Linky Friday: Print & Predators
Cities:
Image by xiquinhosilva 
[Ci2] Our major cities are producing fewer black mayors as African-Americans dilute their vote by moving around.
[Ci3] A friendly reminder that just because you make more money in the city, doesn’t mean you’re making a better living there.
[Ci4] Lyman Stone looks at conservative urbanism, and how the definitions will determine success or failure.
[Ci5] No straight bars welcome here.
[Ci6] I’ve mentioned this recently but China really is home to some of the largest cities you’ve never heard of.
[Ci7] Meh.
Education:
Image by Rennett Stowe
[Ed2] Save your mental health: Quit school.
[Ed3] Avi Wolfman-Arent on how science teachers are dealing with fake news and ideological poking.
[Ed4] The California State University system is making news by ditching remedial and being required to disclose off-campus housing costs.
[Ed5] Speech codes and the tyranny of the neurotypical and a neurodiversity case against speech codes.
Media:
Image by callewaert_megane
[Me2] Andrew Willshire argues that the BBC is at risk of losing sight of its purpose.
[Me3] Well, narrative is the organization of facts, events, and trends. I don’t fully understand how they can be avoided. Anything else is a world with data but no information.
[Me4] The affirmative action story was a huge debacle for the media.
[Me5] Franklin Foer has a good piece the relationship between Silicon Valley and journalism.
[Me6] Speaking of media embarrassments, I am of the mind that Miller won that round. {More}
Technology:
Image by steevithak
[Te2] Meanwhile, robot presidents, robot citizens, and more!
[Te3] Are smartphones ruining everything?
[Te4] 5G is scaling up, and it’s a good time to have antenna real estate.
[Te5] No parcel service would insure it, so the famous Wicndows XP background image was delivered to Microsoft by hand.
[Te6] Insurers are concerned that people might overestimate the automatedness of automated automobiles.
[Te7] Not all predictions of the future are junk. This one is pretty on-point!
War:
Image by expertinfantry
[W2] Did North Korea nuke up so that it wouldn’t become Libya?
[W3] The two largest nations in the world going to war against one another would probably not be a good thing. Boxer Vijender Singh agrees, in an unusual fashion. {More}
[W4] Meanwhile, Japan is weighing strike capability.
[W5] As we look at expelled diplomats in 2017, we can also look back at 1986.
[W6] Europe is making things harder for groups trying to save refugees at sea.Image by Rennett Stowe
Ci1: These lawyers can’t go to court in California unless licensed there though.
Ci3: The standard of living is subjective though. A person who doesn’t want a big house and a big lawn but does want the culture and goods the city could offer isn’t going to find the standard of living higher.
Ci4: Conservative urbanism is probably always going to be on the fringe of conservative ideology in the United States. Most American conservatives have decided that urbanism is inherently anti-conservative since at least the end of World War II if not much earlier as the article points out. To the standard American conservatives, Americans should live in the country or at least in a single family home with a big yard.
Ed5: Neurodiversity and neurotypical are ill-defined words that I see thrown around a lot on the Internet. According to wikipedia, neurotypical isn’t even a word that psychologists and psychologists use but slang in the autistic community for people without autism. This makes people in the autistic community, the neurodiverse. This makes both neurodiversity and neurotypical political correct terms in that they are both trying to find polite ways to refer to certain people. I find it rich that a person using political correct terms is arguing for his or her right to be non-political correct.
In so much that neurotypical mean average or normal under this definition, I really don’t think that people obsessed with campus speech codes, virtue signaling, and social justice count as typical people.
Me2: It would be nice to know what the BBC’s purpose is. Most non-American countries have BBC like media services and like the BBC, the often operate more like an American commercial network than PBS because they have to appeal to a broad audience. I’m not sure why the BBC is getting signaled out for criticism except for being the most well-known one.Report
“These lawyers can’t go to court in California unless licensed there though.”
A question about bar certification – if you’re involved in Federal cases (which my understanding these are, mostly patent cases), do you need a state license for the venue in which the federal case is being heard?Report
Its a tricky question and the answer is it depends. Anybody admitted to the practice of law anywhere in the United States may practice in front of any Immigration Court, USCIS office, or Social Security Court anywhere in the United States. There is a separate patent bar that you need to pass in order to be a patent lawyer in the United States but I assume that passing it enables you to practice patent law anywhere in the United States.
Any lawyer admitted anywhere in the United States can also practice in front of any Circuit Court of Appeals if an admitted lawyer will vouch for them. If somebody was willing to sponsor me, I could be admitted to practice in front of the 7th or 8th Circuits even though I only have a New York License. District Courts must be applied for individually and I think you need to be a member of the relevant state bar but IIRC. In New York, the Southern and Eastern Districts allow you to apply for admission to them at the same time.Report
There is a lot of migration between CA & TX, so TX may have a healthy supply of lawyers who were admitted to the CA bar.Report
The link is broken. Assuming that it’s supposed to point to this Houston Chronicle story, it’s a patent law firm. There are lots of big multi-state outfits doing patent law. Years ago, when I did work that generated patent stuff, I was often on the phone with the law firm in Detroit that handled the patent work for the Denver-based company where I worked. From time to time, a group of the Detroit lawyers flew out to Denver for face-to-face meetings with management and the inventors.Report
Ci1 is fixed and Ci7 has been added.Report
In Illinois, one doesn’t need to be a member of the Illinois bar to practice in one of its district courts. One needs to be admitted to practice in one state (or D.C.), provide a certificate of good standing from its body, pay a $231 fee, and have an attorney already admitted move for your admission, vouching for your moral character (its a form to be signed). Since I’m looking at local rules, I assume they vary by state.
Traditionally, though corporations borrowed attorneys from private law firms when they had need for some specialty for their in-house work, not necessarily for court appearances. (My sense from the article is that the patent lawyers here are doing litigation, but I don’t know)Report
From what I have heard, Illinois was changing that to where an out-of-state attorney would be required to procure Illinois co-counsel, ostensibly to advise them of procedure.
Really, not much difference I can see procedurally. Illinois is really strict about notice requirements, and has separate chancery courts, but there’s not much else.
Also, fact-pleading.Report
Ed5,
Writing these “speech codes” is an exercise in stupidity in the first place.
We’re to the point where honest confusion about someone’s desired gender affiliation gets you screamed at on the street (and in small towns, too). I mean, dude, the person is silver and wears a Raggedy Ann red wig and is six foot tall. If in slacks, is it really so wrong to address said person as sir? At least the first time?
But, hell, I’m writing this on a site that has decided that a normal (non medical) word for the transsexual (or autogynephillic) is a slur.
I mean, for the love of fucking god, I do NOT expect people to put a trigger warning on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia because it’s got That Fucking Door Noise (and yes, they put it in there Just To Troll. And no, you don’t need a trigger warning just because it causes PTSD flashbacks. It’s a Fucking Door Noise).Report
Me1: You can also look at the R. Kelly story as the hip-hop equivalent of the Baby Groupies of the 1970s like Sable Star. This isn’t the first time a big named celebrity and musician used his fame to do some really immoral things.Report
W2 – North Korea nuked up so it wouldn’t become Iraq. But Libya de-WMD’d so it also wouldn’t become Iraq. (a last chapter to the story that the author yada yada’s over)
The lesson to world thus was made clear.Report
K,
Iran nuked it up so it wouldn’t become Iraq as well. They’re backing away from it now, or at least they were pre-trump.Report
W1: I see things like that and I just think “Humanity* delenda est”
I know this kind of thing has always gone on, but that doesn’t help.
(*sorry. I don’t know enough Latin to know the correct form here so I’ll just use English.Report
W3 – the risk is real, but we’re already seeing a greater risk in Kashmir, between two countries also with nukes and even greater enmity .Report
K,
We fixed that. At the beginning, Paki and India had the equivalent of eniacs running their nukes.
With a 5 minute window of “fire or you won’t ever be able to”
(Please remember, America and Russia had about 30 minutes, and the “did you guys just…” question was triggered multiple times, often by birds).Report
W5 – for a professional diplomat, Combs isn’t coming across very well. From his telling, the staff at the Soviet embassy come across as soft, whiny, and overentitled – oh, it’s ‘tiresome’ that you had to clean the urinals every day?
Boo Hoo you poor babies.
This is only a little over 5 years since an entire diplomatic mission was taken hostage for like 400 plus days. And these dips in Russia are complaining about having to clean up after themselves?Report
Ed1 If Bug really wants to shoot for an Ivy, we will support him, but both of us are graduates of a State School & neither of us have found a significant difference in the quality of our education compared to an Ivy. So we’ll encourage a state School for him.Report
My impression is that there are certain fields of endeavor where an Ivy degree matters. Some of these fields are highly lucrative. Others are less lucrative, but have other benefits. I have a relative who recently took a Ph.D. in musicology, which means an intended career in the academy. Ordinarily, the sensible response to a doctorate in musicology is to giggle uncontrollably, but in this case it is from Harvard. I am very curious to see how this plays out.Report
My impression is similar, and I think it is most apparent in fields where you don’t have good objective measures of quality and where you start your career — or if you start it at all — is more a function of connections and networks. A bright undergraduate who wants to be a journalist (some would say that’s a contradiction) and a handful of clippings has a much better shot if those clippings appeared in the Harvard Crimson or the Yale Daily News because he or she knows people who know people. Someone in the sciences, not so much.
If your field generally requires graduate education, where you got your undergraduate degree doesn’t matter that much, within reason. The admissions offices at the elite graduate programs know that X State or some small regional liberal arts college is good, and if you have a sterling record there you’ll beat out a middling Ivy undergrad.
But then the quality/connections-network issue repeats itself. A new Ph.D. in a hard science can point to real, measurable indicia of quality. A kid fresh out of law school can’t. Is a middling Columbia Law graduate better than a Brooklyn Law Review editor? I don’t know and neither do the BigLaw hiring partners. But guess who gets the easiest shot at what are regarded as the best jobs?Report
A recommendation, if I may: a smaller school that doesn’t rely heavily on TA labor for the intro level classes. Or, start at a smaller place where you know the credits will transfer, then go to the “name” school for upper level classes.
I know this is advice older than the legendary grand-dad’s underwear, but….I wanted to go to a Public Ivy and did, and in retrospect, would have been better off at a smaller school.
Of course, by the time Bug is old enough, we may just have gone to neural transplants/robots took all the jobs and everyone gets UBI/some other option.
but as someone who teaches at a small regional school and does her darned best to give the students the best education I possibly can – I like to speak up for small schools.Report
I’ve long considered a similar approach, with the added wrinkle that if they wanted to go out of state (and I do think there is value in traveling away from home for college), I’d encourage them to move to the desired state, establish residence while working or doing something else worthwhile, and then applying to school. “Gap years” are common in Europe and I think they can have real value.Report
Speaking only for myself, a gap year would have been a bad idea for me. I probably (or at least possibly) would have been drawn too much into my job (fast food) and would have been too tempted to go the shift manager to assistant manager route instead of going to college. That would have been a poor fit for me but still something I might have done.
I also really needed to leave my parents by that time in my life. My parents were good people, but I needed to strike out on my own and under a gap year I wouldn’t have been able to do that. (However, under a gap year where one moves to another state, as you suggest, that would have been possible.)
I should also say–and this sounds weird–I’m not sure I would have known *how* to do a gap year. I wouldn’t have known that it would be okay to go back to my former teachers and ask them for letters of rec even though I was no longer a student, for example. And also, I didn’t quite know how to find college applications. Most of that probably seems laughable to the others here (and it’s kind of laughable to me, now)–and if I had had the will to do it, I would’ve found out how to do things without too much trouble–but no one in my immediate family had gone to college or knew the process, so they couldn’t help me. And I might have opted on my own for the easier-in-the-short-term path of not trying. And I say this as someone who was pretty close to the top of my class, did well on most of my AP exams, and really liked school. [ETA: “really liked” is an understatement. I was passionate about learning and about things like history, literature, and foreign languages.]
Again, that’s only me. Others’ mileage may vary. I just have an idea of the choices I probably would have made, and they wouldn’t have been good ones for me. This is just speculation against a counter-factual, but I suspect that if I hadn’t gone straight out of high school, I might never have gone.Report
Ci2: Standard of living is relative here. I want access to places like the Brooklyn Academy of Music or CalPerformances, not a large house and yard.
Ed1: I’ve been thinking about intelligence recently and there might be different kinds here. There is the kind of Intelligence that lets someone just thrive in a system for financial/personal gain and this would seem to be the kind of intelligence that the author dislikes. These are the kids who just study hard, get good grades, go to an Ivy-league or equivalent and then get the top-level Consulting, Banking, Tech, Law, Business jobs, etc. Then there is a more out there type when intelligence causes you to question the system. The second group can often have a rougher time of it economically but do just as well in school and still go to the Ivies.
I suppose the response of the first group would be what’s the point in questioning the system?
Ed5: I think Lee’s points are salient here. I don’t think the Free Speech issue is quite as bad as the critics say and a lot of these essays read to me as shock about getting pushback for using bigoted and offensive statements towards minorities. “What do you mean I can’t accuse my Jewish classmates of controlling the media and finance in a ‘joking’ tone anymore?” seems to be the real issue.Report
Ed5: That wasn’t exactly the point I’m making but close enough. My main point was that the really vigorous defenders of Social Justice type speech aren’t really that neurotypical, in the sense of having an ordinary, average mind either because ordinary, average people don’t spend that much time thinking about these issues one way or another.Report
Ed5: have you seen Chris-chan’s “I am looking for a boyfriend-free girl” sign?
I do, in fact, find it hilarious that these free speech codes can be wielded to completely eliminate entire schools of art from the curriculum. Shit, that would be a fucking hilarious troll.
(Yes, I really, really badly want to do this)
“You can’t display this art! It’s anti-Semitic!”
“But, you’re saying that we can’t even teach an entire country’s art?”
“Yup! The teaching of it in that country has inherited biases, and I can show it to you in the artwork itself.”
Now the fun part: Name the country.Report
I’m kind of agreement with Kimmi here. The SJ types require more than just common decency but saying the right things in the right way in all circumstances. They turn simple politeness into a cudgel they can attack you with.Report
I think part of the argument around “standard of living” is that increased cost of living in certain cities may eat up whatever salary increases you see compared to other areas, and possibly then some. So you won’t be able to afford to take advantage of what the city has to offer because the $10K raise you got to work in the city was quickly eaten up by a $1K/month increase in basic living expenses.Report
Ci7- to get my daily allowance of tu quoque, the Catholic Herald should remember that medieval Gothic churches were the Brutalitism of their day – i.e. specifically designed to *not* be ‘human scale’.Report
Ci7 is something that I partially agree with. Most modern architecture really isn’t the problem even though it might not be to people tastes. What was the problem was that designing a city that’s convenient for driving but also dense enough to be walkable and pedestrian and transit friendly seems impossible. Car friendly cities requires wide roads, high ways that cut through neighborhoods, and a very generous amount of parking. All of these things really make medium to high density places where you can take transit or walk around difficult to pull off.Report
Employers continue to refuse to wage raises even in a tight labor market:
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2017/08/more_americans_would_rather_not_work_than_take_jobs_for_the_stingy_wages.htmlReport
It would be much easier to take the MSM seriously here if they didn’t also produce propaganda pieces claiming that we need more immigration to solve the labor shortage
While there is supposedly a labor shortage hitting California farmers agricultural metros in California have the nation’s highest unemployment rates.Report
There is a labor shortage, people are refusing to work.Report
Are we still at 39 states that it is more profitable to be on welfare than have a $8/hr job?
What I am saying is there may not be a refusal to work, just a rationalization of a sort.Report
Many/most of those ag jobs are physically demanding and performed under harsh conditions. It is unlikely that I (to pick an example) could handle them.Report
Are they worse than coal mining? Employers can also make them less harsh, for example the meat packing industry has backslide in both pay and working conditions in the past 30 years as it has returned to immigrants as a souse of labor.Report
What exactly are you arguing here, @dan-d ?Report
That immigration allows employers to get away with crappy pay and working conditions.Report
This assumes that immigrant workers are basically scabs and don’t care about pay and working conditions. This isn’t true though. Immigrants workers in the United States were long on the for front of protesting and striking for pay and better working conditions. During the 19th century, nativists arguing for immigration quotas did so because immigrants were really involved in unionizing and radical politics like socialism or anarchism. This trend continue into the 20th century. Hispanic immigrants are heavily involved with the SEIU and other labor organizations.Report
Can’t we assume that immigrant workers are basically scabs and more pleased with their pay/working conditions in the US than with what is available back home?Report
It is possible for immigrants to be involved in union activism and for the presence of larges numbers of immigrants to drive down pay at the same time.Report
You mean illegals are driving unskilled wages down? That’s unpossible.Report
Pay enough and you’ll find people to pick your fruit. If this keeps up, I’m sure that’s what will happen. A tiny increase in the price of produce will support an increase in picker wages and the food will be picked.
Realistically, even if picking strawberries is very slow work, how much human touch time does picking a strawberry take? Even at $45 an hour, how much per basket of strawberries is that?
We’ll live.Report
From what I remember of ag markets, the problem isn’t that the farmers don’t want to pay more, it’s they almost can’t, or are horribly afraid to, because the buyers won’t pay more for the produce just because the farmers costs went up.Report
Argentine strawberries are good.
What you’re suggesting is that the labor for hand-picked ag products is not worth that much. If its not worth that much, I don’t know why we would want to subsidize it with waivers of labor laws (LA Times reported half of immigrant farmworkers crossed illegally). It certainly does not ameliorate wage inequality. The alternatives are increased mechanization and greenhouse production.Report
Well, no, I’m not suggesting that. I don’t think.
What I am saying is that farmers have a strong incentive to suppress wages as much as possible to keep costs down because the market for produce is not as neat as people like to imagine (it’s almost always a buyers market, rather than a sellers).
We subsidize it with waivers of labor laws because somebody is opposed to the idea of the price of produce reflecting reality, and those somebodies have political influence.Report
Well, I understood you as saying that the payable wage was constrained by the consumer. In agriculture that turns a lot on the availability of substitutes. I can either buy this fruit from the U.S. or Mexico, I can either buy this fruit or a different one.
Unless there is a specific soil or climate limitation, the only advantage the U.S. can bring to global markets is using capital investment to increase productivity. We cannot win the race to the bottom by maintaining total labor compensation at third-world levels, and we cannot expect people to pay double the price for produce than what is available from imports.Report
we cannot expect people to pay double the price for produce than what is available from imports.
Call it organic, pain-free, and sun-grown without aluminum nitride ceramics.Report
Technology will make food so cheap, that only the rich will pay for food bundled with virtue.Report
Your destroying the Farm to Fork movement!Report
Except your farmers in Argentina can not sell direct to US grocery stores. The sell to produce distributors, who in turn sell to grocery stores, and who mark-up the imported produce until it’s in the ball park of other sources (or above that, if it has a greater demand). And I can not easily buy from said farmers.
In the states, about the closest a farmer can get to selling direct to a consumer is to either run their own store front, or join a Farmer’s Market, or cultivate relationships with local stores. Joining a farm co-op can help with leveraging distributors.
And that’s before we even talk about the various regulations and subsidies and whatnot that control the prices even further.
It’s a big ugly mess.Report
And isn’t this a big template for your typical SIlicon Valley tech setup — replace all of the middlemen between producer and end user with yourself? IIRC this has been attempted for groceries a lot with little tangible success. Blue Apron, for instance, just laid off a quarter of its workforce. Amazon is starting to approach the process with auto-repeat for certain products, but for perishables like fruit and vegetables, that’s going to be really hard to get scheduled in advance because the logistics of moving food that will rot if left warehoused or in transit for too long are fairly demanding. The things Amazon is having success at moving to consumers are non-perishable goods.Report
Burt,
My friend who started a “Make your own Meals” thing as performance art had to cancel it when he started making money hand over fist. (apparently that wasn’t part of the business plan)Report
@troublesome-frog @oscar-gordon
I don’t know enough about agriculture to say but the article makes it clear that this problem goes beyond farm labor to pick fruits and veggies and also plagues the construction and other industries.
Fruits and vegetables might be one thing but it seems to me that for something like roofing, a company should be able to tell customers “We have a labor shortage and need to pay more to get workers. So we can either charge you X to cover this cost or not do the job at all. Which do you pick?”
But this isn’t happening and it seems many employers are still in the idea that the wage for work X should be iron-bound regardless of the laws of supply and demand.Report
Oh no, I agree, if employers can’t find workers and they haven’t started offering more money, I have no sympathy.Report
Just to be clear here, who are these agri american producers in competition with, and what are those other countries paying?Report
For fruits and veggies, the competition is everything from Mexico south to Chile, depending on the produce and the season. In 2015, Mexican ag workers in Baja California had a two-month strike seeking a hike to $13 per day, plus better enforcement of overtime laws.Report
Now it looks like $13 Baja faces competition from lower wage regions of Mexico.
My point is, we put these farmers out of business not because of their ability/capability to be competitive with other producers, but because we demand minimum wages in the local markets far beyond what they are competing against.
The farmers aren’t suffering because of their own poor efficiencies in capital formation, but barriers placed socially on capital formation.
Not saying anything here about morality or right and wrong, just a awareness that there is a barrier to capital formation due to social constructs for the american farmer that do not exist in it’s competition.
Can anyone claim a comparative advantage(plus shipping costs) of other locations over the US when that barrier is removed?Report
In every other market, that negotiation is implicit in the price. The price of construction already goes up and down, mostly based on swings in demand, but labor is just another supply side factor. Construction prices go up and we do a little less construction overall, but that’s about it.Report
So maybee the MSM should refrain from claiming that we need more immigration to solve the Labor Shortage. How many members of the media have nannys and housecleaners? Maybee that has something to do with the way they report, Matthew Yglesias has said that immigration is good because it allows him to hire household help.Report
OK, NOW I understand your point!Report
We used to pay a substantially larger percentage of our incomes for food. If the price goes up the tiny amount it costs to pay pickers slightly more, I doubt the strawberry market will collapse.Report
Ed5: So, um, you’re quoting a Professor guy who George is quoting as saying that that Google Memo is fair and accurate representation of the science involved.
Is this because you think that trolls make good linkbait, or is there some other reason?
[Please note: this is not nearly as egregious as quoting a date-rapist, which someone else has done on this site].Report
Ed5 — Oh hogwash. Neurodiversity is not a free pass to spout any racist or sexist nonsense that crosses your mind.Report
Eh, a chunk of nerdy white guys are also going to find a way to argue that in reality, they’re the oppressed minority.Report
Still, one does kind of have to feel sorry for Chris-chan, and his sign
“Looking for a boyfriend-free girl”Report
I knew someone whose kid had Asperger’s Syndrome and his line (as to why he worked so hard with his kid) was “Asperger’s doesn’t mean you’re allowed to be an ass.”Report
I want to provide an example of how high SES liberals rig the economy in their favor against the proles.
Pepsi to lay off 80 to 100, blames soda tax
McDonald’s, Walgreens, 7-Eleven hit with lawsuits over Cook County soda pop tax
The Byzantine Soda tax throes blue collar workers out of their jobs but scumbag lawyers get rich off the lawsuits that it creates.Report
Being high SES is emotional labor that lower SES people never have to put up with.Report
Defect till it hurts dude. Did you ever get out of the population center you were in?Report
Is there a reason why you believe Pepsi? I mean, if I’m a massive company that wants to lay off some folks, I’m going to find some reason to blame liberals, especially since I know as a result, a massive chunk of the population will unquestionably believe me.
I mean, every premium increase after the passage of the ACA was blamed on that by conservatives and health insurance companies, despite continued larger premium increases in prior years to the passage of the ACA. It’s almost liked the insurance companies passed the blame.Report
Because the soda tax advocates claimed the intent was to reduce soda consumption. If you reduce soda consumption it will lead to soda companies laying people off.Report
I think the claims were mixed; it seems like the Philadelphia mayor thought that the sin tax would raise revenues and he accused Satan’s little helpers of raising soda costs so high that people bought soda in New Jersey. Shouldn’t there be job opportunities across the river?Report
And the tax hasn’t worked.
http://freebeacon.com/culture/study-philadelphia-tax-makes-soda-expensive-beer/Report
So apparently Charles Murray tweet positively about a Megan McCardle column reflects poorly on her.
https://twitter.com/edroso/status/896081468677435394
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/896081744012623872Report
Ed2 [quitting PHD programs because they’re bad for mental health]:
I haven’t read the study, but I’d be interested to know if those “rates” have at least as much to do with the fact (if it is a fact) that graduate students have more access to mental health care than non-graduate students?
No, no, no! Black lung was much worse.
Look, I’m not against quit-lit. I might write a piece myself some day. I’m not against discouraging people from making the mistake of getting a humanities PHD. I’m not against reminding grad students that they do have the option to quit. I’m still bitter about my decision to get a PHD. (Still, I benefited in some ways, and even if I hadn’t, it was my decision.)
But as bad as it can be, it’s a much better fate than a lot of others suffer. Dear PHD students: You’re not peculiarly oppressed!Report
you know who else drive their motor vehicles in an unsafe manner?Report
https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/896442048928260096Report
Shortly before the reporter got punched in her face, she said the car was a Dodge Challenger with no plates. Dodge Challengers are man’s version of the honey badger.
Think the Dodge Challenger cares about a bunch of protesters? No, the Dodge Challenger don’t care. It just eats what it finds.Report
It had plates.
And its brake lights were on. I’ll leave it at that.Report
From the VIN, it’s a 2010 model with a pretty normal engine (about 245 hp). From the picture, it looks like there might be a dent right behind the driver’s door handle.
Anyway, a Hellcat or Demon would’ve inflicted vastly more injuries because of their ridiculous acceleration. I don’t know if a pedestrian could even see a Demon coming at them because it goes so close to light speed.Report
A police helicopter went down in the woods after circling the antifa protesters. Two probably dead.
lots of pics at the Daily Mail.Report
A member of the Kennedy family?Report
Divorce or War.Report
So far, both this and the helicopter appear to be actual accidents. Still, there’s the question of whether/when the political classes in some number of states might say, “We’re not willing to fund Reconstruction 3.0.”Report
How many enthusiastic amateurs do you need, do you think, in the absence of funding?Report
What makes you say the car was an accident?Report
Here’s the picture. If he was doing it on purpose and was serious, he’d have killed a lot more than one person. Maybe not the 86 killed in Nice, but more than one.Report
The momentum of the Challenger was arrested by it ramming into another car that’s just ahead of it in that pic (just behind those people), and that car hit another one.
The Challenger then reversed at high speed, badly damaged. Soon after (perhaps within a minute, but maybe more, but the car didn’t go farther than a few blocks) it stopped, and then police arrested the driver.Report
The driver has been identified, a 20-year old from Maumee Ohio, 15 miles outside Toledo.Report
And given that the local authorities have preferred a charge of second-degree murder, I was almost certainly wrong.Report
Why do you think that divorce is even possible? The general theory behind the divorce or war settlement is that Red America, Trump’s America, or whatever you want to call it will gladly accept a peaceful separation from Blue America or Clinton’s America if they were allowed to do as they please within their borders. There isn’t a lot of evidence for this from my perspective. At least a minority or even a plurality of them seem to want to impose their vision for the United States on the entire United States.Report
Why do you think that divorce is even possible?
I actually think that divorce is inevitable.
What I am wondering is if it happens before the war (and, thus, might actually go so far as to prevent the war) or if it happens after the war (with substantially more than 600,000 fewer people).
I’m hoping that it’s even possible because of that >600,000 number.
But you may be right. That might be a pipe dream.Report
I don’t think there is going to be either a divorce or a war. Rather, a paradigm shift. A realignment, if you will.
That is what I am reading in the Trump/Bernie tea leaves.Report
Americans are fat. So that will help us avoid a war, maybe.
I don’t see many other reasons to get my hopes up.Report
The main thing that I am expecting in the short term is repurposed statements made about Muslim Extremists in the days following 9/11 and/or the 2nd Intifada.
You know, stuff like “not all domestic terrorists are alt-right Nazis, but all alt-right Nazis are domestic terrorists” and “An extremist right-winger will run over you with his car. A moderate right-winger will hope that an extremist right-winger will run you over.”
Stuff like that.Report
You’re not thinking this through as a project to convince the political class in 38 states to decide an exit amendment is in their interest. What it takes will vary from state to state.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that what Alabama’s political class wants is a Baptist theocracy, no votes for blacks, and they don’t care at all about whether California makes investments in the state. In Arizona, OTOH, the Mormons are a thing (and it hasn’t been that long since the Baptists were denouncing them as a cult), blacks aren’t even the second largest minority, and they care very, very much about California investments. If California wants to leave, Arizona is already more than half-way there.Report
Democrats are only in full control (governor and both houses) in six states: Hawaii, California, Oregon, Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Hawaii, California, and Oregon could form a potential block, but the others aren’t viable on their own.Report
Well, I’ve always asserted that if a partition occurs, it will be into a small number of large pieces, not lots of small pieces. A corollary of that is the issues driving a successful partition will probably not be the ones that people are howling about today (or at least not entirely those issues). I point at issues/patterns/trends in the West that are suggestive: water, energy, public lands, differences in how government works compared to most of the non-West (ie, ballot initiatives, the fourth branch of government), and more.
Taking the liberty of putting words in @jaybird ‘s mouth (fingers?), while he and I may both say “divorce”, the issues where he brings it up are unworkable as a basis for a partition.Report
Re: Ed1
For god’s sake, that article is about Yale. Yale has been like that since at last the early 20th century. It has always had great students, but it has always been noted for cranking out conformist bankers. Sure, there are Yalies who have fought the system, but the sensible ones transfer to Harvard or even Princeton which are wild and crazy places in comparison.
The marvel at most of the Ivies and a few top technical schools is that the kids do what other kids at other schools can barely do, and they do it at a walk. It lets the faculty skip over the basics and get miles ahead.Report
These people don’t want a divorce. They want a marriage where they are the only ones with a say.
They can either cease wanting that, or War will be chosen for them.Report
Fair enough.
Somewhere, Chernyshevsky is laughing.Report
I remembered something.
A million years ago, before the election, I came up with a formula for whether or not Trump would win:
There’s a similar formula for there being a Democratic wave next November. Whatever the number is for there being a Democratic wave in 2018 is a number much lower than T.Report
My money’s on the trolls.Report
Assuming the “they” is white supremacists, I find this an odd thing to assert. Let’s say a bunch of white supremacists tried to have just one town in the entire country that they could run according to their own values, discriminate to their heart’s content — including the town government, town stores, town housing & apartments, etc. Would the rest of the country allow this? Pretty obviously not — they’d run afoul of countless anti-discrimination laws, and lawyers and activists would have them under a microscope. Obviously they’d also have a hard time dealing with the perfectly legal but constant protests and boycotts.
Maybe several decades ago you could say that only their side wanted to tell everyone else what to do, but in 2017 that’s pretty obviously not true.Report
Its been strongly argued here and in other places that Nazi’s are really a bred of left-wing socialists.
Look at who they came out with in “Unite the Right” rally. Neo-Nazi’s know their potential friends, allies and coalition partners are right-wing extremists with racist views.
It was the same for the real Nazi’s, as the American knockoffs. The Nazi’s themselves knew where they belonged and acted on it. Claiming they are secret leftist has long been completely bogus.Report
Do you know how clueless American Nazis are? They’re basically like Satanists, in it to be edgy.
But the uniting of national socialism, which is staunchly anti-capitalist, with the KKK, which was all for the rights of rich, ultra-capitalist plantations to own slaves, show the vast failures of the leftist progressives.
Progressives are all about the divisions of identity politics, and kept dividing people up until the left screams at each other over gender, race, abortion, lesbians, trans, trans Hispanic lesbians, illegal alien trans Hispanic lesbians, and gay Muslims for sharia. They’re all about division, and that’s how they lost over a thousand legislative seats, a slew of governorships, and all three branches of the federal government.
In contrast, The ultra-capitalist KKK has made common cause with national socialists, the emphasis on socialist. How can this be? Because they are all about coming together and comprising to get something done. Sure, the KKK believes in owning slaves, but under National Socialism they wouldn’t have to buy their own slaves. Their slaves would be provided for them by the state, just as Nazis provided slaves to various armaments industries during the war. Thus the KKK is seeking free slaves, and since they won’t have any money invested in their slaves, and since the Nazis don’t really care if the KKK killed slaves who get out of line, the discipline can be much tighter.
Now of course it’s bad enough that the KKK wants slaves, as this makes them lazy. But now they’re not even wanting to put in the effort to buy them. They want free government slaves. Now that’s really, really lazy. What they’re doing will lead to the destruction of the white man’s will to work, his initiative, his drive. Blacks, Mexicans, and Jews will be the only productive people around, while white folks will sit around saying “Darn it Sharlene, we need to get our congressman to assign us more slaves so you don’t have to keep fetching my beer when I’m out there supervising!”Report
Yes, Nazi’s finding allies with other racist right-wingers is completely the result of American progressives. That’s why they coalitioned with the notoriously socialistic DVNP, offspring of those famous Marxist parties, the German Conservative Party and the German Fatherland party. Then they were put into power by those devious old socialists, Hindenberg and von Papen.Report
George,
Fuck off. You don’t need to worry about running into genuine American Nazis.Report
Ci4: My own perception is that both so-called conservative urbanism and the current incarnation of Richard Florida have the same goal: lots of modest cities of 50,000 or so people with a single central core. Florida’s would be more crowded (more apartments, more public transit), but the general scale is the same. I find it interesting that for most of my life, I’ve lived in places where that type of city has never existed, and is unlikely to ever exist.Report