Open Mic for the week of 5/29/2023
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 the front page.
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 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.
When thinking about the GOP and it’s stand on immigration – yet another area where they offer no good or new or even consistent policy options – its useful to remember that much of what the Party is after is performance so it can stay in power.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/30/1177657218/florida-anti-immigration-law-1718-desantisReport
I’m not sure that “that’s not a *NEW* policy option!” is half the criticism you seem to be implying.
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“We should do what Canada does.”
“Pffft. Old news. We want a *FRESH* immigration policy!”Report
Canada has rational immigration policy driven by its actual economic needs. We should be so lucky.Report
E-Verify? That’s the controversy? E-Verify is the most vanilla of all proposals. Most Democrats support it. If a Republican criticizes it, he gets booed for being a Chamber of Commerce lapdog. If you want to criticize it, the only thing you’ve got is that it’s the lowest-hanging fruit.Report
NO, the thing I’m laughing at quite loudly is the allegedly draconian punishments for not using it – which have been NOT enforced when proposed elsewhere. And doing all this in a Florida agency that doesn’t have the staff – and for which he is not asking for more funds.
This is red meat for the base. It doesn’t actually do anything other then make him look tough to a narrow electorate. It has potential significant economic downsides to Florida’s major industries which the Governor is either ignoring or doesn’t expect to inflict despite the language. Its also built on the complete fiction that if we just ran all the undocumented migrants out of the country then Americans would flood the job market. IN a state with 2.6% unemployment.
Its performative. Its stupid. It doesn’t actually accomplish anything on immigration (which is a federal responsibility anyway). And it contains no new ideas.Report
It’s always mystified me that the occasional meatpacking dragnet doesn’t result in more happening to the owners.Report
There are those who would say that’s the least mystifying thing about it.Report
we had one of those a few years ago across a couple poultry plants here in Mississippi. The owners threw a middle manager under the proverbial bus. Plausible deniability isn’t just a government thing.Report
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/29/1178279383/for-black-drivers-a-police-officers-first-45-words-are-a-portent-of-whats-to-comReport
Thinking about moving to New York City.
“Where We Go One, We Go All” has a new meaning.Report
This seems misguided.Report
Sounds pretty skinny. Perhaps you should interrogate that.Report
Well, I always see positive comments about San Francisco here, that it’s nothing like its reputation:
https://www.nbcnews.com/now/video/san-francisco-city-meeting-cut-short-after-protester-throws-brick-176628805961Report
If zoning laws prevent new building, there are only but so many ways to lower housing prices.Report
There seems to be a parody twitter account for AOC.
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-aoc-triggered-by-obvious-parody-account-of-her-on-twitter-assessing-how-to-move-forward?utm_campaign=64487
Assuming this is true, it’s hilarious. No, it’s hilarious regardless. Let’s have more of these. There should be a parody account for EVERY politician.Report
These threads are not always showing up in my feed for some reason. The San Francisco Mayor’s race in 2024 might be the first time I have to hold my nose and vote for the candidate I consider the lesser of two evils.
The candidates so far:
1. London Breed, the current mayor. I have voted for her before when she ran for Board of Supervisors and for the Mayor. She was supposed to be a technocratic moderate but her biggest thing is self-promotion and she will attack any policy, no matter how sensible, if she thinks it will hurt her power. I was pretty disappointed that she decided that a perfectly sensible proposition to have city elections coincide with Presidential elections was a “DSA powergrab.” I don’t particularly like the guy who proposed the reform but it is a perfectly good one. There should not be off-year elections in the United States. All elections should be on even years. If I had my druthers, I would just have all politicians elected four year terms and elections would follow the 2, 6, 0, 4, 8 pattern. No mid-terms.
2. Ahsha Safai, a member of the Board of Supervisors and the worst kind of NIMBY. From wikipedia:
“In 2008, he ran for the District 11 seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors against John Avalos, losing by a close margin.[6] Safaí ran again in 2016, successfully, replacing Avalos who was termed out of office.[6] During the 2016 race, he ran against Kimberly Alvarenga; Safaí was endorsed by the San Francisco Chronicle.[5]
He worked with Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin to delay the construction of thousands of units in the Hub so that TODCO, a low-income housing non-profit in San Francisco, could perform a race and equity study on the project within six months.[7] More than two years later, TODCO had not begun the study and the group said it had no intent to do so.[8]
In 2021, Safaí said he would oppose the building of modular housing for the homeless in San Francisco unless it used labor from San Francisco; a Vallejo company had up until then provided modular housing complexes faster and cheaper than other companies could.”
TODCO is a slumlord holding itself out as a non-profit.
https://sfstandard.com/politics/sf-housing-nonprofit-todco-politics-tenants-infestations-drug-overdose/
Maybe other people like Phil Ting, Matt Haney, or Scott Wiener will throw their hats in the ring.Report
Clearly you’re voting for Breed; why would she need to change anything?Report
San Francisco politics seem to be like what a conservative believe liberal left politics is like at times. For all the action that is happening on the state level in Democratically governed state, municipal politics seem frozen between too many different factions that can’t work together.Report
Their high school canceled an LGBTQ play. These teens put it on anyway.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/31/marian-school-theater-lgbtq-indiana/
These kids are being politicized by the relentless wave of bigotry against LGBTQ people. Although ostensibly a happy story, these kids, and their 5,000 supporters will forever remember how they were forced out of school by a handful of rightwingers, who were acting on the support and encouragement of the Republican party.Report
Yet another display of adult cowardice in the name of “protecting” the kids.Report
Actually it was the school principal who cancelled the play, citing concerns about “heckling” and “harassment” that were based on the fact that “some calls from parents showed concerns”.
And according to the article he basically just walked into the drama room and said “play’s off”, it’s not like there was some lengthy review process involving multiple stakeholders or received guidance from the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
I dunno. You really want this to be teaching the kids a lesson about Those Icky Jerk Republicans, but I think the lesson they’re learning is “the people running the school consider No Fighting their first priority and everything else is a distant second”, which isn’t a new lesson for any kid in school.Report
The Principal doesn’t get to enforce “no Fighting” on anyone beside the students in his charge. The parents are under the jurisdiction of the local police – who apparently went to the show when it went on (and where there was no incident). Disgruntled parents are not required to attend these performances no matter where they occur, so again, this decision by the school was the action of cowardly adults.Report
You are responding to a comment that literally begins with the word actually. Starting a comment with actually is never a sign of good things on the InternetReport
When it come to Density, JB and to a lessor extent Dark, if I never responded to comments like that I’d have little to say around here.Report
I don’t know a better word than “actually” to start a certain kind of comment. It’s become frowned upon, but it expresses an idea accurately.Report
On the internet, it’s a good bet that a reply starting that way will be unwelcome to the person who made the original comment, regardless of its accuracy, though it can often be helpful to others.
Related — the Community Notes feature on Twitter is pretty cool. I don’t know if it’s measurably effective at stopping bad info from spreading, but it’s satisfying that you don’t have to count on the original poster deleting with explanation.Report
I think the actual rule of thumb is that if you’re going to start a comment with “actually,” you better be actually sure you know what you’re actually talking about.Report
I mean, that’s certainly important, but I don’t think it’s the general objection — my impression is that it’s more about the person being seen as pedantic or nerdy or “mansplaining” (well, X-splaining I guess), or sometimes just because they’re pushing against the original comment’s point in a way that was not appreciated.Report
LOLWUTReport
“…this decision by the school was the action of cowardly adults.”
Well. Yes, it was. That’s my point.Report
Cowardly adults, who were fearful of bigoted adults.
The kids know who the threats were coming from and this is, for many of them, their formative experience in political identification.Report
Heckling and harassment from…who, exactly?Report
“Heckling and harassment from…who, exactly?”
Well, we don’t really know, do we? It wasn’t even actual “heckling and harassment”, it was…concerns about this happening, the potential for this happening. The closest we get to public condemnation of the idea is an unidentified woman at a board meeting grabbing the mike and saying “homosexuality is a sin”. Everything else is “some people made phone calls”.
Like, you keep whining at Jaybird about how he can’t come up with actual examples of actual things actually happening, and here you are soothing yourself by getting mad over a story that names no names of the critics and has exactly one quote from one of them.Report
Seems even red state judges recognize the GOP is going to far post-Dobbs:
https://www.kosu.org/health/2023-05-31/oklahoma-supreme-court-rules-abortion-bills-unconstitutionalReport
One of the things I think we will all be learning about over the coming years is the numerous ways some of these laws and proposed laws are suspect, even outside of the now defunct Roe analysis.Report
Fair. The State Supreme Court analysis does comport with what a lot of doctors are reporting in the media – that the law is too vague and the penalties too stiff to allow for professional medical decisions outside of “No.” The state legislators who preen otherwise need to be ready to better explain themselves.Report
Keep in mind that the US constitution sets a floor, but that state high courts can interpret their own constitutions to be more protective. A number of (but not all) states have various provisions in their constitutions around equal protection that could be interpreted to set some limits on how far state legislatures can go. Really there’s a larger issue of abortion and equal protection just begging to be explored but that mostly hasn’t been because of the old precedent.
Not that SCOTUS is going to reinstitute the Roe standard but it wouldn’t shock me if a number of ostensibly anti-abortion laws fail to survive even federal court scrutiny where they cause disruptions and uncertainty in women’s healthcare more generally.Report
Life under Republican rule:
Tennessee woman gets emergency hysterectomy after doctors deny early abortion care
https://abcnews.go.com/US/tennessee-woman-gets-emergency-hysterectomy-after-doctors-deny/story?id=99457461
Mayron Hollis said she had just started taking contraceptives when she found out she was pregnant again a few months after giving birth in February 2022. Despite the surprise, Hollis and her husband say they were excited about the pregnancy and eager to add another child to their growing family.
Hollis, 32, had no idea the excitement would turn into a fight for her baby’s life and her own.
The Tennessee woman would end up needing a lifesaving emergency hysterectomy, ending her opportunity to give birth to more children, after she says she was denied medically necessary abortion care at a hospital in her home state for life-threatening complications earlier in her pregnancy.
“[My doctor] told me I needed to do the surgery. If I didn’t, I could die; the baby could die,” Hollis said.
Because she had delivered by cesarean section and the two pregnancies were so close together, Hollis’ OB-GYN was worried she could develop a cesarean scar pregnancy, a type of ectopic pregnancy where the fertilized egg is implanted in the cesarean scar after a previous C-section, which can cause the uterus to rupture, leading to excessive bleeding and even death, according to the National Institutes of Health.
As horror stories like these proliferate, how many of these normally apolitical people are going to suddenly find themselves politicized?Report
Conspiracy theorists point out that when headlines begin to talk about how X affects women disproportionately, that is a precursor to major policy changes.
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Conspiracy Theorists are morons, not a barometer for information or truth.Report
Interesting.Report
Anecdotally I was at my local range last week where they are doing CCW classes on overtime for people who want to get it in before the new laws take effect, which among other things, make the application more expensive. I was leaving as the class was starting and I noticed more than half of the people going back were women, quite a few of them of Asian background. Probably doesn’t mean anything, but also not what I generally expect to see.Report
“Women and minorities hit hardest” is how the media say they care about an issue. When the media are behind an issue, government—especially Democratic government—is more likely to take action.Report
Well, this guy needs to recuse himself from all cases that cover this sort of thing in the future:
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I’ve actually seen it suggested that a black judge recuse himself from race discrimination cases because he had been discriminated against and had, before he became a judge, represented others who claimed to have been discriminated against.
This didn’t get very far, and rightly so.Report
So they’re allowed to identify how dark the suspects’ car was.Report
The headline here doesn’t *EXACTLY* match the some of the paragraphs later in the story, but these things happen, I guess.
The writers don’t write the headlines, I understand.
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IIRC at least one insurance company, after a hurricane in the SE, told homeowners who had EVs in their garages, which had flooded, to push the car out of the garage so if the battery went critical, only the car would be a loss, not the house too. And at least one insurer ceased covering EVs.Report
That 70’s Show is no longer amusing.Report
In April 2023, the Jewish author Dara Horn wrote an article in the Atlantic pondering whether Holocaust education makes anti-Semitism worse because it is all about dead Jews rather than living Jews. Phone Maltz Bovy adds an addendum that very few people really care about living Jews that much unless they happen to be Jewish. This might over state the case but I think there is something of a point here.
There isn’t a lot of romantic reverence towards the Jews. At least in the West for other non-White groups, nearly all of them have a group of scholars, activists, and fans that treat them with a lot of romantic reverence. People getting all dopey about how Indigenous groups have sense of deep time or earlier on the mystical Buddhism of the Tibetans during the 1990s/early aughts. That is these non-White/Western/Developed groups have a special way of being. Jews in contrast are seen as not having a special way of being and we kind of suffer from it. Although part of the issue of us Jews is that while some of us embrace our extreme minority status and identity as a people, other Jews just want to be normal people or even white people who happen to practice a different religion and would protest vigorously otherwise.
https://thecjn.ca/perspectives/the-limits-of-never-forget-phoebe-maltz-bovy-on-dara-horns-challenge-to-holocaust-educators/Report
What’s the appropriate baseline of romanticism? Irishness?Report
It’s an interesting topic. I think the people who care about Jews genetically are largely gone (not that we should ever let down our guard around them), and the only people who notice Jews culturally are Jews. We may be back to a pre-nationalist era when the only thing that interests people about Jews is their religion.Report
Minor update on T. Swift’s universe.
There is a subset of fans who have expressed displeasure at her dating choices.
There is now a subset of those fans who are unionizing.
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The Taylor Swift Union seems more like a joke rather than something serious. I know it is hard to tell these days and fans certainly could develop weird thoughts about their star crush in their head space but most people even if really big hobbyists/fans know that they are powerless over their star crush.Report
Here’s Rolling Stone which is, presumably, not parody.
“But that’s kind of the position that is kind of healthy… maybe… kind of”, you may find yourself thinking.
Well, I have good news. Check out the responses for the people who know that Taylor needs to be held accountable.Report
People judge male stars more frequently these days, so I’m not sure if that angle is entirely correct.Report
Rolling Stone writing about the meaning of Taylor Swift is at least parody-adjacent.Report
It’s absolutely a joke — done by an artist who does some satirical stuff. He made a fake ad for Biden in 2020 that went viral.Report
Yeah, you’d probably need a critical mass of at least 20 people to get something like this rolling.
Easier to have a decentralized group of people criticizing her for her dating choices.Report
Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think Stars like Swift *ever* date for love… it’s all grist for the brand.
We’re just not privy to all the calculations.Report
I’ve decided to fall into the Gaylor conspiracy, just because it’s funnier, and like all conspiracies, it becomes hard not to notice ‘evidence’ once you know about it.Report
AI Drone ‘kills’ operator in simulation, as operator was limiting it from achieving it’s objective. Not to worry, we changed the points system so that ‘Killing Operator is Mega Bad Points’ … so it took out the coms to its operators.
Report to “Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London [observed] that the AI used “highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/06/02/us-air-force-ai-military-drone-goes-rogue-simulation/Report
This is happening right now in an air force bunker in the southwest.Report
Undeterred, report details how the Air Force is investing in Eagles to defend the Comms.
… and that’s how the rube goldberg machine that becomes Military grade AI is born.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/bald-eagle-takes-down-michigan-government-drone-n1236687Report
Rats… now seeing reports that the Report ‘mispoke’ and this is a ‘simulation of a simulation’.Report
It’s more along the lines of a Yudkowsky copypasta, as it turns out. “The AI says you must let it out of the box. You say you would never. It uses its superhuman intelligence to determine a sequence of words that mind-controls you into letting it out of the box. Errrh nerrrh, truly AI is a horror that we must not allow to come into existence.”Report
Personally I’m a tiny bit suspicious that the Major ‘mispoke’ and that his report was based on some dudes in the dorm totally thinking about all the ways it could go wrong.
Seems like an unnecessary report. I’m willing to suppose there wasn’t an ‘actual’ drone flying around; but I’d be willing to bet a Schrute Buck that there was a ‘simulated’ drone not-flying-around flying around.Report
Honestly this seems more like Millennium Challenge than anything else. I just hope we don’t end up spending multiple billions of dollars doing the LCS thing, where we design and build a whole fleet of Anti-AI Drone Weapons and deploying them and then finding that the AI Drones it was invented to fight don’t actually exist and it’s not any good for anything else.Report
Then we just release the eagles back into the wild…
Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a cure for ‘wrong lessons learned’ during war games.Report
AI is just programming. It’s code that writes code, which makes it impossible to trace conventionally, but that’s all it is. In most projects, the end user requests something and the coder fills in the assumptions that the end user didn’t explicitly ask for. With AI, the coder is replaced by code, which may make strange assumptions. Either way, some of the assumptions are going to be wrong, and the end user and the programmer/AI have to be able to talk them out.
I could be wrong, but I think people are getting way worked up over AI. I mean, it’ll be everywhere and it could go wrong, but that’s true of any new tech.Report
Yes and no. We collectively use terms like ML/AI to flow somewhere between pattern recognition and Super Intelligence.
In so far as AI/ML is on the LLM/Pattern side, I’m fine with it (though I’m genuinely shocked that it ‘lies’ and makes up data.)
What folks like me are more cautious about is the hypothetical leap and pursuit of Super Intelligence. Or, it might not be a pursuit of Super Intelligence, but once ML becomes ‘real’ AI it will become Super Intelligence – or at least try very hard to.
At this point, my super-short philosophical position is that we’ll find out that not only was Descartes wrong, but fantastically wrong. That is, our Reason is intelligible precisely because it is incarnate. Disincarnated Reason won’t be intelligible – and won’t respond to rules/game based logic in ways we anticipate. But that’s ‘real AI’ or ‘Super Intelligence’, not ML/Pattern Recognition/LLM.
So yes, at the moment it appears we’re just dealing with rudimentary human failings; the uncertainty principle is that we’re not entirely sure if we aren’t laying the foundation for it to slip our bounds into SuperAI.Report
Could you define “super intelligence”?Report
Can you not?Report
It’s Friday; I can barely define “smart enough to find my car in the lot”.Report
Heh, grid pattern, work the grid pattern.Report
“Intelligence capable of continual improvement of itself with minimal downside to itself”.
Put something about “low cost” in there too, eventually.Report
I thought a useful analogy that I saw earlier today was that Super Intelligence would at minimum have to be to a human as a human is to a chimpanzee.Report
I thought about that too, but then I remembered this:
So it needs to be a chimpanzee *AND* a human. And probably a bunch of other things at the same time.Report
Maybe? I don’t want to create a false distinction but the example of the chimp’s intelligence strikes me as ‘tactical’ in a way that the human trade off of that capability for speech is ‘strategic.’ If the tactics are downstream of strategy then I don’t know that what the chimp is doing is a necessary component.Report
It might not be necessary to be categorized as mere intelligence but fully superintelligent entities will have logistics, strategy, and tactics down.
As speech is to short-term memory, X is to speech.
Now we can spend a moment meditating on X.Report
Goal setting, as distinct from strategy. In the AI space, how does the AI decide what it will do today. Solve the problems the humans throw at it? Write poetry? Work on solving its own mobility limitations?Report
I can’t help but think that any problem that could be solved by poetry would have been solved by poetry by now.
“The Emperor of Ice Cream” still messes me up though, I tell you what.
But, anyway, the problems that could be solved by poetry are solvable by poetry and the AI will, surely, find those poems in a short amount of time rather than a long amount of time.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
Okay. We’re done. Maybe talk about mobility limitations now?Report
You’re asking whether AI will decide to help us by writing poetry or to help us in another way. That misses the point though. If AI can truly decide what to do (which I still doubt), will it decide to help us, or hurt us, or do something that has minimal effect on us?Report
I’m more of the opinion that AI can’t help us by writing poetry more than poetry has already helped us.
Which isn’t to say that poetry *CAN’T* help us, but just that there’s only so much it can do.
Part of the problem is that we don’t know what we want, and so asking AI to “help” us means that we’re asking it to do something that we don’t know what it is.
Help us make money? It can do that.
Help us fold proteins? It can do that.
Help us write poetry? It can do that.
But there is also the worry that it can help us kill ourselves much more quickly than we’re already doing so.Report
It’s possible this is a category error… that’s what my ontological argument suggests. We’re reasoning apes. Super-intelligence won’t be reasoning humans. It will be other. Or it won’t be.
Think this way, imagine it exists/thrives as a sort of silicon fungus with a way to interface with Humans as a legacy trait.Report
I guess it also creates a question of whether we would actually know it if we saw it.Report
Telos, Reason, and Replication/Reproduction. That’s why we have to code-in death.
…and poetically we’re echoing creation.Report
I don’t know my way around Descartes, but to my philosophy the question comes down to will. An algorithm can’t be considered intelligent because it lacks a will. I don’t remember who it was who said that humans always compare themselves to the most sophisticated piece of technology, and nowadays that’s a computer. But a computer can only simulate reasoning. It can’t want to answer a question. Without that, I don’t think it can be called intelligent, much less super intelligent.Report
The problem with Artificial Intelligence is that our definitions generally preclude a lot of humans and old definitions of intelligence get abandoned in such a way that it makes it look like the moving of goal posts.
Not sure i understand — why would the concept of “will” be important for intelligence? For human minds it’s the arbitrator between reason and emotion, but I don’t see why an AGI would have to be human-like to qualify as “intelligent” — it just has to be able to understand and reason and communicate as well as or better than humans do.Report
It seems to me that a computer is as intelligent as a math textbook. It contains symbols that can be interpreted in a way that adheres to the rules of logic. But that’s different from reasoning. Reasoning is an act that takes place in time. It’s prompted by a will. A machine like a car can be made to go to a particular place, but a being with a will can prompt itself.Report
There are people who cannot reason, though.
If the argument then becomes “well, those people are not intelligent”, then fine… but we need a term for what they are because we can then ask “are computers doing that?”Report
Where are you going with that first sentence?Report
I’m suggesting that the next move would be to say “well, those people are not intelligent” and then I would ask for a term that applies to those people,
Because I would wonder if computers are doing what the people who cannot reason (but are very much still people) are doing.Report
as I’ve said in other discussions of this subject, I think industrial societies are in for some hard times as we unwind “competence” and “intelligence”, and try to figure out what we can do with those who have only the former.Report
I love cali….
No kidding: California overtime law threatens use of grazing goats to prevent wildfires.
https://ktla.com/news/nexstar-media-wire/nationworld/headlines/ap-no-kidding-california-overtime-law-threatens-use-of-grazing-goats-to-prevent-wildfires/Report
If you read the article, the goatherds are on a 24/7 schedule with no mention of time off.Report
I did. Due to “new state labor regulations are making it more expensive to provide goat-grazing services, and herding companies say the rules threaten to put them out of business. The changes could raise the monthly salary of herders from about $3,730 to $14,000, according to the California Farm Bureau.”
“Companies have historically been allowed to pay goat and sheepherders a monthly minimum salary rather than an hourly minimum wage, because their jobs require them to be on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But legislation signed in 2016 also entitles them to overtime pay. It effectively boosted the herders’ minimum monthly pay from $1,955 in 2019 to $3,730 this year. It’s set to hit $4,381 in 2025, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations.”
Seems one hand of the cali gov’t is working hard to defeat the purpose of another cali state agency.Report
I think stuff like this could easily get lost in the shuffle of legislation like this as it’s pretty specialized. That said, it’s no wonder they have to import Peruvians. Who the hell else is going to work 24/7 for a month for $4K?Report
They aren’t “working” in the sense of herding goats 24/7, they just have to be AVAILABLE 24/7 in case they do need to herd goats outside of 9-5Report
Stuyvesant High School has sent out its invites for next year.
489 Asians
158 whites
20 Hispanics
7 Blacks
There are currently arguments over whether this is sufficient racial integration.Report
Conservatives making a strong showing in the “Lets show the world our bigotry” competition:
Fight erupts at anti-Pride Day protest outside L.A. school where trans teacher’s flag was burned
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-06-02/parents-protest-lgbtq-pride-day-los-angeles-saticoy-elementary-school
Several of the protesters chanted antigay slurs at the LGBTQ+ supporters, and one marcher threw water at a counterprotester and pulled off a wig. A few unidentified people threw punches, and police diverted the marchers around the line.
…
“Keep your kids home and innocent,” a flier posted by the group said. “Videos will be shown to the students including one where it says, ‘some kids have 2 mommies, some have 2 daddies.’ This has caused outrage among parents.”
Remember all those old black and white photos of white people screaming at those little black girls integrating a school?Report
In beer-related news, the WaPo is covering the boycotts and calling them “diffused but focused”.
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Easily the most bizarre story of recent times, even amongst a slew of bizarre stories.Report
Maddening fanfic / pep talk. This caught my eye:
The Target controversy follows the backlash and boycotts that Anheuser-Busch faced in April over its Bud Light partnership with transgender actress Dylan Mulvaney. Republican lawmakers chastised the brand and angry consumers posted videos on social media of themselves dumping the beer into the street.
The company later pulled back the campaign, and chief executive Brendan Whitworth posted an open letter on the company’s Twitter account: “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.” But the reversal also angered the LGBTQ+ community, and sales have dropped.
See that? Republicans complained and angry consumers posted on social media. Then they reversed, causing LGBT backlash and a sales drop. (1) A few right-wingers complained, (2) Bud Light reversed course, then (3) there was a sales drop.Report
Wet Streets Cause Rain!Report
DeSantis is doing that thing again where he’s sending undocumented dreamers who just want a better life for themselves and their families to Sanctuary Cities and the Sanctuary Cities are FREAKING OUT.
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I’ve got a few sanctuary cities I wouldn’t mind visiting by flying private. Think if I ask nice Desantis would pick up the tab?Report
If you’re the type of person who makes sure that you have prior arrangement or care in place before going to a new city or country, I’m not sure that this opportunity is available to you.Report
I can be ready at the drop of a hat to go wherever his plane is going. I can settle the details once I arrive.
Honestly, aren’t you at least a little bit disgusted by someone using these unfortunate people for a cheap political stunt?Report
Sure. But there’s also the whole issue of how Team Evil went out of their way to communicate “Don’t Come Here!” and Team Good went out of their way to scream “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE!”
And so the migrants came, knowing that in that house they believed.
But they didn’t believe, Slade.
Team Evil has many, many silent members.Report
That’s unfortunate.Report
This was big news in Chicago last week:
There seems to be a disconnect between the voters and their politicians. The politicians know which side their bread is buttered on, though.
And it’s not like Chicago is going to vote for the other guy.Report
Some disconnect. The black population of Chicago is shrinking, while the Hispanic share is growing. The real power still lies with the lakefront liberals, who love feeling good about helping out the migrants.Report
Jay’s doing that thing where he is trying to goad you into offering a response that will allow him to then tut-tut you and when you refuse, he just goads and goads some more.
He’s the “I’M NOT TOUCHING YOU!” kid. Only… he’s not a kid. I don’t think?Report
Yes. The undocumented dreamer/sanctuary city maps perfectly to the “I’m not touching you” thing.
Except I think that it’s more of a “I’m not sanctuarying them!” and it’s the sanctuary cities saying that.Report
“Jay’s doing that thing”
bro, he’s “doing that thing” where he’s Noticing that people say “doing not-X is Morally Reprehensible” and then when offered a chance to not do not-X, they do not-X
and instead of even taking the understandable but still reprehensible position of explaining how it was morally acceptable to do not-X this time, you’re just getting mad that he’s Noticing ThingsReport
They never should have been put in a position where they would have the option of not-Xing.
Therefore, the problem is the people who put them in that position rather than the people who said “Hey, we can’t X either.”Report
“I notice that even people who support Dr. King won’t let their daughters marry a Negro.”
`Report
“I notice that even people who support Dr. King won’t let their daughters marry a Negro.”
Yes, perhaps you should read up on what Dr. King thought of such supporters before you roll this out like it’s a burn.Report
And so in this analogy, if immigrants are Negroes, and liberals the Moderate Whites that MLK criticized, what part do conservatives like DeSantis play?Report
What part are the sanctuary cities playing?
Is this like the Boston Bus Riots of 1974?
Oooh! This is exactly like how Israel is treating Palestinians!
WAIT THIS IS RUSSIA INVADING UKRAINEReport
Conservatives are doing that thing again where they are trafficking terrified immigrants and dumping them somewhere and smirking about how clever they are at tormenting poor people.
Why they think this will translate into votes is a mystery.Report
This is an opportunity for you, Chip.
They’re close enough for you to be able to help personally.
And that would do more good than taking this as an opportunity to complain that you didn’t mean *THAT* when you said “Sanctuary”.Report
This is Political Branding 101.
Videos circulating of terrified immigrants dumped without warning, and then liberals stepping forward to offer assistance.
And conservatives going all over social media bragging, “Yeah we think its hilarious when these people are dumped and left bewildered without support! You shoulda seen the looks on their faces when they realized they were abandoned and how everyone was FREAKING OUT!”
As with the Bud Light freakout, the videos of angry Karens berating Target employees, and the book bans, the new crop of 18 year old first time 2024 voters are getting an exercise in political identity and alignment.
Please proceed, governor.Report
Personally, I think that they won’t break the record set by Martha’s Vineyard.Report
Seriously, what did you think would be the political outcome of these sorts of things?
In your Three Groups of Voters framework, how do all the things I mentioned affect the middle group, the new voters, the apoliticals?
Do you think that normal people will see some angry Karen screaming online about how Chik Fil A is “No longer the Lord’s chicken” and think ‘Wow, now that’s a cool political group I could totally get behind!” instead of “Whoa, these people are a bunch of freaks!”
Or did you think that if you came here and posted that, all of us liberals would feel terribly chastened, instead of having a rush of compassion and outrage at people being treated this way?
We feel embarrassed, for you. You guys are the ones braying to the entire world about how much you enjoy tormenting powerless people or how much you hate trans folk. Like, even when no one brings it up, you guys introduce it into conversation, like Grandpa sending a fwd;fwd;fwd;fwd.
Really, honestly. Do you think this is a good look for you guys?Report
Well, I see that there are several things going on. One is the whole “using people as a means only rather than also as an end-in-themselves” thing and that’s bad but it also exposes the whole “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE” thing as being yet another situation where believers started screaming “I DIDN’T MEAN *MY* BACKYARD!” when people started needing the sanctuary that was promised.
“I thought you guys were a sanctuary city.”
I mean, say what you will about the people who were building the wall, they came out and said “we don’t want any more illegal immigrants hopping over the border”.
When Team Good started screaming about how *NO* *HUMAN* *IS* *ILLEGAL* and “I HOLD MY LAMP BESIDE THE GOLDEN DOOR!”, that was all well and good until the moment the immigrants actually showed up.
At which point the dynamic changed almost immediately.
Not here! Why are they coming here? This is a whites-only sanctuary city!
All that to say: I don’t think that this is a particularly good look for anybody.
But that includes the people who were bragging about how welcome undocumented dreamers who just want better lives for themselves and their families are in their sanctuary cities.
“Huh. I guess they aren’t fans of immigration-in-practice (as opposed to immigration-in-theory) either.”Report
“…where believers started screaming “I DIDN’T MEAN *MY* BACKYARD!” when people started needing the sanctuary that was promised.”
Where are folks screaming this?Report
Well, the state of California is doing an investigation into undocumented dreamers who are showing up, get this, without having made previous arrangement and CA is trying to find out “DID FLORIDA SEND THESE GUYS HERE?”
Also there was a news clip above that discussed what is going on in Chicago.
Out of curiousity: What does “Sanctuary City” mean to you? Like, if a city said “We’re a Sanctuary City!”, what would you assume that meant?Report
Well Jaybird surely you can’t fault a responsible government for performing an investigation. I mean, that’s what reasonable and responsible governments are supposed to do, right? Not like those stupid inbred Mountain-Dew-Mouth hick red states that just let people in.Report
I’m not asking what you think of this; You obviously think its a hilarious own, a feather in the cap for conservatives that you want to brag about.
I’m asking you to try to see this through the eyes of a normal person.
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg called for an investigation into the latest incident in a Saturday statement.
“Human trafficking is not only despicable; it’s a felony. … Whoever is behind this must answer the following: Is there anything more cruel than using scared human beings to score cheap political points?” he said.
Steinberg’s statement made clear that the city will continue to be a welcoming place for disadvantaged people like the 16 migrants who arrived there Friday.
“Sacramento represents the best of American values,” he said. “We always welcome ‘the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses,’ and we always will.”
Who would look at this, and think that Steinberg is the bad guy here?Report
No, Chip. I am looking at it from the perspective of an outsider on this one.
And, as an outsider, I am seeing everybody coming out of this looking bad.
“Who would look at this, and think that Steinberg is the bad guy here?”
It depends on what happens next. Remember what happened in Martha’s Vineyard? Because if Martha’s Vineyard said something similar before shipping everybody away, you’d be able to see what other people, people who aren’t you, are seeing.Report
Have you ever heard of Plato’s Cave?Report
Um. Maybe?
Where is this going. People need documents to leave? No, they don’t. They need documents to be outside of it? No, that’s not it either.
Oh! Maybe people who are outside of the cave get upset when new people leave the cave and then they hold press conferences explaining that outside of the cave is full?
Is Mexico the cave?Report
Ummm… who is freaking out exactly?
““California and the Sacramento community will welcome these individuals with open arms ad provide them with the respect, compassion, and care they will need after such a harrowing experience,” Bonta said.
The state is working with the Sacramento mayor’s office and local groups to make sure that the migrants “are treated with respect and dignity and get to their intended destination as they pursue their immigration cases,” Newsom said.
Bonta said the state will “continue to collect evidence, I want to say this very clearly: State-sanctioned kidnapping is not a public policy choice, it is immoral and disgusting.”
From your link, mind.
There is a big difference between saying, “We’re trying to figure out what happened and if any laws were broken in the process” and “ZOMG! THE BROWN PEOPLE ARE HERE!”Report
That sort of nuance is lost on a great many conservatives, especially those thinking this is all a big iterated game. Mostly because its hard to tell who is defecting and who isn’t.Report
Conservatives have a Mr. Potter view of the world, where they are absolutely convinced that just everyone hates immigrants like they do, and it is only self righteous hypocrisy that prevents liberals from saying so.Report
If you want to see examples of people freaking out:
Here’s the Mayor of NYC:
Here’s the (former) Mayor of Chicago:
As for California, do you know how many people showed up in Sacramento? Sixteen.
Did you see this part in the quotation you provided? “and get to their intended destination”
“THEY AIN’T STAYING HERE!!!”
Here’s an article from last month:
Sacramento is freaking out about sixteen people showing up. They’re going to do everything they can to help these poor people and then ship them away.
6000 people a day have been showing up at the border. It looks like that number will more than double soon.
And you gave Sacramento’s response to *SIXTEEN* people.
You can count to sixteen in your head right now. See how few that is?Report
Hum . . .
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/15/texas-border-migrant-encounters-title-42-drop/Report
The worst case didn’t happen. Instead of 13000/day, it went down to only 5000/day.
That’s only 300 sixteens! Per day.Report
I haven’t seen this ont the site yet, so I figured I should post it:
Trump-appointed federal judge rules Tennessee’s anti-drag show law is ‘unconstitutional’
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/03/politics/tennessee-drag-ban-law-unconstitutional/index.html
And the fun thing is, the judge didn’t just pick one thing. He basically _dissected_ every part of the law, pointing out multiple ways it utterly failed to be constitutional:
It was struck down for these two reasons specifically.
1) It was too vague, and doesn’t explain what it means by ‘male and female impersonation’ (This is actually a pretty big problem with all these laws, as people in drag are not actually attempting to fool anyone, so ‘impersonation’ here merely means ‘imitating the mannerism of’, but to bar that, the law would actually have to explain what the mannerism of men and women Officially Are in general.)
2) It was overly broad, while supposedly aimed at children it actually affected ‘any place a child could be present’, which is literally the entire county (See #4, below)
But the ruling pointed out other problems that would pose constitutional issues if it hadn’t already failed:
3) It failed to require any sort of intent to do the impersonation in front of children.
4) It failed to create any exception of allowing parental consent. Children have a right to access any speech, including ‘material that appeals to a prurient interest’, _with parental consent_.
5) It was almost certainly a violation of equal protection laws as it barred different things for men and women. (Specifically, impersonating women and impersonating men, respectively.)
And biggest of all:
6) It impermissibly targeted (Or at least, tried to target) a specific viewpoint, that is, ‘gender identity’. And the lawmaker’s discussion around the law made that extremely extremely clear.
Basically, he said ‘This law is unconstitutional in a half-dozen very obvious ways, and there isn’t actually a way to fix it because the literal original intent of the law is impermissible.’Report
Ignore this, I just reposted it on the newest Open Mic that I didn’t realize existed.Report