On the road again…
In a perfect storm of hurdles, irritations and sabotage, getting posts up is nearly impossible both today and, probably, tomorrow, as I am morning to New Jersey, laptop-less, to present “Ethics Blues” to the New Jersey Bar. Who knows what horrors lurk? Meanwhile, this whole week has seen Ethics Alarms approximately as popular as the Motel Six in Lagos. I blame Labor Day, but it’s probably me.
Anyway, please issue your own ethics observations, revelations and theories, and fight nobly and persuasively when challenged. Maybe I’ll get to read what results…
Ethics Alarms 
We’ll leave the light on for you, if you’ll wire us five thousand dollars to free up the million dollars of gold bullion that belongs to you that we’ve found!
Er… I spent Jack’s portion already. Sorry, OB.
You think those dancing girls worked for free?
Here’s the kind of social justice warrior nonsense we deal with on a daily basis in Madison Wisconsin area.
Politicians In A Political Bubble
I think we’re rapidly approaching what’s been happening for a while in Portland Oregon.
The person that started the Facebook absurdity, Ali Muldrow, issued an non-apology for the reverences to concentration camps
Not once did she acknowledge that she did anything wrong. I rate here so called “apology” a solid #9 bordering #10 on the Apology Scale.
ARRGH, typo!
The person that started the Facebook absurdity, Ali Muldrow, issued an non-apology for the references to concentration camps
Sorry to hear about that Steve. The left has gotten rid of all pretense of being rational or logical. They also feel they are above the law. I know you probably are tempted to go to a school board meeting and confront the board about this, but they would probably have you arrested for disturbing the peace and not find it hypocritical at all. I mean, when CNN journalists have other journalists removed by force from their “Freedom of the Press Award” and no one sees a problem with it, the chances that the school board is self-aware is pretty slim.
She shouldn’t acknowledge that she did anything wrong and it does not appear to me that she did anything wrong, except resort to the informal fallacy of making bad analogies between police and Nazis and jails and concentration camps.
It would be irrational of me to expect people with a limited grasp of logic to think logically. And, their poor reasoning does me no real harm. Finally, there are not enough hours in the day for every offense to reason to be forgiven.
She made dumb arguments. That’s all.
-Jut
Well, she accused him of wanting various protected minorities to be impoverished and imprisoned disproportionally. She accused him of just wanting to put certain types of kids in jail. She accused him of being afraid of certain types of children. She therefore has publicly suggested that he is a bigot and as many -phobes as you can think of. Such accusations can have serious repercussions. It is completely inappropriate for a public official to accuse a citizen of being a bigot just because the citizen criticized their position. This is a democracy. All elected leaders must be open to criticism for their statements and policies for democracy to exist. Any politician that would try to stifle a policy criticism by labelling the person a bigot needs to be forced to resign if we want to have a democracy.
But, that is not what the apology was about, was it?
I did not see the apology on that page, so I do not know what precipitated it, but I don’t think it was directed at Steve Witherspoon.
-Jut
I think they they were talking past eachother, Ali asked Steve if he wanted more kids to be arrested. I think she expected him to answer the obvious “No”, and wanted to use that as a point to jump off from. I think Steve read that as an accusation that wanted more kids arrested, and then it all went downhill from there.
I agree. They were talking past each other. But, I suspect He knew that and she did not.
-Jut
Looking more closely, I think you have mischaracterized the exchange:
“Well, she accused him of wanting various protected minorities to be impoverished and imprisoned disproportionally.”
I did not see that. I saw her trying to lay a trap for him. She believes those groups are imprisoned disproportionately. She tried to get him to agree to her terms. He dodged that and so she concluded he was ok with the way things are (as she sees it). (As for the impoverishment part, I don’t think she addressed that (hard to switch back and forth on my phone though)).
“She accused him of just wanting to put certain types of kids in jail. “
I did not see that, unless it follows from what she inferred was his endorsement of the status quo.
“She accused him of being afraid of certain types of children. “
No. She said he was afraid of children. A stupid inference on her part. But, she did not say what you said she said (unless she said it somewhere else in the exchange.
“She therefore has publicly suggested that he is a bigot and as many -phobes as you can think of.”
No, no, no. She did not suggest it; you inferred it. There is no therefore there. She did not say, “bigot” anywhere in that exchange (at least, that I saw). Might she have been implying something to that effect? Sure, but you are twisting words to make that inference (as well as the many -phones you can think of part).
“Such accusations can have serious repercussions.”
As a general statement, sure, I agree. But she did not make that accusation.
“It is completely inappropriate for a public official to accuse a citizen of being a bigot just because the citizen criticized their position.”
Sure, I guess. But, even if she did accuse him of being a bigot, it was not just because he criticized her position. It was because of what she inferred his position to be. In other words, it’s not THAT he criticized her, but WHAT the criticism was.
“This is a democracy.”
Well, not really. But, I hate it when people pull out the “we’re not a democracy; we’re a constitutional republic” line when the actual form of government is not relevant. If we were talking about the Electoral College, for example, that’s another matter. So, sure we’re a democracy.
“All elected leaders must be open to criticism for their statements and policies for democracy to exist.”
Sure, ok.
“Any politician that would try to stifle a policy criticism by labelling the person a bigot needs to be forced to resign if we want to have a democracy.”
Not sure that follows. In democracies, you vote elected officials out (or impeach them, or recall them, or whatever the system allows). And, as it applies here, she did not LABEL him a bigot; I did not see that word in the exchange. Even if she implied that adjective, your use of LABEL implies an explicit, rather than an implicit, use of that word. And, even if it was explicit, the implication that she was doing it to “stifle” criticism seems incorrect. It was because of WHAT the criticism was. She was not calling him a bigot (at all, but for sake of argument) because he supports Tax Increment Financing for a retail redevelopment project (as racist as those are), but because she inferred that he supported bigoted policies.
-Jut
You claimed ““Well, she accused him of wanting various protected minorities to be impoverished and imprisoned disproportionally.”
I did not see that”
Ali Mildrow wrote: “Steve is OK with students of color, LGBTQ youth…disproportionally being subjected to incarceration.”
Gee, seems pretty clear to me.
“He is deeply invested in punishing some young people.”
“But he doesn’t think people who are different than himself are worthy of those things.”
Pretty clear that Steve is a racist. So please, spare me the equivocating and the defense of this official.
Michael R. :You claimed ““Well, she accused him of wanting various protected minorities to be impoverished and imprisoned disproportionally.”
I did not see that”
Ali Mildrow wrote: “Steve is OK with students of color, LGBTQ youth…disproportionally being subjected to incarceration.”
Gee, seems pretty clear to me.
Pretty clear? She said incarceration. You said impoverished and imprisoned. Where did she say impoverished. Like I said, I did not see that. If it is clear to you, show me where she said impoverished.
And, I am not defending this individual, She seems like a moron, but your critiques are not much better.
-Jut
Your defense is beginning to sound like Mildrow. Deflect.
You wrote ““She accused him of just wanting to put certain types of kids in jail. “
I did not see that, unless it follows from what she inferred was his endorsement of the status quo.”
Now you admit it. Your whole defense of this woman is deflection and nitpicking.
Ali Mildrow wrote:
“He is deeply invested in punishing some young people.”
“But he doesn’t think people who are different than himself are worthy of those things.”
Look at that last quote. That defines a bigot. Your telling me that this quote to the community is not accusing him of being a bigot? Give me a break. Your arguments are not believable. If your boss stood up in front of your colleagues and stated that “It has come to my attention that JustGlory donsn’t feel that people different than they are deserve the same vacation time, medical benefits, flex time, promotions, pay, or raises. I am here to tell you that such opinions are against who this company is.” would you think you had just been accused of being a bigot? Would you think your boss should be held accountable for such an action? I guess not.
”Pretty clear that Steve is a racist.”
The avatar doesn’t lie, am I right?
“Muldrow said she was grateful to those who reached out to her and challenged her to broaden her perspective.”
She chose a rather unconventional way to show that…um…gratitude; by SPIKING Steve’s “challenging” comments.
“I have learned a tremendous amount from people’s willingness to tell me what about my statement made them uncomfortable or bothered them,”
Oh, the cascading hypocrisy!
You don’t know the all of it, Jut; in the same thread some EPIC FUCKING IMBECILIC ADDLEPATE posted that he could tell by his avatar that Steve was, and I quote, a Nationalist.
Perhaps Steve might post that monumentally idiotic slobbering, which I swear left me feeling exponentially more stupid for having made the mistake of reading it.
And Muldrow is no 1st offender in the HAPPY HORSE$#!T sweepstakes, as one concerned local citizen points out.
Yes, I ignored Bill Anderson’s commentary, as the post was primarily about Muldrow.
-Jut
I think you’re talking about these two comments…
and this one…
Jeez. I thought MY Facebook Borg friends were bad…
If you’ve ever wondered why I’m a tad…um…unrelenting when discussing the 77 Square Miles Surrounded By A Sea Of Reality, wonder no more!
Wanna read another one from someone I’ve never ever talked to…
Interesting how these people can justify in their minds to jump to conclusions that are completely unsupportable by facts.
Ugh.
They are worse than almost everyone on political-oriented newsgroups on Usenet.
It’s been my routine observation that Muldrow’s mojo* is to talk and write using ludicrous innuendo, extreme hyperbole, outright false accusations, and heir overall incendiary rhetoric. It’s people like Muldrow that are doing everything they can to incite riot. Come to think of it, that’s the mojo of most, if not all, progressives and absolutely ALL social justice warriors.
What Muldrow wrote was wrong in that it was not correct or true; incorrect. The only reason Muldrow offered her non-apology was to try to appease the public outcry over her statements including the police who she, and those she closely associates with, have routinely compared to Nazi’s in the past and jails/prisons to concentration camps. The police department and the Dane County jail should get a real apology from Muldrow, but it’ll never happen from that extreme ideologue. This is not new rhetoric from Muldrow, this is not a one off mistake, this is par for the course from her and her group of social justice warrior extremists and they need to be held accountable for their incendiary rhetoric.
By the way Jut, me posting the non-apology was an aside and not the primary post, in hind sight I shouldn’t have posted it, it was a distraction from the core post.
What do you have to say about Muldrow intentionally selectively censoring speech that directly challenged her and then intentionally blocking me from her Facebook page which might be illegal? I’m already perusing the legality of her blocking me by initiating contact with the ACLU of Wisconsin who posted, and I linked to, the opinion that “When a public official blocks critics from the page because of their viewpoints, she violates the Constitution.”
Steve Witherspoon: “What do you have to say about Muldrow intentionally selectively censoring speech that directly challenged her and then intentionally blocking me from her Facebook page which might be illegal?”
Not a lot. I have not read that recent case, but it sounds like it would apply to these facts (as I understand them, which is not terribly well).
-Jut
I didn’t like the original ruling… My understanding is that because of the way that Twitter works, and because of the way that Trump uses Twitter, the court deemed his Twitter to be an official government outlet, and that blocking someone from that outlet infringed on their first amendment right because it blocked them from interacting with and around that government outlet. That seems…. quaint.
From the appeal ruling: “The First Amendment does not permit a public official who utilizes a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude persons from an otherwise-open online dialog because they expressed views with which the official disagrees” – Circuit Judge Barrington Parker
That doesn’t mean that you get to creep the personal social media accounts of elected people you don’t like and hurl insults at them. Explicit in the ruling is that the public official must use their account in an official capacity. That almost certainly will not apply here. While Muldrow is a school board member, and while she did post something inflammatory on her page, she does not list her position on her details, she does not use her page for official purposes, and (as far as I could tell) she does not appear to promote or even mention her board activities on her page.
I think you are insanely involved in a Facebook spat with a school board official. I think that messaging her both publicly and privately while calling her names and swearing at her probably scared her, because even to me, an involved party, you sound unhinged. And now you’re talking about legal action because she made herself unavailable for your abuse, because of course you are.
My two cents, HT: Steve Witherspoon is one of the most level-headed (if a tad head-strong) and ideologically consistent guys I know.
Muldrow is unequivocally race-obsessed, and a rabid ideologue with a loooooong history of making fanatically unsupportable charges to demonize the opposition whenever she takes a notion.
Steve’s one of the few people that’s called her out on her bull$#!t, it’s painfully clear that dealing with that has proven to be a challenge for which she lacks adequate experience.
I can only go with that I see.
That Muldrow seems like an ideologically-driven progressive is obvious.
But I don’t think that levelheaded people stalk public officials they disagree with on social media, insult them, swear at them, and then throw tantrums when they get blocked, seeking free legal advice from the ACLU.
I don’t know what you want from me.
HT,
You can disagree all you like but you just crossed the line from reasonable discourse to absolute absurdity, it was a friggin public discussion on her public Facebook page discussing something directly related to her elected position and I was blocked because of my critical opinion and according to the ACLU “When a public official blocks critics from the page because of their viewpoints, she violates the Constitution.”
I didn’t stalk or abuse anyone, it was a public discussion that she chose to drag off the rails when she literally started making up unsupportable lies about me and posted some of them as fact.
Bite me, HT.
You acted like a whiny bitch on Facebook, you got blocked, you called the ACLU, you’re considering legal recourse, you copy/pasted most of the interaction onto a 20 foot long blog page which you have labelled “(1 of 2)” and then whined about it here.
Don’t tell me I’m unreasonable, tell me how, exactly, I’m wrong.
I already explained how you were being unreasonable. Try reading for comprehension.
Res ipsa loquitur
Here is your problem: you said she was posting on a publicly accessible “personal” page. The ACLU article you said:
“The case arose after the chair of a local board of supervisors in Virginia, Phyllis Randall, briefly blocked a critic from her official Facebook page and deleted a comment he made about her colleagues’ management of public funds.”
That involved an OFFICIAL page. Thus, it was a government provided forum. If Muldrow’s page is actually a PERSONAL page, then you are probably out of luck.
But, it gets trickier because it sounds like, even if it is a personal page, it could still become a public forum if it is used to disseminate information related to one’s official capacity.
In this case, a diatribe about the juvenile justice system’s role in the school system may or may not be related to her public office.
-Jut
She has the public personal page that she discuss political things and she has a second private personal page.
Jut,
Getting police out of the schools is literally one of the things she ran on in her election earlier this year, it’s a very hot topic and the school board had to deal directly with the problem.
Okay, and what is the problem with running on that position? You have your policy arguments and she has hers.
-Jut
I’m not following you.
You were talking about the differences between public and private pages and disseminating information related to official capacity. I provided information that she has two completely separate pages one public and one private and on the public page she is talking about things that are directly related to her official capacity.
She can run on what ever her litt heart desires, here choice.
Damn it submitted before I was done.
She can run on what ever her little heart desires, her choice and of course we are welcome to our own policy opinions.
What’s your point?
Steve Witherspoon, My point is that I was referring to this:
“Jut,
Getting police out of the schools is literally one of the things she ran on in her election earlier this year, it’s a very hot topic and the school board had to deal directly with the problem.”
I was not responding to your post about her having two profiles.
I think we may have gotten to the point where the imbedded comments are not tracking, because you are talking about a comment I was not addressing, and I might have responded to something directed at someone else.
-Jut
Actually, I take back part of that. You were obviously making that comment to me.
I responded.
I guess I should have asked you what your point was.
She ran on the issue. Okay.
What’s your point?
That she was discussing a campaign issue on her page?
Okay.
-Jut
The campaign issue was an issue prior to her being elected and after she was elected and still is today. This was clearly a discussion about something that was directly related to her official capacity as a member of Madison Metropolitan School District board, therefore it was fair game.
Here is the comment I posted in the Facebook thread…
I think he’s trying to say that because she posted about something that was part of her campaign, her personal Facebook page became a defacto official Facebook page, and therefore blocking him was unconstitutional, and he cares about that because he really… REALLY… wanted to continue yelling at her on Facebook.
I don’t think the legal argument is sound, I just know the functional one is fucking stupid.
Stop being an ass HT.
You’re just jealous I said it better.
HT,
Read more, react less..
There’s really no defacto official page. As I wrote above…
The discussion was on the public personal page not the private personal page.
Look, she could have had a dozen pages, half of them could have been public, and that still wouldn’t mean that any of them were official. Hell, you’re even calling them “personal”. I guess your free legal advice didn’t tell you not to make self-defeating public comments.
Regardless, the inescapable fact is that you want to be unblocked because you want to continue hurling comments at someone on the internet who would prefer not to deal with you. “I have a constitutional right to yell at elected officials on the internet” may or may not be true, but regardless of whether you have that right, I think you’re an asshole for exercising it, particularly the way you are.
HT,
You’re welcome to your own opinion of the situation and your own opinion of me.
Eventually people must stand up to the wackos in the left and tell them NO MORE of their bull shit will be tolerated. I’ll start where I choose and you can sit on your feet and bitch me out for it but that won’t stop me.
I accept that I’m an asshole and
Steve, in this case, she’s wrong, but you’re the wacko.
She’s in the wrong and I’m a wacko for standing up against the wrong?
Seriously; are you listening to yourself?
Yes. And Yes.
You need to take a giant step back and re-evaluate your interaction. You’ve taken a policy disagreement with a school board member to a frankly insane place.
You disagreed.
You came to an impasse.
The conversation became heated.
She started deleting your comments.
You private messaged her.
She blocked you.
You called the ACLU and asked for legal advice.
Which you are contemplating acting on
So she has to unblock you.
So you you can send her more messages.
You copied the conversation.
You pasted it into a blogpost.
You came on here and continued talking about it.
All because you disagree with a progressive on a progressive issue and she blocked you.
That’s not healthy.
I have watched this exchange with interest.
HY says “… All because you disagree with a progressive on a progressive issue and she blocked you.”
Sounds remarkably like what a progressive would do: indeed, we can all attest to knowing about progressives doing just this sort of thing to their opponents, without consequences.
Steve is simply using their playbook against them. This is predictable, this is karma, and this is human nature, given that it works in a world that refuses to censor such tactics.
If there was a way to stop this behavior, it would have been used far before this. I don’t see an alternative, if we want progressives to return to the social contract.
All we have left is mutually assured destruction, where progressives learn that they, too, are not immune to asshole tactics. They are in power, and thus can be hurt by the guerilla tactics they used to get there.
I think that Ali had a point in her second comment that you may have missed, or not had the context for. She said: “Are you hoping we will arrest a lot more students at school and expose far more children to incarceration[?] [W]hich I believe is developmentally inappropriate.”
The point that Ali has is based on the data that suggests that black people are more likely to be detained, more likely to be arrested, more likely to be convicted, more likely to serve time, and more likely to serve more time than white people *for the same behavior*. This series of data is mirrored between men and women, where men are more likely to be impacted by the justice system than women. It’s easiest to see those disparities in sentencing. Black, male first time drug users are *significantly* more likely to serve jail time than white, female first time drug users, as a stark example.
To simplify, there is either a cognitive or systematic bias disadvantaging black people and men, or a cognitive and systematic bias benefiting white people and women.
The question then becomes: “What should be the baseline?” No one is questioning that the black male drug user in my example above was in fact a drug user, or that using drugs is a crime, or that the crime includes jail time in the sentencing guidelines. The assertion is that justice should be equal, and so the question is whether the black man was put in jail when he shouldn’t have been, or the white woman also have been put in jail. Do we put more people in jail, or fewer?
This is the question Ali was asking you, she wasn’t saying that those children weren’t being disorderly in class, she was asking if being disorderly in class *should be* an arrestable offence, and then insinuated that abled, straight, white children were less likely to have the police called on them for disorderly behavior, and so enforcing the standard of “all disorderly conduct is arrestable” would probably mean that more children would make it into the system at a young age. I’ve never seen data on the topic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if to some extent she had a point.
Whenever I see reference to the fact that minority students are disciplined at a significantly higher rate than whites, I wonder if ethnicity is really the reason. The higher rate applies to Blacks and Hispanics, but it does not apply to Asian minorities. Teachers as a group tend to be very liberal, and they are thoroughly schooled in racial sensitivity, and yet we are to suppose their prejudice accounts for the disparate outcomes. I suspect that the culture at home plays a role, but that is difficult to quantify. I suspect family structure plays an even bigger role; that would be easier to quantify, especially single parenthood. Suppose we had good data on disciplinary actions sorted by family structure, especially over time as divorce rates and single parenthood increased; what would that reveal? Marriage promotion is a double-edged sword, to be sure, and I cannot imagine a major political candidate supporting it in a big way. The alternative that seems to be growing in popularity is the government taking on more of the role of raising our kids. To me, that doesn’t seem the best way to go.
Like I said…. I haven’t seen anything that actually showed that the racial/gender justice disparities start as early as childhood school environments, I just would be really unsurprised if they did. Even if they did, I would agree and assume that those discrepancies would only close the gap so far, because the strongest indicator for criminality is poverty, and poverty goes hand in hand with the blight that is single parenthood, both of which are particularly disproportionate in minority families. Again, I haven’t seen this studied, but I’d be genuinely surprised if it weren’t true.
That said… I think you give too much credit to teacher’s progressive bias and education. First off… Teachers generally aren’t generally any more well trained or educated than the population at large, particularly in grade school. Second, half the posts to this site highlight the rampant hypocrisy that is baked into progressiveness, even if we assume a progressive bent, the first time that teacher is nailed with a spitball, those principles are flying out the window.
I think my answer supports that I didn’t miss a thing.
If you had the opportunity to read the entire thread and all the comments that were deleted you would easily see that Muldrow categorically refuses to acknowledge that less crimes committed by students would require fewer arrest of students and in turn less incarceration of students. This is a signature significant black hole for Muldrow.
How about this signature significant statement that Muldrow made…
In all seriousness; anyone that writes that kind of question is completely blinded by their own bias, or they’re a blithering idiot, or they’re trying to justify the elimination of police, prisons and detention centers. Is she showing signs of advocating for absolute free will with no laws, lawless social chaos and vigilantism? Give me another reason someone would ask such a insane question and I’ll consider it in the possibilities.
As for the statistics that both you and Ali are using, or misusing; you must review these cases based on the facts of the case. All cases are different in their own unique ways even if they were arrested at the same time doing the same thing. Just because statistical data shows that a “black, male first time drug users are *significantly* more likely to serve jail time than white, female first time drug users, as a stark example” doesn’t mean that implying or saying that the statistic proves that’s solely because he’s a black male and she’s a white female. Boiling down statistics to simple identity politics is not presenting all the facts, it agenda propaganda bull shit and I don’t condone abusing statistical data in such manipulative ways.
“What I’m hoping for is less crime committed at school thus requiring fewer arrests and that is what you should be hoping for too.”
I think this is a useless truism. In a conversation about whether certain group are being treated differently than others or whether we ought to arrest children for being disorderly at school, saying “I wish people committed fewer offenses.” is a non sequitur.
As an aside: And this is a question Ali didn’t ask properly: Do you think that children should be arrested for being disorderly? And what do you think “disorderly” in that context entails?
Ali Wrote: “Explain to me how arresting people makes the world a better place, how prisons and detention centers are keeping Americans safe?”
To which you commented: “In all seriousness; anyone that writes that kind of question is completely blinded by their own bias, or they’re a blithering idiot, or they’re trying to justify the elimination of police, prisons and detention centers.”
I think this is an Americanism. Ali said that America was one of the most deadly nations on Earth. That’s not true, she should visit the Congo. But it is somewhat ironic that “The Land of The Free” has three times as many incarcerated people per capita that any other nation on Earth. Does American exceptionalism mean that Americans are also exceptionally criminal, or are you maybe doing something wrong? My take is that America locks people up for a ridiculous number of non-violent crimes, but your mileage may vary. And I don’t think “Well did he break the law or not?” is a good response to “Should this crime carry jail time?” or even better, “Should this be a crime?”. People learn how to be better criminals in jail, it stunts their lives both financially and socially, it’s permanently scarring, and sometimes fatal. While it is necessary to remove people from society or otherwise punish them for some things, sending people to criminal boot camp for jaywalking *is* counterproductive, it *does* make the world a worse place. (and I realize jaywalking is not that kind of crime, that’s hyperbole.)
“As for the statistics that both you and Ali are using, or misusing; you must review these cases based on the facts of the case. All cases are different in their own unique ways even if they were arrested at the same time doing the same thing. Just because statistical data shows that a “black, male first time drug users are *significantly* more likely to serve jail time than white, female first time drug users, as a stark example” doesn’t mean that implying or saying that the statistic proves that’s solely because he’s a black male and she’s a white female. Boiling down statistics to simple identity politics is not presenting all the facts, it agenda propaganda bull shit and I don’t condone abusing statistical data in such manipulative ways.”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard “I don’t want to be confused by facts” as directly as this before in my life.
I *don’t* have to look at these on a case by case basis, because while you’re right in that individually outcomes might differ because circumstances will differ, the law of large numbers dictates that the more cases you compile, the more accurate the averages will be, and when you compile tens of thousands of case studies, like people have been doing for decades, and on average black people are disproportionately impacted by the justice system; specifically, explicitly, and this is important: For largely the same input, then you have *some* kind of systematic problem. This isn’t even particularly controversial, you just have no idea what you’re talking about.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black-men-sentenced-to-more-time-for-committing-the-exact-same-crime-as-a-white-person-study-finds/
That’s false, I said or implied nothing of the sort. Read again.
Everything I wrote…. And THAT’s your response?
Yup, that’s my response. Was there some requirement that I have to reply to more of what you wrote?
Again, we disagree and you’re welcome to your opinion.
Steve,
The school board members comments illustrates how thinking gets trapped by ideology.
There is one thing that I would like someone to explain to me. Where is the law that specifically protects any named group? I was under the impression that discrimination based on race, gender, orientation etc was illegal but nowhere can I find specified protected clases.
What I cannot fathom is why she could not agree that reducing incidents requiring police involvement would be preferential to an easing of sanctions. It appears Ali Muldrew does not believe the groups she claims are disproportionately affected are incapable of behavioral change because of their differences to their white hetero classmates. Does she realize that makes her a bigot?
Based on her statement that most student arrests are for disorderly conduct I don’t know why she believes a six month incarceration would result. She also said resisting arrest was another reason for higher numbers of arrest. Well, “resisting” is an added charge not an initial reason to arrest.
To Mudrew: You know which demographic groups have behavioral issues that result in arrest. Why not teach these kids how to react appropriately when confronted by authority.
No one wants to incarcerate, expel, suspend or otherwise punish kids. Children need to be taught. If these kid’s parents are unwilling or unable to teach appropriate behaviors in stressfull situations then you have the power to lead by creating appropriate curriculum. But until you do that you cannot complain if the lawful authority figures need to take action to correct such behavior.
Double negative error. . . . It appears she believes that the disproportionately affected group is incapable . . .
No, she thinks everyone else are the bigots and racists, but I did step up and explained bigotry in hopes it would ring her ignorant bell.
As if you needed any further proof of her weak grasp of reality, I present you with this AOC tweet:
I wonder what she suggests we do with criminals given that imprisoning them is immoral (in her own words). Shoot them on sight?
Well, since her comment fully reads “…FOR PROFIT,” I think you missed her point. I’m not a fan of hers (I think in many ways she is the Dem version of DJT), but I agree with this – there are industries that shouldn’t be run by for-profit corporations.
Do you think government is better at running these facilities? If so, why?
Mrs Q
From a public safety perspective I doubt seriously if there is much of a difference.
However, from a public policy perspective prisons have moved away from penal institutions to rehabilitation facilities. Private for profit entities and government run prisons have diametrically opposed goals.
For profit facilities need beds filled whereas the government would prefer to see reductions in headcount. Private institutions will quietly lobby for longer sentences and fewer parolees.
Private institutions can affect the good time credits earned by how strictly they impose rules. That affects parole decisions and actual time required to be served. That affects profit. In short, a person in prison is a means to an income for the private provider while a freed ex felon is no longer costing upwards of 30k per year and assuming the felon is working, he or she is contributing to the tax base.
If private prisons adopted the reimbursement plan medicare uses in which payments to the prison provider is inversely related to recitivism rates then we can all get on the same financial motivations page
Now it may appear that law and order politicians want to lock people up but it only appears that way because we assume crime is directly related to population density and as our population grows we will need to incarcerate more people..
Most officials would prefer a highly docile, rule following public. They get more votes cutting taxes or building schools than funding prisons.
Might I suggest that the push by government to reduce headcount in their prisons is based on finances. Fewer prisoners means fewer mouths to feed and fewer staff to deal with them. Its just a “profit motive” pig with a bad application of lipstick.
Have you found any stats that might suggest that “rehabilitation” in the state-run prisons is anything more than just a word?
Mike
At the officer level rehabilitation is te last thing they think about. However at the executive level the goal is to trying figure out who can be saved and who are incorrigible. I ran a college program at MCTC for the last 5 years of its 25 year existence until the crime bill of 1995 killed it. We tracked our recidivism rates over that lengthy period and could demonstrate a complete inversion of recidivism rates.
Prisons are like any enterprise. At the top you have visionaries and on the line you have cogs. In this case the cogs merely want no trouble from the inmate and could not care less if they became productive people. In contrast, management were the ones working to provide human capital development and not just warehousing.
As someone who worked for the Arizona Department of Corrections for 25 years, I think I can fairly assess both the advantages and problems associated with privately-run prisons. Contracting with various companies to provide various prison services can produce some substantial cost savings to the public, but has some negative effects that aren’t always considered. The Arizona Department of Corrections privatized several different areas during my career there, including medical care, food service, and some rehabilitative programs. The department has also held portions of the inmate population in units run by private contractors.
Advantages of privatization included direct cost savings (with private prisons costing less per bed) and the ability to share prison construction costs with the contractor, allowing the construction to become part of a multi-year contract, rather than an up-front payment. The direct cost savings can be difficult to fairly assess, as contractors would often refuse to accept those inmates who were most expensive to house, either due to having major medical issues, a tendency toward harassment litigation, or membership in a prison gang. Since the private prisons had some security issues that led to inmate escapes, departmental staff also spent considerable time screening inmates before they would be considered for placement in the private prison units. The complaint from ADC staff involved in these assessments was that “Of course they’re cheaper! If I got to pick and choose only the inmates who were least difficult to deal with, I could run my unit more cheaply, too!”
Privatization of food services produced direct cost savings, but increased the need for security oversight of the area and precipitated numerous lawsuits about the quality of the food. I was responsible for reviewing my unit’s kitchen for a couple of years: The food service contractor’s poorly-paid employees were frequently unprofessional, corrupt, or incompetent. I regularly had to deal with inmate complaints about the contract kitchen workers. Having once worked through a violent disturbance precipitated by bad food, I had no intention of doing so again. The food we served might not have been great, but it damned well better be cooked properly and served in appropriate portions.
As the unit’s grievance coordinator, I had to deal with inmate complaints about the medical care. The contractor was not able to keep as many medical staff on site as had previously been the norm, doctors and other medical staff were expected to see more inmates per day, and treatment delays were common. As with food service, this was more cost-efficient up front, but at the cost of increased lawsuits and avoidable delays in inmate medical treatment.
The rehabilitative programming provided through private contractors generally worked well, was professionally run, and was regarded by the inmate population as worthwhile and beneficial. Not all inmates really care to improve themselves or change their lives, but some do, and those programs allowed them to do so.
The most significant problem with private prisons has nothing to do with all those complaints. The problem is that private prison contractors exert political pressure to increase their own business. If a state politician wanted to reform the prison system, shifting toward punishments other than mass incarceration, he could face tremendous pressure from these prison contractors. Politicians at the state level knew that just talking about the topic would guarantee that the contractors would throw thousands of dollars into their political opponents’ campaign funds. I spoke with ADC’s Director many years ago about the possibility of expanding carefully supervised home arrest programs instead of incarceration, since we now have the technology to track a monitored inmate’s every move. An inmate on home arrest could still hold a job and be with his family. If he didn’t attend required treatment programs or doesn’t follow the rules, it’s not like we lack prisons to put him in. I was told at the time that we were just waiting for the costs to come down. Well, the costs have come down. The problem is that there is no political traction for such a program because the damned privates jump all over anyone who proposes such a reform.
Interesting and thorough analysis.
Thanks James for your perspective. Private vs. state run prisons is an issue I never thought much about and I appreciate how you discussed political maneuverings regarding costs of (certain) prisoners and contractors.
The home arrest program you mention, would it be based on using ankle monitors? I read those monitors have issues, especially regarding proper tracking. Also do you think this “abolish prisons” movement will gain further traction? If corporations make money off more incarcerated criminals but government saves from having fewer, will this abolish ideology ever really happen? If we did have more convicted criminals monitored outside of an institution, how will we keep advances in monitoring technology from targeting non-criminal citizens, in the name of safety?
Home arrest programs have previously used ankle monitors, which do have tracking issues at times. Some of these issues can be avoided due to the nature of home arrest supervision. Inmates on home arrest are not permitted to go anywhere without authorization. Prior to approving a location that the offender desires to visit, the monitoring staff can verify that the site will not prevent them from receiving his signal. Offenders are required to comply with direction from the monitoring staff, and may only travel to locations required for such activities as employment, attending rehabilitative programming, and routine tasks such as shopping for groceries or visiting their bank. This stands in strong contrast to other monitored individuals, such as those on intensive probation, whose travel is not limited as much, and who may reasonably go places where their monitoring equipment isn’t effective.
I don’t think that such programs involve much risk of encouraging a surveillance state, where the government constantly monitors potential troublemakers. For one thing, the people involved here are convicted felons. Their status necessitates some infringements on their rights that most Americans would not see as acceptable or appropriate if applied to the general public.
COTD, please.
If something is ethical to do, why would it suddenly become unethical to do as part of a commercial agreement?
Is having sex ethical? Does it become unethical when part of a commercial agreement?
1. Depends on the situation.
2. A marriage can be considered an agreement to exchange sustenance/shelter/income for sex/childbearing/family care, especially in more conservative societies (and even historically in Western ones). Does that agreement by itself make sex within such marriage unethical?
1. Exactly.
“Caging of humans for profit” implies that the private prisons have something to do with actual arrests and sentencing. Since they DON’T, and simply house and feed the criminals at the behest of the government, can we not just agree that AOC is being a moron here?
“Officer Bob here. Sorry, you’re under arrest because a prison company which I don’t work for wants money. You didn’t do anything wrong, but we just don’t have enough actual felons to fill our prisons, so we occasionally arrest innocent folks just for profit. We don’t benefit, it’s just a favor we like to do for the evil corporations. Ask AOC how it works, she’s watched lots of movies with evil CEOs as the villain, so she knows.”
I don’t think she’s an idiot, I think she’s just reading from the Justice Democrats talking points. I didn’t realize “Cultural Marxism” was a conspiracy theory (here’s the SPLC on the topic- they frame it as anti-Semitic because Marcuse et al. were German Jews), but I find it a very plausible explanation for these sorts of ideas. If the goal is to destroy any and every Western institution, destroying prisons makes sense. If the goal is to remake Western society, it has to be destroyed first. To me, this explains what’s going on in the American academy and the political and cultural left. It explains and makes sense of most everything that’s happened in the U.S. in my lifetime, actually (b. 1951).
Let me rephrase that. She’s an idiot but a “useful” (i.e. dangerous) idiot.
“I didn’t realize “Cultural Marxism” was a conspiracy theory (here’s the SPLC on the topic- they frame it as anti-Semitic because Marcuse et al. were German Jews), but I find it a very plausible explanation for these sorts of ideas. If the goal is to destroy any and every Western institution, destroying prisons makes sense. If the goal is to remake Western society, it has to be destroyed first. To me, this explains what’s going on in the American academy and the political and cultural left. It explains and makes sense of most everything that’s happened in the U.S. in my lifetime, actually (b. 1951).”
I think I can help here. Or, I propose that I can yet I will include a caveat that my ideas are generally speaking *off-limits* and too-far-out-there. I have swallowed the Red Pill and its nefarious enzymes have penetrated into my flesh and psyche and I just don’t see the world the same anymore.
The destruction of Germany represents the destruction of Europe in many senses. The destruction of Europe — that is, the killing of Europe at a ‘soul’ level — has a thousand effects but a very large one is now present and visible: the suicidal will-to-die that allows the fundamental attack-on-whiteness. The attack on whiteness is a complex, psychological affair, but it is deadly. I believe this is not an exaggeration.
The Destruction of the European Jews, which is the title of the trilogy of study by Raul Hilberg, is an outline in what Jews will never tolerate again. Though the gas chambers is a complete myth, nevertheless millions of Jews were killed in cold blood in the East by more-or-less conventional means. The European Jews were largely wiped out and, with no doubt, this was the initial will of the Germans: to cause Jews to leave Germany. It began in this way: an expulsion. Just one more expulsion in the long tragic Jewish history (which has not ended). To understand ‘it has not ended’ is vital to understanding Our Present.
For Jews, the mediation on ‘what happened’ was so enormous that Gentiles can hardly imagine it. On one level it led to a will-not-to-live and a sort of a will-to-suicide (and many Jews after the war, though saved, ended in suicide: the weight was too great). You see, God abandoned them. And a god that would allow that level of destruction is not a god worth allegiance. Can you begin to understand what this realization meant in the eyes of post-Shoah Jews? ‘Never Again’ became — has become — a frighteningly powerful element of Jewish will. Houston Chamberlain, a genius but definitely not a philo-semite, wrote that what distinguishes the Jew is a will that is frightening to non-Jewish sensibilities. It is the will to cling to an Idea despite terrifying opposition. That is one main aspect of what the Diaspora inculcated in Jews, to speak generally. Gentiles remain non-comprehending of Jewish Will, and they do not understand the group of decisions taken by factions within Jewry, and more specifically within the recently-formed Jewish state. That is to say a Jewish state with an intelligence agency (or a nexus of them).
In order to understand The Present — this is my assertion — one has to understand the dynamical conflict between Gentile Culture and Jewish Culture. This conflict is fundamental to Europe. In the most basic terms — and I must offer an apology for reductionism and generalization — what ‘Europe’ is and what Europe means is a long cultural process of ‘taming’ and ‘civilizing’. One major pole has been Christianism and the various political forms that came to exist as the means to establish civilizational control. One major aspect in this process, within Christendom, is the psychological element. To tame a people — this must be obvious — requires not only a physical restraint but a psychological one. And Europe was substantially tamed ‘for a thousand years’.
This brings us up to about 1850 more-or-less. Suffice to say in abbreviated terms that a Europe-wide movement began that involved rediscovery of the pre-Christian culture. To define this is not easy. Because the essence of this ‘discovery’ was (is) romantic and spiritual. And what is romantic and what is spiritual does not have to do necessarily with purely rational categories. So, to understand ‘what happened’ in Europe one must begin to understand the rise of a romantic movement within Germanism (the widest possible definition of what *Europe* is, which was understood by philologists to be Aryanism: a proto-culture which among many different cultural achievements stood behind Greek pagan culture and its amazing accomplishments. And Germanism, and certainly Germany itself, got very very interested in Greek categories.
The roots of German Revival are the roots of European Revival. It is very hard to see this, and also to accept this, but the Germanic Awakening was an awakening at a somatic-spiritual level and to carry this out necessarily involved a tossing off of the various bindings that had constrained the European Man. I am not defending nor attacking — I am explaining. If you wanted to produce and have stand in front of you one exemplary of this European Awakening I think it would be Goethe. But for our purposes we have to turn to a powerful activist of Germanic Pagan revival: CG Jung. There is no other person who so *romantically* and yet so *scientifically* opened a path to Pagan Revival. To understand what he did — to understand what he is still doing — is not easy. Obviously, these issues involve wide sweeps of cultural and civilizational time, and to focus on these large, determining elements, one must lift oneself away from immediate, limited focus.
The conflict between Freud and Jung is a fundamental conflict and is highly relevant to understand a great deal of what goes on even now — especially now — in Our Present. Freud clearly saw ‘what Jung was up to’ in Zurich and, logically, it frightened and appalled him. He saw the writing on the wall, so to speak. That ‘writing’, if I may be so bold as to put it in sheer terms, was the beginning of an identity-movement that would result in the expulsion of the European Jews. There you have it.
In order to understand ‘what is going on in our present’ one must gain an understanding of very large cultural and civilizational processes. In order to understand the present Radical Opposition which has — quite suddenly, hasn’t it been? — arisen in our present, with all these strange and deadly undercurrents, one has to choose, consciously, to enter a very tricky and a very dangerous psychological *territory*. I am alluding here, obviously, to what many of you would call and what the SPLC does call new manifestations of Antisemitism. It is a good question to ask What is your purpose? We do not understand! You frighten us with these revelations!
The Frankfurt School
To understand these men — Jewish indeed, and Jews expelled from German soil and all of the long Jewish experience in the Rhine Valley and in The Pale, which is to say their very life — one must understand 1) Jewish will, 2) Jewish ressentiment, and 3) the vital relevance of the US within the context of Jewish History. To understand this in the most immediate and I think obvious way all you’d have to do is to grasp the animus (spirit) behind The Authoritarian Personality:
If you do not understand what this means I will explain: it means a psychologically expressed will to undermine Gentile power and determination at the most fundamental, spiritual level. This is a psycho-spiritual endeavor. This is done so that the *threat* of fascism, and the threat of expulsion and physical harm, is curtailed: ‘nipped in the bud’ as the expression goes. Now, that explains only in a glossary sense what ‘Frankfurt School’ means. If you ever can get through Adorno’s knotty prose you will appreciate a great deal of what he says, at least I did. But one must, I suggest, see and understand the Larger Aspect of social taming. (A very good exposition on all of this is in a YouTube video by Jonathan Bowden called — appropriately and yet disconcertingly: Western Civilization Bites Back).
Now, this is what ‘Jewishness’ means in a certain aspect. This is where ‘Jewish will’ has become focussed. And of course this is where Jewish ressentiment is evident. And it must be remembered and understood that Jewish power now has a state and an intelligence agency.
I could go on as there really is a great deal more to say. What is the purpose of this Exposition, you ask. Well, the purpose of to *see clearly*. If you cannot really *see* things, you are in the dark. And if in the dark you cannot really act. The metaphor I most admire is that of Plato’s Cave: chained to a provided perspective one cannot ‘turn one’s head around’. All one sees are the ‘dancing figures’ of shadow.
Keep in mind what I have written here in order to better understand the psychological war that is being conducted right now in our present. It is going get far more severe and, to those who can *see*, far more obvious. If you want to understand, you will. If you don’t, you will choose not to.
There seems to be some sort of destructive agency at work in society. It seems implacable and seems to be growing stronger and more gleeful all the time. Very strange and very dangerous. I find Bernie Sanders and the Justice Democrats terrifying. Noam Chomsky: a total nihilist. Scary.
Interesting. I don’t know how well (if at all) this will mesh with your thoughts above, but you might enjoy an old BBC series The Day the Universe Changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed
It appears that all 10 episodes may be available on YouTube…used paperback for a buck or two on Amazon.
I don’t remember if I saw all the episodes, or really all that much about it overall (will have to watch the videos, myself, I suppose), but one thing that stuck with me was the author’s idea that religion played a role in the (relatively) modern ascendancy of the west (Europe) over the rest of the world. One of his suggestions, IIRC, was that (mainly) northern European protestant Christianity of the “God helps those who help themselves” variety caused a shift from the philosophies of the East (and even Catholicism) of the “what will be, will be” sort that encouraged a surrender to God/fate/karma. He supported this idea, in part, by noting that the reason behind “Scotty” becoming a typical nickname for engineers (hello, Star Trek!) was the fact that, at one time, a large percentage of the world’s trained engineers were actually produced in Scotland (and being dispersed across the British empire).
On the railroads they built all over the world.
“God helps those who help themselves,” has to be of Anglican rather than Roman Catholic origin.
Looks quite interesting. I’ll watch it tonight. If afterward I get weirder than normal you’ll know why.
It’s there on YouTube:
I generally concur with that. I will watch that series too.
My theory is that Christianity itself is responsible for the work ethic, general niceness, and integrity we expect from “modern” Western institutions and culture. It was a gradual change because Christianity is a set of principles that works to the extent that individuals internalize them. The change gradually started in the Roman Empire when early Christians (and later, the Catholic Church) frowned upon normally accepted practices including slavery, child abandonment/exposure, death sport, and sexual depravity.
There was a gigantic boost that came along with the printing press and the Reformation, with the full teachings of Jesus and the Bible now available to a wider range of people. Northern Europe and Scandinavia were some of the most powerfully impacted. This is where modern science kicks off, among many other positive developments.
The interesting thing about Germany at the time of Hitler’s rise is not necessarily the politics, but the philosophy. In a very short time Germany had become post-Christian, embracing nihilist philosophers, Nietzsche most of all. It didn’t bother most Germans that Hitler was a Nietzsche disciple (so were they) or that he wanted to create a secular, “positive” Christianity wherein the “state must be the absolute master.” Only a minority of churches (what we would call “evangelical” or “fundamentalist”) opposed this. This localized hard swerve into complete secularism…did not go to good places. And unlike the secularism of other European socialist countries like Russia and Yugoslavia, this secularism was popular, not imposed by force.
If I’m right about Christianity being the “secret sauce” of polite society, then it’s safe to say that a Post-Christian Europe and America will gradually get meaner and dumber. (So far I don’t feel any reason to change my hypothesis.) Expect a tremendous leap forward in nastiness in the “good” countries of Western Europe in about 30 years, as the last of the aging religious population dies out and the young atheist generation assumes power. Expect an even worse leap backward a generation later, as the first generation of atheists raised by atheist parents assumes power.
To be fair, I think she’s talking about for-profit prisons specifically. But I wonder if government-run facilities are any better.
Private prisons house a pretty small sliver of inmates (I’ve heard about 5% nationally.)
They also are supposedly “worse” based on metrics like recidivism, violent incidents, etc. although the fact that sexual abuse is LESS of a problem in private prisons means that those statistics are probably kinda worthless. Sexual assault has got to be among the top one or two things you don’t want going on in your prison. And the statistics don’t seem to factor in whether “worse” inmates are likely to go to a private prison.
Another thing critics point out is how much cheaper and efficient the private prisons are, as if it’s a bad thing (guards make thousands less per year!) I THINK that the Left is just trying to inflate the number of public employee union members here. I can’t imagine that their stated goal is to cram more prisoners into the underfunded public prisons. And I also do not think that the Left is going to lobby for more tax money to go to prisons, or as they call it, the “school to prison pipeline.” Assuming that they actually know what they want (a leap of faith, sure,) I can only imagine that they want to empty out private prisons, create more budgetary stress and chaos in public prisons, then protest THOSE for being barbaric, and tar anyone trying to increase funding for them as a fascist or something. Then, I dunno, revel in the chaos and death I guess. You don’t need a Step 3 when your goal is to destroy society.
The content of her tweet notwithstanding… Has anyone else noticed how scarce AOC has been since the catfight with Pelosi? The one that only ended because Trump gave them both something else to fight with? My theory is that AOC figured out that the Justice Democrats don’t own her.
Stay with me.
Back before the 2018 midterms, where AOC was elected, the Justice Democrats held literal auditions for candidates to run against entrenched moderate Democrats or Republicans in districts they thought were up for grabs. They picked young, minority, intersectional candidates with a whole lot of energy and put a whole lot of effort behind them and lo and behold, you get AOC. The Justice Democrats hooked her up with a staff, a couple of talking points, various other instructions and set her loose. Progressives and the media, but I repeat myself, loved her, I mean what’s not to love? So fresh! So face!
The problem is that she rubs non-progressive America the wrong way, and “Progressives”, in the context I use it, make up a fractional minority of America. Pelosi, despite coming off like an addled idiot, did not actually get her position by collecting bottle caps, and realized that if she wanted to have any hopes of taking the presidency in 2020, she had to keep Trump from making “The Squad” the face of the Democratic party. Which is where the fighting, before Trump gave them something to unify against, started.
After the cringe inducing photo ops, one of the things that happened during the reconciliation was that AOC fired her Justice-Democrat-provided Chief of Staff, and *really* dialed back her presence. I think that she and Pelosi had a tete-a-tete. And that Pelosi may have broken through by explaining how despite the JDs setting her up, not that she’s elected, she has the power, not them, and that if she wants party support, she’s going to have to do a little bit better playing team sports.
I wonder what Cenk does now.
I don’t know, HT. I think she still may be reading the scripts the Justice Democrats provide her. I’d love to see that eight year old girl/AOC impersonator reading this statement: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/08/28/alexandria_ocasio-cortez_young_people_understand_our_history_are_more_informed_than_previous_generations.html
He still has Omar and Tlaib. And the woman from Massachusetts.
I think that Justice Democrats’ ability to influence policy should not be understated… Did you know, for instance, that (from Wikipedia):
“In the 2018 elections, 26 of the 79 candidates endorsed by Justice Democrats won their respective primary elections. Seven of these candidates won in the general election: Raúl Grijalva, Ro Khanna, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal.”
Those names sound familiar? How about this;
“To accompany its launch, (Kyle) Kulinski and (Cenk) Uygur published the following set of progressive founding principles for the coalition.[24] Adjustments have been made since 2017, resulting in a slightly different platform appearing on the Justice Democrats webpage at a given time.[25]
–Creating a new infrastructure program called the “Green New Deal”[26]
-Ending arms sales to countries that violate human rights such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt
–Enacting a federal jobs guarantee, which would promise all Americans a job paying $15 per hour plus benefits
-Ending the death penalty
-Ending the practice of unilaterally waging war, except as a last resort to defend U.S. territory
-Ending the War on Drugs in favor of legalization, regulation, and taxation of drugs, and pardoning all non-violent drug offenders and treating all drug addicts
-Ensuring free speech on college campuses and supporting net neutrality
–Ensuring universal education as a right, including free four-year public college and university education
–Ensuring universal healthcare as a right
-Establishing paid maternity leave, paid vacation leave, and free childcare
–Expanding anti-discrimination laws to apply to LGBT people – see Equality Act
-Expanding background checks on firearms and banning high capacity magazines and assault weapons
-Funding Planned Parenthood and other contraceptive and abortion services, and recognizing reproductive rights
-Implementing electoral reform and publicly financed elections nationwide to make irrelevant and obsolete fundraising from large corporations and the wealthy
-Implementing instant-runoff voting nationwide in an effort to make third-party and independent candidates more viable
-Implementing the Buffett Rule, ending offshore financial centers, “chain[ing]” the capital gains and income taxes, and increasing the estate tax
-Making the minimum wage a living wage and tying it to inflation
-Pardoning Edward Snowden, prosecuting CIA torturers and DoD war criminals, shutting down the -Guantanamo Bay detention camp and all other extrajudicial prisons, and ending warrantless spying and bulk data collection by the National Security Agency
-Passing the Paycheck Fairness Act
–Abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE)
-Reforming police by mandating body cameras, establishing community oversight boards, eliminating broken windows policing, ending stop and frisk, and appointing special prosecutors to hold police accountable in courts
-Renegotiating other free trade deals CAFTA-DR, and NAFTA and opposing the Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China and the World Trade Organization
-Stopping any reductions to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and establishing single-payer universal healthcare
-Stopping anthropogenic climate change through an ecological revolution and upholding the United States’ participation in the Paris Climate Agreement
–Uncompromisingly rejecting President Trump’s immigration proposals and policies, particularly Executive Order 13769 and deportation of illegal immigrants, and implementing comprehensive immigration reform which will include giving non-criminal illegal immigrants a path to citizenship
Now, I’m not going to pretend that a lot of this wasn’t boilerplate Democratic thought before the Justice Democrats came on the scene, but I think this list contextualizes some of the discussions we’ve been having.
Absolutely. They’re not idiots. AOC is a sock puppet for these people and they are very nasty people. And they are dangerous.
And, as I tried to lay out above, I find the “cultural Marxism” label helpful insofar as the Justice Democrats seem to be using these sorts of ideas not just as policy prescriptions but as something more sinister, as a precursor to a revolution that will place the JDs in power. They want a top down cultural revolution a la Mao. (Or Pol Pot, for that matter.) They’re playing a long game. And the unwitting media are abetting them.
Wow. Never knew that the frankly quite stupid Cenk (also a genocide denier) was behind any of that.
-Ending arms sales to countries that violate human rights such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt
(Right there I know enough to know that cutting off Saudi Arabia would destabilize the Middle East and ramp up extremism everywhere. They are unpleasant but necessary allies right now.)
–Enacting a federal jobs guarantee, which would promise all Americans a job paying $15 per hour plus benefits
(Also known as: How to Ruin America Forever for Everyone With Just One Law)
-Ending the practice of unilaterally waging war, except as a last resort to defend U.S. territory
(Sure, Sun Tzu, let’s take all defensive or preemptive attacks right off the table and be as loud as possible about it.)
-Ensuring free speech on college campuses and supporting net neutrality
(Cenk is vocally against letting conservatives speak on college campuses, so this is some very creepy Newspeak about ‘free speech’ here.)
–Ensuring universal education as a right, including free four-year public college and university education
(Translation: making a 4-year college degree the new high school degree, making an 8-year college degree the new 4-year college degree, devaluing public education until its nearly meaningless, and making the middle class pay for all of this “free” stuff.
-Establishing paid maternity leave, paid vacation leave, and free childcare.
(Translation: eliminating all jobs that aren’t provided by the massive corporations who can afford to do this. Incidentally, those massive corporations are all our friends.)
–Expanding anti-discrimination laws to apply to LGBT people – see Equality Act
(Dads, don’t send your young daughters into a bathroom without a rape whistle. Oh, and female athletes: invest in ice packs. This equality is going to require you to take a few slams from large men.)
-Funding Planned Parenthood and other contraceptive and abortion services, and recognizing reproductive rights
(We’re going to chop up some babies and gloat over making you pay for it. Sorry, we’re kinda evil.)
-Implementing the Buffett Rule, ending offshore financial centers, “chain[ing]” the capital gains and income taxes, and increasing the estate tax
(We are disturbed by the number of companies that haven’t yet fled to countries with better tax policy. So we’re working hard to get that number up.)
-Making the minimum wage a living wage and tying it to inflation
(Don’t worry, college will be dumbed down so that absolutely anyone can attain the 4-year degree now required to put french fries into the grease and then take them out again. Teenagers looking for a starter job…sorry, those don’t exist anymore. Also, half of all jobs don’t exist anymore. Don’t worry, we’ll have generous public assistance to fix that problem we just created. Don’t ask us how we’re paying for all of this after gutting the private sector.)
-Pardoning Edward Snowden, prosecuting CIA torturers and DoD war criminals, shutting down the -Guantanamo Bay detention camp and all other extrajudicial prisons, and ending warrantless spying and bulk data collection by the National Security Agency.
-Stopping anthropogenic climate change through an ecological revolution and upholding the United States’ participation in the Paris Climate Agreement
(What do you mean, explain what an ecological revolution actually means? It sounds cool!)
–Uncompromisingly rejecting President Trump’s immigration proposals and policies, particularly Executive Order 13769 and deportation of illegal immigrants, and implementing comprehensive immigration reform which will include giving non-criminal illegal immigrants a path to citizenship
(It’s still illegal to come here illegally…but there’s no border, no ICE, no enforcement, and when you get here we’ll get to work on making you a proper citizen. We’ll call it the “You Win, Sex and Drug Traffickers, Right This Way Act.” Also, don’t ask us why anyone would ever want to come here from Mexico legally now.)
Not too far back, there was some discussion here on the ethical questions surrounding the rise of artificial intelligence, i.e.,sentient machines, or “machine becoming man” so to speak. I don’t recall that the obverse of that situation was brought up, that is, the transfer of actual individual human intelligence to an artificial vessel…”man becoming machine”.
Some of the same concerns would arise, but there could be many additional considerations. Would a digital copy that thought is was the person be the person (or even A person)? Would that depend on whether the source was destroyed in a required scan, or otherwise removed (natural death)? Would such a thing create immortals…maybe far superior in memory, computational, perceptive, and cognitive abilities to the meat people? Would it have a soul? etc., etc….
https://www.livescience.com/37499-immortality-by-2045-conference.html
I’ve been writing notes about this for a few years that I would like to publish some day. In the meantime, it’s a really hard problem, and unless we figure out consciousness it could be very similar to the abortion debate, with the caveat that we can’t guarantee that there’s an actual human on the other end. We can’t know when lived experience starts, so we need to draw a line somewhere, and I suggest we draw it conservatively.
I’d like to read your thoughts on the topic. Let me know where to find it someday.
I promise I will. 🙂
THIS: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/newspapers-bug-out-cockroaches-at-washington-post-latest-in-infestation-woes
Apparently, WaPo has a cockroach problem, seemingly (ironically?) confined to their newsroom.
Clever little creatures to recognize, and find their way to, the place where journalism dies in darkness.
Proof that God has a sense of humor.
They want to be around their kind?
Here’s a small one that has jumped out at me recently. On a local radio station, there are two different advertisements – one talks about “putting the AF in affordable” and another (for the local tollway authority) talks about “being able to get from A to B without saying F.” I think these are crude and another sign of the coarsening of culture, but friends say that they’re not actually saying anything offensive so it’s no big deal.
On an slightly related tangent, I heard a recent jewelry business’s radio ad use the term “center stone of color” when describing some of their rings.
I rarely listen to over-the-air radio anymore but one of the few times I did I caught the following string of advertisements in the same block:
– “Not really” dating service social club for singles (but actually dating service for practical purposes)
– Engagement ring store
– Local hospital announcing a recently remodeled maternity ward
– Paternity tests
It was only missing “sleazy divorce lawyer” for the royal flush. Adult contemporary radio is lit.
“business’s” OK, remove that last “s”. (I really hate not having edit capabilities)
Putting ‘apostrophe ess’ at the end of a singular plural noun is rare and obscure but more correct than dropping the ess. I may be the last defender of the practice. I guard it in the hopes that a valiant hero will make his way past the death traps, pass the ancient tests, and bring the forgotten grammar concept into the world to bring about a new age of peace and prosperity.
It’s a problem for the masses, and for the masses’ a forgotten one.
😉
The NYTs reported a few days back on a family of organic farmers in Indiana who sold their produce for years at a local Farmer Market. The woman of the family, Sarah Dye, had expressed some of her ‘White well-being’ opinions in some public message boards. Antifa-types traced them back to her, and then created a huge problem at the Farmer Market for the family, doxxed her, spread lies and partial-truths.
This is where things are going now. More and more people shall begin to be fearless in showing their identitarianism, however they see it and understand it, and the goons will be called when they are doxxed, the MSM will give fuel to their attacks, and the financial and reputation-harm will be done.
Here is an interview with the woman who owns Schooner Farms:
Where I live, this sort of behavior would have been stopped by police (already present, thank you very much) and the perps possibly imprisoned. I suspect this is why the TDS do not act this way in public where I live.
Not to mention that a sizable percentage of the population is armed.
Here is an interesting tweet.
Bizarre mini tale in the satire files….
Someone posted an article titled “Vegans Call Stuffing Chicken Sexual Assault”, from a site called “Woken News”.
I fell for the story, but not the way Democrats think. I assumed the story was a hyperbolic conservative rant about PETA’s latest stunt. I did not even question that some idiot on the left said this to attract cheep, hypocritical attention.
The article read exactly like a conservative shock-jock mocking PETA with far more attention than they deserved. Then I got to the end and confusedly read their explicit disclaimer that it was satire (and claiming they “had” to post that because they were “fact checked”). I am still confused.
I didn’t check all that carefully to see if the site was otherwise ethically explicit about its purpose. It certainly left no doubt it was right tilted.
However, what I found most disturbing was that, sure enough, Facebook just casually left a “related article” just below the original. Facebook just kind of whistled and pretended not to watch while I read the satire piece to see if I would notice if it were fake.
If the disclaimer were only added after the site were “fact checked”, then it would have been unethical. The site was pretty clear about its biases however, so any responsible critical thinker should be able to weigh the evidence. I concluded the story was likely overblown by reading the story. Most may not.
Facebook’s actions, however, just give me the creeps.
Most sadly, that I would only hear of this alleged embarrassing stunt from a shock jock did not surprise me….
Here is something disturbing.
The police here are ethics dunces. This man murdered three people and resisted. Why did they even take him in alive, while gunning down unarmed black men?
this is why civil authority does not work. We need to replace civil authority with martial law. There is no way the military would have taken this guy in alive, had they been in charge. Unlike the cops, the military took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution (including the 14th Amendment), and they would shoot everyone equally. For gunning down unarmed black men, while taking in white murder suspects alive, is a violation of equal protection.
the military takes its oath seriously.
Civil authority does not work. it did not work in Los Angeles in 1992; it does not work today.
Why do we even have civil authority?
Police, like all people, are allowed to use force, even deadly force, o defend themselves or others from threats of death or serious bodily harm. In addition, police can use deadly force to apprehend a violent offender where allowing to offender to remain free would further endanger the public. The latter requires some serious factual support for the decision to do this.
The man in the video is obviously not armed. The dead people are dead and nothing the police do will change that.They had no choice but to chase him down and capture him. If your point here is that because of what he did (allegedly did) was so terrible that they should have just shot him then and there, you are nuts. That’s the law and has been for roughly half a century. Quit being a troll.
um,
Naked means no weapon, if they had shot the guy to death the are on the wrong end of a wrongful death lawsuit. They are completely immunized from any lawsuit by the dead victims. Welcome to the nation we have built be giving special privileges to our police in regards to the law.
Here is more from Brent Larkin.
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2019/08/if-legislators-dont-fix-ohio-guns-laws-the-voters-will-do-it-for-them.html#vf-7464300019330
I wonder where Brent Lasrkin gets the idea that white males are doing all the slaughtering.
Are they doing most of the slaughtering in Compton, California or Camden, New Jersey?