TSN Open Mic for the week of 4/10/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to Ten Second News.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these on the Sidebar every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
You’re white.
Until you’re not.
Far-right media outlet targets L.A.’s Asian business leaders. They’re fighting back
The friend in Taiwan had spotted a story published that day on the far-right-wing site the Daily Caller, co-founded by Fox News showman Tucker Carlson. It focused primarily on former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti but featured Wang as a supporting character. In a hit piece devoid of damning facts, heavy on innuendo and liberally sprinkled with the words “alleged” and “allegedly,” the article painted Garcetti and Wang as dangerous stooges of the Chinese Communist Party.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-04-09/daily-caller-walter-wang-dominic-ng-us-china
It reminds me of that anecdote told to me by a Jewish friend, saying that Jews could never really trust Gentiles because their equality was always conditional and hedged and subject to revocation at the whim of the Gentiles.
Or black people or women or LGBTQ folk, where even decades of feeling like you are just accepted and equal then all it takes is a spark and suddenly you are facing a howling tiki torch carrying mob.Report
That Asians are sometimes white and sometimes not is one of the few things the left and right can agree on.Report
Exactly, which is why I keep saying that bigotry is a form of evil in that it is never solved, never behind us, always present everywhere inside everyone always and forever.
And like any other evil it grows stronger the more we deny that it exists, and it hides from our internal diagnostic which means oftentimes we need other people to point it out.
We can’t vanquish it but we can reduce it and fight it.Report
https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/politics/gop-lawmakers-target-tester-re-election-bid-with-jungle-primary-bill/article_6f717d12-918e-5890-ada6-830a6ea6cd9e.html
The Montana GOP is attempting to pass a law which will create a jungle primary for the 2024 Montana Senate race and then sunset in 2025. Meaning, they are trying to do everything they can to prevent Tester from winning reelection because they think it will be hard to beat him, even in a Presidential year with Trump or DeSantis on the ballot.Report
Oh my: https://twitter.com/goldengateblond/status/1644905158671998981?s=20Report
Nice to seem some good old fashioned knife-fighting going on.Report
My favorite so far the TN house speaker apparently doesn’t live in the district he represents, which TN law requires.Report
Politifact has fact-checked Ron Desantis’s racist attack on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Report
So picking on a black DA for doing what white DA’s do all the time is just coincidence?Report
Never doubt the love of “technically correct” among savvy faux-cynical fact checkers and bad faith devil’s advocates.Report
I’m not the fact-checker here, Saul. Politifact is.
Here’s a paragraph from the story, even:
Report
DeSantis’ attack, which is completely truthful, is that Bragg let the wrong kind of criminals walk free.Report
“peer counties” i.e. other NY state counties. One could make the assumption that those peer counties’ DAs share similar outlooks.Report
This is one of those things that I would have phrased differently:
Report
One reason why the Israeli Left imploded besides the Second Infintada is that the intellectual forces behind them seem to think this sort of self-flagellation will get them votes.Report
“federal partners”
Report
Bob Lee deserves to be more than a mascot: https://missionlocal.org/2023/04/bob-lee-crazy-bob-mobilecoin-san-francisco-homicide/
For a guy who claims not to be right-wing, you sure like to pick on San Francisco and hold it up as an example of everything wrong with everything.Report
I don’t think it’s an example of everything wrong with everything.
I think it’s an example of what we could make the whole country into, if we managed to finally marginalize Republicans.Report
Your terms are acceptable.Report
Full steam ahead!Report
I thought you knew actual liberals??? SF is unique. Everyplace is unique but SF is very unique. The geography and history constrains it and more importantly SF is a wild outlier even on the liberal/left side.
The entire country will turn into SF has been a repub attack line since the 80’s. Maybe even the 70’s.
Maybe the R’s should stop marginalizing themselves at light speed. They are the ones going to send up tfg again and are tripling down on attacking everybody who isn’t them. Example: Tenn R’s have given a giant boost to two young D’s and made themselves look like massive jackasses. When Abbot pardons the murderer thats gonna play horribly. That is warp speed self marginalization.Report
Imagine what we’ll be able to accomplish once they’re no longer in the way!Report
Then you should help them stop self marginalizing. Maybe R’s need some help to not drive away everybody but old white people. It would be great to have a sane, imho, opposition to the D’s. Maybe import some Christian Democrats for western europe.
Seriously, if you think SF lefties represent the generic Dem or lib across the country then you have very bad data. Not even close. There are all sorts of cities and states out with D trifecta’s that arent’ turning into SF.
Whitmer in Mich or Adams in NY is more likely model for D’s for better or worse. ( Whitmer good, Adams bad)Report
Eh, I’m more a fan of particular policies than particular parties.
Or anti-fan of even more particular ones.
“You want my vote? Promise X!” is how I approach things.
Believe it or not, both parties are pretty bad when it comes to doing what I want.
It’s cool, though. I’ve had friends from both parties tell me that my voting this way is *REALLY* a vote for their antagonist party.Report
Yet you spend 90% of your time on here posting right-leaning arguments, agreeing w/ right-leaning articles, and continually complaining about the evil Left.
Is there another place where you complain about the GOP and post only articles from MSNBC, The Huffintgton Post, and Twitter screenshots from prominent resist libs?Report
The overwhelming majority of the articles I post are from boring middle-of-the-road places (with the occasional exception of Reason).
In this very post, my links are to London Breed’s medium post and Haaretz. I suppose you could argue that Haaretz is pretty right wing.
As for the other ones, I tend to want to post links to sites like Wikipedia. When it comes to posting news links in the sidebar, let’s look what I’ve got…
CNN Politics, NBC News, and the AP.
So let’s look at last week’s open Mic…
MattY’s substack, the NYT, Discussing Film, Bloomberg (and that story had a link to NPR in it), the New Yorker, Compact Magazine, NBA Central, Hollywood Reporter, and the Miami Herald.
While I suppose it’s true that the Miami Herald could be considered right-leaning, I’d say that the majority of the articles I post are from boring, dull, centrist sources.
I’d also question whether the arguments I post them to are, in fact, right-leaning.
I know that the current thing that has a bustle in my hedgerow is the whole “Alvin Bragg is a bad DA” thing and the main example I use for that is stories like this one.
Now, it *IS* true that the New York Post is usually first to break stories like that and when they do, I’m going to link to them, but I prefer to link to the stories that show up in the AP instead. (Funnily enough, Bevedog posted this article in response to my original posting of the story of the arrest. Wouldn’t it be weird to argue “that’s from Fox!” in response rather than about the contents of the article?)
Why do I try to do this? Because when I post to the AP or NPR or wikipedia, I’m less likely to be accused of posting “right-leaning articles”.
I, seriously, would much rather discuss the contents of the article and whether Bragg is an awful DA than how this link is from the New York Post.Report
Jaybird is the kind of person who vaguely thinks of himself as anti-establishment but it is always hazy and inchoate. He sees winemoms as the establishment and therefore needs to be anti-anti right.Report
As someone who has lived here for fifteen years now (how did this happen?) let me just state that everyone thinks the average Bay Area resident is way more to the left than he or she actually is. There are examples of them being really far left but trust me that our city-wide elected politicians tend to be center-left technocrats, not bomb-throwing revolutionaries.Report
Saul, if I wanted to post stories about “the most progressive city in the country”, what city should I use if not San Francisco?
Portland?
As a resident, how far down the list would you say San Francisco actually is?Report
it’s rather amusing to see the “who-dat, where-dat” criticism trotted out against freaking San Francisco
like
we’re not talking about Midlanowear Illinois hereReport
Seattle, maybe? I mean, if you’re going to call out the PNW for being Progressivtopia, why not look at Portland’s richer, better-dressed big sister?
Maybe Madison? Oh, I hear Chicago is the end-game state of liberal-progressive policies run amuck. And so are Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and the surprisingly left-leaning Salt Lake City.
But we do have the mostest and bestest food carts and craft breweries here, so if you’re going to do a drive-by on-the-street report on your TikTok channel, you will at least get a really tasty meal before you fly out to go do your editing and post-production at home without bothering to stick around long enough to learn a thing about what the city is really all about.
Also, Saul said “Bay Area” which is not the same thing as “San Francisco.”Report
I’m not particularly interested in the “run amuck” part. I mean, Chicago doesn’t have any Republicans around but I wouldn’t call it particularly “progressive”.
I am specifically looking for “progressive”.
San Francisco, it turns out, is center-left.
I’m looking for left.Report
Good luck. Municipal governments are run by and for the benefit of land developers. You’ll find Democrats there, but only the kinds of Democrats who like land developers, not landlord-lambastin’ progressives.Report
“Municipal governments are run by and for the benefit of land developers.” If only that were true in Cali and the rest of the west coast. You probably wouldn’t have the dumpster fire housing issues you do.Report
What’s interesting about city governments as opposed to legislatures is that city governments tend to be centrist if for no other reason than they are focused on management.
You can talk a good game of ideological purity but that won’t get the trash picked up or the potholes filled.
This is why the police, fire, street services and utilities are all pretty much the same in San Francisco or Mobile, Portland or Tuscaloosa regardless of which political party runs things.Report
Worldpopulationreview.com lists the 20 most liberal US cities in 2023 as:
San Francisco, CA
Washington, DC
Seattle, WA
Oakland, CA
Boston, MA
Minneapolis, MN
Detroit, MI
New York City, NY
Buffalo, NY
Baltimore, MD
Chicago, IL
Portland, OR
St. Paul, MN
Austin, TX
St. Louis, MO
Philadelphia, PA
New Orleans, LA
Los Angeles, CA
Pittsburgh PA
Denver, CO
The methodology seems to be largely about taxes collected per capita and responsiveness of urban institutions.
I wonder about some on the list for taxes. Detroit, for example, had little choice but to impose steep taxes post-bankruptcy. They also did things like sell most of their water utility to the surrounding suburban counties.Report
I get it, and at least those things are quantifiable. But what I think we’re looking for with “I am specifically looking for “progressive”. ¶ San Francisco, it turns out, is center-left. ¶ I’m looking for left.” are things like a Deputy Municipal Pronoun Promotion Officer, a Wymyn’s Mutual Business and Self-Esteem Support Collective and Book Exchange, needle sanitization stations in the public parks, and a self-serve kombucha bar called “BLACK BLOC BOOCH” that doesn’t open until 9:00 p.m.
Which, now that I write it out, sounds more than a bit like how a right-winger would parody the TV show Portlandia so credit where it’s due, Jay may not have been that far off with his second guess.Report
Well, the main thing that I am trying to avoid in the future is for me to argue something like “Even Portland does X and it’s the most progressive city in the country!” and to have someone point out “You know, Portland has this reputation that it got from comedy shows but when you get into the weeds here you’ll see that it’s not that progressive and it’s mostly center-left.”
And I’ll be stuck wondering if we have a single progressive city in the entire country.Report
Do we?Report
Do we have a single ultra-conservative one?
Are we a nation of places that veer center-left (San Francisco) to center-right (Colorado Springs) and, golly, there’s not much beyond the mushy middle?Report
If we leave aside performative stuff like bathroom admittance ordinances and sanctuary city declarations, this may not be unreasonably far from the truth.Report
When you’re running a city, far more than at higher levels of gummint, there’s a lot of day to day stuff you have to do that doesn’t map anywhere onto the ideological spectrum except centrist* and if you do that stuff poorly you will be handed your hat by the voters regardless of what culture war stuff you peddle.
*Except libertarians who’s philosophy is as conducive to city management as lit matches are to safely storing gasoline which is why libertarians don’t usually get elected to run, well, anything.Report
Come to think of it, the Vice-Provost-Elect of the Wymyn’s Mutual Business and Self-Esteem Support Collective and Book Exchange having a date at BLACK BLOC BOOCH with the off-duty Deputy Municipal Pronoun Promotion Officer, a date that goes horribly wrong in less than five minutes, has the potential to be pretty funny.Report
Not that Jaybird cares but here is how it goes:
San Francisco politics is and can be a perpetual clash between the technocratic moderates vs. progressives. Progressive candidates get elected most often to the Board of Supervisors because those are not city-wide elections. They can get elected to city-wide posts that often fly under the radar like the City (Community) College Board and School Board or sometimes even to D.A. They tend not to last long in city-wide elections.
The progressives and moderates profess to wanting the same things but often have very different ways to get there. Inertia happens.
Or they can fight over very silly things because they are perceived as power grabs.
For example, SF currently elects the mayor, DA, and City Attorney on odd-years. DSA advocate and Board of Supervisor member put forth a very sensible proposition that the elections should occur at the same time California votes for President (also known as even years).
The proposition easily passed but London Breed decided it was a “DSA power grab” and spent campaign money trying to defeat it.
Fun fact, London Breed and her enemy come from the same Board of Supervisors district. Breed is angry that Preston beat her hand-picked successor.Report
Oh, lemme ask again, then:
Saul, if I wanted to post stories about “the most progressive city in the country”, what city should I use if not San Francisco?
Portland?
As a resident, how far down the list would you say San Francisco actually is?Report
…if I wanted to post stories about “the most progressive city in the country”, what city should I use if not San Francisco?
I think Saul’s point is that there are no progressive cities in the country. Only cities that are (at most) center-left in practice despite having a reputation for being progressive. Here in Colorado, the People’s Republic of Boulder is the reputation. In practice, in terms of real policy, the largest progressive policy there is the now decades-long effort to seize control of Xcel’s electricity distribution infrastructure without paying Xcel the couple hundred million dollars that infrastructure is worth. Much of the rest of the reputation is window dressing.Report
The argument that we don’t have any that qualify as “progressive” and, therefore, we won’t have one that counts as being “most progressive” strikes me as a variant of “X cannot fail, X can only be failed”.
And that’s without getting into issues of how different Boulder felt in 1995 from how Colorado Springs felt in 1995 compared to how San Francisco felt in 1995 compared to how Grand Rapids, Michigan felt in 1990.
We should be able to make positional qualitative judgments even if we all agree that it should be the job of the DA to throw crooks in jail.Report
If the thing you’re trying to avoid is for you to argue something like “Even Portland does X and it’s the most progressive city in the country!” and to have someone point out “You know, Portland has this reputation that it got from comedy shows but when you get into the weeds here you’ll see that it’s not that progressive and it’s mostly center-left.”
you’re pretty much out of luck.
Because as we keep saying, there really isn’t such thing as a city which is progressive or conservative in toto.
Every city various elements within it that would seem to contradict its reputation.
Even Alabama has I’m sure, some sort LGBTQ outreach agency somewhere in its bureaucracy just as Los Angeles has its fascist Sheriff’s dept where they have gang tattoos.
So if you’re hoping to score a point by saying “Even Portland does x” well, too bad, because that’s not really saying anything.Report
Because as we keep saying, there really isn’t such thing as a city which is progressive or conservative in toto.
Oh, is that what I was asking for?Report
Meh. None of it matters because there is no reason we should hear or talk about SF or PDX. They are picked as extremes to bash on. Which beyond silly since most of the people obsessed about SF think we should pay more attention to the rest of the country. All the “fly over states”, rural place and regular people.
We could talk about Whitmer as a model Dem or Adams as a classically NY brand of Dem. Or a dozen other cities or places.Report
It became necessary to burn down the library in order to save it (from Those People):
From NBC News-
Texas county weighs closing local library after federal judge orders banned books returned to circulation
Missouri GOP votes to slash state library funding over LGBTQ+ books
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/04/missouri-gop-votes-to-slash-state-library-funding-over-lgbtq-books/Report
Republicans, continuing to build their brand identity as heirs to Jim Crow:
How Ron DeSantis waged a targeted assault on Black voters: ‘I fear for what’s to come’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/12/ron-desantis-voting-rights-black-voters-florida-gerrymander
Someone oughta tell those black folk they’re wrong. They seem to think Republicans don’t like them very much.Report
Republicans, showing us their values:
Missouri Republican defends 12-year-olds getting married
While debating legislation that bans gender-affirming care for minors, the bill’s sponsor Missouri state Sen. Mike Moon (R-Ash Grove) expressed his support for children as young as 12 years old getting married to each other.
When pressed by state Rep. Peter Meredith (D-St. Louis) about a different bill Moon voted against in the past, which would make it illegal for adults to marry children, Moon doubled down on his support for underage marriage.
“Do you know any kids who have been married at age 12? I do. And guess what? They’re still married,” Moon responded.
Shorter Republicans:”Why does my girlfriend have to ride in a car seat?”Report
Creepy and weird.Report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/12/discord-leaked-documents/
Surprise surprise but the person allegedly leaking intel to Discord is also apparently fond of racist and anti-Semitic slurs and has a group of nerdy right-wing Discord fanboys who want to be in a action dystopian movie.Report
Let’s see if this guys gets popped faster then Trump or not.Report
A suspect has been arrested in the stabbing of Bob Lee and it turns out to be another tech executive who knew Lee. No word on motive yet. Where does San Francisco go for its apology on out of control crime and the homeless issue?
https://missionlocal.org/2023/04/bob-lee-killing-arrest-made-san-francisco/
“Lee’s death, however, was packaged in the media and on social media into a highlight reel of recent San Francisco misfortunes and crimes: large groups of young people brawling at Stonestown; the abrupt closure of the mid-market Whole Foods, leaving San Franciscans just eight other Whole Foods within city limits; the severe beating of former fire commissioner Don Carmignani in the Marina District, allegedly by belligerent homeless people — it all adds up to a feeling of a city coming undone.
This manner of coverage, however, does not capture the actual lived experience of the vast majority of San Franciscans. It also omits potentially mitigating details of the individual events. Carmignani, for instance, was brutally struck in the head with a metal rod and hospitalized. But the lawyer for his alleged attacker claims that the former fire commissioner first pepper-sprayed the homeless man accused of beating him — which certainly would color this incident.”Report
Funny story. All that silly Thomas brouhaha about his lack of disclosures of gifts from Crow. Well get this, hilariously it turns out that Crow bought houses from Thomas. Which has to be reported. But he didn’t. Just your basic hidden financial relationship w/o any of the legal and obvious ethical responsibilities being followed.
Let the bs cover stories nobody is supposed to actually believe begin.Report
“I was told that I do not need to report real estate sales when the buyer is a dear friend of many many years who makes substantial political donations to my wife’s partisan advocacy group.”
“Ummm…. Who told you that, Your Honor?”
“Well, Harlan Crow, of course. I trust him!”Report
Propbulica might even have more shoes to drop on Thomas. They rolled this out after the first story. Let all the garbage defenders let loose the trash then follow with something even worse.Report
Florida being Florida:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/13/politics/florida-abortion-ban/index.htmlReport
Thus ends the DeSantis for prez talk.Report
We should be so lucky.
Nebraska:
https://newrepublic.com/post/171845/nebraska-republican-6-week-abortion-ban-great-replacementReport
Pics or it didn’t happen.
I mean, it could have, but it wasn’t in the clip, and the text in the article makes the accusation without a quote demonstrating it. So this is a simple request: show me that he said anything more than that the state population has only increased due to immigration. Show me where he said anything about skin color. If it’s there, point me to it. If not, admit it.Report
Did you watch the video? No?
White people make up 77% of Nebraska’s population. Between 11% and 12% are Hispanic. Blacks are 5% and the remaining 7% are split along various liners of Native Americans, Asians and persons of mixed race. The white population declined from 82% decade ago.
He’s not hiding his racism very well.Report
There is nothing racist about that quote. There’s nothing colored by Great Replacement theory.
If you want to say he believes in Great Replacement theory, you can, although there’s no evidence in that quote. But you can’t even say he “argued Wednesday for a six-week abortion ban by claiming there are too many foreigners living in the state”. Even if he does think there are too many foreigners, he didn’t claim it, and it wasn’t the basis of his argument against abortion.
Again, show me or admit it isn’t there.Report
Also, this should be obvious, but no one argues against abortion in order to increase the white percentage of the population. Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on 2021 Nebraska abortion data, it looks like the black rate of abortion in the state is 6x that of the white rate.Report
Wrong:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-fight-to-ban-abortion-is-rooted-in-the-great-replacement-theory/Report
King wasn’t talking about abortion, though, was he? That was linking replacement theory with replacement theory. Unless there’s some other context you and the article didn’t present. And the article provided no other examples from the past 100 years that I noticed. It also mentioned the eugenics movement, just in passing, in a confusing sentence that barely admits that the pro-abortion movement was racist pure and simple back then.
You still haven’t demonstrated anything about Erdman’s statement. If you still believe what TNR said then you should defend it; if you don’t, then you should admit it.Report
I have led you to source materials. You do not want to put these pieces together. Best of luck with that.Report
The source materials don’t say what you’re claiming they do. That’s a problem for the source materials, but if you continue to use them then it becomes a problem for you. You posted three times citing two articles that don’t make your case. According to one of the quotes you posted, the assertion is that “there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries”. But Erdman didn’t make that assertion as far as I can tell.Report
Smart politicians let the voters read between the lines with this stuff.Report
That’s a possible explanation for why Philip and his sources can’t back up their claims even though they really believe them to be true. It doesn’t make those claims true though.Report
If anyone in Nebraska is concerned about Great Replacement, the Black population isn’t where they’re focused. Or at least, not where they should be focused. Hispanics are the largest minority in the state and are growing quite rapidly.
Sen. Erdman’s district is out in the panhandle. If he’s going to worry about demographics, he needs to worry about the three counties that are Omaha, Lincoln, and their suburbs. More than half the state’s population lives in those three counties now. Those counties accounted for essentially all of the population growth in Nebraska from 2010 to 2020.
As a historical note, his part of Nebraska threatened to secede and join Wyoming back in the 1890s.Report
There wasn’t much that was usable outside the white / black stats. The numbers get too small, and Hispanic data is inconsistent.Report
MTG notes a traitor and a criminal is being treated like a traitor and a criminal: https://www.rawstory.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-complains-suspected-intel-secrets-leaker-is-being-treated-like-a-traitor-and-criminal/Report
I wonder how she squares “anti-war” with National Guardsman . . .Report
Judge Thomas Rice issues a new order compelling the FDA to preserve access to mifepristone in 17 states and D.C.—without any of the old obstacles—”irrespective of” the 5th Circuit’s decision.
https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1646621862837755906?s=20Report
FREAKING AWESOME!!!
WE NEED MORE JUDGES TELLING THE FDA TO PRESERVE ACCESS!!!Report
Heh. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: knowing what it takes to get a drug past the FDA, it ought to be well nigh impossible, barring unforeseen thalidomide kind of outcomes, for any court to weigh in.Report
Absolute most important story of the week: Dan Snyder reportedly agrees to terms with buyer for the f/k/a Redskins. I can’t even say the stupid new name and hope for one more real rebrand (I of course accept the old name is gone).
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/13/washington-commanders-near-a-sale-to-76ers-owner-josh-harris.htmlReport
https://twitter.com/elliosch/status/1646569258938236932Report
Heh it’s going to be great.Report
I could believe that crowd 10 years ago. Now, DC people just don’t care. They’re like Star Wars fans now.Report
Yea it’s basically an expansion team now. I think there will be some jubilation though. I went to a DC Defenders game last month and Audi field was filled with people chanting F— Dan Snyder.Report
I heard that chant at church once. (Not true, but closer to the truth than non-locals would think.)Report
It wouldn’t shock me at all. I find the situation impossible to convey to all the transplants. I went to Catholic school as a kid and we wouldn’t have homework on Mondays (or Tuesdays, as applicable) after a win, with the full support of parents, teachers, and clergy. My wife has said and her mother confirmed that the nativity pageant her church did every year ended with Joy to the World immediately followed by a rendition of Hail to the Redskins. Very different times, and all replaced by anger, bitterness, and at this point apathy.Report
That’s funny.Report
Good news!
Report
I realize you’re being sarcastic, but yes, everybody should pay their taxes.Report
The upside is that this will destroy console scalping.Report
Bud Light caved.
I will remain a wino.
Report
Wow. They found a way to make it worse.
The underlying tweet from AB is getting ratioed, hard, with sarcasm and dismissals coming from both right and left. Which makes sense, because this “Responsibility to America” statement from AB is about as devoid of content and side-taking as their beer is devoid of flavor.
The right thing for AB to have said was nothing, and the right thing for AB to have done was to keep on doing exactly what it had been doing, and wait it out for a week, by when the next shiny object would have popped up in popular culture. The next best thing (although more morally cowardly) would have been for AB to have said nothing and quietly discontinued the market-to-trans people campaign while resolutely continuing to say nothing at all about it.
But, instead, we get this statement — which doesn’t even indicate that they are discontinuing the Dylan Mulvaney campaign (if indeed they are).Report
Yeah. Doing nothing at all would have been better than this.
Instead they give a bowl of mush that won’t make the boycotters feel better, infuriates the Dylan stans, and opens them up for releasing a new statement next week after the outcry refuses to die down.
I just went to Bing and I gave the prompt: “Please write an apology letter in the style of a CEO who is upset about a boycott of his beer due to a lower level PR person hiring a controversial spokesperson”
The AI proceeded to write a letter in which they explained that they fired the spokesperson and fired the PR guy who hired the spokesperson.
So I prompted “I’d like you to write a new one but, this time, do your best to be wishy-washy. You aren’t going to terminate any contracts and you’re not going to fire anybody but you really want the people boycotting to stop their boycott. How would you write that letter?”
Here’s what it wrote the second time:
Even *THAT* is better than the mush that AB ladled out. Well, re-reading both, they’re both pretty much crap.
But AI wrote their own crap letter for freakin’ free rather than taking 3 PR people making six figures to do it.Report
John Smith’s letter on behalf of ABC Beer at least directly addresses the issue.
Seriously they could have given this to an intern filling in some gap time between completing high school and their first year of community college, and got a better result.Report
I think the damage is done.
The tweets and videos of Republicans frothing at the mouth about a trans spokesman fits perfectly into the brand identity Republicans have carved out for themselves as the party of LGBTQ bigotry.
Remember how only about a few years ago we here at OT were all mentioning how the same sex marriage wars were over and Republicans had made their peace with LGBTQ issues? Like they were trotting Milo Y. out as their It Boy who would outflank us on culture issues?
Nah. That’s all gone now. Their brand now is pretty much where it was circa 2004 when Karl Rove was planting SSM measures on state ballots so as to juice base turnout. Today they’re doing the same, with trans bills.Report
Yes indeedy. This pickle soda tastes very similar to that last batch you mentioned.
Excepting the absence of Log Cabin Republicans who, credit where it’s due, did … oh wait, did absolutely nothing to helping the GOP mitigate that decade-long spiral into that particular own-goal. If there’s an organized cadre of transsexual Republicans out there today, well, I’m willing to bet that Caitlin Jenner and that other person are probably going to have about the same level of effect.Report
Okay. I laughed out loud.
Report
The Supreme Court temporarily restores the status quo re Mifepristone. The forced birthers have until Tuesday at noon to provide a counter brief: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/us/politics/supreme-court-abortion-pill.htmlReport
Chicago to host 2024 Democratic Convention:
1. Republicans are cranky about Chicago as it is, feeling it is a vulnerable place to point to high crime rates and the failure of gun control laws to prevent gun crime. May not matter.
2. Battleground states of Wisconsin and Michigan are reasonably nearby, true. Query how much that helps. But it’s for sure Democrats don’t need any help in Illinois. And they probably do need help in Georgia. If rebuilding the midwest as a backstop for Democrats were the objective, Milwaukee would have been a better choice. There are plenty of hotels and other facilities there. May not matter.
3. Chicago’s a super fun city to visit and play in. Won’t be hard to get people to want to go there. Almost certainly will not matter.Report
I don’t see how it could matter at all. I doubt you could swing a state with a convention in modern times, and in a city the size of Chicago I doubt people will even notice it. There’s likely to be an unchallenged incumbent. The only potential fear would be if Biden doesn’t run, and a Kamala or someone gets outshone by either Obama.Report
Yeah, that seems about right.Report
I’m not sure the symbolism of these picks actually matters. Pundits and political journalists just want it toHolding the RNC in New York in 2004 did not help Bush II in the state.Report
When Denver got the 2008 convention, the rumor around the state capitol was that it was a reward for flipping the General Assembly in ’04 and the governor’s office in ’06. That theory would have put Michigan in line for 2024.
The other thing about 2008 was that Denver’s hotel industry had gotten ahead of itself so they could handle a group that size on 18 months notice. To be sure of getting everything necessary — the convention center, Ball Arena, tentative blocks of hotel rooms, and on and on — groups that size more typically book 36-48 months in advance. The number of cities that can be a successful host on the current schedule is getting fairly short.Report
If you arrest a drug dealer and throw him in prison, you’ve created a job opening. There will be a new drug dealer there in less than a week.
Some crimes are not like that.
Report
The article is paywalled, but assuming the text matches the headline, it challenges a lot of long held beliefs about crime and the judicial system.Report
It challenges them rather than confirming them?Report
One of the long held beliefs is that the way to reduce crime is to arrest people, which deters them from recidivism.
Yet these 327 people have been arrested nearly 20 times each. They don’t appear to be very deterred.
Another is that without draconian police powers like no-knock raids and warrantless searches, criminals can evade arrest.
Yet these 327 people have been arrested on average nearly 20 times each. So police have no problem finding and arresting them.
So obviously some new thinking is needed to address the small number of criminals who account for the majority of these crimes.Report
It’s not the arresting them that deters them. These people were arrested more than 6000 times.
It’s the sequestering them away from others that deters them.
The problem isn’t that they haven’t been arrested enough.
It’s that they haven’t been sequestered enough.Report
OK.
So a homeless mentally ill guy who has been repeatedly arrested for shoplifting steals a can of Red Bull.
Your solution?Report
I suppose that this is where the “not reading the article” comes in handy.
“I’ll just talk about different things than the story talks about! No one will notice!”Report
Like I said, its paywalled.
And just to be clear, these 327 people are not mentally ill and homeless?Report
If you click on the tweet and scroll down a bit, you’ll see a link to a paywall-free version. As I don’t know the ethics/legality of linking to that version, I sha’n’t do it, but it is an option.
But here’s the part of the article that talks about the identities of the shoplifters:
So the story doesn’t say.
But let’s assume that these 327 people are all mentally ill and homeless. Each and every one.
Why would sequestering them from society not result in less crime?
This isn’t like drug dealing. Putting these 327 people away wouldn’t create job openings.Report
So a solution might be taking these mentally ill and homeless people and sequestering them for a long time?
YES PLEASE!!
Unironically, with all sincerity, YES LETS DO IT!!!Report
But that would involve work. Jaybird flipped a reference to an article people have to pay to see. If he were interested in a substantive discussion, he could have told us, in his own words, what the article said, or, at least, responded to issues raised by people who weren’t inclined to pay to see it by telling us what the article said. If he were interested in a substantive discussion, that is.Report
Well, there’s always the old “open it in an incognito window” trick. There are also plug-ins that work for this sort of thing.
And if you don’t even want to have to do that, you can click on the tweet and scroll down until you get the link to the unpaywalled version. (It’s about 20-30 tweets down.)
The best part is that you can scroll past other ways to argue against this. “Maybe we should feed these 327 people! Maybe they’d stop stealing!” “Oh, you’re talking about this instead of employers engaging in wage theft?”
That sort of thing.
As for a short summary of what the article says, I’m good with the headline and subhed.Report
And this discussion will inevitably go the way it always does when the subject of the societal cost of mental illness and homelessness comes up.
After breathlessly presenting the problem, people draw the logical conclusion that we should institute a massive government program to sequester the homeless and mentally ill, providing them with food, housing, medical and psychiatric care.
At which point there is the sound of brakes screeching and furious backpedaling.Report
I’m pretty sure that everybody agrees that the homeless and mentally ill should be given food, housing, medical and psychiatric care.
Especially these 327 people.Report
Good news! Germany is finally getting rid of its last nuclear plants!
Report
Or France? Somebody.Report
If you’re not sure, just check the nighttime satellite images next year.Report