Did this really just happen?

[_Some Schmo]

Trump wants to claim the 75 year old man injured by police in Buffalo is part of Antifa.

If so, I'm even less worried about Antifa than I was before. Apparently, they're a bunch of pushovers.

[_Jersey Girl]

Trump wants to claim the 75 year old man injured by police in Buffalo is part of Antifa.

If so, I'm even less worried about Antifa than I was before. Apparently, they're a bunch of pushovers.

He's desperate.

[_Gunnar]

Come on now! You know I didn't mean to imply that it's different now! See how I amended the post.

Oh yeah? Did you amend it before or after you read my post?

After. Your comments made it clear that at least some might have found my wording a bit ambiguous, though I didn't think so, myself.

[_Res Ipsa]

What Doc linked to:



What you find when you search for the Twitter account:



Who did Doc let punk him:



And who is Andy?

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/cu ... fa-877914/

Did you know that if you say CamNC4me fast while holding on to your tongue, it sounds just like "gullible"?

Seriously, Doc. I kid only because I love. And I owe you one for helping me discover claims by some members of the Seattle-Antifacists that they participated in the events that led to CHAZ. But, please, step up your skeptical game.

[_Gunnar]

[Quoting this:]

Good for the state correctional departments in question. How do you suggest that one should deal with US's massive for-profit incarceration industry, which depends on a huge flow of prisoners from the justice system to keep it profitable? I am sure it pays a lot of money to lobbyists to argue its case in Washington.

When a while back I pointed out that a lot of US citizens' expenditure on 'health care' is siphoned off by an essentially parasitic health insurance industry. I received an indignant reply from one poster talking about the threat to 'people's jobs' as a reason to keep one's cotton-picking hands of that sector. I suppose that the tobacco and alcohol industry lobbyists use that argument too. And no doubt the 'people's jobs' argument will fuel a lot of lobbying to retain what may be the world's least 'correctional' corrections system, however much more efficient in reducing crime other ways of doing things may be.

Am I wrong about that, do you think?

No, I certainly don't think you're wrong about that. I have little doubt that the strongest opposition to prison reform will come from the for-profit incarceration industry. Obviously they have a vested interest in keeping crime rates and recidivism rates high, and prison terms long. How could any reasonable and responsible people ever have thought that corporate owned for-profit prisons were a good idea? The same is true of the health insurance industry too, as you also pointed out. And there is certainly no justification for health essential and life saving drugs being priced 10 times or more higher in the USA than the identical drugs cost everywhere else.

by the way, Chap, this post reminded me of a sitcom series called Pushing Daisies that aired for only two seasons in the USA. I doubt that it ever aired in the UK. The protagonist Ned, was a piemaker who had a unique gift. He could bring anyone or anything that had died to life just once by touching them with his finger, but there was a deadly catch. The touch only worked once per person, and a second touch would immediately end the recently revived life forever. Furthermore, unless that second touch was applied within a minute, some random, nearby person would die in place of the recently revived. He found this out the hard way when he, while a young boy, revived his mother who had died of a stroke. The next time he touched her a short time later, she died again, and he couldn't revive her again. In the meantime, because more than a minute had passed, the father of his favorite playmate and childhood sweetheart, who lived next door, died. A private detective later accidently discovered the now adult Ned's secret and talked Ned into partnering with him to solve murders. Ned would secretly bring the murder victim to life for the permitted minute to ask who the murderer was, and then apply the second touch in time to prevent any other random, innocent, nearby person from dying.

The reason this discussion reminded me of this sitcom is that a couple of episodes involved Ned and his partner's competition with a crack Norwegian private detective team who had come to the USA, because Norway's crime rate had declined so low, that they could no longer make a profit there. The Norwegians, as you can imagine, were obsessed with trying, but in vain, to discover the secret of Ned and his partner's remarkable success rate.

Another amusing wrinkle to the story is that Ned and his childhood sweetheart reconnected as adults, when he used his unique method in an attempt to solve her own murder. He couldn't bear to lose her again, so the funeral director at the mortuary died instead. She moved in with him and became part of their crime solving scheme, but they had to establish elaborate protocols and procedures to prevent them from ever actually touching each other, as that would irretrievably mean her death. Not the least of the reasons I liked the series was that Christin Chenowith was part of the cast. She played the part of Ned's frustrated employee, who was head over heels in love with Ned, who liked her only platonically and as a trusted employee, and she could never understand why Ned and his girlfriend never, ever touched each other, despite obviously being deeply in love with each other. If this series can be obtained in UK, you might enjoy it as much as I did. I loved its quirky premise and the imaginative plot lines. The two seasons are available on DVDs as boxed sets in the USA. I imagine it should be possible to order them in the UK.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

My city has banned tear gas use and chokeholds by the SLCPD. That’s a pretty good start and a good faith effort by the city entering into talks with the community with regard to reform.

- Doc

[_Jersey Girl]

Defunding the police is a misnomer. All they have to say is reimagine community services or better yet, reconfigure community services.

And that takes care of it.

[_Jersey Girl]

My city has banned tear gas use and chokeholds by the SLCPD. That’s a pretty good start and a good faith effort by the city entering into talks with the community with regard to reform.

- Doc

Denver has already banned the choke/carotid hold. Not sure about tear gas.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Armed white people have started patrolling their neighborhoods in LA:

https://unitedwithisrael.org/armed-jewi ... s-angeles/

Yikes.

- Doc

[_honorentheos]

There's a culture on the left and a belief among many poor and minorities that it doesn't matter who is on charge. Voting is a waste of time. Chappelle used to make that a punch line all the time.

I wouldn't underestimate the potential concern if the.mesaage becomes "us against the system" rather than believing there is opportunity to change the system through participation. I wouldn't assume that a message that draws a hard provocative line that isn't acceptable to a lot of people avoids becomes one more way for the left to self destruct because Trump is so bad.

I think the left stumbles for two main reasons. The first is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The second is the timidity of centrists. You want more people to vote and reform within the system? Given them a goddam reason to support the system. The left-center is so scared that Trump will win it is afraid to breathe. It wrings its hands over every action, every slogan, every ad, every speech, every comma in every sentence of every bill. It gets so wrapped up in arguing over the right words to use in a slogan that it forgets to do anything.

Learn from Trump. Not his lying or his white nationalism. Learn from his boldness. "Build a wall and make Mexico pay for it." Did proposing bold action cost him the election? Hell no. It won him the election. So why is the center-left so damn timid on race? If you had to pick the single biggest impact that the democratic party had on black folks in the last 30 years, what would you pick? I'd maybe pick throwing so many of their assess in prison for minor drug crimes. The democratic party has treated racial minorities like the republican party treated evangelicals for many years: make them enough promises to get them on board and then do little to nothing for them. Until the evangelicals put their foot down and made it clear their vote had to be earned. And they were rewarded with a lock on the judiciary that will outlive me.

Every bold initiative from black folks is greeted like this:



You don't want Trump to be re-elected? Give disaffected voters something to vote for. Don't be the guys in the meme.

I've thought about this over the course of the day since reading it. On the whole I agree, what we are seeing is largely the result of too many years of politicians and authority assuming that pandering to minorities to win their vote is all that is needed. This, combined with putting politics over real justice and values that realize the ideal of equal freedoms and rights has led both Democrats and Republicans to conspire in maintaining a certain status quo of treatment that hasn't really materialized into the promise of a better way. That includes examples like Biden/Clinton in the 90s and early 2000s supporting tough on crime legislation that resulted in disproportionate numbers of minorities losing their futures through prison sentences their white peers more easily avoided or Obama failing Hispanic supporters completely in his first term, only awakening to a better approach when it became clear he needed them to get reelected in 2012. Those are all fair points.

So it left me thinking about the claim this is the fault of centrists who are more concerned with politics and winning elections than effecting change. I don't know. Being a centrist is a political position on a spectrum of beliefs regarding how government should work, what values society should prioritize, and as such described someone who is less likely to identify fully with one or the other party's approaches - or claimed approaches. To my mind, being a centrist covers a lot of possibilities when it comes to combining socio-cultural values. Frankly, I disagree with that statement in your comment because it compresses everyone right of a particular position into a hand wringing political knob who lacks genuine concern for issues of substance. That's a bad comment.

And to be frank, it reflects the first point you made as I read it. That being, the issue with the left is most left-wing political positions are rooted in ideological or idealized views of a potential future that has never existed. On the one hands, it's a beautiful thing to imagine a better tomorrow than has ever existed before. But it also means there is ONLY the perfect, with almost no room for Good to be lost in the pursuit of the perfect ideal of whomever is doing the imagining. Every so often there's a leader who comes along, like MLK, whose vision is compelling but who also understands how to make progress towards it over time. I understand his longer term vision was very far reaching, taking on poverty and other issues that contributed to racial injustices. But they are rare. So it usually all collapses into chaos because no two people can agree on anything except when it comes to agreeing someone else is wrong. Like defining centrist views as antagonistic to ones ideal view because...well, because they aren't the same exactly so they aren't even good let alone perfect.

Some progress has to be good enough to allow a next step, and another step, and another step to be taken. And it seems to me far too many expect things to happen immediately and if they don't it's failure. That's kinda saying the same thing about letting the perfect get in the way of the good...but there's something lost in not acknowledging why it happens. Or how the comment reflects it.