Open Mic for the week of 1/8/2024
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.
The Holland Tunnel Exit in Manhattan is being blocked by pro-Palestinian protestors.
After protestors blocked the Bay Bridge in San Francisco last November, we got our first ceasefire!Report
If you were trapped on I-5 because of the illegal acts of pro-Hamas protestors, you have legal rights for civil damages.Report
So some lawyer looking for clients says. I’d be interested in hearing the legal theory for such a claim.Report
In San Fransisco, they’ve started prosecuting the protestors who shut down the bridge on charges of (deep breath) “false imprisonment, refusing to comply with a peace officer, unlawful public assembly, refusing to disperse and obstruction of street, sidewalk or other place open to public”.
If I had to guess, I’d say that the legal theory would be that the falsely imprisoned can sue the false imprisoners for civil damages related to their own false imprisonment.
Maybe something about 42 U.S. Code § 1983?
Report
This guy is offering to represent the people stuck in traffic, not the protestors. The protesters can, of course, be prosecuted for a variety of things, though if the authorities go about it wrong they could, in turn, be sued by the protestors, but not by the people stuck in traffic. And the people stuck in traffic can’t use Section 1983 to sue the protestors because the protestors were private miscreants not acting under color of state law. Quite the contrary.
That’s all rather basic stuff.Report
So when it comes to:
Every person who … causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured
This is only talking about cops/authorities and not “every person”?
Golly!Report
You just… cut out the most important part there: ‘under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia.’
Were the protestors acting under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage?
Here… this explains how it is about suing state government employees for civil rights violations: https://libguides.law.umn.edu/c.php?g=125765&p=2893387#:~:text=Section%201983%20provides%20an%20individual,civil%20rights%20that%20already%20exist.Report
“subjects, or causes to be subjected” strike me as relevant words as well.
Especially the “or”.Report
I’m shocked, shocked that JB engaged in selective editing.
Well not that shocked.Report
“Every person who A, B, C, D, E, F, or G” got quoted as “Every person who … G”.
“Why didn’t you mention A, B, C, D, E, or F?”
And, let me point out, that that’s *AFTER* I put the full quotation out there.
Criminy.Report
Wha…? Those are… verbs. If any of people A, B, C, D, E, or F take action G or cause action G to happen.”
You edited it to say “If people… G.”
I mean, that’s the BEST I can come up with to make sense of this. And it still doesn’t make any sense.”
None of that changes the very clear, very explicit list of people the law applies to.
Did you read the link?Report
Okay.
… and so on.
Is that better?
So now we just have to hammer out whether these protesters qualify as being persons under any custom or usage.
I’m willing to argue that they are.Report
You may be willing to make that argument, but I would advise that you not do it on a contingency fee basis. It’s flat wrong, even legally frivolous.
All the talk about who or what is a “person” is entirely beside the point because the “person,” however defined, must act “UNDER COLOR OF LAW,” as I pointed out the first time.
“Under color of law” means that the “person” acts pursuant to legal authority. Years ago, there was a lively debate over whether you could bring a 1983 suit only when the defendant acted in accordance with state or local law or also when the defendant, though claiming the authority of state or local law, violated the law relied upon. That was resolved long before you were born in favor of the second view.
That usually means (with some rare exceptions) that the defendant must be a public officer of some kind, who has some legal authority to misuse. A few specific examples from actual cases: a police supervisor sexually assaults a subordinate whom he has legal authority to boss around can be sued under 1983 if he misuses that authority; a police officer who sexually assaults a colleague of equal rank, relying on his muscles rather than some supervisory authority, cannot. A student sexually abused by a school principal, who has legally-conferred supervisory authority, can sue under 1983; a student sexually assaulted by the school janitor, who has no authority over students, cannot.
Cops are given clubs, guns, and the authority to use them under proper circumstances. A cop who beats the crap out of a peaceful protester for no good reason can be sued under 1983 because he is misusing his authority as a cop. If the same cop beats up his wife because he thinks she is sleeping with his partner, he isn’t using or misusing his authority as a cop; he’s just a jealous thug and though he can be sued under state tort law for battery, he can’t be sued under 1983.
The traffic-blocking protestors had no legal authority to use or misuse and didn’t, and couldn’t, claim any. They were private persons with no business blocking the streets, subject to arrest for doing it. They did not act “under color of law.” So they can’t be sued under 1983, even though they are undoubtedly “persons.”
This is all pretty basic if you’re in the business of handling 1983 cases, as I have been for over three decades. There is no shame in not knowing such things if you’re not in the business. The only shame is aggressive ignorance.Report
But that’s not what it says. It doesn’t say “under color of law”. It says “under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage”.
Heck, half of the protestors are wearing safety vests of the kind favored by construction workers. Are employees of the DOT acting under color of “any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage”?Report
When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Statutes, ordinances, and regulations are plainly law by any definition “Custom or usage” is legalese for practices that, by long acceptance, have the force of law even though not formally enacted. Collectively, they are referred to in commonly-understood legal shorthand as the “color of law” requirement.
The protesters may have been wearing vests that look like DOT vests, but that no more confers the legal authority of DOT employees, such as it is, on them than wearing a fake police uniform confers on the impostor the legal authority of a cop.
Again, there’s no shame in not knowing what you’re talking about; the only shame is talking about what you don’t know.Report
Wait, so “under color of law” doesn’t apply to people impersonating law enforcement?
Holy cow, I thought it would.Report
You thought wrong. There’s even a case where a suspended policeman who tried to do (bad) cop things got out of a 1983 case because, having been suspended, he had no authority to use or misuse.Report
There’s even a case where a suspended policeman who tried to do (bad) cop things got out of a 1983 case because, having been suspended, he had no authority to use or misuse.
Wow. This system is pretty corrupt!
But this isn’t about the system protecting cops by any means necessary.Report
Corrupt? It’s the logical consequence of a principle, color of law, that has nothing to do with protecting cops, whose actions usually are under color of law.
And whatever bad things the suspended cop did can be addressed under other laws. If he beat someone up, he can be prosecuted criminally and sued civilly (under state law) for assault and battery. If he did other bad things, there are plenty of other laws that cover them. Just not 1983.Report
This unnamed case you’re referencing… was the cop prosecuted under any of these other laws?Report
That would have happened, if it did, after the decision was issued, so the decision doesn’t say and it would be lots of work to try to track down what was done, if anything, later.Report
Well, if I were the cop’s lawyer, I’d argue that he was already found innocent and this is double jeopardy.
And, you know, further undercut 42 U.S. Code § 1983.
Hey! Wait! QI was the response to that!
Like, that law was an attempt to reign in bad cops and QI fought against that!
Wow.Report
Wrong again. Leaving aside that this was a civil proceeding and, therefore, no jeopardy attached, he wasn’t found innocent of anything. He was found “guilty,” if you’ll pardon the expression, of not being a cop. And, therefore, his misdeeds were not committed under color of law. That’s all that was decided. That would not, for example, affect his civil or criminal liability for assault and battery, or any other crime or tort he might have committed. He just can’t be sued under 1983. But there are lots of other laws out there. No need to try to shoehorn every kind of misconduct into a 1983 case. Unless you just like the vibe in federal court better than the vibe in state court, or want the bad guy to pay your lawyer’s fees. I suspect that’s what drives a lot of attempts to “make a federal case” out of routine state law torts.Report
“Was he charged with ‘impersonation of an officer’?”
“No, because he is an officer.”
Funny how this stuff works out.Report
1. Don’t know.
2. He wasn’t, so it wouldn’t be a defense if someone bothered to charge him.
So how, exactly, did it work out?Report
if someone bothered to charge him
Ah.
Fair enough.Report
““Under color of law” means that the “person” acts pursuant to legal authority.”
this is some Sovereign Citizen shit right here bro
you’re a lawyer IN NEW YORK, I should think you’d be aware of New York State lawReport
I can read and understand your link; you can’t. “Under color of law” is not an element of the state-law crime of unlawful imprisonment. Any a**hole can do it. The very point of the crime is that the defendant has no right to imprison someone, no authority to use or misuse. “Under color of law” is, however, an element of a federal civil rights action under 1983.
Try again. Or, better yet, don’t.Report
is not an element of the state-law crime of unlawful imprisonment.
Oh, well then. I shouldn’t have asked “Maybe something about 42 U.S. Code § 1983?” and, instead, should have appealed to the law making unlawful imprisonment illegal.Report
Nothing wrong with asking whether some law you know little or nothing about might apply to some situation. That’s a way to learn things. If you really want to learn things rather than take and maintain silly positions and squabble with the folks who know better and can actually help you learn things.Report
My first stab at a law that might apply to false imprisonment was off the mark by quite a bit.
Does the New York State Law against Unlawful Imprisonment apply here?
Or, that may be the wrong question because I could see the answer being “only a judge could decide that”.
Is it obviously wrong to say that a reasonable judge could reasonably argue that a reasonable case could be made that this law applies and, therefore, won’t summarily dismiss the lawsuit?Report
Saul and Lee have addressed that at least as well as I could, and I will defer to them.Report
We have pivoted from “I will put a great deal of effort into proving you wrong” to “I will defer to others on this topic”.
That is answer enough for me.
Thank you.Report
Simple economy of effort. Why reinvent the wheel?Report
While it is clearly marketing/trolling and JB is clearly trolling, I don’t think the first amendment provides protection from civil liability per se. Part of civil disobedience is a willingness to suffer the consequences for your civil disobedience. There is a right to protest but not necessarily block traffic. A law protest would be holding it in an established public forum like a park, square, or street. It does not include blocking traffic on a bridge or front of a tunnel. So I can hypothetically see this scenario:
1. Mr. Jones is being raced to the hospital after a stroke or MI;
2. Protestors block the path;
3. Mr. Jones dies.
4. Ms. Jones sues the protestors for wrongful death.
All of this is highly speculative and there are other complications with regard to causation and damages but I think it is a clear enough theory of liability to overcome summary judgment. Of course, collecting damages against a diffuse group of protestors is another issue.Report
The prosecutors are going after protestors for “false imprisonment”.
Seriously. This is happening.
The falsely imprisoned might be able to make it past summary judgment going for a civil suit as the falsely imprisoned. (And, heck, I understand that people can win civil suits against people who beat criminal raps.)Report
I can see several torts that might come into play as a result of being stuck somewhere because protestors were blocking a transportation corridor. One would be the wrongful death scenario you played out above. There were donor organs in transportation to UCSF hospitals that were held up by the Bay Bridge protest. This is could also be grounds for a suit. False imprisonment is another potential law suit. If the initial blockade caused an accident that hurt people or damaged cars, there could be negligence or trespass in play.Report
Being willing to suffer the consequences of your civil disobedience might technically be part of it but I find that usually people just protest at suffering the consequences because their cause is just.Report
The protesters indeed do not have a First Amendment defense to some sort of state-law tort action. But for reasons set out above, there is no viable 1983 suit against them, even without considering the First Amendment.
I’d still be very interested in hearing about the legal theory this lawyer has in mind, if he has one.Report
Well, my take would be that since the prosecutors in San Francisco are going after the Bay Bridge protestors with such charges as “false imprisonment”. Here’s from the AP:
If the prosecutors can charge for “false imprisonment”, then I’d wager that those falsely imprisoned have a case that’ll make it past the first post.
Perhaps the argument is that the prosecutors are reaching and that particular charge is part of the “everything but the kitchen sink” plan.Report
I’d be interested in the take of the person who is considering bringing lawsuits, or someone else who knows what he’s talking about. Anyone else, not so much.Report
Police keep trying to pull this nonsense of charging ‘false imprisonment’ against protestors blocking traffic, but none of those cases have actually _worked_ in court. Impeding traffic is already a specific charge.
Being unable to drive a vehicle forward is not ‘imprisoning’ someone, they can at minimum turn off their vehicle and exit. False imprisonment requires keeping _a person_ in an specific area, not not letting their _car_ go forward.
And, hell, even if they get past that hurdle, in other cases where prosecutors have tried to apply it (Although they generally are not success), the protestors at least ‘trapped’ cars, as in, got in front of and behind them. Which is not generally happening here.
I would suggest, though, that a much saner thing to do is do what the Holland Tunnel people did, block an entrance ramp, and thus not let people on the road _at all_, which can’t possibly be false imprisonment under even dumb legal theories.
And if they can’t do that, block highways at an angle where there _is_ an exit, which will still cause complete chaos as people are forced to all fit through that exit (And for max chaos do it where they can’t immediately get back on.), but is not ‘detaining’ people…setting up a system where people leave slowly is not detaining them.
I understand the point of this is disrupt things, but causing literally random drivers to either be trapped in their cars for hours or abandon them is asshole behavior. You can screw up traffic and bring it to a crawl without doing _that_. There’s a difference between ‘getting home an hour later’ and ‘literally not being able to get home’.Report
From what I understand, civil cases don’t have to go to the lengths that criminal cases have to go to.
Like, even if a criminal case fails to find a defendant guilty of X, a civil case can find the same defendant liable for X.
I can find you some prominent examples, if you’d like.
There’s a difference between ‘getting home an hour later’ and ‘literally not being able to get home’.
Is “I let the kid go three days later” a defense against a charge of kidnapping?Report
Civil cases have lesser standards of proof, what they don’t have (For the same thing) is lesser standards of action.
If the problem for conviction is you cannot prove a specifc person was the one who committed wrongful imprisonment, it is easier to get them via a civil lawsuit than criminally. You might be able to prove it was them by ‘preponderance of the evidence’ and win a civil care even if the state can’t prove it was them ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ and win criminally.
If the problem for conviction is that everyone agrees what happened, but the court said the facts of what happened does not count as false imprisonment, it’s not suddenly going to be easier in a civil case.
False imprisonment is a charge that was basically designed for the police detaining people (It’s literally why you are supposed to keep asking cops ‘Am I free to go?’, to make them either definitely ‘imprison’ you or not, instead of just implying you have to stay but later claiming you were always free to leave.), and it has been somewhat repurposed to apply to others detaining people.
But pretty much all the various state laws about it are explicit about ‘intentional restraint of another person to a confined area’ and courts have repeatedly held that if someone knows they can safely leave, in any manner (Even if it’s in a way they don’t particularly want to go), they are not imprisoned.
This keeps people from, for example, claiming that they were falsely imprisoned them when Walmart locks the doors on one side in the late evenings and makes people leave via the other doors. Or when a bomb threat forces a specific evacuation of an office building in a certain way. As long as you _can_ leave a location in some manner (And you know how to do that, and believe it’s safe), it is not false imprisonment.
The only possible claim here might be ‘it is unsafe to leave your car in the middle of the highway’, but that sorta falls apart with the actual facts of ‘There are stopped cars in a line across the road and thus no possible way to get hit by moving cars if you leave your car and walk forward.’.Report
This is marketing, not a legal argument. He might not be wrong but once again, your trolling here is weak.Report
It’s not trolling?
That’s a real response to a real protest?
It strikes me as likely that such a lawsuit would be able to, at the very least, change the credit scores of a bunch of prominent protesters?Report
A California city’s transformation from ‘murder capital’ of the U.S. to zero homicides
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-08/a-california-citys-transformation-from-murder-capital-of-u-s-to-zero-homicides
The interesting thing about the article is how it demonstrates that reducing crime is never about a single magic solution, but an array of “necessary but insufficient” variables all working in concert.
Increased police officers, community group support, after school programs, and increased economic opportunities all contributed to bringing lawlessness under control.Report
Help came in the form of outside law enforcement. Palo Alto donated four officers; Menlo Park provided two. Later, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department brought in 18 deputies, and the state assigned 12 Highway Patrol officers. The outside officers more than doubled the strength of the department.
Golly. Fund the police, I guess.Report
Yes.
Throwing money at the problem does in fact work.Report
If we could only make payrolls large enough…
Wait, did the article get into whether the people hired actually performed any duties or was it merely a case of making sure that these additional 36 people were able to make rent?Report
If only the strike in Chicago could end!Report
One of the patterns that seems to show up over and over is the whole issue of not understanding why we have people do various jobs.
Like, what’s the point of having teachers?
I imagine that most people would answer something like “to teach various subjects to students”.
Right? That makes sense to me, anyway.
So lets say that there’s a teacher whose students failed to learn various subjects. Like, you give these students a test and the students all fail.
Ask the question: Should this teacher be fired?
Suddenly there is hemming and hawing. Discussions of how many things go into whether or not a student fails to learn something. How complicated measurement is. How difficult it is to say where the points of failure are. How unfair it would be to fire a teacher for just one test.
So on and so forth.
As if the point of having a teacher was having someone to give a salary to. Hey, they’re making rent. They’re paying taxes.
We turned this one city around by hiring more cops and more deputies.
“Throwing money at the problem”
As if the point of having this many more cops/deputies was having more people to pay.
Just raise the funding!Report
This is a valid comparison. But we also have to understand that performance is tough to measure, and while student performance is a proxy for teacher performance, it is only a proxy.Report
The article flatly refutes the proposition of “If metrics are bad, fire the ones in charge”.Report
Seems to also flatly refute “defund the police”.
But I’d argue that, in this case, what was needed was not “throwing money at the problem” but, instead, “law enforcement” (and “no, more law enforcement than that”).Report
Hey, any defunders out there? Jaybird seems to want to argue with them. Please step up and give him someone to talk to and stop bothering the rest of us.Report
We have had a couple.
Sometimes they show up.
Sometimes they just lurk.
If you’re upset that I do not tailor more of my comments to you, just pretend that I asked you a direct question about a topic about which you have professional experience.Report
I’m hardly upset, and certainly don’t demand that comments be tailored to me. But it is tiresome watching shadowboxing.Report
To be quite honest, reaching the point where we can see “Defund the Police!” as a strawman that nobody seriously believes/believed enough to be worth mentioning, that’s pretty funny.
Because, seriously, that was a big deal there for a bit.
I do hope that there is some non-straw remaining for stuff like “police reform” but that window has probably closed, huh?Report
This is why we don’t have a list of “what conservatives have conserved”. We don’t write down every silly thing that liberals push for a while then back away from. (“Communism was inevitably going to fall, so why should the right expect any credit for it?”) I did think that some of your comments about tough-on-crime last week sounded dismissive though, as if a super-addictive form of cocaine was inevitably going to fall out of favor.Report
Eh, it’s more that “tough on crime” has to not be stupid/lazy.
Does the guy selling loosies matter? Not at all.
Does the guy shooting up a classroom matter? Very much so.
The cops end up killing the guy selling loosies. Remember who shot the school shooter in Ulvalde? A guy from the Border Patrol.
If you have horrible/incompetent cops, it won’t matter if you double the number of them (“just throw money at the problem”). You need good cops to go after bad criminals.
But, like, how do you formalize that? Make it scale?
You can’t.Report
The cops in the 1990’s were able to enforce the new laws sufficiently well to increase the number of people in the prison system and clean up the streets. I don’t know if they were better or worse, in morals and/or effectiveness, than the average officer now.
I think most every profession is encumbered by fear of litigation more than it used to be. Medical costs are high because of it. DEI exists to prevent it. That’s one reason I think QI isn’t a bad thing.Report
Whether that’s really what happened is a subject of serious debate by criminologists. That the average age of an American has increased to nearly 40 and a lot fewer young men grew up around lead paint probably plays as much if not more of a role than anything the police did. Which isn’t to say that the police or society should just let crime and disorder go. Just that there’s not some simple straightforward solution.
We had all these debates about killing unarmed black men which are statistical anomalies but probably not nearly enough about ‘stop and frisk.’ Whenever studied that methodology hasn’t proven particularly effective at finding evidence of a crime but does lay the ground work for the police/community divides that blow up when there’s some controversial incident. Tough on crime isn’t worth much if you aren’t also being smart on crime.Report
“Does the guy selling loosies matter? Not at all.”
It matters a lot to the fellow who owns the convenience store that this guy is selling loosies outside, because that fellow pays a lot of money to rent the space and is very careful to follow all the rules, and he takes that deal because the rule-enforcers say that they’ll enforce the rules on everybody.
And if suddenly there’s a “little guy” exception to the rules, and the rule-enforcers are gonna say “well hey the laws don’t apply if you’re just some dude trying to hustle and make it any which way he can”, then maybe the store owner says ‘screw it, why do things the hard way’ and now there’s a vacant storefront.Report
he takes that deal because the rule-enforcers say that they’ll enforce the rules on everybody.
But they don’t.
That’s the problem.
They don’t enforce the rules on everybody.
They only enforce them wily-nily and loosey-goosey and you have no idea who is going to be protected today.Report
One of the things I was reminded of when I was in Germany in the fall was just how much social enforcement against low level disorder goes on in at least some parts of the old world. There was a night I was sitting at the hotel bar, and witnessed as the hotel manager, with the support of a handful of cranky old patrons, ran off a couple of drunk kids who had wandered in demanding to be served. The two really critical pieces of this were (i) bystanders coming to the support of the manager without even being asked and (ii) the kids ultimately being willing to be run off without more than some griping about it.
It struck me that, maybe outside of small towns, you would never see something like this in America anymore. The only recourse is the police, who for a number of reasons are a blunt tool with a propensity for heavy handedness and overkill.Report
This is a great comment, and deserves elaboration.
I know that Lee and Saul have made similar comments about how the American culture stigmatizes the “Karens” who act as officious busybodies of the public order.
And yeah, a lot of that is probably deserved. But I’ve also come to see how the shared sense of public order in other countries is something we could stand a bit more of.Report
I’ve heard it said that the “Karen” thing is an op. Customer service and service in general is going to disintegrate over the next few years. Complaining that the service sucks is now coded as “low status”.
Enjoy!Report
I think the challenge may be having just a little bit of it. My experience is mainly the German speaking world, and other European countries I’ve visited have their own ways of dealing with things, some being more tolerant of this or that conduct than others. Anyway in Germany, do something like cross a street against a signal, or have your child out without a jacket on something less than a warm day, and you may find yourself sternly scolded by a complete stranger, usually an old lady. Get caught doing something a little more disorderly like trying to dodge a train fare and not only will you get the fine, you may be very publicly and loudly chewed out on a level that to American ears sound like fists might start flying. Except that afterward everyone just goes on their way. I don’t know that it’s something we can import and a lot of Americans would chafe at the culture that makes what happened at the bar I was at possible.Report
That’s why it’s OK to arrest or issue an appearance ticket to the loosie seller, though, frankly, that’s a low-priority use of police resources. Just don’t rough him up or kill him.Report
Now that I’ve read the article, I guess more police go hand in hand with a booming tech industry. Can we get more social media startups with astronomical salaries that raise the median household income? Not to mention more citizen involvement.Report
Kansas changed their tax incentives to attempt something like this.
It failed.
Which is a bummer.Report
The point is, how much of the decrease in murders is attributable to increase police presence vs. a decrease in residents likely to commit murder? I’d wager it has more to do with the improved socioeconomic standing of the citizenry than with more police.Report
The decrease in murders was to *ZERO*.
I’d be more than happy enough to agree that an injection of wealth and money resulted in cutting it in half.
Cutting it from one of the murder capitals in the world to nothing? That involves, at least, physical removal of at least a few nodes.Report
Zero is a fluke.Report
They got it down to four 30 years ago. I mean yay, they went from 90% reduction in 1 year to 100% reduction 30 years later, and it’s always nice when no one kills anyone, but the story here isn’t how they went from 42 to 0 in 31 years, but 42 to 4 in 1 year. You do that by getting crack off the streets.Report
That was the thrust of the article, that it wasn’t “Just” anything.
It was:
More cops;
Community based policing and trust-building relationships between the cops and citizen groups;
Increased economic conditions;
A handful of programs like afterschool programs and requirements to hire locals for new projects;
Zero murders is probably a statistical fluke; But the city has dramatically reduced its crime rate, and kept it low for a few years now.Report
As soon as some drunk beats his wife to death, the percentage increase in murder will be astounding, as it always is when the base rate is low enough.Report
Pinky touched on removing crack and that probably had a fair bit to do with it. That was 30 years ago and the low murder rate has held steady since then. A growing tax base able to better fund a police dept. seems to be the key here.Report
East Palo Alto was the nation’s “murder capital” in 1992, and only in 1992, which was an extreme outlier, per the chart in the article. It has historically had fairly high homicide rates, but other than a rough patch from 1988-1992, it was roughly what you’d expect given its demographics.
Even 3.6 murders per year (their average over the past 5 years) is not great with a population of 28k, giving 13 per 100k, about twice the national average over the same period. But certainly it’s better than 30 per 100k (their average in the years after 1992), and much, much better than 80 or 170 per 100k. The huge drop from 1992 to 1993 probably had something to do with a gang war ending, possibly with a nudge from law enforcement, while the secular decline over the past 30 years is probably attributable to the city becoming much less black (from 40% down to 10%) and more Latino (currently up to 60%).
So in the mid 90s, East Palo Alto had a homicide rate typical for a city of its demographics at the time, and over the past 5 years, it has had a homicide rate typical for a city of its current demographics. The 0 for 2023 should be presumed a fluke for the time being. With a city that small, even with an above-average homicide rate, you’re occasionally going to have years with 0 homicides. Assuming that East Palo Alto murders follow a Poisson distribution with a mean of 4 per year, there’s about a 2% chance in any given year of 0 homicides. That’s not all that likely, but not extremely unlikely, and if it hadn’t happened we wouldn’t be reading an article about East Palo Alto’s homicide rate, so publication bias is at work.
I find the census stats a bit surprising. 40% of the population is foreign-born (mostly Hispanic, not Asian), only 71% of adults have at least a high school diploma, only 25% have at least a bachelor’s degree, yet the median household income is $103k. It’s not that Latinos can’t do well, or that you can’t succeed in America without a college degree, but the socio- and economic parts of “socioeconomic status” are diverging more than usual here. Maybe all the rich people in the other Palo Alto (median household income $214k, with smaller households) are driving up the cost of labor.Report
The first launch of the United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket went off without any problems with the rocket (the moon lander payload is having a technical glitch right now).
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/ulas-vulcan-rocket-shot-for-the-moon-on-debut-launch-and-hit-a-bullseye/
This was an important launch for several reasons. It keeps the Vulcan on track to be certified for national security payloads, and be an alternate to SpaceX for those missions. It demonstrates the new BE-4 engine works reliably — both ULA and Bezos’s Blue Origin are completely dependent on the BE-4 engines. And it makes ULA a viable concern, important because it’s up for sale.Report
Biden’s speech at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was interrupted by peace-activist protestors calling for a ceasefire.
The peace-activists’ free speech act was interrupted by ushers physically escorting them from their peaceful assembly during which they were shouted down by congregants chanting “FOUR MORE YEARS“.Report
The 1st Amendment fully functioning as it should. Messy – yes. But fully working.Report
Shouting ‘four more years’ at people _protesting a war_ seems, uh…like the exact thing you do not want to be shouting. I know they are talking about four more years of Biden, and not four more years of war, but, wow, literally anything else would be better.Report
Something to bolster your spirits:
Report
Ever wonder why Black conservatives still vote Democratic?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/09/black-conservative-gop-numbers/Report
“It practices moral individualism, less concerned with group differences than independence and self-determination.”
Isn’t that racist?
“And it’s respectable, prioritizing a certain public presentation — diction, dress, etiquette, and the like — in hopes of improving opportunities and outcomes, equality and justice.”
I mean, that’s super racist!Report
Audience Reception Mixed On Christopher Nolan’s 3-Hour-Long Acceptance Speech Delivered In Reverse Chronological Order
https://babylonbee.com/news/audience-reception-mixed-on-christopher-nolans-3-hour-lond-acceptance-speech-delivered-in-reverse-chronological-orderReport
Trump team argues assassination of rivals is covered by presidential immunity
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4398223-trump-team-argues-assassination-of-rivals-is-covered-by-presidential-immunity/
The dog that is not barking here is the GOP base, which is remaining studiously silent on the matter. This is the regime they want.Report
Brought to you by the same party that thought crushing a kid’s nuts was OK.Report
Nobody enjoys making fun of Atlas Shrugged more than I do. It’s got a couple of half-decent speeches, maybe… some nice imagery with the whole trains acting as blood vessels for the country, maybe. But, seriously, it’s overblown and pompous as heck. The heroes aren’t even cardboard cutouts. They’re, like, tissue paper cutouts.
That said, the villains are, like, ripped from the headlines.
On Tuesday, Supervisor Dean Preston, who represents the Fillmore, introduced a resolution demanding that Safeway reverse its plan to close the store, and called for the supermarket chain to work with residents and the city to “develop a plan for the site that centers the needs of the community.”
(From elsewhere in the story: “The property is being sold to Align Real Estate, which plans to develop a mixed-use project with as many as 1,000 housing units.”)Report
So a politician advocating for the needs of his constituents is a villain? Fascinating.Report
Eh, he’s sort of a landlord who opposes new housing units because those will dig into his profits.
So… yeah.
I’m not sure how “we will force you to keep your store open” will work in practice. We’ll see, I guess.
Maybe it’ll work better than in Atlas Shrugged.Report
In this case he’s a notorious NIMBY and a pillar of the phenomena that drives homelessness and poverty in California and also is a general blot on liberals everywhere. So, yeah, fish the crooked fisher.Report
Thanks for the context. Too bad that wasn’t included in the initial post.Report
It’s not in the article either.
Just the part about how much he loves his constituents and wants them to be able to eat food.Report
“So a politician advocating for the needs of his constituents is a villain?”
rather surprising to see you defending Jefferson DavisReport
In related news on the other coast: Fourth Walgreens to close in a predominantly Black and Latino Boston neighborhood in about a year, raising equity concerns.
Sounds like there’s a real opportunity for an entrepreneur to make him or herself a lot of money in the vacuum being created.Report
A real opportunity for the government to step in and provide the pharmacy needs directly instead of relying on the fickle vagaries of the marketplace.Report
If Boston does a good enough job at doing that, maybe they could provide a template for the rest of the country to follow.Report
Sure. Or the state of Massachusetts or the federal government.
We just have to drop the whole “Free Ennaprise” fetish and stop fretting about whether it costs a lot or not.
Because really, this is a perfect example of how the marketplace simply can’t provide universal healthcare because the gap between the ceiling of what people can pay and the floor which the market is willing to offer is too vast.Report
Yeah, I don’t think that it’d be possible for a company to make money there either.Report
Walgreens is one of those companies that desperately wants to see constant growth, that consistently tries to juice performance and then sees that juicing slip backwards. It bought Rite-Aid a few years ago, that works to bump things up for a bit, but it has started slipping.
It tries everything to get out of ‘constant low profits’ mode. And it has failed to notice it is a PHARMACY.
You know, pharmacies, the things you build, and then people come to, and buys medicine that makes almost no money, and maybe some bandages and milk cause they ran out, which also makes almost no money. You are less exciting than a _grocery store_, there is absolutely no growth potential there.
There’s a very specific derangement in this society where every company needs to be EXCITING and INNOVATED with UNLIMITED GROWTH, and…it’s like, um, or, alternately, you could just be a normal store that sells us the stuff we want to buy and make enough money to run the place and even take some small profit.Report
And I will freely admit, I don’t know the specific here, maybe those specific stores were very slightly unprofitable, maybe in some other universe where executives actually were satisfied with low profits, those stores would be closed anyway cause they barely lost money instead of barely making it.
But it’s just as likely those stores were only 5% profitable, and the executives want an average of 10% so they can announce it so the big whirly stock numbers go up. Or whatever.Report
What mysteriously never seems to be noted in these “Urban Doom Loop” posts is that Walgreens is closing 150 store all across the US, and most of them in markets which aren’t blue cities.
And also what doesn’t get noted is that brick and mortar retail is dying, everywhere.
Everyone should ask themselves, how much of your regular shopping is done in brick and mortar stores and how much via online, then you can start to grasp why a company that wants to sell shampoo and cosmetics might be struggling.
The Walgreens on my corner closed, but immediately was replaced by half a dozen little bodegas selling the same stuff, all of which are thriving.Report
Hey, if you could get an investor, you could go in there and start raking it in. The infrastructure is already there and you already have an established customer base.
It’s win-win-win.Report
Yeah, I’m going to go back in time and do that. I’ll call the company…Rite-Aid. Wow, I’m wildly successful. Oh, wait, Walgreens is buying me. And shutting down those stores. Oops.
In fact, that’s part of the current problem: It used to be that a way to pump of stock and pretend to have growth was acquisitions, but companies are literally running out of other companies to buy. Walgreens has branched out into clinics and stuff, but that isn’t working as well as they want. So now they’re just flailing around and trying to desperately trim ‘fat’, by which they mean ‘Things are profitable and literally do make them money, just not _as much_ money as other things.’
The free market will eventually ‘fix’ the problem’ (Until the super-rich break it again), but, spoiler alert, those people over there need their insulin _today_ and their pharmacy is gone.
It’s a problem of relative power, and how quickly the market can ‘correct’. Rich people can just rip everything to shreds on a whim, wasting something that is a _massive_ amounts of money and capital to us random people but nothing to them, and leave nothing standing.
—
I think a good chunk of this is due to wealth inequality, this is my ‘Rich people have become so rich that they literally don’t care about what are objectively large amounts of money and treat it as valueless, which is directly harming other people’ theory, which I’ve mentioned before. But, hey, maybe it’s caused something else.
But it is something that keeps happening, in fact, I just subtle made a reference to something else that happened: Insulin prices. The market just…voluntarily lets one company become a supplier of that critical need, who then can jack up prices, and it’s easy to say ‘The market will fix this’, and I’m sure it _will_, but, ‘will’ can be an incredibly long time for things people need to survive.
Why weren’t there competitors? Because it wasn’t some super-profitable exciting thing, it was just…a thing you made for X, and then sold for slightly more than X to a fixed set of people. You know, boring stuff that is _literally the thing humans need to happen to survive under capitalism_.Report
No, I mean, turn it into a local Mom&Pop!
DTC Pharmacy: “We Care”
Walgreens is buying me
This is why it has to be you. If it’s someone else, they would sell.Report
Hey, have you checked how much it costs to start up a pharmacy these days? I certainly don’t have the money, do you?
Because the people who _do_ have that amount of money are, instead, investing it Walgreens stock.
Saying ‘People should do this thing’ doesn’t actually accomplish anything…people are manifestly not doing that thing.
So what’s next?Report
I suppose “less restrictive licensing/zoning” isn’t on the table…Report
Uh, pretty sure those places are already zoned as pharmacies. Which isn’t even a specific zoning, it’s just retail.
Even if we didn’t have those now-empty places, in what universe do we not have enough _retail_ zoned properties? Where is that limiting anything?
And not really sure we want to have weaker licensing for pharmacies. You know, the place where all the drugs are?Report
Rite-Aid is not the hero of your story, believe me.Report
No one is the hero of the story here, as evidenced by the fact no one has actually fixed anything.
I’m not even, technically, blaming this on companies buying other companies. I think that is a big aspect of it, but theoretically, we could have the same problems if they had not.
The problem is that companies somehow have decided that ‘Taking good from truck, putting them on the shelves, employing people to do that and sell them, and then making a smallish profit each year’ is somehow not a functional way to run a business.
Hell, the market likes to talk about _increases_ in profits from year to year, instead of just _profits_. You dumbasses know that ‘less profits’ than last year is still PROFITS, right? You still actually made money! You do not need constant exponential growth, and you do not need to tear functional companies apart in order to try to get that, you know that, right? People sometimes rely on those companies!
It’s sorta the same problem with housing prices: You asshats can run whatever speculative market nonsense you want, but the rest of us would like to be able to BUY GOODS AND SERVICES and HAVE AFFORDABLE HOUSES in a reasonable consistent manner from day to day. And not have you wander in and casually break things we literally need to survive.
We’re all trapped in a casino with the uber-rich and they’re driving bulldozers around.Report
This is one of those things for which the conservatives have absolutely nothing worthwhile to say (hence the use of snark).
The marketplace demonstrably cannot be used to provide the poor people with health care so if there is to be its provision, it will have to come from some form of government action.
People will yell and scream and ry to desperately change the subject but at the end of the day, that’s what its going to have to be.Report
I mean, is this even anything to do with failing heath care?
Yes, pharmacies provide health care, but they aren’t going out of business because people can’t afford medicine and they have to provide it anyway, or the myriad ways that the health care industry is screwed up.
Pharmacies would perhaps have _more_ customers if healthcare was less insane here, but there’s absolutely no reason why they should not be able to function with the amount they have. If anything, health care is getting them a lot of money for basically free (It’s not like they’re advertising drugs or anything.), along with a lot of walk-in traffic to buy other things!Report
Its related in that the marketplace is the vehicle for delivering the healthcare.
Assuming the pharmacy isn’t shutting down just for sh!ts and giggles, assuming their reason has to do with getting a better return on capital elsewhere, healthcare is entirely dependent on the vagaries and whims of the capital markets.
Probably fine for pizza and boob jobs, but not so much for drugs and health care.Report
A good object lesson for those who think we should do better at emulating Nebraska or Ohio.
“What would a Progressive state like California or Massachusetts do?” would be a good hypothetical lens to look through at this particular conservative Republican screw-up.Report
Steering into the ditch once again.Report
My point is they are!
Not really, not for ‘no reason’, they are shutting down because they are not as profitable as other Walgreens, but ‘less profitable’ doesn’t mean ‘unprofitable’.
The decision to close them doesn’t have anything to do with our broken health care system, except in the sense they’d probably make slightly more money selling drugs if the system worked better, but that’s not particularly relevant, they’d still be the ‘worse performers’ and still get closed.
As we can tell by the fact these locations often do not have places to buy food, or do banking, or anything. This is not a health care thing. Indeed, thanks to the fact that poor people often do have sort of some health insurance, pharmacies often hung on later than everywhere else.
It will always be more profitable to operate businesses in wealthy locations than poor locations, that’s just a truism of how reality works. And we have build a society where locations that not earning ‘the absolute most profits they can possibly hypothetically earn’ are often shut down randomly because it somehow makes things look better to investors. Again, not ‘losing money’, literally making profits, just not _as much_ profits.
And it’s easy to say ‘Well, someone else will fill in’, except for the fact that thanks to incredibly consolidation that the government seems to have no problem with, there usually _is_ no one else.
And even if there was, they can’t compete with the chains, so what happens is a chain runs them out of business, then the chain closes because it can’t compete, _years later_ a new local pharmacy opens, and either a chain decides to randomly put a new one nearby…which drives them out of business…or just buys the place, and the cycle starts all over again.
Which I’m sure in someone’s head is ‘the market working’, but it REALLY SUCKS FOR PEOPLE WHO NEED MEDICINE.
And it’s not just pharmacies that happens with. There’s all sorts of poor communities out there that the big players in a market will refuse to _consistently_ serve, and that inconsistency is somehow worse than refusing to serve them at all, because it means that no actual local competitors end up existing either, cause they can’t compete when those guys decided to wander in for a decade, either smashing or buy them…and then they eventually wander out again, leaving nothing.Report
It will always be more profitable to operate businesses in wealthy locations than poor locations, that’s just a truism of how reality works.
Yes and no. If there is no competition, then it’s more profitable. In reality if that store is pulling in serious money then another store will appear in it’s area.
Which I’m sure in someone’s head is ‘the market working’,
We don’t have a market.
My insurance company makes “a special deal for access” with various providers. It’s basically impossible to get a price for most services and what price we’re charged for drugs depends on the person.
This is not a market. The poor fall outside of those deals so they lose out for various reasons.
“Falling outside of those deals” means even if it would be economical to supply them with drugs, HC providers may not be willing to because it would wreck their deals. It might even be illegal for them to do so because the gov is one of the biggest clients and various laws will get in the way.Report
Yes, sometimes people might overestimate how many pharmacies a wealthy area can support, and build more there, and then close them, but…that doesn’t impact anyone. There are still pharmacies in that area.
Meanwhile, poorer areas will still be less profitable in general, which means in a world where consolidation means that only a few companies are actually in the market at all, and if they decide not to service an area (dues to morons owning and operating the stock market to get fluxation in stock prices instead instead of just ‘steady income’, so shut down actual profitable locations to jack the stock price), that area is screwed.
This would be a lot more believable as a source of the problem if the exact same thing of ‘No one will service the area’ didn’t also happen with grocery stores.
But, hey, let’s say you’re right. And now let’s ask ourselves: Would this be as doable if there were actual competitors in the pharmacy space? If instead of health insurance being able to cut deals with just a few chains, they had to cut deals with thousands of them?
Or, indeed, not cut deals, and just operate fixed reimbursements for everyone, with insurance companies saying to their customers, ‘We will reimburse you $100 for this drug that our studies show normally sells for $110, you pay the rest, or, hell, keep the extra if you find it cheaper than $100.’ and letting the market operate?Report
The marketplace demonstrably cannot be used to provide the poor people with health care
I know poor women who have had plastic surgery. Similarly poor people can have pets with vet care.
You’re blaming our insane HC system’s structure on “the marketplace” when we don’t have a marketplace.Report
It’s not the poor that are the challenge with respect to costs, it’s the old.Report
It’s not the poor that are the challenge with respect to costs, it’s the old.
The challenges and trade offs are political. We don’t want the old (who as a class are rich) to pay for their own health care.
The problem would be a lot easier if we lowered prices by a lot.Report
We do demonstrably have a marketplace in ‘Where people can buy prescription drugs from’, though, so I am unsure how this is relevant at all to this discussion.Report
Sometimes I buy my drugs outside of my insurance. It costs about 30x as much as with insurance.
Those kinds of distortions are going to have serious impacts on what drugs are sold and too whom.
Now there’s also home delivery. Various companies poke me about mailing my drugs to me instead of me picking them up.
That kind of behavior could kill WalGreens without disrupting access but I’m not sure how common it is.Report
Pharmacies, Walgreens included, do make a massive amount of money from selling drugs:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/01/02/what-are-walgreens-key-sources-of-revenue/?sh=548641c9516d
So we have 60% from prescriptions, and 25% from other retail, and 15% from ‘wholesale pharmaceutical’, and that last thing is not something that happens at the store level. Recalculating just the stores, without wholesale pharmaceuticals, that’s 70% from prescriptions and 30% from retail.
And then realize that that last 30% of the revenue generation is using like 80% of the space. Plus needing clerks to check people out of that part, and stocking, and inventory, and wow. People don’t realize that, but pharmacies could just literally operate profitably as a prescription drug dispenser, where you just walk up the actual drug dispenser and exchange money for drugs.
They don’t need the rest of it, that part of the operation is basically just an attempt to use the rest of the storefront for something that makes money. They can’t really get retail spaces the size they would want, so might as well sell other random things, especially since gas stations have often stopped being convenience stores. It’s why my local Walgreen just cut away a third of the store for a doctor’s office.
But the question is: Why do they care what’s being prescribed? They make money regardless.
What they actually need is customers who have prescriptions.
Which the closed Walgreens actually do have, FYI. They do have enough prescriptions being sold that they would make money.
I’m pretty certain that such a thing would be from pharmacies. It might not be _Walgreens_, but they are legally a pharmacy.
But anyway, that’s not the fault of the screwed up health care system, that’s just…capitalism.Report
You are using averages for the entire company to support why a specific store shouldn’t be closed. It doesn’t work that way (nor should it).
You need to talk about how shutting down this specific store makes it difficult for people to get drugs.
Google Maps says there are 4 other pharmacies within a mile of the closed store. Another Walgreens and three CVS.
If we take it to two miles it gets silly.
The closest drug store from my home is 3 miles.Report
And incidentally, you’re right, and Amazon is actually incredibly useful for ‘food deserts’ and ‘drug store deserts’ and things like that, the poor areas where they don’t build and randomly close stores, because Amazon doesn’t ‘close less-profitable stores’.
It might be obvious, but it’s worth stating: It is actually profitable to sell to people in those areas. Amazon proves this. In fact, it’s so profitable that you can _literally deliver to their houses_ and still make money. (Imagine what sort of profit you could make if you could instead deliver to a central location that would ‘store’ the goods until people came by and picked them up. We could even just ship the goods in advance to these ‘stores’ and have people pay when they pick them up, first come first serve! What a concept!)
It’s just _not as_ profitable as stores in other locations, so they close those stores first.
The only problem with this ‘solution’ is…supporting Amazon and its ever larger grip on large section of the economy.
Sometime I find myself weirdly wishing that milkmen still existed. Or, you know, that the postal service actually functioned at the level it used it.Report
Amazon is actually incredibly useful for ‘food deserts’ and ‘drug store deserts’ and things like that,
I live in a food desert. I live in a drug store desert(*).
We define “desert” as “outside of walking distance”.
These definitions are insane. We use them so people can pretend we have a problem.
(*) BTW the people who live next to that closed drug store do not. Google maps says the location of all those other drug stores means they’re still not in a “desert” although I am.Report
A lots of people in cities do not have cars. Even cities that aren’t New York. In Boston, only 2/3rds of households own a car(1), and I suspect that is tilted towards wealthier people, so we could be looking a neighborhood where something like half the people do not own cars. That’s why they list the time in walking distance, they’re not just being cute about that.
And the thing being pointed out is not that _particular_ store is closing, but there is a pattern that is happening of multiple stores closing, all in poorer neighborhoods. Pointing at a somewhat near store (if you have a car) and saying ‘That one isn’t closed’ does not help when local residents are reading that as ‘That one isn’t closed yet‘.
Which is probably part of the reason for this being called out…it’s unlikely that this particular store will be affected, but it might stop further closures.
Also, as the article mentions, it isn’t just drugs. Pharmacies are often the only convenience store in poorer areas. Picking up prescriptions once a month isn’t the problem, being unable to pick up milk is.
1) This actually puts in squarely in the middle of ‘large cities that are not New York City’. NYC is just weird because it’s below 50%, but a lot of larger cities are between 60%-70%.Report
a lot of larger cities are between 60%-70%.
Places that have great public transport have less cars. Let’s just ask Google maps how many public transportation spots are near that pharmacia… 5 bus stops.
Google map incorrectly claimed Boston doesn’t have a subway so IDK about that.
Everyone in that area really was captive to walking and had no choice but to use that store, then it’s very hard to picture it also being inactive and unprofitable.
What we should be doing is asking the people on that area (and lots of other areas) how accessible drugs/food is and how long it takes them to get it.
5 drug stores within a one mile and 12+ within 3 suggests it’s very possible that there is no problem.Report
It is actually profitable to sell to people in those areas.
Which is why if we use a sane definition for “reasonable distance to access”, they have more than a dozen stores.
Which is probably a big reason why that specific store is closing. It has too many local competitors.Report
We don’t have “free enterprise” nor even a market place. Notice the lack of standard prices or even just prices?
We have command and control and price fixing but it’s run by insurance companies rather than the gov.
Because of that we had insane amounts of non-value-added activities.Report
Its great that you can imagine a marketplace in which very poor people can afford healthcare, but since there is no actually existing example of such, we might as well say “If we only had true socialism, healthcare would be free” since it makes as much sense.
Until either of those things comes into being, we’re stuck with the tools we have, Medicare and Medicaid and Obamacare.Report
In theory, our current system “helps” the poor because the gov could “strike special deals” and force HC providers to cover some people below cost.
In practice that results in regulatory capture and price fixing to the insane degree that we have. Everyone is trying to shift the costs onto everyone else and that just can’t work. We’re spending a lot more money on the shifting than we are on HC.
The tools we have are creating the problem.
Pass a law saying all HC providers must publish and honor one price. That’s actual HC reform.
After we have a market, if we want to subsidize some people we’ll be able to… we just won’t be able to do it by stealth. Food Stamps is a pretty decent model for this.
Edit: If we’re trying to describe what we have, “command and control” is a much better description than “market” since we have no prices.Report
we might as well say “If we only had true socialism, healthcare would be free” since it makes as much sense.
Socialism blows up everywhere it’s tried while markets have a very long history of working.
None of this situation is “special”. All of it falls into normal economic behavior and normal predictions can be made about outcomes.
If we want to reduce costs, we need to either get really brave politicians who are willing to destroy multiple GDP points worth of jobs (including their own), or we need market forces in the current system.
“Market” doesn’t mean “we do nothing for the poor”. Food in the US is handled by the market and we don’t let people starve.Report
Once again, TFG decides a non-white person can’t run for president:
Recall that he leveled similar accusations against the current VP, former President Obama, and Senator Ted Cruz. Now grant 4 is a small sample size, but you can see a pattern emerging here.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/09/opinions/trump-spreads-birther-lie-nikki-haley-avlon/index.htmlReport
Its the logical result of a worldview of hierarchy and rank where there exist no rights, only privileges.
Haley was accepted, but acceptance is merely a privilege which can be revoked at will by anyone of higher rank.
Disney was accepted until they offended the party, then became an enemy of the state to be destroyed.
Pence was accepted, until his loyalty was in doubt, then became an enemy to be destroyed.Report
If I was the Haley campaign I’d be happy about this. It means Trump sees her as a threat.Report
This is the “Trump thinks things through” hypothesis. I prefer the “Trump feels slighted” hypothesis, with a touch of “Trump doesn’t respect any women”.Report
Maybe. My read on Trump is that he tends to not bother with people he doesn’t think are in his way, and that such people might not even register for him as existing at all. It’s only when he sees someone that might present a problem for him that he starts throwing punches. Whether this is conscious or just a personality trait is anyone’s guess.Report
Rosie O’Donnell?Report
Heh, I’d attribute that to schtick.
But hey who knows? Maybe he thinks there’s something about Rosie uniquely suited to dressing him down in a way our self serious punditry and political commentariat failed to ever really succeed at.Report
Trump has always had those tiny feuds with people. He’s never been anything but petulant. Seriously, I don’t see how people don’t know everything about the guy. He’s been displaying these traits on the public stage all his life, and on the political stage for almost 10 years now. He always overreacts to anyone who shows him less than 100% deference. Like, he never really feuded with CNN – it was always broad strokes for applause lines, but he took it personally when an individual reporter would ask him a question rudely. Democrats think of him as mean to them, but he was much worse to any Republican who showed the smallest independence. Former staffers – did he ever rotate staff without criticizing the people on their way out? I just don’t understand people who misread the most obvious guy in the world.Report
He is exactly who he appears to be, but many people, especially in the pundit class, that there is some sort of Secret Trump, like that old SNL skit about how Reagan was actually in private a sharp forceful kickass guy.
There is Santa Claus and there is no Secret Trump.
The petty guy who is betrays everyone and grovels for those more powerful is exactly who he is in all walks of life.
Anyone who isn’t terrified of this guy having the launch codes is delusional.Report
I never said he isn’t vindictive too. He’s clearly also a petty and combative guy that fights and feuds with anyone and everyone for any or no reason, overreacts to any slight no matter how minor, etc.
But I’m thinking as much of his takedown of other Republicans in 2016 as anyone else when I say I think he has a good sense of actual competitors versus pretenders. I don’t think it was pure luck that he killed Jeb the way he did even if he also got really lucky that popular sentiment was perfect for it to land so decisively.Report
Jeb wasn’t much of a contender. More of a threat than Fiorina (he made fun of her face), less of a threat than Cruz (he implied that his father killed Kennedy).Report
Fair enough, but probably need to agree to disagree. I think he has a gut level knack for picking out who it’s in his interest to try to take down a peg. I’ve dealt with people like this in negotiations and corporate politics many times, which is why I have mostly disagreed with Democratic strategy in dealing with him.
Contra Chip that doesn’t mean I think he’s a secret genius or master tactician or anything, any more than I think a schoolyard bully is a secret genius for picking up on who he can get away with tormenting or a shady salesman is a genius for being good at picking out marks. It’s a similar thing, maybe better understood as a personality trait than a skill.Report
And Cruz and Obama? That wasn’t about disrespecting women.Report
a touchReport
Haley looks really white for someone who supposedly isn’t white. I didn’t even know she was supposed to be non-white until recently.Report
Vox has this interesting article about a miniature conservative culture war over a T&A calendar. Roughly speaking it puts the Barstool Conservatives, the people who hate the Woke because they see them as killjoys, vs. the Social Conservatives that hate the Woke but want to replace Woke values with their own version of virtue.
https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/1/10/24024341/calendargate-conservative-civil-warReport
Calendar company quoted as saying: “Spell my name right.”Report
In this corner, we have Team “Wimmin Are Property Of Men’s Desires” and in this corner we have Team “Wimmin Are Property For Men’s Desires But Only Behind Closed Doors”
Are you ready to RUMMMBLE!!!!Report
Ha. The division between Libertine Conservatives and Virtue Conservatives have always existed. Also the idea that Liberals, small l and big l, are a bunch of killjoys out to ruin your fun. When the franchise started to expand to lower middle class and working class men in late 19th century Britain, the Conservative was able to get that vote by arguing they would allow you to do fun things on Sunday like drink in pubs or watch sports while the Liberal Party supported strict Sabbath observance because they were reliant on the morally upstanding Evangelical voters.
The tension might be a bit less on our side of the aisle but there is still some tension between Libertine Liberals and, for lack of a better term, Virtue Liberals. Vox had an article about a faction of young progressives just turned off about excessive sexuality but for liberal-left reasons a few months ago. We haven’t really determined what is a positive way cis-gender heterosexual men can express their sexuality or whether it is all inherently objectifying of women and bad. Is a T&A calendar or the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition a bit of harmless fun or is it actively bad is a debate on our side.Report
The conflict between freedom and responsibility is as universal for sexuality as it is for mortality.
As much as we like to imagine ourselves as deep and spiritual beings and our bodies are sacred, the horror genre reminds us that our bodies are sacks of meat for about a million species and exist merely as a food source, or as a repository for their hatchlings.
I don’t think its entirely possible to escape that conflict. No matter who we are or what we believe, the desire to view other people as repositories for our own pleasure is always there, just lurking below the surface.
What I think helps the liberals is that our coalition shares power with women, particularly middle aged women who have experienced both sides of the desire coin; Being young and pretty and seeing how liberating it is to explore freedom, then witnessing how that becomes a trap, shutting as many doors as it opens, then finally seeing how once its gone, they become invisible.
This is why IMO, neither the lets call it, the Playboy/ Bill Maher faction, nor the Dworkinite faction has been triumphant. If you go to a meeting of some local Democratic Party club, you will find it run by middle aged women who are happy to accept other people’s sexual freedom, but also not keen on making a pinup calendar.Report
The only real goal of life is to live long enough to pass down your genes in a strictly scientific sense.
I prefer the term Libertine and Virtue factions because you can use them for both the Right and the Left. Interestingly enough, Hugh Hefner did appear on Buckley’s TV show in the 1960s and argued whether conservatism should be Libertine or Virtue.
I’m also not sure if having women play more of a roll for longer necessarily helps the Democratic or really liberal people in general navigate this debate. Everybody depicted in the Real American Woman calendar is a conservative activist woman who is both conventionally hot and finds some liberation in flaunting this. The critics of the calendar include a lot of conservative women. So basically the same as liberals but the anti-faction is approaching this through Christian virtue rather than Feminist virtue.Report
There is a certain fundamental tension that has never been resolved that is causing this. Pre-Feminist society basically argued that women should be virtuous and that sexual wives and mothers but also sexy playmates for men. A lot of the sexual revolution for women was a reaction against the Madonna role they were placed into. However, since most people are heterosexual that would mean doing things that appealed to men and kind of lean into the other pre-feminist type of sexy playmate for men. A lot of the debates we have, at least about heterosexuality, is trying to deal with this fundamental tension.Report
Virtue and Libertine are good terms, and they each confer benefits on different people at different times in life.
Lets say you are the young man idealized in Playboy- Wealthy, powerful, having all the toys and status objects.
And lets say you are the Playboy idealized female- Young, sexy and sexually adventurous.
Both of those people find a lot of power and status in the Libertine model.
But of course in due time they can find all that stripped away, and be poor, unattractive and watching their bodies degrade.
Virtue then, can give them power and status.
And of course, both Virtue and Libertine work by exclusion and stigmatizing those who don’t conform.Report
There are also people who are consistently Libertine or Virtue throughout their life. A man could find the Hugh Hefner ideal boorish. A young woman the Playboy ideal objectifying even if she meets the standards. Or they could be Libertines but not able to take advantage like their younger selves but still think the Virtue crowd are killjoys whether doing it for liberal or conservative reasons. People are complicated that way.Report
Amazing:
This isn’t lost on postliberals. Writing on Calendargate in the American Conservative, former Ron DeSantis speechwriter Nate Hochman bemoans the way that so-called conservative brands play into mainstream culture rather than challenging its premises.
“Fewer swimsuits, more Nazi symbols!”Report
Chris Christie out. Apparently a hot mic caught him saying Haley would ‘get smoked’ and that Ron DeSantis called him afraid he was going to endorse her.Report
Weird – I think he’s said tougher things deliberately. Well, NH is not Trump’s strongest state, and I think Christie was polling well there, so maybe there’s a little opening.Report
Yea I don’t think anyone could get too mad about what he said. If I am an anti-Trump Republican though this is what I would want to see happen.Report
Oh, yeah. I am and I am. I called for the party to unite around a non-Trump candidate from the get-go. I preferred DeSantis, but I’m also comfortable with Haley, and I don’t mind an ideological debate for the future of the party. Still, I’d be happier if there were only one guy going against Trump.
It’s a tough path though. Iowa likes surprising people and/or doesn’t take the process too seriously. I assume Trump will win it, but anything less than a comfortable win will be noticed. New Hampshire could also give Trump a weak #1 or even a #2. I haven’t been looking at the numbers, but my gut says that DeSantis is Trump’s greatest challenge in Iowa, and Haley in NH. A legitimate challenger to Trump would have to come out of both those with gold and/or silver. Next is Nevada (a silly caucus) and then two weeks until South Carolina.
By all rights, Trump should walk away with SC. He would have to really hobble himself in the next two months and have a solid competitor for him to not be celebrating a major SC win.Report
You may have heard about the tunnels under the synagogue.
You may have seen the footage.
You may have made some jokes about it.
But now? You can make jokes about how the youths at the synagogue hired migrants to dig the tunnels. The youths described the migrants as “Mexicans”.Report
Feds charge eBay over employees who sent live spiders and cockroaches to couple; company to pay $3M.
This story may go all the way to the top.Report
Wow — I’m sure i’m the 5 millionth person to think this, but it’s like a real-life version of this comic.Report
I’m trying to think why I’d want to click on either of these links, and I’ve got nothing. I mean, it’s older XKCD, so I’ve probably seen it, but I don’t wanna.Report
Suit yourself, it’s not like any of us are getting a commission on these. At least I can confirm that I’m not.Report
I thought it was funny.Report
Reason Magazine reports: Lab Leak Is Not a Conspiracy Theory, Anthony Fauci Concedes.
Personally, I think it still is one.Report
I don’t think it rises to the level of conspiracy theory but it still strikes me as considerably less likely than the natural origins theory.Report
I think that the fact that so many powerful people were trying to prevent it from even being discussed raises it back to “conspiracy theory”.Report
What steps did they take to prevent it from being talked about?Report
Everything from social shaming to social media censorship.
This is talked about in the article that opens up when you click on the link.Report
I saw Taibbi on Twitter pushing his Twitter Files nonsense again. Muckraking ain’t what it used to be.Report
Yeah I read the link which is why I asked. About the closest anyone came to actually suppressing he theory was Facebook prohibiting users from posting about it.
Even Fauci said it was possible, just not very probable.
So it seems most likely that “powerful people” weren’t trying to suppress the truth, just dismissive of something they didn’t think was likely.Report
It all depends on what your definition of “suppressed” is.Report
If having one of your social media accounts frozen over information which looks false and very likely defamatory, the claim to martyrdom seems comical.
And even then, in hindsight it looks like they made the right call.Report
information which looks false and very likely defamatory
That’s the problem with some variants of true information, I guess.
Sometimes it looks defamatory and false first.Report
So basically not very powerful people at all, at least in governmental terms, just some social media people?
Yeah no wonder the lab leak people have to strain so hard- nailing yourself to a cross solo is a lot of work- not really a one person job.Report
“At least in governmental terms”
Well, this is where the whole “did government tell Twitter/Facebook to do this?” thing comes in handy which brings us back to the twitter files that have already been mocked.
I imagine that, soon, we will be at “everybody knows it was a lab leak but that doesn’t mean that China did it *DELIBERATELY*.”Report
“everybody ALWAYS knew it was a lab leak, and it’s misinformation to say that anyone ever thought it was misinformation, because everybody SERIOUS always thought that was true. maybe they said we should wait for confirmation at first, but that’s just GOOD SCIENCE, not like racists jumping to assume that brown people are responsible for everything bad.”Report
Don’t see it moving much that way.
And did the Trump administration tell Twitter and Facebook to do this? And think they’d listen to them? I mean honestly, Jay me lad, the lab leak theory is a little speculative but exists in the world of the plausible- this other thing? That’s pure fantasy.Report
And did the Trump administration tell Twitter and Facebook to do this? And think they’d listen to them?
According to what Journalist David Zweig said, it wasn’t “The Trump Administration” but “the U.S. government under both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden“.
Even if Trump acts as an official “but that makes it okay”, Biden did it too. Which means BSDI.
Which also makes it okay? I think?Report
Relax everyone, social media aren’t powerful!Report
I actually think this gets to why I find this particular perspective a bit odd. I generally agree with the Taibbian, Greenwaldian, whatever, critique, that at minimum this is not a business the government should be in. The part that never comes up is the increasing irrelevance of what we have to date known as social media. Twitter is dead and I think there’s a lot of reason to believe we’re passed the peak (FB is dying, meta never took off, etc.). This is why the story has seemed increasingly backwards looking in a way that undercuts its relevance.
Which in fairness this isn’t just a them problem. A lot of media from a lot of people feels strangely stuck in a moment that’s getting a little further in the rear view mirror every day.Report
We’re reflecting on 2020, so the social media tier list has changed. And government is always by its nature going to lag behind trends. What is worth noting is that, with private cooperation, a handful of businessmen and government officials were able to restrict speech on the largest platforms.
I don’t think anyone would argue that Tik Tok is inherently more oriented toward freedom. But the specific medium doesn’t matter as much as the underlying weakness that’s been revealed. We tend to give social media a lot of latitude because it’s seen as democratizing, but it can be tweaked into a tool that increases government control over speech.Report
Yes, that is what needs to be emphasized, that social media companies are the property of billionaire oligarchs and are arbitrary, capricious and prone to error in what they allow or what they restrict, and that’s even when they are not acting as tools of government control.Report
I hear what you’re saying but hear me out on this; would you say the results of what Twitter’s former execs did have been good for them? And would any tech entrepreneur look at how this played out and conclude it is a path to success? I think the answer is pretty clearly no.
Now, I don’t want to give you some trite ‘the system worked as it should nothing to see here’ kind of nonsense because I don’t think that’s true either. It sucks that there are federal bureaucrats and law enforcement out there trying to set up this kind of stuff. But I also think the backlash, hostile takeover, and hollowing out of Twitter is already spurring its own kind of corrective. Look for example at how substack has refused to get involved in the same kinds of politically charged moderation games Twitters old bosses did that lead them to their downfall. To me this means that if you’re still stuck in a 2020 perspective, instead of a 2024 perspective, you’re doing a lot of missing the forest for the trees.Report
If Twitter collapsed under market forces, I could feel a little more optimism. But it was conquered by a weird billionaire who clearly doesn’t care if he destroys it. That’s a black swan event. Beyond that, it’s encouraging that the courts are at least starting to rein in the government’s ability to do this kind of thing. And there’s the great comfort that the fourth largest social media company isn’t interested in spreading American propaganda, I guess.Report
I’ve always said so.Report
Subscriptions must be flagging over there or something to indulge in yet more Fauci statement inferences.Report
At this point I can’t fathom what more there is to say about any of it.Report
I believe that what is to be said is a variant of whether we should silence people next time.Report
Vaguely related: Psy-ops are a crucial weapon in the war against disinformationReport
I might be misreading your comment, but this was one of the biggest public health crises in the past 100 years, so anyone interested in policy should be poring over the records for years.
I made a comment above about how conservatives don’t keep good records. “Of course highly addictive cocaine was going to disappear from the streets, why should we even look back on it?” This is another example. Just as the actions of officials and agencies should be reviewed, so too the parties and ideologies.Report
I’m convinced that some sort of independent review of what exactly we are doing with gain of function research and international partnerships on the same is warranted.
I’m not so convinced another day exploring Fauci’s contradictory statements or relitigating for the umpteenth time his role as face of the public health response at the height of the pandemic is in fact doing any of that, or likely to produce anything useful at this point.Report
This isn’t even like third quintile weirdness for Reason.Report
Reason didn’t pluck this topic out of thin air — do y’all not realize that there have been Congressional hearings with Fauci the last few days?
Maybe it’s a bubble thing — when I do a News search, I see a lot more hits in the righty or independent sources than I do in NYT/WaPo etc.Report
Wait, there have been Congressional hearings with Fauci the last few days?
And Reason is talking about it???Report
CBS, AP, USA Today, even Newsweek covered it. Problem is the first day was 9 hours behind closed doors, so all we have on that so far is committee statements. Hard to gin up good headlines without soundbites.Report
Given the state of the House these days it’s not at all surprising they hauled ol’ Tony in.Report
He’s a nice distraction from both a looming shutdown deadline AND the circus that is the Hunter Biden hearings, what with the latter in attendance when he was formally referred to the full House for contempt of Congress.Report
NEW BLACK CROWES ALBUM! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!Report
That’s a delight to see!Report
Stochastic terrorism is a threat to American Democracy:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/12/politics/arizona-election-director-maga-invs/index.htmlReport
Man, after October 7th, I thought I’d not see “stochastic terrorism” until at least 2025 or 2026.Report
October 7th was actual Terrorism. Stochastic Terrorism is “the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” Which harassment of the kind described in the article would be.Report
I mean, like, the pro-Palestinian protests that started popping up everywhere.Report
Do you believe those have had any effect? Like forcing election officials to quit over fears for their own safety? Because one of these things is not actually like the other . . .Report
Yeah, that’s the counter-argument, isn’t it?Report
If you want to “B-but but but Palestinian protests!” and document that Palestinian supporters are sending in bomb threats and death threats to public officials, sure, lets call it stochastic terrorism. I’m cool with that.
But that concedes Phillip’s assertion that labeling these Trump supporters and the mediasphere they feed from as stochastic terrorists is correct.Report
It’s the usual. “You’re misunderstanding what ‘from the river to the sea’ means!” and whatnot.
“No, no, that’s not *REAL* stochastic terrorism!”
Anyway, what I was saying was that I expected that term to go away for longer than, apparently, it has.Report
So long as the Proud Boys and their fellow travelers exist and so long as the Trumpists call the Jan 6 insurrectionists “hostages” the term will be applicable.Report
Of course, of course. Keep using it, I say. Heck, use it against internet commenters!Report
Okay, everyone stop for a second, because it seems like _no one_ here knows what stochastic terrorism actually is. It’s a pretty well-defined concept, even if it’s hard to figure out edge cases of if someone is doing it.
That wouldn’t actually be stochastic terrorism, that’s just normal terrorism.
Stochastic terrorism is setting up a system where certain people are deliberately influencing others to do terrorism against specific targets, but the people who do this pretend to have some level of legal distance where it is not their fault.
The ur-example, before we even had the term stochastic terrorism, is anti-abortion activists leaders who would create situations where violent individuals were aimed at doctors who did abortions, and killed a few of them, but the leaders would never actually say ‘go kill that guy’. Killing the people was _normal_ terrorism, whereas anti-abortion leaders setting up the targeting, publishing addresses and names and talking about baby-killers, and knowing someone would then go harm them were doing stochastic terrorism…which lead to the normal terrorism.
It would be possible to claim that pro-Palestine protests _leaders_ are doing stochastic terrorism, but to actually do that, you have to show the end result of some sort of terrorism, you can’t just vaguely handwave it.
And…there really hasn’t been that. No, violence at conflicting protests don’t really count there, the premise is ‘priming individuals and sending them off’.
Whether what Trump did would count, I don’t know. I would say no, I wouldn’t include ‘riling up a violent mob’ as stochastic terrorism, mostly because those two concepts already overlap…and stochastic terrorism is doing the same thing as ‘riling up a mob’, just extremely indirectly. So I don’t feel it makes sense to try to muddle the difference.Report
But what about recent edge case?Report
I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it’s important to realize that ‘stochastic terrorism’ is not actually a crime, and thus there’s never going to be a decision on what is or isn’t it. No one is going to be prosecuted for it. (1)
And it probably _can’t_ be a crime in the US, considering it is free speech and the ‘incitement’ threshold to get past the free speech protection are so incredibly high that takes someone as dumb as Trump on Jan 6 to actually do that, and even there we aren’t sure he would hit them under the law, hence the lack of charging him with incitement.
The entire premise of stochastic terrorism is that people are doing non-illegal things that cause other people to commit terrorism, and the first people fully know and intend that to be the outcome.
So I think, definitionally, to say someone is doing stochastic terrorism, there has to at least be an end result of terrorism, someone else has to actually commit some terroristic acts. And also they not only have to have been clearly motivated, but essentially handed a target, by what the first person said.
I feel the ‘handed a target’ part is pretty important there, because otherwise we’ve generalized the concept into ‘just saying bad things about people in general’. No. Stochastic terrorism is what got George Tiller killed, or the Boston Children’s Hospital hit with weeks of bomb threats. People broadcast those specific people and places with the full knowledge and intent that someone else would attack them.
Which, I repeat, is legal. But we do get to actually condemn the people who do that.
1) A lawsuit, OTOH, is probably on better legal ground, as there are much less speech protections there.Report
Thinking about that, it probably would be good to actually clarify some of that law. Libel or slander that resulted in individuals literally attacking you should probably have some additional penalties. I think the law cares only about reputational harm, and I’m thinking ‘reputational harm so bad it causes actual literal assault of you by other people’ should probably get a bump.
And it would be good to clarify exactly when even ‘truthful information’ or even opinions directed at a specific individual that caused actual real world terrorism, and the people presenting that information knew that would happen, hit a specific line that would allow people to sue for damages. That’s not actually libel, but you can still sue on that, it’s just case law is…just a mihsmash of stuff, and it would be nice to make actual real laws there.Report
October 7th was actual Terrorism
Not all violence is terrorism. The violence done wasn’t against civilians. I’d call it an insurrection or even “attempted coup”.Report
Congress are civilians, technically.
I would argue that if the violence was intended to scare Congress into voting a certain way, it could be terrorism.
However, I don’t think that’s true. I think the main intent of the violence was to disrupt things enough that the voting did not actually happen on the day it was legally supposed to happen. This is why Pence was the target…if Pence was killed, or just physically driven out of Congress (And there is the fact the Secret Service tried to get him to leave, and we never really answered the question if they were working on Trump’s request.), the proceedings couldn’t happen at all.
PS. We really really need some Constitutional fixes, because it is, in fact, literally unclear what would happen if electoral collage votes were not cast on the proper day…although President Trump’s term expired at noon, Jan 20th, which means ‘failing to elect a new president’ certainly wouldn’t mean he magically remains president! Even in the stupidest universe where we can’t fix the missed Jan 6th electoral vote, that just means the Speaker of the House becomes president, cause we forgot to elect a new one.
But that process, as laid out, is incredibly fragile.Report
There are apparently many people out there making pro-piracy arguments.Report
Okay. A minor new development in the Rufo vs. Harvard thing.
Rufo has mentioned a couple of times that he got his degree from Harvard but, he admits, it’s from the Harvard “night school“. That is, the Harvard Extension School. Not anywhere near as much prestige but… hey. You get to put the degree on your resume.
On January 4th, Jennifer Hochschild (a political scientist at Harvard and Professor of African-American Studies) tweeted:
Well.
It’s one thing for plebes like us to say “He didn’t *REALLY* go to Harvard. He’s not anywhere near the same as what we normally think of as a Harvard grad.”
It is 100% different for a *PROFESSOR* to tell the truth like this.
I mean, it’s easy to hate Rufo. It’s easy to say “he’s a grifter” or “he’s a shill” or “he’s a cat’s paw of shadowy billionaires conspiring against the elite of America” or “he’s Italian” or whatever. But stuff like this is an absolute gift to him. In her desire to take Rufo down a peg, she fired off an RPG that blew up hitting FREAKING EVERYBODY IN THE HES.
Anyway, today Professor Hochschild tweeted:
Good for her.
But I suspect that the damage has been done.
She went to Yale from 1972–1979… assuming she graduated at 17 and went off to college at 18, that’d put her at 69 coming up on 70. Nice.
A good age to retire and spend time with one’s family. Has nothing to do with insulting her school and her students. Seriously. When do classes start? Next week? She’s going to walk into a classroom full of HES students.Report
She’s tweeted out another non-apology:
Report
The missing piece of information:
Report
I am just going to sum up the various debates between liberals and conservatives on this thread and previous threads on certain topics as being about do we need a certain amount of harshness as official policy or unofficial cultural enforcement in order to get an optimal society. The Western liberal response is generally that we don’t need any harshness or at least very little harshness while the conservative response is that we need quite bit of official or unofficial harshness to get at least a minority of the population onto the straight and narrow.
During the pandemic, there was a lot of envy among Western liberals in general and American liberals in particular about how the populations of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan seemingly just compelled withe the COVID restrictions without that much complaint or protest. Meanwhile every Western nation had a very loud minority that would just not get with the program no matter what and a slightly bigger set that got with the program in general but had little or not so little cheats for some stuff. When this was brought up on the other blog, I brought up the fact that the East Asian developed democracies might have some elements that Western liberals do not like in their society and these things are deeply wound up with the things we like about Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan in ways that are difficult to handle.
I don’t think that any Western liberal is going to like the way that Japan deals with its hoarders. If somebody’s hoard gets bad enough and big enough nuisance for the neighbors, the local municipal government would just send workers to burst into your apartment and home and start clearing the place over your protests. The good of society outweighs any personal issue that led to your hoarding tendency and they can take away the stuff you accumulated. End of story.
So the big Western debate is can we have a society that is both maximally caring and community oriented while allowing for maximum self-expression without harshness or do we need a certain amount, and maybe quite a bit of official or unofficial harshness in society to get the maximum people in the best shape. I’m honestly not sure about either argument.Report
Imagine a scenario where prominent politicians instituted a mask mandate.
Now, get this, let’s get *META*.
Okay. We’ve imagined a mask mandate, right? Now here we are.
Nice. We’ve got a mandate.
So, like, now let’s imagine that the politicians who mandated the mandate were caught *NOT FOLLOWING IT*. Seriously. Let’s imagine that this politician was caught partying in a club, this other politician was caught blowing out birthday cake candles in a public restaurant, and this other politician was caught just, like, dancing. There’s a band and she likes the band and she’s dancing. Just imagine that.
Anyway, under this scenario that we have postulated…
Let’s try to establish a new consensus.
What’s the baseline?
Like, let’s say that the folks in charge of deciding what is/isn’t a misdemeanor is in charge of deciding what is and what is not a problem under the new system.
You gonna pay attention? This is an important question.Report
“You gonna pay attention?”
No. Those who align with said politician will not care. Oh, they may make a few noises, but they won’t do much more. Not so the other side. They’ll use it. Only a small minority group will see it for what it is, regardless of political side: rules for thee,, not for me. “Important” people get a pass.Report
I tend to think there’s so much path dependency involved that debating it like we would a policy we can implement is probably pointless. Western democracies are the product of a different history than our east Asian counterparts, and the US itself is an outlier among the former. We will always be a little more unruly, individualistic, and less respectful of authority. This comes with upsides and downsides.Report
This is the culture vs. policy debate. A lot of liberals hate arguments from culture because it can quickly lead to some really dark places, comes across as an argument for not doing anything, and cultural issues are a lot harder to solve than policy issues. I think many liberals also see arguments from culture as really low brow and false.* Policy is something that is mere matter of legislation though and achievable with numbers.
*An example of this is why single family housing is more common in Anglophone countries compared to continental Europe. The cultural argument would be something about English values and everyman’s home is castle creating a preference for single family housing. The policy argument is that continental European cities kept their walls up for a lot longer than British cities, so had to grow up rather than out and this leads to the differences in housing stock.Report
The liberals weren’t harsh during covid? Sending the police to shut down stores, closing churches and restaurants? And in general: when has the left been reluctant to regulate “hate speech”, firearms, pay rates, wedding cakes…Report
The crisis facing Western societies is rooted in identity.
Changing demographics and immigration have changed what our identity is and he established order is having an existential crisis.
It isn’t possible to frame this in high principled terms of Order/ Liberty because it doesn’t divide along that axis.
Liberals insist on Freedom when it comes to gender identity, but Order when it comes to things like hate speech.
Conservatives insist on the opposite.Report
Freedom when it comes to gender identity
If you’re pointing to a male reproductive organ and proclaiming it female and should compete with the other females, then your “freedom” is imposing on others’ freedoms.
but Order when it comes to things like hate speech.
The President of Harvard and some other liberal plantations just got into trouble for insisting that hate speech was protected. Presumably they’ll go back to it not being allowed as soon as a group that isn’t Jewish is targeted.Report
your “freedom” is imposing on others’ freedoms.
Of course it is. All freedoms inevitably are limited by some imposed order.
That’s my point, that the conflict isn’t between Freedom versus Order, but which order is allowed to impose on which other freedoms.Report
Not all Orders are equally ethical and not all freedoms impose equally.Report
I feel the same.
Which is the great national debate we are having.Report
What I am saying is that it might not be possible to pick and choose when we have order and when we have liberty. A society with the levels of public decorum, general respect for others, and willingness to follow things like strict COVID regulations in mass might just be incompatible with extreme levels of personal freedom in manners of self-expression. We might not be able to have both an African-American gender queer person with dyed dreadlocks and total willingness to follow pandemic restrictions.Report
Isn’t that the accusation from conservatives,? That we liberals do in fact have both an African-American gender queer person with dyed dreadlocks and total willingness to follow pandemic restrictions.
That we scorn traditional norms, but impose new ones of our own. And I would argue that it has largely succeeded.
Like, imagine a person from 1963 visiting a “conservative” community in 2023. They would be astonished at what is permitted, and what is taboo.
And its not like other societies don’t also have these sorts of tensions. They just have them to a lesser degree. I don’t think that the things that distinguish American culture from others is hardwired into us and can’t be changed.Report
“Isn’t that the accusation from conservatives,?” == “Isn’t that observation low-status?”Report
If you’re going to point to societies that don’t allow our level of diversity, then I don’t see why you’d think some of the tiny sub-cultures would be allowed to exist.Report
I’m not saying that tiny subcultures like fundamentalist Christians shouldn’t be allowed to exist.
I’m just saying that we should encourage them to assimilate into the larger culture, or at least conform to some basic set of norms.
I am quite serious, by the way.Report
Fundamentalists as a percentage of the population are at least 10% and might be higher than 20%. They’re not a tiny subculture.
For a measurement of their numbers and their power, they got the Supreme Court get rid of Roe. That should give us a lot of pause when considering which sub-cultures would survive.
If we’re going to get into the business of encouraging assimilation, we won’t be targeting them. We will be targeting a lot of other groups.Report
Who’s “We”?
Who is more acculturated into the mainstream of American life- the African-American gender queer person with dyed dreadlocks, or the fundamentalist Christian who wants to ban a book about two penguins?
The 10% of fundamentalist Christians matches the 10% of Americans who are gay, but the gays have a deep and wide support among the other 90%, whereas the fundamentalists don’t.
This is why they describe themselves as besieged and surrounded, pilgrims in an unholy land. Its also why they have given up on democracy and now see it a roadblock to be overcome.Report
So in other words, the fundamentalists will never be able to do something like get rid of Roe.
The 10% who are gay don’t vote in lockstep (nor am I sure it’s 10%). The ten to twenty percent who are fundamentalist have proven they will.
That “deep and wide” support looks great on paper but doesn’t amount to much in politics.
RE: besieged
They are besieged because their world view runs counter to science and has other problems.
But we’re generations or centuries away from removing God as a power in our society.
I don’t like that, but facts don’t care about what I like.Report
I mean…we already do. At we do now.
I’ve pointed out before, there was a hypothetical window in which Republicans could have pivoted and gotten some gay votes, in the same way that Bush II tried to pivot of Hispanic votes, which did work a little. (Although I think Trump undid most of that?)
And they could have done that because of how badly and cautiously of how Democrats handled gay marriage. We ended up with the courts mostly deciding the thing. Republicans could have, at any time, pivoted to ‘Gay marriage is still marriage, and we encourage it’.
And then we got Republicans pumping any-trans nonsense full volume for several years straight. Which is still going strong, BTW, even if everyone seems to have forgotten about it. And they’ve even stopped pretending it’s about kids…or even trans people, and have just gone straight homophobic.
And it’s not just actual LGBTQ people. The youngest generation of voters is completely accepting of LGBTQ, they ave much queer than previous generations and even if not, have tons of friends who are. They are not going to vote for people trying to hurt them. This is a horrifically stupid losing issue for Republicans for the future, and it’s going to lose them more than 10% of that generation. Permanently.
Just like they’ve permanently lost the Black vote.
Republicans constantly throwing minorities under the bus has resulted in quite a few minorities who will never vote for them, (regardless of all other politics), and that one single fact has doomed them to demographic irrelevancy in the near future…honestly, it already happened!
It’s easy to say ‘That one individual group doesn’t matter’, but it sure as hell adds up why you run off Black voters, queer voters, and a lot (Not all, but a lot) of female voters…and probably Hispanic voters too, I haven’t really checked. They do actually need people to vote for them who are not straight white men.Report
and that one single fact has doomed them to demographic irrelevancy in the near future…
I have been hearing that for the last 30+ years. There are huge structural forces which make the parties 50/50.
Gays have won the culture war. They are being accepted more and more. Efforts to lower the bar, i.e. find some vast amount of anti-gay discrimination to rally against, are limited to the occasional cake.
Give it another 20 years and it will be like having red hair or being left handed, i.e. a characteristic no one cares about. That implies that them as a voting demographic will disappear.
The future is less clear (or maybe less bright) for trans.
RE: Hispanic
Far as I can tell, Trump does better with Hispanic voters than Biden (link below). Long term I think Hispanics will become White.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4383903-trump-leads-biden-among-hispanic-young-voters-poll-2024-election/Report
The rash of anti-queer book bans by Republicans shows that gays have won the culture war broadly but there is still fierce resistance among conservatives.
Most importantly, for someone who is either gay or ally, is to see how quickly people who one day seem perfectly accepting of queer people can suddenly with just a little bit of propaganda, turn into a howling torch carrying mob demanding the firing of gay teachers.
Republicans voters liked Nikki Haley, really liked her, until she offended the Boss, then suddenly she wasn’t really born in this country, now was she?
They hated Muslims and screamed bloody murder about a moscue in downtown Manhattan and creeping Sharia law, then when some Muslims protested queer books, they suddenly discovered that Muslims are kinda OK.
Republicans have demonstrated by their actions that in their world, there is no such thing as “rights”, but merely privileges which are conditional, transactional, and subject to revocation at the first infraction.Report
…try that again, this time with feeling.
West Virginia is currently trying to outlaw trans people existing within 2500 feet of a school or in front of minors. Aka, from existing at all in public, because no one can be sure there aren’t minors around in public. (And 2500 feet is absurdly far to stay away from _anything_, rendering entire cities off limits and basically making travel impossible. The limits for actual convicted pedophiles to stay away from schools are generally 500 feet.)
Indiana, meanwhile, is currently trying to define trans people out of existence.
And before you go ‘that’s trans people, not gay’, be aware that the LGBTQ community does not care about this distinction. An attack on one is rightfully seen as an attack on all, especially since such attacks almost always embolden attacks on other queer people, and are often done at the same time by the same people.
The Indiana bill, for example, also decided to amend the _gay marriage ban_ still on the books there to make sure that it didn’t recognize trans people. The law that is not in effect, but clearly those Indiana lawmakers wish it was.Report
before you go ‘that’s trans people, not gay’, be aware that the LGBTQ community does not care about this distinction.
If wiki is correct and a lot of trans youth would be gay adults if they were left untreated, then gay and trans are natural rivals.
They had their common repression to keep them allies, now they don’t.
The left handed don’t ally with anyone, there is no serious “left handed community”.Report
‘wiki’, whoever that is, is wrong. That is an utter lie by transphobic people.
The vast majority of trans people are not straight after transition. It’s not even _close_.
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-023-16654-z/figures/2
28.2% of trans men are straight, 20.3% are gay or ‘same-gender loving’, and 23.9% are bi/pan. (And another 26.3 call themselves queer or other…which almost certainly does not mean straight, and probably should just be classified as a very complicated way to say bi.)
23.3% of trans women are straight, 21.7% are gay, lesbian, or same-gender loving, and 38.8% are bi/pan. (With 12.6% queer/other)
If they transitioned to not be gay, you’d think LESS OF THEM WOULD END UP BEING GAY. (And what the hell would bisexuals even think they were doing?)
Non-binary people, OTOH, hilariously seem to have absolutely no idea what the hell ‘straight’ means for them and basically refuse to use it at all. (More seriously, there’s a weird technical reason for that having to do with gender identity, but it’s way too complicated to explain.)
Stop getting your news from sources that have absolutely no connection to the community. The actual community is almost entirely united on this issue.Report
Oh, and I feel like I did not emphasize enough here that queer people are 100% aware that the people pushing transphobia are also pushing homophobia, in fact they’re often literally it doing _at the same time_ like I said about the anti-gay marriage law being amended as part of the Indiana bill that erases trans people from existence.
And how ‘concerns’ about kids using different names and pronouns have somehow turned into keeping any sort of LGBTQ books out of schools.
And if the transphobes aren’t pushing anti-gay stuff at that exact moment, it’s because they’re trying to stupidly dupe non-trans queer people into joining them.
Cis queer people are not, in fact, utter morons, and understand that anyone trying to police gender is going to come after them immediately afterwards, because, well, they’re breaking those rules too. People who have ‘concerns’ about what gender someone is will have exactly the same ‘concerns’ about what gender someone is dating.Report
‘wiki’, whoever that is, is wrong. That is an utter lie by transphobic people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_youth#Persistence_of_transgender_identity
They’ve got 5 links to serious studies. Looks like the real deal.
Stop getting your news from sources that have absolutely no connection to the community.
That was not “news”. That was me making observations.
The two groups interests used to line up exactly, everyone in the movements grew up in that environment and understood that.
However there have been truly massive changes in the last couple of decades.
My expectation is that in 40 years “Gay” will be roughly “Left handed” as far as societal oppression goes. That implies the entire gay movement will be destroyed.
This is their peak. Momentum can keep you running for a while. They just won the war, but their activists are searching for new mountains of oppression to oppose. Their opposite parties are also searching for new things to oppose.
Both sides are trying to keep the conflict going to protect their own jobs and place in society, but the Gay movement has won and that will be it’s end.Report
“ESPN was caught winning more than 30 Emmy Awards for individuals who are imaginary employees”
https://theathletic.com/5193316/2024/01/11/espn-emmys-fake-names-college-gameday/?source=emp_shared_article
Note paywall. You can read enough though. Imagine, after your company gives you the award, years later they call you and tell you to give it back. Christ, what a holes.Report
So, here’s the thing. I discovered something on Twitter, something people I agree with were doing that was really stupid and I was going to come here and talk about it. But instead I want to talk about both that, and context. First, let me actually type what I was going to say:
Apparently, pro-Palestinian protestors have targeted the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center: https://nypost.com/2024/01/15/metro/pro-palestinian-protesters-target-nycs-memorial-sloan-kettering-cancer-center/
And this is obvious a stupid tactic, and I was going to talk about it and bad tactics, but it was _such_ bad tactics that it made me pause and actually question what really was going on.
And checking into this, and it’s actually been impossible for me to find any news coverage that points this out, I’m basically having to read randos on Twitter to find what was really going on, but what the protestors have actually been doing is wandering the streets and shouting at _everyone_ that they are complicit. Like, by name, they call out the name of the places they are going past, and assert they are complicit. They walk past a Subway, they call out Subway as being complicit. They walk past Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, they call Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center out as being complicit.
This is, I want to add, is still incredibly stupid as a tactic. For quite a lot of reason, including ‘Calling everyone complicit is nonsense’. They have literally no idea who’s complicit or not. Their definition of complicit appears to be ‘Not magically ending what is going on’.
I have no idea why the protestors would think this is a good idea, and at some point you have to wonder what sort of idiots are proposing this. It’s the same thing as the ‘blockading highways mid-highway’ instead of just blocking entrances…why are you doing it _that_ way? I get breaking traffic flow as a tactic, but you also understand that there are _safe_ ways and _dangerous_ way to do that, right?
Who the hell is running these things? Why don’t we get the incredibly competent people who have been protesting Cop City here locally in Atlanta? They know what the hell they’re doing. Hell, most BLM managed to be semi-competent. This is just…baffling.
OTOH, the protestors weren’t actually doing what was claimed, or at least not in the context of what was claimed, and the only people talking about this is the right wing media…and left wing media has decided to pretend the protests don’t exist at all because it’s inconvenient politically for Democrats, so all the coverage is from the right. I was going to say that people should check any information they read, but this is literally something I know only because I follow certain people on Twitter.Report
Is Zionism a cancer?
If so, it makes sense to protest a cancer hospital.
Why are you defending cancer?Report
You got any actual things to say about this, Jaybird?
Because I am actually asking ‘What should people do when an organic protest movement ends up with some very stupid ideas as tactics?’Report
What should people do when an organic protest movement ends up with some very stupid ideas as tactics?
I would say that you have two main options:
1. This is a false flag. This is actually a bunch of Nazis who are trying to make Progressives look bad.
2. Police the hell out of these people. Shame them. Yell at them. Tell them that this sort of thing will result in them writing minor players in the blogosphere begging them to remove their names from posts from months ago. And then explain it again. Explain that they’re hurting their own cause. Explain it again.
That’s just off the top of my head.Report