Commenter Archive

I meant defending the people that do this sort of thing.

In terms of the metro system itself I am the one defending it. I want to take my family on it and the best way to make sure I can is for the authorities to remove blatant scofflaws and obviously crazy people.

I don't really understand why removing people for long established remove-able conduct is deemed something that requires a lot of chin scratching.

The Friday before last me and a buddy of mine took our sons to the museum of natural history. We took metro, which in my experience matches March's description of slow decline rather than the insanity you hear about in other cities. I have a station right near me and am on it for one reason or another every other month or so.

My experience this time would have been improved if the transit cop and/or station manager stopped and cited the group of 6 or 8 rowdy kids who clumsily jumped the supposedly now jump resistant entry barriers. Instead they just stared off into space like nothing was happening.

I also had an experience on the way to a Caps game last year (a Sunday afternoon game) where an apparently crazed person yelled profanity at my son for about a third of the ride. Removing him would have been good.

Is this the stuff of Fox News outrage? Not really. But I also have no idea why anyone would be interested in defending this kind of thing.

It is well within the norm for Ann Telnaes.

It is not a great look.

While I don't want to overstate the importance of this kind of thing I have to say I appreciate the seeming return of principled resignations. At this point a little limited evidence that some people at these institutions may actually have principles feels like a revelation.

That song is definitely terrible.

The conversation inspired me to Google 'halfway houses near me' and 'homeless shelters near me.' There are several of each in the county I live in. I noticed a few of them posted their rules on the websites, many of which included things like being sober, being able to meet certain standards of hygiene, and similar stuff like that. It struck me that anyone able to comply with the rules probably has a decent chance of fixing their situation via the accommodations already offered to them. I also suspect people able to follow those rules are probably the least likely to be the ones that create disturbances or engage in conduct likely to upset the wider public.

To me it all comes back around to what we do for those that can't. I don't want to steal too much valor but my baby lawyer days took me into many of the county lockups across the state. These are places people end up on short stints of less than a year, and where the types of individuals in question spend a lot of time in and out of. It was obvious to me then and remains so that these are not the right places for those in that condition. While this challenges my civil libertarian principles on several fronts I have come to think that institutionalization, provided it is humane, may be the least bad answer.

There was an energy permitting reform bill proposed in the summer and backed by Manchin which is now officially dead. This is the kind of thing where the federal government's authority supersedes, should it chose to exercise it.

I don't think that's a remotely fair or serious response.

You're acting like there's no such thing as a homeless shelter and that social services don't exist. If you aren't ready to deal with the reasons they don't always work in current state then you can't act surprised when people treat the 'just build a home and give it to them' proposal with skepticism.

I try hard to be charitable here but if you think all it takes to turn people in states of debilitating addiction or with untreated severe mental illness into highly functioning members of society is a roof over their head, a hot meal, and a hug all I can conclude is that you have not thought that hard about their actual plight. Just put a bunch of people like that in a building without any rules or controls and see what happens, to say nothing of whether it's the kind of place people who are just down on their luck would be willing to go. More likely they'd be terrified of it, and for completely understandable reasons.

I think you're glossing over the tough cases i.e. those who for whatever reason or lack of ability to reason will run back to the street.

I think it's a little more complicated than that. Plenty of cities do offer housing support but they only work for those sufficiently in their right mind to properly utilize it.

Not to do argument by recent headline grabbing culture war incident but Jordan Neely was given free treatment and a place to live. And he was also allowed to leave at will, return to mass transit, and resume creating a disturbance and threatening people.

Which isn't to say I am in total disagreement with you on the big picture. But I think it's also fair to say that housing and treatment doesn't do much for the hard cases if at a certain point you aren't also willing to forcibly put people into it and impose consequences on those that refuse to cooperate.

He isn't wrong.

But, to further his point, and the point I made above, the conservative parties in those countries also tend to have governance ideas beyond down-sizing whatever public health insurance system they have for the poor as a fig leaf for deficit spending on tax cuts. I punch left here plenty but it's also just a fact that no one seriously expects the GOP trifecta to do anything constructive on this front over the next 2 years, or at any time in the near future.

I think something is better than nothing. Indeed my political alignment turns on it.

As I understand it the difference comes down to relaxed land use rules, meaning you can actually build sh*t. You are of course much closer to it than me but my understanding is that the land use rules are so favorable renewals development has happened in spite of hostility from the political establishment.

Maybe so. But that's a result of having only one party interested in investing in our state capacity and one that isn't interested in playing ball on any subject other than tax cuts. Ideally you'd have a center left spearheading these kinds of efforts and a center right willing to offer some votes, provided the center left agrees to cut out a lot of the rules and BS and sops to whatever entrenched left leaning interests. Instead we have a center left that proposes investments but is only able to pass anything by avoiding any and all goring of progressive sacred cows. I suppose ymmv but I do not see the center left as the dysfunctional part of this dynamic.

No.

The sort of permitting and land use reform that would be necessary to unleash development is the kind of thing that would ideally be the subject of a bipartisan deal. I think we all know why that isn't possible in the current environment.

I forgot to mention this due to my post playoff clinching stupor yesterday but I saw Nosferatu on Sunday afternoon. It was really awesome and is very worth seeing in the theater. Atmosphere was of course incredible like all of the Robert Eggers movies have been. The only thing I'd maybe criticize was the casting of Lilly Depp. She's got that unfortunate Instagram face too many actresses have talked themselves into doing. Made her look out of place in 1830s Germany and her acting wasn’t enough to overcome it (I rank her as only a 5 out of 10 as a scream queen, sad given her dad could easily be ranked as an 8 out of 10 scream queen for his performances in Nightmare on Elm Street and Sleepy Hollow). Overall though it was really good. Going in I thought the run time might be excessive but turned out not to be. I never once felt bored and didn't even need the restroom, despite it being one of those nice theaters where you can order giant beers, which I of course did.

No more tiresome than white people pretending they speak for black people, or anyone other than themselves for that matter.

I'm not sure how common it is for high schools to have opera but this sounds like more of a class and regional thing than a 'race' thing. It may be worth rethinking how important those sorts of affinities really are when it comes to objective questions. Among the many major errors made by adherents to the ideas in question is the one that grossly inflates the importance of various little customs and cultural superficialties into totalizing theories of how the world works. Which doesn't mean these things never matter but it's how we get into everything from idiotic fights over who can cook a burrito to insisting various forms of incompetence or laziness are actually an essential cultural value for certain people.

Good progressives think that the way to assess a person is based on blood quantum. Same with white supremacists.

I think the only way you're going to get to the answer you're looking for with this is to start thinking bigger picture. Let me help.

I come from planet Catholic. By virtue of that my heritage is a mish mash of non-Anglo Saxon Europeans that did not share the religion of the traditional American ruling class, and whose treatment varied and was not always great upon arrival. However we are now assimilated. My extended Catholic family and larger social circle is now starting to grow twigs and branches incorporating people whose heritage is Salvadoran or from other 'hispanic' countries south of the Rio Grande. The children largely speak English and are growing up in normal American suburbs. There is no reason to believe they will not also be assimilated, if they aren't already. I think more already are than our cultural institutions are yet ready to admit, but that's another story.

My guess is that you too and the Jews you have grown up with are also assimilated. Most of the Jews I have interacted with (and there are many in greater DC) are. The only group that did not go through normal assimilation processes in this country are the descendants of African slaves. And even they have done a lot of assimilating since the big legal barriers to them doing so were removed 60 years ago.

What I am trying to get at with this, is that, maybe with the exception of descendants of slaves, the whole intersectional DEI classification chart is BS. It's based on the idea that racial social constructs are much stronger and more enduring than there is any reason to believe to be the case in 21st century America. Most of the people grasping at these identities (and this is the key part) aren't living in some sort of extra level of authenticity nor do they carry any particular moral authority. More likely than not, the educated people who are obsessed with this sort of thing are under the surface suffering from intense anxiety and neurosis over the social atomization that is sadly a feature of modern American life. That is sad for them but you are not compelled to take any of it at face value, and the sooner you stop the sooner you'll feel better.

Very true. We can probably live with a C- if everyone else is getting Ds and Fs.

I think we may be agreeing. At risk of restating what I'm trying to get at is that we do not want to emulate their loss of competitiveness. That goes well beyond the ongoing refugee issues they've dealt with over the last 15-20 years and hits the heart of the larger suite of protections they've instituted for themselves from competition, both from immigrants and outside the EU and it's satellites. They have a lot of the things our economic populists dream of and the trajectory isn't just bad, it's shockingly bad given the near parity that existed between the EU and the US 20-25 years ago.

I nod along with this but think it circles us back to the larger looming question. Can Congress adapt our laws to changing conditions anymore?

The populist impulse isn't wrong, in the sense that the law is supposed to serve the American people. And to the extent benefiting big corporate employers also benefits the people more broadly, then there's nothing inherently wrong with it, but when it doesn't, the state can and should act as a necessary corrective.

At the same time I think it's probably wrong to believe we can win the 21st century by overly restricting ourselves. We should still want to be the top destination for foreign talent, and the last thing we should want to emulate is Europe's combination of populism and competitive nosedive.

Roundabout way of saying it's a hell of a needle we're going to need to thread. I'm pretty pessimistic about the ability of the people we keep putting in charge to figure it out.