the relentless belief that you can neatly separate the world into good people and bad people, and good people deserve things and bad people don't, is so fucking toxic
Except for THOSE ones.
Well, that's why I included the second footnote!
The January Sixers Have Their Own Unit at the DC Jail. Here's What Life Is Like Inside.
The DC Jail is even more segregated than the city it serves. Just 3 percent of the inmates, on average, are white; 87 percent are Black. What happens inside when you lock up dozens of overwhelmingly white men arrested as part of a radical-right insurrection? The jail's overseers decided they didn't want to find out. The Sixers--as they're known to their faithful--were confined to a medium-security annex, away from other prisoners. The brass call the block C2B, or Charlie Two Bravo. Its 40 or so residents call it the Patriots' Pod.
The trips by the the like of MTG to investigate conditions at the jail are infuriating and absurd. The hypocrisy label is weak sauce and things like this go well beyond hypocrisy*. Their words and actions are not even hypocritical, they are just unmoored from anything other than their assessment of political gain. And I think that is how they should be treated. Scary fucking clowns who are dong massive damage.
*See Lindsay Graham. Nothing h says should be viewed through the prism as anything other than tea leaf reading re: politics. And yet he is everywhere on TV and in the papers.
Wow. I guess that was a safe move, but I'm sad for them not to get a teeny bit beat up.
5: Who knows if it prevented anything. Incarcerated voters (being the low-info, low-social trust individuals they are) voted largely for Trump!
In California and a few other states. I hadn't seen such data though.
Of course criminals voted for the criminal candidate! Why is this surprising?
Vermont and I think Maine allow prisoners to vote. I would not be at all surprised if in those states they voted for Trump.
This project surveyed incarcerated people whether or not they could vote. Nationwide, 50% Trump, 33% Harris.
(In California, only if you're in county jail, not if you're in state prison.)
We used to in MA, based on the Supreme Judicial Court finding that the MA constitution required it, until we amended the Constitution in 2000. It looks like there may be a move to amend it again.
I have a friend who is a psychiatric occupational therapist, and one of her hospital sites is a for-profit place. I'm sure they aren't supposed to talk politics, but she's a bit of a rabble rouser and a very authentic person. All of her patients know they can get her a bit riled up when they talk politics, because they're all Trumpers. These are all on SSI and the patients nobody else wants to work with.
In 1988 it was a minor campaign thing when Willie Horton said he would vote for Dukakis. (The whole Willie Horton thing was not minor.)
Related to 13.last, I expect that homeless people in my town are like a 90%+ Trump demographic.
Vermont isn't included in the survey in 11 but Maine is and respondents there were 62% Trump.
Lots of liberals have completely lost the plot on Trump and minority voters. Trump is by far the most popular conservative among minority voters that this country has ever had, and he's only getting more popular. In part this is because decreasing racism has made Trump's personal racism less salient (especially among younger voters, Trump is still unpopular among older Black people), in part this is because the way that college-educated liberals have decided racism is mostly about elaborate language games turns off lots of minority voters (especially non college-educated and male minorities), and in part this is because most minorities (again especially lower education and male) agree with Trump about gender politics.
I don't think that liberals have decided that racism is a language game.
I mean, in my neck of the world the big racism-related push was to have people write "diversity statements" for their job applications.
A real opposition party would've brought a breathalyzer to these hearings.
The identitarian left have done a tremendous, possibly fatal, amount of damage to every cause they support.
I've been working for thirty years and have run into basically none of that in real life.
I admit that I don't really think anything much about having to fill out a diversity statement. You have to fill out dozens of forms to get money. Having to find a way to say "I'm a white dude" strikes me as no more imposing (and much less ridiculous) than explaining why I want a job without saying "money and health insurance."
Around 2016, I was letting my dog splash around in a creek in the local park, as we did several times a week, when a lesbian couple approached on the opposite bank and started yelling at me about male privilege. After a minute of me ignoring them, their eyes flicked over to the black man and his son fishing about twenty yards away. After the briefest of pauses, they started yelling about white male privilege.
I don't know what I'd say to that, but it's never happened to me.
This was during the period when leftists decided being huge toxic assholes over trivial shit online was praxis. I feel a little bad talking about this because people have gotten better, but there are a lot of conversations online wondering about the fascist turn among young men where this behavior has been memory holed.
17: it's also hugely because dems have forgotten how to talk about class.
24: that is absolutely wild. What was the issue?
Let's all list our incomes and SAT scores and how many nice young men we've probably inadvertantly radicalized.
My dog was off leash. Every once in a while out of the hundreds of people who would see my dog enjoying the hell out of life there'd be someone who felt it important to tell me about leash laws. The right coded ones would threaten me with the cops.
Can we hijack this thread to talk about the Hegseth nomination or get a post? I'm going through the report by Jane Mayer about the pressure campaign now... at least the drunkenness issue should warrant some popcorn. What drink goes best with popcorn?
I know about conflicts over latino/a/e/x because I've read about them here and elsewhere online, but I think I've never seen a discussion in person where anyone ever expresses a strong preference for one or the other of those out of the blue, let alone getting mad at anyone about making an honest mistake with them. That may just be because I'm oblivious or live in a non-Hispanic bubble, but my daughter goes to a public charter school where 50 percent of the instruction is in Spanish. (In her grade. For the first 3 years, it's not 50 percent of the instruction in Spanish, it's 100 percent.)
I think I could make similar statements about transgender children, transgender athletes, and people who overreact to racial appropriation or similar issues. I'm sure the "identitarian left" exists in some trivial sense that it probably describes some real people among the 330+ million people in this country, but if it was just a boogeyman made up by the Right to scare the middle, I couldn't tell the difference.
Re: Eggplant's dog, I don't like it when people let their dogs go off-leash outside the specially designated dog park 10 blocks away, but I'm too non-confrontational to mention it unless they're doing something wrong in addition.
That's a huge fight in my area. A greyhound (rescue dog) was off leash in the park (not in the dog run) and just murdered someone's fluffy little something. Anyway, you'll get yelled at if you have an off leash dog.
23. "It's a less obnoxious way of acquiring money and health insurance than most of the alternatives." This is probably untrue, but it's a more plausible lie than claiming that this unique opportunity to sell your labour power is what your whole life has been leading up to. Which is what they're fishing for.
What drink goes best with popcorn?
Domestic Pilsner.
32: Yeah, I am regular/centrist/whatever enough to be kind of irritable about lefty rhetoric online, and I am also pretty much the most likely person I run into in day to day life to use that sort of language myself.
34: I always feel dirty after I write a cover letter.
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I just went to a presentation about plans for how we can use AI securely at work. The young strategy guy was super excited about how it could help us summarize text and draft e-mails. The sample e-mail was 5 paragraphs long and should not have been more than 2. Now I'll need AI to condense the overly wordy e-mails.
|>
More to 32: Which means that I both sympathize with people who find lefty goofiness annoying and also believe that the number of people who are annoyed by it first-hand rather than reacting to stories that are either second-hand, third-hand, or pure invention are pretty small.
38: Can you just send them back with a request to make sense?
I mean it's not a big deal to write a diversity statement, but it's definitely an example of "anti-racism is interpreted as language games that primarily benefit people who went to fancy colleges."
Basically the point was to let deans say that they're great things about racism (back when that was what got you fancier dean jobs, now they've all moved on to other things) while consolidating power (i.e. making hiring decisions yourself because departments were insufficiently heavily weighting the diversity statements in decisions) and hiring white people.
38: I try to have patience with colleagues who are using LLMs to draft things in what is a second language for basically all of them, and a third or fourth language for some. But when I saw a marketing document get noticeably longer with each iteration I did decide not to bother reading something that they hadn't bothered to write. Fortunately the über-boss put a stop to that document ping-pong with words to the effect of "get to the point!"
There's defiantly been some language practices and various cancellations that have annoyed me but that all seems like small potatoes in comparison to things like systemic racial oppression.
Due to various recent executive orders HUD competitive grant applications now require separate narratives on "Advancing Racial Equity" and "Experience Promoting Racial Equity." They're not hard to write, but they are additional hoops to jump through and they don't seem like particularly well-targeted tools for doing anything about racial equity.
One might even argue that they constitute barriers that advantage people who are good at writing racial equity narratives over people who might benefit personally from more racial equity.
Yeah, there's certainly room for critiquing DEI practices without either disagreeing with their ultimate goals or thinking that they're meaningfully worse than a million other things big organizations do in a silly or inefficient way.
The whole grant process advantages people who write more good. It's not like your plumber lost a job because of it.
You busybodies are missing the point.
47: Just get CHAT GPT to write it. Is there an example of one?
There was not, but they seem to have accepted the ones I wrote. One got kicked back initially for being insufficient so I fleshed it out some at that seems to have worked.
I'm not saying that's the best implementation, but probably its good that HUD consider racial equity as an element in its evaluation of projects?
47 is exactly the point I'm trying to make. But at any rate, I don't think this is the only factor in Trump's increasing popularity with minority voters, but I do think it's one of the factors, and the key thing is for more Democrats to realize there's *some* reasons why Trump is the most popular conservative politician with minority voters that this country has ever seen.
53: Sure, I don't have a problem with the concept in theory.
Considering racial equity would be good, though even that is largely unpopular with many minority voters, vut considering people's *writing about racial equity* is not considering racial equity.
I just always explain that an evil scientist named Yakub created white people, but that the NIH has to pretend that evolution is real.
I think the frustrating thing about trying to explain Trump support among almost any group is that when people are interviewed about that support, they explain it in terms that include a ton of things that aren't true, like they're just reciting a series of other people's lies that they've come to believe. Those reasons* often don't map well onto the kinds of explanations deemed acceptable by the "there must be a reasonable explanation for this" interpretations of polling data.
*The DNC is the most corrupt institution in America, Benghazi, don't outlaw my stove, the Biden crime family, great replacement, they're trying to take away my guns, the 15 minute city is a police state, white men can't get hired for good jobs anymore, the Green New Deal would be the overthrow of capitalism, blah blah blah.
51: I'm not saying that I personally have ever got ChatGPT to write an environmental impact statement or an equality and diversity impact assessment which I knew no one would ever read. But I have extremely reliable grounds to believe that this has happened.
I am really hoping that LLMs can finally do the whole culture of personal statements in, an awful habit that at best sets a test of how felicitously you can draft pure wind and at worst encourages people to bullshit, boast, and flaunt either probably invented victimhood or rich-guy extracurriculars or - if you're a real master of the craft - both. There's a very clear marker of social class set at whether you habitually big yourself up in front of authority or play it down, and personal statements may as well be a pair of radio buttons asking you to pick one.
On 38, by the way, I recently needed to extract important points and references from 115 pages of conference notes by three people across two events and NotebookLM really did a job on it.
The discussion kind of went off-topic less than 40 topics in and I contributed to that, but I feel bad about it because I feel like January 6 can't be talked about enough.
It's the only thing I can imagine wanting to talk about with the hypothetical Republicans I get in imaginary arguments with, but I can't imagine any such discussion being productive. Who cares about marginal tax rates or sunsetting the ATF or whether the latest nominee is beyond the pale or merely really bad when Trump pulled a coup attempt, failed, and got reelected anyway? Because I'm so non-judgemental I hesitate to take my own side in an argument, I'll admit I'm biased: I live in DC and am closer, geographically and personally, to the Congressional staffers who were threatened that day than to the people who were threatening to lynch them. (I attended the wedding of someone who was a staffer at the time, although she wasn't there that day, and my wife was a staffer from 2007 until 2018.) But so what? What kind of a fucking sociopath to you have to be to be neutral and non-judgemental about a fucking coup attempt? American democracy has been deeply fucked since January 7, 2021, if not decades earlier, when it was apparent that there would indeed be "neutral ground" or a "compromise" position about democracy itself.
Comment 60 is relevant to this. I'm vaguely curious what "facts" Republicans are living with that make a coup attempt acceptable or even good, but not enough to seek out the few Republican friends-of-friends of mine to actually ask them.
Because I'm so non-judgemental I hesitate to take my own side in an argument, I'll admit I'm biased: I live in DC and am closer, geographically and personally, to the Congressional staffers who were threatened that day than to the people who were threatening to lynch them.
I feel confident that you could live within an hour of an honest-to-god J6er Halfway House and still feel closer to the staffers who were threatened that day than to the violent nimrods trying to hang Mike Pence.
63: I find it beyond the pale that he got the nomination. Never mind that he got elected. And all of those Supreme Court cases at the end of last term broke my heart. Even more sad to me is the way that inflation seemed to tip low information voters to his side. I would certainly understand that if we had Weimar Germany levels of inflation, but we didn't.
I've been wanting to find some kind of way to mark inauguration as a day of mourning. An arm band or something. I just can't believe that it falls on MLK day.
OT: There are way more ice rescue ladders than I was expecting.
I've said this a couple of times, and I'm really not happy about it, but Trump's renomination and reelection broke something about how I relate to political news. I can't make myself feel that it's serious or important anymore: it's all just meanly funny. This is not good: it is important, real people are going to suffer. But I can't feel that way about it.
66: Yeah, sometime in the last twenty years or so, Parks put those everywhere there was open water in a park. I guess better to have them than not? And they can't cost much.
67: Me too, but I don't hold myself to high standards about it. I did what I could and that had no effect so I'm going to care about things I can influence.
Which is basically my own garden, far as I can tell.
67: Similar. I cannot face most of it, and it does seem remote and just so, so stupid. I am also struggling to reengage with the non-partisan voting and civic education group I have worked with. I just feel that I am too fully partisan at this point to really do it in good faith. I think n maybe no more speaking, but helping behind the scenes.
67: That was my attitude from like 2016 to 2023. During the election season I tried to be realistic but earnest about it all. Since the election it's just depressing.
The Russian Tea Room is still a thing.
As to J6 itself, I do think there are a few things which let it be minimized/ignored by non-crazed people who voted for Trump. (I mean they--and all of us--are still part of a socially-induced political psychosis, but the kind who would actually be bothered by J6 when they think about it.
As I recall, the day of stuff got somewhat tempered by the ability of Congress to get back in session that evening and over the objections of R dicks actually certify the election. For me and some others I know it was only that weekend where much of the really intense footage came out and the reality of it sank in. I know why it happened that way, but I think on the spot arrests would have made it seem more, um ... illegal I guess. And as I think I said here recently, I now think immediate impeachment was the correct path, but I was certainly less sure at the time.
I do think it could have been deployed a bit better during the election. No one wanted to hear about, or think about it. And the "threat to democracy" stuff was too abstract, and easily turned on the Dems. My thought was just in the mix of adds have a very short, non-talking video of about 20 seconds of the worst shit, maybe alongside a picture of grinning Mr. T sitting in the Oval office dining room with something like Trump's respect for law and order or something like that. Something very simple, but forces the fuckers watching football to *see* that shit. Good chance not persuasive, but make the motherfuckers own their fucking decision and what they are voting for.
I seriously did not "get" the J6 threat to democracy. So what if a bunch of rioters shut down Congress; I couldn't then and still can't make a connection between that and who got sworn in on Inauguration Day. Even if they succeeded and somehow forced Congress to certify the wrong thing or something, I didn't think it would overturn the legitimacy conferred by having the AP call the election (I know that's not the actual authority but I think it is the national emotional authority) and I was pretty sure that Joe Biden was going to take the oath either way. It might have forced a national showdown, but I didn't think that the majority of the country, which had just voted in Biden, was going to think that some Congressional documents created with a mob hovering over them were legitimate.
Proceduralists think that fouling the procedure would have made people accept the 2020 Trump term, but I couldn't and can't see it. Yes, I know Trump would have claimed it, but I don't think it could have worked.
I know that I am callous and shit, but I wish they hadn't been stopped and they had killed Pence and a senator or two. I had some preferences about which ones and was even willing to throw in a couple of our own. I think that would have made everything much clearer.
77
I seriously did not "get" the J6 threat to democracy. So what if a bunch of rioters shut down Congress; I couldn't then and still can't make a connection between that and who got sworn in on Inauguration Day.
Sure, there was always some "underpants gnomes" thinking in the conservatives' plan there, but...
1. It's depressing that the mere fact that they tried wasn't a deal-breaker for everyone else.
2. If they had stopped the certification, or delayed it until after Jan. 21, then presumably Trump would have still been President and would have stayed that way indefinitely. I'm not sure what a "showdown" would have looked like or what levers Biden would have had in it. Congress? It's hard to imagine stopping the showdown without preventing Congress from meeting. The armed forces? If I remember correctly, the Joint Chiefs had just taken the unprecedented step of making some press releases declaring neutrality in domestic political disputes. That's better than taking Trump's side, but not the same as taking Biden's. 2020 wasn't a blue wave election giving Biden a groundswell of support; it was a minor-to-moderate anti-incumbent nudge. (Presidential popular vote, +4.5% D; Senate, +3 D; House, +13 R; Gubernatorial, +1 R.) Conservatives were gambling that people would have shaken their heads and moved on, and I think 2024 showed that they were right.
I know that I am callous and shit, but I wish they hadn't been stopped and they had killed Pence and a senator or two. I had some preferences about which ones and was even willing to throw in a couple of our own. I think that would have made everything much clearer.
I'm glad they were stopped, but yeah, I can imagine that the last four years would have gone differently if they had actually killed people who mattered (if you'll pardon the phrasing). When I try to imagine those conversations with conservatives about 1/6, I assume they'd say it was a nonviolent protest that got out of hand. That argument would be even more ridiculous if more people died than Babbitt and guards maybe of related injuries days later.
I can also imagine the last four years going differently if Trump's prosecutions had been faster or less "lucky", or if RBG had lived four more months, or if Biden had dropped out earlier or later or the Democrats had run a better campaign in general. It's always easy to say coulda-shoulda-woulda, but that's not the timeline in which we live.
77, 78: I was afraid that successfully killing some members of Congress, controlling the building for a period of time, any kind of concrete success would have led some organized governmental body capable of exerting violence (no specific idea of who, but some Army or National Guard unit or something) to step in on behalf of Trump as the legitimate victor and president. At which point I don't have any clear idea what would have happened, but I was scared.
Turns out it didn't make much of a difference either way, so there's that.
Well it looks like Trump got a ceasefire deal and an end to the genocide, a deal Biden could have sealed at any number of points these last 14 months if he were truly interested in trying and applying pressure to Netanyahu. I hope it holds.
You don't think Netanyahu was holding out specifically to help Trump get elected? Because I do.
Honestly, a cease fire would have been a giant political win for Biden. Do you think he didn't want that, or that what's obvious to you and me isn't obvious to him?
I get that the premise is that Biden is callously indifferent to the death of Palestinians, but I don't understand the belief that he's not out for his own political best interests.
New York has a Flatiron Building just like Pittsburgh.
We also both have a Frick. But I'm not near that so far as I know.
I bet you don't have a statue of Seward in the park across the street, though. Because that'd be a heck of a coincidence.
I have to judge him on his actions and he was never willing to apply any real pressure to Israel. The hardliners in Israel are not happy about this at all.
Barry, do you think Trump applied real pressure to Israel or to Netanyahu over the last month or two?
I do, especially the last couple of weeks. I think he wants to start his term without having to deal with the massive clusterfuck Biden and Netanyahu made of the whole region.
85: No, but the building is the same shape.
Witkoff insisting Netanyahu meet him on the sabbath and getting his way is kind of hilarious and a real turnaround from how American envoys are usually treated by Netanyahu.
I think it's likely true both that Netanyahu was holding out for Trump to win and that Trump drove an unexpectedly hard bargain. I don't know if Biden could have gotten a ceasefire by employing harsher tactics (I suspect not) but I don't see any indication that he ever really tried.
I think Trump is going to let Israel take the West Bank.
Didn't Netanyahu explicitly say a while ago that he wasn't going to do a ceasefire until Trump was elected?
You don't think Netanyahu was holding out specifically to help Trump get elected? Because I do.
Yes.
I think an underrated thing about Netanyahu specifically is he's not just abstractly conservative, he's literally a Republican. Like he was born a US citizen, grew up in the Philly suburbs and went to college at MIT. He probably literally voted for Nixon.
89: Well, of course. Trump got the political benefit of the killing continuing until after the election, and now he gets the benefit of being credited with the ceasefire, but any specifics can be blamed on Biden because it still happened during Biden's administration.
Saying that "Trump applied pressure now, and that's why there's a ceasefire" seems to be clearly true, but doesn't at all imply "So Biden could have done the same thing by applying pressure whenever he wanted." I am certainly not in a position to say Biden did everything that could be done, but you can't talk about the situation without being clear that Netanyahu was actively trying to cooperate with Trump and politically damage Biden.
96: I was thinking he was 10 years younger than he is and thought he was too young in 68 and 72. In 1972 he was 23 and could have voted for Nixon. In 1968 he was 19, but the voting age was still 21.
Whatever the benefits and causes of this ceasefire agreement, I think that sadly it's way too early to declare "an end to the genocide." Particularly if
Trump is going to let Israel take the West Bank
which I wouldn't exactly put past him, but how much evidence is there as of right now?
It was on my list of predictions for the next year.
If I did the math right, it looks like Hamas came down a bit on their demand for a release of all Palestinian prisoners, and settled for 1/3 to 1/2 of them (i.e 30-50 released per hostage, with 100 hostages, and just under 10k prisoners).
101: Maybe I used some induction too.
Trump delaying the return of the hostages until after the election is in the great Republican tradition of Nixon in 1968 telling the South Vietnamese not to participate in peace talks, and Reagan in 1980 telling Iran not to release the hostages.
That's uncanny. What terrible people.
Also a friend of mine who has a sophomore in high school and a freshman in college just announced she's pregnant. I'm reeling a bit. I would guess she's mid-40s?
I'm definitely not ready to be an empty-nester, but the thought of starting over would be a bit overwhelming.
I think he is. They've been together for probably a decade, and I think he's about 7-8 years younger than her. So this may have been planned, even.
My brother had his first baby at 50, which is even older.
Wow. That's easier for me to relate to, though, because I might go for it in that situation. I've never been your brother before.
My sister's neighbors are in their mid/late-40s and had a surprise vasectomy baby many years after their first batch of kids. Apparently even though the husband did the 6-month-follow-up to verify that the surgery worked, by six years later it stopped working. Oops.
I walked 30,000 steps today and I have a blister now.
Maybe OT, haven't read all the comments. I've been thinking about why we're all anxious and depressed, especially young people. Then I was on my computer and google pocket is recommending to me: an article telling me there is a right and wrong way to wash my face; an article telling me that my reusable cotton tote bag is way worse for the environment than a plastic bag; symptoms of colorectal cancer in young people (note! they are vague and could apply to everything!); 7 things you should never do as a wedding guest; eight important tax deadlines I need to pay attention to.
It turns out having a media industrial complex telling me all the time that everything I am doing is wrong is not good for mental health.
My husband's cousin had his first baby at 50 and then an oopsie baby at 52. The mom was 10 years younger, so 40 and 42. Off the top of my head I know about 12 women though with oopsie babies in their 40s, two of the women had surprise twins.