Wednesday Writs for 6/24
Authority of Law outside the United States Supreme Court. Photo by by Matt H. Wade via Wikimedia Commons.
Note: Due to a heavy work load at my paying gig, full case write-ups will occur bi-weekly for the time being, unless time permits. Thanks! -Em
WW1: Senator Mike Braun, R-Indiana, has introduced a bill to reform qualified immunity. Under Braun’s proposal, an officer would enjoy QI “only when they can prove their alleged conduct had previously been authorized by federal or state law, or when a court has found the alleged unlawful conduct was consistent with the U.S. Constitution and federal laws.” As discussed recently, the current state of the law provides the opposite, in which QI applies unless the conduct has been found unconstitutional previously, creating an endless loop. The problem is this: must the officer’s action have been affirmatively condoned, or will silence be deemed sufficient approval? Does the fact that QI has prevented so many incidents from reaching adjudication essentially mean that the conduct has been condoned by a Court?
WW2: President Trump announced he will sign an Executive Order protecting “historic” statutes from being torn down by protesters–hoodlums, anarchists, and agitators, according to the president– acknowledging that such destruction is already a violation of the law.
WW3: Interesting headline out of Idaho: “Far-right lawmakers to try to hold own special session, despite constitution, law.” Their stated goal is to overturn their governor’s executive orders regarding coronavirus restrictions. Providing security: Ammon Bundy of the 2016 Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Siege in Oregon, whose group will provide armed crowd control.
WW4: A convicted rapist in Pennsylvania will have his appeal of his conviction heard in the state Supreme Court. The Court has agreed to hear argument on whether the trial court erred in allowing the testimony of five women other than the victim in the case that the man had drugged and raped them, as was alleged at the trial. Secondly, the man says the Court should have thrown out the case because of a prosecutor’s alleged promise not to bring charges. The convicted rapist is a former comedian and television star.
WW5: An effort is underway to remove a loophole in the state constitution of Ohio, which permits slavery as punishment for crime. No word yet on whether the group behind the push intends to focus on the Thirteenth Amendment next.
WW6: The Supreme Court ruled this week that the SEC may only take assets from securities fraud defendants up to the amount of the profits obtained via fraud. Cops can still take your car if you have weed in it, though.
WW7: A tale of two headlines: Why Trump Keeps Losing at the Supreme Court vs. How the Supreme Court is Quietly Enabling Trump
Assuming this made it into law, this is my concern as well. It makes me wonder if the current state of QI is simply because judges are loathe to set precedent in such cases that might get overturned on appeal or hurt them in an election, etc.; or is it the result of judges doing whatever they can to protect cops from accountability? If the former, I think we’ll be fine, if the latter, I think we’ll see a whole new paradigm of judicial shenanigans in order to protect cops.Report
Qualified immunity is largely a creature of the federal courts, where judges are not elected. Even QI’s defenders will mainly concede — indeed, some will insist — that, doctrinally, QI is a mess and needs to be straightened out. But that’s hard work. And nothing I have seen convinces me that legislative tinkering will do anything but make it messier.Report
Does “messier” mean “worse”?Report
“Messier” generally means worse because it makes it harder for judges to come to sensible resolutions of real-life cases. No one, pro- or anti-QI, can look at the current state of doctrine and deny that it is too messy to guide judges. I have my own ideas how to clean it up, but nobody has given me a robe. Most proposals I have seen, short of outright abolition, would likely be even messier than current law. Abolition, being a bright-line rule, would not be “messy,” since there would be no doctrine to apply, but, as I have suggested before, advocates of abolition will likely find themselves in the position of the dog who has been chasing a car and has no idea what to do when it stops. Messy and otherwise unsatisfactory as QI opinions can be, they may be better, from the point of view of abolitionists, than a bunch of opinions where courts say “I believe the cops” or “You don’t have the rights you’d like to think you have.”Report
How are judges doing when it comes to sensible resolutions of real-life cases under the current system?Report
As I said, not very well. But I doubt that the alternatives I have seen would be better.Report
Well, my take is that the system we have now resulted in, among other things, riots across the country.Report
Tangential to WW1:
Schumer signals that Democrats will block GOP police reform bill
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) signaled on Tuesday that Democrats are prepared to block a GOP police reform bill.
Schumer, speaking from the Senate floor, sent his strongest warning yet that the Republican bill — spearheaded by Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the only Black GOP senator — will not advance and urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to back down.
“We Democrats are certain that the McConnell plan will not, indeed cannot, result in any legislation passing. It’s clear that the Republican bill, as is, will not get 60 votes. There’s overwhelming opposition to the bill in our caucus,”
Schumer said.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/504068-schumer-signals-that-democrats-will-block-gop-police-reform-bill
And the perfect become the enemy of the good…
Also, RE WW4, it is odd that you don’t mention Cosby in the blurb.Report
I doubt it’s really the perfect being the enemy of the good, as much as the Democrats don’t want to be seen as not owning this and letting the GOP take point.Report
“Also, RE WW4, it is odd that you don’t mention Cosby in the blurb.”
I assumed that was because doing so may influence how folks interpret the proceedings.Report
That was quite intentional.Report
Are there any Pennsylvania practitioners out there who know how PA appellate procedure works? Did the PA Supreme Court have to take the appeal or did it have discretion to deny it? If it did have discretion whether to take the appeal or not, is there any significance to its taking it other than that there are legal issues that can be argued with a straight face?Report
What if the R proposal isn’t good though? I’d say it’s weak sauce that doesn’t go far enough. We can and should get more reform then the R’s are offering.Report
Great! It would be something that we can build on then, right!
But, no.Report
The whole “better than nothing” debate is important and there really isn’t a fine line between “trivially better than nothing” and “not merely trivially better than nothing”.
I would like to know if this bill is merely trivially better than nothing. If it is merely trivially better than nothing, then we need to come up with a better bill. If it is not merely trivially better than nothing, it’s something that should be supported (and we can discuss what additional reforms need to be implemented).
Even though it’s not the reform that I’d *LIKE*, I do think that not merely trivially better than nothing moves us in a better direction than arguing that it’s not a silver bullet that will magically fix everything.Report
So, maybe we need some sort of omnibus “Police Reform Bill?”
Something like, oh, I don’t know, a “Crime Bill?”
Unintended consequences have had a record way of biting us in the ass lately. And biting Black Folk in the ass dramatically. As the tortoise said, slow and steady wins the race.Report
We should get more now. The R’s are aiming for as little as they can get away with. The D’s are pushing for more reforms. Surely the R’s can at least negotiate with the D’s to offer more and work with the D’s. Wouldn’t that be good.Report
Isn’t there a process by which other legislators can edit a bill, maybe amend it, that kind of thing? You know, take the bill Scott put forth and tack on a few more things.Report
A lovely little speech.
If the bill gets shot down, I’d like to come back to this in a year or so and see what has been accomplished in its stead.
If what happens instead of this bill is better, lemme know. You can say “I told you so!” and remind me and I will write an essay doing a compare/contrast and conclude with a sentence like “I am delighted to eat this tasty, tasty crow.”
Report
Negotiating to get somewhere is always good. I simply fear that as one part of that negotiation has already signaled that what the majority comes up with is no good, the perfect will be the enemy of any good.
If the D’s come up with something that the R’s like, awesome. And it will be just as stupid if McC unilaterally decides to tank anything from that side of the aisle. (All that said, I am a proponent of going slowly, as I do not want another Crime Bill disaster of foreseeable consequences. But, that is just me apparently)Report
I just read the Senate bill, and I’m sure the people who wrote it thought they were giving away the store. From what I read, the Dem fear is that amendments will not be considered, and that the bill would become law as written. The chances of this thing getting through the House as written, however, are nil.
One section I found interesting was the Closing Law Enforcement Consent Loophole Act. Under this law sexual contact is prohibited. The punishment is fining, imprisonment, or both. I’m not sure we want to deal with rapists wearing a badge by fining them.Report
“Duty Booty” is one of those things that sounds like a strawman. “That can’t be legal in 32 states! You’re making things up!”Report
Heh. I’ve never heard that. The things you need laws for are just mind boggling.Report
Duty Booty should not need a law. It’s rape under duress (the threat, implied or otherwise, of arrest being the force applied).
If a cop and a citizen have sparks fly, they can exchange numbers and meet up when they are off duty.Report
You just ruined every cop porn movie ever made.
(I agree.)Report
Senator Scott gave a long talk about the bill, and how he told the Democrats they could have five amendments. They said “No.” So he told them they could have twenty amendments. They said “No.” It went on and on, and he finally realized they were never going to allow such a bill to pass, even though it goes further than the Democrat bill, because of some pretty bad reasons.
Tim Scott’s discussion about itReport
Interesting. Sen. Scott makes a good point about how some measures the Dems seek are not really available to federal law. Really, the only federal control available is withholding of funds.
In the past, the feds have coerced states into lowering the speed limit or mandating seat belt use through the threat of not allocating highway funds for states that don’t fall in line. Today I saw a clip from Fox News where Sen. Loeffler called for withholding highway funds from cities that cut their police budget.
So, here’s an interesting thought experiment. Sen. Scott’s bill allows for a maximum of 25% of federal police grants to local authorities to be withheld if certain guidelines are not met. Say a Dem. senator proposes 100% instead. Should it pass?Report
Perhaps. The things is, the federal money isn’t a major component of local police budgets, and I could easily see many mayors deciding to virtue signal by saying they no longer accept any fascist right-wing federal funding for law enforcement. At a 25% cut, they couldn’t make that claim, even if the federal money is a pittance.
NPR story on federal police funding
From that, it looks to be about $400 million a year. Spread across the US, that’s hardly more than a dollar per person.Report
WW1: I like how the burden has shifted. I understand how, in the heat of a handful of moments, cops need to make a split-second decision and that means that some of them are going to make sub-optimal ones.
But I very much dislike the emphasis on “how could they have known that shooting the kids’ dog wasn’t covered?” rather than on questions that non-sociopaths might ask.Report
Oh, and because I think WWII is the perfect place to put it
Report
Interesting. But maybe the onus should be on the old guard to adjust to the young guard?Report
Well, that is what we have elections for.
Otherwise, we are just spitting into the wind on Twitter.Report
Like the elections that were held to erect these statues in the first place?Report
Exactly! That was a younger group supplanting an older group.
(Had the older group wanted the statues they would already be there.)Report
Once again- The governments which authorized those statues were installed as a result of lawless mob violence which disenfranchised the black population.
The Jim Crow governments were not the legitimate holders of power since they didn’t have the consent of the governed.Report
Why, its almost as if a group of people who were told to change at the point of a gun, did not accept that change!
Whoever would have thunk?
Maybe burning the village to save it didn’t work…Report
You keep making my point.
The Confederates rejected the surrender terms, and refused to accept the legitimacy of the government, even to this day.Report
They accepted surrender terms. The people coming along 150 years later keep changing the story of what they wanted.Report
No, they didn’t.
The massacres and lawless mob violence occurred just a few years after Appomattox in a successful campaign to overthrow the legitimate governments of Reconstruction.
The statues and the governments which authorized them were the act of revolution.Report
“Like the sand of an hourglass, these are the shifting goalposts of our times”
The only thing you are showing is that you cannot change people’s minds with the barrel of a gun. And you keep showing this over, and over and over.
@Lee, I am a jew. I would gladly stand next to any Nazi, Klansman, or any other person whom I may find loathsome to defend their rights. Why? Not only because I already know the system we have created is better than their ideology, but because they are human and deserve everything a human deserves. Just like Bill Cosby, Just like Charles Manson, just like every person falsely accused.
I am not defending slavery, I am speaking against the attempts at defining morals as only what one set of politics decides, sans democracy. Of delegitimizing anyone we don’t like without taking into account what they believe and giving them the chance to speak. Of trying to change people’s minds at the barrel of a gun, as opposed to using reason.Report
“Accepting the terms of surrender” literally means, accepting the terms of surrender.
The terms of surrender were to accept the legitimacy of the Federal government which requires them to accept black people as their equals.
They refused to do that in 1876, they refused again in 1963, and still do to this day.Report
Wait, the South rose again? Those states, having accepted the terms of surrender, violated it? Or, rather, did individuals not agree with what was being forced upon them via violence and so enact violence themselves?Report
Just to be clear, your position is to defend the Confederate mob violence overthrowing the Reconstruction governments?Report
No, what I am explaining is that attempting to use force to enact morality doesn’t work, and often is met with opposing force, which in turn will not work on your morality.Report
“He was wrong, so I punched him! Then he punched me back!”
“Well, you punched him, what did you expect?”
“He was wrong, why are you defending his opinion?!”Report
Well sure, attempting to use force to get bank robbers to stop robbing banks doesn’t work either.
But we at least acknowledge that when bank robbers refuse to accept the legitimacy of bank robbery laws, they are acting in a revolutionary fashion.Report
No, they are not acting in a revolutionary fashion. They are acting in a criminal fashion. And no, we don’t just use force on them, we use the courts. Using force on them is what someone did to George Floyd.
And look at what happened afterward.Report
We use force against bank robbers when they actually rob a bank. We don’t use force against them when they are talking about robbing banks, or planning a bank robbery, or arguing for the legitimacy of robbing banks as a just method of redistributing wealth.
We try to wait until they show up at the door of the bank with a gun.Report
Yes, we do in fact just use force to subdue them and once they surrender we use the courts.
But the Confederates rejected the courts and the entire legal apparatus of the Reconstruction era governments. They rioted numerous times from 1866 to 1878, killing thousands of Americans and targeted government officials and eventually drove Federal troops from the South.
Once again- They refused to accept any government except themselves as legitimate.
Here is Wm. F. Buckley, restating it:
“Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer was crystal clear: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
What Buckley is doing is rejecting the foundational premise of America as illegitimate.Report
No, Buckley isn’t rejecting the foundational premise of America, in fact, he is affirming it (at least in the quote you provide, if there is context to determine otherwise, you lopped it off.) Nowhere in that quote is he saying anything about violence, revolt, pulling down statues, or other acts of mischief. Indeed, that quote says nothing about Republicans whatsoever, just about southerners.
And again, this is moving the goalposts of our original disagreement, which is you saying that Republicans are the revolutionary party. A fact that you haven’t shown at any point of these proceedings.Report
You are contending that the assertion that all men are NOT created equal is an affirmation of America’s premise;
I’m saying it is a revolutionary declaration.Report
Yeah, no.
Your quote doesn’t talk about anything other than electoral politics and culture. If you lopped off something, that would be different, and while it might bolster your case (can’t prove a negative), he is talking about Democrats having a superior political position, as far as I can tell. But, if he is talking about violence (again, can’t prove a negative), well, he would be talking about Democrats, further disproving your thesis that Republicans are a revolutionary party.Report
I actually agree with Aaron: southerners used force to enact their racist morality and erected statues as a symbol of that morality. Jim Crow law and valorizing the confederacy was what one set of politics decided, sans democracy. They changed people’s minds with the barrel of a gun.
That has now led to our recent violence. Yeah, I see that. I supposed if southern blacks had just reasoned with the whites, all of this could have been avoided.Report
Underrated comment.Report
The rise of the first KKK and how blacks were treated after they fought to end Reconstruction are real things. There wasn’t a war but across the South blacks were subjugated once again until the Civil Rights Era. All the monuments we are pondering were put in the decades after Reconstruction was defeated.Report
Let’s all remember that while the south raised monuments to their confederate ideals and basically acted like the butthurt losers they were; the north, for pretty much a whole century, did feck all to stop them, and had healthy demographics who were just fine with Jim Crow, et. al.
I mean, Germany, while I would argue they were a bit extreme in their methods, did not tolerate Nazi’s after the regime fell.Report
Oh yeah, the North acquiesced to Jim Crow and the end of Reconstruction. Reconciliation between the North and South left Blacks out and very much screwed over. All the more reason to get the damn statues of southern traitors out of the North.
We are long overdue for looking at our history and expunging some of the toxic elements from public honor.Report
I can’t help but feel that a lot of the US’s residual social problems are caused by the fact the US was far too kind to the Confederacy. As Machiavelli put it:
“You must entice men or else destroy them utterly, for mean will avenge a light insult but cannot avenge a heavy one.”
The USA should not have lightly insulted the Confederacy.Report
Exactly. I’m not entirely sure how we could have without a constitutional amendment outlawing the confederacy somehow, but yes, too many plantation houses avoided the torch.Report
Total War is never something that we ought to engage in now and always something that we ought to have engaged in previously.Report
The civil war was the bloodiest and most destructive war we’ve ever had. “22.6 percent of Southern men who were between the ages of 20 and 24 in 1860 lost their lives because of the war” (google, Hacker).
“Total War” would mean… what?
Chip has a point about violence being used after the war. Where his argument is a mess is the moment the South was allowed to have elections (and local law) again they created Jim Crow.
The North wasn’t willing to refight the civil war year after year after year. The North was also unwilling to dismantle Southern Democracy for a generation or three to prevent Jim Crow.Report
The problem isn’t that the Confederacy was treated too kindly post-war (see reconstruction) but that the follow-through was handled by people who didn’t give a shit about anything they professed to care about. Thus we had civil rights abuses all down the line that led to Jim Crow (codified civil rights abuses) coupled with a resentful population (lovers of the lost cause).
When the majority of Blacks still lived in the south, but the country needed to be brought back together as a whole, it was a situation calling for delicacy. Which the Feds did not provide.
A lot of the residual social problems stem from society at war with itself, either hot or cold, and often both. The Machiavelli quote is telling, but you leave out any bit of enticement, and there was no way to destroy the south while retaining it as part of the U.S.Report
Germany faced up with what they’d done, i.e. all of the insanity and evil of it. The South knew exactly what they’d done and were ok with it because of the beliefs at the time; i.e. that the races are seriously different and the whites superior.
The North was seriously racist by our standards and believed more or less the same thing. They just didn’t think that justified slavery.
If the North had black populations equal to the South, we probably would have seen Jim Crow in the North too instead of “just” redlining.Report
Do you realize who you are defending?Report
He does, and he doesn’t appear to care.Report
He’s defending Democrats. It’s a rough task.Report
“maybe the onus should be on the old guard to adjust to the young guard?”
I think you’re mixing up who’s the old guard and who’s the young guard in this storyReport
Once again: a statue is a statement from the present to the future. The statement is: “This is a person we really admire, and we think you future people should admire this person too. We admire this person so much we’re going to spend the money to make it inconvenient and expensive for you to remove the statue.”
Then the people who put that statue up die off or fall out of power and the future people take power. That happens in all sorts of ways. At that point the statute transforms itself into a statement from people in the past to people in the present: “This is a person we really admired, and we thought you should admire this person too. We admired this person so much we spent the money to make it inconvenient and expensive for you to remove the statue.”
And now the people who have power have got a decision to make. Is the person depicted someone that that they:
A) also admire, and therefore will choose to maintain the statute?
B) don’t care much about one way or the other, and therefore leave the statue there because it’s easier and cheaper?
or
C) really don’t like, in which case they will take the statue down somehow.
If in Iran it turns out that statues are put up and torn down every generation, then yes, that is a very sad thing for Iranians. It means they haven’t had any heroes of such prominence that subsequent generations continue to admire them.
Turning our attention in part back to the United States, although not ignoring the perspective from the Iranian commenter — consider now, a situation in which the people currently in power are culturally out of step with the people they govern, and therefore the presently-powerful maintain the statues of historical figures which the people out of power find odious.
When the people out of power periodically assert themselves and demonstrate their frustration with the ruling class by tearing down statues of the heroes of the powerful whose memories have become odious to the powerless, that’s a signal that the people in power are, indeed, out of step with the people who have to live under their rule.
You might say, “That’s fine. That’s the way of things. The powerful get their way and the powerless have to go along with it.” But if you said that and really meant it, you’d be disavowing democracy, at the very least. In a government where leaders are supposed to represent the interests and desires of the people they govern, a lot of extra-governmental tearing-down of statues isn’t merely vandalism, it’s a symptom of a deeper illness: people in power are not properly representing the interests of the people as a whole.Report
No, that is not what I have been saying lo these many months and years. What I have been saying that there IS a very democratic method of removing the statues, which is by the democratic process, open and above board. And handling it like this comes with a whole host of things; how much the people (in aggregate) really want them removed, what are they willing to sacrifice to ensure the removal, how much support do they truly have in this, and so on. See, this is all part of politics. And much like other seemingly well-supported ideas, they often fall apart at the one poll that counts, the voting poll.
Part of my frustration with this is assuming that what you perceive from a symbol, everyone perceives similarly. That there can be only one interpretation. And, over time, this is only amplified. Is this difficult, trying to get enough people on your side? Yes, because to overcome inertia (which all symbols of the South have at this point, 150 years after that war) is always difficult. But if you believe it is necessary, then doing that hard work will be worth it.
It most defiantly isn’t about who has power vs. who doesn’t, keeping the little guy down. It is about preserving democracy. And while you may see something as an illness, others might not. This is why any competent doctor recommends a second opinion.Report
At least as to your first paragraph, I don’t think you and I disagree in any material way. Maybe you don’t like my framing of the choices that leaders today have looking at monuments left over from the past, but the A-B-C choice I described above are the three basic actual actions a government entity can take with respect to a statue: A) continue to do things which honor the subject of the statue, B) leave it be with no action taken at all, or C) take it down. That seems to be precisely what you’re saying: people need to do the hard work of democracy to address the cultural inertia inherent in a public legacy of such monumental art.
I’m 100% in favor of that happening by way of public debate and coalition-building and all of the other kinds of civic participation you’re discussing with respect to historical figures. You may recall that I wrote a rather lengthy essay about that exact subject with respect to the ambiguous personage of Roger Taney, and a statue of him that was until relatively recently on display in the city of Baltimore, right here on this very website. You’ll note in re-reading that essay that I approved of the democratic process in the City of Baltimore resulting in the removal of Taney’s statue, of the way that the public entity found representatives to advise civic leaders of the balance of merits and demerits in Taney’s legacy from a contemporary perspective.
Now, of course different people have different subjective reactions to art and of course some historical figures are controversial. And certainly there are artists who pick controversial subject matter, including provocative historical figures, as catalysts for social discussion or to provoke emotional reactions in their audiences.
But that’s not the kind of art we’re talking about here.
My subjective response to a given piece of public art differing from your subjective response to it is not the issue here. The issue is the intent of the public entity, of the people holding power in that public entity causing public money and public space to be used to create a permanent monument depicting a particular person.
When a public entity does that, the people making that decision are very clearly not doing it for the purpose of damnatio memoriae. Monumental art is inherently about the public entity bestowing honor upon the subject.
I claim that there is no statue of Robert E. Lee that was erected by a public entity in the United States for the purpose of calling Lee a traitor. Rather, it’s very probable that statues of Lee were erected by those public entities for the purpose of identifying Lee as honorable and admirable for at least some reasons.
Please note that neither my contemporary interpretation of Lee’s memory nor yours are relevant to that inquiry. We don’t need a “second opinion” about what the people who built a monument thought of its subject. The various civic leaders were probably thinking a lot of different things when they commissioned (or authorized, etc.) that monument, but we can be confident that at least one thing they weren’t thinking was “This guy was a real asshole who did stuff we hated, so let’s build a monument to him.”
The point that I think you’re objecting to — that contemporary leaders aren’t always in step with what their constituents think about historical figures — can be the subject of a thought experiment. What if Baltimore had decided differently in 2016, and kept Taney’s statue in that park? We’d surely not be surprised if, today, we read about that statue being torn down by angry demonstrators. In such a world, what would we say about the democratic quality of the decision to have kept the statue up? Would those decisionmakers have made a decision that reflected the wishes of their constituents? And, perhaps most pertinently, would they be democratically justified in spending public funds to erect a replacement statue of Taney after the vandalism?Report
Working our way backward through your post, if Baltimore had kept up the statue of Taney, and it was decided democratically, in other words by the people of the city discussing and choosing to keep it up by that process, then no matter our opinions, BLM’s opinions nor any other group, no one has any sort of moral claim to be able to tear down that statue. It has been decided democratically, that highest and only true moral force. And if some group, Antifa for example, then pulled it down, they are only showing a false sense of moral superiority.
I do not have any problem with your framing of the choices, as you put it in much better terms than I was attempting, a sure sign of a good lawyer! In what I was attempting to make clear, and you make crystal.
But what I am trying to get at, clumsily as I may be, is that there is much more to the presence, and removal of, artifacts of our shared culture. No matter what we do, the history and effects of being at one time a slaveholding nation will stain us. No pulling down statuary, scrubbing movies from databases, nor burning books will erase this. Like air, it just is. And likewise, Germany will always have the stain of Nazism, Britain the colonies, Japan will have Manchuria and Korea, and any group of people will have a period they will consider abhorrent. And to start the process of willful whitewashing must come from the place of highest moral standing, true Democracy. And until we get there, there will still be enough people to disagree, and with that disagreement hold resentment, which in turn will cause damage down the line.
You cannot enforce morality at the point of a gun. You cannot terrorize people into belief. You must leave room for disagreement, no matter how odious you find it. Otherwise, you are the bad guy.Report
I would be reluctant to even bow to anything but an overwhelming democratic push to remove statues and memorials because we’re not letting dead people vote (except in Democrat cities, obviously). Should a city really be able to vote on sending bulldozers in to rip up an Indian burial ground or a Southern slave graveyard to put in a Walmart, simply because none of the white residents give two hoots about somebody else’s dead ancestors?
In Britain you can’t put in much of anything without having archaeologists check the site and recover anything significant, even at a cost of major project delays or even cancellation. If you’re in a land like Egypt, Mesopotamia, or much of Europe, one of the reasons to never tear down significant memorials and monuments is because if everyone felt free to do that, there wouldn’t be any history left because most people, in most places and times, really don’t care about preservation until they’ve gotten to a position where they can afford to care and then start studying the past.
In this regard, a memorial or monument is kind of like a baby or a national park. Once people decide to build one, everybody who comes along much later should accept that they’re stuck with it.Report
“In this regard, a memorial or monument is kind of like a baby or a national park. Once people decide to build one, everybody who comes along much later should accept that they’re stuck with it.”
Wow. Wrong.Report
Should we just go ahead and start burning all the libraries, too? Most of the books they contain are horribly racist and offensive, and the public shouldn’t be exposed to such trash.
Maintaining civilization is hard if people are so determined to destroy it.Report
The past can not forever bind the future, there needs to be a non-violent way inside the system to change stuff or we’re telling society the only way is violence outside the system.
Given that there are non-violent ways inside the system to take down monuments, the monuments we do have are protected by force of law and threat of legal violence by the system.
Violent protesters doing “X” outside the system are opening the door for violence, wrecking the system, and need to be dealt with harshly. If you’re excusing “X” then we can change “X” to “shooting abortion doctors”, “burning down buildings”, or whatever.Report
“Rather, it’s very probable that statues of Lee were erected by those public entities for the purpose of identifying Lee as honorable and admirable for at least some reasons.”
Then given the current attitude of the country it should be no trouble to introduce and have approved by a strong majority a legislative mandate to remove the statue.Report
Y’all are acting like I’m endorsing vandalism. I’m not. I too want to see the democratic process result in a removal of the statues.
I’m not saying “It’s good that demonstrators pulled down the statues.” But I am saying that the proposition articulated immediately above, that legislative bodies will always reflect the will of the populace at large, experientially doesn’t seem to be the case. And this oughtn’t be a partisan-against-partisan observation: there’s plenty of right wing griping about Democratic politicians being corrupted against the public will or blind by way of their ideology to the public will.
Demonstrators turning violent when a significant portion of the population feels not only that they’re losing elections, but that their concerns aren’t even being heard in the first place or taken seriously by anyone with power even if they are, is when you get things like statues being torn down.
That observation is not an endorsement. It’s seeing a raised red flag. When things like that start happening all over the place, those in power should take some time to listen to voices they usually don’t hear and to answer the concerns those voices raise.
I’m sorry that this observation makes so many people uncomfortable.Report
WW5: There have been jokes about “stamping license plates in prison” since I was a kid (Sing-Sing was the prison that got used all the time when I prison was specified).
Does this mean that, in Ohio anyway, that license plates will no longer be stamped in prison? Or is it just that if prisoners stamp license plates, they’ll do it for minimum wage instead of for 28 cents an hour? (Will their paychecks be garnished and the garnish be delivered to the prison for room/board?)Report
WW3: 15 members of the Idaho House showed up, far short of what they needed for a quorum. The crowd looked to be mostly the crowd controllers. Speeches were given, ranging from reasonable to full-on conspiracy theories. Ada County, where the capital is located, is having a surge of Covid-19 cases and has reclosed bars and nightclubs starting today.Report
An acquaintance pointed me at this proposal to attach eastern parts of Oregon and Washington to Idaho. This one makes more sense than most such proposals: (1) the new state would have a reasonable population for a state at ~3.7M people (29th, just above Connecticut), and (2) it doesn’t cut the new state off from all existing central state bureaucracies.
Most proposals like this assume that there would be no need to recreate a state-level bureaucracy. That’s simply not true in this day and age. States have to fit into a complicated federal statutory framework and a bureaucracy is a requirement. Well, I suppose they could pay the non-compliance fines and penalties instead. Some of those are extremely punitive.Report
Maybe if you attach Montana and Wyoming too…….Report
As a representative of The Left, I would be triggered if Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and both Dakotas were to merge into one superstate.
Triggered. So terribly, terribly triggered.Report
Let’s not get greedy. I’ll take the earlier proposal and a separate deal to combine the Dakotas. How about combining Kansas and Nebraska while we’re at it?Report
Put New York City in New Jersey.
Change the name of the rest of New York to “Upstate”.Report
Combine Kansas and Missouri. Make the capital Kanas City once we won’t have to ask which one.Report
What about Long Island?Report
They can secede and set up a police state.Report
If it’s not Upstate, it’s going to Jersey.Report
Louisiana has been trying to give everything north of Alexandria to Arkansas for decades. They don’t seem to want it for some reason.Report
I can make geographic arguments against having a state that runs 1000 miles east-to-west and 600 miles north-to-south, but I understand the feeling.
In a weird twist, there’s a quite real possibility that come January, Montana could have two Democratic US Senators and a Democratic governor.
From a contemporary perspective, there seems to be even less reason to have Vermont, Delaware, or Rhode Island either.Report
This also reconciles the North/South divide in Idaho with the north being so disconnected from the rest of the state. With this, you could travel from Sandpoint to Boise without leaving the state or going through the Payette Lake pass. And perhaps more importantly it would connect the north of the state to one of the state’s main population centers.Report
OTOH, the single state would be fighting with the feds about the future of both Hanford and the INL.Report
I wonder about Idaho’s public meetings law (there basically has to be one). That’s a law that requires (among other things) when public officials meet to discuss political issues, that they provide appropriate advance notice to the public of their meeting and the subjects to be discussed, and for the minutes of those meetings to be published and made part of official public records.
Campaigning events are excepted from such meetings, because campaigning (“This is how I feel about issue X, and if you agree you should vote for me”) is distinguished from the discussion of public affairs (“This is what I think we should do about issue X, and if you agree you should sign on to my proposed legislation”). Did this demonstration violate a public meeting law? Are legislators permitted to access the facilities of the legislature for meetings that aren’t duly noticed under the public meetings law or the other regular procedural rules of their legislative body?Report
I think they’re good. The meeting was announced, or at least the call to meet was made publicly. The subject was announced, to debate whether the governor had exceeded his authority and possible emergency legislation to rein him in. The gallery of the Idaho House chamber was open. Members of the press were present.Report
Okay, cool.
I wouldn’t have been in favor of any sort of actual punishment for them even if they weren’t; they’re expressing a political point of view and we ought to be very deferential to that. I was thinking about various kinds of sunshine laws because of something that came up in my own professional life today, and then RTFA so that’s where my mind went.Report
Speaking of Milwaukee, apparently there was a situation where a couple of girls disappeared, the parents called the police, the police didn’t issue an amber alert (the girls weren’t considered “critically missing”), the parents traced one of the girls’ phones via GPS to a house, and there the story gets all confusing. The police say they went into the house and could not find the girls. The neighbors, who at this point were getting unruly, went in and found the girls. The house has since burned down.
Those are the parts of the story that are not in dispute.
If you want to get into the crazy conspiracy theories that are flying around, just do a search for “Milwaukee” on twitter.
Even the best-case scenarios here don’t look very good.Report
The Chicago Tribune is covering this now. I couldn’t help but notice this part:
I’m not sure that appealing to the importance of trusting the police and how the police do things is the right play in June 2020.Report
It’s the only play they know.Report
Passive Voice Used In Story:
It’d sure be nice if the police had credibility or something in the neighborhood of it.
But there’s no evidence that the weird stuff actually happened.Report
Here’s a summary from the Milwaukee paper: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/06/24/milwaukee-missing-girls-what-we-know-scene-40th-lloyd-washington-park/3252433001/
Sounds pretty crazy, and I’ll bet it turns out the girls just decided to go walkabout.Report
I made the mistake of watching the videos taken by people that were streaming live during the altercation. One of them showed people under a tarp being loaded into a minivan and being driven off.
That made all kinds of klaxons go off for me.
But if the girls just went walkabout, I guess we’re in a good place and there was just a lot of bad information coming out and being filmed.Report
WW3: It worked so well at Altamont.Report
Harvard Law sued for going entirely online in Fall 2020 because of COVID, student plaintiff is represented by class action powerhouse lawyers Hagens Berman: https://abovethelaw.com/2020/06/harvard-law-school-student-sues-over-outrageous-tuition-for-online-classes/Report
In that same vein:
It’s coming.
It’s coming *HARD*.Report
2008 Part 2. They always wanted to do this and now they’ve got the excuse.Report
I am 100% down with a full investigation as to why college has gone from costing what a guy living at home could make working a minimum wage job to costing ~8K a year (in state) to ~20K a year (out of state).
And if someone wanted to say that, hey, once upon a time, college merely provided several cinder-block buildings and several more Gramscian tweed-jacketed beardos and *NOW* they have (points to list) so OF COURSE it costs more!
Well… there’s a lot of ruin in an institution.Report
At least at my institution (here in CO) college cost increase has several causes. One is a reduction in state funding over many, many years. Most of our funding comes from tuition. Administrative bloat is a thing–it seems like we’re constantly creating new offices and titles for administrators. Of course, ask an administrator and they’ll say we don’t have enough of them (based on studies made by other administrators, I’m sure). The highest administrators and coaches have six figure salaries, and any new office/administrator will require an administrative assistant and other staff. We have to have a Title IX officer, who does little but schedule the mandatory online training. The last one we had botched the first big case to come to his office and had to leave. Really, the state should have a small Title IX office and send them out when needed–it would probably save some cash and eliminate potential biases in decisions (because the resident person would also be on other committees). There is also more stuff in colleges: climate control, computers and internet access, things to attract students, grass and the water that keeps it alive, etc. Colleges are about to be hit hard, but that’s mostly a demographic thing: there are fewer college-age people and that’s going to be true for a while.
As for your “full investigation,” it’s not hard: reduced funding (at least in “state” schools) is the main culprit for higher tuition. At least this is true for regional comprehensive schools like mine. You want low cost state schools? You’re going to have to pay for them. (Colorado’s constitution also means that many budget elements are hard to cut, except for higher ed)Report
There’s a graph in this link showing that although state funding per student in CO has gone down, it’s only like a third of the amount tuition has gone up.
https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2020/05/08/colorado-colleges-university-budget-disinvestment-tuition/#:~:text=By%202018%2C%20it%20reached%20an,has%20nudged%20up%20to%209.1%25.Report
I think this quote is important: “Tuition in Colorado already makes up on average 71% of total educational revenue at public colleges, leaving little room for increases. ”
Also the graph is “state funding per student” vs. “tuition revenue per student” and not “how much tuition has gone up”, so I think that article supports my point.
I do think some of the things I mentioned may play a role, but I’m not sure how much. I think state money usually amounts to about 16% of my uni’s funding (at least that’s what we’ve heard from admins).Report
This is not a measurement of tuition increasing much less a reason why.
“Tuition revenue per student” is a measurement of “how much tuition has changed adjusted for student population increase/decrease”. A third of the increase in tuition (since 2000) is because the state is giving less money, ergo two thirds is not.
So tuition would have gone up, A LOT, even if the state had kept its funding level. Without knowing anything about U of CO my expectation is they’ve had a lot of new buildings created and have a very bloated administration. I expect that because that’s the typical story on why college costs are increasing.Report
It’s been long enough since I’ve looked at the state’s capital construction budget that I’m probably out of date, other than to say that it’s dominated by maintenance rather then new construction. The state government’s share for most new construction at U of Colorado is, or at least used to be, smaller than it’s share of operating expenses.
An exception to that is the new medical campus. Colorado, the cities of Denver and Aurora, and the U of Colorado system have built/are building a campus that is the core of a rapidly expanding medical R&D district.Report
I think we agree on bloated administration, but I don’t know that tuition would have HAD to go up a lot. The state probably should have increased its funding level, right? Prices go up–schools have to pay electricity, water, etc and these aren’t trivial costs, especially in a large school. Even my small uni has about a 200 grand water bill every year (we should really do some xeriscaping). We’re going solar to save some costs (partially through some grant funding). While I agree that bloated admin is a problem, I’m not sure about buildings because that comes from a different state fund. I suspect tuition increases are exacerbated by rising costs and the lower state funding. I think of the expansion of technology from 2000 to now–instructor work stations, projectors, whiteboards, wifi on campus, better internet connections, etc. Those were all improvements being made with less state funding. You can make an argument that none of that is necessary, but it would be hard to attract students without such technology.Report
What causes me to despair in discussions about college costs is the underlying premise of learned helplessness and passive resignation.
As if, even when we come to agreement on the problem being bloated administration or expenses on unneeded buildings, the conclusion becomes “Well, so that’s why we must do X” and X is something like cutting off student loans which inevitably have the result in making college out of reach for anyone but the rich.
In other words, the idea that we could reduce or eliminate administrative bloat seems like an impossible dream, something beyond the reach of the citizens in a democracy.
I see echoes of this in our discussions about policing, where the options always seem to come down to either helplessly accepting the status quo, or burning it all down.
The idea of an effective efficient and responsive government is now considered to be a wildly radical concept.Report
It’s not called the “Tissue Paper Law of Bureaucracy”, it’s the “Iron Law of Bureaucracy” for a reason.Report
Why does the “Iron Law” only apply to American bureaucracies, and only in the last few decades?Report
Q: Why does (false claim) and (false claim)?
A: It doesn’t.Report
And yet, other nations can deliver higher education, health car, and policing in far more effective and cost efficient means that we can.
The Iron Law is really just an excuse for failure.Report
I mean, if we wanted to point out differences between the FDA and the European Medicines Agency and say something like “Hey, the FDA should be more like the European Medicines Agency”, you’d be surprised at the people who show up to defend the FDA and say that it shouldn’t have to change.Report
Can’t say that without examining where they were starting from.
I mean, I can hear you wanting to point to Europe, in which case, I will say “remember WWII”. Having a war gut your country is pretty close to burning it all down when it comes to reforming a bureaucracy.
And I’m not saying you can’t reform a bureaucracy without having to burn it down first, but the people in that bureaucracy will resist any change that negatively impacts them.Report
Costa Rica has a better healthcare system than America.
Canada has a better healthcare system than America.
Spain and Switzerland sat out WWII and have superior healthcare systems than we do.
At some point, Mother Teresa’s Little Sisters of The Poor will recruit people to travel to the tribal wastelands of Alabama to teach the natives how to wash their hands and wear facemasks to ward off disease as they tend to the helpless sick lying in gutters.
Médecins Sans Frontières will send people to Oklahoma to teach the natives that vaccines are not the work of evil spirits, but life saving medicine. But occasionally some will be shot by superstitious villagers.Report
Better healthcare system by what measurement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa#Quality_of_medical_careReport
Here is what Costa Rica has instead of the FDA. They pay more than 90% less than what we pay in the US because their version of the FDA is less restrictive.
Here is what Canada has instead of the FDA. They pay a hair under 90% less than we pay for insulin because their version of the FDA is less restrictive.
Here is what Spain and Switzerland have instead of the FDA. You know the drill.
You’d be amazed at who shows up to defend the FDA whenever people say “hey, the FDA should be less restrictive.”Report
Great, sign me up to overhaul our system to be more like theirs.Report
Jaybird, make note of this for the next time we have a discussion about reforming some other part of the US bureaucracy and Chip starts telling us we need to slow down, and move more carefully, etc.Report
Dude, I’m drunk!
But okay.Report
Speaking of which, the Weeknd song “Blinding Lights” is really good.Report
Let me save you some time.
If the reform is “lets deregulate and see what happens” then the response is “no thanks.”
If the reform is “Country A has a better outcome, lets emulate their approach” I’ll be happy to look into it.Report
Would you like to see examples of people being shown what is happening in Europe vs. the USA and shown the difference in the amount of, for example, EpiPens approved for use by the citizenry and how *THEY* responded when shown this?Report
I think it would be a lot more fun to guess:
France is small, and monoculture which is why America can’t do this;
France was a vast colonial empire which is why America can’t do this;
France had the good fortune of being overrun by Nazis, which is why America can’t do this;
The French version of FDA relies on socialized medicine which is why America can’t do this;
The French don’t shave their armpits which is why America can’t do this;Report
If the reform was “the FDA is too restrictive, it needs to move from a philosophy of X to a philosophy of Y” would you need more than a cursory examination of X and Y to say “no, you haven’t met the burden of proof, which I haven’t yet specified”?
If there were someone like this who showed up to argue against the FDA changing, what arguments would you suggest that I use to change the mind of the people who thought that the FDA deserved the benefit of the doubt?Report
You seem to have trouble taking “yes” for an answer.
We both agree that France appears to have a better method of protecting its citizens while approving new medical devices, and that America should learn from them.
What are you even arguing here, and with whom?Report
I am not arguing that we should change to be more like France. I am pointing out some of the things that prevent us from becoming more like France.
I am arguing with someone who expressed incredulity that there might be an Iron Law of Institutions.
I am not arguing that we need the FDA to change. That isn’t the argument.
I am demonstrating that there is a tendency out there for people to say something like “no, we shouldn’t change this institution!” even in the face of malfeasance of the institution.
There are a lot of things protecting institutions from change. This tendency is one of them.Report
You are spending all your time telling us that some people prefer the status quo and resist change?
Again, I agree. In fact, I’ve written this same statement a number of times on this very thread.
So I’m not sure where we disagree.Report
Maybe that’s the problem. You’re seeing me as disagreeing with you when I’m seeing me as trying to tackle the question “Why does the “Iron Law” only apply to American bureaucracies, and only in the last few decades?”Report
Does the Iron Law prevent France from having an efficient approval process?
If the Iron Law is universal how to explain the differing outcomes around the world?Report
The Iron Law prevents the institutions in France from changing. It doesn’t prevent them from doing what they’re doing.
As for the second question, I’d say “culture”.
But that invites the questions: How come cultures are different? How come some cultures are more efficient than others?Report
That’s demonstrably untrue.
France didn’t always have bureaucracy they currently have.
At some point their bureaucracy changed from that to this.
Why didn’t the Iron Law prevent that?Report
And we didn’t always have the bureaucracy that we currently have. Colleges didn’t always have the bureaucracy that they currently have. Ships didn’t always have the barnacles that they currently have.
The Iron Law is that it is easy to get barnacles and requires massive, massive effort to scrape them off.
Not that once you get a barnacle, you’ll have it forever.
“Why is it easier for French barnacles to be scraped off?” is a question that assumes that it is easier for French barnacles to be scraped off and I’m not sure that it has been demonstrated.
But assuming that it is true, I’d merely suggest that French culture probably has something to do with that.
How come cultures are different?Report
I mean, you’re an architect, right?
Let’s say that you want to build a 3-story commercial building where an old parking lot now stands.
How much stuff would you have to do beforehand?
How much more stuff would you have to do beforehand than you’d had to have done back in 1980? 1950?
There is a good reason for every single regulation we have today that we didn’t back then.
But it’s hard to not notice that it was easier to build in 1980 than it is today. And it was harder in 1980 than it was in 1950.Report
Ok, so after all these comments we come back to my comment, that somehow the unspoken assumption is that success just somehow beyond our reach.
Not beyond the reach of the French, or the Germans or any other peer nation
No, the assumption is that America can only choose failure.
Universal prosperity, education and healthcare are things we consciously choose to reject.Report
I don’t think that it’s somehow beyond our reach.
It’s just that there are very good reasons for why we put every single barnacle on our ship. And suggestions that we remove one of them always immediately results in people saying “but, wait! We might need that!”
Every. Single. Barnacle.Report
But aren’t those people making a conscious choice to defend the status quo?
And aren’t you making a conscious choice to allow that to be the final word?
Are you open to the idea that America can defeat those voices and have universal education, healthcare and prosperity?Report
But aren’t those people making a conscious choice to defend the status quo?
This is why I brought up the FDA and EpiPen thing.
Were you making a conscious choice to defend the status quo? I’m not asking you to agree with me on the EpiPen thing.
I’m asking you to explain your mindset from back when we were discussing it.
And aren’t you making a conscious choice to allow that to be the final word?
I’m trying to not, actually. I do stuff like argue for reform of everything from Police Unions to the FDA. You wouldn’t believe some of the pushback I get.
Are you open to the idea that America can defeat those voices and have universal education, healthcare and prosperity?
Dunno. Part of the problem with some of those things is that we need to do stuff like deal with how we deal with education, healthcare, and prosperity. Every single barnacle has a very good reason to be there.Report
If I may jump into your head for a moment, I’d say that you weren’t defending the status quo when you were arguing against the FDA becoming less restrictive.
You were arguing that we had those regulations for a reason and that if we loosened them, it might result in a handful of cheaper items, sure, but people would die from lax regulation. In addition to people dying, a lot more would be injured (hepatitis, that sort of thing).
And so you saw Libertarians yelling “MAKE AMERICA SOMALIA AGAIN” instead of people explaining that the reason we don’t have more European prices for our EpiPens is that we don’t have more European oversight.
It wasn’t “defending the status quo”. It was protecting people from the harm that comes from lax regulations.
See also: Police Unions.Report
You’re just repeating the argument in different words, that vested interests block progress.
But vested interests can be defeated. See the history of Obamacare.
What you and Oscar are saying is that we have a political problem. There isn’t any mysterious universal law blocking progress other than politics.
And politics is amazingly fluid.
See current shifts in attitudes towards policing.Report
The Iron Law describes a political condition. It specifically talks about how the people in the bureaucracy actively work to maintain their bureaucracy.Report
My complaint about Pournelle’s law is that he states it, then leaps immediately to the position that it only exists in large (largely democratic) governments. Then writes novels in which giant corporations and interstellar monarchies are immune.
I can only assume that the man never worked in either a giant corporation or a large monarchy. Job one for any department head in any big company of any age is “preserve the department.” Job two is grow the department by pilfering responsibilities from other organizations in the company. Job three is usually something about products, and customers fall somewhere below that. I’ve never worked for a monarchy, but doubt they’re any better.
“Protect the tribe” is pretty much hard-wired into humans.Report
Sure.
But using the law to explain what I described, that learned helplessness and passive resignation, is like explaining a failed missile launch with, “well, the Law of Gravity”.
There are other laws and principles of politics that can overcome the Iron Law.Report
Let’s look at the law:
in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions
So let’s look at your two examples:
Medicare part D
Establishing the DHS
Did these two things increase the power of the people who run the bureaucracy?
If the answer is “yes”, then you now have an answer to “how did we accomplish this despite the Iron Law of Bureaucracies?”Report
Did the reformation of those bureaucracies require the defeat of powerful entrenched interests, i.e., the second type of person described by the law?
If the answer is “yes”, then you will understand why invoking the law to explain our national failure is inapt.Report
How in the hell is the answer “yes”? It centralized power, it created more jobs which required more managers and that made more project managers who had more people under them on the org chart.
You’re saying “the bureaucracies were reformed!” but they weren’t. Medicare D didn’t get rid of anybody. The creation of the DHS didn’t get rid of anybody. It added the TSA (remember when security was the job of the airport and not the gummint?).
Which entrenched interests were defeated by the creation of Medicare D or the DHS?Report
A re-formation of any bureaucracy reduces the power of certain interests, even as it increases the power of others.
The chain of command is disrupted and the org chart reshuffled. Some career paths are blocked, others advanced.
Even your statement shows this; The airport bureaucrats who were tasked with security saw their scope eliminated and replaced by other entities. They were an entrenched interest that was easily defeated.
This is implied by the Iron Law, actually; The individuals within the bureaucracy are not interested in whether the overall entity grows or shrinks; All that matters is their personal fiefdom and place within it.
See, you are looking at entities as purely one dimensional; They can only change in one of two ways, either growing larger or smaller.
But they actually are three dimensional; They can grow in one direction and shrink in another, where one division has its scope expanded, while another has its scope reduced or merged into another.Report
By “reform”, you don’t mean “reform” but “re-form”?
Oh.
In any case, you were asking how it was possible that our government was able to do something as big as put out Medicare D and establish the DHS.
My answer is that if we look at the Iron Law, we see that the government was entrenching its power, not loosening it.
And pointing out that a handful of Airline Employees formerly in charge of Security got new jobs with the DHS doesn’t argue against that point.Report
OK if you want to interpret the law to say that bureaucracies only want to grow bigger I won’t argue that point either.
But even then, we have seen plenty of examples where bureaucracies are reduced in power and scope.
Witness the rollback of environmental and worker safety regulations for example. The EPA, OSHA, and Dept of Agriculture literally have less power now than they did just a few years ago.
But lets not forget my original point; Which was me asking why we feign such helplessness in the face of dysfunctional college administrations.
We have seen plenty of examples of even entrenched bureaucracies being re-formed, or reduced in power.
But more to my point- you’re fixated on whether they grow larger or smaller, but I’m speaking about their effectiveness in the core mission.
Why can’t bureaucracies become more effective?
The military failed miserably in Vietnam, but improved by the time of the Gulf War.
Improvement wasn’t a matter of growing or shrinking, but learning and adapting.
Why can’t our universities improve their effectiveness?Report
Why can’t bureaucracies become more effective?
Because in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.Report
The most important part of this comment is the very last phrase: “… the rules under which the organization functions.” Emphasis mine. If the bureaucracy doesn’t keep the organization functioning, it will eventually all come crashing down around the bureaucrats’ ears. They know it.
Consider US Navy procurement. Vast bureaucracy. But it still manages to deliver the occasional nuclear aircraft carrier. Almost invariably late and over budget, but they get delivered. Why don’t people arguing for the universality of the Iron Rule use DOD procurement as their example?Report
DOD procurement is a classic example.Report
When was the last time you saw the phrases “Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy” and “Department of Defense” used in the same argument? No, it’s always public teachers’ unions and OSHA and EPA. Usually the teachers’ unions, which seemed to be one of Jerry’s particular peeves.Report
His wife, I believe, was a teacher. She probably had a handful of stories to tell.Report
google: iron law bureaucracy department defense
you don’t get anything recent, but you do get some older stuff that is interestingReport
Be sure to stick “pournelle” in there too. I get essentially nothing, but I admit that Google tends to give me things I’m looking for these days. Disturbingly so.Report
Pournelle had his blind spots, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean other people were not finding his law generally applicable.Report
This would be much more persuasive if I hadn’t just listed examples to the contrary.Report
The examples you list to the contrary are things that I’d use as examples as to why it’s more difficult to build a three story building in 2020 than it was in the 20th Century.Report
Because they ran off all the Republicans. ^_^Report
Define “universal prosperity”. For that matter define the other two as well.Report
Y’know, your posts on this subject- the way you write and respond- always throw off this air of crossed arms and intransigence.
Not a criticism, just an observation.
How about this?
Remember the sunny optimism of the Reagan years, when conservatives promised to make the world a better place for everyone?
I honestly, seriously, would like to hear your ideas for a conservative plan for universal health care and education and prosperity.
A world where virtually no one goes without healthcare for lack of money, where even higher education is easily affordable to anyone who desires it.
This idea here is to test my theory that no such thing is possible. There can be no conservative plan for universal anything because (in my opinion), the entire conservative worldview relies on hierarchy and rank where some people must be above and some must be below.
Anything universally accessible to all equally is unjust, from this point of view.
But this is a testable theory. The test is whether a conservative plan is plausible, or merely laughable.Report
When I needed to change my religion to adjust for the facts I did so. Facts are stubborn things.
“Unjust” is an ethical argument. More typically the problem is “math”. Any “universal” plan needs to be based on absolute, not relative, measures and goods. If we’re not building enough housing supply to clear the demand, then housing is a “relative” good and any solution which doesn’t increase the supply will fail.
Similarly, any plan that insists we have unlimited resources will also fail. If “universally accessible to all equally” means “the 1% won’t be allowed to buy anything better than the rest of us” then that’s possible but hard. If it means “everyone can spend money as though they were Bill Gates” then even the Progressives will ultimately fail.
“All equally” is marketing and magic thinking, not reality. I expect goal post moving for your own plans. The homeless don’t get massive lake house mansions. You don’t want to spend unlimited amounts of money on a demented bedridden 90 year old with cancer. You won’t put everyone in the same classroom as Obama’s children, etc.
Make the markets work. Outlaw hidden prices (HC providers must publish their prices and honor them). Outlaw “networks” (HC providers must give the same price to everyone). Allow various players to function over state lines.
That is HC reform, it will destroy most of these bureaucracies which only exist to “negotiate” with other bureaucracies. It also gets rid of various other serious abuses, like someone being given a “surprise” $100k bill because what they thought was in-network isn’t. There are other problems which increase the cost of HC, tort reform, malpractice reform, regulatory capture, and separating employment from HC insurance, but let’s keep this short. The cost of HC probably drops by two thirds (a WAG) and we end up with “Lasik surgery” level prices.
Right there that makes things cheap enough that we can afford things like giving everyone a “food stamps” type program for HC, everyone gets X dollars a year for HC, if you don’t spend it this year it collects interest and accumulates until you do spend it.
And at this point if you want you can point to someone who isn’t covered by this system, say that demented bedridden 90 year old with cancer, and claim it’s not “everyone”.
Education for the purpose of education is already cheap, it’s called community college.
Education for the purpose of signaling you’re better than everyone else isn’t cheap and it’s also a relative good. Harvard doesn’t give a better education, it lets you establish relationships and claim you went to Harvard.
By 1980’s standards? If we use absolute metrics we’re already there. This is why I wanted you to define “prosperity”.
Every poor person has access to more knowledge, for free, than anyone did back in 1980. Close to every poor person walks around with more and better technology on their phones than I had access to and I lived for this sort of thing. Multiple diseases and disorders are now cheaply curable/treatable.
We haven’t succeeded in making everyone a member of the 1%, nor giving everyone the same in positional goods, but that’s math.Report
Without even arguing, I agree that it would be a marvelous happy world, if the American voters were faced with a conservative party that had a plausible plan for reducing healthcare costs by 2/3 and a sincere desire to provide that final third for free to those would couldn’t afford it.Report
As someone who agrees with you in principle on a lot of these things I don’t think it’s the best argument. Starting from the assumption that western European countries are peer nations has always struck me as faulty. We’re connected to Europe in some very important ways and tend to think of ourselves as being like them. The reality is we’re much more like the other countries in our hemisphere for purposes of these conversations. From that measure we aren’t really that bad, though could certainly do better.Report
“America! Still just slightly better than Haiti! Booyah!”Report
Heh, you joke, but I think it’s the perspective we have to come from. You might go out seeking to become Germany and accidentally end up Brazil instead.Report
Seconding everything Jaybird is saying, and I will add that YOU, Chip Daniels, are also part of the reason we can not reform things. Every time you resist a reform for a malfunctioning bureaucracy because you don’t see it is a problem, or you envision a negative consequence, etc., you are making it harder to reform any other bureaucracy.
You can not pretend that the systems of support that protect your favored bureaucracy do not also protect those you would have changed.
We do not choose failure. We chose, some time ago, to protect favored bureaucracies from being reformed in ways we disagreed, and in the process, because equal protection is a thing, we granted those same protections to other, less favored, bureaucracies.
Thus the Iron Law was set. Now reform is hard, because we want it to be hard. Not impossible, but very difficult. Reform requires a groundswell of popular and political support to be maintained for an extended period of time.
Take your own high speed rail. It does not lag and linger because CA can’t do things, but rather because CA chose to make it difficult for powerful organizations to bulldoze people and the environment out of their way for ego or profit. CA chose to craft all manner of red tape so as to prevent abuse and to benefit the workers.
But what is good for private corporations is good for governments, so those same rules apply.
The people of CA chose to put the Iron Law in place.
PS The people of France did as well, they can’t change their bureaucracies very easily anymore either. They just did it after WWII.Report
I’ve only just be glancing at this convo. Liberals types and D’s have been trying to reform all sorts of things for years. We heard all the don’t/can’t change arguments from conservatives. You seem to be reading Chip as making the generic conservative argument which i’m not sure he is.
The biggest reason we have trouble changing is that we have so many veto points in the gov. There are so many places for people/lobbyists/etc to stick their finger in to gum up the works. Not some metallic law. That seems to be what you are saying, which i agree with. We arent’ protecting bureaucracies, we’re allowing small groups to have outsized impact. See also filibusters which may be the biggest example of this.Report
I think this is right, our system is not set up to make reform easy. Federalism, and the fact that we have competing centers of power doesn’t help us either.
I do think there’s a flaw in our culture too. For whatever reason we don’t seem to value competent administration for its own sake. Or when we do, it’s always subordinate to pandering and self interest. Which isn’t to say that other countries don’t deal with this, we just seem to be particularly bad at it.Report
We’re at the point of being sclerotic.
Yeah culture is a thing and just competently running something without flash or making a fortune is not sexy.Report
But we aren’t sclerotic, when we want to be.
Consider the history of Medicare Part D, and the reorganization of our security agencies into the Department of Homeland Security.
These were both massive changes, on par with anything in the New Deal.
Yet both went from initial proposal to effect within a few years (Medicare proposed by Clinton in 1999, signed into law 2003, taking effect 2006).
How did our “sclerotic” system filled with choke points and entrenched vested interests manage to make such radical changes in so short a time?
The answer is because there was a bipartisan political consensus that it should be done.
Lawsuits were brushed aside, regulatory reviews were rubber stamped, objections and filibusters crushed.
Compare this to Obamacare, which went through a long torturous legislative process, was obstructed at every step of implementation, and is still being litigated to this very day.
Our system works fine, when we have a political consensus.
We have a political problem. It isn’t our regulatory system that blocks effective healthcare, education or policing.
We have a very large plurality of citizens who consciously and openly vote against universal healthcare and higher education and police reform because they don’t want them.Report
We can always quickly come together when we want to put more barnacles on the side of the ship.
But we’re still taking our shoes off at the airport.Report
Yes we can do somethings. True. Things have gotten worse in the last 10-15 years i think especially with the abuse of the filibuster. Lack of consensus is a partial issue. In the Obama era it took a supermajority to get things passed which meant it didn’t happen. That was a chokepoint.Report
UHC, using our current system with just a few more layers of gov-micromanagement, would break the bank. UHC, if properly done, would involve destroying millions of well-paid jobs and getting rid of dozens of politically connected companies.
If Thanksgiving dinner let the turkey have a veto on whether it was on the menu, then it wouldn’t be on the menu.
If it requires “political consensus” to destroy millions of well-paid jobs/companies, then it shouldn’t be a big mystery on why it hasn’t happened.
Similarly, the political power of the police’s unions should be viewed as a part of the problem for police reform and so on.Report
Switzerland’s system works for 8.6 million people and they’re rich. Here that would mean it working for the top 3% of the country.Report
Do you suppose people made this sort of argument when the Transcontinental Railroad was proposed, or the Interstate Highway System, or rural electrification, or the vast sprawling water delivery systems that bring water from Niagra Falls to New York or snowmelt from Northern California to Los Angeles?
See, this is what I find so weird. I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s at the tail end of that era when people could make those earnest and triumphal films about The American Way and boast about how America was the biggest and best in everything.
I remember seeing newsreels of the Peace Corps and USAID workers fannning out around the world building hospitals and schools.
And now…I live in an era when, in response to a suggestion that we attempt to match(not exceed, but merely match) what our peer nations do, people offer up a limp excuse of “Well, Switzerland is small. So of course America can’t do it.”
Why? Where does this come from?Report
Building the Transcontinental Railroad didn’t involve firing millions of well paid workers in a time period where everyone is politically connected.
Further, we were willing to let people die then. We were able to let NIMBY’s be stepped on. If we’re not willing to do those things now then that’s the choice we’ve made.
The government has been transformed from a source of progress to a source of stasis.
If you want a fancy new government program to deal with health care, you need to first deal with the existing massive government involvement in healthcare.
We also have the issue that many of the “match what peer nations do” comparisons come down to lifestyle choices and multi-culturalism. We’re fatter, drive more, and are more murderous than they are so we get dinged on many metrics.Report
You don’t think that you yourself are an example of the thing you describe?
You argue against healthcare reform by protesting that it will be difficult and step on vested interests;
Then assert that America is in a sort of stasis because we are unwilling to pay the difficult costs of reform.
But ultimately you’re validating my theory, that whatever the reason, America has made a series of choices which leaves us unable to do great things.
There is no structural or iron law at work preventing us from being healthier, more prosperous and happy, just a series of self-defeating crippling choices.Report
No. I have solutions on the table, they don’t involve magic thinking. They do involve (for HC reform) firing millions of people. I just think that task is impossible for the politically responsive system we have and easy for an impersonal market.
Not only is more market (to make things cheaper) and less government (because it’s a force for stasis) a way to go but it’s the ONLY possible way that can work.
Me refusing to consider “solutions” that involve magic thinking is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I am healthy, prosperous, and happy because I don’t make self-defeating choices.
The big obvious choice is to not count on an all knowing, all benevolent, all powerful entity to run my life, whether we call it “god” or some faceless bureaucracy.Report
The US has always been one of the premier builders of transportation systems in the world: railroads, highways, massive water transfers, distribution of electricity. Add to that list the spectacular network of airports and the leading edge of moving stuff to low-earth orbit and beyond.
(Arguably we’re good at building them the first time, but not at maintenance. How many times have we let the rail system go bankrupt? But that’s an argument for another day.)
We’ve never been very good at providing floors under day-to-day outcomes for all of our citizens.Report
I made the point here once that all the greatest artistic and engineering marvels of human history, from the Pyramids to the Versailles, from the Collosseum to the moon landing were the product of powerful central governments.
Which shouldn’t be a controversial idea. There isn’t any way that such massive agglomeration of labor, materials and capital can be organized for such a single purpose without a powerful central authority.
I believe that this idea which caught hold in America in the past four decades, that central authority itself is by inherently incompetent has become a crippling sort of national neurosis leading to the sad spectacle that is our national response to the pandemic.Report
I made the point here once that all the greatest artistic and engineering marvels of human history, from the Pyramids to the Versailles, from the Collosseum to the moon landing were the product of powerful central governments.
yo hold up
you just cited the Pyramids and the Colosseum as positive examples
earlier on you pointed to the USA Transcontinental Railroad
dude, what, just whatReport
Costa Rica – Civil War 1948 – and a whole lot of political upheavals since (with very powerful executives, etc.).
Canada – IIRC that was a rather long process (it was not quick or easy)
Spain – Didn’t they have a dictator for a long ass time – dictatorships make reform easy!
Switzerland – also, like Canada, a rather long, not easy process.Report
So more effective and efficient and universal systems ARE possible, but it takes hard work.Report
Gotta agree with Jaybird, you need to show evidence that other countries can easily reform their bureaucracies, and/or that we could easily reform our bureaucracies in the decades past.
Hell, part of the reason we are STILL talking about structural racism is that we have never been able to easily reform our bureaucracies, even when there is strong popular and legislative desire to do so.Report
Just look at the outcomes of education, healthcare, or policing in other peer nations.
Somehow their bureaucracies are able to deliver better results than ours.
Instead, the main focus here seems to be a determined effort to explain why failure is the only possible outcome for America.Report
Have you ever witnessed what happens when someone suggests, say, relaxing the American FDA to, for example, allow more EpiPens to be available on the American market?
If you have, you might see that there is a *LOT* of resistance to the idea of changing institutions.
Have you ever seen something like that?Report
And so you’re saying this conservative impulse “(No, that won’t work”) is at the heart of our dysfunction.
I’m not disagreeing!
I would add to your observation, the observation of how Americans reacted to being asked to wear masks as a commonsense precaution.
Or the hysterical fury at being offered universal healthcare.
Which is as good a time as any to note that this very same impulse- the resigned passivity and learned helplessness- is a hallmark feature of these miserable 3rd World dystopias Americans like to sneer at.
My only comment then would be to note that this stance is itself a conscious choice. Other nations make different, and better choices and enjoy different and better outcomes.Report
How do you think resistance to changing institutions (for example, resistance to making the FDA less restrictive) can be best overcome?Report
Mock and ridicule anyone whose first impulse is to say “No, that won’t work”.
Treat “standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!” as a punchline of idiots instead of a rallying cry.
Never let anyone invoke the “Iron Law of Bureaucracy” without challenge.Report
You didn’t challenge the Iron Law, you just said, “Eh, y’all a bunch of slackers! Back in my day, we used to change bureaucracies more often than we’d change underwear!”
You want to challenge my assertion, show me a country that was easily able to enact significant reform to turn a failing bureaucracy into a successful one without a major outside disruption or some other event that weakened the existing structures.
And easily is important here, because I have not claimed we can’t reform our systems, I’m only saying it’s not trivial to do it, and it requires a significant majority of voters to not only see the problem, but to also become active enough to enable change & stay active long enough to see it through*.
That’s why it’s an Iron Law.
*We have a bad habit of taking our collective eyes off the ball and trusting politicians to carry through.Report
Again, what was their starting point? Was there a major disruptive event that weakened the previous established bureaucracy?
How many other nations had police that were out of control and managed to bring them around? How many of them had police founded on Peelian Principles. rather than our system of ‘keep the riff raff in line’? Did they have police Unions like ours? Did they have legislation on the books, at multiple levels of government, that granted the police special privileges? Did they have the various Drug War (or other tough on crime) policies and laws that granted the police extra powers? What was the relationship between the judicial system and the police?
Same with education and healthcare? What was the starting point and were there any disruptive events?
And Jaybird is right. I talk about reforming X, and I get an awful lot (from you & others) of appeals to Gates and Fences and how we can’t reform this part because that untrustworthy or greedy group will be able to game the system, etc.
Before you try to lecture me or others about how we just aren’t trying hard enough to reform the bureaucracy, how’s about you take a hard look at how much you defend other bureaucracies, and remember that there are a lot of people doing the same damn thing for the one you want to reform.
And that’s before we even dig into how cleverly the agents of the bureaucracy have dug in to protect themselves from being held accountable and/or dismissed (hello Public Sector Unions!).Report
I don’t mind the appeal to gates/fences and whatnot.
I mind the whole issue of, 10 minutes later, wide-eyed asking incredulously “how come there is so much resistance to change in the institutions of the United States?”
Never a “Yeah, I know why we’re like this. It’s because of people like me.”
Wanna know why people are pulling down statues instead of reforming Police Unions?
Because it’s possible to pull down statues.Report
Oh, it’s possible to pull down police unions, but it’s a whole lot easier to pull down statues.
PS agree with you otherwise.Report
Never a “Yeah, I know why we’re like this. It’s because of people like me.”
Because they don’t, actually, think it’s because of people like them. Because when they did the things that make it hard to change, they did them for good reasons, to help people, and that means nothing bad can ever happen because of those things. If something bad does happen, well, it’s because of other people, bad people, racist transphobic Karens who broke the dream, either that or you’re lying about it being bad (or about it happening at all; the woman in that video is probably just pretending.)Report
Just suggest that we toss out thousands of pages of crazy ATF gun regulations and go with something more like Switzerland’s system, since the homicide rate there is so low and everybody has assault rifles.
Then we’ll find out that every single codicil and subparagraph is absolutely essential to keeping our streets safe.Report
BATFEIEIO should not even be a LEO agency.Report
What should we use for a proxy to measure comparative health care? Covide deaths per capita is resent, so lets go with that!
Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Sweden all fared worse than the US, so we can easily say that those countries are worse, no? So, bad outcomes for much of Europe in Health.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Now, what should we use for a proxy in Education? Nobel prizes? We are number one there, with England having one-third of our numbers, and Germany a little over a quarter. But in raw education rankings, we come behind a few Euro countries (Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Iceland, Norway) while coming in better than others (England, Switzerland, France, Sweden, etc.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index
We certainly are ranked higher in police shooting than anyone in Europe, but we saw how reform efforts went with that yesterday, with Dems walking out of talks even after been offered unlimited amendments.
So, its, in my eyes at least, a wash.Report
1) Scale matters.
We tend to have a lot more people, land, situations, and cultures. Pointing to a tiny “country” which is the size of a state (or even city) which has to deal with one mono-cultured people doesn’t impress. I run my family as a socialist utopia, from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. That doesn’t work at larger scales.
2) Reform matters.
The argument is less here about whether we can do it if we started from nothing (i.e. what they had after WW2) and more about whether we can change what we have to work better. Reform is harder.
If you want an example, we JUST reformed the HC system with Obamacare. It should showcase just how hard it is, the compromises that needed to be made, and the vast difference between the promise and the reality.Report
Indeed. Most any of us could split the states into two or three groups, possibly splitting a state here and there, and wind up with contiguous “countries” capable of implementing major changes. Different changes in each one, likely, but changes.
Not that any of these would be homogeneous. But there would be large enough majorities to make changes where the 50-state whole today can’t.Report
“THE HUMAN COST IS STAGGERING” (now that it is happening to [me/us/my institution])
I can’t tell if this tweet plays better or worse given the deaths to coronavirus and the economic hardships people have experienced for 4 months now…Report
An interesting incident in Israel today. A driver, Ahmed Erekat, crashed into a soldier checkpoint and hit a soldier. The driver immediately got out of the car and then the soldiers shot the driver. The driver survived the initial shooting, apparently, but bled out and soldiers didn’t let him get medical assistance. The official explanation is that they had to make sure that the car didn’t have a bomb and Ahmed didn’t have a bomb belt. About an hour after the shooting, Ahmed died.
There is a lot of controversy over this.
The pro-driver position seems to be something to the effect of “everybody makes mistakes, you forget which is the gas and which is the brake, you panic, these things happen… it shouldn’t invoke the death penalty!”
The pro-soldier position seems to be “wanna know a good way to get shot? Ram your car into a soldier checkpoint.”
The driver appears to have made two announcement videos as he was driving to the incident. The pro-soldier position seems to be that these are obviously goodbye videos. The pro-driver position seems to be that these are obviously *NOT* goodbye videos.
This seems to be evolving into a George Floyd situation over there. Keep an eye open.Report
If only there were other positions available.Report
I’m kind of at a loss. Could you give an example of a third position that isn’t “hey, he made a mistake ramming the guard post. He didn’t deserve to die because of it!” and “The soldiers had the information that this guy was ramming their guard post and then he jumped out of the car. Of course they shot him.”?
Because I’m trying to come up with a third position that is somewhere around as reasonable as both of those and failing.Report
Regardless of the guy’s reason for ramming the post, the soldiers were right to fire. Vehicles have been used as weapons before, military installations have been targeted, and there is simply less room for “mistakes” in close proximity to them. Once he was shot and immobilized, they should have had medical support at the ready and quickly assessed the potential for additional threats. If he posed no further threat, administer the care. If he had a bomb, do your best to disarm and provide care if/when possible.Report
While googling the shooting discussed here, I found one far more troubling: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news/.premium-border-police-shoot-dead-a-man-suspected-of-carrying-a-gun-in-jerusalem-s-old-city-1.8882656
Regarding the checkpoint shooting, the released video looks inconclusive, which simply lends credence to both (all) sides. However, it does seem to dispute the soldiers’ claim that he went towards them upon exiting the car. Looks to me like he exited and was either immediately shot or shot upon backing away. However, given the circumstances, I’d be hardpressed to call it a “bad shoot.” But I’d still take issue with what came after.Report
From the article: “The shooting officer said he suspected Hallaq was a terrorist because he was wearing gloves.”
If that’s all it takes, we’re all dead.Report
I admit: I would have suspected he was a terrorist because he was wearing gloves whilst ramming his car into a soldier checkpoint.Report
You… didn’t read the link.Report
I thought we were still talking about the one people were arguing was ambiguous.
That story is awful and reminds me of the Elijah McLain murder.
The names of the cops have been sealed. Sigh.Report
From the article: According to an initial investigation, two officers began chasing Hallaq after they were told by other police that he was a terrorist. The more senior officer of the two shot in the air while the junior officer shot at Hallaq, who was trying to hide behind a dumpster. The shooting officer said he suspected Hallaq was a terrorist because he was wearing gloves. If it matters, he was also autistic.
This seems somewhat like Tamir Rice.Report
Isn’t that just “wanna know a good way to get shot? Ram your car into a soldier checkpoint” with much nicer phrasing?Report
If we’re only looking at the shoot, sure.Report
In defense of the position: it seems to be looking at both the shoot *AND* the ramming.Report
Speaking of Qualified Immunity, I just saw this funny little story on the Twitters explaining QI.
Now, I hear you explain, that’s not fair. That’s not exactly how it works. It’s a lot more complicated than that. Many times a lot of the stuff that a cop does doesn’t even make it to the stage where they explore Qualified Immunity!
Well, the public understanding of Qualified Immunity is now that. Those 36 seconds.Report
That guy has some other good stuff. Those 36 seconds summarize QI pretty well. Especially the last line.Report
Teen Vogue has insights to offer on Police Unions. If you’re one who believes that the literature the kidz are reading today is likely to influence what is fashionable tomorrow, you’ll be most interested in this.
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Good article.Report
일산오피Report
I wonder if Tik-Tok was worth it for this young lady’s profile picture.Report