Context, for anyone confused by ogged's oblique style.
He couldn't stand to stay without MY.
The editor-in-chief is moving on too.
Matty AND Ezra? Who woulda guessed. Reading between the lines of MY's screed about it, the "woke" Millennials were driving him nuts. Wonder if Ezra is moving to the NYT because they will never object to any opinion piece he submits.
I am both a little sad, and not sure what I wish Ezra would have done instead.
My general impression is that both Ezra and MY did good work at vox, and I read and liked their stuff, and it makes sense that both of them would move on at some point. It's unfortunate that they're both moving behind paywalls*, and it also just feels like the spirit of blogging is slowly dying.
* Though it's a little ironic that "big media Matt" is the one striking out on his own.
Reading between the lines of MY's screed about it, the "woke" Millennials were driving him nuts.
I thought Matt's point which was more specific to Vox was that they started out trying to compete with the NYT and lost -- that the NYT is become both the economically successful online and hosting a lot of really good writing, and that makes it difficult to be a competitor.
Citation for 6 (emphasis mine).
The Times is up to seven million digital subscriptions thanks to a Trump-era boom. But what's really bad for the competition is that the Times is specifically kicking ass by refusing to be disrupted. We had this idea when we launched Vox that the old dog would refuse to learn new tricks for Christensen-type reasons. Instead they hired Max Fisher and Amanda Taub. And Brad Plumer. And Jenée Desmond-Harris. And Sarah Kliff and Jim Tankersley and Eleanor Barkhorn and Johnny Harris and Jane Coaston.
That's just Vox. They've also got Choire Sicha, one of the great original digital media entrepreneurs. And Kara Swisher, another of the great original digital media entrepreneurs. What's more they are so big and so successful that they can afford to be kind of wasteful in their hiring. They poached the editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed to write a once-a-week media column. And it's a great column!
People complain about the NYT because that's life. But anyone who's halfway honest with themselves has to admit that it's a stellar product. People who don't like "woke" stuff are mad about the 1619 Project (which certainly had its flaws) but the sheer extent of attention it garnered makes it just about the single most successful special issue of a magazine ever. But if you're woke-skeptical, Michael Powell is doing great stuff on that beat. Jennifer Medina was ahead of the curve on Trump's Latino supporters. Nellie Bowles has been taking on the excesses of protestors and critiquing policing abolition for months. It's simply a very capacious product.
If you're not a tedious ideologue, you can't help but notice that Liz Bruenig and Ross Douthat are both great columnists and so are Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Goldberg and David Brooks and Farhad Manjoo. Did I mention they also have Nobel laureate Paul Krugman? And that's just in opinion.
They are of course not unaffected by the pathologies I opened this item with. And at times the newsroom seems to be at risk of tearing itself apart, as when the infamous Tom Cotton op-ed led to James Bennet getting fired, rather than an organized discussion about whether the tradition of publishing random noteworthy takes from politicians makes sense in the Internet age. But the Times has gotten into a virtuous circle where they can poach more and more talent and grow their subscriber base and poach and poach -- and the people who make the hiring decisions have shown excellent judgment.
And good for them. But the more that would-be disruptors are in a precarious position, the more tightly people working in the industry cling to ideological fads and groupthink because their employers can't offer stable career paths or distinct identities.
If you're not a tedious ideologue, you can't help but notice that Liz Bruenig and Ross Douthat are both great columnists
I feel like I would reword this as "If you're actively infected with brain parasites" or something but to each their own.
If I can predict the body of a column with a reasonable degree of accuracy just by knowing the topic and the author, I don't feel like the threshold for greatness has been met.
MY changing jobs doesn't really phase me, he changes jobs a lot and will still do his thing. EK is a shock though. This seems like a step backwards in terms of his ambitions. Ross obviously just wanted to be a NYTimes columnist since he was 19, but it seems small for Ezra given his previous career. I'd have thought they'd need to offer him Michael Bennett's old job to poach him.
7: They are of course not unaffected by the pathologies I opened this item with. (and the rest of that paragraph and the next). A classic example of burying the lede.
8.3: I feel like that's the case a lot of the time even for columnists I like. It's really hard (actually probably impossible) not to become predictable after a while.
9: That's a good point. Maybe they promised him a path to management.
Kind of tangentially, does anyone know if BitchPhd and Jackmormon are well?
12: Though quoting from 7: "[The NYTimes] poached the editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed to write a once-a-week media column. And it's a great column!" They can't all end up running the Times!
I hate op-eds so much. It's just a horrible format. I hate that you're allowed to just lie in them, I hate their length (too long but also too short), I hate that it's the sam epeiple writing them for years. I'm pretty sure that I haven't read an op-ed in 4+ years. It's depressing that EK is doing that when he used to do interesting stuff.
I was actually just thinking about unfoggedcon for some reason and I can't believe I flew to another city on my own to meet people from an online community while my wife was home with a three and one year old. I think I had some hotel points I had to use or something.
That was the one ogged pulled out of at the last second, a most unusual behavior for him. I did get to sit next to saiselgy on the couch.
Blogs rendered op-eds obsolete, but the skillset is essentially the same, and just as there are many good bloggers, there are many good op-ed columnists. Klein will be very good in that format, and he'll have a big platform.
Leaving aside the gratuitous insult to folks who don't like these columnists, I'm basically onboard with this from Yglesias:
If you're not a tedious ideologue, you can't help but notice that Liz Bruenig and Ross Douthat are both great columnists and so are Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Goldberg and David Brooks and Farhad Manjoo. Did I mention they also have Nobel laureate Paul Krugman? And that's just in opinion.
I mean, I wouldn't dream of criticizing anyone who found Bruenig, Douthat and Brooks repugnant (and Yglesias wisely avoids bringing up the very skilled and entirely unreadable Dowd), but I can't bear to listen to Limbaugh for more than 5 minutes at a time, and I do want to understand what's going on in the heads of the deplorables.
No one should write weekly op-eds in the same outlet. Or even monthly, I think.
Formatting messed up, but 17.3 was intended as a blockquote of Yglesias.
18: Find me a mediocre Michelle Goldberg column. Maybe nobody should do it for more than a few years, though ...
20: Even if they're individually good, they must get deeply repetitive. I don't know, I don't subscribe.
9: I don't know about that. It's never been clear to me that Ezra actually wanted a managerial role (and he stepped back from one at Vox as soon as he could). He started Vox because he had a vision of a type of journalism he wanted to do and couldn't find another outlet that would provide a platform for it. Now it seems like he wants to do a different kind of journalism that is more congenial to the big outlets, and good for him.
As for Matt, there's a lot that rings true about his media post but this part doesn't really make sense to me:
But the more that would-be disruptors are in a precarious position, the more tightly people working in the industry cling to ideological fads and groupthink because their employers can't offer stable career paths or distinct identities.
Those... seem like totally different issues? They definitely both seem to be happening, but I don't see any obvious connection between them and Matt doesn't explain the connection he sees.
I also just hate the NYTimes and will never ever forgive them for the emails shit. So I'm sad that they seem to be winning.
Those... seem like totally different issues? They definitely both seem to be happening, but I don't see any obvious connection between them and Matt doesn't explain the connection he sees.
I happened to notice him expanding on that in comments.
There's two arms to it:
One is that if somebody would pay you a good, stable salary to write rigorous, accurate articles that challenge your audience and your colleagues and your peers then you might want to do that. But if you're going to be working for shit pay with no stability regardless of what you do, then why make people mad at you on top of that?
The other, as Tim Lee said here in another reply, is that the bleak economic conditions facing young journalists color their attitude to everything about the American economy and society.
And somebody else in comments says this (which is identifying a different issue, but an interesting point):
I think it comes up in Silicon Valley a lot too (Thiel talks about it in Zero to One), where smaller start-ups can't compete with the comfort and pay of FANGs, so they have to recruit and retain talent though 'ideas' or intrinsic rewards (like join a team that is focusing on real things like ending aging).
If that's all you have and you never get more revenue/funding, any attempt to broaden or diversify a small group of highly devoted people will end in reducing cohesion.
Also worth posting in this thread: statement from Vox. It looks to me like they will be focusing more on video
This is a big day of transition at Vox: Today, Lauren Williams, Vox's Senior Vice President and Editor-in-Chief, and Ezra Klein, Co-founder and Editor-at-Large, announced to the Vox team that they'll be moving on to exciting new roles and projects in the months ahead. After seven years of helping to expand our upstart into something so much bigger and more impactful than we ever could have imagined, Lauren and Ezra are each preparing for significant career moves.
Lauren will take all she's learned at Vox and launch a new nonprofit startup, Capital B, focused on creating a news outlet that will provide high-quality civic journalism tailored to Black communities across the country. I couldn't be more excited for this ambitious step, and can't wait for Lauren to put all her creative energy into building an urgently necessary publication. We'll cheer her along, and we look forward to partnering with her new outlet.
...
You'll see us launching on more OTT channels next year with our deep video library, and you'll see our television ambitions grow with partners that include Netflix and YouTube Originals, as well as HBO. In audio, we've got a new slate of podcasts planned for 2021, including a new science show and a history show. We'll be hiring to create and develop those shows, as well as roles to support the reach of Today, Explained and The Weeds and to launch a new interview show.
And we're posting a role today to support our contributions program, one of our biggest -- and most successful -- experiments in 2020. We'll be thinking through how to build a stronger community around Vox's work, and to sharpen our efforts every day to ensure that what we create at Vox is a uniquely differentiated offering for our audiences.
the long-awaited, "pivot to video"
The first step on the road to porn.
I hate op-eds so much. It's just a horrible format. I hate that you're allowed to just lie in them, I hate their length (too long but also too short), I hate that it's the sam epeiple writing them for years. I'm pretty sure that I haven't read an op-ed in 4+ years.
This is how I feel, exactly. I don't know why it's so much more different than blog posts, or articles, but it is. They feel forced and annoying and I don't know why I'm supposed to care what this yahoo thinks.
The first step on the road to porn.
Sort of a dance-step.
I know very little about Ezra's life, but doesn't he have a small kid? Maybe management sucks and he wants to report and have someone else be the boss so he can leave work at work in the evenings and be with his family.
That's fair. I don't have a problem with that (well, other than hating The Times and wishing he'd gone somewhere less awful).
15: It used to be the case (on the veldt...) that op-eds were a rare excursion into obvious opinion journalism. The author could be openly partisan, biased, etc. Now all articles are like that so what's the op-ed for?
I will never forgive the NYT for Whitewater, much less Clinton Cash and the emails. The coup de grace, though is that they responded to the huge upswing in subscriptions from people hoping to keep an eye on Trump by hiring asshole conservatives to give bad faith lectures to their readers, new and old.
I subscribed to the Post at the beginning of the year to follow the election. They always had some conservatives, and some of them seem wrong but honest, while the Trumpers they publish are all ridiculous.
Yeah, I'm also subscribed to the Post. As I said I don't read the opeds though.
I'll never forgive them for Judith Miller. Trying to keep her on after the facts came out was really the cherry on top.
Even Alexandra Petri, who I read with delight in the Post, I think is ill-served by a permanent regular column.
Bummer about Vox. Matt and Ezra bounce off each other really well, and it introduced me to great voices like Jane Coaston. (She was the first to announce she was leaving, but I figured that was just because she has so much talent and clearly is Going Places.) But I'm also absolutely a sucker for the aesthetics of the explainer. This feels like a temporary move for Ezra to take stock and figure out what his next big thing is. Or maybe there's no more VC money for what he does and he's stuck in a high impact, high prestige writing gig forever. I dunno.
That thread is chock full of cock jokes. How far we have fallen.
13 I keep in sporadic touch with jackmormon and the last I've heard a couple of months ago she is well.
I am a tedious ideologue, so fuck Breunig and Douthat. I'm passed the point in my life where when I read a bunch of bullshit, I go "Really makes you think, doesn't it?" Truth comes from the careful collection of evidence, not a bunch of opinions designed to pander to certain prejudices or be "provocative".
I read io9, so sometimes I click on one of the stories they promote elsewhere on Gizmodo, and it strikes me that the biggest change is the hectoring tone of the writers. They've had complete turnover in writing staff over the years. I wonder if this is related Yglesias' observations about younger staffers. It's not that they're any further left, but they're just humorlessly intolerant of the world around them. There's an article today on how horrible they cut down a tree to put in front of Rockefeller Center. Now I'm the kind of crank who insists on having an artificial tree at home -- a source of friction with my wife -- but even I thought "Who gives a shit?" With the previous generation of writers, at least the article would have attempted to be funny. I stumbled across an article on Jezebel where the author explained why she hated "Love Actually" so much. And the article was funny! It didn't really require you to care about "Love Actually". I checked, and the article was from 2013.
42: The rant about the Rockefeller Center tree was in the "Earther" sub-gizmodo section. What else would you expect?
Anyway, the big news about city Christmas trees this year is that apparently they all look scraggly and beat up. Some of them have been removed because the public was so negative about them. The positive news is they found a saw whet owl in the RC one, and it's mega-cute.
42: At some point between 2010 and today, the distinction between "journalist" and "troll" collapsed.
That's because the best rewarded in a pay-for-clicks world are those who attract the most hate-clicks, right? I'm sure part of the attraction of Douthat, Breunig, Stephens for the NYT business side is that every stupid and obviously refuted article that blows up on Twitter generates much more ad revenue than a reasonably argued Krugman piece.
44: I've been wandering around this topic trying to figure out exactly why people on my side of things annoy me so much more than they used to. It's not "wokeness is out of control" or "cancel culture", although there's enough overlap with that conversation to make it confusing, it's a rhetorical style thing. My current theory is that it's something to do with a sort of principled resistance against being held to the literal meaning of what's being said -- more of the discourse is a layered mass of allusion and sarcasm and an assumption that you can't expect to understand anything fully unless you've read a whole lot of material of unclear application to the specific conversation at hand.
the discourse is a layered mass of allusion and sarcasm and an assumption that you can't expect to understand anything fully unless you've read a whole lot of material of unclear application to the specific conversation at hand.
This sounds like a description of the dismal academic culture of capital T Theory, which doesn't seem to have changed at all since the 80s. It makes sense. Journalism is now mostly a profession for children of the at-least-sort-of-rich, so they would all have imbibed this culture at whatever expensive schools they went to.
The other issue was described by an ex-journalist I was reading recently. She pointed out that only at the very top tiers is there enough money to allow people to do anything resembling what we traditionally think of as journalism (research, interviews & etc.). For everyone else, there are so many deadlines that they can barely leave their keyboards if they want to meet them. "Research" becomes "What do my friends on twitter say about this?", which explains the creepy groupthinkiness where it seems like everyone is always reading from the same script.
47: What's an example? I'm trying to think through what you're saying.
11 is a fair and good observation, which is why greatness is rare. Excellent writing is one way to blunt lack of novelty. Presenting compelling, perhaps obscure facts is another. He's earned a reputation as something of a scold in recent years but TNC is a great example.
I would rather more long essays than short op-eds as well, which is why I now subscribe to The Atlantic. Fuck the Times.
This is a dumb, tiny example that comes to mind, and throughout this Nikole Hannah-Jones was being reasonable and honest, and the people arguing with her were being pointless jerks. But I think she was kind of talking in the way that I will wave at as 'like this', and it led to unnecessary confusion in a way I find irritating.
She's the 1619 Project organizer, right? And right wing people were losing their minds over it. One criticism made was that the Project identified 1619 as "the real founding of America" when it's really 1776. And Hannah Jones said on Twitter that the project never made that claim, and irritating stupid people pulled up the quote from the Project that says "1619 was the real founding of America," and there was a very pointless flap over what a huge liar she was.
Obviously, Hannah Jones wasn't trying to deceive anyone. She meant something like "in the dumbass literal sense in which you're asserting that 1776 was the founding of the specific political entity called the USA, the 1619 Project didn't intend to assert anything different, regardless of the presence of words saying '1619 was the real founding'." But saying the words she said only conveys that thought precisely to someone who is a sympathetic member of her discourse community, and specifically to someone who already knows what assertions the 1619 Project did make. To someone who doesn't know what's going on in the whole argument, her non-literalism, I think, creates confusion in a way I don't like, even though it's not in any way intended dishonestly.
That's a dumb little example that comes to mind. But I feel that I fairly frequently lately read things where it is clear to me that the meaning is not literal, and that trying to pin down the precise literal meaning would be difficult and perceived as offensive and hostile by the speaker.
And this can all be overstated. No one's ever perfectly literal, I'm habitually sarcastic enough that I will often look back at my own writing and realize that when I had thought I was being straightforward, I was actually saying the reverse of what I meant in what I believed to be transparent sarcasm. What I'm reacting to, in an impressionistic way, is a sense that people who are being non-literal are much more likely, lately, to perceive an inquiry into what precisely they do literally mean as hostile and to refuse to engage with it.
So is the issue with the original quip on the website, or the response later on when called on it? Like, is the fix to be more precise in the follow-up discourse, and say "No, you dumbass, I was being cute and not literal when I wrote that"? Or should she not write that in the first place?
Are you getting at the distinction between writing for sympathetic in-group reading vs. writing for unsympathetic out-group reading? Writing that is going to be scrutinized by a cold observer has a very different standard than writing that is for the audience of friends, and maybe that is getting lost in the moment?
52: So would "defund the police" be an example?
It's almost as if both sides are adopting characteristics that used to be more the domain of the far right, of adopting an extremest position and then dancing back and forth with whether it was literal or figurative, according to whether it suits them in the moment.
Over the summer, I was okay with "defund the police" but now I am strongly against that language. I think it is wrecking discourse.
We can look forward to the glorious day when all journalism consists of "It's not my job to educate you".
53: I think either? That is, the problem is, I think, not accepting that if you're going to be engaging with people who aren't inside your [I keep calling this a 'discourse community', that's probably a defined term that means something different than I mean it to], at some point dull literalism is necessary if you don't want the interaction to break down. And that may be an intentional political choice, but I dislike the interactions it produces.
54: Yeah. I think some people mean 'defund' or 'abolish' the police absolutely literally and most don't, and this type of rhetoric makes it hard to tell what the latter sort of person does intend.
55: Yes, very much. In the "Worst Kind of Activism" thread I called the OP something meant to be taken 'seriously but not literally', and of course that was originally someone talking about Trump. I think there's much more of this kind of thing on the right, but I find it harder to pick apart when I'm not sympathetic to the underlying intent and politics. From the right, I just look at it and go "oh, more insane lying, nothing new." On the left, I can kind of get what's being communicated even if I don't like the style.
The non-literalism also gets used in the other direction, and sometimes it's fair and sometimes it's not. That is, we all know how things like The Bell Curve work -- dancing around saying that Black people are intractably genetically inferior without quite literally saying it, so you can either put in months of work pointing out all the logical flaws and false implications, or you can save time and effort by saying "shut up, racist." And those can both be valid responses -- there's no general obligation to break your heart over pretending that people are acting in good faith when they're not.
But I do think there's been a move to assuming that any indication that an interlocutor isn't comfortably in the same discourse community as the speaker means that maximal bad faith on their part can be presumed, regardless of the literal meaning of their words, and I think this tends to be overly hairtrigger. I'll try to come up with a nice clean example, but I don't have one offhand.
the discourse is a layered mass of allusion and sarcasm and an assumption that you can't expect to understand anything fully unless you've read a whole lot of material of unclear application to the specific conversation at hand.
It occurs to me that one of the things I appreciate about John Scalzi's political posts is that he very much does not do that (in part because the community he's writing for isn't defined by politics, and in part because of his experience as a workaday writer).
There was a pair of posts on LGM about abolishing the police which seems like kind of an illustration of what you're talking about.
I mentioned that I was reading more twitter around the election, and one of the accounts that got me to check was John Holbo, and I think he's very good about identifying time when writers on the right (particularly Rod Dreher) make arguments which assume a certain argumentative framework which in in tension with their argument.
I wasn't able to find the example I was thinking of, but here's one that's (a) short and (b) responding to an argument on the left(-ish).
[Jessie Singal] For people who defend Dem establishment leadership, what would you accept as evidence that they aren't, in fact, good at what they do?
[John Holbo] I would need evidence there is something you can say to partisans on the other side, causing them to flip in large numbers, delivering Dem victories without losing support on your side. Some simple tactic to hack this seemingly-tilted-against-D's, evenly hard-fought game.
Nancy Pelosi is about as skilled a politician as one could hope to have at the helm. Joe Biden is too old. And Kamala Harris is a formula that seems to work better on paper than in real life. Nevertheless, it's not clear a charisma candidate would have done better.
Biden had better favorables/unfavorables in the end than going in. He had good ones going on. It's not obvious there is some easy formula for doing much better. If D's put forward a young, charismatic Latino - Julian Castro, but Obama-grade - he might have lost the Midwest.
Regardless of which side you come down on, I think John Holbo is correct to note that Jessie Singal is engaging in a rhetorical flourish which functions as question-begging.
The discourse around "Medicare for all" was another annoying example. There was a lot of Bernie types arguing that actually "medicare for all" means a particular specific plan, and if you support literally having Medicare for everyone but not that specific plan with that name then you're the enemy. So much is about vocabulary and technical use of words, and less about the actual point.
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Tangentially related (in the sense of trying to pick apart arguments seen on twitter), I'd appreciate help fleshing out an argument that I ran into yesterday. I was curious to know what Rachel Bitecofer was saying about the election, so I checked her twitter feed and she is annoyed
What happened. Indeed the fallacy of Cohn's "no, really! Its persuasion! Don't believe your lying eyes! " misdirection campaign that @tbonier, @gwlauren, & @perrybaconjr have so deftly disproven. That "tell" is that suddenly persuasion ends at the congressional and state leg
I haven't read most of what she's referencing there, but the arguments that I've seen on the persuasion/turnout discussion are:
I think it's important for us to be clear-eyed about what happened in 2020. We're not going to know exactly what happened until there's more analysis of precinct results. But I think that the county-level data we have tells a pretty clear big-picture story. Which is that we won the presidency because, one, while we lost non-college-educated white voters, we kept those defections to a relatively low level, and two, a bunch of moderate Republicans who had voted for Trump in 2016 decided to vote for Biden this time.
Turnout was up, but it was up for both parties. According to Nate Cohn's estimates, Black turnout was probably up by around 8 percent, but non-Black turnout was up by something like 15 to 20 percent. So we had the highest-turnout election in a century, and despite that, we still only won because a bunch of people switched their votes in our direction.
I did find this from Perry Bacon Jr
Stacey Abrams had a playbook for turning Georgia blue
Abrams won 1.9 million votes in 2018, almost double the 1.1 million votes of Georgia's 2014 Democratic gubernatorial nominee. Biden won almost 2.5 million votes, compared to Clinton's 1.9 million. There are probably lots of reasons for the increased number of Democratic voters -- particularly anti-Trump sentiment and Georgia's changing demographics. Plus, Republican voter turnout in Georgia also surged this cycle, so maybe the Trump era has just boosted turnout among all groups. All that said, it's worth isolating the role of Abrams, because she has executed a specific, turnout-based strategy in Georgia for nearly a decade and has pushed for the Democratic Party to join her in implementing it.
...
It is really hard to know how much Abrams's efforts mattered. Perhaps anti-Trump sentiment and more liberal people moving to the Atlanta were by far the most important factors in boosting Democratic turnout in Georgia. But it's hard to dismiss Abrams's role -- after all, Democrats won Georgia, and pretty much exactly the way she laid out.
I knew what would happen there, as soon as I heard it I started (during EW in TX) the Ds were screwing themselves by suspending doors permanently. I knew the effect size, roundabouts, on that. I expected it would shave off a point or two off their vote shares.
One of my old bosses said that politics is like you're in a hot-air balloon. A lot of the stuff that you deal with day-to-day -- microtargeting models or digital ads or whatever -- that's just throwing sandbags on and off; the thing that really determines where you go is the weather. In politics, the important thing is to do what you can to change the weather, which is very hard. Most of what determines the "weather," the national media environment, are these big structural forces -- the economy, anti-incumbency, cultural forces, whether it's what's in the media or the country getting more educated or secular over time. But campaigns and activists do have the ability to shape media narratives about what gets talked about and what doesn't. From an electoral perspective, those are the most important decisions campaigns and activists make, and that creates a real responsibility on the part of everyone involved.
When you look at "defund the police" specifically, there was a real movement among educated, liberal people in the media and among activists across a broad swath of the left to elevate this issue and get folks to talk about it. And there are pros and cons to doing that. I'm not going to claim that I know what the right thing to do is -- sometimes, it makes sense to talk about unpopular issues. But we should acknowledge that in practice, those decisions to elevate the salience of certain issues and reduce it on other issues -- those decisions are actually something campaigns and activists have a lot of control over. And they are going to end up influencing vote share much more than any decision that any individual campaign makes about what digital vendors they use, or how many digital ads they use versus what TV ads they use.
Ultimately, in this hyperpolarized world, what national media outlets choose to talk about is going to be much more important in determining whether [Democratic Congressman] Collin Peterson survives in Minnesota's 7th district than anything he does. That's just the reality. [This month, Peterson lost his bid for reelection.]
My initial intuition is that the 2020 election shows that a focus on turnout won't transform politics -- it might work, or it might not, but it isn't a game changer -- based on the fact that 2020 had extremely high turnout and essentially the same partisan balance as any other election. But I take it that Rachel Bitecofer feels like there's good evidence to the contrary; that turnout is clearly more important than persuasion, but I'm not quite clear what she's pointing at.
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62: Right, that sort of thing is I think what I was talking about in 60. If you can identify someone as not in perfect agreement with you, it's fair to assume that everything they say (as in endorsing slightly different versions of universal health care) is an insincere mass of trickery.
There was an interview where Pelosi was asked for "Medicare for All", and she responded with the ways in which Medicare wasn't a great basis for a universal system, and I saw responses online of the form "How dare you?", being outraged that she didn't know that "Medicare for all" could only be used for Sanders' specific plan, and to take it to mean anything else was trolling.
I laughed at 58.
I think there's a tendency that was always visible in liberalism that has gotten worse in the social media era, because everything is so much dumber -- the idea that liberalism was so self-evidently correct that you didn't need to convince anyone of it, and anyone who didn't already see that it was true was a lost cause. It may have been a result of Bell-Curve-era conservativism, but I remember seeing it even back when Bush was President. It's what's behind the old saying "Conservatives look for converts. Liberals look for heretics."
The aspect of "wokeness" discourse that bothers me is when it seems pretty clearly exclusionary towards say high school educated Black people in their 50s. Where like knowing the phrase "lived experience" is more important than lived experience.
Another obvious example is BIPOC, where you need like a 4-page explainer to figure out what it means, and the overwhelming majority of the people it's referring to don't use that word or know what it's supposed to mean. It feels pretty presumptuous and honestly kinda racist.
I have precisely no interest in giving any oxygen to the moral panic over erstwhile cancel culture. It's just PC revanchism come around again.
But social media has exacerbated the tendency of folk to jump to conclusions. Also, the bad faith of the right especially around apologia has made it more difficult for folk to even recognize a good faith apology as sincere and effective. Overgeneralizing all rhetoric at all times, including now, has led to a very trite level of discourse. To their credit, the young seem to have evolved an effective immunity to these poisons, without running as much afoul of the cynical detachment that characterized Gen X.
A firehose of idiocy.
In the old world, a thousand people could think that Pelosi was being silly in thinking that Medicare for All meant changing the eligibility rules for Medicare -- just because Medicare is an actual thing, and the exact purpose of choosing this slogan was to leverage positive feelings about that actual thing* -- and the chances that any one of us would hear this even once would be miniscule. Now, we all hear it over and over.
And blame is shared all around, from the people who just can't resist going "well, actually . . ." every damn day to the people who keep using bumper sticker slogans easily blunted by an obvious "well, actually . . ."
On the election, we worked our tails off here in the county and were able to maintain our past ratio in the midst of a rising red tide. Our counterparts in other areas didn't and got swamped. I don't think there is anything at all that our statewide candidates could have done differently. Nothing.
* The fundamental bad faith that underlies this discourse is just so maddening.
"Conservatives look for converts. Liberals look for heretics."
I've never heard this before, but boy is it a succinct way to summarize the tendency towards grooming newby followers vs. alienating them.
The only way to win is not to talk to anyone outside of Unfogged.
I let myself get sucked into a stupid 'well actually . . .' yesterday at the Other Place with some of our prodigals over the Senate. OK, enthusiastically engaged in a well actually because, well, why not. 'Because it's dumb' somehow just didn't make occur to me.
And back to the campaign, we never really had an effective answer to the Republican frame: If you want to know what Steve Bullock will be like as a senator, don't pay attention to anything he says or does, or his 8 year record as governor and 4 years before that as attorney general. No, the one true way to know is to listen to a freshman member of Congress from New York City or, better yet, some activist from Portland who holds Bullock and everything he stands for in complete contempt, about what they think would should happen. It's so dumb, and yet so effective. They'll never stop as long as it works, and it'll work as long as people are entertained by bad faith right wing media.
58 has brightened my whole day. Thank you.
There is no phrase that implies a reduction in the stated and unstated duties of the police that will not be immediately be seized upon and discredited by the right-leaning population. None.
'We need to better fund mental health services.'
True, but most of us are not stating "defund the police" literally. I would say "reform the police and doubly reinvest in the social safety net" if I want to be taken literally.
74: I think you're doing the thing I was pointing to in 60. That is, what you said is perfectly true for some large part of the right wing -- they're always talking in bad faith, and whatever you say they'll warp it to be proof of pure evil. So just give up on worrying about how to interact with them, and I'll agree that's fair.
But persuadable people who aren't all the way to total agreement with you already do exist, and aren't always listening in bad faith. If what you actually do mean (and I don't know if it's true for you) is "we can reduce the need for police and the potential for police violence by also funding alternative mental health responders, and this should turn out to be cheaper in the long run," it's worth thinking about what language to use to sell that to people who could be brought on board but aren't there yet.
"Why should my taxes go to lining the pockets of the so-called mental health industry?" is an actual sentence I have heard from a wingnut relative.
Like, my mother is a fire-breathing leftist who hates cops (she's Queens Irish and thinks of cops as people she thought were horrible assholes when she knew them as teenagers), and she brought up "defund the police" to me as self-evidently stupid. I had to walk her through the sorts of things police functions could be replaced with before I could get her on board with it. Being put off by the wording doesn't mean you're unreachable.
77: I just don't think there even is a defensible turn of phrase that won't immediately be poisoned by the right over weeks to years. Not within the current set of memetic ecosystems at any rate.
It's possible that trying to word things appealingly is going to fail in light of the level of control right-wingers have over the media environment, sure. But it's still worth trying to some extent. On 'defund the police', I don't have a better snappy slogan, but in general it's worth making an effort.
Let me be the first to suggest "Black Lives Matter."
There's a vegetable stand near my place with the most entertainingly mealy mouthed political sign. It's one of those "in this place we believe" with a list of platitudes, but it includes "black and all lives matter" and "not all cops are bad." The latter really cracks me up: "look, we can agree that most cops are bastards, that's a given. Just not literally all of them."
"LWCATMCABTAGJNLAOF" won't fit on my knuckle.
Only tangentially related, I'm feeling super frustrated about police reform right now because of articles like this.
On my iPhone - apologies for the lack of an html link
Basically, under public pressure bills passed both the House and the Senate, but it looks like they are going to die in conference committee.
It just seems like all the action is in conference, so people with organized access through lobbyists and the like have even more of an advantage. I think that's why so many broad-based things like paid family leave or our health reform are either accomplished through ballot initiatives or the threat of one. That doesn't work for something like police reform. Dispiriting.
So basically, at the state level, I'm not sure how much messaging matters. The people behind closed doors have well defined interests and are less influenced by messaging and marketing.
I think "Black Lives Matter" is in a completely different category from "Medicare for All" or "Defund the police" or "BIPOC." It is meant entirely literally, and isn't based on esoteric understanding beyond what's in the words. It's an example of good discourse, not bad discourse. And "Black Lives Matter" has over 85% approval among Black Americans, whereas "defund the police" only gets 45% approval among Black Americans (with 38% opposed!).
74: This is always the excuse for not saying what you mean. If you don't marinate in left-wing culture, you don't know what "defund the police" means, and you think it means "abolish the police". We all know what it means because we were in contact with the circles where it came into circulation. It's exactly the phenomenon that LB is talking about.
But c'mon, seriously. How many folk running for office actually used the slogan "defund the police"? How many people from the left generally with airtime on TV or the radio? To a first approximation: none.
So why is it that liberals are being held publicly accountable for that phrase, with which they broadly disagree, while conservatives aren't being held publicly accountable for idk "stop the steal" "lock her up" "we will not comply" and other pithy memes that are both vaguely toxic to the public at large, but freely swirl around the right and are often used by public figures from the right?
We're not complaining about people who run for office, we're complaining about people who write for Vox!
Didn't Bobo used to call himself "Bono Vox"?
Fundamentally, because partisan right-wing media is a huge thing that exists and there isn't a similarly huge partisan left-wing media. I mean, the complaint I'm making about rhetorical styles obviously shouldn't apply to people who really aren't talking like that, but with Fox News and the like attributing every bit of left wing speech to every Democrat, it's going to stick sometimes. I don't know what to do about that.
Conservatism thrives on bad faith. Liberalism doesn't.
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.
So there was that.
I personally have no idea what anyone is thinking or seeing, or what set of facts they're working with anymore.
Yeah, I follow her on Twitter and she's being absolutely literal. But lots of other people using the slogans aren't.
94: Exactly. That headline is from the NYT. It's not like abolish the police was some invisible fringe idea that was cynically signal boosted by Fox News.
Much as I dislike the phrase, that's a classic example of an exception that proves the rule.
Right. Even with an op-Ed in the NYT, Kaba is an activist not a Democratic politician. I'd be surprised if she even thinks of herself as a Democrat. Her activism might not be couched so as to best advantage Democratic candidates, but there's no reason at all that it should be.
It's unfair that Democratic candidates get attached to positions they don't hold, but I don't know how to stop that from happening.
Yep, telling radicals that they can't use certain phrases because Democratic politicians might get associated with them doesn't seem like an effective strategy.
Of course you can't control what radicals say. But if you're a politician, you will sometimes get associated with positions you don't actually hold if they come from someone broadly speaking on your "side"*. And when that happens you may need to clearly disavow those positions.
Maybe that's annoying, but it's just politicians sometimes being required to act like politicians.
*And "But they're not on the Democrats' side!" is a non-starter. There are 2 sides in US politics, and the abolish the police folks are on the left.
I don't think anyone's in disagreement about that. This piece of conversation started with me griping about rhetoric, but it's drifted pretty far from that. But I think everyone agrees that politicians who don't want to abolish the police should say so.
The complaints I've seen on Twitter seem to be directed at radicals, telling them that they should stop using those slogans because it's dragging down the democratic cause.
100, 101 -- 'Clearly disavow' has no meaning when 'pay no attention to what Steve Bullock says' is the frame. Democratic politicians that needed to disavow this stuff did so. It had no impact in the right wing press. No one else is relevant to the fucking frame. There's no one weird trick that gets Democratic candidates out of the slander.
102 If radicals gaf about whether Republicans win, they might consider the impact of their rhetoric. If they do not care whether Republicans win, then, ok, let loose. Just don't be surprised about the consequences, or that the Republicans they helped elect aren't interested in furthering their agenda.
Life isn't fair and actions have consequences. 'It's not my fault that life is unfair' is both true and irrelevant. What is bullshit, imo, is 'oh, that didn't happen, no one used my rhetoric dishonestly.'
Defund the Police is a great bumper sticker sized slogan for a truly righteous cause. The slogan was a little too easy to hijack from both left and right, though.
I just don't think hectoring radicals is effective at all. These people are already pissed that they had to vote for Biden, and many don't buy the claim that being more centrist is a winning strategy. If someone is angry that Dems only talk about 'police reform' rather than 'defund the police' (this describes a lot of people I follow on Twitter) then hectoring them to shut up is only going to make them angrier. It's not clear to me that the infighting among the left is helping to improve overall strategy as opposed to making Bernie bros less willing to vote Dem.
In general I'm much more uncertain about my intuitions about what is 'electable' than most people (whether far left or center left) seem to be.
I don't disagree with 105.1. It's a terrible spiral, and it's not clear to me how to break it. The main problem is dishonest right wing framing, but no one has figured out how to get out from under that in jurisdictions where far left is electoral poison, and center left has a fighting chance. IRL, I spend my time on this topic telling center left folks to quit complaining about the far left, because it doesn't work, and because we have to beat the right.
It's unfair that Democratic candidates get attached to positions they don't hold, but I don't know how to stop that from happening.
I think the solution is at the source: Fox News and Facebook. I don't think the Fairness Doctrine is exactly the right thing, but I do think there should be legislation that requires that a news show is factually accurate, with frequent fines until the rightwing news media changes. Sure sure, free speech. That's fine for opinion pieces, labeled as opinion and maybe labeled as factually accurate or not. But there are sources for a great deal of the real bullshit (OANN, Russia Times) and if Dems can legislate at all (or even regulate), they should. The list is so long (voter rights, post office, CO2 regs, courts) and this is on it.
I mean, there may be difficult grey areas, but whether a candidate is supporting Defund the Police is not. That's confirmable by looking at the candidate's speech. Lying that they do support it should get a platform fined.
I think the solution is at the source: Fox News and Facebook.
This is what I was getting at in 96: the source in this case wasn't really Fox News. It was the NYT and Vox and similar places that chose to massively signal boost the least defensible and most unpopular versions of Abolish The Police a few weeks before election day. I'm sure Fox would have done it if they had thought of it.
As far as candidates tarring their opponents with positions they don't hold, of course it's dishonest. But it's a bog standard form of dishonesty that's been a regular part of politics since forever. But it was organs that pride themselves on how anti-Trump they are that handed republican candidates this particular bit of ammunition, not the right wing mediaverse.
Just for fun, the intro section to Judge Brann's decision in that Williamsport case.
In this action, the Trump Campaign and the Individual Plaintiffs(collectively, the "Plaintiffs") seek to discard millions of votes legally cast by Pennsylvanians from all corners - from Greene County to Pike County, and everywhere in between. In other words, Plaintiffs ask this Court to disenfranchise almost seven million voters. This Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated. One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens. That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more. At bottom, Plaintiffs have failed to meet their burden to state a claim upon which relief may be granted. Therefore, I grant Defendants' motions and dismiss Plaintiffs' action with prejudice.
I want revenge on everyone involved in the plaintiff's side of that, including all members of the PA legislature who voted to delay counting the mail-in votes.
I'm wondering if backing Fetterman isn't the way to do that best.
I'm watching "Clue". The acting is really pretty great.
Also, I totally thought that was Susan Sarandon.
Honestly, I'd like to have seen what Chekhov could have done with this material.
I can't recognize Susan Sarandon, but I was right that the singing telegram woman was Jane Weilan.
She's had a short but brilliant movie career.
I hate to be so Bernie bro about this, but I do think if the Democratic platform had some eye-catching new social programs or payments that they pounded more, it would be harder for opponents to pin on them the eye-catching stuff that activists happen to have recently bubbled up.
Madeline Kahn was a national treasure.
119: The toast also believed that-- https://the-toast.net/tag/madeline-kahn-mondays/
If the NYT actually published that piece, but sacked James Bennet for publishing Cotton, it really has lurched a long, silly way to the Left. In practice "defund the police" would mean exactly the same as "send in the army" -- and I'm not in favour of either.
Order must ultimately be maintained by force. The question is who wields it and how; and the idea of a professional, legitimate, civilian, police force is one of the genuinely gret social innovations of the nineteenth century. The problem with American police forces is that they are too militarised and too much like an occupying army; but you can't get over it by pretending that without the credible threat and occasional use of force we could all get along.
Maybe this is all well known here, but I found it helpful in specific and (pardon the word) bullet form when Simon Balto points out that the city of Chicago spends close to two billion dollars every year to have no arrests in 78 percent of first-degree homicides, pays close to two billion dollars a years to have a decade average of no arrests in 80 to 90 percent of sexual assault and abuse cases. They are paying close to two billion dollars a year for a force that receives more than 20 official complaints each and every day of the year. (And how much nonsense isn't being reported? Way, way, way more.) How much is the city paying in brutality settlements? Balto doesn't say in this article, but it's surely in the millions yearly.
http://www.publicbooks.org/how-to-defund-the-police/
If I had to put it on a bumper sticker, I'd call it "real public safety." So many people aren't getting it, for so many reasons. The more we talk about how much the police cost for what they don't provide, the better off we are.
120 led me to a bit of whimsy from Ortberg that I had previously missed and which brought me great joy during this time of profound distress and foreboding amidst the unraveling of the nation.
Joan Didion and Anna Wintour: Best Friends Forever
Recently I purchased a twelve-dollar gray wig online and had it shipped to myself at Nicole's house, where I've been staying for the last three and a half weeks, because I was suddenly and inexplicably seized with the thought, "I should have a gray wig and film the ongoing adventures of best friends Joan Didion and Anna Wintour."
...
<eight short videos>
I've also found, as the series has continued, that their respective characterizations have been marked by a significant decrease in dignity and reserve and a 400% uptick in relentless enthusiasm, because that is just the energy I cannot help but bring to the table. This is, I suppose, my pivot to video. Thank you for watching.
124: And never did seek medical help.
I thought LB's original point was more interesting than just as an opening salvo on the War Over the Election that will consume the next 2 years at the very least. I felt validated that LB described herself as being crabby. I think secretly I believe that LB is smarter than me. I would never admit that, though.
I think what bothers me about the kind of online discourse LB is talking about is that it reads to me like dishonest hackery, just dishonest hackery in the service of my side. Maybe it's good marketing, but I don't want to fucking marketed to. "Cities waste billions of dollars on useless overtime and settlements for police abuses, rather than solving crimes" is a perfectly intelligible point. I don't feel incredibly strongly about "defund the police" (since I can squint and the connection with the previous sentence), but in general the endless opaque sloganeering does get on my nerves.
125: This is what makes the way the whole thing developed so annoying. There was a point soon after defund the police first popped up on the media radar when it became clear that almost no one had any idea just what a huge fraction of municipal budgets were being eaten up by the police. That was the kernel of a potentially popular program! But we got headlines like "Yes, we really do mean abolish the police" instead.
It was an own goal. And it seems to have been driven in part by a desire of media types to be clever in a particularly sophomoric, MLA seminar way. Which I guess is part of what LB was picking up on in her original comment.
129: Why are you blaming that editorial (yes, singular, unless there was a wave of such that I missed) for blunting popular appeals for police reform rather than the impending election, the ongoing catastrophic pandemic, the entrenched power of the police, and Americans' tendency to drop any subject after no more than a month of hesitant reflection?
If I had to put it on a bumper sticker, I'd call it "real public safety."
I think this is a much better soundbite.
You can't make bumper stickers that talk aloud.
The problem with American police forces is that they are too militarised
This is a problem with American policing, but not the problem, which is that in most of the country, the police were formed either to control Blacks and immigrants, or to put down labor strikes. The people being controlled know this very well, and I understand where they're coming from, but that said, when, in the heat of the controversy, the Times runs the most extreme version of this view, under a headline saying "we literally mean," they also know very well what they're doing.
There is a lot to be said for "Defund the Police" as the seed of a good policy, or at least policy worth discussing.
We shouldn't throw it out because opponents will attack us for it in bad faith. When they do, the appropriate response is to turn things around and accuse them of supporting police brutality, and white supremacy, and remind everyone that theirs is the side with all the nazis.
One would think we could make that stick, but instead we focus fire on our own activists.
Lurching in the Sapir-Whorf direction, I wonder if it cascaded to some problems that there isn't a great word in English unambiguously meaning "cut funding significantly" as opposed to "remove funding for". When the activists made their demand "cut police funding 15-50% right now, invest that in non-police community safety programs, and work toward being able to move all our public safety to institutions discontinuous with police", they perceived it as a major and constructive compromise, but as 122 shows, many saw it as indistinguishable, and partly for the genuine reason that "defund" can mean 100% as easily as 15%.
There's "slash", but that seems inapt.
Maybe if we had just promoted the "Abolish ICE" message more, people would have better seen the distinction between "Abolish" and "Defund."
Also I'm fairly sure Democrats, or Democrat-adjacent people, probably don't have happy experiences of stuff getting defunded.
I'm not a messaging guru, but I would have guessed that focusing on the goal rather than the mechanics would have been the way to go. "Real public safety" rather than "funding cuts." Ideally, cities would have just made various procedural changes: sending social workers with police along as a backup, for example, without making a big show of getting rid of the police.
From a marketing perspective, the only problem with "Black Lives Matter" was that it let people brag about police officers who killed white people with mental illness.
I'm not a messaging guru, but I would have guessed that focusing on the goal rather than the mechanics would have been the way to go.
I'm on board with this, especially in as much as adding a bunch of social services to policing activities may well end up costing more, not less. Certainly the "Defund the Police" message is at odds with something like the "make sure all police have a body camera" message, because running a body camera program actually costs money.
Me, I'd rather figure out what the right thing to do is, do it, and then figure out the accounting later. When you focus on budget up front, you lose site of the end goals.
123 We know that when fascism comes to the US, it'll be with a bible and our civic hymns, but I wouldn't have guessed that socialism will come from a bunch of semi-mythical undisciplined individualistic malcontents
It could ne be clearer that the right's actual position is No Lives Matter.
No Lives Matter
That was the slogan on 2020's "Cthulhu for president" bumper stickers.
It was a refreshing change from the usual standby: "Why settle for the lesser evil?".
"there isn't a great word in English unambiguously meaning "cut funding significantly" as opposed to "remove funding
How about "cut back"? Ok , two words.
Or just Police Cuts Now. Everyone knows that "spending cuts" don't mean spending goes to zero.
Also I'm fairly sure Democrats, or Democrat-adjacent people, probably don't have happy experiences of stuff getting defunded.
This also bothers me. I assume that if police budgets were reduced, it would be done poorly.
Spike- "When they do, the appropriate response is to turn things around and accuse them of supporting police brutality, and white supremacy, and remind everyone that theirs is the side with all the nazis."
I don't think it makes any sense for us to do this anymore. They are already advertising these things to turn out their base. Our complaints just make them happier about what they are doing. And everyone else in America has heard it already.
"Police cuts" is still the same message, and has the same problem -- it's about hobbling the police in some fashion, rather than changing the police. Maybe the police should be hobbled, but if so, "Defund the Police" captures that nicely.
It isn't up to activists to market-test their slogans -- people say stuff and sometimes it catches on. But "Defund The Police," as a slogan, is obviously an effort by the activists to trim their language to appeal to the broader public. The less diplomatic way of saying it is, "Fuck the Police."
As Walt notes, LB has framed the interesting question: How should we talk to each other about these things -- not because we are worried about being overheard by the NYT or whoever, but because we want to be honest and clear with each other (and yeah, maybe because we hope honesty and clarity catches on as a trend).
Ogged's example in 94 is about that public conversation, but I think it's a great example of LB's complaint. The headline is "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police," and I'd bet anything that the author was happy with that headline, but when it comes down to actually advocating a program, here is what she says:
I've been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power -- whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent -- here's an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. ... The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers.
I'm pretty sympathetic to her view, but "Abolish the Police," whether or not it works as a slogan, doesn't strike me as being clear and honest.
I agree with 149, and wanted to say in response to 118, that I think the Warren campaign demonstrated the ineffectiveness of this as a fundamental element of success pretty conclusively. There's no weird trick. There's hard work and slow boring -- of the kind Minivet and Spike are both involved in -- as part of a well coordinated and well run effort to increase registration and turn-out. All across the coalition.
There's also some persuasion. I don't know if we know how many Obama-Trump-Biden voters there are in places like Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia, but those margins are close enough that you wouldn't want to leave them on the table.
Meanwhile, WTF is going on in Georgia with Sidney Powell? It seem biblical all right, but more like Abraham being compelled to sacrifice his son than, what, Joshua at the walls of Jericho. Or maybe it really just is they that carried us away captive required of us a song, and they that wasted us required of us mirth.
I guess I would depart from 149 to the extent of saying that I agree that calling out racism etc is not going to be effective as a mass communication, but that it might well be highly effective, at the margins, in one-on-one interaction.
152: Fair point, that was definitely the Warren strategy and its failure is an important data point. But I feel like there was a lot of wasted space in Biden and other major Dem messaging; they could have at least tried it. (A massive child tax credit, for example, is extraordinarily popular, and probably with more salience and persistence than the "popularity" of M4A.)
133: point taken. But what was there before? Lonesome Dove style posses?
Surely not in the cities.
The problem for me with slogans like Cuts or Defund, is that while spending less money on the police is good too, what I primarily want is for them to be doing fewer things. The slogan is something like Abolish The Police (as all-purpose first responders for situations that could plausibly be resolved without killing anyone), but I don't know how to say that in three words.
Speaking of Lonesome Dove, Ricky Schroder is apparently bailing out Kyle Rittenhouse.
The slogan is something like Abolish The Police (as all-purpose first responders for situations that could plausibly be resolved without killing anyone)
That sounds like "Abolish The Police (except for SWAT)" which sounds like a terrible idea.
My thinking is more along the lines of, "abolish the idea that the Police, as currently constituted have unique professional understanding of how to resolve situations which potentially require violence and, as such, deserve great latitude from court, politicians, and other city agencies in the exercise of discretion."
We need a conceptual framework which manages to both acknowledge the fact that (a) police are professionally required to act as best they can in potentially chaotic or violent situations and (b) that, "it seemed like a good idea at the time" should not be, by itself, sufficient justification to do whatever they want.
Obviously I have neither a slogan or an immediate plan for how to accomplish that.
155: Night watches, similar to England.
The formation of formal police departments wasn't about controlling brown people, it was cities following Peel's lead in London and in the Eastern U.S. also a response to the rise of street gangs in the mid 1800's After the war of 1812 there was a massive immigration surge and with it clashing nativist and immigrant gangs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowery_Boys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_Uglies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirt_Tails
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Rabbits
This doesn't have to affect messaging, but I should add the point of fact that defund advocates do in fact see less police funding, personnel, etc. as a positive good, if in a more tactical sense than are the outcomes they seek. They are wary of reforms that have ultimately increased police funding, and see the heavy political involvement of police management and unions (including skulduggery as they apparently did with Buttigieg as mayor) as itself a major obstacle to further-reaching reform, that needs to be shrunk. Plus, of course, reducing the number of confrontations and killings.
Right -- the sort of changes I'd like to see would naturally go along with cutting police funding, and it'd be a positive good to have that money spent in a more useful way (that is, on non-violent methods of achieving public safety). Foregrounding cutting funding without talking about how to structure what's being cut does sound like a way to end up with an even more terrified, hostile, and useless rump of a police force.
That's why I'm putting some of my eggs this year in de-policing traffic enforcement.
I genuinely don't think any fix starts with the police. I think it starts with shoring up the agencies who need to take over the ancillary functions that the police have acquired. Just plain start with investment. None of this "balanced budget finite pie" paradigm bullshit.
I wrote 163 back when it seemed less like I was paraphrasing the comments immediately preceding it, and then was interrupted before I posted it, and then in the interim other people said it better. FINE.
The pieces that seem like they could be peeled off first are mental health calls, traffic enforcement, sex work, drug enforcement. I personally think some large part of detecting can be done without having violence workers in house.
Doesn't seem like there's much opposition to peeling off mental heath, cause the cops don't want to be doing that either. So yeah. Minivet's on the right track. Get working on getting police out of traffic enforcement. And decriminalizing sex work and drugs. That's a big agenda, but not utterly shocking to the moderate mind.
Of course, the follow-through, that after the cops aren't doing that, their budget and personnel shrink, that's also a course of work.
In my city we are peeling off some of the work related to managing rowdy college kids and their house parties to a non-uniformed position in the police department. As I understand it, this is based on a model they use in Heebieville.
Interesting! I have no idea how we rein in our reckless rowdy students.
Also on BART there's a new "ambassador" position that's working decently so far.
Is that also modeled after the system in place at Heebieville for our subway system?
Reading "A Paradise Built in Hell" did a lot to convince me that armed police are not in fact a strict prerequisite for public safety and often harmful to it.
168 -- Ah, the perfect position for Diane Feinstein. Not as glamorous as Denmark or Portugal, to be sure, but closer to home.
"abolish the idea that the Police, as currently constituted have unique professional understanding of how to resolve situations which potentially require violence"
So who does have an understanding then? Many leftist ideas around policing are obviously being put out by people who are a stranger to violence.
I can report that Jackmormon is indeed well. Also, we celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary last week. Thanks again, Unfogged.
I have no idea how we rein in our reckless rowdy students.
Something called a social host ordinance? It allows the neighbors to complain about kids hosting "unruly gatherings" and the kids get fined and the landlord gets notified. I'm sure I would have felt it to be the height of oppression when I was aged 18, but now that I'm older I see the wisdom.
Apparently Heebieville's implementation of this is the one to imitate. The idea is to work with the school to fund a position that basically acts as go-between among the student, the neighbors, and the landlord, to head off potential student evictions before they happen by informing them about things they can do to not piss off their neighbors.
So who does have an understanding then? Many leftist ideas around policing are obviously being put out by people who are a stranger to violence.
It sure as heck isn't me, which is why I say I don't have a specific proposal. But I'm thinking in the direction of some combination of:
1) Restricting qualified immunity (and probably putting more restrictions on asset forfeiture as well)
2) Civilian Review Boards that have at least some real power.
3) More involvement by other city departments in strategic planning which involves police (maybe this is already being done, I don't know). Are the PDs working with public health folks? If the PD and library are talking about ways in which the library interacts with the homeless population is the experience of the library staff considered just as important as the police?
174: Thanks for sharing the good news/happy occasion with us. Glad to hear it.
150: Unfortunately, Germany is still working on this.
Kinda sorta related is that a lot of smaller jurisdictions were formed to keep the Black people out, or conversely to corral them in certain areas. (St Louis County Missouri has 88 municipalities, for example.) As a result, their police forces are essentially tax farming operations. Those jurisdictions need to be abolished in toto.
I should add the point of fact that defund advocates do in fact see less police funding, personnel, etc. as a positive good, if in a more tactical sense than are the outcomes they seek.
We've been running a bit of an experiment on this over here.
Since 2010, police funding and police numbers have been cut 19% in England and Wales.
Every year of the last ten has seen a lower number of police-related deaths in E&W - deaths in custody, in police-related road traffic incidents, and by shooting - than all but the lowest year of the previous decade. Source: https://www.inquest.org.uk/deaths-in-police-custody.
The crime rate, OTOH, is now 20% higher than a decade ago in England & Wales. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1030625/crime-rate-uk/
Notice the very clear divergence between E&W and the devolved nations of Scotland and NI, which didn't see the same spike in crime and where police numbers remained constant over the period. https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-scottish-police-numbers-under-the-snp. (Numbers of police-related deaths in Scotland and NI are so small as to be resistant to year-on-year comparison.)
When you say "experiment on this", "this" means "cutting police without providing any additional nonviolent alternative services for public safety? Because that doesn't sound ideal.
175: I think that is the imposter Heebieville that is delivering well-designed public policy to address reckless partying.
It sounds great, though. In contrast, our big lighting-rod issue that the rentier class has prevented is full implementation of a rental registry of landlords. In other words, when there is a party raging out of control, the city has no way to determine who the landlord actually is. So they've tried to implement a point system of dinging landlords when there are persistent problems, but it only works if you actually have an address or contact information of the landlord, and it is hard to have such a thing in a state when the right to break laws is part of FREEDOM for the upperclass and must be protected at all costs.
Imposter Heebieville causes lots of problems for everyone. I even almost signed my kids up for a summer camp there once, by mistake.
I'm a little disturbed by reforms that take violations of public order by college students outside the purview of police while leaving police interactions with poor or working class communities unchanged. That seems like the wrong order to go in.
183: Does that mean people will have to stop giving edibles to trick or treaters?
I'm not defending that, but I can give the standard explanation: it's an issue of scale - parties by poor families are just not occurring on such an uncontrolled scale, whereas the college kid parties feel out of control to the residents.
So the difference is the fee-fees of the ruling class - poor people feel well-controlled or well-corralled, and so there's not an issue there that needs a creative solution. The college students do NOT seem well-corralled, and so they want to come up with something effective, and they're open to new ideas to get this under control.
That does make a certain amount of sense -- that the police are simply not policing student parties (presumably because it seems overly harsh using normal policing tactics on "good kids" for the same behavior that would get other people arrested and brought into the criminal justice system) so there has to be some kind of alternative for public safety. At which point I do start wondering why those alternative methods wouldn't work more broadly.
184: Wait what? How does Heebieville mail real estate tax bills? Also, how do landlords evict non-paying tenants without telling some government entity what property they own?
that the police are simply not policing student parties (presumably because it seems overly harsh using normal policing tactics on "good kids" for the same behavior that would get other people arrested and brought into the criminal justice system)
It's not even this - it's not that the parties aren't policed. It's that the policing doesn't move the needle on the sheer scale of the parties. This is in large part because of the constant turnover of students. The policing doesn't do anything for next year's crop of partiers.
190: I don't know the details, and I've asked similar questions, and gotten handwavy answers. But I think there are a lot of third parties blocking the property owner and generally obscuring things - making it impractical to determine the owner by putting a lawyer or a local property caretaker in the way as the address for communications.
The current system (I believe) is that there is a point system in place, and if you acquire points for bad behavior as a landlord, then you are put on the rental registry, and there's a system for determining the owner or else the permits will be revoked, etc. So at this point the rental registry is growing. But it was quite a fight to get to this point. And these rental properties are flipped constantly, making it difficult to keep the registry functional.
The real estate transfer tax here is 4 percent, which seems very high, but probably doesn't encourage flipping.
Anyway, I don't mind real estate agents as people, but the industry as a whole doesn't seem like something we want to encourage.
That seems like a system where you'd want the property itself, rather than the landlord, to be on a registry.
Some of those who stage houses,
are the same who burn crosses.
When you say "experiment on this", "this" means "cutting police without providing any additional nonviolent alternative services for public safety?
Well, actually, "this" means "cutting police and also cutting all nonviolent alternative services for public safety". Austerity government, you know. They weren't doing it because of a desire to reduce police numbers specifically - they wanted to cut everything, and did.
Because that doesn't sound ideal.
It has not, in fact, been ideal.
As ajay says, there has been a massive drop in the clear up rate of all kinds of crimes, and all of the other associated professions are also massively overstretched and doing a much worse job than they did 10 years ago.
The U.S. is right now at peak-Covid and that's with large sections of the population dodging tests unless they need hospitalization. The day after tomorrow is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year and about a third of the population is making it a point of pride to have a big dinner. I guess the silver lining is that deaths will finally start to drop about the time Biden is inaugurated, unless there's another major holiday in about a month.
I didn't actually say that clearup rates had dropped as well but I should have done because they have - thanks. And delays between crime and trial are way up. And so on and so on. And it killed the post-GFC recovery for five years, and left public services with less slack than ever, just as a bit of surge capacity would have been REALLY HANDY.
It's probably going to be a really horrible month for medical people.
So who does have an understanding then?
Of how to handle situations that might turn violent? Nurses. Customer service staff. Religious leaders. EMTs. Firefighters.
203: Anyone whose training is specifically in de-escalating instead of projecting force... yes.
unless there's another major holiday in about a month
Good thing that the Islamist-Communist-Liberal Alliance has destroyed all memory of that "holiday".
But I guess there is still Kwanzaa.
Imposter Heebieville causes lots of problems for everyone.
I thought it was Imposter Heebieville at first too, but its actually confusing because both Heebieville and Imposter Heebieville have been doing something along these lines.
But ours is based on the Real Heebieville - take a look at your Code of Ordinances /Subpart A. - General Ordinances/ Chapter 34-Environment/ Article 6. - Host Responsibilities of Parties in Residential Areas.
I'm not defending that, but I can give the standard explanation: it's an issue of scale - parties by poor families are just not occurring on such an uncontrolled scale, whereas the college kid parties feel out of control to the residents.
This, basically. It wasn't poor families that turned the pumpkin festival into a riot....
re: 200
I'm actually remembering an earlier thread where you did say that, and I was surprised when I looked it up, just how massive the drop has been.
I'll check it out after I teach!
Just watched our Allegheny County certification meeting live. Very short and too the point. Several thousand votes in different categories set aside and not included due to ongoing lawsuits (none of these are in the results showing on the county or SoS websites, but most have been tabulated --except for ~300 challenged provisionals which have not been opened yet).
Vote was 2-1 to certify. So far in PA, seems to be Republicans are voting not to certify as a protest, but not yet heard of any whole county not certifying like Waynein MI tried to do. But would not be surprised. There will be no "normal" elections after this one for a long time. (But one anxiety at a time rule precludes worying about that ...)
204: firefighters get specific training on de escalation of force? Wow.
Well, actually, "this" means "cutting police and also cutting all nonviolent alternative services for public safety". Austerity government, you know. They weren't doing it because of a desire to reduce police numbers specifically - they wanted to cut everything, and did.
Yes - pretty different from the defund/abolition movement's concepts. So yes, my conveying the idea "less police funding, personnel, etc. as a positive good" is probably boiling it down too much - they wouldn't argue, aren't arguing, to cut police and put nothing in their place, especially not to cut social services alongside. More about the reduction of police size alongside other reforms as being an important and helpful middle step, not replaceable with "make the police better"-type reforms. (Although it is simultaneously true that they don't talk a lot about police as a deterrent on crime - which may be a limitation to broader acceptance, but which I still find at least understandable considering the much higher baseline of police violence in the US vs the UK, and the experience that policing in marginalized areas looks a lot more binding than protective. (And acknowledging that plenty of people of color outside the movement, including in those same areas, still demand police presence in practice - possibly because they like the model, possibly more often because they see little other near-term assistance as likely.))
Firefighters are also EMTs and first responders here. They show up in a full engine for mental health calls. I see about one every nine or ten months on the corner where I live. Strangely, they manage to do all that without shooting anyone. There are zero firefighter involved shooting deaths in my city.
Very similar to how mail carriers manage not to shoot any dogs every year.
A police dog just died near here. They were searching an unused warehouse and the dog fell down an open shaft. I think they need to figure out how to give the dog a flashlight.
Firefighters are also EMTs and first responders here. They show up in a full engine for mental health calls.
Ah, OK. Different here: our firefighters do fire and rescue stuff, and fire prevention and civil defence, and the ambulance service does ambulance stuff. Do they then transport the patient in a fire engine? I wouldn't have thought there would be room.
I suspect that EMTs kill a load more people every year than police do, in the US as well as the UK.
Very similar to how mail carriers manage not to shoot any dogs every year.
infamously, they shoot a fair number of other mail carriers, though.
In many areas of the U.S., the ambulance people are a private company. The fire fighters show up do to EMT-stuff and call the ambulance for transportation of the patient if needed.
Also, it's usually the processing center people who get shot by other postal employees.
The beauty of the American system is that way the ambulance can charge you $50K which you pay out-of-pocket because they weren't in your network, and which you can't decline because you're unconscious. Capitalism!
Not that I'm in the policy or the slogan business, but "Suburbanize the Police" seems about right. So it includes things like Imposter Heebieville's non-police way of dealing with parties, but more generally what we need is the atmosphere of respect for residents from the police. Treat everyone like you do the people in the nicer parts of town. I have no idea how one creates that -- but from what I've read a lot of poorer 'urban' communities want more policing, not less.
215: Often 911 gets you all three in smaller towns, or they dispatch whoever is closest while the appropriate crew arrives. I'm pretty sure that when I was in a car crash the first responders were the EMT-firefighters, followed by the cops.
Legally, it's probably not hard for anyone to shoot a dog. Concealed carry permits are available in every gas station restroom and close to nobody uses a dog leash. Just shoot and cry self defense.
I suspect that EMTs kill a load more people every year than police do, in the US as well as the UK.
By this you mean "fail to save dying people" for EMTs and "affirmatively cause the death of" for cops? Because that seems like a weird comparison to make.
Yeah, but medical errors by EMTs that kill someone who would have been fine if they had just not showed up? That could happen, but I doubt it happens much.
What about kill someone who would have been fine if they had showed up and not made an error?
That still sounds to me like 'not saving'. It might be a severe error, it might be medical malpractice, but for anyone who would have died without medical assistance, even if saving them would have been easy, I wouldn't say the EMT killed them.
We could combine EMTs and police into a single agency. If they shoot someone and inflict a non-fatal wound, they have a second chance to kill the person through medical errors.
Synergy!
226: That seems like a really low bar. I was thinking "usual care" or something as a baseline.
Or at least against "would have lived if a neighbor drove them to the ER."
The beauty of the American system is that way the ambulance can charge you $50K which you pay out-of-pocket because they weren't in your network, and which you can't decline because you're unconscious. Capitalism!
Maybe not 50k, but public fire departments can and do bill people for ambulance-like services. IHPMTHBB my friend a few years ago got billed a few hundred dollars just for being checked over by the city fire department while she was briefly unconscious (and declining further assistance after coming to; it was a known medical condition).
228: I'm not thinking of it as a baseline for good EMT care, just for comparing death toll to police killings.
It's probably not a very good comparison to make because the denominators are so different.
That's different from saving/not saving.
I have mentioned here before, I have a younger relative who has mental health issues. As it happens, the police have dealt with him with great tact and sensitivity, even though he can be quite intimidating, and I say this as someone who isn't really big on law order solutions to social problems.
I'm not really sure who should be the first responder of choice when he has had an "episode" but people probably shouldn't kid themselves that there's an easy solution that doesn't basically involve people able use physical coercion. I'm not sure what people think happens in psychiatric hospitals when someone starts beating up nurses, but it doesn't just involve quiet voices and sympathetic looks. Nurses, in places like that, are very good at persuasion and talking people down, but that's not the only tools they have in their arsenal.
That's not to say that the response of choice should be some pig-ignorant cop turning up and tasing him, of course, and a huge number of people with mental illness will never have any interaction with the police, ever. But if my relative was kicking off somewhere, and I was some 3rd party, rather than a relative, I'd be pretty unhappy if someone told me that the people turning up--to deal with some ranting 6ft 4-ish 220lb guy with a shaved head*--would (only) be a mixture of nurses and social workers.
* and, also, people are very keen on phrases like "he looks scary but he wouldn't hurt a fly". That is not the case here. When he's unwell, he looks scary, because he is scary.
230 is pretty horrifying. And "suburbanise the police" is an excellent slogan, but it might also require efforts to suburbanise the communities policed.
What ajay and ttaM say about the effects of austerity on the whole criminal justice system is important and entirely true. We are much less safe, and live in a lower trust society, as a result of all that defunding. I don't think there would have been any votes in cutting police budgets while keeping a functioning probation system. or legal aid, or making prisons work towards rehabilitation, or paying social workers. You wouldn't need a very advanced AI at all to write the Daily Mail's treatment of those ideas.
But if my relative was kicking off somewhere, and I was some 3rd party, rather than a relative, I'd be pretty unhappy if someone told me that the people turning up--to deal with some ranting 6ft 4-ish 220lb guy with a shaved head*--would (only) be a mixture of nurses and social workers.
Even in my circles, which do sometimes approach the performatively progressive, I have never heard anyone say or imply that physical coercion should be ruled out or unavailable as an option to people in mental health crises.
re: 238
I think this is what I struggle with when it comes to some of the more extreme versions of the "defund the police" slogan. Who would those people be? Or the people dealing with violent assholes?*
That's not to say that I don't agree with the basic idea that a vast array of social problems are better dealt with by non-police solutions, and that, even when we do need something that looks a lot like the police (in some sense), what we don't want is some homicidal, racist, authoritarian, immune from punishment, armed gang, which is what seems to be the case in much of the US. I'm completely down with the idea of shutting down a lot of actual existing police services and just fucking starting again with a clean slate.
* I think the numbers of those people are often overstated, but there's enough of them out there to make a lot of people's lives miserable, and the pain they inflict falls disproportionately on poor people, women, children, and people of colour.
218: I actually had a firefighter ambulance. I had a really fast nosebleed, had pulled over and gotten out of the car, and somebody else called, because they saw me bleeding. They were EMTs but not paramedics. Only ambulances have paramedics. In my town they are private, though the town has been thonk8ng of setting up a public one. Boston has public.
Anyway, I never got a bill. I did get a follow up survey about their service. One of the questions was "How did you feel about the way we handled billing?"
I'm not sure if I told them that they never billed me.
Funny how the hubbub is all about "Defund the Police" rather than "All Cops Are Bastards."
weird how we have to agonize over what defund the police really means in the wake of 30-straight years of austerity policies that have 'defunded' every other public institution nearly to death. health care cuts? a tough but necessary budgetary measure. defund the police? it's an insurrection!
The problem is that in the US physical coercion almost always means guns, and because there's a high chance that the civilian also has a gun it means being on a hairtrigger to actually use the gun. Unarmed police would already go a long way towards this kind of "suburbanization", but almost certainly would lead to police getting shot more often, which makes it really difficult to implement (since dead cops are understandably unpopular in general, and understandably very unpopular with police unions).
243 is what MY is always saying on twitter. If you want the police defunded you should vote for Trump who is defunding the police by blocking funding to state governments, and not for Biden who wants to increase police budget and has successfully fought for police budget increases in the past.
I'm not personally agonising over it, and i've been consistently outraged and actively politically complaining against all of the other defunding that has happened in the UK over the past 10+ years. If I had to choose how to distribute a fixed amount of cash, I'd be right there with the people prioritising social care, the NHS, education, etc. over the police.* I think we are working/living in quite different worlds, though.
The police (here) suck in a lot of ways. But it's very different from the ways in which they suck in the US. The levels of police homicide and police violence are so different, it's almost like we aren't talking about the same institution.
* although I'm on team "let's just spend the fucking money", generally.
Maybe the slogan should just be "Make the police Canadian." And if we ever succeed at that then we can make "Make the police British" the next goal. But basically, yes, we're not talking about the same institution and the goal would be to get our police even in the same conversation as your police. (Again, not that that Canadian police or British police are perfect, but they're just not comparable to police in the US or Brazil or South Africa or Mexico.)
Little on the history of policing in America. https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/
First, if feet are like that, how is sex happening? Second, how does anybody have feet that nice after age 45? Third, is it just me or does one of those pairs of feet look alarmingly small?
It's weirder than that. The two outer feet belong to one person, and the two inner feet to another. They met at a shoe-trade event for asymmetrically footed people.
215: I was quite surprised when I was visiting friends in Nworb and Ume's town a few years ago during which time my friend went into cardiac arrest in front of me, and we had to wait for ambulances and EMTs to come directly from the hospital. It hadn't occurred to me that other countries might not stage EMTs at multiple places throughout a jurisdiction.
Either way, I should remember to take the Lipitor.
re: 251
My Dad was an ambulance driver, and his "base" was not the nearest major hospital. Similarly, we have an ambulance base at the end of our road, which covers our local area, and that's also not the local hospital, although the local hospital is pretty close. So I suspect it varies quite a lot.
A friend of mine was an ambulance-driving EMT in Seattle for years, and listened in on all the fire/police radios he could, and got quite proud of how often when the official request for an ambulance came he could *immediately* respond with "We're coming around the corner; do you want us to put the lights on, or not?"
They had zones rather than bases, iirc, although the places they could use a bathroom got to be very *like* bases.
Zone coverage seems like it would be cost effective compared to man-on-man.
251: we do stage ambulances at forward locations, as ttaM says. Probably in this case the hospital was just closer.
We also, especially in cities, have non-ambulance paramedic vehicles, because they can get through traffic faster - so you might get a paramedic on a motorbike first who stabilises the casualty, followed by an ambulance to transport them. Or you might get HEMS (aeromedical) first, but still transport by ambulance. They stage forward or patrol in high-density areas.
The issue is that while forward-basing decreases response time to forward-stage, it doesn't always improve total sortie rate very much, because the ambulances still have to go to hospitals to drop off, and then they have to "reset" - clean the back of the vehicle and restock all the stores they've expended - and that isn't always possible at forward staging locations, especially if they're temporary. In particular, if the issue is gridlock traffic around your A&E, then forward-staging won't help, because as soon as your ambulances go to do their first dropoff they're lost anyway.
Close reading will reveal that I've been doing a bit of thinking and research in advance of starting my new job.
re: 257
Here, where I live, the forward staged ambulance base is, unfortunately, caught in the traffic caused by the LTN (low traffic neighbourhood) changes. The specific massive pinch point (outside my son's school) is almost exactly midway between the ambulance base and the hospital. It's only about 1km between the two, but the traffic in between is often gridlocked. Even if they are blue lighting it through that stretch, there's a few hundred metres where there's just nowhere for cars to go, even if they want to move out of the way.
259: exactly. They shouldn't be blue-lighting from the forward staging base to the hospital anyway, but the delay will come from ambulances that have dropped off not being able to get back to the FSB to reset.
One of the biggest delays is actually at the hospital - ambulance crews can spend half an hour after they arrive doing the patient handover, and only once they're finished the handover can they go and reset. It's partly paperwork and partly just A&E being too busy to deal with them - not every patient that arrives by ambulance will need immediate treatment, after all, so they can end up sitting around for quite a while, and of course the ambo is completely idle while the crew's waiting for that to happen.
251: I think the nearest hospital was Addenbrookes' which is certainly the base for Cambridge, where the problem is traffic rather than distance, as ttaM suggests. This was the case even before the locally controversial LTN.
But I did some research last autumn after an ambulance took four hours to turn up to my mother's care home (20 miles from A&E) after she wriggled herself out of bed -- and in all that time the care home staff did not dare lift her back for fear of legal consequences, even though she was perfectly conscious and not in pain. It turns out that in rural areas the response times -- even with forward basing -- are miles off the very generous targets. Five or six hours' wait is not unusual if the triage doesn't say that this person is in imminent danger of death. That was the case before Covid. What the figures are now I don't like to think.
Meanwhile, talking to one ambulance driver, I learned that there was a prisoner in the cells in Kings Lynn (30 miles north of where we were; 60 from Cambridge) who was suffering chest pains, and was going to have to wait six hours for transport because my people were coming off shift. That kind of delay kills you with a heart attack.
261: all true. IIRC their performance is mainly judged on responses to the really urgent cases - the ones that require response within eight minutes - so less urgent cases suffer as a result. And the services, certainly in the SE, are permanently overstretched - they simply don't have enough vehicles, even under normal traffic conditions and even if all the vehicles are on the road.
I am not sure what sort of impact COVID will have - at present, in England, 1300 people are being admitted every day with COVID. So 39k per month. But under normal circumstances half a million people a month are admitted to English A&E departments. So COVID admissions are 8% of total.
Are those figures for all admissions to A&E or only for those who come in ambulances? Because most people appear to get there under their own steam.
Both figures are for all admissions.
The ambulance services in England do on the order of 10-20,000 transports to hospital A&E per day - 300k-600k per month. A very large share of ambulance service responses don't include transport to hospital - more than 40% in some months.
But ours is based on the Real Heebieville - take a look at your Code of Ordinances /Subpart A. - General Ordinances/ Chapter 34-Environment/ Article 6. - Host Responsibilities of Parties in Residential Areas.
This is fascinating. And it looks like it was last updated in 2009. The general belief of residents is that college students are a constant threat of parties, but it's very hard to ascertain who deals with parties on a regular basis and who lives under the fear that a bad neighbor may move in but doesn't actually live nearby. But I do still think parties are a problem?
I'm seeing a loophole in part (c) "It is unlawful for the owner or manager of an apartment complex to knowingly allow an unruly gathering to occur or continue in a common area." as the only place that the owner/manager is mentioned in the statute. So I don't think this ordinance ever carries any weight beyond punishing the college student that hosted the party.
Did I ever mention that one time in college we (really, mostly my roommates) hosted a party that the cops broke up with about a dozen officers and a bus to transport arrested students?
Did I ever mention that one time in college we (really, mostly my roommates) hosted a party that the cops broke up with about a dozen officers and a bus to transport arrested students?
Going back to the slogan question, the pro-defund city council candidate who just beat the more equivocal, also Black, incumbent in my district* had one poster slogan "Care Not Cops". That's pretty good.
*Primarily a long-marginalized Black area but also contains downtown and, recently, many white people guilty about gentrifying. I didn't vote for the challenger, but mostly because of her very bad takes on housing; if it were just policing I would have.
The problem is that in the US physical coercion almost always means guns, and because there's a high chance that the civilian also has a gun it means being on a hairtrigger to actually use the gun. Unarmed police would already go a long way towards this kind of "suburbanization", but almost certainly would lead to police getting shot more often, which makes it really difficult to implement (since dead cops are understandably unpopular in general, and understandably very unpopular with police unions).
I agree that the hair trigger thing is a huge part of the problem, but I think it's more attributable to being trained to treat every interaction as a potential gunfight than anything rooted in sensible risk assessment. If police doctrine treated dead civilians as the same sort of harm as dead officers and trained to minimize unnecessary shootings, I think we'd get fewer unnecessary shootings. The whole "thin blue line" culture is fundamentally screwed up. Police perform a necessary function, but they are not the only thing standing between ordinary people and dangerous assholes.
Right. There are certainly way too many guns out there. But there isn't that big a segment of the population carrying a loaded gun and prepared to murder a cop. Like, there are little pilot programs with people doing unarmed response and intervention to violent situations, and I'm not reading stories about them being gunned down en masse.
And of course, this is part of the reason to approach this sort of issue as about shrinking the responsibilities of the police, rather than 'reforming' them. You couldn't possibly send an unarmed police officer into a possibly violent situation, the risk of their being injured would be unacceptable. The safety of the police is their own primary concern.
But if you trained people in non-violent dispute resolution, and hired on the basis of being willing to accept a certain amount of risk, that'd be different.
Much like the SUV safety fallacy - a policy of confrontation (e.g. the 20-foot concept) is less safe even if all you care about is individual cops.
One interesting area for left-right conversation on police would be about the power of police unions. I'm more skeptical about unions in the public sector than the private sector generally, since the political process and civil service systems perform create some protections that don't exist for private sector employees, but even if you're less squishy on that than I am, bargaining for impunity is a bad thing when members of the bargaining unit carry guns and clubs.
You couldn't possibly send an unarmed police officer into a possibly violent situation, the risk of their being injured would be unacceptable. The safety of the police is their own primary concern. But if you trained people in non-violent dispute resolution, and hired on the basis of being willing to accept a certain amount of risk, that'd be different.
I am just baffled by what this is possibly meant to mean. You can't possibly send cops, even unarmed, into a risky situation, but you can send [vaguely defined nice people] because they bought the ticket, they knew what they were getting into? Don't social workers have a union? [oh god this is the US, perhaps they're counted as dogs or something]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn0WdJx-Wkw
There are lots of jobs where people accept more risk than police officers are willing to -- it's not one of the most dangerous jobs out there. Bouncers in nightclubs aren't authorized to shoot people if a fight starts, and yet it's possible to hire bouncers.
Most British police officers still don't carry guns, right? And they accept that level of risk. US police officers wouldn't accept that much risk in the US (higher than in the UK certainly) but that doesn't mean no one would.
Right, our police don't carry unless some specific reason comes up, but this is the most appallingly American solution to anything ever. the cops won't patrol without firearms while the country is awash with guns! I know, let's find someone who'll cross the picket line.
and we'll tell them they're morally better people. [praps we can get away with less on the pay and conditions? check with the lawyers.]
You're maybe not hearing the implicit assumption, stated fairly clearly in 272 by DaveLHI, that the police systematically overestimate the dangers they face as a justification for using deadly force whenever they feel threatened.
Also police seem to be systematically fearful of the wrong situations, in part because they've lodged themselves on the conservative side of the culture war. So when they're actually confronted with armed lunatics, they share a common enough background to signal to each other that they don't mean to harm each other personally.
Right, our police don't carry unless some specific reason comes up, but this is the most appallingly American solution to anything ever. the cops won't patrol without firearms while the country is awash with guns!
You are aware that many of us walk those same streets without guns of our own, correct? It's not the gun nuts that the police are worried about.
Of course the largest actual threat to police is driving accidents. But obviously cops don't give a shit about cops dying that way and would resist any attempts to make the job safer.
Honestly, some of them aren't helping themselves with the mustaches either.
Here's a program that's been running for quite a while in Eugene, Oregon, and they're not all murdered yet: https://whitebirdclinic.org/cahoots/
They don't respond to violent crime, but they do show up for mental health crises and conflict resolution -- situations where American police would feel unsafe without guns. But it does seem to work okay.
A driver got mad at a cyclist today and shot him despite the fact that a car is a better weapon against a cyclist than a gun. Maybe that's just the impact of societal norms or maybe he tried the car first and that's why he hit a bus shelter.
You guys have taken the ex recto factor to the next level here.
It still amazes me that the per capita number of knife/sharp-thing related murders in the US is higher than that in the UK: 4.50 knife murders in the US per million in 2019, vs. 3.81 per million in the UK in the year ending March 2019. We're a violent people.
I do get a very strong sense from a lot of the comments that few of the well-intentioned US commenters have ever lived in, or even visited, a place where the threat and fear of physical violence is all pervasive.
I've had some small experience of those places, and I did spend a lot of time with the Metropolitan police decades ago when I was writing a book about them. None of the theorising here fits those realities at all. One reason why the police in the UK are able to function credibly while unarmed is that they do have behind them the credible threat of overwhelming physical force if something goes wrong.
If, for example, you are arresting a large young man in his bedroom, no force is necessary if there are three of you. Anyone can calculate the odds, and I have watched them being calculated in real time. If the odds were different the calculation of the costs and benefits of violence would also change.
Another factor that I think is left out of these discussions is the effect on police morale of the fact that almost everyone lies to them in many of their interactions with the public. That's probably inevitable in that kind of job where maybe half the people you deal with have something to hide, and some proportion of those who don't are trying to manipulate you for their own purposes. But when it goes on day after day and year after year it does foster a rather jaundiced attitude towards the outside world.
288: arm the cyclists. It's the only answer.
291: That's right, at least for me, and probably for the rest of the commenters. I have spent the last twenty years living in a dense mixed-income immigrant neighborhood, but the threat and fear of physical violence hasn't ever been something I've experienced as a result. Doesn't that suggest to you that "places where the threat and fear of physical violence are all pervasive" are perhaps not a significant enough part of our society to justify structuring policing as if they were the norm?
I represent state agencies in my day job, and one of my agencies has its own sworn law enforcement officers to enforce environmental laws -- antique stores illegally selling tortoiseshell, that kind of thing. I had a meeting last spring with one of these guys, and he showed up wearing a gun. Nothing against him personally, presumably that's the departmental "just getting dressed for work" norm. But it's stupid. He's not making himself or anyone else safer by making sure he could shoot someone if necessary at a meeting with his middle-aged, law-abiding, attorney. He didn't have to travel through a lawless hellscape out of Escape From New York to get to the meeting either. But policing culture requires assuming that the world is such a terrifyingly violent place that a dude who's largely concerned with the provenance of antiques should be capable of killing at a moment's notice.
Among other things, I would like that guy not to be in the trained killer business. It's not necessary, it'd probably be better for his mental health, and we'd all be safer.
But those are the places where the police spend a disproportionate amount of their time, though.
295: Not all that disproportionate. Police officers spend their time in the specific geographical locations where they're employed, dangerous or not. Every commenter you're dismissing as not understanding the terrifying realities of police work because the place they live isn't a seething mass of violence and mayhem? There are police working in all of those places -- they're not all clustered in the tight little areas where the mayhem happens.
Trump is going to Gettysburg, a place that openly celebrates violence against people who hold his views.
His legal team is going to re-enact Pickett's Charge?
Doesn't that suggest to you that "places where the threat and fear of physical violence are all pervasive" are perhaps not a significant enough part of our society to justify structuring policing as if they were the norm?
This is not what the problem is, though. Most police officers seem to believe that they're correctly modifying their behavior according to whether there's a pervasive threat and fear of physical violence. So around white people in the suburbs, police officers bring a very different set of expectations.
The problem is that there's a crapload of racism underlying the heuristics that police officers use to modulate their expectations.
Well, there are a bunch of problems. The thing I was referencing, that the policing assumption is that the world is so dangerous that every cop, including my buddy the Tortoiseshell Enforcer (not a bad guy, does his job well, I don't have a bad thing to say about him other than that his departmental norms are crazy) has to be ready and equipped to kill at any moment, is a big part of it.
And then once you start with that assumption, the opportunity for racism to turn deadly gets huge.
Well, that's because I read threads sporadically and then respond to random phrases out of context. Now who should carry a gun?
Probably not either of us? I'm irascible and you're distracted.
Only white men trying to overturn an election won by a Democratic candidate.
295: Not all that disproportionate. Police officers spend their time in the specific geographical locations where they're employed, dangerous or not.
No, I meant at a much smaller scale. Even a police officer in the idyllic community of Perfection, NV, is going to spend more of her time in the bits of Perfection where the crime happens than in the bits where the crime doesn't happen. In the houses where the violent criminals live, because that's where you go to arrest them; or on the scenes of crime, including crimes that are actually in progress.
a dude who's largely concerned with the provenance of antiques should be capable of killing at a moment's notice.
It can be a dangerous job.
You've drifted from Andrew's point, then -- what he was talking about was high crime areas (that is, he was saying that no one here lives in or visits that kind of place), rather than specific encounters like being in a particular violent criminal's household. Nothing wrong with drifting, I just like keeping it clear what we're talking about.
And at that point, not sending in people with guns ready to kill until there's been a specific assessment that it's necessary works fine in the UK. The US is more dangerous than the UK, sure -- that sort of specific assessment might plausibly be made more often here. But I'd like to at least not have people ready to kill at a moment's notice sitting in meetings with me or wandering around the peaceful streets in the middle of the day.
But I'd like to at least not have people ready to kill at a moment's notice sitting in meetings with me or wandering around the peaceful streets in the middle of the day.
When am I supposed to wander around the streets, then?
Lurking darkly in the shadows after midnight, presumably. You can nap when the sun's up.
So the President reads Unfogged comments, and seeing mine above, turned to an aide and asked about Pickett.
Trip cancelled.
We've had rallies here in solidarity with BLM, but I'd say the truer passion is MMIW rallies. Which are definitely not about defunding or abolishing the police.
Re-direct the Police!
I can hold LB's and heebie's guns for them. I've seen a lot of action movies. I know how to handle a gun in each hand.
311: but then I don't sleep as well and I get all cranky.
309: I used to go into somewhat less safe areas. One of those has been gentrified since, but one block was so bad that I went through there quickly, stayed inside as much as possible and made sure I was out of the area by 2:30pm. Even at 4 during spring or summer, my black clients with schizophrenia would wait with me at the bus stop to make sure I was safe.
316: All the more reason why you should be disarmed.
317: Yeah, I'm really not sure where NW is drawing the line on direct experience of exposure to violent areas that qualifies any of us to have opinions. I mean, I'm perfectly willing to accept that there's nowhere in NYC these days that qualifies by his standards, but the neighborhood you're talking about might.
It might well qualify, and there are neighbourhoods like that in most cities. Even the Tenderloin in SFO.
Equally, I doubt I would have the sangfroid that LB displayed if one of my colleagues turned up armed -- even if it was only to subdue the photographer. But it is surely relevant that she did not in fact believe that he was prepared to kill anyone, and that his equipment no more demonstrated a homicidal nature than his car did. Had she supposed otherwise she might, I don't know, have called the cops or something.
The point I was aiming at was pretty much ajay's 307. The microclimates, so to say, where the police work, are by definition the most violent bits of any given society. Mostly they are completely invisible to the surrounding, more orderly and pleasant parts. And this was true even in the very low crime society of Sweden in the 1970s.
I don't get the impression that the activists promoting the Defund and/or Abolish the Police message are coming from peaceful suburbs and are unaware of the human capacity for violence. It's just that in their experience the police only contribute to the violence.
I mentioned this at the time -- at the state platform convention this summer, we had a discussion about eliminating bail, the limiting of which is a fine idea, and broadly supported. A pretty left guy from here who works as a public defender -- I like him, and am glad he won a house seat -- successfully argued that we should stake out the position of getting rid of all bail, and not have exceptions for public safety or whatever. His point was that judges would apply the exceptions in bad faith. The counter-argument was that sometimes people actually are dangerous to, say, members of their household who called the police.
The Republicans didn't pick up on this -- the flyers I got said my house and senate candidates supported knocking down Mount Rushmore. Which is obviously more likely than that they'd support letting accused but not yet convicted criminals out of jail.
I cannot stop crying. I have no profound statement to make here; my words are just bullshit piled atop more bullshit.
I don't know what you mean by saying that I didn't think the Tortoiseshell Enforexer was prepared to kill anyone. Of course I'd thought he was. I didn't think he intended to kill anyone in particular, and I certainly didn't think he was at all likely to kill me, but he was carrying a gun because it was part of his job to carry a gun: there's no reason to carry a gun professionally unless killing people with it is the sort of thing you might be required to do in the course of your duties. That's the understanding that armed police officers have about their jobs, and the training they get, and it's the understanding the rest of us have when we interact with them.
I was trusting that he wasn't enough of a fuckup to start shooting people when it was a bad idea (that is, almost always). And I trust people I work with not to be fuckups all the time. It's just that most of them, if they do turn out to be fuckups, which is a fairly regular occurrence, no one gets shot. I would like to not have to trust random people I don't know that much when it's not necessary.
successfully argued that we should stake out the position of getting rid of all bail, and not have exceptions for public safety
I don't understand this. Bail isn't about public safety, it's about making defendants show up for court. If there were a determination that it was unsafe to release a defendant before trial, how could it be safe to release them because they could come up with bail money?
Cops routinely carry guns in situations where they're unnecessary or even potentially harmful because it makes their dicks hard them feel powerful.
It's generally policy that they're supposed to carry all the time, right? I think that's insane, but it's not precisely the individual cops necessarily getting off on it.
I didn't think the Tortoiseshell Enforexer was prepared to kill anyone.
Now I'm imagining that New York State, through some bizarre bureaucratic glitch, has created an agency whose sole responsibility is tracking down and confiscating contraband tortoise shells.
326 -- Everyone gets out, no bail. No locking up without conviction.
Oh, I didn't understand. This was someone with a position out past "eliminate bail". I hadn't encountered that before -- while I'm on board with eliminating bail, no pre-trial detention for anyone, no matter how apparently dangerous, does seem like a bad idea.
325: "trusting enough that he wasn't prepared to kill anyone when this was a bad idea" is pretty much what I was aiming at. Guns aren't essential to these calculations. We know from battlefield studies that lots of soldiers, even, despite their training and equipment, find it very hard deliberately to kill someone. What matters most is intent. I'm sure that some of the ex soldiers I know could kill me with their bare hands if they thought that was necessary, but I rather trust them not to do so.
I agree, of course, that the policy that the cops have to carry guns all the time is insane.
322: when you look at what happens to neighbourhoods when the cops do withdraw entirely, I think you'll find this belief is misplaced. A counterexample would be eg London/Derry during the troubles, which was superficially peaceful enough but absolutely terrifying as order was enforced either by the army or the IRA.
If you agree that the policy that police officers should be carrying guns at all times is insane, regardless of what duties they're carrying out, what are we arguing about?
One thing that may be not obvious to someone who isn't from the US -- I think it is culturally impossible, here, to disarm the police at all. If a job is going to be done by a police officer, it's going to be done by a person carrying a gun, and therefore with the capacity to kill people in a momentary exercise of bad judgment (can you kill someone without a gun? Yes, of course, like Chauvin, the maniac who murdered George Floyd. But it's a lot harder to do it without really meaning to.) If there are jobs that should be done by unarmed people, in the US that means having them done by people who aren't called police.
In a cultural environment where unarmed police were conceivable, shrinking their area of responsibility wouldn't be so attractive.
We know from battlefield studies that lots of soldiers, even, despite their training and equipment, find it very hard deliberately to kill someone.
Actually, this finding is both questionable and very out of date.
SLA Marshall's study of US infantry in the ETO is the normal one cited here, but
a) even Marshall said that by Korea - just six years later - improved training had cut the "did not shoot" percentage from 85% to 45% of infantry.
b) there's also a good chance that Marshall may have confused "did not fire" with "did not fire even though the situation made it desirable to fire". It's entirely possible to be an infantryman in battle and not to fire simply because you never actually see the enemy, for example, or because you don't want to stick your head out of cover for fear of being shot (you are in fact being suppressed), or because you didn't want to give your position away and attract return fire, or because you had a different primary role such as radio operator.
c) Marshall's study was based on data supposedly taken from a large number of post-action interviews with US infantry companies, few if any of which seem ever to have actually happened.
d) Marshall wasn't the only person doing this kind of research in WW2 and no one else found the same thing he did. Other researchers found quite the opposite - the challenge was to get troops to shoot at the enemy less because they were burning their ammunition too fast and giving away their positions.
e) The basis of infantry warfare is the platoon attack. One group suppresses the enemy by firing at them - hoping, if not to kill them, at least to keep their heads down and stop them from returning fire or shifting position. Meanwhile, another group manoeuvres to assault and overrun the enemy position. It's very difficult to see a platoon attack ever working if 85% of the suppressing group is refusing to fire or firing ineffectively. The normal ratio for a successful attack is three attackers to one defender - so our platoon of 20-30 is attacking a position held by 6-10 enemy. Of that platoon, a third is in reserve, a third are manoeuvering to assault - leaving a third to suppress. And if Marshall's 85% ratio is right, that means that one man, or at best two men, firing effectively (with bolt-action rifles!) are supposed to be suppressing six to ten enemy - which is basically ridiculous.
I feel very deceived over the years watching so many British procedurals refer to bail in brief ways that allow Americans to assume it's money bail. ("Well, he's made bail...")
Wait, what does bail mean in the UK?
Just pretrial release, I think - so, making bail means a judge has granted your release, usually or always with conditions.
339 is entirely right. See here:
https://www.gov.uk/charged-crime/bail
The alternative is "remand" - being held in prison until trial. "Gaol/jail" and "prison" are synonyms in the UK - we dont make the distinction between pre trial jail and post trial prison.
Money bail is, I think, restricted to the US.