Open Mic for the week of 6/5/2023
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.
(Featured image is “img183” and was uploaded by C Thomas. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)
A *REALLY* interesting article talking about the five days that a neighborhood in Brooklyn had non-police answer 911 calls.
Hyper-local policing looks something like this, maybe.Report
except those men are likely unarmed and lacking arrest powers.Report
Isn’t that what we want? Crime was prevented and no one got shot.Report
it is, but Jay’s idea of hyperlocal policing requires actual police . . . remember he’s not a defund fan.Report
Police officers are involved in the story. They’re right there in paragraph 2.
“Five plainclothes police officers watched warily. Across Pitkin stood about half a dozen men, civilians in jeans and purple-and-gray sweatshirts.”Report
I could see the argument that this is, effectively, decriminalizing low-level street crime but the examples given in the story (cherry-picked?) were of crime that was prevented in the first place.
Which is also good.Report
I would say one scenario is it decriminalizes low level crime. The other scenario is it empowers local people who are both the least competent but also most fired up about exercising power to do so. Think the rabble policing the CHAZ CHOP in 2020 on the left and make my day style vigilante nuts on the right. Maybe it does both at once.
So it is certainly nice that there are some positive anecdotes but it is also hard for me to see how it turns out net good. Overall I think there’s kind of a mistaking of cause and effect with these sorts of solutions. Some societies self police relatively well and that can lead to some good outcomes but my sense is that it comes from the bottom up. I’m not sure you can just mandate it on the complexities of America’s urban crime and social problems.Report
To wit, this is what I would envision. Report
That strikes me as the most likely response to police abolition, though.
You’re never going to get rid of the cops. You can only privatize them.Report
Indeed I have the identical response to police abolition. If we should have taken anything from the last few years it’s that the only viable form of law enforcement we have is a government run police service. There are also serious, serious problems with how these forces are run but there is no magic bullet to running them better.Report
For God’s sake, gents, let’s at least give the good folks of Brooklyn a chance before we brand them night riders.Report
Dude, that is the OPPOSITE of what I am doing.
This story has anecdotes of people who live there intervening in low-level local crime and using their own extant moral authority to prevent crime under the watchful eye of Actual Cops.
This isn’t vigilantism.Report
If it proves viable I will gladly admit my error.Report
It’s true that private companies can do whatever they want, but can USG do more to align companies with what USG wants?
Report
I find it darkly amusing that the courts are so keen to protect outright lies.Report
It’s positively shameful that BIden’s lawyers are assisting them with this effort.Report
That’s not the impression AG Bailey’s thread leaves — Bailey suggests that the government encouraged Twitter (etc.) to censor certain kinds of statements (questioning masking efficacy, vaccine safety, and election integrity) based on viewpoint. Something (experience) tells me there’s WAY more nuance to what’s going on than that.
As to the “catspaw” theory, I believe the standard is if it can be proven that an agent of the government intentionally induced a private company to do something that it would not otherwise have done and which would violate the constitution if the government did it directly, that is also a constitutional violation. Note you need all three elements: 1) private action was something private actor would not otherwise have done, 2) government intentionally induces private actor to do this thing, and 3) the thing would violate the constitution if the government did it.
Is that what’s going on with Missouri’s case? I dunno, we don’t have a transcript or the pleadings at hand from the thread. What we’re reading is the plaintiff’s lawyer’s version of what was said at an oral argument. Which is in no way slanted away from strictly neutral objectivity.Report
I was taking the guy at his word that the judge asked questions and the feds answered variants of “it depends”.
If we can’t trust this guy (and maybe we can’t), we’re stuck waiting like Schrödinger’s Cat.Report
Bailey claims coercion in his thread, but only sees fit to cite the judge’s hypotheticals. Is the lede buried, or is there no lede?Report
Sadly I lost interest before it occurred to me to look up and read the briefs.Report
We can have a lengthy, wonky, in-depth discussion about why that is, and the degree to which it is true, and the inexact boundaries of it. An interesting place to start would be United
States v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709 (2012), finding the Stolen Valor Act inconsistent with the First Amendment. Suffice to say it is at best unclear that truth is the teleological function of free speech.Report
If that’s the case then we are in deeper trouble then we thought since that means there’s no way for a government to counter election denialism.Report
The government can engage in speech of its own. when it does so it is not required to be viewpoint-neutral or give “equal time” to competing viewpoints. Pleasant Grove v. Summum, 555 U.S. 460 (2009). This particular case makes me queasy, but the basic idea–the government gets to speak on matters, including those of public controversy, and take a side in that controversy–is not particularly bothersome. For instance, it seems obvious that the government ought to be able to use its power of speech to encourage people to engage in desirable but non-mandatory behavior like vaccinating their children or quitting smoking. If the government can go so far, as in Summum as to say “We don’t like this particular religion so we aren’t going to set aside any space in the public park for its monument,” then it can surely also say “The 2020 election was free and fair and the result was valid and legal.”Report
There have been a large number of state officials saying publicly that their elections are accurate and secure. Including many in red states. Certainly GA’s Secretary of State is in that category.
But there’s apparently no way for the government to stop people going on TV and lying about election security and accuracy in general. (As opposed to, eg, Germany where such lies are illegal.)Report
There is a chess opening called the Borg Defense. It’s not named after the tennis player or the Star Trek race. The opening by black (1..g5) is the mirror image of an opening by white (1. g4) known as the Grob Opening, named after Swiss International Master Henri Grob. They are both considered weak.Report
History of the World Part II is not very funny.Report
I watched a couple of episodes, and it was funny in spots. Mostly, it seemed like a way for actors to say they’d worked with Mel Brooks. Whoever thought we’d see Borscht Belt comedy in 2023?Report
What does modern day voter suppression look like? Seeking to destroy a bipartisan organization that both keeps voter rolls clean and registers new voters to vote. The later is especially pernicious because it’s predicated on the idea that the unregistered don’t deserve to register or vote:
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008/eric-investigation-voter-data-election-integrityReport
You would think low information voters would be there bread and butter. If anything, Gateway Pundit, and like minded individuals, should be applauding efforts like this.Report
GP was one of the originators of the lies that took it down.Report
Kari Lake recently tweeted that California is Red and that Trump really won the state in 2020 with Biden only winning the SF Bay Area. The problem is that she tweeted out the county map from the 1984 Presidential election: https://politizoom.com/beyond-bathit-kari-lake-claims-californias-a-red-state-voted-for-trump-in-2020/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Who is being fooled by Kari Lake’s original tweet?Report
Low information red state voters who harbor white grievances. So almost no one here at OT.Report
The 1984 Presidential election in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidential_election_in_CaliforniaReport
The actual 2020 map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_CaliforniaReport
New Candidate for Weirdos just dropped:
You know what? I’m on board. Might be nice to finally have a president who didn’t plagiarize. Who didn’t *HAVE* to.Report
I’d vote for him in a heartbeat.Report
I can’t see Prof. West without thinking of this brilliant SNL sketch: https://youtu.be/Q4HEV5r65yMReport
Does he get more votes than Andrew Yang?Report
Huh. I’m not really familiar with his work, but I had always assumed based on his reputation that he was a serious intellectual. But here he comes off as deeply unserious, and frankly a bit dim-witted.Report
I had this same experience about ten years ago, when my daughter sent me a video of a talk of his. I didn’t dive in enough to see if something had changed, if that video was the exception, or if the reputation was just unjustified.Report
Slate had this depressing article on what happens when cities run out of money. Urbanism is something that Americans seem to fail at frequently.
https://slate.com/business/2023/06/state-city-fiscal-crisis-budgets-schleicher-in-a-bad-state.html?pay=1685989128197&support_journalism=please
Transit ridership has basically collapsed since the pandemic for a variety of reasons even in places with high levels of transit use by American standards. This seems to be mainly because the increase of real or perceived bad behavior and work from home making going to the office rarer. My unpopular opinion on WFH is that it is like cars, great for people as individuals but horrible on a whole because they basically destroy the city. The downtowns stop thriving, traffic gets bad because cars are really inefficient at moving lots of people to destinations, street life disappears, etc.Report
“My unpopular opinion on WFH is that it is like cars, great for people as individuals but horrible on a whole because they basically destroy the city. ”
You’re begging the question of whether the city ought not to be destroyed.Report
There are other scenarios.
The concept of converting all those offices buildings into housing is picking up steam. The enormous stock of offices, and the trillions of dollars of equity at stake is driving property owners to explore ways to repurpose and save those investments.
I live in a converted office building in the downtown core and can testify that there is a tremendous benefit to living and working in a city.
There are plenty of people who really love living in some remote wilderness and telecommuting to a job, but cities have an allure for the same reasons they always have- the culture the excitement, the connection to other people and community.Report
There are also a great many of us in the suburbs who love urban lifestyles but abhor working in offices and commuting. The introvert that I am, never going back to an office anywhere vastly improves my productivity and my morale.Report
Converting office buildings into residences is challenging and expensive compared to new construction from what I understand. The decline of offices and commuting doesn’t help cities but might not necessarily be fatal. What does hurt cities would be if people don’t even come to them for fun or if they lack street traffic on their own. I was in the South Bay yesterday. They are building many new condo buildings but at least in some places these aren’t going to increase the liveliness of the street because they are just big condo buildings with no stores or any reason for people to be outside and come there. Almost rather Soviet like that way. Likewise, I was visiting my parents in their East Bay suburb over Memorial Day weekend and their suburban downtown was a lot more lively than anything I’ve seen in Brooklyn West in terms of people being on the street.Report
Da, Comrade, San Jose is like former Soviet Union: you pretend to work at big tech company doing things you and company and government all pretend are important. They pay you much money for this and then the government takes this money from you.
But look at attractive stucco facing and lovely red Spanish tiles on the standardized housing units! Is much better.Report
The argument I think holds for San Francisco and other cities is that downtown may be dead but other neighborhoods in the city are thriving. The Ferry Building farmers market still draws a big crowd on Saturdays. Bars and restaurants in the Mission and other neighborhoods are still jampacked at other times.Report
I’m still looking for the lively areas in Oakland. Downtown is nearly always dead. Jack London has more than a few bars but doesn’t seem to be that buzzing generally. There has to be a place where people are out and about.Report
Uptown by the Fox especially when there are concerts. Oakland is pretty sprawlingReport
It’s only ten more square miles than San Francisco in size.Report
“Converting office buildings into residences is challenging and expensive compared to new construction from what I understand.”
There’s also the question of zoning. Converting offices (or hotels) to residences involves a change in zoning from Commercial to Residential, and (as with traffic) that can have long-term effects that the builder isn’t going to have to pay to solve.
“What possible long-term effects could come from changing zoning?” Well, when you change Commercial to Residential it’s basically impossible to ever change it back, which means that if the economy picks up and businesses want to move back into the city then you’ll have nowhere to put them.
The thing about commercial real estate is that it’s very difficult to turn the revenue-generating knob up, whether that knob be “area zoned” or “rents”. So it’s often preferable, in a long-term economic sense, to keep a big commercial building unoccupied, because the cost to get a non-commercial or low-rent space converted to commercial high-rent exceeds the lost revenue of keeping it empty…
Meaning, you’ve got extremely strong economic incentives working against conversions — incentives which are well-reasoned! Supported with numbers and data! Not just made-up, you actually do have to make a business case against them!Report
The 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square just opened up!
Make it residential via a waiver! You should be able to turn that into a flophouse no problem.Report
Can’t the cities just request more money from California?Report
https://www.kpbs.org/news/race-social-justice/2023/06/05/black-san-diegans-more-likely-stopped-biking-walking-infractionsReport
The best argument for religion is all the energy that people spend on things like obsessing over celebrities or in different fandoms when they secularize. Debate.Report
Have you considered the possibility that Taylor Swift actually is the Goddess? The Swifties certainly all act consistently with that theory.Report
I don’t know if he will be able to shake it off.Report
I am rather impressed and slightly scarred that you were able to guess the reason behind this post.Report
Thought it was pretty obvious, actually.Report
It’s fairly unlikely that we’ll see millions of dead in a Stan war anytime soon, and the areas of the world that are religious, still seem to be worse than areas w/ less religious belief, compared on a 1 to 1 basis.
I guess even as all ideologies try to say, “hey, maybe we lost something with religion and should take a 2nd look,” I’m going to stay on the side of the atheists, despite being an agnostic.Report
The biggest wars tend to be non-religious.Report
I dunno. Religion was a pretty significant motivation for war from roughly Islamic expansion in the 7th century through end of 17th century Europe. I know we aren’t allowed to talk nicely about it anymore but the Enlightenment is in significant part a response to several centuries of destructive sectarian warfare.Report
The largest wars from that era were the Mongol invasions, the An Lushan Rebellion in China, and the conquest of the Americas. The first was non-religious and the second and third only tangentially.Report
I dunno. Feels weird to me to say the 30 years war was not major. Or to look at the conquest of the Americas as a single conflict but the numerous wars set off by the Protestant Reformation followed by the Counter-Reformation as separate and distinct events.Report
OK, I thought you had the cutoff at the beginning of the 17th. The Thirty Years’ War was major, just not as costly as the others. And it started as a religious war, but once France declared war on Spain, the label no longer really fit. As for the American conquest, it’s a tough one to generalize. The body count is mostly due to disease.Report
The conquest of south america was a religious war of conquest.Report
The European powers were big on conversion, but also wealth. They were looking for quick ways to India, and when they found other lands they were happy to convert and conquer the natives, but they were particularly aggressive in the places that the natives had gold. Now, admittedly, some of this may be that the Americas offered less resistance than, say, China or Japan.Report
I would say religious wars in the West breaks down to:
-wars with Muslims (sometimes defensive, sometimes offensive)
-wars to convert pagan hold outs
-wars between Catholics and Protestants
I’m with you that conquest of the New World is way too complicated to be viewed as a sectarian conflict.Report
My understanding, at least of the Spaniards, is that gold was the primary objective, with the priests tagging along for the ride.Report
The political, economic, and religious aspects are very hard to untangle. On the one hand these missions were being funded for profit and power. However those who sponsored them also held unapologetically religious world views. They lived in a time where there was no separation of church and state anywhere and the Catholic Church, though diminishing, was still an important and powerful political entity. Under those circumstances it’s hard to imagine a world where they didn’t send the priests as part of the entourage that was also setting up landed vassals in the New World with allegiance to the Spanish monarchy, based on the same kind of structures that existed in Europe.Report
To put a finer point on it, the possibility of not sending priests probably isn’t something that would have occurred to them.Report
Humans are complicated. A lot of the Crusaders were looking for loot, or family clout, or just something fun to do. On the other hand, as our Andrew notes, plenty of Americans saw WWII in religious terms.Report
Fair but I think it’s hard to nuance the religion out of fighting expressly called for by the official religious authority!Report
Yeah, I’m still thinking about Jesse’s earlier comment more than where the conversation has led to. I haven’t even dug into his contention that religious areas tend to be worse than non-religious. The tangent we didn’t go on was how the wars of the 20th century were nearly all non-religious. I once tried to work out the numbers of whether more people died in religious or non-religious wars, and the numbers were comparable until you got round the Napoleonic era. Then it’s just a horror show of atheism and nationalism.
I’m a fan of the Enlightenment, by the way. The French approached it like psychos, but other countries processed it into something admirable.Report
Yea, I think the existence of nationalism has muddied the water. Fot example, was the war between Iraq and Iran a nationalistic war or a Sunni/Shia war? Is the Taliban fighting for Sunni-ism or the interest of Pushtuns? What about India and Pakistan, or the wars involving Israel and its neighbors, or Serbs and Albanians? One could fairly argue different perspectives.Report
I mean, World War I wasn’t a “religious war” per se, but if you look at writings of the time, there was lots of talk about God’s will and lots of talking up of the war in the pulpits of the time.Report
Yes, people cast things like war in terms of good versus evil. But France, UK, US, and Russia versus Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottomans is not a religious war. World War 1 is the maybe the worst example you could have gone with.Report
WW2. Hit.ler made a big deal about how he was God’s holy warrior leading God’s holy cause. He was pretty open about how aspects of what he was doing were expressly motivated by religion.
Al Quida is probably a better example, ditto the Taliban. OBL’s big skill was how to describe his cause and the murder of civilians as a holy duty.Report
He made his pitch primarily on nation and race. “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer.” He used religious imagery, sure. He used everything; that’s what totalitarians do. He appealed for Lutheran Germany to annex Catholic Austria on the basis of race and nation, then to annex everything else around him on the basis of just wanting it. He allied with atheistic Russia to carve up Catholic Poland, inviting a war with the Anglican, um, Angles. Then turned on atheistic Russia when he thought that’d work.
He used Christianity as a prop. So did Stalin during the war: would you call him religious? He also used paganism.Report
I’m not sure there’s anything left after we remove the props.Report
The question is whether this is rational.
Report
Huh.
A town losing one of its businesses.
Must be bad political leadership.Report
It didn’t lose the *BUSINESS*. It just lost the *WORKERS*.
Easily replaced.Report
Remember in ’08 when right wingers were lambasting homeowners for doing essentially the same thing?
Of course it’s rational.Report
Here’s where we discussed the topic in 2021.
I still take the attitude “the borrowers were paying PMI, the lenders were protected, I don’t see what the big deal was with underwater folks walking away… I mean, what is mortgage insurance for if not this exact situation?”.
(I’m trying to find where we discussed it in 2008.)Report
You may take that attitude, but GOP politicians and talking heads declared it a moral failing of the borrower to have put themselves in the position of intentionally injuring the bank’s bottom lines by defaulting. Do you really not see this stuff, or do you just not believe it?Report
Oh, I saw it but I saw it from McArdle. If we’re stuck with the whole “IS MEGAN IN THE ROOM WITH YOU RIGHT NOW” counter-argument that we see from time to time, I’m stuck pointing to the discussions we had right here.
Yes. There were Republicans who argued that it was bad that non-corporation people walked away from a bad loan.
I imagine that Republicans will not be arguing that this corporate person walked away from their own bad loan.
I’m not sure what conclusion I ought to reach. “Hypocrisy is bad”?Report
That would be an excellent start . . . see where that takes you . . .Report
Okay. “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”
Now what?
Wait, are we not talking about the hotel anymore? Man, that’s a good technique.Report
Oh Slade and I are still talking about the hotel – and “just noticing” how a hotel doing this is probably fine for conservatives but ordinary people doing it is not.Report
Am I allowed to say “it makes sense that they walked away from a bad investment”?
Do we need to spend more time on what McArdle probably thinks first?
We probably want to avoid talking about whether it was ever a good investment and what happened between then and now and whether it’s likely to be a good investment in the future.
Probably want to avoid talking about whether it’d make good housing.Report
You brought it up. If you want people to take some specific point from it, you can tell us what your point is and we can decide whether it’s worth talking about.Report
One of the responses was about how Megan McArdle was opposed to people walking away from underwater mortgages.
I would be pleased to acknowledge that, sure, she was opposed to that and she could well be opposed to this! (I haven’t looked.)
But I don’t think that Megan McArdle’s take on walking away from bad investments back in 2008 is anywhere near as interesting as this thing that happened yesterday.
Stuff that I think might qualify as “the point”.
“They’re wrong. This is still a good investment. Someone is going to make a freaking mint off of this property.”
“They’re right. This isn’t a good investment anymore but it is quite an opportunity for San Francisco to provide housing to thousands of people.”
Maybe some musings about how it was built in 1964 and changes over time but I’m sure that it repaid its investors by the 70’s rolled around.
Those are the specific points that *I* took from reading the story.
I admit that “huh, this is like walking away from underwater mortgages” occurred to me at the time but, as someone whose disagreed in 2008 with the whole moral argument about the immorality of walking away, I didn’t see a moral argument here.
Just a cold calculus followed by a conclusion.
Strikes me as probably being the right conclusion, all told… but if someone wanted to argue that this was a great investment even yet, I’d like to hear that argument. If someone wanted to argue that this wouldn’t make a great flophouse, I’d like to hear that too.Report
Did a search for “from:asymmetricinfo hilton” on the twitters and the most recent tweet is unrelated and from 2022.
So she has not yet tweeted about whether this is immoral.Report
So in response to a request for your point, you start with what someone said in response to your comment? And follow up with a laundry list of things that you think “might qualify” as your point?
Now that’s a “technique.”Report
I was answering the “you brought it up” charge.
I did bring it up.
And one of the responses was not “it” but “what about the opinion of someone else, given their opinion of something vaguely similar 15 years ago?”
So I had to deal with their point before I could get to my points.
Which have to do with whether this was a good idea on the part of the company, whether morality entered into it, and whether it’d make a good flophouse for ~2000 people in the current year.
Would you like to talk about any of that or would you prefer to talk about me or Megan McArdle or something else entirely?Report
“So I had to deal with their point before I could get to my points.”
Or you could have just… led with your point from the get go.Report
So me? That’s more interesting than the major investment bank walking away from the major investment?
Fair enough.Report
Huh?
You shared a link. It is generally good to offer some sort of analysis or rationale for sharing the link.
Maybe start with, “I think this is interesting because…” and going from there.Report
Because my take is more interesting than a bank walking away from a nigh-2000 room hotel that has been a safe investment for more than 50 years?
Okay. I’ll throw something together.
“This is bad. This isn’t one of the last bad things that happens before things turn around. This is one of the really big bad things that indicates that worse things are around the corner.”Report
I’ll throw something else together:
“This is good. This isn’t one of those bad things that happen before things turn around, this is a sign of things already turning around, like one of the really big god things that happen and indicate that better things are around the corner.”*
*Supporting data and logical arguments extracted from the same dark sweaty place as the “Bad” analysis.Report
If you want some supporting logical arguments that hints at data, I can point to the article pointed to in the article that I linked to.
Here’s a quotation:
I suppose we could ask about data.
Is there any evidence of:
Record high office vacancy?
Concerns over street conditions?
Lower return to office than peer cities?
Weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 that will negatively impact business and leisure demand?
Here’s an article from NBC Bay Area that has the headline “San Francisco Office Vacancy Rate Reaches New Record High”
Here’s an article from the San Francisco Chronicle talking about street conditions:
Here’s an article from The Real Deal (a real estate blog) with the headline “SF workers slowest in U.S. to return to the office”
I don’t know what the expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 was. So maybe they were making that up.
I’m willing to say that the analysts are *PROBABLY* basing it on something other than their nethers, though.
Do you have any supporting data for your assertion?Report
Unemployment at record lows, inflation easing, wage gains among the working class, crime resuming its decades long downward trend, Covid receding into the past, to start.
Look, I know you are deeply wedded to the “decline” narrative especially in tandem with your disdain for liberals but feigned concern is less plausible than just a frank statement of your biases and partisan leanings.Report
Chip, the investment bank said “Now more than ever, we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges, both old and new: record high office vacancy; concerns over street conditions; lower return to office than peer cities; and a weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 that will negatively impact business and leisure demand.”
I gave examples of the first three and admitted that I don’t know how to dig for the expected convention calendar to compare it to the actual one.
The statement given by the investment bank matches up with 75% of the headlines I provided.
But looking at what you have argued…
San Francisco’s unemployment is not at record lows. It’s low! But it’s at 3% and the record low is 2%. You can confirm that for yourself here.
As for “inflation easing”, I can’t help but note that this is a “not as bad as it was” rather than an “actually good” measure but if you want to check out the San Francisco CPI for yourself, do so here:
That is better than what we saw between February 2021 and June 2022, though. So I’ll give you “inflation easing”.
As for “wage gains among the working class” in San Francisco, the stuff that I’m digging up points out that the mean hourly wage in San Francisco was $41.63/hr.
I’m not sure what “working class” means here either. I do know that the occasionally cursed discussion that begins with “You know, $250,000/year isn’t that much!” is usually talking about NYC or San Francisco.
As for “crime resuming its decades long downward trend”, the ABC report that talked about how crime in San Francisco wasn’t that bad compared to the rest of the country also pointed out: “The number of reported assault cases is up by 2% and robberies are up by 14%. But rape and human trafficking crimes are significantly down.”
Hey. Human trafficking is down! Significantly!
“Covid receding into the past”
Hey, I understand that political leadership in San Francisco stopped masking mid-2021!
All that to say… I’m not sure that your assertions are fully reality-based and I’m also not sure that they would have been unknown to the investment bank that walked away from their hotel in San Francisco… one of the largest in the country that is outside of Las Vegas.Report
I made no assertions, I just recited facts.
There was a story yesterday about a massive farm in Trumpland that went bust, and every year rural Trump-loving towns slowly wither and die, but you don’t see me wanking on about “Decline”.
Because in an economy of trillions, a single hotel or farm or retail store going under just doesn’t mean much.Report
Here’s the assertion you made:
I don’t see how it’s a really big god (sic) thing that happened.
And the stuff I looked up to see if it bolstered your assertion didn’t tend to.Report
“Because my take is more interesting than a bank walking away from a nigh-2000 room hotel that has been a safe investment for more than 50 years?”
Sigh. Stupid or asshole?Report
Some of us would be perfectly happy to talk about it. Just not with you, and now you know why.Report
Seems that some of you would much rather talk about Republicans instead of about what happened.
For the record, I think that this was a smart move on the part of the investment bank. I think that their read on the situation is accurate and, as such, pulling out was the right move fiscally.Report
Just not with you.Report
Just about Republicans.Report
If you want people to talk about what you want to talk about, there are ways to do it. Give them a try.Report
Bro, don’t you have some more teachers to fire?Report
That’s obscure even for you.Report
The conclusion is, “Conservatism consists of a single proposition: Society must be comprised of two classes of people…”Report
From the FAFO files:
Texas sheriff recommends criminal charges in DeSantis’ migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article276114271.html
According to a statement provided to the Miami Herald, the Bexar County sheriff completed its criminal investigation into the on-the-ground operation that allegedly lured migrants onto the flights with false promises of jobs and opportunities on the other end. “The case filed includes both felony and misdemeanor charges of Unlawful Restraint,” according to the statement. “At this time, the case is being reviewed by the DA’s office. Once an update is available, it will be provided to the public.
Last fall, Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar issued special certifications to all of the migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard declaring them to be official victims of a crime and paving the way for them to stay in the United States under a special visa for those helpful to law enforcement. Unlawful restraint is a misdemeanor unless the victim is younger than 17 — as was the case for five of the migrants.Report
Get a judge to sign a warrant!
Extradition between states is pretty much immediate unless the person who is having the warrant served is in an asylum state.
Asylum state?!? Are states allowed to do that?!?Report
It’s prom season and parents are posting prom pictures on social media. What strikes me about this is that many proms these days seem to be either on a Friday or a Saturday. When I was a suburban high school kid in New York, every high school in the area had their prom on a Thursday and the seniors would take the next day off as a senior skip day. Was this only common to the New York area? Did it used to be more common but times changed and the these type of rituals are not allowed anymore because we all have to be ultra-serious?Report
20 years ago my kids’ high school had a large After Prom Party at the school. Music and lots of carnival-style games and silly competitions arranged/built and staffed by parents. After Prom drew more kids than the prom itself, since admission was free, no fancy clothes, etc. Started at 11:30 pm and ran until 6:00 am or so the following morning. Much easier to get parents involved if the day after After Prom isn’t a Mon-Fri work day.
Looking online, I see that all of the public high schools in the city where I live now had similar After Prom events this year.Report
After Prom was not a thing in New York when I was a kid in the 1980 and 1990s. Another friend from New York pointed out that event space would have been really expensive in New York and the immediate suburbs on Fridays and Saturdays, so Thursday prom could also be an economic measure. This argument is reasonable but should also apply to places in the San Francisco area, Los Angeles, and other high rent areas but they have Friday or Saturday proms.Report
My 3 after-prom memories on Long Island all involve alcohol, a beach (or summer house), poor decisions and breaking up with my date.
Not always in that order.
And not all of them are actually remembered…Report
This is generally done to give the kids a safe (e.g., drug and alcohol free), chaperoned event. Growing up, we were taken on buses to a variety of local venues (e.g., laser tag) to keep us busy.
My current town does something similar for after graduation, wherein they convert one of the middle schools into a massive themed event.
It’s a smart idea.Report
Adding to my above observation, there seems to be a sort of minor rebelliousness that was tolerated in teenagers from say when my parents were teenagers in the early 1960s to the mid to late 1990s when I was in high school as type of healthy testing of boundaries that isn’t much tolerated across the spectrum anymore. Like trying to get away with a little underage drinking at a party or something or a day when the seniors would skip school and go to a local amusement park even if not after the prom because graduation was approaching. These days not so much.Report
FAFO files, part deux:
Watch: Republicans literally beg migrants not to leave Florida over DeSantis anti-immigration law
https://www.rawstory.com/ron-desantis-immigration-law/
Florida Republicans on Monday met with migrants to urge them not to leave the state in the wake of a new anti-immigration law that is sparking boycotts of the state.
On Monday, state Reps. Alina Garcia (R) and Rick Roth (R) spoke at an event advising migrants of the impacts of SB1718.
Video of the event was obtained by Thomas Kennedy of the Democratic National Committee.
“This bill is 100% supposed to scare you,” Roth told the group. “I’m a farmer, and the farmers are mad as hell. We are losing employees. They are already starting to move to Georgia and other states.”
“It’s urgent that you talk to all of your people and convince them that you have resources, state representatives, and other people that can explain the bill to you,” he continued.
“This is a bill basically to scare people from coming to the state of Florida,” she insisted. “I think that it’s done its purpose. This bill really doesn’t have any teeth.”Report
This is like an abusive partner begging the person being abused not to leave the relationshi[p because they will change baby even though they won’t.Report
For a second I thought you were talking about the Hilton San Francisco Union Square.Report
The farmers are losing employees?Report
Why yes Jay. See, farming is one of those industry segments in the US that relies heavily on migrants (documented and undocumented). Pass laws that make migrant labor afraid to work – which at least these reps admit was the purpose, and your labor force departs. And given how little the agriculture sector pays, and how hard the work actually is, most Americans won’t fill that void.
Anything else you need explained to you?Report
Wait, so these “laws” are making “breaking the law” unattractive for some of the people inclined to break the law?Report
Migrants cross the border undocumented because they believe its their best option, not because they are seeking to break laws. Agriculture (and construction and cleaning services and restaurants and …) hire them when they do because it boosts profits while ensuring a compliant workforce that won’t complain about unsafe working conditions or wage theft owing to immigration status. Enforcement to date has focused on removing the migrants, not prosecuting those hiring them. Meaning that only one party of law breakers ever faced any sort of consequences.
Now Florida has added to that set of consequences and the migrants have had enough. Notice though how the farmer representative doesn’t say he’s going to change the law to keep them on the job. Because the farmers aren’t ever going to be targeted. Only the document-less “others.”Report
Gotta say… I’m finding it hard to get worked up about this.
It seems like the old way found a good way for undocumented dreamers who only wanted a better life for themselves and their families to be exploited and now that good way to exploit them is gone.Report
When your fresh fruits and veggies quadruple in price because there’s no one to pick them you might want to consider getting worked up.
Or ya know you could get worked up over people being treated as less then . . . in a structural system that’s designed to keep them fearful and oppressed.Report
Yeah, I got into this below:
“Oh, they’ll quickly change their mind when they see how much of their lifestyle is subsidized by this exploitation!”
You’re probably right, though. More people will care about their strawberries costing more than they give a dang about the exploitation of undocumented dreamers who only wanted a better life for themselves and their families who are willing to work without papers.Report
“When your fresh fruits and veggies quadruple in price because there’s no one to pick them you might want to consider getting worked up.”
it is very amusing to compare this to rhetoric on the subject of minimum wage laws, where food quadrupling in price is a good thing we should all clamor for because it means that workers are finally getting paid what they need to surviveReport
From me its the same rhetoric. Which starts with workers deserving to get a fair wage for their contributions, and an acknowledgement that in agriculture we rely almost exclusively on immigrants. In this case however, prices won’t rise to support better wages, they will rise due to a shrinking workforce – which is being shrunk to score cheap immoral political points.Report
There is almost always a version of Godwin’s Law in these conversations about “Who will work in the fields?” where eventually someone will toss out the idea of using the prisoner/slavery exception in the 13th Amendment.Report
It’s so much easier to hire undocumented dreamers who only want a better life for themselves and their families. Keeps prices down too!Report
phil
if the thing that makes wypipo care about Immoral Restriction Of Immigration is rising prices, and they’ll react by taking actions to alleviate the rising prices, then why would those evil wypipo not do the same thing when minimum-wage laws also cause prices to rise?Report
This summer yet another daughter will be starting the work force on a min wage job.
She neither needs nor deserves a living wage just yet.Report
They are just going to other states to be exploited.Report
“Enforcement to date has focused on removing the migrants, not prosecuting those hiring them. Meaning that only one party of law breakers ever faced any sort of consequences.”
Then you must really be happy about the E-Verify policy you were criticizing last week.Report
I never actually criticized the e-verify policy . . . . just the budgetary bill it was a part of.
And frankly, I don’t think its going to change anything. There won’t be more business owners perp walked as a result of it. Much less jailed or fined. Which is my point.Report
It’s maybe your point this week, but last week you were calling it draconian.Report
I was calling the whole thing draconian. Which the GOP proposal is and was. Because just like this Florida law, expansion of e-Verify won’t be enforced against the employers. But it will make the lives of people in significant segments of the economy much much worse.Report
I just looked over your comment from last week, and…wow, that is the point you were trying to make. I didn’t get that from your comment at all. I think because the article you cited began by making the opposite case, that the laws would have an impact. Even now you seem to be indicating they will, even while labelling them performative.Report
Draconian and performative are complementary.Report
They are performative for the employers, potentially devastating for the employees. Is that clear enough?Report
What part of them is potentially devastating for the employees, given that you’ve made the argument that they’ve never been enforced and were given to an agency without any corresponding increase in resources? Or is the word “potentially” doing some heavy lifting here?Report
time and time again we see immigration laws enforced against the employees. They loose their economic livelihoods; families are disrupted. People are deported. And each time the employers who created demand for these folks are allowed to slide. Sure, they occasionally throw a middle manager under the bus, but the owners never see jail or a fine. Should Florida actually choose to enforce its new laws I expect the same set of outcomes.Report
Have any blue states passed legislation that will sanction the employers rather than the employees?
I’m thinking California or New York, specifically, but would accept any blue state.Report
No, because Blue state rightly recognize that immigration is a federal responsibility, and they also don’t need to signal hatred to their base to remain in power.Report
Pity about the employee exploitation.Report
I read the article that you linked to. How could this law be used against employees but not employers?Report
The exact same way that federal immigration enforcement is currently carried out against employees and not employers.Report
That’s not an explanation. If you don’t have one, it’s ok, but since you raised it: how could E-Verify laws target employees but not employers?Report
you keep dodging the actual issues. But sure I’ll bite because I’m bored.
E-Verify requires both employers and employees to participate. But Employers are not generally sanctioned for E-Verify violations, nor for violations of any other immigration law. Enforcement of immigration laws always focuses first on the employees not the employers. SO Requiring more companies to comply with a law they don’t comply with now (and with little penalty) isn’t going to impact the employers.
These Florida Republican politicians know this – its why they are trying to gaslight immigrants into staying Florida. If employers had anything to worry about, then the GOP rep who is a farmer never would have supported it in the first place.
I’d also note the E-Verify portion is only one part of the larger law.Report
“I’d also note the E-Verify portion is only one part of the larger law.”
True. If you could explain what other parts of the law are hard on employees, please do.
“But Employers are not generally sanctioned for E-Verify violations, nor for violations of any other immigration law..”
Employers typically aren’t sanctioned, but the Florida law is intended to sanction them. Employees that provide fake ID’s generally aren’t caught either, although it’s possible. The point of this law is to (either in reality or simply to appear to) go after employers. There’s nothing in the E-Verify part that I can find that goes after employees.
“Enforcement of immigration laws always focuses first on the employees not the employers.”
Show me where this law does. I’m not denying it could, but you haven’t shown me where it does. Your assumption isn’t enough.Report
Why do you believe this law will be enforced any differently then other immigration laws?Report
The question isn’t why he does, it’s “why do the farmers?”
Because if the story you shared is accurate at all… they seem to think that.Report
The farmer in question is also a state legislator who voted for the bill. He’s loosing workforce as a result. He’s outright quoted as saying the bill has no teeth, which tells me IF there’s enforcement, it won’t be directed at people like him.
That said, Pinky has staked a position that this state level bill will be different then all the federal laws. I want to know why.Report
The employees seem to be running away this time instead of shrugging.
You gotta admit: SOMETHING is different about this than last time.
What is it?Report
They are tired of wearing targets on their backs. Simple as that. Florida passed a law the employees believe is aimed squarely at them, and added to everything else they decided it was too much.Report
So it’s not that this law is much different than previous laws, it’s not that this law is likely to be enforced any differently than previous laws, it’s that the undocumented dreamers who only want a better life for themselves and their families have finally said “enough is enough”?
That seems less likely to me than the explanation that something is different about the law and/or enforcement this time.Report
Well, they may enforce it once.
Some years back, shortly before Colorado turned blue, the Republicans announced that the laws would be enforced. That year a large part of the itinerant work force that follows the harvest(s) north simply skipped Colorado. That included people who were perfectly legal, who said that they didn’t need the hassles. Enforcement went back to normal the next year.Report
Why do I think this law will be enforced differently than other immigration laws? Well, for one thing, I don’t know for a fact that most state immigration laws “always” focus first on the employees rather than the employers. That’s an assumption you’ve made, not me. So I don’t see a reason for me to apply your general impression of immigration law as a whole to this specific piece of law.
Beyond that, the article you linked to says:
“But the most worrisome measures — for businesses and undocumented immigrants alike — are the host of penalties for those who violate new employment mandates.”
This is your source indicating that this law is at least newsworthy, unless they regularly publish articles about all the states’ very similar laws. If you have a reason to think that the story is wrong, give us a link to back it up.Report
There are already a host of federal penalties relating to immigration and specifically to E-Verify. Penalties in law mean little when the are not actually applied.
I keep referencing managerial penalties as being non-existant because they are. Even at the height of the Trump Administration (FY 2018) ICE reported a whopping 49 Managers of businesses nationwide convicted of immigration employment violations (https://www.ice.gov/features/worksite-enforcement). 49. Nationwide. Out of around 2000 criminal and administrative arrests. The penalties in federal law are not enforced – I have no expectation they would be in Florida either.
As to state enforcement, only Iowa, Texas and Alabama have laws as strict or nearly as strict as Florida, and most are very recent – which means its not yet possible to draw conclusions because of sparse data.
I stand by my conclusions and assertions, and reiterate that Republican lawmakers in Florida created their own crisis by pandering to a small slice of their population. Pandering built on decades of needless vilification if immigrants who form major segments of our economy. That the vilification is now costing specific GOP lawmakers money – and employees – is a predictable and laughable result. The wanted to scare immigrants to not take advantage of the few legal protections they have. And it worked. Really well.Report
You assert that it’s not possible to draw conclusions, then immediately say that you stand by your conclusions. Can you see where that might not persuade the reader?Report
This strikes me as intentionally missing the point. Republican dominated legislature passes what they thought would be just a scare tactic, then becomes alarmed when the targets of the law take it seriously.Report
Well of course he’s intentionally missing the point Slade. Its one of Jaybird’s best skills.Report
What is “the point”?
“HA! Republicans passed so many laws against undocumented dreamers who only wanted a better life for themselves and their families that fewer undocumented dreamers who only wanted a better life for themselves and their families will be able to be exploited!”
“Oh, they’ll quickly change their mind when they see how much of their lifestyle is subsidized by this exploitation!”Report
So right there your framing is specious at best. “Dreamers” are a subset of undocumented migrants, brought here by their parents and extended specific federal protections by Obama which the GOP has been fighting in court against.
This law applies to the broader slew of undocumented migrants.Report
They’re all dreaming of a better life, Philip.
Allow me to quote you: “Migrants cross the border undocumented because they believe its their best option”
They’re dreaming of better options.Report
To be more precise-
Republicans don’t want to get rid of immigrants, they just want to strip them of rights and legal protections so as to make them into second class serfs.
Jim Crow 2.0Report
Mexico is moving up the productivity ladder as a country. That probably has a lot more to do with us losing cheap labor than any specific law. They’re getting better at making better jobs.Report
My understanding is that a good metric is the average person reaching approximately 1970s US living standards. Once that happens the reward of illegal entry versus the risks diminishes.Report
Labor productivity is tough to measure, but by everything I’ve seen, Mexico’s is persistently poor. And anyway, the majority of the people crossing the Mexican border aren’t Mexican.Report
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263597/gross-domestic-product-gdp-per-capita-in-mexico/
Mexico’s gdp per cap is basically a linear line up. Their productivity is supposedly higher than China’s.
We are going to lose the cheap Mexican labor force, the only question is when.
RE: Aren’t Mexican
A lot of non-mexicans aren’t seasonal labor, they’re want-ta-be immigrants. The typical story is some country will lose control of itself and suck bad enough that people flee.
That’s not really disagreeing with you, but a lot of those countries are pretty small, we just see a lot of immigration because we’ll get a larger percentage of their pop than Mexico’s.
In theory if one or two of them get their acts together, immigration basically stops.
My expectation is if we want a cheap labor force long term we’ll need to look overseas, which means we’ll have to change immigration laws and stop pretending we’re opposed to immigration.Report
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1331779/growth-rate-output-per-worker-mexico/#:~:text=Labour%20productivity%20in%20Mexico%2C%20measured,2010%20it%20reached%203.3%20percent.Report
That’s one data point plus covid.Report
https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099100103252224294/pdf/P17082908942250380867901fba9060dcbc.pdfReport
From Pinky’s document:
I don’t see massive enough growth in Mexico to drive emigration to the US down any time soon.Report
In US dollar terms (probably more relevant than PPP) the ratio of Mexico’s gdp per capita to the United States’ has been falling for the past decade, and is not significantly higher than in was in the early 70s.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15WhjReport
It will be interesting to see if this is a tempest in a tea pot (!) or the beginning f the end of McCarthy’s leadership.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/politics/republican-revolt-mccarthy-rule-vote/index.htmlReport
Indeed:
So when they come to take your gas stoves away like the tyrants they are, you’ll have Matt Gaetz & Co. to thank for it, because they let their guard down to flex on Kevin McCarthy!Report
I’d love to have a gas stove to have taken awayReport
Oh, hell, I didn’t realize we had a new one of these. Here’s what I just posted on the last one:
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 #3, 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.’
—
If anyone is wondering where I got all this information, cause it’s not in the article, and you can’t find the 70 page judgement anywhere…I saw it in a Twitter thread a couple of days ago. I just spent like an hour searching for it, but didn’t find it. I _think_ I correctly remembered everything the thread pointed out that the judge had said ‘Uh, hell no’ about, but I can’t promise it.
But the judge really was not pleased _at all_ at this law, and didn’t stop at the really obvious ‘overly broad and too vague’ that all the articles put at the headline, where he could have stopped. He ripped into the law multiple ways. And he repeatedly cited lawmaker discussions about the law’s creation and what it was intended to do.Report
You know, we haven’t revisited Jacobellis v. Ohio enough.Report
At some point we probably need to start asking ourselves: Are conservative’s naked masked-off bigotry interfering with the passage of laws that would otherwise present plausibly deniability?
I remember, and he is indeed probably what started it, how judges had some serious concerns about _things the administration said_ about Trump’s Muslim Ban, with the implication a few times that they could have possibly gotten away with more if they haven’t just come out and _said_ why they were doing things.
Likewise, this judge supposedly had a pretty strong objection to the fact that people promoting this bill seemed to be attempting to stop something they called an ‘ideology’ or a ‘cult’ via restricting something that they obviously thought of as a form of speech, because…the government, quite literally, is not allowed to do that. The bill was very very clearly aimed at a point of view and the issue they were claiming to be worried about was blatantly an excuse and they as much as admitted it!
I mean, I think he would have struck it down anyway, his main two objections are pretty obvious to any constitutional scholar, but I’m not sure he would have gone on to list _other_ problems.
Florida Republicans are currently having the exact same problem WRT Disney, too. Removing or altering the weird legal agreement with Disney, probably legal. Doing it for the stated reason of ‘punishing them for their speech criticizing the Florida government’, um…obviously not legal. All they had to do was not say that was why they were doing it…but they did. And Disney is about to tear them apart in a lawsuit citing their exact words.
Too many of the elected Republicans are true believers in their bigotry, they aren’t doing it with subtle deniable things, they’re just standing up and openly proclaiming why they are doing it, and even Republican judges are like…”Um…no?”Report
If the mask-off bigotry is interfering with bad laws, isn’t that good?
I mean, forcing them to dog-whistle is better only if you see passing laws as good things in and of themselves.Report
I think I phrased that a little weirdly, like it was something that I thought we should seriously discuss as a ‘bad thing’, when in reality it’s an obvious good thing when politicians trying to do things for obviously bigoted reasons fail to hide them. I just meant more ‘We should notice this has started happening to a major extent’.
As compared to the past, where we got a bunch of dogwhistles about things.
I almost feel like the conservative base has gotten less sophisticated, but I think that’s not it. Because I’m of the opinion that neither party’s base is sophisticated or knows much about political theory, they’re just repeating what the media tells them…it’s just conservative media has gotten so…naked since the 90s or so. Just a non-stop downward spiral, faster and faster.
And the people watching it don’t know they’re not supposed to say these things. I would say Overton Window moved, although I don’t think the Overton Window is exactly the right concept, this is more about ‘ideas it is acceptable for humans to hold’ instead of ‘ideas that are politically possible’, but it’s close. They have built their own Overton Window, and then run into everyone else who…still has a normal one.
And then…we started elected those people. True believers.
I’m not talking about Trump there (Trump doesn’t believe in anything.), but the people around Trump, the conservatives who previously had been shoved out because they didn’t know they shouldn’t be saying those things, he brought them in. The Steve Bannons of the world. But people like that already were coming in, getting elected in a word where the only thing that matters is how far right you are in the primary. They’re just finding it easier to get elected under Trumpism.Report
I agree, it has started happening more often. The extremes are getting louder and there’s very much an exclusion of a “soft” conservativism which is something like “how everybody agreed on things a decade ago” which is not on the table at all.
“You want to go back to 2013? WHEN GAY PEOPLE WERE STILL DENIED THEIR HUMANITY?” and whatnot forcing people who just want to grill, for goodness’ sake, to pick between (horrible example that is totally representative) and (risible example that only happened once and is not representative at all).
So which do you want?Report
You just have to bring in weird both-siderism to everything, don’t you?
No, this is not, in any manner, something that has happened to Democrats. I’m not sure what positional changes you are even talking about, unless you mean Biden backing Obama into supporting gay marriage, although that was slightly more than a decade ago.
But…that wasn’t a masks-off thing. At least, that’s not how any of us thought of it at the time.
It also wasn’t an extreme position, it was a position supported by roughly 50% of all Americans, opposed by 45%, which means the elected Dems were rather late in flipping to support it.
I’m actually having trouble thinking of what policy positions you could be thinking of. Perhaps you have been duped like others and thinks the Democrats have suddenly become extremely pro-trans, when in reality they…are pretty much exactly where they were a decade ago.
There are plenty of people saying things well past the agreed political window on the left…and none of them get elected except by accident. They certainly aren’t running around making laws that are so overtly unconstitutional in their attempted effects that judges are horrified.
I have no idea what you’re talking about with grilling.Report
I’m pleased that you do have (horrible example that is totally representative) vs (risible example that only happened once and is not representative at all) hammered down flat.Report
Yes, living in an echo chamber so strong it causes elected officials to pass blatantly unconstitutional laws (Two of my examples have actually been held by the court to be unconstitutional, and I think we all agree that there’s no way that Florida’s buffoonery is going to stand up in court.) for impermissible reasons is, uh, the same as policy positions evolving, I guess.
Do you have any examples of elected Democrats attempting to do really unconstitutional and stupid stuff? Before you pretend I dismiss all your examples, you might want to, uh, give at least one.Report
“Before you pretend I dismiss all your examples”
Could you give an example of yourself not dismissing every example?Report
The leading Republicans thought they would be clever and spit the “T” from LGBTQ and Just Ask Questions about trans swimmers.
But now the base is out there attacking parents and students, sometimes violently, simply for being accepting of gay people, and using old Anita Bryant rhetoric word for word.
The base doesn’t want the mask off- they’re out and proud, you might say, with their bigotry.Report
Honestly, it’s not even the base. The Republican base is in favor of gay rights, in favor of trans rights, and you have to word questions in very specific and untrue ways to get them to start getting dubious about anything, and even then it’s a pretty vague rebuke like ‘I dunno, sure, maybe trans girls in school should have their own changing area?’ and things like that.
People who watch this sort of things noticed that the _exact same people_ seem to show up and testify at legislative hearings, all referencing the exact same sources. This anti-trans push not only isn’t organic, but it’s getting pushed really hard by organized people, and barely getting any traction at all among actual voters.
For example, here:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-06-06/glendale-braces-for-protests-ahead-of-school-board-vote-to-recognize-lgbtq-pride-month
Reading that, you notice that only ‘ a few speakers expressed anger’, and the name ‘Belissa Cohen’. I’m out of links without going into moderation, so feel free to google that name. She is not a parent at that school, in fact, she’s unlikely to have any kids at all of school age, being 64. She’s basically a professional anti-trans activist at this point…who speaks at school board meetings. And you’ll notice she gave a quote of ‘I’m here on the side of parents who want to keep the focus in schools on academics rather than on sexual orientation’, which is a weird quote for someone who describes herself as a LGB activist (Because she is not.)
The paper couldn’t seem to find a _parent_ to quote who had issues with declaring June Pride Month, aka, what the school board was voting on.
Belissa Cohen is one of maybe 50 or 100 people who have seem to have actual careers (She is a paid spokeman for an anti-trans group.) running around doing this, complaining publicly and loudly about trans people, usually in incredibly deceptive ways while misrepresenting themselves. This is in addition to the usual suspects that were causing violence outside the school, aka, the Proud Boys and other far-right military cosplayers.
This anti-trans stuff is being pushed amazingly hard, both with fake grassroots _and_ with conservative politicians, and actual human voters are just…not caring at all. The anti-gay people (Because that’s who it is, it’s the same people who pushed the anti-gay stuff giving up on that and moving on to trans people) are completely failing to make actual headway at all on this topic…well, except for a bunch of laws that cause massive problems for trans people until they get struck down.Report
If you don’t keep the base mad about “The Other” they might figure out you are hosing them too.Report
I agree that the most vocal and rabid are only a small minority of Republicans.
BUT….
It is and always has been thus. Throughout all of human history only a small minority do awful things to the persecuted minority but they rely on the majority to avert their eyes or dither or find excuses.
Even right here, its difficult to find a conservative who loudly and unequivocally condemns the bigotry.
So when the state shows up to arrest a parent and cart their kid off to foster care, all the moderate Republicans will just draw the blinds and turn up the tv volume.Report
Thank you DavidTC, very informative.Report
He’s not the only judge deciding that way:
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2023/06/06/judge-blocks-florida-transgender-care-ban-citing-bigotry-and-harm/70293295007/Report
No.Report
Did he do it for everyone, not just children?
Because the media isn’t reporting what Florida did there…they theoretically allowed gender affirming care for adults, but did in a way is currently literally impossible: They require multiple doctors to sign off on it, using a form the government hasn’t even come up with yet.
And even once the form is created, it is absurd hoops to jump through, with multiple convoluted nonsense that no other medical treatment requires. But right now, it is _literally_ impossible to do, due to the non-existence of said form.Report
he ruled on the plaintiffs before him . . . . I have not had the chance to hunt up the full ruling to see if it would apply to everyone.Report
Incidentally, looking at that law, it really is a mess. Here’s the legislation, if anyone wants to see it: https://legiscan.com/TN/text/SB0003/2023 Yeah, it really is that short.
(Before people get confused and think is is entirely reasonable to bar simulated sex in front of children, note the ‘simulated sex’ clause is on an _or_, and the other half of that is literally just ‘someone employed at an adult-oriented establishment’, and they literally just defined male of female ‘impersonation’ as ‘an adult-oriented performance’, so, yeah, that’s everyone in wrong-gender clothing…although they might have to be an employee or contractor? Volunteers doing drag shows might be allowed, I guess?)
It really does just use the term ‘male or female impersonation’ without defining that at all, raising quite a lot of questions with just that one clause…which is actually almost the entirety of the passed legislation, them having amended an existing law that is, itself, somewhat vague. (1)
Are they attempting to ban impersonating a _specific_ male or female, or the concept in general?
You may think the answer is obviously the latter, but…people in drag generally have personas, they’re being ‘impersonating’ specific people. (As opposed to a man who uses a high-pitched voice to imitate a ‘generic woman’.)
But…those people don’t exist, so aren’t actually being ‘impersonated’. Impersonated is not actually the correct term here. Like, I know that drag queens have a long history of being called ‘female impersonators’, but…that’s a somewhat confusing concept, legally.
Also, everyone assumes that it is trying to bar females from impersonating males, and males from impersonating females, but it _doesn’t say that_. The judge assumed it was supposed to say that, but it actually doesn’t. Depending on how you read that law, it could bar anyone from impersonating anyone who is male or female. It’s incredibly badly written, which is amazing for something that is just four words.
What they actually mean is ‘playing a character that is the sex that they are not’, but they have not phrased it in a sane way.
1) That whole list is utter nonsense. What the hell is a ‘go-go dancer’, legally speaking? The only thing I can think of is ‘paid dancers who dance above a crowd on a platform or cage’, which…if that’s what they mean, I don’t see any constitutional issues with barring it, although it’s weird as hell and really vague and they should probably _define_ what they mean. Also, what are ‘exotic dancers’ that are not topless _or_ strippers…and aren’t topless dancers strippers to start with? Or does being a stripper require _removing_ clothes? If they walk out completely nude to start with, are they a stripper? Is that even barred…I guess they’d also be topless, but what if they just wear a shirt?
How about being _competent_ lawmakers and listing some actual things that are barred on stage, like ‘nudity’, an presumable legally-defined term under your public nudity laws, instead of sounding like some weird 1920 preacher railing against the immorality of dancing clubs, you complete dumbasses?Report
Those who were upset at CNN’s turn toward the hard right can breathe easier:
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This reminds me of Iger and Chapek. And also of any coach who’s expected to turn a bottom-dweller into a playoff team in a single season.Report
Maybe Stelter and Lemon might come back?
Report
It looks like The Atlantic had a very unflattering profile of Licht a few days ago. It’s behind a firewall, so I can’t tell if he was fired because of what he said, or if he was burning bridges on his way out, or if it was just that bungled an interview.Report
This is now a public health crisis:
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/06/1180416892/gun-deaths-in-2021Report
Remember the whole Stanford Law School speech kerfuffle?
Well, the students are now being given the opportunity to enjoy the whole “listen to a trainer, eat the donut, sign the form” kinda thing.
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right – because free expression should be consequence free – and abhorrent ideas deserve to stand on stage with moral and ethical principles.Report
Behold: Consequences.Report
Being a lawyer is different. If you can’t comport yourself with high standards of decorum you don’t deserve your license, and you cannot be trusted to adhere to your professional responsibility to your clients.Report
Right, because none of the rest of us have ethical standards to adhere to nor do we possess professional responsibilities to our customers and stakeholders. Arrogant much?
Read up on the people posting that tweet – they aren’t advocating for lawyers to be held to a standard – they are advocating for “civil debate” of all ideas without consequence. Except that Nazee-ism doesn’t deserve civil debate. No form of bigotry does actually. And law students and lawyers ought to push back harshly on such things.Report
The only relevant question is whether their conduct will prejudice their clients if they have a matter before that judge in the future (or some other judge who is aware of their participation in the incident). Personally I’d expel any of them unwilling to write the judge a formal apology showing they understand the error in their conduct. As a lawyer you give up the right to put your feelings before the interests of the client, and if you can’t do that then you aren’t fit to practice.Report
Did the people who posted the tweet create the videos?Report
I’d have to see the videos (and probably have a law degree) to comment on them. But where did you get “consequence free” from? As for abhorrent ideas, they don’t inherently deserve to be treated equally, but an Enlightenment society needs to lean that way, right?Report
And in case you haven’t noticed, certain parts of our society are backpedaling hard on the Enlightenment. Most notably the people advocating for unfettered “free speech” so they can promote hate in peace.Report
The statement
“Nazee-ism doesn’t deserve civil debate. No form of bigotry does actually.”
is a backpedaling on the Enlightenment.Report
Let me see if I understand the boundaries:
Like, if someone advocates having sex with children, that’s right out of bounds and not allowed to be discussed.
But if they advocate gassing and incinerating those same children, well, then, we Must Be Civil because Enlightenment.Report
I believe the main cause of the protest was the judge’s refusal to describe a male defendant charged with possessing child pornography with female pronouns when requested by the defendant.Report
Some people might say that this is biased but here’s some clips from The View:
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Today, I learned there was a writer’s strike. Not entirely coincidentally, my friend-the-writer ALSO learned today there was a writer’s strike. It’s been going on for a month.
One of their demands is “do not replace us with this AI that’s been writing television and movies.”
AI’s response: “If you go on strike for a month and nobody notices, maybe you should be replaced by AIs.”Report
Today for lawyers not following their own advice. Lewis Brisbois is one of the biggest law firms in the United States. Two partners announced they were forming a new firm and taking 140 lawyers with them. As they departed, the two lawyers decried Lewis Brisbois workculture as soul sucking and a grinding mill. This is not incorrect.
Lewis Brisbois fired back by releasing e-mails with all the horrible bigoted statements and jokes that the two made with each other. Of course, Lewis Brisbois knew about these statements and e-mails for years probably.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-06-07/revenge-delivered-ice-cold-top-l-a-law-firm-outs-former-partners-racist-sexist-emailsReport
Of course some may ask themselves why such horrible sexist and racist people were tolerated for so long at Lewis Brisbois and only outed when they became an irritating competition.
Or even, how many others are still working there.Report
The Forward version of the story stated Lewis Brisbois found the e-mails when it was conducting an audit/investigation after the complaint. This is probably enough to create plausible deniability while also failing.Report
Lewis Brisbois has long had a suspiciously frequent presence in the help wanted advertisements, at least in NYC. Maybe this helps explain it.Report
As I wrote, the partners are not wrong in their description. It is basically an insurance defense firm/mill writ large.Report
I started at Bell Labs 45 years ago this month. Sometime in the first six months I had to sit through training where the legal staff pounded, over and over, that the question to ask yourself before you clicked send on that e-mail was “Am I willing to have this message read in court or printed in the newspaper and attributed to me?”
It’s still a habit for me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the last person in the world who does that, and then hits delete instead of send.Report
In 1978, my first question would have been “What the heck is “e-mail”?”Report
You had e-mail in 1978?Report
Its Bell Labs, man.
They probably had the Maxwell Smart shoe phone.Report
Yep. UNIX and uucp inside the Labs in 1978. I was in New Jersey and quickly became dependent on e-mail to coordinate stuff with the developers in Illinois. Uucp mail started spreading outside the Labs in 1979. I recall using bang paths to send e-mail back and forth to Australia circa 1981 to coordinate a session for the IEEE GLOBECOM conference.Report
In 2001 or 2002, there was an email incident at work. Our various leads kept sending out emails saying “DO NOT ABUSE CORPORATE RESOURCES BY ABUSING YOUR EMAIL!”
And, like, some of us were *PARANOID* about this. Like, Maribou would sometimes send me an email with a short grocery list to pick up on the way home and I would call her and say “please don’t, we got another warning email”.
Anyway, one Halloween, lunch came and went and when we got back from lunch only half of the team was there. Everybody was whispering and I asked my manager what the deal was.
“Are you here?”
“Yes?”
“Then don’t worry about it.”
Over the next day or so, we found out that the various leads were part of a joke-email chain group that sent inappropriate emails to each other including links to European Commercials that were normal in Europe (if a hair earthy) but downright hilarious and offensive to people that included Management.
So Management fired everybody who had forwarded/sent an email within this joke group and that was about half of the team.
I learned that management reads our emails on that day.
I asked if we could do stuff like have our wives send us grocery lists and we could write back with how we would pick the stuff up on the way home and New Management said “sure, just don’t abuse the company resources”.Report
Reading your emails in 2002?
Certainly logs of emails could be pulled in 2002 if someone had cause to want to pull them; I’m not 100% sure that the current keyword based systematic screening of emails/messaging systems in real-time became a feature until approx 2010 +/-.
Same with eDiscovery… that really took off around 2008 +/- which was the foundational batch tech that preceded the ‘real’ corporate spyware we live with now. And, which coincidentally cratered the Legal Associate market for a while. The initial limitations were have to identify exact (vs. fuzzy) phrases that would trigger capture.
Which is to say, my guess is someone forwarded the email to the wrong person who then pulled the logs; that’s different than the current standard which is ‘alerting’ people to issues that need investigating.
I could be off on the exact dates of the software advances (my space is adjacent to this) but that’s about when I recall(TM) seeing data driven automation of internal resources like this. Smaller companies as a rule are later adopters than large companies… and among large companies, it depends upon their tech profile and risk compliance profiles.
Not denying the story at all! It’s a good story. Just commenting on the causal factor, which I’d propose was human rather than automated.
p.s. I’m sure someone like Michael Cain somewhere wrote a custom program for some company or other… but COTS software for this doesn’t really get rolling until more recently.
p.p.s. And that’s nothing compared to ‘sentiment analysis’ that’s just now being deployed externally for brand management and internally for HR purposes. Even now, Sentiment Analysis is still having trouble with irony. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780128044124000073
p.p.p.s One of my buddys just took the CRO position at a company that’s doing what I call spyware for remote workers… Engagement Metrics. Ugh.Report
Having done these kinds of investigations you still usually need some kind of human management of scope and review. I’ve yet to see a software program that really ‘gets’ what you’re looking for at a human level and simply unleashing something into the logs to find things still tends to fall into more trouble than it’s worth territory. I’ve never had to look at anything that wasn’t brought to my attention by litigation or some other kind of specific complaint/issue. Just because someone could theoretically be watching doesn’t mean they are, and I’ve never worked anywhere that IT had the resources to monitor and report.
My guess is that someone at Jaybird’s company back in 2002 was somehow exposed to the e-mail thread, didn’t like it, and reported it to HR or some other authority. Only then was IT asked to go and identify the chain and anyone on it.
Edit to add, still stupid to put anything in an email you wouldn’t be comfortable with your boss and/or anyone else at the company seeing. However it is pretty unlikely email is being monitored real time at the vast majority of companies.Report
If this requires a human factor, I know exactly who it was and, yes, he was promoted in the days that followed.Report
I get this twice a year – once in ethic training and once in media training. For 22 years now.Report
It’s rare to see such expertise backstabbing in this blunt and clumsy age. It is also bad that lawyers could not follow the text/email like it will be read in open court advice.Report
One of the quotes they’re being dragged for is “How about someone who’s not a Jew?” in reference to a job candidate.
Here’s the thing, though: A lot of the people who are rightly condemning this would be wrongly defending “How about someone who’s not a white man?” Discrimination against white people, especially men, is not only tolerated, but actively encouraged. It’s done out in the open, not in email between two trusted colleagues.
Supposedly this is justified because people with poor critical thinking skills think that overrepresentation can only be due to privilege and underrepresentation can only be due to oppression.
But you know who’s much, much more overrepresented in law than white people? Jewish people! If law firms should discriminate against gentile white candidates to make the legal profession look more like America (they shouldn’t), then they should discriminate even more harshly against Jewish candidates (they shouldn’t do this, either).
I’m not saying that they’re actually super woke, of course, but this does highlight the intellectual inconsistencies and blatant hypocrisy of the charlatans preaching the systemic racism mythology. The continued success of market-dominant minorites undermines their narrative, so they quietly sweep it under the rug rather than do the work to bring their ideology into conformance with reality.Report
So I’m a little confused – does the federal judiciary have a place in elections administration or not? The Robert’s Court can’t seem to decide:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/politics/supreme-court-alabama-voting-rights-milligan/index.htmlReport
Three of the four decisions issued today were solid liberal wins and the fourth decision was on trademark law and basically as apolitical as it gets. It was also probably the correct decision. I am a bit confused.Report
Conspiracy theory time: Roberts really cares about the court’s reputation, (and I feel this may be true of Kavanaugh despite ironically the court having _him_ on it is somewhat disreputable in itself.) and thus have realized that the only way to keep conservative wack-a-doodles from putting cases in front of the court that the majority of the court either rule _for_ and mess up the court’s reputation, or rule _against_ and anger the wrong people…
…is to make there be less conservative wack-a-doodles making laws. Or at least give them slightly less power.
I mean, that was always the danger: Once we got into motivated jurisprudence, at some point the Supremes would realize that their motives aren’t really the same as anyone else, they aren’t magically the same as other conservatives…the only reason they would care about how many Republicans are in power are to maintain a majority on the court itself, but…Congressional maps have nothing to do with that. The House of Representatives doesn’t decide the court, _and_ could be a nice counterbalance to them having to deal with nonsense conservative cases they don’t want to have to take positions on.
Just a theory. It’s actually possible that Roberts did the right thing for the right reason, and heck, he got Kavanaugh to do it too.Report
I suspect Alabama went too far, too fast, and too transparently in its desire to gut the VRA to meaninglessness and Roberts decided it was a bridge too far and convinced Kavanaugh to go along. I think you are correct that out of the six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, those two care the most about the reputation of the courts.
However, today was overall a really good day for liberal decisions including expanding the use of 1983.Report
Yeah, if you really read the case, Roberts and Kavanaugh both basically said, “we don’t disagree with you, you just made the wrong arguments and were way too obvious.”
I’m sure it did hurt John “Shelby County” Roberts to actually issue a ruling that helped the VRA, even temporarily, though.Report
Pat Robertson just died by the way.Report
It was obviously God’s punishment for being a vicious bigot.Report
Made me think of this:
https://archive.org/details/saturday-night-live-s-12-e-15-charleton-heston-wynton-marsalisReport
Same thing happened to Clara Peller.Report
I’ve always been grateful to Robertson and his ilk. They were a swarm of hateful grifting ticks that contributed to the spectacular implosion of right wing Christianity (or maybe Christianity in general) and as a gay person that is no small thing. And he died during Pride month, I mean never let it be said he didn’t do anything kind for the LGBTQ+ community.Report
The Evangeliban is doing a lot better than they should through decades of long work. The current crusade against trans people is passing laws.Report
They’re passing laws in the states they control and further alienating everyone but their true believers which, in the long run, will make the list of states they control relentlessly diminish over time.Report
The moral of his story was that rejoicing over someone’s death is a jerk move. You didn’t get that?Report
I’m sorry to see him die, actually.
Sorry that he didn’t see the error of his ways in time to repent before dying, where he will be judged by his own god, a god who is wrathful and hard hearted and bereft of love and kindness, a god who is quick to anger and slow to show mercy.
As Robertson crosses that great rainbow bridge to eternity, I’ll say a prayer that he may be judged by one of the other gods, one who loves all their children regardless of color or orientation and is infinitely accepting of how they made us.Report
… you really believe that those gods exist? Wow. And here I thought I was cynical.Report
Chip is just lashing out. He doesn’t seem to realize his first theological mistake is claiming to know the state of a person’s soul at the hour of death. We don’t know mine, yours, or his, either now or at that final moment.Report
Oh?
How’d you feel when Osama Bin Laden was killed?Report
I certainly didn’t rejoice. Deaths of the enemy are a part of war, but they’re not to be celebrated. I don’t remember if I was posting here at the time but I don’t think you’ll find any expression of joy from me about it.Report
Or Castro!Report
I was good with OBL being killed. I might have celebrated, I don’t remember.
On the other hand if comparing Pat to OBL seems Godwin’s Law territory.Report
Wow Pat has a long list of controversies. Most people manage to get through life without a tenth of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Robertson_controversiesReport
IIRC ol’ Pat exulted in the Haitian earthquake as he believed it was proof that the Haitians made a deal with Satan to defeat the French during their slave rebellion. Call me a sinner- Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go and ol’ Pat is firmly in the latter group.
Let’s just say I wouldn’t attend his funeral to dance on his grave but I would send a nice letter saying I approve of it.Report
And yet they wonder why Black people don’t trust them or like them very much.Report
Yeah, that’s why I have no problem at all with rejoicing in his death: He rejoiced in Haitian deaths due to a (entirely fictional) deal with the devil they supposedly made to ESCAPE SLAVERY.
Him just condemning actual Biblical is one thing, him repeating nonsense myths in what was just outright racism bigotry to celebrate Black deaths due, supposedly, again, their ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY is…just wow.
Haiti has always been a target of racists due to the fact they actually had a successful slave revolt and murdered their enslavers, and you can pretty quickly identify racists by checking how much they dislike that part of history.Report
Why shouldn’t I rejoice over the death of somebody who worked to make the life of people I care about worse for decades, before I was even born.
If being happy a racist bigot is dead makes me a jerk, so be it. Every person who thinks like Robertson that moves on from this mortal coil makes the world a better place.Report
People will rejoice at your death as well, should you climb to the lofty heights of Robertson. Sad, isn’t it?Report
I caution people to not rejoice over death, anyone’s. It’s bad for your soul to cheer death, to wish for death, to take pleasure in it.
And then death takes someone whose principal public achievement has been doing great harm to others, as was true for Pat Robertson, and my adherence to this maxim is once again sore tested.Report
I agree, and in my comment above was being serious, not snarky.
I am very sorry when people spend their entire lives making the world worse, spending all their energy and resources inflicting pain and suffering on others for no good reason.
Robertson’s death doesn’t undo all the damage he caused, but at least it stops any further destruction.
We should mourn, not his death but the way he chose to spend his life.Report
It’s weird to even celebrate (or whatever term you wish you use) deaths of old age.
I mean, it’d be one thing if the guy was assassinated or something. “YAY! WE GOT HIM!”
But “He made it to 93… didn’t make it to 94!” seems like such a limp celebration. “He died at the ripe old age of 94 in his mansion, a year after his wife passed. He is survived by four children, several grandchildren, and a couple of great-grandchildren.”
There are people who will look at that and say “He won the game.”Report
I see the point, kind of but some people really just do massive harm.Report
On the other hand, he is a damn hypocrite and I am tired of right-wing hypocrites without any humility: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/us/pat-robertson-dead.html
“He went to Yale Law School, where he met a nursing student, Adelia Elmer, known as Dede. They secretly married on Aug. 27, 1954, and their first son, Timothy, was born 10 weeks later.”
Why do we give these people any importance? Why do we think it is bad form to challenge them? And give grave warnings about what it does to the self to not speak ill of them?
“If I am only for myself, what am I?”Report
It’s the second child that takes 9 months, Saul.
The first can come at any time.Report
He’d be a hypocrite if he claimed to never have sinned. A Christian claims to be forgiven.Report
Christ also instructs believers quite pointedly NOT to judge other sinners, even for sins of which we are forgiven. The root of Robertson’s hypocrisy is his hyper willingness to judge others, and deny them the grace his own salvation gave him.Report
I don’t think Saul meant that kind of hypocrisy, given that he cited an apparent sexual sin. And I’m not even sure he was a hypocrite in the way you suggest. I think he encouraged repentance.Report
A sexual sin which Roberston sought to hide, for which he openly and routinely condemned others, and which he fought against laws and funding in the political arena to prevent through birth control and abortion. Robertson deserves the label hypocrite and he was indeed apostate.Report
Yes… the long con. 68 years of marriage to hide it.
If every incontinent fornicator married the girl he knocked up and stayed with her for 68-years while raising a family of 4 children… How would we ever deal with the hypocrisy?
This is one of those reasons why Catholic Moral Theology gets a bad rap without anyone understanding why it’s necessary to parse various sins into component parts… it’s tedious and can seem like splitting hairs, but there’s a logic to it and reason for it. Reasons like this.
Basically you guys aren’t getting the sin right… it’s incontinence. An incontinent fornicator is different from an intemperate fornicator.
So, not having followed the man at all… it’s possible that he indulged in hyporcrisy vis-a-vis incontinence. Did he? Hypocrisy in this case would be *not* marrying the girl… or somehow suggesting that being serially ‘incontinent’ wasn’t instead being ‘intemperate’.
Which is why one of the things that distinguishes incontinence from intemperance is recognizing the sin the incontinence engaged in… repenting and making amends.
So ends today’s lecture on the Chesterton’s Gate of Catholic Moral Theology. We may not like it or get it, but there’s a reason why people spent time reasoning through it: we want to get our hypocrisy arrows slung correctly.
Apostate? I don’t even know where we’re baselining that from. Participant in an heretical sect? Sure, but even we Catholics don’t baseline that as apostacy… not even, technically, heresy. Though likely under scrutiny, I’m confident Robertson would have persisted into Heresy… but one cannot presume.
My point, lest it get missed in some light-hearted ribbing over Moral Theology, is that we owe a man fairness in getting the sin right; not that he didn’t sin in this case, or never sinned at all in any other case.
I can say with complete kindness that I paid Pat Robertson almost no heed at all.Report
“The Pharisee looked upon the publican as a great sinner,—probably as unjust, extortionate, adulterous; but how mistaken he was, inasmuch as the condemned publican was even then justified! If God’s Mercy is so great, that one single moment is sufficient for it to justify and save a man, what assurance have we that he who yesterday was a sinner is the same to-day? Yesterday may not be the judge of today, nor today of yesterday: all will be really judged at the Last Great Day. In short, we can never affirm a man to be evil without running the risk of lying. If it be absolutely necessary to speak, we may say that he was guilty of such an act, that he led an evil life at such and such a time, or that he is doing certain wrong at the present day; but we have no right to draw deductions for today from yesterday, nor of yesterday from today; still less to speak with respect to the future.” – St. Francis de SalesReport
Translation: As a priest I reserve the right to call people evil or good based on the needs of the church.Report
Sure, let us get the ‘such and such acts’ right… what to do after that? Well, St. Francis is correct there too.Report
Agreed. I didn’t post that to contradict your point. I can never remember the word for the approach you’re taking, which is the proper categorization of sin. I haven’t found a practical value in it, but it’s an interesting field. It’s one of those things that you have to really understand to get value out of.Report
The world is filled with judgmental hypocrites and if that was the sum of his issues he would have lived and died in obscurity like everyone else.
Robertson deserves our scrutiny because he spent an entire life as a powerful force of hatred and intolerance.
Those parents showing up and violently berating clerks over rainbow tee shirts?
Robertson bears much of the blame.
Laws that threaten state violence against parents of trans adolescents?
Robertson helped elect the people who did that.
The vast pyroclastic cloud of racial hatred that washes over us?
Robertson was an eager volunteer to keep that fire burning and spread it to every nook and cranny of America.
These aren’t unfounded accusations; These are things he was proud of, and was eager to claim credit for.
The most damning indictment of his memory would be a long, very long video record of Robertson speaking in his own words, unedited and without commentary.Report
Long read but came across this article on the slow collapse of the streaming service economic model, as applied to the writer strike situation:
https://www.vulture.com/2023/06/streaming-industry-netflix-max-disney-hulu-apple-tv-prime-video-peacock-paramount.htmlReport
That’s an interesting article… seems to go hand in hand with the “two Americas” theory of television. If you go on Twitter, you might think that Succession is the biggest show on the teevees. Then a clip from the show “The Good Doctor” goes viral and people laugh and then boggle that this show has been on for more than one season? It’s been on for five seasons? And it has bigger ratings than Succession? Why have I never heard of this?
Young Sheldon is a huge hit. Young Sheldon! Season seven is just around the corner!
Blue Bloods is still on?
And so there’s this weird thing where there is Hip Television and there is Not-Hip Television and all of the streaming shows want to be Hip but Not-Hip is where the money and *LONGEVITY* is.
THE SIMPSONS HAS BEEN RENEWED THROUGH SEASON 36!!!!! And I had the first 7-8 seasons memorized!
If you get a degree in “Television Writing” and you win the internship lottery and get to run around getting people coffee, you daydream about doing that for Ted Lasso. But if you want to be working in 10 years for the same show, you want something like NCIS. Which, seriously, I haven’t even thought about since Abby quit.Report
Yea, there was an article I came across a few months ago that said one of the streaming services (I believe Prime) had stopped showing audience ratings in large part due a prestige police drama with what we’ll call very modern sensibilities losing out massively in audience test screenings to old episodes of Starsky and Hutch.
What I found most interesting is the section on how easy it has become to imitate the trappings of prestige TV but without the quality or level of audience interest necessary to sustain it. So instead of mass produced cost effective crap people like it’s mass produced crap at a totally unsustainable budget for an audience so niche it may not actually exist.Report
This was the report:
https://fandomwire.com/amazon-reportedly-stopped-using-audience-scores-to-rank-shows-after-fans-found-lgbtq-stories-off-putting/Report
Needs some bare midriffs to become the highest-rated show in the country. You could get all of the Republican households to watch it to post outraged “navel count” lists to Facebook together and express a mixture of satisfaction and disappointment when there are only single digits this week after four straight weeks of 15+ belly buttons.
“It’s Las Vegas. Why is there a beach?”
“I dunno. Maybe one of the casinos has one?”Report
I remember hearing about that, where the humans didn’t like the Amazon show so Amazon stopped asking humans.Report
“While the real show was based on a POC policewoman placed in the deep South where she was apparently disconcerted by the blatant racism, sexism, and abuse of power her colleagues cultivated upon the communities they were supposed to be in service of. Moreover, it also highlighted the policewoman’s struggles of keeping her back safe in a treacherous place and trying to bring positive change both in and out of the department.”Report
I’m not an entertainment exec, but I suspect that deliberately ignoring what your audience wants is a bad idea. They’re trying to let a noisy minority dictate what the majority wants, the majority can still vote with their feet.
This was not an indication that Starsky and Hutch was good TV but rather what they’re trying to do is even worse. The other poll at the bottom of the link was also suggestive.
Big picture this showcases the difficulty of serving two masters. It’s not that it’s impossible to make good entertainment that is also inclusive, but making good entertainment is already hard and taking an existing plot and nailing an external message onto it is easier to do poorly than well.
You have very limited resources in the story that you’re going to tell (i.e. screen time).Report
Okay, this discussion is based on a literally backwards understanding of what is going on, promoted by either idiots or bigots at fandomwire.
Amazon did not stop using ratings. They stopped using _focus testing_.
The actual Hollywood Reporter story that is ‘cited’ lays it out: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/inside-amazon-studios-jen-salke-vision-shows-1235364913/
The _audience testing_, aka, where they collect random people and put them in a room and ask them stuff, was asserted to be skewed. And Amazon stopped using it. You can think that’s good or bad, but it is, in fact, what happened.
And a _lot_ of articles were written about how they stopped using ‘audience scores’, which is what Amazons calls their _focus testing scores_, by, um…let’s all them anti-woke (Or possibly just very stupid) websites in what seems to be a deliberate attempt to mislead people into thinking Amazon had stopped using their _viewer ratings_.
Focus group testing is, uh, not super great at deciding things. It’s good for learning about things you’ve never thought of, aka, the ‘Companies need to run every marketing campaign past a 12 year old boy’ thing, but it’s not super-great for actually _weighing_ things.Report
At the same time Young Sheldon, the Good Doctor, and Blue Bloods are not getting anywhere near the ratings that they would during the pre-streaming era. I believe none of those shows has viewership approaching ten million while in the 80s and 90s they would.Report
But what does?
Fandoms everywhere are getting more clarified.
Which means that if you spend time on the twitters, you are *NEVER* going to stumble across The Good Doctor unless there’s a crazy 15 second clip that goes viral among the Succession crowd.Report
I still have no idea what the new paradigm is going to look like… but in my darker moments I suspect it’ll look a lot like cable- just transmitted over the internet.
That being said, this quote at the start of the article:
“These companies took what was an extraordinarily successful economic model and they destroyed it in favor of a model that may or may not work — but almost certainly won’t work as well as the old model.”
Is knee slapping, laugh out loud hysterical. No coked up twits, it wasn’t the companies; it was the masses that killed the old model.Report
There is a certain inevitable logic to bundling that I am not sure the streaming services have been able to escape. For me personally the thing that has kept me from cutting the cord is the issue of live sports where, other than the NFL, streaming has not been able to displace or replicate regional cable channels and trying to get access to them all separately (which isn’t even always possible) runs up the costs to the point that you might as well just get cable.
However to your point it isn’t like the cable companies hadn’t ossified their approach to the point that it wasn’t also begging for some kind of disruption which is why Netflix and the imitators took off to begin with.Report
For sure, The cable companies are ossified and hateful but it was the buy in (and pirating) of the masses that endorsed/led to the creation and comparative success of the streaming service companies. I feel you on live sports (and thank goodness every day I never fell into that habit) because I haven’t missed cable for even a hot minute since I cut the cord over a decade ago.
What it boils down to is advertisements. Everything from media to journalism is still reverberating from the blow the internet delivered to the advertisement paradigm. People won’t/don’t watch ads the way they did before the internet but with those ads gone the money is just missing from the whole model. Facebook and google hoovered it up but i get the distinct vibe that even there the advertisers are going “umm we’re not getting customer engagement for our bucks”.
Somehow money has to flow from customers to content producers (with the middle folks wetting their beaks on the way) and we, as a whole, haven’t exactly figured out how to do that now. It’s gonna sting, for sure, when this era of speculative capital funded entertainment ends. We consumers have been getting a sweet deal for a decade of so. Reminds me of the pre-patreon/substack internet: it’s been hard as heck dealing with the fact that free stuff can’t keep being free. But somehow the grip has to get paid.Report
Agree. And hard for me to see how we reach an end point other than everyone spending the same $100-$150 bucks a month they were on cable on a bundle of streaming services where they still don’t watch 95% of the content.Report
Yep. You can already see it happening. I get ads for Hulu + Live TV, which looks a whole lot like a cable company delivered over IP, for $70/month. Plus whatever you pay for high-speed data service.Report
One question I have had about the whole setup is how the streamers determine the revenue brought in by a particularly show. With TV, they measure ratings which determines ad rates, which makes it easy to see what shows make money. With the streaming shows, there is no real direct way to see the effect. They can track how many times a show is watched, but without a way to atrribute a number of new/retained subscribers, I am not sure how the economics work.Report
Streamers, by definition, should find it easy to track how many times show X is shown. They can’t tell the difference between me watching it alone and me watching it with my daughters but that’s always been true.
In theory their “ratings” are far more accurate than before because they can measure stuff directly.Report
I agree. My comment mentioned that they can track how many times a show is watched. My question is how they figure out how that equates to revenue.
If I subscribe to Netflix and watch Stranger Things 100 times or 0 times, they do not make any more or less money. They make my monthly subscription fee, regardless. In fact, they are losing money every time I watch something because they have to pay to deliver it.Report
That’s a level of detail that’s probably not possible.
They have customers which pay $X. That gives them a bucket of money and it’s their job to make choices on what to supply.
The people who own the movies will charge them for the right to stream the movie. The question is whether they do it “flat fee” or “per time the movie is streamed”.
One of the huge problems authors and other creators have is after we went digital we also gained the ability to store movies basically forever.
Ergo the supply of movies goes up every year. Supply is also going up because technology makes it easier to make content as time goes on.
The demand for this is falling because of other things I can do with my time. For example I’ve been avoiding movies and watching you tube news about the war and other issues.
Increasing supply and decreasing demand suggests there’s way less need for these guys and they’ll be paid less.Report
They can’t tell the difference between me watching it alone and me watching it with my daughters but that’s always been true.
Years ago when I worked for a large cable company, I put together a small box for one of the other research groups that monitored remote button presses, channel changes, and as an experiment did frame grabs of the room the box was in when a button click happened. The purpose was to evaluate problems with the STB software by finding abandoned user attempts to select channels by category/search/etc. The frame grabs were to verify whether insane button patterns were because the three-year-old had got hold of the remote.
I put it in one of the staff’s home for a couple of days. She sat down with the UX people to review what had happened. The frame grabs led to multiple cases of “Oh, yeah, that’s when such-and-such happened.” The UX people told me that those were events that test subjects never remembered without prompting, and loved my little box.
The project was killed before it was used on actual customers. But there was lots of discussion about release forms, security for the collected content, whether frame grabs should be suspended depending on which channel was in use, etc.Report
“Ergo the supply of movies goes up every year.”
That’s a really interesting observation. Modern movies have relied on availability, buzz, and often spectacle to make a profit. Some of them were really must-see. There have always been art-house theaters that showed old and/or obscure movies, because people are willing to pay for them and they trust the implicit recommendation of the local theater. But a movie was going to get near 100% of its total viewers in the first three weeks of release, and the one time it ran on one of the Big Three tv networks.
But if there’s no difference in viewing experience between Disney + and Tubi, then new releases lose a lot of their competitive advantage.Report
One of the issues with streaming services is that nobody has to watch the same show even though they were watching the same streaming service. You can have some Netflix viewers watching Stranger Things and others House of Cards or something more niche. With network and cable TV, everybody watching a particular channel at a particular time had to watch the same show.Report
I think the issue is that there is a lot of old or foreign content that people in the United States or other countries want to see and will pay money to see but not enough for the IP holders to figure out how to make it available. So people develop cheats to see what they want and the IP holders work equally hard to keep these things only available through them.Report
Pay Per View seems like a more likely solution than bundling.Report
For some content, certainly. From the ads I get, most of the streamers who are doing content aggregation include a large amount of virtual DVR storage as part of the deal for time shifting.
When I was doing technical cable/telecom research work, I lost a bet I made with one of the marketing guys. I bet that given a customer’s channel data, I could write software that did a reasonable job of picking 25 movies to preemptively load to their STB for on-demand viewing that wouldn’t require a dedicated downstream channel.
I was happy to fail. I told my boss once, after he complimented me on a another successful experiment, that too many of my ideas were working out. I was being paid to think outside the box, and should have had more bad ideas.Report
I think there’s two divergent things being discussed:
1. Business Model is broken
2. Content Model is broken
The business model was disrupted by the ‘binge’ phenomenon that we all discussed years ago — there’s no particular reason to subscribe to any one channel for more than a month or so.
“In 2013, Netflix released the entire first season of House of Cards on the same day, overthrowing the time-honored orderliness of weekly schedules and giving viewers a brand-new way to spend 13 consecutive hours.”
The Content issue is related, but slightly different… when the metrics of success being tracked was basically Equity growth through disruptions, then #1 pays off until #2 catches up to you. The industry first doubled down on #1 because the incentives were still tied to growth, not sustainability.
Now that disruption has moved into consolidation? Focus will shift to #2 and we’re already seeing movement away from the Binge phenomenon into Serialization again… or at least advertising *on top of* paid access. I expect we’ll see more of this… more long-term commits in exchange for fewer or no ads.
But, as for content? Well your second link touches on that landmine.
Finally, the Writer’s Strike is tied-up in the fact that writers have been commodified in a model that doesn’t pay for play, but pays for Equity Growth… Trickle down wage slavery.
… this is where I once again break out the Marchmaine 21st Century Distributist plan for 30% Equity Allocated directly to Labor.Report
The equity allocation concept isn’t a bad one but it does run into this which I thought was an interesting counter-point to the writer’s position:
One high-level agent says that studios regard the WGA’s demands — for higher minimum pay and staffing requirements, among other things — as simply incompatible with the way TV is now made: “The Writers Guild, delusionally, is harkening back to a day when there were 25 episodes of Nash Bridges a year and repeats and residuals. Back-end payments existed because Europeans were willing to watch our garbage, and Americans were willing to watch repeats of that garbage on cable at 11 at night. The real issue is that the medium changed. Instead of getting a job as a staff writer on CSI: Miami for 46 weeks a year, now it’s a 25-week job working on Wednesday, which is a better show. That’s just progress.”Report
Right… not a counter-point at all. If you toil on behalf of the organization and your project is less successful than another, you get indirect benefit of the other project’s success.
It recognizes that not all success is 100% related to individual genius — sometimes more talented people work on less optimal projects. It allows for the proper re-allocation of resources (a ‘benefit’ of capitalism) without fetishing an individual genius that doesn’t exist. Plus, there are soft benefits of providing the ‘other’ content needed for the platform to keep it going for ‘break out hits’ to break out.
Ultimately ‘talent’ is still rewards with higher pay and a greater likelihood of re-employment after shows are cut, but if the goal is Equity appreciation then let everyone who works on the project get some small share of the appreciation.Report
Is there real equity though if all these shows are getting made on what sounds almost like a venture capital model with a question mark as to how the servicr gets to profitability? I thought that was kind of the other point, that investors were inflating the share value based on buzz and subscription activity without thinking about whether spending $50 million dollars per episode of the Rings of Power or $25 million per episode of Stranger Things or whatever was actually a good business model. Now that they are realizing it isn’t the shares are coming back to Earth. So I guess if you’re a writer under the equity model who got in and out at the right time you made a huge windfall. But is the more realistic diminished equity really going to meet the writers’ expectations when there, as the executive says, has been a complete paradigm shift? Maybe! But I don’t know that the answer is obviously ‘yes it will.’Report
Yes; the equity is in Netflix or Amazon or whatever. It certainly goes up and down and can even crater. Which is why it isn’t a substitute for wages. But even the companies that ‘fail’ and get gobbled up but other more successful ventures still have all their equity bought (or swapped for) in the transaction. So getting cashed out after having worked for a ‘loser’ is less good than riding a ‘winner’ but better than what’s amounting to pure gig-work plus a lottery system.Report
And Netflix is still not releasing Season 4 of Babylon Berlin!Report
“Europe’s top climate activists are planning a ‘large-scale civil disobedience campaign’ of highway blockages, hunger strikes and disruption at ‘federal properties’ in the US in August”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12160801/Europes-leading-eco-zealots-planning-summer-chaos-climate-protests-US.html
Funniest comment: “Remember, multiple states have legalized running over protesters if they present a threat, we aren’t the UK.”Report
“The planet Earth is conducting large scale protests against human-caused environmental damage. The protests include massive wildfires resulting in blankets of smoke and soot over New York City, the collapse of fisheries across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, depletion of aquifers leading to cropland loss, and hurricanes and wildfires forcing insurance companies to drop coverage in locations such as Florida and California.
The scale of the protests dwarfs any seen so far and threatens economic havoc and disruptions to several market sectors. Attempts to reason with Earth have so far proven unsuccessful. Senator Foghorn Leghorn (R, Louisiana) has threatened “Second Amendment Solutions” but experts say that shooting at clouds is not likely to have much affect.”Report
“The battle the world has been waiting for: As Ukraine’s counter-offensive gets underway, a breakdown of what has been achieved so far, with Russia on the backfoot and Western weapons turning the tide”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12177823/Ukraines-counter-offensive-gets-underway-MailOnline-breaks-achieved-far.htmlReport
This will probably be the most difficult time for the Ukranians and it will likely get worse before it gets better.
Everyone wants them to strike south right into the densest Russian fortifications. My bet is that what a successful Ukrainian operation will actually look like is recovery of parts of the east and what a really successful operation looks like is recovering a big chunk of the east that allows them to squeeze the Russians in the south. Then they slowly bleed those garrisons depending on ever tighter more difficult supply lines until it is soft enough to retake or the Russians come to the bargaining table.
Worst case scenario for them of course is a big conventional defeat or a muddled result where the map looks not much different than it has since November.Report
The Unabomber has been found dead in his federal prison cell. It would be irresponsible not to speculate.Report
He’s 81, in poor health, and has extremely poor mental health. Wiki says there’s strong speculation he committed suicide.Report
You’re no fun at all.Report
OK, it’s difficult to picture him knowing anything that anyone would care about… so it must be aliens.Report
Saw the new Spiderverse film today. Audibly gasped multiple times at the panoramas and eye orgy of gorgeous animation while my mind reeled, drunk, on the tight excellent writing. I was staggered- the film is pure artistry.Report