"Andy crawled to school through five hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can't even imagine, or maybe I just don't want to. Five hundred yards... that's the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile."
A few tweets later he pointed out there was a Vox explainer on that exact topic.
Maybe that will be the subject of Colson Whitehead's next novel.
Statements like this are bad faith attempts to imply the subject is incoherent or nonexistent, under the cover of intellectual honesty. Except when I do it. I'm completely sincere in my admissions of ignorance and incomprehension.
4: It really is about the shame. "It just occurred to me that while I've been seeing this phrase forever, I know nothing about it. Where should I be looking to get up to speed?" doesn't belittle the subject.
The way he put it, though, sounds exactly like what you said.
4: I don't think so in this case. I think that Matt thought (as LB said) that it was cute to admit that he didn't know rather than just find out.
On something substantial and on-topic, I was struck recently by how applicable to current problems the Peelian Principles still are.
To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
And our popular media has really been falling down on #8.
Reason #733 why Twitter sucks. A thought pops into your head while reading something else? Could find out more about it in 90 seconds, but that's plenty of time to write a tweet before you've figured it out!
8: I knew those, but hadn't looked at the wording for a while. I have no idea of the US history with respect to the Peelian principles -- whether there's anything similar we've ever adopted here.
Because wow would that be an improvement on how US policing seems to be run.
I think the U.S. one ended with "JK. We'll hire Irishmen and give them clubs."
As of a month ago, I don't have any more relatives serving as police officers. At least none close enough that I know what they do for living.
Hm. Peel's Metropolitan Police Act dates to 1829. According to this, the first professional police departments in the US (as opposed to old-style watches) date to 1838 for Boston, 1845 for NYC, etc. So it certainly sounds like it was in imitation, in the North at least.
Oh, definitely, Peel is the innovator and the concept of policing in the US comes from his work. But I don't know to what extent US departments have every explicitly adopted those principles. Which really are fantastic -- the 'police are the public' is wonderful, as is the principle of minimal force.
It could also be a good bridge with the growing number of activists arguing for disinvestment in police, basically giving the current institutions up as a bad job and looking for alternative means of conflict resolution. I think they would like an actually Peelian police force* in communities of color!
*Service. (Hot Fuzz calling!)
It was FANTASTIC. And very popular with every policemanofficer I know.
there was a Vox explainer on that exact topic
A great Twitter moment. No one reads Vox!
Wow, if anyone proposed anything like 8 as policy they'd be immediately attacked as anti-police, that dipshit from the NY police union would be on TV moaning about endangering police lives, etc.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if some or many US police departments have the Peelian principles somewhere in their regulations. There are a lot of US departments, and Peel is a big part of the history of policing. It's just not the public face they present these days.
You can certainly catch echoes of Peelian principles in Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol.
The Buggles' other songs never had the popularity of their one hit.
I NEVER WONDER TO SEE MEN IGNORANT, BUT I OFTEN WONDER TO SEE THEM CONFESSING IT ON FUCKING TWITTER.
I had to Google that they sang "Video Killed the Radio Star." I guess I knew that whoever sang that song had a name, but I never knew it.
Anyway, the link in the OP is now dead. I'm assuming that means LB hurt Matt's feelings.
I blame FaceBook. No one reads blogs anymore.
No one reads Vox!
Teasing aside, I just yesterday saw somebody tweet media reach numbers* for a half dozen platforms, and Vox was more or less tied for #1 among (IIRC) Buzzfeed (News?), 538, and a few others. Point being, whatever their IRL reach, they do, in fact, seem to be doing well wrt their peers.
*no idea what the metric was, but I assume it's somewhat meaningful for apples-to-apples comparisons.
They're not terrible in their genre. I don't read them regularly, but I will occasionally have a Yglesias moment and realize that I have no idea what's going on with something current, and there's often a Vox explainer that has enough background that I can make sense of the rest of the coverage.
To the OP, I in fact saw that tweet in the momentary gap before he tweeted the link to the Vox explainer, and my first thought, other than WTF, Matt?, was, "Surely Vox has an explainer for this."
In related news, I actually signed up for Twitter today. I had almost literally never looked at it before the election*, but I took a complete news/blog break for weeks/months after Nov 8, and I only ever got back to reading a few of the blogs I had been. But I did start following Kendzior, and then Matt (mostly because I enjoyed that he would respond to every single one of Ryan's BS tweets about GOP ideas with some variation of "to slash healthcare for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich"), and then other people caught my eye, but it's a pain to follow lots of people on Twitter if you aren't on yourself. I don't really plan to use it to say anything, but we'll see.
*one exception: when Krugman more or less abandoned his blog and got active on Twitter. But that's a fairly new development anyway.
30: I look at them once a day, but I doubt I average even one article a day.
tweet media reach
[Vomits blood, black bile and gall.]
21: they should read them out loud to the assembled coppers at the start of every shift, like they used to do in the Navy with the Articles of War, so no one can ever claim ignorance.
Booker's response tweet was good.
Can someone explain blocking on Twitter? Even if you're blocked you can still browse anonymously and see everything a person said, right? It's all still public. So you can't send someone DMs, whatever. The other thing I'd assume it would be useful for- preventing you from responding to someone and having others see it as a response instead of just a free floating tweet- doesn't even seem to be one of the features. I see people in response threads all the time complaining how they were just blocked by the originator of the thread.
I mean, I'm not terribly shocked that Twitter sucks balls at preventing harassment, but why does everyone act like it's such a big deal?
When the revolution comes, bloggers who abandoned their blogs for Twitter will be first against the wall.
I actually signed up for Twitter today
My one piece of advice on choosing people to follow is to pick people who post cool stuff but don't chit-chat. The latter make the feed unreadable for me. Chris Hayes: smart guy, posts some cool stuff, but is constantly responding to people and having discussions. I don't care! So I dropped him. I also followed Kendzior for a while, but there were a couple of instances where I thought she was stretching the truth a bit, so I stopped following her too. The best people to follow themselves follow a bunch of people and pick interesting things to retweet. Farhad Manjoo says a lot of dumb shit, but he seems to follow the whole world, and posts good links. Daniel Kay Hertz regularly posts very neat urban planning stuff. And Ed Yong is good for science. I'm sure there's a whole architecture twitter community, too.
But I don't know to what extent US departments have every explicitly adopted those principles. Which really are fantastic...as is the principle of minimal force.
You mean like if they put it specifically in a section of the patrol guide titled "force guidelines"?
It could also be a good bridge with the growing number of activists arguing for disinvestment in police
Fuck those idiots. Like the libertarians, I'm still waiting for them to provide a real example of a city without a govt sponsored police force where order is maintained by the drum circle instead of the local warlord or mafia.
God, why did I click on that Yglesias link? I was at least was amused that he's turning into Price the drug dealer.
Another thing about the dumbness of this tweet is that the phrase school-to-prison pipeline is nearly self-explanatory. I mean, maybe you can't speculate about the exact forces that would take a kid into the prison system, but schools and prisons both serve people, and so a pipeline from one to the other will be...I mean...
42 is a thought that occurred to me as well. This is really not that complicated or unintuitive a concept.
Yes. Sociologists (if that's where this comes from) are usually much shittier at naming stuff.
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Further to our recent discussion of the political affinities of Portuguese-Americans, it turns out Devin Nunes is of Azorean heritage.
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Almost everyone I've blocked on twitter I've never interacted with. I've blocked a bunch of politicians and political commentators as a way to keep them from getting quoted or retweeted into my timeline. I could mute, and sometimes do that instead, but it's usually more satisfying to block, especially when they're in the presidential administration or Congress.
The result is that when the president tweets and people quote him to talk about how dumb or wrong or evil he is, I just see "this tweet is not available," and when people retweet him I don't see him at all.
re: 24
Saying this for pure name dropping reasons, I was at his studio -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookend_Recording_Studios -- a few years ago when friend's band were recording there, and saw him in the 'green room' after a gig just a few months ago. He looks much the same, except grey. I imagine, after his production career, he has more money than god.
Speaking of Twitter, it look's like Comey might have been outed.
47 He may have more money than god but he's still a poor guy. The bb gun story. Oof.
Matt Taibbi's twitter has been outstanding the last 24 hours. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi
We seem to have different definitions of amazing.
39: Nothing wrong with those guidelines that I can see offhand, but it's a little different having a section in the refs from treating the same concept as a fundamental principle underlying what it means to be a police force.
I also followed Kendzior and then stopped for the same reason.
I have serious reservations about Kendzior so I don't follow and never retweet her stuff. Same thing though for different reasons with the likes of David Frum though he too has been excellent on a lot of Trump stuff.
My highlight of the Eric Garland profile is that Garland, Kendzior and Mensch are lie buddies. They ostensibly have little in common but it's the same grift.
...are like buddies...
There's some excellent science/natural history twitter folks if you're interested in snakes, spiders, pseudopenii, weasels that look like non-weasels and dinosaurs trash-talking.
Who am I kidding, everyone will be interested.
@AlongsideWild @AnneWHilborn @AsiaMurphy @SUEtheTrex
I can't find the spider lady at the moment but she does a 'black widow or not' spider evaluation. There's also Dam or not, Whose carcass is this, and Puma or not depending on the day.
I also follow the endless screaming bot which is so great and appropriate these days.
Yeah, on board with 42. The only thing I can remotely imagine is that he thought it must somehow be more complicated than it sounds. Which isn't an excuse, it's just the only way I can make sense of it. I mean, it would be like asking "What's an afterparty anyway?" It's almost literally self-explanatory.
56: That actually sounds like BS to me. AFAICR, she hasn't retweeted or in any other way promoted Garland in weeks, and I only remember* one retweet since January. Maybe she was just embarrassed by the whole "game theory" thing, but the claim in that article doesn't square with reality. There are at least 10 writers who show up regularly, and he isn't one.
And of course that article's snide tone about how ridiculous it is to believe in Russian conspiracies looks incredibly bad 24 hours later. I don't actually know why anyone who's been dismissive of Putin/Trump should be listened to about anything anymore.
*which I remember because I noticed it, because he wasn't showing up in her feed anymore
Obviously a party for people in the back of the boat.
61: The implication is of disbelief, which is what makes it such a pissoff. That is, if you say 'afterparty', it's obvious what it is and that it's something that might or might not happen for any event.
For 'school-to-prison pipeline', he's not implicitly asking 'what does that even mean?' He's asking 'does that really happen?'
Or, to be slightly fairer, saying "I had no idea that sort of thing happened. Who knew?" Ignorance, rather than disbelief. But still irksome.
Maybe he was thinking of Keystone.
63-64: He's always like that, not just this one time.
63-64: He's always like that, not just this one time.
63-64: He's always like that, not just this one time.
That's rather Trumpian. Who knew healthcare was complicated? Who knew legislative processes were complicated? If you aren't aware of it then it can't be widely known. Maybe it's a New Yorker trait.
64: I actually didn't read it that way, despite the fact that 66 & 68 are basically correct (67 is crap, though). Aside from the phrasing not reading that way to me*, it's not one of his hobby-horses (so I wouldn't really expect him to be making a dickish sarcastic point the way he does about, say, zoning or professional licensing), and then the follow-up link to the Vox explainer doesn't make any sense if that's what he was doing.
BTW, I should be clear that I agree he was being dismissive and ridiculous; I just don't read it as remotely the same as when he, frex, links to a cross-burning story and mentions "economic anxiety".
*that is, his faux-naivety is usually, well, more naively phrased than that, without the intro/disclaimer. Maybe. I can't say that I've analyzed his syntax through the years.
I don't think it's all that self-explanatory. The metaphor of a pipeline makes it sound to me like it's referring to a specific route or means by which students leave school and go to prison, but I'm not sure that it's intended literally and maybe it's referring to many different ways that students leave school and end up in prison? (Like a several different school-to-prison pipelines and tankers...) If you drop out of school or graduate before you end up in prison are you still part of the school-to-prison pipeline? Is the point that there's specific ways that schools are directing students towards going to prison? Or is it a failure of omission where schools are failing to equip students to avoid prison?
I'm not going to brag about my ignorance because I should know, but in point-of-fact I don't think I know what the school-to-prison pipeline is. I did read the Vox explainer, but it didn't really help me that much.
I don't think Yiggles get the "I'm a mathematician so what do you expect" waiver.
More specifically, does the school-to-prison pipeline refer to something more specific than that the high-risk age for crime is about the same as the age that people finish school?
72: It's specifically school discipline leading directly into the criminal justice system. So specific ways schools are directing students toward going to prison.
It's not that the phrase is completely and perfectly self-explanatory, but it does give you enough information to arrive at a couple of plausible guesses, one of which was right. And you don't even write about public policy.
Tell me about this thing you humans call "analogies."
I still have some weird exasperated fondness for him, but that tweet is really not out of character. Matt, if you're lurking right now, sorry, and also, please do better.
but that tweet is really not out of character
This I won't dispute.
Maybe it's because I arrived here after he left, but I've never understood why people have any time for Yglesias. I guess that's not entirely fair. He says mean things about Republicans, and that's not nothing. But it's also not much. He's a lazy commentator, and I don't think I've ever learned anything from reading him. Even Klein -- spit when you say his name -- at one point took the time to master the details of healthcare policy (and nothing else, other than self-promotion, ever again).
