Fair. What we can do with things like welfare checks right now is maybe identify behavior that suggests the most serious or overt of mental health problems. Like the guy who lived in the park near my house for a week and screamed at the trees. I'm not a psychologist, but I think it's reasonable to suspect that fellow has a mental health problem and to go just a step further and say that ma-a-a-a-aybe that guy shouldn't have access to weapons. But what I don't have is a person I can call and say "Hey, there's a dude in the park across the street from my house who screams at the trees and I'm feeling a little unsafe here." I could call the police with that and I'd get one of a) "Is he committing a crime? Because screaming at trees isn't a crime." (To which one would be tempted to retort, "If he does it at two in the morning it is.") or b) "Too bad for you, should have voted for a city council member we like better, but now everyone on the force has the Blue Flu," or c) "We'll be right there" and they show up and scare the hell out of the guy and he winds up getting shot which I didn't want, I just wanted someone to calm his inner demons so that the rest of us folks in the neighborhood can get some sleep. (Options b) and c) are what you'd get in Portland today; I hope you'd at least get a) in your city.)
I don't presume to speak for any of my commiepinko brethren but for me, "Defund the Police" was ever something I understood even by its most extreme advocates to be a call for zero law enforcement. Rather, it was a call to divert particular governmental functions that may or may not be characterized as "law enforcement" which are currently being executed by the police to different agencies. You don't necessarily need an armed police office to serve an eviction warrant, for instance (unless the tenant responds to the service with violence) nor do you even always want to have armed, uniformed police officers responding to people having mental health meltdowns in public.
Maybe "Defund the Police" was and remains a bad idea. Maybe "Defund the Police" was and remains a strategically-more-extreme-than-sincere position taken by progressives because previously, calls for the more moderate-sounding "Reform the Police" or even "How About You Cops Just Shoot People Less Often And Maybe Dial The Racism Back A Couple Notches" appeared to have gone ignored or dismissed.
Furthermore, I don't think anyone in this thread has mentioned confiscating guns from anyone. There is discussion of gun control generally but I haven't seen a lot of policy specifics about what gun control would look like. Even back in the Oppressive Totalitarian State days of 1994-2004, the "assault weapons ban" prohibited the manufacturing, sale and resale of certain semi-automatic weapons, but not the possession of any such weapon that had been acquired legally before the ban took effect. The ex post facto clause seems to me like it would prohibit any ban or other criminalization of any weapon that was acquired legally at the time it was acquired, so if you have an AR-15 that you acquired legally today, even if AR-15's were banned tomorrow, you'd be able to keep it.
IOW, no one was ever going to reduce our cities to anarchy, and no one is going to come to try and take your guns away from you.
What I’m doing is insisting that we look at a public health emergency, caused by having more guns then citizens, and ask ourselves if that’s morally right, given the significant level of interpersonal violence that said gun to people ratio creates.
Forget it, comrade.
Conservatives responded to the last public health crisis by staying silent while the more vocal, extreme members of their caucus urged people to not get vaccinated against it, and to ignore masking and social distancing rules as intrusive upon their rights and freedoms.
Let us pray they do not proffer a similar solution to the health issue of "getting shot" as they did to "getting COVID," viz., "just go get it already and acquire 'natural immunity.'"
It's a high culture day for me on Saturday -- the relatively local winery is having a release party, and I've tickets to Mahler's Fourth at the Oregon Symphony. I need to be mindful of my companion's need to let her dog out of the house for relief. Sunday will likely see a hike in the Cascades and a nice home cooked dinner.
I sincerely believe that if we open the door to red flagging people for mental health reasons, we’re going to start finding all sorts of mental maladies.
I ask: would that be a bad thing? (Which is pretty similar to the question Pinky asks below, now that I think about it.)
Dark Matter raised the question of incidences of gun violence increasing dramatically in certain zip codes. And when we're talking about "certain zip codes" I for one read that as shorthand for "economically-challenged dense urban communities populated mostly by people of color" and as long as we're trying to be real, let's be real about what that phrase means.
1. I trust that everyone here is repelled by the idea that there would be one rule for areas that are populated principally by people of color and a different rule for areas that are populated principally by descendants of fair-skinned Europeans. Can we all at least agree that although different areas of the country do indeed have varying problems of varying degrees of immediacy, when we're talking about the law, we are necessarily talking about something that's a uniform rule for everyone? If you are going to answer that question "no," I'd appreciate your being explicit about taking that position and promise in exchange to read a justification for that from a default position of charity. Also note that it is possible to have a uniform rule that is enforced with different kinds or levels of emphasis in different areas, which can happen both for good faith reasons and bad faith reasons. Thinking about "bad faith reasons" brings me to point #2...
2. Confronting the fact that we see greater reports of gun violence in urban, poor, and majority-minority neighborhoods SCREAMS to me that addressing this disparity demands we confront the underlying reasons why these neighborhoods suffer from economic poverty and high crime, which again I hope we can all agree is not any sort of genetic difference between the people who live in these neighborhoods but rather the immediate local culture, which is another euphemism for why there are these variances in immediate local culture, viz., the historical legacy of racism baked into the culture at large. Which, while we're on that subject, take a moment to consider point #3...
3. Considering our historical legacy of racism also gestures very strongly to consider resulting disparities in the level and quality of criminal justice administration, from policing to sentencing, that occurs in these varying neighborhoods. Which again, takes us ultimately back to the historical legacy of racism baked into the culture at large. To be more explicit: perhaps one of the reasons we see areas that are mostly populated by white affluent folks with very low incidences of gun violence reported by police compared with neighbors populated by people of color and lower economic means is that police classify the affluent white people misbehavior differently than they classify poor minority people misbehavior. I do not mean by this statement that affluent white people necessarily engage in the same kinds of misbehavior involving weapons that occurs in the inner cities, as I think there very likely is a very significant difference. But I do think it suggests we should moderate our interpretation of police reporting to account for the possibility that there is lensing going on at least at the margins and the differences between these neighborhoods (or zip codes, if you prefer) might be a little less dramatic than has been previously suggested. So keep the salt shaker handy, because we are probably going to need a few grains here and there if we want to get at the truth.
And if you and Oscar were to do that, CJ, certain members of the dissenting 25% would nevertheless fight the immensely-popular proposal with the tenacity of 1960's George Wallace resisting integration.
As you may recall, my practice is employment litigation. A macro-observation I've made to employers: gruntled workers will put up with things that violate the law. But once you disgruntle them, they will seek out something to complain about, and sometimes they're right. Worse, it's VERY hard to re-gruntle a disgruntled worker. So your best policy is to keep 'em gruntled.
Taking to Zoom and telling workers that they aren't getting bonuses but they should move out of Pity City is an excellent way to disgruntle workers. Especially if they can read in the 10-Q that you paid yourself a bonus.
Tell them that the way to get their bonuses back is to sell the family dog and work more? You're lucky you don't have a spontaneous strike.
When in Italy, J_A, I suggest that you try to find restaurants that don't have English menus.
The only bad meal I ever had in Italy was at a cafeteria immediately off of Piazza San Marco in Venice, where my then-wife insisted she needed to eat something right now despite my warning that it was unlikely to be very good. Afterward, she gave the restaurant a review of, "Oh, that wasn't very good."
Timothy, could you be so good as to more precisely define "the Left" as used in your comment above? It'd be helpful to know who you were talking about.
Yes, she ... completely missed how Trump tapped white conservative male backlash to 8 years of a black man in the White House.
Well, to be fair, she did say they were part of a "basket of deplorables." And they, in turn, pretended to be offended by her having called racists "deplorable" and we then spent more than a year debating whether people who never, ever, ever were ever under any circumstances going to vote for Hillary Clinton were somehow "forced" to vote for Donald Trump because they were so deeply offended that she deplored their racism.
[Wistful sigh] Good times...
For the record, racism is deplorable, and we ought to deplore racists. And it turns out, opposing racism is popular with voters, most of whom are opposed to racism.
The thirtysomething engineers that I used to socialize with back in SoCal who worked mostly for Branson's company would often say, "Turns out, space is hard." And yes, it turns out space is hard. There's a reason we use "rocket science" as a rhetorical proxy for "an intellectually challenging endeavor."
Branson's engineers studied every test and operational failure carefully to learn from it and figure out how to not have a failure later, no matter how small that failure was. I can't imagine SpaceX's engineers are any different.
That is the anti definition of responsible firearm use and defense.
Sure! I agree! Here's the thing: the law does not mandate responsible firearm use and defense. The law says "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." And any attempt by people who suggest that those who fail to demonstrate a mentality of responsible firearm use and defense and therefore maybe oughtn't be trusted with firearms, get accused of violating that law. And we get into low-trust situations and a lot of now-very-familiar arguments about all sorts of things that basically come down to "I distrust you therefore I oppose anything that you suggest."
I agree -- SYG is subject to criticism but neither of these cases invoke it.
A mentality of "fire first, figure it out later," is the link I suspect we'll find is in common here, possibly augmented, as we discussed above, by diminishment in mental capacity.
What a delight for your son to play with a star like Zoe Knighton!
I agree that the smell of the city is something the requires experience, for its sudden variability. Almost all the pleasant smells are to do with food preparation, there is little waft of flowers and not nearly enough fresh cut grass.
So at the macro level, we approach the issue of auto safety now with extensive design-level regulation on the manufacturers to mandate safety features, and renewal-by-mail for driver's licenses.
At the macro level for guns, we now have constitutional carry laws in most places. Some states have red flag laws, which I applaud. (Despite acknowledging that they, like all laws, are subject to potential abuse.)
At the micro level of what to do about older folks who might be losing their faculties, there is little if any official structure to review either driver licenses or possession of firearms once issued.
I think we can imagine other issues that might go beyond dementia to identify issues in which there are legitimate safety concerns. I know we can, precisely because red flag laws exist.
I take your point that checking in on people too much can become intrusive and authoritarian and ripe for abuse. That's correct.
Not checking in on them at all has a price, too.
Seems to me that on the whole, we aren't at the sweet spot* between "letting people be" and "preventing preventable harm."
As a general rule, I agree with this. If what we're talking about are rare things, then making rules around preventing them may well not be particularly justified and may cost us more than we gain.
People shooting strangers through their front door is pretty rare. People shooting other people is, unfortunately, not rare at all.
As I understand it, if you're going to be shot at all, chances are pretty good you'll be shot by someone you know (including yourself in a suicide attempt). About 300-350 people are shot, on average, every day; about 2/3 of them survive with varying injuries. That works out to somewhere between 40,000-41,000 gun deaths a year (closer to the 41,000 figure in 2021) with about twice as many survived gun injuries a year.
Compare that to NHTSA estimating that about 43,000 people died in auto accidents (or "collisions" if you prefer) in 2021. It's impossible, or at least really hard at a moment's look-around, to tell how many people are injured but not particularly seriously in the ~6,000,000 auto collisions and accidents that happen every year.
How many of those accidents, injuries, and possibly fatalities are caused by drivers who have lost their physical and mental abilities to drive proficiently due to old age? Again, can't find it very easily.
So yes, auto accidents are a greater cause of fatalities and injuries. But not by a lot.
Back from meetings. Yes, I see that number now also.
That moment between the gathering on the first day for pretrial motions and when the jurors walk into the box is the last best opportunity to settle. And nearly every trial lawyer who was convinced they had a good case will join me in bristling at the instruction from the client to go explore settlement at that point in time anyway -- and then complying and doing what you know is in the client's best interests.
Also, I believe it was Saul above who said: "Dominion is not part of the resistance." This was right when he said it, and now it is proven.
On “The Problem With Constitutional Carry”
Fair. What we can do with things like welfare checks right now is maybe identify behavior that suggests the most serious or overt of mental health problems. Like the guy who lived in the park near my house for a week and screamed at the trees. I'm not a psychologist, but I think it's reasonable to suspect that fellow has a mental health problem and to go just a step further and say that ma-a-a-a-aybe that guy shouldn't have access to weapons. But what I don't have is a person I can call and say "Hey, there's a dude in the park across the street from my house who screams at the trees and I'm feeling a little unsafe here." I could call the police with that and I'd get one of a) "Is he committing a crime? Because screaming at trees isn't a crime." (To which one would be tempted to retort, "If he does it at two in the morning it is.") or b) "Too bad for you, should have voted for a city council member we like better, but now everyone on the force has the Blue Flu," or c) "We'll be right there" and they show up and scare the hell out of the guy and he winds up getting shot which I didn't want, I just wanted someone to calm his inner demons so that the rest of us folks in the neighborhood can get some sleep. (Options b) and c) are what you'd get in Portland today; I hope you'd at least get a) in your city.)
"
I don't presume to speak for any of my commiepinko brethren but for me, "Defund the Police" was ever something I understood even by its most extreme advocates to be a call for zero law enforcement. Rather, it was a call to divert particular governmental functions that may or may not be characterized as "law enforcement" which are currently being executed by the police to different agencies. You don't necessarily need an armed police office to serve an eviction warrant, for instance (unless the tenant responds to the service with violence) nor do you even always want to have armed, uniformed police officers responding to people having mental health meltdowns in public.
Maybe "Defund the Police" was and remains a bad idea. Maybe "Defund the Police" was and remains a strategically-more-extreme-than-sincere position taken by progressives because previously, calls for the more moderate-sounding "Reform the Police" or even "How About You Cops Just Shoot People Less Often And Maybe Dial The Racism Back A Couple Notches" appeared to have gone ignored or dismissed.
Furthermore, I don't think anyone in this thread has mentioned confiscating guns from anyone. There is discussion of gun control generally but I haven't seen a lot of policy specifics about what gun control would look like. Even back in the Oppressive Totalitarian State days of 1994-2004, the "assault weapons ban" prohibited the manufacturing, sale and resale of certain semi-automatic weapons, but not the possession of any such weapon that had been acquired legally before the ban took effect. The ex post facto clause seems to me like it would prohibit any ban or other criminalization of any weapon that was acquired legally at the time it was acquired, so if you have an AR-15 that you acquired legally today, even if AR-15's were banned tomorrow, you'd be able to keep it.
IOW, no one was ever going to reduce our cities to anarchy, and no one is going to come to try and take your guns away from you.
"
Forget it, comrade.
Conservatives responded to the last public health crisis by staying silent while the more vocal, extreme members of their caucus urged people to not get vaccinated against it, and to ignore masking and social distancing rules as intrusive upon their rights and freedoms.
Let us pray they do not proffer a similar solution to the health issue of "getting shot" as they did to "getting COVID," viz., "just go get it already and acquire 'natural immunity.'"
On “Experimenting with Miracle Berry Tablets”
[Brubaker-style slow clap]
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 4/17/2023”
Thus, my friend, we are guaranteed employment.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Home Stretch”
It's a high culture day for me on Saturday -- the relatively local winery is having a release party, and I've tickets to Mahler's Fourth at the Oregon Symphony. I need to be mindful of my companion's need to let her dog out of the house for relief. Sunday will likely see a hike in the Cascades and a nice home cooked dinner.
On “The Problem With Constitutional Carry”
Maybe it should be its own article. I've written what I chose to on the subject, though, above, while this discussion is hot.
Can I get you to consider point #3 as a cautionary call for skepticism and critical thought when approaching crime statistics?
On “VIDEO (13m): The Emperor of the United States”
This seems to have mattered to the people of San Francisco not a whit. Which I for one find heartening.
On “The Problem With Constitutional Carry”
Jaybird opines:
I ask: would that be a bad thing? (Which is pretty similar to the question Pinky asks below, now that I think about it.)
"
Dark Matter raised the question of incidences of gun violence increasing dramatically in certain zip codes. And when we're talking about "certain zip codes" I for one read that as shorthand for "economically-challenged dense urban communities populated mostly by people of color" and as long as we're trying to be real, let's be real about what that phrase means.
1. I trust that everyone here is repelled by the idea that there would be one rule for areas that are populated principally by people of color and a different rule for areas that are populated principally by descendants of fair-skinned Europeans. Can we all at least agree that although different areas of the country do indeed have varying problems of varying degrees of immediacy, when we're talking about the law, we are necessarily talking about something that's a uniform rule for everyone? If you are going to answer that question "no," I'd appreciate your being explicit about taking that position and promise in exchange to read a justification for that from a default position of charity. Also note that it is possible to have a uniform rule that is enforced with different kinds or levels of emphasis in different areas, which can happen both for good faith reasons and bad faith reasons. Thinking about "bad faith reasons" brings me to point #2...
2. Confronting the fact that we see greater reports of gun violence in urban, poor, and majority-minority neighborhoods SCREAMS to me that addressing this disparity demands we confront the underlying reasons why these neighborhoods suffer from economic poverty and high crime, which again I hope we can all agree is not any sort of genetic difference between the people who live in these neighborhoods but rather the immediate local culture, which is another euphemism for why there are these variances in immediate local culture, viz., the historical legacy of racism baked into the culture at large. Which, while we're on that subject, take a moment to consider point #3...
3. Considering our historical legacy of racism also gestures very strongly to consider resulting disparities in the level and quality of criminal justice administration, from policing to sentencing, that occurs in these varying neighborhoods. Which again, takes us ultimately back to the historical legacy of racism baked into the culture at large. To be more explicit: perhaps one of the reasons we see areas that are mostly populated by white affluent folks with very low incidences of gun violence reported by police compared with neighbors populated by people of color and lower economic means is that police classify the affluent white people misbehavior differently than they classify poor minority people misbehavior. I do not mean by this statement that affluent white people necessarily engage in the same kinds of misbehavior involving weapons that occurs in the inner cities, as I think there very likely is a very significant difference. But I do think it suggests we should moderate our interpretation of police reporting to account for the possibility that there is lensing going on at least at the margins and the differences between these neighborhoods (or zip codes, if you prefer) might be a little less dramatic than has been previously suggested. So keep the salt shaker handy, because we are probably going to need a few grains here and there if we want to get at the truth.
"
And if you and Oscar were to do that, CJ, certain members of the dissenting 25% would nevertheless fight the immensely-popular proposal with the tenacity of 1960's George Wallace resisting integration.
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 4/17/2023”
As you may recall, my practice is employment litigation. A macro-observation I've made to employers: gruntled workers will put up with things that violate the law. But once you disgruntle them, they will seek out something to complain about, and sometimes they're right. Worse, it's VERY hard to re-gruntle a disgruntled worker. So your best policy is to keep 'em gruntled.
Taking to Zoom and telling workers that they aren't getting bonuses but they should move out of Pity City is an excellent way to disgruntle workers. Especially if they can read in the 10-Q that you paid yourself a bonus.
Tell them that the way to get their bonuses back is to sell the family dog and work more? You're lucky you don't have a spontaneous strike.
On “Not French Onion Dip”
These lil' babies are going to be on offer for my next potluck.
"
When in Italy, J_A, I suggest that you try to find restaurants that don't have English menus.
The only bad meal I ever had in Italy was at a cafeteria immediately off of Piazza San Marco in Venice, where my then-wife insisted she needed to eat something right now despite my warning that it was unlikely to be very good. Afterward, she gave the restaurant a review of, "Oh, that wasn't very good."
On “GOP Elites Should Blame Themselves for Trump’s Popularity”
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Timothy, could you be so good as to more precisely define "the Left" as used in your comment above? It'd be helpful to know who you were talking about.
Appreciated.
"
That was a really interesting conversation to read. Despair-inducing, but interesting.
"
Well, to be fair, she did say they were part of a "basket of deplorables." And they, in turn, pretended to be offended by her having called racists "deplorable" and we then spent more than a year debating whether people who never, ever, ever were ever under any circumstances going to vote for Hillary Clinton were somehow "forced" to vote for Donald Trump because they were so deeply offended that she deplored their racism.
[Wistful sigh] Good times...
For the record, racism is deplorable, and we ought to deplore racists. And it turns out, opposing racism is popular with voters, most of whom are opposed to racism.
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 4/17/2023”
The thirtysomething engineers that I used to socialize with back in SoCal who worked mostly for Branson's company would often say, "Turns out, space is hard." And yes, it turns out space is hard. There's a reason we use "rocket science" as a rhetorical proxy for "an intellectually challenging endeavor."
Branson's engineers studied every test and operational failure carefully to learn from it and figure out how to not have a failure later, no matter how small that failure was. I can't imagine SpaceX's engineers are any different.
On “The Problem With Constitutional Carry”
Sure! I agree! Here's the thing: the law does not mandate responsible firearm use and defense. The law says "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." And any attempt by people who suggest that those who fail to demonstrate a mentality of responsible firearm use and defense and therefore maybe oughtn't be trusted with firearms, get accused of violating that law. And we get into low-trust situations and a lot of now-very-familiar arguments about all sorts of things that basically come down to "I distrust you therefore I oppose anything that you suggest."
"
I agree -- SYG is subject to criticism but neither of these cases invoke it.
A mentality of "fire first, figure it out later," is the link I suspect we'll find is in common here, possibly augmented, as we discussed above, by diminishment in mental capacity.
On “New York City, For We Are Many”
What a delight for your son to play with a star like Zoe Knighton!
I agree that the smell of the city is something the requires experience, for its sudden variability. Almost all the pleasant smells are to do with food preparation, there is little waft of flowers and not nearly enough fresh cut grass.
Please keep up the delicious and complex writing!
On “The Problem With Constitutional Carry”
So at the macro level, we approach the issue of auto safety now with extensive design-level regulation on the manufacturers to mandate safety features, and renewal-by-mail for driver's licenses.
At the macro level for guns, we now have constitutional carry laws in most places. Some states have red flag laws, which I applaud. (Despite acknowledging that they, like all laws, are subject to potential abuse.)
At the micro level of what to do about older folks who might be losing their faculties, there is little if any official structure to review either driver licenses or possession of firearms once issued.
I think we can imagine other issues that might go beyond dementia to identify issues in which there are legitimate safety concerns. I know we can, precisely because red flag laws exist.
I take your point that checking in on people too much can become intrusive and authoritarian and ripe for abuse. That's correct.
Not checking in on them at all has a price, too.
Seems to me that on the whole, we aren't at the sweet spot* between "letting people be" and "preventing preventable harm."
* Pareto optimization, if you prefer.
On “Dominion Settles With Fox News”
And getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine was.... grrrrrrrrr.... the right result.
On “The Problem With Constitutional Carry”
As a general rule, I agree with this. If what we're talking about are rare things, then making rules around preventing them may well not be particularly justified and may cost us more than we gain.
People shooting strangers through their front door is pretty rare. People shooting other people is, unfortunately, not rare at all.
As I understand it, if you're going to be shot at all, chances are pretty good you'll be shot by someone you know (including yourself in a suicide attempt). About 300-350 people are shot, on average, every day; about 2/3 of them survive with varying injuries. That works out to somewhere between 40,000-41,000 gun deaths a year (closer to the 41,000 figure in 2021) with about twice as many survived gun injuries a year.
Compare that to NHTSA estimating that about 43,000 people died in auto accidents (or "collisions" if you prefer) in 2021. It's impossible, or at least really hard at a moment's look-around, to tell how many people are injured but not particularly seriously in the ~6,000,000 auto collisions and accidents that happen every year.
How many of those accidents, injuries, and possibly fatalities are caused by drivers who have lost their physical and mental abilities to drive proficiently due to old age? Again, can't find it very easily.
So yes, auto accidents are a greater cause of fatalities and injuries. But not by a lot.
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 4/17/2023”
Back from meetings. Yes, I see that number now also.
That moment between the gathering on the first day for pretrial motions and when the jurors walk into the box is the last best opportunity to settle. And nearly every trial lawyer who was convinced they had a good case will join me in bristling at the instruction from the client to go explore settlement at that point in time anyway -- and then complying and doing what you know is in the client's best interests.
Also, I believe it was Saul above who said: "Dominion is not part of the resistance." This was right when he said it, and now it is proven.