Open Mic for the week of 9/11/2023
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.
I’ll say this for Texas – they are sure shaking a lot apple trees these days:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/11/opinions/texas-chaplains-school-law-religious-liberty-tyler/index.htmlReport
As far as I can tell, they aren’t even trying to sell a legitimate, non-proselytizing function for public school chaplains.Report
Bingo.Report
Something something suspending the Constitution- Can they do that?Report
This is it. The end of an era.
Report
Aren’t there rumors that he won’t be allowed anywhere close to either Creative or the talent?Report
I have no idea.
Quite honestly, I thought he was out the last time they killed him.
But he just came back even stronger.Report
Oh. And the cuts are beginning.
This wasn’t a sale but a merger and we now get to explore the whole “redundant jobs” thing. It makes sense that the accounting and HR stuff has overlap, I’ve heard that the backstage hair and makeup have redundancies and I think that that can’t be true, given the whole “on the road” thing. Maybe some video packaging, maybe some producers… but the WWE spends a lot of time on the road compared to the UFC and the time between dates is small.
I went to Stubhub to check on getting tickets for upcoming events and there are 7 events between Sept 16 and November 11 (with 2 shows in Vegas) for six different cities (5 US, 2 Middle East).
Between Sept 16 and November 11, Stubhub is selling tickets to 65(!) WWE shows. (Germany, Netherlands, UK, and all four time zones in the US.)
As for the talent, it’ll probably be a bloodbath.Report
So it appears the courts disagree with the political left about what is and is not free speech. It also appears that the federal bench disagrees with itself. It will be interesting to see if SCOTUS takes this up.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/08/politics/biden-administration-social-media-lawsuit/index.htmlReport
When conservatives yell that they “just want to keep teachers from talking about sexuality” in class, this is what they mean:
A children’s book about a lion raised by two men has been banned in Florida because right-wing activists suspect the men might be gay – despite nothing in the book suggesting they have any romantic relationship, according to a report.
https://www.rawstory.com/christian-the-hugging-lion/Report
(snark)Oh come on Chip, don’t you know “real men” aren’t nurturing? That’s clearly woman’s work, so if two men are doing it, they MUST be effeminate, which of course means they are gay.(/snark)Report
Volcano discovery could power electric cars for decades, scientists say
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/mcdermitt-caldera-lithium-deposit-electric-car-b2409616.html
But: At a disputed Native massacre site, tribes brace for a new, lithium-driven rush
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/02/at-a-native-massacre-site-tribes-brace-for-a-new-lithium-driven-rush/
What’s a historical Native site to powering all those 50K EVs that only go 235 miles before having to be recharged for 30 mins (at best).Report
I think the future will look a little bit different than the present from the perspective of electric vehicles. We can reasonably expect a larger fleet and the cars in that fleet to have longer range. Not so sure about some of the other bells and whistles and I am not versed enough in the technology to quantify what “longer range” means, although it seems to be the holy grail the engineers are working towards. Also don’t know about recharge times.
But there will surely be a demand for that lithium. Balancing the interests of the tribes to control their lands and a reasonable level of environmental hygiene with the mining and use of the lithium strikes me as a big challenge. It could be done in good faith. Whether that will happen or not? I’m not sure history is on that side of things.Report
There is a conservative tope that federal spending to fight poverty doesn’t work because we still have poverty. Sadly for those conservatives, statistics keep proving them wrong:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/12/politics/2022-census-poverty-increase-child-tax-credit/index.htmlReport
Federal spending, by definition, can’t fight poverty because the way we measure official poverty excludes that spending.
The official poverty definition uses money income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps).
https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty/guidance/poverty-measures.html
We also have the issue that the goal posts will always be moved so we still have people in poverty. For example it used to mean that poverty meant you didn’t have access to water, electricity, or sewers. Now most of the poor have smart phones.
This has effects on immigration, to be “poor” here is very different than in other countries.Report
In theory, welfare spending could reduce poverty by breaking the cycle of poverty and helping people, or at least their children, to become self-sufficient. In reality, of course, it doesn’t do that, because socioeconomic determinist theories of poverty are wrong, wrong, wrong, and the cycle of poverty is perpetuated mostly by heritable behavioral traits, possibly with some cultural effects thrown in.
That said, the excerpt above refers to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which does take government spending into account, so giving people more money reduces poverty primarily through brute force arithmetic: If you make $27,000 per year, the SPM threshold for your family is $29,500, and the government gives you $3,000, your income for SPM purposes is now $30,000, pushing you over the threshold, and you are no longer poor.
And let’s be clear that that’s exactly what’s happening here: It’s not that 7% of children fell from the middle class into deep poverty; it’s that their family incomes inclusive of welfare benefits fell from just a bit above the SPM threshold to just a bit below the SPM threshold.Report
Yeah but no. To start this wasn’t spending per se, but instead a temporary expansion of the child tax credit – meaning wage earners on the lowest economic rungs got to keep more of their pre-tax income because they owed the IRS less. So their money income rose temporarily, lifting them above the poverty threshold. Take away that tax credit, or take away the incremental increase in this case, and their money income ultimately god down in terms of what’s left to actually live on.Report
These were refundable tax credits, and I’m pretty sure families with children who are near the SPM threshold already have negative federal income tax liability to begin with. It really is free money, not just allowing them to keep more of the money they earned.Report
either way they now have less then before. And that does have an impact on their economic status.Report
These were tax credits which allowed job creators to work their magic of investing in the economy by purchasing consumer goods.
Next time you get your paycheck you should say a quiet prayer of thanks to that single mom who bought her kids new shoes at WalMart.Report
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/us/politics/susanna-gibson-virginia.html
A Democratic candidate for the Virginia Legislature apparently consensually performed live sex acts for some internet site with her husband. The video was apparently recorded and archived on another site. Some Republican operative somehow found out about this, found the video, and shared it with the AP and Washington Post.
At least as far as I can tell that is the story.
There is an interesting is/ought problem here. Yes, in an ideal would, I agree that this should not be an issue because it was consenting adults performing an activity. But we do not live in such an enlightened world. If we did, I suspect that most issues in social politics would be gone.Report
Are the videos available somewhere? Asking for a friend.Report
When I first heard the story, I thought that this was something she did on the side currently.
Which struck me as *NUTS*. But, you know, fairly “current year”.
As it turns out, it’s something from years ago when she was an, ahem, content creator for a video chat website.
Which strikes me as being somewhat different than leaking intra-marital sexts.Report
“When I first heard the story, I thought that this was something she did on the side currently.”
Fact Check: False. It was mostly on the front or back, but she did take special requests.Report
And this is perhaps the least scandalous thing currently making political news.Report
Probably but it strikes me as an is/ought problem for social liberalism. Also potentially some basic political competency. If you performed as a content creator as Jaybird put it above, it should be somewhere in your mind that it could come up as an issue. I’ve heard conflicting reports on whether the couple tried to delete the tapes or not.Report
The past 8 years have really been revelatory for me, in demolishing a lot of myths and assumptions about how Ameerican politics works.
Remember after the Access hollywood tapes, everyone just knew that Trup was finished? Because the Conventional Wisdom was that no politician could ever survive that.
Or that 5 minutes after Jan 6 when everyone tought the party was finally going to turn onTrump?Because the Conventional Wisdom was that no politician could survive that.
Or even how it was assumed that no president could ever be indicted and made to stand trial, because, as we were told in 1974, such a thing would tear the country apart.
We have been through so many things which were once unthinkable, and yet life just keeps going on as usual.
This may or may not be a decisive factor in her campaign, but i’m open to the idea that in America 2023, a candidate who made porn (and which was almost certainly watched by many people in both parties) isn’t going to be a catastrophic blow.Report
What about Trump’s pee tape? You don’t see anybody trying to make hay with that!
Therefore Q.E.D.Report
Maybe you are correct. Her district is red-leaning though and no one ever went broke underestimating the hypocrisy of Republicans. I also think the blowback would be on the leaker if she were in a solidly blue district.
That being said crying that this is revenge porn is not true. I don’t think it takes a Ph.D. in political operation to think through “is there a risk in that the fact that I was a ‘content creator’ a few years ago is going to come out in the campaign?” She should probably just own that she did this.Report
Yes, she’s a dumbass for not figuring it out. She’s a bigger dumbass for trying to play the victim card, and really that is where I think team blue can tend to screw these things up. The best thing for her to do would be chuckle, say of course it was her, and seductively wink at the camera. The boo hoo thing plays well to defunct twitter brain that contorts itself into believing a person can be both courageous for proudly flouting whatever social norm but a victim of terribly unfair treatment when that same person goes histrionic defensive in light of the natural blowback that comes from doing so. It screams weakness and no one likes weakness.Report
Something, something, Democrats aren’t fighters, something, something.Report
Isn’t vulnerability the *TRUE* strength, when you think about it?Report
I think so, but a whole lot of people still don’t. Like you aren’t a “man” if you express emotional vulnerability. You are a cuck. or some such.Report
I’d compare it more to going into a fight with wildly over the top machismo and boastful self confidence then shrieking for sympathy when turning into quivering jello at the first counter punch. It just doesn’t work.Report
One can both own that one did this, and be upset as the creator that you have lost control of how it is being used/distributed.Report
I really don’t think you can. The whole point of putting self made porn on the internet is for people to see it.Report
yes, but through whatever channel you uploaded it. If you are using OnlyFans you expect to be paid for it. PornHub not so much I hear. But there’s at least an illusion of control in both cases.Report
So the real issue here is whether the person that released it paid the $3.99 and strictly complied with the site’s terms of use…?Report
Funny.
But not.
The real issue – for me anyway, is we still have a perverse belief in the US that women’s sexuality is something to fear, something hide, something to only flaunt under the “right” circumstances. Like Coors commercials. We can’t stand to see women breastfeeding in public, and even when we passed laws saying its ok, too many people still see it as a sexual act needing to be hidden.
Should this womn have led her campaign off with a link to her online porn site? probably not. Should she just wink, say yeah that’s me and since I’m that unafraid of my sexuality can you imagine how unafraid I will be as a representative tackling tough issues? You bet.
But we live in a country where that level of comfort with female sexuality doesn’t yet exist. So she’s trapped and has been victimized in a certain sense.Report
No, she is not a victim in our society in any remotely plausible way. This trying to have it both ways is what I was trying to get at about the twitter brain, and is what naturally strikes people as risible. She is a highly educated (per her bio UVA and Columbia) medical professional (NP) with an apparently very successful life and career in the Richmond area plus an attorney husband all of which she is now channeling into political ambitions. By any objective measure she is knocking it out of the park at life. You cannot be that person and also a victim of vague, abstract social forces. I know there are a lot of professors and journos and similar types that want to say you can but they are wrong and everyone knows it.Report
Perhaps the Democrats could run on a platform of “stop stealing content!” and get sites like PornHub shut down.
“Not because we’re prudes!”, they can point out. “But because creators should be paid!”Report
Remember her? Consequences. I can’t tell you the number of Youtube vids I’ve seen with Onlyfans content creators who don’t think doing that content will have an impact on their lives other than bringing them lots of cash.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/23/ca-onlyfans-mom-says-her-kids-have-been-expelled-from-school/Report
There was a tweet that came out last year that said (and I’m copying pasting this):
I’m top 37% this month on OnlyFans. I made about $100. That means 63% of creators made less than $100 this month. do whatever u want with this information
Apparently, to get to $1000/month, you have to be top 8%.
Dunno about you, but $1000/month is right around where I’d see it maybe being worth it as being a nights/weekend thing for beer money.
And 92% don’t hit that number.
Now, in the case of Ms. Gibson, I could see saying something like “We’re going to be doing this all day Saturday anyway” (Well, a couple decades ago, I could see saying that) “So why not have people give us money to do it?”
Because, let’s face it, if I could make $250/week by giving a running monologue as I went up and down the aisles at Costco on Friday afternoon, you bet I’d be doing that.
“I used to snort at the 48 ounce tub of cream cheese. Then the pandemic hit.”
But nobody wants to see me doing that.
And 37% seems to be the $100/month cutoff for OF.Report
My ‘Only Fridge’ account would be top 8%Report
You’d be surprised how many people watch streams of literally just someone doing stuff.
I used to wonder why that was.
Then it occurred to me that in a world where there’s no more Just Hanging Out At The Mall With Your Friends, where there’s no more Going Over To Frank’s House To Play Nintendo, no more Spending The Afternoon At Sarah’s House Watching TV, then “watching a stream of literally just someone doing stuff” is how you spend time with people.
Like, maybe I’m not actually in the store with this guy, but I can certainly pretend like I am, and that’s almost as good. Sort of.Report
Democratic voters aren’t the same as Republican voters. For every Democratic voter saying that this is something between two consenting adults and should be no biggie in our enlightened day and age, there are two or three other Democratic voters who expect better and/or have culturally conservative backgrounds and don’t like this sort of thing. Gibson’s district seems to have a high percentage of Indian American voters and they probably aren’t that keen on their representative doing porn.
I think assuming that nearly every Democratic voter has the sexual morality of the very online is a big mistake. Many of more conventional sexual moralities than the very online.Report
You are both making assumptionsReport
For a lot of this the reasoning was always backwards.
We don’t like Trump so he needs to self destruct.
THIS IS WHERE THAT HAPPENS
Whoops, it didn’t.
Repeat 50x.
I think it would very hard for someone other than Trump to pull all of this off. By constantly spinning up Blue and getting these accusations, some of which are proven to be false, he lowers the value of any one problem.Report
The response on the other blog has been interesting because while lots of Democratic voters like the idea of the Democratic Party as a diversity party they don’t like the fact that this mean there is going to be a diversity of view points. That is many Democratic voters are going to be uncomfortable with a Democratic politician doing this sort of thing because they come from a culturally conservative immigrant background or just want better and more upstanding behavior from their politicians. This goes to my theory that multiculturalism really means food, festivals, and fabrics with college educated bougie ethics and morality but everybody is way to mealy-mouthed to admit it.Report
The real scandal here is that Republicans are interfering with school librarians’ freedom of speech by banning this video from elementary school libraries.Report
As a matter of policy, I give politicians a pass on their sex lives (sex crimes are a different issue).
Their sex life doesn’t affect me, what they vote on from a policy point of view does.
(This includes Trump).Report
Exactly as it should be, and I concur.Report
Best comment i’ve seen on this is this: “Ultimately, it begins. The blurring of the line between the two oldest professions, politics and prostitution.”
Now, I’d argue that’s not the case, as I’d use the term politician as a prostitute by a different name. One sells sex one sells something else, but YMMV.Report
Come on, man. Prostitutes are doing honest work for honest pay. Let’s not smear them by association with politicians.Report
Fair.Report
Stupid question:
Was she vetted?
This seems like such a dumb question because my immediate response is something like “OF COURSE SHE FREAKING WASN’T” and that makes my follow-up question something more like “Well, shouldn’t there be someone who does vetting?”
But I know that the answer *MIGHT* be “yeah, she was vetted and this was ruled to not be disqualifying.”
Which gives me a handful of questions about the vetters.Report
Why would you assume the vetters failed because she does consensual online adult content creation?Report
I assume the vetters failed because they seem to be caught flat-footed and her response is “how dare you!” rather than “you’re a prude, and you’re a prude, and you’re a prude! Sex between married people is what you people should want!”Report
How competitive is the district?
I think it’s hilarious when the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot, and then try to say that “It’s a good thing! Really!!”Report
Oh, man, my heart goes out to John Puccio, who wrote this back in May:
And so after three snaps, 0/1 completions, zero yards passing, zero yards rushing, and a grand total of 75 seconds played, Aaron Rodgers came up lame with what we now know to be a season-ending, if not career-ending, torn Achilles tendon. Now, the Jets wound up winning last night and they deserved to win. Great show by the Jets D, and a stunner at the end of regulation. But, with all the hope and promise and excitement that John described… it’s still the Zach Wilson era.
Fate came for the Goddamn New York Jets once again. So sorry, John.Report
That TD catch by Garrett Wilson was one for the ages. I saw it happen on TV and audibly gasped.
https://youtu.be/Kw5aVjOTfIA?si=8Z9N7hQ9HmFNGkDxReport
I laughed my butt off when Rodgers went down (and let’s be real it was never going to work anyway), but that was probably due to my own bitterness over what the Dobbins injury has done to my fantasy team.Report
You’re better than this InMD.Report
What is it about QBs from Green Bay thinking they get a second act elsewhere?Report
At least this one didn’t have time to share any provocative photos.Report
or embezzle state welfare moneyReport
yet.Report
Someone pointed out that part of the trade deal had the Jets give multiple early-round draft picks to the Packers in return for getting Rodgers…but only if Rodgers played a certain amount of football during the season.
Which…won’t happen now.Report
Greatest salary dump in NFL history!Report
Thanks Burt. It aint easy being green.
I also wrote:
“Being a Jets fan means waiting for the other shoe to drop and never being surprised when a boot comes down on your throat.”
My further thoughts on Monday Night I posted on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/JohnPuccio/status/1701615455385895325Report
I just realized that naming the “Inflation Reduction Act” that, despite having essentially no credible anti-inflation measures, was a cynical ploy to put Biden and the Democrats in a position to take credit for totally unrelated reductions in inflation occurring as a result of monetary policy and falling oil prices.
Inflation is down. The Inflation Reduction Act must have worked. Bidenomics!
Credit where credit is due: I respect a good grift.Report
As it turns out, inflation rose higher than expected.
Well, you have to understand. When the economy is doing as well as it is under Biden, it makes sense that there will be inflation.
Report
Also, don’t forget that only the government can officially state what’s happening with the economy, and they can only do that a year after it’s actually happened. (We had that discussion here before!)Report
What even is inflation anyway? Laypeople use this word all the time without having done so much as taken a recent post-grad-level course on economics.Report
Sure, but if you look at annualized month-over-month core CPI inflation, there’s a clear downward trend. Inflation is coming down, despite everything Biden and the Democrats have done to get in the Fed’s way.Report
https://jabberwocking.com/a-tidbit-of-good-news-about-inflation/Report
Inflation in goods has been below 2% for the entire past year, and last month’s spike was the result of a transitory rise in gasoline prices.
Oh, so long as the inflation is transitory…Report
We shall see next month if it’s transitory or not but Drum has been pretty good on inflation so far. Though he seems to think the interest rate spikes are going to take full effect later this year and thus fears a significant chance of a recession which is a pretty gloomy perspective.Report
A small town in Kansas summarily fires two librarians for putting up an LGBTQ display at the library.
It…wasn’t an LGBTQ display.
https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/politics/government/2023/09/13/lawsuit-alleges-kansas-librarians-fired-for-autism-symbols-during-pride-month/70836504007/Report
Not a bug, a feature.Report
Heh. Those people are racing each day to outdo each other in the moronic take dept.Report
A rainbow pattern with a heart and “we all think differently”, and no other explanation, and everyone’s supposed to know it’s about autism?Report
Does it really matter what’s referred to?Report
That was the punch line of the story, right?Report
Mine was a serious question.Report
I took it seriously. The news story was that two people were fired because of a misidentified autism display. I don’t think the misidentification would be unusual, however. I have no problem with local communities setting standards for their employees’ actions.Report
I need to point out again, how comfortable self-described “moderate” and “reasonable” conservatives are with outright bigotry.Report
Standards against autism? Standards against knee jerk reactions to things they don’t immediately understand? My mind is kind of boggled that people like this are entrusted with the franchise.Report
Sounds like you live in a great country where communities are permitted to hold opinions different from yours. But to this specific example, did you know that a rainbow infinity with a heart was an autism symbol? I’m just not sure what position you’re taking here.Report
Right, because they were fired because people thought it was a gay pride display, and how dare a community take pride in its gay members.Report
Frank Drebin ran into this same issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFEK0Sbq4o8Report
Landlords (or “Housing Providers” as they would like to be known. Threw a party over the end of the eviction moratorium in Berkeley. It did not go well: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/berkeley-landlords-throw-evictions-party-18363055.php?IPID=SFGate-HP-CP-Spotlight
You can argue that the eviction moratorium might not have been good policy or lasted for too long. But throwing a party over its ending is at the very least bad form.Report
I was on the side of the protesters until I read that they had a chant.Report
Berkeley is such a unique brand of hypocrisy and sanctimony.Report
That was still going on? After the end of the pandemic, plus two years of sub-5% unemployment?
In a just world the city council would be personally liable for the unpaid rent.Report
In a just world people would be paid wages sufficient enough to obtain housing.Report
If we only have enough housing for X% (where that’s less than 100%), then there is no level of wages sufficient enough to house everyone.
It’s like trying to make everyone above average.Report
I’ve been beating this drum for years, and I think you’re the only other person I’ve ever seen acknowledge it, but it’s so obvious. It’s like musical chairs. If there are more would-be households than housing units, it simply is not possible for everyone to have affordable housing. No matter how high wages are, housing must be rationed either by queuing or by rising to a level where some households can’t afford it and either double up or go without housing (ideally by moving to cheaper city, but homelessness is another option).Report
Lots of peeps round here beat that drum. I certainly do. It’s not only a commonly beaten drum but it’s a drumbeat that is making headway against the entrenched NIMBY’s.Report
YIMBYism has a lot of advocates, but I was referring specifically to the literal impossibility of making housing more affordable by pushing up wages, which is not something I see stressed much.
Although now that I explicitly search for it, I do see some people pointing this out, e.g. this from 2013.Report
I’m terrible at reading through comments here but I know I’ve retorted that more money on the renters side would simply go to landlords unless supply was increased. Likewise more money for “public housing'” would simply be absorbed by existing land owners and regulatory entities producing very few housing units. You have to reform the supply restrictions or you won’t get anywhere.Report
I think pretty much everyone here at OT agrees that constraints on housing supply are a bad idea.
But its a bit like saying that constraints on trade are a bad idea; Everyone agrees in principle, but its easy for specific concerns to override the principle when money and jobs are at stake.Report
For sure, concentrated benefits vs diffuse costs and, on top of that, the costs fall on nonvoting, future residents! It’s a real pickle.Report
IMO, NIMBY’s biggest strength is that there are a trillion different reasons to be NIMBY and this makes it hard to overcome the entrenchment:
1. You have NIMBYs whose attitude is basically “Fish you, got mine.” These are classic NIMBYs and they tend to be more politically active and connected plus they have time and resources to go to all the annoying public comment meetings.
2. Somewhat related to group #1 are NIMBYs who can remember the days of “urban renewel” which basically meant destroying a lot of neighborhoods inhabited by minority groups and/or destroying a lot of nature. This group thinks they are fighting the good fight against evil developers. Basically, every stock villain developer in a children’s movie is from this set.
3. You have bohemian NIMBYs who hate that the business and engineering majors from college moved into the city instead of stick to the burbs. This group refuses to believe that NIMBYism is shooting themselves in the foot.
Etc.
YIMBYs might be upwardly mobile and well-educated but they also tend to exactly be the kind of people who do not have much time to get involved in things like going to open comment meetings and other hearings. Or filing litigation to support building.Report
Yes, entirely correct, and sometimes the different types of NIMBY’s intermingle and code shift. It’s a major challenge.Report
My favorite is activists who kill a housing project because it’s “not creating affordable housing”. That’s decreasing the supply of housing and lowering the willingness of people to create that supply.Report
The funny part of this tweet has since been deleted but here is the root:
The response was “How many were affordable?” and the response to that was “How many affordable housing units did the Burger King have?”Report
Jaybird, you grew up in a religion. You really can’t understand a mindset that would prefer nothing be done than that something useful be done by sinners for immoral reasons?Report
One of the benefits of having a mature religion is that you normally have a couple of greybeards sitting around who can say to the middle-aged folk “that’s Pelagianism. It shows up around ages 23-24.”Report
Fair enough. I remember only a small fraction of what I’ve read here over the years, and read an even smaller fraction of what’s been posted.Report
You and me both BB!Report
I am an aliens truther, myself.
But it’s fun to think about.Report
A judge Biden appointed to the Federal Bench has suspended Gov. Lujan Grisham’s gun order. I’m going to defend her against the blowback that even liberals are pouring on her. At least she tried something. She saw an untenable situation and tried to do something in her power which she thought could help the situation.Report
She did indeed. Which is more then one can say for the House, the Senate, or decades of successive White Houses.Report
It seems to me that what she was trying to do was a more blunt, progressive coded version of stop and frisk. Or at least I assume that’s how the order would be enforced. So not a situation without precedent, and one that ought to be analyzed with that experience, including collateral consequences thereof.Report
Ah, the Politician’s Syllogism.
The status quo is rarely the worst option on the table. Doing “something” is not inherently worthy of praise.Report
true – the worst option here is deaths from firearms – including suicide – continue to increase.Report
It’s utterly impossible to see if you have any positive vision in life besides stay the course because you think the status quo works for you.Report
I wait for positive visions that don’t involve magic thinking. I think it’s fair to oppose them for that reason alone.Report
When I was a kid in elementary school during the 1980s we only had fire drills. Kids these days have active shooter drills to prepare them on what to do if some madmen decide to take a mass killing machine to school and start shooting people up. Anybody who doesn’t realize how disgusting and believes it is more important for people to be able to swagger around with guns strapped somewhere on their body really needs their sense of reality readjusted to something better. But hey, 2nd amendment baby. Got to teach kids early that it is better to be murdered than live without fear so people can swagger with weapons everywhere.Report
Probably no one believes this. However we don’t see the connection between giving up Constitutional rights and getting suicide mass murderers to follow the law.
It’s akin to suggesting everyone be forced to accept Jesus as a solution or that we stop accepting homosexuals or stop doing abortions.
The actual problem has more to do with turning mass murderers into media celebrities.
Oh, and in 1980 the murder rate was 10.2 per 100k, much higher than the current rate.Report
I have no idea how empirical this is, but I’ve come across articles on the virtual disappearance of seriel killers. No one knows why this has happened, though of course theories abound. Among them is that cultural and technological changes have evolved those personalities into spree shooters, and of course the media environment has evolved with it since Columbine. Maybe instead of lurid stories on tabloid news programs about the menace picking up hitchhikers and lurking at truck stops we have mass media events for those incidents that push the right buttons.Report
Most serial killers were women. The arrival of the “True Crime Podcast” has given them an outlet that wasn’t available until very recently.Report
No wonder my wife hasn’t smothered me in my sleep yet!Report
I’d assume that modern surveillance and forensics would make it hard for a disorganized killer to commit multiple murders. As for the organized killer, you and I are currently surfing the world wide lust and rage immediate gratification system, and that might account for a lot.Report
Those are also among the theories I have seen. Even without the forensics just the fact that everyone is walking around with a tracking device they’re addicted to pinging towers with goes a long way towards catching people. Others give a lot of credit to the outlet of the internet generally and the ubiquity of streaming hardcore pornography in particular.Report
Is it worth considering that mass shootings have become the outlet now? That some of those shooters would have become the serial killers of another time?Report
Serial killers and spree killers often have different motivations. The “save the world from the —‘s” guy could do either type of killing, but the guy who’s looking for sexual gratification wouldn’t be getting the same thing out of a mass killing.Report
Since I’m just asking lazy questions here, does the data show anything about serial rapists?Report
I think it’s hard to say. My totally uneducated belief has always been that the line between the crazy a-hole who decides to shoot up a school or shopping mall and the crazy a-hole who declares allegiance to ISIS (or whoever) prior to committing a terrorist attack is a really fuzzy one. The common thread tends to be young, alienated men, which means you almost have to assume some kind of feelings of sexual frustration or repression is a factor in whats going on in their heads. That’s probably more stereotype than science but whatever.Report
I give no credit to unworkable plans which, even if they’d worked, wouldn’t have done anything.
We have issues with criminals who don’t follow laws.
Dealing with people who disobey the law is hard.
Dealing with the law abiding is easy.
So we pretend that we have a problem with the law abiding to make the problem easier.Report
“At least she tried something”.
Does this defense scale?Report
“in her power”?Report
Well, arguably in her power.
Turns out it was a losing argument (as most of us here, you and I both, predicted).Report
No, her position wasn’t arguable, at least not within a framework of the oath of office and the Constitution. Her argument was that she wasn’t bound by either. Now, I don’t think she believed that argument. I think she accomplished what she was hoping for. I also think the January 6th rioters didn’t believe they were going to overturn anything. They’re still criminals.Report
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66803960
Sweet agnostic jesus, it’s like these clowns are running an academic study “what does it take to get a liberal jurisdiction to actively turn on police unions and try to get rid of them.”Report
They really don’t care.Report
They think they’re untouchable- and so far they’ve remained untouched.Report
I suspect that the blue line is going to continue for a while and if it disappears, will disappear all at once. The problem here is sort of an inverse of the NIMBY problem The number of people who are into police reform have a variety of different reasons and goals and this makes it hard to coordinate.
You have the people who mean defund/abolish police and prisons, sincerely and literally. I think this crowd is small but they are very loud and refuse to be quiet. So when someone says “Defund is more like reform” The defunder/abolish crowd will respond “NO abolish means abolish”
And that pretty much destroys everything because while the defund/abolish crowd makes a lot of good arguments about inadequate funding for social services and how prison and policing act like a new Jim Crow; it is still a simplified argument that sweeps a lot of stuff under the rug,.Report
Which would you rather put up with:
a) Corrupt police
b) What happens in the absence of police
There are a lot of reasons to choose b!Report
The example on the table isn’t “corrupt”, it’s “inappropriately using black humor”.Report
I think that it’s not too crazy to expect professionalism from the cops who run over citizens.Report
Sure. But go back to your statement.
Which would you rather put up with:
a) Cops who inappropriately use black humor.
b) What happens in the absence of police
There are a lot of reasons to choose b!Report
I assure you: My problem with the cop who joked about killing a pedestrian has the black humor down around #9 or #10 on my list of problems with the situation.Report
The ability to make these black humor jokes with an impunity can often be evidence of corruption because cops believe they can do as they please.Report
You only make black humor jokes about things that you are not responsible for, or feel no responsibility for.
When they make black humor jokes in the hospital, it’s not generally about people they have just killed. Black humor is joking among doctors that someone is going to die because they have a terminal illness.
It’s not joking that they died because you just screwed up in surgery and killed them. If a doctor was making jokes about having just killed someone, that probably would be seen as inappropriate even by black humor standards.
I.e., Jaybird is right, the problem is not actually the black humor, but the fact they are using it _right as they have just killed someone_ does, in fact, create some information about how they think about that. This isn’t ‘Hey, remember that time you drove over some lady’ a couple of months later.Report
B is essentially a blackhole. I’m not an anarchist and I’m not inclined to think that abolishing police and prisons is going to lead to a sunny utopia Smurf Village. I think most people tend to not be anarchists.Report
Also false dichotomy in aisle 4. False dichotomy in Aisle 4.Report
c) defund the policeReport
d) Reform the police and establish and enforce Peelite principalsReport
C is for Camden.
or so I’ve heard.Report
If you want to see where we discussed Camden here on the website, you can do so here.
You may be surprised to see who didn’t show up to comment! (Which, I understand, is worth criticizing.)Report
Do you think it’s odd to see people argue against stuff like “Abolishing QI” or “Getting rid of Police Unions”?Report
Which people are currently arguing against breaking police unions?
The Nation: How Did Police Unions Get So Powerful? July 2020
The New Republic: No More Cop Unions May 2020
Mother Jones: The Infuriating Reason Why Police Unions Have So Much Power
Adam Serwer: Bust The Police Unions July 2021
The Guardian: Revealed; Police Unions Spend Millions On Lobbying
Wall Street Freaking Journal: The Problem With Police Unions
The Economist: Reigning In Police Unions Power
Teen Vogue: Police Unions; What To Know And Why They Don’t Belong In Labor
Vanity Fair: Police Unions; How Law Enforcement Closes Ranks August 2020
These are what Google returns with the query “Arguments in favor of Police unions”.
I couldn’t find anyone other than Police Unions themselves defending Police Unions.
Oh but I did find this:
The GOP and Police Unions: A Love Story
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gop-and-police-unions-a-love-storyReport
Do you understand the mindset of someone who would reflexively defend police unions?Report
Yes I understand the conservative mindset very well..
Here is Cato Institute:
Majorities of Black (69%), Latino (69%), and White Americans (62%) support eliminating qualified immunity. However, there is a partisan divide. While majorities of Democrats (79%) and independents (64%) support this, a majority of Republicans (58%) oppose ending qualified immunity.
…
Nearly two‐thirds, 62%, of Americans say police unions should not be allowed to collectively bargain with government officials “over the methods used to hold police officers accountable for misconduct.” Strong majorities of Democrats (71%) and independents (65%) oppose collective bargaining for this purpose. But Republicans stand out. A slim majority (52%) think police unions should get to collectively bargain over disciplinary methods, while nearly as many (48%) oppose.
Huh. it truly IS surprising who opposes abolishing QI and police unions.
And by “surprising” I mean “not at all surprising and quite predictable”.Report
Is the conservative mindset toward protecting police unions the only pro-police union mindset you can imagine holding?
What advice would you give to people who had the conservative mindset if you wanted them to change their minds on police unions?
If there is another mindset in addition to the conservative one, what advice would you give to have people change that one?Report
You misunderstand.
I’m not saying that only conservatives support police unions.
I’m saying support for police unions is stronger among conservatives than liberals.Report
Oh, no doubt.
Do you think it’d be easier to get progressives who still support police unions to change their minds or conservatives who still support police unions to change their minds?
What advice would you give to people who had the conservative mindset if you wanted them to change their minds on police unions?
If there is a progressive mindset that reflexively defends police unions, what advice would you give to have people change that one?Report
I’d make the same arguments I make here. Or have them read articles in The Nation or Wall Street Journal. depending on their persuasion.Report
“It’s unfashionable; look at who supports it”?
I suppose that that would be a good argument against progressives.
I’m not entirely sure it’d work against people who are a little more aspy, though.Report
But you have to understand, Jaybird doesn’t look at politics politically, he looks at it aesthetically. Republican Senators kill a police reform bill over abolishing qualified immunity and the Magpie vents his ire not at reform’s real and effective opponents but at people who merely lack his enthusiasm over the shiny objects that are, at best, points 17 and 18 of a 20-point plan.Report
“Which is why he has the same positions that he had two years ago. Which is kind of suspicious, if you think about it. Why would he continue to think the same things for years at a time? Is he not getting new information?”Report
That’s certainly consistent. Responsive, no; consistent, yes.Report
“Why would he continue to think the same things for years at a time? Is he not getting new information?”
Like, two years ago he thought masks weren’t sufficient and he still thinks masks aren’t sufficient protection! Doesn’t he understand how science works?Report
Your comment about polilce unions and QI being only 2 of a 20 item list is correct.
What the Reason survey shows is that those two items have broad based support, even among Republicans.
And so it would seem that there is political space for a bipartisan reform of these items.
But, I don’t think so.
First, I suspect, but can’t prove, that police unions and QI are moving to become coded as “liberal” issues.
And one thing we know about contemporary conservativsm, is that they tend to be reactionary; Whatever is seen as “liberal” or “woke” instantly become anathema to conservatives.
And conservatives are generally either cool or actively hostile to the other 18 items on the police/ carceral reform agenda like cash bail reform and sentencing reform and alternative forms of policing.
I suspect that within a short time, conservatives’ dislike of unions in the abstract will be suppressed in favor of their support for militarized policing especially for Those People in urban areas.Report
Unions and QI hit the radar as having no purpose other than to defend bad apples. I think we can get rid of both without overturning the system.
Many of the others hit the radar as being worthy of experimentation but not wide roll out. Humans are complex creatures and IDK what getting rid of cash bail does for 2nd and 3rd order effects as everyone changes their actions.
Try it in a city or three and see what happens then get back to me.Report
I see individual conservatives like you agreeing to abolition of police unions and QI.
But the only groups I see dedicated to the purpose are groups like the ACLU, NAACP and Campaign Zero, which are primarily liberal groups.
I’m not aware of any primarily conservative groups actively fighting to oppose police unions.
I think its fair to say that whenever a conservative group gets involved in the question of police unions, its to parrot their press releases about the thin blue line and outtacontrol crime.
And it appears to me that the partisan divide is widening, with conservatives lining up behind police unions and liberals increasing lining up to oppose them.
Here’s some data:
n the wake of Floyd’s killing, the bill expanding bargaining rights for police unions is all but dead as currently written, and not because of the pandemic. House Democrats rushed to pass a first of its kind police reform bill that would, among other measures, ban choke holds, establish a national database tracking misconduct and end the doctrine of qualified immunity, which shields police officers from civil lawsuits. More quietly, they quickly backed away from the collective-bargaining bill. In the span of three months, the party had changed its calculus, now viewing a labor bill that was endorsed by nearly every House Democrat as recently as March as untouchable in its current form.Report
“Your comment about polilce unions and QI being only 2 of a 20 item list is correct.
A few years back now, we had an essay called “Altering the Police Paradigm“.
You should check it out. It might blow your mind.Report
The entire post and comments confirms my point.
Mind, unblown.Report
Do you still think that a pre-req to meaningful police reform is school integration?Report
Yes, in the “necessary but insufficient” category.Report
Well, I hope that progressives are able to lead the way to integrated schools.Report
Wow. Just wow. That post was 3+ years ago, so much of my life has changed since then… and I had no clue at the time.
I still feel the same about the same things however.
Amusingly my #4 girl is now going to a majority minority school. So everything I put in that series of posts about paying attention to test scores and not skin color has remained a thing.Report
I’m always gratified to look back on a thread on a topic outside my knowledge and passion and see that I didn’t comment on it. It’s like finding a picture of yourself sober from your 20’s.Report
Everyone who goes after police unions are salivating at the opportunity to go after teacher unions.
Police unions are the thin blue line protecting teachers.Report
Funny but wrong!Report
Though I am SURE it won’t satisfy the House Freedom Caucus, Hunter Biden has been indicted. Proving again that the DoJ under Mr. Biden feels perfectly free to prosecute whomever it needs to.
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/hunter-biden-indictmentReport
The only way a white guy gets charged with these crimes is because his name is Hunter Biden and his father currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania AvenueReport
What part of “Shall Not Be Infringed” do they not understand?
To be honest, this is less bad than the whole “lying about Biden talking about the business deals” thing.Report
On the one hand, Poland is testing women to see if they have abortion medication in their blood stream and that could happen here.
On the other hand, Biden is 80 years old and did not snap his fingers to enact national healthcare and supergenerous UBI and so people can quit their day jobs: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/14/opinion/abortion-pills-testing-poland.htmlReport
Most smart people, when they are handed a judgement of $1.5 Billion in a civil law suit, and then file for bankruptcy to avoid paying it, would try not to get caught spending $93,000 a month to “live.” Alex Jones is clearly not “most people.” One wonders when the courts will dispense with this nonsense.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/14/media/alex-jones-sandy-hook-court/index.htmlReport
They did a study on the deaths prevented by the BLM movement and the excess deaths following the BLM movement.
Report
How did BLM protests cause a decline in police activity?Report
Cause? Can we say whether cause and effect even exists? Maybe things just happen.
All we have are correlations.
But if you want me to excerpt from the paper, I can:
Report
Why did the police choose to derelict their duty?Report
You know, the tweet links to the papers.
But here’s another excerpt.
Report
So, after a spate of street protests and magazine articles criticizing police unions, the police chose to abandon their jobs and allow people to get murdered, is that about right?
So this sounds like it validates all the criticisms made about police.Report
Which would you rather put up with:
a) Corrupt police
b) What happens in the absence of police
There are a lot of reasons to choose b!Report
We’re insisting that the police take the boot of repression off of everyone’s neck.
We’re also finding out that some people need to have that boot there or their murder rate increases above their already very high rate.
A) If you want the boot back, then that’s fine.
B) If you don’t want the boot back, that’s also fine.
Insisting that we don’t want the boot because criminals are just misunderstood victims but also being shocked that there are side effects suggests we might want to rethink this.Report
Are you open to the possibility that effective crime control doesn’t require giving police unchecked power to kill people with impunity?Report
Of course I am.
However as we reform the police we’re finding the murder rate going up, not down. Worse, it seems to be in the areas where we’d expect the opposite if all this attention did what we wanted.
Are you open to the possibility that there are trade offs?Report
Who is reforming the police, and where?
And we are not “finding” the murder rate going up, we are “finding” that police consciously choose to abdicate their duty. Which sounds to me less like the consequence of reform, and more the need for reform.Report
What, other than the murder rate, makes you say that?
Far as I can tell, we want the police to be less risky and more respectful. Ergo they are engaging less with risky people, i.e. the ones who they might have to shoot if it goes pear shaped.
Are you saying their duty is to take risks that might get people killed?Report
No one has put forward any theory of how the murder rate rose, other than the police have made a choice to voluntarily refuse to do their job.
Are you saying their duty is to take risks that might get people killed?
That is, precisely, their job description.Report
Do… do we want to put forward a theory on how the murder rate rose other than that the police voluntarily refused to do their job?
Because I’m not going to touch that with a 20 foot pole.Report
Fair enough.
Until a better theory comes along, cops being derelict in their duty is the most reasonable explanation that fits the facts.Report
So let’s assume that.
How do we resolve the problem?
“We need cops willing to do the job”?
What will that entail?Report
Probably about 20 separate items ranging from banning police unions from being involved in discipline, ending QI, and various carceral reform and alternative policing strategies.Report
And those things will result in fewer homicides?
I’ve lost track of the goal.Report
I did. I’ll restate it.
Making the police less powerful and/or less available, for whatever reason, creates opportunities for criminals.
So if the cops are dealing with protesters, they have less bandwidth to deal with other issues.
Outside of that, if the criminal classes feel more free because they think the cops are busy or have fewer tools, then they take advantage of it.
From the point of view of the criminal classes, the protesters are supporting their class against the cops. The cops will be not be trusted, will not be called, and will operate under a microscope.
The cops are garbage men. Garbage men don’t hunt down garbage, people have to call and tell them to pick it up. If they’re viewed as an occupying army, then they’re going to get a lot fewer calls and people do call them will be viewed as traitors.Report
Not just police, but also prosecutors. Police can arrest criminals all day long, but after that it’s out of their hands. If a city elects a crime-positive prosecutor, arresting criminals won’t do much good.Report
You’re both getting too cute by far and way overestimating the thought process of steeet criminals. The people involved in this sort of activity are barely aware of the larger political debates around these subjects or what their local police force is doing. So just as there’s a point where it’s kind of ridiculous to blame ‘the police’ in aggregate for the criminality of individual perpetrators, including at the aggregate level, so to is it absurd to give the benefit of the doubt to public servants for phoning it in on a job they’ve negotiated themselves ample protection to do. This is basically the conservative mirror image of progressive excuse making for public education failures. There’s no other areas I can think of where people indulge in such passionate apologetics for run of the mill laziness, bureaucratic selfishness, cynical ass covering and incompetence. As if any one is supposed to feel bad for someone refusing to do their jobs because their feelings got hurt. Like aren’t these also the people that call themselves the thin blue line? It’s preposterous, the same way all the public school teachers that self appointed themselves selfless saints look preposterous since covid.Report
I have a cat. I put food right outside a sliding glass door to attract birds & cats and increase the drama in his life. If I allow it, toads steal the food.
Toads are even less smart than street criminals. It’s purely an opportunity thing. They react to the environment they live in.
If we make the environment more conducive to criminal activity, we get more of it.
Proclaiming that the police are genocidal and randomly kill black people because of racism reduces society’s willingness to cooperate with the police.
For example, there are streets in Chicago where gangs operate and there are other streets right next to them where they don’t. The gangs understand that the other street works by different rules.Report
What people are saying is nowhere near as important as what they are doing. A cop that used to be on the corner but no longer is because of the blue flu is infinitely more important with respect to crime rates than what some activist or pundit says. Unless the police decide otherwise that is.Report
And is that happening?
Because we know the level of distrust in the police was high enough to cause riots. We know entire communities think their young black men are next. That being murdered by the cops is a reasonable concern for them personally.
That, by itself, seems enough to explain these other things.
If you have some evidence the police are engaging in mass sick outs over the course of years, by all means put it on the table.
It wouldn’t need to be mass sick outs. The police refusing to go into certain neighborhoods. Police response times increasing drastically. There are lots of way to measure whether or not the police are really engaged in dereliction of duty.
But as far as I’m aware, we don’t have that. So we’re assuming what we should be proving… and we’re doing that in spite of not needing to have this factor at all.Report
Wait, isn’t you’re thesis in this thread that in response to public pressure the police are disengaging with risky people/populations with widespread criminality, resulting in the increased murder rate?Report
I don’t see why it’s an either-or but it’s not a great thesis.
We don’t have any evidence of the police pulling back (like, zero, other than the murder rate increasing).
We do have a lot of evidence that distrust in the police has increased. Increased distrust by itself could explain things so there’s no need to expand beyond that.Report
Explain how the police in the two year period 2020-2021 were “made less powerful or less available”.
It couldn’t have been the protests, they happened over a period of a few days, and only in a few places and the spike in murders didn’t correlate with those dates.
Your evidence-free hypothesis doesn’t hold together, even in theory.Report
If they’re viewed as an occupying army, then they’re going to get a lot fewer calls and people do call them will be viewed as traitors.
BLM (etc) proclaimed calling the police will get someone killed, that the police are genocidal. They were so convincing we had riots.
Ergo fewer people call the police. There is less cooperation between the cops and society at large.
This weakens the police and strengthens the criminals.Report
You seem to be unaware that for most minority areas in most American cities, the police HAVE been viewed as an occupying force since forever. Like, that very phrase has been used repeatedly by minorities themselves, well before George Floyd’s death.
And yes, people of color have long been hesitant to call or confide in the cops, because they know from experience the cops can’t be trusted.
This is a damning indictment of the cops, and predates BLM by by about a century.
Again, you’re spinning a theory completely untethered to any sort of fact or experience.Report
“Society’s trust in the police” is not a binary thing, where either everyone trusts them or distrusts them.
Lack of trust in the police is one of the big things that enables criminals to function in a sub-culture.
Presumably the places which enjoyed riots had that level of trust lowered. Ergo criminals are more enabled now.
BTW I’m not saying the riots themselves lowered trust, I’m saying they’re a measurement of which places had their trust lowered.Report
How could riots possibly lower trust in police?
The conventional wisdom is that riots tend to cause people to cling to the police out of fear.
If trust in police declined, in the wake of George Floyd’s death and resulting riots, wouldn’t the logical conclusion be that it was the behaviuor of the police themselves which caused the decline in trust?
Every explanation you give only makes the police look worse, not better and BLM look prescient.Report
How could riots possibly lower trust in police?
The police *IN THEORY* or the police we actually have?
Because if the police we actually have just cordon off the area and allow people with rifles to go in and shoot rioters, then I could see how someone might lose a little faith in the police.Report
They don’t. Canaries don’t cause mines to have poison gas, they just report it.
We have a narrative and we release trauma porn on a community to the point where they have a riot.
The narrative and the trauma porn are doing the heavy lifting for creating distrust, the riot is just the expression of that.
So if a zip code saw riots, then the way to bet is distrust in the police has gone up a lot. The narrative is believed.Report
You keep coming back to the same point, though.
That the police, in response to riots, chose to refuse to perform their duty, and willfully allowed murders to occur.
Once again, this seems to validate what you call the “narrative”.Report
“Allowed murders to occur”
It’s like a poltergeist!
Cabinets opened! Drawers slammed shut! Glasses broken! Passive voice employed!
Murders occurred!Report
You’re the one saying that the murders are attributable, not to murderers themselves, but by BLM.
Its literally the last line in the tweet you posted.Report
Community underpoliced!Report
At an individual level, every murder is done by the murderer.
If we’re talking about the overall murder rate for a community, then putting out a narrative that the police are genocidal racists will have predictable results.Report
My zip code has a murder rate of zero. Other zips have murder rates that are scary high.
This difference isn’t because the police are preventing murders here and “willfully allowing” murders there.
The police are not arming people and telling them to shoot other people or they will be arrested.
If you want the police to step in, then you need to call them to step in. If you don’t trust them enough to call them, then it’s not the police who are directly at fault.
The police are not omnipotent nor omniscient. These places have decided they want less policing because that’s less dangerous.
A reduced trust in the police resulting in more murders is expected.Report
You’re no closer to an explanation than you were five posts ago.
The tweet that Jaybird posted stated that the BLM protests led to a subsequent spike in murders among black people due to an unexplained reduction in policing.
No one can seem to explain how this reduction in policing happened.
We’ve heard explanations such as that the police voluntarily chose to avoid risky areas, and now this one, that people living in high crime areas lost trust in police and reduced calls to them.
The first explanation makes cops look like sociopaths, and the second is wholly without any supporting data and leaves open the question of why people distrust cops.
Both explanations validate BLMs accusations.Report
The “supporting data” is the riots.
The “open question” about “why people don’t trust the cops” ignores that the number of people killed unjustly by the cops rounds to zero but the airwaves are filled with trauma porn and an emotionally convincing genocidal racism narrative.
Where we have a “lack of evidence” is for police dereliction of duty. It’s possible but unproven.
More importantly, if these areas are insisting on less police involvement because of an increased lack of trust in the police, then the murder rate increasing is an expected outcome.
Do you agree or disagree with that last statement?Report
As I have pointed out several times before, killings by police occupy the extreme absurd endpoint of police misbehavior, not the totality of it.
Those community don’t trust police because the police constantly harass people in them for no reason, detain people without cause, over-enforce trivial laws that are broken with impunity elsewhere like jaywalking and street vending, creating a systemic cycling of people through the criminal justice system which gives them authority to harass them even more, and are often needlessly violence and overaggressive with criminal enforcement, even things the community agrees should be enforced.
And at the very far far extreme end of all that, the police sometime murder people for no reason.
But that last thing is just the cherry on the cake of the the fact that the police, generally do not, in any manner at all, help make anything better for people who live those communities. Literally no one there expects good outcomes when interacting with the police, and their expectation is not wrong. The bad outcome is normally not ‘being murdered’, in fact that’s incredible rare, but it is still not a _good_ outcome.Report
There is zero evidence put forward that people changed their crime reporting behavior in 2020-2021, when the spike in murders occurred.
Zero.
And zero evidence that these areas are “insisting on less police”.
Zero.
But even if we accepted those premises, it STILL
makes police look like sociopaths, because since when do police stop enforcing laws because people don’t want them to?
When the watch commander assigns patrol duty each morning, he doesn’t put it to a vote. Even if no one in the neighborhood wants it, they get patrols regardless.
When a 911 call comes in about a man beating his wife, do the cops poll the neighbors to see if they should respond?
I’m not sure that there even was a reduction in police response and activity.
The conclusions put forward in Jaybird’s tweet quote (that there was a reduction in police activity, and that it was the fault of BLM) are preposterous and can’t be made into anything coherent.Report
I’m not sure that there even was a reduction in police response and activity.
It’s a scientific paper, Chip. They talk about how they measured things.Report
From the link:
Moreover, we can probably trace this to a decline in police activity, as indicated by the decline in the property crime clearance rate.
But notice, they aren’t saying “911 calls decreased by X” or “Police patrols reduced by Y”.
What they are doing is taking an actual measurement (Rate of property crime clearance) and inferring a conclusion from it (Therefore there was less police activity).
Was there less police activity? Well what does that even mean? Literally fewer officers on duty?
Or did the officers just drive around and refuse to answer calls?
And how does any of this have anything to do with BLM or the protests?Report
The big question for “property crime clearance rate” is whether that’s a percentage or a raw number.
Ideally we’d have both of those both before and after.
If the raw numbers are down but the percentage is up or flat, then either crime has gone down or people aren’t getting the cops involved.
If the percentage is down but the raw numbers are flat or up, then the cops are doing less. That might mean “fewer cops”, “not making this a priority”, or outright blue flu territory.Report
I can’t tell which it is from reading the abstract.Report
Specifically, over the five years after local BLM protests, property crime arrests decreased by approximately 12%, while reported murders increased by roughly 11.5%, which is over 3000 additional homicides. Moreover, the property crime clearance rate experienced a sharp decline of around 8%. These statistics are not only alarming but also offer compelling evidence of a substantial decrease in police activity.
You are cursed to use the numbers you have. Not the numbers you wish were measured instead.Report
Sez who?
Who sez we have to accept that property crime clearance is a proxy for something called “police activity”?
But in any case, we’re just right back to trying to explain what “police activity” is, and trying to explain how it happened in a way that doesn’t make police look like socipaths.
You guys have collectively made about a dozen attempts, and you aren’t any closer than when I first asked the question.Report
Also: “property crime arrests decreased by approximately 12%”
“Why should fewer arrests indicate less police activity?”, you may ask. Well, the question is whether property crime decreased by approximately 12%.
If it did… hey. Fewer arrests are to be expected.
Oh, and I’m fine with concluding that the police are sociopaths.
Hell, let’s take that as a tentative premise for future arguments.
The police are sociopaths.
Now what? More body cams? Defund? Make sure that nobody touches QI?Report
Are you accepting that the reason murders spiked is because police voluntarily chose to do less work?
I’m not convinced of that. I don’t think anyone has a really good explanation for the spike in murder, especially since it seems to fleeting.
But I am convinced that this Cremieux guy is an innumerate buffoon and we shouldn’t be burdened by any of his hot takes again.Report
My goodness, if it’s true that murders spiked because the community was policed less, then that would reflect really poorly on the community.
I think that since we want to avoid that conclusion, we have to just say that we don’t know anything, including knowledge about how we know things. Scientific papers? What are those? Eggheads, lying with numbers!Report
I expect the cops get too much credit/blame for the murder rates. Don’t they mostly step in after a corpse has been created?Report
1. We don’t know if the community was “policed less”.
2. It would be perfectly normal and expected for crime to rise in the absence of policing.
But at this point, you aren’t even making any sort of coherent argument, but just sort of moving your king from side to side to avoid checkmate.Report
Well, we’re back to “what do you think you know and why do you think you know it?”
Did property crime go down during the time period?
If it did, then we should expect arrests to go down.
If it did not, then arrests going down would be an indicator of less policing.
“Maybe they did *MORE* policing and just had a 24-karat run of bad luck!”
I suppose that that’s an option as well, but it’s not the way to bet.
Light googling had the top link be here, a real estate blog.
It mentions that there’s only a 13% clearance rate for property crimes. So that going down is notable.
The next links are from the FBI. No! No FBI crime stats! Forget it!
Then I got here and it says: “Property crime rates fell by 8.1% between 2019 and 2020, but the newest quarterly data reveals crime has jumped up to 1,000% across the largest U.S. cities.”
And from deeper in the article:
If it fell by 8% and arrests fell by 12%, then that does hint at less policing (barring the “bad luck” argument).
And:
But then I saw this:
Darn it! We can’t use this information either!
I really wish we had a source we could trust when it comes to crime stats.
I mean, maybe the murdered people aren’t even dead? I heard that there are a handful of soldiers whose names are on the Vietnam Memorial Wall and they weren’t dead.
Q.E.D.Report
Wait, how is it that anyone called 911 when the narrative tells them to expect the cops to kill everyone involved?
And how do the cops even find out about this if no one calls 911?Report
Both explanations validate BLMs accusations.
Does the material reality on the ground justify increased policing? Even of the sub-standard kind we had back in the innocent days of 2019?Report
So many people want the respect, adulation, and rewards of being a “brave martyr” without having to take the risks of being brave or suffer the losses of being a martyr.
The brave martyrs of Uvalde, Texas–the people who didn’t go home to their families that night–were public school teachers, and the young students who risked their lives to call 911 from the occupied classroom.Report
One of the interesting tests for what we want the cops to do was Ma’Khia Bryant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ma%27Khia_Bryant
Shooting her results in her dying. Not shooting her results in her victim being stabbed.
Shooting happened April 20. Police Chief started showing video footage that evening and continued into the 21st. Protesting started the 21st.
Even with video footage showing exactly what the situation was and how much time the cop had to react, there were various people claiming, some on this forum, that he didn’t do the right thing.
The thing is, whether to shoot or not is a decision society is making, the cop is just the one to implement that decision.
Maybe our choice is he should not fire until after Pink gets stabbed.Report
This may be less a dereliction of duty are more a trade off.
Society has made it clear we want the police to kill fewer people. So they need to run less risk and do less about risky people.Report
“purposeful or accidental failure to perform an obligation without a valid excuse, especially an obligation attached to their job.”
Dereliction defined. Since cops have NO obligation to any specific individual citizen, I read this as not being dereliction of duty. YMMV. Remember, everyone responds to incentives, negative and positive. That’s likely what they are doing.Report
I admit: Stuff like this makes me upset because the corruption is kinda evident.
Report
The true was “inconvenient”.Report
Yeah, the guy who killed her is obviously connected (or worse, one of the connections) and they can just up’n do this.Report
For those that didn’t read, the Court dismissed the suit for lack of standing but basically told the parents that they are probably right that their daughter was murdered.Report
I’m not certain that that makes things a whole lot better, Lee.Report
Looks like the falcon can’t hear the falconer.
Report
Kim Davis is having another 15 minutes:
https://themessenger.com/news/same-sex-couple-in-kentucky-awarded-100000-for-being-denied-their-marriage-license
I can hardly wait for the fee petition.Report
(the men got the license)Report
Well, yes. They won, after all.Report
They got the license eight years ago, days after after she initially refused to issue it.
As usual, it’s not clear to me why taxpayers should have to shell out for this. She’s the one who didn’t do her job. Make her pay for it. Or if we must make taxpayers pay, cap it to actual damages. My understanding is that punitive damages can’t be awarded when suing the government, so presumably these are ostensibly compensatory, but I’m deeply skeptical that they legitimately suffered $100,000 in damages.Report
Yes, as I said, they sued and won. And rightly so.
Whether the taxpayers rather than Davis must pay is a question of Kentucky state law. I don’t know Kentucky state law, but in every state I do know about public employees are, with rare exceptions, indemnified for judgments against them based on actions they took — whether correct or not — in the course of their public employment. When I drove a beer truck, my employer was on the hook if I ran someone over while making deliveries. The legal rationale is different in the public employment case, but there’s nothing unusual about the employer, private or public, having to pay for the employment-related acts of an employee. (A cop who uses excessive force on a perp will usually be indemnified because using some force on a perp is part of the job, even if too much force is wrong. If the same cop whales on his wife because she slept with his partner, there’s no way to shoehorn that into doing your job wrong rather than doing something not job-related. (The test is not whether you were doing your job wrong, but whether you were doing your job period. Kjm Davis’s job was to determine whether marriage license applicants were eligible for a marriage license under the laws of Kentucky and, if so, to issue them. She was doing her job wrong, but what she was doing was her job.) Victims like indemnification because it means they get paid. Humble government employees are often judgment-proof.
Why do governments indemnify their employees? Because no one would become a public employee if they had to pay out of their own pockets for actions they wouldn’t be in a position to take if they were not public employees.
As for damages, it’s true that punitive damages can’t be awarded against a municipality, but they can be awarded against the individual defendant. The story doesn’t tell us whether the damages were compensatory, punitive, or both. Either way, the amount is a bit more than I would expect from a Kentucky jury, but it is well within the range of comparable verdicts. I understand that, from the outside, you may think the verdict too high, but a Kentucky jury heard all the evidence and went against its likely prejudices to assess a non-remarkable amount.
I’m looking forward to the fee petition, which will probably also be paid by the taxpayers and will almost certainly exceed the damage awards.Report
“I understand that, from the outside, you may think the verdict too high…”
What I’m wondering is why did they have standing to sue since they received the license they wanted from the government office from which they’d requested it.
(Clement, let’s take it as given that you reflexively defended the judge’s decision because you’re required to do that in your profession.)Report
Let’s not take it as given that I am required to defend a judge’s decision as a matter of professional obligation. A good bit of my practice, and that of a lot of other lawyers, requires us to attack judicial decisions. In any event, the amount of damages is, within certain limits, a matter for the jury, not the judge.
But to get to your question, the plaintiffs had standing because the clerk’s office refused to issue a marriage license when they asked for one. That gave them standing at the start, which is what counts. Even after they sued, Davis refused to issue the license, and spent 5 days in jail for contempt of court for defying a court order to issue the license.
Eventually, they got the license when the office made alternative arrangements, which made requests for injunctive relief — essentially, give me the damn license — moot, but wouldn’t affect standing because the plaintiffs had also included a claim for damages. That doesn’t go away just because they got the damn license. So they had a trial on damages (not on liability, because it had already been established) and got the verdict they got.Report
Just google this yourself but British comedian Russel Brand apparently abducted, assaulted, and raped teenage girls for years. The BBC knew about this and told him just to be careful and make sure not to be caught rather than report him to the law. Anybody who doesn’t believe in evil is deluding themselves.Report
How can the BBC call him out when they can’t keep their own house in order? Or, better yet, how can they RISK getting on their high horse when they’ve actively shielded their own employees….
https://news.sky.com/story/huw-edwards-bbc-presenter-latest-police-teenager-explicit-pictures-12917955#:~:text=We%20now%20know%20the%20accused,Jennifer%20Nadel%20told%20Sky%20News.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/jimmy-savile-report-stuart-hall-bbc-employees-who-knew-about-sexual-predators-a6896246.htmlReport
Jimmy Savile was the subject to multiple police investigations about sex crimes.
Stuart Hall served time.Report
RE: Russel Brand
Maybe. He certainly has a history of sexual mental illness.
However it seems that no one, ever, contacted the police about this at any point (wiki).
Stories that are seriously outrageous where no one ever attempts to involve the cops are often proven to be false later. In this case that would be “the victims and their friends/family who didn’t notice them being kidnaped”.Report
This is about where I am. He is clearly a weird cat, or at least really good at playing the persona of one. It’s possible he is also a criminal pervert. However I think we’re all best off waiting for full investigation before accepting the truth of the most serious accusations. That’s especially so when these things come out way after the fact. Maybe there was indeed a cover up of sorts, as has at times been shown to be the case. Of course we’ve seen plenty of other instances where none of it could be substantiated.Report
How the FBI gets its data.
You know, apparently it’s not just from one source!
Golly.
I am going to go back to using FBI stats.Report
What I want to know is whether 911 calls went down in the affected areas more than the rest of the country.
I looked for that and failed. Been a lot of drama today so it might just be me.Report
Intersectionality is something that really only exists in the head of the activists and college educated bougie people. In 2015, the small city of Hamtramck, Michigan elected a Muslim majority city counsel to the celebration of liberals. The same city counsel has now voted unanimously to not fly Pride flags on city property because guess what, traditionally religious Muslims have the same opinions of LGBT people as Evangelical Christians. There was a similar liberal cry out earlier this year when Muslim parents in Dearborn, Michigan protested pro-LGBT education in public schools. Despite these two events, the activist set is still going to advance their theory of a United Wretched of the Earth (but not Jews) (TM) is going to organize against a White Patriarchal Christian Capitalist Imperialist Dictatorship (may or may not include Jews) (TM).
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/17/hamtramck-michigan-muslim-council-lgbtq-pride-flags-bannedReport
I agree that intersectionality is dumb. But I also think there’s nothing inherently offensive about not putting up a pride flag. I’ve never flown one and doubt I ever will. Nevertheless I support gay rights, and since we got to vote on gay marriage in Maryland, my vote for it may be the only one I have ever cast I didn’t feel at least a little bit ambivalent about (up until my vote for Biden, anyway). Now I am not a fool. Practicing Muslims are generally unlikely to support gay rights. What matters though is that gays got them anyway, and as long as the public services aren’t discriminating against gay people it doesn’t matter whether there is some flag waving at city hall, especially if it’s that increasingly hideous thing they’ve replaced the rainbow with.Report
From a 2021 interview with Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989:
“Since intersectionality got popular, there are critics who frame it as simply an ‘identity sweepstakes.’ And some of it is kind of funny, actually, because it is such a distortion. People say that you just count up how many identities you have, and voilà, here’s your intersectionality score. That gives the impression that everyone has a score and it’s their intersectionality badge and it says the same thing throughout time and across institutions, time, and space. That’s actually kind of the opposite of what intersectionality is really about.
“Intersectionality is about capturing dynamics and converging patterns of advantage and disadvantage. Those are going to change from context to context. Our way of thinking about what discrimination looks like is flattened, and it says, race discrimination is the same for everyone. We’re thinking Black women experience racism the same way Black men do or that Latinas experienced sexism the same way that white women do, but there are millions of different ways that power converges. We’re telling some of those stories to disrupt the false assumption that there is only one story, or a couple, and that intersectionality is just a number. It’s not a number. It’s a set of experiences. The podcast tries to tell those experiences.”
https://news.columbia.edu/news/what-does-intersectionality-mean-2021-kimberle-crenshaws-podcast-must-listen-way-learn
Crenshaw said that intersectionality reflects that “there are millions of different ways that power converges.” For example, a Muslim-majority city council can be hostile to gay rights. That’s one experience in a world full of experiences.Report
That might be the formal academic definition of intersectionality but the pop definition put forth in the commons seems to be something more like solidarity, where different types of oppressed people should get together to fight off their oppressors. The formal academic definition always comes up when the pop definition does not happen.Report
But this sort of squabbling among members of the oppressed classes has always existed and youor observations have been noted many times.
This isn’t a criticism, so much as to note that the sort of intolerance demonstrated by the Muslim majority council isn’t befuddling, or a head-exploding paradox, but actually the norm.
It’s common, ordinary, and to be expected that the loudest yelps for tolerance come from people who would happily put their boot on the neck of another.Report
My way and my culture are the correct ways. You should be not only tolerating them but adopting them because they are right.
Me tolerating other ways is fine but only where they don’t actively conflict with my ways since my ways are correct.
To be fair, banning non gov flags on gov land isn’t much “oppression”… but that assumes that’s where they stop.Report
You might find it the norm or not confusing but there are plenty of people on our side that do find it confusing. When the residents of Dearborn protested at what they saw as Pro-LGBT education corrupting their children, many people I internet knew seemed really emotionally devastated at this fact. Many LGBT people interviewed about this call it a betrayal. I think a lot of people really do have this wrong romantic notion that the Wretched of the Earth (Jews Not Included) (TM)are always going to be in magical solidarity with each other despite all evidence to the contrary.Report
That’s true, there is always a lot of romantic attachment to the image of Liberty Leading The People, where there is some magical spontaenous uprising which requires not difficult negotiations or organization or hard work.
ETA: This is why I stress how important it is to elect even moderate Democrats like we have here in California.
Very few of the Legislators or state Senators or mayors our city councilpeople are actually radical; Most are moderate technocrats like Mayor Bass or Governor Newsom, but collectively they fget a lot of very progressive stuff accomplished.Report
Another way to look at “intersectionality” definitions besides academic/pop:
The word was originally defined by a black woman who was developing ideas to describe (among other things) how the various sources of violence and discrimination against women of color interact and combine.
The word definition now in vogue is popular among mostly white people who are describing what they believe their hopes are.
The “formal academic definition” SHOULD always come up when the “pop definition” is dismissed, because otherwise dismissing the latter might lead to erasing the former.
(Crenshaw’s original essay is available in _Critical Race Theory_ (New York : The New Press, 1995), pgs 357-383.)Report
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t release academic terms outside the Ivory Tower and claim not fair when they become something else when non-academics are handling them.Report
Saw this earlier. Thought it made a good point:
Report
Ah.
How do you react when legal jargon becomes something else outside the Marble Courthouse?Report