As a former resident of New York and now San Francisco (and someone who grew up in suburbs of NY, this makes sense to me)

You can't escape poverty if you live in NYC or San Francisco. I have always lived in fashionable and gentrifying neighborhoods in both cities. Neighborhoods filled with young professionals, destination restaurants, hip bars, and convenience stores that sell fancy beer and food stuffs (domestic and international) but you still see poverty. I probably see at least two to four homeless people a day in San Francisco. Sometimes a lot more. There is still a lot of mixing despite gentrification. When I lived in Brooklyn, I lived on a small street filled with brownstones worth millions of dollars. Many were single family homes to professional families (I rented the bottom floor from one such family). One cross street was filled with the type of stuff as described above. The other cross street was a huge housing project.

I guess living in a city makes you more aware of poverty and if you are doing well, maybe it increases feelings of guilt and wanting more economic justice. Most of those million dollar partners do not have enough money to truly insulate themselves*, they probably still take the subway to work and walk and see the multitudes. Suburbs don't always but can lead to a more bubble because they tend to be economically more homogeneous and it allows for the poor to become more like an intellectual abstraction or an inconvenience.

*This requires tens of millions of dollars, living in an area like Pacific Heights or Park Avenue and having a private driver (not a cab) take you everywhere.

I think there has always been the moral angle but what has intensified it is the polarization of the parties. Richard Hofstatder's work seems to cover this especially in the Paranoid Style in American politics. There is nothing new under the sun for Michelle Bachmann's rhetoric. The right-wing especially was always likely to see liberal Americans as being fundamentally unAmerican. See also: The Know Nothings, anti-Mason, How the Federalists and Anti-Federalists used to talk about each other, etc.

There were always very conservative Republicans and large elements of the Evangelical community always associated with the Republican community. There were also liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits. Likewise, there were conservative Democratic supporters and liberal Democratic voters/politicians. In short, both parties were more big tent.

So more polarized parties plus a permanent condition in American politics equals lots of rhetoric about being morally stumped or at best just plain moronic.

Intriguing. Can you prove this?

I was born in a very blue area to a very blue family and have stayed that way. I lived in a red area during college but stayed within the very blue bubble of the college campus.

I know some people who were conservative who moved to blue areas and slowly or quickly changed their tune depending on the circumstances. However, I don't know anyone who moved from a blue area to a red area to become a Republican or Conservative. Partially this could be because of Big Sort reasons as listed above and selection bias. Usually my liberal friends in red areas tend to move very quickly or associate with a small circle of like-minded people.

Though you are right that it is probably a very lonely existence to be the odd duck out. Whether this means being a liberal in Wyoming or a conservative in San Francisco.

Are you a brony?

Outside the Beltway reported that Penn State is taking the punishment without appeal or complaint.

Note: My undergrad was a Division III school that was not allowed to give out athletic scholarships. We did not even have a football team (T-shirt motto: "Undefeated in football since 1865.") My grad school had no athletic teams and my law school was connected to a Division II school. Short version: The pre-occupation with college sport in the United States is a bit perplexing to me and always has been. I've more or less only attended institutions of higher ed where sports were not a big deal. My high school was not great at sports either.

That being said, most of the ire seems to be going towards the NCAA. The deadspin guys called them guttless shitbags. My more-sports oriented friends think the punishments are justified or do not go far enough. I've yet to see anyone beyond those who already have see Penn State has the victims. Though there was one article about how the punishments will severely hurt the economy of the town of State College.

I think that there has to be a reasonable balance between preventing too much NIMBYism and also addressing valid concerns for historic preservation and such. A distinct architectural style adds economic and/or psychic benefit to a community. San Francisco has the Edwardians. Brooklyn has the brownstone, etc.

Everyone talks about how San Francisco is the home of too much NIMBYism but I don't have any concrete (pun intended) evidence on whether this is true or not. There does seem to be plenty of construction going on but there is also places that have been boarded up for years with no sign of sale or development. There is a theatre a few blocks from my apartment that has been unused for about a decade or so, maybe more.

I agree with you that not all liberty comes at the expense of the liberty of others but there are plenty of times when the liberty of one can or does conflict with the liberty of another.

Civil Rights is a good example. On the one hand, you have the rights of minorities to fully participate in the civil and economic life of a country. On the other hand, you have the rights of people to conduct business as they please and hire who they want or serve who they want. There were and are plenty of people who argue against civil rights legislation on the grounds of personal liberty.

I disagree with this stance. In this case, the better and more moral option is to allow minorities to fully participate in civil and economic life as equals and not be forced into segregation. I don't think the market would have eventually gotten rid of segregation in private and public facilities. History seems to show that segregation can act as a strong enough force that a business person who wanted to buck the trend would have been driven out of business.

On a smaller level, there is also the idea of each person having the quiet use and enjoyment of their property. I don't quite enjoy my apartment as much if I live next to someone who thinks they have a right of liberty to blast Megadeath* in the wee hours of the morning. The same would be true in any suburb where the housing is not as close but not that far from each other either. In this case, nuisance lawsuits are about one person's liberty trumping another person's liberty.

I firmly believe that the Constitution cannot change social prejudice but it can't stand by it either. The Constitutional option is always for laws that prohibit social prejudice in civil and economic life. Bigots can keep their bigotry in their hearts but they cannot and should not be allowed to operate businesses or anything else in a way that conforms to their prejudices.

*Or any other music. I do have someone who lives across the street who plays Opera at one or two in the morning every now and then. I live across the street from some kind of assisted living facility. I enjoy the Opera more than Megadeath. At least it allows me to imagine who this old soul is with their opera on at 2 AM.

I don't think I see the analogy/comparison as being equal.

A doctor performing spontaneous volunteer medical services has already had four years of medical school, internship, residency, and X years of medical experience, and is licensed after serious examination. Even a new doctor has a lot of training under his or her belt.

As far as I can tell, the requirements for becoming a licensed gun users and/or CCW permit holder are much, much lower.

There are about as many guns in the U.S. as
people. I think that at least half or more of the
population owns zero guns. Some people seem
to own entire arsenals

The usual line is that bad facts make bad law.
Not always but close enough especially in crim
Law and procedure. In civil law, bad facts are
more subjective.

I am curious about what would happen if a CCW holder
did accidentally kill a bystander. We don't have any stories
about this as far as I know. Let's say it was like Aurora,
would the gun lobby mind the CCW holder being charged with
Involuntary Manslaughter because of gross recklessness? What
if the prosecution could prove our CCW defendant was
a very bad shooter even at the firing range?

I generally am suspicious when people say don't "politicize the tragedy"

Maybe at best it can be used to mean, "Let's not enact hasty and poorly written legislation in response to a catastrophic or tragic event"*. However, there are many times when the phrase is simply used as a very blunt tool by one side to silence the opposition and prevent them from bringing up their favorite talking points or prefered policies. It is also used to make the other side look like vulgar opportunists.

Many people in the Democratic Party and/or liberals support gun control laws. We think, possibly correctly or possibly incorrectly, that good regulations would prevent gun massacres like the Aurora shooting from happening. Liberals tend to think that the tougher gun laws in Europe work to lessen gun violence and gun massacre. Not perfectly of course but as far as I can tell European countries tend to suffer many fewer incidents like Aurora or Columbine or Virginia Tech.

Conservatives or pro-gun people tend to think otherwise. They talk about how if everyone was packing heat, things like Aurora would not happen. This strikes me as crazy talk. Concealed Carry stikes me as crazy. pro-Gun people see gun control policies as being fascist. What are we to do?

Politics and policy seek to change the real world and are designed in response to real world events. These are not lofty abstractions for the seminar table to be combined with references to Kant and Hegel. It seems perfectly natural to say "Here is a real world event that is tragic and should not have happened. I think policy X will help reduce the chances of real world event happening again. Let's enact it."

The Depression was a real world tragedy. Much of the New Deal was created to prevent such recklessness from happening again like Glass-Stegal. As far as I can tell, Glass-Stegal worked very well for the fifty or or years it was the law of the land.

In this election, you do seem to be in the minority that might decide the winner.

My blogs have been showing that an overwhelming majority of people have already decided whether the are voting for Obama or Romney. This could change but probably not by much.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/president-obama-mitt-romney-deadlocked-in-race-poll-finds/2012/07/09/gJQAaJwdZW_story.html?hpid=z1

I agree with Kazzy though. The platforms of both parties seem so different to me that I have a hardtime comprehending someone being undecided. We are in an age of hyper-polizarization.

Partially. Not necessarily because there are two parties but because I think there are growing perceptions that being an open partisan shows that you are willing to ignore inconvenient facts from the other side.

The Congressional system seems to favor having two parties more than having multiple parties.

What is interesting about the United States is how old our parties are. The Democratic Party is nearly 200 years old (let's say it started with Jackson) and the Republican Party is not that far behind. The demographics of the parties have changed over generations but as far as I can tell there were always key groups that identified with each party from the start.

Previous American parties stayed around for a few generations and then disintergrated like the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, the Whigs, etc.

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/26/149402358/just-how-independent-are-independent-voters

http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/are-independent-leaners-closet-partisans-or-true-independents/

http://www.center-forward.org/2012/05/17/washington-post-five-myths-about-independent-voters/

This is not to say that there are not true independents out there. There are 300 million people in the US. That leads towards a lot of variants but based on everything I've read, it seems that many people who described themselves as Independent are still largely straight-down party voters.

I thought it has been pretty much proven at this pont that almost all Independent voters are really "closet partisans" who do not want register with a party for largely psychological/perception reasons.

George Turner,

It is a myth that people used to go around carrying guns in the Wild West. In many towns, cowboys and others had to check in their guns with the Sherrif when entering town kind of like we have coat checks at restaurants.

The legendary fight at the OK Coral was because the people did not want to check their guns.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/23/nation/la-na-tombstone-20110123

Chief Justice Burger did say that.

Unlikely.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/07/20/could_a_brave_citizen_with_a_concealed_weapon_have_prevented_the_aurora_shootings_.html

The theatre was dark, crowded, and the gunman was wearing body armor and threw out a tear gas type of grenade. CCW bravehearts would have likely made things worse.

For damned good reason:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/07/aurora-movie-shooting-one-more-massacre.html#ixzz21BpEZtmr

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/07/the-certainty-of-more-shootings/260133/

American Gun laws are absolutely insane and I am tired of living under rule by the NRA. There is no legitimate reason for local police or civilians to have military grade weapons. There is no legitimate reason for Concealed Carry unless we want to prove that the United States really is a paranoid nation and we all think Escape from New York is around the corner. This is not an anarchy filled with warlords.

I saw this book review today.

The book seems to be your basic conservative screed about how Intellectuals and Professors are ruining America. The interesting twist is that it is written by a Jewish American professor of Computer Science at Yale. His argument is that pushy, leftist Jews are the problem and we should have never destroyed the old quota system.

This might be the first example of right-wing self-loathing Judaism I have ever seen.

http://chronicle.com/article/Dreaming-of-a-World-Without/132813/

The U.S. government is currently holding a lot of money in trust for the Crow or the Sioux (I can't remember which) over the Black Mountains in South Dakota.

The tribe does not want the money. They want their ancestral lands back from the Federal government.

This is also true of Native American artifacts in museums. The tribes don't want money for the artifacts. They want their history and culture back. There is a federal law dealing with Native American tribes being able to reclaim their artifacts back.

I will probably see it this weekend in an afternoon show.

What most interests me without seeing the movie are:

1. The cases of fanboy rage going after dissenting critics. Have we gotten to the point in superhero/fanboy madness that a dissenting viewpoint on a movie needs to be taken down? Is the net just making everything more tribal?

2. I've seen critics attack this movie from the left and the right. The left seeing this as a randian screed aganist OWS. Conservative critics (not Rush L) have seen at as very pro-OWS. Can the movie be both or are we all post-modern now and just view things from our own lens and now everything is all things to all people?

Andrew Sullivan publishes info showing that somewhere around 50 percent of the electorate favors legalization or decriminalization at least.