Because people aren't angry enough yet.
Confronting my own gender prejudice -- I was shocked that the cop that shot him was a middle-aged woman. While my cohort is as racist as anyone, probably, I thought we were reliably less trigger-happy.
I just assumed everybody lived in fear of middle-aged women.
But because we would reduce you to quivering heaps of shame by glaring at you, not with the shooting. I was surprised by the shooting.
When I heard the cop was a woman my first thought was that maybe she'll actually be held accountable this time, as she's lower in the pecking order than a man would be.
2,5: There was a compelling Twitter essay the other day, about how that would elicit the other racist narrative "innocent white woman menaced by black man". Not that it's not worth doing on principle, but it's not a solver.
I should clarify that in 5 I mean held accountable by the cops (i.e. fired or disciplined), not by the justice system. I have zero faith in the justice system holding cops accountable.
I don't suppose there's been a scorching hot take about how this shows women shouldn't be sent armed into combat situations (of course there has, there have been twenty or more all competing for twitter mentions).
It seems like there have been more filmed murders by cops recently. I guess if we assume none will ever be held accountable, they have a big incentive to murder people during election season if they think it will lead to riots which will then help elect Republicans.
Every now and then I wonder how a racist cop isn't given pause that someone might be filming them. (Maybe many are.)
When I heard the cop was a woman my first thought was that maybe she'll actually be held accountable this time, as she's lower in the pecking order than a man would be.
I'm willing to believe this, or that at least it progress further towards a trial and conviction than if she'd been male. Last year there was a nasty shooting near Harrisburg where the police officer was female; she was tried and found not-guilty. Admittedly a confounding factor is that the victim was white (I think; not going to watch the video). I see by 8 that wasn't what you meant but I think this is still a case where our culture's racism will be in conflict with its sexism.
While my cohort is as racist as anyone, probably, I thought we were reliably less trigger-happy.
I would bet statistics on police shootings bear out the "reliably less trigger-happy" hypothesis. "Less" doesn't mean "none", of course. Police shootings are so frequent that even unlikely events will happen from time to time.
In this case (and hopefully more as bodycams become routine) they were filming themselves.
Incidentally let me flag what big assholes Boston PD are being about body cams- there's a 6 month program, they asked for volunteers, and they unanimously refused so now 100 are being ordered to try them while of course the union bitches with whatever the approved excuse of the month is:
In Boston, the police department often emphasizes community policing, saying it has strong community relations. There has been some concern raised about how the body cameras may change how the public interacts with police (e.g., people not wanting to speak to police because of the body cameras).
During the court hearing over the Boston pilot program, the police union suggested cameras may cause people to react negatively toward officers. The union cited a study by the Rand Corporation that found some officers faced increased risk of assault while wearing cameras.
I should not they lost, and the pilot 100 camera program is going ahead by the end of the year.
What's caught on camera can be bad, but what's caught when they're pretty sure they're not on camera can be worse.
17 - I mean yes they can't do anything illegal and must follow the law but I sure do sympathize with the cops in that particular situation. "What can we do stop this insanely annoying nutter who is fucking up our DUI stops" doesn't really seem like the police coverup crime of the century.
I mean it sounds like the cops should probably ve discuplined there, but come on. Ridiculous in the context where we're talking about real people being killed by cops.
"Whiny white guy DUI protester's not very consequential inconvenience matters!"
No death no foul, amirite? It's reasonable to discuss in that it's a glaringly obvious and well-documented example of police malfeasance that leaves no room for argument whatsoever. It's a strong case for further police camera deployment and reduces the rhetorical effect of bad faith police union arguments.
Actually, unless they in fact fabricated evidence that was used in the prosecution (which they may have -- it's unclear from the article, and if they did and it was in fact used, that's very bad) it doesn't sound like they committed malfeasance at all. Cops are allowed to say "what can we charge this guy [who is otherwise being a disturbance] with?" -- that's an essential part of police work. They're allowed to investigate and charge with discretion. What they're not allowed to do is fabricate evidence or lie about an event, and it's unclear whether that in fact happened there or not.
However unworthy the protester, I think "policemen shouldn't make stuff up in order to incriminate people" is a principle worth defending, even if it means putting the hammer down on cases like this.
24 - sure, but see 22. There's a big difference between "hmm what can we find to charge this asshole with" (which is an important and necessary part of police work) and "let's just make up evidence and falsify the record to convict a guy" which is obviously terrible. It's unclear exactly what happened in that case other than a guy maybe talking about fabricating evidence. The fact that the story and the complaint aren't squarely focused on evidence fabrication make me think that part of the case is lilely weak for some reason.
22- They say in the video (1:49) that they're going to make up witnesses and claim the witnesses didn't want to give statements so the cops took action themselves.
"what we say is that multiple motorists stopped to complain about a guy waving a gun around, but none of them wanted to stop and make a statement."
They certainly talked about fabricating evidence (the motorists who said he was making a disturbance), and I think it was entered as evidence in the trial: it's listed in the complaint, item 78. Regardless, if police can't properly and maturely handle a low-stakes encounter with a protester--without lying to him, damaging his property, and considering and then entering falsifying charges--that's worrisome. I wouldn't trust they guys in situations where they might consider deadly force.
Every now and then I wonder how a racist cop isn't given pause that someone might be filming them. (Maybe many are.)
Presumably for the same reason they aren't given pause by a DoJ ride-along.
26-27 - Right, but it's unclear whether that was in fact done, or not. If it was, and they did make it up, that's very bad. If it wasn't done but some cops seriously pushed to have it dine, they should certainly be removed from the force. If it's cops talking about how they might legitimately build a record to convict the guy, or joking, ir something else, then it probably warrants sone discipline but nothing more.
If it was genuine evidence fabrication in fact used to prosecute you'd expect that to be at the center of the story and complaint, and since it's not (but only reported as part of the tape, without further explanation) It's a reasonable bet that this isn't the strongest part of the case. I could be wrong!
Is conspiracy not a thing for police?
I should be clear that by "worse" I meant even more blatantly malfeasant, not objectively worse than shooting someone.
78. The tickets charged Mr. Picard with violating Conn. Gen. Stat. § 53-182 (use of a highway by a pedestrian) for standing on the gore, and with violating Conn. Gen. Stat. § 53a-181a (creating a public disturbance) for carrying an "exposed loaded side arm in plain view of passing motorists" and because some motorists "complained [that Picard] was holding a weapon in his hand." Attached as Exhibit D.
OK, but did that in fact happen, or not?
33: All signs point to no, but since this guy annoys you, he has no rights under Halfordismo.
In any case, he should feel grateful for his white privilege that allowed him to survive this encounter.
Given that it's a complaint from a guy obviously itching to sue the police, and its relatively minor role in the pleading, I'm going to guess that there's no real evidence of evidence fabrication at all and that this quote is taken out of context. It does seem clear that there was intent to harass this guy but cops can do that if they do so within the bounds of the law.
33- When you say happened, yes they used the evidence in the complaint, and based on what they said in the video, no there were not actually any motorists who complained. Whether he even had a gun, I don't know.
36: No dispute about the fact that he had a gun that he had a permit to carry.
36 - but it's not clear that there were no such motorists. The complaint alleges as much but clearly the recording doesn't establish that unambiguously. It's true that the state eventually dropped the piblic disturbance charge (according to the Complaint) but that alone isn't proof that the charge was based on fabricated evidence.
36: He had a gun legally. From the complaint:
42. Defendant Barone then pointed to the pistol that Mr. Picard was wearing in a hip holster, and theatrically shouted to the other defendants, "I've got a gun!"
33/35: It was definitely entered into evidence. I don't see how the quote in the video (around the 2:00 mark) is out of context. There's about 1:20 of the conversation before it.
Shaun King is one of my go-tos after yet another one of these goddamned murders.
Can African-Americans get a little of that Ahmad Khan Rahami treatment?
40: That's heartbreaking to read.
Has this been mentioned? It's amazing that the judiciary, even in a lefty state like Massachusetts, is recognizing and trying to correct how this affects black men.
Should probably have said "trying to very slightly ameliorate" instead of "trying to correct."
39 - if that's the whole video (I hadn't realized one could watch it and just watched it now, thanks) it's not directly out of context, though there may be more to the video. But more importantly it's not at all clear from the video that they're fabricating evidence. They run through a list of charges, which is a perfectly normal thing to do. Then one cop says "and we could say that" which is ambiguous -- it's possible to read the statement as saying charges are fabricated, but it's also possible (on the video) to understand it as talking through evidence that supports the charge. The recording alone doesn't get you there.
Pretty sure that's the entire video, since it goes from when the camera is taken from him to when it's returned. (During the part before the conversation where the ACLU's explanation of what happened appears, the audio is consistent and you can still see stuff going on in the background.) Even if it wasn't, if these motorists existed it's unlikely he would have witnessed the complaint. As for what they said, it sounds like he's introducing new information, not talking about shared knowledge, especially as it comes pretty late in the conversation: "And then we claim in backup, we had multiple people, they didn't want to stay and give us a statement, so we took our own course of action." But this is probably the point where I should stop arguing with a lawyer--it's a pretty strange way to phrase that if those people existed, but it's not a completely implausible thing to say.
Then again, it'd have been really weird for him to be waving his gun at people, too, as the evidence claims the police were told by these motorists. Why would he do that? If you're a protestor daring the police to violate you rights, waving a gun around at passing cars seems odd. But yes, he probably can't prove he didn't do that implausible thing.
As a dumb IANAL question, even if the evidence was correct, wouldn't it be hearsay? Or does that not apply to LEOs?
I'm thinking of taking up waving my gun around at passing cars. It changes the whole "I can kill you but you can't touch me" dynamic.
Thanks to Google's new "reminder" feature, I can have a message every morning reading "Brandish More Often."
44 last which evidence? Of other complaining motorists?
Apparently DOJ is investigating Crutcher's killing at the behest of Tulsa police. So a worst case of victim-blaming exoneration by local authority is unlikely.
It would likely be hearsay unless you could get the complainers to testify as to what they saw. That's important. If, in fact, the cop's story was true -- witnesses complained but didn't put in a report (and thus weren't contactable) you could have the legitimate basis for a charge but a difficulty of proof (because of difficulty of finding the witnesses). So that would be a reason for writing a (legitimate, non-fabricated) ticket but then having the state's lawyer drop the charge once things proceeded further. That's another explanation for the "we could say that" -- the cops know it's kind of a bs charge but it's not an illegitimate or fabricated one.
Obviously it's possible to read the conversation the other way, too, as purely fabricating evidence. But without more that video and recording is not stone-cold evidence of cops caught on tape fabricating evidence -- it's at best evidence of a single ambiguous statement that could or could not be taken to refer to a plan to fabricate. Given how short the conversation and video is it really is ambiguous. You'd need more -- statements from other cops, records of the incident as a whole, information about the decision not to charge -- to conclude that evidence of complaints was actually fabricated. Maybe it was or maybe it wasn't.
47: Yes, I meant the police statement. It's reproduced in the complaint, page 18.
Guh, I'm sorry for being the major contributor in this derail. This is interesting but it is missing the forest for the trees, so maybe Tigre was right in 19.
49: Thanks for the explanation on hearsay. I think I'm in agreement with you that it couldn't be proven. And honestly, given that finding those witnesses would be impossible, that probably would have been sufficient for the prosecutors to throw it out.
Although I'm surprised that waving a gun around only amounts to a less than $200 fee (googling, 53a-181a and 53-182 are infractions, meaning the only punishment is a fee--although the law might have changed since it was put online as the amount they charged for 53-182 is higher than the max amount here). Even if it's just a bs charge, definitely some white guy privilege going on there. The two other counts in the complaint are meaningful and clearly happened, but yes, nothing compared to what police have been doing to innocent black people. Fuck, I think I'm in complete agreement with Tigre now.
Point in 47 and 19 taken, I will save the rules of evidence close-reading for another thread. I do wonder at ACLU's strategy here; where there are so many shockingly avoidable deaths at the hands of the police and such a serious and devestating disconnect between police and the folks they're supposed to protect, what is the endgame in the ACLU's representation of (and so their attraction of national attention to) an obvious twerp with allegations of mid-level bullying? It seems counterproductive but then the ACLU is good; they probably know something I don't. I mean it's about the camera being taken and developing law at First Amendment/Fourth Amendment intersection of course but is it really uniquely situated to address that?
Crutcher is heartbreaking. I guess inviting DOJ investigation is commendable though honestly it should be reflexive for police depts. at this point.
52 - there's huge state-to-state variance in the quality and smartness of the different state ACLU chapters. But I'd guess their primary concern is protecting the rights of people who photograph and record cops (that is an important right!) and what really got their interest wasn't the allegedly bogus charge or the low-level harassment but the cop's bogus statement to Mr. gun-carrying DUI annoyo that it was illegal to photograph the police.
52.last So should cameras I would think, which would document criminal perfidy. Also make it easier for all the good cops not to support the bad ones.
54 I suppose the officer saying "it's illegal to take my picture" on camera is a, uh, bad fact for the PD, I am just enough of a cynic that I assume there were 10 identical documented conversations in Hartford that day. Again, this guy is entitled to bring his lawsuit and may well be entitled to win it, and these officers are, among other things, completely witless, I just don't get the impact litigation angle. Or I think I do and disagree with it. It's ok, that's ok! They don't need to clear this stuff with me.
55 yes, though I don't think they're the panacea they're often described as. I want a million fucking consent decrees with a million special masters and all of the special masters are Michelle Obama with the frosty glare described in 4.
57. I see the major human rights innovation in the 21st century US being not social change or legal innovation but ubiquitous pocket cameras to put limits on which lies can be told. Perhaps now the time is ripe for social change though.
You know, it's a little depressing that a thread about a black man getting shot has turned into a legalistic discussion about a completely unrelated case affecting a white man.
59 is certainly correct, though "minor inconveniences to annoying white dweebs* matter" could I guess be a mouseover text here.
*not excluding myself.
59: I think it reflects our/my general feeling of helplessness.
The Five Things I need from White People Right Now
#4 Should probably do more of that via social media but it can feel self-serving sometimes -- "I'm posting this thing by a black person -- aren't I a good white person?"
#5 Should definitely add a couple of orgs. to my monthly donations.
58 I am hostile to the "uber, but for scraps of dignity" formulation but one of us will be right eventually I guess.
re 59 for me part of it is not knowing what the fuck to say and frankly even if I did it's not my place to hold forth on the central horror. The places I do have insight and/or leverage are at the best on the conceptual edges of extremely concrete devestation; I am at my most useful poking around in those edges, but you are right that that doesn't mean now is the time for it.
61 is similar to what I was going to say. At some level, it was a relief not to see the same people here rehashing the same things and knocking about a slightly different one instead. But have we moved from what can we possibly say? to what is to be done? or is that hopeless too?
The Tyre King killing hit close to home because he's the age of my daughter's brother and in a neighborhood where we've spent time and where people I love live. This one is just heartbreakingly clear and yet still not enough to open eyes. And we have a presidential candidate saying that obviously the answer is stop-and-frisk. I. can't.
59: Yeah, I fucked up. As said above. I fell for Tigre's trolling style in 18 through 20 (not to say he was wrong or insincere). People sometimes discuss things they disagree about sometimes in preference to things they're in concurrence with. So let's bring it back some.
61.1: That, too. That reaction could #4 could be seen as a second order application of #1, although it's probably best not to come across in a sanctimonious way.
Err, I mean #2, not #1, that it isn't about your (our) feelings.
FWIW there is an app available through the ACLU that facilitates filming encounters with cops. It uploads the video to an ACLU-run website right away, so if your phone is confiscated and the video deleted there is still a record. It's customized state by state, so get the one for your state.
If you guys want examples of things that are hopeful/helpful, here is a very simple very meaningful way to change policing incentives for the better.
I personally am turned off by a social media tendency to treat police shootings as an endless string of opportunities to say OH WOE I DESPAIR ABOUT RACIAL INJUSTICE IN THIS COUNTRY I AM A GOOD WHITE PERSON. I'm not saying that's not well-intentioned or even that it's inaccurate or counterproductive. There is racial injustice in this country and it should make you despair! But it implies a certain distance from policing stuff as a real issue and real policy problem in the real world as opposed to just another opportunity to proclaim OH WOE. In fairness though I am weird on this issue.
I mean, to be clear, it's a lot better than THERE IS NO MORE RACIAL INJUSTICE IN THIS COUNTRY I AM A GOOD WHITE PERSON which is apparently what a lot of white people go around saying, just no one I happen to hear regularly.
11: You kidding? They're outraged at the prospect someone might be filming them. For that matter they're outraged, many of them no doubt, at the prospect of being compelled to film themselves. The prospect of someone even saying they should be held accountable, and of anyone listening to such people -- even if it doesn't amount to anything legally, as the Crutcher case probably won't* -- is still totally alien and disorienting to most police departments. Getting to play God with the lives of poor and/or Black people was quite apparently one of the tacit job perks many of them signed up for, so how dare people get all shirty about it now? "Blue lives matter" and nobody else's, or as Bryant put it in Blade Runner, "if you're not cop, you're little people."
* Ever notice how even critics' assumptions seem to be framed by the narrative that gangbangers' lives are essentially worthless? The first thing we heard about Crutcher, as if it was relevant to anything, was that all he had in his record was parking tickets. I really don't care if he had a dozen DUIs and nine aggravated assaults on his record and a pound of PCP in his trunk, that still doesn't make murdering him when he had his hands in the air any less an act of murder, but I doubt that case is going to play out like that.
Yet again Tigre's world and mine are photonegatives of each other.
That's not quite right - my facebook feed is filtered pretty well and I design my life not to hear what other people around me think.
69: You forgot how many kids he has. Always relevant! It's amazing how much is a capital crime when it's convenient for it to be one.
Someone had a really nice quote about when a black man is killed you hear about his past and when a white man is killed you hear about his potential that I should google and source properly, but I won't yet because I'm on a work deadline.
Threads here also turned into interminable lawyering when the topic was specific shootings of Black people.
when a white man is killed you hear about his potential
Hell, you hear about potential when a white man rapes a woman. Us white guys, we're all about how much less shitty we'll be in the future. Maybe.
Ever notice how even critics' assumptions seem to be framed by the narrative that gangbangers' lives are essentially worthless?
Bugs the shit out of me. I can't decide how much it should bug me when the narrative is about immediate innocence--that is, were the hands up in the context of a breakdown or the end of a chase following a no-doubt crime--but that's at least understandable*. But there's really no reason to emphasize the personal merit of a murdered man. Although some of it is just the natural course of sudden deaths--if someone is killed by a drunk driver, the details of her goodness and those left behind will be in the story, and not with the implication that the drunk driver would otherwise have been justified--there's no doubt that it bleeds over into an implicit "unlike the others, this one didn't deserve to die."
*because there's a continuum--at least once in a great while, a police killing is a 100% justified, best-practice outcome, and some number are legal, understandable, and excusable, even if a better cop could have avoided it, etc.--and so we want to understand where a given incident falls on that continuum, even if very few of the ones generating outrage are what we, as a society, should accept. As I say, I don't like it, but it's understandable, and probably unavoidable even if you don't actively want to give cops a pass.
69 last is a thing that happens and it is vile, the most twisted among many twisted justifications offered. It's strange to see it persist in the police violence context while it fades from discourse around prison, where you no longer hear much of "ok this person got flayed by his cellmate while guards looked on, but come on he was a sex trafficker," where as that kind of argument got plenty of traction as recently as a couple of years ago.
I don't know what in particular that precipitated that shift or if there's anything specific way to urge it, though it is something I think about, and that I cling to that as an indicator of at least the possibility of change.
59: Josh!
To all the lawyers here feeling the need to "do" rather than solely blather it's the beginning of mock trial season! http://www.crf-usa.org/mock-trial-program/ find a local high school with a diverse team and get involved.
69
Also very relevant in determining if a person deserved to be shot: Was he wearing a hoodie? How low were his pants?
It's become increasingly clear that some chunk of Americans see cop shootings as a form of ethnic cleansing/eugenics program. In that case the number of kids the victim had always has either 1) too bad we didn't get him sooner, or 2) thank god he doesn't have the chance to have more.
I am sure there are studies that I am not looking up, but it's pretty clear some percentage of white people are incapable of empathy towards black people. Two immediate examples that come to mind are: 1) the outrage that Rue in the Hunger Games was played by a black actress, even though the character in the book was pretty clearly black. 2) The comments on this article, which read more like something from Fox News*
*Basically, a moving story on a woman left caring for her unresponsive gunshot-victim daughter and her grandkids, and the most upvoted comments are all basically, "the woman had 4 kids by age 20, therefore she basically deserved to be shot."
80.1
I mean, always has either an undertone of
Someone had a really nice quote about when a black man is killed you hear about his past and when a white man is killed you hear about his potential that I should google and source properly, but I won't yet because I'm on a work deadline.
Maybe this? (Which a white friend of mine who grew up in Alabama and small-town western Pennsylvania and currently lives in Georgia just posted on FB.)
80: I think the rabbit hole goes deeper than that. The white response to BLM is mostly based on a fear that the Haitian Revolution and/or Nat Turner is at hand at any time because whites on some level understand 1) the depth of violence used on blacks over the years and 2) how much they're convinced blacks must hate them and want to kill them on that basis. Never mind that in real life black people rarely ever feel this way.
Seriously, does the standard suburban white response of shitting themselves everytime they see more than six black people in a four square block area have any other explanation?
83/84: Yeah, a lot of white people definitely do live in constant fear of black rebellion and always have; the Second Amendment was about suppressing slave rebellions rather than resisting tyranny from the federal government. And it seems abundantly clear that many police shootings of young black men stem from a widespread, though not universal, sense among cops that they are vermin who need to be exterminated. This is particularly clear in the Tulsa case, but it's implicit in a lot of the others.
To put it another way, the most fervent opposition to Black Lives Matter comes from white people who literally and sincerely do not believe it's true, and are legitimately shocked to learn that any white people disagree. They really and truly believe that young black men are vermin who need to be exterminated, and that killing a young black man is a net positive for the world since it's statistically likely that he would end up murdering at least two people over his lifetime.
All of these beliefs are totally insane and disconnected from any empirical evidence, of course, but that doesn't mean they're any less sincerely held. I think (and hope) they are less commonly held among actual cops than among terrified old white people, but the Tulsa shooting seems to show that they do have at least some traction within PDs. The Tulsa PD's response to this incident does at least suggest that norms may be changing about how to handle this sort of incident even within PDs.
I see it as closely connected with the hatred of "illegals" (and that apparently delectable slur itself) and probably also "terrorists" -- if crime is inextricable from a culture, then the culture itself is a threat and hatred of it becomes existential. It's all a toxic racist stew of pure unreason, except for the one thread of defensible reasonability: laws really do exist (some bullshit, some not) and people really do break them. In the good old days when white people got to do hella violent shit all the time for the glory of it, being "law-abiding" was a less appealing castle to erect, but it is the proudest citadel of U.S. white supremacy now, as long as the myriad weapons inside continue to be lawful.
87: Absolutely, yeah. Although I suspect that both "white" and "law-abiding" were defined differently back in the day.
and so we want to understand where a given incident falls on that continuum
The national discussion is not going that way. Walter Scott gets lumped in with Mario Woods, Jamar Clark, Alton Sterling, etc. More recently, Milwaukee got set on fire due to the Sylville Smith shooting, which is nuts. Smith, a suspect in a shooting and witness intimidation case from a year prior, was rolling around with a stolen handgun on him. He runs from the cop and then turns on him with the gun, so of course he gets shot. The cop is also black and from the same community, even attending the same high school as Smith. None of it mattered. People posted the cop's address on social media so he gets to go into hiding for his safety and in the meantime Jesse Jackson gives the eulogy at Smith's funeral. Good luck recruiting officers from poor Milwaukee neighborhoods for a while.
Right in this thread Thorn, an intelligent and thoughtful commenter, invokes Tyre King as "heartbreakingly clear" example, which I'm pretty sure she means as malfeasance by the police. If that's the case it's hard to see the national conversation as anything but fucked for the foreseeable future. Tyre King had robbed someone with that gun a short time before the police chased him. The 19 year old with him has already admitted that.
AFAICT the Crutcher shoot is bad. I've watched and discussed the video with probably a dozen other detectives up on my floor and so far it's been unanimous agreement that it's a bad shoot. But the Crutcher family narrative is ridiculous. If all you hear about with white guys is their potential the flip side of that is that when a felon gets shot they were just getting their life turned around. This song and dance from the family of him doing nothing illegal and merely having car trouble? Come on. Yes, it is in fact illegal to go rolling around in a car while you're high on PCP. He was acting erratic and told a bystander the car was going to blow up. All of which the bystander called in to the cops. (IIRC the cop who shot him hadn't been dispatched on this call though and was going on her own observations) The police do have a legitimate interest in not having non compliant erratic people get back in their vehicles. But you just can't go lethal without some pretty specific criteria and IMO in this case those criteria weren't there. But the shoot is farther along the continuum then is being portrayed.
Some of the focus on people's backgrounds and the "deserved to be shot" stuff that crops up is of course just good old racism. But before any of you jump my shit I would ask you take a minute to think about your reaction to the Lavoy Finnicum shooting. He was a largely law abiding guy who absolutely made some decisions that contributed to his own death. I'd guess most of you were a bit more ready to consider those factors for Lavoy because for the average liberal he's a hugely unsympathetic character. On the Crutcher shoot there obviously needs to be action directed towards the police side but it's not racist to acknowledge that a contributing factor was that a long time offender was operating piece of heavy machinery in public while using PCP and that maybe there should also be a push to see what could have been done differently to prevent that scenario.
Walter Scott gets lumped in with . . . Alton Sterling
Hang on... weren't you pretty much down with the shooting of Alton Sterling?
But before any of you jump my shit . . .
Because it's not like you're about to give anyone huge cause to jump your shit.
Not:
On the Crutcher shoot . . . it's not racist to acknowledge that a contributing factor was that a long time offender was operating piece of heavy machinery in public while using PCP
God, you're such a mealy-mouthed disingenuous fucker. This is me jumping your shit. The cop who shot him knew nothing about his being any kind of long time offender or being on PCP, whether or not any of that is true. He was a random guy who walked in out of frame and had his hands in the air and was not a threat to anyone when she up and pumped a fucking bullet into him. You keep astonishing me with the depths to which you'll fucking sink.
Feel better?
She did have her observations to go on as to think he was under the influence. "Hands in the air" is probably not accurate.
Again, it's a bad shoot. But he was driving on the highway on PCP. "Random guy" and "not a threat" is garbage.
89: As I've said before, it's good to have you here and willing to engage productively despite the fact that this is a very unsympathetic environment for you and the arguments that you tend to make. So, for real, thanks for that.
That said, even assuming Crutcher was operating a vehicle on PCP, which has not been demonstrated in any public records AFAIK, that is not actually a capital crime and there need to be rules of engagement for the use of deadly force no matter how bad the bad guys are assumed to be. By all accounts Crutcher was not armed, regardless of his mental state at the time he was shot. It's hard for a layperson to see why he couldn't have been apprehended for whatever crimes he may have committed without deadly force.
And, to zoom out a bit, how many of these incidents will it take for honest, decent cops like you (and I don't think anyone here has ever questioned your personal integrity) to stop reflexively defending the cops who are involved? For real, how many? Even if any particular incident has mitigating or at least questionable factors, surely a general pattern has become apparent by now. I don't think anyone except the most extreme extremists on both sides is going to argue at this point that there aren't both good and bad cops, and that the bad cops need to be held accountable in some fashion in a systematic manner regardless of what happens in any individual case.
And I do realize that you personally have in fact proposed specific ways that bad cops can be penalized in meaningful ways short of criminal prosecution, and I think those efforts would be immensely valuable and I wish there were more bipartisan efforts to enact them. But as I'm sure you realize, that's never going to happen until this ceases to be a partisan flashpoint issue, and endlessly microlitigating every single incident is never going to get us there.
Gah. Look, I really do think you're a decent guy, and that more cops are like you than not. (And I do have a fair number of friends or at least acquaintances who are cops, so it's not just you personally that I think this of.) And I'm a white guy, and am therefore extremely unlikely to end up in any sort of trouble that the cops get involved with unless I do some really bad stuff, in which case I would totally deserve it. So this really isn't personal at all. But these incidents keep happening, almost every week lately, and that's a problem that needs to change.
Rehashing every single incident ad nauseum is worse than worseless, since it distracts from the very necessary work of building a system where the police really do protect the people of their communities effectively and are acknowledged for it by those communities. I know earnestness is deprecated here, but that really is what I want to see, and I don't fucking care what it takes. And I hope you recognize and will be able to continue to participate constructively in future discussion of these issues.
(And, btw, my own neighborhood has recently been the site of a string of murders, apparently as part of a city-wide trend of increasing murder rates for mysterious reasons. I do not feel any more afraid than I did before this started, in part because I do trust my city's PD to solve these crimes and make the city safer. That may well be an overly naive approach, but I'm sticking with it.)
Oh, good, it seems gswift and Castock have already gotten into it while I was writing 92. Okay, hotshots, here: There have been three murders within a couple blocks of my house in the past month. This is a largely but not exclusively white middle-class neighborhood in a very white city and state. Two of the murders remain unsolved; one of the victims was white and the other was Alaska Native. The other case involved one black man being being shot by another, who was caught within a few hours and surrendered without incident. How scared should I be of 1) being shot by a criminal; 2) being shot by a cop? If Castock were to visit me, what would his answers be?
That said, even assuming Crutcher was operating a vehicle on PCP, which has not been demonstrated in any public records AFAIK
You're technically correct but bystanders and cops both thought he was high, he's acting erratic, has a history with PCP, and PCP was in the car. If I was a betting man...
And god, the "reflexively defending" bit. DUDE, "me and everyone I work with says it's bad" could not be clearer.
Rehashing every single incident ad nauseum is worse than worseless, since it distracts
This is where probably some of the disconnect is. From a professional standpoint we absolutely tend to break down tactical situations in detail to talk about how it could be done better. At least, it's something a good department should pride itself on. We do it and the chief of Richmond CA has talked about it in interviews with regard to their huge improvement in use of force interactions.
And god, the "reflexively defending" bit. DUDE, "me and everyone I work with says it's bad" could not be clearer.
And yet, you went on to spend several sentences explaining how it may not have been so bad, really. Optics, man! Even if you don't actually care, perceptions matter.
This is where probably some of the disconnect is. From a professional standpoint we absolutely tend to break down tactical situations in detail to talk about how it could be done better. At least, it's something a good department should pride itself on. We do it and the chief of Richmond CA has talked about it in interviews with regard to their huge improvement in use of force interactions.
And that's fair enough, but it's one thing to discuss tactics internally to improve performance and another to hash this all out in public while police unions are endorsing Trump left and right. Again, optics! A beat cop may legitimately not care about any of this, but a police chief sure as hell should. And the Tulsa chief, to be fair, does seem to have acted appropriately in reviewing this incident and asking for the DOJ to investigate. But, as every single one of these threads has established, this is a systemic problem that goes beyond the ability of any individual PD to address.
A side effect of fewer cops shooting people in situations that* appear to have been escalated needlessly, will be fewer critics saying things about the situation that may be inaccurate or unfair. But as long as stuff like this continues, this is going to be the discourse. Maybe there's more that could be said about a "bad shoot" beyond "it's a bad shoot" but saying it isn't going to help anything in a general discussion, even if it's valuable in other contexts to break down every detail. There's a big gap between "they shouldn't have shot him, but you have to admit he was acting erratically" and "how can we adjust our tactics when someone's acting erratically so we don't shoot them?"
* taking the broader view, not the view from just the moment at which the cop(s) shot
93: Eh, if he want's to rant it's a free internet. Harder to rile me with that stuff these days. Age and the job I guess.
With regard to your question, your odds of killed by a stranger or the police are probably still pretty slim. Crime is up in most major cities though so your odds being a victim of a robbery and maybe an suffering an assault during that robbery are probably up.
With regard to your question, your odds of killed by a stranger or the police are probably still pretty slim. Crime is up in most major cities though so your odds being a victim of a robbery and maybe an suffering an assault during that robbery are probably up.
Well, I mean, of course I know that and am not actually afraid for my own personal safety. Crime here is up but that's largely a result of these weird murders that don't seem to have any relation to the overall crime rate. If I were black or Samoan, though, I doubt I'd be so unafraid, and that's sort of the point.
In any case, as I'm sure you realize, I'm totally going easy on you and you're going to get crucified once the East Coast people wake up.
93: Statistically it looks like I would stand about as much chance of being shot by a cop as the average Black man would stand of being lynched under Jim Crow, which is about my impression of the state of policing in America -- e.g. still significantly less of a threat than disease or accidental death but significantly more of a threat than an institution supposedly tasked with serving and protecting should ever be -- and would conceivably complicate a decision to call the cops in to deal with otherwise more proximate threats in a way that I can't say is true of cops in Canada, warts and all.
Which would be part of why I'm kind of short on patience with gswift's routine. Even the same breath as rather grudgingly admitting a bad shoot he's still trying to come up with extenuating circumstances. I could see calling PCP "a factor" if the guy had actually done something violent or threatening, you know? Like, you walk up to a scene and one guy is eating another guy's face or something, yes, going to guns is totally understandable. But here, if you're not even claiming that, why even bring it up?
I for one really value gswift's comments on this stuff. Agreeing with them is a little beside the point. What I think might emerge constructively (hah!) from these endless thrashes is a sense of how little the details of an individual incident matter when set in the context of an overarching story. This may not be an entirely coherent thought. But I think that Lavoy Finnecum analogy is relevant here. Given that America is an enormously racist society, or at least one with a very high level of interracial tension, every incident of this kind is going to remind people of that overarching narrative far more than it will encourage them to examine the specifics.
Another, minor, stylistic point is that gswift's tough guy persona ("a bad shoot") suggests a lack of moral outrage which will encourage others to make up that perceived deficit.
Lavoy Finnecum analogy is relevant here
Banned!
The post-hoc reasoning here is bullshit (he had PCP in the car, he had outstanding tickets, he had or didn't have kids, whatever). Finicum they knew he was armed and had talked about shooting cops at the time they apprehended him. Most of these unarmed black man incidents they don't know any of this- they only have certain observations at the time of the shooting, rarely enough to justify even having 5 cops draw on him much less shoot, and clearly one of the things biasing a lot of cops in favor of more or lethal force is the color of the person ("he looks like a bad guy"). Don't tell me why the cop has a defense in the court of public opinion- tell me why cops assume black people inherently require approaching with guns drawn?
At least as any single death, the most soul crushing aspect of this is the reaction of the American public. 12 year old boy shot in the park? All lives matter! Let's pass a bunch of legislation to make sure that never again will our brave police officers be held accountable for shooting people.
SP has it right. What the cops, at most, knew about Crutcher when making the decision whether or not to kill him: acting peculiar, possibly in a way consistent with being on PCP. Nothing about his record, no certainty about whether he wasn't sober. That's a good reason to be in a heightened state of alertness around him, sure. It doesn't approach anything like an explanation for shooting him. (G, I know you conceded that it was a 'bad shoot'. But the fact that he might have been on PCP doesn't come close to making any difference given the video; it's not worth bringing up as an extenuating factor.)
What the cops definitely knew about Finnecum: he was an armed member of a group threatening and engaging in violence against the government. That is a fundamentally different state of prior knowledge than the cops had about Crutcher. I'm not certain that shooting Finnecum was a reasonably necessary decision for the safety of the people at the scene -- the video I saw wasn't enough for me to have a strong decision -- and if it wasn't, it shouldn't have happened. But the background information that everyone involved had made it a totally different situation.
103: This.
I for one really value gswift's comments on this stuff.
Good for you. Seems to me I can watch cops and cop apologists devalue murdered Black bodies with games of Disingenuous Asshole Madlib pretty much anywhere.
Anyone remember seeing a picture of a protest sign that was sort of like this one in that the gist was "of course all lives matter but let me break it down for you." The one I'm thinking of was handwritten and held by a middle-aged African-American woman wearing a winter coat, other people visible around her but just her in the picture. It was a very good formulation that I should have bookmarked.
I agree with 105.1.last. "It was a bad shoot BUT" is an argument that seems to be saying that it wasn't quite so bad due to what comes after the "but," and that it might not be justifiable but it approaches justifiability. Maybe in a different context that's a useful thing to say--I dunno, say we're training officers to handle this sort of situation, I could see saying it's was an unjustified execution but in the moment it might feel justified due to these extenuating factors, here's how you work around that to a correct assessment and reaction. But in this context it sounds close to "sure he shouldn't have been shot but he was no angel." I know your intent is to help us see it more from the perspective of the police, but at least in my case that isn't helpful.
As you say, in many but by no means all of the cases, there's something that the person involved could have done differently to prevent that scenario. But it still boils down to the same old things for me: they're not the one with the gun and the power of the state behind them, they're not the one who made the final irrevocable decision to kill, but they're the one dead.
107: this is not handwritten, but otherwise fits your description.
I agree with 105.1.last.
I'm heading out and probably won't be around a computer today but real quick, go back up and look at what I quoted and was responding to when I posted 89.
I'm talking about the details specifically as a discussion of where an incident falls on a continuum when it comes to use of force. ( I demand you all hear this in the toughest voice possible)
But in this context it sounds close to "sure he shouldn't have been shot but he was no angel."
To be fair, the more canonical "he was no choirboy" is hard to deploy here because he was in fact a member of the church choir.
Oh, hey, just like Patrick Dorismond. Damn these crafty black people getting themselves shot but depriving the police of the most natural thing to say about them. (That is, Giuliani called him 'no altar boy', and a reported dug up the fact that Dorismond had been.)
"he was no angel" is safer, unless you're literally dealing with Satan or Matt Damon in Dogma.
110: You mean how you're responding to what the family said? Yeah, I could see how it feels like moving goalposts, or even purposefully ignoring pertinent facts. (Although that's giving the benefit of the doubt that he was high or otherwise committing a crime.) But the continuum of threat assessment becomes discretized into a shoot-to-kill/don't-shoot-to-kill decision, and focusing on those things make it sounds like he was almost kill-worthy. Maybe the issue is that us bleeding-heart non-cops think of the the continuum as having a yugeeeee gap between the things-that-don't-get-you-killed and the things-that-get-you-killed, while cops see it as really close?
I dunno. It still feels weird to focus on the things he could have done differently, instead of what the state-backed armed group that had a helicopter and at least four presumably sober uniformed officers on the ground could have done differently. But I acknowledge that it might seem pernicious to police officers if we don't at least acknowledge the possibility that the guy may have been committing some crimes and (not sure if they knew this at the time?) that he had a record. If that's a prerequisite for improvement, whatever, talk is cheap.
where an incident falls on a continuum when it comes to use of force.
The thing is, though, "man possibly acting peculiar" is all the cops were reacting to. And if that's anywhere on a 'continuum' when it comes to use of force, it's jammed right up against the bottom end point. It loses out to "person not acting peculiar at all" but it doesn't make it near justifying any use of force at all. Talking about it as if it were on a continuum that plausibly does justify the use of force seems really misleading to me.
"he was no angel" is safer, unless you're literally dealing with Satan or Matt Damon in Dogma.
Or a baseball player.
Yeah, I'm out of patience with the victim-blaming, and particularly the shit-talking about the family of a guy who gswift acknowledges was wrongfully killed. The only thing I'm learning from this is that gswift is way more emotionally invested in getting liberals to stop being a bunch of delusional pussies than he is in sympathizing with people who have lost family members due to "a bad shoot." I also don't know what this is hinting at:
a contributing factor was that a long time offender was operating piece of heavy machinery in public while using PCP and that maybe there should also be a push to see what could have been done differently to prevent that scenario.
Longer prison terms? Smart cars that you can only operate by pouring a cup of clean piss over the ignition? Time travel? Jiminy Cricket? IDK.
115: "He was no Los Angeles Angel of Anaheim!"
109: Dang, you're right, that's the very one. Guess I was combining it with another one in my head. Thanks.
(Tangentially, it's getting ever weirder to refer to someone as "middle aged" and realizing that other people could, and presumably do, say that about me.)
109: Dang, you're right, that's the very one. Guess I was combining it with another one in my head. Thanks.
I'm confused, that's exactly the same sign as the one you linked to originally.
120.2: Probably not although it does have the exact same words on it.
She just has extremely neat handwriting.
She just has extremely neat handwriting.
Also, sometimes people behave or move erratically because of disability or mental illness, or hell, a muscle spasm at the wrong time. I sure wouldn't want to be a black man with cerebral palsy or epilepsy.
Again, the fundamental question is: should using drugs, illegally selling cigarettes, driving without a tail light, getting drunk, or owing back child support be capital offenses? If not, then we need to seriously reform policing. If we decide they should be, then we need to get the guillotines up and running ASAP.
124.2: No, the system we have is working fine.
It still feels weird to focus on the things he could have done differently, instead of what the state-backed armed group that had a helicopter and at least four presumably sober uniformed officers on the ground could have done differently.
Yes. This. No police department should use these videos as examples of how to handle a situation. Police are supposed to deal with non-compliant people. That is their job. Now they are being trained that every situation is a potential ambush so they need to shoot before the danger manifests itself.
Do we really want them to be able to shoot non-compliant people bc those non-compliant people might suddenly pool out a gun?!? In a country with many states having open carry?
Then you have the same people defending the cop who seem to be all about the Bundy's being able to defend their land against BLM. Is it any wonder black people feel like they are in danger!? ug
126 - ambiguous acronym "BLM" strikes again!
127
Coincidence?? I think not.
#Walmartconcentrationcamps #ObamaisHitler #Hilarysvagendaofwhitocide
Excuse me, #Hillarysvagendaofwhitocide
129: Thanks! It makes me so angry when my name is misspelled!
Here's a thought. The term "bad shoot" seems to refer to whether or not a particular action is criminally culpable. OK, fine, but I'd like the term to apply to actions that are not only criminally culpable, but also administratively unsound. That is, it's not just the officer's actions in the second the trigger was pulled, but the minutes leading up to that.
How do do it? Any officer who shoots a person is immediately terminated and barred from law enforcement for life. The ex-officer then has an opportunity to prove to a federal board that he/she is a choirboy -- that the entire action was good policing, and the use of deadly force was required. By a preponderance. At which point the officer can be reinstated.
Trump and I believe there's been far too much talk about institutional bias and racism within law enforcement.
Depending how you interpret the poor grammar of that sentence, maybe he's saying that law enforcement is talking too much about being racist and biased and they should should stop.
131.1 is not only a good idea but actual policy in a number of departments, including (for about a year now) the LAPD.
131.2 is a horrible idea that would be a disaster of epic proportions for anyone who lives in an area with serious crime.
131.2 actually seems more extreme than any of the solutions Shaun King proposes here https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1136506649721585
126 gets it right. For our actual military acting as an actual occupying force in foreign countries their are stringent rules of engagement they must follow before shooting someone, let alone shooting to kill. For our police shooting and/or protecting their fellow citizens, who knows, they theoretically could be found guilty of something, unless they're popular with their coworkers.
I get the impression that police are trained to be paranoid as hell, and dedicated to self-protection above all. The former may in certain places be more or less justified, but IMO the latter isn't. We ought to pay cops well for the fact that their lives are more expendable than the lives of non-officers (not civilians - that distinction exists between military and non-military. Police are civilians.), but the essential fact is we pay them to take risks that we are unwilling to take, including going up against PCP - addled potentially violent people and defusing the situation, not escalating at every point the way it always seems to go in these videos. So many of them seem like they could have been defused if the cop had just taken a bit of time to try to connect with the person as a person instead of as a mortal threat. That may mean more cops die, but fucking lumberjacks die at a higher rate than cops, so just pay them like lumberjacks and let people decide if they want to take that chance or not.
138.1 is absolutely the case. I believe they call it, in all seriousness, Warrior Training.
138 - I've been seeing arguments like that a bunch recently. Here is the thing that always gets left out. One HUGE incentive for cops (no matter how well-paid) is always to do less, not more. "Guy with a gun over there in a shitty neighborhood? Uh bro I get paid like 40k a year and have two kids and union protection and how 'bout no I do not go over there and risk my life." The increase in cop "safety" training and technique is designed in large part to reduce that incentive and to get cops to do their fucking job -- yes it is OK to go and take out that active shooter because you have full-on military training and vests and whatever.
And these kinds of safety-first techniques have become especially salient as we've asked cops to move from being basically protectors of an orderly street to an occupying force in full-on drug wars, which are armed and real and exist in many cities. Because PDs and cities want cops to do increasingly dangerous things, they want them to have increasingly over-the-top training and protection to get them to do those dangerous things.
Obviously this also can create the problem we talk about here, where a sense of cop (over)protectiveness leads to an excessive willingness to use force where force isn't needed.
But the countervailing incentive for cops to do *nothing* if they don't feel safe doesn't just go away. It's a real problem.
And emphasizing de-escalation actually makes this worse, not better. You don't de-escalate, as a cop, if you feel threatened. You shoot. You might do nothing and avoid the situation. But asking cops to be well-trained de-escalators of conflict requires measures to help them feel more, not less safe.
And not because we particularly love cops. We need to worry about this kind of stuff precisely because cops are not heroes and we can't realistically ask them to be heroes. They are ordinary humans and civil servants and it's best to figure out how in the real world we can get them to do their jobs well.
This is also interesting, if people are interested. A big part of the problem with unjustified police shootings has to do with the Western US (including Oklahoma) not "cops" generally. Basic differences in gun culture and training mean a lot. Oklahoma and New Mexico cops shoot to kill at something like 8-15x times the rates of NYC cops. Many of those shootings, obviously, are avoidable. See also here.
And it seems like on the whole the number of total police shootings is down since 1970 or so, even adjusted for crime rates (we'd think that lower crime rates would reduce the number of shootings, but the reduction goes beyond what you'd expect from lower crime rates). So it's pretty clear that some of the narrative of "over-protective, over-paranoid militarized cops have started turning lethal in a way they weren't before" is just factually wrong -- the trend goes in the other direction.
This is also interesting, if people are interested. A big part of the problem with unjustified police shootings has to do with the Western US (including Oklahoma) not "cops" generally. Basic differences in gun culture and training mean a lot. Oklahoma and New Mexico cops shoot to kill at something like 8-15x times the rates of NYC cops.
Huh. That is interesting. It makes complete sense, but not something that I'd seen numbers on before.
From the other place. Cops and Klan go hand-in-hand:
67 Black men have been killed by the police since Colin Kaepernick started protesting police brutality on August 26th by not standing for the national anthem. SIXTY-SEVEN MEN! That's not even one month ago. And, yet, we still fail to have overwhelming public outrage about this.
How does a white man go into a church and kill 9 people and get apprehended by the police without incident (even taken out for a burger)? How does a white man go into a movie theater and kill 12 people and injure 70 others and get apprehended alive? Yet there is video after video after video of unarmed Black men getting killed by police, even shot in the back while running away!
It is brutal and relentless and vicious. The violence is killing our souls. It must stop.
I am no expert, but this has to be a part of the problem and at least for those of you that remain unconvinced there is a problem in law enforcement, here is some evidence that will hopefully change your minds:
In October 2006, the FBI released a report warning of the white supremacy infiltration of law enforcement (http://s3.documentcloud.org/.../doc-26-white-supremacist-infi...).
From the following Grio article (http://thegrio.com/.../fbi-white-supremacists-law-enforcement/):
"Several key events preceded the report. A federal court found that members of a Los Angeles sheriffs department formed a Neo Nazi gang and habitually terrorized the black community. Later, the Chicago police department fired Jon Burge, a detective with reputed ties to the Ku Klux Klan, after discovering he tortured over 100 black male suspects. Thereafter, the Mayor of Cleveland discovered that many of the city police locker rooms were infested with "White Power" graffiti. Years later, a Texas sheriff department discovered that two of its deputies were recruiters for the Klan.
In near prophetic fashion, after the FBI's warning, white supremacy extremism in the U.S. increased, exponentially. From 2008 to 2014, the number of white supremacist groups, reportedly, grew from 149 to nearly a thousand, with no apparent abatement in their infiltration of law enforcement.
This year, alone, at least seven San Francisco law enforcement officers were suspended after an investigation revealed they exchanged numerous "White Power" communications laden with remarks about "lynching African-Americans and burning crosses." Three reputed Klan members that served as correction officers were arrested for conspiring to murder a black inmate. At least four Fort Lauderdale police officers were fired after an investigation found that the officers fantasized about killing black suspects."
So it's pretty clear that some of the narrative of "over-protective, over-paranoid militarized cops have started turning lethal in a way they weren't before" is just factually wrong -- the trend goes in the other direction.
Why should that be wrong? Ordinary Americans seem to believe that crime is up, rather than down.
140,2: It would be just and politic if the burden of making sure police officers feel safe were distributed a little more equitably.
And these kinds of safety-first techniques have become especially salient as we've asked cops to move from being basically protectors of an orderly street to an occupying force in full-on drug wars, which are armed and real and exist in many cities. Because PDs and cities want cops to do increasingly dangerous things, they want them to have increasingly over-the-top training and protection to get them to do those dangerous things.
This is just bullshit corporate media/pig-lover propaganda. It's 100% the decision of the cops to go on most of those "High RisK" warrant servings and shit. Most of the time they're going to pick up some kid who slings the occasionally sack of weed, but the go to the wrong house, terrorize the Black people living there, and shoot the family dog. That's not "risky" from the point of view of anybody but Black folx. Bunch a fucking cowards, that's what cops are. Most of them are rapists who physically torture and abuse their own families and the families of people they encounter. And EVERY SINGLE FUCKING ONE OF THOSE CREEPY RACIST FUCKS IS AN ACCESSORY TO MULTIPLE MURDERS.
I mean, you're a rich white guy, we get it. Your position depends completely on the cops maintaining the color line in this country. So tell us again how poor Black men are all vicious monsters and cops are angelic little Boy Scouts who spend all their time giving little boys mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
142: Due to poor reporting it's not clear to me how much that's going down, although I'd appreciate any more data. For example, this implies it more or less held constant over the 2003-2011 period, close to the Post's number for last year (990). But I agree that most of the outrage over a perceive increase is due to better coverage by now pervasive camera-phones* regardless of the underlying trend. However, I think it's different from the perceived increase in crime by white suburbanites in that we do have good data that crime has been going down, while this is sketchier due to not having long term national statistics (but again, I just might be ignorant and appreciate any data anyone can find).
* It feels weirdly anachronistic to use this term, but it's the only salient feature I care about.
Most of them are rapists who physically torture and abuse their own families and the families of people they encounter.
Speaking as somone who loves to comment baked - put down the bong and step away from the computer. The cops and Jews will still be there in the morning.
Feels more like the bottle than the bong to me, speaking as someone who likes to comment drunk sometimes. But a key to drunk belligerent blogging is that you never want to go full genocide.
Still, you gotta hand it to those little momsers: They've got this pre-intellectual, instinctive understanding of solidarity that you just can't teach someone in a workshop.
And we'll all be under a kilometer of ice sometime in the next 100,000 years or so anyway.
150: Oh come on! You don't think this persona is accurate do you? I'm basically a Rockefeller Republican with a little Friedman thrown in. Jesus, I don't even like hummus!
with a little Friedman thrown in
Milton or Kinky?
True story: A man sat down next to me on the bench on the train platform, late Saturday night, and he was somewhat the worse for drink. "They despiiiiisse you...they despiiiiisee you" he hissed through broken teeth. "Everybody despises everybody," I replied.
157: Would you hate me forever if I said "Thomas?"
2 light rail lines and 1 commuter rail.
He did give us the Friedman Unit. The next six months will tell the tale of whether that was worthwhile.
I admit that Natilo is probably the last commenter I would have suspect of harboring a secret affinity for the Mustache of Understanding.
OT, I guess: I grow weary, already, of the Hillbilly Elegy guy and his vacant insights.
Exchange between two friends in high school*, visiting colleges (I guess?):
1: "There's a statue of Morgan Freeman and they say that, when the sun hits it at a certain angle, you can see a hammer and sickle."
2: "There's a... what?"
1: "Well, it wasn't really clear if the hammer and sickle was a shadow or if it lit up on the inside or what. I'm not even sure this story is true."
2: "Morgan... Freeman? A statue? Are you... is it maybe Sidney Poitier?"
1: "No no, the economist, Morgan Fre... oh wait."
I remember this vividly because -- well, obvious reasons. It has not gotten any less mysterious after twenty years' exposure to the wider world. Like, there is a bust of Milton Friedman (not at the U of C), but why would this have come up?
Image searches have nonetheless revealed this meme. I love it. I will carry EVERY motherfucking piece of furniture out of this joint without help by NOON. FUCK teamwork. Who among us is bright enough not to have personally disproven this maxim more than once?
It has not gotten any less mysterious after twenty years' exposure to the wider world. Like, there is a bust of Milton Friedman (not at the U of C), but why would this have come up?
Because tour guides tell them this:
http://uchiblogo.uchicago.edu/archives/2011/05/the_may_day_myt.html
That's right! Still, that was some wild garbling.
(And, yes, you've been gone from regularly commenting long enough to get the "!" treatment.)
Hey, X.Trapnel: you're all done voting in U.S. elections, I suppose? How does it feel?
What? He's still a citizen and can vote, I think?
I assume almost everyone is disenfranchised for some reason or another. Do you get to vote this year, teo?
Errr still need to get my absentee ballot...
Look at the Millennial destroying America by lazy.
Do you get to vote this year, teo?
I'm a white guy. I always get to vote.
By modern definitions, sure.
Also, aren't you up really early?
For real, though, I woke up briefly and am going back to bed.
My dad does that, but he was born when Hoover was president.
166: Shockingly, I've missed that guy entirely.
I am so motherfucking goddamn mad right now that I can't see straight. I overheard two of my co-workers have a conversation that went from "they shouldn't give trophies to everyone in Little League" to "fuck you, Colin Kaepernick, go to another country if you don't like it here" to "you don't see white people getting upset that they're charging that white cop in Tulsa and we don't really know what happened and anyway if they just do what the cops tell them to, this wouldn't happen."
I would like to tear both their heads off but feel that would be frowned upon in the workplace. Instead I've gone to a remote part of the office where I don't have to see them until I can calm down enough to speak without bursting into tears. Goddamn anger crying.
One is a white secretary whom I suspected was supporting Trump but then I dismissed that as too outlandish. (Also, "America's going in the wrong direction and no one is trying to turn this ship around.") (P.S. Way to go supporting a candidate who would outlaw unions and put you out of a job 5 minutes after taking office if he could.) The other is one of my peers who has generally good politics. He has a very hard time walking through a door that I open first ('cause that's just the way he was raised) but otherwise seemed like a reasonable human being. He's Latino, to the extent that that matters.
I don't mean to go all "poor little white girl, I had to hear someone say something racist"; I just wasn't expecting it here and I need to blow off some steam before I can have a conversation.
I love the "just go to another country if you don't like it here!" from people who are anti-immigrant! Sorry, Kraaby. I think it's totally legit and understandable to be overwhelmed and furious-sad about this. Yuo seem to be handling it well.
Are you sure you're holding the door open wide enough for his balls to fit?
Thanks, Thorn.
Good question, Moby. I'll ask him.
183: Holy shit! At this point I would just start screaming in your situation.
I just got my absentee ballot. Since Hillary is probably going to win in New Hampshire, I was thinking I'd vote for a third party. They got the Libertarians, the Greens, and something called the American Delta Party, which is running one Roque "Rocky" De La Fuente. Apparently he supports freedom. I can get behind that!
He ran in the Dem primary too and even campaigned personally in Alaska, not that it did him any good.
Roque "Rocky" De La Fuente's other major issue appears to supporting ballot access for Roque "Rocky" De La Fuente.
He's just pandering to his base on that one.
You're trolling, right? New Hampshire is literally the closest swing state.
167 is great. The famous economist Morgan Freeman, of course, and his intellectual rival Milton Keynes.
Economists who wanted to distance themselves from a controversial discovery would often publish under the alias Adam Smithee.
There's a town in England called Milton Keynes, which Mrs y invariably refers to as Maynard Friedman.
go to another country if you don't like it here
You know, the funniest part of this is that, in every case, anybody I have heard express this sentiment is also a person who has complained bitterly and incessantly about this country for the past eight years.
Yes, trolling. If I still lived in Maryland, I'd be totally willing to vote third party, but I recognize that's not an option. In NH, I have to pick between the top two, which sucks because the Republican and Democratic parties are basically the same. And on the one hand, Trump doesn't appear to know how the US government works, is likely to insult our allies and cause global instability, and has emboldened the worst strains of white nationalism. On the other hand, Clinton with the email servers. Its a tough call.
You need to be more subtle with the trolling if you want anyone to take the bait.
If I still lived in Maryland, I'd be totally willing to vote third party
I had been saying that unless Texas were somehow in play I'd write in Bernie. Stunningly, Texas *is* now in play but I think I'd vote for her regardless.
I've come around to the point of view that she should get the highest possible percentage of the popular vote. She doesn't need the "message" that voting for Jill Stein or writing Bernie in would send; she knows that millions of people are going to vote for her out of desperation
197: That's why they love Trump so much. They'll get to leave this first amendment lovin' brown homo hellhole and emigrate to another country: Greatamericaistan.
OMG. I just realized today that "Milton Keynes" the town isn't named after Keynes. It's some kind of postwar planned town, right? I thought it was like some kind of "let's honor our famous economists and rival East German powerhouse Karl Marx Stadt in the naming after economists game. I don't think I would have said that Keynes' first name was Milton if asked but I'm not totally sure I wouldn't have.
It really is weird to have (a) a new town (b) one of your most famous citizens with a not that common name and then (c) ise the last name of the famous guy for the town but toss in some rando first name. "Welcome to your new planned suburb, "'Steven Luther King.'"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the name of the academic/Bloomsbury family is pronounced "canes" and the new town "keenes," isn't it?
Milton Keynes was the old village that was used as the core of the new town. In the Norman period it was Middleton, belonging to a baron called de Cahaines, who "came over with the Conqueror". Nothing to do with John Maynard Keynes, except that he may be descended from the Norman family.
I do like Tigre's vision of the postwar British mindset, though. "The East Germans are beating us at geographical propaganda! Quick, do we have any famous economists to name stuff after?"
Whereas my understanding is that the reality was more like, "It sure would be nice if we had some money to rebuild all the stuff the Germans bombed. Didn't we use to have an empire?"
I like the idea of new towns. It would be cool if they did that in the US.... in terms of absorbing population growth, I think plopping down new, efficiently designed mid-sized cities in well-selected places is preferable to expanding the suburbs of the old ones.
We did do that in the US, at the same time the Brits did. It worked about as well, which is to say, not very. So the suburbs won out.
It sure would be nice if we had some money to rebuild all the stuff the Germans bombed.
It would be nice to think they picked the Milton Keynes area in honour of Bletchley Park, which is in the middle of the new town but was still a state secret at the time. But apparently it was chosen because it was equidistant from a number of other important centres.
And as the suburbs grew they eventually enveloped most of the New Towns, so now they're mostly indistinguishable.
The only new town I can think of in the US is Columbia, Maryland, which is kind of a poster-child for shitty ideas in car-centric urban design. "Fuck the grid system, lets weave together a bunch of curvy roads, spread out across a vast area, and plop down occasional high-class strip malls we call 'village centers'."
204: I thought the same thing until reading this thread.
214. Whereas Milton Keynes, which was also designed to be car friendly, is on a strict grid pattern apart from the old villages it swallowed up.
214: Yes, it's the most famous example of how the idea was implemented and why it didn't work.
Irvine California sort of worked if by worked you mean "university" "extremely expensive homes" and "Real Housewives therefrom."
Yet Columbia is "consistently ranked in the top ten of CNN Money's Best Places to Live in America." I guess that isn't surprising.
Sure, if by "nice place to live" they mean "entirely devoid of soul," which actually be a key attraction for CNN/Money's target audience.
Although, I think CNN/Money is actually talking about Columbia/Ellicot City. And Elicott City is actually a totally charming, interesting little town (or rather, it was.) My douchebag friend who used to live in a ticky-tack condo in Columbia always claimed he lived in Ellicot City.
Maybe the CNN list is written by self-aware cars.
high-class strip malls
The working-class malls strip in the sleazy bars on the edge of town.
Heebie, further to the link in 220, you should read this, which I think is analagous to problems you've had in Heebieville.
198: If I still lived in Maryland, I'd be totally willing to vote third party
Is this true?
Sure, why not? I voted for Jill Stein in 2012, and as a result, second term Obama was way better than first term Obama. Sending messages works!
It just drives me nuts that Stein supporters apparently don't realize she's against raising the debt ceiling. Or they're too stupid to realize what that means.
I'm also generally pissed at the Green Party for nominating her.
Similarly, it annoys the hell out of me that Gary Johnson supporters apparently don't realize that he proposes to raise the retirement age to 75. Ha. Ha. Ha. That's funny.
So, Hillary Clinton voices unwavering support for Israel's apartheid government. We're none of us perfect.
229: Sorry, did you just try to portray difference of opinion over Israel as in the same class of stupid as refusing to raise the debt ceiling? And if so, then why is anyone supposed to care what you think? I'm asking this as someone who agrees with you that Israel is essentially an apartheid regime.
Sorry, I didn't realize the object was to only oppose politicians who's policies you think are stupid, rather than malign.
Further, in no plausible universe will Jill Stein's opinion on the debt ceiling actually affect the debt ceiling, so its not really one of my foremost concerns in considering whether to cast a meaningless vote for her in a non-swing state.
I'm generally a fan of trolling but stakes are sufficiently high n this election that it's not super funny. Like trolling cancer victims or something.
Whatever. I'm living up to my responsibility to vote for Hillary in a swing state, even though I really fucking don't want to. I think its reasonable to express my support for people who have other options.
Cutting your own dick off is merely stupid, so I'm casting my protest vote for the dick-cutter.
CUTTING OFF SOMEONE ELSE'S DICK CAN BE KIND OF UNSATISFYING TOO, BELIEVE ME.
I do, but how many other people can honestly say they have thrown a penis out of a car window?
I bet at least part of the reason police don't like domestic violence calls is because they might have to search for a severed penis.
I think if that's part of the situation it becomes apparent pretty early on.
237: None, but I vaguely recall a medical memoir with a story about leaving one in someone's pocket after gross anatomy class.
239: Relationships are tricky enough without being expected to guess when she's going to cut off your penis.
Is that a penis in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?
241: If she gives you a specific date early on she's a keeper.
Now that I think about it, it was probably The Making of a Surgeon, but a similar thing happens outside of a medical context in In the Realm of the Senses.
You could have a countdown calendar and everything.
241, 243: In many cultures, when a couple announce "we're cutting off the penis", it's understood on the model of "cutting off the water", and means they want the world to know that they've graduated to bed-death. You can make a nice living as a celebrant if you play your cards right.
Damn you, teofilo, stealing the balance of my punchline like that.
233: Yeah. O rhe way I'd put it is anyone who thinks they have the luxury to keep gratuitously bad-mouthing Clinton as "malign" is a moron.
Like trolling cancer victims or something.
New mouseover.
No, here the cancer victims troll the rest of us.
(Incidentally and this will come as no surprise: Clinton's relationship with Israel is much mroe complicated than Spike allows, but never let nuance get in the way of portraying the person you're supposed to be voting for as some kind of conscienceless supervillain, right?)
Do you honestly see any fundamental reshaping of America's relationship with Israel as remotely possible during a Hillary Clinton administration?
Where was the "much more complicated" part in that article? She supports the Iran deal, and...what else? (I admit I skimmed, but nothing jumped out.)
Mostly the article reminded me of how awesome Bernie was.
I wonder who he's supporting in the general.
253: Things are possible with rational politicians that are much more desirable than are possible with insane fascists, a Bernie administration is not on the cards and neither, as you reminded me, is a Jill Stein one and your question is therefore fucking stupid.
254: Supports the Iran deal, opposes settlements, fairly US-traditional on Israel otherwise but hardly the racist pro-Bibi warhawk Spike attempted to imply.
(The Iran deal incidentally is a massive strategic reshaping of the American relationship with the Middle East that significantly reduces the prospect of further wars that can be used to the advantage of Israeli far-right hawks. Supporting it is not a little thing, the fact of that deal and the process leading to it is the whole reason we saw Bibi trying to do end-runs around Obama through the GOP nutcases in Congress.)
opposes settlements
Gives lip service to opposing settlements. Actually opposing settlements would entail something like linking them to a reduction in US military aid, or not blocking UN Security Council resolutions regarding settlements.
The Iran deal incidentally is a massive strategic reshaping of the American relationship with the Middle East that significantly reduces the prospect
Yes, it certainly has been one of Secretary of State Kerry's more impressive accomplishments.
I dunno that it's sensible to engage with this level of discourse, but since I've seen it around before 260 is rank bullshit. The Iran deal started to be negoriated under her tenure by people who were her inneromost personally-loyal staff. And then completed by Obama/Kerry who certainly also deserve credit. But the notion that Hillary Clinton would be decidedly different on that deal is just shit-eating stupid.
Applause for 256. Hey, Liz Warren is great too. Who's she backing? Is it Jill Stein, Spike? Do you happen to know?
To be sure, mulishly denying Clinton any credit for a part in a policy whose virtues you can't ignore or outright lie about might seem dishonest and childish and irresponsible to the uneducated eye, but of course the really important thing is that admitting any positive thing at all about this person you're supposed to be voting for would interfere with the Butthurt Bernie Bro Routine and we can't have that.
And hey, I can see why. Not like it's an historically important election or anything. By all means go on behaving like an eight-year old throwing a moody because Mom wouldn't buy him a chocolate bar.
Voting third party, even in a safe state, mostly sends the message that third parties are viable which is a stupid, destructive message to send.
There's also no reason to think that Democrats will interpret a Green Party vote as a reason to move left rather than a reason to view leftists as unreliable and to court the centrists.
264. They should be viable, but they're not, which makes the US Green Party mildy dangerous. At this point in their long game they shouldn't be running spoilers for President, which is childish. They should be running for city/county level seats they might win and gain some political experience.
Oh, I see the NYT, having campaigned for Trump most of this year AFAICR, has woken up and decided that Clinton might be a better bet after all. Wankers.
266: No they shouldn't. Until we get a different. Electoral system it's primaries or nothing.
268: If the Republican insurgency shows anything it's that sub-federal politics matters plenty.
Voting third party, even in a safe state, mostly sends the message that third parties are viable which is a stupid, destructive message to send.
Do you think that's true in general or just this year?
In either case, I think you're quite incorrect on the message that is intended or sent. Protest votes are often pretty clearly just that. Whether that's a useful tactic is another question (and, as noted above, it's definitely not useful this year).
Chris y is right that local and state politics is where it's at. I wish the damn Dems would figure that out. Third parties have won a decent number of offices at that level and done some good. E.g., the Statehood party in D.C. before it got taken over by the Greens.
Fans of English place names and clever jokes about Christianity would enjoy this blog, written in real life by the part-time (unpaid) vicar of a village near MK.
That's great. I like the "Letter of the week".
There's a village 25 miles from MK where the vicar used to be in an uber-successful rock band. You never know what you'll find in the south midlands.
I'm going presidential here. I have reasons. You know who I am.
I think its fair to say that Hillary Clinton was the foremost voice within the Obama administration favoring a harder line with Iran. You can look to her statements in the 2008 primaries in which she called Obama irresponsible and frankly naive for being willing to meet with Iran's leaders without preconditions. Or you can note the way she lead the charge on sanctioning Iran in 2010. Pointing to her opening negotiations six months before she left doesn't really change my appraisal there; I see it as an indicator that she recognized there would be an eventual agreement and that she wanted to frame it on her terms.
And it also reasonable to say that her motivation in this was due to her strong views on supporting Israeli security interests - the main interest in this case being Israel's desire to maintain its nuclear monopoly. She says as much in this 2012 leaked email favoring US involvement in the war in Syria.
So, under the Iran deal we got, which, yes, Hillary Clinton set the stage for - though, as has been pointed out did not close - the United States spent huge amounts of global political capital to bring reluctant allies on board with a sanctions regime that caused great damage to Iran's economy, and to the people who live there. The purpose of this was to bring Iran into compliance with a nuclear non-proliferation regime, while at the same time providing cover for continued nuclear proliferation on the part of Israel.
Ultimatly, we were able to use the stick of economic ruin to get a deal with Iran, but the carrot of bringing Israel's nuclear program into the daylight was never even on the table. This was a choice of Great Power politics over peace-building and de-escalation.
I think that's fucked up and bullshit, and I certainly expect more of the same from a Hillary Clinton administration. I'm sorry if it annoys you that I'm peevish about having to cast my ballot for her.
270 last -- I don't think there's any question that in situations where one of the major parties is so weak that a "third" party can effectively become the "second" party, third party voting makes a lot of sense.*
I also don't think there's any mystery on the part of Democratic strategists, officials, or whatnot, about the importance of state and local elected offices. What there is is a shortage of candidates willing to run races they don't think they can win -- running for office is difficult, time consuming, and expensive -- and a lot of places where running as a Democrat is enough of a long shot that people don't want to do it. Especially in cycles where a substantial part of our coalition generally doesn't vote.
I know there's a tendency to blame candidates for this, but that seems to me to be a lot like blaming Clinton for the fact that when you analyze news stories about her, the word "email" predominates: isn't she smart enough to know that she should try talking about something other than her email? Maybe offer some sort of non-email related policy suggestions?
* But now I'll argue the other side of this. The city I live in is predominantly Democratic. Nearly ever legislative seat in the county is held by a Dem, all the county commissioners are Dems, as are all the other county-wide officials. City council is non-partisan, but nearly all are committed Dems (one actual Rep out of 12 councilpersons). So why not get a third party going here? Because we provide turnout, money, volunteers, and enthusiasm for Dems in purple and red counties. The supply of people willing to do the actual work of local politics is not unlimited, and when you siphon a slug of folks out of the Dem apparatus to form something different, you end up with a weaker Dem party (and a decade or two of rancor . . .) I suppose there's some small number of people who are staying away from local politics because it's not pure enough for their liking. ISTM that these will be outnumbered by curmudgeons and misanthropes in whatever 3d party emerges, but maybe that's just cynicism.
"the carrot of bringing Israel's nuclear program into the daylight was never even on the table"
George, if you are suggesting that Iran would have happily signed up for the 2015 agreement without any sanctions needing to be imposed, in exchange for the U.S. saying "ok we admit it Israel has the bomb" then you are high. Iran already knows Israel has the bomb. Everyone knows. Everyone knows the U.S. knows. Admitting it would have zero benefit for Iran.
The negotiations with Iran were hung up on their "right to enrich" uranium, which I don't think was unreasonable given that Israel enriches and produces bomb, but for some reason everyone is ok with that and its treated as an open secret. So, an appropriate counter to the right to enrich would have been to acknowledge, yes, Israel has the bomb, and that our official position is that "no, they do not have a right to enrich either."
An American statement to that effect would obligate it to work toward pressuring Israel toward nuclear disarmament (or, more realistically, nuclear arms stockpile reduction) and compliance with the spirit (even as Israel is not a member) of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. I believe it would also obligate the United States to not share ballistic missile or dual use technology with Israel and, more broadly, would signal the US stepping away from supporting the militaristic tendencies of the Israeli state. Which is something the United States should be doing anyway.
So, from Iran's perspective, putting acknowledgment of Israeli nukes on the table is absolutely a carrot. Its also something that Iranian moderates could have taken home to their constituency and said, "hey look, we got something out of this, its win-win" rather than "ok, we recognize things have sucked for years and so we said 'Uncle'."
Alternatively it would have torpedoed the deal on the U.S. side, damaged relations with Israel, done no good at all for counter proliferation, and also you seem to think Iran has some sort of elected leader responsible for its foreign affairs and nuclear program and it doesn't.
Damaging relations with Israel is a feature here, not a bug. The US has been joined at the hip with Israel for far too long, and the politics of Hillary Clinton and her husband are major reasons for that. Its not good for America and its not good for Israel, Palestine, or the entire Middle East.
Israel's interests are not America's interests, and there needs to be a departure from the axiom that they are.
The internet also claims that George Washington was a descendant of the Prophet.
https://kanzunqalam.com/2013/12/19/george-washington-genealogy/
Damaging relations with Israel is a feature here, not a bug.
I think this is oversimplistic, but even if true, in Hillary Clinton you have a rational individual to whom you can make this case who is basically an honest and sane politician to anyone who hasn't been cutting up and sniffing thirty years of GOP propaganda about her. No, you don't have an excuse to be "peevish" about the prospect. The alternative is an incompetent fascist nutcase and you know it. No, you don't have the luxury of pretending you don't know that and that you're somehow being asked to choose a lesser evil. That's extremely stupid. The left can stop being extremely stupid now. Bernie managed it, Liz Warren managed it: you can Suck. It. The. Actual. Fuck. Up.
281: Huh. That's... never heard that one before.
279 last: Iran isn't a democracy, but does have factions and constituencies, and the relatively moderate faction doing the negotiating would certainly have benefited from having more bones to throw to the hardliners. That said, I'm totally with Ajay. Although
Israel's interests are not America's interests, and there needs to be a departure from the axiom that they are
is also true.
Suck. It. The. Actual. Fuck. Up.
You know, I've been trying to avoid being drawn into your hostility here, but I'm done with that. Fuck you. I'll be voting for Roque "Rocky" De La Fuente, just to piss you off.
I don't disagree with 280, even though I'm literally posting this from a synagogue, but as ajay mentioned US support for Israel is driven primarily by American domestic politics and it's not going to change until that does. Clinton is more pro-Israel than Obama, but they're both operating in this context.
You know, I've been trying to avoid being drawn into your hostility here
Eat me, thou fustilarian. If a few harsh realities from me are supposedly enough to drive you over the edge, you were dishonest from the beginning.
ajay mentioned US support for Israel is driven primarily by American domestic politics and it's not going to change until that does.
This is true. There is an orthodoxy among American politicians that you can't question Israel. And I have long viewed the Clintons as some of the top enforcers of that orthodoxy. I don't think I'm wrong about that.
Obama may have tried to stray a bit on the Israeli-US relationship, but he hasn't gotten very far. I think that the fight to block Palestinian observer status in the UN General Assembly was the height of dickishness on the part of the United States. That was on Obama's watch, with Hillary Clinton standing right behind him. And pretty much the entire rest of the planet, save Israel, was on the other side of the argument.
If the leaders at the top can, you know, lead on this issue, I think that's pretty sad. Despite what the polls say, I think the public would actually be pretty malleable here. Its foreign policy - most people don't actually give a shit.
Roque "Rocky" De La Fuente
Is he not well or something? I know he's a decade younger than Clinton or Trump and that bad lighting can cause photos to look bad, but that looks like the kind of facial coloring that causes nurses to whisper.
Ah yes, harsh realities. The things you value are stupid: fall in line. With messaging like that, I can see why Hillary has been so dominant in the poles lately.
Ah yes, harsh realities Yes, like if your "values" can't survive a stiff breeze or a bit of harsh language, they're a sham. Like if your arguments are based on lies and distortions, they're worthless. Like if you insist on trying to undermine and stir up irrational hatred for a candidate you affect to be voting for, you're a liar. Those kinds of harsh realities.
The Clintons are not the "top enforcers" of the pro-Likud orthodoxy. For God's sake, do you not remember what happened in Bill Clinton's first term? He managed to persuade an Israeli prime minister to shake hands on camera with Yasser Arafat while agreeing to hand over large parts of the West Bank, and thus sign his own death warrant. He arranged a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. Pro Israel sentiment is virtually a permanently existing factor of the US strategic landscape. It dominated Congress while Bill Clinton was still a first term Governor. I know this and I live three thousand miles away from your country. How can you not know it?
Also voting for X just to piss someone else off is the act of a petulant child.
It's the central appeal of Trump. We're the Petulant Nation.
On the third-party thing, 276 basically matches my experience, including the part about the importance of the infrastructure a major party can bring to local races.
One interesting trend we've been seeing recently in Alaska is independents running as the de facto Democratic candidates in certain races, which sometimes allows them to access some of that infrastructure without officially affiliating with the party. Sometimes they even win. I'm trying to think through how something like this could work as an alternative to a third party as a way for disaffected lefties to make their message heard, but to be honest I'm not coming up with anything that's likely to actually work. A better alternative is New York's system where minor parties can endorse major party candidates and get credit for some of their votes.
294: anecdotally it was also a lot of the appeal of Brexit. People really hated Guardian-readers and wanted at all costs to make them angry.
My take, not this-conversation-specific: For some reason the fact that this particular election has made it especially hard for people to jerk off to some fantasy idea of their being revolutionary white male working class has really brought the grossness and shittiness out of the woodwork. "You fail to allow me to treat politics as the particular fantasy I have, therefore I hate you" seems to be a dominant theme.
Running an election where the battle is so clearly "sane reality vs delusional nightmare-world" has really brought home how much of the "left" is just a desire to reject "sane reality" with some fantasy universe (the details of the fantasy often vary) and this the hardest thing for them to do is to cast a vote that fucks with their inner game of fantasy political justice.
Running an election where the battle is so clearly "sane reality vs delusional nightmare-world" has really brought home how much of the "left" is just a desire to reject "sane reality" with some fantasy universe (the details of the fantasy often vary) and this the hardest thing for them to do is to cast a vote that fucks with their inner game of fantasy political justice.
True of the right too, of course, except that they actually do get to vote for their insane fantasy universe. Which is why it's so terrifying.
But it sounds really freeing. That's why I'm voting for Trump.
270: I was too belligerent and absolutist, but while there may be tactical victories gained through local third party candidacies a significant leftist third party would be disastrous. There is no space for one except as a spoiler.
The fascists have had great success molding the Republican Party through primaries and local elections. Why not adopt their tactics?
"You fail to allow me to treat politics as the particular fantasy I have, therefore I hate you" seems to be a dominant theme.
Quite. Although it has a rather familiar resonance with the '68 election and Hubert Humphrey.
Apropos this: You know, the funniest part of this is that, in every case, anybody I have heard express this sentiment is also a person who has complained bitterly and incessantly about this country for the past eight years.
Good column by Shaun King laying this out: To be white and frustrated with this country is somehow patriotic, but if you're black and frustrated then you're a traitor
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