TSN Open Mic for the week of 5/15/2023
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.
Massive Twitter files update!!!. Funny enough it turns out Edrogen, autocrat of Turkey, ask Twitter to block things he didnt’ like and might hurt his election chances over last weekend. Musk bent the knee then got all smug about it. Which is his MO. Happily bend to authoritarians then get pissed at people for the gall of questioning him.
Don’t believe people using good ideas (free speech) in a cynical and bad faith manner.Report
An attempt at turning commercial office space into residential space.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-office-building-could-become-housing-18096218.phpReport
Whole lotta buzz about this topic in my world.
While there are a tremendous amount of difficulties doing something like this, what makes it imperative is the fact that the commercial office market is stagnating, even prior to Covid; and the affiliated ecosystem of office-dependent buildings and uses like lunchtime restaurant, dry cleaners, bars, retail- are all suffering as well.
Plus, there was a massive wave of office space constructed int he 80’s-90’s, so the inventory of office buildings is huge, meaning the investment capital at risk is also staggeringly large.
The pressure to find some way to make this inventory profitable again is immense.Report
I am very interested in this topic.
Why is it so difficult to turn commercial office space into living quarters? I know that the bathrooms, for example, will have to be revamped but a sink is a sink and a drain is a drain. Is there a significant difference between a bathroom remodel and turning a bathroom with 3-4 stalls into two rooms, one with a full bath and, on the other side of the wall, a kitchen?Report
The linked article points out that most office buildings lack the necessary depth to make apartments people want to live in. At least for newer buildings, the windows won’t open and are too big. Plus there is the problem of each floor having two bathrooms and no showering facilities.Report
Yes, that and the bathrooms needed for say, 10 apartment units are distributed across the floor plate instead of clustered by the stairwells. And the air conditioning systems are entirely different for the uses. And apartment units want balconies which would need to be added.
But having said all that, there aren’t any problems that can’t be fixed with a large enough infusion of cash.
And the cash investment at risk is enormous so the amount of money investors are willing to throw at it is similarly enormous.
But in the end, its entirely possible that for some buildings, limping along half empty or a total demolition is actually the most cost effective option.
Here’s another good article from a trade journal:
https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2023/05/11/art-of-the-possible-the-road-ahead-for-sf-office-conversions/Report
You have, no doubt, been around some office buildings Jay. If you think about how many bathrooms and kitchens there are on, say, a given floor and the imagine that floor being subdivided into, say 20-30 living units each needing a kitchen and bathroom you begin to get an idea of how utterly inadequate the plumbing in a commercial building is compared to a residential one. Then replicate that with, virtually, every system and structure. Doors, electrical, garbage. They’re utterly different structures physically and mechanically and turning a commercial building into a residential one is HARD.Report
Yep. I have seen larger homes like mansions or old-school brownstones broken up into smaller units. I have seen some non-office but non-residential buildings turned into homes or condos like former schools, churches, libraries, and police headquarters but office buildings are several levels harder. The is the loft conversion experience but that seems of limited applicability.Report
Many of the old 19th century tenement buildings, the ones that Jacob Riis made infamous, started off as the homes of wealthy people before being divided up.Report
That’s the story of virtually all (urban) housing in a nutshell up until modern times.Report
Indeed, Saul, and even many of the examples you give are “gut rehab” conversions where the developer basically hollows out the whole building and rebuilds it inside the shell of its superstructure.Report
I was reading about conversions being done in Washingnton, DC. In one case, they were cutting out the center of the building to create a courtyard for windows. In cases where that kind of major surgery is being done, plumbing seems like an easy addon.
I remember once wondering about how many of the problems in converting an old building to 3,000 sq ft hard lofts could be solved by putting in an 18″ raised floor.Report
Absolutely, but in both the cases you’re musing about you’re talking about what we in the biz call “Gut rehab” conversions where everything but the superstructure of the building is gutted out and rebuilt. In a lot of cases gut rehabbing a building is harder than simply razing it and rebuilding from scratch.Report
The office buildings I’ve been in may not have made for decent 20-30 living units, but they sure as heck would have made swell 4-6 units.Report
Sure, but if you’re turning a forty floor high rise office building into a 160-240 unit residential building you’d better pray to the God(ess?)’s of real estate that there’re a lot of not very choosy rich people bouncing around looking for a shoddy downtown apartment in your market because that’s the only people your price point will be able to appeal to. Get it up to twice to three times that number of units and you can sell to middle class folks and that’s a much bigger market and also allows you to do a better job of conversion which, again, expands your market and improves your odds of not being sued to oblivion*.
*Before you sell out, abandon your construction company as a legal entity and then reincorporate as a new one. Don’t get me started.Report
I admit: I wouldn’t think that my plan would work in Des Moines.Report
Whoa boy. Rudy is in some deep doo-doo. Very ugly though not particularity surprising.
https://twitter.com/frankrunyeon/status/1658164832904912896Report
I read the complaint and had to take a shower afterward.Report
One of the more famous principles in the Common law is Blackstone’s Maxim that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent person get convicted. It turns out that most normal people don’t see it this way and rate letting guilty people go free and innocent people get convicted as equally bad. This reflects the problems that ideologues often have when dealing with normal people. Ideologues tend to think in abstraction but normal people think in practicalities like allowing ten murderers to go free because the Prosecutor didn’t dot the I’s and cross the t’s is allowing ten maniacs that might kill them on the street.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/american-juries-fail-blackstone-maxim.htmlReport
That’s why the maxi was invented, wasn’t it?
That in Blackstone’s day, crowds cheered at public hangings and were happy to see ten innocent men swing rather than a guilty one walk.
Or that in the late 18th century, the majority of American citizens wouldn’t have offered up the Bill of Rights, and would have happily condoned torture and state-sanctioned religious persecution.
All the legal niceties we have like the Miranda rights and right to counsel didn’t arise after a spontaneous uprising of the public, but were imposed, top-down by legal theorists.
I link this to Dark Matter’s invocation of dysfunctional cultural groups. That formulation, that certain groups of people are dysfunctional and refuse to abide by civilized norms, makes the error of essentializing people, assuming that the way people think and behave is fixed and immutable.
Here too, the idea that people see justice differently than theorists assumes that the people have fixed and immutable beliefs, instead of belief systems which are flexible and amenable to suasion and and norm-shaping.Report
The definition of “civilized norms” changes a lot from culture to culture and time period to time period.Report
“That in Blackstone’s day, crowds cheered at public hangings and were happy to see ten innocent men swing rather than a guilty one walk.”
True. On the other hand, they would also point out technical incorrect issues with the pleadings in open court so men could go free instead of dying.Report
I think the main idea then and now is that it is all well and good for affluent people to be easy on crime because they are generally safe but many working class people have to live with the criminals. The demand for England to create a professional police force came from below not above.Report
I think its more that the upper classes view the lower classes as abstractions.
When they are an abstraction, its very easy to objectify, romanticize, or vilify them sometimes all at the same time.
I think its safe to say that the horrors of Riker’s or any of the gulags holding immigrants are only a fleeting concern of most people who don’t have a loved on ensnared there. But a fleeting concern is better than none at all I suppose.
I think its a problem when liberals accept the framing that Blackstone’s maxim or Miranda are somehow in opposition with effective policing. As if we need to nervously wring our hands and apologize for rights. I remember in the 90s when “Card-Carrying member of the ACLU” was a Republican sneer.
The hallmark of brutal regimes lacking in rights isn’t “tough effective policing” its “comically inept and corrupt Keystone Kops policing”.
And conversely, the safest and lowest crime societies usually have very strong rights protections.Report
They’re mono-cultures with culture doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
If there is no “other”, then there is just “us”.Report
You have just lived thru the single most radical reshaping of culture in a millennium.Report
I lived through… gay marriage, police reform, a political party getting a corrupt politician, rise of social media.
Sorry, this is small beer compared to any of the following…
Women getting the vote. End of Slavery/Civil War. Blacks getting the vote. End of the US as a colony and the foundation of our country. End of US isolation and rise of US as global cop. Globalization.
I’m sure I’m missing a lot of others, the Irish becoming White was probably a big deal but I’m not sure how long that took.Report
People are just addicted to their narratives and won’t change them. Blackstone’s Maxim is a statement of abstract principle and most people do not think in abstract principles. So most people are going to handle this from what they see as a pragmatic base of letting ten guilty people go means ten whackos in the community that we have to deal with and the idealists don’t. It is sort of like on the other blog, many posters have to see this poll in the light of American racism no matter what evidence is presented that African-Americans tend to see this in the same way as White Americans. They just can’t change their narrative in light of the facts. The will not bend.Report
That idea comes from a time period when the concept of truth was an issue. “Spirit testimony” (in the Salem Witch trials) had been accepted within living memory. The Spanish Inquisition was still ongoing.Report
Talk about going out with a whimper:
George Turner must be disappointed.
https://news.yahoo.com/prosecutor-ends-probe-fbis-trump-193913644.htmlReport
“we investigated ourselves and found that our only flaw was that we cared too much and tried too hard”Report
I’ll be interested to see if the administration can actually turn cities in fly-over country into tech hubs. My own guess is not. I’ve been interested in how particular areas become start-up meccas for decades. I’ve pretty much concluded that the critical factors are: one or more high-end research schools; in an area that’s already attractive to recent graduates of those schools; with either a national lab, or a very large corporate lab in the area. From that base, you can grow the kind of “infrastructure” that’s necessary. Eg, 20 years ago in the Denver metro area, you could find two companies that would work with you to figure out how to do the explosive-shaping of exotic alloys you needed.Report
Having NOAA and NIST just up the road in Boulder also helps.Report
Musk Virgin Islands subpoenaed docs from His Muskness in it’s Epstein investigation.Report
When all you have in innuendo it’s easy to loose informants:
https://www.newsweek.com/republican-admits-key-informant-against-joe-biden-now-missing-1800209?fbclid=IwAR0ZFmGqGASAXOFV5kKuDY56NENcqhgk-CJwRFBDiK7hsmY2ZKC2xWN2Nr4Report
These children live in Brooklyn, for goodness’ sake! They are able to read the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty in person!
Report
Typical NOMSGs.Report
Anyone who can should get their kids out yesterday. What a mind boggling decision by the city.Report
And the hand of censorship clamps tighter in Florida:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/16/us/florida-teacher-lgbtq-disney-movie-investigation-tuesday/index.htmlReport
And lets’ be clear – this isn’t keeping curious kids from asking questions:
Report
So, a Florida teacher submits her resignation citing “politics and the fear of not being able to be who you are” in the public school system. A week later she shows her students a Disney movie with a gay kid. I don’t believe that was an innocent mistake.Report
What .conservatives are making clear is that LGBTQ people existing openly is objectionable.
They refuse to accept their hated outgroups as equal citizens.Report
Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.
If you think LGBTQ is a spreadable lifestyle, then your right to spread it ends at my child.
There’s an emotional response to thinking your kid could be X.
That’s not just “gay”, that’s also “having sex before marriage”.Report
Is heterosexuality a “spreadable lifestyle”?Report
I would say no because I don’t remember deciding to be straight.
However this is a highly emotional argument and I’m a lot more self honest than most.Report
No one decides to be gay, or transgendered either. Its an innate as heterosexuality.Report
It’s an emotional issue, I expect we have various people claiming otherwise.
The Left has it’s own irrational issues, it’s part of the human condition.Report
Feelings don’t care about your facts.Report
There’s a big difference between an orientation and a lifestyle. You don’t choose your orientation (although it can be encouraged or discouraged) but all of us in the modern West choose our lifestyles.Report
Explain for us the difference between a heterosexual orientation and a heterosexual lifestyle.Report
Closets.Report
“[The teacher[ says she played the 2022 animated Disney movie “Strange World”…”
oh right, the one that came out that nobody watchedReport
In the continuing news of the huge anti-woke backlash against cancel culture…let me check my notes, wait, oh, the GOP has lost the Mayorship of Jacksonville they’ve held for the past eight years, the left-aligned candidate won the Colorado Springs mayorship, the Democrat’s are easily willing another special legislative election, the AOC-aligned left-wing choice is going to be the next Allegheny County Executive, and oh yeah, Donald Trump just said, “I’m the one who overturned Roe vs Wade.”
Truly, Chris Rufo’s dream world is just around the corner because Bud Light lost some sales.Report
Yemi ran as a nonpartisan and he’s “left-aligned” insofar as he is a POC but if you want to visit his website, you can check it out here.
He’s very much a small business guy. Exceptionally so.
I mostly hope that he keeps his promises about the potholes.Report
Appropos of nothing in the US I suppose:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/17/us/texas-gun-ownership-mass-shootings/index.htmlReport
Reading the “study”, it’s a very anti-gun group carefully setting the goal posts to get the results they want.
Illinois and Maryland have both very high levels of gun control and very high gun death rates, there is much excusing why they have those rates in spite of their laws.
Their list of laws is… interesting. Long list of everything ever proposed, no attempt to care whether or not some of them are purely virtue signaling. That’s how they determine whether or not a State has strong gun laws?
They very much also have the problem of pretending that Illinois “average” rate of 16.1 per 100k describes something.
Chicago has multiple zip codes with murder rates (not even including suicide) which are above 100 per 100k. Those set the average for the state.Report
In 2021, Texas had a homicide rate almost exactly equal to the national average, lower than Maryland, Delaware, Illinois, and Michigan.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htm
It also had a slightly below average suicide rate. It does have a demographic advantage there, with the high Hispanic population; on the other hand, this is a slight handicap when it comes to homicide.Report
The Week In Beer.
You may have heard about the Bud Light kerfuffle surrounding Dylan Mulvaney. It has, apparently, affected the bottom line of Anheuser-Busch. The stock price has gone from somewhere around $66 a share to under $59 over the last month.
Well, earlier this week, this ad campaign from a couple of months ago resurfaced on the twitters:
It got a lot of retweets with a lot of funny quotations (“women were among the first to brew beer… ever”) and more calls from more people for more boycotts.
Anyway, the main thing that I noticed was the website that the commercial flashed at 1:06
https://www.millerlite.com/badsht2goodsht
I got curious. Are they still running that campaign?
As it turns out, they ain’t. Maybe you can no longer mail Miller Lite the bikini girl posters in your basement and have them turn the posters into mulch for women hops makers. I dunno. I had to search for their address. It’s not on their “contact us” page. I had to go to the “visit us” page.
I suppose you can still mail your stuff to 4251 W. State St. Milwaukee, WI 53208.
But there is no trace of the promotion from this commercial on their site and their twitter account is tweeting out mostly pleasantly dumb beer tweets. “Like if your alarm clock this morning was your roommate cracking a beer.”
See? Pleasantly dumb.
But two months passed and then the Dylan Mulvaney thing happened at which point, and I’m speculating here, the Bud Light people said “WE GOTTA DO SOMETHING!!!” and someone remembered this ad campaign and, IMMEDIATELY, they said “FIND SOMEONE TO TWEET ABOUT IT AND EASE THE HEAT OFF OF US FOR ONE FREAKIN MINUTE” and, dutifully, they did.
Miller Lite is pretending the ad campaign didn’t happen, apparently.
I think it’s the best play, myself. (Quite honestly, I think that their ad campaign landed with a hard clank, they didn’t get more than a dozen items mailed to them, and they quietly shut down the page.)
Lemme tell ya. The CEO of Coors has probably spent the last week calling the VP of marketing screaming “JUST SHOW BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE HIKING AND LOOKING AT MOUNTAINS” into the phone.
In a vaguely related tempest in a teapot, gun manufacturer Heckler & Koch had a social media person get into an argument on twitter with a bunch of people about how their old ad campaigns were much like Miller Lite’s used to be but now they’re better.
Here’s the text of one of the many since-deleted tweets:
Well, that was earlier this week.
Today, H&K tweeted this:
Social media, man.
Social media.Report
“JUST SHOW BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE HIKING AND LOOKING AT MOUNTAINS”
“COOL MOUNTAIN STREAMS, YOU MF”ERS, COOL MOUNTAIN STREAMS”Report
OMG. There is a monster.com-adjacent site out there that is using this as an opportunity to advertise. “Don’t let one bad hire hurt your brand.”Report
Heh, how to deal with founders and CEO’s : in this workshop we explore…
Not everyone can be the Steak-umm or National Parks tweeter. And even they are working without a net.Report
Translation: “Everyone’s either perfect, or they sink to the bottom of the ocean.”
It’s like you’ve never failed before. It takes failure to get good at anything. Lots and lots of failure.Report
My default beer these days doesn’t advertise, beyond the occasional local print media. And that’s mostly to update either who’s playing or the food truck schedule at the taphouse/beer garden.Report
I appreciate that there *ARE* differences between mostly-fungible products. I prefer “Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi” to “Diet Cherry Coke”. But when I go out to a place that has neither, I have no problem getting a Diet Dr. Pepper.
I considered doing a post this weekend where I would buy a “build-your-own” six-pack and taste test Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller Genuine Draft, Miller Lite, Coors In The Yellow Can (“The Banquet Beer”), and Coors Light (“The Silver Bullet”) and talk about the taste of each.
But. Man. I don’t particularly like beer and I don’t want to spend $20 for two sips from six cans and then pour the rest out into my rosebush.
Especially since I honestly suspect that the differences between each beer will be less than the differences between Coke and Pepsi.Report
Just start pounding out loaves of beer bread!Report
Here is where I extend my pinky: If I am going to make beer bread, I am going to use something like a Brauerei Ayinger Celebrator Dopplebock (that’s the one with the little goat charm around the neck).
Turn the liquid bread into something more solid.Report
This one is somewhat interesting in that people involved in one industry are critiquing another industry entirely as their ad campaign.
Will this sell lotion? Soap?
Is that a stupid question?Report
I think it probably does increase goodwill for the brand. But the description of the ad railing against “overly sexualized women” misses the point. Body type is about more than sexuality.
MEN might relate a woman’s body inextricably to her sex appeal, and we’re mostly men here in this comments section.* It’s a good bet that women don’t.
At least, it’s a good enough bet that this ad — which is not aimed at middle-aged dudes — has a plausible chance of increasing goodwill for the brand and therefore selling more soap.
It’d be interesting to do a compare-and-contrast with Peyton Manning selling Mastercard credit products:
https://youtu.be/YGmX6m78zDM
* This exchange would benefit from our female colleagues chiming in. You, after all, live every day with the social expectations of a stringent and inflexible beauty standard that permeates your lives to degrees that we men can at best only imagine.Report
I live in a woman’s body. So yes, society does have “stringent and inflexible” beauty standards that it wants to draw around me.
My response is the same as most black professionals. Break the mold. Do it once, and people take a second look at you. They reenvision you.
Would it be a good idea if “busty boobette” advertising perished? Yes, and no. It’s bad if you’re saying that dumb women will get drunk and be easy to talk into the sack. It’s qualitatively Better if you’re viewing the ad from the woman’s point of view. That’s showing her in her career suit, coming home, and saying “Honey, I’m home!” while dad’s in the backyard grilling (and kids are playing all over the place). “Out here honey!”
Then mom comes out in pretty revealing clothing, carrying your bud lite. “Bud. For when you want to relax” (and show her smiling at the end, sitting in her man’s lap.)
As for internet culture? I think we were better served in the asstr days of the internet, where you could go on ICQ and find chat groups about every fetish you could name (and quite a few you couldn’t). It was a handy way for an insecure kid approaching puberty to understand that “no matter what my body type is, someone out there will love it.”
Now, my personality? That takes someone special to love.Report
Maybe look at their actual stock prices before repeating silly information? Their stock price hit the highest point this year in March 28.
The actual story of their stock price is that right _before_ Mulvaney (Which happened April 1), their stock price shot up from somewhere around 59 to 65 for no obvious reason, then the Mulvaney story happened and stock proceeded to stop going up (Which you can hypothetically blame on that, I guess?) and then proceeded to bounce around somewhere between 63 and 66 until about two weeks ago, at which point then decreased to around 59, where it…was two months ago.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BUD?p=BUD&.tsrc=fin-srch
This is not due to any sort of Mulvaney reaction, this is due to Inbev having a pretty volitional stock price, which is easy enough to see if you zoom out to the year level, where the stock gets down to 45, or to five years, where you realize the stock was 100 a share just four years ago.
No, they didn’t. No one actually cares about this, and corporations are not changing their behavior towards LGBTQ stuff.
It’s going to be very interesting to see how a lot of people react when all the Pride stuff happens like clockwork in *checks watch* two weeks. Stores have actually started putting their stuff out.Report
That link got a little wonky, but it does still go to the right place…switch it to either Year To Date or six months to see the trends.Report
I did look at their actual stock prices. Here’s the webpage I used. You can toggle the thing to 1M and see how the stock price has gone from somewhere around $66 a share to under $59 over the last month.Report
It’s $59.20 at this moment but, seriously, on May 17th (when I wrote my comment), it was under $59.Report
And now zoom out to to _three_ months and notice when the events we were talking about happened, which started on April 1, ramped up to full steam approximately April 10 or so, and were going for two weeks. Maybe three weeks?
Huh. There’s not really any story that makes sense there if you are trying to make it about Mulvaney. You can maybe argue that story cause it to drop by about three dollars from what was a _yearly_ high, but it managed to recover most of that by the start of this month.
And _then_ it started dropping, after the story was mostly over. Back to where it was three months ago, incidentally.Report
I would guess that the numbers for sales and whatnot would have a lag of two or three weeks as virality viraled. It was April 13th that Brendan Whitworth released his “Our Responsibility To America” letter. The stock price seemed to bounce up a little bit after that and then… what happened on April 26 that was then followed by the dip?
Well, according to Fortune Magazine:
So now what happened on May 4th? Star Wars Day! Also this: it made the New York Times.
Seems like there are official moves made by official people on the days before each of the “it’s over”s and each of the “we’re back”s in that chart.
So I guess the story ain’t over yet.
I will try to keep us posted in the weeks to come!Report
You say, while trying to read tea leafs about specific events and nonexistence changes around them.
Yes, I guess you can argue that _the CEO releasing a statement_ can cause the stock price to, uh, dip down for one day and then go back up by the end of the week. Sure.
But you realize this actually works exactly backwards of the narrative: Anheuser-Busch saying ‘We will not do these sort of things anymore’ supposedly caused the stock to _dip_.
It is possible to read this as stock movement caused by that story, I guess, although I will point out that that story was released by The Hill after the market closed on March 28th, which makes it rather difficult to account for the movement starting on March 28th.
And again, you realize this worked exactly backwards of the narrative: Anheuser-Busch getting called out by the HRC caused their stock to dip.
What did happen on May 4th? Because what actually appears happen is that stock prices _shot up_ in a way that you, someone reading every single tea leave of movement, should have some explanation of. One day, the stock price jumped up by two whole dollars, which is literally the largest single-day change in _the entire time period we’re talking about_.
And then they proceeded to decline, not quite as fast, but massively.
Surely a giant jump and a massive decline would have to be explained by at least _two_ things. Something made it go up May 4th, something made it go down May 5th.
Now, if I wanted to argue in the same way you were, I would argue that the upward stock price movement on May 4th was due to Anheuser-Busch actually having a pretty good quarter _despite_ the market for their beer slowly dying.
I.e, it was an entirely normal and correct market response to quarterly financial information, the exact sort you would expect when a contraversy has happened and the market is not sure if sales were impacted, and the company announces that they were not.
I.e., again, the opposite of your narrative.
But then it filtered out to the activists, who realized that Anheuser-Busch had repeatedly said ‘We super-duper promise we won’t do any sort of queer ads again’, and their stock price just…starts going down and never stops.
And, yet again, the opposite of your narrative.
It really is amazing to read your actual breakdown where you apparently inadvertently prove ‘The ad and conservative backlash didn’t do anything to the stock price, what actually repeatedly harmed the stock price was Anheuser-Busch’s reaction to the backlash and criticism from the left’, but you don’t seem to notice that.
I would love to claim that as a victory for queer activists, but I’m simply not able to read minute variations in a stock as anything but randomness. Maybe if the stock keeps going down, though.
Although I’m sure a bunch of conservatives will somehow try to claim that as a victory, despite the fact the stock price only started going down after Anheuser-Busch very firmly said ‘That promotion was a mistake and we will never ever do anything even vaguely like that again, we swear, we are literally saying it in a call to stockholders that we not allowed to lie on’, which happened basically a _month_ after the promotion.Report
Maybe if the stock keeps going down, though.
We’ll see where we are over the coming weeks and if the geniuses in charge of A-B release any more statements or comments or if there is a deliberate attempt to do something interesting with commercials.
But then… does anybody even know anything? How do we know what we know? Maybe we’re butterflies.Report
You’re right that a lot of things affect stock prices. But you can’t claim that nobody cares about this.
It was an interesting thing to watch. I’m terrible at predicting how the public will turn (I didn’t see the pro-Tucker anti-FNC thing coming) but the Mulvaney thing was obvious to me. He’s uniquely pathetic. So unique that I don’t see other products getting the kind of flack that Bud Light got. That said, I think companies will try to be more careful this upcoming month although I doubt that they understand what they have to be careful of.Report
I just think its hilarious to see the pivot from “We’re not bigots!” to “If they dare use a trans person as a spokesman, we will destroy them!!”Report
Good news, everyone. The right has figured out you can just _threaten_ employees to get corporations to take down LGBTQ stuff.
https://www.businessinsider.com/target-axes-some-pride-merch-after-workers-receive-threats-2023-5Report
From USA Today: Bud Light maker stripped of LGBTQ+ rating for caving to Dylan Mulvaney backlash
Anheuser-Busch has 90 days to make things right.
THE CLOCK IS TICKINGReport
Seriously. Revelation 3:16 talks about this.Report
I mean…there’d already been criticism towards some of their behavior. The Stonewall Inn had refused to serve their beer during Pride 2021 for donating to anti-LGBTQ politicians. I can’t actually find anything about 2022, though, so maybe they resumed?Report
Here’s a Chicago story from May 5th:
I’m assuming that they were selling them before they announced they’d stopped selling them.Report
Yea, most bars sell their beer, including, I assume, Stonewall Inn normally. This was a very very specific boycott during only June 2021.
It actually was a rather weaksauce boycott and didn’t do much. I suspect the entire point was for Stonewall to be able to explain, in response to people ordering their beer, that that Anheuser-Busch donated to anti-gay politicians to their clientele, who are presumably the sort of people who would care about that.
…incidentally, that article phrases things extremely odd. ‘LGBTQ+-owned bars in Chicago’? That phrasing stuck me so much that I assumed at least one of the bars was _owned_ by someone who was LGBTQ, but the bar itself was not specifically targeted at LGBTQ people.
But no, I checked their web pages, and all those bars listed in the article call themselves LGBTQ bars, which would usually be the way to refer to them…or just ‘gay bars’. Huh. Weird it mentioned the owners instead.Report
DJT appears to have lied about something. Must be . . . anyday fo the week:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/18/politics/donald-trump-documents-classified-2024/index.htmlReport
My impression is the root of this is stupid and maybe insane.
On the way out the door he takes everything on or in his desk and drops it into a box.
Some of that was important docs.
He doesn’t have a use for them but now they’re “his” and he doesn’t give up what’s his without a lawsuit.
Maybe they’re docs he intended to read and never got around to it.
So there’s little to no unity behind what they are and no purpose for him having them.
After that we have him lying because he always lies in this sort of situation.
It’s less “has an evil plan for them like selling them” and more “showcases total unfitness for the office”.Report
The Supreme Court held unanimously this morning, in Amgen v. Sanofi, that the lower court was correct in ruling that an Amgen patent failed to “enable any person skilled in the art . . . to make and use the [invention] as defined by the relevant claims.” This is a potential can of worms. Lots of patents fail that requirement. Or at least, fail it short of a generously funded research project and a lot of time. The last of the patents with my name on them have expired, so I no longer have a personal stake in that sort of problem.Report
An interesting take on the Neely sitch:
If you see someone doing something bad on the subway: STEP IN. INTERVENE.Report
See Something, Say Something apparently doesn’t apply to former Marines in a subway.Report
The obligation to intervene is a strange master.Report
How so?Report
Sometimes it’s vigilantism, sometimes it’s vigilantism-but-good.Report
Depends on who you’re killing, I guess.Report
Who.
Whom.Report
Snark aside, I did find the surfeit of footage, and lack of intervention, a bit disturbing.Report
The footage I saw was all in medias res.
So I was stuck having to do stuff like ask why there were people helping the vigilante rather than the other guy.
I mean, if you wanted more people to intervene, there were more people intervening than just one.Report
I was going to say, it seems to me like people did intervene, they just (apparently, based on facts so far and subject to revision with new information) intervened on the side of Penny. That still doesn’t mean Penny was totally in the right or that he didn’t go beyond what the law allowed, but the whole line of thinking is still a classical begging the question fallacy.Report
We don’t generally execute people publicly for yelling, experiencing homelessness, or having mental breakdowns. He went beyond both the law and morality and deserved no help at all. That no one helped the man he killed is an amoral tragedy, but unsurprising in a nation that crows so much about individual liberty.Report
You do not actually know that and I do not think anyone will actually know that until there is a complete investigation which is then put before a jury, if in fact it goes to trial.Report
Reporting surrounding this incident refers to Mr. Neely as known to be unhoused and suspected of being in a related mental crisis. That he was yelling is also reported across multiple sources.
We do not execute people for these things in the US. Mr. Penny went beyond morality and legality in doing so.Report
We also aren’t supposed to convict people of crimes without following a process. And it’s totally possible Penny committed one. However it makes no more sense to conclude that at this juncture than it does to exonerate him.Report
MR. Neely was convicted of a crime and executed by Mr. Penny. No need to overcomplicate that further.Report
That’s just not accurate though. You’re not making things less complicated, you’re changing the facts.Report
Penny applied lethal force to Penny for longer then trained – assuming he was trained in that procedure. And yes, a choke hold is lethal force. Penny applied the force based only on a threat he perceived in front of him, and he did not remove that force when the threat was neutralized. Neely was deprived of life and liberty by a single person who decided to act as judge jury and executioner. And it’s on Youtube.Report
Terms like “convicted” and “executed” apply only to the state. You’re not using them correctly. You could use them for emphasis or analogy if you wanted, but you can’t strip away everything else and only present an analogy and claim that’s the essence of the issue. It just doesn’t make sense.
But is that worth my complaining about it? Yeah, because you’re saying that he was convicted of being homeless. As far as I know, no one on the train knew he was homeless. No one did anything to him on the basis of his homelessness. They perceived a threat. That’s the thing you seem to be trying to avoid.Report
And they acted as if the had the state’s permission to deal with that threat with lethal force. Penny perceived the threat and used his training – which was supplied by the state – to meet and subdue that threat with violent force which exceeded that necessary to eliminate the threat – which at that point as a guy shouting loudly. Which would have been bad enough had he simply turned the guy over. He went beyond that point though and executed Neely by continuing to apply trained lethal force after additional help arrived and after the threatening person was noticeably subdued. Only the state can do that, and as we have seen with George Floyd, even that has limits.
I chose the words I chose because I believe they accurately describe the actions and their attendant outcomes.Report
Did he identify himself as an agent of the state? Is there any reason to think he would have behaved differently if he’d been trained in martial arts as a civilian?Report
At my kids karate dojo, the duty to retreat is ALWAYS emphasized as the first action. Penny had no duty to act other then to call 911. That he did, relying on his military training to apply lethal force to what at the time was a non-lethal threat, puts him squarely out of moral bounds. Particularly once Neely stopped resisting him and other arrived to help hold Neely down.
Your semantic deflections aren’t going to work here. Neely was executed for yelling in a public place. Only the state has that right, and only after exhaustive trial and appeal. Neely received none of that. He was violently executed for yelling.
And it blows my mind anyone wants to defend that.Report
“Neely was executed for yelling in a public place….And it blows my mind anyone wants to defend that.”
No one is defending that. They’re tentatively defending what actually happened.
ETA: Actually, I think that Dark Matter answered this better than I did, just below. Note that he didn’t say Neely deserved to die because of his history of violence. He said that if Neely remained true to that history – if Neely was acting violently – then everyone’s reactions would be reasonable. That’s important.Report
They – and you – in defending what happened, which is Neely was executed by lethal force well in excess of that required to mitigate the “threat” he posed by yelling in a public place. No one there – including Penny – knew his history, so even if he was acting to it, they didn’t know that. And despite the desperado streak running through American mythology, ordinary citizens don’t have a duty to contain hostility in public places by applying trained lethal force. At best they had a duty to toss him off a train and call 911. Maybe, Maybe I can see a single person restraining him IF no help was forthcoming, but once others arrived to assist – and Neely ceased to resist – the continued application of lethal force was unjustified and immoral as well as hopefully illegal.Report
The first time I read Dark Matter’s comment, I thought he was saying that a violent history could justify the killing. I find that kind of reasoning objectionable. It’s like the argument that Michael Brown’s robbing of a convenience store justified his shooting death. It didn’t. Either he was killed justly or unjustly, and the answer to that question is found only in the incident that occurred, not in a person’s past.
But that’s not what Dark Matter said. I was wrong. He said that if Neely was acting violently during the incident it could justify the killing. There’s a difference. What matters is the incident. If he was just yelling and posed no threat, then the killing was unjust. If he did pose a threat, that would mitigate the blame or even justify the killing.Report
Neely’s history wasn’t relevant for Penny, but it’s relevant to us in evaluating how likely it is that he was acting threatening in the incident (since we weren’t there to see for ourselves). Maybe not usable in court, but certainly makes sense to factor into our assessment in our own debates.Report
Deus Ex Machina much?Report
I have no idea what this means.. i was basically saying the same thing as CJ below. Seems like you’re in full Fight Mode and just posting your first reaction to everything — maybe take a breath and carve out a bit of time to reflect before responding more?Report
Actually on second read CJ’s comment is about something else – guess I’m reading too fast as well.Report
Maybe take a breath and carve out a bit of time to reflect before responding more?Report
Indeed.Report
A great many folks around here are using knowledge no one on scene had to judge what must have been the correct course of action when these two encountered each other.
My contention since I waded into this morality free morass is that our Ex Machina knowledge is not exculpatory for Penny, and in fact is even more damning. Neely was executed for yelling in a public place by a person trained by the state in the use of lethal force, who decided with little provocation (again based on reporting) that yelling constitutes a lethal threat that must be met by lethal force. What we from the Deus Ex Machina perspective know or don’t know about Neely is not an excuse to permit this sort of thing.Report
Our knowledge isn’t exculpatory for Penny!
That said, the argument that, therefore, vigilantes would have been justified in attacking Neely and, indeed, that that would have been (let me copy and paste this) “the anthesis of vigilantism” weaponizes our ignorance into a new, much more secure, kind of knowledge.
The old paradigm of “just look at your shoes” had the benefit of being followed by moral agents.
“You have an obligation to intervene” is *NOT* going to go the way you want it to go.
Not at all.Report
We’re not called to make that judgment though. We can guess, for whatever good that does (and it actually does harm). Even jurors in a criminal case shouldn’t be making that judgment.Report
You are judging. Ken is judging. Dark is judging. Jay is judging. Even Chip and CJ are judging. So am I. You just happen to think Penny was right.Report
I think every person you listed has said some variation on “if” or “maybe”, except for you. I don’t think any of us has said that Penny was right.Report
The thing I notice when I look at Neely’s history is his worst acts were his most recent (so he’s getting worse), and the periods of time when he wasn’t doing violently insane things was when he was in jail.
We also have a warrant for his arrest because the Court doesn’t trust him to be out on the streets without treatment. We also have multiple other people warning about him being dangerously aggressive.
If we ignore all that, then Penny’s actions look grossly excessive based on what little we know about the train.
If we don’t ignore all that, then we need to wonder if the frequently violent lunatic was once again being so violent and dangerous that someone needed to step in.Report
The jurors certainly need to follow the rules, because their judgment actually affects people’s lives. We’re just shooting our mouths off here, so we can think what we want. I’m totally with you that we don’t have enough information yet to conclude anything with 100% certainly, but i don’t see why we can’t form tentative, even probability-weighted conclusions based on what we know so far. Otherwise let’s shut down all the current events conversations here until a year after the event is done — it takes a long time for all the info to work its way out.Report
Whether that’s an accurate account of Dark Matter’s views is for Dark Matter to address, but otherwise this is basically right. With one nit to pick. If A is acting up and B is deciding how to respond, if B knows about A’s violent history, that might legitimately be taken into account in deciding the reasonableness of B’s response. If B doesn’t know, it can’t.Report
True, but is that what we’re dealing with here? Neely has a history of violence, including insane violence.
If he remained true to his history, then that would explain both Penny’s behavior and the behavior of everyone else on the train.
Having said that, the fog of unknown is pretty thick here. Was Neely choked, or was it just a head lock; How long was Penny holding him, was it one minute or fifteen? Did everyone else on the train really back Penny?
We have 5+ 911 calls that haven’t been released and so on.
There’s room in the margin of error for this to be outright murder, there’s also room for it to be an accident that doesn’t deserve any charges.Report
Penny knew nothing about Neely’s history. He just reacted t what was in front of him. Penny hold him in excess of 10 minutes based on the videos in play so far, which is far longer the chokehold training would allow. Penny concluded that the threat Neely presented warranted lethal force, which he continued to apply after bystanders stepped in to help, and after Neely ceased struggling – again according to the videos.
The margin of error here is razor thin, and Penny exceed that margin.Report
I’m actually open to Penny having a self defense claim to kill Neely.
But I would need to be convinced that not only was he afraid of Neely, but that he used lethal force as a last resort, after de-escalation and evasion.
I haven’t seen much to convince me one way or the other.
What I do see is a lot of Rorschach stuff going on, people ascribing hero and villain roles based on our own priors and biases.
So my expectations for actual justice are not high.Report
Penny not knowing Neely’s history of being a violent lunatic doesn’t change that Neely was a violent lunatic. He even had a warrant for his arrest for the same.
Neely announced his intentions and it’s unclear how off the wall his behavior was. However if it was “only” as bad as it’s been before, i.e. randomly attacking people, then we’re into defense of self or others territory.Report
Yeah, that’s why I’m not commenting on this generally. Because pretty basic facts appear in dispute. Especially the duration of what does appear to be a sleeper hold.
Even assuming Neely was out of control, which itself appears in dispute, but assuming that: I have no qualms with an actual trained person applying a one of those intended to cause unconsciousness to stop someone out of control, honestly it’s a lot better than shooting or even tazing someone.
But, then again, if he was trained, he should have known that those work by cutting off blood from the brain and need to be released _immediately_ upon unconsciousness, which should happen in less than 15 seconds after you get in position and apply pressure, and it can be as short as _3_. Sleeper hold are basically as close to ‘immediate unconsciousness’ as are possible, or, to put it another way, you remain conscious in one of them as long as you do after _having your head cut off_…both those instantly cut off the flow of blood to your brain, and a sleeper hold is exactly as lethal if it keeps being applied…and even if it’s not held quite that long, it can cause the effect of a massive stroke.
Someone who is going around cutting off the blood to people’s brain is exactly as responsible for their actions as someone who walks around holding a gun. There is a duty there to act responsibly, to understand the fact you can end someone’s life with slight carelessness.
And fifteen minutes can’t even vaguely be considered an accident.
But then again, did he do that? Holding someone _after_ a sleeper hold can look a lot like continuing the hold, indeed, that’s how it is supposed to work, you shouldn’t just drop people to the floor, both because that can cause injury and because that can _wake them up_, thus undoing what you just did. You stop applying pressure and gently lower them…or keep holding them in your arms without any pressure if you’re worried they might wake up, so you can do it again.
Or was it even a sleeper hold at all? Or was it the thing you actually aren’t supposed to do, causing someone to pass out by blocking their _windpipe_ instead of their blood. You aren’t supposed to do that because a) It produces the normal chaotic struggle that humans do as they slowly suffocate, which is very counterproductive to holding them, and b) you can’t really know the point they actually pass out, so it’s nearly impossible to time that safely. OTOH, people can do that without any sort of training, so might not fully understand how dangerous that is. (Well, besides the fact that the person they are doing it to is clearly suffocating.)Report
I am not aware of vigilantism ever being “good.”Report
In a rare instance where I might both understand and agree with Jay, I believe he is arguing that calling for folks to “intervene” between Penny and Neely is encouraging vigilantism. Or, rather, encouraging the very thing Penny himself is criticized of doing.
It appears that Penny “intervened” into a dangerous situation between Neely and subway riders. People are upset by this and think the solution was for OTHER people to have “intervened” between Penny and Neely.Report
Reporting is inconclusive about any danger. People yell on subways all the time. You, as a New Yorker, should know this well. It is not an offense requiring execution, especially since other reporting indicates Neely was believed to be unhoused and possibly experiencing a mental crisis. Penny engaged in vigilantism by placing him in a chokehold. As did those who aided him. Removing that physical threat to Neely is the anthesis of vigilantism.Report
With a mom that loved to take me to NYC and DC, I’ve been on at least a hundred subway rides. People do not yell on subways all the time — I do not remember a single person doing this, and my adult experiences bear out that truth.
How do you suspect “removing that physical threat” to go? Please bear in mind the person you are attacking has combat trained responses. You are asking me, a person as small and light as Chauvin — and with far less training, to stop him?Report
I’ve actually thrown a belligerent person not in full possession of his faculties (alcohol, drugs, mental health?) off a subway train, onto the 14th Street platform. And I’m nowhere near the physical specimen Penny is.
I didn’t kill him. Or, as far as I can tell, even hurt him.Report
And at most that’s what you should have done. Penny could have done that too. He chose lethal violence. And it appears he may well get away with it because of who Neely (post hoc) turned out to be.Report
My wife, who wasn’t my wife then, thought I was nuts. In general, she’s right about these things.Report
That, exactly.
Margin of error here goes from no danger to self defense totally justified.Report
Removing that physical threat to Neely is the anthesis of vigilantism.
If there was a reasonable interpretation that Neely was threatening others physically (as some of the reports have stated), then there are a lot of antitheses out there.
At least the old rule of “if someone is violent in your car, keep your eyes on your shoes” made sense! This way, when a homeless guy is screaming at some Karen, you can think to yourself “I’m not intervening. I’m being virtuous by not intervening.”
Now there’s a situation where when some guys starts yelling “LEAVE HER ALONE!” at the homeless guy, you’re obligated to beat up the white knight.
Which is not how a lot of peoples’ moral intuitions are going to go.
Seriously, you’d be better off with a fully funded police force with the discretion to tell people telling homeless people to leave Karens alone to back off of risk arrest.Report
NYC and NY Transit have very well funded and trained police forces who were summoned by multiple callers to this incident. Their response time is atrocious, buts that’s a different issue. Penny MAY have had a right to defend himself if in fact he or other were physically attacked, but all the reporting seems to be the incident consisted of yelling. At no time, based on reporting, did Penny have the reason to deploy lethal force because Neely had not deployed lethal force. Once Neely was no longer resisting, and additional bystanders were helping hold him, lethal force was definitely uncalled for. Penny continued – on film – to deploy lethal force for minutes after that point. The only marginally virtuous people here were those who recorded the whole thing as evidence.Report
Based on reporting, I have heard that Penny threatened others in the car. Information that we have that Neely didn’t is that Penny has attacked others in the past.
One thing that we haven’t gotten into is the importance of being able to judge whether a person is going to be violent.
We know that Penny didn’t know that Neely was a violent person and therefore should have waited for Neely to attack someone before engaging in force himself.
Sure.
But everyone who chose to intervene chose to intervene on Penny’s behalf.
I suppose we could all jump to the conclusion that they were all jerks who couldn’t have known anything either. Sure. Everybody in that car did the wrong thing except for the people who filmed it.
If only we had more of the antithesis of vigilantes on the subway!Report
First 911 call: 2:27pm
Police show up and take charge: 2:30pm (or a hair before).
The police were on the scene in less than 3 minutes.
Penny was done touching him before that and had laid him down on his side.Report
I’m not going to argue the specifics of what happened on the train because I have not seen enough information.
My point is this:
– Some are saying, “People on the train should have done something when trouble started!”
– Others are saying, “Penny did something on the train when trouble started!”
You can argue those things are not the same.
But others will argue they ARE the same.
Both arguments are legitimate.Report
Here’s a better statement: if you see someone face down in the gutter, step in, intervene.
We just had this occur right outside a hospital, where hundreds of people walked by and did nothing.
Credit to the nurses who stopped on Cardiac Hill to see if someone was suffering Cardiac Arrest and not “drunk as a skunk.”
People do not intervene, as a general rule. If you truly understand this, it puts a lot of onus on yourself, if you see someone bleeding — Step In, Intervene. If you see a child ready to fall off a balcony — step in.
Be the one person who did something.Report
Much to think about here:
https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/05/17/a-low-income-housing-developer-swears-off-any-more-portland-construction/?mc_cid=d4fb251683&mc_eid=f9bfaa3a1b
I’m far from surprised to learn that overgrown bureaucracy is a significant impediment to mitigating our housing crisis. I doubt anyone outside of the municipal government is.
Worth noting: every bureaucrat involved would have a plausible-seeming justification of the importance of their roadblock to the process.
Also worth noting: the developer here was willing to market to low income residents, and to deal with some expenses relating to both bureaucracy and crime. He still saw a path to profit.
Finally worth noting: there appears to be a model of a solution readily available. If only the city would learn from it.Report
Here in CA, we’re finally getting some traction, with the spate of bills passed in 2021 and 2022 which make life easier for developers-
The most potent is the one called the “Builder’s Remedy” where is the city can’t approve housing fast enough, the builder can just bypass the entire entitlement process.
https://therealdeal.com/tag/builders-remedy/Report
The comparison that I saw that made sense to me was hiking. There are dozens of things that make perfect sense to put in your backpack and every single one of them is perfectly reasonable to include in a long hike.
But if you include all of them, you’ll fail to complete your hike.Report
Republican anti-business policies are causing Job Creators (TM) to flee to the pro-business pro-freedom state of California run by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/business/disney-ron-desantis-florida.htmlReport
I heard that they’re closing the Star Wars Hotel because of him.Report
The Saint Louis DA has resigned.
Report
LADOT has announced a new kind of bus shelter designed by and for women at bus stops that provides lighting and shade.
Let’s see more of this!Report
https://twitter.com/LP_CLC/status/1659562485794365440
Report
A for-real defense of the structure from KDI:
I suppose that this is the real story.
The whole “by women, for women” was a fun way to mix it up and get retweets but, fundamentally, “given the law, this is all we could build.”Report
So…Good guy with a gun exercising his 2nd Amendment rights, or dangerous lunatic about to go on a killing spree?
No way to know, until he pulls the trigger!
I-Team: Parents concerned about man with assault rifle at school bus stop
SEVERN, Md. —
Parents are concerned about a man who is regularly spotted carrying an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle at a school bus stop in Severn.
Jamie Sparrow, a Severn Elementary School parent, recorded a cell phone video Wednesday showing the man with an AR-15 in his hands at the bus stop where his 6-year-old daughter gets off. Parents said the man, J’den McAdory, has been there for drop-offs for weeks.
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/man-with-gun-severn-school-bus-stop-anne-arundel-county/43932236#
Think of this incident, and reflect on the Jordan Neely case.Report
Neely being a dangerous lunatic is well known by the gov. Even with that, and a warrant for his arrest, he can openly hang out in heavily policed areas causing problems. He can even be repeatedly arrested for attacking children and very old women.
This is the example you want to showcase the gov is competent enough to disarm and protect us against people who aren’t law abiding?
If you see something, say something.
With Neely that happened dozens of times.Report
If you saw a man walking towards a school bus stop with an AR-15, would it be lawful to overpower him and forcibly disarm him, or even shoot him on the grounds he posed a deadly threat?
Or does he get one free murder, before someone is allowed to put him down?Report
Two years ago, if you saw someone naked in public, odds are he posed a deadly threat to you and your friends. Do you think the appropriate response to an ill person is to kill them before they can kill you? Even if they are directly attempting to spread the deadly disease to as many people as possible?Report
I don’t know where you live, but if it’s full of people who think a naked person wandering the streets poses a deadly threat, I am sure I don’t want to live there.Report
I’m sorry you no longer wish to live in the “land of reality.” Please return to the land of insanity at any time. (Reality does not care about how many people can accurately describe the symptoms of a deadly disease.)
And you’re missing the point. The point was risk assessment, and what to do about it. If you see someone who has a 99% chance of contaminating a football field’s worth of humanity with a deadly disease (I’m going to lay out this is measles, and you can see them having a seizure) — do you get to kill them, in order to prevent them from contaminating and killing more people?
If not, then “person with AR15 near schoolbus stop” (which has a lower probability of spreading death) is -certainly not- someone you’re allowed to go kill.Report
I don’t know where you live, but where I live is as real as it gets — realer than places where a naked person wandering the streets is ipso facto a deadly threat.Report
Why do you say “two years ago”? Have cultural conventions about nudity changed from 2021 to 2023?
I should think context matters quite a lot when assessing the threat signalled by nudity in public. A naked guy staggering down the street in apparent intoxication, shouting at lampposts, and waving pointy objects about? Yes, that’s a dangerous scenario. That would be a dangerous scenario if the guy were clothed; nudity would further indicate mental instability but it’s any sort of too-erratic behavior coupled with proximity to a weapon that would trigger my spidey-sense.
A naked guy staggering down the street at a Pride parade whooping like a Nashville bachelorette party? He’s almost certainly harmlessly drunk and hopefully his friends will get him home to sleep it off after the party dies down. A guy who’s naked and probably stoned, tubing down a river on a hot summer day? In a lot of places the nudity part of that would be legal or at least tolerated, as long as other behaviors didn’t indicate a likelihood of lewd conduct or violence. Hope you used the waterproof sunscreen, dude.Report
Many cultural conventions have changed from 2021 to 2023, most particularly the “odds of you being out in public.”
I was discussing a symptom of a deadly disease, however. The two years ago was a reference to when it was “deadly” (also the symptoms for the mutating disease have changed radically over the course of those two years).
I don’t believe anyone was killed for being nude in public, despite the statistically high likelihood that they were symptomatic spreaders of a deadly disease. (Tased, tackled, otherwise arrested, sure.)
This wasn’t even considered important enough to bring up to the television-watching public. (Or beat cops, for that matter.)Report
Sorry. You’re being too elliptical about what it is you are trying to say. I give up on trying to coax out a worthwhile point from the exchange.
You might or might not be Kimmi behind that VPN, but the resemblance is uncanny.
Either way, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about here. And based on that last comment, there’s every reason to suspect that whatever point might be in there is grounded in both non-standard postulates about reality and fantasies about weird things that just plain didn’t happen, and therefore will almost certainly be of little value to the general discussion.
Thanks anyway. (To be explicit, this last sentence is not strictly an expression of gratitude but rather a closure of at least my end of the conversation).Report
Music Video filmed in Europe with models walking around naked, inflicting themselves on an unsuspecting public. No one was alarmed.
NSFW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHF3X8tQYPUReport
In the words of Liz Lemon, “I want to go to there.”Report
The answer to both of those questions is “no”.
No, having a gun doesn’t instantly mean you’re a threat nor does it mean that you’re making threats. Pointing it at people does, but this guy isn’t doing that.
No, you don’t get one free murder. If you start threatening people with it, or just threating in general, then people can assume you’re serious. Not only do you not get one free murder but you don’t get one free attack.Report
What if he is holding the gun in a ready posture, preparing to shoot?
Or does the muzzle need to be directly pointing at someone?Report
If he is holding the gun in a ready posture, preparing to shoot wildlife, he is actively hunting.
If he is holding the gun in a ready posture, preparing to shoot a barn door, that’s called target shooting. He’d be liable if it wasn’t his barn, or if the kids got in the way.
Jeez, if you want to make a claim about “taking proactive action” — use a knife. If someone at a children’s bus stop has a knife in hand (not using it to cut someone’s backpack to make a temporary conveyance, or any of the other reasons someone might need a knife on the normal basis), and is gesturing at other people with it (or brandishing it), many people would say “Someone’s life is in danger” and intervene. The safest way (for the intervener) to intervene is to use a gun (may not even need to fire it).
We have some pretty hard lines here.
1) Even being a deadly disease-carrier doesn’t mean we kill you (we may evacuate the vicinity and call “pest control” if you are rabid).
2) Flourishing a non-fist weapon is pretty much grounds for “People take it away from you, and you possibly wind up injured, or in a bad case, dead.”
3) Safely carrying a weapon (holstered, for those that can be, and “pointed at the ground” for long guns, demonstrating proper safety standards) is green conduct behavior (although you may be shunned, or asked to leave private establishments).Report
If your argument depends on fogging over the difference between “actively making threats” and “not actively making threats” then you have no argument.
Also see Arth’s reply.Report
You can see, can’t you, how the difference between “Actively Making Threats” and Not Actively Making Threats” is extremely arbitrary and dependent upon a lot of very subjective interpretations of human behavior.
Body posture, eye contact, tone of voice…these are the things that commenters on the Neely case and others have used to justify a credible threat, or not.
And in the absence of clear eyewitness testimony, any after-the-fact jury evaluation will depend largely on the jury’s subjective and biased opinion of the participants and their believability.
Which just points up the absurdity of “Lets all carry guns around and hey what’s the worst that can happen”.Report
As I recall, someone asked the guy what he was doing, and he said he was protesting a gun control law.
Color me skeptical.Report
The governor just signed a series of new laws in response to the Bruen decision, so it is entirely possible that is what he understands himself to be doing. In practice he is really just embarrassing himself and undermining his own cause with the public.Report
Was it Phil who said that if a black man did something like this he would be killed by cops?Report
Texas has basically stripped its municipalities (at least its blue ones of authority): https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4007362-texas-passes-bill-stripping-authority-from-cities/?fbclid=IwAR3BlR5d619JmrUHVtgTwkDMO3KDscqUdxtk-pYj8Z-Q2yATJOgKttiS0oQ
Constitutionally, this probably stands because municipalities are creatures of the state and derive their powers from the state. From a prospective of democracy, this is basically Republicans freaking out about demographic changes and deciding minority rule is better.
There was another study I saw this week regarding U30 voters and party affiliation. Not every state tracks this information but among those that do, U30 voters were vastly registering as Democrats in all but three states. The outliers are those economic powerhouses known as West Virginia, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Even Nebraska has U30 voters overwhelmingly swing Democratic.Report
I was just about to post this. So much for democracy and local control when they don’t like what local control does.Report
I keep saying “no one cares about federalism.”
This turns out to be true also regarding vertical allocation of power within a state as well as vertical allocation of power as between a state and the federal government.
No one cares about where power is allocated vertically, and vanishingly few people care about where power is allocated horizontally. All they care about is their side winning, today.Report
The United States is officially federal but the states are unitary bodies in themselves. The Courts have generally held that the states have complete power to shape local government as they please. California could turn every county into a department with appointed officials like France does and it would be constitutional.Report
As one point of reference, the Utah state constitution actually makes makes the counties somewhat sovereign. Colorado school districts have constitutional independence. The latter cost us any opportunity to compete for certain federal grants in the past because the federal government’s scoring system heavily penalized states where the legislature could not force their school districts to conform.Report
Which is why I refuse to discuss the Republican party as anything other than a revolutionary faction, unwilling to accept the legitimacy of any opposition.Report
Democratic states like California strip municipalities of authority all the time. When California imposes a regulation, municipalities are stripped of the ability to choose not to impose that regulation. When California raises taxes, municipalities are stripped of the ability to choose to have low taxes and spending. When California raised the minimum wage to $15.50, this stripped municipalities of the ability to choose to have a lower minimum wage.
There’s a major asymmetry in the framing here, where a state imposing government interventions statewide (and thus prohibiting municipalities from not having those interventions) is seen as totally legitimate, while a state preventing municipalities from imposing interventions is seen as an anti-democratic assault on the right of self-government.
If you’re in favor of more taxes and more regulation, this framing is very convenient, because you get four legitimate chances to get the taxes and regulations you want: Federal, state, county, and city.
If you want to stay that states should allow more local control, fine. But be consistent about it. If municipalities should be allowed to add more government control, then they should also be able to subtract it.Report
I get that for logistical reasons there are some regulations that need to be uniform, but there are many that do not need to be, as evidenced by the fact that municipalities have any regulatory power at all.
The minimum wage is an obvious example: There’s no reason certain municipalities couldn’t have a minimum wage lower than the $15.50 statewide minimum. California’s recent ban on pork produced in certain ways is another example. There’s absolutely no reason municipalities shouldn’t be able to override that if they choose, but California’s state government has stripped them of the authority to do so.Report
*ahem*
“That’s different.”Report
A Harvard (yes, *THAT* Harvard) poll has Trump beating Biden by 7 in a head-to-head matchup.
This strikes me as an outlier of a poll.Report
This strikes me as a poll eighteen months away from the election. You’d get more predictive results if you threw chicken entrails at a wall.Report
For some reason the always pictures of Trump in his prime rather than his current bloated Orcus form.Report
Well, The Hill is probably the most dishonest media outlet out there.
I almost thought “This is likely to be bullcrap!”, but I figured that… hey. The Hill pointed to things that actually existed so it’s not like I was linking to something like Fox, right?Report
Biden’s NLRB is going to take on the ridiculousness of the NCAA’s “student-athletes:”
https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2023/05/19/nlrb-files-complaint-against-usc-pac-12-ncaa-arguing-student-athletes-are-employees/Report
Let’s be clear that the problem is a subset of sports at a subset of schools/conferences. The fencing team at U. C. San Diego has student-athletes. Football teams at the Power Five schools largely do not. If U. C. San Diego has to pay their fencers a reasonable salary plus benefits, there won’t be a fencing team. I don’t see how they make it work without splitting men’s football and basketball off into something only loosely connected to the schools.Report
“I don’t see how they make it work without splitting men’s football and basketball off into something only loosely connected to the schools.”
Maybe that’s what needs to happen! You don’t need a college degree to play Minor League Baseball. Maybe we need to just admit that there are people whose career will be “sports player” and set up minor leagues for everything.Report
I think the issue is that College football and basketball earn basically professional level profits while Minor League baseball doesn’t. Plus people get all sorts of dopey attachments to their college football and basketball teams as their teams in a way they don’t with minor league baseball. So creating basically another NFL or NBA is a no go.Report
Pay the minor athletes min wage and do something more market for the major athletes.
There is a HUGE amount of money floating around in the system, if all the coaches need to take a 50% haircut to fund this then they’re still earning 10s of millions.Report
Not just the fencing team. I used to tutor computer science at a big U with a serious team. It was though the athletic program so everyone I met was a student athlete.
I never met a men’s basketball or men’s football player. They have special classes. Heck, just taking a sport is 12 credits. Thus someone complaining to my mom that her football player son actually had to take a class during the season. He was dumb as a bunny and was listed in the local paper as having a 3.0 college gpa. That was 3 credits of a fluff class and 12 of football taken pass fail.
I met various athletes from women’s sports (including basketball), and men’s not-football not-basketball.
Since I was tutoring a serious class I only met real student athletes.
For that matter my brother’s basketball team in (small) college was also all student athletes.Report
(I can’t reply to Chip up there, so I’ll reply down here).
The problem with using Neely as an example of “very subjective” is his history shows a pattern of violence. He’s covered with so many red flags that seeing a red flag seems reasonable.
Penny may have gone too far. Penny may have jumped the gun. However those are different issues than whether it’s reasonable to think Neely was a violent lunatic. The objective truth is Neely was a violent lunatic.
Yes, it’s not a perfect system.
No one is suggesting that everyone carry guns. What is suggested is that we have the choice (even the right) to evaluate our own risks, competence, situation, and make our own choice on whether to arm.
However your actual position is we should collectively disarm.
We don’t have anything close to the cultural support to make this workable. Our lack of unity is so high we don’t have the ability to make everyone wear masks or get vaccinated during a pandemic. That’s before worrying about whether criminals will obey the law.Report
You’ve got me thinking, should we even consider “no more guns” a position?Report
Not one that any thinking person should take seriously.Report
(I can’t reply to Chip up there, so I’ll reply down here.)
Fixed that. Thanks for including the note.
Standard WordPress behavior is to not include a reply link when a comment is at the maximum nesting depth. Changing that is not one of the available options. Because I, for one, think it’s stupid, we patch the WordPress source code so it includes a reply link no matter the nesting depth. Every time the WordPress version is updated, or rolled back, the code has to be patched again. My check-and-patch daemon runs daily at 3:05 am (MT), so those reply links are missing for some period after an update.Report
Yes, I think that if ordinary people feel the need to arm themselves just to go about their daily duties, this is a catastrophic failure of governance and culture.
I can’t help but notice the striking juxtaposition of people being shocked and outraged by stores locking up their items for fear of shoplifting as a sign of governmental failure, but then nonchalantly accepting the idea that Mommy, Daddy, and Junior all need to gear up like a SWAT team just to go out for ice cream because of the real likelihood of deadly violence breaking out.Report
I’ve seen more people say “Yep, that’s a natural outcome of governmental failure” than “OH MY GOSH WE NEED TO HAVE THE GOVERNMENT BE EVEN MORE GOVERNMENTAL!”
Now, I’m not going to say that nobody has argued the latter.
It’s the internet. Of course you’re going to find people who scream “DON’T TOUCH POLICE UNIONS!” then “DEFUND THE POLICE!” then “WE NEED THE POLICE TO DO HOUSE TO HOUSE SEARCHES FOR GUNS!” mere days apart from each other.
But what we’re seeing is society moving from a higher level of trust to a lower level of trust.
You’re not going to like the stages that follow this one.Report
I think it is gun owners who are really not going to like what comes next, considering that their argument is “Yes, you must accept a certain amount of visible disorder in order to maintain Constitutional rights.”
As has been pointed out here so many times, when it comes to seeking safety and security, people are perfectly happy to cede more power to the government.Report
They are among those who are really not going to like what comes next, yes.
But they aren’t going to be the softest targets available.Report
The gun owners won’t like what happens next. The ammo manufacturers will love it though.Report
At this point, you’re about three chords away from Helter Skelter.
In the late 60’s, as seismic shifts were happening in American culture, there were all sorts of “decline and fall” pundits and commenters (Including a certain Mr. Manson) grimly predicting things like race riots, loss of gender roles and traditional relationships and general chaos and ultimately Divorce or War.
Except, as it turns out to absolutely no one’s surprise, most people don’t want to run out into the streets and start gunning down their neighbors, and when faced with chaos and instability will elect a Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, a firm authority figure who will bring order to the streets.
This political moment is different- the revolutionaries are in the Republican party and they have more power to sow chaos and catastrophe.
But in the end, its hard for me to imagine a bunch of suburban moms and dads being cool with creepy weirdos lurking with AR-15 around their kids.Report
I don’t predict those sorts of things, I expect we’ll muddle through. I also suspect things are getting better, not worse.
It helps a lot that if you care about order, then there are murder free zip codes to move to.
The guy in question is apparently (and maybe cluelessly) engaged in political protest. And from your link, the resolution of this was…
McAdory said that earlier Thursday, he came to an agreement with school officials to no longer publicly protest during school pickup or drop off times.Report
“Juxtaposition” implies irony or conflict.
The first image may be causing the second.
Neely is a violent lunatic, who…
1) …the gov has been told about dozens of times,
2) …the gov has been told to arrest by a local judge,
3) …routinely hangs out in heavily trafficked gov-controlled gov-run facility causing problems,
4) …has no political support or organizational support what so ever.
And the gov is apparently unable to do anything about him. If the gov wants to be trusted to maintain order then they need to earn that trust.
As it is, if my family is living next door to Neely or someone like him, then I reserve the right to decide I’ll be safer if we have a gun in the house.
That is unlikely, and that isn’t the optimal way to deal with this situation. However the level of gov (and/or social) dysfunction can get that bad.Report
The City Beautiful channel on YouTube had an interesting video on how to make the suburbs less boring. I generally agree with the points made in the video. Where I disagree is that making the suburbs less boring in ways described, allowing for more diverse housing options, mixed land use, and less car base transportation would be popular. From what I can tell the suburban experiment has been so successful that nearly all Americans of all races and many immigrants to America see them as the quintessential American way to live. It is what most people, regardless of race, seem to really want. They might moan about the prices but the big preference is for single use, single family, and very car-oriented suburbia.
Besides the recent problems to cities caused by COVID, the two big issues seem to be the American inability to give up the car and that people seem to think that kids or really anybody who isn’t in a romantic couple should have their own room. We aren’t going back to sharing rooms and even new apartments aren’t built for each kid to have their own room.Report
What do you mean? Three- and four-bedroom apartments have been around for a long time.
Modern American cities have two major shortcomings. First, you can’t have a private yard. This is a problem inherent to high density. Parks kind of make up for this, but it’s not quite the same, and also, making a segue to the next major problem, they’re full of drug addicts.
More generally, cities are full of criminals and drug addicts. As anyone who’s ever been to a major East Asian city can tell you, this isn’t inherent to city life. It’s a policy choice. Voters in American cities have made a deliberate choice to tolerate crime and public drug abuse, with predictable results.Report
Three to four bedroom apartments exist but they are rare. Most apartments that are being built are studios, one bedrooms, and two bedroom affairs.Report
Voters in American
citiessuburbs have made a deliberate choice to tolerate crime and public drug abuse, with predictable results.Fixed it.
The addicts and homeless people in the cities weren’t born and raised there. Most of them were born and raised in the suburbs, then when their lives collapsed, were conveniently shuttled off to the cities to become someone else’s problem because its cheaper than levying taxes to support mental hospitals and treatment centers.
What, you think that people in the suburbs don’t develop schizophrenia, or an addiction? As anyone who has ever been to a major East Asian country can tell you, these things are universal.Report
Speaking of:
Though often perceived to be a problem of the inner city, substance use and misuse have long been prevalent in rural areas. Rural adults have higher rates of use for tobacco and methamphetamines, while prescription drug misuse and heroin use has grown in towns of every size.
Substance use can be especially hard to combat in rural communities due to limited resources for prevention, treatment, and recovery. According to The 2014 Update of the Rural-Urban Chartbook, the substance use treatment admission rate for nonmetropolitan counties was highest for alcohol as the primary substance, followed by marijuana, stimulants, opiates, and cocaine.
Factors contributing to substance use in rural America include:
Low educational attainment
Poverty
Unemployment
Lack of access to mental healthcare
Isolation
https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/topics/substance-use
Schools:
COLUMBUS, Ohio—Even with higher rates of poverty in Ohio’s major cities, urban school districts are outperforming rural districts, a recent study by The Ohio State University shows.
Rural schools, particularly in Appalachia, tend to have lower average test scores than schools in urban areas, despite city districts having higher poverty rates and a larger proportion of students with limited English proficiency, said Mark Partridge
The takeaway here is NOT that rural areas are cesspools of addiction and dysfunction. This, and many other studies confirm that the prevalence of mental illness and behavioral disorders are pretty much universal.
The takeaway is to push back against the idea of essentializing crime and disorder; that there is just something different about the people in cities versus people in suburbs and rural areas.
That they somehow are better or worse, just inherently good or bad.Report
But they’re Real Americans.(TM) So that doesn’t count.Report
Yes, absolutely correct. There are really terrible places all over. Appalachia has a well known rep for being bad, their test scores and what not will reflect that.
Having said that, everywhere is not equally dysfunctional. I believe strongly in whipping out the ruler and checking the data.Report
The data shows that geography isn’t important.
Every zip code has roughly the same prevalence of mental illness, addiction.
Just because some zip codes bus their addicts to a different zip code doesn’t change that.
Naturally, if one zip code dumps all its dysfunctional people onto its neighbor, of course the neighboring zip code will be more dysfunctional.
Again, this is just a sly way of trying to essentialize people, to make it seem as if some groups of people are just different somehow, more or less morally righteous.
It also robs us of the ability to discuss solutions by making it a discussion of blame and fault.
I personally know a guy who grew up in a great zip code, an affluent suburb, went to the best schools, had a great intact family, the whole works.
And he ended his life as an alcoholic sleeping in an alleyway.
The “Blame” dialogue revolves entirely around who is at fault, who is to blame, and then it just…stops.
So we all agree that this guy is personally to blame, he is entirely at fault.
OK so now what? The conversation doesn’t allow us to talk about forcible confinement or treatment, it just centers itself on moral condemnation.
It just doesn’t matter whether this zip code has more addicts or mentally ill people than that one, because in the end its a problem that every single zip code needs to help solve.Report
Mental illness rates are hardly the be all and end all of a zip. Murder rate, school success rate, location of jobs, and so on can vary wildly.
Nor is mental illness the only source of “dysfunctional people”.
No blame and no fault normally means we can’t talk about cultural dysfunctions, like not calling the police and not getting married.
It’s hard to understand how not talking about this helps. If we can’t even talk about that then there is no solution. Imagine trying to get rid of dueling without being willing to talk about dueling.
Or I gave a lecture to College Physics students on applying for engineering internships. Most useful part of that was the most common errors I see on resumes.
Single most common mistake is not understanding the difference between “experience” and “paid work”. If you flipped burgers for McDonalds then you were paid. If you programmed a robot for First Robotics then you weren’t. Skip the first and focus on the second.
It shouldn’t matter whether there’s “blame” on stupid mistakes that lots of people make. They’re still serious problems and they deserve a spotlight.Report
Great then let’s talk about dysfunctional people who make mistakes and what we can do to solve that.Report
Increase the training budget!Report
The single biggest thing we could do is increase marriage rates. So… linking gov handouts to marriage status (i.e. paying people to get married)? Name and shame?Report
Report
Dating coach and gym membership for those. Although in my case I joined a dating service and then went on a blind date that worked out well.
I’m not sure what men do now although I guess I’ll have to look into this at some point.
However it’s procreation without marriage that’s normally thought of as the issue. Unfortunately a lot of your success (statistically) is determined by who you picked for your parents.Report
I can definitely get on board with the spirit of this.
For instance, free government daycare and preschool, and things like relationship counseling are things which can help young people form their first households and ease the stress on a new marriage.Report
HIppie.Report
Given the demographic problems in the entire first world this seems like a good idea.
However this won’t work unless it’s “married couples only”. We’re trying to encourage marriage, not single parenthood.Report
Remember, we’re trying to solve societal problems like crime and dysfunction here.
For every category of people who are excluded from help, we need to address the consequences of that exclusion.
Like, if we exclude unmarried households from preschool and counseling, that produces negative consequences which we as a society have to either accept, or address in some other fashion.
ETA: Its like free needle exchanges. While it seems distasteful to enable someone’s addiction, it has proven to greatly reduce the harm to society in the form of HIV and other health consequences.Report
Yellow flag – we are only trying to solve SOME sorts of crime and dysfunction. Domestic violence won’t be solved by this. Rape and incest won’t be solved by this. Child sexual abuse won’t be solved by this.
White collar crime won’t be addressed by this. Political dysfunction won’t be addressed by this. We are just focusing on the highly urban and visible.Report
No, we don’t, and we also shouldn’t.
Different groups can respond differently to different stimulus.
So giving money to single unwed people can be paying them to not get married in one group (which isn’t help) and be helpful in another. Thus some of my pregnant relatives, under tremendous social pressure, got married despite the gov’s “help”.
We get what we pay for. If we’re paying for dysfunctional people to stay dysfunctional then that’s a problem. If we say you have to be functional to accept this then not so much.
No one is deliberately getting addicted to enjoy getting free needles.
My highly-functional, well paid, PhD engineer brother walked me through the math of why he wasn’t getting married to his pregnant girlfriend because of gov benefits. He’d clearly done a deep dive on the subject.
We need to make it so it’s easy to be functional. You don’t do that by rewarding what should be punished.Report
Are we mistaking the direction in which the arrow of causation points here?Report
I’ve been wondering about this myself. All the evidence we have from twin and family studies suggests that genetics contributes much more than upbringing to variation in adult traits and outcomes. It’s quite possible that single parenthood is just a proxy for heritable traits that influence outcomes, rather than a major causal driver of outcomes.Report
see, you can’t shame genetics. You can shame individuals and culture – even whole societies. And when you believe beyond a doubt that its all about culture, pesky evidence otherwise must be wrong . . . .Report
Genetics doesn’t explain the real world outcomes we are seeing.
For instance, there has been over the past two decades, a dramatic decline in the outcomes of white working class people in the Rust Belt regions.
People whose parents lived prosperous law-abiding lives are now mired in addiction, depression and troubled marriages and dysfunctional families.
Vice versa, a century ago the slums of places like New York or London had Irish neighborhoods teeming with crime and drunkenness and dysfunction. They no longer exist and the descendants of those dysfunctional people are living prosperous highly functional lives.Report
Our genetics hasn’t changed over the last century, but marriage rates have.Report
I’ve wondered about that but my relatives have been very open about what they were doing and why. The gov paying for dysfunction is clearly a problem.
Also I believe Chip is correct about rates of mental illness being pretty common across all groups. Clearly we have people who are dysfunctional because of that, but if the rates of mental illness are common and the rate of dysfunction is not, then the difference is poor choices.Report
A first time encounter with people I know online but met in the real world yesterday has let me wondering whether a big problem with the DEI/Woke movement is that it makes more intuitive sense to people from bougie backgrounds rather than anybody else. Not in terms of the substance of the teachings but mainly in the surface level behaviors. There is a sort of refined manners in human relations that really appeal to people from educated bougie backgrounds like myself. For groups that favor more blunter/earthy ways of talking and acting in public, the entire thing seems eye-rolling at best.Report
There is a wonderful section from Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to be an Anti-Racist”:
You can read it in context here.Report
The term “racist policies” (from the linked context) might fly a little better than “institutional racism”. What regular Joe is making policy? This allows a lot of hand washing while still leading people into the fight.Report
I’m one of those who thinks that Kendi is mostly wrong but with some serious kernels of truth that need to be wrestled with.
The problem is that the solutions he offers are mostly wrong.
To use the easy example of schools in Baltimore, is your guess that the policies are more racist in the current year than a decade ago or less racist?
Well, here’s The Nation’s Report Card for Baltimore.
What would a less racist policy for Baltimore’s schools look like?
I’d suggest, at the very least, it’d be one that had better scores.Report
Not gonna lie, this white American isn’t going to lecture a black guy about racism in this country.Report
Maybe the schools will get better without people like us giving input.Report
That’s really up to the good citizens of Baltimore, wouldn’t you say?Report
Some might say that it has been for decades and decades now.Report
You know, I’ve been cleaning off my back porch for a bit between watching the PGA on TV, and I’ve been thinking about this exchange. All we’ve done thus far is trade witticisms, to no great end.
I’m not too concerned with the state of the schools in Baltimore, or any other locale in these United States other than the ones in my fair city. You, on the other hand, are. What positive advice for the improvement of their schools do you have for the burgers of Charm City?Report
My concern is more of the form that we’re actively harming people in the name of being virtuous.
As for improvement of the schools, I’d point to something like this:
So take what worked there and apply it elsewhere.Report
Perfect!
(Good Lord, they’ve discovered phonics!)Report
Well, there was a major sweep a few years back where our best and brightest noticed that most of our best and brightest didn’t use phonics but, instead, used whole word reading.
The idea was that if we taught everybody whole word reading, we’d end up with a lot more best and brightest.
Anyway, that mistake seems to be in the process of being reversed in some areas.
Let’s hope that schools that can’t believe that they have ZERO proficient students follow suit.Report
“I’m not too concerned with the state of the schools in Baltimore…”
The reason we’re concerned with the state of the schools in Baltimore is that the things people want you do to with the schools in Your Fair City are the same things they wanted Baltimore to do with its schools and when Baltimore did those things it didn’t work.Report
You didn’t live through the impact of the Treaty of Versailles on Germany, so that’s off-limits too I guess.Report
You mean the one that ended a world war? Last I checked, I’m still living on this world.Report
Wow, I’ve never thought of myself as too subtle, particularly when breaking Godwin’s Law. So let me be blunter: if you can’t Kendi’s peddling racism in the name of counter-racism, how can you judge Hitler’s?Report
You don’t have to lecture him (I doubt he’d be too interested to listen anyway), but it’s ok to disagree with him — many Black people do too.Report
One day someone is going to tell that guy you can control for multiple variables and it’s going to blow his mind.Report
Multiple regression (what people usually have in mind when talking about controlling for different variables) is actually not a very good tool for causal inference in social science. It’s much better than raw correlations, of course, but it still doesn’t really work. You can never be sure that you’re controlling for everything you need to control for, and often controlling for things you shouldn’t control for can cause problems, too. Multiple regression has produced a lot of really bad social science papers.
Really you need a find and exploit a source of exogenous variation in the variable of interest. This is a lot harder, but it gives much stronger evidence than multiple regression. Economists have made a lot of progress in developing techniques for doing this over the past few decades.Report
So a cigender lesbian who dresses in masculine clothing was forced out of a women’s bathroom.
She is biologically female, so according to laws she was in the correct restroom.
https://twitter.com/KarbonSays/status/1659966632926801920
Yet the busybody bigots forced her out anyway.
Because this has nothing to do with protecting anyone. Its about protecting the “correct” understanding of gender roles and clothing.Report
Okay. The Sarah Comrie story. Question for the lawyers: the Twitters are bubbling about how much of a defamation case she has as well as one heluva employment case against her employer.
IS THIS ACCURATE?Report
Hard to say unless you assume we know what the “Sarah Comrie story” is. We don’t. And we don’t advise potential clients who won’t tell us what their issue is and what they want done about it.Report
Okay. Fine.
Sarah Comrie is a nurse who happens to be six months pregnant. She claims to have rented a bike from one of those bike-rental apps. There was a dispute with some young people who claimed that, no, *THEY* were the ones who rented the bike.
There was a verbal altercation. This verbal altercation went viral.
Some people claim that Sarah was trying to get these young people murdered. Some people claim that the young people were “pranking” Sarah.
There was an online mob that leaked all of Sarah’s info (and her husband’s info as well) and Sarah claims that she and her husband have had to make all of their social media private as a result. Enough people called her place of employment to have her put on leave until there is an internal review.
Anyway, you can see multiple threads discussing the altercation:
In any case, Sarah claims to have provided receipts that she was the one who rented the bike. The receipts don’t matter as much as you’d think.
Report
If it turns out that Sarah is not lying about having the receipts, I’m wondering if she has something like a case.Report
Probably not. Certainly not against her employer, since there’s no law preventing an employer from suspending an employee based on what might have been her role in an altercation, until they can figure things out. Probably not against the people who criticized her on Twitter for defamation either, because what they said was opinion based on disclosed facts, i.e., the video.Report
Ehhhh real life isn’t an exam question though. Also doesn’t hurt that she’s a protected class. She’d be a fool not get an attorney to ask that her employer ‘make this right,’ and depending on the definition of what ‘right’ is it’s entirely possible they would offer something or another to avoid an EEOC complaint, outside counsel fees, and whatever other hassle.Report
Everybody is in a protected class if there is a plausible claim that the employer acted because of that class status. There isn’t.
Maybe the employer will do something if asked, depending on what it is, but clients often overestimate the likelihood that an employer will do something substantial merely because someone can file a piece of paper and create a minor kerfuffle.Report
There is a sort of deep pockets issue unless her lawyers manage to get Twitter in as one of the defendants.Report
Makes me wonder the extent to which Bellview’s pockets are relevant.Report
Only to the extent they are a defendant. It’d be dumb for her not to at least consult counsel given that they had an official (though not necessarily totally unreasonable) reaction. It’s often cheaper to pay someone off than to litigate, regardless of the merits.
Randos on twitter are a more complicated matter, and even where you could win in theory you can’t get blood from a stone. Lawyers have to eat too you know.Report
Can you wring an apology from a stone? Or is something like that not usually at stake? I mean, there are a small number of posts like this:
Would a lawyer say something like “your choice is between X and Y and you cannot afford Y, you can barely afford me”? (I mean, assuming that Sarah is not lying?)Report
Certainly demanding a retraction is a thing a lawyer might help do and you can’t argue with success. What is important to understand, and I daresay my fellow lawyers at OT would probably agree, is that issues tend to be resolved more by amoral economic calculations than on the merits.Report
Wait, is there a suggestion that Twitter accounts who whip up mobs of people to attack some private individual can be held liable?
This will be very interesting.Report
Defamation is indeed a tort.Report
Sarah’s GoFundMe has gotten more than $100,000.
I imagine that this would pay for a couple hours of a couple of bloodsucking lawyers who would be willing to abuse the process to threaten people stupid enough to use their real names on their twitter accounts.Report
Good News!
Levi’s will test AI-generated clothing models to ‘increase diversity’
Of course, analog diverse persons are complaining about this.Report
I watched the documentary version of David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count today. In it he introduced a great phrase which really describes the awkward place that Jews have in current social battles in the developed world, the sacred circle of oppression. At least for the liberal-left faction, or the Woke faction, whatever you call it, those who are good are in the sacred circle of oppression and everybody outside it is neutral or even actively evil. A lot of the current left seems to want to place Jews very firmly outside the sacred circle of oppression. We are either a neither group like East Asians or Hindu Indians or an active oppressor group depending on their opinion. The White supremacists of course insist that Jews are evil but from the other side.
I don’t like it. The feeling is of extreme homelessness with endless with the best option is to be taken advantage of by one side or another. Endless appeals on why we should support this or that faction, our history/Holocaust for the liberal-left and Israel for the right but abandonment when real Jews need real help. I also don’t like that so many Jews are so into their liberal/leftist credentials that they blind themselves to this or they can’t see the danger from the right because Israel or something. Jews are basically alone at the current moment and we only have ourselves to rely on.Report
Being both successful and oppressed undercuts the Left’s beliefs on how the world works.Report
I suspect the current emphasis on systematic racism does explain why so much of the Left struggles with anti-Semitism. They can form a relatively straight line from African-Americans being enslaved to Jim Crow to current harsh policing tactics. With Jews, it is really hard to see how the Russian pogroms, the Holocaust, or even the more exodus from Iran made Jewish life worth. The Iranian Revolution caused Iran’s Jews to flee to Los Angeles and Nassau County where they are thriving isn’t exactly something that seems that bad to many people.Report
Agreed, but imho it’s a lot worse than that.
The Left wants to measure outputs, not inputs. As a whole, Jews are successful, ergo they’re not oppressed. If we admit that they (and the Asians) are oppressed but are successful anyway, then why can’t others do that?
This line of thought results in needing to admit that America isn’t all that racism a country, that level of racism has gone down. Gone down so much that it’s not even the dominate reason why various groups aren’t successful.
A lot of people have real problems questioning their core beliefs. They’d much rather believe “it wasn’t that bad” or “Jewish conspiracy” because those “explain” why their core beliefs aren’t wrong.Report
There is often a tendency among even those who think of themselves as liberal to essentialize people, imbuing entire groups with various characteristics.
We recognize it instantly when it is in the form of ‘Jews are good with money” or “black people have natural rhythm” but not as easily when it is in the form of “Jews and black people are liberal”.
So like when we encounter a homophobic black person or anti-Semitic gay person or bigoted Jew, there is a dissonance.
But there’s not really any reason why this shouldn’t be so is there?
After all, the core of the liberal outlook is that the human experience is universal, so why should we be surprised to discover that oppressed minority groups are themselves spread out all along the political axes?Report
It is a lot worse than merely being flat-footed when a minority it being anti-Semitic. For a lot of the Left, there is a lot of acceptance of old anti-Semitic canards like Jews are good with money as you noted above or even a lot of acceptance of anti-Semitism if it comes from the right people and you can squint hard enough and see it as revolutionary, anti-imperial, and anti-Zionist. There is also the fact that national liberation movements and radical nationalists from other groups are lionized as heroes while the Jewish equivalents are degraded as imperial oppressors. If Menachem Begin was born into any other oppressed group but the Jews, he would at least get a “you have to understand” or even be seen as hero. Since he was a Jew who fought for Jews, he gets to be a big villain instead. Same with say the Irgun vs. the Black Panthers. It doesn’t help that many Jews can’t take their own side in a fight and you have a lot of of traitor Jews who side with people that will do us harm because it is so revolutionary.Report
The Sacred Circle of Oppression strikes me as a strange way to distribute moral merit.
It’s likely to result in people saying “As an individual, *I* experienced” and then provide some story from their own lives and hearing “Yes, but 100 years ago” is going to end up with a weird, weird, weird, weird, weird conversation.Report
It may not be heroic to reject a model just because it treats your group badly, but it got you to the point where you’ve identified the model as unjust, and there’s no excuse to turn back now.Report