Open Mic for the week of 11/13/2023
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.
Secret Service agents protecting Biden’s granddaughter open fire when 3 people try to break into SUV.
Did the Secret Service really need to open fire? The carjackers didn’t know that someone actually important was in the car!
Great. Didn’t even hit the target. Back to the range, guys. The last thing you guys need is to accidentally hit a bystander when you’re shooting to protect the President’s granddaughter from street crime.Report
Oh jeez!
The agents, assigned to protect Naomi Biden, were out with her in the Georgetown neighborhood late Sunday night when they saw the three people breaking a window of the parked and unoccupied SUV, the official said.
It was unoccupied and everything.Report
I don’t know what the statistics say but if you flip on the local news the impression one gets is that the district has become a hotbed of car theft and car jacking. A week or two ago two preteens attempted to take the car of what turned out to be an off duty federal law enforcement agent of some kind (not sure if agency was reported, these people run the gamut from FBI or Secret Service types to glorified security guards at a government office building). Either way though that guy didn’t miss, and there was a bunch of controversy when the would be thief who was killed turned out to be 12.Report
If more police had been defunded, there would be fewer police reports making it to the nightly news.Report
Given the seemingly rampant crime, we’ve achieved the desired outcome of defund without actually defunding. Lose-lose.Report
This article has a chart summarizing changes in police funding for major cities from 2019 to 2022. There’s no indication that this is adjusted for inflation. About half of the cities increased funding less than 10% over those three years, while cumulative inflation was about 15%. For several cities, including Seattle, New York, and Washington DC, funding was down more than 2% in nominal terms.
Granted, this isn’t the dramatic defunding that the crime-positive left wanted, but real, and even nominal, funding does appear to be down in many major cities.Report
Technically in this case we’re talking about federal agents who aren’t under the authority of the city government. On the defund issue my sense is that Muriel Bowser has tried to triangulate, by on the one hand making showy signs of support for activist sentiments while also taking a position against cutting the budget for the metropolitan police. Some people claim the showy signs of support has created morale problems, and DC is having recruiting issues, but then so is everywhere. That said, there is absolutely a weirdo activist community in DC that gets a voice politically, but there is also a local machine that gets the votes of the poorer, heavily black parts of the city, and that accepts the necessity of good public services, including police.
Now far be it from me to be an apologist for the competency of the district government, but I’m not sure we have a clear line of causation on this one. The city should be better policed, but I also have this weird feeling that covid knocked a bunch of social screws loose and not all of them have been properly reset.Report
federal law enforcement vehicles have been crime targets for years. How many stories does the Post publish annually on this or that federal agent getting their car broken into and ransacked . . .Report
That is true. Pretty sure the guy who shot the kid trying to steal his car was in his personal vehicle though. The city also just did a highly publicized give away of tracking devices for ride share drivers in hopes it deters theft/car jacking.Report
I saw that about the tracking devices.
At first I thought it was some sort of industrial grade ‘tracking device’ that the police use.
Then I saw they were giving away Tile/Air Tags.
Better than nothing, I suppose… but my experience with Tile is that it will work for about a month, sorta work for about 9 months, then won’t work after a year when the battery dies.
Maybe airtags are better.Report
I lack the experience with them to have any insight on effectiveness. It is telling I think that there is at minimum enough of a perception of a problem for the DC government to respond.Report
Agreed; seemed more of a message to potential carjackers that there’s at least a small possibility that there might be a tracking device hidden somewhere – so factor that into risk calculations?
Or strip the cars underground or somewhere with bad cell service. Make sure you (the thieves) aren’t also using Tile.
But worst of all, Tile is fundamentally a Bluetooth technology that relies on other Tile/Bluetooth pings/network.Report
Yeah, how come the President’s granddaughter gets coverage that NSA Agent Joe Blow just doesn’t get?
She wasn’t even in the car! According to the article.Report
Someone confronted by the Secret Service trying to bresk into a protectee’s vehicle is lucky to get away.
That aside, The Washington Post regularly covers federal law enforcement officer vehicles thefts and break ins, since its the local paper for DC.Report
Yeah, they were lucky to not get shot!Report
Everyone in DC is lucky to not get shot.Report
It was a Secret Service car. So their car but they weren’t in it.Report
It seems the new House Speaker has the same problems as the old House Speaker – he can’t fund government because governing is hard – throwing temper tantrums is easy:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/13/politics/mike-johnson-shutdown-house-gop-government-budgetReport
He seems like a tantrum guy. What part did you find most tantrum-like?Report
I was more referring to his Freedom Caucus colleagues.Report
They’re using Congress as a platform to further their media careers.
And the margin is so thin it’s impossible to govern without the lunatic fringe being on board.Report
No it isn’t.
There are fewer than a dozen members of the lunatic fringe, and 435 Congresspeople in total.
Something as simple as a continuing resolution can pass easily with bipartisan support if they just disregard the Tantrum Caucus.Report
Yes, and the the Tantrum Caucus would toss Johnson . . . . which would be funny but not in any way good. the GOP members will not vote for Jeffries for Speaker, nor will they put up a responsible governing member for Speaker . . .Report
He seems like a irresponsible guy. What part did you find most irresponsible?Report
We could start with his assumption that he could get the Tantrum Caucus to do something they don’t want to do when his predecessor was ousted for doing so.Report
Yes, the more responsible thing for him to have done was…not assume they would?Report
His statements his first couple of days as Speaker certainly made it sound like he had the nihilists on board for at least one clean CR to carry things through mid-January while the rest of the 12 appropriations bills were passed. That presumably died as soon as it became clear that appropriations bills that satisfied the nihilists wouldn’t pass.Report
some of them have passed the HOuse but certainly won’t make it out of the senate.Report
Finally, something liberals and conservatives can all get behind… hating on the Neo-Liberals.
I think the article is on to something real… they call it The Fissured Economy, and it has some good explanatory power behind why people are dissatisfied with the Green Line. The Green Line is Neo-Liberal metrics and we’re transitioning to a Post-Neo-Liberal future.
If you read it from the Left, you want Biden to ‘Lean In’ to the PNL aspect of his New Industrial Policies.
If you read it from the Right, you realize there are good reasons to build New Industrial Policies which remove the distortionary regulations (and Tax policies) that separated production from Intellectual Property and effectively cut workers out of the gains.
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/what-should-be-the-goal-of-us-industrial
“The fissured economy generated early returns, but its costs and contradictions have grown increasingly burdensome. Unlike the virtuous cycle of Fordism—in which high investment drives high wages which drive strong demand—the sequestration of corporate profits away from the most labor- and capital-intensive pieces of corporate value chains breeds financialization, stagnation, and heightened inequality. Despite ideological pretentions of fiscal rectitude, the neoliberal model relies upon debt to sustain consumption—whether private household borrowing, as in the run-up to the financial crisis, or large government budget and trade deficits, which have prevailed for most of the neoliberal period—exacerbating household precarity and systemic financial instability.”Report
TL:DR – Quit trying to solve Demand side problems with supply side approaches.Report
I think it’s a lot more than that… like, Demand/Supply are secondary to IP/Production.Report
It’s a good diagnostic but it eludes what I think may be the hardest part, and the most critical sentence that follows the paragraph you quoted:
Moreover, the hollowing out of manufacturing and the abandonment of capital-intensive industries has gradually undermined U.S. capacity for innovation in many sectors, threatening the American geo-economic position and some upper echelons of the economy, in addition to internal strains caused by the steady erosion of the middle class and growing regional divides.
What it doesn’t hit is the upside of the status quo, that being that the US really is awash in cheap consumer products that people enjoy and to at least some degree make life better and more convenient. Now the hope is that you can sufficiently make the case that creating something like a modern version of the Ford-ian virtuous cycle can make this even better. But in the interim you have to convince people that the national, long term interest outweighs our abundance of cheap sh*t. That kind of case sounds good on paper, and has certainly been made in a way in the past, particularly as a temporary war time exigency. However we have yet to see it done in a time of relative peace and prosperity. My guess is that we will at minimum need a pretty humiliating kick in the balls (which hopefully isn’t so bad it destroys us) before people are willing to give that a go. I mean, Walmart may have killed mainstreet in flyover country, and what they sell definitely isn’t made in America, but even those voters like and have a revealed preference for the cheap stuff.Report
Agreed (but). Or to quote Abraham Lincoln, “Policy is hard, dude.”
Status quo always has an advantage in large complex systems… I’m not a silver bullet guy, so my point wouldn’t be, “This one neat trick will fix all our problems…” Some things I don’t even think are really problems of outcomes, but problems of incentives and problems of unjust appropriation of gains.
But, to your point, we have had some shocks to the Status Quo. Covid introduced shocks to our supply chains that exposed things we didn’t really appreciate; tangentially, the chip shortage exposed risks to the status quo presented by Taiwan/China; and the inexplicable malaise of MattY’s Green Line Bidenomics is, I think, the sort of shock to the status quo that is (perhaps) explained by the term coined: Fissure Economics.
So the article points out that the CHIPS act is a change to the status quo; the [cough] Deficit Reduction Act is a change to the status quo… and recognizing that the way we’ve decoupled profits from production — financialized all gains and turned all gains into financial instruments is a social phenomenon that bright people could use to motivate smart changes to the status quo.
The real point of the article isn’t to build some sort of controlled economy (they go to some lengths to demonstrate even China attempts to let market forces have at least a voice in which companies get picked as winners and become seats for their nephews); the real point is to debunk the idea that neo-liberalism was somehow libertarian driven laissez faire rather than policy preferences that had/have outcomes that we can and should measure.
It means that you don’t try to control the uncontrollable, rather you recognize that the existing rules of the game produce outcomes that we may or may not want and the goal is to alter some existing rules, apply some new ones, and leave most rules in place, and monitor how the game proceeds and iterate accordingly. But first, it’s helpful to name the game and explode the myth that it’s ‘natural’ and not the outcome of policy preferences (good and bad).
This, IMO, is the game it names… and best to look at it full on.
“More importantly, neoliberalism incentivized specific modes of wealth generation that brought about a “fissured economy,” and the resulting changes in corporate and investor behavior are arguably the most profound and enduring effects of the neoliberal revolution. These changes underlie both the loss of strategic supply chains and the explosion of inequality, and it is only by addressing these issues that post-neoliberal industrial strategy can be successful in achieving its policy goals. Moreover, to avoid the conventional partisan polarization that sets, say, student-loan borrowers against displaced Rust Belt manufacturing workers, it is necessary to grasp the phenomena that contributed to both outcomes.”
But yes, I completely agree that making changes, any changes can break things and outcomes could be better in some areas and worse in others. BUT — I’d rather acknowledge that the game we’re currently playing isn’t openly acknowledged.Report
You and I are very much in agreement, especially about the point of rules producing outcomes, as a contrast to totalizing theories. What I wonder is whether our political elites are in a place where they can have this kind of conversation in the nuanced way it requires. Of course maybe naming that which we are trying to discuss really is the first step.Report
Neo-liberalism is a bunch of things:
1. Largely dead;
2. Morphed into a vague term for “thing I do not like” over a specific set of policies and beliefsReport
Saul, comments like this are a bunch of things:
1. Largely made by people who didn’t read the article or comments
2. Morphed into vague second points that are more wrong than a specific sort of stupid.Report
Okay. The insta-cleanup of San Francisco for Xi’s visit.
I’ve seen a number of takes on this. The usual ones are some variant of “they could have always done this, it could always have been this secure… but they voted for decay!”
I think that this seriously overstates what’s true. The counter-criticism that should be familiar to all of us is “they only fixed the superficial problem… THEY DIDN’T ADDRESS THE ROOT CAUSES!”
I’m pretty sure that most folks wouldn’t agree what the “root causes” consist of. Maybe two or three of the high notes (“racism”, “capitalism”, “entropy”) but once you get granular, you’ll see that most of the criticisms are variants of the pet issues of the people explaining that the temporary solution is not a permanent solution.
Granted, this does not get into how freakin’ funny it is that San Francisco is a Potemkin Village in the current year.
Anyway, Newsome will show off his Potemkin Village to Xi, Xi will smile and nod and visit a surprisingly chill Chinatown, and then we’ll be back to business by Christmas Eve.
Clean streets for Xi but not for thee.
I understand that this will not fix the long term problem, but there seems to be a level at which this is like not solving the problem of barnacles.
Yes, periodically they need to be cleaned off.
This does not mean that cleaning them off is meaningless.
Sisyphean, maybe… but not meaningless.Report
Well crap. The story the governor is giving undercuts some of the counter-messaging.
Report
I work in Chinatown in San Francisco. I am here literally five days a week. It is chill without any homeless or other visible disorders beyond tourists.Report
Surely there isn’t a different amount of squalor in Chinatown than there is a few blocks away.Report
Troll gonna troll. I was downtown recently a bit for two depositions. Are there homeless people? Yes. Do some of them possibly suffer from mental illness? Also yes. Is it a violent hellscape like the Warriors or Escape from New York? No. It was very quiet and peaceful.Report
The Hellscape narrative must be fed and maintained.
That you and I live in these places don’t make no nevermind, they know it is a Hellscape dammit.Report
No doubt. Even your governor is talking about how nice San Francisco is!Report
There are like literally only 1 or 2 homeless people in downtown San Francisco. Most are in the Tenderloin. The Pro-Palestinian demonstrations that happen on Montgomery are more annoying.Report
” Is it a violent hellscape ”
exactly as much of a violent hellscape as the suburbs where you see “TRUMP” stickers on large trucks, I supposeReport
I was in SOMA for a week in Sept. My observation compared to previous years was that the ratio seemed higher owing to fewer folks walking about; but the biggest difference to me was qualitative where very, maybe even extremely, able bodied men outnumbered the crazy, bedraggled, and crazy bedraggled female homeless.
I’d guess the numbers were about the same(?), but the experience was worse for the reasons cited above. Not that it stopped me walking daily over a mile back and forth… but SF has lost a lot of its chill vibe. It feels like its on the edge of making it; but maybe not.Report
Work from home is still pretty big in the Bay Area and while there are tons of stories about tech CEOs stating “we need to get butts back into the office”, I would say there are more small or medium sized firms that decided that they could save money by having smaller offices and most people remote. I had a depo at a mid-sized lawfirm that decided to have a smaller office with two conference rooms and a bunch of attorney or general hotdesksReport
Yes, HQ can’t fit everyone in the office anymore so people rotate by department on assigned days. That’s the thing, right? Cities need a superabundance of normie squares to offset the crazy and provide a big enough herd to act as a buffer. A lubricant of humanity keep the wheels of the city spinning.Report
“The chillest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”Report
Then global warming happened.Report
Look who may need to work with Democrats to pass a clear CR bill: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/us/politics/house-shutdown-plan.htmlReport
Let’s see if Mike Johnson puts country over party.Report
One of these things is still not like the other:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/13/opinions/republicans-us-credit-rating-moodys-avlon/index.htmlReport
Good news on the inflation front, and the stock market is responding accordingly. Of course, that’s merely reality, and can be easily dismissed because people are notoriously inaccurate about their own perceptions of inflation, wage growth, and the like.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/14/business/cpi-inflation-fedReport
Alright, the IDF has made a lot of progress in Gaza, and seized full control of Rantisi Children’s Hospital, and now can fully expose Hamas’ evil in building tunnels under hospitals and command centers out of them.
…
Okay, it turns out they didn’t have tunnels under _this_ hospital, but we have searched the place, and have discovered a bunch of evidence they, uh, kept hostages here! Like…
…the basement had baby bottles and children’s toys in, and milk in the fridge! There was a makeshift bathroom and kitchen down there also! There’s a lot of evidence of people down here!
*crowd grumbles*
…yes, fine, it is a children hospital that was under assault and full of people taking shelter, but um…
…look, here’s a calendar with a list of terrorist names written on it for the days they took a shift! We will hunt down and destroy every single one of these terrorists…why are you laughing?
…okay, it turns out the stuff written on the calendar is actually the names of the days of the week in Arabic, and we just swore vengeance against Tuesdays, but give us a break, how were we to know any of you stenographers would be able to read Arabic? I mean, uh, how we were to know what it said?
But look, there were curtains covering a tiled wall, which is, uh…a way you keep hostages…
*sigh*, yes, okay, that’s not a way to keep hostages, has nothing even logically connected to hostages, and also it’s clearly just a backdrop for video conferences that the hospital did in the basement before it was full of refugees. Also, yes, we don’t seem to have any of those hostage videos we say could have been made there.
*looks behind, worried* Guys, where’s the real evidence?
Ah ha! Look, there’s a rope near this chair! And hostages are _tied up_. That’s real evidence! Can’t explain why a rope would be there, can you?! Hospitals aren’t known for using ropes, are they? *quickly checks* HA, no, they are not! Indisputable evidence!
Oh, also, we also found this room full of guns laid out of on a table! Look at that! A clear Hamas operation!
…okay, a lot of you seem to be talking, so let’s address this one of at a time.
First, no, of course we didn’t just carry these guns in and put them on a table. The idea is absurd, we’d never do anything like that…stop laughing…I know we’ve done stuff like that before, but this is serious!
Secondly, a few of you seem confused as to why the guns and everything would have been left here when all the hostages were removed, and how the hostages were removed through the IDF surrounding the place, and what on earth this has to do with hostages at all.
Does it matter? There were GUUUUUNS. Right there. You can all see them. We took a lot of pictures.
…no, of course it’s legal under international law to assault hospitals because there are guns there. That made it a military objective.
I mean, sorta. Okay, that’s not a very good reason, in fact, it’s hard to see how recovering a dozen guns could be a proportional gain to a military operating that killed a _single_ civilian, much take over a children’s hospital thus directly threatening the lives of hundreds of children…
Hey, we found a tunnel! It’s…okay, it’s about two football fields away in someone’s house, and, no, we can’t tell you where it leads because…locked door in it! But it must got to the hospital!
…yes, I know we said it was a Hamas _command center_, and the claims that it is instead used to hold hostages is an entirely different claim and the evidence appears to be literally nonexistence besides ‘People appear to have been living in the basement’, but…we were allowed to bomb it, pinky swear.
—
You know what, to be honest about all this, I’m going to post a link to the lies:
https://twitter.com/oliveblogs/status/1724175096242143716
Watch that video. Watch the nonsense. How ‘tunnel under this guy’s house’ is magically turned into ‘So it must go over here to the hospital, and also there are some guns there’. The ‘Raw footage’ that does not bother to document the actual ‘You can get to the hospital through the tunnel’, and it fact it sounds like _they didn’t actually check that_. (Or, at least, didn’t check it at the time of making the video, which means they aren’t technically ‘lying’ if they, you know, check it later, discover it doesn’t, and don’t bother to tell anyone.)
Is there any point in this process where we actually start acknowledging the lies that the IDF tells about why they are bombing civilians?
Also, not really related but, that ‘tunnel entrance’ is clearly an elevator. You can see the guiderail, the counterweights next to it, it’s also why the ladder is way set back under the lip.
Now, I guess that could be a Hamas elevator, but the super-odd thing is that the guy explaining this doesn’t mention that it’s an elevator. It would be extremely clear, standing there. There’s no way to miss that. There would be an elevator at the bottom, for one thing!
Why is he not mentioning that? I dunno.Report
With where the IDF’s collective head is at, it’s very possible for them to look at service entrances and see tunnels. I think it’s clear they intend to ignore human shields, both Gazan and Jewish, and destroy Hamas.
When they calm down a bit, maybe with Biden’s poking, we should see some more restrained behavior and Hamas will have to work a little harder to get civilians killed.Report
CNN has a reporter embedded in the IDF.
Supposedly this is pretty raw. Might be what you were talking about but I can’t see yours on X (might be me or it might have been taken down).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP6raWKH7DA
As for the rest, shrug. It’s early footage. The key thing to take away is CNN has a reporter embedded in the IDF and they’re making claims about what they expect to find tunnel-wise and might have found in the basement of a hospital.
More data is better than less and we’ll have the chance to check what is claimed + found latter to this.Report
That is the exact same claims as in https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1724169252054188276
You will notice a) a bunch of stuff that literally just shows people living in the basement, which the hospital points out people were doing to take shelter, b) stuff that would be incredibly easy to carry in and also is incredibly weak, like ‘Look at these old guns’, and c) a tunnel down (which, again, is _clearly an elevator_ and it is very weird no one is mentioning that.) that…is vaguely asserted to maybe go in the direction of the hospital, although that we don’t actually see evidence of it.
There is no actual evidence there, at all.
In fact, there’s a lot of stuff they keep showing (At least, in both videos they’ve made of this) that isn’t even _pretending_ to be evidence of anything. “Look at these roof solar panels, and then look, they have power going down to the bottom of this shaft! This is important for me to document when proving Hamas!” “Um…is powered lighting some uniquely _Hamas_ concept in your universe, because, over in America, most areas of constructed buildings have power running to them to operate lights. Why are you spending time on this? Also, why are you pretending that’s not clearly an elevator, which itself would require power anyway?”
I don’t want to go over, again, how the IDF have repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be liars, but even _if_ we assume those guns and ‘rope near a chair’ and ‘a dress’ (?) were already there, this is _amazingly_ thin.
I really like the split second line of ‘This was the Hamas armory here’ of…an empty space with some children’s posters on the walls. Looks like an armory to me, I guess.
Again, before they took control of this place they claimed it was a Hamas HQ.
You know, they could _easily_ demonstrate something here by showing that that tunnel actually ran in to the hospital. Or even find the door at the hospital end. Weird they haven’t bothered to do that yet, they’ve literally had control of this place and posted the first video about it _checks Twitter timestamp_ 3:55 PM Nov 13 EST, so 34 hours at this point.Report
RE: There is no actual evidence there, at all.
Hamas supposedly has spent Billions of dollars building tunnels rather than infrastructure. Here is a tunnel with solar panels where hospitals depend on Israel for power.
The really, really, good news is Israel is starting to care about what other countries think about all this. Even if their evidence is thin for this specific basement, caring about international opinion (hopefully) means they will be backing off on the obvious overt war crimes.
Not just blowing up hospitals which everyone thinks are also military bases, things like refusing to send in food and water. All out war in Gaza is horrific enough.Report
I am not denying that is a Hamas tunnel entrance…it clearly is. Hamas has a _huge_ network of tunnels. It is utterly massive, and really far down…in fact, that’s why that’s an elevator, the tunnels are often 160 feet down. That is how Hamas operates, it has tunnels under everything. Mostly because Israel will bomb anything it sees.
(Although…if you’re trying to say that the hospital should have those solar panels and not the tunnels and Hamas is wasting resources…hospitals require a lot more power than tunnel lighting, those solar panels are pretty small, and a lot of buildings in Gaza do, indeed, have solar panels on them already and it’s entirely possible the hospital does, like it has a generator.)
I am saying ‘This tunnel does not connect _to the hospital_, and thus is absurd justification for attacking _the hospital_. Indeed, lack of connection to the tunnel system makes it incredibly unlikely hostages were held there.’
Actually, here’s a fun question: If the Hamas tunnels hooked to the hospital, why wouldn’t they be getting power _from the hospital_ instead of solar panels that could be spotted? Hospitals, after all, need to have power 24/7, no one finds it suspicious, and considering how small that solar panel it, Hamas tunnels clearly don’t need much power. Easy enough to siphon some off.
If anyone was actually calling them out about any of their claims, sure, but they aren’t. And for the record, the evidence isn’t ‘thin’. The evidence is just outright lies.
And they aren’t stopping. The IDF is currently in control of Al-Shifa Hospital…and in fact were shooting at it from tanks. This is not to be confused with the place they didn’t bomb at the start of this, Al-Ahli, getting a lot of people upset at the Very Obvious Slander That Israel Would Attack Hospitals…but, the IDF did, in fact, shoot at Al-Shifa last Friday to no fanfare…and lied about it until the New York Times called them out: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-al-shifa-hospital.html
But they finished that, and last I heard, the IDF were sorta wandering aimless through the hospital, demanding that all young men surrender themselves so Israel can figure out if they’re Hamas, which is…a strange thing to have to do. Why don’t they just go down to the Hamas areas? The big bunker that Israel built under the hospital, the one we’ve been assured repeatedly was Hamas HQ?
Honestly, this is actually looking a little worse for Israel than even I assumed,…I assumed they would at least find evidence that Hamas was there, considering Hamas have used it for meeting before, I though maybe Hamas actually were using _this_ hospital and assumed they had hooked it into the tunnel system, (Which doesn’t excuse the IDF attacking others, or shooting at this one), but…it sounds like Israel is sorta scrambling when it turns out that’s not true…
Oh, oh, this just in: The IDF says they have found ‘Hamas weapons’, unspecified, inside the hospital. (Not…in the bunker?) Just…found some ‘weapons’ in an active war zone, huh? And magically figured out they were Hamas, eh? Are…you going to tell us what sort of weapons?
Luckily, journalists were there to document this…oh, all the journalists were arrested and removed before this. Um, okay.
In in the end, what is going to happen is that Israel is going to vaguely wave a bunch of rusted guns that they _say_ were in the basement of hospitals, and the US is going to pretend a) their claims are true, and b) that this justified Israel’s actions.Report
If Hamas were a normal army trying to follow normal rules, then you’d have real points. Instead what we have is everyone knowing and admitting that Hamas hides behind it’s civilians, and we’re just wondering if Israel was correct, incorrect, or just lying about this specific instance.
My read on this is Israel has bad intel (and there’s going to be lots of bad intel) and their checking isn’t that great. They see what they want to and act accordingly. They’re filled with rage and it’s affecting their judgement.
Unfortunately we can’t tell the difference between Israel behaving badly and Hamas behaving normally.
Israel is obligated to make some effort to bomb Hamas and not civilians. If they get it wrong some of the time, or even a lot of the time, we’re still stuck with it being Hamas’ fault.
They’ve made it hard to tell the difference. Every civilian death is a victory for them, this is what they wanted.Report
I am aware that is a thing _you_ ‘know’, but it is also a thing that is not actually true. All that stuff you ‘know’ isn’t true.
Hamas is a guerrilla warfare resistance movement, and hence is often indistinguishable from the population. They don’t live in barracks, they go home at night.
Is this legal under the laws of war? Yes, actually, as long as they clearly distinguish themselves _while actively in combat_ by openly carrying arms and insignia. There is no rule requiring soldiers to walk around in uniform at other times, although they should be aware they may forfeit certain POW protection if they are captured while not. (Which Hamas doesn’t care about, as Israel doesn’t treat them as POWs anyway. Which is weird, because, if Gaza is truly an independent country, and Hamas is truly the government there, uh…Palestine has signed Geneva, as has Israel.)
That does not mean they are _hiding behind_ civilians. There’s almost no evidence they locate _operations_ deliberately close to anything.
The actual problem there is that Israel has a tendency of firing rockets blindly, so ‘close to’ is often ‘within a quarter mile’.
Hamas is not required to stand in open fields with flashing arrows pointing at them.
…I’m actually not wondering that. Israel doesn’t even have the concept of ‘correct’, they just do whatever they want and then do ‘hasbara’, which is roughly ‘coming up with explanations to justify Israel’s actions’.Report
RE: There’s almost no evidence they locate _operations_ deliberately close to anything.
NATO, the EU, the US, the UN, Israel, various other countries, various Palestinian factions, and various factions of Hamas itself all disagree with you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_human_shields_by_HamasReport
Pssst: What’s the very first claim made in that article:
In the latter, Israel has presented evidence alleging that Hamas placed parts of its command network and military tunnel systems under civilian infrastructure, including Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital,[11][12] and stored weapons under the Al-Rantisi Hospital.[13][14][15][16]
Interesting, because we seem to be standing here and not seeing that claim. In fact, we were literally just talking about how the Rantisi was an incredibly weak claim of ‘a few guns and a rope’ and the other two are links to thing that Israel claims they will find under Al-Shifa, not things anyone has found under it.
In fact, a hell of a lot of the allegations are ‘Hamas has placed a command center under Al-Shifa’, that is literally the entire basis of their claims. And I don’t think I need to point out how the entire claim falls apart when it comes out that fact isn’t true. Because that command center has not shown up. This is a bunch of people making assertions and coming to legal conclusions based on entirely bogus information supplied by Israel.
And the rest of it is nonsense like ‘Let’s all pretend military tunnels that pass under civilian things are illegal’, which if actually true, would be news to a hell of a lot of governments. Washington DC is riddled with tunnels.
Hamas has said that it launches attacks from 200-300 meters away, which in a sane world is more than enough separation for military operations from a civilian population, and the actual problem is that Israel thinks it has the right to destroy Hamas with vaguely aimed massive overkill missiles. Likewise, Israel thinks it has the right to bomb anything above military tunnels. These are not actually rights, and you don’t have a right to magically have ‘good places to kill enemy forces’, they are not actually required to stand around in the open with signs when you are aerial bombarding them.
Guerrilla warfare being waged via tunnels against a long-entrenched enemy that is supported by a local population is a horrific NIGHTMARE of a war *cough*Vietnam*cough* and gets even worse in urban areas, and might in fact be a literally unwinnable war, but that fact doesn’t give people the right to commit war crimes. I would suggest countries don’t _fight_ unwinnable wars and attempt any method to figure out some sort of peace, instead of constant provocation, but what do I know?
Fundamentally, Israel wants to wage a way but never put any of their forces in danger, and they are doing it by dangerous over-bombing, and this is _exactly the situation that the laws of war were written to cover_…you don’t get to project death at vague ‘the enemy (and a bunch of civilians) are over there’. You have to actually show up and sort out who is who, actually have some discernment in targeting, and Israel has literally none.
Speaking of ‘Israel wants to never put their forces in danger’, you did catch that link to the articles about how Israel has used human shields, and that isn’t actually debatable… the IDF literally _went to court_ trying to justify their use of _forcing Palestinians, including children_, to participate in military operations with the idea that other Palestinians would not hurt them. Which is _actually_ what the war crime of ‘using human shields’ is, not ‘set up a fairly large distance away from a school but Israel is indiscriminate in its attacks and one of them went off course and hit it’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_shield#Use_by_IsraelReport
The footage we’re seeing in hospitals shows less of a presence than Israel claimed but still a presence.
RE: Israel human shields
Yes. To be fair the scale of this seems a lot less.
RE: Overbombing
Not a bad summation.
I suspect they’ll dial the brutality down to just barely legal and then keep it there for as long as they need to, which might be years.
RE: Peace
Israel will kick out N and the right wing. The Left will make the same offer they made in 2008.
We’ll find out that Hamas doesn’t want peace at all and might reasonably take over the West Bank. We’ll also find out that high-ranking Fatah officials are promising a full, literal Palestinian right of return into Israel because it’s what their people want.
The war may not be winnable, but I’m not sure peace is an option.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_peace_process#Difficulties_with_past_peace_processesReport
It is perfectly legal for members of a military force to use civilian hospitals as hospitals, and even remained armed while doing so. That is not a military use of the hospital, military use requires ‘acts harmful to the enemy’ at bare minimum, and healing people, even soldiers, is not that…it’s specifically excluded from that.
Hell, even if the _hostages_ were treated there, that is not a military use. That would be a completely surreal rule, a law of war barring the medical treatment of hostages. You are actually _required_ to care for hostages you have, which again is not an act harmful the enemy…it’s literally the opposite.
And I think we’re already having some sort of mental revisionism as to the level of Hamas operations that Israel was claiming, with a massive underground complex that was Hamas central hub and was directing everything out of. They had 3-D maps, they had normal maps with red areas highlighted, they claimed this was the most important thing ever to justify attacking a hospital.
And they found…a few weapons in the hospital, apparently (Which incidentally does not mean _Hamas_, civilians can indeed have weapons.), and a good chunk of the weapons were in a truck on the parking lot, and I remind people: Trucks move, and the fact a truck was sitting there does not a Hamas HQ make. (And I also remind people that Israel lies and we have basically no evidence Israel didn’t put that truck there, but I don’t think any of you are ready for that.)
Absolutely none of the Israeli claims about what would be found in the hospital were true, and they don’t get to scale all that down to ‘a few guns’. Not only is that massively moving the goal posts, but it also means their attack and occupation of a hospital were completely and utterly illegal under international law, because ‘a few guns laying around’ do not somehow revoke the protection that hospitals operate under.Report
Oh, and it’s not even just ‘attack the hospital’. They are occupying it, they have allowed patients to die due to lack of power and supplies, and they eventually kicked everyone else.
No.
If Israel wants to occupy a hospital, or at least the land that a hospital sits on, they can do that under international law. Countries at war seize parts of other countries, becoming ‘occupying forces’, and often those parts include hospitals.
And those occupying forces have an obligation to not only interfere in medical treatment as little as possible, but the onus is now on _them_ to provide supplies, if they can’t be got other ways. They have to provide power for medical care, they have to provide medical supplies, they have to provide food, they have to provide, in worse case, _medical personnel_.
You absolutely do not, under any circumstances, get to seize a hospital and _shut it down_. Even if it did somehow lose its protected status so you could attack it…once you did, and _win_ control of it, congratulations, you now OWN A HOSPITAL. It’s your job, as an occupying force, to run it, or at least to make sure it can keep functioning.
Granted, Israel has _never_ believed it had to do things it was required to do as an occupying force.Report
And…it turns out that bunker that everyone knew was there, and Israel was fully expecting to find…was cemented over a long time ago.
Whoops. There go all the plans to actually to show at least _one_ Hamas bunker under a hospital, and sorta muddle everyone’s brain into thinking _all_ the claims weren’t lies.
Israel is desperately trying to claim it was cemented over in the last three days, which is an absurd thing to have happened, especially considering how hard concrete actually is to get in Gaza any more thanks to a decade of it being mostly blockaded.Report
And, in other news….Pastor John Hagee, notable famous antisemite and also Netanyahu ally and ‘supporter’ of Israel (In the sense he want it to exist so it can cause Biblical endtimes), will be speaking at at the March for Israel rally today in DC.
I am sure certain people here, who have been freaking out because sometimes random pro-Palestine anti-Zionism college kids at demonstrations sometimes wandered into vague antisemitism, will be just as upset by the Jewish Federation and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations have decided invite a man who has asserted that Hitler was sent by God to drive Jews back to the only home that God intended for them.Report
Hagee is an ulcer, and his presence is a natural consequence of the tendency of the pro-Israel Center and Right to use sentiment about Israel as a better proxy for anti-Semitism than actual anti-SemitismReport
New Loonie just dropped:
Report
I hate it. Getting old sucks.Report
You’ll have William on there before you know it.Report
I’ll hate that less but when it happens I’ll still be grumbling about how the Queen was the best.Report
Looks like he’s got that early aughts spikey wet hair thing going.Report
It’s not my job to criticize Canada, but that is _way_ too big.Report
House passes CR bill with 209 Democrats and 127 Republicans. How long before Johnson faces a motion to vacate?Report
I’m rather surprised that Republicans realize a shut down is bad news and needs to be avoided or at least enough of them do.Report
Of Colorado’s three Republicans, the one that voted for the CR is the one who would be going home on the weekend for the ten-day Thanksgiving recess and facing five military facilities worth of personnel not getting paid.Report
Hastert Rule a thing of the past.
Good.Report
127 Republicans is a majority of the conference, which conforms to the Hastert rule.Report
I thought you needed more Republicans than Democrats!
With this many loopholes, who needs rules at all?Report
so this is a very interesting dynamic. The Freedom Caucus voted as a block to say no, the House has been taking up but not passing actual approps bills, and anything that comes back to the floor in the House and gets to the Senate likely won’t get passed anyway. and the CR’s end right before Primary season starts. The calculus seems off . . . . which usually means I’m missing something.Report
The Federalist goes all in on the “Trump is an innocent victim of pollitical persecution and so its OK to do the same!” defense:
WaPo, New York Times Make Dumb Fake News Out Of Very Perfect, Very True Trump Quote[ed note- notice how they all start to talk like him? WTF?]
He was accurately describing the logical consequence of criminalizing political opposition. When the party in power falls out of it, they’re vulnerable just the same.
That’s called payback, and no doubt Trump and his supporters want it. But let’s not leave out the details of how we got here. That’s the most interesting part of the story.
Sure. This all makes sense if you believe Trump is innocent of the 91 indictments.Report
The Stormy thing approaches innocence. I really wish they’d just drop that one.Report
Chris Rufo, call your office. Parents are exercising their rights:
A school district in the conservative town of Sherman, Texas, made national headlines last week when it put a stop to a high school production of the musical “Oklahoma!” after a transgender student was cast in a lead role.
…
But then something even more unusual happened in Sherman, a rural college town that has been rapidly drawn into the expanding orbit of Dallas to its south. The school district reversed course. In a late-night vote on Monday, the school board voted unanimously to restore the original casting.
…
The board’s vote came after students and outraged parents began organizing. In recent days, the district’s administrators, seeking a compromise, offered to recast the students in a version of the musical meant for middle schoolers or younger that omitted solos and included roles as cattle and birds. Students balked.
After the vote, the school board announced a special meeting for Friday to open an investigation and to consider taking action against the district superintendent, Tyson Bennett, who oversaw the district’s handling of “Oklahoma!,” including “possible administrative leave.”
Suddenly, improbably, the students had won.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/us/trans-actor-oklahoma-sherman-texas.htmlReport
RE: offered to recast the students in a version of the musical meant for middle schoolers or younger that omitted solos and included roles as cattle and birds
Bhahahahaha. Well, if you don’t want adult roles, then that’s where you are at.
Good for them.Report
As someone who has been involved in high school and amateur theatre, that’s the sort of thing that causes an entire theatre program to walk to out.
It is really interesting to watch how because no one pays attention to school board elections or even the actions of schools, extreme reactionaries can be elected to those things or pressure them into doing stupid extremist things…
…which immediately themselves cause huge backlash among more normal people.
And it really is funny to watch nonsense like this, where someone learns exactly one fact like ‘A trans boy has been cast as a man in the local high school play’ and runs screaming to the school about it, and clearly doesn’t know basic high school theatre facts like ‘High school theatre (and amateur, and even professional to some extent) theatre have _way_ more female actors than male actors just at a general level, despite a good chunk of plays being written the other way around, so _actual_ female actors get cast in male roles all the time.’.Report
This is the best neutral summation of the current Israel v Palestinian conflict that I’ve seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5tcwIicICg
Lots to like, dislike, and learn for everyone.Report
Stop everything! Berkshire County (in Massachusetts) has released an open letter calling for a ceasefire!
Has *YOUR* county sent an open letter yet?Report
I would have a lot more respect for these letters/calls if they were suggesting Hamas surrender and not that Israel should pull back and let Hamas launch more terror attacks.Report
If Texas intends to secede they should just say so and suffer the consequences. Otherwise they really need to stop doing stuff like this:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/15/politics/texas-border-billReport
I see nothing which prevents state or local level law enforcement from enforcing federal laws. This is basic civics on how our system works.
The state can, in theory, pass a law which says “the state will enforce federal laws”, but I see no reason for them to do so because that’s already the case.
1) Illegal immigrants are illegal.
2) Yes, the federal gov sets these laws, so they’re illegal under federal law.
3) Local law enforcement is allowed to enforce local, state, and federal laws, but only over their local jurisdiction. State law enforcement is allowed to enforce state and federal, but again only over their state jurisdiction.Report
https://tracfed.syr.edu/tracker/dynadata/2012_09/R41423.pdf
Call me a simpleton, but those conditions don’t exist in this case.Report
IANAL, but I seem to recall that neither a local DA nor a state AG can prosecute someone in state or local court for violations of federal law, nor can they file a criminal case in a federal court. At some point “enforce” has to turn into “prosecute” or you’re just harassing people.Report
Hmm… we’re getting close to dancing on a pin here. This state is trying to outlaw something which the feds have already outlawed. Federal law trumps state, but the feds don’t want to enforce their own law.Report
The feds are enforcing their own laws. Interceptions continue to rise, deportations follow; sometimes asylum claims bear out. The feds are doing everything they can with t he resources they have.
Texas has no authority over immigration unless the feds ask them to do so. They don’t like that – they can try to leave. Which didn’t work out well the last time states of the union committed treason.
OR
They can make sure Washington has the funds – via taxes – they need to do even more enforcement. Since Texas isn’t advocating for that . . . .Report
RE: Texas has no authority over immigration unless the feds ask them to do so.
That flies in the face of my high school civics classes. Local & state law enforcement can enforce federal laws.
So they can round people up, hand them over to the federal courts, and watch as they’re released. If that’s unacceptable, then states could also outlaw the crime and have state courts get involved.
Isn’t that’s pretty similar to how we handle murder? If the Feds want to handle it then they can but mostly it’s the states that deal with it.
What I’m pointing out is from a process point of view, what Texas is trying to set up isn’t crazy.Report
Protests in front of the DNC HQ in DC.
Maybe next week, being Thanksgiving, will be calmer.Report
So, you’re thinking resentment and stupidity will disappear by the weekend, then by Tuesday or Wednesday they’ll have read enough history to realize how wrong they are?Report
They can come back the week after.
At which point it will be legal to drive them back with “All I Want For Christmas Is You”.Report
Legal, maybe, but just?Report
Legal? Who can say?
Ask two lawyers what the law is and get three answers.Report
So, can get a second vote to expel?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/16/politics/ethics-committee-releases-santos-reportReport
The “There’s a HAMAS HEADQUARTERS UNDER THE HOSPITAL!” looks to have been a dud.
I mean, one one level I have sympathy for Israel on this.
Like, imagine: Two identical restaurants. Same floorplans. Front room with a bar and tables and a couple of booths, a back room suitable for wedding rehearsal dinners, corporate events, and holiday parties, a kitchen, a storage room, and a back office with a couple of desks, couple of file cabinets, and a whiteboard with some various restaurant-related writing on it.
If I were to tell you that one of these two restaurants was used by mafiosos to engage in conspiracy and vice in the back room, how would you be able to tell which one of these restaurants was an HQ for the mob if you locked down the restaurant and had 100% access to everything?
Now, let’s get to the nut of the problem, Like, imagine: Two additional identical restaurants. Same floorplans. Neither one of these restaurants is used by the mafia. Fat Giovanni ate at the second one once. Thought it was okay. How would you tell the difference between these two sets of two restaurants?
I submit: You can’t.
I mean, maybe you could hope for one of the mafia guys to go from the back room to the office and write “CLOSE THE RESTAURANT FOR MAINTENANCE ON WEDNESDAY THE 21ST— WE ARE GOING TO BE WHACKING FAT GIOVANNI” on the whiteboard but the mafia guy will most likely not be doing this.
To even a trained investigator, both restaurants will appear identical.
Because a bunch of guys sitting around and talking about stuff is a bunch of guys sitting around talking about stuff and that presents identically to a Rotary Meeting.
So even if you’re 100% certain that Hamas used the hospital as an HQ (as I am)… there ain’t gonna be anything that looks like “proof” of that in the basement. “We found a room. People sat in it! They ate food! There was a wall calendar!”
And it’s one thing to be certain that they used it as an HQ and to be able to prove that in a court of law and there’s a greater difference between proving it in a court of law and proving it in the court of public opinion.
Which means that the Hamas HQ in the hospital basement is a dud.Report
Check out this headline!
Arrest made in death of Jewish protester who fell and hit his head.
Someone chose this headline. Someone put it there. What other decisions is this person in charge of? Do they pick which news stories get printed or don’t get printed?Report
Whew, they’ve changed it. “Arrest made in death of Jewish protester in California after confrontation over Israel-Hamas war”
That still ain’t perfect but we are no longer in “What the hell?” territory.Report
Didn’t this already happen in the first reporting of the event, and didn’t they change that one too?
I mean, I get that you open yourself up to a libel suit if your headline claims someone committed a crime and they’re later found not guilty, but there certainly seems to be no problem with saying “alleged right-wing mass shooter arrested in death of protestor”…Report
Yes. It has happened multiple times.
Keep this sort of thing in mind whenever you see someone complain about political commentary instead of accurate reporting. This is the ocean we swim in. Notice the water.Report
Israeli masterminds set up a psy-op attack against principled Palestinian protestors, undercutting the work they’re doing:
Report
Can we please arrest people deliberately stopping traffic?
Oh good, they already did. 80 people taken into custody and 15 cars towed.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/dozens-of-protesters-stop-traffic-on-bay-bridge/3373428/Report
I’m pretty sure that making people sit on the only bridge between the East Bay and San Francisco for three and half hours is going to make people very sympathetic towards the Palestinian cause. Surely they will think that if Israel was not fighting a war against Hamas, we would be driving peacefully and therefore it is the fault of the evil settler-colonialists of Israel that my morning commute sucks.
This is sarcasm for those who don’t understand it and read it in the future.
The Pro-Israel strategy of having a few large and well planned protests that do their best not to disrupt people is the better strategy.Report
Protest, by its nature, is not about making people comfortable.Report
I imagine that most protestors want to effect positive change rather than get people angry at them. Pro-Palestinian activists seem to be doing their best to piss everybody who doesn’t see the world the exact same way they do off. Same with the climate activists that believe threatening the destruction of great works of art will get the world to do something.Report
My way of thinking is right. If people paid more attention to me they’d understand that and join me.
If they find out about me and still disagree then F’ em. They should be uncomfortable, and they will continue to be uncomfortable until I get what I want.Report
Much the same was said about blacks during the Montgomery bus boycott.Report
There are more than a few difference. The biggest one is that African-Americans during the Montgomery bus boycott were dealing with a domestic issue aimed at themselves. This meant that the people in charge had direct power to do something about the issue. The Pro-Palestinian protestors are dealing with a foreign affairs issue that the United States has indirect power over.Report
If these guys were boycotting the bridge, I’d probably applaud their ingenuity.Report
Boycott: I refuse to use your services unless you treat me right.
That’s vastly different from “I will physically prevent you from using those services until I get what I want”.
We’re in Tony Soprano territory.Report
I’m also relative sure that most normies are going to see the Pro-Palestinian activists as the Illinois you know what from Blues Brothers rather than righteous activists.Report
Shutting down transportation is moving past “protest” and into darker things.Report
Really? Seems to me to be an effective non-violent technique.Report
Well, it certainly does make people mad. And they’re definitely aware of the thing you want them to be aware of.Report
“Effective”.
What’s the goal? To get more support among San Franciscans for Palestine? To make Gavin Himself know how Californians feel about the problem in the Middle East? To demonstrate the violence inherent in the system when police officers show up and violently arrest people peacefully holding people captive against their will?Report
You’d have to ask the particular protestors at the particular protest. My observation is the goal differs from protest to protest.Report
So the technique is effective, we just don’t know whether it was effective here, in this particular case, because we don’t know what the protestors wanted?Report
we know its an effective technique. We know what these protestors wanted – it was on their banners an din their slogans. Whether it was effective in achieving their objectives is a “time will tell” sort of thing.Report
My experience is that disruptive techniques work only to the extent they have popular support among the people.
When there is widespread anger and a sense of injustice, disrupting the status quo can be very effective; If the majority of the people don’t share that, it can backfire.Report
This. Its why people get angry at the climate protestors threatening great works of art. Most people care about the art than the climate crisis. A lot of people do not see I/P like the protestors do. Many people see Hamas as a dangerous organization that needs to be dealt with.Report
So if there’s a ceasefire in two weeks, the die-in on the bridge worked?Report
Shutting down transportation for everyone means you’re doing a lot of really toxic things.
Women in labor can’t be driven to the hospital, people with medical emergencies can’t get help, the police and fire services are hindered.
If your “protests” are going to get people killed then I’m hard put to describe them as “non-violent”.
That’s the extreme, the expected result is vast amounts of economic damage. That damage will also result in various serious problems that are not well defined but are directly attributable to the “protest”.
This is economic hostage taking. You do what I want or I will prevent you from making a living.Report
how long have any of these shut downs lasted? Hours right? Sometimes minutes? And that’s economic hostage taking?
You know what violent protest really is? Krystal Nacht. Or running a car into a crowd of demonstrators in Virginia. Or using fire hoses and attack dogs on people walking across a bridge (who were, as I recall, also blocking traffic). People stopping traffic for 30 minutes with banners and chanting? That’s violent?
Wow you really have zero tolerance for free speech don’t you?Report
Minutes? For this example, the bridge was shut down for 5 hours and only opened when the cops arrested the “protesters”.
If you’re physically making me drop everything and put my life on hold to pay attention to you then it’s not “speech”.
Free speech implies an economic loss of zero on the people who are listening. If you’re imposing significant losses on me through your physical actions then you are imposing on my rights.
You wanting to talk shouldn’t mean I am forced to listen to you, much less that I am forced to restructure middle eastern politics so the Palestinians can commit mass murder without starting wars.Report
Things lefties think should be protected speech:
1. Interfering with the use of physical infrastructure.
2. Vandalism.
3. Teachers preaching their pet ideologies to a captive audience at taxpayer expense.
Things lefties do not think should be protected speech:
1. Actual political speech.Report
Link’s broke.Report
Whoops. It was a link to the Wikipedia page for Citizen’s United.Report
UCSF stated that the protests caused delays in transplant operations.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/ucsf-transplant-organs-delayed-bay-bridge-18496699.phpReport
Protest is not necessarily about making people uncomfortable.
As a side point, maybe on a deeper level, protest is about making the protestors feel more comfortable.Report
“I’m pretty sure that making people sit on the only bridge between the East Bay and San Francisco for three and half hours…”
I’m surprised anyone could tell the difference from normal commute traffic! (bah-DOOMP)Report
I just really don’t understand what the people demanding a ceasefire now are thinking. Believing that President Biden has the authority for some reason to get the Israeli government and Hamas to do his bidding is just foolish. America might have a lot of influence but that doesn’t mean we have feudal power. Israel and Hamas/the Palestinians have agency to.
The other thing is that a ceasefire is just a ceasefire, not a permanent peace. Hamas is still going to be Hamas. They will eventually launch another rocket barrage or kidnap some more hostages or even pull off another Simchat Torah massacre and the entire thing will start again. There isn’t going to be any permanent stop in the hostilities until Hamas is gone.
There is just so much fuzzy thinking angry magical undewear gnome thinking among Pro-Palestinian activists in the West that they are really bad allies.Report
It’s all emotional. If we stop the killing right now then everything will be fluffy bunnies.Report
I’m going between some believing what you think and others believing that Israeli response to Hamas is inherently wrong because reasons.Report
Imagine a world where Hamas took the music festival and kept going. The rockets worked and penetrated the iron dome. Iran got involved, Lebanon got involved, and Egypt got involved.
What percentage would still be calling for a ceasefire?
What percentage would be discussing how complicated decolonization is in practice compared to how bloodless it ought to be in theory?
That second percentage explains what some of them want.
Not all, of course. Not all.Report
Eight white students arrested for beating black student to death in Las Vegas:
https://www.fox5vegas.com/2023/11/15/las-vegas-police-arrest-8-suspects-murder-teens-beating-death/Report
Dead guy is white.
I only found pictures of two of the others but IDK what race they are. Not black.
At least four of them are being charged as adults, Gianni Robinson, Damien Hernandez, Treavion Randolph and Dontral Beaver.
They’re in Clark County School District… if we care, their minority enrollment is 80%. Probably more relevantly, 59% of students are “economically disadvantaged”.
Hmm… what does “economically disadvantaged” mean?
…gross family income at the time of application and the immediately preceding 2 years, fell below 150 percent of the federally recognized poverty level…
That level depends on how many people your family has, but it’s $45k for a family of 4 (i.e. poverty is $30k)Report
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/17/business/gas-prices-thanksgiving-inflation-oil/index.htmlReport
Regarding the whole bridge protest thing. Conor Friedersdork had a decent point:
The idiots on the bridge got arrested and nobody FREAKIN NOBODY said “this compounds the injustice!”
Instead, the responses run the gamut from “They got arrested? They’ll be home by suppertime” to “They got arrested? BFD. They’ll be home by suppertime.”Report
Sam Altman just got fired from OpenAI.
That ain’t a “he is eligible for rehire” kinda announcement.Report
Greg Brockman is stepping down as CEO (but he will apparently be staying with the company).
Yeah. This is either a sex scandal or really, really, really bad.Report
Wait. Never mind.
Report
Argentinian elected the controversial Miel as President. They are about to get an exercise in H.L. Mencken’s belief that democracy is “the theory that the voters know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.”Report