matter to FRSO Left, ISO, WWP, CWL, and PC USA to name just a few, all these organizations are now being redubbed Politically Correct USA.
It is rape to ever demand or try to coerce someone to have sex regardless of their age, sex, or gender. There is no place in any civilized society to allow rape or rape culture, and especially not the Left. In other cases, women were expelled for exposing male sexual predators, such as in ISO, DSA, WWP, and PC USA. I was told I should be ashamed of myself for shaming the PC USA by exposing a predator, when that party should be ashamed. In other cases, women were expelled because they didn’t agree with male comrades over the question of prostitution and violent porn. Imagine the outrage if a black man was stripped of his position and expelled, because he didn’t like to be called an N* and didn’t agree that slavery and lynching films weren’t empowering? In fact, why is the Left offended by Black Face, but not by Drag? Transgenderism is misogyny in drag.
Soros has spent over millions of dollars promoting transgenderism. Yet women on the Left who complained were ridiculed and silenced.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the CP subverted itself to neoliberalism when it decided to pimp itself to the Democratic Party. Even the ISO, FRSO right and many other so-called Left parties began embracing bourgeois liberalism, which has its roots in neo-liberalism or the free market economy, completing wedding themselves to parliamentary instead revolutionary goals.
Think of the level of misogyny; the CIA couldn’t destroy so many grousp like WW, which has existed for 60 years. How did it finally destroy these parties through transgenderism? Before we think this is an organic movement, which is separate from being transgender, it is actually funded by the CIA and its think tanks. That is the reason why it funded by so much money. Any legitimate organization would distance itself from these elements and I’m sure there are LGBTQ+ organizations that did.
When the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund hosted the 2018 Trans Equality Now Awards in Washington D.C. on May 17, 2018, its sponsors looked like something from a parody. The list included: the CIA, George Soros’ Open Society, Facebook (which is partially funded by the Atlantic Council, i.e. NATO), Google, Amazon, Capital One Bank, Shook, Hardy & Bacon (a law firm dedicated to defending Big Pharma), as well as a number of pharmaceutical companies and clinics including: Gilead Sciences, Meltzer Clinic, and Pharma. [See comments at the end of this article.] For women on the Left, this open display by the CIA and Soros was like the government and the bankers sticking their middle finger at them. It proved what they had been saying all along.
To this day, the Left still hasn’t apologized to women and is still promoting destructive ID politics, pushing women to the hypocritical right-wing. It makes perfect sense for liberals to be doing this, because as their name suggests neo-liberalism, they want to push women to the right. But why the Left? In fact, why was the Left so eager to adopt trans ideology and expel women.
Either promote the Left, that is the Left we’ve inherited and, like a corrupt union, we understand as Marxist-Leninists that we don’t destroy, but attempt to revitalize, or create female Left organizations like Women for Racial and Economic Equality to push Left more left.
Comment on sources
The source for the CIA and others having funded the 2018 Trans Equality Now Awards seems to have “disappeared” from the internet, and they seem to have decided that their sponsorship of the 2019 awards would have been too open. However, after some searching, we were able to find the Transgender Equality Annual Report 2017, at: https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/resources/annual%20report%20 2017%20final.pdf (page 8; page 10 of pdf), which includes the same sponsors as in 2018.
Also, Soros’ Open Society Foundations has funded individual transgender activists who are leaders in various Left organizations. One is Imani Henry, a leading member of International Action Center and Workers World Party. The source of this is available at: https://www. opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/cfp_20050101.pdf, on p. 10-11. This criticism is more aimed at his party than at him himself, for allowing him to accept this funding, just as no progressive trade union organization would have its members accept money from the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a notorious conduit for CIA funding.
As sources mysteriously disappear from the internet, we have put these sources on the web-site used by Towards Marxist-Leninist Unity (www.RedStarPublishers.org).
Towards Marxist-Leninist Unity
2023.06.07 07:07 kksingh11 Identify Politics and Revolutionary Parties
The Use of Identity Politics to Undermine the Left Anna Coco
The US government and ruling elite have infiltrated and attempted to destroy the Left since its inception. In the 1960’s the CIA think tanks came up with numerous strategies to destroy the Left, such as promoting drug use and promiscuous sexuality as a form of not only “Brave New World” escapism, but diverting attention from working class issues. Remember Jerry Garcia repeating Timothy Leary’s famous quote “turn on, tune in, and drop out?” Even the decriminalization of marijuana today is really not to stop the Prison Industrial Complex, which is still arresting millions of young men, especially those of colour, but about pushing escapism as a replacement for protesting in a country where half the population lives near or below the poverty line. “Get high; forget your cares.” “Don’t fight back. Jesus was a pacifist.” (Forget that Jesus flogged the bankers in the temple during Passover.) The Communist Party USA and other Left parties were successful in pushing back this degeneration, discouraging drug and alcohol use as well as criticizing sexual objectification, particularly of women.
Another government strategy involved promoting Identity Politics, which along with political correctness in the late 1980’s actually achieved its goal of successfully undermining the Left as can be seen in its current state. This time period wasn’t coincidental, since this was the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was collapsing. It was at this point that the Left started turning inward and becoming fragmented, with no centre to keep it together which is what the Soviet Union represented. Feeling betrayed, demoralized, and bewildered, the CIA easily infiltrated and injected the Left with its poisonous sting, causing many Left parties to reject dialectical materialism, and in some cases even Marxism itself! ID politics was the late 1960’s brain child of the CIA to divide and conquer the Left, pitting groups against each other. Political Correctness helped promote ID politics by using the same methods as McCarthyism. Since socialism is a logical, scientific economic system, proponents couldn’t be allowed to explain or discuss what is was or it would convert others; therefore McCarthyism relied on shutting down debates and free discussion by employing name calling, shouting down speakers, and further isolating and marginalizing Leftists, especially through blacklisting them.
From the 1930’s to the 1970’s the motto of the Communist Party and the Left was “Black and White Unite”. The question for example of the CP getting involved, whether in the Scottsboro Case or in unionizing the segregated South, took place with many open debates, where all questions were allowed to be raised, discussed, and answered, including those by less advanced white workers who didn’t understand or agree. It was the openness of these discussions and debates that allowed this sector to understand the nature of racism and to make the CP’s motto a success. In a nation that was then only 12% black, gaining white support during the Civil Rights era was crucial in changing the nation and its laws. The Black Panther Party understood this and gave talk in some of the poorest white communities such as in the Appalachians; even converting and forming important alliances with white working class organizations, such as the Young Patriots in Chicago.
The CIA unfortunately successfully changed “Black and White Unite” into Identity Politics in the 1970’s, where different special interest groups began vying for crumbs, promoting selfish individualism and rejecting collectivism, one of the basic foundations of Marxist Leninist ideology.
Following bourgeois feminism, white men were now the enemy and women felt pitted to fight men in order to demand more managerial jobs. Blacks began demanding the right to have more black police officers; as if women oppressing other women or black officers cracking the heads of black men was somehow progressive. What followers of ID politics failed to understand was that changing the driver didn’t change the system. My chances as a woman of dying from a preventable heart attack are the same whether the doctor at the hospital today is male or female, as are the chances a black man having his head smashed in by the cops whether the officer is white or black. Instead of collectivism, workers divided among race, sex, ethnicity, religion, etc., promoting selfish individualism. Of course there are supportive women and people of colour. But certain individuals are not the system. A perfect example was the Left dismantling the anti-war movement during the Obama administration because it would be seen as racist to protest a black president. What was forgotten were the millions killed abroad in US wars of Imperialism, especially Africans who didn’t care what race the current president was. As a result, today, Libyan men are being sold into slavery!
Whereas before ID politics, the enemy was clearly understood to be US imperialism, or the 1%, now the enemy had become the white, heterosexual, male workers. Marxists understand that white men are not our enemies, but our necessary allies in getting reforms under capitalism and in overthrowing the true enemy, the 1%. United we stand, divided we fall.
Unfortunately this vilification and exclusion of white males led to bitterness, creating the racism and sexism we see today. Many were driven into the arms of the right-wing in order to feel included. Enter transgender ideology, the new ID politics of today. Exploiting the Lesbian, gay, and bisexual movement, although the ideology itself is anti-gay and homophobic, it has been promoting itself as the Civil Rights movement of the 21st century. Let’s forget that Native people, African-Americans, and women still haven’t won many significant civil rights.
If white men were the enemy of yesteryear, women are now the new enemy, regardless of colour or race, allowing men their turn to experience inclusion in the Left by attacking and excluding women.
It’s not for nothing that penises are still called penises, but vaginas are front-holes, breast-feeding is chest-feeding, and woman can get their monthlies just like men (although I would seriously suggest that any man who does should go see a doctor ASAP and have their hemorrhoids put back in). Because transgender ideology, which is not the same as transgender individuals, just as all feminists are not bourgeois feminists, is a two-pronged attack not just against women, but the Left, too.
Its first prong of attack undermines women’s contribution to reproducing capital, both as the sex that bears tomorrow workers and cannon fodder and as workers. Discussions on birth control, maternity leave, food stamps, public services, as well as low wages and work inequality along with sexual harassment that affect working class women, become subordinate to transgender questions that affect less than 1/10 of 1% of the population, such as unisex bathrooms.
The second prong undermines the unity of the Left and the possibility of revolution. As Lenin said, “There can be no real mass movement without the women.” How can there be when women represent half the population and are the most exploited sex under crapitalism? In fact, how many people are aware that every major revolution in history was started by women? From the English, French, and the Russian Revolution, which by the way took place on March 8, 1917, International Women’s Day, it was women demanding bread that began it all. It is women who generally have to take care of and feed the family, especially the children. Prevent women from organizing or leading their own organizations, and the 1% are guaranteed there will be no reform or revolution.
What is Marxism? What does it represent? It doesn’t represent Hegelian idealism nor does it represent bourgeois mechanistic science. It represents a historical, dialectical materialism that analyzes the evolution of human society from one form to another, as Charles Darwin’s theories in the Origin of the Species analyzed the evolution of living beings.
Much of the transgender movement isn’t even working class; it mainly represents white, upper middle-class males who are racist, homophobic, and misogynist. It argues for gender stereotypes that tell homosexual men, for example, that they are really women or that racism is an imaginary concept. When transwomen says they are women, they are in fact negating not just biology and science, but eliminating the whole history of oppression that women experience. You heard the expression, you are what you eat. Imagine someone saying “I ate some soul food last night and I’m feeling black, although I’ve never seen a black person in my lilywhite town.”
Transgender ideology has set a dangerous precedent by referring to feelings rather than biology, which ultimately allows discrimination not just against women, but people of colour including native people.
Women aren’t oppressed because of a feeling, but because of their sex; for physically being the only sex that can literally reproduce the workers for capital. Being a woman isn’t a feeling. Just like being black isn’t a feeling. Being a Native American isn’t a feeling. I can’t wash off my sex any more than a person of colour can wash off their colour. Is capitalism a feeling, too? Can we unfeel exploitation on Monday morning?
Liberals who reject dialectical materialism reject nature and the evolutionary connection in nature.
Transgender ideology is effectively using language to erase women and subordinate them to the fetishes of men in nearly every English-speaking country. With the passing in England of the Gender Recognition Act, which Congress is trying to pass in the US as the Equality Act, women must defer to men as men now have the right to enter female facilities and colonize female sports at will against the wishes of women and the safety of girls. It took until 1920 for women in the US to have separate bathrooms, which Russian women won in the 1917 revolution. Lenin in fact championed female-only spaces and female leadership in female organizations. Really, how many women would like to turn around in the women’s showers and see a throbbing hard boner on a transgender woman staring at you? What about at a Rape Centre or women’s prison? For those who don’t know, it’s already happening: paedophiles and male rapists insisting they feel like women have been allowed into girls’ bathrooms and even placed in women’s prisons where they have raped women. Female sports and scholarships, better kiss that goodbye as men by birth have a physical advantage over women. Let’s go back to 1950’s America.
When the Left so wholehearted absorbed trans ideology, it threw scientific socialism under the bus as well as thoroughly self-destructing, making it the butt of jokes for the right-wing. From Black Lives Matter to FRSO Left, ISO, WWP, CWL, and PC USA to name just a few, all these organizations are now being redubbed Politically Correct USA.
It is rape to ever demand or try to coerce someone to have sex regardless of their age, sex, or gender. There is no place in any civilized society to allow rape or rape culture, and especially not the Left. In other cases, women were expelled for exposing male sexual predators, such as in ISO, DSA, WWP, and PC USA. I was told I should be ashamed of myself for shaming the PC USA by exposing a predator, when that party should be ashamed. In other cases, women were expelled because they didn’t agree with male comrades over the question of prostitution and violent porn. Imagine the outrage if a black man was stripped of his position and expelled, because he didn’t like to be called an N* and didn’t agree that slavery and lynching films weren’t empowering? In fact, why is the Left offended by Black Face, but not by Drag? Transgenderism is misogyny in drag.
Soros has spent over millions of dollars promoting transgenderism. Yet women on the Left who complained were ridiculed and silenced.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the CP subverted itself to neoliberalism when it decided to pimp itself to the Democratic Party. Even the ISO, FRSO right and many other so-called Left parties began embracing bourgeois liberalism, which has its roots in neo-liberalism or the free market economy, completing wedding themselves to parliamentary instead revolutionary goals.
Think of the level of misogyny; the CIA couldn’t destroy so many grousp like WW, which has existed for 60 years. How did it finally destroy these parties through transgenderism? Before we think this is an organic movement, which is separate from being transgender, it is actually funded by the CIA and its think tanks. That is the reason why it funded by so much money. Any legitimate organization would distance itself from these elements and I’m sure there are LGBTQ+ organizations that did.
When the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund hosted the 2018 Trans Equality Now Awards in Washington D.C. on May 17, 2018, its sponsors looked like something from a parody. The list included: the CIA, George Soros’ Open Society, Facebook (which is partially funded by the Atlantic Council, i.e. NATO), Google, Amazon, Capital One Bank, Shook, Hardy & Bacon (a law firm dedicated to defending Big Pharma), as well as a number of pharmaceutical companies and clinics including: Gilead Sciences, Meltzer Clinic, and Pharma. [See comments at the end of this article.] For women on the Left, this open display by the CIA and Soros was like the government and the bankers sticking their middle finger at them. It proved what they had been saying all along.
To this day, the Left still hasn’t apologized to women and is still promoting destructive ID politics, pushing women to the hypocritical right-wing. It makes perfect sense for liberals to be doing this, because as their name suggests neo-liberalism, they want to push women to the right. But why the Left? In fact, why was the Left so eager to adopt trans ideology and expel women.
Either promote the Left, that is the Left we’ve inherited and, like a corrupt union, we understand as Marxist-Leninists that we don’t destroy, but attempt to revitalize, or create female Left organizations like Women for Racial and Economic Equality to push Left more left.
Comment on sources
The source for the CIA and others having funded the 2018 Trans Equality Now Awards seems to have “disappeared” from the internet, and they seem to have decided that their sponsorship of the 2019 awards would have been too open. However, after some searching, we were able to find the Transgender Equality Annual Report 2017, at: https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/resources/annual%20report%20 2017%20final.pdf (page 8; page 10 of pdf), which includes the same sponsors as in 2018.
Also, Soros’ Open Society Foundations has funded individual transgender activists who are leaders in various Left organizations. One is Imani Henry, a leading member of International Action Center and Workers World Party. The source of this is available at: https://www. opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/cfp_20050101.pdf, on p. 10-11. This criticism is more aimed at his party than at him himself, for allowing him to accept this funding, just as no progressive trade union organization would have its members accept money from the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a notorious conduit for CIA funding.
As sources mysteriously disappear from the internet, we have put these sources on the web-site used by Towards Marxist-Leninist Unity (www.RedStarPublishers.org).
Towards Marxist-Leninist Unity
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The US government and ruling elite have infiltrated and attempted to destroy the Left since its inception. In the 1960’s the CIA think tanks came up with numerous strategies to destroy the Left, such as promoting drug use and promiscuous sexuality as a form of not only “Brave New World” escapism, but diverting attention from working class issues. Remember Jerry Garcia repeating Timothy Leary’s famous quote “turn on, tune in, and drop out?” Even the decriminalization of marijuana today is really not to stop the Prison Industrial Complex, which is still arresting millions of young men, especially those of colour, but about pushing escapism as a replacement for protesting in a country where half the population lives near or below the poverty line. “Get high; forget your cares.” “Don’t fight back. Jesus was a pacifist.” (Forget that Jesus flogged the bankers in the temple during Passover.) The Communist Party USA and other Left parties were successful in pushing back this degeneration, discouraging drug and alcohol use as well as criticizing sexual objectification, particularly of women.
Another government strategy involved promoting Identity Politics, which along with political correctness in the late 1980’s actually achieved its goal of successfully undermining the Left as can be seen in its current state. This time period wasn’t coincidental, since this was the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was collapsing. It was at this point that the Left started turning inward and becoming fragmented, with no centre to keep it together which is what the Soviet Union represented. Feeling betrayed, demoralized, and bewildered, the CIA easily infiltrated and injected the Left with its poisonous sting, causing many Left parties to reject dialectical materialism, and in some cases even Marxism itself! ID politics was the late 1960’s brain child of the CIA to divide and conquer the Left, pitting groups against each other. Political Correctness helped promote ID politics by using the same methods as McCarthyism. Since socialism is a logical, scientific economic system, proponents couldn’t be allowed to explain or discuss what is was or it would convert others; therefore McCarthyism relied on shutting down debates and free discussion by employing name calling, shouting down speakers, and further isolating and marginalizing Leftists, especially through blacklisting them.
From the 1930’s to the 1970’s the motto of the Communist Party and the Left was “Black and White Unite”. The question for example of the CP getting involved, whether in the Scottsboro Case or in unionizing the segregated South, took place with many open debates, where all questions were allowed to be raised, discussed, and answered, including those by less advanced white workers who didn’t understand or agree. It was the openness of these discussions and debates that allowed this sector to understand the nature of racism and to make the CP’s motto a success. In a nation that was then only 12% black, gaining white support during the Civil Rights era was crucial in changing the nation and its laws. The Black Panther Party understood this and gave talk in some of the poorest white communities such as in the Appalachians; even converting and forming important alliances with white working class organizations, such as the Young Patriots in Chicago.
The CIA unfortunately successfully changed “Black and White Unite” into Identity Politics in the 1970’s, where different special interest groups began vying for crumbs, promoting selfish individualism and rejecting collectivism, one of the basic foundations of Marxist Leninist ideology.
Following bourgeois feminism, white men were now the enemy and women felt pitted to fight men in order to demand more managerial jobs. Blacks began demanding the right to have more black police officers; as if women oppressing other women or black officers cracking the heads of black men was somehow progressive. What followers of ID politics failed to understand was that changing the driver didn’t change the system. My chances as a woman of dying from a preventable heart attack are the same whether the doctor at the hospital today is male or female, as are the chances a black man having his head smashed in by the cops whether the officer is white or black. Instead of collectivism, workers divided among race, sex, ethnicity, religion, etc., promoting selfish individualism. Of course there are supportive women and people of colour. But certain individuals are not the system. A perfect example was the Left dismantling the anti-war movement during the Obama administration because it would be seen as racist to protest a black president. What was forgotten were the millions killed abroad in US wars of Imperialism, especially Africans who didn’t care what race the current president was. As a result, today, Libyan men are being sold into slavery!
Whereas before ID politics, the enemy was clearly understood to be US imperialism, or the 1%, now the enemy had become the white, heterosexual, male workers. Marxists understand that white men are not our enemies, but our necessary allies in getting reforms under capitalism and in overthrowing the true enemy, the 1%. United we stand, divided we fall.
Unfortunately this vilification and exclusion of white males led to bitterness, creating the racism and sexism we see today. Many were driven into the arms of the right-wing in order to feel included. Enter transgender ideology, the new ID politics of today. Exploiting the Lesbian, gay, and bisexual movement, although the ideology itself is anti-gay and homophobic, it has been promoting itself as the Civil Rights movement of the 21st century. Let’s forget that Native people, African-Americans, and women still haven’t won many significant civil rights.
If white men were the enemy of yesteryear, women are now the new enemy, regardless of colour or race, allowing men their turn to experience inclusion in the Left by attacking and excluding women.
It’s not for nothing that penises are still called penises, but vaginas are front-holes, breast-feeding is chest-feeding, and woman can get their monthlies just like men (although I would seriously suggest that any man who does should go see a doctor ASAP and have their hemorrhoids put back in). Because transgender ideology, which is not the same as transgender individuals, just as all feminists are not bourgeois feminists, is a two-pronged attack not just against women, but the Left, too.
Its first prong of attack undermines women’s contribution to reproducing capital, both as the sex that bears tomorrow workers and cannon fodder and as workers. Discussions on birth control, maternity leave, food stamps, public services, as well as low wages and work inequality along with sexual harassment that affect working class women, become subordinate to transgender questions that affect less than 1/10 of 1% of the population, such as unisex bathrooms.
The second prong undermines the unity of the Left and the possibility of revolution. As Lenin said, “There can be no real mass movement without the women.” How can there be when women represent half the population and are the most exploited sex under crapitalism? In fact, how many people are aware that every major revolution in history was started by women? From the English, French, and the Russian Revolution, which by the way took place on March 8, 1917, International Women’s Day, it was women demanding bread that began it all. It is women who generally have to take care of and feed the family, especially the children. Prevent women from organizing or leading their own organizations, and the 1% are guaranteed there will be no reform or revolution.
What is Marxism? What does it represent? It doesn’t represent Hegelian idealism nor does it represent bourgeois mechanistic science. It represents a historical, dialectical materialism that analyzes the evolution of human society from one form to another, as Charles Darwin’s theories in the Origin of the Species analyzed the evolution of living beings.
Much of the transgender movement isn’t even working class; it mainly represents white, upper middle-class males who are racist, homophobic, and misogynist. It argues for gender stereotypes that tell homosexual men, for example, that they are really women or that racism is an imaginary concept. When transwomen says they are women, they are in fact negating not just biology and science, but eliminating the whole history of oppression that women experience. You heard the expression, you are what you eat. Imagine someone saying “I ate some soul food last night and I’m feeling black, although I’ve never seen a black person in my lilywhite town.”
Transgender ideology has set a dangerous precedent by referring to feelings rather than biology, which ultimately allows discrimination not just against women, but people of colour including native people.
Women aren’t oppressed because of a feeling, but because of their sex; for physically being the only sex that can literally reproduce the workers for capital. Being a woman isn’t a feeling. Just like being black isn’t a feeling. Being a Native American isn’t a feeling. I can’t wash off my sex any more than a person of colour can wash off their colour. Is capitalism a feeling, too? Can we unfeel exploitation on Monday morning?
Liberals who reject dialectical materialism reject nature and the evolutionary connection in nature.
Transgender ideology is effectively using language to erase women and subordinate them to the fetishes of men in nearly every English-speaking country. With the passing in England of the Gender Recognition Act, which Congress is trying to pass in the US as the Equality Act, women must defer to men as men now have the right to enter female facilities and colonize female sports at will against the wishes of women and the safety of girls. It took until 1920 for women in the US to have separate bathrooms, which Russian women won in the 1917 revolution. Lenin in fact championed female-only spaces and female leadership in female organizations. Really, how many women would like to turn around in the women’s showers and see a throbbing hard boner on a transgender woman staring at you? What about at a Rape Centre or women’s prison? For those who don’t know, it’s already happening: paedophiles and male rapists insisting they feel like women have been allowed into girls’ bathrooms and even placed in women’s prisons where they have raped women. Female sports and scholarships, better kiss that goodbye as men by birth have a physical advantage over women. Let’s go back to 1950’s America.
When the Left so wholehearted absorbed trans ideology, it threw scientific socialism under the bus as well as thoroughly self-destructing, making it the butt of jokes for the right-wing. From Black Lives Matter to FRSO Left, ISO, WWP, CWL, and PC USA to name just a few, all these organizations are now being redubbed Politically Correct USA.
It is rape to ever demand or try to coerce someone to have sex regardless of their age, sex, or gender. There is no place in any civilized society to allow rape or rape culture, and especially not the Left. In other cases, women were expelled for exposing male sexual predators, such as in ISO, DSA, WWP, and PC USA. I was told I should be ashamed of myself for shaming the PC USA by exposing a predator, when that party should be ashamed. In other cases, women were expelled because they didn’t agree with male comrades over the question of prostitution and violent porn. Imagine the outrage if a black man was stripped of his position and expelled, because he didn’t like to be called an N* and didn’t agree that slavery and lynching films weren’t empowering? In fact, why is the Left offended by Black Face, but not by Drag? Transgenderism is misogyny in drag.
Soros has spent over millions of dollars promoting transgenderism. Yet women on the Left who complained were ridiculed and silenced.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the CP subverted itself to neoliberalism when it decided to pimp itself to the Democratic Party. Even the ISO, FRSO right and many other so-called Left parties began embracing bourgeois liberalism, which has its roots in neo-liberalism or the free market economy, completing wedding themselves to parliamentary instead revolutionary goals.
Think of the level of misogyny; the CIA couldn’t destroy so many grousp like WW, which has existed for 60 years. How did it finally destroy these parties through transgenderism? Before we think this is an organic movement, which is separate from being transgender, it is actually funded by the CIA and its think tanks. That is the reason why it funded by so much money. Any legitimate organization would distance itself from these elements and I’m sure there are LGBTQ+ organizations that did.
When the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund hosted the 2018 Trans Equality Now Awards in Washington D.C. on May 17, 2018, its sponsors looked like something from a parody. The list included: the CIA, George Soros’ Open Society, Facebook (which is partially funded by the Atlantic Council, i.e. NATO), Google, Amazon, Capital One Bank, Shook, Hardy & Bacon (a law firm dedicated to defending Big Pharma), as well as a number of pharmaceutical companies and clinics including: Gilead Sciences, Meltzer Clinic, and Pharma. [See comments at the end of this article.] For women on the Left, this open display by the CIA and Soros was like the government and the bankers sticking their middle finger at them. It proved what they had been saying all along.
To this day, the Left still hasn’t apologized to women and is still promoting destructive ID politics, pushing women to the hypocritical right-wing. It makes perfect sense for liberals to be doing this, because as their name suggests neo-liberalism, they want to push women to the right. But why the Left? In fact, why was the Left so eager to adopt trans ideology and expel women.
Either promote the Left, that is the Left we’ve inherited and, like a corrupt union, we understand as Marxist-Leninists that we don’t destroy, but attempt to revitalize, or create female Left organizations like Women for Racial and Economic Equality to push Left more left.
Comment on sources
The source for the CIA and others having funded the 2018 Trans Equality Now Awards seems to have “disappeared” from the internet, and they seem to have decided that their sponsorship of the 2019 awards would have been too open. However, after some searching, we were able to find the Transgender Equality Annual Report 2017, at: https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/resources/annual%20report%20 2017%20final.pdf (page 8; page 10 of pdf), which includes the same sponsors as in 2018.
Also, Soros’ Open Society Foundations has funded individual transgender activists who are leaders in various Left organizations. One is Imani Henry, a leading member of International Action Center and Workers World Party. The source of this is available at: https://www. opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/cfp_20050101.pdf, on p. 10-11. This criticism is more aimed at his party than at him himself, for allowing him to accept this funding, just as no progressive trade union organization would have its members accept money from the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a notorious conduit for CIA funding.
As sources mysteriously disappear from the internet, we have put these sources on the web-site used by Towards Marxist-Leninist Unity (www.RedStarPublishers.org).
Towards Marxist-Leninist Unity
2023.06.07 06:39 dice1899 LFMW Rebuttal, Part 18: The Early Church – Polygamy [C]
Posts in this series (note: link will only work properly in new Reddit): https://www.reddit.com/lds/collection/363e4ce4-8cec-40ad-8ea9-5954cf1fe52d
Sorry for taking so long to get this posted! I’ve been putting in more than 60 hours a week at work lately, and I just didn’t have time to properly research this post.
This week, the topic under discussion is Joseph’s wives and the way that he personally practiced plural marriage. It’s true that some of the circumstances a little unusual compared to how later members practiced it, and it’s also true that sealing practices in general were unusual compared to how we practice them today. The world was also very different in the 1840s than it is today in the 2020s.
All of that means that it can be very difficult for us to understand what was going on and why. I’m going to do my best to break this all down so that it makes sense, but just remember, it’s okay if it makes you uncomfortable. It’s okay if you don’t like the idea of plural marriage. It’s okay if you don’t ever want to practice it. I don’t, either.
But I do have a firm testimony that it was commanded by God. That testimony didn’t just magically appear one day. I had to earn it. I had to get on my knees and pray, and I had to ask Heavenly Father whether He instituted it or not. I had to study the issue and the circumstances surrounding it. More importantly, I had to ask Him to help me understand the reasons why He instituted it.
That’s the only way to really know for yourself.
So, having said that, let’s get into Faulk’s claims.
One thing to remember is that the sealing power is to seal us all together as one giant family. It’ll be one unbroken chain connecting all of us together. Many of these sealings of Joseph’s were done for that specific reason, to bind families together in the next life. That’s why there were things like adoption sealings, where people would be “adopted” into each other’s families through the sealing process. Siblings were sometimes sealed together. Women who were married to men who were not members of the Church would sometimes to be sealed to righteous Priesthood holders for the next life.
Also, it drives me batty that Faulk keeps repeating that Joseph took wives. None of them were married to him against their will. They all had a choice in the matter.
One of the reasons it’s believed that Joseph was sealed to so many women who were already married is because he was trying to satisfy God’s commandment while not hurting Emma. If he was sealing himself to married women, he wouldn’t have to actually marry them and live together as husband and wife. As the Gospel Topics Essay Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo says:
And, believe it or not, some of the women who practiced plural marriage probably found it easier to do so when the other wife was biologically related to them. After all, they already loved them and knew how to live together with them in harmony.
At this point in the LFMW, Faulk posts a small chart taken from Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness. You can find that chart here.
The mob was led by Symonds Ryder and Ezra Booth, because they thought he’d try to steal their property under the Law of Consecration. They’d both already apostatized for various reasons, then led a smear campaign against Joseph and the Church through local newspapers for a while before leading the attack. The only evidence that Eli Johnson was even involved are brief reports that he was the one who provided and heated the tar. According to at least one account, he wasn’t even an active participant, but just left it out for them to use. The mob tried to castrate then murder Joseph and nearly did kill Sidney Rigdon, and were unsuccessful in all attempts.
However, as we all know, Joseph’s infant son tragically died from the effects of the frigid weather that night. Pretty tough bunch of guys, right? Gathering up a violent mob to go murder a baby.
Regardless of which date is accurate, Orson was not sent on a mission so Joseph could steal his wife if the sealing happened 2-3 years after he left. They were not sealed “shortly after his departure” at all. In fact, even the earliest sealing date is closer to the date he returned than the date he left.
Zina, however, clarified that she came to accept the principle through searching the scriptures and praying, and that she received an answer from God that it was from Him. It wasn’t because she felt pressured into it at all.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to pin down exact details when it comes to Zina’s timeline, as there are a lot of discrepancies. When I wrote my response to the CES Letter, I cited liberally from a book titled 4 Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier. This book used to be housed on the Internet Archive, but has since been taken down. Forgive me that I can’t show exact pages anymore on those citations. Many years after all these events took place, Zina gave testimony saying that she first learned of the principle of plural marriage from Dimick, who had heard it from Joseph. Other sources, seemingly reliant on her diary, say that she learned it from Joseph while she was staying at his home. Some sources say that Joseph proposed to her three times while she was living at his home and that she refused him each time out of respect for Emma. Other sources say she declined to give him an answer and kept putting him off, also out of respect for Emma. Some sources say that Joseph wrote Zina a letter saying he’d been threatened by an angel with a drawn sword, while others say that it was a verbal message passed to her by Dimick, who had been sent to offer her another proposal (even though she was already married to Henry Jacobs at that point). Some sources say that Henry was present for that initial sealing to Joseph, but absent from the other resealing to Joseph for eternity and sealing to Brigham for time. Others say Henry was there for the sealing to Brigham, but are silent on whether he was there for the first sealing to Joseph. Zina said in her later testimony that it was just Joseph, her, and Dimick present at their initial sealing, but that Brigham later resealed them after he returned from a mission to England, meaning that she would have been sealed to Joseph three times in total. However, in signed affidavits collected by the Church, Zina, Dimick, and Dimick’s wife Fanny all verified that Fanny was there at the sealing, too. Etc.
Because of all of this, it’s difficult to know exactly what happened, who was aware of what, and when and how they all became aware of it. However, Zina did say that the Lord had prepared her for the doctrine prior to her hearing it:
In fact, according to family tradition, he was present when Joseph told Zina that the reason he hadn’t officiated their wedding is because she was meant to be his plural wife. Henry accepted the news because he was close to Joseph and trusted him. Zina was the one who hadn’t received an answer yet and still had reservations.
Brigham supposedly told Henry to find another wife, though that can’t be corroborated. He also supposedly had to tell Henry to stop writing love letters to Zina after they were married.
Brigham eventually had several dozen wives and 57 children, in addition to being the leader of the Church and the governor of Utah Territory, owning multiple businesses, and directing the settlement efforts across a very large area. Dude was a busy guy, just saying. Zina did not live with him and did not spent tons of alone time with him. She lived for a time in a separate home with her children, and for a time in a house with several of his other wives. The time she spent alone together with him was sporadic and infrequent.
How would Brigham know that Zina was getting love letters from Henry Jacobs unless she told him? And if she enjoyed receiving those letters, why would she tell him? Why not hide them from him? It would’ve been pretty easy to do so—all she had to do was keep her mouth shut. It’s not like Brigham was snooping through all of his wives’ things in his limited free time. The only reason for her to bring the letters to his attention was if she didn’t like receiving them.
Imagine it from her point of view. You get divorced and move on. You describe that marriage as an unhappy one at several points throughout the rest of your life. You marry someone else and even have a child with them, but your ex keeps contacting you, telling you how much they still love you and still want to be with you. How uncomfortable would that be? It’d be an extremely awkward situation for anyone.
To me, it’s far more likely that Zina went to Brigham and asked him to intervene because it was making her uncomfortable than it is that Brigham found out on his own and flew into a rage and forbade Henry from contacting Zina despite her protestations.
Aside from a very few notable exceptions, most of Brigham’s wives and children spoke of him in glowing terms. Zina herself mentioned his kindness repeatedly.
Henry, meanwhile, was married three more times and all four of his marriages ended in divorce. I don’t know what led to the end of the other three marriages, but I do know that he’s the common denominator in all of those marriages.
It seems clear that Zina left him in what is sometimes called a “folk divorce,” which was a thing in the 19th Century where the man and woman decided to dissolve their marriage and go their separate ways, leaving each of them free to marry again. She chose to marry Brigham for time, and Henry struggled to move on afterward...for a time. Brigham asked him to back off, and he did.
But that third quotation, about how she’d never have been sealed to Joseph if she knew it was anything more than a ceremony? That’s taken from page 19 of an early anti-Mormon pamphlet called Narrative of Some of the Proceedings of the Mormons: Giving an Account of Their Iniquities by Catherine Lewis, published in 1848. She claimed to have heard Helen say this to her mother at some point, though everything in the book is suspect. It’s all pretty badly distorted from reality, which you can see for yourself just by reading it.
Helen herself certainly never backed up its claim. She did admit to being upset as a 15-year-old at being prevented from going out to dances with her friends because of the sealing, so it’s possible she said something like that at one point in her frustration and disappointment. But the circumstances surrounding it are certainly skewed, since Catherine reports it in the context of Helen refusing, after Joseph’s death, to be sealed for time as her father’s plural wife. That surely never happened. And in fact, after a few more years, Helen became a very vocal defender of plural marriage and of Joseph Smith for the rest of her life.
So, I’d take that statement with a very big grain of salt. That Faulk presents it here as if it was a direct quote from Helen’s own letter to her children is repulsive.
Eliza R. Snow listed her as one of his wives, and so did Orson Whitney, the son of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney. Helen was one of Nancy’s good friends so there’s solid evidence to believe it, but it’s not confirmed.
Craig Foster wrote a great article for the Interpreter a few years ago) which demonstrated that in frontier America in the 1800s, females often married quite young, and their husbands were usually older and more settled. It was much less common in the settled cities along the East Coast, but on the frontier (which included Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and especially Utah), it was relatively common. Men in their 20s-40s marrying teenagers was not unusual.
Even today, it’s legal for teenagers to get married. Let’s not forget that most of Joseph’s teenaged wives were 17-19 years old. Many of us in this church know women who got married at 18 or 19. While they are technically still teenagers, calling them teen brides is implies that they were underage.
The entire concept of “underage” did not exist in the 1800s. In fact, the concept of “teenagers” didn’t even exist back then. You were either a child or an adult, and there was no in-between.
Applying our societal standards to a past society and judging them for their lack of adherence to our norms is a logical fallacy known as “presentism.” I get it—today, it’s unusual and it makes us squirm to hear of girls aged 14-16 getting married. But it was also not out of place in that day and age. And, most importantly, there is no evidence of any sexual activity between Joseph and his youngest wives.
We don’t know the reasons for this sealing, just like we don’t know the reasons behind many of Joseph’s sealings to civilly married women.
If he’s right, this appears to be one of those sealings where Joseph was sealed to a woman whose husband wasn’t (at the time) a faithful member of the Church so that she could still obtain exaltation.
The fact that this is still in the LFMW after all this time caught me by surprise. We know the LFMW has been updated since its first posting, since the original FAIR rebuttal addresses differently worded accusations. There was plenty of time to correct the inaccuracy. In fact, this particular objection appears to have been added to the original text, rather than removed.
Again, though, I’m not sure why this is supposed to be a point of scandal. None of them were married against their will. They all had the choice, and they all agreed to these arrangements. Is it unusual? Sure. It’s weird, I think we can all agree with that. But is it sinful? Nope. When God commands polygamy, it’s not sinful, and levirate marriages have been around for thousands of years. This is somewhat similar to that practice, particularly in the case of Mary and Mercy Fielding and Hyrum Smith. Or, one could argue, between Zina Huntington and Brigham Young.
Remember, when plural marriage was first introduced, they weren’t really given a rule book. There are some directions and guidelines given in D&C 132, but they only cover certain situations. In the Nauvoo days, they were basically winging it. They had to adjust to the new commandment that completely upended their entire lives and then figure out the best way to live it. There was trial and error, heartache, sacrifice, and suffering involved. It was not easy for any of them, and they did the best they could. If they made mistakes, they need our grace, not our judgment.
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This week, the topic under discussion is Joseph’s wives and the way that he personally practiced plural marriage. It’s true that some of the circumstances a little unusual compared to how later members practiced it, and it’s also true that sealing practices in general were unusual compared to how we practice them today. The world was also very different in the 1840s than it is today in the 2020s.
All of that means that it can be very difficult for us to understand what was going on and why. I’m going to do my best to break this all down so that it makes sense, but just remember, it’s okay if it makes you uncomfortable. It’s okay if you don’t like the idea of plural marriage. It’s okay if you don’t ever want to practice it. I don’t, either.
But I do have a firm testimony that it was commanded by God. That testimony didn’t just magically appear one day. I had to earn it. I had to get on my knees and pray, and I had to ask Heavenly Father whether He instituted it or not. I had to study the issue and the circumstances surrounding it. More importantly, I had to ask Him to help me understand the reasons why He instituted it.
That’s the only way to really know for yourself.
So, having said that, let’s get into Faulk’s claims.
They were not affairs, they were sealings. Sixty-five is also a pretty exaggerated number. Most reputable sources put it at around 30-35. And again, remember that sealings are different than marriages, even though we often perform them together today. Many of those sealings were for eternity only, not for both time and eternity the way that sealings are done today. In fact, some of those wives, such as Cordelia Morley and Rachel Ivins Grant, did not have any kind of union with him at all while he was alive, and were sealed to Joseph for the very first time after he was already dead.Due to the secretive nature of Joseph’s affairs, the actual total number of wives Joseph took is unclear. Written records, primary accounts and second hand accounts puts the number between 29-65 women.
- The Women
One thing to remember is that the sealing power is to seal us all together as one giant family. It’ll be one unbroken chain connecting all of us together. Many of these sealings of Joseph’s were done for that specific reason, to bind families together in the next life. That’s why there were things like adoption sealings, where people would be “adopted” into each other’s families through the sealing process. Siblings were sometimes sealed together. Women who were married to men who were not members of the Church would sometimes to be sealed to righteous Priesthood holders for the next life.
Also, it drives me batty that Faulk keeps repeating that Joseph took wives. None of them were married to him against their will. They all had a choice in the matter.
Most disturbing was the fact that many of these women were already married, much younger and related to each other.Why is that “most disturbing”? The women were all of legal marriageable age, and there is no evidence of any sexual relations between Joseph and any of the civilly married women, or with any of the youngest wives.
One of the reasons it’s believed that Joseph was sealed to so many women who were already married is because he was trying to satisfy God’s commandment while not hurting Emma. If he was sealing himself to married women, he wouldn’t have to actually marry them and live together as husband and wife. As the Gospel Topics Essay Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo says:
These sealings may also be explained by Joseph’s reluctance to enter plural marriage because of the sorrow it would bring to his wife Emma. He may have believed that sealings to married women would comply with the Lord’s command without requiring him to have normal marriage relationships. This could explain why, according to Lorenzo Snow, the angel reprimanded Joseph for having “demurred” on plural marriage even after he had entered into the practice. After this rebuke, according to this interpretation, Joseph returned primarily to sealings with single women.Joseph’s youngest wife, Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, was sealed to Joseph when she was fourteen. We’ll discuss her in some detail a little later in this post. But that union was done for dynastic/adoptive reasons at her father’s request, to join Heber C. Kimball’s family to Joseph’s in the eternities.
And, believe it or not, some of the women who practiced plural marriage probably found it easier to do so when the other wife was biologically related to them. After all, they already loved them and knew how to live together with them in harmony.
At this point in the LFMW, Faulk posts a small chart taken from Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness. You can find that chart here.
1. Married: Between 8-11 women were married to other men at the time Joseph took them for his wives.And every single one of them remained married to their husbands after they were sealed to Joseph. That’s because, again, sealings and marriages are not the same thing, and sealings for the next life had no bearing on their marriages in this one. Joseph did not live with these women as husband and wife.
He sent several men on missions for the Church then married their wives, or married their wives in secret and then sent the husbands on missions afterwards.Many of the husbands in question knew about the sealings and even participated in them. Joseph also did not send the husbands on missions so he could marry their wives in secret.
Um. No. Eli Johnson was Marinda’s uncle, not her brother, and he wasn’t the leader of the mob. The mob also didn’t attack him for that reason. Marinda herself said that Joseph had never acted inappropriately while he was staying in her father’s home. This accusation was first introduced during the infamous 1884 Braden-Kelley debate, and repeated by Fawn Brodie, Grant Palmer, and a host of others.In September 1831, Joseph and Emma Smith moved in with the Johnson family while Joseph and Sidney Rigdon worked on translating the Bible. While staying with the Johnsons in March, 1832, Joseph Smith was dragged out by a mob and tarred and feathered. Marinda’s brother Eli led the mob because he felt that Joseph had been too intimate with Marinda.
- Marinda Nancy Johnson-Hyde-Smith
The mob was led by Symonds Ryder and Ezra Booth, because they thought he’d try to steal their property under the Law of Consecration. They’d both already apostatized for various reasons, then led a smear campaign against Joseph and the Church through local newspapers for a while before leading the attack. The only evidence that Eli Johnson was even involved are brief reports that he was the one who provided and heated the tar. According to at least one account, he wasn’t even an active participant, but just left it out for them to use. The mob tried to castrate then murder Joseph and nearly did kill Sidney Rigdon, and were unsuccessful in all attempts.
However, as we all know, Joseph’s infant son tragically died from the effects of the frigid weather that night. Pretty tough bunch of guys, right? Gathering up a violent mob to go murder a baby.
Soon Marinda married apostle Orson Hyde. On April 6, 1840, Orson was sent on a 3 year mission to Jerusalem. Shortly after his departure, Joseph married his wife Nancy Marinda Johnson-Hyde while Orson was gone. In Joseph Smith’s journal, in a list of his marriages he wrote “Apr 42 Marinda Johnson to Joseph Smith.” In 1858 Orson and Marinda separated.The separation of Orson and Marinda Hyde had nothing to do with her sealing to Joseph, which had happened 15 years earlier. The rest of this is also pretty heavily distorted. Orson Hyde was sent on his mission on April 15, 1840, and returned on December 7, 1842. There are two sealing dates for Joseph and Marinda, making it unclear when it actually happened. It was written down in Joseph’s journal by his scribe Thomas Bullock as taking place in May of 1842. This entry was apparently not recorded until after July 14, 1843, however, and the affidavit Marinda signed stated that the sealing took place in May 1843, after Orson was home.
Regardless of which date is accurate, Orson was not sent on a mission so Joseph could steal his wife if the sealing happened 2-3 years after he left. They were not sealed “shortly after his departure” at all. In fact, even the earliest sealing date is closer to the date he returned than the date he left.
That last line there is a pretty big exaggeration of what the article actually says. In fact, the article doesn’t talk about Zina Huntington at all. The only place she’s mentioned at all is her inclusion in a chart of the different accounts of the angel with the drawn sword. I’ve included a screenshot of the only three mentions of her from Faulk’s cited source. In fact, it’s actually a paraphrased line from Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness.Zina was 18 when her mother died and after went to live in the Smith’s home. Soon she met Joseph’s friend, Henry Jacobs. Joseph was to officiate their wedding, but never showed. Instead, bishop John C. Bennett performed the marriage. Later, Zina asked Joseph why he didn’t show, “He told her it had been made known to him that she was to be his Celestial Wife and he could not give to another one who had been given to him.” (Henry Jacobs, History of Henry Bailey Jacobs)
- Zina Diantha Huntington-Jacobs-Smith-Young
During Henry and Zina’s marriage, Joseph sent Henry on 8 missions. At one point Joseph sent a message to Zina through her brother Dimick. It read, “Tell Zina I have put it off and put it off until an angel with a drawn sword has stood before me and told me if I did not establish that principle and live it, I would lose my position and my life and the Church could progress no further.” After four proposals and pressured with the responsibility for the life of the prophet, Zina finally accepted. (Brian C. Hales, Mormon Historical Studies 11, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 69–70.)
Zina, however, clarified that she came to accept the principle through searching the scriptures and praying, and that she received an answer from God that it was from Him. It wasn’t because she felt pressured into it at all.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to pin down exact details when it comes to Zina’s timeline, as there are a lot of discrepancies. When I wrote my response to the CES Letter, I cited liberally from a book titled 4 Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier. This book used to be housed on the Internet Archive, but has since been taken down. Forgive me that I can’t show exact pages anymore on those citations. Many years after all these events took place, Zina gave testimony saying that she first learned of the principle of plural marriage from Dimick, who had heard it from Joseph. Other sources, seemingly reliant on her diary, say that she learned it from Joseph while she was staying at his home. Some sources say that Joseph proposed to her three times while she was living at his home and that she refused him each time out of respect for Emma. Other sources say she declined to give him an answer and kept putting him off, also out of respect for Emma. Some sources say that Joseph wrote Zina a letter saying he’d been threatened by an angel with a drawn sword, while others say that it was a verbal message passed to her by Dimick, who had been sent to offer her another proposal (even though she was already married to Henry Jacobs at that point). Some sources say that Henry was present for that initial sealing to Joseph, but absent from the other resealing to Joseph for eternity and sealing to Brigham for time. Others say Henry was there for the sealing to Brigham, but are silent on whether he was there for the first sealing to Joseph. Zina said in her later testimony that it was just Joseph, her, and Dimick present at their initial sealing, but that Brigham later resealed them after he returned from a mission to England, meaning that she would have been sealed to Joseph three times in total. However, in signed affidavits collected by the Church, Zina, Dimick, and Dimick’s wife Fanny all verified that Fanny was there at the sealing, too. Etc.
Because of all of this, it’s difficult to know exactly what happened, who was aware of what, and when and how they all became aware of it. However, Zina did say that the Lord had prepared her for the doctrine prior to her hearing it:
I will tell you the facts. I had dreams — I am no dreamer but I had dreams that I could not account for. I know this is the work of the Lord; it was revealed to me, even when young. Things were presented to my mind that I could not account for. When Joseph Smith revealed this order I knew what it meant; the Lord was preparing my mind to receive it.Additionally, Henry was called on his first mission in May of 1839, before he ever even met Zina. The guy was a prolific missionary who served repeatedly throughout his life. None of those missions overlapped with Joseph’s sealing to Zina.
In fact, according to family tradition, he was present when Joseph told Zina that the reason he hadn’t officiated their wedding is because she was meant to be his plural wife. Henry accepted the news because he was close to Joseph and trusted him. Zina was the one who hadn’t received an answer yet and still had reservations.
After Joseph’s death, Brigham Young also took Zina for his wife while she was still married to Henry Jacobs. Brigham called Henry to serve a mission in England and told him to find another wife. While Henry was in England, Zina began living at the Young house with her children and soon bore a child with Brigham.Let’s walk through all of this. First, many of Joseph’s sealed wives who were already civilly married to someone else just stayed married to their husbands after his death. They had the choice on whether to re-seal themselves to Joseph or not, and the single wives had the choice of which members of the Twelve they wanted to be sealed to for time. Zina wasn’t forced to leave her marriage to seal herself to Brigham. She chose to do that.
Brigham supposedly told Henry to find another wife, though that can’t be corroborated. He also supposedly had to tell Henry to stop writing love letters to Zina after they were married.
Brigham eventually had several dozen wives and 57 children, in addition to being the leader of the Church and the governor of Utah Territory, owning multiple businesses, and directing the settlement efforts across a very large area. Dude was a busy guy, just saying. Zina did not live with him and did not spent tons of alone time with him. She lived for a time in a separate home with her children, and for a time in a house with several of his other wives. The time she spent alone together with him was sporadic and infrequent.
How would Brigham know that Zina was getting love letters from Henry Jacobs unless she told him? And if she enjoyed receiving those letters, why would she tell him? Why not hide them from him? It would’ve been pretty easy to do so—all she had to do was keep her mouth shut. It’s not like Brigham was snooping through all of his wives’ things in his limited free time. The only reason for her to bring the letters to his attention was if she didn’t like receiving them.
Imagine it from her point of view. You get divorced and move on. You describe that marriage as an unhappy one at several points throughout the rest of your life. You marry someone else and even have a child with them, but your ex keeps contacting you, telling you how much they still love you and still want to be with you. How uncomfortable would that be? It’d be an extremely awkward situation for anyone.
To me, it’s far more likely that Zina went to Brigham and asked him to intervene because it was making her uncomfortable than it is that Brigham found out on his own and flew into a rage and forbade Henry from contacting Zina despite her protestations.
Aside from a very few notable exceptions, most of Brigham’s wives and children spoke of him in glowing terms. Zina herself mentioned his kindness repeatedly.
Henry, meanwhile, was married three more times and all four of his marriages ended in divorce. I don’t know what led to the end of the other three marriages, but I do know that he’s the common denominator in all of those marriages.
It seems clear that Zina left him in what is sometimes called a “folk divorce,” which was a thing in the 19th Century where the man and woman decided to dissolve their marriage and go their separate ways, leaving each of them free to marry again. She chose to marry Brigham for time, and Henry struggled to move on afterward...for a time. Brigham asked him to back off, and he did.
Yep, because blessings come after the trial of our faith. Heber and Vilate were sealed for time and eternity that same night as a reward for their faithfulness. Theirs was one of the very first sealings of this dispensation.Shortly after Heber’s return from England, he was introduced to the doctrine of plural marriage directly through a startling test. He had already sacrificed homes, possessions, friends, relatives, all worldly rewards, peace, and tranquility for the Restoration. Nothing was left to place on the altar save his life, his children, and his wife. Then came the Abrahamic test. Joseph demanded for himself what to Heber was the unthinkable, his Vilate. Totally crushed spiritually and emotionally, Heber touched neither food nor water for three days and three nights and continually sought confirmation and comfort from God. On the evening of the third day, some kind of assurance came, and Heber took Vilate to the upper room of Joseph’s store on Water Street. The Prophet wept at this act of faith, devotion, and obedience. Joseph never intended to take Vilate. It was all a test.” (Heber C. Kimball, Mormon Patriarch and Pioneer by Stanley B. Kimball, p.93)
- Vilate Kimball
Teenagers: Ten of Joseph’s wives were teenagers.Here, Faulk posts another little chart, which I have also linked.
This is presented somewhat disingenuously. Joseph and Helen were sealed two years after Heber and Vilate were sealed. The two incidents are not connected at all. And, as mentioned earlier, Joseph and Helen were sealed at Heber’s urging. He wanted to link his family to Joseph’s in the eternities.Instead of taking Heber C. Kimball’s wife, Vilate, as Joseph had done with others, he married Heber’s 14 year-old daughter, Helen, in May of 1843.
- Helen Mar Kimball-Smith
“The youngest was Helen Mar Kimball, daughter of Joseph’s close friends Heber C. and Vilate Murray Kimball, who was sealed to Joseph several months before her 15th birthday.” (Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo, LDS.org, Oct. 2014)Ooh, this is super dishonest framing! The first two lines in quotation marks are indeed taken from an autobiographical letter written by Helen to her children in 1881. The first is from page 482 of a book titled A Woman’s View: Helen Mar Whitney’s Reminiscences of Early Church History, and the second from page 486.
In a letter written by Helen Kimball, her father had asked her if she would be willing to be sealed to Joseph Smith, Joseph himself came to her and said,
“If you will take this step, it will ensure your eternal salvation and exaltation & that of your father’s household & all of your kindred.” She talks of her mother’s hidden grief “to see her child, who had scarcely seen her fifteenth summer, following in the same thorny path [of polygamy].” “I would never have been sealed to Joseph had I known it was anything more than ceremony. I was young, and they deceived me, by saying the salvation of our whole family depended on it.” (Helen Mar Kimball, Mormon Polygamy: A History, by LDS Historian Richard S. Van Wagoner, p.53)
But that third quotation, about how she’d never have been sealed to Joseph if she knew it was anything more than a ceremony? That’s taken from page 19 of an early anti-Mormon pamphlet called Narrative of Some of the Proceedings of the Mormons: Giving an Account of Their Iniquities by Catherine Lewis, published in 1848. She claimed to have heard Helen say this to her mother at some point, though everything in the book is suspect. It’s all pretty badly distorted from reality, which you can see for yourself just by reading it.
Helen herself certainly never backed up its claim. She did admit to being upset as a 15-year-old at being prevented from going out to dances with her friends because of the sealing, so it’s possible she said something like that at one point in her frustration and disappointment. But the circumstances surrounding it are certainly skewed, since Catherine reports it in the context of Helen refusing, after Joseph’s death, to be sealed for time as her father’s plural wife. That surely never happened. And in fact, after a few more years, Helen became a very vocal defender of plural marriage and of Joseph Smith for the rest of her life.
So, I’d take that statement with a very big grain of salt. That Faulk presents it here as if it was a direct quote from Helen’s own letter to her children is repulsive.
Joseph told a reluctant Helen Mar Kimball that if she married him it would ensure her salvation and the salvation of all her family. Imagine the burden on a 14 year old girl’s emotions of the salvation for her entire family riding on accepting Joseph’s proposal.Except that Helen herself admitted that she didn’t understand what he was trying to teach her, and neither of her parents, who were there at the time of the proposal, understood it that way at all.
It’s not confirmed that Nancy Winchester was a plural wife of Joseph Smith, though evidence leans that way. We also have no idea when that sealing would have taken place, because no records of the sealing exist. We don’t know much about her at all. Her brother Benjamin was a known and rather hostile critic of Joseph’s who never mentioned the fact that they were sealed, so either he didn’t know about it, he didn’t see anything wrong with it (which is highly doubtful), or it never happened and her inclusion on the list was a mistake.While records show Nancy was married to Joseph, no dates were written. At the time of Joseph’s death, Nancy was 15 years old. It is possible that, like Helen Mar Kimball, Nancy could have been 14.
- Nancy Winchester Smith
Eliza R. Snow listed her as one of his wives, and so did Orson Whitney, the son of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney. Helen was one of Nancy’s good friends so there’s solid evidence to believe it, but it’s not confirmed.
Unlike what is commonly taught in Sunday school lessons, marriages to young teenagers were not “common in pioneer days.”Not true, and Faulk’s evidence for this claim doesn’t even say that:
“In 1890, when the U.S. Census Bureau started collecting marriage data, it was recorded that the average age of a first marriage for men was 26 years, and the average age of marriage for women was 22 years.” (http://classroom.synonym.com/agemarriage-us-1800s-23174.html)Note that this quote says the average age was 22 years old. That means that some women were much older and some were much younger. 1890 is also half a century later than 1840, and society can change a lot in 50 years.
Craig Foster wrote a great article for the Interpreter a few years ago) which demonstrated that in frontier America in the 1800s, females often married quite young, and their husbands were usually older and more settled. It was much less common in the settled cities along the East Coast, but on the frontier (which included Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and especially Utah), it was relatively common. Men in their 20s-40s marrying teenagers was not unusual.
Even today, it’s legal for teenagers to get married. Let’s not forget that most of Joseph’s teenaged wives were 17-19 years old. Many of us in this church know women who got married at 18 or 19. While they are technically still teenagers, calling them teen brides is implies that they were underage.
The entire concept of “underage” did not exist in the 1800s. In fact, the concept of “teenagers” didn’t even exist back then. You were either a child or an adult, and there was no in-between.
Applying our societal standards to a past society and judging them for their lack of adherence to our norms is a logical fallacy known as “presentism.” I get it—today, it’s unusual and it makes us squirm to hear of girls aged 14-16 getting married. But it was also not out of place in that day and age. And, most importantly, there is no evidence of any sexual activity between Joseph and his youngest wives.
3. Mothers and Daughters: Joseph married a mother and daughter pair.She was sealed to Joseph for eternity while her husband was a faithful member of the Church, and though she and her husband both later received their endowment, they weren’t sealed at that time. She also didn’t re-seal herself to Joseph in the temple after his death the way that many of his other plural wives did. The reasons why are unclear. After her husband’s death, she was sealed for time to another man. Around 1867, after submitting an affidavit concerning her plural marriage to Joseph, she was offered the chance to be re-sealed to Joseph again, though I’m not sure if she accepted or not.
- Patty Bartlett Sessions (Mother – already married to David Sessions)
We don’t know the reasons for this sealing, just like we don’t know the reasons behind many of Joseph’s sealings to civilly married women.
Windsor Lyon was excommunicated from the Church in November of 1842. Joseph and Windsor remained good friends for the rest of Joseph’s life. There are conflicting dates from two unsigned affidavits saying that Sylvia’s sealing to Joseph either took place in early 1842 or early 1843. Brian Hales favors the later date.
- Sylvia Sessions Lyon (Daughter – already married to Windsor Lyon).
If he’s right, this appears to be one of those sealings where Joseph was sealed to a woman whose husband wasn’t (at the time) a faithful member of the Church so that she could still obtain exaltation.
Sylvia bore children with both husbands; three children with Windsor and one with Joseph. (Josephine - February 8, 1844)No, no, no. She most certainly did not have a child with Joseph. For a long time, it was considered an unproven possibility, but was never definitive. However, even the possibility was ruled out by DNA testing in 2016, seven years ago.
The fact that this is still in the LFMW after all this time caught me by surprise. We know the LFMW has been updated since its first posting, since the original FAIR rebuttal addresses differently worded accusations. There was plenty of time to correct the inaccuracy. In fact, this particular objection appears to have been added to the original text, rather than removed.
4. Pairs of Sisters: Joseph married 3 pairs of sisters.Yep, he sure did. Zina and Presendia (her name is not Presidia) were both sealed to Joseph for eternity only, with no marriage in this lifetime. But Emily and Eliza Partridge and Sarah and Maria Lawrence were all sealed to Joseph for time and eternity.
- Emily Dow Partridge and Eliza Maria Partridge.
- Sara Lawrence and Maria Lawrence.
- Zina Huntington Jacobs and Presidia Huntington Buell.
Again, though, I’m not sure why this is supposed to be a point of scandal. None of them were married against their will. They all had the choice, and they all agreed to these arrangements. Is it unusual? Sure. It’s weird, I think we can all agree with that. But is it sinful? Nope. When God commands polygamy, it’s not sinful, and levirate marriages have been around for thousands of years. This is somewhat similar to that practice, particularly in the case of Mary and Mercy Fielding and Hyrum Smith. Or, one could argue, between Zina Huntington and Brigham Young.
Remember, when plural marriage was first introduced, they weren’t really given a rule book. There are some directions and guidelines given in D&C 132, but they only cover certain situations. In the Nauvoo days, they were basically winging it. They had to adjust to the new commandment that completely upended their entire lives and then figure out the best way to live it. There was trial and error, heartache, sacrifice, and suffering involved. It was not easy for any of them, and they did the best they could. If they made mistakes, they need our grace, not our judgment.
2023.06.07 05:41 ShadowsNMirrors When Prosecutors Go Bad
 | submitted by ShadowsNMirrors to The_Digital_Detective [link] [comments] When Prosecutors Go Bad RMRI, LLC. has a long history of working criminal defense cases, and we are pretty good at it. We always produces a favorable outcome for out clients, and where we really shine is in Jury trials. We have a pretty spotless record in Jury trials, and we work very complex cases, such as computer crimes. As you work criminal defense cases, you get to know the participants, the Judges, the prosecutors, and the defense attorneys. As you continue working in this field, you learn who you like to work with and who you don't, who is pleasant and who is nasty. A good friend to RMRI, LLC., and a long-time friend to the administrator of RMRI, LLC. just got some really good news yesterday. He was convicted of a domestic violence charge that he did not commit. He just was not the type of person to do what he was charged with. His name is Paul Hoover and in 2004 his wife accused him of pulling his firearm on her and threatening her, and he was prosecuted by one of the nastiest prosecutors RMRI, LLC. has ever had the displeasure of working against. I know, I know, this is just me saying he was not guilty. Everybody says they are not guilty. Right? But below is the proof: Paul Hoover Pardon The Governor of a state does not just "willy-nilly" decide to pardon someone from a crime because his coffee creamer tasted extra good that day. It takes a lot of time, a lot of research, and a lot of people reviewing the case for the Governor of a state to pardon a person of a conviction. The reason for this pardon was that upon further review, the Governor and his legal staff determined that there was never sufficient cause to convict Paul Hoover of Domestic Assault and Unlawful Use of A Firearm to begin with. The prosecutor in this case did not care if there was ANY cause much less probable cause to convict Paul Hoover. The prosecutor's name is Merrilee Crocket and she was the prosecutor in Columbia, Missouri. It is not this one incident that would make RMRI, LLC. advocate about how reckless she was with people's lives and how nasty of a person she is, with no regard for whether the people she prosecuted were actually guilty or not. RMRI, LLC. has been to court in cases with her many times, and we were on the winning side every time. We made her dismiss a case because we challenged the evidence in a court hearing for spoliation issues, of course though she did have the "FEDs" pick the case up, the defendant's name was Chad Mullen. We were on the winning side of a case where we proved that a young lady in college had no intent to get some illegal content over LimeWire, this young lady was found not guilty on all counts. Merrilee Crocket did not care if the evidence showed there was no intent to receive the files this nineteen-year-old college student did, Merrilee Crocket was trying to put her in jail for seven years and get her on the sex offender registry for the rest of her life. This young lady's name was Kristen Lamb. Here is a link if you want to read about this case. Kristen Lamb Trial Effectively, Merrilee Crocket was trying to completely ruin this young lady's life. The reason that Merrilee Crocket like prosecuting these cases was because they were easy, all she has to do was play on the emotions of the Jury. I mean, everyone wants to convict a person that looks at child pornography whether they are guilty or not, right? Fortunately in the cases that RMRI, LLC. worked against Merrilee Crocket, RMRI, LLC. and the defense attorney "beat the bloomers off of her". RMRI, LLC. was there to help a few people that would have fallen 'victim" to Merrilee Crocket's disregard for any sign of actual innocence in her prosecutions, but she did ruin a lot of people's lives. I wonder if a person can be proud of the sum total of their life is calculated by how many people's lives they have ruined. This is what we have to demand that our system do better, hire a higher quality of person that has this type of responsibility. This is a responsibility for people's lives, nothing else should be taken more seriously than this. Effectively, what we saw here was a wrongful conviction of Paul Hoover, because the prosecutor did not care to look any further into the case. The prosecutor took an emotionally charged case and ran with it for a conviction to get a notch on her belt at the prosecutor's office, innocence be damned. This is why we are getting more and more wrongful convictions. This is why states are being sued for these wrongful convictions. Prosecutors don't care because they have a very broad form of immunity, they have Absolute Immunity Any kind of immunity for prosecutors, law enforcement, and Judges has ALWAYS been a bad idea. If the prosecutor is afraid to do their job because they can't have immunity to shield them from misdeeds, they were probably going to do something they should not have been doing to begin with, same goes for law enforcement officers and Judges. We as a society should demand more. Let's start demanding more, contact your legislature, your congress, demand better. An injustice against one, is an injustice against all. And remember: When you talk to your private investigator, ask some questions and write down his or her answers. Don't be afraid to ask questions, after all it is your money you are spending. At least ask these basic questions: (1) What is your full name, proper spelling please? (2) What is your full company name, proper spelling please? (3) How long have you been licensed in the state of Missouri? (4) Where is your office located? (5) Do you have a criminal record, if so do you have any felony convictions on your record? (6) Do you have any references?HOW TO HIRE A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR IN MISSOURI When you hire a private investigator make sure he or she is licensed in Missouri by going here: Missouri Private Investigator Licensing Also check the license thoroughly. Look at the address on the license and run a Google Map Search on it here: Google Maps After you have done these searches, look up your private investigator on CaseNet here: Missouri CaseNet Run a simple Google Search on the company name, use parentheses, such as: "Derick's Dishwasher Repair" at Google. If you see multiple felony CONVICTIONS for crimes of moral turpitude, a private investigator doing business out of a P.O. Box. or the person is licensed under a year coupled with these red flags, move on to the next private investigator on your list. Chances are you are going to get screwed out of money or pay for a very poor work product. RMRI, LLC. RMRI, LLC. Phone Number: (573) 234-4871 RMRI, LLC. Website: http://www.rmrillc.net RMRI, LLC. E-Mail: [email protected] |
2023.06.07 05:09 Aiitrus Ex parte HRO denied
This is in the state of Minnesota. I'm the respondent in this case.
Long story short a 20yo woman filed an ex parte hro on me last week. The judge denied it for "no immediate danger." She elected to have a hearing if the petition was denied. We have a hearing Tuesday June 13th on zoom.
The best part is I don't even know her in person. She's a mutual acquaintance through my fiancé. It's my fiance's ex boyfriend's daughter. The petitioner showed up at my house a few weeks ago with a camera rolling and intent to cause trouble. She rang the bell and my elderly parents answered the door. She was frantically screaming and yelling at them about how horrible of a person I am. The only way she knew my address was her father. At this point I felt my family was in danger. I scooped my parents inside the house and closed the door behind me. I placed my arm around her upper back and started escorting her off my property. That's when she maced me in my eyes in my front doorway. At this point I went into full defensive mode and chased her off my property, getting maced 4 more times in the process.
I read through her petition and she's spinning the incident as sexual assault, and it's full of other criminal allegations pertaining to separate instances that are false.
I've already retained a criminal defense attorney. I'm just wondering how I should approach this hearing, and what I can expect?
submitted by Aiitrus to legal [link] [comments]
Long story short a 20yo woman filed an ex parte hro on me last week. The judge denied it for "no immediate danger." She elected to have a hearing if the petition was denied. We have a hearing Tuesday June 13th on zoom.
The best part is I don't even know her in person. She's a mutual acquaintance through my fiancé. It's my fiance's ex boyfriend's daughter. The petitioner showed up at my house a few weeks ago with a camera rolling and intent to cause trouble. She rang the bell and my elderly parents answered the door. She was frantically screaming and yelling at them about how horrible of a person I am. The only way she knew my address was her father. At this point I felt my family was in danger. I scooped my parents inside the house and closed the door behind me. I placed my arm around her upper back and started escorting her off my property. That's when she maced me in my eyes in my front doorway. At this point I went into full defensive mode and chased her off my property, getting maced 4 more times in the process.
I read through her petition and she's spinning the incident as sexual assault, and it's full of other criminal allegations pertaining to separate instances that are false.
I've already retained a criminal defense attorney. I'm just wondering how I should approach this hearing, and what I can expect?
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Please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have and we will provide you with all the information we can! Our main priority at NightmareBeforeChristmasSvg is your complete satisfaction with our products and the service we provide. We hope you love the designs we create just as much as we do. Thank you so much for visitingNightmareBeforeChristmasSvg. contact us via email:[email protected]
submitted by fantasyanimated to u/fantasyanimated [link] [comments]
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Please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have and we will provide you with all the information we can! Our main priority at NightmareBeforeChristmasSvg is your complete satisfaction with our products and the service we provide. We hope you love the designs we create just as much as we do. Thank you so much for visitingNightmareBeforeChristmasSvg. contact us via email:[email protected]
2023.06.07 03:52 JeanMariee Thoughts, Suggestions, Ideas, HELP!
I filed for a K-1 Visa in November 2021. Today I was finally able to submit an inquiry due to my case being outside normal processing times. I got a reply back already and it says "Your case is currently delayed because the required security checks are still pending. We cannot make a decision on your case until we receive the results of these security checks"
Please does anyone have experience with this, I have so many questions, I don't know how to proceeded or how to get more answers, its so hard to talk to a person at USCIS. I hoping that I can be proactive about this, I'm sick of just sitting on my hands and waiting.
submitted by JeanMariee to USCIS [link] [comments]
Please does anyone have experience with this, I have so many questions, I don't know how to proceeded or how to get more answers, its so hard to talk to a person at USCIS. I hoping that I can be proactive about this, I'm sick of just sitting on my hands and waiting.