Open Mic for the week of 12/4/2023
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.
Venezuela just voted to annex part of Guyana.
From the River to the Sea, Guyana will be free!Report
That’s an odd little corner of South America. Venezuela, 30M people, official language is Spanish. Farther around is Brazil, 215M people, official language Portuguese. In between are Guyana, population 0.6M, official language English, Suriname, population 0.6M, official language Dutch, and French Guyana, population 0.3M, officially an overseas department of France so part of France and the EU. Multiple of the borders are disputed.Report
The maps that the news people are putting up all point out where Jonestown happened.
Because, apparently, that’s what we need to know. “Where in the heck is Guyana?” “You remember Jonestown?” “OH YEAH…”Report
Can we do conspiracy theories?
In the short term… Venezuela and China recently, like in the last few months, made an assortment of deals. Some saber rattling about Guyana provides another place where the US and UK will be tempted to deploy weapons — and perhaps more — that’s nowhere near Taiwan.
More of a long-term prediction than a conspiracy… The world’s headed towards towards regional powers rather than the American hegemony. I can envision South America eventually shooing away the last of the European colonial footprint.
Now I need J_A to come around and tell me that I’m completely wrong :^)Report
Realism due to a lack of other options? Kissinger would find that funny as heck.Report
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/04/politics/trump-presidential-power-2024/index.htmlReport
I do think this is all undeniably true, but that the January 6 insurrection, no matter the precise contours of Trump’s legal responsibility for it, sent a much louder message and this is just another echo.Report
All true – but January 6th is receding in the minds of so many as the assault it was. A one off you see. So best to remind folks of the pattern, which is unavoidable.Report
In case you were wondering what important work the House is up to now that it has a new speaker, it seems they are going full tilt ahead with impeaching the president for doing legal things as a private citizen, and for following the direction of the Administration he worked for as VP.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/04/politics/house-gop-biden-impeachment-inquiry/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/04/politics/oversight-committee-hunter-biden-car-payments/index.htmlReport
We don’t want activist judges who legislate from the bench shout Conservatives. Who then mount a multi-decade campaign to pack the federal bench – including SCOTUS – with activist judges who legislate from the bench:
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/05/1216859366/supreme-court-tax-codeReport
The question presented in the case is: whether the Sixteenth Amendment authorizes Congress to tax unrealizes sums without apportionment among the states. I don’t think the particular 11% number you quoted is pivotal to the decision. Most everyone agrees that the Court has the authority to issue rulings interpreting the Constitution. So where’s the alleged activism?Report
This and other coverage I have read will claim a decision in the plaintiff’s favor will gut something 1/3rd of the tax code. And the now retired Republican politicians who wrote the code that’s being questioned have said they see the case as suspicious.Report
Wikipedia says, “judicial activism is a judicial philosophy holding that the courts can and should go beyond the applicable law to consider broader societal implications of its decisions”. Judicial activism is a procedural approach to reach the desired results – sometimes stated as such, sometimes not. There’s no indication that I’ve seen as to how the Court will rule, much less what their motivation or reasoning would be in its ruling.
By their nature, nearly every court case will have a winner and loser. By the nature of political parties, many of those court decisions will favor or undercut a party’s goals. That doesn’t make the rulings activist.
There are two main approaches to judicial originalism. Some say the Court should focus on the original intent of the legislation, while others favor the original meaning of the words of the law. There’s bound to be some overlap between the two but also there are potential conflicts. If I sign an unfavorable contract, I’m bound to it. Likewise, I’d argue that if legislators write and presidents pass laws in which the text conflicts with their intent, the text of the law should be followed. So even protest from the lawmakers aren’t a sign of judicial activism.Report
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/december-4-2023-c67?selection=60929017-774c-4777-8c49-78f5e9f8bc49&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=webReport
A few years ago, when I first heard that the Substack author with the most subscribers was a historian, I was surprised. It all made sense when I actually started reading some of her output and realized that she was just a shameless hack cashing out her credentials to give a thin veneer of credibility to midwit lefty talking points.Report
For decades, the Supreme Court has been handing Democrats (and sometimes even libertarians) Constitutionally dubious (and often just blatantly unconstitutional) policy wins. As such, they feel entitled to have the Court rule in their favor. They’ve convinced themselves that that’s obviously the right thing to do.
As they say, losing privilege feels like oppression. When people feel entitled to have the law bent to favor their own policy preferences, and equate that with good jurisprudence, of course they’re going to see actual good jurisprudence—ruling on the basis of what the Constitution actually says—as illegitimate.Report
Yeah, that makes sense. Most of us don’t know law, so we read the stories the way the Washington press corps presents them, and they only have one way of approaching a story. Also, the dominant liberal Courts of the past century didn’t think to hide their activism, so a lot of people just assume that the Court is supposed to back out their rulings from their ideological goals.Report
Los Angeles Magazine says:
My suspicion is that this is due to corruption.Report
Gasp. How could one think such a thing.Report
Further reading for those interested:
Having spent $32,619,694 through June 30, 2023 on 57,533 nights of rooms in hotels, the cost per homeless individual served comes out to $567 per night, or $17,009 per month. Notably, these costs include Los Angeles Police Department security for “encampment cleanup support,” Los Angeles Department of Transportation for moving participants, Los Angeles County Homeless Services Authority assistance for homeless outreach and the offering of housing, and services for program participants such as 24/7 monitoring and food.
At the program’s current retention rates, roughly one in six individuals who enter the program exit, choosing to return to the streets. Despite tens of millions spent, only 1,463 individuals have been served, 1,105 of whom are in the program’s short-term housing, 108 of whom have entered permanent housing, and 250 of whom have either left the program entirely or are “served from the streets” and maintain some form of contact with a social worker but are no longer housed.
Of the $250 million Los Angeles expects to spend on Inside Safe for fiscal year 2023-2024, $92 million is for hotel rentals, $18 million is for damage to hotels from program participants, $6 million for staff bringing people in, $16 million for case management in hotels and helping people find housing, $16 million for overhead, $10 million for resident monitors at each hotel, $13 million (or $21 per individual per day) for food, $1 million for participant belonging storage, $13 million for move-in subsidies to longer term housing, $18 million in rental assistance (two years per participant at $1833 per month), and $47 million ($31 million of which is from state funding) for purchasing and operating hotels as Inside Safe projects.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_c624934e-3702-11ee-aa6c-a3aa4f237ce7.html
As I keep saying, over and over again, any solution to homelessness is going to be freaky expensive. Very few people on any political side are willing to confront just how expensive it is to house these people.
The comparison isn’t this program versus your apartment. The proper comparison is this program versus full time institutional care such as a mental hospital or jail. Which continue to be more expensive yet.Report
Yeah. Corruption.
Thanks, Chip.Report
“the cost per homeless individual served comes out to $567 per night, or $17,009 per month.”
Even in California, prison costs about half as much.
That said, we can do better still. Find cheap land in a rural area and build housing out there. Tell vagrants that they can stay there or in jail, but that they don’t have the right to live on public property. The money saved can be used to provide supplies and hire staff to serve them.
Most of the problems here stem from the insane belief that people contributing less than nothing to society have an inalienable right to free housing in the top 0.1% most valuable real estate in the world.Report
Incarceration cost is only part of the cost of imprisoning people.
That cost is after you pay the police to apprehend them; Incarcerate them before trial; And then try and convict them. I doubt the published cost of incarceration amortizes the cost of building the prison in the first place.
Notice the costs listed above- most of them have little to do with the actual cost of housing people; a lot of them are the police and counselors and maintenance.
Your response typifies the incoherence most people deal in regarding this issue.
First you write:
Tell vagrants that they can stay there or in jail…
Then you write:
Most of the problems here stem from the insane belief that people contributing less than nothing to society have an inalienable right to free housing in the top 0.1% most valuable real estate in the world.
OK so which is it? Do you want them to wander freely (which is the status quo) or give them free housing, AKA jail?Report
considering that around half of people experiencing homelessness on any given day in a major metropolitan area are employed at least part time, your assertion of lack of contribution is without merit at best, and a pernicious lie at worst. (https://invisiblepeople.tv/working-homeless-more-than-half-of-unhoused-people-have-jobs/)
That aside, why is it so hard to accept that society has a responsibility to all its members, not just the ones you like?Report
Just because I’m fussy, and not for any policy conclusion – the study found that 52.8% of sheltered homeless have income reported on a 1040 or W-2, which are annual forms. That doesn’t mean that they’re working at the time of their homelessness.Report
It’s really funny how you come up with an immediate solution to the problem, ‘Build public housing somewhere cheap and let the homeless live in it’, but then decide that ‘most of the problems’ are due to something _besides_ the fact we have not done that.
Who do you think is refusing to do that?Report
RE: Who do you think is refusing to [build housing cheaply]?
The gov refuses to allow this because anti-housing interests have captured the regulatory bodies.Report
I mean, the premise here is the government build it in a ‘cheap rural area’, which means that local NIMBY screaming ‘what about my home value!!!!1111!!111!!’ are not a concern.
I agree it is entirely possible that very wealthy people who own a lot of rental properties have entirely captured governments, stopping them from building any housing at all, but we actually need to address that if it’s true. We can’t pretend it’s the same NIMBY nonsense.Report
Huh? I’m attributing the fact that we have not done that to people who believe that homeless people have an inalienable right to live in extremely high cost of living areas.
Surely you’re not suggesting that, in California, Republicans are the ones preventing the government from doing this, or anything at all? Aside from the Democratic supermajority, it’s not like California and its city governments are holding back on spending—they’re just spending as inefficiently as possible.Report
RE: . The proper comparison is this program versus full time institutional care such as a mental hospital or jail.
No. The proper comparison is the cost of the program vs hospital/jail with utilization rates of both included.
If, after using the program for a while, you can turn people into effective wage earners then that lowers your rate and increases your return.
If the mentally ill end up sleeping on the street and aren’t in prison, then prison just got cheaper.
So if someone is always going to need help for housing, it’s utilization rate is 100% (the cost to house one person), while if the alternative is doing nothing which runs a 15% chance of them ending up in prison, then we can take the cost of 15% of prison for it’s true cost.Report
First Patrick McHenry announced he won’t seek reelection. Now McCarthy decides to take his marbles and go home:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/06/politics/kevin-mccarthy-resigning/index.htmlReport
He’s not going home. He’s going to become a lobbyist.Report
Well yes, I was using a figure of speech. Yeash.Report
I would have gone with “If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”Report
Only if he can keep his hand on the spigot of all that sweet, sweet oil money.Report
If you can pass or not pass a law, you have influence.
If you can write the law, you have power.
He’s moving from the former to the latter.Report
He’s not writing that law.Report
Depends on the lobby shoppe that picks him up, I guess.Report
Biden administration believes that Hamas is refusing to release the rest of the female hostages because they are systematically abusing them.
https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/1732418423316005131?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1732418423316005131%7Ctwgr%5Ee4b9d32621d8de48fa2715e54ac15f55e51300db%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdisqus.com%2Fembed%2Fcomments%2F%3Fbase%3Ddefaultf%3Dlawyersgunsmoneyblog-comt_i%3D13763420https3A2F2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com2F3Fp3D137634t_u%3Dhttps3A2F2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com2F20232F122Fpropaganda-works-2t_e%3DPropaganda20workst_d%3DPropaganda20works20-20Lawyers2C20Guns202620Moneyt_t%3DPropaganda20workss_o%3Ddescversion%3Dd5a9ab71279657946012542f2a6e0739Report
Full article rather than tweet:
https://puck.news/what-is-hamas-hiding/Report
A reminder that almost all the 80 hostages released so far are woman and children, and none of them have reported any sexual abuse that we are aware of.
And it really is interesting to read article that create suppositions about what is going on without literally a single quote from _Hamas_ about what their claim is. Here’s what Hamas says:
In hostage negotiations with Israel on Thursday and in the hours after fighting resumed, Hamas has been insisting that that they did not have any more non-military female hostages to release, claiming that some of the remaining women in their captivity were considered a part of the Israel Defense Forces, the sources said.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/01/middleeast/israel-resumes-combat-operations-hamas-truce-expires-intl-hnk/index.html
Now, maybe they’re lying, but you’d think the article linked above would _mention the claim_, right? Hell, it even asks ‘But why did Hamas refuse to release the rest of the female captives? ‘, and then…doesn’t ask Hamas? Why doesn’t Hamas do something, who could possibly have any knowledge about that? No one, let’s speculate wildly!
It really is amazing how often what is presented is ‘Here is what Israel said, and here is what the US said, and here is where we will end discussion’
Now, again, you can choose not to believe that if you want. Maybe Hamas is lying. But it is an explanation, and moreover, it’s a perfectly valid not to release them…those would be POWs, not hostages.
I’m reminded again how literally right after the attack everyone here was so confused as to why Hamas took hostages, despite the fact that Hamas had very very very clearly said it had taken hostages to exchange for Palestinian hostages, which…a good chunk of the people reporting on Oct 7 didn’t even bother to mention or pretend was a knowable thing.
I have never seen such weird bias in literally just presenting information in my life, it’s like Hamas operates in some sort of black hole universe that information cannot escape to…except, of course, this ‘Hamas says it has no more female civilians and is now moving to older men like it said it would’ was literally on CNN, so…really seems like ‘puck.news’ should have known that.Report
And…I’ve sat and argued with myself for like twenty minutes about posting this, but everyone does understand the rape allegations are…not backed up by anything?
I don’t mean ‘not proven in court’, I mean ‘a lot of people have said they saw things, both some people involved and afterward, but…for some reason, we don’t seem to have any of the victims, at all’. I don’t mean ‘talking to the public’ or even alive, but…we don’t have names, or anonymized identities, or anything.
We have a bunch of people alleging that they know that other, unnamed and unidentified people got raped (Which is expected in something as chaotic as that, they wouldn’t know the name), but have somehow skipped the part of the ‘crime’ where we…find out who that actually happened to.
There’s a man named Yoni Saadon who has an absolutely harrowing story, feel free to Google it, and part of it involved hm peering out and seeing ‘this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her’, and…so we know where that happened, right? I don’t know if he told us the general area, but he certainly could. So…in that area, there was a corpse that is the victim of a horrific gang rape and eventual murder. So…have we tracked down who that is? Maybe not her name, but…literally any information about her? Or maybe found a couple of different women it could be? No? We didn’t bother looking into that?
We are almost _two months out_, and almost all those bodies are in the ground already, any evidence has to already been collected. Where is it?
LeeEsq’s article links to a #metoo article, at https://archive.ph/JWdmq and that article does manage to talk about a specific woman…a charred female corpse with no underwear on. And…it sure is weird how that is evidence it thinks is important and would prove things, instead of what seems to be much more obvious of ‘women’s bodies that were found stripped naked and bleeding from their genitals’, which that article mentions.
But the reason it’s talked about is that charred corpse is because that is actually a real person we have evidence exists, as people have seen that body on video, whereas all those ‘women’s bodies found stripped naked and bleeding’…we don’t have any evidence they exist at all, somehow.
That article says we should believe Jewish women (Or, I would add, believe their corpses), but…what Jewish women are making allegations that they were sexually assaulted? What bodies were sexual assaulted when alive..or dead? We have none of that. It’s just a bunch of people making allegations that they know that _other people_ were sexually assaulted, and those supposed victims are completely unidentified, making the entire thing unfalsifiable.
And I’m not saying no rapes happened, I’m not saying there has to be some hard and fast level of evidence, I’m not even technically complaining about the lack of evidence, I’m complaining that we don’t even have any specific supposed rape as a unique event with a specific unique victim! You can’t just vaguely claim ‘A bunch of incredibly violent rapes happened’ and not produce any actual victims.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this evidence has come out and I just haven’t noticed it, but, then again, if there was better evidence, I don’t think the #metoo article would be talking about ‘Didn’t the charred corpse with no underwear convince you?!’Report
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/hamas-rape-israeli-women-oct-7-rcna128221
There seem to be a lot of reports for there to be nothing and there certainly were a lot of war crimes going on.
If none of the female hostages release say they were raped, then either Hamas didn’t lose control over it’s troops and it ordered them to not commit that crime, or the ones who were raped are simply being killed.Report
You should probably read that article carefully. There is a hell of a lot of hedging in it because Israel simply will not produce any real evidence at all.
Here’s the entire evidence NBC has seen: Over the last several weeks, NBC News has reviewed five interrogations of captured Hamas fighters, an Arabic-language document that instructed Hamas how to pronounce “Take off your pants” in Hebrew, six images of naked or partially naked deceased female bodies, seven eyewitness accounts of sexual violence including both rape and mutilation, 11 testimonies of first responders, and two accounts from workers in morgues who handled the bodies of women after they were recovered from the massacre.
When you read ‘interrogation’, you probably should understand they mean ‘torture’. And you should also probably remember the last time Israel produced physical written evidence from Hamas, they misidentified the names of the days of the week for the name of terrorists, and NBC dutifully repeated their ‘translation’. So perhaps NBC should actually produce a picture of that document, which they have not done.
—
So, starting with the eyewitness accounts, which…I don’t want to have to get into this, but Israeli have basically dehumanized Palestinians where they will believe literally any action ascribed to them, and things are chaotic in war, and you’d be amazed how often people report eyewitness accounts of _other people’s rape_ that did not actually happen. It’s why evidence of that has to be produced.
And I know there are medical personnel quoted in there, and you will notice how all their quotes follow my exact complaint: They like to refer to extremely general things of ‘stuff they have seen’, and not at any point is there any specific ‘And we tested this specific woman, who we shall call Jane Doe, and found this evidence that these things were done to her, and I have signed off in my capacity as medical personnel that this is true’.
Why do they not say that? What the hell is going on?
Actually, it’s weird. We don’t seem to have any MEs in there at all. We have eyewitnesses, who can’t identify people, we have first responders who can’t identify people, and we have morgue workers who can’t identify people. You know who can identify people, and would be speaking about specific people? Medical examiners, or whatever Israel calls the actual doctors that examined the bodies and signed off on the cause of death. Why nothing from them? They are the people who should be talking, they can cite actual victims and instances of rape, instead of talking about ‘I saw some unknown person being raped’ or ‘I saw a boatload of rape when dealing with a bunch of dead people’, neither of which statement is testable.
—
And we’re left with some half clothed people. Which…the proper response to that in a sane world by NBC would be ‘So you did a medical examination for physical signs of rape and did a test for semen, RIGHT? And you have the results of that, RIGHT?’
But they don’t have that, of course. Or they do, but…for some reason aren’t telling NBC the outcome.
And Israel keep having people saying things like ‘Two Israeli investigators cautioned against the use of precise numbers of rape victims at this stage.’ and other completely insane things. (Why would they not be able to give an actual _minimum_ number of ones they have concluded have happened? They were perfectly willing to give ‘1400’ as the number of killed Israelis, which accidentally included 200 Hamas fighters.)
I know it’s hard to get this to sink in, but the IDF lies, repeatedly. We have pretty well documented evidence of it, throughout all of its history. And it really feels like they have constructed a narrative of massive amounts of rape and are finding it hard to literally produce even just a _couple_ of examples.
And, again, I am not saying that there was no rape. I’d be completely surprised if there were not a few. I am saying, either they feel they don’t have to produce any evidence at all, or can’t find it.Report
RE: they feel they don’t have to produce any evidence at all
I’d bet on that one. Every photo of a female missing her pants is evidence of a rape. Israel hasn’t shown any but Hamas did.
Israel clearly views the photos and whatnot of the hundreds of dead civilians as trauma porn and hasn’t released it to the public. The reports we get from the people who do get access say it’s beyond horrific.Report
Which is why those of us who have been paying attention and notice just how often Israel’s claims come up empty (Hey, where _are_ all those Hamas HQs under hospitals? We still just have an a few extremely iffy videos that in no way demonstrates a connection to a hospital.) do not accept those claims as justification for everything.
And those claims have _repeatedly_ been used as justification for Israel’s behavior.
Meanwhile, the IDF just said ‘Hey, US, stop suggesting that they’re raping those hostages’, which is…interesting for them to say.Report
The IDF has, at this point, asked the US from spreading there ‘irresponsible’ claims by the US.
“The conversation around the issue is irresponsible, inaccurate and should be avoided,” the IDF says in a rare statement.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-appears-to-push-back-on-irresponsible-us-claim-hamas-refusing-to-release-raped-hostages/
Hmm.Report
Interesting. Thank you.Report
When people tell you who they are, believe them:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/06/politics/kash-patel-trump-administration/index.htmlReport
Going after his enemies in Justice and the rest of the gov and installing loyalists is more of a problem.Report
Its all a problem. I just chose this one piece to remind folks that the “Both sides/horse race” coverage the legacy media are giving Trump won’t save them, and we should really be worried about that.Report
McCarthy to retire at end of the year.Report
Look up Saul – https://ordinary-times.com/2023/12/04/open-mic-for-the-week-of-12-4-2023/#comment-3947242Report
Economics is apparently the art of living in a bubble of cognitive dissonance claiming it is a rational approach to anything:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/06/economy/holiday-spending-consumers-economy/index.htmlReport
At this point, we need to just take the polls as venting and nothing else.Report
That venting is in part what led us to TFG. He was a great big middle finger by white people who saw their place in the world slipping to a political establishment they believed (rightly) had left them behind but demanded their loyalty. Polls that show us huge discontent with a growing economy are much the same thing. Its about societal order and function and angst over the demands for a larger slice of the pie, not about individual actions, impressions or beliefs.Report
TFG did not win the popular vote and 2022 was a red trickle and 2023 a good year for Democrats with general and special elections.Report
NBC News Reports:
White House interns demand a Middle East cease-fire in letter to Biden
Here’s the part that has me scratching my head:
How have we failed our recent college graduates this badly?Report
Don’t have the courage of their convictions do they?Report
They opened with “we the undersigned”.Report
Pro-Palestinian teachers in Oakland do an unauthorized teach in that has a coloring book that teaches violence against the (((Zionists))).
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/us/oakland-california-teachers-palestinians-israel.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EE0.ezOH.FXOj-p8ceR7c&hpgrp=c-abar&smid=url-shareReport
Did you read the article? How do you leap from 70ish teachers taking this action — which was then condemned by pretty much every leader in the city/school district — and conclude what you conclude below?
Also, your comment here basically says that Zionists = Jews and Jews = Zionists. Are you comfortable saying that?Report
They shouldn’t have been permitted to do this in the first place and a condemnation is not a punishment.Report
And honestly your last sentence is just incredibly stupid. The majority of Diaspora Jews are Zionists in believing that believe Israel should exist. Most of us are in Israel’s side in the war against Hamas. The people who did this freaking stunt were either really dense or they knew they were being provocative and didn’t care because they don’t see Jews as part of their Wretched of the Earth Diversity coalition.Report
So, it’s totally fine for you to crawl into the head of other people but if someone suggests that one self-identified group that overlaps with but is different than another self-identifed group, they’re stupid?
“Some public school educators in Oakland, Calif., presented pro-Palestinian lessons on Wednesday as part of an unauthorized teach-in.
The school district said this week that it opposed the event, and some Jewish groups and parents condemned it and called for teachers who participated to be disciplined.”
So, again, did you read the article?Report
Yes, I read the article. The school district opposed the event. It still happened anyway.Report
What would you have liked the school district to do? Barge into those classrooms, arrest the teachers, usher the children out, and confiscate all the materials?
Think about that for a second…Report
I’d be fine with the teachers being transferred to middle school.
“Your punishment: 8th Grade English.”Report
Only 51% of Jews under 35 support giving military aid to Israel.
https://www.jewishelectorateinstitute.org/november-2023-national-survey-of-jewish-voters/
Ironically, it’s older voters who care more about antisemitism on campus, than the actual younger voters who might actually be on campus.
There’s a large chunk of younger Jews in the US, who will likely begin to treat Israel the same way most European immigrants treat their home country – not something they need to defend, at all times. I’m half-Polish, I feel no need to defend the reactionary Polish government.Report
” your comment here basically says that Zionists = Jews and Jews = Zionists.”
I recognize that you very badly need to believe this so that when you get extremely angry about all those bastard jerks in Israel, you can tell yourself you’re angry because they’re Zionists and not because they’re (((those people))).Report
So… you’re suggesting I’m anti-Semitic? For what reason?
Lee said: “Pro-Palestinian teachers in Oakland do an unauthorized teach in that has a coloring book that teaches violence against the (((Zionists))).”
The article said: “A coloring book for elementary students features a Palestinian character who says, “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.””
Lee’s description of the coloring book does not fit the description offered in the article. And the only way you can get there is if you argue that Zionists = Jews and Jews = Zionists. It also doesn’t teach violence against anyone — Jews, Zionists, or otherwise — though it gives a pretty perverted view of Israel’s founding and I can see how it could lead to thinking violence is justified.
But, yea, call me the anti-Semite because I can recognize that many Jews aren’t Zionists and not all Zionists were Jews.
Lee has gone off the deep end in grossly mischaracterizing anyone and anything that doesn’t 100% comport with his views on what happened/is happening with Israel and Gaza right now. If you want to join him, be my guest.
Judaism and Zionism are not one in the same. Hard stop.
There is LOTS to push back against what happened during this event. But misrepresenting what happened only weakens those arguments.Report
You realize that there’s nothing in there about ‘teaching violence against Zionists’, right?
The colorbook suggests ‘Intifada, rising up for what is right’ and as an example of that has two people flashing a peace sign at barbed-wire fence.(1)
I want everyone to imagine that in literally other context. East Germany, for example. A book suggesting that people should ‘rise up for what is right’ via _flashing peace signs_ at the Berlin wall.
It’s pretty funny watching people trying to take very generic symbols of ‘oppressive behaviors’ like fencing people in with barred wire, and symbols of fighting oppression like ‘The absolute most milquetoast rebellion ever invented of meekly asking for peace’, and trying desperately to pretend those symbols are ‘violence’ because those symbols are about Israel and Palestine.
Maybe, uh, don’t fence people in with barbed wire if you don’t want the optics of fencing people in with barbed wire?
Really, the ‘Are we the baddies?’ clip should be playing 24/7.
1) If anyone actually wants the technical translation of intifada, it means ‘shuddering’, and is derived from nafada, which is ‘shaking something off’. It was chosen to mean ‘aggressive nonviolent resistance’, and was designed indicate _non-confrontation_ to get rid off Israel control by protests and general noncompliance.
Although, in reality, both intifadas did get violent…but pretty much all words that mean ‘resistance’ can carry an implication of violence, include ‘resistance’. There is no magical idea that means ‘oppose the bad people but only to the point of causing no harm’.
The coloring book, however, was pretty clear that they were talking about non-violence. In fact, literally asking kids to demand peace.Report
RE: Maybe, uh, don’t fence people in with barbed wire if you don’t want the optics of fencing people in with barbed wire?
Israel is stuck with the optics.
The barbed wire was put there because Hamas was blowing up buses of civilians.
It will probably be put back because after Hamas knocked it down they killed hundreds of civilians.
RE: pretty clear that they were talking about non-violence
One hopes (I can’t read the original link because it’s paywalled).
Does the coloring book back a two state solution or is it trying to “non-violently” destroy Israel?Report
Or it’s an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank.Report
If we’re talking about the war in Gaza, and the people in Gaza, and “fencing people in with barbed wire” in Gaza, then I don’t see the point of expanding the conversation to the West Bank.
Gaza is an open air prison camp and not Singapore in the ME because Hamas runs it as a terror camp.
If Israel is going to leave Hamas there, then they need walls to stop them from engaging in Terrorism. On 10/7, those walls failed. The alternative to barbed wire in Gaza was a brutal war and lots of civilians dying.
Given who and what Hamas is, I don’t see how we can blame Israel for not making peace with them.
Now maybe Israel can take over Gaza and run it like a territory, which would presumably include making life better for it’s people. If they’re going to have peace, then Israel needs to step up to the plate and Hamas needs to be removed.
Which makes these various calls for a cease fire just grim. I keep hearing that but I hear no one calling for Hamas to surrender.Report
We are, in fact, talking about a book for elementary students.
And this page: https://youtu.be/6ZKCT6LfCgQ?t=119Report
Tell me David, how should Israel defend itself from Hamas if even the most minor form of border security constitutes a bad act? Hamas openly states that that the only solution they see as just is “No Israel, No Jews” and the idea is that if Israel does all that the freaking Pro-Palestinian activists in the West believed that if Jews did all that was good and right, which generally means ignoring our communal needs in favor of Palestinians and/or Muslim communal needs and being content with second class subsidiary citzienship and no place of our own in the world, that Hamas would magically go away.
Bull. Just bull. The people crying bloody murder and bloody apartheid at the existence of the world’s only Jewish state are honkey dorey with the concept of the Muslim world. They wouldnt’ care if the Jews stuck living in a Muslim majjority country would feel utterly alienated that symbols of the state are symbols that have nothing to do with us or that we get barely a mention in the textbooks if any at all. Nor would they care if quotations from Quran are placed every where while Jews are routinely mocked in popular culture and society in the place.Report
Open Borders is the only moral position, Lee.Report
To a first approximation, there are no Jews in the areas where the Muslims are in charge.
From the polling right before the war broke out, the people of Gaza wanted Hamas to engage in military operations. They certainly don’t like the current situation but I don’t hear calls for Hamas to surrender.
Picture WW2 with the allies invading Germany and there being vast calls for a cease fire which would leave Hit.ler in charge and no calls for him to surrender.Report
I think the standard anti-Zionist line is that the Arabs would not have forced out the Jews if it wasn’t for the Zionists creating Israel. I don’t believe this one bit. The non-Muslim population of the Middle East has been dropping fast since the mid-20th century as the non-Muslims have been pressured/forced out by the Islamists.
The WWII analogy is a good one. I’ve seen accusations that Israel is stuck at the Dresden level of strategy for dealing with Hamas, who I referred to as Muslim who know who. However, WWII ended when the Allies totally defeated the Axis powers and basically rewrote the rules for them.Report
…what a weird, nonsensical claim.
Literally all you have to do is look at the Jewish populations in various countries before the Nakba and after. Israel forced out a bunch of Arabs, Muslim countries forced out a bunch of Jews. It’s not even debatable.
A number of small-scale Jewish migrations began in many countries of the Middle East in the early 20th century, with the only substantial aliyah (Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel) coming from Yemen and Syria. Few Jews from Muslim countries immigrated during the existence of the British Mandate for Palestine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world
And it has nothing to do with “Islamists’. I was going to go look up the countries one at a time, but that doesn’t even need to be proven…almost all expulsion and voluntary immigration happened _basically immediately_ in 1948, or happened right after the Six-Day war in 1967. There is absolutely no change of government associated with any of them!
There’s basically only one county that ‘became Islamists and Jews left’ is a vaguely accurate description of: Iran. Iran did _not_ have the same response to Israel as Arab countries back in 1948 had (Because it is not, in fact, an Arab country), but did have about 3/4th of its Jews leave after the Iranian Revolution…and that wasn’t the government expelling them, the new government went out of their way to try to claim they’d be fine, but Jews didn’t believe them, and the fact the government wouldn’t let them leave was…rightly worrying. And still is, the government will not let Jews leave! They don’t allow entire families to leave the country at once. It’s actually a serious issue, they’re sorta using them as hostages.
So, weirdly, the only Middle East country that became oppressive towards Jews as the result of being ‘Islamist’, uh, is a country that is doing the exact opposite of expelling them. Which is, I must add, very bad, but…not what we are talking about.Report
Oh, now LeeEsq will talk to me after months of literally ignoring any point I made in response to him. Let’s see if this will continue.
Tell me LeeEsq, how do you know this barbed wire fence is ‘border security’ and not the fence of an Israeli settlement in the West Bank?
Are people allowed to ‘fight’ (aka, ask incredibly politely for peace) from _those_? Are we allowed to tell kids about _those_? That if people come into their neighborhood and kick everyone out and erect fences and put their own people in there and guard it at gunpoint, that’s _bad_ and they should violently…politely complain about that?
It’s weird, but sometimes things look bad because they _are_ bad!
You know that, um, the reason that Hamas controls Gaza is a) Israel deliberately fostered radicals that opposed the Palestinian Authority to keep from actually getting any sort of consensus from them, so it wouldn’t actually ever have a ‘Palestine’, b) deliberately and illegally broke Palestine in half by pretending to free half of it, c) then did nothing after Hamas was elected in half, because that helped advance (a), despite the fact that would have been fulling capable of easily taking down Hamas at least until 2010 or so, d) but instead helped prop up and support Hamas with Qatari support when it looked like that government was going to collapse, because that would have resulted in the PA taking back over, and that would have, again, risked Palestine _actually existing_.
Hamas is where it is because Israel found Hamas very convenient to everything it was doing until October 7th. Some people will try to claim it ‘created’ Hamas, which it…didn’t exactly, that’s an exaggeration, but it sure as hell said ‘Hey, everything going on here is great, having religious manics in control of part of Palestine who keep shooting trivial rockets at us means we literally never have to do anything to resolve this situation and we can keep stealing the West Bank and randomly laying waste to Gaza’, until suddenly, it all backfired.
…I mean, if Jews were going to move to a place that was majority Muslim, that sort of would be expected.
Zionists could have worked with the British to make sure that a secular Palestine was created where minority religions had rights. But they didn’t. Instead they asked the British for a piece of it despite being an incredibly small minority there.
They could probably still do that, in fact. Nothing is actually stopping a one state solution.
As a white person, I feel the same way about Rhodesia. (I guess that’s a reasonable thing to say now?) We should all have a place, and if we don’t, we should _take_ one.
Also, it sure is weird how so many _Americans_ are very determinedly insisting that Jews have no place in America. I’m pretty sure they do. Indeed, the amount of Jews in America and Israel are about the same.
You do know what happened during the _last_ genocide/ethnic cleansing of the Jews? The small one that everyone sorta forgets about, in Argentine? The entire world say ‘Hey, wait, we know we screwed up last time, Jews refugees can come here’, and opened their doors. (Admittedly, it was just the Jews, which rather suggests the world has only learned one _very specific_ thing.)
Hey, question: How long do resistance movements actually last when they win?
And honestly, this situation feels a lot like the claim of: We can’t possibly let all the slaves free, they’ll immediately join John Brown and murder all the white people.
That’s not actually how that works, and saying ‘We have to continue to treat people horrifically because if we give them freedom, they will be incredibly angry and kill us’ has long been used to justified continuing oppression, and frankly doesn’t happen.
If Israel wants to get past this, they need to get back to actually defensible borders, and literally stop interacting with Palestine at all, keep operating the Iron Dome because potshots will keep coming, and watch the population’s support for Hamas slowly dry up over the next decade or so as people stop being incandescently angry that Israel killed their parents and brothers and sisters.Report
I really don’t understand why so many people sympathetic to the Palestinians have decided to act like caricatures from Fox News. I live in Oakland and a good chunk of the local politicians and public servants seem to want Oakland to take a militantly pro-Palestinian stance. My brother thinks that they are trying to preserve Oakland’s reputation as the Radical Black City of the Bay Area despite Oakland only being 22% Black these days. There is weird mix of domestic and international politics in the moment and also an attempt to kick Jews out of the Diversity Coalition and say we don’t belong.Report
BIPOC + AAPI people have every right to want to have spaces without Whites. Wait, I mean whites.Report
The anti-racists need an enemy to justify their existence.Report
the amusing part is that the reason Oakland is black is that in 1942 all the Japanese got sent to a concentration camp and their houses got taken by the government and sold to black people, so Oakland has even less claim to being Black than Israel has to being Jewish…Report
One has to snarkily wonder why retail would lie about how much a problem shoplifting is.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/07/business/shoplifting-surge-hype-nightcap/index.htmlReport
Without getting into a debate about the statistics I think a big driver of the Discourse is (i) these were always very lightly enforced laws but (ii) it’s only recent that people have come to understand how loosely enforced they are, by virtrue of cameras being everywhere. Now there’s a regular stream of mass ‘smash and grab’ incidents that by their nature are a lot more visually disturbing than discretely pocketing something and leaving without paying, not that either is acceptable behavior.Report
What you see on cameras is not reality. A viral video makes something seem ubiquitous when it may be isolated, while ubiquitous things can easily go unrecorded.
What people often overlook is that no one, anywhere, actually knows how much shoplifting is going on.
Every study of it begins with the raw empirical data of “shrink”, the difference between items purchased and items sold.
But there isn’t really any clear understanding of how much of the shrink is theft by employees, theft by customers, or damage or faulty accounting.
So any study which doesn’t acknowledge this should be taken with a high degree of skepticism.Report
It really doesn’t matter what the real stats are. What matters is the PERCEPTION that community has of crime. That perception can be close to reality or vary wildly.Report
While this is true, Retailers have done a lot the last couple of years to drive this perception in a single direction and the media have played along. Turns out the retailers were lying.Report
RE: Turns out the retailers were lying.
Unclear and your experience can vary.
If you are an online-only store then you have zero shoplifting. If you are a physical store then it’s wildly unlikely your shoplifting rate is average for the nation.
If your store gets the occasional flash mob ransack then you have a problem that may destroy you.
If your store is in a zip where 7 cop cars show up for every shoplifter(*) then you probably don’t have a problem.
The same rules apply for murder rates. Taking the average rate for all zips says something but doesn’t change that some localities have bigger problems than others.
(*) I counted, but I’m only assuming it was a shoplifter.Report
People don’t need retailers like to perceive visible disorder.Report
The retailers lying and the media playing along for hits creates a perception that what people are actively witnessing is disproportionately risky somehow. When one reads the story I posted, one finds that outside of NYC, incidents of shoplifting are at or below pre-pandemic levels. Which means peoples perceptions are being directed not by their own lived observations, but by biased actors who are not actually interested in helping people see the world but furthering their agendas. For some as yet unnamed reason, retailers WANT you to perceive visible disorder where it doesn’t exist in any greater quantity then before.Report
I don’t disagree. But kind of building off Damon’s point, if the perception is that you could be shopping in certain places only to find yourself in the middle of a flash mob ransacking the place, well that sounds like a dangerous situation you would want to avoid, and the fear could depress sales in ways that are more harmful than shrinkage. I agree that without good statistics it’s hard to say, but there’s more to it than just lost merchandise.Report
People always like to say this, that perception is what matters, as if perception is just some naturally occurring phenomenon like gravity.
How “we” as a community perceive things is the end result of messages and persuasion, which themselves are immensely malleable to can be shaped.
What we are doing right here is part of that. When someone asserts that crime is OUTTACONTROL and gets swatted down, they are less likely to carry that message, and the onlookers are less likely to amplify it.
We also know from the vast trove of urban legends that false messaging tends to only work on those predisposed to already believe it.
A reasonable person may believe for a moment that someone is putting razor blades in Halloween candy, but can quickly be reasoned with that this is ridiculous.
But a person already predisposed to view the world in dark ugly terms is likely to hold on to that message because it fits their priors.Report
Again, I’ll be the first to agree with you that perceptions of crime and risk of being a victim tend to be disproportionate to what is actually documented. I will also be the first to agree that those misperceptions have been used to take us into some bad, disproportionate directions on public policy. But beyond that I’m also not sure what point you’re making. None of that makes these incidents good or defensible on their own terms nor does it provide the kind of corrective we should be aiming for. Crime is bad and fears of crime, even where misplaced, have negative externalities.
To use a (very imperfect) parallel, we know that police killing unarmed black people is in fact an extremely rare phenomena. However I believe I have seen you yourself make good points about how this perception that it is really widespread, which is also driven by the same advent of viral video, still raises important questions about what is going on with law enforcement. I also agree with you there. But I don’t see how it can be both ways, where we chose to read a lot into one misperception (of what is still a real problem) but not another.Report
RE: One has to snarkily wonder why retail would lie about how much a problem shoplifting is.
15% of “retail” shopping has moved online. So “the same amount of theft” as a percentage is on a smaller base.Report
If you know that the cops won’t do anything when someone shoplifts, how many times are you going to call the cops when someone shoplifts?
Here’s something I saw the other day:
This 2021 story from the San Francisco Chronicle:
I think that the fact that we don’t have good numbers should bug us more.
Because the main fact we know indisputably is that we don’t have good numbers.Report
If a store manager sees a guy snatch a candy bar, what is the appropriate response, both by him and the police?
Call 911 and have them dispatch a police car? Have them issue a BOLO for “Man with candy bar”?
Chase after him and have a sidewalk brawl?Report
“Therefore shoplifting isn’t happening”
I think that the fact that we don’t have good numbers should bug us more.
Because the main fact we know indisputably is that we don’t have good numbers.Report
So what is the appropriate response?
Do you have an idea or is this like Obamacare and homelessness, just something conservatives like to shout and shake their fist at?Report
In this case, I’d like good numbers.
Because without good numbers, we might find ourselves saying “BUT THE NUMBERS (that we don’t have) ARE OBVIOUSLY ACCURATE WHEN IT COMES TO SHOPLIFTING!”
What are the numbers?
We don’t know.
Without them, asking for an appropriate response is like asking the doctor “what do I do about my blood sugar?”
“What are your blood sugar numbers?”
“Why are you hung up on the numbers, Doc? What is the appropriate response?”Report
So its like homelessness and healthcare, something you by your own admission don’t know very much or have any useful ideas about, but wank on about constantly.Report
It’s more that I have indicators.
Stuff like “shoppes closing” and the sheer number of people admitting that they don’t even call in shoplifting because what are the cops going to do.
And we don’t have good numbers.
I do know that when shops close, defenders point to the numbers.
But we know that the numbers aren’t good.
So we just have indicators.
I do think that the indicators are that things are worse than the surface indicates.Report
So in response to that guy on Fox News begging for someone to give him a reason to vote for them, your response would be, “Um, well, you see, we really don’t have good numbers but I do think that the indicators are that things are worse than the surface indicates.”
I think conservatives should definitely go with this message. I feel owned already.Report
I would say that he has very good numbers indeed.
It’s those who are dismissing him that might not have the accurate figures.Report
the thing is though they aren’t. Going back to my initial post, outside NYC the FBI data on shoplifitng shows it going down. That’s the indicator. Not the number of viral Youtube videos, which in many cases are the same event posted by different people.Report
As opposed to….?Report
Retailers are lying to you about the problem.
The media is amplifying the lies.
The President, the Governor and the Mayor have done the things they can to make this a better place to live and do business.Report
A conspiracy, then? Between the shops, the media, and the government?Report
‘Whatever you see is false. Whatever we tell you is true.’Report
Did you really expect a substantive answer?Report
I think it’s worth trying to look at it with some nuance. Like I said above I think the reality is that it has always been true that there is not a lot police can do about petty shoplifting as traditionally understood (i.e. a person discretely slips something in a jacket and walks out undetected). You have serious problems identifying the perpetrator, serious problems getting evidence, and a priority problem when we’re talking about high crime urban areas.
I am a lot less sure those assumptions hold up when we are talking about groups of people openly running in and grabbing armfuls of merchandise and running off with it. I also think that what those incidents may have done is exposed that these are not well enforced crimes with an effect of encouraging copying the conduct, whereas the previous lack of knowledge about enforcement served as a deterrent, at least generally and in the aggregate. Time was you didn’t know what would happen if you were caught. Now everyone knows most likely nothing serious. At minimum that may justify having greater on foot police presence in commercial areas ready to arrest people who do this stuff.Report
What is the appropriate response to organized groups of people committing grand theft?
How is the appropriate response different than the actual response?
Here’s an example:
More than $250,000 worth of watches were recently stolen in a brazen smash-and-grab robbery at a Newport Beach jewelry store — the type of retail crime state officials are hoping to crack down on with new grant money to assist local police agencies and prosecutors.
It took less than 20 seconds for a trio in black masks to enter Jewelers on Time on Riverside Avenue, break two display cases and flee with at least three boxes of expensive watches, according to security footage from the incident and interviews with store staff.
Police responded quickly to his call, but Kenny Nguyen, the store’s sales manager who was working during the Sept. 8 daytime robbery, said the robbers were already long gone. He said 23 watches, worth more than $250,000, were stolen.
Here is some background information:
While officials are warning that this type of retail crime appears to be becoming more popular, Los Angeles Police crime statistics show that robberies and burglaries this calendar year have fallen compared to 2022 but are up slightly from 2021. Orange County robbery and burglary statistics for this year were not immediately available. Oberon, the Newport police spokesperson, said his department has not documented a rise in such retail thefts.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-15/250-000-of-watches-lost-in-newport-beach-smash-and-grab-as-state-looks-to-combat-such-theftsReport
Seems like we need more cops patrolling the area who will arrest people that do that kind of thing.Report
Good idea.
Guess who is already providing the funding to prevent and investigate organized theft?
Continue reading the article for the shocking answer!Report
Although I have long thought, entirely apart from shoplifting, that we need more foot patrols, the problem with “patrolling the area” for shoplifting is that “the area” that will get patrolled is where larger, more politically-connected retailers (many of which have the resources for significant private security measures) congregate, not the areas where the far more vulnerable bodegas, dollar stores, pawn shops, and low-end jewelry stores are found.Report
There was a story that got a lot of fanfare over a decade ago where they did some data analytics on Philly, and found that significant amounts of crime was being committed in relatively small parts of the city. However, resource allocation had cops driving around in cars trying to be everywhere all at once. They didn’t say this but it would not surprise me if extra attention was being paid to well to do and/or politically influential areas. Regardless, the take away was that you could make a major impact by focusing resources on hot spots instead of driving around, reacting to calls as they come in (I believe there was a pilot that proved the theory, but it was allowed to expire for unstated reasons). However to date I have never heard of anywhere trying to move to this kind of approach. From what I have heard the high crime areas of DC and Baltimore that I am most familiar with are per capita quite under policed in the areas where they need it the most.Report
This was on the news the other night on LA’s Fox station:
Anything that can’t go on forever will stop.Report
The fear should be that some shop owner with a carry permit is going to shoot one or more of these people and the jury acquits because they just aren’t that interested in delving into the nuances of whether he or she was reasonably in fear for his or her life.Report
Are you sure that, for many of the declinists, this is a bug rather than a feature?Report
Oh I am certain it is a feature.Report
The fear should be that some busboy with a carry permit is going to shoot the restauranteur who is cheating him of wages, and the jury acquits because they just aren’t that interested in delving into the nuances of whether he or she was reasonably in fear for his or her life.
Scans a bit differently, don’t you think?Report
Most wage theft occurs against people without documents.
So that’ll probably be the talking point.Report
RE: Scans a bit differently, don’t you think?
Yes it does. Contract disputes and even contract breaking is a “lawyers” thing because you have everyone’s address and name.Report
Wage theft is not a contract dispute, its deliberate fraud. You can go to jail for it.
See here:
https://www.epi.org/publication/fighting-workplace-abuses-criminal-prosecutions-of-wage-theft-and-other-employer-crimes-against-workers/
But the fact you want to portray it as a “dispute” is telling.Report
When I have personally needed to deal with employers who were doing this to me, it was presented by management more as “legally we can do this” than “FU we’re stealing your wages”.Report
Again, I can’t speak for other states with certainty, but that type of crime is usually investigated and enforced by state agencies with regulatory authority over the subject matter.
Asking why no one is mad the local police aren’t looking into it is like asking why no one is mad that the NYPD isn’t investigating SEC violations on Wall Street.Report
One of the big reasons I can be flippant about this is it worked out all right in the end.
1) I did NOT get my money back. Any of it.
2) Instead I got a massive pay increase by jumping to a different contracting company doing the same thing for the same employer.
3) The fortune 500 employer was less than happy about this mess and banned their contracting company from the work site.
Well, they almost did that. A few days before that happened everyone in the company quit and the banning was dropped as irrelevant.
4) Many months after the fact our corp leadership ended up in jail.Report
LOL. I love that hilarious claim of ‘It was presented this way’, as if we should trust how management presents the issue.
“The thieves told me they can do it, legally.”
And then you say they all went to jail.Report
RE: “The thieves told me they can do it, legally.” And then you say they all went to jail.
Yes.
However me walking out of the company was way more useful, effective, and timely than anything the authorities did.
That was even more effective and timely than anything the Fortune 500 did and they were much quicker than the authorities.Report
You bring this up as if it is apples to apples. Admittedly I don’t know the situation in California but Maryland has an online portal you can use for free to report that kind of thing to the Department of Labor Licensing and Regulation, who will initiate an enforcement action for you, up to and including escalation to the attorney generals office, who can prosecute. I actually had to use it against an a sketchy law firm run by an a-hole I worked for early in my career. While not being an expert on what happens in other states I somehow doubt there is anything remotely comparable for the kinds of crimes in question (i.e. shoplifting), because the understanding is that stuff is dealt with by the police.Report
“You bring this up as if it is apples to apples.”
The argument I’d make here is that we are in a position to define what is an apple and what is an orange. We could decide that wage theft was no different for any other form of property crime and thus was under the jurisdiction of the local PD. But we don’t do that. We’ve decided one is an apple and one is an orange. Laws are social constructs. They aren’t fruit.Report
Part of the problem is that, according to the Wikipedia, the workers most at risk are, ahem, “foreign born”. It turns into a discussion of hiring the undocumented and unauthorized.
And *THAT* turns into a discussion of immigration theory and stuff like E-Verify and whatnot.
Easier to pretend that it’s a small business owner insisting that you not clock in until your apron is on and your hands are washed (or, I suppose, you must clock out prior to having your bags checked by security… but the Supreme Court covered that last one).Report
Who, other than Jaybird of Colorado Springs, is “turning this into a discussion of immigration”?
Like, no one here has injected immigration into this, but somehow, for you and you alone, this is a salient point.Report
“What about wage theft?”
“Here’s the Wikipedia page devoted to Wage Theft.”
“WHY ARE YOU MAKING THIS ABOUT IMMIGRATION”Report
Unfortunately for you, some of us can read. While undocumented migrants are implicated, so is WalMart. And there’s an entire sentence in that paragraph you =referenced about wage theft being more prevalent in small businesses.
So how about we agree to focus wage theft discussion on th perpetrators and not the victims? That way we don’t have to get caught in the messy business of American businesses that want to keep labor costs low and profits high by hiring undocumented migrants and stiffing them for wages earned?Report
Sure. 100% on board.
Can we talk about the stuff we disagree about yet?
Or do you want to hammer some more on wage theft?Report
Yes, why ARE you making it about immigration?
Most of the theft occurs in minimum wage jobs, but this isn’t about the minimum wage is it?
It is rampant in the restaurant business but it isn’t about the service sector is it?
Much of it is directed at women, but this isn’t about feminism is it?
Of all the possible tangents you can use to derail the conversation, why pick that one?Report
Because of the source that I provided, specifically this line:
Undocumented workers or unauthorized immigrants stood at the highest risk levels.
That was a copy/paste, by the way.Report
Yes, and?Report
Well, I get to cover another square on my Jaybird Bingo card.Report
Here’s another one for your card: You can’t really talk about wage theft without also acknowledging Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk.Report
Of course we can.
We can say that wage theft is actual theft, and that it is rampant, and that it is rarely prosecuted and that many people even here at OT don’t consider it to be a big problem.
We don’t need to go down a rabbit hole of irrelevancy.Report
The law, as enforced, is irrelevant?
Lots of luck with calling it “actual theft”.
Maybe you could write an open letter.Report
Immigration is irrelevant to our discussion here, but nice try to derail it.Report
I’d say immigration is about as relevant to wage theft as wage theft is to shoplifting.Report
No, that’s not something you do often enough to warrant a square on the Jaybird Bingo Card (TM).Report
Well, then. Add it. I’ll do what I can to introduce it more in the future.
I mean, it directly deals with workers being on-site when they want to go home but management says “you can’t leave yet” but insists on not paying them despite not allowing them to leave. (Management refused to even stagger shifts so that time-to-leave would be de minimis!)
And, if you ask me, that is 100% time that ought to be remunerated.
But here we are.Report
My card has “posts a direct quote from a fellow commenter to demonstrate that he’s the one being disingenuous”.Report
I’d score it as a push. Chip brought up a mostly non-sequitur emotive point and Jaybird added a mostly non-sequitur emotive counterpoint.Report
If this issue becomes a new obsession for you, dropped into conversations regardless of relevance, it can go on the next edition of the card. For now there’s no room.Report
I plan on dropping it into discussions of wage theft.
Right after I bring up the wikipedia page for wage theft that focuses on “workers at risk”.
And you can pull the old “what does *THAT* have to do with WAGE THEFT?” game then too.Report
Your plans don’t get you on the bingo card; only your actions. Maybe you’ll get this on the new edition, maybe not. It’s going to be up to you. Trying to persuade me in advance is a waste of time for both of us.Report
I guess I would just say take that up with the legislature. They create the agencies that are responsible for this kind of enforcement, in part because they have determined it isn’t an area the regular police are well suited towards. I don’t see a lot of grounds to question their judgment.Report
I’m not necessarily arguing against the status quo… just think we should acknowledge that the status quo — the fact we see and treat these things differently — is a choice and not something necessarily inherent to them.Report
I think you’re inferring a value judgment into a decision that is actually about the need for specialized expertise.Report
No. I’m merely pointing out that when saying, “These things aren’t the same so stop talking about them like they are,” we should acknowledge whether those things are inherently different or whether their difference is a construct. Tis all.Report
They are both crimes, both crimes of theft.
The comparison is to compare how we here at OT and how we as a society treat them.
The theft of a bottle of soda is presented as something worthy of killing a person over, while the theft of thousands in wages is, well, just not that big a deal really.
Again, if you read a story about a busboy killing his thieving employer, would you nod and say “yeah, I was afraid this was going to happen because wage theft is rampant.”?
Would I be wrong to say that virtually nobody would react that way?
So why the murderous reaction to a two dollar bottle of soda?
I suggest that the disparity is because one is visible and one is not.
The way that a viral video of a puppy trapped in a storm drain gets millions of offers of adoption, while thousands of puppies being euthanized behind closed doors is ignored.Report
Chip, the disparity is 1. that shoplifting of the nature we’re talking about could indeed become a confrontation where someone might in fact feel threatened, but 2. also because any shop keeper who shoots and kills a person walking off with a $2 bottle of soda will be charged and quite likely convicted of 1st degree murder. The context is also that we are talking about that which is in the purview of the regular police, which does not usually include wage theft. If the agencies that regulate wage theft are failing or being given disincentives to enforce then maybe we could have something of a parallel conversation about that.Report
I actually find myself wondering what would happen if a waiter shot a restauranteur taking tips off tables, a form of’ wage theft’ that is actual literal theft. It’s not, like, ambiguous:
Money left as a tip legally already belongs to the tipped person outside of very specific circumstances of a preagreed tip pool, which untipped staff (like management) are not allowed to participate in, period. You can’t have some ‘policy’ about it that overrides the law.
Management picking up a tip that isn’t theirs is committing literally the exact same crime as someone walking in off the street and doing it. That’s legally already _the waiter’s_ money, even if not in their possession.
And yet, it happens all the time.
Imagine how easy it would be to do a sting operation on that sort of thing, if we actually had any sort of enforcement. Law enforcement could even be exceptionally clever and leave a tip of $200 or whatever to tip it over into a pretty serious felony.
Why are we spending money on ‘bait cars’ again, this is _way_ easier?Report
The point of police is not only to protect the shop owners, but to protect the thieves.
That’s something we may remember soon.
“Don’t worry, we’ll just have the cops lock up the vigilantes!” will not be sustainable.Report
I don’t want to be too flip about this, but yes, there is some truth to that. You don’t want people resorting to self help. There is lots and lots of history, and even modern day examples, of why that is.Report
Cops that lock up the store owners but not the thieves will not be cops that retain funding.Report
To be clear about what I am saying, the primary way to prevent people from engaging in self help is to prioritize the thieves, not the shopkeepers. I am also saying that part of the reason to prevent that outcome is that no one benefits from a shooting gallery, the end result of which is no shops at all, for anyone.Report
LOL. The car used was stolen from the police impound lot. It’s amazing how this bit of incompetence is just glossed over in the story.Report
As a rule, the media always leaves out the best facts.Report
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-retail-lobbyists-retract-key-claim-organized-retail-crime-2023-12-06/Report
Reading that…
Okay, they said that “nearly half” of their inventory losses were due to organized shoplifting rings and they’ve since retracted that.
They haven’t adjusted the number for “shrink”, just the source.
I very much dislike that last clause. Feels like information is being obscured rather than illuminated.Report
The problem with “shrink” is it emcompasses many things: Employees lifting items, inventory being spoiled by being damaged in transportation, inventory being spoiled by improper storage/accidents/etc and theft by external people (shoplifting). Only the last of those issues has any significant public policy implications but businesses have -every- incentive to hide as much of the former issues under its umbrella of “Shrink”. And, of course, media has every incentive to wax on at length about out of control crime- the MSM because it fellates their “balanced” pose and because “if it bleeds it leads” and the right wing propaganda media because a Democratic administration is in office.
Shoplifting is likely a problem- it’s likely not anywhere near as huge a problem as the media and business groups scream that it is.Report
Well, there are a handful of things working in concert.
1. Incredibly brazen “flash mob” events that are intended to go viral
2. “Boosting” and re-selling vaguely expensive household items in places where normies will see it happening
3. Mitigation efforts against both of the above
It’s bleeding out into normieland.
That’s bad.
That’s *VERY* bad.Report
Yup, but #1 is, itself, mostly an outgrowth of #2 and the way to combat #2 is probably through some kind of liability or regulatory crackdown on online resellers more than anything else.That’s not appealing to business or right wingers though.Report
You’d think that one of the progressive cities could pull it off.Report
It’d be extremely difficult for a municipal government to go after an international e-commerce platform- or, more specifically, ALL international e-commerce platforms.
And, of course, if a government higher up the food chain than that goes after them then the libertarians and conservatives come out of the woodwork and start screaming like fruit bats about “rampant out of control regulation”.Report
Eh, not really. Something as simple as “we’ve noticed that you’ve moved more than $600 in product. Here’s some forms for you to fill out.”
I mean, pretend that they’re selling packs of cigarettes.
Or something from a store that has official documentation.
Or treat them like they treat the tamale lady.Report
Sure, but all the things you’re using as an example happen within the municipality and thus lie within their ability to regulate. Minneapolis, say, can’t make Facebook Marketplace do that. I’m not even confident Minnesota could make them do it.Report
I am talking out of my ass with this (actual legal thinking hat is off) but one possibility would be to try to get a coalition of state attorney generals to go after the sites themselves for trafficking in stolen goods. A parallel might be something like what the feds did with backpages for prostitution under the auspices of ‘human trafficking.’
The difference of course is that the goods in question are themselves legal and I am not sure how the sites could police it. You’d just be shutting them down altogether, which would probably annoy at least as many if not more people than the real or imagined shoplifting situation is.
At a certain point I think some screws just fell loose during covid and it’s going to be a little while until they’re put back in. A smart redeployment of law enforcement to give a sense of order may help but there might also just be a few chaotic post plague years we have to go through. I’ve read there was an element of that to the roaring (19)20s.Report
I think the same thing as you and I’m certainly fine with city AG’s and Mayors not “going easy” on shoplifters to whatever extent they actually are. But trying to busy the bums who make off with, say, a trashbag full of tide pods and then sell them on the internet is not something that a city can do. Nor would Jay WANT them to have that authority. So I fear he may just be mirroring Chips vibes pose on the right.Report
If we’re in a place where people mostly following the law are subject to police oversight (including proctology exams whenever there is the tiniest *HINT* of tax malfeasance) and people who absolutely are not following the law are able to work without getting hassled by the cops…
Well. That’s a bad place to be. I’m not sure it’s sustainable.Report
So this is where the argument retreats to.
Not citing actual facts, but just ominous feels and vibes.
Everything that has been said here has been consistently said, like every single year, since before any of us were born.Report
Remember when I opened with:
Because I do.Report
We all can remember how you first assert how its Really Bad that cities are in a doom loop of chaos and petty crime, then after that is repeatedly knocked down, retreat to posting signs and divinations and vibes of impending doom, and now retreating to telling us that well, since we don’t have any evidence showing this, that must be Really Bad.
Look, if you want to cling to the belief that the urban apocalypse is nigh, well, that’s fine.
Just don’t expect the rest of us to find it convincing.Report
I find it more convincing to find articles with headlines like “London Breed and Eric Adams Built Their Own Doom Loop“.
That turns it from “something that some rando pseudonymous commenter thinks” to “something that the media is involved in covering”.
So, like, when the camera crew from Good Morning America does something like “decline to show up to film a segment in San Francisco because they think it’s too dangerous”, that turns it from an argument about Me Personally into one of how enough people seem to think this that it has leaked into the camera crew of Good Morning America.
“Jaybird, you’re wrong!” isn’t that interesting of a conversation. “The camera crew is wrong!” is more interesting (and, indeed, that’s the tack taken by the article I linked to).
But it does point to a reality external to both of us.
And we get to deal with stuff like London Breed arguing that San Francisco is *NOT* too dangerous and that quotation making it into a New York Magazine piece titled “London Breed and Eric Adams Built Their Own Doom Loop”.Report
Yes of course you find a random comment from a camera crew convincing.
That’s my point!
You pivot from yesterday demanding “scientific evidence” and asking if we accept FBI statistics, to today telling us a random comment from a camera crew is “convincing”.Report
Chip, you misunderstand my use of the word “convincing”.
Hrm.
That may explain disconnects elsewhere.Report
Just cause I’m feeling feisty – what do you mean then? cause last time I checked that word had a universal definition.Report
He says: “We all can remember how you first assert how its Really Bad that cities are in a doom loop of chaos and petty crime”
But I am not asserting that the cities are in a doom loop.
I, instead, assert stuff like “The San Francisco Chronicle says that London Breed is trying to keep San Francisco out of a doom loop” and then link to something like this:
The arguments that I would think would be convincing are not arguments like “SAN FRANCISCO IS IN A DOOM LOOP!”
I find it more convincing to find articles with headlines like “London Breed and Eric Adams Built Their Own Doom Loop“.
He said “Yes of course you find a random comment from a camera crew convincing.”
I didn’t find the random comment from the camera crew “convincing”.
I found the article talking about how the camera crew was afraid to be more convincing than any assertion I could make about San Francisco being in a doom loop.
I mean, let’s say I said “San Fran is in a doom loop!”
Would you find that convincing? I wouldn’t think so.
You know what I would think would be more convincing?
Linking to something like this from last week in the New York Times: How Did San Francisco Become the City in a ‘Doom Loop’?
Do you see why I would see that as more convincing?
And do you see the difference between how I was using the word and how Chip seemed to think I was using it?Report
Did…you actually read that article?
It doesn’t sound like you did.Report
Which one? The one talking about budget shortfalls impacting food banks? The one talking about London Breed doing damage control after a camera crew refused to film in San Francisco? Or the one talking about San Francisco’s interwoven problems that are not worse than those experienced by Los Angeles?Report
This one:
There was this constant stream of dark, sordid viral media, mostly about homelessness and street crime, that profoundly influenced how everyone saw the city — residents included. Who was producing it? How was it spun and manipulated? What arguments were implicitly being made by this content, and which players stood to benefit?
And it is based on this story:
Whatever really happened in the courtroom, by the time of Colfax’s ruling, the tabloids had lost interest. Nobody could be certain what the story represented. That Carmignani was a victim? A villain? That Doty belonged in jail? That the city was worse than it seemed? That it was better? But this indeterminacy was the quality that made the story resonant. It spoke to the predicament of San Francisco as a whole: stories were produced, magnified and spun, until they came to define the city, not just for outsiders, but for the residents themselves, whose own experience of reality became unstable as a result, and disproportionately fearful.
Carmignani is the landlord for a restaurant that opened this September, one in which he also has a small financial interest. Il Porcellino Grasso — the fat piglet — is in the heart of the Financial District, where nearly vacant commercial buildings have been selling for 50 or 75 percent under their prepandemic values, generating new headlines about the doom loop. Carmignani had lambasted the city as a zone of pure chaos, where “animals” roamed the streets and the police were nowhere to be found. But that was not the whole story, it seemed. When it came time for business, he was taking the opposite view — that downtown San Francisco, the most maligned neighborhood in the country, was destined to bounce back.Report
Oh, you mean a fourth story that no one had linked to?
You’re right. I hadn’t read that one.Report
You really should.
I don’t know if they will be “convincing” or “more convincing” but they may be enlightening.Report
No I don’t. As a verbal literalist anyway.Report
Okay. Let’s get down to pure syntax.
Do you see the difference between “convincing” and “more convincing”?
If you don’t, I think we’ve found the problem.Report
yes I see that difference. But you originally said you and he didn’t agree on the definition of convincing.Report
He was using it to mean “Jaybird was convinced by X”.
And I was using it differently than that.Report
““The camera crew is wrong!” is more interesting (and, indeed, that’s the tack taken by the article I linked to).”
But I’m sure that Chip has many, many articles by people who aren’t the white cishet servers-of-capital-interest who are just fine with hanging out in San Francisco, which means that you only picked that particular article because you’re racist.Report
One of the last few times we discussed San Francisco having problems, Chip pointed out a story talking about a company investing in the Wharf:
I asked Chip “an oasis from what?”
He didn’t answer.Report
If posted such an article, would you consider Jaybird’s point refuted?
Or would the goalposts shift yet again?Report
I didn’t say “one”, I said “many”.
Like, you’re telling us that Jaybird is picking just one article that supports his point, despite the many articles that don’t. Where’s the many?
Keep in mind that last time we did this you linked to a Google search, and when it was pointed out that everything in that search disagreed with you, your response was to go pick one article and say “well, this one supports my point!”Report
I’m just making sure that this is the actual goalpost.
Not FBI statistics. Those don’t count anymore.
Not businesses moving in or out of SF. That no longer counts.
Not random comments from people online, but actual articles, where people dispute the Doom Loop theory. And you want many, not just one.
Right?Report
“Here’s an article that says X.”
“Well, here’s an article that says not X!”
“Therefore?”
“THEREFORE NOT X!!!”
“Your article doesn’t say ‘not X’, though.”
“YOU DIDN’T READ THIS OTHER ARTICLE THAT I AM NOT GOING TO LINK TO!”Report
I’m just making sure that this is the actual goalpost.
Not FBI statistics. Those don’t count anymore.
Not businesses moving in or out of SF. That no longer counts.
Not random comments from people online, but actual articles, where people dispute the Doom Loop theory. And you want many, not just one.
Right?Report
We can use FBI statistics!
It’s just that if we see evidence that people have stopped reporting crime to them, we get to say something like “the number is probably higher than that”.
Right?
Or why can’t we?Report
So if we don’t have FBI statistics, what do you want to use?
(And is this goalpost in addition to articles?)Report
We can use FBI statistics!
It’s just that if we see evidence that people have stopped reporting crime to them, we get to say something like “the number is probably higher than that”.
Right?
Or why can’t we?Report
We could only make that assumption if it was backed up by other statistics.
Would you accept statistics from the city itself?Report
Would something like this count as a statistic from the city?
If not, why not?Report
“When asked why the shoplifting reports had decreased again in October, Abbott said she wouldn’t be able to answer any more questions and directed The Chronicle to the Police Department as well as Target’s media team, which did not answer questions either.”Report
Sure, that’s a good graph, showing that if you make it easy to report something people utilize it.
Since you are now accepting statistics, here’s a graph also from the police showing various crimes overall in the city:
https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rate-and-property-crime-rate
Notice anything about it, like what direction it is moving?
See, you just keep trying to cherry pick isolated data points and use them as signs and omens, rather than any coherent line of logic.
The fact is, by any measure, crime in SF just isn’t out of line with other cities of its size and has lower crime than Houston or Columbus
And in fact, appears to be resuming its long term decline trend.
Does anyone here still want to see articles quoting people from the city?Report
Chip, I never stopped accepting statistics.
I just asked:
You say: “The fact is, by any measure, crime in SF just isn’t out of line with other cities of its size and has lower crime than Houston or Columbus”
You say that it makes sense to compare Columbus to San Francisco?Report
First lets just agree on facts.
Do you accept the facts of the graph I posted?
Are those true and accurate?Report
I would accept that chart up until 2022, yes. It strikes me as a hair early to have tabulated 2023 numbers.Report
So here’s another article with a series of graphs, comparing SF to peer cities like Columbus, Denver and Indianapolis:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francisco-problems/crime
Would you accept this as true and accurate?Report
Sure.
I looked at the link and it said: “In 2020, the reported violent crime rate in S.F. was 21% below the average of 20 most populous cities other than San Francisco for which there was full 2020 data available. Meanwhile, the city’s property crime rate was 41% above average.”
So if I were discussing property crime, would you be willing to accept that San Francisco has a property crime problem?
Like, if we were in a discussion about property crime, would you accept that San Francisco’s property crime is particularly bad?
Like, could I use your article as a source for that?Report
Absolutely SF has a property crime problem.
Not as bad as Denver or Seattle, but still bad.Report
So we’ve gone from comparing San Francisco to Columbus to comparing it to Denver or Seattle?
Fair enough.
“San Francisco has the third worst property crime in the nation!” is a statement that you’d accept?
I suppose we could discuss how, recently, it was the worst in the nation…Report
Yes we are in agreement that SF has a property crime problem, worse than some major cities, better than others.
Since the trend line is downward, where is this doom loop the kids are talking about?
What metric would demonstrate it?Report
If you ask me, I’d say that getting rid of Chesa was a good start.
As for your question, where is the doom loop? I’d say that one of the places is in stuff like “corporations abandoning property in San Francisco”.
I’d say that another is in the perception that San Francisco is too dangerous to film in.
Feel free to ask me for any evidence that corporations are abandoning property in San Francisco. Ask me for any evidence that news crews think that San Francisco is too dangerous to film in.Report
OK, so now that we’ve gotten rid of the crime angle, the metric is “Investment in the city”
So if the city were in a doom loop, we would expect to see falling investment and a steady decline in property values as investors and owners flee the city.
Would you agree that this is a good metric?Report
No, we haven’t gotten rid of crime. No more than Chesa did.
So if the city were in a doom loop, we would expect to see falling investment and a steady decline in property values as investors and owners flee the city.
I’d want to hammer out whether we’re arguing that San Francisco was actually in one first.
If, say, we were worried about it falling into one and we were arguing against it being on a bad trajectory, we’d probably want to argue that it’s not in one and change the subject to that.
Do you agree?
I’d say that if the city were in danger of falling into a doom loop, we’d see articles talking about how the Mayor needs to keep the city from falling into a doom loop.
Do you agree that this is a good metric?Report
Whether it is in a doom loop or not is the hypothesis we are trying to test.
So one metric would be crime, and we’ve already established that crime isn’t uniquely bad to San Francisco.
And you’ve just established another metric, “companies abandoning property”.
I’m just trying to get you to agree that companies abandoning property is in fact a useful metric to test the hypothesis.
Because if we see a trend of property owners abandoning their properties we would then logically expect to see a decline in property values, wouldn’t you agree?Report
Oh! Then that’s the disconnect! You thought I was arguing that San Francisco was in a doom loop!
I’m pleased that I can agree with you that it is *NOT* currently in a doom loop.
So that’s done.
Now you can be confused the next time the topic comes up.
“I thought you agreed that San Francisco wasn’t in a doom loop.”
“I did.”Report
Why would you even try to claim that those stats are true and accurate immediately after being shown that one store accurately reporting shoplifting stats for a month (or part of a month?) doubled the citywide tally of shoplifting reports for that month? This implies that retail theft is underreported by at least an order of magnitude, making the stats totally unreliable.
I think it’s plausible that crime is going back down—the backlash to the crime-positive movement has started, and the incarceration rate is ticking back up—but with stats being so incomplete, they really can’t be relied on for anything, especially comparisons between cities.Report
Its possible that shoplifting is underreported.
But then we need to figure out if they have always been underreported, or if that is something new.
And then tie this to a larger argument of whether San Francisco is unique, or if shoplifting is underreported in all cities.
Because all measures of crime show that it is steadily declining all across America.
If you want to claim that these measures aren’t accurate, go right ahead.Report
Congratulations conservatives – Texas has given you exactly what you wanted post-Dobbs: a state where doctors are afraid to practice reproductive medicine and where court orders are now required for women to get abortions for medical necessity.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/07/us/texas-abortion-ruling/index.htmlReport
Nobody’s telling them to act like that.
They’re doing a work-to-rule protest.Report
Who is them? Doctors? The rules they have been handed are being consistently reported as so vague – and the penalty so big for failure to comply – that they are actively avoiding care that is medically necessary. This is a downstream impact of Dobbs that was well discussed in these pages at the time.Report
Not a bug, but a feature.Report
Likely true.Report
I would also be extra careful if my livelihood was on the line.Report
Ken Paxton the AG of Texas is nobody?Report
And of course, Texas Attorney General has threatened hospitals and doctors with felonies anyway.
In a statement Thursday afternoon, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that the judge’s order “will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else, from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas’ abortion laws. This includes first degree felony prosecutions.”
It also does not prohibit private citizens or a district or county attorney from enforcing Texas’ pre-Roe abortion laws against Cox’s doctor or anyone else, Paxton argued, adding that the judge’s order “will expire long before the statute of limitations for violating Texas’ abortion laws expires.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pregnant-woman-texas-gets-court-order-abortion-rcna128537
Thus illustrating the point of the law, to make any determination of the law hopelessly ambiguous and open to any interpretation.Report
I would love to see him explain to a judge why he thinks he has the special super secret get out of following restraining orders decoder ring.Report
Washington Post staff is on strike today.
Someone should explain to them that inflation is back down to a reasonable level.Report
If you were wondering “Will Planned Parenthood release a statement on Israel/Gaza?”, you can now exhale.
Report
A trolley problem for the modern age.
You are a university president. A trolley is heading down the track. It is going to hit a donor. If you pull the switch, it will instead hit a student.
Do you pull the switch?
Report
Actions have consequences. Who knew?Report
Many Pro-Palestinian activists are so into the righteousness of their cause that they believe they should be able to act without consequences.Report
This is from another poster on the Other Blog but it really gets to the point of the issue facing university presidents on this issue:
That’s a good summary of the legal basis. But beyond that, isn’t the fundamental issue here that rules conform to what exists, rather than forcing what exists to conform to them? Suppose that heated rhetoric about the Israeli-Palestinian war does, in fact, cross a line that these universities have laid down? If it does, then the universities are fucked, because there are a lot of intelligent, well-off, and radical kids studying at them; and youth being youth, the rhetoric will escalate. Do the universities want to deal with this can of worms, which is less a ‘can’ and more a vast pile of unstable nitrates permeated with gasoline? They do not. They don’t want there to be a line that their students are charging across.
It’s obvious by now that the I/P conflict is escalating internal Democratic tensions — I don’t know if Stefanik is intelligent enough to realize the details of this, but I suspect she is. The basic problem that universities are confronting is that they have spent WAY too long emphasizing ‘safety’ of their students. ‘This X is a safe space’ has been used to justify alternative assignments, students skipping lectures, trigger warnings, all sorts of stuff being cut from the curriculum.
Now, Jews feel unsafe. But to a lot of other students, ‘Jew’ = ‘Afrikaaner’, and Afrikaaners don’t get to bitch about feeling unsafe. This claim by Jews to being unsafe is a very, very unsafe one for anyone who is trying to manage a university.Report
That’s a pretty good insight.
If Jews are White, we may have to dismantle DEI a little bit.
If Jews are POCs, we just have to get the other members of the Rainbow Coalition on board.
Easy-peasy.Report
I have a sinking suspicion that much of the more outrageous antics of Pro-Palestinian movement in the United States is to tell Jews that we aren’t in the Rainbow Coalition but are as white as white can be,Report
Just tell them something like “I don’t consider myself to be white, though!”
Tell them that over and over again.Report
Lee, respectfully, you need to get over this. All of the DEI, intersectionality, whatever spouting people, are all one of three things: rich assholes, useless and effete charlatans, or people who have some how deluded themselves into taking the opinions of rich assholes or useless and effete charlatans seriously. None of them are principled people. Most of them aren’t even particularly smart people. Let em go.Report
I can’t reason out why the student would, much less should, be suspended.Report
It’s because of donors.
Which brings us back to the trolley problem. Do you pull the switch?Report
That still doesn’t get me there. You can suspend a student for not being liked by donors? Obviously you shouldn’t though. You could send the donors that clip of Musk, or explain to them that the purpose of the university is to move toward the truth through free debate.Report
That ship has sailed. The argument, as I understand it, is something like “You guys haven’t been playing by the old rules for at least a decade. You are playing by the new rules. So now that we’re playing by the new rules and your ox is getting gored, you appeal to the old rules? I prefer to play by the old rules but I will not play by the old rules while you continue to play by the new ones.”
And while I wouldn’t say that you can suspect a student for not being liked by donors, you *CAN* find a pretext to suspend the student and suspend the student for that if the donors are vocal enough.Report
I’m not interested in playing the game. The holocaust-denying monster girl is in the right. Now get some teachers in there to explain to her that she’s wrong about everything.Report
Looks like DoJ is doing the independent prosecution thing again. I mean really, how can they keep up their reputation as a weaponized agent of Joe Biden when they have charged him twice now?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/07/politics/hunter-biden-criminal-case/index.htmlReport
Clearly it is all smoke and mirrors to cover the hidden truth about his nefarious agenda. Tune in to Sean Hannity tonight for more.Report
Woman arrested for pouring gasoline, trying to burn down Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth home
It’s awful that people are trying to do things that will divide us.Report
People in LA should watch out. The LAPD has issued a warning:
If you think that people might be engaging in First Amendment Activity, stay inside.Report
If you see something, say something. (Not “say” though.)Report
That’s incredibly stupid wording, but the following two tweets seem reasonable:
“The Department will continue to work with any protest organizers to facilitate lawful demonstrations while protecting the safety of all involved including surrounding communities. Violence of any kind will not be tolerated”
“The Los Angeles Police Department is asking that all individuals and groups involved in protest or counter-protest activities not allow individuals who express the intent to commit violence or property to compromise the otherwise lawful demonstration.”
Of course, that does take on a rather sinister tone now that we know that words are violence. Here’s hoping that nobody told the LAPD.Report
There is credible evidence that Hamas has engaged in systematic rape of Israeli Jewish women they held captive. There has been a lot of awkward silence around this in ways similar to what happened during the Women’s March’s anti-Semitism https://digbysblog.net/2023/12/04/me-too-2/Report
There’s no such thing as “reverse rapism.” Rape is penetration plus power, so it’s literally impossible for Palestinians to rape Israelis. To do that they’d have to go back in time to 1948, win the war, and spend the last 75 years occupying Israel.Report
University students who are show a map of Israel/Palestine change their minds about From the River to the Sea:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-which-river-to-which-sea-anti-israel-protests-college-student-ignorance-a682463bReport