Open Mic for the week of 7/31/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
When Solyndra failed in the Obama Administration after a $560 Million DoE loan guarantee, there was a great hew and cry from the right. Now Yellow Trucking has closed over the weekend – laying off 30,000 employees, after a $700 Million pandemic loan obtained from the Trump Administration.
I await the same hew and cry form the same sources . . .
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/30/1190960948/yellow-trucking-shutdown-explainedReport
The covid loans were granted stupidly. It never should have happened. Same as a lot of green spending.
Your opponents’ beliefs are consistent.Report
So far you are the only one of my opponents to so say. I guarantee that NONE of the GOP politicians who drubbed Obama over this will even blink at Yellow’s demise as anything more then the market speaking.Report
So I guess Ron DeSantis complaining about it in May of 2020 doesn’t count?
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/331605-just-not-fair-governor-laments-federal-ppp-loans-going-to-big-businesses/Report
So the count is now two . . . .Report
His complaint was PPP money went to the wrong people.Report
Yellow has been a dead company walking for years. When I was working in LTL in the mid-2010s it was widely known the company could fold at any minute. The drama with the union this summer was just the last straw, when the strike threat came down you got a “freight run” – just like a bank run – because most customers and bookers had long been expecting and preparing for Yellow’s collapse and now it has happend. 30k jobs gone in a few days, 22k of those union Teamster jobs. There is a lot of blame to go around here.
There are accusations that the Teamsters used some maneuvering to push this collapse past the recently announced new contract with UPS two weeks ago. But even if true, Yellow was going to fail, and frankly its amazing it lasted this long.
If interested you can hear my comments here you can hear my comments on the topic hereReport
Apples and Oranges.
The gov shutting down the economy is different from the gov picking winners and losers.Report
If Solyndra was a bad loan – picking an alleged winner that became a looser – then Yellow was a bad loan propping up a loser. As Andrew notes, Yellow has been in trouble for a long time . . . .Report
The Covid loans had a different goal, I’m told.
They were just trying to “press pause” on the economy or something.Report
And how was Yellow picked? If the answer is “it had political influence” then that’s a problem. Solyndra’s big skill was lying to the gov, the gov didn’t have the skill to evaluate it, this suggests the gov shouldn’t be doing this at all.
If the answer is, “the gov shut down lots of companies and decided it didn’t want to break them”, then the gov was paying for damage caused by it’s own actions. So we’re in disaster relief territory.
In this situation the history of the company is largely irrelevant.Report
Guns n’ Roses and the Pretenders are touring together. In many ways, this makes no sense fanwise or music style wise. They also missed a real opportunity by not calling it the My Paradise City is Gone Tour.Report
Tattooed Love Boys, Precious, Middle of the Road…Patience, the first 2/3 of November Rain…I can see it working.Report
At my little local diner, they were playing the 80’s station and “Crazy Train” and “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” got played back to back.
80’s AF.Report
It makes sense because IRL, the Gen Xers who can afford tickets probably like both bands.Report
100%. Would see, albeit with sincere worries that Axl makes it onto the stage.Report
2024 is going to be a Biden and Trump rematch: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/us/politics/2024-poll-nyt-siena-trump-republicans.html
The only person from 2020 who will probably not be participating in 2024 is Mike Pence. People have fifteen minutes to throw a fit and then get over it.Report
you gave them too much time Saul.Report
Looks like Haunted Mansion flopped.
Co-worker saw it over the weekend, said that it wasn’t as good as Eddie Murphy’s.
Disney has had a rough year.Report
I’m thinking it’s not bad luck that’s the blame….Report
I think it was Jaybird who asked on Twitter why on earth wasn’t this movie release around Halloween. For all we know this is the Citizen Kane of scary movies, but who the hell is going to see one in July?Report
Yeah, the fact that this was released Friday instead of the first Friday in October is malpractice.Report
Not only should it not have been released at this time of year, but there are two, or at least one and a half, box office smashes currently going on. Who is going to see Haunted Mansion before Barbie? What the hell was Disney thinking?Report
“Several examples from just the last two months show a similar sort of thinking percolating among some of today’s young conservative revolutionaries. Last week, Media Matters for America reported that Matteo Cina, a Fox News staff member and former writer for Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, wrote on TikTok that it’s “hard to talk about the Holocaust and rising antisemitism without discussing Jewish presence in banking.”
“Both Breitbart and, on Monday, the right-wing Washington Free Beacon have reported on the unabashed antisemitism of the high-profile pro-DeSantis influencer Pedro Gonzalez. In private chats, Gonzalez described his growing radicalization against “subversive” Jews and his admiration for the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who is perhaps best known for shepherding Kanye West into his pro-Hitler era. (Gonzalez has since renounced his former “performative bigotry,” and blamed the internecine feud between Trump loyalists and DeSantis supporters for the Breitbart story.) ”
As Chris Rock noted, “those trains are never late.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/opinion/radicalization-republican-party.htmlReport
As I wrote on the other blog, this era feels like a particular era of Jewish homelessness. The Right hates us as always but many on the Left continue to insist that Jews are nothing more than a strange form of wypipo and not part of the official Wretched of the Earth (TM). It is a feeling of political homelessness. What is worse is that many Jews refuse to recognize this. They either put themselves entirely with the Left or the Right and we fight among ourselves. Jews need to realize that we only have each other in the world and that everybody will abandon us if they find it to their advantage.Report
The question isn’t whether you can get white folks to agree that you’re not a person of pallor.
The question is whether you can get POCs to agree that you’re not a person of pallor.Report
What does your side have to offer us? There are more than enough people on your side that believe the Woke Demon Banker Jew is out to destroy all that is good and true about whatever, White Christian America or the Islamic Ummah or something else.Report
What does my side have to offer? Um. D&D, video games… erm. guitar solos.
But, again, the question is whether you can get POCs to agree that you’re not a person of pallor.Report
As I see it both white people on the Right and people of color on the Left approach the Jews with two raised fists. One raised fist contains an absolute demand for support for whatever reason. The other raised fist is a fist of complete denial in return for following the absolute demand.Report
Remember when they introduced “BIPOC”? I used to think “what in the heck does that give them that ‘POC’ didn’t?”
I now realize that it was introduced to sidestep the whole “Jewish people aren’t white!” debate when it came to minority representation.
Are Jewish people POCs? Well… now we’re going to have a discussion about “white” vs. “WASP” vs. “Ethnic Whites” vs. “People of Color” and start splitting hairs.
BIPOC?
Oh, Jewish people definitely aren’t BIPOC.
So you now say something like “BIPOC AND AAPI representation” and you can mean pretty much everybody except white people and Jewish people.Report
BIPOC makes sense to me as a pushback against scope creep. Native Americans were decimated and Blacks were enslaved, and these things have clearly had multi-generational social and economic effects for these groups, going way beyond the impact of discrimination in this country towards others in the “POC” umbrella.Report
If it makes you feel better, freakin’ Breitbart are the ones throwing Gonzalez under the bus, so this stuff doesn’t even fly in the right wing fringes.Report
Happiness and perpetual concern about one’s place in some nebulous ethno racial hierarchy are mutually exclusive. I keep waiting for Lee to realize the whole thing is a cynical form of Calvinball.Report
What makes you think that Lee or anyone isn’t already aware that the “ethno racial hierarchy” is a game of Calvinball?
This is one of the main points that people keep making, that ethno racial boundaries are essentially arbitrary constructions and ever-shifting and designed on a whim by those in power.
But this is a game of Calvinball where people get killed.Report
Level set. In the United States of America people mostly die of complications related to eating too much.Report
It might be a cynical form of Calvinball that exists mainly online but it can have some very real world effects. I’ve noticed that a lot of very online politics is entering real world politics fast. You see this much more on the Right where many politicians on that side are essentially doing online trolldom in real life. Even on the Left side, there is an incredible amount of spill over.Report
I’m all for rejecting and pushing back against anti-semitism when it arises. However I can’t imagine a scenario where playing this game moves the needle towards the desired outcome.Report
The whole Palestinian optics thing just keeps getting worse year after year and arguments supporting ethnostates in the current year make less and less and less sense.
The argument that people who are supporting the alleged territory of “Palestine” are engaging in anti-semitism gets fewer automatic nods this year than last year and it got fewer last year than the year before that.
Something’s gonna give.Report
Why yes it does, because more and more people are savvy enough to separate the secular state of Israel, and its active oppression of the Palestinians, from the Jewish people who are equally, historically, on the receiving end of oppression.Report
I don’t think that helps in elite level discourse but I’m just not sure it’s all that relevant to the mean incidence of anti-semitism in America, which is probably more likely to arise from some longstanding, highly localized ethnic grievance or mental illness. There’s just not much evidence we’re on the verge of the kinds of ethnic cleansing pogroms which for understandable reasons I have to imagine loom large in the Jewish psyche.
None of which is to say we are perfect, or that there aren’t still interpersonal incidents of hate and discrimination. But this idea that we sit today on the precipice of some kind of race war is mirror image Timothy McVeigh stuff. It’s black helicopters for people with NPR tote bags.Report
Eh, the war ain’t gonna be here. But we are going to have to deal with the whole “but is it a *HATE* crime?” question when there is a “punching up” incident.
It also seems like Israel/Palestine is going to come to a head (again) and the debate over the importance in our role in maintaining the status quo has been weird the last few times. It’s going to get weirder.Report
I think it’s the kind of thing that may matter a lot online and in humanities departments but the pure policy question is the mundane matter of whether we continue our commitment to Israel for arms and military intelligence. That mattered a lot decades ago but I don’t think it’s the existential question it once was. The Palestinians are too degraded and the Israelis have an advantage that could last in perpetuity even if we cut them off.Report
It depends on how likely you are to see online and humanity department discourse leak out into the real world.
I’m of the opinion that the blood/brain barrier has been breached.Report
You think there’s not much evidence of that in a country that currently has somewhere around 100,000 internal refugees fleeing from oppressive areas, probably to keep them from stealing their kids? States where the government is removing books from libraries?
I’m not Jewish, I can’t speak for them, but maybe give them a little credit that they know it doesn’t _start_ with ethnic cleansing of Jews…it starts with even smaller groups of even less acceptable people, and _moves on_ to Jews. There’s a famous poem about that.Report
If you lower your voice you can hear the helicopters now.Report
The line is wrong. It’s almost always the Jews first.Report
It literally was not with the actual N.azis.
The people they went after first were, as the poem says, the socialists(/communists). And, as the poem leaves out, gay people and pacifists.
The first organized book burnings in May 1933 were against gay people, specifically, the Institute of Sex Research, which had a rather large library of work about gay people.
That actually was an organized event that had other marches across German linked with it, and was set to lead to other book burning of other ‘unGerman’ books, and to quote Gobbels giving the speech that night: “Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kästner.”…and you may notice that none of those people are Jewish…or gay, for that matter. They were, however, all pacifists and possibly socialists. And all of them were pretty anti-N.azi.
Likewise, the Feburary 1934 Reichstag fire was blamed on communists, not Jews.
While antisemitism was always a part of the N.azi platform, they did not actually direct their violence at Jews until _after_ they seized power. I’m not entirely sure why, perhaps the Jewish population was large enough that they didn’t want to make complete enemies of it?
Before the N.azis seized power in late Feburary 1934, their violence was directed at ‘unGerman’ people in a more general sense, which a large chunk of were just their political enemies of Socialists, Communists, and anti-N.azi people. Which, yes, also included someone Jews, but not specifically. It was more an excuse for ‘Why this book is unGerman’.
The first organized anything against Jews was April 1st, 1934, and was a…one day boycott of Jewish businesses, which seems weirdly mild of the N.azis. (And then that same month they banned Jews and Communists from the government and banned Kosher slaughter and all sorts of stuff. They actually did real things, it’s just funny they started with a trivial one-day boycott.)
But the first people they sent to the concentration camps were, indeed, the socialists, which happened on March 22, 1934, which is before the rather tame boycott of Jewish businesses a week later.
(Although arguable the ‘first people that the N.azis came for’ were the queer people they murdered while raiding the Institute of Sex Research, almost a full year earlier.)Report
Philosophically, it was always motivated by anti-Semitism.Report
Philosophically, it was motivated by white nationalism. (‘White’, of course, means whatever people the people in charge want it to mean, because races are not real. Here, they invented the term A.ryan to exclude Slavs, because who even knows.)
White nationalism just generally includes antisemitism.
But we weren’t talking about who they hate most. We were talking about who they ‘came after’ first. And fascists always warm up on the smallest, weakest minorities (In addition to their actual political enemies who could get elected and replace them, which is presumably why they went after open socialists and pacifists.) before going after the larger ones. Jews were a large enough group that they were not first, and the N.azis waited until they had consolidated power before going after them.
(Is it literally impossible to turn the stupid filters off on this site?)Report
Expanding the lens a bit to include the Rwandan genocide, the Rohynga massacre, the Bosnian ethnic cleansing and now the Ukrainian invasion, these things always start with the essentialist notion that there is Something Wrong with Group X, and society would be better off if Group X no longer existed.
The explicit goal of the Republicans is to make it such that trans people cannot exist legally.
And they are very open about this, that transitioning from one gender to another is abhorrent and they would prefer that these types of people simply not exist.Report
Jews were under 1% of the German population. There were definitely more SPD and KDP members than there were Jews in Germany during the period before you know who took over. You know who mainly sought to target their political rivals for power during the Weimar Republic.Report
Okay, I can see how that was a bit confusing, but I was talking minorities separate from socialists and pacifists.
N.azis went after their political opponents in a major way, for the rather obvious reason their opponents were the most likely to stop them. The poem is accurate when it says that they _first_ came come for the socialists. Although it’s worth pointing they mainly cared about leaders and famous outspoken people…they weren’t tracking down people who had even indicated any sort of support of socialists. They weren’t trying for genocide of socialists.
They also, independent of that, went after minorities, generally picking the smallest and most disliked one first and working upward.Report
There really wasn’t any other way it could go, the current system was unsustainable and the Israeli far right has long demanded the end to the existence of Palestine, with Israel controlling the entire territory (Which somehow never seemed to be treated the same as Palestinian leaders calling for the same for Israel), and the conflict with Palestine is _empowering_ the far right, so they have every incentive to accelerate it. So they were just going to get more powerful and things were going to get worse.
Some of us figured this out sooner than others, but at this point, it’s hard to not see it even if you have a lot of sympathy for the country and the reason it exist.Report
A major problem here is that politics generally is being talked about, and all the platforms given to, people who are at no risk of the Calvinball smashing them in the face.
“Let’s not have identity politics” is a thing said by people whose lives have never been impacted solely due to their identity.Report
Yea I always forget upper middle class white progressives especially those with cushy jobs in NPOs and universities are by far the most vulnerable people in our country.Report
I’m all for calling out people for anti-Semitism when they’ve done it. When people tell you who they are, believe them. It also has to be said that by that standard, more than 98% of self-styled conservatives have either demonstrated no opinion about the Jews or have a romantic crush on Israel.
There’s an interesting conversation waiting to be had about Fuentes, Gonzalez, Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys, Mauricio Garcia (Texas mall shooter), and others.Report
A trait shared by fringe a-holes (Fuentes, Gonzalez, Tarrio) and insane murderers (Garcia) is being drawn to the ugliest, most shocking ideas possible to the societies they inhabit. Which doesn’t preclude them from being actual anti-semites and I have no problem with dubbing them that. To your point, it’s not a situation where I see any reason to debate whether they hold their stated beliefs. But the buried lede is that these ideas are in fact broadly considered shocking which by definition makes them pretty marginal. It’s the very opposite of what would be necessary to effectuate them in a country of 330 million people.Report
The question, as always isn’t “how any people hold these ideas?”
It’s “How many people are willing to tolerate those who hold the ideas?”
All the horrors of bigotry require an atmosphere of conspiracism, that there is a vast unseen but potent evil force guiding the world.
Today the Republican party is awash in conspiracism, everything from QAnon to the Big Lie of the 2020 election, to the idea that there is are hidden cells of queer teacheres grooming children for sex.
And we keep getting told, sometimes right here on this blog, that these things are harmless, or maybe even that there is a legitimate reason why people might believe them.
How far is it from “An evil cabal of Deep State agents stole the 2020 election” to “Those evil people are Jews”?Report
For anti-Semitism, the issue is that many people are willing to tolerate it anti-Semitism when it comes from somebody who can’t be deemed White or doing it from a Far Right place. It is trivially easy to find ltos of examples of anti-Semitism in Muslim majority countries or among different groups of non-Whites like in the Black Nationalist group, see the Women’s March fiasco. There are lots of people who are willing to squint and look the other way because they would rather do anything than criticize anti-Semitism when it comes from a non-traditional source or group seen as an out-group in the West.Report
I have to be honest, it’s hard for me to parse the rest of what you said with what I’ve always understood to be an anti gay slur in the middle of it. If some gay people want to reclaim it that’s certainly no business of mine but it’s pretty uh.. disorienting.Report
There doesn’t seem to be any legal “there there.” Ethical? sure, but not legal:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/31/politics/devon-archer-house-testimony/index.htmlReport
I am sure Chip can tell us more, but I like this solution:
https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/how-resilience-hubs-can-help-communities-face-the-heat-and-the-climate-emergencyReport
slowly admitting that people care much more about libraries being regularly-cleaned air-conditioned buildings with toilets that anyone can go in for free than about there being books presentReport
Troll on brother man.Report
Hardly a troll, what I described is how the model “library patron” uses the place these days. I think we should just make that A Thing We Do instead of making librarians take on the role of unpaid volunteer amateur social workers.Report
Then I and my family are no longer “Model patrons” because we still check out and read books.Report
How about, and this sounds crazy, we actually go back to having indoor public spaces _in general_? Places that people can actually congregate that are not owned by some corporation that expects you to buy something, that have air conditioning and bathrooms.
The fact that libraries are literally the only outpost that still exists is nothing to do with libraries, it’s the fact we got rid of everywhere else. (Hell, in a lot of places we got rid of outdoor public spaces also.)Report
“How about, and this sounds crazy, we actually go back to having indoor public spaces _in general_? ”
so…what I wrote, then?Report
We have this discussion about public transport occasionally.
Someone will mention violence on the bus or someone vomiting on the train and then someone else will bring up John Rocker’s bigotry or manspreading and yell “Q.E.D.!”Report
…I wasn’t arguing with you?Report
There is a Times/Sienna poll that has Trump and Biden essentially tied for 2024 with 14 percent undecided. I am not that concerned about national polls this far out but this little data tab is very revealing:
New NYT/Siena poll:
“Men:
50% Trump
36% Biden
Women:
49% Biden
37% Trump”Report
The interesting question is how much of that 50% think their wife voted for Trump as well, but she didn’t. That’s probably not a small part of the Dobbs and Trump-releated shift in the suburbs of Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin, et al.Report
Well, the indictment for Jan 6th just got handed down…and was sealed by the judge, so we don’t know anything.Report
So that leaves Georgia to indict . . . do we want to start a pool on when that happens?Report
Times says: “Trump has been charged with four crimes: one count of conspiracy to violate rights, one count of conspiracy to defraud the government, and one count each of obstructing an official proceeding and conspiring to do so. Convictions on the first two would carry a sentence of up to five years in prison each; the obstruction charges carry up to 20 years.”Report
Y’know, if I was the conservative movement, I’d simply get behind one of the many Governor’s who didn’t try to overturn the government, but also have talked to somebody who has watched something to the left of FOX News since 2020, and actually enjoy doing politics.Report
Then he’d get accused of killing people with cancer, beating up gays in college, and tying his dog to the roof of a car.Report
None of which would matter a whit in the election similarly to how the right perennially calling the lefts candidate a communist, godless baby killer never moves the needle. But when his Randoid comments got into the news that’d actually hurt him along with the inevitable fact that he’d be a corporate vulture minion of the wealthy plutocrats. It’s weird how even right wingers are so luke warm about voting for a leopard to eat their faces that they’ll vote for one to eat others faces instead.Report
The Union Forever, Hurrah Boys Hurrah, Down with the Traitors, Up with the StarsReport
But see, that’s exactly what they did.
Only a few months ago Serious Journalists and Reasonable Republicans were earnestly assuring us that Gov. DeSantis was the Serious and Reasonable Republican who would once and for all defeat Trump.
Now after a series of bizarre ads and leaked chats it turns out that his campaign staff is a swamp of fascists.
But those chats and bizarre ads were being concocted at the precise moment we were being assured that such a thing was un-possible.Report
The indictment: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-full-the-indictment-against-trump-for-his-efforts-to-overturn-the-2020-electionReport
Chinese Zoo denies Malayan Sun Bear is intern in a costume: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/world/asia/chinese-zoo-sun-bear-costume.htmlReport
Fitch has downgraded the US’s long-term credit.
Here’s a tweet from a guy who is opposed to that sort of thing to explain why it’s dumb that that happened and why he’s mad about it:
Report
A deep dive into the creator of Florida’s new educational program on slavery: https://popular.info/p/meet-the-scholars-who-created-floridas
“But a closer look into Allen’s background raises questions about his credibility and qualifications. Allen has a history of making incendiary remarks and a track record of promoting right-wing ideology. In 1989, when he served as chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Allen gave a talk at an anti-gay conference titled “Blacks? Animals? Homosexuals? What is a Minority?” He branded “special classes of protection for homosexuals and other minorities as a ‘fatal’ mistake” that heightens “tensions and antagonism” within society. According to his prepared text, creating legal protections for minority groups “is the beginning of the evil of reducing American blacks to an equality with animals and then seducing other groups to seek the same charitable treatment.”
At the time, the rest of the Commission denounced the speech for being ”disgusting and unnecessarily inflammatory.” When the Commission held a vote to condemn the speech, Allen “was the only member of the commission to vote in behalf of himself.”
During his time as chairman, Allen was also charged with kidnapping a 14-year-old girl from an indigenous reservation in Arizona. The girl was at the center of a custody battle between her birth mother and a white couple that wanted to adopt her. “Allen contends that the girl wants to leave the reservation, though the mother has formal custody,” TIME reported in 1989.”Report
“According to the newspaper account, Allen learned of the case from psychologist Barry Goodfield, who is a consultant to the commission and who also had advised the Desrochers family. Allen told the commission he went to the reservation with Goodfield, two U.S. marshals and a camera crew which was making a documentary on Indian adoption cases to speak with the girl as she was heading home from school. They spoke with the girl for about 30 minutes, then drove her in Goodfield’s car to her home, where they had a “tense” exchange with the girl’s mother, Allen said. As Allen, Goodfield and the others were driving away from the reservation, they were stopped by sheriff’s deputies at the request of tribal police and detained for questioning. They were released four or five hours later, police said.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/03/18/rights-panel-asks-chairman-to-apologize/df260319-981e-4966-acdd-29e9076c8b0d/Report
JFC, are you a witness for defense or prosecution?Report
Feminist Frequency was one of the forces that resulted in #Gamergate. #Gamergate is one of the forces that gave us Donald Trump.
And on the day of Donald Trump’s indictment:
Report
Cops really don’t know when to stop . . .
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/01/politics/texas-congressman-detained-ronny-jackson/index.htmlReport
There’s a tweet making the rounds where a robber is stealing stuff from a Convenience Store while telling the Sikhs working there that they can’t do anything. Well, they eventually tackle him and beat him with what might be a broom or mop handle for a few seconds.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to link to it.
I guess I bring it up because a handful of people are saying that vigilantism is replacing policing and I’m not certain that a guy defending his own property counts as vigilantism.
We’re not talking about a so-called “good Samaritan” who steps in on the part of the Sikhs. This is the Sikhs fighting against the robber.
That’s a *LOT* closer to self-defense than vigilantism.
And conflating the two concepts will make vigilantism more popular rather than less.Report
Great. So how do you propose we address this?Report
More “In This House” lawn signs in the suburbs and people explaining that “defund the police” doesn’t mean that we should defund the police but reallocate funds from the police to different societal functions like social work.
I’m just kidding.
More policing. More policing of stuff like “robbery”. Sequestration of criminals away from the rest of society once a particular threshold has been reached (something like a “three strikes” law, maybe).
At the same time, realize that criminality is seen by a good way to make money (or acquire products) by the stupid and uneducated. We should do a better job of making sure that there are fewer illiterate people and that involves making schooling better.
It’s a mess, that’s for sure.Report
More government power is needed, it looks like.
See this is the Decline Narrative again.
A robber is chased off by a store clerk. This is the most ordinary dog-barks-at-mailman story, something so humdrum and unremarkable that at no point in human history would this even make the top of a discussion by the bored old gossips at the beauty salon.
Yet, in your mind, this is a Significant Occurrence, a Portent and Harbinger of Big Things.
And of course, the excuse for an enlargement of the police power of government.
And even by your own telling this has no logic.
The moral of the story could just as easily be that, see, ordinary citizens can handle minor problems and we don’t need any more government power.Report
More government power is needed
“I thought you didn’t like Soros DAs but here you are calling for a DA to prosecute crime!”
A robber is chased off by a store clerk.
He was not chased off. He was tackled to the floor and beaten.
The moral of the story could just as easily be that, see, ordinary citizens can handle minor problems and we don’t need any more government power.
I think that I will find less to complain about in a future where shop owners can beat thieves than you will. Even taking into account the various localized escalations that will result.Report
You’re trying to sell fear to a guy who walks thru Skid Row without a trace of it.Report
I’m not selling “fear”, Chip.
I answered the question “So how do you propose we address this?”Report
JB sees portentious things in humdrum events, you don’t say?Report
Eh, it’s mostly movement down a slippery slope that I find noteworthy.
“Slippery slope is a fallacy, though!”
“Sure.”
“It’s barely movement!”
“Okay.”Report
“JB sees portentious[sic] things in humdrum events, you don’t say?”
Do you think more “TRUMP 2024” bumper stickers around town is portentous or humdrum?Report
In Mississippi at the moment its both.Report
Is there any indication they’ve been arrested or charged with a crime?Report
I haven’t seen any information about the robbery beyond “here’s the footage!”
No State, City, or Date.
I imagine it’s recentish.Report
Wait, it’s NYC.Report
Wait again, eagle-eyed viewers point out that the lottery ads that show up in the store indicate that it’s California.Report
It seems to me that decision is really where any larger implications lie.Report
The convenience store owners are now under investigation for assault.Report
As e-bikes proliferate, so do deadly fires blamed on exploding batteries
https://ktla.com/news/as-e-bikes-proliferate-so-do-deadly-fires-blamed-on-exploding-batteries/
“NEW YORK (AP) — The explosion early on a June morning ignited a blaze that engulfed a New York City shop filled with motorized bicycles and their volatile lithium-ion batteries. Billowing smoke quickly killed four people asleep in apartments above the burning store.”
“Consumer advocates and fire departments, particularly in New York City, are urging the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to establish national safety standards and confiscate imports that don’t comply with regulations at the border, so unsafe e-bikes and poorly manufactured batteries can be taken off the streets and out of homes.”Report
There is apparently a Bollywood movie that use the Holocaust as some type of metaphor as the secret for a happy marriage. You can watch it on Amazon Prime. Critics inside and outside of India are ripping it to shreds:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/08/bawaal-movie-amazon-prime-holocaust-auschwitz-bollywood.html
There is this big growing divide between how the educated approach history and how everybody else uses history. Not being from the culture could makes things worse but this divide can exist within a culture. For a lot of people history seems nothing more than an interesting back drop at best. So having MLK’s I Have a Dream Speech as a type of self-help advice in a RomCom (I got this from the comments section) is something that lots of people can node sagely towards. For more educated people, the thing seems rather cringe at best.Report
I don’t know if you’re familiar with India’s view of Hitler, but it’s…unique. He opposed Churchill, and that gets kudos in the former colony.Report
I believe many non-white countries in Asia and Africa tend to have a favorable view of Hitler and his party for that reason.Report
Great moments in bad-faith lawyer trolling, Trump’s lawyers argue that West Virginia is more diverse than D.C.Report
This is one of those things that strikes me as *EXCEPTIONALLY* avoidable.
I mean, prominent progressives should just avoid this entirely. Seriously. It undercuts other things.
Report
No one on that side cares about that….Report
Taxes are the price we pay for civilization!Report
..avoid what thing? Also, are you calling him a prominent progressive, or are you saying that prominent progressives should avoid him (Or perhaps the People’s Party) entirely.
I really don’t understand what you are trying to say, and I’m also unaware if you are aware that Cornell is, uh, not actually that popular with the left at this point, mostly because he is a bit wackadoodle and surrounds himself with other wackadoodles that comprise the anti-voting-Democratic part of the left.
I do agree that is flatly ridiculous for _any_ presidential candidate to have unpaid taxes. Literally the first thing you check before being in politics.Report
I was calling him a prominent progressive.
Indeed, he was one until he started this thing where he could theoretically siphon votes away from the candidates who are legitimately entitled to them.
(Seriously, If I called him a prominent progressive 3 months ago, nobody would have blinked.)Report
If you had said in the first place that that was all you were saying, it would have been a damp squib unworthy of comment, and responded to as such.
Of course, that assumes that what you say now you were saying then is, in fact, what you were saying then.Report
In the first place? I was complaining that a prominent progressive failed to pay his goddamn taxes!
And that turned into a “is he a prominent progressive? Really?” conversation because, of course, we all know that anybody who disagrees with Biden is a Trumpist.Report
That’s your story and you’re sticking to it.Report
To be honest, I kind of see “progressives should pay taxes too” as a bit of a damp squib that nobody would disagree with.
Certainly one running for president.
The whole “Cornell is, uh, not actually that popular with the left at this point” thing might be interesting to mine but, seriously, he was a prominent progressive until *VERY* recently.
Now you can go back to talking about me instead.Report
As long as we all agree that this was a damp squib from the beginning, we’re cool.Report
Absolutely. I shared it because I shared something to the effect of “new candidate for weirdos just dropped” a few weeks back when he announced.
And when I found out that he was half a mil behind on paying his taxes, I thought that that was also somewhat vaguely noteworthy.Report
I guess it’s not surprising, but it is cynically amusing to see them “who-dat” Cornell West…Report
You know, if more of this happened, it wouldn’t matter that cops aren’t policing in Cali.
https://www.tmz.com/watch/2023-08-03-080323-7-11-1661034-187/
“7-ELEVEN WORKERS SAVAGELY BEAT CIGARETTE ROBBER ON VIDEO”Report
Cops did nothing, now they are investigation the guys who gave the robber, on the third theft, a “piece of their mind”.
https://www.kcra.com/article/stockton-7-eleven-attempted-robbery-beatdown-investigation/44741700
Guess who’s gonna go to jail?Report
Someone who can afford to hire protesters can hire someone to go get him a case of something.
That said, someone who can afford to hire protesters has deep enough pockets to sue.
Report
Jaybird, this is the same thing as the Bake My Cake thing. The point is not whether you could, the point is that someone said that you couldn’t, and that’s just not how we do things these days. No, no, that’s just not how we do things these days.Report
Oh hey, this is surprising, and by surprising I mean completely expected and predictable:
Richard Hanania, Rising Right-Wing Star, Wrote For White Supremacist Sites Under Pseudonym
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/richard-hanania-white-supremacist-pseudonym-richard-hoste_n_64c93928e4b021e2f295e817
Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Na.zi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.
I’m sure he’s just an alienated proletariat concerned about OSHA regulations of office chairs.Report
Remember the Oberlin lawsuit?
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An amusing corollary to the smug Noticing of insurers declaring living in certain parts of the country to be Willfully Risky Behavior and thus uninsurable.
As someone pointed out, this is another example of “much of the past ten years’ excessiveness was just an artifact of zero-percent interest rates rather than any particular social upheaval”Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIpXkQhq1ps&ab_channel=News4JAXTheLocalStation
Homeowner questions EV safety after fire destroys her Nocatee home.
Million dollar home gone. Given a loaner that was under recall for the issue that destroyed their car. Guess who’s gonna pay for this….everybody.Report