"Republican leadership pull the trigger" - what does this actually mean? At present, Donald Trump has 2443 pledged delegates to the Republican National Convention. 1276 votes are required to win the nomination. The convention is in one month.
How is that situation going to change?
You could introduce a rule saying "delegates can vote for whoever they want" but that was tried last time and failed, and even if you tried it again and got it through, a lot of them might still vote for Trump. You could introduce a rule to the Rule Committee saying "Donald Trump may not be nominated under any circumstances" but then you have to get that past a majority of the committee (which has two members from each state).
If they did that maybe he'd send troops to the RNC.
The Republican leadership won't flip. As Jeff Sessions has just demonstrated, Trump can primary every one of them from the right, and all he needs to do that is Twitter.
It's Trump's party There's not other leadership.
3 & 4 have it right. I think it is highly questionable that Pence would pull more votes than trump, especially if it was via some Republican party internal "coup." But they won't anyway.
5 me. The interview isn't close to bizarre enough.
My nightmare is the probably inevitable tightening and the affluent white people deciding their 401ks will do better under Trump and a bunch of other bizarro unpredictable shit.
A country that elected Trump in the first place cannot be trusted to get anything right.
Biden is not my ideal president, but I've come around to the idea that he's the ideal candidate for the moment. (I'm not going to count my chickens or anything, of course.)
I was specifically thinking of the 25th amendment. If he's certifiably demented the number of pledged delegates to the convention is irrelevant: that only matters, when, as now, he is uncertifiably demented.
I've been on zoom calls or otherwise looking at screens for three hours with hardly a break. My brain is pureed.
Fox and Barr seem most relevant to me. Voter suppression, lies, will that be enough for a minority party to steal the US election?
11: He's not certifiably demented. He won a contest.
11: that requires the VP, and a majority of either a) the Cabinet or b) some other body as per a law passed by Congress, to certify incapacity.
That's never going to happen.
b) is impossible anyway because if Congress tries to pass a law changing the rules, it will be vetoed (and the veto cannot be overturned) even if it gets through the Senate (which it will not). So it's a), the VP and a majority of the Cabinet - eight of them.
Congress doesn't get a look in until after he's been removed and has written to them saying that he's fine now and wants to go back.
The wife has become totally convinced that Trump will hold power by means of what amounts to a military coup. If he can't "win" the election by (1) creating what amounts to a civil war inside the largest cities and (2) cheating if that doesn't work.
This is disturbing because she's usually not this worked up about things.
Others have pointed out the procedural and political issues that keep Republicans from rebelling. But the other thing that decent-minded liberals have a hard time understanding is that the Republican leadership likes the guy.
Stupid, crazy and evil is the Republican brand -- and has been at least since Reagan. It's what the rank-and-file demands, and what the leadership loves to provide. Deep in their heart-of-hearts, very few Republicans are unhappy about Portland. You know what guys like Lindsay Graham want, policy-wise? They want to bomb Iran.
Even now, it's not clear to me that the actual impact of Trump is worse than that of GW Bush, though god knows Trump is trying. And as much appropriate hand-wringing as has been done about fascist police and wildly incompetent pandemic response, if you had told me in 2016 that this is where we'd be, I'd say my worst fears were not realized (yet). I mean, do you know why Trump hasn't started a massive war? I don't.
My guess is probably the same as Graham's: Trump is too scattered and gutless for a project like that.
So is this interview bizarre enough to stand out from other things he does?
No. Just no. I don't even see a counter-argument. This is just another routine outrage, and it's already mostly forgotten.
16. I'm starting to genuinely worry. Biden will win in November, but it's hard to imagine that November through January will be orderly and peaceful. Remember when Obama nominated Merrick Garland in accordance with the laws and rules of our government, and the Republican Senate simply refused to to follow those laws and rules, and the country just caved? In January the stakes will be even higher.
The wife has become totally convinced that Trump will hold power by means of what amounts to a military coup.
If it helps, Unfogged has predicted three out of the past zero US military coups.
I am pretty sure that Trump would do anything in the Nov-Jan period and Homeland Security forces would go along with it. Especially since the alternative for Trump is facing criminal prosecution. But I don't get how it lets him stay in office.
Like, in Portland right now, the Feds are doing illegal shit and kidnapping people. I assume Trump would want to ramp this up. But he's getting tons of pushback, but aside from that, how does it achieve the goal of holding power? They're there, but they aren't the mayor. They aren't controlling Oregon. They aren't persuading anyone. In some ways, they have the inverse problem of demonstrators. They can do all the things, but in the end, it is too diffuse to achieve an end.
The pushback matters. They're drawing people out into the streets instead of shutting the streets down. They're starting to beat up the parts of the population that aren't thought of as fair game for beating up. Ultimately they can't confine everyone.
I just don't see how force (at the level they can apply if the armed forces don't participate) can apply pressure that changes things like who the elected officials in the county are, and who would do the actual swearing in of Biden, and who wields the symbolic power. They can bully people in the streets, but how that turns into 'Trump stays in power' isn't clear to me.
20.1: How would people react if the day after winning the election Biden promises to pardon Trump?
Or maybe he needs to make the offer in private -- "if you leave office like a good boy, then I'll give you a pardon".
Military leadership is quite anti-Trump, if there's a coup it'll be by the police, ICE, etc.
20.1: How would people react if the day after winning the election Biden promises to pardon Trump?
I, personally, would react badly. I understand the potential utility; I also think it sets a bad precedent and it would be particularly galling in this case when Trump has gone to the Supreme Court arguing that and judicial actions against the president must wait until they leave office, to follow up with, "and not after leaving office either."
Setting a precedent?
I would be incensed. I deeply believe that letting white-collar criminals get off without punishment is how we arrived here. It is one of the things I'm still mad at Obama for.
20. No coup necessary. The armed uniformed amateurs are for television footage to keep his people enthusiastic, footage tear-gassing regular people won't make it onto fox.
Stealing and suppressing the vote can be done in closed rooms, remains to be seen if it'll work. I sure hope not.
20: Are they going to successfully frighten the suburbs into voting Republican? That's the thing that worries me. But at the same time, Trump is going to keep on fucking up pandemic response and the school reopening is going to be a terrible disaster and I kind of hope that those white suburbanites who are not in fact in the tank for Trump already are going to see whatever chaos in the cities as part of the general Trump fuck-ups.
I just don't understand why people are not desperate to vote him out - I mean, why everyone isn't desperate to vote him out. The rest of the rich world is starting to recover from the pandemic but there is literally no end in sight here in the US and there won't be an end until we have a coordinated response from the entity that actually prints the money. We're going to go on with the deaths and the impoverishment and the slow decay of just about everything until the federal government does what the rest of the rich world has done. I don't understand why people aren't seeing, eg, Scotland and Czechoslovakia and so on returning to a guarded normal and getting desperate for that here.
Trump is a coward who backs down if there is resistance, and who doesn't really like being president anyway. He will bitch and moan, excessively, but he will go.
We ARE desperate to vote him out. There is almost no Biden enthusiasm, but there is fervent Not-Trump enthusiasm. That alone is getting Not-Trump fifteen point leads in national polls.
27. I think many people in the US do not believe life outside their subdivision/rural settlement is real. Except for Disneyland and golf courses. Foreign news from places like the coasts or the city is irrelevant to their tough-minded empiricism; anyone who speaks of things that are confusing is lying. It's a simple approach, but a durable one. I don't have an answer for how to reach them, but they need a path back to sanity if there's to be any hope for a future here.
Like, in Portland right now, the Feds are doing illegal shit and kidnapping people.
They're really not. The secret police kidnapping talk is pure propaganda. They're federal units defending a federal building. They have shoulder patches with department and an ID number similar to our badge numbers.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdaDp3lXgAAO75X?format=jpg&name=large
Grabbing instigators once they're away from the crowd is a standard tactic. I've done a bunch of overtime the last couple months in that exact role, a mobile arrest team in an unmarked van. We grab them up and get them out of there before a crowd can form and take them to a designated processing area for the arrest and booking.
Why would a crowd take them for processing?
GOP have only been rewarded for doubling down for decades now. If they stay with Trump through thick and thin, they can lose, lick their wounds, pretend to have a deficit-hawk come-to-Jesus moment once he's out of the picture, and come roaring back later with more deniability. So not much risk for those at the top, however 2020 ends.
Not to say that this is the plan. If Trump started indiscriminately vanning activists and protesters nationwide, with the implicit threat that elected politicians are next, and extended this new power to barefacedly take over the voting machinery, they'd stand by just as placidly.
I'm not sure they have been rewarded for doubling down for decades. There is at least one model, here in California, where they lost credibility and have never regained it. Here, they are still bottoming out and don't know how to return. That is also a potential outcome, if you use the rule that Trump destroys everything he touches. There may still be people successfully campaigning on "my opponent was a Trump supporter" in 2024 and 2025.
Utah state level makes 'instigation' a crime? What are the elements that make it distinct from leading a protest?
33: Godamnit. But yeah, but getting them out quick helps avoid situations like this one, which features Natilo's ex con wheelchair guy who punches a cop in the face and after he's arrested they find a loaded gun in his backpack.
https://twitter.com/LAPDHQ/status/1284891644454596608
35: True; but still at the nationwide level and in the vast majority of states. I think they're aware of the potential to bottom out California-style but downrate the risk.
To your 2024 scenario, I'd note even the CA GOP steadfastly refused to move to the center even as they kept losing and losing. Organizationally and culturally committed, I suppose. A couple of them gave it a go - Mayes, Maienschein - and ended up leaving the party.
Grabbing instigators once they're away from the crowd is a standard tactic. I've done a bunch of overtime the last couple months in that exact role, a mobile arrest team in an unmarked van.
1) Sure, I can see the practical reasons why you'd do that.
2) That's still deeply creepy. Can you understand why people would want to make sure that departments were being _very_ careful about how they used those sorts of tactics?
3) Just because it could be legal if the Feds were being careful, are you completely sure that everything they've done is legal? For example, the original reports said that the officers didn't show department & ID.
36: I mean instigators of violence. Rock and brick throwers, launching fireworks at the police line, etc. On our second night there was a young guy chucking a lot of rocks. He wandered away from the main crowd and my team scooped him up (well, after a brief chase into a parking structure). Loaded Beretta .380 in his pocket.
39.2: Absolutely.
39.3: They definitely could be pulling questionable moves. It's the feds. Like remember in the Bundy standoff when the FBI guy who opened fire just picked up his shells and left without telling the sheriff he was one of the shooters? Shady stuff.
I'm sure they do downrate the risk. Trump performed magic for them in 2016 and just as much as the Democrats learned that unexpected losses are absolutely inevitable and they should freak out forever, Republicans learned that Trump does magic as an underdog. But new information is coming in November, and we'll see who was right. Even if they do lose this, I don't expect them to become more mainstream, not for another many losing elections. In CA, we're what, ten years out from Brown's election and Dem supermajorities? No sign of CA Republican resurgence yet, and Trump knocked it backed even farther.
I would like to think that top Republicans do have some personal stakes. I am sure Mitch McConnell would take it very hard to no longer be majority leader. I absolutely wish for a deep anti-corruption cleanse, perhaps led by Warren. Or someone with the equivalent fire.
Yes, I don't think a CA-style cratering is a prelude to resurgence. I am still worried we're going to go through the cycle at least once more at the national level.
32, 41: So it's pure propaganda, but you have no reason to believe that the federal officers are obeying the law. Are you even listening to yourself?
Also, the stories that have been reported on, the people taken off the streets haven't been ultimately charged with anything. This seems pretty distinct from your description of quietly arresting someone who had been observed committing a crime.
If, as looks very likely, Biden wins, I'm pretty curious about 2022. Bitecofer says there is always a backlash against the party in charge in the next election. I am wondering how much the new organizations (Indivisible, Swing Left, all those women in their 50's and 60's who have dedicated their retirements to fighting Trump within the system and are doing the grinding electoral work) can tamp down that electoral backlash. Seems to me that will be even more telling than the Not-Trump enthusiasm that's out there now.
There's videos of this stuff. It's the peaceful protesters who are getting attacked.
Haven't you been listening? They only look nonviolent when anyone's filming. When the cameras are off they're all committing super dangerous crimes.
That's when the elves make all the shoes that I find every morning.
44: Do you even read? The question was can I be sure everything they've done is legal. Of course I can't know that.
We don't know they won't get charged, just that they were detained and ID'd. Not uncommon to release pending the charges getting screened, especially in a jurisdiction where almost no one is getting held on bail.
An officer in Detroit just got charged for shooting rubber bullets at journalists with no possible provocation. I wonder how many people were similarly shot but can't prove anything because there didn't happen to be clear video?
If you don't know any more than the reporters on the scene about what's going on, where do you get off calling the reporting "pure propaganda"?
51: They're framing uniformed feds with patches ID'ing both themselves and their departments executing a totally standard arrest technique as "secret police kidnapping civilians". That's not a good faith description, that's propaganda to whip up hysteria.
Except for the bit about the officers being individually identified, which CPB has confirmed they weren't: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/17/portland-protests-federal-arrests/
"The CBP agents identified themselves and were wearing CBP insignia during the encounter," CBP said in its statement. "The names of the agents were not displayed due to recent doxing incidents against law enforcement personnel who serve and protect our country."
Seriously, you're looking at video of these animals clubbing someone who was peacefully talking to them until his bones broke, critiquing them for not hitting him harder, and expecting people to listen to you about how anyone who says anything unusual is happening is making things up?
53: It's basically a badge number. It's an identifier. They're not making up that doxing stuff. We're doing the exact same thing out here. Having a bunch of these guys showing up to officer's houses is a recipe for violence.
54: I expect you to listen to nothing. Aggressive ignorance is all you bring to this topic, as usual. I've wasted enough time today.
So, there's an identifier badge which you're sure all the officers were wearing, it's just not the kind of identifier that would let any member of the public find out who they were because that wouldn't be safe for them. That sure is a special kind of ID.
They definitely could be pulling questionable moves. It's the feds.
Specifically, it's the border patrol. There is simply no legitimate explanation for their activity in Portland. If you don't like "kidnapping," what would you call it when someone is removed from the streets by an illegitimate paramilitary force infiltrating a city over the objections of its duly elected representatives?
It's basically a badge number. It's an identifier.
You surely understand that the victims aren't taking down these "badge numbers." Nobody can be deluded enough to think that these "identifiers" provide any kind of accountability.
Check it out, the chair of the history department at Lewis and Clark in Portland got shot in the face by these goons: https://twitter.com/elliottyoungpdx/status/1285628351957348352?s=21
I mean, probably she was instigating something.
These kind of conversations don't bode well for a mayor ordering the police to stop federal agents from people-snatching on city property. Which I suppose is fine, because I might have to re-think my position on the police, if there were an even worse bad guy and the police stood against them. Fortunately, from the sound of Gswift, I won't be encountering any of that kind of dissonance.
By city property, I mean non-federal property within city limits.
The Oregon AG's lawsuit with particulars, if anyone is curious.
Why don't you stop wasting anyone's time by fucking off forever?
Unpleasant though it is to listen to, I do feel as if I know a lot more about police sentiments from having gswift comment here. He wasn't a Trump voter in 2016, used to be a pretty liberal guy, and works in what's reportedly an unusually professional and nonbrutal force by US standards. So, as cops go, he's probably in the segment most likely to be able to appreciate law enforcement wrongdoing as a real problem.
And even given that, it's all apologetics and if you only knew what I know about policing, you'd see that this is all fine. Which means that I have no hope for decent policing in the US without something that completely destroys the current culture and builds a new one from the ground up -- I just don't believe there's any core of decency left in the profession.
Sorry not sorry, no ID, not lawful. This is pretty basic stuff. Any fool can drum up a uniform-like thing; the badge and the accountability is the fucking point.
On another note: anyone else thinking that it's weird that Trump is bragging that he passed a dementia test? I admit I don't quite get the context here -- is this something all Presidents do? All over-70s? But if I were worried enough about my dad to have the doctor test for dementia, the fact that he could identify what an elephant was wouldn't eliminate the underlying worry that made me seek out the doctor in the first place.
Trump still doesn't seem to understand that it's a dementia test, which, yeah, is worrying regardless of the test results.
To put it mildly, yes. I don't know if he's literally demented, but wow is he strange.
Which means that I have no hope for decent policing in the US without something that completely destroys the current culture and builds a new one from the ground up
Yeah. That's it. The culture -- country-wide -- has decayed to the point where there's really no salvaging it. You look at the police unions standing up proudly for lawlessness, or the Buffalo cops unanimously expressing their support for brutalizing an old man, and in the end, you have to acknowledge that it's just the sea in which all cops swim. To them, it's just the way the world is. It's not recognizable as a problem, so there is no hope of solving it internally.
66: Yes, it's weird. However, if we're talking about the right test and if he really did pass it, it has more complex stuff than identifying an elephant; reshuffling of concepts, short-term memory, alertness, etc. It seems to have been validated as a test.
Wouldn't mean there are no other problems. He seems to have a whole host of idiosyncratic personality issues, none of them necessarily clinical. In this case, there's the part that he can never help bragging more than he can breathing, so by extension anything he talks about having done he must have done fantastically.
70: Yes, yes. "Elephant" was just shorthand for "diagnostic test for dementia", which, unless it's part of an ordinary work-up, doesn't seem like a good thing to be having to take, even if he passed.
9: How so? I think almost anyone else would be better. And he's probably committed sexual assault. He should drop out.
My guess is that he is the "perfect candidate for this moment" because he's so boring that he can't be smeared. He's too well known for too long for attacks to feel plausible to the electorate.
I don't like him either but he is doing a fine job of being Not Trump and that is clearly working in the polls.
71: I agree that something is seriously wrong with him; I just don't see that it's necessarily a dementia-adjacent disorder, or even something clinically diagnosable. Not sure if that's what you were implying.
His niece in her book (leaked PDF) suggests various possibilities, including antisocial personality disorder, dependent personality disorder, and even some kind of learning disability, but concludes "Donald's pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he'll never sit for."
You can have a fair bit of cognitive decline and still pass that test.
Especially if you like elephants and counting backwards.
73 is completely stupid. I also was lamenting having Biden as the candidate in February because I wanted someone who could communicate that although the economy seems good, actually Trump is bad and most people aren't in a good position and we could be doing better. Also because I didn't think he had the stamina to campaign all over the place without making gaffes and seeming frail and having Trump make fun of him for being confused. Also to a lesser extent, because there were going to be Republican ratfucking operations to demoralize young ethnic minorities with stories from the 70s and 80s like they did to Hillary with "superpredators", and operations to convince people like yourself that he and Trump are equally bad because of the Tara Reade story. Amazingly almost none of that matters now. The virus and Trump dooming us to mass death and economic catastrophe unmatched in any country we think of as our peers has changed everything.
Pretty interesting how the usual suspect rolls in, makes his usual spate of condescending, impossible to verify, and/or factually incorrect claims, and flounces out whenever this topic comes up.
CW: sexual violence
...
Idk if we've talked about it here but the case from a couple of weeks back where the police union doxxed a council member and her duplex neighbor was raped (plausibly in a case of mistaken identity) and told it was to teach her a lesson...
Burn the police departments to the ground.
Yeah. That's it. The culture -- country-wide -- has decayed to the point where there's really no salvaging it. You look at the police unions standing up proudly for lawlessness, or the Buffalo cops unanimously expressing their support for brutalizing an old man, and in the end, you have to acknowledge that it's just the sea in which all cops swim. To them, it's just the way the world is. It's not recognizable as a problem, so there is no hope of solving it internally.
How about the newest clever scheme, the Minneapolis cops deciding they can all claim to have PTSD and go on disability to own the libs.
53: It's basically a badge number. It's an identifier. They're not making up that doxing stuff. We're doing the exact same thing out here. Having a bunch of these guys showing up to officer's houses is a recipe for violence.
I think if they got into fights with people who show up threateningly on their property they would get more sympathy than getting into fights with random activists yelling at them in public. Has that been happening?
They aren't making up the doxing stuff, but Tucker Carlson is.
75: my point was just that I don't know what prompted the dementia test. If I were to suggest my parents needed one, it would because I or someone close to them were worried about symptoms. So, is someone close to Trump worried, or is this a standard test or a political move? "Don't worry my doc says I'm not crazy" used to be a suboptimal look.
AIMHMHB, when my dad took his last cognitive test, he got the one where they ask you who the president is. Dad's response was "I think it was a mistake but they went with this guy Trump."
78: Why does none of that matter now? Certainly it matters less, but what makes you think a different candidate wouldn't do better in November? (Also, for the record, and since it isn't clear in your comment whether you think I do, I don't think he's as bad as Trump.)
Here's an informative twitter thread, discussing a press conference given by Kris Cline, Deputy Director of the Federal Protection Service, about vÃdeo of a protestor being taken away in an unmarked van by federal officers: https://twitter.com/andrewmcrespo/status/1285738001004482561?s=21
The tl:dr is that contrary to gswift's confident assertions, they didn't have probable cause to think he'd done anything. They wanted to question him about people he was standing near. Hot constitutional tip: that's not a basis for a legal arrest.
It's basically a badge number. It's an identifier. They're not making up that doxing stuff. We're doing the exact same thing out here.
"We aren't hiding our identities! Plus, we're right to hide our identities."
I wish we'd either ban gswift or have a norm of not responding to him. I find it tedious how every police-adjacent conversation gets derailed when he shows up
88: word. It looks to me like things are leaning harder toward banning, but someone has to make it happen.
As I said in 63, I find him genuinely informative to have commenting. I'm a lot readier, as a temperamentally conservative middle class person, to accept that something transformatively drastic enough that 'abolition' is a fair description of it has to happen to American policing because I've heard his reactions on issues relating to law enforcement wrongdoing.
And I'm generally very, very slow to think banning is necessary. Gswift's presence doesn't, I think, make conversations impossible that would be happening in his absence. Governance of this blog is not any kind of organized thing, and someone else with keys to the front page might be closer to banning him than I am, but I'm not close to banning him.
For Christ's sake let's not have the gswift argument again.
Here's something else to worry about. A GP circular from Hong Kong:
UPDATED ADVICE FOR OUR PATIENTS : July 22 2020
,
As we are sure you are all well aware there has been a resurgence of locally transmitted and imported cases with 700 cases in the last two weeks and a further 200 local cases in the past three days.
We suspect but as yet have no confirmation that the increase in cases may be related to a mutation making Covid-19 more contagious increasing its RO from 2 to 4
They might be talking about the D614 to G614 mutation. G614 is the dominant strain outside Asia and seems to be much more contagious (though not more deadly), but I think the original D614 remained dominant in China at least until recently. https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30820-5.pdf
You surely understand that the victims aren't taking down these "badge numbers." Nobody can be deluded enough to think that these "identifiers" provide any kind of accountability.
Police over here don't wear name tags - they wear (or are supposed to wear) numbers on their shoulders, and carry (and display on request) photo ID with their names. Covering the shoulder numbers up does happen, especially when they're doing dodgy stuff in riots, and they get called out for it.
I would like someone to explain what function is served, with regard to civil liberties etc, by a tag saying SMITH that isn't served by a tag with a unique identifier number on it. SMITH is not a unique identifier in a force of several thousand, apart from anything else. But if you want to lodge a complaint against a British police officer, you can do so by shoulder number.
If there are police running around in the US without name tags or numbers, that is a different issue. Similarly if there's no way to lodge a complaint, or if complaints are ignored.
what makes you think a different candidate wouldn't do better in November?
Better than fifteen points ahead? OK dude.
Thanks, Lourdes: that is moderately reassuring, and fits the other reports that say the present flareup is due to relaxing border controls.
Ajay is pertinent about badge numbers. Of course all these schemes depend on there being some trust that the police want to be responsible. If they all wore name tags that said "Donald Trump" or even "Lizardbreath" that would not increase accountability; nor would badges that all bore numbers starting "00".
If your working assumption is that all the police always operate in bad faith there is nothing that will reassure you.
My working assumption is that the Border Patrol
agents who have been repurposed as general purpose federal enforcers who are pulling people into unmarked vans without probable cause to believe they have committed any crime are acting in bad faith, yes. If you don't share that assumption, I suggest that you either may not be paying close attention to the story or may be somewhat credulous.
And on the 'badge numbers' point -- first, whatever the practice is in the UK, standard practice in the US is that police officers are identified by name as well as badge number. Second, accounts from people in Portland report federal officers with no such insignia -- you can categorically disbelieve them, at which point I refer you to my prior paragraph. And third, none of the statements I have seen from CPB says anything about these officers bearing identification numbers that, like a badge number, could be used by members of the public to identify the officer with whom they interacted.
Look at the picture gswift linked in 32. I can't attest to where he got it from, but the number he's talking about is four digits: two letters, two numbers. That's not a likely badge number for an individual, as opposed to some kind of temporary designation, in an organization of any size.
the number he's talking about is four digits: two letters, two numbers. That's not a likely badge number for an individual, as opposed to some kind of temporary designation, in an organization of any size.
That gives you 67,600 possibilities - 26 x 26 x 10 x 10.
The photo there is of a Border Patrol BORTAC member; there's only about 220 of them in total.
(The entire UK police manages fine with two letters and two or three digits. So "SO 213" will be an officer based at Sun Hill police station, callsign SO, and individual number 213.)
That seemed unlikely about the UK police , and at least according to Wikipedia it's not true -- they use numbers up to four digits with additional letters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collar_number
An exception to the above is the City of Westminster borough. Westminster has over 1,500 officers therefore a three digit number system is too small. Until late 2009 constables and sergeants had four digit shoulder numbers beginning 1, 2, 3 or 4 (with the leading number signifying which part of the borough you were attached to - 1 Westminster North, 2 Westminster Central, 3 Westminster South or 4 Westminster HQ). With the amalgamation of Westminster Central and South in late 2009 the decision was taken to amalgamate all the shoulder numbers into one numbering system. All new officers joining the borough will be given the first available number and cross division moves will no longer result in the need for a new shoulder number.
Specialist MPS units do not necessarily follow any of the above numbering rules, with both Constables and Sergeants having anything from one to four digits.
But the fundamental point about Portland is both that people are reporting officers with no individual identification, and that I have seen no statements or reporting indicating that any numerical designation any of these officers do bear can be used by members of the public to identify them.
I would like someone to explain what function is served, with regard to civil liberties etc, by a tag saying SMITH that isn't served by a tag with a unique identifier number on it.
I can speak to this one personally. I once spent a night in jail for trying to photograph a guy getting roughed up by police. It never occurred to me that I should look for, and memorize, some identifying number on the cop's uniform, but I did take note of his nametag.
The nametag itself wasn't enough for the internal affairs guy, by the way. I also had to pick the cop out of a photo lineup. Nametags apparently are sometimes swapped or stolen.
But the fundamental point about Portland is both that people are reporting officers with no individual identification, and that I have seen no statements or reporting indicating that any numerical designation any of these officers do bear can be used by members of the public to identify them.
Genuinely unidentifiable cops/security forces are obviously a really bad thing. Numbers that no one understands as identification are also a bad thing, though very much easier for the protestors to fix. But - what I take ajay's original point to be - numbers which are understood by the public as identification can work fine and in fact better that common surnames would.
PF having to double check with a photo lineup also speaks to efforts both to cheat the system and to fight back against cheating.
Similarly if there's no way to lodge a complaint, or if complaints are ignored.
That's the other thing. I can recount in hilarious detail my interactions with internal affairs and the legal system. I was/am a guy who oozes privilege, who knows the levers by which things get done, and at every turn, it was explained to me quite accurately that the cop involved was untouchable and that this was simply the way things worked.
To give you an idea of what a pain in the ass I was able to be: The internal affairs guy knew who I was because his boss, who was out of town, had seen me ("this moon-faced guy") discussing my arrest on CNN.
So when gswift tells you that you can report somebody's ID number, he knows quite well that this is how police provide the illusion of accountability. (See also: The Better Business Bureau; state attorney grievance commissions; state medical boards, etc.)
85.1 is a really great thread.
Chad Wolf (what a name) is acting secretary, has he been in post longer than the Vacancies Act allows. There are a couple of other actings who I've read have been in longer than the VA allows.
numbers which are understood by the public as identification can work fine
100: If you're right about ajay's original point, true or false it's completely irrelevant to what's going on in Portland, where citizens are being beaten and kidnapped by members of an organization that has not previously been involved in policing the city. If people can't, or don't know how to, go from a displayed number (if numbers are actually being displayed) to identifying a wrongdoer, the number doesn't provide accountability.
That seemed unlikely about the UK police , and at least according to Wikipedia it's not true
The entire UK police force manages with two letters and three digits with the exception of the Westminster district of the Metropolitan Police Service which uses two letters and four digits. I was utterly wrong in my earlier statement and can only apologise.
I think I've told this story before, but in college I went out of town for the weekend (by bus) and came back to find my car towed. They had put up special event signs on Saturday notifying that they would tow on Sunday, which was a violation of the city rule that they have to give 48 hours notice for such a thing. I called the police to find my car, and after they told me I said I wanted to file a complaint about them breaking the rule. The cop yelled at me, "You can't complain! You can't complain!" and hung up. I wasn't fast enough with my rejoinder that this is America, it's a fundamental right to complain.
Ponder@88: I wish we'd either ban gswift or have a norm of not responding to him.
NW@91 For Christ's sake let's not have the gswift argument again.
I'm a sucker for the meta conversations -- the discussions of what we value here and why. I appreciate gswift's contributions, and I don't believe I am feeding a troll by engaging with him. I think gswift plays fair. He offers us his best understanding of the world, and is an honest witness to events. So when he tells us how he wheeled a cop car around to confront protesters, we know what happened even if he doesn't. When he tells us that the CBP provides ID numbers so that citizens can root out misconduct, he really is operating from a place where this isn't self-evidently absurd. (And I didn't know that CBP had identifying numbers on their uniforms.)
Part of the problem that people have with gswift is frustration at his imperviousness to obvious interpretations of events. I get that, but don't share it. I like to think that interactions with me improve people's souls, but in the end, I'm happy to settle for having my own outlook broadened.
I have the mental and emotional capacity for providing content for this place, but I do NOT have the capacity to be the arbiter for this kind of thing. For one thing, I instinctively tune out when things get heated here, and if I were to wade in and try to follow the discussion and make judgements on who is being understandably defensive and who is going to far, then it would another task on my to-do list which I am not prepared to undertake.
This place is decentralized and does not have someone who loves playing CEO. I don't know how self-governance emerges in what is essentially a pick up game without a referee.
This place is decentralized and does not have someone who loves playing CEO. I don't know how self-governance emerges in what is essentially a pick up game without a referee.
It's not easy. I haven't been in that position, but I wrote a paper about online communities in college and one of the lessons from that was the governance is tricky -- for many reasons. You don't have extra time and energy to spend on it, and there are ripple effects. Communities like this work because a lot of people feel some sense of investment and even ownership, and there's no easy way to resolve it when people's sense of ownership pulls them in different directions.
For what it's worth, I feel good about my interaction with gswift in this thread. He showed up and said that "They're really not [doing illegal shit and kidnapping people]." I was willing to concede that pulling people into unmarked vans wasn't prima facie illegal, but that it was creepy, and asked if he was _sure_ that the Fed's weren't doing anything illegal. He replied that, of course, they might be. That seemed like a successful clarification of our respective positions.
Agreed with NickS. Gswift and ajay have been helpful in convincing me that the lack of names on the uniforms is not itself evidence of unconstitutional or unprecedented goings-on. What it does is make it even less likely that any accountability can happen. And whatever is happening is happening with complete opaqueness as Commandant Chad Wolf makes it up as he goes along. Maybe the minivan has three people from Border Patrol and two federal prison guards in it. Maybe they switch those numbers around between people every day. Are there any rules? Goals? Who knows. The stated goal appears to be to combat vandalism.
I am also curious if anyone is really using the fact that police have name badges to go their homes and harass them. Why wouldn't that have happened in previous decades as well? If it is happening, it seems like it would get sympathy on social media. It's controversial when even the worst people are harassed at their own homes.
Or is it just that people are now looking the police up online to see if there's anything embarrassing or criminal in their past and then broadcasting it to the crowd.
Re the ongoing police thing. My understanding of Weimar history was very sketchy until recently (and is now only a little less sketchy). What jumped out at me from recent reading was how incredibly violent Weimar was from 1918 onwards. Every major political party had an armed wing, not just the NSDAP, and they would have street battles. Each year brought scores of political murders, running some years into the hundreds. And then you had the Freikorps: demobilised WWI troops just roaming the streets in armoured cars, looking for someone to fight. This last is what makes me hesitate wrt defunding the police.
Anyway, in happier news, sort of, I'm struck by how conceptually deficient Weimar Germans seem to have been, as a collective. For instance, they don't seem to have had a decent concept of depression or any inkling of its cognitive effects. When Spengler writes of how terrible everything is, intelligent Germans just nod along in agreement instead of saying 'wait, what about confirmation bias?' or else doing a bit of informal CBT and mentally listing all the things that aren't terrible. And you get Heidegger (in 1920s proto-Nazi mode) running away with _anxiety_ as somehow revelatory, or constructing a Spenglerian 'the They' in which everything public is 'levelled down', mediocre and bad (and therefore we should sweep away democracy). It's happier news because I don't think the US or any other country I can think of is quite there or even particularly close.
Re the ongoing police thing. My understanding of Weimar history was very sketchy until recently (and is now only a little less sketchy). What jumped out at me from recent reading was how incredibly violent Weimar was from 1918 onwards. Every major political party had an armed wing, not just the NSDAP, and they would have street battles. Each year brought scores of political murders, running some years into the hundreds. And then you had the Freikorps: demobilised WWI troops just roaming the streets in armoured cars, looking for someone to fight. This last is what makes me hesitate wrt defunding the police.
Anyway, in happier news, sort of, I'm struck by how conceptually deficient Weimar Germans seem to have been, as a collective. For instance, they don't seem to have had a decent concept of depression or any inkling of its cognitive effects. When Spengler writes of how terrible everything is, intelligent Germans just nod along in agreement instead of saying 'wait, what about confirmation bias?' or else doing a bit of informal CBT and mentally listing all the things that aren't terrible. And you get Heidegger (in 1920s proto-Nazi mode) running away with _anxiety_ as somehow revelatory, or constructing a Spenglerian 'the They' in which everything public is 'levelled down', mediocre and bad (and therefore we should sweep away democracy). It's happier news because I don't think the US or any other country I can think of is quite there or even particularly close.
or else doing a bit of informal CBT
Canonically aren't Germans more into scat play?
(Sorry, that was a good comment Charlie W)
"The emergence of the WC shelf, 1914-1989". That's the subtitle, anyway.
I agree a ban might be a bit much. I'd be fine with a non-response norm. People who feel like they're learning from him can do so passively, without derailment.
(There have also been copious photos of municipal police with obviously taped-over ID numbers; I have no reason to think DHS would be more scrupulous.)
I am also not keen on a non-response norm. A non-response norm leaves gswift's claim that the Portland unmarked-van arrests were perfectly normal and coverage to the contrary is hysterical propaganda out there unchallenged. And it's plausible until you go looking and find out the feds have admitted they're arresting people without probable cause. Not everyone is going to have the time or motivation to look for themselves.
Like I said above, I think it's informative and valuable finding out how a police officer views current events. The fact that I think his comments are a valuable source of information about how police officers view things doesn't mean that I think his views are an accurate or reliable source of information about the world that should be left unchallenged.
Maybe there could be some automatically-bracketing misinformation cautions like Twitter's doing.
Or we could muddle along the way we usually do without any kind of policy action, which is my instinct.
110: I liked Peter Gay's Weimar Culture a lot for this. If the leftish parties had violent wings, they were pretty ineffectual because there werent too many right-leaning politicians who died, while there was a huge number of lefties who did. The prosecutor's office wasn't especially interested in those, was staffed by imperial carryovers. What are you reading that you liked?
IMO a big issue with US police is the wall of silence-- the Buffalo "solidarity" above, or that no cops testified against Jon Burge in Chicago being examples. I'm not sure what I expect from gswift to say about this-- he usually floats in, has a few surprising facts about that paint someone dead or publicly injured in a unflattering light, and leaves. IMO one avenue for meaningful reform that I've seen mentioned would be to bring the financial consequences of settlements for misconduct back to the police budget rather than from municipal general funds as they are now. Doing that would create incentives for good cops to get rid of or deflect into desk jobs the worst among them. Not full-on culture change, which is harder, will take longer and would be a better outcome, but at least an incentive to be less bad without necessarily agreeing about which cops are bad enough to be sent to prison or talking about collective culture, which is hard to test. It's a budget remedy, so there will be flaws and city politics shady money events; but maybe wortha try and better than status quo. I don't know how much it'd help Baltimore. More social workers and a less bad safety net to keep neighborhoods from going to shit when work dries up would be nice also.
119. budget imapct of gswift-induced derailments could be debited against his personal dues. Everyone else is paying Ben dues, right?
Hey, just dropping in quickly to say: this is in part an issue with the technical limitations of the site. Some people want to argue with gswift or solicit his opinions; others don't want to see them at all. One technical solution would be some form of threading where the policing arguments could branch off and the branches be collapsed... the question would be whether to accommodate people who want to talk about police issues without any input from gswift and his interlocutors, because that would require some behavior modification for individuals, not code (you can comment in the main thread, you need to stay in the side thread). To the extent that there's an ethical question here, it needs to be teased out from the confounding problems of implementation on this rickety old platform. Unfogged site design is not a proxy for the idealized public sphere. (I'm being deliberately pompous now. Back to this tedious UX design review meeting for the paid job... "Does this page need a mustache?" is the question currently under discussion, so I have no frame of reference for normal discourse at the moment.)
There was at one point a script which hid Bob comments, iirc. And maybe some other commenters. I think Neb wrote it.
Unfogged site design is not a proxy for the idealized public sphere.
I disagree! I haven't seen a better blog design. The inevitable problem with any public sphere is the public.
And a discussion of technologically walling off, separating or channelling comments is simply a reiteration of the original problem. A blog itself is a method of accomplishing those things.
Barry! I am a) so sorry to hear about Pola; b) so sorry to have heard about the election results in Poland, just so depressing. How does she feel about it all?
She's down about it but not nearly as obsessive as I am about US politics. She went to her embassy here to vote, twice since there was a runoff or something.
Yeah, quick NYT summary if anyone's curious.
The opposition was fueled by support from young people around the country, securing a majority of votes from people under 50, and turnout was among the highest since the country turned away from communism.
Poland's major cities, from Gdansk in the north to Krakow in the south, were bastions of resistance, but the governing party rallied its faithful in rural communities, many left behind in the rapid transition from communism to capitalism.
Mr. Trzaskowski conceded defeat Monday afternoon after the country's electoral commission said that with 100 percent of the actual vote counted, Mr. Duda had secured 51.03 percent of the vote. Mr. Trzaskowski won 48.97 percent. The turnout was 68.18 percent. [...]
In the pro-government weekly Sieci, the Warsaw mayor was accused of supporting pedophilia. State television, which has been turned into a propaganda machine for the government, suggested that Mr. Trzaskowski would be controlled by Jewish interests in complicated questions related to restitution of property dating from World War II.
Xenophobic arguments are nothing new for Law and Justice, which took power in 2015 on a campaign against accepting migrants, has described itself as defending Christianity against foreign forces, and has tarred the European Union as a threat to national autonomy. But appeals tinged with anti-Semitism, in a country whose Jews were largely wiped out in the Holocaust, were generally off-limits until recently.
This stuff isn't even surprising these days, but the all-out "we have to save the country" mobilization ending in failure left me feeling dismal. On a more positive note, reportedly Bolsonaro got bitten by a rhea.
120: Thanks for this recommendation. My way into the topic is Ian Kershaw's 'The Hitler Myth' (1989); I've also been listening to Richard Evans and have ordered an English translation of Sontheimer (German historian active in the 1960s).
IMO one avenue for meaningful reform that I've seen mentioned would be to bring the financial consequences of settlements for misconduct back to the police budget rather than from municipal general funds as they are now.
How do you imagine this creating meaningful incentives for better behavior? Police budgets are going to be mostly salaries, with most of what's left going to equipment and gasoline and such. Cutting the budget maybe means older equipment or fewer new hires, but it's a long way removed from the daily incentives of people in the system. And just look to the IRS for the long-term consequences of defunding an agency with enforcement powers: the people who are still around are mostly the ones without other options, they don't have the tools to do a decent job if they wanted to, and they're mostly focused on the poor and powerless because that's where the easy targets are. And for that matter, look at police departments themselves: many of the worst horror stories come from hiring people who should be nowhere near police powers because that's all some crappy underfunded department can attract.
Yes to all of that. Defund the police, sure, but you aren't going to successfully incentivize better behavior by threatening police budgets. Ending qualified immunity and not automatically indemnifying officers from judgments against them individually might work, but the incentive has to be on the level of the individual officer.
Yes to 133 and everything else LB has said in this thread. I get more convinced all the time that US police culture is just fundamentally broken and has to be rebuilt from the ground up.
I think threatening to cut their overtime pay could have a real effect.
135: But that only works if you don't actually need the overtime work to get done. If you don't, you shouldn't have been funding it in the first place, and if you do, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face. Plus you probably have to fight with the union about whose overtime gets cut first. Which gets at a big hard ugly problem: actually existing police unions are a giant force for evil and we badly need a mechanism for protecting police officers' legitimate employment rights that isn't evil.
132. The IRS is a good counterexample as a dysfunctional outcome, hadn't thought of that. I Don't know then-- fire them all and start over with a better attitude doesn't seem realistic or realizable. Qualified immunity is bad, getting rid of that would be good.
Poland observed the 32nd anniversary of its first semi-free election after the imposition of communism by having its second semi-free election after the imposition of communism. The observation is not original to me, I'm afraid.
Anyone still interested in Weimar questions, I have a now-vintage grad degree in German studies, and have been in-country for most of 20 years. Hit me up if you like, though my lists of sources may be a bit dated.
When talking about whether would-be tyrants succeed in their attempts to hang on to power, you typically look at attitudes in the "power ministries," which are usually Defense (since the more accurate War has passed out of fashion), Interior (not in the US sense) and Foreign Affairs. State hates Trump (though not universally; when I was living in a small Caucasian capital, some embassy people were right-wing whackjobs despite all of the evidence around them) and representation of and/or international recognition of a rump Trump regime would not be forthcoming. War is divided, because although the armed forces lean heavily toward one party they are also institutionalists, especially in the upper reaches. There's not a Hindenburg or a Ludendorff with any visibility in the US. Interior is a bigger problem, this seems to be the Trumpiest of the power ministries. Will they go all-in for voter suppression? I don't know. Will they stand aside if things are murky and the most motivated Trumpistas among their ranks try to keep him, possibly assisted by court decisions that make Bush v. Gore look like Marbury v. Madison? Probably. Some scenarios are even worse than just a second term for Trump.
84: what makes you think a different candidate wouldn't do better in November?
Because (and this has been true for months) there isn't currently a process for replacing Biden that all major factions of the Democratic party will accept as democratically legitimate. In theory one could say that the delegates to the convention, acting as the representatives of the respective factions that were supporting their original candidates, could negotiate together to find a new candidate who was acceptable to a majority of the elected delegates at the convention. But Bernie supporters spent weeks if not months during the primary arguing that that precise process was not democratically legitimate (back when it looked like he might wind up with a plurality of the delegates short of a majority).
Back when there were calls for Biden to step down over the Tara Reade accusations, it was clear to me that a whole bunch of online Bernie supporters were assuming that if Biden stepped down, Bernie should automatically get the nomination as the holder of the second most number of delegates. It wasn't clear if they would accept a process that led to a different outcome. But that outcome itself is deeply problematic, given the actual outcome of the primaries in which clear majorities of Democratic voters voted Not Bernie when it came down to a choice between him and Biden. It also would be pretty disrespectful of the preferences of African American Democratic voters who preferred Biden by huge majorities propelling him to the nomination. I can't imagine that a general election in which we had a lot of African American voters nursing a grievance about the way their expressed preferences were ignored by a bunch of white people would wind up better for the Democrat than the one we seem to have shaping up now.
And there really isn't any good way to hit a reset button and do the primaries over again at this point, especially in a time of Covid-19.
As it is, Biden is turning into a pretty effective candidate who is promoting a positive program while pointing out a bunch of the ways Trump has created the current disaster. He's reached out to Bernie and AOC and a bunch of other figures in Bernie's camp and given them prominent positions in creating a joint platform statement that all the parties involved seem pretty happy with. There's a good chance that most of that platform will actually get enacted into law if we can also take the Senate. He's promised a woman as VP who will be in a prominent leadership position within the party and a strong candidate to succeed him.
Maybe Johnny Unbeatable could do better, but Johnny isn't running, and I don't see any path given the mechanisms that we actually have to replace Biden without risking the degree of party unity that is pushing him to his current poll leads.
Interior is a bigger problem, this seems to be the Trumpiest of the power ministries. Will they go all-in for voter suppression?
This is what I'm worried about. Gin up an excuse for DHS goon squads to patrol polling places.
138: Doug, good to know.
My night school type interest in Heidegger is motivated by a desire to see him dropped from built environment discourse, where an annoying church of Heidegger has been built. I think this is down to him going out of his way in the 1950s to address building, and also perhaps because he got embedded into US humanities campuses by way of Arendt and others. Anyway, the more you read him, the worse his ideas seem; more and more stuff comes out the family archive to force the most negative interpretation; and his era is wild and fascinating in its own right.
Also, I still hope to see the Heidegger reading group reconvened one day ...
Like I said above, I think it's informative and valuable finding out how a police officer views current events.
I feel as if the value that comes from this has been amply demonstrated at this point.
I, admittedly, need to do a lot more reading on abolition and defunding. While that's underway, one of the immediate questions I have is how to better address the kinds of problems that I've been reading about in ProPublica's series on sexual assault and rural policing in Alaska. The series seems to come from the perspective that rural villages need more police or public safety officers, and better funding so that the officers aren't themselves former criminals (which I guess is more common than what one might expect). What are the alternatives? Does the high rate of sexual violence require such a fundamental change to society that thinking in terms of policing is just the wrong kind of analysis?
[On the other issue, as an academic I have a high tolerance for offensive and obnoxious men who dominate the discussion because I regularly attend meetings and serve on committees with at least three of That Guy. Most of us here can be pretty obnoxious, too, though it's leavened with genuine fondness for the collective, if not for every individual member, and it's part of the charm of the blog. My own personal preference is that when someone says something reprehensible, especially when there's a pattern of doing so, that others don't treat that person as though they're arguing in good faith.
I think I started reading this blog 15 years ago. Since I was in grad school at the time, and procrastinating, I started by reading TFA (though my memory is shitty and chemo hasn't helped, so I've forgotten details of the scandalous gossipy stuff, like that thread with SEK that was deleted for some reason). I haven't added much to the comments over the years--most of my interactions with you all have been at The Other Place, or in person, or by sending interesting articles to FPP to share. I remember that a few years ago I said something stunningly ignorant about HIV, and I was honestly grateful that a number of you responded to the effect of "WTF? That's offensive, and we've known for 20 years that HIV doesn't work that way." For the occasional shitty remark, I think that's a good model. For repeat offenders, I think it can be worthwhile to address fucked up claims, but perhaps not at great length or through drawn-out engagement.]
Oh yeah, here's the series: https://www.propublica.org/series/lawless
Meanwhile, Barry, where in Poland is Pola moving?
145: Maybe you should consider moving--the Tri-Cities area is wonderful, or you could look at Sweden or Germany. Even if the relationship didn't work out, the relocation could be worth it if the job situation was satisfactory. It's not at all difficult to get around the major cities even with limited Polish.
My dad lived in Gdynia before the family emigrated to the US.
even with limited Polish.
I'm sure he's perfectly mannered.
I mean, I wouldn't move in together this early, but you could sublet a flat...
146 We're close but the romantic aspect is still nascent so I'm not sure. I'll have to feel her out. Meanwhile, I'm applying for a job in Canada.
I visited Gdansk long ago, with my grandmother, when she was honored at one of the universities (that may not have actually been in Gdansk? now I can't remember.)
I remember liking it, and joking about the Gducks swimming in ponds.
No, I remember now. It wasn't an honor for her, it was a posthumous honor for Kurt Lewin, and we went to accept it on his behalf.
And it was in Bydgoszcz. But they did send us on a little tour of Gdansk.
Polish hospitality, in my experience, frequently involves inviting people you barely know to live with you for months (I've been on both ends of this), so that's part of what leads me to think this wouldn't be weird in this cultural context, given that you want to leave anyway). I think it's a combination of generous hospitality + lots of migration.
That's one reason why I'm not at tempted to move to a bigger house.
General fear of long-term house guests, not just Polish ones.
To further illustrate, in the 90s my grandparents legally adopted the daughter of a (late) family friend so she could live with them and work in the US for two years. I also spent a week in the lovely vacation condo of family acquaintances on the Hel peninsula (very close to the Tri-Cities), despite never having met them before they picked me up at the train station. Meanwhile, if the distant cousins I stayed with last summer in London (having met them once, twenty years prior) ever end up vacationing in the US as planned, I imagine we'll be hosting them for a good three weeks.
one of the immediate questions I have is how to better address the kinds of problems that I've been reading about in ProPublica's series on sexual assault and rural policing in Alaska. The series seems to come from the perspective that rural villages need more police or public safety officers, and better funding so that the officers aren't themselves former criminals (which I guess is more common than what one might expect). What are the alternatives? Does the high rate of sexual violence require such a fundamental change to society that thinking in terms of policing is just the wrong kind of analysis?
That series has done a good job highlighting how huge and difficult to solve the problems are, but unsurprisingly it's been light on offering concrete solutions. Early on it had one article stoking outrage about communities hiring former criminals as cops and another stoking outrage about communities with no police at all, but in practical terms those are the two alternatives available right now to most communities. Providing the level of policing that the series implies the communities need would require an investment of resources orders of magnitude beyond what anyone is willing to invest right now, which could either take the form of the state vastly expanding the number and staffing of trooper posts or someone (probably some federal agency or other) providing massive amounts of funding so communities can afford to hire their own police who are fully trained and standards-compliant. A small number of communities that happen to have a lot of money do recruit cops from elsewhere (the North Slope Borough is probably the best example), but I don't know if there's any evidence that this has actually helped. I think your last question gets at the real challenge here.
It's better to hire a former criminal than a future one.
Many communities attempt to find the sweet spot by hiring current criminals.
Like repeated, easy to find, tax evasion?
Tax evasion, domestic abuse, extortion, that sort of thing.
Apparently, Jacksonville is too dangerous even for a death cult meeting.
I just had a fascinating conversation with my sister-in-law. For context, she met my brother-in-law [in another country] and they moved here about two years ago, and got married last summer. Her English was pretty terrible two years ago, and has been steadily improving.
They were in NYC when everything shut down. They stayed there a month, and then flew out to [in-law's house], with their 13 year old. So they've been living with my in-laws since April.
She told me that over the last four months, a lot of English has started coming into focus, and all of a sudden she's realizing all these things about Lyndon's family that she had had no idea about. For example, my FIL watches Fox News (never around me), and partway through the past few months she suddenly understood what was being said and was horrified. Also, she hadn't realized that the siblings are all utter brats to each other (Lyndon excepted) and how their father and the three younger siblings all treat their (truly wonderfully kind) mother like crap.
I nodded and shared some of the stories that shocked me the most, when I started to get to know them. She asked how Lyndon turned out so differently (and it's because he was five when his mom married his father, and just had a very different upbringing than the rest in a lot of ways).
I can't imagine how disorienting the past few months must be for her - like, who the fuck did I marry?! Wtf? I imagine her husband acts much more mature when he's not around the rest of the pack? And of the siblings, he's the most developed (although that's a low bar to clear).
She was also trying to ask what was American behavior, and what was specific to the Johnsons. Most of it is specific to them.
"Sorry, I got the only good one. Sucks to be you."
I was like, "If your sister-in-law is married to your brother-in-law, what's the familial connection? Shouldn't one of the two be your sibling?" But then 168 made me realize it's the indefinite transitive property of in-law-dom. Moby being helpful again!
I wasn't trying. I married an only child, so that's the only in-laws I have.
Don't your siblings have spouses?
I've met my sister-in-law's siblings probably once each.
Approximately 66.6% of them.. That's what I meant.
Anyway, I didn't clink on the link in 169 until just now, so I didn't understand it.
There's definitely a thing where spouses of siblings bond over the weirdness of the family they've married into.
It's also the knight's move double meaning again.
My siblings' spouses are mostly as awful as my siblings. It balances out, though. My wife's family is great.
Not at all! We are in total agreement on both families, and are entirely content to avoid mine.
To be clear, the sister-in-law is Lyndon's brother's wife.
I am somewhat delighted that the Washington Redskins have dropped the "Redskins" nickname and now wish to be known as the "Washington Football Team". It's apparently only a temporary arrangement, but, as everyone knows, nothing lasts longer than a temporary arrangement.
A football team has no name.
177: My spouse is great, my spouse's siblings are great, my spouse's sister's husband is great, but by the time you get to my spouse's sister's husband's brother's wife, it gets a little questionable.
181: For maximum confusion, they should've been Washington FC.
I am somewhat delighted that the Washington Redskins have dropped the "Redskins" nickname and now wish to be known as the "Washington Football Team".
It continually amuses me that the team is the "Houston 'Texans' " or maybe the "Houston, Texans" - I've never been sure which geographic scale is the mascot. Either way, it's like they legitimately thought "Redskins" was respectful, and were like, "Hey! WE'RE the real warriors! Let's cartoon ourselves!"
I think all MLS teams should take names from Clash of the Titans, but only if from the one with Harry Hamlin.
I had known that in my lifetime the Kansas City Chiefs were known as the Dallas Texans. What I hadn't known until just now is that when Lamar Hunt moved them to KC, he had to be talked out of calling them the Kansas City Texans.
So, the Washngton team should be the Terrapins, and have hopefully soon to be ex-senator Mitch McConnell as their mascot.
My dad is enthusiastic social media friends with my husband's parents and the families of each of my sisters' spouses. Also with one of the uncles who married into my mom's side of family (though my parents have been unamicably divorced for thirty years). He has, however, blocked his Trump-loving brother, which I have also had to do.
(My dad also tags my undergraduate advisor--whom he has met all of once--in posts all of the time, which remains very awkward.)
The "Washington Kracken" is no longer an option.
139: there isn't currently a process for replacing Biden that all major factions of the Democratic party will accept as democratically legitimate
I find this astounding. The party doesn't have rules for choosing a nominee if the person with the most delegates drops out or is incapacitated before the convention? What about between the convention and the election? If you're right, that is egregious. It should have such rules.
As I have noted before, this would be a great opportunity to bag the whole corrupt primary/convention system and hold a ranked-choice mail-in vote where every registered Democrat in America gets a ballot.
Unfortunately, since I first suggested this, Trump has captured the US Postal Service and installed his minion at the top. So, the mail is out.
Maybe instead the Democrats could do electronic voting using an app?
They could get that guy who did the app for the Iowa Caucus to write it. That worked out pretty well, no?
Good hell some of you really obsess too much over my opinions. I haven't even looked at this thread in days. I only started commenting more again with some free time due to Covid. With schools being shut down I've been tasked to homicide for a bit and have other things to do besides annoying people on a defunct blog. Everyone, stay healthy.