While I agree with all of this, it's worth pointing out that Congressional control over the post office's inner workings is very much a reason why we should be skeptical about its ability to do banking. I think complaints about the post office's competence are usually quite unfair, but the competence of its administration is quite beside the point, or at least ought to be - the post office's bigger problem is that Congressional/Executive meddling and oversight provides it with little to no ability to timely respond to changing market conditions. It can do relatively little to respond to conditions without first getting the approval of the PRC, which are a bunch of political appointees whose job it is to protect their respective party's constituencies rather than protect the postal service's interests.
I can see the need for that kind of oversight when the USPS is a true monopoly, but that's not really the case any longer. Yes, it has a monopoly on delivering to post boxes, but that's no longer a very valuable monopoly since it's so easy for UPS and Fedex to deliver directly (and, well, there's the whole issue of email too).
Indeed, the whole pension issue is an excellent example of how this politically-mandated inflexibility undermines the USPS' ability to successfully operate in a modern economy. When the pension mandates were passed into law, the USPS had just completed a year in which it handled the most pieces of mail in its history (207 billion), and had run a profit of at least $1 billion per year in all but one of the previous 15 years, several times running a profit approaching $5 billion. While first class mail was declining, junk mail was still increasing. So why not require the post office to over-fund its pension plan while loosening some of its other restrictions (it's worth mentioning that the bill passed both houses on a voice vote, by the way)? But that volume declined swiftly and dramatically, even as there's no political interest in undoing the pension funding requirement or otherwise freeing the USPS up more.
I strongly suspect these problems of inflexibility would be even worse if it were to get back into the financial services sector, where market conditions are more fluid, and there is a lot more competition, etc.
Far from letting freedom ring, this insistence on defining terms so broadly as to be incapable of expressing any actual meaning, rather than permitting them to be called by their proper names, is downright Orwellian.
Surely our language is sufficiently rich and varied as to allow a word other than "sandwich" to describe a food in which the filling is or must be folded into a single piece of starch!
I am wholly torn on this question, though I must re-emphasize that what is served in Chicago is not pizza but rather tomato pie. It is not the thickness of the crust that alters its character, but rather the order in which the ingredients are placed. It is possible to have a thick crust pizza or a thin crust tomato pie (see, e.g., Justice Alito's favorite restaurant, DeLorenzo's, formerly of Trenton but now of Robbinsville, which serves only delicious, delicious thin crust tomato pies). To say that a tomato pie is a pizza because it has the same ingredients is to say that a burrito is a taco is an enchilada, which is clearly not the case.
As for the issue at hand, I am likewise initially inclined to agree with Likko, C.J. that it is the between-ness that distinguishes a sandwich from a roll, though I do not agree that the outer substance need specifically be a bread, but may instead be any product which follows the formula of A(B-X)A and in which the "A" would be capable of being gripped by the hands while held parallel to the ground without the (B-X) being squished out the sides (the rear being a different subject). When something is between two items of another thing, we describe it as being "sandwiched," and thus I do not believe that the nature of the exterior substance is necessarily important, except as a matter of engineering.
In Austria, for instance, the word "hot dog" refers not to the type of meat that goes in the exterior substance, but rather to the fact that the meat (most frequently a delicious, delicious Kasekrainer, the world's most Wunderbar form of wurstel) is placed within a tunnel cut into the center of a whole loaf of bread. I think we would all agree that this is not a sandwich, delicious as it is (and really it is the best meat in tube form/bread combo in all the world, without any doubt).
And yet, even if we were to ignore the use of the word "hot dog" to refer to the bread itself and instead replace the Kasekrainer with an inferior American Hot Dog, we would still all agree that it was an acceptable way of eating a hot dog. Indeed, even in America, hot dogs are often not served on a bun (and the use of the word "on" to describe its relationship to a bun should alone be dispositive here), but instead are sometimes served in often disgusting but nonetheless common other forms - on a stick, or within a greasy pretzel-like substance, or even within a phyllo-like pastry.
Were we to serve hot dogs between two flat pieces of bread, they would simply roll out, though, so ordinary sandwich form is the one way in which we absolutely cannot serve a hot dog.
Similarly, we might also consider that we call lobster filling served on a bun a "lobster roll," rather than a lobster sandwich, which would be a reference to lobster meat served between two slices of bread.
And that form is critical, rather than merely a matter of aesthetics. If the product must be eaten in an enclosed form, or within the spaces of a "V," then there is no order to how we experience the flavors involved. In a proper sandwich, the food hits the tongue in layers, but in a half-split roll, or fully enclosed starch tube, the filling hits the tongue simultaneously with additional starch.
As for the hoagie/sub/torpedo question....properly made, such things are quite clearly sandwiches, as the bread is often wholly sliced and separated. But even if it is not sliced in that manner, but it is otherwise properly made, it will still be designed to be held parallel to the ground such that only trace amounts of starch are contained in the same layer as the filling when it reaches your tongue.
To be honest, I'm not sure how the question of tenure really comes into play in this case, at least not from an analytical perspective, though it's possible that it only got as public as it did because of the push by the tenured community.
I'm also not sure how it's really an academic freedom issue - he's a Native American Studies professor and he's not commenting on anything at all related to his academic work. Maybe the emphasis on the academic freedom portion of the equation is what brings the tenure question into play?
Regardless, it is a very clear 1st Amendment issue - this is a public university and a government employer. He had the job offer rescinded for speech having nothing at all to do with the job for which he was being hired. It was protected speech, it contained no actual threats.
It was debatably anti-Semitic, yes, but that doesn't make it unprotected speech, and rescinding the job offer was clearly and indisputably an adverse employment action.
He is going to win his lawsuit, and he should. Any adjunct who had a public job offer rescinded so quickly after offensive speech came to light would likewise win their lawsuit, and they likewise should.
If free speech stands for anything, it stands for the proposition that the government does not get to decide what is and is not acceptable speech. Even if you're a government employee, they don't get to make that decision unless that speech directly relates to your job. I'm really struggling to see how that exception applies here.
The thing is that I don't see how delicacy is even possible here - see my comment above to @nevermoor. The entire debate hinges on demonstrating that the name is especially outrageous, and it's impossible to express the extent of outrage without acting outraged.
The primary difficulty here is, I think, that there's an assumption that saying "this thing you support is racist" is identical to saying "you're a racist for supporting this thing."
Separately, I think you're overestimating the extent to which incivility is incompatible with persuasiveness. In so much of political debate, an emotional connection is needed to even start trying to think about opposing arguments and take them seriously.
Otherwise, it's easy to fall prey to thinking in something of a closed loop - we start with a set of values that are important to us and which we sort of assume to be universal, and think through issues from there. Consequences of that thinking on other values don't really enter into the equation or get easily dismissed. A prerequisite to even considering a change of heart is often for someone to force you to consider the other value, which means drawing an emotional connection, and that can often mean being less than nice.
Civility and reason are really important, but they're sometimes only part of the equation that will change a given person's mind. That doesn't mean "always be uncivil," though - incivility can obviously backfire easily, and there are an awful lot of different ways of being "uncivil," few of which will work in a given situation. It more means that it should be deployed sparingly in close conjunction with other arguments and in a way that is geared towards invoking something your opponent presumably cares about but is undervaluing or ignoring.
Used wrongly or excessively, it undermines your credibility and causes people to tune out to everything else you say. But used in the right circumstances in conjunction with other arguments, it can be a necessary way of grabbing your opponent's attention.
I think it's probably fair to say that a good chunk of the 71% just haven't thought about it much and don't really care enough to think about it much. "Maintain the status quo" is an easy default position for people without much of a stake in a given issue and with little interest in learning enough to care.
Ehhh, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Snyder's not listening. Other fans of the team and supporters of the name are different story, but Snyder himself pretty clearly isn't given the tone-deaf way in which he's responded.
Someone who's listening would not proclaim ""We'll never change the name . . . .It's that simple. NEVER — you can use caps."
Nor would he state ""We understand the issues out there, and we're not an issue..."
And he certainly would not persistently refuse invitations to meet with either the Oneida Nation or Ms. Blackhorse.
One of the reasons this issue has gotten so much traction, in fact, is that Snyder's made such a point of making it clear that he's not listening and not interested in listening.
Had Snyder just taken the position that the Chicago Blackhawks have taken over the years, it would have remained a second-tier story. That position is, essentially "We're always listening and will do all we can to maintain and strengthen the lines of communication with American Indian groups to make sure that we treat this issue as responsibly and respectfully as possible, but are not prepared to change our name or logo at this time." That doesn't stop opponents from protesting, obviously, but it avoids the creation of conflict, perception, and absolutism that drives media coverage and allows for public pressure to build.
On this issue it would be A and C. If it were an issue that is actually core to the Democratic Party like healthcare access or unemployment insurance or clean energy, I’d probably be angrier.
I'm not sure how it's possible to answer both A and C on that particular question, but that aside, I recall an awful lot of criticism of Wyden at the time precisely on the grounds mentioned above, though my google-fu is having a hard time with it now. At minimum, though, there's plenty of examples of attempts by enforcers of Dem Party orthodoxy to discourage liberals who oppose drone strikes from supporting Paul's filibuster by trying to bring in his positions on various other issues. Here's one: http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/03/07/1685411/what-rand-paul-really-thinks-about-drones/
Then of course, there's the whole way in which Jane Hamsher and company became personae non-grata, not just amongst VSPs but also amongst orthodox Democrats.
I can think of several other instances as well wherein the critique of a particular indisputably liberal Democrat was that he was daring to work with a Republican on a given issue, which was thus enhancing that Republican's credibility, without any meaningful critique of the resulting proposal.
But even if there is a meaningful critique of the resulting policy, the fact that "worked with Republican X" is at all a significant part of the argument is a sign that one is worried a lot less about accomplishing a prioritized goal and more about maintaining ideological or partisan orthodoxy, or to put it another way, that one has turned too much into a matter of principle and thus has lost their principles.
I still think my main point stands where the Very Serious People of the punditsphere and media think that they can condescend to liberal desires and concerns but they generally are not as dismissive of the GOP conservative base.
I'm not at all sure this is true, though I don't think it's provable either way. However, if it is true, it seems to me that there's a much more obvious and likely reason for it: those who you call "Very Serious People" are, by and large, themselves Democrats with their own set of political agendas. Sure, there's a few Republicans in their circle, but by and large their route to power, particularly nowadays, is through the Democratic Party. Indeed, slightly more self-identified "moderates" voted for Obama in 2012 than self-identified "liberals," and it's only been in the last two or three years that self-identified liberals have obtained even a modest numerical advantage over self-identified moderates. By comparison, self-identified conservatives have consistently had about a minimum 2-1 (and often a 3-1) advantage over self-identified "moderates" in the GOP for a very long time:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/166787/liberal-self-identification-edges-new-high-2013.aspx
To the extent liberals are more likely than conservatives to be dismissed as unserious, it's because the VSP/"moderate" contingent of which media elites tend to be part is trying to maintain control over the Democratic Party reins.
As I said above, though, I've got no problem at all with liberals fighting that battle and attempting to take the reins from the VSPs. All I wish to do is dispense with the notion that party orthodoxy is synonymous with principle when in fact it's close to the opposite of principle.
I'm actually quite a bit more torn on this than the Mozilla case (at least as widely reported, as I understand there were some less-reported facts that would have changed the equation for me), where I thought that the firing was inappropriate. I think I still come out on the side of this being inappropriate, but it's a very close issue for me:
1. Schneider is an actor, but in this case he is an actual spokesperson for the company at issue, and the views are obviously relevant to what the company does. While the Mozilla case involved a CEO, who has to act as a spokesperson, his support of Prop 8 was not, in and of itself relevant to what Mozilla does. While there may have been concern about his treatment of gay employees, that concern requires an inference that does not necessarily follow from the fact of a single donation to support Prop 8. No inference is needed here - Schneider is anti-vax, and State Farm is unequivocal in its support of vaccination.
3. My primary concern with the Eich situation (detailed in the comments to this thread: https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2014/04/29/free-speech-is-dead-donald-sterling-edition) wasn't that it had a tendency to chill speech, but rather that it tended to blur the line between political participation and the rest of life. But here, Schneider's intentionally blurred that line himself by using his non-political reputation to promote a political cause, so my primary concern disappears.
That said, I think I still come out against the campaign to fire him, but not out of any free speech or political participation concerns, although my reasons are functionally still similar to Russell's. Specifically, as Russell pointed out, Schneider's spokesperson role with State Farm did not offer him an opportunity to promote his views. Until now. While he previously said some things on Twitter and in other fora and tried to put his views out there, it doesn't seem like anyone really cared what he had to say or paid him any attention. His efforts, in other words, were largely unsuccessful.
Now? By campaigning so vigorously against him, it makes it look as if his views on the topic are actually important and worth considering. How many more people have now listened to Rob Schneider talking about vaccination than a week or two ago? The optics are probably also not terribly good to fence-sitters, and might make it appear to them that there's something to hide here.
With Jenny McCarthy, the equation was different - she already had a disturbingly large following on this subject and a lot of people already cared for some reason what she had to say. She was a leading anti-vaxxer who had largely become associated as much or more with that fact as she was associated with doing anything else. Privileging her with a position on The View where she could and would promote her anti-vaxxer claims thus quite likely lent legitimacy to those claims and to the anti-vaxxer movement writ large. But Schneider's role with State Farm did none of that, and was not giving him an opportunity to amplify his views.
I strongly suspect that the campaign to dump Schneider has thus created something along the lines of a reverse Streisand Effect.
2. Schneider hasn't just made a donation that would have been kept secret in many states and that was discovered only because someone decided to research his views; instead, he's actively sought to use his fame and name to promote the view in question. One of my biggest concerns with the Mozilla case was that it felt like an inquisition - Eich's beliefs had to be more or less reverse engineered. Had Eich appeared in a commercial or spoke at a rally, I'd have had much less, if any, concern. Schneider is actively relying on his name and "reputation" to promote and amplify anti-vaccination. If you intentionally put your reputation on the line to promote something, then you shouldn't be upset when you lose that gamble.
I generally agree with this, although I don't think it's right to imply that either Paul is treated as a brave "moderate." Ron Paul was treated as essentially a joke by the media throughout his campaigns, and Rand has very carefully cultivated an image that presents him as an intensely loyal Republican, and I don't think the media has ever portrayed him as being particularly independent of the party's conservative base. Nor could they, as he's been so careful to cultivate the support of that base. While he's trying to broaden the GOP's tent, he's not trying to do that by reaching out to the centrists and media elites, but instead by trying to reach out to more traditionally liberal groups. We'll see if he succeeds, but I don't think it's right to suggest that the media celebrates him particularly much.
But beyond that, I'd agree that the media distinguishes between "VSP" or "moderate" Democrats and liberals. I actually have a fair amount of respect for liberals wanting to take the party over from those folks, with whom they're starting to have less and less in common (though still far more in common than, say, McCain or Christie has in common with the Pauls and Justin Amash).
But that doesn't mean that the VSP's lack principles, just that they have different principles from most liberals, who in turn may themselves have different principles from each other.
Here's a good way of showing the distinction between principled liberalism, principled VSP-ism, and orthodoxy:
Rand Paul stands up and filibusters for clarification about the extent of the President's authority to order drone strikes. Ron Wyden joins him. Is your response:
(A) Good for Wyden. I might dislike Rand Paul, but there is something troubling about the unrestricted use of drone strikes and I'm glad to see a liberal Senator joining the fight.
(B) Screw Ron Wyden. Why is a liberal helping this anti-tax/pro-life/anti-gun control/isolationist/anti-welfare conservative bring attention to himself?
(C) Drone strikes are a critical defense against terrorism and I trust that the Executive Branch will not abuse this power, regardless of the President's political party. People who are concerned about drone strikes are flat out wrong.
If your response is either wholly (A) or wholly (C), then you're acting on principle, whether those are the principles of a liberal or a VSP. But if your response at all involves (B), then I submit that you're no longer acting out of principle.
Why is it always assumed that the most orthodox members of a given party are actually "principled"? Quite frankly, the reverse is probably true - if you're that orthodox, you've probably outsourced your "principles" to your party. As I have said time and again "have too many principles and you soon have none."
That doesn't mean that "moderates" are necessarily principled in the sense of their view of the public good, or that compromise is always (or even usually) a public good. It is to say that the very term "moderate" as a reference to anyone who does not adhere to ideological orthodoxy is a misnomer.
In Cuomo's case, he certainly has had some things where he has stuck to his guns and been fairly unwilling to compromise - it's just that he's often (though not always, see his gun control legislation and SSM) been pointing those guns to his left. So I can understand the left having big problems with him and trying to primary him. Frankly, if my sympathies personally laid more with downstate than they lie with upstate, there's a nonzero chance I even would have preferred Teachout (although the fracking issue is one where a lot of upstaters would support her), just as I strongly preferred DeBlasio to anyone handpicked by Bloomberg.
But that doesn't make Cuomo (or Bloomberg, for that matter, much as I wholly and completely despise the man) unprincipled.
Additionally, like it or not, a willingness to compromise with other political ideologies is very much a part of being a successful governor or President, even if it is sometimes a good trait in a legislator. The question is rarely whether to compromise, it's "(a)which values of mine are most important, (b) which are least important, and (c) with whom can I work in order to protect the values that I find most important?"
If your answer to question (a) prominently includes "party unity" or "appeasing my party's ideological base," or "keeping my ideological orthodoxy pure" then you've just artificially restricted your ways of addressing the problem at hand. What's more, you've reduced "effectively solving the problem at hand" to something closer to an answer to question (b) than question (a).
Competency in the executive branch of government additionally requires a recognition that your decisions will affect real people who, if you piss enough of them off sufficiently in pursuit of a short term ideological goal, can make it impossible for you to govern effectively on other issues for the rest of your term. It requires building consensus, both inside and outside of your party, and perhaps most importantly it requires an ability to work with (or at least make sure your appointed officials can work with) the bureaucracy and government employees that will ultimately be responsible for carrying out your directives.
Certainly, there's an argument to be made that Cuomo has not performed these tasks particularly well, and I'm not qualified to offer an opinion on that. But the point is that these tasks are as or more important to competent executive governance as "principles" and, what's more, "principles" and ideological orthodoxy are two different things. "Principles," while only one element of competent administration, are indeed necessary to being a good leader of an Executive Branch, but whether those principles appear consistent with ideological orthodoxy isn't all that important, and taking a "my way or the highway" approach to most things is a guaranteed way to be totally incompetent.
None of which is to say anything specific about whether Teachout would have been competent. It's only to dispense with this notion that anything short of uncompromising ideological orthodoxy is somehow unprincipled or, in its more polite parlance, "moderate."
In other circumstances, we like to talk about "moderate" and "extremist" Muslims, and specifically the need to support the "moderate" Syrian rebels without supporting the "extremist" Syrian terrorist groups, as if the "moderates" are somehow less serious about their religion rather than simply having a very different interpretation of religious texts. That there can be nothing "moderate" about someone who actively takes up arms against their government seems to have been lost in the discussion.
Similarly, we might talk about "moderate" and "extremist" Christian groups, even though the difference between them lies largely in how much they emphasize the fire-and-brimstone aspects of the Old Testament versus the peace-and-love aspect of the Gospels. I could easily make the case that the latter group, far from being "moderate," is in fact more "extreme" because their interpretation is in my view more faithful to the actual texts and overall more internally consistent.
Nor should it, seeing as the scenario is pretty much batshit insane with no possible connection to reality.
1. To my knowledge, illegal immigrants from Africa don't come via Mexico, which would be kind of silly, seeing as they'd need to get a visa to travel to Mexico just as much as they'd need one to travel to the US. If you're going to spend the dough to get a visa and fly across the Atlantic, you're going to fly direct to the US and then skip out on your visa. Why do the same with a Mexican visa, but also add a bunch of less than safe and not very cheap additional steps, such as (a) finding a coyote in a country where you don't speak a word of Spanish and don't know a soul; (b) hiring said coyote and hoping he's not going to defraud you, seeing as he knows you don't speak the language and have no local connections; (c) traversing a fishing desert; and (d) hoping that you're not in one of the groups that the Border Patrol in fact does catch?
2. The time between first symptoms and death with Ebola is a week to 16 days, with the bleeding phase starting within 5-7 days. So that means that someone with symptoms would have less than a week to somehow: (1) get a passport if they don't already have one; (2) travel in person to the nearest Mexican consulate (ie, he'd have to travel to Monrovia); (3) convince the person at the Mexican visa desk that he's feeling perfectly well despite starting to show symptoms; (4) get that person to immediately issue a visa to travel to Mexico, a process that in most instances is itself probably going to take more than the week he has to live, and in any event which Mexico's website indicates requires a minimum of two business days; (5) raise the $5000+ required to pay airfare from Monrovia to Mexico City, which isn't exactly going to be a direct flight; (6) fly to Mexico City, which accroding to Kayak involves 30 hours and 3 layovers in 3 different countries, at each of which he may need to clear customs/immigration without anyone noticing that he's sick; (7) find a coyote who is leaving for the border immediately despite not speaking a word of Spanish; (8) have raised enough money to pay the coyote; and (9) travel from Mexico City to Juarez, which Google Maps says is an almost 20 hour drive.
I suppose he could try adjusting his scenario so that the sick man is only just at an incubation stage, which he knows because he just treated a dying family member. But even still, it's not as if the average Liberian has $5000+ just lying around, nor as if the average Liberian has any awareness whatsoever of how illegal immigration from Mexico works. Nor is it as if visas from Liberia are something that Mexico is going to rubber stamp these days and process in just a couple of days. Amongst other issues, no doubt.
So, yeah, if Ebola spreads to the US, it's not going to have anything to do with illegal immigration from Mexico, and definitely isn't going to have anything to do with political correctness regarding that issue.
3. As for the idea of terrorists smuggling into the US from Mexico while taking advantage of some sort of distraction.....really? Why would these hypothetical terrorists wait for a distraction that would have no effect whatsoever on border policy or on resources already being dedicated to anti-terrorism? And why is it assumed that, in doing so, they'd so easily be able to smuggle themselves and their weapons into Mexico?
4. What's more, as far as I can tell, the apprehension rate at the border is above 50% - in 2012, the Border Patrol apprehended about 650,000, with about half of those actually reported and arrested, but all presumably turned back. I can't find any numbers for 2012, but in 2009, the estimate was that only about 300,000 successfully entered. So this scenario assumes that a terrorist looking to attack the US would decide that his best odds would be to hope to avoid detection by Mexican authorities while flying to Mexico - which really isn't going to be much easier than just trying to fly direct to the US since there's a limit to how effective airport security can be - and then take a less than 50% chance of crossing the border via Mexico.
I'm pretty sure I completely agree with you on this one, Tod.
I'll just add that, while his stand up routine is often very hit or miss for me, Jim Norton's keynote speech at the JFL Festival this year strikes me as a really good companion to this:
The most pertinent part is probably between the 8 and 20 minute mark, and especially between 13 and 18 minutes.
Key quote: "The gift of what we do as comics . . . is that we take things that aren't funny and we allow people to look at them in a way that makes them laugh."
The moral compass is simple: there is someone dead who did not deserve to die and who was not - whatever Wilson believed and however reasonably or unreasonably he believed it - about to attack Wilson, but was surrendering.
As for "appropriate," "take" and "obtain" pretty clearly describe what he did - the statute doesn't say "take off the premises" or "remove from the premises." And none of that matters anyway, because attempted stealing is in fact a crime anyhow.
I am confident that the prosecutor is not going to try to gloss over what we see on that video as “typical teen behavior.”
You mean that the prosecutor who depends on the police for all of his cases and would like nothing more than to see this case go away as quietly as possible?
giving rise to a reasonable belief, on his part, that he could not safely allow him to get too close.
How, then, was Wilson to complete the arrest? It sounds an awful lot like you're suggesting that once the altercation at the car began, there was not a damn thing Brown could have done that would have made it inappropriate for Wilson to kill him.
Mine suggests to me that peace officers, like every other defendant, are entitled to benefit of doubt, and presumption of innocence.
Oddly enough, so does mine. But whether or not he is, can be, or should be convicted has nothing whatsoever to do with what I should think about the moral propriety of his actions. I don't need a court to tell me that OJ killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, even though the prosecution did such a disastrous job that the jury had little choice but to acquit. I don't need a court to tell me that Adrian Peterson crossed an intolerable line in his treatment of his sons even though there's a reasonable chance that he, too, has a valid criminal defense and should be acquitted if the evidence supports it. And I don't need a court to tell me that Officer Wilson, at minimum, made an egregious error in shooting Michael Brown even if the law or jury says that what he did wasn't murder.
The dude had stopped fleeing. Period. There's no dispute about this. You can't use deadly force to stop someone from fleeing if they're no longer actually fleeing and have surrendered. And, YET AGAIN, I don't give a crap whether Wilson has a valid legal defense - I've already conceded, repeatedly, that he's unlikely to be convicted given the low legal bar for him to meet.
I care about whether what he did was morally justified, which does not have a damn thing to do with whether he's legally guilty. This is the same way I feel about the Adrian Peterson case - I don't give a rat's ass whether he has a valid legal defense, it's still morally unacceptable to hit a child to the point of physical injury.
I learned a long time ago that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. I also get to learn on a daily basis that the law is quite frequently an ass.
All young adults, age 18, know full well that you aren’t “shoplifting” until you exit the store with something, without paying for it.
I'm going to need a source for this. Because the kids we used to catch stealing from the record store I worked at back in the day sure as hell didn't seem to think this. And, well, here's the definition of the crime of stealing in Missouri: "A person commits the crime of stealing if he or she appropriates property or services of another with the purpose to deprive him or her thereof, either without his or her consent or by means of deceit or coercion." And the definition of "appropriates": ""Appropriate" means to take, obtain, use, transfer, conceal or retain possession of." There is nothing in there that suggests the crime is complete only upon leaving the store. It certainly reads as if it's complete when you take possession of the item with the intent to deprive the owner without consent. But maybe the caselaw in MO says otherwise. It wouldn't matter for our purposes, because "attempted stealing" is a separate crime, in this case, a Class C misdemeanor.
So if every teen "knows" this, they're wrong.
Since you seem so conversant with the folkways of our urban youth, perhaps you wouldn’t mind educating us on what “Swishers” are commonly used for.
In my day, making blunts to smoke pot was hardly something exclusive to "urban" youths, unless middle class and upper middle class white kids from the exurbs count as "urban youth." Teenager smokes pot. News at 11.
Ultimately, I just don't get why Wilson's defenders find it so necessary and important to build a dead teenager who can't defend himself into a vicious, unrelenting, unthinking, and murderous animal. I don't get why it's so important for the killing of Brown to be viewed as something approaching heroic rather than something tragic, even if Wilson did everything right.
I'd have a hell of a lot more respect for Wilson's defenders if they could just acknowledge that Michael Brown was a human being who made a mistake that cost him his life and that, whether or not Wilson was legally or morally justified in shooting him, he didn't "deserve" to die.
I don't understand why it's so impossible to even consider that Wilson might be capable of making mistakes just like anyone else, especially in the heat of the moment, and that maybe, just maybe, Michael Brown is dead because two people made mistakes that day.
And lastly, I definitely don't understand why it's so hard for so many to even consider that it might be problematic that the police kill a minimum of 400 people in this country every year, of which Michael Brown is just one, yet police in other fairly large nations collectively discharge their weapon fewer times in an entire month than there are bullets in Michael Brown's body. Whether or not we want to continue making it so easy for police to justify shooting suspects, I don't see why it's so unworthy of discussing things the police may do to decrease the number of people they kill every year.
At 40-50 yards, much less 50 feet, the only way the witnesses would have heard nothing at all, not even something unintelligible to them, is if Wilson was using what my six year old would call an indoor voice. If you're issuing orders to prevent someone you fear is about to attack you from moving, you don't use your indoor voice. And if your in a high stress situation where your adrenaline is pumping, my experience is that you have to actively try to keep your voice at a low volume, which I'm pretty sure would be the last of my concerns in this situation.
Not to indulge in “stereotypical thought,” but perhaps it’s just a “White thing”–the perception that a criminal record can really mess up one’s career aspirations, and result in significant expense and “jail time.”
This completely misses the point. Every teenager knows shoplifting is a crime. A common crime in which a huge percentage of teenagers engage, but a crime nonetheless. If a storeowner catches you and wants to press charges, every teenager assumes that will wind up on their criminal record (and in some case it even will). So his choice wasn't "give up the Swisher Sweets and nothing happens to you" versus "hold on to the Swisher Sweets and risk getting a criminal record." His choice was "give up the Swisher Sweets and probably get arrested and a criminal record" or "push the store owner out of the way and probably avoid getting arrested and getting a criminal record."
The question isn't whether that was a good choice - obviously it wasn't - it's whether that was an irrational choice that bespoke a willingness to act in the most irrational and life-threatening manner possible a few minutes later.
How would you persuade a juror that Brown wasn’t simply “out of control,” unwilling or unable to brook opposition?
First, Brown isn't the one on trial here. Wilson already acted as his judge, jury, and executioner, whether or not he was justified in doing so. Second, I hate to keep saying this, but I'm not interested in legal standards here. I'm interested in moral ones. Third, I'm absolutely astounded at the belief that, even if Wilson did nothing wrong, it's necessary or appropriate to assume that what Brown did in the convenience store shows him to have been uniquely insane and violent in a manner far worse than the average instigator of a bar fight. Finally, the answer to your question is obvious - someone who is fleeing is not "unwilling or unable to brook opposition."
I’m not sure you help your cause with the claim that his threatening and bullying conduct should be regarded as unexceptional. You know that scrawny clerk could lawfully have blown his head off, right?
It's evidence that he did something stupid. It's evidence that he did something indisputably wrong. It's not evidence that he was batshit insane in a manner different from an awful lot of other people, which is what he'd have to have been for the theory that he was doing anything other than surrendering when he turned around, put his hands up, and said "OK, OK, OK" to a police officer he had just been running away from and who had just fired several shots at him.
As for the idea that the store owner legally could have shot him, I fail to see how that is remotely relevant to Wilson's subsequent actions. I'll also add that the only moment at which your statement would be true would have been in the instant that Brown reached out to push the shopowner. Before that moment, the shopowner had no reason to believe he was stopping anything more than shoplifting, and after that moment, there was no longer a felony to protect against - the crime was committed and the danger to the shop owner had ended.
And, well, it's no less legal for the victim in a bar fight to use deadly force against his assailant. But that doesn't mean that the assailant is going to be crazy enough to fake a surrender and then run at someone who is already actually shooting at him 10 minutes later.
Seriously. Wilson will not only testify that he told Brown to halt,
Sure he will. That doesn't mean he's telling the truth, and he's got a much stronger motive to lie than any one of the numerous witnesses who would testify to the contrary. Will that be enough to create reasonable doubt, though? Absolutely, because there will always be people who refuse to consider that police officers are every bit as capable of lying as anyone else.
but that he had been attacked with such severity as to require hospital attention.
We still don't know much about this allegation, but again, it doesn't matter from a moral standpoint even if it may matter from a legal standpoint. And I'm primarily concerned right now about the moral issue. The injury - which seems to have been no more serious than a black eye - occurred, if at all, right at the outset, before Brown fled, and well before Brown attempted to surrender. If the fatal shots occurred during the struggle in the police car, the alleged injuries would matter. But once that struggle ended, there's no longer a threat.
That, and the fact that his firearm was discharged during this encounter takes Brown well beyond the pale of harmless innocence.
First, why does Wilson's use of his firearm, in and of itself, reflect on Brown? That sounds an awful lot like "Brown deserved to be shot because he was shot." Second, why does Brown need to be harmlessly innocent for Wilson's use of force to be morally unjustifiable? Or even legally unjustifiable, for that matter? Failing to be harmlessly innocent hardly strikes me as moral justification for being killed.
That, too, Chris.
@archon41 You're forgetting about the acknowledged fact that at least one shot was fired while he was fleeing, and that he was quite likely suffering from at least one wound by the time he stopped.
You're also ignoring the congruity of the accounts indicating that, when he stopped, Brown said "OK, OK, OK..." while putting his hands up, again a universal sign that he was giving up.
But where's the evidence that, with Brown standing in front of Wilson with his hands up, Wilson gave Brown any instruction whatsoever? The accounts seem unanimous that no instruction was given.
So, here's Brown, with his hands in the air, and possibly with a shoulder wound, getting no instruction. There's no evidence that he's ever had a gun pointed at him before. What's he supposed to do, knowing that he's about to make a life-or-death decision? Walk backwards with his hands up? The cop will think he's running away again. Just continue to stand still with his hands up? If he's got a shoulder wound, that's becoming harder to do by the second, but even if not, the officer's silence while still pointing the gun at him suggests that he hasn't done enough to surrender yet, so maybe he needs to do something else. But what?
Kneeling would be the best choice, obviously. But try kneeling with your hands up without taking a step forward to balance yourself.
But maybe it's not a bad idea to walk slowly toward the cop with your hands up to show you're ready to be arrested. The cop has to know you've surrendered, right? Your hands are up and you've just said "OK, OK, OK."
You're not trained what to do when a cop is pointing a gun at you and isn't giving you any instruction. I'd hope that cops are trained to recognize that a suspect with his hands up and either standing still or walking slowly is probably trying to surrender, and the appropriate response to that.
Legally, I'll be the first to concede that it doesn't much matter whether he was charging. The justifiable force bar is low enough for law enforcement that it'll be very difficult to get a conviction no matter what happens.
But morally, and in terms of whether or not people should be outraged at what happened? That's a different story altogether.
And morally speaking, the convenience store issue and the question of who threw the first punch at the police car are irrelevant. Either Brown was trying to surrender, or he wasn't. And he pretty clearly was.
Just because a use of force may be legally justified (or more accurately, fail to evidence lack of justification beyond a reasonable doubt) does not make it morally justified and does not mean that the officer acted appropriately or in a manner that wouldn't have been prevented with better training and less of a warrior mentality amongst the police.
As for this:
Why would any rational person, knowing he had been caught red-handed, risk the filing of a criminal complaint by flinging aside a protesting clerk and swaggering through the door with those Swishers?
Oh, I dunno. Maybe because he had already been caught red-handed and figured he was about to get a criminal complaint against him anyways. I'd frankly be pretty surprised to hear that a teen caught red-handed shoplifting but with the ability to escape by just pushing someone out of the way would do anything other than push that person out of the way. I'd be even more shocked to find out that an average teen believed that doing so would convert their petty shoplifting offense into a low-level felony.
I mean, the rational teens that I've ever encountered would view the risk as "I'm totally busted if I stay here, but I'll probably get away with this if I get this guy out of my way, which I can totally do."
And I'll just add that I've seen no shortage of otherwise ordinary people with no criminal records initiate far more violent confrontations than a simple shove for far more trivial reasons than wanting to get away with a box of Swisher Sweets. Things like "Dude, you're standing in my spot" at a country music concert. Or "Scoreboard, asshole."
And those dudes fight like hell when the authorities come for them, even though the authorities always win in the end. These dudes don't wind up dead, though, and if they did, few would assume they had an irrationally "violent disposition" that would render them willing to knowingly risk their lives, whether or not anyone thought the authorities used excessive force.
Here's the link. http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/workers-who-were-witnesses-provide-new-perspective-on-michael-brown/article_14a3e5f8-6c6a-5deb-92fe-87fcee622c29.html
That account doesn't help your theory at all, actually. The quote you've pulled is taken completely out of context, for starters, but more importantly, the key phrase is "after the third shot." Not before, after.
That means that Brown had his hands up for at least one, and possibly as many as three shots (depending on how you interpret the reference in the article - it's either the third shot after Brown put his hands up, or the third shot overall, with the first two shots being fired before Brown put his hands up). It was only after he was struck that his hands went down - and, well, I'd imagine it's not terribly easy to keep one's hands up in the seconds after being shot.
But it's even more damning in context, because this is the paragraph immediately preceding the quote:
Wilson, gun drawn, also stopped about 10 feet in front of Brown, the worker said.
Then Brown moved, the worker said. “He’s kind of walking back toward the cop.” He said Brown’s hands were still up. Wilson began backing up as he fired, the worker said.
Walking, not running, not charging. Walking. And walking with his hands up, the universal sign of "I surrender and I'm not a threat to you."
It's worth repeating what I wrote a few weeks ago here. There is agreement on all sides on the following:
1. There was some sort of physical altercation at the police car door, though there is dispute as to who started this (I don't see how this much matters).
2. During this altercation, Wilson fired a single shot at Brown that may or may not have grazed Brown in the shoulder.
3. After this shot was fired, Brown fled.
4. While Brown was fleeing, the police themselves have acknowledged that at least one, possibly more, shots were fired, but claim (quite plausibly) that those shots missed.
5. After this shot(s), there is also agreement on all sides that Brown stopped and turned around.
So the claim that Brown was charging Wilson rather than trying to surrender rests on the assumption that Brown - who had nothing more than marijuana in his system, hardly a drug known to cause aggression and also not a drug for which testing is good at showing actual intoxication levels:
(1) Got into a fight with a police officer
(2) Disengaged with the police officer after the police officer fired a shot at him
(3) Started to run away, but stopped after one or more additional shots were fired and missed.
(4) But instead of being scared that he'd be killed if he didn't surrender, he decided that the time was ripe for him to turn around, run by himself AT the officer who was shooting at him, and renew the physical confrontation that he was fleeing in the first place.
I think anyone has to admit that this is completely and utterly implausible even if you believe Brown was a career criminal (and he wasn't, but the point is that this is irrelevant). The only way it's plausible is if Brown was either suffering from extreme, Miami face-eater level, mental illness or was on PCP*. Not one person has ever said that Brown suffered from that kind of mental illness, and the toxicology reports did not show any traces of PCP.
Now I'll concede it's plausible that, in the heat of the moment, Wilson perceived Brown stopping and turning around as the beginning of an attempt to charge him. If so, I don't think that would have been a reasonable conclusion for him to reach, but when officers are insufficiently trained, "reason" can too easily give way to "gut instinct" in the heat of the moment.
But it's more fun to blame the victim than acknowledge that cops are just as fallible and capable of evil as the rest of us. And, well, we probably shouldn't so easily overlook that, at minimum, the police chief lied at the press conference about the distance between the car and the body, even if that doesn't necessarily say anything about the distance between Wilson and Brown when the shots were fired.
*It's actually not plausible if he was on PCP, as the violence inducing effects of PCP are greatly exaggerated from my understanding, but for the moment I'm willing to assume that PCP could make someone have this level of aggression.
On “The Bank of Wal-Mart?”
While I agree with all of this, it's worth pointing out that Congressional control over the post office's inner workings is very much a reason why we should be skeptical about its ability to do banking. I think complaints about the post office's competence are usually quite unfair, but the competence of its administration is quite beside the point, or at least ought to be - the post office's bigger problem is that Congressional/Executive meddling and oversight provides it with little to no ability to timely respond to changing market conditions. It can do relatively little to respond to conditions without first getting the approval of the PRC, which are a bunch of political appointees whose job it is to protect their respective party's constituencies rather than protect the postal service's interests.
I can see the need for that kind of oversight when the USPS is a true monopoly, but that's not really the case any longer. Yes, it has a monopoly on delivering to post boxes, but that's no longer a very valuable monopoly since it's so easy for UPS and Fedex to deliver directly (and, well, there's the whole issue of email too).
Indeed, the whole pension issue is an excellent example of how this politically-mandated inflexibility undermines the USPS' ability to successfully operate in a modern economy. When the pension mandates were passed into law, the USPS had just completed a year in which it handled the most pieces of mail in its history (207 billion), and had run a profit of at least $1 billion per year in all but one of the previous 15 years, several times running a profit approaching $5 billion. While first class mail was declining, junk mail was still increasing. So why not require the post office to over-fund its pension plan while loosening some of its other restrictions (it's worth mentioning that the bill passed both houses on a voice vote, by the way)? But that volume declined swiftly and dramatically, even as there's no political interest in undoing the pension funding requirement or otherwise freeing the USPS up more.
I strongly suspect these problems of inflexibility would be even worse if it were to get back into the financial services sector, where market conditions are more fluid, and there is a lot more competition, etc.
On “Question Answered”
Far from letting freedom ring, this insistence on defining terms so broadly as to be incapable of expressing any actual meaning, rather than permitting them to be called by their proper names, is downright Orwellian.
Surely our language is sufficiently rich and varied as to allow a word other than "sandwich" to describe a food in which the filling is or must be folded into a single piece of starch!
"
I am wholly torn on this question, though I must re-emphasize that what is served in Chicago is not pizza but rather tomato pie. It is not the thickness of the crust that alters its character, but rather the order in which the ingredients are placed. It is possible to have a thick crust pizza or a thin crust tomato pie (see, e.g., Justice Alito's favorite restaurant, DeLorenzo's, formerly of Trenton but now of Robbinsville, which serves only delicious, delicious thin crust tomato pies). To say that a tomato pie is a pizza because it has the same ingredients is to say that a burrito is a taco is an enchilada, which is clearly not the case.
As for the issue at hand, I am likewise initially inclined to agree with Likko, C.J. that it is the between-ness that distinguishes a sandwich from a roll, though I do not agree that the outer substance need specifically be a bread, but may instead be any product which follows the formula of A(B-X)A and in which the "A" would be capable of being gripped by the hands while held parallel to the ground without the (B-X) being squished out the sides (the rear being a different subject). When something is between two items of another thing, we describe it as being "sandwiched," and thus I do not believe that the nature of the exterior substance is necessarily important, except as a matter of engineering.
In Austria, for instance, the word "hot dog" refers not to the type of meat that goes in the exterior substance, but rather to the fact that the meat (most frequently a delicious, delicious Kasekrainer, the world's most Wunderbar form of wurstel) is placed within a tunnel cut into the center of a whole loaf of bread. I think we would all agree that this is not a sandwich, delicious as it is (and really it is the best meat in tube form/bread combo in all the world, without any doubt).
And yet, even if we were to ignore the use of the word "hot dog" to refer to the bread itself and instead replace the Kasekrainer with an inferior American Hot Dog, we would still all agree that it was an acceptable way of eating a hot dog. Indeed, even in America, hot dogs are often not served on a bun (and the use of the word "on" to describe its relationship to a bun should alone be dispositive here), but instead are sometimes served in often disgusting but nonetheless common other forms - on a stick, or within a greasy pretzel-like substance, or even within a phyllo-like pastry.
Were we to serve hot dogs between two flat pieces of bread, they would simply roll out, though, so ordinary sandwich form is the one way in which we absolutely cannot serve a hot dog.
Similarly, we might also consider that we call lobster filling served on a bun a "lobster roll," rather than a lobster sandwich, which would be a reference to lobster meat served between two slices of bread.
And that form is critical, rather than merely a matter of aesthetics. If the product must be eaten in an enclosed form, or within the spaces of a "V," then there is no order to how we experience the flavors involved. In a proper sandwich, the food hits the tongue in layers, but in a half-split roll, or fully enclosed starch tube, the filling hits the tongue simultaneously with additional starch.
As for the hoagie/sub/torpedo question....properly made, such things are quite clearly sandwiches, as the bread is often wholly sliced and separated. But even if it is not sliced in that manner, but it is otherwise properly made, it will still be designed to be held parallel to the ground such that only trace amounts of starch are contained in the same layer as the filling when it reaches your tongue.
On “From a Twitter to a Scream”
To be honest, I'm not sure how the question of tenure really comes into play in this case, at least not from an analytical perspective, though it's possible that it only got as public as it did because of the push by the tenured community.
I'm also not sure how it's really an academic freedom issue - he's a Native American Studies professor and he's not commenting on anything at all related to his academic work. Maybe the emphasis on the academic freedom portion of the equation is what brings the tenure question into play?
Regardless, it is a very clear 1st Amendment issue - this is a public university and a government employer. He had the job offer rescinded for speech having nothing at all to do with the job for which he was being hired. It was protected speech, it contained no actual threats.
It was debatably anti-Semitic, yes, but that doesn't make it unprotected speech, and rescinding the job offer was clearly and indisputably an adverse employment action.
He is going to win his lawsuit, and he should. Any adjunct who had a public job offer rescinded so quickly after offensive speech came to light would likewise win their lawsuit, and they likewise should.
If free speech stands for anything, it stands for the proposition that the government does not get to decide what is and is not acceptable speech. Even if you're a government employee, they don't get to make that decision unless that speech directly relates to your job. I'm really struggling to see how that exception applies here.
On “Some Not-So-Random Thoughts on the Redskins Controversy”
The thing is that I don't see how delicacy is even possible here - see my comment above to @nevermoor. The entire debate hinges on demonstrating that the name is especially outrageous, and it's impossible to express the extent of outrage without acting outraged.
The primary difficulty here is, I think, that there's an assumption that saying "this thing you support is racist" is identical to saying "you're a racist for supporting this thing."
Separately, I think you're overestimating the extent to which incivility is incompatible with persuasiveness. In so much of political debate, an emotional connection is needed to even start trying to think about opposing arguments and take them seriously.
Otherwise, it's easy to fall prey to thinking in something of a closed loop - we start with a set of values that are important to us and which we sort of assume to be universal, and think through issues from there. Consequences of that thinking on other values don't really enter into the equation or get easily dismissed. A prerequisite to even considering a change of heart is often for someone to force you to consider the other value, which means drawing an emotional connection, and that can often mean being less than nice.
Civility and reason are really important, but they're sometimes only part of the equation that will change a given person's mind. That doesn't mean "always be uncivil," though - incivility can obviously backfire easily, and there are an awful lot of different ways of being "uncivil," few of which will work in a given situation. It more means that it should be deployed sparingly in close conjunction with other arguments and in a way that is geared towards invoking something your opponent presumably cares about but is undervaluing or ignoring.
Used wrongly or excessively, it undermines your credibility and causes people to tune out to everything else you say. But used in the right circumstances in conjunction with other arguments, it can be a necessary way of grabbing your opponent's attention.
"
I think it's probably fair to say that a good chunk of the 71% just haven't thought about it much and don't really care enough to think about it much. "Maintain the status quo" is an easy default position for people without much of a stake in a given issue and with little interest in learning enough to care.
"
Ehhh, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Snyder's not listening. Other fans of the team and supporters of the name are different story, but Snyder himself pretty clearly isn't given the tone-deaf way in which he's responded.
Someone who's listening would not proclaim ""We'll never change the name . . . .It's that simple. NEVER — you can use caps."
Nor would he state ""We understand the issues out there, and we're not an issue..."
And he certainly would not persistently refuse invitations to meet with either the Oneida Nation or Ms. Blackhorse.
One of the reasons this issue has gotten so much traction, in fact, is that Snyder's made such a point of making it clear that he's not listening and not interested in listening.
Had Snyder just taken the position that the Chicago Blackhawks have taken over the years, it would have remained a second-tier story. That position is, essentially "We're always listening and will do all we can to maintain and strengthen the lines of communication with American Indian groups to make sure that we treat this issue as responsibly and respectfully as possible, but are not prepared to change our name or logo at this time." That doesn't stop opponents from protesting, obviously, but it avoids the creation of conflict, perception, and absolutism that drives media coverage and allows for public pressure to build.
On “Oh, Tennessee”
Yeah, but it's Stephen Lynch. If ever there were an equal opportunity offender....
On “Musings on Moderates & Militants”
I'm not sure how it's possible to answer both A and C on that particular question, but that aside, I recall an awful lot of criticism of Wyden at the time precisely on the grounds mentioned above, though my google-fu is having a hard time with it now. At minimum, though, there's plenty of examples of attempts by enforcers of Dem Party orthodoxy to discourage liberals who oppose drone strikes from supporting Paul's filibuster by trying to bring in his positions on various other issues. Here's one: http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/03/07/1685411/what-rand-paul-really-thinks-about-drones/
Then of course, there's the whole way in which Jane Hamsher and company became personae non-grata, not just amongst VSPs but also amongst orthodox Democrats.
I can think of several other instances as well wherein the critique of a particular indisputably liberal Democrat was that he was daring to work with a Republican on a given issue, which was thus enhancing that Republican's credibility, without any meaningful critique of the resulting proposal.
But even if there is a meaningful critique of the resulting policy, the fact that "worked with Republican X" is at all a significant part of the argument is a sign that one is worried a lot less about accomplishing a prioritized goal and more about maintaining ideological or partisan orthodoxy, or to put it another way, that one has turned too much into a matter of principle and thus has lost their principles.
I'm not at all sure this is true, though I don't think it's provable either way. However, if it is true, it seems to me that there's a much more obvious and likely reason for it: those who you call "Very Serious People" are, by and large, themselves Democrats with their own set of political agendas. Sure, there's a few Republicans in their circle, but by and large their route to power, particularly nowadays, is through the Democratic Party. Indeed, slightly more self-identified "moderates" voted for Obama in 2012 than self-identified "liberals," and it's only been in the last two or three years that self-identified liberals have obtained even a modest numerical advantage over self-identified moderates. By comparison, self-identified conservatives have consistently had about a minimum 2-1 (and often a 3-1) advantage over self-identified "moderates" in the GOP for a very long time:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/166787/liberal-self-identification-edges-new-high-2013.aspx
To the extent liberals are more likely than conservatives to be dismissed as unserious, it's because the VSP/"moderate" contingent of which media elites tend to be part is trying to maintain control over the Democratic Party reins.
As I said above, though, I've got no problem at all with liberals fighting that battle and attempting to take the reins from the VSPs. All I wish to do is dispense with the notion that party orthodoxy is synonymous with principle when in fact it's close to the opposite of principle.
On “On the freedom to speak stupidly”
I'm actually quite a bit more torn on this than the Mozilla case (at least as widely reported, as I understand there were some less-reported facts that would have changed the equation for me), where I thought that the firing was inappropriate. I think I still come out on the side of this being inappropriate, but it's a very close issue for me:
1. Schneider is an actor, but in this case he is an actual spokesperson for the company at issue, and the views are obviously relevant to what the company does. While the Mozilla case involved a CEO, who has to act as a spokesperson, his support of Prop 8 was not, in and of itself relevant to what Mozilla does. While there may have been concern about his treatment of gay employees, that concern requires an inference that does not necessarily follow from the fact of a single donation to support Prop 8. No inference is needed here - Schneider is anti-vax, and State Farm is unequivocal in its support of vaccination.
3. My primary concern with the Eich situation (detailed in the comments to this thread: https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2014/04/29/free-speech-is-dead-donald-sterling-edition) wasn't that it had a tendency to chill speech, but rather that it tended to blur the line between political participation and the rest of life. But here, Schneider's intentionally blurred that line himself by using his non-political reputation to promote a political cause, so my primary concern disappears.
That said, I think I still come out against the campaign to fire him, but not out of any free speech or political participation concerns, although my reasons are functionally still similar to Russell's. Specifically, as Russell pointed out, Schneider's spokesperson role with State Farm did not offer him an opportunity to promote his views. Until now. While he previously said some things on Twitter and in other fora and tried to put his views out there, it doesn't seem like anyone really cared what he had to say or paid him any attention. His efforts, in other words, were largely unsuccessful.
Now? By campaigning so vigorously against him, it makes it look as if his views on the topic are actually important and worth considering. How many more people have now listened to Rob Schneider talking about vaccination than a week or two ago? The optics are probably also not terribly good to fence-sitters, and might make it appear to them that there's something to hide here.
With Jenny McCarthy, the equation was different - she already had a disturbingly large following on this subject and a lot of people already cared for some reason what she had to say. She was a leading anti-vaxxer who had largely become associated as much or more with that fact as she was associated with doing anything else. Privileging her with a position on The View where she could and would promote her anti-vaxxer claims thus quite likely lent legitimacy to those claims and to the anti-vaxxer movement writ large. But Schneider's role with State Farm did none of that, and was not giving him an opportunity to amplify his views.
I strongly suspect that the campaign to dump Schneider has thus created something along the lines of a reverse Streisand Effect.
2. Schneider hasn't just made a donation that would have been kept secret in many states and that was discovered only because someone decided to research his views; instead, he's actively sought to use his fame and name to promote the view in question. One of my biggest concerns with the Mozilla case was that it felt like an inquisition - Eich's beliefs had to be more or less reverse engineered. Had Eich appeared in a commercial or spoke at a rally, I'd have had much less, if any, concern. Schneider is actively relying on his name and "reputation" to promote and amplify anti-vaccination. If you intentionally put your reputation on the line to promote something, then you shouldn't be upset when you lose that gamble.
On “Musings on Moderates & Militants”
I generally agree with this, although I don't think it's right to imply that either Paul is treated as a brave "moderate." Ron Paul was treated as essentially a joke by the media throughout his campaigns, and Rand has very carefully cultivated an image that presents him as an intensely loyal Republican, and I don't think the media has ever portrayed him as being particularly independent of the party's conservative base. Nor could they, as he's been so careful to cultivate the support of that base. While he's trying to broaden the GOP's tent, he's not trying to do that by reaching out to the centrists and media elites, but instead by trying to reach out to more traditionally liberal groups. We'll see if he succeeds, but I don't think it's right to suggest that the media celebrates him particularly much.
But beyond that, I'd agree that the media distinguishes between "VSP" or "moderate" Democrats and liberals. I actually have a fair amount of respect for liberals wanting to take the party over from those folks, with whom they're starting to have less and less in common (though still far more in common than, say, McCain or Christie has in common with the Pauls and Justin Amash).
But that doesn't mean that the VSP's lack principles, just that they have different principles from most liberals, who in turn may themselves have different principles from each other.
Here's a good way of showing the distinction between principled liberalism, principled VSP-ism, and orthodoxy:
Rand Paul stands up and filibusters for clarification about the extent of the President's authority to order drone strikes. Ron Wyden joins him. Is your response:
(A) Good for Wyden. I might dislike Rand Paul, but there is something troubling about the unrestricted use of drone strikes and I'm glad to see a liberal Senator joining the fight.
(B) Screw Ron Wyden. Why is a liberal helping this anti-tax/pro-life/anti-gun control/isolationist/anti-welfare conservative bring attention to himself?
(C) Drone strikes are a critical defense against terrorism and I trust that the Executive Branch will not abuse this power, regardless of the President's political party. People who are concerned about drone strikes are flat out wrong.
If your response is either wholly (A) or wholly (C), then you're acting on principle, whether those are the principles of a liberal or a VSP. But if your response at all involves (B), then I submit that you're no longer acting out of principle.
On “Oh, Tennessee”
FWIW, Bill Gates is arguably the main reason the Common Core exists.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-pulled-off-the-swift-common-core-revolution/2014/06/07/a830e32e-ec34-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html
On “Musings on Moderates & Militants”
Why is it always assumed that the most orthodox members of a given party are actually "principled"? Quite frankly, the reverse is probably true - if you're that orthodox, you've probably outsourced your "principles" to your party. As I have said time and again "have too many principles and you soon have none."
That doesn't mean that "moderates" are necessarily principled in the sense of their view of the public good, or that compromise is always (or even usually) a public good. It is to say that the very term "moderate" as a reference to anyone who does not adhere to ideological orthodoxy is a misnomer.
In Cuomo's case, he certainly has had some things where he has stuck to his guns and been fairly unwilling to compromise - it's just that he's often (though not always, see his gun control legislation and SSM) been pointing those guns to his left. So I can understand the left having big problems with him and trying to primary him. Frankly, if my sympathies personally laid more with downstate than they lie with upstate, there's a nonzero chance I even would have preferred Teachout (although the fracking issue is one where a lot of upstaters would support her), just as I strongly preferred DeBlasio to anyone handpicked by Bloomberg.
But that doesn't make Cuomo (or Bloomberg, for that matter, much as I wholly and completely despise the man) unprincipled.
Additionally, like it or not, a willingness to compromise with other political ideologies is very much a part of being a successful governor or President, even if it is sometimes a good trait in a legislator. The question is rarely whether to compromise, it's "(a)which values of mine are most important, (b) which are least important, and (c) with whom can I work in order to protect the values that I find most important?"
If your answer to question (a) prominently includes "party unity" or "appeasing my party's ideological base," or "keeping my ideological orthodoxy pure" then you've just artificially restricted your ways of addressing the problem at hand. What's more, you've reduced "effectively solving the problem at hand" to something closer to an answer to question (b) than question (a).
Competency in the executive branch of government additionally requires a recognition that your decisions will affect real people who, if you piss enough of them off sufficiently in pursuit of a short term ideological goal, can make it impossible for you to govern effectively on other issues for the rest of your term. It requires building consensus, both inside and outside of your party, and perhaps most importantly it requires an ability to work with (or at least make sure your appointed officials can work with) the bureaucracy and government employees that will ultimately be responsible for carrying out your directives.
Certainly, there's an argument to be made that Cuomo has not performed these tasks particularly well, and I'm not qualified to offer an opinion on that. But the point is that these tasks are as or more important to competent executive governance as "principles" and, what's more, "principles" and ideological orthodoxy are two different things. "Principles," while only one element of competent administration, are indeed necessary to being a good leader of an Executive Branch, but whether those principles appear consistent with ideological orthodoxy isn't all that important, and taking a "my way or the highway" approach to most things is a guaranteed way to be totally incompetent.
None of which is to say anything specific about whether Teachout would have been competent. It's only to dispense with this notion that anything short of uncompromising ideological orthodoxy is somehow unprincipled or, in its more polite parlance, "moderate."
In other circumstances, we like to talk about "moderate" and "extremist" Muslims, and specifically the need to support the "moderate" Syrian rebels without supporting the "extremist" Syrian terrorist groups, as if the "moderates" are somehow less serious about their religion rather than simply having a very different interpretation of religious texts. That there can be nothing "moderate" about someone who actively takes up arms against their government seems to have been lost in the discussion.
Similarly, we might talk about "moderate" and "extremist" Christian groups, even though the difference between them lies largely in how much they emphasize the fire-and-brimstone aspects of the Old Testament versus the peace-and-love aspect of the Gospels. I could easily make the case that the latter group, far from being "moderate," is in fact more "extreme" because their interpretation is in my view more faithful to the actual texts and overall more internally consistent.
On “But I Fear”
Nor should it, seeing as the scenario is pretty much batshit insane with no possible connection to reality.
1. To my knowledge, illegal immigrants from Africa don't come via Mexico, which would be kind of silly, seeing as they'd need to get a visa to travel to Mexico just as much as they'd need one to travel to the US. If you're going to spend the dough to get a visa and fly across the Atlantic, you're going to fly direct to the US and then skip out on your visa. Why do the same with a Mexican visa, but also add a bunch of less than safe and not very cheap additional steps, such as (a) finding a coyote in a country where you don't speak a word of Spanish and don't know a soul; (b) hiring said coyote and hoping he's not going to defraud you, seeing as he knows you don't speak the language and have no local connections; (c) traversing a fishing desert; and (d) hoping that you're not in one of the groups that the Border Patrol in fact does catch?
2. The time between first symptoms and death with Ebola is a week to 16 days, with the bleeding phase starting within 5-7 days. So that means that someone with symptoms would have less than a week to somehow: (1) get a passport if they don't already have one; (2) travel in person to the nearest Mexican consulate (ie, he'd have to travel to Monrovia); (3) convince the person at the Mexican visa desk that he's feeling perfectly well despite starting to show symptoms; (4) get that person to immediately issue a visa to travel to Mexico, a process that in most instances is itself probably going to take more than the week he has to live, and in any event which Mexico's website indicates requires a minimum of two business days; (5) raise the $5000+ required to pay airfare from Monrovia to Mexico City, which isn't exactly going to be a direct flight; (6) fly to Mexico City, which accroding to Kayak involves 30 hours and 3 layovers in 3 different countries, at each of which he may need to clear customs/immigration without anyone noticing that he's sick; (7) find a coyote who is leaving for the border immediately despite not speaking a word of Spanish; (8) have raised enough money to pay the coyote; and (9) travel from Mexico City to Juarez, which Google Maps says is an almost 20 hour drive.
I suppose he could try adjusting his scenario so that the sick man is only just at an incubation stage, which he knows because he just treated a dying family member. But even still, it's not as if the average Liberian has $5000+ just lying around, nor as if the average Liberian has any awareness whatsoever of how illegal immigration from Mexico works. Nor is it as if visas from Liberia are something that Mexico is going to rubber stamp these days and process in just a couple of days. Amongst other issues, no doubt.
So, yeah, if Ebola spreads to the US, it's not going to have anything to do with illegal immigration from Mexico, and definitely isn't going to have anything to do with political correctness regarding that issue.
3. As for the idea of terrorists smuggling into the US from Mexico while taking advantage of some sort of distraction.....really? Why would these hypothetical terrorists wait for a distraction that would have no effect whatsoever on border policy or on resources already being dedicated to anti-terrorism? And why is it assumed that, in doing so, they'd so easily be able to smuggle themselves and their weapons into Mexico?
4. What's more, as far as I can tell, the apprehension rate at the border is above 50% - in 2012, the Border Patrol apprehended about 650,000, with about half of those actually reported and arrested, but all presumably turned back. I can't find any numbers for 2012, but in 2009, the estimate was that only about 300,000 successfully entered. So this scenario assumes that a terrorist looking to attack the US would decide that his best odds would be to hope to avoid detection by Mexican authorities while flying to Mexico - which really isn't going to be much easier than just trying to fly direct to the US since there's a limit to how effective airport security can be - and then take a less than 50% chance of crossing the border via Mexico.
Etc., etc.
On “The Dissected Frog: or, Man walks into a bar, offends everyone…”
I'm pretty sure I completely agree with you on this one, Tod.
I'll just add that, while his stand up routine is often very hit or miss for me, Jim Norton's keynote speech at the JFL Festival this year strikes me as a really good companion to this:
The most pertinent part is probably between the 8 and 20 minute mark, and especially between 13 and 18 minutes.
Key quote: "The gift of what we do as comics . . . is that we take things that aren't funny and we allow people to look at them in a way that makes them laugh."
On “Did the Police in Ferguson Lie on Day 1?”
The moral compass is simple: there is someone dead who did not deserve to die and who was not - whatever Wilson believed and however reasonably or unreasonably he believed it - about to attack Wilson, but was surrendering.
As for "appropriate," "take" and "obtain" pretty clearly describe what he did - the statute doesn't say "take off the premises" or "remove from the premises." And none of that matters anyway, because attempted stealing is in fact a crime anyhow.
You mean that the prosecutor who depends on the police for all of his cases and would like nothing more than to see this case go away as quietly as possible?
How, then, was Wilson to complete the arrest? It sounds an awful lot like you're suggesting that once the altercation at the car began, there was not a damn thing Brown could have done that would have made it inappropriate for Wilson to kill him.
Oddly enough, so does mine. But whether or not he is, can be, or should be convicted has nothing whatsoever to do with what I should think about the moral propriety of his actions. I don't need a court to tell me that OJ killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, even though the prosecution did such a disastrous job that the jury had little choice but to acquit. I don't need a court to tell me that Adrian Peterson crossed an intolerable line in his treatment of his sons even though there's a reasonable chance that he, too, has a valid criminal defense and should be acquitted if the evidence supports it. And I don't need a court to tell me that Officer Wilson, at minimum, made an egregious error in shooting Michael Brown even if the law or jury says that what he did wasn't murder.
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The dude had stopped fleeing. Period. There's no dispute about this. You can't use deadly force to stop someone from fleeing if they're no longer actually fleeing and have surrendered. And, YET AGAIN, I don't give a crap whether Wilson has a valid legal defense - I've already conceded, repeatedly, that he's unlikely to be convicted given the low legal bar for him to meet.
I care about whether what he did was morally justified, which does not have a damn thing to do with whether he's legally guilty. This is the same way I feel about the Adrian Peterson case - I don't give a rat's ass whether he has a valid legal defense, it's still morally unacceptable to hit a child to the point of physical injury.
I learned a long time ago that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. I also get to learn on a daily basis that the law is quite frequently an ass.
I'm going to need a source for this. Because the kids we used to catch stealing from the record store I worked at back in the day sure as hell didn't seem to think this. And, well, here's the definition of the crime of stealing in Missouri: "A person commits the crime of stealing if he or she appropriates property or services of another with the purpose to deprive him or her thereof, either without his or her consent or by means of deceit or coercion." And the definition of "appropriates": ""Appropriate" means to take, obtain, use, transfer, conceal or retain possession of." There is nothing in there that suggests the crime is complete only upon leaving the store. It certainly reads as if it's complete when you take possession of the item with the intent to deprive the owner without consent. But maybe the caselaw in MO says otherwise. It wouldn't matter for our purposes, because "attempted stealing" is a separate crime, in this case, a Class C misdemeanor.
So if every teen "knows" this, they're wrong.
In my day, making blunts to smoke pot was hardly something exclusive to "urban" youths, unless middle class and upper middle class white kids from the exurbs count as "urban youth." Teenager smokes pot. News at 11.
Ultimately, I just don't get why Wilson's defenders find it so necessary and important to build a dead teenager who can't defend himself into a vicious, unrelenting, unthinking, and murderous animal. I don't get why it's so important for the killing of Brown to be viewed as something approaching heroic rather than something tragic, even if Wilson did everything right.
I'd have a hell of a lot more respect for Wilson's defenders if they could just acknowledge that Michael Brown was a human being who made a mistake that cost him his life and that, whether or not Wilson was legally or morally justified in shooting him, he didn't "deserve" to die.
I don't understand why it's so impossible to even consider that Wilson might be capable of making mistakes just like anyone else, especially in the heat of the moment, and that maybe, just maybe, Michael Brown is dead because two people made mistakes that day.
And lastly, I definitely don't understand why it's so hard for so many to even consider that it might be problematic that the police kill a minimum of 400 people in this country every year, of which Michael Brown is just one, yet police in other fairly large nations collectively discharge their weapon fewer times in an entire month than there are bullets in Michael Brown's body. Whether or not we want to continue making it so easy for police to justify shooting suspects, I don't see why it's so unworthy of discussing things the police may do to decrease the number of people they kill every year.
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At 40-50 yards, much less 50 feet, the only way the witnesses would have heard nothing at all, not even something unintelligible to them, is if Wilson was using what my six year old would call an indoor voice. If you're issuing orders to prevent someone you fear is about to attack you from moving, you don't use your indoor voice. And if your in a high stress situation where your adrenaline is pumping, my experience is that you have to actively try to keep your voice at a low volume, which I'm pretty sure would be the last of my concerns in this situation.
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This completely misses the point. Every teenager knows shoplifting is a crime. A common crime in which a huge percentage of teenagers engage, but a crime nonetheless. If a storeowner catches you and wants to press charges, every teenager assumes that will wind up on their criminal record (and in some case it even will). So his choice wasn't "give up the Swisher Sweets and nothing happens to you" versus "hold on to the Swisher Sweets and risk getting a criminal record." His choice was "give up the Swisher Sweets and probably get arrested and a criminal record" or "push the store owner out of the way and probably avoid getting arrested and getting a criminal record."
The question isn't whether that was a good choice - obviously it wasn't - it's whether that was an irrational choice that bespoke a willingness to act in the most irrational and life-threatening manner possible a few minutes later.
First, Brown isn't the one on trial here. Wilson already acted as his judge, jury, and executioner, whether or not he was justified in doing so. Second, I hate to keep saying this, but I'm not interested in legal standards here. I'm interested in moral ones. Third, I'm absolutely astounded at the belief that, even if Wilson did nothing wrong, it's necessary or appropriate to assume that what Brown did in the convenience store shows him to have been uniquely insane and violent in a manner far worse than the average instigator of a bar fight. Finally, the answer to your question is obvious - someone who is fleeing is not "unwilling or unable to brook opposition."
It's evidence that he did something stupid. It's evidence that he did something indisputably wrong. It's not evidence that he was batshit insane in a manner different from an awful lot of other people, which is what he'd have to have been for the theory that he was doing anything other than surrendering when he turned around, put his hands up, and said "OK, OK, OK" to a police officer he had just been running away from and who had just fired several shots at him.
As for the idea that the store owner legally could have shot him, I fail to see how that is remotely relevant to Wilson's subsequent actions. I'll also add that the only moment at which your statement would be true would have been in the instant that Brown reached out to push the shopowner. Before that moment, the shopowner had no reason to believe he was stopping anything more than shoplifting, and after that moment, there was no longer a felony to protect against - the crime was committed and the danger to the shop owner had ended.
And, well, it's no less legal for the victim in a bar fight to use deadly force against his assailant. But that doesn't mean that the assailant is going to be crazy enough to fake a surrender and then run at someone who is already actually shooting at him 10 minutes later.
Sure he will. That doesn't mean he's telling the truth, and he's got a much stronger motive to lie than any one of the numerous witnesses who would testify to the contrary. Will that be enough to create reasonable doubt, though? Absolutely, because there will always be people who refuse to consider that police officers are every bit as capable of lying as anyone else.
We still don't know much about this allegation, but again, it doesn't matter from a moral standpoint even if it may matter from a legal standpoint. And I'm primarily concerned right now about the moral issue. The injury - which seems to have been no more serious than a black eye - occurred, if at all, right at the outset, before Brown fled, and well before Brown attempted to surrender. If the fatal shots occurred during the struggle in the police car, the alleged injuries would matter. But once that struggle ended, there's no longer a threat.
First, why does Wilson's use of his firearm, in and of itself, reflect on Brown? That sounds an awful lot like "Brown deserved to be shot because he was shot." Second, why does Brown need to be harmlessly innocent for Wilson's use of force to be morally unjustifiable? Or even legally unjustifiable, for that matter? Failing to be harmlessly innocent hardly strikes me as moral justification for being killed.
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That, too, Chris.
@archon41 You're forgetting about the acknowledged fact that at least one shot was fired while he was fleeing, and that he was quite likely suffering from at least one wound by the time he stopped.
You're also ignoring the congruity of the accounts indicating that, when he stopped, Brown said "OK, OK, OK..." while putting his hands up, again a universal sign that he was giving up.
But where's the evidence that, with Brown standing in front of Wilson with his hands up, Wilson gave Brown any instruction whatsoever? The accounts seem unanimous that no instruction was given.
So, here's Brown, with his hands in the air, and possibly with a shoulder wound, getting no instruction. There's no evidence that he's ever had a gun pointed at him before. What's he supposed to do, knowing that he's about to make a life-or-death decision? Walk backwards with his hands up? The cop will think he's running away again. Just continue to stand still with his hands up? If he's got a shoulder wound, that's becoming harder to do by the second, but even if not, the officer's silence while still pointing the gun at him suggests that he hasn't done enough to surrender yet, so maybe he needs to do something else. But what?
Kneeling would be the best choice, obviously. But try kneeling with your hands up without taking a step forward to balance yourself.
But maybe it's not a bad idea to walk slowly toward the cop with your hands up to show you're ready to be arrested. The cop has to know you've surrendered, right? Your hands are up and you've just said "OK, OK, OK."
You're not trained what to do when a cop is pointing a gun at you and isn't giving you any instruction. I'd hope that cops are trained to recognize that a suspect with his hands up and either standing still or walking slowly is probably trying to surrender, and the appropriate response to that.
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Legally, I'll be the first to concede that it doesn't much matter whether he was charging. The justifiable force bar is low enough for law enforcement that it'll be very difficult to get a conviction no matter what happens.
But morally, and in terms of whether or not people should be outraged at what happened? That's a different story altogether.
And morally speaking, the convenience store issue and the question of who threw the first punch at the police car are irrelevant. Either Brown was trying to surrender, or he wasn't. And he pretty clearly was.
Just because a use of force may be legally justified (or more accurately, fail to evidence lack of justification beyond a reasonable doubt) does not make it morally justified and does not mean that the officer acted appropriately or in a manner that wouldn't have been prevented with better training and less of a warrior mentality amongst the police.
As for this:
Oh, I dunno. Maybe because he had already been caught red-handed and figured he was about to get a criminal complaint against him anyways. I'd frankly be pretty surprised to hear that a teen caught red-handed shoplifting but with the ability to escape by just pushing someone out of the way would do anything other than push that person out of the way. I'd be even more shocked to find out that an average teen believed that doing so would convert their petty shoplifting offense into a low-level felony.
I mean, the rational teens that I've ever encountered would view the risk as "I'm totally busted if I stay here, but I'll probably get away with this if I get this guy out of my way, which I can totally do."
And I'll just add that I've seen no shortage of otherwise ordinary people with no criminal records initiate far more violent confrontations than a simple shove for far more trivial reasons than wanting to get away with a box of Swisher Sweets. Things like "Dude, you're standing in my spot" at a country music concert. Or "Scoreboard, asshole."
And those dudes fight like hell when the authorities come for them, even though the authorities always win in the end. These dudes don't wind up dead, though, and if they did, few would assume they had an irrationally "violent disposition" that would render them willing to knowingly risk their lives, whether or not anyone thought the authorities used excessive force.
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Here's the link. http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/workers-who-were-witnesses-provide-new-perspective-on-michael-brown/article_14a3e5f8-6c6a-5deb-92fe-87fcee622c29.html
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That account doesn't help your theory at all, actually. The quote you've pulled is taken completely out of context, for starters, but more importantly, the key phrase is "after the third shot." Not before, after.
That means that Brown had his hands up for at least one, and possibly as many as three shots (depending on how you interpret the reference in the article - it's either the third shot after Brown put his hands up, or the third shot overall, with the first two shots being fired before Brown put his hands up). It was only after he was struck that his hands went down - and, well, I'd imagine it's not terribly easy to keep one's hands up in the seconds after being shot.
But it's even more damning in context, because this is the paragraph immediately preceding the quote:
Walking, not running, not charging. Walking. And walking with his hands up, the universal sign of "I surrender and I'm not a threat to you."
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It's worth repeating what I wrote a few weeks ago here. There is agreement on all sides on the following:
1. There was some sort of physical altercation at the police car door, though there is dispute as to who started this (I don't see how this much matters).
2. During this altercation, Wilson fired a single shot at Brown that may or may not have grazed Brown in the shoulder.
3. After this shot was fired, Brown fled.
4. While Brown was fleeing, the police themselves have acknowledged that at least one, possibly more, shots were fired, but claim (quite plausibly) that those shots missed.
5. After this shot(s), there is also agreement on all sides that Brown stopped and turned around.
So the claim that Brown was charging Wilson rather than trying to surrender rests on the assumption that Brown - who had nothing more than marijuana in his system, hardly a drug known to cause aggression and also not a drug for which testing is good at showing actual intoxication levels:
(1) Got into a fight with a police officer
(2) Disengaged with the police officer after the police officer fired a shot at him
(3) Started to run away, but stopped after one or more additional shots were fired and missed.
(4) But instead of being scared that he'd be killed if he didn't surrender, he decided that the time was ripe for him to turn around, run by himself AT the officer who was shooting at him, and renew the physical confrontation that he was fleeing in the first place.
I think anyone has to admit that this is completely and utterly implausible even if you believe Brown was a career criminal (and he wasn't, but the point is that this is irrelevant). The only way it's plausible is if Brown was either suffering from extreme, Miami face-eater level, mental illness or was on PCP*. Not one person has ever said that Brown suffered from that kind of mental illness, and the toxicology reports did not show any traces of PCP.
Now I'll concede it's plausible that, in the heat of the moment, Wilson perceived Brown stopping and turning around as the beginning of an attempt to charge him. If so, I don't think that would have been a reasonable conclusion for him to reach, but when officers are insufficiently trained, "reason" can too easily give way to "gut instinct" in the heat of the moment.
But it's more fun to blame the victim than acknowledge that cops are just as fallible and capable of evil as the rest of us. And, well, we probably shouldn't so easily overlook that, at minimum, the police chief lied at the press conference about the distance between the car and the body, even if that doesn't necessarily say anything about the distance between Wilson and Brown when the shots were fired.
*It's actually not plausible if he was on PCP, as the violence inducing effects of PCP are greatly exaggerated from my understanding, but for the moment I'm willing to assume that PCP could make someone have this level of aggression.
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Thanks for this, Chris.