I agree.
Well somebody's gotta write the first comment!
It's attention-grabbing and clever. Is it accurate? I wouldn't have picked Nigeria as my comparison country, but that's probably quibbling. Three percent is horrific in any event. The part I'm really wondering about is this:
Today, 56,000 new HIV infections each year in the U.S., a 40% increase from last year, symbolize neglect and indifference -- and the failure of our U.S. HIV prevention efforts," said Michael Weinstein, President of AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
FORTY PERCENT? Is that a misprint? Did we suddenly change our HIV testing policy in this country, so that we're now catching way more infections than we were? Seriously, that's insane.
(I'm also wondering what this AIDS Healthcare Foundation group wants Obama to do -- that is, assuming the reason people are getting new infections is because of lack of ecnomic and/or social power, what can the federal government do about that? If you're engaging in survival sex because you're poor, or if you're getting bullied into not using a condom because you have no power in your relationship, what are the policy recommendations to solve that? Or maybe I'm wrong about the reasons for new infections.)
"Survival sex"?
The ad would be more effective if it showed Obama looking out the window, no?
Involvement in survival sex was defined as having ever exchanged sex for money, gifts, drugs, shelter, or other needs.
That's a somewhat broad definition for a particular HIV-risk study involving youth living on the street. There are plenty of colloquial definitions. If you're having sex you wouldn't otherwise want to have, to keep a roof over your head, get cash for groceries, etc., you're having survival sex.
Did we suddenly change our HIV testing policy in this country
Hader and her boss, health director Dr. Pierre Vigilance, both made the point that D.C. in recent years has developed one of the most comprehensive testing regimes in the country. Vigilance, in his slight British accent, pointed to a "surveillance bias," where "doing a better job of testing people means more people actually get tested and more people get results. And you may find that there are more people with disease than you knew beforehand."
The unspoken subtext, of course, is that if New York or Detroit or Uganda or Kenya tested as thoroughly and reported their data as thoroughly as the District does, the District might not look so bad.
Oops, I misread the quoted part as being about a 40% rise in DC rather than nationally.
I agree that it's attention-grabbing, but the comparison troubles me. Pretty non-analogous situations.
8: Yes, I think my reaction is just huh? vs. better do something about it!
Um, to 7 of course. I'm not that self-referential.
Okay, it turns out not to be a misprint, but it's not quite an accurate statement as regards "this year" and "last year" (among other things). From an August 2008 CDC press release:
Now, new technology developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) can be used to distinguish recent from long-standing HIV infections. CDC has applied this advanced technology to develop the first national surveillance system of its kind that is based on direct measurement of new HIV infections. This new system represents a major advance in HIV surveillance and allows for more precise estimates of HIV incidence (the annual number of new infections) than ever before possible.
CDC's first estimates from this system reveal that the HIV epidemic is--and has been--worse than previously known. Results indicate that approximately 56,300 new HIV infections occurred in the United States in 2006 (95% CI: 48,200-64,500). This figure is roughly 40% higher than CDC's former estimate of 40,000 infections per year, which was based on limited data and less precise methods (see "Historical Challenges in Tracking HIV Infections").
It is important to note that the new estimate does not represent an actual increase in the annual number of new HIV infections. In fact, CDC's analysis suggests that the epidemic has been roughly stable since the late 1990s, though the number of new HIV infections remains unacceptably high. These findings underscore the ongoing challenges in confronting this disease and the urgent need to expand access to effective HIV prevention programs.
assuming the reason people are getting new infections is because of lack of ecnomic and/or social power, what can the federal government do about that?
It's like the entire history of the Left never happened.
I'm also unclear on what they want Obama to do. All the ad says is that Obama has been silent.
Stats from Whitman-Walker, the HIV/AIDS powerhouse in D.C. (see also):
DC has the highest rate of new AIDS cases per 100,000 population in the United States -- a rate that is 12 times the national average.
In DC, heterosexual sex is the most common mode of infection, followed by men having sex with men, then injection drug use.(D.C. has -- or had, anyway -- a good needle exchange program.)
Whitman-Walker's fundraising dropped through the floor once the triple cocktail became widely available. I don't know how it's doing these days.
DC has up to a 5 percent prevalence rate? With hetero sex the most common transmission route?
Shit, that's scary.
Actually, the linked stats show homosexual sex as a more frequent transmission route than hetero sex. Still scary, though.
Why is transmission by hetero sex scarier than transmission by homo sex? Or are you just talking about your own personal risk?
I agree with 7, 8 and 12. It's a weird analogy. What was Bush supposed to do that he didn't do? The primary realistic options for government action are education, research, and distributing/making available condoms. Were these things not done?
You could point the finger at Reagan and say that his inaction was unethical and criminal. But if you're going to blame AIDS deaths in 2009 on the government, I need an argument explaining why. I'm not saying I can't be convinced -- I don't know much about AIDS policy -- but I need more than an incendiary slogan.
I agree with 7, 8 and 12. It's a weird analogy. What was Bush supposed to do that he didn't do? The primary realistic options for government action are education, research, and distributing/making available condoms. Were these things not done?
You could point the finger at Reagan and say that his inaction was unethical and criminal. But if you're going to blame AIDS deaths in 2009 on the government, I need an argument explaining why. I'm not saying I can't be convinced -- I don't know much about AIDS policy -- but I need more than an incendiary slogan.
Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?
I don't know what's going on in DC w/r/t HIV/AIDS prevention, but it's clearly not enough if you've got that kind of prevalence rate.
Or are you just talking about your own personal risk?
Unless he's banging druggie prostitutes, probably isn't a personal risk for him.
Some good articles were done by the Baltimore Sun.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/health/bal-aids,0,5524359.storygallery
In particular on the source of the overwhelming majority of the hetero transmissions, read "An epidemic's unseen cause" from 2007.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/health/bal-aids110407,0,3424925.story
Needle exchange? Prostitution crackdown (trying to disrupt it as a business, without necessarily arresting prostitutes -- I'm not sure how to do that)? Giant condom-dispensing billboards?
Further: The thing about HIV infection is, the communities that are most vulnerable to the epidemic in the U.S. are also communities without a lot of economic or social power. From what I understand, that the most common mode of infection in the District is heterosexual sex is a marker that the epidemic in the District disproportionately affects people of color, particularly African Americans. (Straight white people who don't inject drugs are at very low risk of infection.) Other groups at great risk, of course, are IV drug users and gay men, particularly gay men of color.
I don't believe we've nearly reached the point in the provision of government services that we can say the government does enough -- thinking here about those services targeted at stopping the epidemic and those aimed at correcting the background socioeconomic inequalities that make populations vulnerable to all sorts of bad things, including HIV infection.
I also think it's perfectly legitimate, in fact probably a good move, to provoke public discussion with a campaign like this. Why not demand that the government fix a problem that's otherwise unfixable, a problem that involves the suffering and death of thousands?
I wonder what simply burying HIV positive prostitutes in social services would do? You walk into an office, say "I'm HIV+, and have been engaging in survival sex," and on confirmation by blood test, you get whatever income support and services you need to stop hooking, up to housing and so forth. The core population there can't be that big, no?
22 is intriguing. The problem of women hooking for drugs complicates things, I'd think.
When I said that the campaign confused me, I didn't mean to imply that there wasn't anything that the government should be doing to make things better - Bave is certainly right that it is something that should be talked about and that action needs to be taken. (My problem with the poster is that instead of thinking about AIDS, I think about Katrina and get stuck trying to make the analogy work rather than think about the very real problem it is exposing).
22
... You walk into an office, say "I'm HIV+, and have been engaging in survival sex," and on confirmation by blood test, you get whatever income support and services you need to stop hooking, up to housing and so forth. ...
So you want to encourage people to get infected?
re: 22
You walk into an office, say "I'm HIV+, and have been engaging in survival sex," and on confirmation by blood test, you get whatever income support and services you need to stop hooking, up to housing and so forth.
Those would be quite high, I think. The resources needed, I mean, because, as Bave says in 23 it's not just about providing the subsistence level support. In the UK you can receive housing benefit, income support, etc and health care is free, but that doesn't eliminate the problem.
Still, it'd be a start.
23: Yeah. I don't know quite how you solve that -- heroin prescriptions seem unlikely. But I have to think that having a place to live and enough to eat, with medical care and social worker support and so on, that you can't lose through bad behavior, would have to make it much easier to quit the drugs, or at least to get the drug habit down to a point where hooking wouldn't be necessary.
25: Yeah, it's kind of like the reverse of a dentata, but in a bad way.
I actually find this ad slightly offensive, because the analogy is so inapt.
One could certainly advocate for more active measures to slow down rates of HIV infection in DC -- although, as this thread has shown, there's clearly some confusion about just what those measures should be -- without setting up a needless comparison to the negligent/willful destruction of a great American city, which is what "Katrina" means to me. Totally different levels of government involvement/responsibility, and totally different kinds of problems.
I mean, it's a little bit like "The Tobacco Companies: America's Holocaust." Just a wrong and needless comparison.
Good call, James. Who among us wouldn't immediately jab a rusty HIV needle in our arm for the paradise that is a shitty one bedroom apartment and some food stamps?
25: It is a perverse incentive. Not one I'm sweating about much, though.
26: Yeah, I'm thinking of something very expensive on an individual-by-individual basis -- a lot of individualized social worker attention, for one thing, on top of the housing and so forth. The hope would be that the population of HIV+ prostitutes would be small enough to make surrounding them with support on a very high level possible.
You know what else I think needs to be opened up again, despite the fact that it sounds oppressive? Contact tracing is a very powerful tool for dealing with STIs generally, but hasn't been used much for HIV. While avoiding contact tracing was a reasonable reaction in the '80s, given the exaggerated stigma back then, I think it might be a good idea to reopen the idea.
I wouldn't have picked Nigeria as my comparison country, but that's probably quibbling.
Having consulted with my colleagues, and based on information gathered from the Nigerian Chamber of Commerce, I am pleased to propose a confidential business transaction to our mutual benefit. ...
You could ask these people what they did. Considering the circumstances it looks pretty impressive.
31: The point isn't to make an accurate comparison: The point is to make a comparison that is utterly humiliating to the people in power, and that is just barely justifiable enough that they can't blow it off without a backlash. The point, IOW, is to get the politicians off their asses and actually do something to ameliorate the problem.
Reading these ads through the filter of a senior seminar in literature makes them seem like stupid bullshit. Through the filter of "get shit done" they make perfect sense.
34: O.K. My bank account number is ....
Reading these ads through the filter of a senior seminar in literature makes them seem like stupid bullshit.
You know, there are days where I really hate what grad school has done to my ability to read without that filter.
25, 33: The perverse incentive would seem to be a very minor problem. However, trying to intervene with at risk prostitutes before they get HIV could be more cost effective.
26: Yeah, I'm thinking of something very expensive on an individual-by-individual basis -- a lot of individualized social worker attention, for one thing, on top of the housing and so forth. The hope would be that the population of HIV+ prostitutes would be small enough to make surrounding them with support on a very high level possible.
Well, it's not like the population of HIV+ prostitutes is in any way fixed. You pick up a heroin habit and contract HIV via dirty needles and then start turning tricks to make money for more heroin, or you pick up some other drug habit, start turning tricks for money for drugs, and get HIV from the same people who was buying sex from the other HIV+ prostitutes. It seems like the problem reduces to "eliminate most drug-related prostitution", which doesn't seem amenable to simple fixes.
I mean, yes it could be awesome if we instituted some broad-based European-style social welfare state, but cynically speaking I can't imagine the spread of AIDS via crackwhores being the straw that breaks the camel's back.
OT:
Goddamn NY State politics. They are incomprehensible and maddening.
It's like the entire history of the Left never happened.
Yeah, sorry, I'm home sick today and I'm kind of fuzzy in my thinking.
What I was trying to get at (and the more so now that I have actually looked at AHF's website, which seems pretty professional and established) is what specific objective they're trying to accomplish with these ads. Raise awareness? Sure. Increase shame or guilt? Maybe. But they're ostensibly addressed to our policymaker-in-chief, the president. So what do they want him to DO?
(It's fine with me if the answer for that is "Raise the EITC" and "Stop funding abstinence-based education and work on funding programs that teach young people how to communicate effectively even when they are in asymmetrical power relationships" and "Provide more money for drug courts" and "Use the power of your pulpit to push for widespread, matter-of-fact HIV testing" and "Get your HHS staff to prioritize HIV" ...I'm just not clear on what they actually want.)
And contrary to above, I do think it's an effective ad. Bush's non-action during Katrina was an international shame. I haven't been following Obama's actions on HIV, and as far as I know he's done nothing awful but nothing particularly notable either. It's OK for an advocacy group to try to goad him by saying, essentially, do you want to be remembered like this guy?
However, it's very irritating to see that in their advocacy they're stooping to the cherry-picking and misleading slanting of data that is shown by Apo's link in 10. Not cool.
I get 36, but there's a problem with rhetorical overkill, too. Frankly, my immediate reaction to this ad was both "God, the AIDS advocacy groups are really getting desperate in the post-triple-cocktail world" and "God, that's diminishing to Katrina victims." I'm not saying that those reactions of mine were correct or appropriate, but they do go to the effectiveness of the advertising.
Well, it's not like the population of HIV+ prostitutes is in any way fixed. You pick up a heroin habit and contract HIV via dirty needles and then start turning tricks to make money for more heroin, or you pick up some other drug habit, start turning tricks for money for drugs, and get HIV from the same people who was buying sex from the other HIV+ prostitutes. It seems like the problem reduces to "eliminate most drug-related prostitution", which doesn't seem amenable to simple fixes.
I'm not saying I'm sure it'd work. But if I remember what I've read about STIs and epidemiology, the vast majority of infections tend to be traceable back to a small core population, and if you can disrupt that population, you can break the back of the epidemic. My guess is that HIV+ prostitutes are probably the core, at least in the hetero population, and if you can pull a majority of them off the streets at once, the odds of the replacement generation of hookers becoming infected drops.
I'm not sure the perverse incentive issue is as minimal as it might seem to people who aren't having survival sex. I don't have a clear idea of how to mitigate the negative impact, but it might turn out that the increased survival sex infection rate is worth it given the decrease in survival sex (and subsequent infection of others) by people who are already HIV+.
Luckily those articles in the Baltimore Sun indicate that people are running studies to answer these epidemiological questions.
Further to my 42: I know next to nothing about HIV transmission statistics or effective prevention practices, so somebody with some actual knowledge would be extremely welcome here.
Update: I just wondered what the Black AIDS Institute's policy prescriptions were, and I wandered over to their website to check. What do I find but:
Black AIDS Institute Board Chair Speaks at White House
Jesse Milan, Jr., JD, Chair of the Board of Directors for the Black AIDS Institute, spoke at the April 7 White House press conference announcing the federal government's latest initiative to combat AIDS in Black America. The Act Against AIDS program seeks to support Black institutions in building HIV prevention awareness, and is the first such program of its kind in almost 20 years.
Hmm. Sounds like Obama hasn't exactly been sitting around staring out windows.
From Milan's speech:
Hallelujah!
Today's launch is a cause for Celebration --- a federal campaign against HIV/AIDS. It has been a long time since we used the C words of "celebration" and "campaign" in conjunction with HIV and the federal government, but we can use both words today.
As an American living with HIV, I celebrate a president who CARES about the epidemic here at home. He can multitask and still get a federal campaign reviewed, cleared and launched from the White House in less than 100 days. Hallelujah!
As an African American living with HIV, I celebrate that Act Against AIDS will focus early on black people --- our leaders, our media---and our people, men and women. And I particularly celebrate that this campaign will address black youth and black gay and bisexual men. It's about time!
I'm not sure the perverse incentive issue is as minimal as it might seem to people who aren't having survival sex.
I'm not really sure of anything either. But for someone who's desperate enough that they're having survival sex and the prospect of three hots and a cot looks attractive enough that it's worth getting HIV for, actively trying to get infected seems like improbably organized long-term planning.
Eh, I doubt anyone would try to get infected. You might see less condom usage, if getting infected means being showered with social services. Which I assume is much more than 3 hots and a cot.
48: Too disorganized to deliberately get infected with HIV? I can't tell if that's optimism or pessimism.
49, 50: The thing about perverse incentives is that they happen at the level of things you consciously plan to do -- you know that doing something (like having condomless sex) which might generally have a bad result (like becoming HIV+) will have an offsetting desirable result (like the warm bath of social services I contemplate). Anyone who's having survival sex and is so desperate that seroconverting would be an acceptable price to pay for a room indoors and some income support, is, I would guess, in enough of a mess that they aren't weighing costs and benefits of their actions out past the next couple of minutes, and so aren't subject to the perverse incentive.
I could be wrong, but that's how I'd guess.
Semi-pwned by Witt in 42.
Through the filter of "get shit done" they make perfect sense.
I think the ad is poorly conceived from this perspective as well. I don't like the Katrina analogy, but if you're going to use it, don't tell me it's like Bush staring out a window. Tell me the one or two policy changes that will help rescue people from the rooftops.
The letter they want people to send to Obama is annoyingly vague:
It was recently reported that the HIV prevalence rate in Washington DC surged past 3% - higher than the rate found in Lagos, Nigeria. Despite this recent announcement, you have remained silent on AIDS. I urge you to do the right thing and take strong action to address the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in D.C. and across America.
President Obama, please be the change we can all believe in on AIDS.
If you dig around some, there's this: "President Obama received plaudits from AHF and many others for appointing Dr. Thomas Frieden, the former Public Health Commissioner for New York City as his new head of the CDC," added AHF's Weinstein. "Demanding nationwide compliance with the CDC's own prudent, yet largely ignored HIV testing guidelines would be a great place for Dr. Frieden and the Obama Administration to start in addressing the domestic AIDS epidemic."
(The D.C. ads are largely opportunistic (not necessarily a bad thing), using D.C.'s high infection rate for attention. The Foundation's domestic work is focused on California, esp. L.A. and the Bay area.)
51: I'm not disagreeing. Just depressed by the observation.
Fuck.
3 People Shot at U.S. Holocaust Museum
A security guard and two other people were shot today inside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in downtown Washington, authorities said.
I don't like the Katrina analogy, but if you're going to use it, don't tell me it's like Bush staring out a window.
We are less than six months away from the time when DC's HIV problems were treated *exactly* like Bush staring out a window, down to both Bush, and the window. Reminding Obama and others of this fact seems to me rather reasonable and entirely fair. To me they say "don't be like this asshole" though apparently a lot of people are reading them as saying that Obama *is* being like that asshole.
I'm choosing not to post an absurdly knee-jerk comment in favor of saying, simply, perverse incentive? Seriously? I wish James B. Shearer would change his name to James B. Nimble for his trolling prowess.
As to the ads, I see them as hyperbole in hope of shock value. I think they aren't meant to guide or inspire deep thinking about strategies, but that they're meant to startle. Also, a part of me (perhaps condescendingly, though if so it's unintended) suspects that there is a specific audience, made up of people who will be more susceptible to the Katrina analogy because they more closely identify with the people whose lives were most disrupted or destroyed during Katrina's aftermath, being targeted by this ad in hopes of shaking them up. If that's the case the use of an image of Bush is no real surprise since that population is probably going to have a strong negative reaction to him and that's the kind of reaction they want to create. The goal isn't really to get Obama to do anything in particular as it is to say to people, "Hey! Something bad is happening! Do something!"
Of course, that reading relies almost entirely on ignoring that the group in question purports to be targeting Obama with their message. So, y'know, me, my hat, me talking through it.
57.1: I actually figured he was kidding. With Shearer, I have a hard time telling.
Don't you laugh at James B. Shearer! People deliberately infect themselves with HIV all the time - I saw it in the documentary 3 Needles, in which Stockard Channing drinks her porno actor son's blood to get herself some of that sweet, sweet AIDS cash!
55: Does it really matter who's the asshole in this analogy? What seems to matter is that lots of poor people are dying, and nobody in a position to do anything about it seems to give a fuck.
58, 59: Don't laugh! I drank some troll blood once to deliberately infect myself with humorlessness. Side effects include blind spots, knee-jerk reactions, long handles and movie reviews.
I think the problem with 22 would be defining the category "survival sex." It's a term used by people who study the situation to describe people who aren't prostituting themselves, exactly, but are trading sex for some sort of security. (e.g., a girl runs away from home, ends up with a "boyfriend" who lets her crash at his place and she sleeps with him sometimes.) I'm not confident there's a group that self-identifies as the survival sex group, and that suggests it might be better to solve this problem by increasing funds that help the poorer population generally and prevent survival sex situations from coming about, rather than creating a program just for them. (No need to wait until someone's HIV positive to get them help.)
Increasing public services generally is an excellent idea, and one that would help. If (and that's a serious if, I'm talking through my hat here) my vague recollections of the sort of social networks that show up in STI epidemics are accurate, where the majority of infections are just a link or two away from a small core population, there's a lot to be said for the sort of intervention that's too expensive to pay for broadly, but is affordable for a small, focused enough group. "Survival sex" might not be the right word to identify that population, but it seems like identifying it and then throwing a whole lot of support at its members might have a serious effect.
Whatever that population is, the characteristic mentioned in 51 (inability to weight costs and benefits) is likely to be a barrier to getting them to any service you can get funded. I'm guessing that there will be moments of crisis when people look for help followed by flight from services in short order.
Yeah, and again I'm engaging in vague, utopian thinking here. But what I'm thinking of is really attractive services -- a clean place to sleep that you can't lose due to bad behavior; counseling/drug treatment; medical care. You'd need to do the math to see if the core population I'm talking about (a) exists and can be identified and (b) is small enough that the sort of over-the-top support I'm thinking of is practical. But if those conditions are met, the hope would be that you could make the help attractive enough on a short-term basis to keep people coming back until the longer-term help (drug treatment and such) kicked in.
64: Yeah, it's a barrier, but my (limited) reading on chronic homelessness, serious mental illness and substance abuse, etc., indicates that for many of these problems, we have effective policy solutions. We just choose not to implement them because they're expensive (in an eye-catching, line item way, rather than as a bunch of spread-out costs), labor-intensive, and can easily be characterized as "rewarding bad behavior".
And man, I was feeling unusually sympathetic to Shearer because he posted his photo on his blog and reminded me he was a human being an' all, but sheesh. Dude, either you know nothing whatsoever about the process of HIV testing (hint: It can be done very quickly with a cheek swab, so if somebody shows up claiming to be HIV-positive you can figure it out pretty darn fast) or you have a horrifically low opinion of human nature.
61: And a phobic reaction to goats.
64: I have some experience in research on people with serious mental illness and we (most U.S. states) don't have effective policy tools. Even where services are funded, you have difficulty getting people to stay in them. You (usually) can't legally constrain people to stay in treatment after they improve a bit on the first part of the treatment.
A security guard and two other people were shot today inside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Now they're reporting just two shot: the security guard and the shooter (by other security guards), with a third person hurt by broken glass. "Law enforcement sources tell ABC News the suspected shooter is an 88-year-old man who has been linked to Web sites with racist writings."
Huh. Wonder if he's really 88, or just said he was for the neo-Nazi reference.
"In 1981 Von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C. Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal. He served 6.5 years in federal prison. (Read about von Brunn's "Federal Reserve Caper" HERE.) He is now an artist and author and lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore."
70: No, apparently he is. Apparently a somewhat well-known nut within that community. Wrote a book, Kill the Best Gentiles! and is an artist.
68: Point taken. I guess I was thinking of the subset of people with serious mental illness who are hugely expensive in a courts/shelters/hospitals kind of way, and fact that "continuum of care" philosophies combined with affordable, supportive housing seem to be effective at helping people keep their lives together in the long term. But yeah, no legal way to compel* people who genuinely don't want help** to keep getting it.
*And I'm not at all sure I think there should be, despite the costs.
**I've certainly come across a lot of people who would have loved help, but not the miserly and sometimes dangerous help they were being offered. You're not doing the homeless mom with three kids many favors if you put her in a shelter where they're at regular risk of attack or molestation by other residents or staff, especially if the whole reason they're homeless is to escape an abusive husband/father
You're not doing the homeless mom with three kids many favors if you put her in a shelter where they're at regular risk of attack or molestation by other residents or staff,
And yet, you don't do the mentally ill / drunk / high homeless person many favors by kicking him back out on the street when he slips up once. And if you've got ten drunk dudes and one single mom...
...and a lost dog that just wants to get home for Christmas...
75: Right, that's what I meant by miserly. There's no reason it should be zero-sum like that. The sheer shortage of shelter space is appalling, and if we were willing to pony up a fairly modest amount of money, we could avoid having to make those choices.
Have a single-adults shelter, maybe sex-segregated. Bring back SROs. Have a women-with-kids shelter. Have a men-with-kids shelter. Pay staff a living wage. It wouldn't eliminate problems, but it would surely reduce some of the worst.
74: I'm not saying that those programs don't work, because they very clearly do work for some. But, they don't work as well when you start to pile on the problems (say combine a mental illness with an addiction with serious physical ailments). Also, in response to 74.2, when talking about a population with mental illness, you should never underestimate the amount extra-legal coersion that occurs (plenty of it from family members).
||
Another right wing terrorist crazy-person-with-a-gun alert.
|>
Oh. that'll teach me not to read the whole thread.
I just noticed the title of the post again. In a previous job, ACT meant 'Assertive Community Treatment.'
71: I'm bitter that the influence of Greater Wingnuttia left me breathing a sigh of relief when I learned that the shooter was a homegrown American racist rather than an Arab or Muslim extremist.
Huh. I'd think the reverse -- there are more rightwing lunatics in the US than Muslim extremists, or at least that's my assumption.
Check it out! The shooter's a member of Mensa!. I say we waterboard all of them.
Huh. I'd think the reverse
I assume KR is worried about the response of Greater Wingnuttia if the shooter had been an Arab. Much less media circus with a white guy.
85: Right, the threat of disaffected people with thwarted ambitions who test well ... hmmmm.
Much less media circus with a white guy.
Von Brunn's in critical condition, so hopefully he'll die soon -- and hopefully the hospital staff will forget to give him pain meds. (This is why I could never be in medicine; I need certain loopholes in the Hippocratic oath.)
Better not to give these guys a courtroom platform, I think.
And who congregate in suspicious groupings.... damn, that's not any better.
88: Look. Is that a bald eagle over there?
Better not to give these guys a courtroom platform, I think.
You don't think? I tend to assume we want them out from under rocks so the sympathizers have to admit what they're lining up with.
I'm in broad agreement with 92. Even better if he explicitly invokes some of the more mainstream right wingers who play footsie with the out-and-out fascists, like Pat Buchanan.
I'm sure that when van Brunn puts on his dramatic closing statement invoking Rush, Hannity, Buchanan, and Jeff Sessions, the networks will run it live and repeat it 24/7 for weeks. Right?
86: Fuck.
92, 93: How would putting him on trial mean that "the sympathizers have to admit what they're lining up with"? The hardcore sympathizers are happy to admit they're lining up with him and Buchanan, et al., will just claim they don't condone violence. It seems like that's a lot easier to pull off than Op. Rescue trying to distance itself from Roeder.
Mainstream anti-choice (and anti-gay) talk includes plenty about punishment in hell and comes very close to legitimizing murder; mainstream anti-Semitism and racism tend to be about unfair privilege and controlling the world.
I see the up side as more theoretical than actual. Can anyone think of an example of a similar incident which tarnished Buchanan and his ilk?
85:Waterboarding coming soon to police dept near you. Presuming you survive the taser.
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But This is my scream-and-pull-hair news item for the week. Or sackcloth & ashes
|>
Sorry. Different Hamdan than the SCOTUS case, which is what had me all PO'd. I thought the UAE was using evidence obtained by torture in Gitmo in a UAE courtroom to convict for terrorism. Instead it is evidence obtained by outsourced torture in the UAE. Very different.
I feel so much better.
And who congregate in suspicious groupings....
In internet "chat rooms", where they exchange coded messages.
ATM
36, 52, etc: Yeah, I'm not really convinced that this approach gets shit done either. I'm always whining about wanting more evidence-based activism, and this probably isn't the place to start. Such a simple-minded, non-specific, analogy-dependent shrill campaigns---coupled with factoids like 12, 52, etc.---just make me much more cynical and skeptical.
95: Can anyone think of an example of a similar incident which tarnished Buchanan and his ilk?
There was a rollback in the hysterical rightwing rhetoric about Waco after the OK City bombing. The civil rights movement got additional traction from the widespread exposure of people like Bull Connor. Not exact analogies, admittedly.
If the connections between people like Brunn, Roeder, and Adkisson and the large right wing hatefest become more widely know it will help to marginalize the worst offenders and perhaps get some of the transmitters* to tone things down a bit.
There will be more incidents like this one in the years ahead. Beating people over the head with the connections between the ones who actually commit violence, the ones who stalk and harass, those who encourage and facilitate stalking and harassment, the people who provide platforms for the facilitators, and most importantly the people who fund them, is the best way to marginalize and disempower the whole structure.
The connections are real, and a lot of people are in denial about them. I don't see how to fix that short of letting the extremists point them out themselves. Liberals pointing and yelling doesn't work because it just taps into the he said-she said model that the media loves to promulgate, and which most people rightly tune out.
*Dave Niewert's term.