Right there though you're making a number of distinctions. Boorish is not (and I'd argue can't be) treated the same way as criminal behavior, nor do I think its sensible to remove everything from historical and social context. Exposing oneself to another in public is the kind of conduct that can and should be prohibited. Its easy to define and enforce. What is and isn't boorish on the other hand is always going to be in flux and vary down to the individual level.
I have not been following the Weinstein stuff closely but I freely concede he sounds like a creep, and maybe even a criminal. The latter is obviously up to a jury of his peers to decide. However, I also think about how the would be enforcers of our new norms would think about all kinds of mundane relationships
even in living memory.
The example that resonates most for me is my own grandparents. My grandfather was 32 and my grandmother 17 when they had my mom. They met each other in post war Europe where he was stationed serving in the army and she a local of a recently liberated country. No one was suspicious of this arrangement at the time or the following decades. Nevertheless I can think of numerous ways their relationship could be seen as #Problematic in our brave new world, despite the fact that the supposed victim in these circumstances (and we know thats the woman, it almost always is*) would find such notions absurd.**
Maybe there is a dam breaking but much if it to me looks like moral panic, not a reckoning for people who have gotten away with things for too long. I'm not a betting man but I think we will look back on a lot of this and the stuff on college campuses the way we look back on McCarthyism or Satanic Ritual Abuse. No doubt itll catch some assholes and crooks, but that doesnt mean its rational or good.
*There's a very patronizing aspect of this that denies the agency and sexuality of women that I also think is sexist. My grandmother may well have used what she had to get herself out of a devastated environment. The movement seeks to impose prudish Victorian tropes on all sexual and romantic activity and become the sex police. I think it's weird, kinda creepy, and very hypocritical.
**For the record I can see why a relationship like theirs might not be what we would want people doing now but that doesn't mean we can't understand that the world was a different place.
There's powerful people being held accountable (good) and there's also mob justice, witch-hunts, and authoritarians given license (bad). The only way to filter out the bad is with dispassion and reason. I'm not always convinced that there's an appreciation of the distinctions between opposing the Ancien Regime and joining the Jacobins.
I can only hope that the purveyors of these rape manuals have been banished by the editors to the deepest pits of internet hell, where their backsides will be non-consensually poked by pitchfork wielding mailer-daemons for all eternity.
It's messy and complicated but I think it always has been. @will-truman mentions the inherent arbitrariness of the law but I actually think that's a good thing as long as we as a society can maintain perspective about what the law can really accomplish. My view is that when it comes to sexual (mis)conduct the law really needs to represent an outer boundary, and a very narrowly defined and easy to understand set of rules.
What we're witnessing now in the culture at large (or parts of it) has an underlying ideology. It posits that we can control for the pecularities of every circumstance and vulnerability, and most dangerously, that the subtleties and nuances of every interaction impacts (maybe eliminates) an individual's agency. This is no good thing for a free society nor is it consistent with sexuality and human experience.
[Cr1] I worked for a competitor of Corizon for several years. Without going into details I can say that the way healthcare is delivered to people in prison is one of the nastiest aspects of mass incarceration that isn't discussed enough. Most facilities have outsourced their infirmiries to fly by night staffing agencies operating on tight margins. Allegedly there's a prison doctor overseeing care but that usually consists of someone who you can call but is rarely at the facility. Meanwhile care is provided by nurses who may or may not have any experience in these environments. Litigation is rampant.
[Cr4] So that's what Louis CK was doing??
[Fo5] Our reign as super power has ended.
[En3] Germany has hit most of the low hanging fruit with available technology. What they've done is laudable but this shows their decision to phase out nuclear power at the same time may have been premature.
I think the 'it shouldn't be the job of the feds to provide healthcare' crowd has never really understood how our system, or any modern system, for paying for care functions. The federal government has been involved in it since the 40s and very heavily so since the 60s. There's no real way to turn that back. Even Republican leaders I think tacitly admitted that when Medicare Part D was passed.
I do think you're right though that we may be living through a watershed moment on how the issue is looked at by the public at large.
And this is precisely why there's absolutely zero appetite for 'repeal and replace' even with the payors. They know very well they were never going to get away with some of the more egregious crap forever. Without Obamacare or something very much like it a day would come where political support for ending for profit health insurance as it exists reached critical mass. If the exchanges aren't stabilized that might still happen, it'll just take longer.
Agreed. There's a plausible scenario where no type of healthcare reform is passed or even attempted. Try to imagine politics over the last 7 years without Obamacare.
That's a really intriguing question that causes my brain to split into so many directions I don't know how to answer. I guess the smart money would be on her riding the backlash against Bush into office but who can say? Her vote to invade Iraq loomed a lot larger then (I think people forget how much Obama's early opposition helped him) and her close relationship with big finance would've been a general election issue instead of a squabble mostly confined to the broader left.
If she actually was POTUS for 8 years I think history would just be too different. My guess is that Obama's star would have long since faded but thats pure speculation. Who knows what would be going on in the GOP but my bet is their same general strategy and predicament would be similar. The trajectory into reactionary populism was already well under way.
This is fair (and apologies for the Trump diversion, it just seems so... topical). Maybe putting candidate selection in the hands of parties generally does a better job vetting but it seems like the risk in a two party system like ours is the parties becoming sclerotic/unresponsive to the people. Like aaron said above it could exacerbate the crisis of legitimacy going on all over the West. I guess your solution would be the abiliy of a hypothetical third party to displace the other(s) with a straightforward alternative agenda?
Someone like Corbyn makes me think that it isn't as much the selection process as it is the circumstances of the polity in question. He's both been vetted by a big party but also often cited as part of the populist revolt.
I think this works in a world where people are really evaluating performance based on policy implementation/legislative successes but I'm not sure thats happening even within our parties (I'd say it definitively isn't in the GOP).
Not to sound like a Marxist or something similarly crass but I think the disconnect between voters and politicians has more to do with economics and culture than the process thats granting power.
Bingo. This fool should've never been allowed to purchase a firearm and was prohibited from doing so under existing law. Its an enforcement/bureacratic failure. If fingers must be pointed the US Air Force and probably to a slightly lesser degree the FBI seem much more blameworthy than the NRA.
In Canada, for example, the Progressive Conservatives (PC) made one bad decision after another. A new party formed, became bigger than the old, and merged with (essentially absorbed) the PC. We don’t really have a mechanism for that here
In our parallel though the Trump-populists just completed their take over of the GOP and absorbed the rump Zombie Reagan (I love that description @marchmaine) establishment. It all just happened intra-party and I'm not sure we'd be in a particularly different place if there had been an official party split beforehand. I'm agnostic on whether or not our current electoral system is the best we can do but I also don't know that a different one would have prevented Trump. Even with multiple parties the vagaries of forming a government can still result in some weird/sub-optimal outcomes (see Berlusconi, Silvio).
@oscar-gordon This exchange you and @kazzy had interested me enough I called a relative of mine who is an FFL and asked if he had any idea why the 4473 is in paper only. He said that the ATF did in the last few years introduce an e form but for whatever reason has done a bad job of keeping the software and versioning correct. Wikipedia seems to confirm this. The result has been essentially zero adoption.
Not a real investigation but it sounds like the answer is government incompetence. The transaction and NICS system is ridiculously outdated and there's no good reason not to bring it into the 21st century.
It makes an outrageously cynical sense when you consider that the Democratic party has completely lost its bearings on the immigration issue. The primary forced national issues into the conversation and Northam wasn't ready. The fact that they let that LVF ad get on the air is baffling to me.
Honestly? Utter desperation by team blue activists and a weird ambivalence elsewhere. House money is probably right to favor Northam but you get the feeling even a rainy day or something could give Gillespie the upset. Northam had to see off a primary challenger to his left that resulted in him seeming a little... off to me. There was a widely circulated one where he said 'Donald Trump is a narcissistic maniac!' that maybe played well with the base but I think seemed patronizing to everyone else.
Caveat is I'm north of the Potomac and my contact with Virginians is primarily with the very blue DC suburbs. This will be decided a bit further out and probably in the Hampton Roads/Norfolk area.
Living in the media market where this is going on has been quite interesting. Most brutal and cynical advertisements I can recall seeing. The big one right now ties Northams votes on restoration of rights to felons to a guy who got caught with a huge amount of kiddie porn.
To give you a response that probably validates just about all of that comment (not least about the community here) I think it might depend on how broadly we define 'legitimate.'
Part of making liberal democracy work I think is learning how to be a good winner, even when the people you've defeated are still bitterly fighting a doomed and largely symbolic rearguard action.
It's what you get when you start with a flawed premise i.e. perfect safety is possible without seriously compromising the thing in question. Maybe there is something cost effective that could make a big dent in foul ball/broken bat injuries to spectators (or panoramic sun roof injuries) that doesnt or only marginally alters the experience but that's not the argument being made.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Linky Friday: (Un)earthly Affairs”
[Sp5] If it bleeds we can kill it.
On “Twilight in the Kingdom of Pariahs and Predators”
Right there though you're making a number of distinctions. Boorish is not (and I'd argue can't be) treated the same way as criminal behavior, nor do I think its sensible to remove everything from historical and social context. Exposing oneself to another in public is the kind of conduct that can and should be prohibited. Its easy to define and enforce. What is and isn't boorish on the other hand is always going to be in flux and vary down to the individual level.
I have not been following the Weinstein stuff closely but I freely concede he sounds like a creep, and maybe even a criminal. The latter is obviously up to a jury of his peers to decide. However, I also think about how the would be enforcers of our new norms would think about all kinds of mundane relationships
even in living memory.
The example that resonates most for me is my own grandparents. My grandfather was 32 and my grandmother 17 when they had my mom. They met each other in post war Europe where he was stationed serving in the army and she a local of a recently liberated country. No one was suspicious of this arrangement at the time or the following decades. Nevertheless I can think of numerous ways their relationship could be seen as #Problematic in our brave new world, despite the fact that the supposed victim in these circumstances (and we know thats the woman, it almost always is*) would find such notions absurd.**
Maybe there is a dam breaking but much if it to me looks like moral panic, not a reckoning for people who have gotten away with things for too long. I'm not a betting man but I think we will look back on a lot of this and the stuff on college campuses the way we look back on McCarthyism or Satanic Ritual Abuse. No doubt itll catch some assholes and crooks, but that doesnt mean its rational or good.
*There's a very patronizing aspect of this that denies the agency and sexuality of women that I also think is sexist. My grandmother may well have used what she had to get herself out of a devastated environment. The movement seeks to impose prudish Victorian tropes on all sexual and romantic activity and become the sex police. I think it's weird, kinda creepy, and very hypocritical.
**For the record I can see why a relationship like theirs might not be what we would want people doing now but that doesn't mean we can't understand that the world was a different place.
"
There's powerful people being held accountable (good) and there's also mob justice, witch-hunts, and authoritarians given license (bad). The only way to filter out the bad is with dispassion and reason. I'm not always convinced that there's an appreciation of the distinctions between opposing the Ancien Regime and joining the Jacobins.
"
I can only hope that the purveyors of these rape manuals have been banished by the editors to the deepest pits of internet hell, where their backsides will be non-consensually poked by pitchfork wielding mailer-daemons for all eternity.
"
It's messy and complicated but I think it always has been. @will-truman mentions the inherent arbitrariness of the law but I actually think that's a good thing as long as we as a society can maintain perspective about what the law can really accomplish. My view is that when it comes to sexual (mis)conduct the law really needs to represent an outer boundary, and a very narrowly defined and easy to understand set of rules.
What we're witnessing now in the culture at large (or parts of it) has an underlying ideology. It posits that we can control for the pecularities of every circumstance and vulnerability, and most dangerously, that the subtleties and nuances of every interaction impacts (maybe eliminates) an individual's agency. This is no good thing for a free society nor is it consistent with sexuality and human experience.
On “Linky Friday: Crime & Sustenance”
[Cr1] I worked for a competitor of Corizon for several years. Without going into details I can say that the way healthcare is delivered to people in prison is one of the nastiest aspects of mass incarceration that isn't discussed enough. Most facilities have outsourced their infirmiries to fly by night staffing agencies operating on tight margins. Allegedly there's a prison doctor overseeing care but that usually consists of someone who you can call but is rarely at the facility. Meanwhile care is provided by nurses who may or may not have any experience in these environments. Litigation is rampant.
[Cr4] So that's what Louis CK was doing??
[Fo5] Our reign as super power has ended.
[En3] Germany has hit most of the low hanging fruit with available technology. What they've done is laudable but this shows their decision to phase out nuclear power at the same time may have been premature.
On “Old Dominion”
Despite the tenor of national politics I think most local and state elections still revolve around these kinds of issues.
"
Danica Roem
On “Hashtag-BanPrimaries, But Not Yet”
I think the 'it shouldn't be the job of the feds to provide healthcare' crowd has never really understood how our system, or any modern system, for paying for care functions. The federal government has been involved in it since the 40s and very heavily so since the 60s. There's no real way to turn that back. Even Republican leaders I think tacitly admitted that when Medicare Part D was passed.
I do think you're right though that we may be living through a watershed moment on how the issue is looked at by the public at large.
"
And this is precisely why there's absolutely zero appetite for 'repeal and replace' even with the payors. They know very well they were never going to get away with some of the more egregious crap forever. Without Obamacare or something very much like it a day would come where political support for ending for profit health insurance as it exists reached critical mass. If the exchanges aren't stabilized that might still happen, it'll just take longer.
"
Agreed. There's a plausible scenario where no type of healthcare reform is passed or even attempted. Try to imagine politics over the last 7 years without Obamacare.
"
That's a really intriguing question that causes my brain to split into so many directions I don't know how to answer. I guess the smart money would be on her riding the backlash against Bush into office but who can say? Her vote to invade Iraq loomed a lot larger then (I think people forget how much Obama's early opposition helped him) and her close relationship with big finance would've been a general election issue instead of a squabble mostly confined to the broader left.
If she actually was POTUS for 8 years I think history would just be too different. My guess is that Obama's star would have long since faded but thats pure speculation. Who knows what would be going on in the GOP but my bet is their same general strategy and predicament would be similar. The trajectory into reactionary populism was already well under way.
"
I think there's a really strong argument the Dems benefitted from it in 2008.
"
This is fair (and apologies for the Trump diversion, it just seems so... topical). Maybe putting candidate selection in the hands of parties generally does a better job vetting but it seems like the risk in a two party system like ours is the parties becoming sclerotic/unresponsive to the people. Like aaron said above it could exacerbate the crisis of legitimacy going on all over the West. I guess your solution would be the abiliy of a hypothetical third party to displace the other(s) with a straightforward alternative agenda?
Someone like Corbyn makes me think that it isn't as much the selection process as it is the circumstances of the polity in question. He's both been vetted by a big party but also often cited as part of the populist revolt.
"
I think this works in a world where people are really evaluating performance based on policy implementation/legislative successes but I'm not sure thats happening even within our parties (I'd say it definitively isn't in the GOP).
Not to sound like a Marxist or something similarly crass but I think the disconnect between voters and politicians has more to do with economics and culture than the process thats granting power.
On “Morning Ed: Politics {2017.11.05.Su}”
Bingo. This fool should've never been allowed to purchase a firearm and was prohibited from doing so under existing law. Its an enforcement/bureacratic failure. If fingers must be pointed the US Air Force and probably to a slightly lesser degree the FBI seem much more blameworthy than the NRA.
On “Hashtag-BanPrimaries, But Not Yet”
In our parallel though the Trump-populists just completed their take over of the GOP and absorbed the rump Zombie Reagan (I love that description @marchmaine) establishment. It all just happened intra-party and I'm not sure we'd be in a particularly different place if there had been an official party split beforehand. I'm agnostic on whether or not our current electoral system is the best we can do but I also don't know that a different one would have prevented Trump. Even with multiple parties the vagaries of forming a government can still result in some weird/sub-optimal outcomes (see Berlusconi, Silvio).
On “Morning Ed: Politics {2017.11.05.Su}”
@oscar-gordon This exchange you and @kazzy had interested me enough I called a relative of mine who is an FFL and asked if he had any idea why the 4473 is in paper only. He said that the ATF did in the last few years introduce an e form but for whatever reason has done a bad job of keeping the software and versioning correct. Wikipedia seems to confirm this. The result has been essentially zero adoption.
Not a real investigation but it sounds like the answer is government incompetence. The transaction and NICS system is ridiculously outdated and there's no good reason not to bring it into the 21st century.
"
It makes an outrageously cynical sense when you consider that the Democratic party has completely lost its bearings on the immigration issue. The primary forced national issues into the conversation and Northam wasn't ready. The fact that they let that LVF ad get on the air is baffling to me.
"
Honestly? Utter desperation by team blue activists and a weird ambivalence elsewhere. House money is probably right to favor Northam but you get the feeling even a rainy day or something could give Gillespie the upset. Northam had to see off a primary challenger to his left that resulted in him seeming a little... off to me. There was a widely circulated one where he said 'Donald Trump is a narcissistic maniac!' that maybe played well with the base but I think seemed patronizing to everyone else.
Caveat is I'm north of the Potomac and my contact with Virginians is primarily with the very blue DC suburbs. This will be decided a bit further out and probably in the Hampton Roads/Norfolk area.
"
Living in the media market where this is going on has been quite interesting. Most brutal and cynical advertisements I can recall seeing. The big one right now ties Northams votes on restoration of rights to felons to a guy who got caught with a huge amount of kiddie porn.
"
To give you a response that probably validates just about all of that comment (not least about the community here) I think it might depend on how broadly we define 'legitimate.'
"
Part of making liberal democracy work I think is learning how to be a good winner, even when the people you've defeated are still bitterly fighting a doomed and largely symbolic rearguard action.
On “Morning Ed: Sports {2017.11.01.W}”
What it sounds like he's asking for is netting covering the entire lower deck of the stadium.
"
It's what you get when you start with a flawed premise i.e. perfect safety is possible without seriously compromising the thing in question. Maybe there is something cost effective that could make a big dent in foul ball/broken bat injuries to spectators (or panoramic sun roof injuries) that doesnt or only marginally alters the experience but that's not the argument being made.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.