Thought for the Day

[fred41]

...But I still I want to live in a society where there are laws, there are people to enforce them, and those who are found guilty in a court of law are made to be punished for their crimes.

Yeah, public safety is a fundamental tenet of civilized society. Without it, it’s very difficult to accomplish...anything. It’s probably up there on what people think tax dollars should provide. So I just want to hear what other folks think would be a better alternative.

[broncofan]

I've seen these views on twitter and I don't understand it. I don't want to live in a society without police or where it's okay to vandalize random businesses because police officers engage in misconduct, including murder. There needs to be serious reform in some of these police departments and frankly I've never understood how obvious abuses of power even short of assault are tolerated. As soon as police officers start ordering people around in ways that have nothing to do with their job and everything to do with their ego you know you have a problem.

I also really don't understand a culture where you're given a set of laws to enforce, but then feel more loyalty towards those you serve with than the laws they've broken. I understand police have tough jobs and camaraderie is important but loyalty to individuals must always be trumped by loyalty to principles or you don't have a functioning institution.

Abusive behavior towards minorities and assault needs to be prosecuted and police cannot be allowed to act with impunity. But yes, I do feel very alienated by some extreme factions on the left who cannot think in terms of reform and propose options that are maybe well-meaning but every bit as extreme as what we see from the white house.

[broncofan]

And just in case anyone thinks my first argument is a strawman it really isn't. I've seen people called white supremacists because they didn't want to see buildings destroyed. Perhaps some of these people weren't outraged by George Floyd's murder enough (I definitely was disturbed and saddened by it) but it's obviously possible to be outraged by murder and think vandalizing stuff calls for a response.

Edit: I'm not mentioning Trump's role in stoking violence and dispersing peaceful protesters but there's a lot to be said about that too. The videos of police officers abusing people is so senseless and such an obvious power trip in most cases. All of it cries out for reform.

[Stavros]

Defund the police...hmm... can anyone on this site that agrees with that sentiment, please explain how it would work in the real world, and what would effectively take its place.

As you probably know by now, it goes beyond de-funding, as Minneapolis City Council member Lisa Bender has argued:

Yes. We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety.
https://twitter.com/lisabendermpls/status/1268644819628224513
https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/06/04/minneapolis-city-council-to-hold-emergency-meeting-on-police-departments-future/

And this from the Telegraph, for once not hidden behind a paywall:
"Pledge to 'dismantle' Minneapolis police force

The president of the Minneapolis City Council has pledged to "dismantle" the city's police force and "replace it with a transformative new model of public safety" in the wake of George Floyd's death.
During a meeting on Thursday night, Lisa Bender said she would support shifting from a traditional police force into a broader public safety department. Under such a system, some of the incidents the police currently respond to would be handled instead by staff such as social workers or medics.
Ms Bender stressed that she was voicing her own views, rather than the council as a whole, but said the idea was likely to be given more consideration later this year.

“To do this kind of big work, we need a deeper, broader conversation than we’ve ever had before,” Ms Bender said. “We need white people like me and my neighbours to show up in a different way.”

The idea has already been touted by grassroots social justice organisations in the area, such as Black Visions Collective and United Against Police Brutality.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/04/george-floyd-death-protests-black-lives-matter-us-uk/


This seems to me to be loaded with questions and problems, and is something I would expect from Libertarians explaining how public order would be maintained in the absence of government, assuming that in a country with zero to minimal government, pubic safety would be locally organized. The most obvious problem is that in the absence of a formal police force, a 'Neighbourhood Watch' would emerge -after all, some of them (in the UK for example) emerged because local people felt neglected by the police. In the US with so many guns and automatic weapons, Neighborhood Watch only works when the people involved are responsible, but you only need one George Zimmerman to decide who is in control in a given situation, to undermine the argument.

The broader argument is also flawed, because the nature of a Liberal Democracy is one in which the State has a legitimate monopoly of the use of force, and setting aside how and when it uses it, this right takes away the right of indivduals to bear arms, because they are protected by that police service- indeed, the right to bear arms and use them is one that indivduals surrender to the State in order to receive its protection.

The last point is this: there were riots and looting in Boston, but the City has acquired a reputation for Community Policing that has seen a decline in crme, and one assumes, a better relationship between police and their community- so I am not sure if the riots and looting undermine this trend, or have been a one-off. But it does show that a different style of policing, and a closer working relationship with local people does mean change can happen without dismanting the force. In many urban areas of the UK we suffer from the opposit of community policing, namely confrontational policing and numerically Black Britons are more likely to be in confrontation with the police than any other group. I think we need a Boston model here.
This is I think a fair review of the model in Boston-
https://pioneerinstitute.org/better_government/community-policing-success-story/

[Stavros]

After writing the above post I read this article in The Guardian which argues that Minneapolis has tried to introduce a form of Community Policing but that reformers in the department have been opposed by the head of the Police Union, Bob Kroll, who loves his President, has described George Floyd as a 'violent criminal' and Black Lives Matter as 'terrorists'. I assume a lot of the artice is based on facts, though it does not tell us what the average police officer in the city thinks. There is an intriguing remark at the end on the impact 9/11 had on Police funding and the purchase of army weapons, though this does not seem relevant to George Floyd's death. Article is here-
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/05/minneapolis-police-union-bob-kroll-us

[blackchubby38]

And just in case anyone thinks my first argument is a strawman it really isn't. I've seen people called white supremacists because they didn't want to see buildings destroyed. Perhaps some of these people weren't outraged by George Floyd's murder enough (I definitely was disturbed and saddened by it) but it's obviously possible to be outraged by murder and think vandalizing stuff calls for a response.

Edit: I'm not mentioning Trump's role in stoking violence and dispersing peaceful protesters but there's a lot to be said about that too. The videos of police officers abusing people is so senseless and such an obvious power trip in most cases. All of it cries out for reform.

Its because if you don't toe the party line and say exactly what they want you say, you're part of the problem and not part of the solution. But human beings can walk and chew gum at the same time.

You can be angry about what happened to George Floyd and want to fight police brutality. But at the same time, you can say that looting and rioting is wrong. Especially when they're leading to attacks on the public, like the couple who owned the pharmacy in Rochester, NY. Or on attacks on the police which have led to deaths of a federal officer in Oakland and a retired chief police in St. Louis by name of David Dorn. Both of whom were black by the way.

Rioting and looting is also wrong when its leading to the destruction of small businesses. Some of which are owned by minorities. I live in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood and there was looting and destruction happening on Monday night. When I saw the results of it the next day on the news, I was disgusted. Now I'm walking around seeing windows being boarded up for fear of happening again.

Finally, I want really know what society the people who are saying the police should be defunded and/or abolished want to live in.

[Stavros]

I don't think there is anything wrong with having a debate on policing, but rather than de-funding what exists on the assumption something better can and will take its place, surely the challenge is to confront those aspects of policing that exist in the here and now that cause most concern, especially when as a consequence, people die.

The most obvious is the immediate ban on chokeholds as a form of restraint, whether it is the arm around the neck, or a knee pressed against it. It is the kind of reform that does not prevent the police from restraining a suspect, but does take away a tactic that can have devastating results. From what little I have seen I don't understand why it is used anyway, though it is said Minneapolis Police are trained to do it, and have used it over 40 times.

The fundamental problems, because they are structural, relate to crime in general, and related issues such as poverty, bad education, the lack of jobs, racial prejudice and so on. These cannot be tackled by defunding, the best that can be achieved through Community Policing or a new form of policing, is a reduction in petty crime, safer streets and a better relationship between the citizen and law enforcement.

But it can't tackle- and put an end to poverty; it cannot change inequalities of income and opportunity; and it won't stop Americans or anyone else from consuming illegal drugs needing by definition, criminals to supply them, in some cases supported by 'corrupt cops'.

The rules of engagement can change, but does it mean replacing every existing policeman with someone else? At a practical level it is a bright idea with diimly lit details. And it avoids the challenges in front of us be it the US or the UK -the fact that inequaities of income have increased in the last 40 years, not decreased. That in 2020 in the richest 5 countries in the world, people are living on the street without a home, while too many people who have one cannot feed its families properly, and many have jobs that pay, but don't pay enough.

The most stunning possibility in the US is that there are more people with access to guns rather than to health care. And it is the resentment that inequality can breed that is dangerous, that when it cannot be controlled or diminished leads to looting and violence.

I don't think a more equal society will eliminate crime, but the time has come for the US to focus more on the re-distribution of wealth given that its concentration into 1% of the population has not improved the country. But as long as it is called 'socialism' rather than being presented as, say, 'health care for all', too many Americans will run away from it, and its powerful opponents will demonize it as 'radical left' without ever asking how it works in Sweden or Norway or Germany or the UK. And it leads to the absurd, indeed, immoral situation where the US will spend $30 trillion supporting idle business and the unemployed, but not commit $10 trilion to education, health care, and housing.

It leads me to think that the actual impact of Covid 19 will not be positive, that inequalities may actually get worse, and I see that happening in the UK as well as the US, because on top of Covid 19 we have Brexit to deal with, and a capitalist economy that needs fewer and fewer people to make its goods, while needing everyone to buy.

[holzz]

"oh why are British/French/German/Canadian people marching about George Floyd??"

becuase, motherfuckers, they can and do experience similar stuff.
because people marched about the iraq invasion - did this people live in Iraq or were even Arab??
because people can have empathy.
and because there are cases in many countries of police brutality/racism.

some people need to grow a fucking brain.
the same people who "racism doesn't exist" or "racism is non-existent".
Fuck that - they don't deserve a brain if they're that retarded.

[holzz]

and i said the r-word. ok, i'm sorry for that.
but then people who genuinely think there is no racism in Western society - check yourself.

[blackchubby38]

I saw this on Twitter and I don't even know what to say:

ACLU of Minnesota
@ACLUMN
BREAKING: Minneapolis City Council members have announced their intent to disband the Minneapolis Police Department and invest in community-led public safety.

[Stavros]

I saw this on Twitter and I don't even know what to say:

ACLU of Minnesota
@ACLUMN
BREAKING: Minneapolis City Council members have announced their intent to disband the Minneapolis Police Department and invest in community-led public safety.

I am not opposed to a review of policing, but would it not make sense to offer a debate on what the alternative is with details on financing, personnel, training, intentions and outcomes, before the decision is made to change the existing system?

The danger is that this kind of policy shift will be used by the President to warn against 'radical, ultra leftist' Democrats proposing dramatic changes to law enforcement with the results that 'the cure is worse than the disease'. That this is now the 'law and order President' ought to be the stick to beat him with, as a President who pardons criminals and his friends and backers, and then suggests the law be used to investigate why they were prosecuted in the first place! I can't recall any President other maybe than Nixon who so personalzed the US Justice System as if it was there to serve his personal interests. But I am sure his supporters on Fox News willl ignore the double standard and promote only one view of this crisis, yet another in the 'permanent crisis' that is the 45th Presidency.

Putin is convulsed in laughter. His apprentice just keeps on giving.

There was a short but fascinating programme BBC Radio 4 on Sunday night which asked why so many Black men are killed by law enforcement, and among a few answers, the miitary style training of police officers was cited as one which either creates or deepens a bias against Black people in general and Black men in particular, seeing every situation on the street in terms of confrontation rather than 'conflict resolution'. It is only half an hour, and I am not sure if it is available in the US, but the link is here-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b060zg8g

[broncofan]

I am not opposed to a review of policing, but would it not make sense to offer a debate on what the alternative is with details on financing, personnel, training, intentions and outcomes, before the decision is made to change the existing system?

The danger is that this kind of policy shift will be used by the President to warn against 'radical, ultra leftist' Democrats proposing dramatic changes to law enforcement with the results that 'the cure is worse than the disease'.
You're right that it's a gift to the President whose horrendous behavior was starting to really erode his support. He is hypocritical about law and order but like authoritarian figures wants to use the law as a tool when it suits him.

You're also right that we haven't gotten a lot of details but it can't be good. Because if it's not as radical and anarchic as it seems then why should it be billed that way? It will only convince some people who were walking away from Trump because he was tearing away at the fabric of society that the Democrats might do the same by taking such an extreme action.

The thing about this option is that it's the least creative solution to the problem. Instead of dealing with the misconduct and trying to increase both prevention and accountability, you go to the nuclear option that will erode trust in elected leaders even more. It's shouldn't fairly be attributed to the Democratic leadership at the national level imo but we know Republicans often don't play nice and voters aren't always perfectly informed. It's a really bad call.

[broncofan]

I'm not sure if anyone is interested in sharing but I'm just curious if anyone wants to say a few words about what precautions they're taking. We're at the point in the U.S. where we have fewer cases but there's still a risk in social interaction and things are opening up again. As I've said, there really aren't any new therapeutics if one gets sick but I can tell people are less afraid, or maybe everyone is getting a better sense of what is risky versus what is relatively low risk.

I work in an office and it is completely flexible when I have to come in as most of my work can be done remotely and my employer has no problem with that. I work with three other people in about 1200 square feet so there is plenty of space to distance. I've been going in now a couple of times a week and the people I work with have chosen to do the same. I still order groceries delivery because I figure why not if I can, and I haven't socialized at all... in person.

Also, when I order packages from amazon I let them sit for two days, then open them and wash my hands. Nothing too tough for me. Anyone been taking a few more risks than that? Obviously it depends on where you live how risky a particular behavior is.

[broncofan]

I intended to put my last post in the covid-19 thread. Ignore it and I'll repost it there.

[Stavros]

At a time when the US is being shaken by the death of another Black Man in the custody of Law Enforcement Officers, I note that the President intends to hold a public rally in Tusla, Oklahoma -the same city that witnessed according to Wikpedia -
" "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States).". The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft, destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district—at that time the wealthiest black community in the United States, known as "Black Wall Street".
More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and as many as 6,000 black residents were interned at large facilities, many for several days"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

I believe the choice of Tulsa at this time is entirely, absolutely, completely, utterly and indeed unalterably coincidental, and as anyway I doubt the President had ever heard of the 'Greenwood Massacre' before, confirmation from Mr Miller or Mr Cotton will I am sure confirm the coincidence.

[blackchubby38]

At a time when the US is being shaken by the death of another Black Man in the custody of Law Enforcement Officers, I note that the President intends to hold a public rally in Tusla, Oklahoma -the same city that witnessed according to Wikpedia -
" "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States).". The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft, destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district—at that time the wealthiest black community in the United States, known as "Black Wall Street".
More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and as many as 6,000 black residents were interned at large facilities, many for several days"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

I believe the choice of Tulsa at this time is entirely, absolutely, completely, utterly and indeed unalterably coincidental, and as anyway I doubt the President had ever heard of the 'Greenwood Massacre' before, confirmation from Mr Miller or Mr Cotton will I am sure confirm the coincidence.

I first learned of the Tulsa race massacre three years ago when I was watching a Smithsonian Channel series entitled America In Color. I think a majority of people on social media first learned about it when it was depicted last year on HBO's Watchmen. So I want to give him the benefit of doubt that the choice of Tulsa is a purely coincidental.

[Stavros]

In the case of the President, ignorance is the most obvious explanation. In the case of Stephen Miller, I doubt it, hence the provocation, the intention to provoke, above all, to insult. Has there ever been a Presidency so mired in insult and abuse? Why is there such a desperate need to humiiate? When he ridiculed Hilary Clinton as a 'skank' I expected public outrage, a 'national debate' on the public insult and abuse of women, or is it the case that Americans are now so used to this constant barrage of insult and abuse that it just gets dismissed 'oh, that's just Donald' -?
And let's admit it, when it comes to insulting Americans, be they white or black, male or female, 'you ain't seen nothin' yet'.

[Stavros]

My thought for today is about Monuments and Robert Lowell. I have been reading Lowell since 1970 or thereabouts, not long after he moved to the UK and read one of his poems on a BBC TV arts programme. Although I then bought Faber's Selected Poems, on my first trip to the US in 1971, I was in the book section of a large department store in Chicago whose name I forget, and bought Lord Weary's Castle and The Mills of the Kavanaughs, so I coud read him in the US where he was born, into that New England elite whose names (Lowell, Winslow, Stark) are carved on a monument to the Mayflower in Southampton in the UK.
I saw him give a recital at the Poetry International in the Queen Ellzabeth Hall in 1972 on the night Josip Brodsky gave his first recital on defecting from the USSR, it was all quite emotional in the way poetry sometimes can be. Lowell, tall, angular and nervous offered a needless explanation to Water, arms thrown out 'It was a Maine Lobster town..." but I can't recall what else he recited, but may have the programme in a box somewhere.

I offer this because For the Union Dead is one of his finest poems, and concerns, in part, the Bronze Relief in Boston of the 45th Regiment the back of which was partly vandalized last week, though the whole thing is now under restoration.

"The first documented African American regiment formed in the north was the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry, instituted under Governor John Andrew in 1863. African American men came to enlist from every region of the north, and from as far away as the Caribbean. Robert Gould Shaw was the man Andrew chose to lead this regiment.
The Massachusetts 54th Regiment became famous and solidified their place in history following the attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina on July 18, 1863. At least 74 enlisted men and 3 officers were killed in that battle, and scores more were wounded. Colonel Shaw was one of those killed. Sergeant William H. Carney, who was severely injured in the battle, saved the regiment’s flag from being captured. He was the first African American to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The 54th Regiment also fought in an engagement on James Island, the Battle of Olustee, and at Honey Hill, South Carolina before their return to Boston in September 1865. Only 598 of the original 1,007 men who enlisted were there to take part in the final ceremonies on the Boston Common. In the last two years of the war, it is estimated that over 180,000 African Americans served in the Union forces and were instrumental to the Union’s victory."
https://www.nps.gov/boaf/learn/historyculture/shaw.htm

I don't know if this poem is a monument in itself, but does it still speak to an American public in these febrile times? And if so, what does it say?

For the Union Dead

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

[fred41]

Finally some good news in the USA, during these turbulent times, by a common sense (at least to me) decision by the Supreme Court to protect LGBTQ employees. In a 6-3 decision, with the majority opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch :

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/15/863498848/supreme-court-delivers-major-victory-to-lgbtq-employees (https://www.npr.org/2020/06/15/863498848/supreme-court-delivers-major-victory-to-lgbtq-employees)

[broncofan]

That is excellent news. For years it wasn't clear whether Title VII's ban on sex discrimination covered discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Your article provides Gorsuch's reasoning with respect to sexual orientation which is that a man who is attracted to men is being treated differently than a woman attracted to men.

Would his technical reasoning be that it's okay to not hire anyone attracted to men as long as both females and males are excluded? I'm not trying to be nitpicky but you can see that insisting on this disparate treatment paradigm is a little mechanical.

Either way, better the court has decided Title VII covers discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity because Congress was not moving. Some states have protections for lgbt employees but the article says about half do not and I think civil rights coverage can go a long way to eroding prejudices.

[fred41]

Would his technical reasoning be that it's okay to not hire anyone attracted to men as long as both females and males are excluded? I'm not trying to be nitpicky but you can see that insisting on this disparate treatment paradigm is a little mechanical.

I’m a little lost here. It could be that we are interpreting his statements differently.I simply see using the female as explanatory reasoning. Theoretically you can still fire any sexual orientation as long as you can prove that it was for reasons other than sex. That’s why laws like this generally work better in a larger environment (such as a corporation) where, at the very least, it’s easier to prove a pattern...I believe.

[Stavros]

One step forward, two steps back?

How it is getting harder to vote if you are a Transgendered American, and William Consovoy, the 'rising star' who seems to be on a mission to remove voting rights, or is it 'cleanse the registers'??

Thus:
"For non-binary people, as well as the transgender community as a whole, barriers to getting an appropriate ID leave hundreds of thousands people vulnerable to disenfranchisement.
In a February 2020 report (https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Voter-ID-Feb-2020.pdf), the UCLA School of Law Williams Institute estimated that 965,350 transgender people will be eligible to vote in November’s presidential election. But of the 45 states that conduct elections in person, 42% of transgender people don’t have the correct identification. These numbers don’t account for the estimated 25% to 35% of transgender people who identify as non-binary (https://www.apadivisions.org/division-44/resources/advocacy/non-binary-facts.pdf), or those who are non-binary but not transgender – which a 2014 study (https://practicalandrogyny.com/2014/12/16/how-many-people-in-the-uk-are-nonbinary/) in the UK estimated as about 0.4% of the population.
The 2015 US Trans Survey (https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Executive-Summary-Dec17.pdf) also found that a third of the people who showed ID which didn’t match their gender presentation faced negative results such as harassment or even assault – something that can discourage transgender and non-binary people from casting a ballot."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/16/trans-people-voting-november-election

And
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/us/elections/voting-william-consovoy-trump.html

https://naacp.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/WeaponizingTheBench.pdf

[broncofan]

I’m a little lost here. It could be that we are interpreting his statements differently.I simply see using the female as explanatory reasoning. Theoretically you can still fire any sexual orientation as long as you can prove that it was for reasons other than sex. That’s why laws like this generally work better in a larger environment (such as a corporation) where, at the very least, it’s easier to prove a pattern...I believe.
For years judges maintained that Title VII protected against biological sex discrimination but not against sexual orientation discrimination per se. Some cases would argue that sexual orientation discrimination could be sex discrimination if gay men were discriminated against but not gay women. I'm posting the reasoning quoted in the article which seems textbook for what Judges use to establish disparate treatment between the discriminated against group and the comparator group.


"It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating ... based on sex," the justice wrote. He gave the example of two employees attracted to men — one male, the other female. "If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact that he is attracted to men," but not the woman who is attracted to men, that is clearly a firing based on sex, he said.

This looks to me like he's saying that if you fire a man who is attracted to men but don't fire women who are attracted to men you are discriminating against men because the exact same attraction is not punished for women. That sounds like disparate treatment language to me rather than just saying that gender identity and sexual orientation are intimately related to "sex" as it's used in the statute. I would prefer this last interpretation, which would basically say that enforcing sex-based norms, about gender expression or who one is attracted to, is illegal.

The reason I interpreted it this way is because all of the old cases on the subject interpret sex to mean biological sex and then try to find ways that gender identity discrimination or sexual orientation discrimination could have disparate effects on men and women. He kind of seems to be doing that but then says that discriminating on these grounds is ALWAYS discrimination without considering all permutations. BTW, I'm not suggesting that he should, just that the disparate treatment paradigm between male and female is not that helpful in the case of sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination.

[broncofan]

I’m a little lost here. It could be that we are interpreting his statements differently.I simply see using the female as explanatory reasoning. Theoretically you can still fire any sexual orientation as long as you can prove that it was for reasons other than sex. That’s why laws like this generally work better in a larger environment (such as a corporation) where, at the very least, it’s easier to prove a pattern...I believe.
The reason he uses this example though is to show that discriminating based on sexual orientation ends up treating the two sexes differently. The example is intended to show that if you discriminate against gay men you are treating them differently than straight women. It is explanatory reasoning but it's intended to stick to the use of sex in the statute as biological sex and in my view kind of misses the point of why homophobia is wrong. It's not wrong because it might treat biological males differently than biological females. It's wrong because it attempts to fix who members of a particular sex are attracted to and thereby enforces norms that are irrelevant to a person's job performance.

Anyhow, I'll look at the case but I have a feeling he starts by citing McDonnell Douglas or some similar case to create a "disparate treatment" paradigm which he then sets out to prove.

[sukumvit boy]

US /Russian relations take a nose dive with the conviction ,in Moscow, of Paul Whelan on spy charges.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/world/europe/paul-whelan-russia-spy-guilty.html

[Stavros]

John Bolton's book will no doubt be an entertaining read, though many people feel cynical about him preferring to publish a book rather than appear at the Impeachment hearings in the US Congress. On the other hand, explosive though his testimony would have been, the Senate made it known in advance that whatever the House concluded, they were not interested, and no amount of facts were going to change their mind, just as this book will not enable Senator Lindsay to revert to the position he held in 2016 and withdraw his support from this President.

Two thoughts: the first, is that what Bolton's career and his book expose is the internal contradiction in the Repubican Party, which cannot decide if it is a Consertive Party when its Conservatism is now so poorly defined, or in the terms of the Constitution, decide if it is a Liberal or a Libertarian party. That the President is not a Republican but now defines the party in terms of his personal interests and a random set of policy preferences, is based on the view that this doesn't matter: Mitchell McConnell takes the view that as long as they get their tax cuts, and Federalist Society alumni into the Circuit and other Courts, the President can do and say whatever he likes, he is just a rubber stamp for their long term objectives.

The second is about ignorance- Finland actually was part of Russia owing to the Russian Empire's annexation of the territory in 1809 when Russia was at war with Sweden, but the point is that I would not be surprised if many/most (?) Americans have never heard of Finland.
But ignorance is not uniquely American, and the British are just as good at it, indeed, here, ignorance starts at the top, with Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford) justifying the merger of the Department for International Development with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, saying it would put an end to the 'giant Cashpoint in the sky'. The Foreign Aid budget has been a source of intense criticism, mostly from those who actually don't know what the aid is spent on, but defiinitely know the word 'Foreign' makes it suspicious.

Thus we are not told what the buget is most often spent on, UN Agency commitments by WHO, UNICEF and UNESCO, or that the aid projects approved by the DfID are not payments from one government to another- no, these become a waste of tax-payers money that benefit rural lesbians in Uganda or farmers in search of water in India which spends billions on a space programme. Then there are the Africa dictators helping themselves to this Giant Cash machine courtesy of the British tax-payer as implied in this letter to today's Telegraph-

"Boris must get rid of the 0.7% minimum spend, stop funding African dictators' Swiss bank accounts and extortionate salaries for CEOs of large charities and direct any aid via our embassies to small charities working on the ground with all contracts to go to British companies or local contractors, not our foreign competitors. "

-the fact is, that the money spent on foreign aid projects is of no interest to 'Africa dictators', most of whom have made their money from a 5% (or more) rake off every commercial contract in the country, or from 'signature bonuses' in petroleum contracts, where these have made some people seriosuly rich in Angola and Gabon, to take two examples; and in most cases, the Foreign Aid budget does go to local charities, which is the purpose of Foreign Aid, even if some of these are not as effective as their might be. Why siphon off $100,00 when you can get your hands on $150 million?
And note that 'African dictators' is the Talisman of corruption, as if there were no corrupt dictators in the Middle East or Central and Southern America.

So ignorance can be found at the top, as well as lower down in society, though one does not in normal times expect to find it in the White House and Downing St, though Boris Johnson has a habit of saying things he knows to be untrue, to say what he thinks the voters want to hear. The end result is that people become tired of it all, and switch off. I don't know if this means the 2020 election will return the incumbent, and if Boris Johnson's poll ratings are poor because of his sloppy management of the Covid-19 crisis he appears to be secure in his job for a few years more, though a lot depends on Brexit, and a week is a long time in politics.

And as in law so in politics -ignorance is no excuse, though it seems a lot of people prefer it to to the moral responsibilty that is conferred by knowledge. Is this not one of the reasons why structural, long-term change seems to be so hard to achieve -or are we in a moment when 'the people' are demanding fundamental change -and who is going to deliver it?

[Stavros]

And now let me confess to my own ignorance -our Foreign Secretary has had to apologize for saying 'taking the knee' is demeaning and not acceptable to him. I admit I was not sure why 'taking the kneel' has become an act -of solidarity, of defiance- until I googled it to discover it is a tactic in American Football, defined by Wikipedia as

"In American football (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_football), a quarterback kneel, also called taking a knee, genuflect offense,[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarterback_kneel#cite_note-2012bn-1) kneel-down offense,[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarterback_kneel#cite_note-2012bn-1) or victory formation occurs when the quarterback (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarterback) immediately kneels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneels) to the ground, ending the play on contact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_football_rules#Downed_player), after receiving the snap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(football)). It is primarily used to run the clock down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_out_the_clock), either at the end of the first half or the game itself, to preserve a lead. Although it generally results in a loss of a yard and uses up a down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_(gridiron_football)), it minimizes the risk of a fumble (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumble), which would give the other team a chance at recovering the ball. "
-But is this the key part?

"The play is meant to keep the defense from seriously challenging for possession of the ball."

As in: who owns the National Anthem? I know next to nothing about American Football, rarely watch the highlights which are shown late at night on BBC TV so I don't really understand the Football context. But it does, I think, explain the way in which Colin Kaepernick used it, but do many people undersand its origins?

[filghy2]

And now let me confess to my own ignorance -our Foreign Secretary has had to apologize for saying 'taking the knee' is demeaning and not acceptable to him.

Why did he regard that form of 'taking the knee' as demeaning but not this for example?

1256812

[Stavros]

Because it is the Queen -he said he would only kneel for the Queen, and his wife, as he did when he asked her to marry him.

[trish]

I'm told that a true patriot would stand erect for the National Anthem. I for one, never found any flag to be all that arousing. Personally, I think standing erect for the flag is a disgusting fetish.

[fred41]

I'm told that a true patriot would stand erect for the National Anthem. I for one, never found any flag to be all that arousing. Personally, I think standing erect for the flag is a disgusting fetish.

I disagree

[broncofan]

I was hoping you two could at least lay out some arguments rather than us watching two extremists state their opinions.

I'm a moderate so I stand half staff for our flag;). And yes that's the best joke I could come up with.

And I don't own a confederate flag but if they come in two ply, I can celebrate my heritage during every trip to the toilet.

[broncofan]

Which reminds me that I do think every statue of a Confederate general is an insult to African-Americans. It's an insult to the idea of patriotism as well since they were traitors. In my view every city should do what they can to make sure we're not memorializing them in our public squares. People make all sorts of disingenuous arguments about what these things mean to them when really it's a big fuck you to a lot of people.

For my part, I don't think every statue of a problematic or racist person should come down but every country that has committed atrocities against people should do what they can to memorialize the victims and not the perpetrators. We have to have some sense of responsibility for our history and send a clear message of repudiation for our villains.

Also, the idea of venerating our flag while violating our Constitution is tiresome. A flag is a symbol and when I've handled a flag I've tried to handle it with respect. But one cannot make demands about the flag once they've fired every person in a position to investigate them and directly ordered police to move on peaceful people. I'm not making demands or anything and there are some nice Republicans but I think the Republican party should probably shut the fuck up about the flag for a century after this administration.

[Stavros]

"President Donald Trump denounced the Supreme Court on Thursday for upholding a program allowing young, undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States, accusing the court of "shotgun blasts" in the face of conservatives."Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?" Trump tweeted after the immigration ruling that came three days after the court ruled against the administration in a LGBTQ rights case."
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/18/donald-trump-blasts-supreme-court-over-daca-decision/3213679001/

Not everything that happens in the USA is about you, 'Mr President'. There is a word for leaders who say 'L'état c'est moi'.

[trish]

I was hoping you two could at least lay out some arguments rather than us watching two extremists state their opinions.

I'm a moderate so I stand half staff for our flag;). And yes that's the best joke I could come up with.

And I don't own a confederate flag but if they come in two ply, I can celebrate my heritage during every trip to the toilet.

My prior post was more joke than opinion. Still, now that I’m thinking about them...really really hard...flags that is...I’m not getting at all erect. Sorry.

I can understand that flags are sometimes convenient for identifying the loyalties of ships at sea, or letting a distant observer know who just took the hill. But I gotta say, it seems to have really developed into a sick and divisive fetish. I love my country, but I’m not so hung up on the flag (nor the National Anthem for that matter). I think is might be nice to mix it up a bit. Adopt new anthems and new flags every so often, just to keep it fresh...you know, like we do with coins.

As for confederate statues: they should all come down. They were traitors and most of them were ‘erected’ during the Jim Crow era. We not destroying history, we’re correcting the prior miss-telling of it.

As for statues of racists: Let ‘em stand. I’m afraid if we took ‘em down we wouldn’t have any statues left. Racists, non-racists: I’m sure there’s “very fine people on both sides.”

Is there a difference between symbols and signs? I don’t know. But it seems to me there might be. The American flag has come to symbolize the country, it’s aspirations, it’s culture, it’s people, it’s laws, the etc. etc. etc. I don’t think I like symbols. They’re too big and too undefined and ultimately, it seems, too divisive. The symbol becomes more important than the actual ideals. We fetishize it. I like signs. It’s nice to know that ship sailing over there isn’t a threat (if you can trust the flag they’re flying isn’t false). We can't live without signs. I'm not sure we can live with symbols.

[Stavros]

In 1968 the residents of El Palo Alto campaigned to have their city renamed Nairobi -I wonder if the US should engage in a 'Great Renaming' to propel its citizens into a fresh, vigorous and optimistic future? Take Georgia, for example, named after His Imperial Majesty, King George II -why not change its name, to, oh, I don't know -Wakanda?

[fred41]

My prior post was more joke than opinion. Still, now that I’m thinking about them...really really hard...flags that is...I’m not getting at all erect. Sorry.

I can understand that flags are sometimes convenient for identifying the loyalties of ships at sea, or letting a distant observer know who just took the hill. But I gotta say, it seems to have really developed into a sick and divisive fetish. I love my country, but I’m not so hung up on the flag (nor the National Anthem for that matter). I think is might be nice to mix it up a bit. Adopt new anthems and new flags every so often, just to keep it fresh...you know, like we do with coins.

As for confederate statues: they should all come down. They were traitors and most of them were ‘erected’ during the Jim Crow era. We not destroying history, we’re correcting the prior miss-telling of it.

As for statues of racists: Let ‘em stand. I’m afraid if we took ‘em down we wouldn’t have any statues left. Racists, non-racists: I’m sure there’s “very fine people on both sides.”

Is there a difference between symbols and signs? I don’t know. But it seems to me there might be. The American flag has come to symbolize the country, it’s aspirations, it’s culture, it’s people, it’s laws, the etc. etc. etc. I don’t think I like symbols. They’re too big and too undefined and ultimately, it seems, too divisive. The symbol becomes more important than the actual ideals. We fetishize it. I like signs. It’s nice to know that ship sailing over there isn’t a threat (if you can trust the flag they’re flying isn’t false). We can't live without signs. I'm not sure we can live with symbols.

I agree.



lol. Actually, I didn’t flesh out my previous post because I didn’t believe it was a disgusting fetish (and I was too crushingly hungover to type more than that), not because of an overwhelming feeling of patriotism. I simply don’t have a problem of standing for the flag. I believe, for most people it’s probably just a perfunctory ritual learned from early on at ball games and assembly in school (do they still have that?). I don’t see it as an evil, until of course - it becomes weaponized, as things far too often are (My patriotism beats your patriotism...that sort of thing. Kinda like religion). It’s funny though, I suppose if you’re born here, it probably gets taken for granted, simply because then, it wasn’t really a choice. But when people often choose to come to this country and go through the citizenship practice...quite often they become proud (of the flag, the country and themselves). I guess it will always mean different things to different folks...and it’s still kind of cool to watch an athlete at the olympics well up when they show the flag and play the anthem. Sometimes I just really don’t always want to be cynical about it.

The whole Confederate thing is horseshit. Get rid of the flag and put the statues in the museum of hate already. As others have stated previously - even if it doesn’t always represent racism to people (whoever those people are) , they lost a war at an attempt to secede, for the very worst of reasons. You generally lose the right to be represented heroically in bronze ...and to keep a bull shit flag.

P.S. Love the “very fine people on both sides” ..:D

[blackchubby38]

This is a post that I made three years ago. It seems relevant given what's been going on in the world recently:

I have always had an interest in history. I constantly read and watch documentaries about it. When it comes to American history, you have to accept the good with the bad. I also believe that the great things that this country has accomplished should not be diminished by the ugliness that has been part of our history. At the same time, that bad shouldn't be rationalized or defended as "well that's the way things were done back then".

When it comes to the symbols associated with the Confederacy, I think they need to be taken into context. When the Confederate flag is being used by the Klan, White Nationalists, or Neo Nazis during a march, it becomes a symbol of hate. The flag decal on the General Lee on the Dukes of Hazard television show, was no big deal and is not a reason to have a show that ran over 30 years ago yanked from a cable network. While I wasn't personally offended by the Confederate flag being flown over the South Carolina statehouse, it was time for it to come down.

When it comes to the people that were associated with the Confederacy, I think you have to look at them with historical perspective. While obviously I'm glad that the Union won the war, I can understand why certain people fought for the other side. As a person who likes reading about military history, I can appreciate their brilliance and valor in battle. But since they did lose the war, they shouldn't have been celebrated with monuments or have parks named after them.

[KnightHawk 2.0]

"President Donald Trump denounced the Supreme Court on Thursday for upholding a program allowing young, undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States, accusing the court of "shotgun blasts" in the face of conservatives."Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?" Trump tweeted after the immigration ruling that came three days after the court ruled against the administration in a LGBTQ rights case."
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/18/donald-trump-blasts-supreme-court-over-daca-decision/3213679001/

Not everything that happens in the USA is about you, 'Mr President'. There is a word for leaders who say 'L'état c'est moi'.

Just two more examples from the Clueless Buffoon on not understanding how the government works. and is throwing another temper tantrum because he didn't get his way. and nobody likes him,expect for the enablers in congress and the senate,who've been allowing him to get away with the despicable acts he's been doing over the last 3 years. and agree everything that is happening in the United States is not about him.

[Stavros]

This is a post that I made three years ago. It seems relevant given what's been going on in the world recently:

I have always had an interest in history. I constantly read and watch documentaries about it. When it comes to American history, you have to accept the good with the bad. I also believe that the great things that this country has accomplished should not be diminished by the ugliness that has been part of our history. At the same time, that bad shouldn't be rationalized or defended as "well that's the way things were done back then".

When it comes to the symbols associated with the Confederacy, I think they need to be taken into context. When the Confederate flag is being used by the Klan, White Nationalists, or Neo Nazis during a march, it becomes a symbol of hate. The flag decal on the General Lee on the Dukes of Hazard television show, was no big deal and is not a reason to have a show that ran over 30 years ago yanked from a cable network. While I wasn't personally offended by the Confederate flag being flown over the South Carolina statehouse, it was time for it to come down.

When it comes to the people that were associated with the Confederacy, I think you have to look at them with historical perspective. While obviously I'm glad that the Union won the war, I can understand why certain people fought for the other side. As a person who likes reading about military history, I can appreciate their brilliance and valor in battle. But since they did lose the war, they shouldn't have been celebrated with monuments or have parks named after them.

I can understand the basic principle you use to condemn the sins of the past while seeking to heal its wounds, for if the parties to a conflict never find a way to accomodate each other, there is no end to the conflict, whatever forms it takes.

The problem is that the history of your country is replete with a determination by some people, whether they are in organized groups or not, to deny Black people the place they deserve in the writing of that history, and I am not sure if the South, in some respects, has ever been reconciled with its defeat, even less the right of its Black citizens to be considered their equal.

It means that Americans, or anyone without proper tuition, live in ignorance of what Black Americans have achieved, when they achieved it, and why so often an 'Age of Achievement' was replaced by an 'Age of Failure'. It would be like the 45th President not only saying, as he has, that Black people are stupid and lazy, but adding, as if it were a generous concession, 'but they are good at sports and can play music very well'. But it becomes deeply problematic when the writing of history becomes an opportunity, not to record it, but to re-write it in order to eliminate people, ideas, movements that the historian doesn't like, to justify the present and those who benefit most from it. So many statues of men appear long afte they were dead, to honour them more for their present meaing rather than their past 'achievement', given that so many were in fact, like the Confederate Generals, losers. Indeed, are these statues not intended to reverse the historical record in some way? As with Robert. Lee in Richmond, so Oliver Cromwell outside Parliament, once the most hated regicide in England, erected in 1899 to remind 'us' of the moral superiority of the British Empire, opposed to the corrupt influence of Roman Catholicism on 'Home Rule' for Ireland.

Because Race in America is a state of mind as well as a state of fact, you have to go beyond Slavery and the Civil War to ask how the country dealt with the aftermath of those two processes. I argue that you find that from an initial fear, indeed, terror, that freed slaves were going to run rampage across the South in violent revenge on their former masters -the fear that led to the first Federal laws on gun control- you find that by the end of the century, Black Americans who had passed the National Civil Service Exam had become an integral part of the US Administration mostly but not solely empoyed in Washington DC, educated, responsible and utterly committed to the Republic.
Add in the cultural explosion of the early 20th century in the music of Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver, and you can see Black Americans not only proving themselves worthy as equal citizens, but shaping the destiny of popular music that would take American music across the world. Aside from the European classical tradition imported by immigrants, American music at one time was Black music, and Black music was American music.

Yet in the first two decades of the century, Roosevelt, Taft, and crucially, Woodrow Wilson, embarked on a sustained campaign to rid the US Administration of its educated and responsible Black employees. It had nothing to do wih efficiency, it wasn't budget cuts leading to job cuts, it was, in stark language, racism, and it came from the very same people who had defeated Slavery and won the Civil War. Thus-

"“Long ago we determined that the Negro never should be our master,” explained (http://www.federalreservehistory.org/People/DetailView/201) one of Wilson’s administrators, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury John Skelton Williams. Williams vowed “stern, final, definite prohibition” of any “social or political equality.”
Wilson appointed white men to important executive positions usually held by leading black politicians, and racist bureaucrats went out of their way to humiliate, demote, and dismiss ordinary black clerks."
https://theconversation.com/how-the-black-middle-class-was-attacked-by-woodrow-wilsons-administration-52200

When I was an undergraudate, my first impressions of Wilson was of the President who brought the US into the First World War in 1917. It was a decisive move because it tilted the balance of power away from Germany, to the extent that the Germans were unable to reap any benefit from the Bolshevik Revolution and the end of the war with Russia in March 1918. Wilson went further and in his 13 Points offered an aternative 'World Order' to that of the European Empires which in some respects -National Self-Determination' for example- was not so different from what Lenin called for. So revered was Wilson that the first Chair in International Relations in a UK University was established at Aberystwyth in 1919, and it was not until years later that I discovered what an appalling racist this man was.

You might argue this is a good case for reconciling the good with the bad, but if it is also the case that he was reflecting the morals and politics of his age, is not also true he was only representing one trend of that age, that he was also repudiating the morals and the politics that had enabled Black Americans to improve their social and economic position while also contributing to the progress of the USA?

In this attempt at a balancing act, it is difficult to reach a moral conclusion about a man so morally compromised. He did not need to expel Black Americans from their positions, it was not a necessity -it was a choice. Indeed, one wonders if history is being re-written today, or if it is in fact, the same unbroken narrative of American history that has seen multiple and diverse people -freemen and slaves- make the US what it is today, but rarely appear in its history as the equal creators of that history, because of a need for a few privileged White folks to hang on to their High Command of that narrative.

And is there not a danger that this complex history of inclusion and exclusion, of grudging respect from some, sneering dismissal from others, breeds the resentment that provokes violence on both sides, locked in a monotone narrative of permanent victims?

It seems to me that the divisions that exist in the US run so deep that reconciliation is impossible right now because there is no common ground in the narrative that explains it, no common ground that can end it. Just as there are historians who interpret the Civil War, not as a fight for freedom from slavery, but the birth of the Imperial Presidency the Founding Fathers were opposed to, that Lincoln tolls the death-knell of the American Revolution, and individual liberty as a 'sacred' right.

To paraphrase Ophelia, 'We know what America is, but not what it might be' -history cannot answer the question, because you are still trying to define who you are, and who your country belongs to. On that level, so are all, in the UK, in France -but owing to your size, you are 'writ large' on the world stage. And a gripping, fascinating narrative it is too. I wish you well in your attemp to shape the future, but your past shakes it weary head.

[filghy2]

Is there a difference between symbols and signs? I don’t know. But it seems to me there might be. The American flag has come to symbolize the country, it’s aspirations, it’s culture, it’s people, it’s laws, the etc. etc. etc. I don’t think I like symbols. They’re too big and too undefined and ultimately, it seems, too divisive. The symbol becomes more important than the actual ideals. We fetishize it. I like signs. It’s nice to know that ship sailing over there isn’t a threat (if you can trust the flag they’re flying isn’t false). We can't live without signs. I'm not sure we can live with symbols.

I don't think there is anything wrong with people as individuals wanting to respect the flag, anthem etc. The problem is when they threaten retribution against those who don't choose to observe the rituals in the prescribed way. I've never understood why taking the knee during the anthem was so bad anyway - it seemed to be a way of making a point without being unduly disrespectful.

I tend to be with Samuel Johnson on these things - patriotism is too often the last refuge of the scoundrel. Just as real smart people don't proclaim how smart they are, real patriots don't engage in ostentatious displays to proclaim how patriotic they are. Instead they demonstrate by their actions that they value their country and respect the principles on which it was founded.

Fortunately, in Australia we don't take all that stuff as seriously as Americans generally seem to. I only know the first few words to our national anthem. Parading the flag makes me cringe a bit because it's often associated with yobbish types - the sort of people who engaged in the Cronulla race riots many years ago.

[broncofan]

Is there a difference between symbols and signs? I don’t know. But it seems to me there might be. The American flag has come to symbolize the country, it’s aspirations, it’s culture, it’s people, it’s laws, the etc. etc. etc. I don’t think I like symbols. They’re too big and too undefined and ultimately, it seems, too divisive. The symbol becomes more important than the actual ideals. We fetishize it.
Over time the symbol never ends up representing the ideals it may have once embodied. A Mexican-American girl I knew used to call the American flag displayed in a pick-up truck "the white person flag". At the time I was either obtuse or pretended to be and said, "well that flag represents all of us." But in certain contexts its display is nationalistic and it looks like a claim of nativism. I probably don't have to say how illogical a claim of nativism in North America is for a white person, but that's what it can be.

The problem with symbols is their meaning is quickly perverted (perverted, erect, where are we going with this). We'd love our flag to embody our ideals, which would mean that everyone who honors it also honors every provision of our Constitution. What if flag-waving were correlated with literacy about what our Constitution says? That's not the world we live in and probably the opposite is the case.

[blackchubby38]

I can understand the basic principle you use to condemn the sins of the past while seeking to heal its wounds, for if the parties to a conflict never find a way to accomodate each other, there is no end to the conflict, whatever forms it takes.

The problem is that the history of your country is replete with a determination by some people, whether they are in organized groups or not, to deny Black people the place they deserve in the writing of that history, and I am not sure if the South, in some respects, has ever been reconciled with its defeat, even less the right of its Black citizens to be considered their equal.

It means that Americans, or anyone without proper tuition, live in ignorance of what Black Americans have achieved, when they achieved it, and why so often an 'Age of Achievement' was replaced by an 'Age of Failure'. It would be like the 45th President not only saying, as he has, that Black people are stupid and lazy, but adding, as if it were a generous concession, 'but they are good at sports and can play music very well'. But it becomes deeply problematic when the writing of history becomes an opportunity, not to record it, but to re-write it in order to eliminate people, ideas, movements that the historian doesn't like, to justify the present and those who benefit most from it. So many statues of men appear long afte they were dead, to honour them more for their present meaing rather than their past 'achievement', given that so many were in fact, like the Confederate Generals, losers. Indeed, are these statues not intended to reverse the historical record in some way? As with Robert. Lee in Richmond, so Oliver Cromwell outside Parliament, once the most hated regicide in England, erected in 1899 to remind 'us' of the moral superiority of the British Empire, opposed to the corrupt influence of Roman Catholicism on 'Home Rule' for Ireland.

Because Race in America is a state of mind as well as a state of fact, you have to go beyond Slavery and the Civil War to ask how the country dealt with the aftermath of those two processes. I argue that you find that from an initial fear, indeed, terror, that freed slaves were going to run rampage across the South in violent revenge on their former masters -the fear that led to the first Federal laws on gun control- you find that by the end of the century, Black Americans who had passed the National Civil Service Exam had become an integral part of the US Administration mostly but not solely empoyed in Washington DC, educated, responsible and utterly committed to the Republic.
Add in the cultural explosion of the early 20th century in the music of Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver, and you can see Black Americans not only proving themselves worthy as equal citizens, but shaping the destiny of popular music that would take American music across the world. Aside from the European classical tradition imported by immigrants, American music at one time was Black music, and Black music was American music.

Yet in the first two decades of the century, Roosevelt, Taft, and crucially, Woodrow Wilson, embarked on a sustained campaign to rid the US Administration of its educated and responsible Black employees. It had nothing to do wih efficiency, it wasn't budget cuts leading to job cuts, it was, in stark language, racism, and it came from the very same people who had defeated Slavery and won the Civil War. Thus-

"“Long ago we determined that the Negro never should be our master,” explained (http://www.federalreservehistory.org/People/DetailView/201) one of Wilson’s administrators, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury John Skelton Williams. Williams vowed “stern, final, definite prohibition” of any “social or political equality.”
Wilson appointed white men to important executive positions usually held by leading black politicians, and racist bureaucrats went out of their way to humiliate, demote, and dismiss ordinary black clerks."
https://theconversation.com/how-the-black-middle-class-was-attacked-by-woodrow-wilsons-administration-52200

When I was an undergraudate, my first impressions of Wilson was of the President who brought the US into the First World War in 1917. It was a decisive move because it tilted the balance of power away from Germany, to the extent that the Germans were unable to reap any benefit from the Bolshevik Revolution and the end of the war with Russia in March 1918. Wilson went further and in his 13 Points offered an aternative 'World Order' to that of the European Empires which in some respects -National Self-Determination' for example- was not so different from what Lenin called for. So revered was Wilson that the first Chair in International Relations in a UK University was established at Aberystwyth in 1919, and it was not until years later that I discovered what an appalling racist this man was.

You might argue this is a good case for reconciling the good with the bad, but if it is also the case that he was reflecting the morals and politics of his age, is not also true he was only representing one trend of that age, that he was also repudiating the morals and the politics that had enabled Black Americans to improve their social and economic position while also contributing to the progress of the USA?

In this attempt at a balancing act, it is difficult to reach a moral conclusion about a man so morally compromised. He did not need to expel Black Americans from their positions, it was not a necessity -it was a choice. Indeed, one wonders if history is being re-written today, or if it is in fact, the same unbroken narrative of American history that has seen multiple and diverse people -freemen and slaves- make the US what it is today, but rarely appear in its history as the equal creators of that history, because of a need for a few privileged White folks to hang on to their High Command of that narrative.

And is there not a danger that this complex history of inclusion and exclusion, of grudging respect from some, sneering dismissal from others, breeds the resentment that provokes violence on both sides, locked in a monotone narrative of permanent victims?

It seems to me that the divisions that exist in the US run so deep that reconciliation is impossible right now because there is no common ground in the narrative that explains it, no common ground that can end it. Just as there are historians who interpret the Civil War, not as a fight for freedom from slavery, but the birth of the Imperial Presidency the Founding Fathers were opposed to, that Lincoln tolls the death-knell of the American Revolution, and individual liberty as a 'sacred' right.

To paraphrase Ophelia, 'We know what America is, but not what it might be' -history cannot answer the question, because you are still trying to define who you are, and who your country belongs to. On that level, so are all, in the UK, in France -but owing to your size, you are 'writ large' on the world stage. And a gripping, fascinating narrative it is too. I wish you well in your attemp to shape the future, but your past shakes it weary head.

Even with the 13 Points, I have no problems saying that Wilson is probably one of the worst presidents of all time. No only for his views on race which you can argue set back the advancement of black people in this country for decades, but I truly believe he was way in over his head at the Paris Peace Conference. Not to mention his stubbornness played a role in the United States not joining the League Of Nations.

I do think there is a balancing act that one must play when you look back on past events with modern day sensibilities. For example, I know a majority of the founding fathers owned slaves. That totally contradicts with ideals that they put forth when they wrote the Constitution and founded this nation. But I while may view those men as being flawed and a product of their time, I don't look at the ideals same way and they should be something that is striven for.

[Stavros]

Your verdict on Wilson is a key one -for an American.
Before I knew more about him, my impression was that Wilson was revered over here because he rescued Europe from one of its biggest mistakes, and that it set a precedent, followed not so long after 1918 by the urgent desire/need for the Americans to come to our rescue again in 1940, and indeed, at the end of the War when, having helped to rescue Europe from the Nazis, it rescued us from bankrupty by financing our economic recovery (while insinuating itself into European Cold War politics through the nascent CIA and the Gladio network).

The 'problem' of the slave-owning Revolutionaries can be dealt with by swerving from their private lives, to the 'Grand Project' which was America's Liberal Revolution, which I take to be one that created a free space for individuals within the State, rather than outside it. The decision to give people the freedom to make their own choices, was based, in part on a low level of taxation, but also on a laissez-faire attitude to social and personal relations. I made the point in a thread somewhere recently that in reality the Christian communities that de Tocquville noted in his study Democracy in America could, and did impose their own strict rules on people, but that to their Scarlet Letter(s) one can also offer the Call of the Wild.

It may seem contradictory to argue that Washington, Jefferson and the other Presidents down to Lincoln remained committed to the Liberal Project, when at the same time First Nations were being obliterated, and slavery embedded in the economy, but when the crisis came in 1861, it was Liberalism that prevailed. For all the critiiques of Lincoln then and now, the vexation over his (alleged) abuse of the Constitution, his provocation of the Slave States -if you like, his Presidential Style- must be set aside as the emancipation of the Slaves was entirely within the Liberal Project, giving Black people equal rights to freedom as everyone else, including the Jews, a small group the subject of the kind of nasty attacks Lincoln was opposed to, he being one of their most ardent supporters and defenders.

It seems to me that the Civil War has become the pivot on which so much of American politics has shifted, because Race is fundamental to an immigrant 'nation', and because so much of American politics has sought to either extend the historic, Liberal project that began in 1776, or re-define it to maintain the political, economic and social dominance of White Christians with a European lineage

Thus, Wilson's determination to expunge the Black professional classes from American government, is matched by the Liberal reforms of the Johnson admnistation in the 1960s, but what is stark, to me, is how the campaigns that have been mounted since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have had the intention, not of re-defining Liberalism, but opposing it. Whether it is the Religious movements, mostly 'Fundamentalist' or 'Evangelical Christians', Republicans and/or the Libertarians associated with the Koch Brothers and Rand Paul, the use of States Rights or State Sovereignty to refine/re-define the meaning of the law, has the clear intention of removing the right to vote from social groups assumed to be natural 'Democrat' voters.

The aggressive means that is being used to deny what the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gives in law, is a break with the Liberal Project of 1776, because what Lincoln argued, that every American must be equal under the Constitution and that Slavery was not and could not be justified, has been repudiated by the hair-splitting argument that, for example, Mr X cannot vote because he lacks the proof of identity the State requires, when this proof is not reasonable to ask for, and when it is a fact that all of those Mr and Mrs X's are Black, or from a minority non-white social group. It is transparent what is happening here: even the President has said it: the more people who are allowed to vote, the less successful his re-election will be. An election that ought to be about policy, is now about process.

But here is the additional dimension: on BBC Radio after the 2016 a Republican was asked what the priorities would be for the new administration: 'to reverse every decision Obama made. It will be as if Obama never happened'. Thus, to the war being waged against the Constitution and the Law, there is a struggle to re-write American history, even the one you have lived through as an adult. The anguish Obama represents is the age-old anguish that assumed freed slaves would seek revenge for slavery and its humiiation, even though freed slaves were more concerned to improve their lives -and many did so, even if it meant leaving the South for the North. The loyalties of those immigrants who arrives in waves after 1865 was not in doubt, be they from Italy or Poland, China or Japan, yet the same queries are raised with immigrants identified as 'Muslim' or 'Asian', as if Ilhan Omar cannot be a authentic American because she was born in Somalia, though no such query is made of the German called Trumpf when he settled in the USA.

For these reasons I see no accommodation between Democrats and Republicans that can heal the divisions, unless Republicans can re-discover and re-commit to the Liberal principles that used to guide their politics. It is no longer an argument about how extensive Federal and State Government should be, or what the levels of taxation best serve the citizen, but the fundamental core of Liberal politics -integrating the citizen into the State as equals, rather than excluding them on the basis of some trivial prejudice based on colour, creed or sexuality. That this basic right can be dismissed, for example in the case of Transgender Rights, as 'Virtue Signalling' is an example of how far from the core values of the US the Republicans have strayed.

It may be stark, so urgent, that you may now have only 130 days to save your Republic. For all his wild allegations of vote rigging by Democrats, what if the 45th President wins a second term on the basis of his own party's transparent, blatant vote rigging- what will the Democrats do?

[Stavros]

From the Speech delivered at Mount Rushmore (written, one assumes by Stephen Miller given that it is full of historical references the President knows nothing about)-

"Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they’re doing this, but some know what they are doing. They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive, but no, the American people are strong and proud and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history, and culture to be taken from them." (my bold)

-so are 'they' Americans?

Full speech is here-
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-transcript-at-mount-rushmore-4th-of-july-event

I saw the video from Florida with the man in a golf cart shouting 'White Power' at protestors, but they were shouting back 'fucking Nazis' -showing how badly divided the US is at the moment, and how ugly it all is, and how one wonders if there can be any dialogue between such polarized communities.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/04/trump-florida-seniors-retirement-voters#img-1

Brexit has divided Britain, but I am not sure it has descended to the level we see in the US, assuming this polarization is widespread...

[KnightHawk 2.0]

From the Speech delivered at Mount Rushmore (written, one assumes by Stephen Miller given that it is full of historical references the President knows nothing about)-

"Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they’re doing this, but some know what they are doing. They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive, but no, the American people are strong and proud and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history, and culture to be taken from them." (my bold)

-so are 'they' Americans?

Full speech is here-
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-transcript-at-mount-rushmore-4th-of-july-event

I saw the video from Florida with the man in a golf cart shouting 'White Power' at protestors, but they were shouting back 'fucking Nazis' -showing how badly divided the US is at the moment, and how ugly it all is, and how one wonders if there can be any dialogue between such polarized communities.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/04/trump-florida-seniors-retirement-voters#img-1

Brexit has divided Britain, but I am not sure it has descended to the level we see in the US, assuming this polarization is widespread...Just another example from the Clueless Buffoon In Chief spreading propaganda at his so-called celebration yesterday,and it shows that him,his enablers and supporters want to keep things the way they are in the United States, and is upset because there is a movement in the country calling for change and they don't like it, and he's also the same one who called the Black Lives Matter Murial in front of his fifth avenue residence a symbol of hate,and calling confederate monuments magnificent. I also saw that video as well and agree that it shows how badly divided the US is at the moment,and how ugly it all is . No unfortunately there can't be any dialogue between such polarized communities, especially when the CBIC is stoking fear and division and attacking people on social media on the daily basis. and the enablers in congress and the senate refusing to do anything about it.

[broncofan]

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1279555471750254592

[Yvonne183]

Thought for the Day:

Looks like Trump was a big disappointment, too much twittering nonsense and other stuff. But having Biden as the next president doesn't inspire confidence. It's like Don Dumb verses Joe Schmoe.

If I was a conspiracy person I might see something else. I think the election all depends on who Biden picks as VP. I think once Biden gets in there will be a campaign by the "woke" generation as well as the media to have Biden resign leaving the VP to take over. Cause Biden does have some baggage which can be used against him. That way the country will get their first woman president. Just a conspiracy thought I had.

Second thought of the day: I do hope things change where trans girls don't have to become sex workers just to survive. If they choose to, that's one thing but it's sad if they have no choice.

OK, that's all till next year or so. I think I will be heading back to the hospital for mental treatment, my head hurts being out in the open air, I need a locked room to survive. Good luck Starvos.

[Stavros]

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1279555471750254592

'This tweet is unavailable'

[Stavros]

Thought for the Day:
Looks like Trump was a big disappointment, too much twittering nonsense and other stuff. But having Biden as the next president doesn't inspire confidence. It's like Don Dumb verses Joe Schmoe.

If I was a conspiracy person I might see something else. I think the election all depends on who Biden picks as VP. I think once Biden gets in there will be a campaign by the "woke" generation as well as the media to have Biden resign leaving the VP to take over. Cause Biden does have some baggage which can be used against him. That way the country will get their first woman president. Just a conspiracy thought I had.

Second thought of the day: I do hope things change where trans girls don't have to become sex workers just to survive. If they choose to, that's one thing but it's sad if they have no choice.

OK, that's all till next year or so. I think I will be heading back to the hospital for mental treatment, my head hurts being out in the open air, I need a locked room to survive. Good luck Starvos.

The fear -conspiracy theory-might be Biden snuffs it before the end of the first term, but I do think the VP choice this time has more resonance than it has had before, though for some to problem is that they don't want a re-run of McCain-?

Covid 19 has rammed a juggernaut through the economy at a time when AI was in the process of shredding jobs, one wonders at the corporate level if the health crisis will be used to 'modernize' work and that many 'on furlough' will have a job to return to. For sex workers, I think that other factors are relevant: the need for instant cash owing to homelessness, or rent; the absence of family support; disrupted education; substance abuse: those factors will persist- but in an urban context that may be more anarchic and dangerous than before.

Sorry to hear about your head, just make sure you keep it where it is and safe, as it's the only one you have- stay safe and well, and write again when you can.

[filghy2]

On a positive note, the recent run of Supreme Court decisions in the US seems to demonstrate (to Trump's surprise I would guess) that Republican judges can maintain a degree of independence and that they do not accept his claims to be above the law.

If the polls continue to look bad for Trump I wonder how long it will be before increasing numbers of Republican politicians also decide it might be in their interests to show more independence from him.

[Stavros]

Who are these people, what do they use for brains? Are they on a mission to be laughed at? Bizarre.


Will Joe Biden do more to protect religious liberty than Donald Trump? Not a prayer. “City of Toronto Bans Catholic Churches From Administering Holy Communion” https://t.co/9oR3YI7Zkf

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 17, 2020 (https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/status/1284072755424616449?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

[KnightHawk 2.0]

Who are these people, what do they use for brains? Are they on a mission to be laughed at? Bizarre.


Will Joe Biden do more to protect religious liberty than Donald Trump? Not a prayer. “City of Toronto Bans Catholic Churches From Administering Holy Communion” https://t.co/9oR3YI7Zkf

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 17, 2020 (https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/status/1284072755424616449?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

Laura Ingraham is a fraudulent journalist and a enabler.

[Stavros]

'The Surge'...where have we heard that before? Baghdad, Fallujah...and now Portland, Chicago...wherever the Sunni Demcrats are, there be chaos in need of law and order, indeed, a 'Surge'. Citizens snatched from the street by men in military uniform without ID (are they Russians from the Wagner Group?) and bundled into unmarked cars -at least, as far as we know, the citzens are not executed, as many were in Baghdad and Fallujah, but how long will the 'Surge' last before peace and tranquility is returned to the streets of America? Suppose the citizens refuse to kow-tow to the 'occupying army'? Who is going to police the November election if the police are confined to their stations? Will it be by armed militias of the Federal Government, or maybe the Proud Boys and National Action?

It seems to me the US is being taken into some dark corners, and that it may be the last desperate tactic of a man who never loses, and doesn't know how take failure, and therefore intends to hold on to power. Beyond this, one wonders if the Republican Party can survive this crisis, if it still exists, just as the old Conservative Party that was once pragmatic and without ideology under Boris Johnson has become a radical party of change defined by its Brexit ideology.

The irony might be that the only saviours of the Republican Party that can acquire the respect of their voters, and assuming they want the job, are the actual managers of that other 'Surge', Gen. D. Petraeus, and Gen. S. McChrystal. Is it not time someone with backbone took hold of the Republican Party, or is it to become a raucous gaggle of libertarian nutters, Christian Evangelists and Jew-hating Nationalists who revere Mussolini?

This study of the other Surge liked here is interesting, but the Introduction by Jon. T. Hoffman is wrong to attribute the chaos in Iraq to tribal and sectarian confict -as Once Upon a Time in Iraq repeats, that we knew, it was the American Regent Paul Bremer who caused the chaos and laid the foundations for Daesh through his 'De-Ba'athification Programme', and the dissolution of Iraq's armed forces. Nevertheless it is a history with some useful insghts the President can use in his Private War against the USA-
https://history.army.mil/html/books/078/78-1/cmhPub_078-1.pdf

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m000kxws/once-upon-a-time-in-iraq

[broncofan]

I can only count three occasions in my life where antisemites have wanted to harm me because I'm Jewish. I'm sure there are many American Jews whose personal experience with antisemitism is less than this. In fact, probably most.

Yet in the past year and eight months or so, there have been to my count, something like 5 mass attacks on Jews in the U.S., starting with the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. I've shared that I live in Pittsburgh, but I have to say it affected me no more than if I didn't because I don't go to synagogue and didn't know any of the victims. There was also a shooting at a synagogue in Poway, a Kosher Grocery store in New Jersey, a machete attack at a Hanukkah dinner in Monsey, and a shooting in Miami.

The ideologies of the attackers were as follows: 1. Pittsburgh-right-wing identitarian, 2. Poway-right-wing identitarian 3. New Jersey-Black Hebrew Israelites 4. Miami-unknown 5. Monsey-Black Hebrew Israelites

In the last month or so, there have been openly antisemitic statements made by several famous people: Ice Cube, Desean Jackson, Nick Cannon, and now today some rapper in Britain named Wiley who has gone so far as to say Jews should be shot.

I don't have much to say about the instances except that they all seem to be kind of extreme given the amount of visibility I've seen them get. These were not gaffes, they were not "problematic" statements, they were open and extreme hatred of the form that motivates people to kill Jews.

It's always speculative and usually an exaggeration when people say something isn't being covered. If I look up each case I can see there are newspaper articles on each one but not really the phenomenon that antisemitism is in fashion even if people want to call it something else. Those who make antisemitic statements will often have tens of thousands of people standing in solidarity with them. I'm sure this is nothing new for many other minorities groups who see people retweet Trump and right-wing commentators making bigoted comments. On the other hand I haven't seen mainstream antisemitism that isn't dogwhistled until recently.

Has anyone else noticed this? Just curious. I'm on twitter more recently and it seems every day some famous person is saying something really hateful and dehumanizing about Jews.

[Stavros]

At a basic level, anti-semitic activity in the UK has been constant throughout my life. There has always been a hard core of Nazis who never gave up admiring Hitler, and who formed or were part of various fringe groups such as Column 88. I recall a documentary on exremist members of the Conservative Party, one of whom had a portrait of Adolf Hitler in his room, and there was the lineage of Britsh fascism/anti Jewish groups that began with the British Brothers League in the early 20th century, continued with Mosley's British Union of Fascists (banned in 1940) and after the War the National Front, the British Movement and the BNP, with some of the members joining and falling out and joining parties like UKIP.

Gerry Gable and others created a monthy newsletter then magazine called Seachlight which regularly posted notes of petty crimes, mostly the desecration of Jewish graves in and around the London area, petty in terms of the law rather than affect. I hardly need refer to the more recent incidences of anti-semitism in the Labour Party, and of course in the US it has reached the highest office, for in spite of the President's daughter marrying a Jew, and Jared Kushner being 'Under-President', the President's baiting of George Soros smacks of the 'casual' anti-semitism that its adherents acknowledge as a message of support, as indeed has been the reaction to the 'Christianist' ideologies of Orban in Hugary and Andrzej Duda in Poland, two countries with a grim historical record where Jews are concerned.

I feel we have to constantly educate people about the truth, which is not elusive, but available eveywhere, but I guess if people want to believe Covid 19 is a hoax, that vaccines cause more illnesses than they treat, that Bill Gates is part of a global consiracy to electronically tag everyone, there will always be a hard core of people who 'make up their own mind', but with the President of the USA casually nodding to QAnon, you have now to deal with this poison at the highest level, and that is with the curious relationship he has with the Russians, and also the Saudi Arabians, whose ant-semitic and anti-Christian literature distributed worldwid is part of the problem.

When they go low, you should aim high, this is a fish rotting from the head down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column_88

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_UK_Conservative_Party#Antisemi tism_towards_Gerald_Kaufman
(the attack on Gerald Kauffman is ironic as he was a severe critic of Israel)

[Stavros]

Futher to my point above, but not mentioned in Mary Trump's book other than her father joining a Jewish fraternity in College, are her family's connections to Jews and Jewish causes, indeed, Fred Trump met the young Benjamin Netayahu when the latter was Israel's Ambassador and lived in Manhattan. It does make one wonder if the baiting of George Soros has been done to send a message to those in America who loathe the Jews, that is, as a political tactic, regardless of the President's actual views- but as one of the comments to the article suggests, Fred Trump may have been motivated by the money he made from real estate, rather than an instinctive love of Israel, and as the other link points out, Fred was arrested when attending a KKK rally in 1927 and Woody Guthrie wrote a song about him after he lived in the Beach Haven complex.

This offers a deeper perspective on the President and the Jews-
https://vosizneias.com/2019/11/01/does-donald-trump-have-jewish-roots/

A tale of two dads-
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-my-racist-father-my-hero-trump-and-netanyahu-s-meeting-of-minds-1.5433047

[broncofan]

Trump does make an interesting case study because he is not very intelligent but is in his own way he's socially adept. As a result, he is very quick to internalize stereotypes about groups of people and with his limited filter these stereotypes are made evident in every interaction he has.

Someone wrote an article in Tablet magazine saying that Trump believes stereotypes about Jews but the positive spin of those stereotypes. He believes Jewish people are good at making money, good with money, love to make deals, are powerful, are more loyal to Israel and other Jews than non-Jews. These comments come across when he speaks to certain right-wing pro-Israel organizations but as these organizations don't represent the brightest members of our community they are flattered by it. In truth, if you think someone is complimenting you, even based on a false premise, you feel ungrateful to object.

The Soros conspiracy theory is becoming much more common on the right. A large percentage of people who rely on the conspiracy theory are unaware it has an antisemitic provenance though it clearly does. They are not criticizing Soros as a person or for his actions but instead attribute to him all sorts of fantastical powers that no person could have. If it weren't based on the fact that he's Jewish, it would still be superstitious nonsense. I believe Trump likes it because it gives him an enemy and it's sort of white supremacist stock in trade: powerful Jew is manipulating people of all races to be disobedient.

One major problem is that people who believe in these powerful Jewish archetypes occasionally commit hate crimes against Jews so the conspiracism isn't just some harmless hobby. And the conspiracy theories are divorced enough from the every day life of a Jewish person that the purveyor of these theories is certain that spreading them doesn't touch on their interests as human beings. One person tried to explain to me one time that he didn't object to ordinary Jewish people like me, just the sort of "big Jew....the powerful Jew....the one in control...."

[blackchubby38]

Antisemitism has been slowly on the rise for the past few years now and it seems its the one thing that both the far right and far left have in common. In 2017, it was a bunch of white guys walking around with tiki torches saying "The Jews won't be the ones to replace use". Fast forward to 2020 and its black people saying antisemitic things on social media. Malcolm Jenkins, an NFL player who is a prominent social justice activist, basically said he doesn't have time to talk about antisemitism.

[fred41]

Antisemitism has been slowly on the rise for the past few years now and it seems its the one thing that both the far right and far left have in common. In 2017, it was a bunch of white guys walking around with tiki torches saying "The Jews won't be the ones to replace use". Fast forward to 2020 and its black people saying antisemitic things on social media. Malcolm Jenkins, an NFL player who is a prominent social justice activist, basically said he doesn't have time to talk about antisemitism.

Yeah, unless you live here, you probably wouldn’t know it, but the majority of anti Semitic assaults in NYC the last couple of years were disproportionately by black people...I don’t even know what category you put that in politically. I doubt the majority of the aggressors really identify with a party, probably just thugs...but I will say this - members of the far left always love to flirt with anti-semtism, often saying it’s just politics against Israeli aggression, but then quite a few of them always seem to have something good to say about Louis Farrakhan too.

[fred41]

To add to what I said though. Aside from insidious Anti-semitism present in today’s politics...the most brutal types - as shown by the examples of mass murder given by Bronco, are (at least here in the States) committed by white supremacists and Nazis. There’s always just so much anger and ignorant narcissism. Plus out and out crazy. Aside from the encouragement they receive when the President says his usual BS, I think they’ve also grown (like many other hate groups) with Twitter and other social media. I remember reading somewhere that they have started really growing around 2012.

I guess the one good thing is - true angry haters just have a really hard time hiding it.

[broncofan]

Yeah, unless you live here, you probably wouldn’t know it, but the majority of anti Semitic assaults in NYC the last couple of years were disproportionately by black people...I don’t even know what category you put that in politically. I doubt the majority of the aggressors really identify with a party, probably just thugs...but I will say this - members of the far left always love to flirt with anti-semtism, often saying it’s just politics against Israeli aggression, but then quite a few of them always seem to have something good to say about Louis Farrakhan too.
I wouldn't put a party to it but the reason the BHI movement and NOI often get attributed to the left is because some of their members are involved in social justice movements. The Nation of Islam is extremely homophobic and transphobic and so aren't in any true sense committed to social justice but then people who use their rhetoric will be involved in protests against bigotry. The Black Hebrew Israelites do not practice Judaism, are not Jewish or descended from practicing Jews, but are conspiracy theorists who think anyone who calls himself a Jew today is a fake Jew or an imposter who is stealing his/her cultural birthright.

They believe they are justified in hating us because we're not really Jews according to them. They also adopt some language of anti-colonialism. I'm getting stuff on my twitter timeline about Anne Frank being a "white Becky" and stuff like that.

I'm certainly not blaming an entire ethnic group as there have been plenty of Jewish Americans who have made anti-Black statements. I'm merely saying the BHI conspiracy theories are real crackpot stuff and people who believe them have no clue how batshit it is.

As for the Israel stuff, it's very true that there is a lot to criticize about Israel and there's nothing antisemitic about it if done in remotely good faith. If I actually showed you the Corbyn supporting twitter accounts I've been talking about you'd see there's nothing fair or normal about the commentary. They post memes that originate on neo-nazi forums about antisemites really being people THE JEWS hate and some quote falsely attributed to Voltaire saying "learn who you can't criticize" cause they rule over you. Like jackals you find them commenting after hate crimes committed against Jews trying to shift the conversation to Israel.

If I had to impersonate them it would be like this:

Person A: Jews are scum and I hate them
Jewish person: That's antisemitic.
Corbynite: It's not antisemitic to criticize Israel
Jewish person: But that had nothing to do with Israel
British Press: Jewish community in furor claiming "antisemitism" over Israel comments.

So all I'm saying is we're seeing a lot of bullshit. I'm by no means saying there's any more antisemitism in the Black community than there is anti-Black racism in the Jewish community. I'm just saying there's been a big uptick everywhere recently.

[blackchubby38]

I wouldn't put a party to it but the reason the BHI movement and NOI often get attributed to the left is because some of their members are involved in social justice movements. The Nation of Islam is extremely homophobic and transphobic and so aren't in any true sense committed to social justice but then people who use their rhetoric will be involved in protests against bigotry. The Black Hebrew Israelites do not practice Judaism, are not Jewish or descended from practicing Jews, but are conspiracy theorists who think anyone who calls himself a Jew today is a fake Jew or an imposter who is stealing his/her cultural birthright.

They believe they are justified in hating us because we're not really Jews according to them. They also adopt some language of anti-colonialism. I'm getting stuff on my twitter timeline about Anne Frank being a "white Becky" and stuff like that.

I'm certainly not blaming an entire ethnic group as there have been plenty of Jewish Americans who have made anti-Black statements. I'm merely saying the BHI conspiracy theories are real crackpot stuff and people who believe them have no clue how batshit it is.

As for the Israel stuff, it's very true that there is a lot to criticize about Israel and there's nothing antisemitic about it if done in remotely good faith. If I actually showed you the Corbyn supporting twitter accounts I've been talking about you'd see there's nothing fair or normal about the commentary. They post memes that originate on neo-nazi forums about antisemites really being people THE JEWS hate and some quote falsely attributed to Voltaire saying "learn who you can't criticize" cause they rule over you. Like jackals you find them commenting after hate crimes committed against Jews trying to shift the conversation to Israel.

If I had to impersonate them it would be like this:

Person A: Jews are scum and I hate them
Jewish person: That's antisemitic.
Corbynite: It's not antisemitic to criticize Israel
Jewish person: But that had nothing to do with Israel
British Press: Jewish community in furor claiming "antisemitism" over Israel comments.

So all I'm saying is we're seeing a lot of bullshit. I'm by no means saying there's any more antisemitism in the Black community than there is anti-Black racism in the Jewish community. I'm just saying there's been a big uptick everywhere recently.

Don't worry, nobody was insinuating that you were saying there was more antisemitism in the black community.

[Stavros]

- members of the far left always love to flirt with anti-semtism, often saying it’s just politics against Israeli aggression, but then quite a few of them always seem to have something good to say about Louis Farrakhan too.


It is a Trotskyist tactic, to identify a grievance or a 'persecuted' or ostacised or minority community, and offer them support so that when the Revolution comes (and it is imminent -ask any Trotskyist!) -these relatively small groups can be recruited as allies in the revolutionary struggle. Once in power, I don't see any future for them as there is nothing a Trotskyist has in common with Farrakhan, and on the basis of how the Bolsheviks in Russia systematically recruited and then disposed of their allies when they needed bodies on the streets (the Social Democrats and the Kadets for example; and one could also point to the fate of the left in Iran who supported the Ayatollahs in February 1979 and were dead by December) I would not expect Louis to waste his time on godless heathens.

One irritating example of how lazy people on the left can be, though it is not exclusively a left-wing problem, is the way in which Israel is being accused of creating an Apartheid state in regard to Israel and the Occupied Territories. I take the view that the Likud and more extreme parties in Israel have in effect, created for themselves a political dead-end by opposing the 1993 Treaty between Israel and the PLO, rejecting any land for peace negotiations, with the proposed annexation of the Occupied Territories without offering any guarantee of citizenship.

Here is the point: part of the plan that Grand Apartheid that was implemented in the 1970s, required Black people to leave 'White areas' -for example, in the Transvaal and the Cape- and 'return' to their 'Homelands' or Bantustans, on the basis that they were their 'natural' homelands, where they would be given the right to be independent of South Africa. In this sense Apartheid intended to take away South African Citizenship and Nationality and grant to the Black population their identity defined by their Homeland -KwaZulu, Venda, Bophuthatswana, Transkei, Ciskei etc. Instantly, it can be seen that the one thing Israel has no intention of creating is a Palestinian Bantustan in which Palestinians would have the right to be politically independent, as this would in effect be the creation of a separate Palestinian state -so the use of the concept of Apartheid is to my mind nonsense.

Segregation, however, is rooted in the Zionist experience, and indeed was cultivated, first, as an idea proposed by Theodor Herzl (who only once visited the Ottoman provinces we now regard as either Israel or Palestine) and was put into practical reality during the first, second and third Aliyah.

[Stavros]

John Hume has died at the age of 83. He was a key player in Northern Ireland's fractious politics from the 1960s to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and one of the finest politicians the UK -and Ireland- has ever produced. It is hard to understimate the importance of his tireless work for peace, a genuine peace, in Northern Ireland, his dedication to resolving some of the most bitter sectarian bigotry found in any part of the world, and his plea, which he made again, again and again, for dialogue. Dialogue within the North across divided communities; dialogue between the North and South of Ireland; dialogue between all and the UK.

Never moving away from his belief that peace is better than war, talking better than fighting, in the end, when the Provisional IRA and the British had fought themselves into a sticky bog with no hope of advance, it was Hume's politics that unlocked the true value that lay in Northern Ireland, in Ireland and in the UK -the value of hope and honest dialogue, based on the view that we are united by more than what divides us.

Look at the currrent generation of policy makers in Government, and compare Hume's passion for justice, his commitment to peace, his transparent language, above all his decency. You find, in the UK and the USA, two men whose only commitment is to themselves, to the inflated legacy they claim for themselves, a fake greatness bereft of palpable achievement. John Hume entered politics in the 1960s and never wavered for three decades -I can't imagine the Prime Minister or the President lasting three weeks in that Northern Ireland.

Ireland North and South, is in a better place today than it was in 1968, and Hume played his part in that transformation.

When Yeats was tangled up in the tumult of Ireland's Nationalist revolution, a revolution that consumed as much as it produced, he penned one of Ireland's most famous laments:

“Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.”



Hume offered a way out of this gloom with his own fanatic heart, a heart imbued with the deeply Christian view that we are all capable of doing good things when we want to, and that we should do so more than cause harm or pain. One is left with some other quote:

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall inherit the earth.

[Stavros]

The 45th President thinks he deserves a Nobel Prize for something he didn't do. That the UAE has decided to recognize Israel as a sovereign state and open diplomatic relations with it, is the formalization of a prevously informal relationship built on the personal relations between Under-President Kushner, the UAE's Ambassador to the USA,Yousef al-Otaiba, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

It is hard to find two more corrupt billionaires in the Middle East than these two Arabs, and the only thing separating them from Benjamin Netanyahu is the fact that the Israeli Prime Miinister has not been able to embezzle from Israel's treasury the kind of money that Otaiba and MbS earn from rent -for neither man has any idea what it means to work for a living. Even if neither Otaiba or MbS passed substantial sums to Kushner in return for 'services rendered', the pressure they put on Qatar must surely have been part of that statelet's decision to settle the colossal debt Kushner had with them, a debt which if called in would have destroyed the family. It is, after all, the Middle East, where nothing happens without the green stuff (it used to be gold) moving from one pocket to another, just ask the average Beiruti why toxic, explosive chemicals were stored for years in a warehouse by the sea.

You can't award a peace prize to someone who did nothing to enable diplomatic relations to open between two states that were not at war, though the point of criticism must surely be the ease with which the Americans have warmed to unelected dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. If the President wants the Prize, where is the end of the war in Yemen where the UAE, Saudi Arabia and US (and UK-) manufactured weapons have destroyed homes, businesses, schools and hospitals? And let us not forget the people who were inside them, over a million of whom are now refugees in their own country-well, maybe yes forget about them.
Yes, give him a prize- for hypocrisy.

The Press will tell you the UAE action is matched by the 1979 Treaty between Egypt and Israel, and Jordan's with Israel in 1993. So ignore, as if it never happened, the PLO treaty with Israel, also 1993, the one that was supposed to be followed by a trade in land for peace. You don't hear about it, because Israel and the UAE have decided the Palestinians are an irrelevance to their own relations, and in any case, the architects of that so-called peace are dead: Rabin slaughtered by a fanatical Zionist, Arafat imploding in a cesspool of lies and incompetence. Best not mention too that Netanyahu was opposed to Peace with the Palestinians even before the Treaty was signed, and that not a single remark from the worthless hypocrites on display in the last 24 hours will promise the Palestinians anything except yet more misery and murder.

The illegal occupation of Palestinian territory will continue; the illegal siege of the Gaza Distict will continue, illegal settlement expansion will continue, and the daily harassment of Christians in Jerusalem and Bethlehem will continue, all approved by the USA, acting in concert with the violent autocracies that it has endorsed, even as it stands by while the UAE foments more war and disarray in Libya. The days when Human Rights, Freedom, even democracy were the base on which the USA argued its moral case in Europe and the world, are over. Two words- Human Rights- have been cut out of every official US statement on foreign affairs; the mere idea that the Republican Party regards Palestinians as people with rights of any kind is just laughable, as the country embraces autocrats and criminals, and rewards the violation of the law, having zero respect for international law, and not much more for its own.

It looks like a primary aim of Israel, to reject regional solutions to the Arab-Israeli confict, to a sequence of bi-lateral treaties is working, yet at every stage the elephant in the room remains fixed to the floor: what about the Palestinians? Weak, divided, without friends across the reigion, it is true this chronic condition has weakened Palestinian politics. But it does not detract from the moral case, made with such chilling, biting reason by Rashid Khalidi in The One Hundred Year's War Against Palestine (2020), or in a more plaintive lament in the writings of Raja Shehadeh.

Peace for whom? The war continues, its victims ignored for now. No triumph to see here, no advance. Just some corrupt, odious billionaires and a crooked politician slapping each other on the back, as they worship what they have in the bank.

[Stavros]

An unarmed black man has seven bullets pumped into his back because five police officers were incapable of arresting him.

An armed white terrorist shoots three, kills two, and is protected by the police, and praised by Tucker Carlson.

Nikki Haley: "America is not a racist country".

What will the President say tonight, if he says anything at all? Not, as Othello did -'It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul' -just before he murders Desdemona, as one expects the President to murder the truth.

Get a grip, America, and get rid of the guns.

[KnightHawk 2.0]

An unarmed black man has seven bullets pumped into his back because five police officers were incapable of arresting him.

An armed white terrorist shoots three, kills two, and is protected by the police, and praised by Tucker Carlson.

Nikki Haley: "America is not a racist country".

What will the President say tonight, if he says anything at all? Not, as Othello did -'It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul' -just before he murders Desdemona, as one expects the President to murder the truth.

Get a grip, America, and get rid of the guns. Nikki Haley is delusional and toned deaf,just like the other members of the Trump Party and is unwilling to acknowledge that is systemic racism is a major problem in the US,and has been for over 400 years and needs to be addressed. The Demagouge And Malignant Narcissistic will be making false claims that him and his corrupt administration has been doing a great job, and the virus is under control and will be going away,when evidence and facts says the opposite, and spreading propaganda and misinformation about his political rival and the democrats,portraying them as the radical left who is going to destroy the country if they get elected,even though the D.A.M.N has been the same thing for over 3 1/2 years.

[broncofan]

I doubt anyone wants to hear it but I anticipate in the next 15 years this will become a bigger issue. In the last year, many Jewish organizations have been vandalized by people claiming support for the Palestinian movement. This includes Hillel organizations, Chabad organizations, and synagogues. In Los Angeles a while back a synagogue had Free Palestine graffitied on it and a bunch of social media users wanted to argue that somehow because Free Palestine is not an antisemitic message that daubing it on an American synagogue is also not antisemitic. But then how do they get to the position that the synagogue in some way is thwarting Palestinian statehood?

I knew eventually Free Palestine would be daubed on a synagogue that either flew an Israeli flag or had in some way mentioned Israel at some point. The connection could be as tangential as a trip for congregants to Israel or support for the continued existence of the state. Flash forward to 2020 and recently a synagogue that flew an Israeli flag was vandalized with Free Palestine. One could say their support of Israel was more explicit than mere implication but what does it actually mean to display a country's flag? If an Iranian-American organization had the Iranian flag, would it be support for murdering protesters or hanging gay men from cranes? Would a Chinese flag outside of an organization for Chinese-Americans be considered support for the current atrocities being committed by the Chinese government against Uighurs? Of course not. People try the analogy with extinct movements like the Nazis or the Confederates where the message is clearly intended to intimidate or support racist ideology and it fails. One of those entities was a secessionist movement that wanted to institute chattel slavery and the other a single regime that sought the death of every non-Aryan on the planet. Israel is a state that exists and the only one in the last 2000 years that has had a Jewish majority. Its statehood is also recognized by the United Nations.

Vandalizing a place of worship is bad even if you disagree with the views of the congregants or congregation. Vandalizing and burning Jewish organizations and then trying to find any connection to the idea of Jewish nationalism after the fact is profoundly sinister.

Somehow though, the proposition that synagogues should not be murals for Pro-Palestinian slogans will be interpreted as opposition to pro-Palestinian messages. I am merely saying that if this is ever the direction a left-wing movement wants to go in, they will end up with about 3% of the Jewish vote and an enormous distraction, for no benefit whatsoever. They will also compromise themselves morally.

[broncofan]

I am having trouble finding facts about the moments that led up to Kyle Rittenhouse shooting and killing two people. Whatever we find out, it is beyond insane that a 17 year old is traveling from one state to an adjacent one with a weapon of war so that he can rove the streets during protests against police brutality. It is beyond insane that he would not be arrested for openly carrying this weapon (he is a minor, forget that this weapon in particular probably shouldn't be owned by civilians), that he would not be arrested on the evening he shot two people, and that police officers would be shown thanking him.

Police officers that want to demonstrate they are being unfairly tarnished shouldn't be supportive of that kind of armed threat by a child against protesters and should perform their duties in a way that doesn't clearly indicate racial bias. Black men are shot by police and after the fact we hear the most strained justifications. Pot use, holding toy guns, resisting while unarmed. Here, a 17 year old was carrying something pretty close to a machine gun in a town he traveled to, shot two people, and was able to leave on his own power. What kind of insanity is that?

[blackchubby38]

I doubt anyone wants to hear it but I anticipate in the next 15 years this will become a bigger issue. In the last year, many Jewish organizations have been vandalized by people claiming support for the Palestinian movement. This includes Hillel organizations, Chabad organizations, and synagogues. In Los Angeles a while back a synagogue had Free Palestine graffitied on it and a bunch of social media users wanted to argue that somehow because Free Palestine is not an antisemitic message that daubing it on an American synagogue is also not antisemitic. But then how do they get to the position that the synagogue in some way is thwarting Palestinian statehood?

I knew eventually Free Palestine would be daubed on a synagogue that either flew an Israeli flag or had in some way mentioned Israel at some point. The connection could be as tangential as a trip for congregants to Israel or support for the continued existence of the state. Flash forward to 2020 and recently a synagogue that flew an Israeli flag was vandalized with Free Palestine. One could say their support of Israel was more explicit than mere implication but what does it actually mean to display a country's flag? If an Iranian-American organization had the Iranian flag, would it be support for murdering protesters or hanging gay men from cranes? Would a Chinese flag outside of an organization for Chinese-Americans be considered support for the current atrocities being committed by the Chinese government against Uighurs? Of course not. People try the analogy with extinct movements like the Nazis or the Confederates where the message is clearly intended to intimidate or support racist ideology and it fails. One of those entities was a secessionist movement that wanted to institute chattel slavery and the other a single regime that sought the death of every non-Aryan on the planet. Israel is a state that exists and the only one in the last 2000 years that has had a Jewish majority. Its statehood is also recognized by the United Nations.

Vandalizing a place of worship is bad even if you disagree with the views of the congregants or congregation. Vandalizing and burning Jewish organizations and then trying to find any connection to the idea of Jewish nationalism after the fact is profoundly sinister.

Somehow though, the proposition that synagogues should not be murals for Pro-Palestinian slogans will be interpreted as opposition to pro-Palestinian messages. I am merely saying that if this is ever the direction a left-wing movement wants to go in, they will end up with about 3% of the Jewish vote and an enormous distraction, for no benefit whatsoever. They will also compromise themselves morally.

There are ways to show support for a Palestinian state. Vandalizing a place of worship (for any reason) is not one of them.

[Stavros]

I doubt anyone wants to hear it but I anticipate in the next 15 years this will become a bigger issue. In the last year, many Jewish organizations have been vandalized by people claiming support for the Palestinian movement. This includes Hillel organizations, Chabad organizations, and synagogues. In Los Angeles a while back a synagogue had Free Palestine graffitied on it and a bunch of social media users wanted to argue that somehow because Free Palestine is not an antisemitic message that daubing it on an American synagogue is also not antisemitic. But then how do they get to the position that the synagogue in some way is thwarting Palestinian statehood?

(Broncofan, I have only edited your post to create space).

Impotent rage often performs these ugly acts, as if seekiing compensation for the real power that it lacks, as if such gestures were anything but. Google 'Free Palestine' and you will find numerous examples from around the world targeting Synagogues and other Jewish institutions and buildings, but no sense that these are, in the international sense, co-ordinated. I am not sure when and where it originated, but Israel's re-building of the Berlin Wall on Palestinian land (they have yet to finish this illegal 700+km project) has provided, on one side, a space for spectacular graffiti, a lot of it daubed by non-Palestinians, and I wonder if this sub-culture has gone global, with 'Free Palestine' the most common logo.

There are some Palestinians groups outside Israel that do and support this, and obviously other groups like BLM who claim to support the Palestinian cause, in their own way, and with some support from within the Palestinian community under occupation, because there have always been militant anti-Jewish elements there, but not in the majority (just as there are vicious anti-Arab factions in Israel).

Thus, the trigger for the graffiti in Minneapolis and other places most recently has been linked to the claims that Israel has been training US law enforcement, even to the extent that putting a knee on the neck as a restraint is an Israeli tactic (it is not, see the first link below) From these misleading claims, one can see the left making the link, serving their purpose of demonizing Israel without engaging in a proper debate about what is actually happening on the ground in the Occupied Territories. Israel, or rather 'the Jews' become a stick with which to beat the Cops, a marriage of wickedness. As the links show, Israel has provided courses to US law enforcement, and many others, mostly in an anti-terrorist scenario, including surveillance techniques, crowd control and so on (see the second link), most of which are a waste of money as Israel has only used intelligence and counter-terrorism techniques to one purpose: to murder Palestinians (cheaper than mounting a trial and no need for documentary evidence presented to a court of law), failing completely to crush the Palestinian movement under Occupation.

So for me, it is horribe, it is pathetic, it is ineffective, it hurts people, it costs money and ultimately, achieves nothing positive. I am aso inclined to the view that protest politics in the US is more violent and destructive than it is here in the UK. In France it tends to means smashing shop windows -the left did it in the 1960s and 1970s, the 'Yellow Vests' last year. What is gained from all this? Nothing, unless you think the left in the US is acting in solidarity with the Palestinians under occupation, who have enough to worry about without being dragged into a protest movement in the US (see the third link). It has been one of the most glaring contradictions in the 'revolutionary' movement since the 1960s, that under the all-embracing term of 'national liberation' they are an Internationalist movement supporting Nationalist objectives, be it in Vietnam, Ireland, Angola or Palestine. That it means they now share the same space as anti-Semitic far right groups ought to be a wake-up call, but they ain't listening.

We have to live with it, just as the President's unofficial Republican Guard is on the front line in Portland and other cities, provoking more violence than is necessary, perhaps a prelude to the fighting to come at the end of the year.

We can still try to counter it, by the tedious method of argument and debate, but I am not sure who is listening, and unless and until major states and blocs such as the USA, the UK, the EU and Russia promote the Palestinian cause with a view to finding a just and lasting settlement, Israel will continue to shape the debate and frustate the process, creating the polarising politics we suffer from today.

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-did-israeli-secret-service-teach-floyd-police-to-kneel-on-neck

https://jinsa.org/i-am-the-architect-of-the-u-s-israel-police-exchange-dont-believe-the-lies/

https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/06/10/radical-groups-co-opt-black-lives-matter-movement-to-target-israel/

[blackchubby38]

Even though they wound up arresting the guy, the fact people chose to record an attempted rape on their phones instead of physically stopping it, is not a good look for the both the citizens of NYC and the city as a whole.

[Stavros]

If there is one statement that justifies the concept 'Black Lives Matter' maybe this is it (and where's he from? Kenosha):

"Following the arrest of five people for shoplifting close to $5,000 of merchandise from Prime Outlets in Pleasant Prairie and a subsequent high-speed chase that ended in a collision with another vehicle, Beth delivered a strong message about the perpetrators, three Black men and two Black women from Milwaukee.

"I'm to the point where I think society has to come to a threshold where there are some people that aren't worth saving," Beth said. "We need to build warehouses to put these people into it and lock them away for the rest of their lives. These five people could care less about that 16-year-old who just got his driver's license yesterday. They drove through a red light, they stole thousands of dollars worth of clothing, and they don't care.

"Let's put them in jail. Let's stop them from, truly, at least some of these males, going out and getting 10 other women pregnant and having small children. Let's put them away. At some point, we have to stop being politically correct. I don't care what race, I don't care how old they are. If there's a threshold that they cross. These people have to be warehoused, no recreational time in jails. We put them away for the rest of their lives so the rest of us can be better." (my emphasis in bold)
https://eu.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/08/27/kenosha-county-sheriff-2018-statement-under-new-scrutiny/5645279002/

[broncofan]

Much of Beth's statement calls on the language of early 1900s race pseudoscience. Even when eugenicists weren't speaking entirely along racial lines they were proponents of the idea that certain people were beyond redemption and intrinsically criminal. When such people have children those children are in some way predisposed to crime simply by being their offspring.

It is popular in right-wing circles to look at someone's record and find 10 or so convictions and dismiss that person as a "career criminal." And while I admit that someone who has a lot of convictions is much less likely to get it together and straighten out their life, it's likely an indictment of our inability to rehabilitate people. That life is easy to fall back into if every other road is blocked off because someone has a record.

The problem with our law enforcement and criminal justice system is that those who are not in policymaking positions have a very narrow mandate and are not encouraged to question whether their methods are equitable. If a police officer arrests a black man for a minor drug offense and that man is then prosecuted and put in jail for a crime that a white person would get community service for, somewhere along the line there has been a breakdown. Perhaps a lot of that inequity takes place in District Attorney's offices where they adas make deals with attorneys representing affluent white clients but are encouraged to punish Black people who aren't excused as "good kids who made a mistake."

Black Lives Matter focuses on the use of force and violence against Black people at the hands of law enforcement. The excuses we hear people make after Black men are shot and killed reveal all of the other biases that run through our system and need to be reformed.

[blackchubby38]

Much of Beth's statement calls on the language of early 1900s race pseudoscience. Even when eugenicists weren't speaking entirely along racial lines they were proponents of the idea that certain people were beyond redemption and intrinsically criminal. When such people have children those children are in some way predisposed to crime simply by being their offspring.

It is popular in right-wing circles to look at someone's record and find 10 or so convictions and dismiss that person as a "career criminal." And while I admit that someone who has a lot of convictions is much less likely to get it together and straighten out their life, it's likely an indictment of our inability to rehabilitate people. That life is easy to fall back into if every other road is blocked off because someone has a record.

The problem with our law enforcement and criminal justice system is that those who are not in policymaking positions have a very narrow mandate and are not encouraged to question whether their methods are equitable. If a police officer arrests a black man for a minor drug offense and that man is then prosecuted and put in jail for a crime that a white person would get community service for, somewhere along the line there has been a breakdown. Perhaps a lot of that inequity takes place in District Attorney's offices where they adas make deals with attorneys representing affluent white clients but are encouraged to punish Black people who aren't excused as "good kids who made a mistake."

Black Lives Matter focuses on the use of force and violence against Black people at the hands of law enforcement. The excuses we hear people make after Black men are shot and killed reveal all of the other biases that run through our system and need to be reformed.

I think this is how you should judge whether or not a person is a career criminal and whether or not there is chance for rehabilitation:

If their 10 convictions are for violent crimes and/or felonies that resulted in violence, then they're a career criminal and there was a good chance they are never going to be rehabilitated.

If their convictions were for dealing drugs, I more than willing to give them a pass under the right circumstances given the fact that I believe drugs should be legalized. But that all changes if they're committing violent crimes along with possession with intent to sell.

If a person has 10 convictions of non violent offenses, I think there is a chance for rehabilitation. A lot of it depends on the crimes they committed and how frequent they were committed.

Finally, if you start seeing someone progressing towards violent offenses, I think that's where you have to start sending a message with them when it comes to sentencing.

[broncofan]

I generally agree with you. I think someone who has a history of violence and sexual assault is much less likely to ever be rehabilitated.

My own preference is somewhere in between what I see in some Northern European countries and what we have here. In Norway, they have mass murderer Anders Breivik in a cell that looks like a small office. I think it might even be decorated. I'm not sure what purpose it would serve but that guy's head should be in a toilet first thing every morning for the rest of his life. There are some crimes where people really cannot redeem themselves or ever be rehabilitated.

On the other hand, people born into a life of poverty who find themselves on the street can commit dozens of crimes and not be vicious or mean at all. They may simply not know any other way out of that life and our system of incarceration keeps putting them back there instead of helping to elevate them out of it. And no I'm not saying that poverty makes someone a criminal, but often times people on the right who talk about their tough upbringing grew up in families that were working class. This is qualitatively different from really extreme forms of poverty.

[Stavros]

Two thoughts today-

1) I don't want to sound mean spirited, but is there something a bit over-the-top in the way RBG is being elevated from her status as Supreme Court Justice, to 'icon' of American Democacy?

2) Has there ever been in recent times a more precise example of what the Greeks callled Sophistry, in the justifications made by Senators MCConnell, Graham and Romney with regard to the process of selecting a new Supreme Court Justice?

Standard definition of Sophistry
"the use of clever but false arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving."...

[broncofan]

Two thoughts today-

1) I don't want to sound mean spirited, but is there something a bit over-the-top in the way RBG is being elevated from her status as Supreme Court Justice, to 'icon' of American Democacy?.
If you look at her personal history, she is not perfect but has been an extremely impressive in the fight for women's rights. She graduated first in her class at Columbia Law and couldn't find a single job in New York City. This would be like an Olympian not getting hired as a high school track and field coach. For Law students, the grading process is done blindly because grades are considered such an important factor in obtaining employment. It may sound like I'm overemphasizing the importance of grades and pedigree but only to the extent those things have always been given that exact emphasis by law firms and law schools who designed a grading system they believed could be administered without favoritism (even if admission sometimes doesn't operate that way; the admissions process for graduate schools is slightly less corrupt than undergraduate admission but there are usually a handful of students who do not merit admission at every top law program).

She authored the first casebook on sex discrimination, she was co-founder of the Women's Rights project at the ACLU, personally argued 6 sex discrimination cases before the supreme court, wrote the brief for Reed v Reed in which the Supreme Court extended the equal protection clause to women. Even if she had never served on the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court, her work at the ACLU would make her an extremely notable feminist figure. The cases she argued extended constitutional equal rights to women and also blocked paternalistic laws that were intended to "protect" women by keeping them out of certain types of employment and mandating their role as caretakers.

I agree that her status as an "icon" is a bit unusual and sudden. But if you look at what she personally did in terms of women's protections under the law, it's hard to think of how one person can have more of an impact at this point in time legally. To frame her previous accomplishments differently, she wrote the brief for the department she helped found at a civil rights organization she worked for in a case that ended up extending equal protection under the law for women. She wrote the first legal casebook ever for the subject of sex discrimination. And won 5 landmark cases before the Supreme Court on sex discrimination. She also authored memorable opinions, including her dissent in Lily Ledbetter which resulted in the passage of the Lily Ledbetter fair pay act.

I think for some she represents defiance in the face of male legislators who want to turn back advances in women's rights. She did not retire when a liberal justice could have been appointed which was a mistake. I would say I give you a qualified I agree and disagree. It's actually her work before she became a Supreme Court Justice that was most pathbreaking I think.

[Stavros]

Thanks, Broncofan, for that eloquent and informative post. I now appreciate the sense of loss, and achievement associated with RBG, and after all, we have also spent lives listening to opera.

[broncofan]

Yesterday Donald Trump was asked whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost. His answer was indescribably dangerous, autocratic in spirit, and sociopathic. He could have said that he has a right to contest the outcome of a close election through legal means but that if he lost he would ensure a smooth transition. What he in essence said was that he anticipates fraud, he doesn't believe he can lose unless there's cheating, that if he loses it will mean that something went awry with the process and that the only way there will be order is if he remains President.

Nobody who supports him can ever be taken seriously as a person with integrity. He was impeached because he used the power of his office to try to ensure his re-election and since then he has actively tried to suppress voter participation and sow doubts about the legitimacy of any result that doesn't end with him winning.

I will never view this country, the only country I've ever been a citizen of, the same way after the last four years. I don't believe in giving in to feelings of despair about electoral results but the utter corruption of the Republican party and the fact that it has barely cost them politically challenges really tests that. How on Earth can even 40% of people in this country think his conduct is okay no matter what benefit they derive from it?

[Stavros]

Mitch McConnell assures his fellow citizens that there will be a smooth transition if his party loses the Presidency. In light of what he has said this past 10 days, you will have to make your own judgment of his sincerity.

I have just finished reading Anne Applebaum's The Twilight of Democracy, in which she charts a course from 2000 to today in which she has lost friends who shared her belief that on New Year's Eve 1999 the world was in a better place than it had been since 1945, and that people of her political persuasion were right to feel a sense of triumph followin the end of the Cold War.
American, Jewish, Liberal, multi-lingual and multi-cultural, one wonders why she has been a Republican rather than a Democrat all her life -but is concerned to chart the course of a politics that to her, has departed from the norms and values she has cherished, watching her ex-friends become Nationalist Bigots who believe the rule of law is 'nice to have, but not need to have', because in those 20 years the world has lapsed into a crisis and nice things no longer work, be it the Constitution, the Rule of Law, or just preferring truth to lies, even when the truth might hurt and be politically damaging- or because it is so.

For Applebaum, the people responsible, people whom she knew and regarded as friends (eg, Lauran Ingraham whom I assume is more familiar to you than she is to me) have betrayed the values through the Cold War they maintained defined what is was to be free, to be American.

These are the people who have no sense of shame in supporting a man who represents so much of what they regard to be America's moral problem -Ingraham, a Catholic convert who claims God saved her from Cancer, yet lauds a man who, whatever he says, she knows has no religion and does not share her values. Ingraham dated him a couple of times, and it went nowhere, apparently not even the bedroom -he spent all the time talking about himself, and she concluded he needed two cars - "one for himself, the other for his hair" (p167). People she knew who were neither anti-Semitic and dissented from the Communist rule they grew up with in Hungary, now not only praise Orban and condemn George Soros, but defend the autocratic take-over of State institions by Orban and Fidesz.

Your probem, as I see it, is that this President has given legitimacy to the kind of public action that no President before him would have done, and that this goes beyond the beltway and his useful idiots in Congress, to endow armed militias and extremist political groups like QAnon, the Proud Boys and so on. These are the people whom Applebaum argues were always there in the USA, who believe that the US is not just their country but exclusively so, and that they do not revere either the Constitution or the Rule of Law, seeing everything in existential terms, and that they must either fight for their country, or lose it. These are the people who probably believe the Election has already been stolen from them, and if the Loser finds all his friends in Congress desert him on the 4th of November, the people will not. They used to be fringe lunatics, now they 'defend' Federal property from 'antifa', 'BLM', with or without fatalities; they plotted to take on BLM and peaceful protestors in Portland, prepared to kill if the situation arose, and have been seen outside polling statons in Virginia, intimidating voters.

Thus, the question is, will they fight, or will their guns stay silent? And if the Loser turns out to be the winner, what will the Democrats do? On the one hand, the last four years might turn out to have been an experiment too far for most Americans, that however criitical they might be of Washington DC as remote from their daily concerns, since 2017 they have been asked to look into the Abyss, and are going to turn around in November (or right now, in some States) and say No!, giving Biden and Harris the opportunity to repair the damage, and restore 'business as usual', even though in the light of Covid 19 and the wreckage of the last four years, that might not be enough.

But Applebaum makes an important point: from war being diplomacy by other means, she feels a lot of contemporary politics, from Poland (her husband is a Polish politician), to Brexit, to 'America First', politics is now war by other means, and quotes someone called James DiGenova-

"The suggestion that there's ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over...it's going to be total war...I do two things, I vote and I buy guns" (p167).

[filghy2]

How on Earth can even 40% of people in this country think his conduct is okay no matter what benefit they derive from it?

Probably because 40% of Americans appear to be disposed towards authoritarianism, and are willing to set aside law-based democracy if they become convinced that it is necessary to defend against some threat. This tendency was probably always latent - it just required the right demogogue (aided by supportive media) to trigger it. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/23/trump-america-authoritarianism-420681

It's interesting that Republicans seem unwilling to directly criticise Trump for his comments, even though they say the right things about a peaceful transition. Some of them are also playing the false equivalence game, equating Hillary Clinton's advice about not conceding a close election until the processes are completed with what Trump said.

[filghy2]

But Applebaum makes an important point: from war being diplomacy by other means, she feels a lot of contemporary politics, from Poland (her husband is a Polish politician), to Brexit, to 'America First', politics is now war by other means, and quotes someone called James DiGenova-

The famous von Clausewitz quote is actually that war is a continuation of politics by other means. The idea that political questions should be decided by popular vote is fairly recent - full democracy only dates from the late 19th or early 20th century. For most of human history political questions were decided either by war or by appointing someone as absolute ruler. The transition to democracy occurred only because most interests eventually came to accept that it was a better way to manage political conflict (and it never happened in much of the world). We may be entering a period in which that social contract is tested as never before.

[filghy2]

These are the people whom Applebaum argues were always there in the USA, who believe that the US is not just their country but exclusively so, and that they do not revere either the Constitution or the Rule of Law, seeing everything in existential terms, and that they must either fight for their country, or lose it.

I'm sure such people have always existed, but what seems to have changed is that they are no longer getting much pushback from the supposed mainstream right. If there are Republicans expressing concerns about the rise of right-wing extremism and discussing what to do about it then I must have missed it. In addition to laws, the key thing that restrains bad behaviour is the recognition that miscreants will pay a price by being ostracised by others in their peer group.

[KnightHawk 2.0]

Mitch McConnell assures his fellow citizens that there will be a smooth transition if his party loses the Presidency. In light of what he has said this past 10 days, you will have to make your own judgment of his sincerity.

I have just finished reading Anne Applebaum's The Twilight of Democracy, in which she charts a course from 2000 to today in which she has lost friends who shared her belief that on New Year's Eve 1999 the world was in a better place than it had been since 1945, and that people of her political persuasion were right to feel a sense of triumph followin the end of the Cold War.
American, Jewish, Liberal, multi-lingual and multi-cultural, one wonders why she has been a Republican rather than a Democrat all her life -but is concerned to chart the course of a politics that to her, has departed from the norms and values she has cherished, watching her ex-friends become Nationalist Bigots who believe the rule of law is 'nice to have, but not need to have', because in those 20 years the world has lapsed into a crisis and nice things no longer work, be it the Constitution, the Rule of Law, or just preferring truth to lies, even when the truth might hurt and be politically damaging- or because it is so.

For Applebaum, the people responsible, people whom she knew and regarded as friends (eg, Lauran Ingraham whom I assume is more familiar to you than she is to me) have betrayed the values through the Cold War they maintained defined what is was to be free, to be American.

These are the people who have no sense of shame in supporting a man who represents so much of what they regard to be America's moral problem -Ingraham, a Catholic convert who claims God saved her from Cancer, yet lauds a man who, whatever he says, she knows has no religion and does not share her values. Ingraham dated him a couple of times, and it went nowhere, apparently not even the bedroom -he spent all the time talking about himself, and she concluded he needed two cars - "one for himself, the other for his hair" (p167). People she knew who were neither anti-Semitic and dissented from the Communist rule they grew up with in Hungary, now not only praise Orban and condemn George Soros, but defend the autocratic take-over of State institions by Orban and Fidesz.

Your probem, as I see it, is that this President has given legitimacy to the kind of public action that no President before him would have done, and that this goes beyond the beltway and his useful idiots in Congress, to endow armed militias and extremist political groups like QAnon, the Proud Boys and so on. These are the people whom Applebaum argues were always there in the USA, who believe that the US is not just their country but exclusively so, and that they do not revere either the Constitution or the Rule of Law, seeing everything in existential terms, and that they must either fight for their country, or lose it. These are the people who probably believe the Election has already been stolen from them, and if the Loser finds all his friends in Congress desert him on the 4th of November, the people will not. They used to be fringe lunatics, now they 'defend' Federal property from 'antifa', 'BLM', with or without fatalities; they plotted to take on BLM and peaceful protestors in Portland, prepared to kill if the situation arose, and have been seen outside polling statons in Virginia, intimidating voters.

Thus, the question is, will they fight, or will their guns stay silent? And if the Loser turns out to be the winner, what will the Democrats do? On the one hand, the last four years might turn out to have been an experiment too far for most Americans, that however criitical they might be of Washington DC as remote from their daily concerns, since 2017 they have been asked to look into the Abyss, and are going to turn around in November (or right now, in some States) and say No!, giving Biden and Harris the opportunity to repair the damage, and restore 'business as usual', even though in the light of Covid 19 and the wreckage of the last four years, that might not be enough.

But Applebaum makes an important point: from war being diplomacy by other means, she feels a lot of contemporary politics, from Poland (her husband is a Polish politician), to Brexit, to 'America First', politics is now war by other means, and quotes someone called James DiGenova-

"The suggestion that there's ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over...it's going to be total war...I do two things, I vote and I buy guns" (p167).Not buying Mitch Connell's assurance that there will be a peaceful transition of power if his party loses the presidency,because he is an enabler and is willing to do whatever the Demagouge Donald Trump tells him and his cohorts to do,including ramming through a nominee for the supreme court,so Trump can challenge the results of the presidential election if he loses,because they believes the supreme court will rule in his favor.

[KnightHawk 2.0]

Yesterday Donald Trump was asked whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost. His answer was indescribably dangerous, autocratic in spirit, and sociopathic. He could have said that he has a right to contest the outcome of a close election through legal means but that if he lost he would ensure a smooth transition. What he in essence said was that he anticipates fraud, he doesn't believe he can lose unless there's cheating, that if he loses it will mean that something went awry with the process and that the only way there will be order is if he remains President.

Nobody who supports him can ever be taken seriously as a person with integrity. He was impeached because he used the power of his office to try to ensure his re-election and since then he has actively tried to suppress voter participation and sow doubts about the legitimacy of any result that doesn't end with him winning.

I will never view this country, the only country I've ever been a citizen of, the same way after the last four years. I don't believe in giving in to feelings of despair about electoral results but the utter corruption of the Republican party and the fact that it has barely cost them politically challenges really tests that. How on Earth can even 40% of people in this country think his conduct is okay no matter what benefit they derive from it?Not surprised by Donald Trump's answer to the question on whether he would commit a peaceful transfer of power,shows how desperate he is to hold on to power by continuing to use underhanded tactics to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the presidential election,and is afraid of losing the election and is unwilling to accept the results,and agree that nobody who supports him can ever be taken seriously as a person with integrity,because the 40% of people in this country who think that his conduct is okay no matter what benefit they derive from it,because they live in an alternative reality just like he does where they view him as the protagonist and the media and everyone else are the antagonists

[Stavros]

The famous von Clausewitz quote is actually that war is a continuation of politics by other means. The idea that political questions should be decided by popular vote is fairly recent - full democracy only dates from the late 19th or early 20th century. For most of human history political questions were decided either by war or by appointing someone as absolute ruler. The transition to democracy occurred only because most interests eventually came to accept that it was a better way to manage political conflict (and it never happened in much of the world). We may be entering a period in which that social contract is tested as never before.


I stand corrected, if an easy mistake to make. Margaret MacMillan has a new study of War coming out in book form in October which may address your argument in some detail (it is availabe in Kindle form)-

https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-How-Conflict-Shaped-Us/dp/1984856138

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/609692/war-how-conflict-shaped-us-by-margaret-macmillan/

"Michael Caputo (https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/michael-caputo), the now-former assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, claimed left-wing Americans were planning an armed revolt.

“When Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said on Facebook. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.” "
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/election-doomsday-could-trump-send-111808071.html

[Stavros]

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian offers some alternative options to what might become a crisis if the election is contested -
a) State legislators who support the President can select the members of the Electoral College, rather than the voters, thereby assuring that no matter how many people vote against the President, he cannot lose the election.

b) noting the extent to which Republican states have used 'State's Rights' to ignore the Constitution, Freedland revives something from the USA's past called 'Nullification' suggesting Democrat States could simply Nullify Congressional and Presidential decisions. It means that Secession need not become an issue in physical terms, as States would in effect, become independent of the Federal Government.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/25/donald-trump-democracy-america-conservatives-power-us

As the Proud Boys descend on Portland -why?- I wonder if in fact what the threats of violence I have noted in previous posts actually is intended to achieve, other than criminality and disruption. I don't see much scope for the violent overthrow of Congress just to keep one man and his family in Office, so it may be that this is mostly just practical rage, though the dreaded possibility that some people will die cannot be ruled out.

Meanwhile, I note there has not been much discussion of US Cities being declared by the President's Wind-up-Monkey as 'Anarchist Jurisdictions', though it has had the bizarre result that now, no matter which radical Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, Trotskyist, Antifa, BLM group is calling for police departments to be de-funded, we know that it is actually being done by -the Federal Government!-

"Alongside Seattle and Portland, New York City earned the official “anarchist jurisdiction” label from Attorney General Bill Barr on Monday. Other cities under Democratic leadership are likely to be added to this farce of a naughty list, targeting areas where potent antiracist, antifascist protests have erupted this summer. The designations are the latest act in President Donald Trump’s theater of the absurd.
Because of the designation, the localities now stand to lose significant federal funding. There’s no subtlety in Trump’s cynical base-pandering, aided once again by Barr’s Justice Department in service (https://theintercept.com/2020/09/09/bill-barr-trump-justice-sexual-assault-case/) as the president’s private law firm.
.....Yet the material consequences for residents in the designated cities could be all too real. White House Budget Director Russ Vought is set to issue guidance to federal agencies on withdrawing funds from the cities in less than two weeks. The New York Post, which broke the story, noted (https://nypost.com/2020/09/21/nyc-branded-an-anarchist-jurisdiction-targeted-for-defunding-doj/) that “it is not yet clear what funds are likely to be cut, but the amount of money siphoned from New York City could be massive, given the Big Apple gets about $7 billion (https://council.nyc.gov/budget/fy18-22_financial_plan_overview/) in annual federal aid.” City coffers, devastated by the pandemic, now face more brutal cuts."
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/anarchist-jurisdictions-portland-new-york-seattle/

Defund Police Departments!

[broncofan]

Public servant announcement for those reading the politics forum, who have posted here for 15 years and think the word "chicom" is clever. People can see who voted for their posts and if you look at your profile, you'll see who voted for yours:). Hint: it wasn't the "chicoms".

[broncofan]

Public servant announcement
I get the master of the malapropism award for yesterday. I don't think there were any other nominees but I'd like to self-nominate and graciously accept the award.

[filghy2]

You'll need to lift your game if you want to compete with the master and his tenants' innuendos.

[Stavros]

Two thoughts-

1) I would love to ban the word ‘misspoke’, because it does not mean a lingual mistake. A politician says something he or she believes, that others find offensive, or that reveals that he or she has not been briefed on their policy. That is not ‘misspeaking’, it is either the natural thought expressed, or a matter of incompetence. Boris Johnson did not ‘misspeak’, he couldn’t be bothered to read the detail of his government’s policy on Covid-19. The President did not ‘misspeak’ when he said “stand down and stand by”, it came to him naturally.

2) There is a presumption that if the result of the election goes to the Supreme Court, the in-built Conservative majority will rule in favour of the incumbent, even if, should Amy Barrett be selected, she were to recuse herself from the judgment. I am not sure that this is a predictable outcome, first, because we don’t yet know, if the case goes forward, what the legal arguments might be. And second, because even Kavanaugh has voted against his sponsor, and in the past Conservative justices have voted on the basis of law, rather than political party.

[Stavros]

All rise for Congresswoman Katie Porter. This is what the scrutiny of policy looks and sounds like.
Her confrontation of Redfield is an outstanding example of an elected politician doing what they are elected to do.

California, can we borrow her please? I want her to kebab Boris Johnson!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/01/katie-porter-whiteboard-congresswoman (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/01/katie-porter-whiteboard-congresswoman)

[broncofan]

As a general rule I think people should not wish harm or death even on bad people. This rule is challenged if and when the harm comes to someone who repeatedly causes harm to others. But then to be comfortable wishing harm on that person one has to take a utilitarian view.

So let me cut to the chase. I think Donald Trump has caused between 50 and 100 thousand deaths because he is selfish and incompetent. His messaging on mask wearing has been inconsistent because his imperative is not to protect the public but to try to find some advantage, either by mocking mask-wearers, by flouting mask-wearing recommendations, or even in one case by questioning the effectiveness of broad compliance with mask wearing by the public.

He's caused a lot of deaths, continues to cause death and this is why so many people don't know what to say about his illness. He's not the only person who's gotten ill. Thanks to him over 7 million people in the U.S. have. Thanks to him, those who repeatedly downplay the danger of the virus and make ignorant arguments against public health precautions don't face much political cost.

[broncofan]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hope-hicks-close-trump-aide-tests-positive-for-coronavirus/2020/10/01/af238f7c-0444-11eb-897d-3a6201d6643f_story.html

Another example of how Trump has been reckless about the safety of others. He heard that he had been exposed to the virus on Wednesday and a day later he flew to New Jersey and met with dozens of people but was not wearing a mask.

Those of us here who are not covidiots know that masks are not (primarily) to protect the wearer but other people. One reason for this is that virus laden saliva projected from a sick person's mouth diffuses and is most likely to be caught by a mask right when it's expelled. Therefore, whatever limitations masks have in terms of microscopic particles passing through them is far less significant if an infected person wears a mask. This is the President though...

[sukumvit boy]

If Trump dies we end up with the bobblehead...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/12/pence-bobblehead/
https://gop.world/products/vice-president-mike-pence-collectible-bobblehead?variant=12264057831540&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Google%20Shopping&gclid=CjwKCAjwn9v7BRBqEiwAbq1Ey41LXH_s_s7lssdiwIMu FEnqj2lrj_fFZnigDGqBXg58MCuW3aNtYxoC-pwQAvD_BwE

[broncofan]

If Trump dies we end up with the bobblehead...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/12/pence-bobblehead/
https://gop.world/products/vice-president-mike-pence-collectible-bobblehead?variant=12264057831540&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Google%20Shopping&gclid=CjwKCAjwn9v7BRBqEiwAbq1Ey41LXH_s_s7lssdiwIMu FEnqj2lrj_fFZnigDGqBXg58MCuW3aNtYxoC-pwQAvD_BwE
The more time passes the more reckless his behavior appears to have been. If he didn't develop symptoms that were bad enough to scare him would he have revealed his diagnosis? I'm going to wait until our knowledge of the timeline is certain but it looks very bad. The Trump era needs to be behind us as soon as possible....and Pence wouldn't be any better.

Trump was very likely infectious on Tuesday for his debate with Biden even if he didn't know it and certainly didn't tell him as soon as he was diagnosed.

The number of infections from their super spreader event also keeps rising.

[sukumvit boy]

The 30 th Annual Ig Nobel Science Awards' for 2020 theme was "bugs" , a nice coincidence considering Pence's "head fly" . Including an operetta"Dream,Little Cockroach" crocodiles sniffing Helium ,and all kinds of fun stuff.
https://www.improbable.com/ig-about/the-30th-first-annual-ig-nobel-prize-ceremony/

[Stavros]

A weird 24 hours. Not sure Speaker Pelosi needs to formally investigate the 25th Amendment, as the President is demonstrating a bizarre spiral of hysterical twittery that suggests to me the Democrats should stand back and stand by while the 45th, so physically fit, so young, makes the case for the funny farm rather than four more years.

And yet, some thoughts-

1) "A top Republican senator has said that “democracy isn’t the objective” of America’s political system.....Lee, who is among a swath of Republicans who recently tested positive for coronavirus, wrote (https://twitter.com/SenMikeLee/status/1314009246305079296): ‘The word “democracy” appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/08/republican-us-senator-mike-lee-democracy

-Hmmmm...."We, the People..." Start from there Mr Lee, and replace the word 'People' with 'Demos' and you might discover something you clearly don't know or understand.

2) According to the President, Senator Harris is a 'Communist' and a 'Monster' -but without Communists and Monsters, we mght not have the baked potato.

3) “I want you to get the same care that I got,” he said. “You’re going to get the same medicine. You’re going to get it free, no charge, and we’re going to get it to you soon.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/us/politics/trump-calls-to-indict-political-rivals.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

-Free at last, free at last...

4) "I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young.”
-Nurse, come quickly!

[broncofan]

If politics were always about being objective I would agree with Pelosi. Trump is dangerously incompetent and unstable. However, we are a month away from an election and Trump is doing very poorly in the polls and there are people who will see her actions as politically motivated and an attack. And she is very unlikely to succeed.

I never imagined we'd get to a point where Republicans are being cagey about whether they have covid and refusing to get tested because they're afraid they'd have to be responsible and isolate. It appears that's where we're at but I want to leave this as a hint because I believe that story is going to develop. Hint: Lindsey Graham has refused a test, but I believe we'll find out more about other top Republicans.

There was a recent plot to kidnap Governor Whitman in Michigan. Early in the course of the pandemic Trump took to twitter to encourage people to violate public health orders in Michigan. He also spent time vilifying Whitman while she was trying to deal with outbreaks, so this is very much something he helped incite.

[Stavros]

Now he is more than incompetent. Using filthy words on public platforms signals the decline of values at the top of American Government, for whatever language they use in private, Americans have the right to expect decency and respect from their President, not the 'F' word. But as this man has described Americans as 'total scum, they're human scum', and is believed to owe money to foreign dictators, and has refused to condemn armed militias of the kind that plotted to kidnap and 'execute' the Governor of Michigan, your President now appears to be the Godfather of American Terrorism, and a Traitor.

And as the wheels come off this runaway truck, I suspect his language will get worse, his public rants more hysterical, his abuse spead far and wide to anyone who does not adore him. As for Lindsay Graham, it is the contempt for his voters that I find so astonishing. But this is not unique to the US, as just this week Boris Johnson approved of decisions affecting the North of England without bothering to talk to any of the North's Mayors to let them know what he was doing.

People don't like being treated like they don't exist. One just yearns for this manufactured lunacy to end, so that politics can revert to the boring task of doing things that work, if that is possible.

[KnightHawk 2.0]

If politics were always about being objective I would agree with Pelosi. Trump is dangerously incompetent and unstable. However, we are a month away from an election and Trump is doing very poorly in the polls and there are people who will see her actions as politically motivated and an attack. And she is very unlikely to succeed.

I never imagined we'd get to a point where Republicans are being cagey about whether they have covid and refusing to get tested because they're afraid they'd have to be responsible and isolate. It appears that's where we're at but I want to leave this as a hint because I believe that story is going to develop. Hint: Lindsey Graham has refused a test, but I believe we'll find out more about other top Republicans.

There was a recent plot to kidnap Governor Whitman in Michigan. Early in the course of the pandemic Trump took to twitter to encourage people to violate public health orders in Michigan. He also spent time vilifying Whitman while she was trying to deal with outbreaks, so this is very much something he helped incite.Also never imagined that we would to point where Republicans are being cagey about whether or not they have covid and refusing to get tested,however not surprised at at all that Republicans are refusing to get tested for covid because it will reveal how irresponsible they are and not taking the pandemic serious,and will have to self quarantine. and also believe that we will find more about top Republicans who attended the so-called ceremony at the rose garden. and agree that Trump's Toxic Rhetoric has helped incite the recent kidnap plot againist Michigan Governor Whitmer.

[broncofan]

If Trump loses the election and Republicans lose the House and Senate I think Democrats should be ruthless. Although bipartisanship is important when there is another party to work with, Republicans have consistently acted in bad faith. I support expansion of the Supreme Court through legislation, and no pardons for any Republicans who are prosecuted for crimes they committed during the Trump administration.

I'd actually be interested to hear the alternative view. How could Democrats afford to act like this last four years was not an abomination that completely undermined the rule of law? Can rule of law be re-established without consequences for Republicans? Can Republicans ever understand that they cannot invent rules like the one they did for Merrick Garland and then apply them inconsistently unless that kind of partisan behavior is deterred?

[filghy2]

I'd actually be interested to hear the alternative view. How could Democrats afford to act like this last four years was not an abomination that completely undermined the rule of law? Can rule of law be re-established without consequences for Republicans? Can Republicans ever understand that they cannot invent rules like the one they did for Merrick Garland and then apply them inconsistently unless that kind of partisan behavior is deterred?

I agree that they shouldn't turn the other cheek and 'play nice' because the other side will never stop behaving badly if they don't suffer consequences for it. However, you also don't want the system to devolve further into a 'tit for tat' game where both sides seek maximum advantage whenever they have the opportunity. So I think they need to focus on lasting reforms to address the shortcomings in the system that Republicans have taken advantage of. Maybe the Dems need a carrot and stick approach where they go harder if Republicans refuse to cooperate, but are prepared to moderate if the other side cooperates in supporting system reforms.

[broncofan]

I agree that they shouldn't turn the other cheek and 'play nice' because the other side will never stop behaving badly if they don't suffer consequences for it. However, you also don't want the system to devolve further into a 'tit for tat' game where both sides seek maximum advantage whenever they have the opportunity. So I think they need to focus on lasting reforms to address the shortcomings in the system that Republicans have taken advantage of. Maybe the Dems need a carrot and stick approach where they go harder if Republicans refuse to cooperate, but are prepared to moderate if the other side cooperates in supporting system reforms.
This is definitely the right answer. I was recommending tit for tat and do see its limitations. The list of systemic reforms is going to be long of course. Although I am pessimistic about what I see, I should also consider that it took Trump four years to fully corrupt the Justice Department. Even now, there are career lawyers and law enforcement professionals who are committed to their work. The courts have blocked various attempts by Trump to interfere with the election by challenging the constitutionality of drop boxes for mail in ballots. The senate and house were there to enable him and had an opportunity to remove him from office for clear-cut impeachable offenses and didn't. They will likely face electoral consequences. I won't say the system is working how it should but reforms can impede future instances of the corruption we've seen. The system is not beyond reform.

[broncofan]

Maybe the Dems need a carrot and stick approach where they go harder if Republicans refuse to cooperate, but are prepared to moderate if the other side cooperates in supporting system reforms.
The best reforms would be those that make our system more responsive to the will of the people. Gerrymandering takes place at the state level and the electoral college will take an amendment to eliminate. I think they are here to stay. A different court could have tackled partisan gerrymandering, but the current Supreme Court will not find a constitutional violation for gerrymandered congressional districts.

I'm sure there are things we can do though to ensure the integrity of elections and help prevent voter suppression. Republicans will likely face a big hit at the polls if things continue the way they're going.

[Stavros]

Pardon my carry on comedy, but I did have a laugh at the attempt made by Lara Trump to prove Joe Biden is suffering from cognitive decline, referring to his apparent difficulty in public speaking which she put like this:

“Every time he comes on stage or they turn to him, I’m like, ‘Joe, can you get it out?”...

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/jake-tapper-lara-trump-021808253.html

[KnightHawk 2.0]

Pardon my carry on comedy, but I did have a laugh at the attempt made by Lara Trump to prove Joe Biden is suffering from cognitive decline, referring to his apparent difficulty in public speaking which she put like this:

“Every time he comes on stage or they turn to him, I’m like, ‘Joe, can you get it out?”...

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/jake-tapper-lara-trump-021808253.html
Lara Trump is just as delusional and uneducated as her Demagouge And Malignant Narcissist of a father in law is,and if anyone has an apparent difficulty in public speaking,it's the clown she works for.

[Stavros]

And a President who uses dirty words on public platforms, and who insults and abuses the very same people who have helped shape his policy, is unfit for public office. I looked at this morning’s press and media in the hope of seeing universal condemnation of his filthy language but find, as usual, a degree of indifference bordering on permission that underlines how far American political discourse has fallen.

[Stavros]

I read a comment to a NYT article that suggests the President if he loses the election, can still be removed from office through the 25th Amendment. Given that COVID-19 seems to be rampant in the White House and the two top guys don’t care and have even tried to cover it up, are there not legal grounds for removing them if it can be shown they are guilty of ‘reckless endangerment’ in relation to White House staff?
It would mean Nancy Pelosi being caretaker President until January, and the first woman to be President.

i had hoped she would retire but maybe she wants to beat Dianne Feinstein’s record. Or maybe a reform should force Senators and Congressional reps to retire at 65?

[broncofan]

I agree that they shouldn't turn the other cheek and 'play nice' because the other side will never stop behaving badly if they don't suffer consequences for it. However, you also don't want the system to devolve further into a 'tit for tat' game where both sides seek maximum advantage whenever they have the opportunity. So I think they need to focus on lasting reforms to address the shortcomings in the system that Republicans have taken advantage of. Maybe the Dems need a carrot and stick approach where they go harder if Republicans refuse to cooperate, but are prepared to moderate if the other side cooperates in supporting system reforms.
I think this is going to be important although it will be difficult to patch up all the areas that can be exploited if one party acts in bad faith and the other does not. I've thought about it and one tit for tat I still support is adding more Justices to the Supreme Court.

The effect of Republicans stealing one seat is that they have a majority that can impede voting reforms that prevent voter suppression and they can roll back civil rights, which they are primed to do. Without their made up rule, they would have appointed one Justice and Garland would be on the Court.

I also think that Democrats should restore rule of law, which does not require passage of new laws but restores an institution that will enforce the law without respect to partisan politics. That means the new Attorney General will be unimpeded in prosecuting corruption and other violations of criminal law by members of the Trump administration.

Edit: this is all a hypothetical assuming the Democrats win the election and both houses of Congress, both of which are far from a sure thing. If you look at the Supreme Court ruling on Wisconsin and the likely effect it will have on at least some ballots, it's even more uncertain.

[filghy2]

I think this is going to be important although it will be difficult to patch up all the areas that can be exploited if one party acts in bad faith and the other does not. I've thought about it and one tit for tat I still support is adding more Justices to the Supreme Court.

It's like the old joke about the Irishman who was asked for directions: "If I wanted to be going there I wouldn't be starting from here".

Interestingly, the Australian government has just announced two new appointments to our highest court (which don't need to be confirmed by Parliament). https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-29/high-court-safe-picks-supreme-coney-barrett-australia/12823720
It's so uncontroversial that the average Australian would probably be unaware of it. That's probably how it should be, but I can't tell you how to get there from where you are.

[Stavros]

Even if Biden wins the Presidency, and it looks more likely to be him than the other guy, the big takeway from this election is the fact that 'Trumpism' is here to stay, though we don't know fow how long. David Smith put it well-

"When some Americans protested “This is not who we are”, Trump voters replied: “This is exactly who we are – and we’re not going anywhere.”
“The so-called moral outrage around Trump’s presidency did not produce any substantive shift in his Republican support,” tweeted Eddie Glaude, a professor at Princeton University and author of Democracy in Black. “In fact, he expanded his base among white voters. Trump continues to flourish in the intersection of greed, selfishness and racism.”
Now, if Trump wins the election, Trumpism wins. But if Trump loses the election, Trumpism wins too.
A sense of grievance over a narrow defeat, fuelled by the president’s bogus claims of fraud and amplified by conservative media, will thrive again a Democratic president. The “Make America Great Again” movement – with its nostalgia for a country that never was – was built for opposition rather than incumbency."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/04/trumpism-us-presidential-election

Here is the thought for the day: he may be tied up in litigation over the next four years, but as the man who created this 'base' that now defines the Republican Party, not as the Party of Lincoln, but the Party of Trump, I can not only see him maintaining four more years of rallies across the country, and insult and abuse across Social Media, the question now posed is: can anyone replace him and maintain his broad message, that Government is the Problem, not the Solution?

So who will run for the POT in 2024? The man who lost in 2020. Will anyone dare to challenge him for the leadership?

In the end, he wasn't debt and buried, but survives, and we do in fact get 'Four More Years'...and you thought it was all over...

[Stavros]

And here we are, as predicted-

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/trump-2024-election-bryan-lanza-b1613613.html

Unless Tom Cotton, or Nikki Haley decide their time has come...

[Stavros]

The chilling thought for the day is that Bannon was not being sarcastic, and that merely by making such an outrageous statement he exhibits the contempt for Democracy in the US that underlines so much of the anxiety many people, inside and outside the US have about the way the country is going, and what its divisions mean for its future governance.

"Steve Bannon (https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/steve-bannon) said a second term for Donald Trump (https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/donald-trump) should start by displaying the severed heads of Dr Anthony Fauci (https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/anthony-fauci) and FBI director Christopher Wray (https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/christopher-wray) on the White House "as a warning".
Speaking on his podcast The War Room, Mr Bannon - the president's former campaign strategist and senior counsellor - said putting their heads on pikes would be more suitable than a simple firing.
"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci, no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man," Mr Bannon said.
"I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I'd put their heads on pikes, right, I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you're gone."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/steven-bannon-behead-fauci-fbi-christophre-wray-trump-b1627108.html

[sukumvit boy]

Trump is now so hounded by debt,civil and federal lawsuits that many experts think he may leave the country . Also there is talk that he may have the audacity to "pardon himself " from the federal suites before leaving office.
Excellent article from The New Yorker here https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/why-trump-cant-afford-to-lose

[broncofan]

Trump is now so hounded by debt,civil and federal lawsuits that many experts think he may leave the country . Also there is talk that he may have the audacity to "pardon himself " from the federal suites before leaving office.
Excellent article from The New Yorker here https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/why-trump-cant-afford-to-lose
I'm going to read this right now. Without having read this article I have always wondered how the pre-emptive pardon would work. Does he have to admit the crime first? How specific does he have to be? Can they be blanket pardons for unenumerated crimes or acts? I might find out in the article or someone else, but this looks like it will be a good read. Thanks!

[broncofan]

I'm going to read this right now. Without having read this article I have always wondered how the pre-emptive pardon would work. Does he have to admit the crime first? How specific does he have to be? Can they be blanket pardons for unenumerated crimes or acts? I might find out in the article or someone else, but this looks like it will be a good read. Thanks!
Very good read. It says the issue of a self-pardon is an undecided legal question. It might not hold up in court. The reason I ask how it's done is that pardons often state the crimes or acts that are being pardoned. I don't know if Trump knows all the sources of legal liability he faces that are within the statutes of limitation. I did just see online that Nixon's pardon by Ford was a "full, free, and absolute" pardon for a time period. I don't think that should be allowed nor do I think the self-pardon should be either.

The good news is that pardons don't reach state level crimes. In New York this is a major source of legal liability he faces and the only way to avoid it is to remain President where his second term might outlast the statutes of limitation. He has possibly committed crimes for the Stormy payments and in bank loan and/or tax documents.

I wonder how his Real Estate empire can be sustained if he really can't get loans like the quoted banker in the article says. He has lots of debt coming due and foreclosures on properties would be the coup de grace for his ego.

He can probably be successful starting a media empire but I don't know if he or the people around him have the organizational ability to exploit his popularity.

[KnightHawk 2.0]

The chilling thought for the day is that Bannon was not being sarcastic, and that merely by making such an outrageous statement he exhibits the contempt for Democracy in the US that underlines so much of the anxiety many people, inside and outside the US have about the way the country is going, and what its divisions mean for its future governance.

"Steve Bannon (https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/steve-bannon) said a second term for Donald Trump (https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/donald-trump) should start by displaying the severed heads of Dr Anthony Fauci (https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/anthony-fauci) and FBI director Christopher Wray (https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/christopher-wray) on the White House "as a warning".
Speaking on his podcast The War Room, Mr Bannon - the president's former campaign strategist and senior counsellor - said putting their heads on pikes would be more suitable than a simple firing.
"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci, no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man," Mr Bannon said.
"I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I'd put their heads on pikes, right, I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you're gone."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/steven-bannon-behead-fauci-fbi-christophre-wray-trump-b1627108.htmlNope the right wing racist Steve Bannon sure wasn't being sarcastic when he made those despicable and vile comments,which got him banned from Twitter.

[Stavros]

On Pardons -I was unable to access the New Yorker article, but found this one, and this expert seems to me have a good reason why it cannot work, and not just because the President cannot be judge and jury in his own case-

"“In US v. Nixon, the Court basically said that Nixon as the subject of a criminal investigation did not speak for the government and therefore could not withhold the tapes from the prosecutor who did. This case teaches that the president cannot act in an official capacity to benefit himself against an authorized criminal prosecution."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/04/here-is-what-9-experts-say-about-whether-president-trump-can-pardon-himself.html

Ie, there is a clear distinction between a legal case involving the Presidency, and a legal case involving the President. He might say 'numerous scholars' think he can pardon himself, but 'numerous scholars' don't regard Roe-v-Wade as settled law, would happily repeal the Voter Registration Act of 1965 and probably the 14th Amendment, after all, it was a legal scholar called Scalia who demonstrated his skills in sophistry rather than law when defending the 2nd Amendment, as if nothing had happened in the intervening 240 years to render it without purpose.

But I think a lot of this is just theatre, the rebel shouting 'FUCK' in the midde of Mass, or exposing himself to women on the Subway, just because he can. And doesn't care about the consequences.

[Stavros]

Another thought which Broncofan alluded to earlier -

A) A pardon can only be given for a crime committed and judged and sentenced in a court of law, so the President would first have to identify what the cimes were, and have them prosecuted and a legal judgment made before he could pardon himself.

so

B) Is it not the case that what the President actually wants is an Exemption from Prosecution? That is not a Pardon, and I doubt it is legal, and let us not forget, it is merely conventional that a sitting President is not indicted for a crime, and that as we have seen in the last 4 years, conventions can become redundant -why some and not others, and does the elimination of one, not justify them all?

[sukumvit boy]

Very good read. It says the issue of a self-pardon is an undecided legal question. It might not hold up in court. The reason I ask how it's done is that pardons often state the crimes or acts that are being pardoned. I don't know if Trump knows all the sources of legal liability he faces that are within the statutes of limitation. I did just see online that Nixon's pardon by Ford was a "full, free, and absolute" pardon for a time period. I don't think that should be allowed nor do I think the self-pardon should be either.

The good news is that pardons don't reach state level crimes. In New York this is a major source of legal liability he faces and the only way to avoid it is to remain President where his second term might outlast the statutes of limitation. He has possibly committed crimes for the Stormy payments and in bank loan and/or tax documents.

I wonder how his Real Estate empire can be sustained if he really can't get loans like the quoted banker in the article says. He has lots of debt coming due and foreclosures on properties would be the coup de grace for his ego.

He can probably be successful starting a media empire but I don't know if he or the people around him have the organizational ability to exploit his popularity.

Thanks for the help on that broncofan . Perhaps the article can be accessed through this link if the other New Yorker link doesn't work for some people
https://muckrack.com/jane-mayer/articles

[broncofan]

Another thought which Broncofan alluded to earlier -

A) A pardon can only be given for a crime committed and judged and sentenced in a court of law, so the President would first have to identify what the cimes were, and have them prosecuted and a legal judgment made before he could pardon himself.

so

B) Is it not the case that what the President actually wants is an Exemption from Prosecution? That is not a Pardon, and I doubt it is legal, and let us not forget, it is merely conventional that a sitting President is not indicted for a crime, and that as we have seen in the last 4 years, conventions can become redundant -why some and not others, and does the elimination of one, not justify them all?
This is very well put. As you say he basically wants to have someone issue a decree giving him immunity from any unlawful act he has committed and may face jeopardy for. He would not want to state the sources of criminal liability to get clemency because it could open him to civil liability. But insofar as there is a reason to have a pardon power, it should not provide blanket immunity.

If there is a good reason to have pardon power, it should be where there is some incongruency between strict legality and morality. In the U.S. it has often been used in a corrupt way and allowed some people to get preferential treatment outside the typical judicial process.

It will be interesting to see what Trump faces in terms of lawsuits, in terms of his debts coming due, in terms of his aspiration to start a network (the New Yorker article Sukumvit posted said he needed 450 million to buy the weather channel as his vehicle). All of it I hope ends with him not taking office again.

[Stavros]

In this article, the author argues against Socialism, by advocating the sort of policies that have been associated in Europe for years.by its Sociialist parties in Government -and note he sees no role for markets or private enterprise -so what's wrong with Socialism?

"Republicans have traditionally been shy about opening the federal purse-strings for such monumental spending sprees, but this time might be different. Republican former governor John Kasich recently offered rural broadband as an alternative to socialism, and a modernized electrical grid might be sold the same way.
So the time may be right for government policies that boost jobs and reward work more highly. Unions and infrastructure don’t exactly fulfill the small-government libertarian dreams of previous decades, but they could represent a centrist alternative to the growing popularity of socialism -- and one that helps Republicans burnish their credentials with the working class they now claim to represent."
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/socialism-isnt-way-win-working-150002170.html

[sukumvit boy]

1282372
Perhaps the Biden transition team could use a few of these in Washington,I understand that they can swallow a medium sizes lawyer whole.

[broncofan]

https://twitter.com/timjhogan/status/1329562651287023624

Somebody I know asked me how Trump's lawsuits were going. I think this is the best answer I can give.

[filghy2]

I think the sight of Rudi's hair dye running with sweat was just as cringe-inducing. Was the aircon not working properly, or is this the sign of a man on the verge of meltdown?

[broncofan]

I think the sight of Rudi's hair dye running with sweat was just as cringe-inducing. Was the aircon not working properly, or is this the sign of a man on the verge of meltdown?
He hasn't been making sense for years. It doesn't seem like senile confusion but his behavior is bizarre and crazy. When people first saw that tar like stuff pouring out of his temples and didn't realize it was hair dye there was speculation that maybe he's a cyborg. I have to admit I was entertaining some of these theories. I've heard he was a respected prosecutor at one point so I was also considering demon possession because that could explain why he seemed like a typical human back in the day. To point out the obvious he's been completely bald for decades and I didn't know dyeing sideburns is a thing....it's a strangely particular form of vanity. Maybe he's doing it to hide bolts in his temples or something?

[holzz]

https://vocal.media/humans/trans-attraction-is-beautiful-not-gay-or-weird

Yep, it IS beautiful!

[KnightHawk 2.0]

I think the sight of Rudi's hair dye running with sweat was just as cringe-inducing. Was the aircon not working properly, or is this the sign of a man on the verge of meltdown?Rudy-Rambling Patsy-Giuliani bizarre press conference was a sign of a man who is experiencing a meltdown and believes in conspiracy theories.

[Jericho]

When I was a kid, the only 'image' of America I had was from the movies. You know, everyone had a swimming pool, drove Lincolns with horns on the front and women got their tits out at the drop of a hat (Though, thinking back, my movie choices may have been a bit suspect).
Which has left me confused.
How can America be *so* liberal and yet so conservative?

Which is a long way of getting around to...Boy, was the internet an eye-opener!...And that's my thought for the day.

[broncofan]

When I was a kid, the only 'image' of America I had was from the movies. You know, everyone had a swimming pool, drove Lincolns with horns on the front and women got their tits out at the drop of a hat (Though, thinking back, my movie choices may have been a bit suspect).
Which has left me confused.
How can America be *so* liberal and yet so conservative?

Which is a long way of getting around to...Boy, was the internet an eye-opener!...And that's my thought for the day.
I was going to say the tits thing may be true in Florida. And not just on spring break.

As an American my disillusionment with my country has grown enormously not just since internet but over the last four years. On any number of things we can watch other countries make different decisions and get better results and we will resist the changes out of enmity or national pride. Your post doesn't just speak to our national myths, or ways we see ourselves that aren't true, but also a lot of regional differences. We find ourselves divided sharply on so many consequential things.

Anyhow, there's lots of good and bad here depending on your preference and where you are. It kind of sucks that when we are bad at something we stick with it (healthcare, gun regulation, criminal justice).

As for Britain, nothing in film or theater prepared me for the fact that there is a great Indian restaurant on every block in London. And no matter which Indian restaurant you try it will be as good or better than Indian food you can get almost anywhere in the U.S. except in NYC. Also, you meet people of every economic and social strata and not just "posh" Brits that we see in our shows (a Fish Called Wanda is probably my favorite movie that plays on national stereotypes and the cultural divide between Americans and Brits).

[Stavros]

If the US now has a 'lame duck' President, could he be referred to as 'Donald Duck, the Quack in the White House'?

[KnightHawk 2.0]

If the US now has a 'lame duck' President, could he be referred to as 'Donald Duck, the Quack in the White House'?Yes he absolutely can. And Donald Duck The Quack In The White House fits Donald Trump very well.

[blackchubby38]

The enemy of my enemy is my friend?


Cuomo Defends Trump against ‘Unprofessional’ and ‘Really Biased’ Media

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cuomo-defends-trump-against-unprofessional-134627352.html

[sukumvit boy]

12837041283705

[blackchubby38]

Time magazine announced its nominees for the Person of the Year today. Some of them include Governor Cuomo, AOC, Dr. Fauci, BLM activists, and Angela Davis.

There are only two types of people who deserve to win the award this year. Front line healthcare and essential workers. I think they truly went above and beyond the call of duty.

[blackchubby38]

Time magazine announced its nominees for the Person of the Year today. Some of them include Governor Cuomo, AOC, Dr. Fauci, BLM activists, and Angela Davis.

There are only two types of people who deserve to win the award this year. Front line healthcare and essential workers. I think they truly went above and beyond the call of duty.

I would also like to add election poll workers to the list of essential workers.

[Stavros]

I would also like to add election poll workers to the list of essential workers.


I agree with you in both of your posts, but I wonder, is Dolly Parton the most likely to be that person?

[KnightHawk 2.0]

I would also like to add election poll workers to the list of essential workers. I completely agree 1000% on both of your posts.

[Stavros]

Dr Anthony Fauci would be an obvious choice too.

[broncofan]

Dr Anthony Fauci would be an obvious choice too.
His dedication to public health as well as his integrity and professionalism are impressive. He's not infallible but he seems to be uniformly respected among infectious disease docs and epidemiologists. His work during the AIDS crisis makes him a heroic figure but for people who didn't know him he re-established himself as someone who even Trump occasionally hesitated to criticize because of his obvious integrity in the face of partisan fantasies.

In an era in which we're struggling to find public servants committed to public welfare, in the midst of what Obama aptly termed an "epistemological crisis", he was a truly incorruptible and honest person, even if he wasn't always able to break through.

[broncofan]

What is even more remarkable is that his role in promoting public health has overshadowed the fact that he is undoubtedly an influential scientist. Consider these facts from his bio:

"In 2003, an Institute for Scientific Information study indicated that in the twenty year period from 1983 to 2002, Dr. Fauci was the 13th most-cited scientist among the 2.5 to 3 million authors in all disciplines throughout the world who published articles in scientific journals during that time frame. Dr. Fauci was the world's 10th most-cited HIV/AIDS researcher in the period 1996-2006."

These accomplishments are especially noteworthy in light of the fact that Trump called him "wrong about everything" and right-wing science deniers tried to portray him as hapless. Yet he was never drawn into an ego contest. He didn't fall back on his credentials or his achievements in science to defend his record but maintained a laser-like focus on public health as he has for decades.

Good call Stavros.

[Stavros]

I think it is clear that Fauci gets cheap remarks from his President because the President is convinced he knows all there is to know, and that on that basis, nobody knows more than he does. It may help explain his lamentable performance this year, but I suspect it is also the case that he is genuinely uninterested in science. What is just as tragic is that he seems surrounded by people who share the same perspective, incapable of protecting centuries of American knowledge if it conflicts with their personal grip on power.

Contrast that with TIME's 'Kid of the Year' and the Honorees. This is what inspiration looks and sounds like, based on a solid commitment to the people and the world around them, and if some cynic steps forward to call that 'Virtue signalling' or some disparaging phrase, look again, because the ideas they are promoting are often cost-effective, practical and really can help change something, however small, for good.

I wonder how many 15 year olds would say in answer to the question about day to day reading: "My pop-culture news is actually MIT Tech Review. I read it constantly."

Here though is one important takeway, when Ms Rao says

"And then when I was in second or third grade, I started thinking about how can we use science and technology to create social change. I was like 10 when I told my parents that I wanted to research carbon nanotube sensor technology at the Denver Water quality research lab..."

I can imagine in some schools, even some parents saying no, or the opportunity to do such things just not exist. The worst thing that can happen to any child is for a parent, a teacher, a school, or an education authority to say no, or discourage, be it for lack of interest in the child, lack of money, lack of politics. This young woman must be in a nurturing and positive environment, but I wonder how many her age her might also be conscious of what they can do, have the same opportunity? It is a problem children face everywhere, not just in the US.

But such an inspring group of young people whose creative energy to do things that benefit others stands in contrast to the highest office in the land, mired in coruption and self-regard, campaigning for a lost cause. I know where my sympathies lie, and it is with the future these young people want to create.

https://time.com/5916772/kid-of-the-year-2020/

[Stavros]

"Trump will leave office having executed about a quarter of all federal death-row prisoners, despite waning support for capital punishment among both Democrats and Republicans.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, William Barr defended the extension of executions into the post-election period, saying he will probably schedule more before he departs the justice department. A Biden administration, the attorney general said, should keep it up.
“I think the way to stop the death penalty is to repeal the death penalty,” Barr said. “But if you ask juries to impose and juries impose it, then it should be carried out.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/09/us-executions-speed-up-under-trump

Hmmmm...so to the man who held up a Bible outside a Washington DC church, and the man who give a speech defending, indeed, promoting Christian morals, what would Jesus say?

'Execute those Prisoners'

or

'Forgive those prisoners'.

Well, which is it?

[broncofan]

“I think the way to stop the death penalty is to repeal the death penalty,” Barr said. “But if you ask juries to impose and juries impose it, then it should be carried out.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/09/us-executions-speed-up-under-trump

Even if one believes the death penalty has a role in our criminal justice system and I don't, it doesn't follow that they believe its use should ever be sped up during a lame duck period. I am not defending its use, because even with procedural safeguards it's used in a biased and inconsistent way, but it's even worse if the process is expedited.

I do think there is a problem with vindictiveness in public life and the death penalty feeds into that. If it doesn't have a role in deterring crimes and the idea that it somehow provides abstract justice isn't all that coherent, its use must serve some need people have to believe bad people are punished. What purpose does the attendance of family members of the victims at executions have except to signify that closure depends on knowledge that the perpetrator is meeting the same fate as his victim (w/o denying any sympathy to these families)?

I say all of this because I've started to notice myself feeling vindictive towards people I think have violated our social compact and behaved disgracefully. But does that serve any purpose or is it really this feeling of frustration that causes people to abandon principle because they don't know how it can be maintained in others?

[Stavros]

I am sure as a law student you were asked in an essay or exam question to define the differance between justice and revenge. It goes back to the origins of human society, how animal sacrifices were used to replace human sacrifice, how the execution of humans replaced animal sacrifice, suggesting a regression in human development. Jesus on the Cross pleading that his be the last human to be murdered by another, yet hundreds of years later in England his followers enacted the most gruesme physical punishments on men, often Priests, who refused to recognize the King as the Head of the Church instead of the Pope. One such Bishop, whose name forget, was strung up in public and hanged until he was barely conscious, whereupon the noose was loosened, he was, in a manner of speaking, de-cocked rather than de-frocked, his torso slit open from his neck to his abdomen so that his intestines spilled out into the open, and then they severed his head, his arms and his feet, to leave this thing in four parts to die. No wonder that Foucault pointed out that the Guillotine when it was introduced was considered a human form of execution.

In these cases, Execution was a punishment, but also a warning, a threat -but a secure and open democracy does not need threats to function. Capital Puishment thus serves the crudest of human emotions and solves, closes nothing -are the families of the victim going to forget their child was murdered? If they are Christians, they are in every case obliged to forgive the murderer, and campaign for his release from prison. And how many prisoners on Death Row are innocent?

Revenge is not justice, for one is based on emotion, the other on reason. Just as the Proud Boys over this weekend chanted 'Destroy the GOP' so they also threatened the US with civil war, though as yet they and the other proto-Terrorist groups such as the III Percenters, the Oathkeepers and others, many of them employed as Law Enforcement Officers who wear the badges of their chosen band on their uniform, have actually killed anyone in authority.

So I suggest you not give in to the provocation which is designed to nudge you away from reason toward emotion, and retain your rational perspective. But it does beg the question, what is the new administration, in the White House and in Congress going to do when presented with the fact that LEOs openly identify with armed militias -should they not be fired and banned from holding public office? How can they swear an oath to defend a Constitution whose authority they repudiate?

What is to be done with Lawyers who, in seeking to reverse the decision of voters, argue in effect, that those votes be deemed illegal, even though they were legally cast -does this not morally ridicule the law, but in legal terms deny the application of voting law itself without the law being repealed? And is it just coincidence that in Michigan, it is not all of the votes in the State they want to be declared invalid, but only those in Counties where the majority of the population is Black?

A lot of the resentment expressed against Trump and his family is their perceived and actual violation of the norms and values that accompany high office, it is the reason why Bill Clinton's reputation was so badly damaged, while the 45th is shameless in his aim to make money from the Office -but is Biden going to just let this go and forget about it, or are all of these things signs that a rot settling into the US political system threatens to gnaw away at the whole?

[filghy2]

I say all of this because I've started to notice myself feeling vindictive towards people I think have violated our social compact and behaved disgracefully. But does that serve any purpose or is it really this feeling of frustration that causes people to abandon principle because they don't know how it can be maintained in others?

It depends what form that takes. Social norms have always been enforced by ostracism and withdrawal of cooperation from those who refuse to abide by them. I don't think it's abandoning principle to show that people can't expect to free ride on the civility of others without reciprocating.

The real problem is that this enforcement mechanism doesn't work so well under extreme tribalism where people don't care about being ostracised by the other side and know that they are unlikely to be ostracised by their own tribe as long as their actions are directed against others. But I think it's still important to try to show that people can't behave badly and not pay some price. Turning the other cheek and just focussing on setting a moral example isn't likely to achieve better outcomes.

[broncofan]

I am sure as a law student you were asked in an essay or exam question to define the differance between justice and revenge.
It's an important topic but we spent surprisingly little time on it. In Criminal law we spent a few weeks discussing the purposes of punishment and it was a mostly theoretical discussion in which we talked about types of deterrence and more abstract ideals of justice. The final exam included one fairly broad essay question asking us to analyze a particular punishment based on the various theories we had discussed.

Your post beautifully spells out the difference between justice and revenge and I agree with you about the death penalty. I think in some cases the same punishment can look either like an attempt to achieve justice or like revenge depending upon the reason the punishment is imposed. The more protections there are for defendants and the more the state tries to protect against inadvertently punishing the wrongfully accused, the less vindictive it looks.

Filghy, I agree with the entirety of your post. This first step is a reasonable response but when it doesn't work you can sometimes have a bit of a breakdown in people's character. It might even be necessary and difficult for people to ostracize those they otherwise like but think have behaved badly.

The way it works best is if the segment we're stigmatizing is small enough that they realize they have to change their behavior to be considered socially or morally acceptable. Take, for example, a public person making openly racist statements and using epithets. At this point, we can still stigmatize this and the vast majority of the population would accept the person has to at the least apologize.

But there's just too much solidarity on the right to stigmatize the things Trump is doing and too many people have decided their tribal loyalty is more important than even accepting reality. In principle I am against wishing people dead or celebrating people's deaths yet I've felt pretty mixed about the covid cases in the white house. I think, 2500 people died today because of their incompetence and they've cavalierly ignored public health warnings, I'm actually going to be annoyed if this is a walk in the park for them. In fact, it's probably more blunt than that and I wish some of them dead...there's no social value in that, and if they die of covid they don't take the place of someone else who died, but the frustration is at that level for me.

Wishing something is not the same as doing something or saying something harmful but it's on the path to social breakdown. We have no means of enforcing decent behavior among almost half the public through social ostracism and we're lucky if we can get partisan Republicans to do their jobs fairly when they're in positions of trust, either enforcing laws or interpreting them. It's a precarious position to be in.

[blackchubby38]

I believe in the death penalty for certain crimes. Not as a deterrent, but because I believe those crimes are so heinous that a death sentence is the appropriate punishment.

But my issue with the death penalty is how the method of execution keeps getting changed under the false guise of being more humane for person being executed. When instead its about making it easier for the people in the gallery to witness. That's why I think it would be better if the only people present during an execution would be the warden, a couple of guards, a priest, a rabbi, or imam (hey that could make a great joke), and the necessary medical officials.

[Stavros]

I believe in the death penalty for certain crimes. Not as a deterrent, but because I believe those crimes are so heinous that a death sentence is the appropriate punishment.
But my issue with the death penalty is how the method of execution keeps getting changed under the false guise of being more humane for person being executed. When instead its about making it easier for the people in the gallery to witness. That's why I think it would be better if the only people present during an execution would be the warden, a couple of guards, a priest, a rabbi, or imam (hey that could make a great joke), and the necessary medical officials.

We can agree that capital punishment is not a deterrent, but I cannot agree with the rest of your argument. The objections to Capital Punishment can be made on three levels -philosophical, religious and legal.

Philosophically, it is a logical contradiction to condemn murder, and then murder the person found guilty. If it is wrong for a man to hit another man over the head with a stick, hitting him back with a stick must also be wrong. If it is wrong for a man to rape a woman, or another man, it must also be wrong for the punishment to require the rapist to be raped. Murder is wrong, hitting people with a stick is wrong, rape is wrong. Replicating the crime does not resolve it.

In religious terms, with regard to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, repentence is fundamental to belief and practice. A murderer who has been executed cannot repent, and in some cases, such as a secular state, even a declaration of repentence is deemed irrelevant. And yet, in States such as the UK which is, officially a Christian State, in the 19th century the idea developed that criminals in prison ought to be rehabilitated into society, recognizing that they had 'gone astray' in their youth and as mature adults were prepared to live without resorting to crime. WIth regard to murder, Christians must forgive those who have wronged them, and a good example of this is the forgiveness expressed by a member of the Congregation of Charleston who openly said to Dylan Roof 'I forgive you'. That said, there was no Christian forgiveness in the UK when murderers were executed.

What strikes me about this, is how men and women occupying public office who make public their religious affiliation then set it aside to suddenly perform a secular 'duty' in the case of murder, while being more partisan when it comes to issues of sexuality, reproductive health, pornography and culture and related issues. thus, on religious grounds, there is a lack of consistency which enables the capital punishment that their religion ought to deny.

The legal, secular problem is probably where capital punishment is at its weakest. Time and again, and not just in the US, men and women have been executed for crimes they did not commit. In some cases they literally had no role in the murder, in others they are alleged to have been and may have been an accomplice, guilty by association. It is not just the philosophical contradiction that shapes this argument, because the State takes a legal and moral position that sets it above the citizen, granting itself the legitimate monopoly of vioence within the State. Thus a moral disgust with murder enables the State to execute, but cannot justify execution in order to protect society from further acts of murder, because the man or woman concerned is in custody -there is no need for a further act of violence.

It is irrelevant how anyone is murdered, the fact alone is all that matters. A lifetime in prison is the most sane option, and also a deserved punishment for the person concerned, if they are guilty.

The more intriguing questions, concern the reason or reasons why someone murders another, where it is not an angry reaction, a crime of passion, or a contract killing. If that person is executed, they are unable to explain why they killed. In the case of Timothy McVeigh, is it not possible that, years after the mass murder in Oklahoma City, he would have been willing to explain why he was involved, and reveal more details that were not known before?

Lastly, in the US where it still happens the judcial process is so flawed, both the guilty verdict and execution may be legally and moraly wrong (it used to happen in the UK before Capital Punishment was abolished in the 1960s).

A documentary whose title I forget, concerned the murder of a homeless man in Jacksonville, Florida in 2014 that led to the arrest of a 12-year old, Sharron Townsend, who admitted he shot the man. But no DNA evidence linked him to the victim, there was no gun, and the only possible motive was the claim by anothe homeless man that Townsend and an associate had targeted the victim before, the point being that this 12 year old was also homeless and living on the streets.
At the age of 12, Townsend ran away from a dysfunctional home after being beaten with an iron bar by his grandmother. In the first video of his interrogation, without a lawyer present, Townsend's mother offers him not a shred of love or pity or warmth, atacking him for 'throwing his life away', while the police officer also subjects him to verbal assault. At no time is he asked to explain where the gun came from, what happened, or why. When they leave and we see him put his head on the table in despair, we are seeing a 12 year old who has never know love, who has zero self-esteem, no moral compass.

We then find out this 12-year old was placed in an adult prison -an adult prison!- prior to being tried two years later and sentenced to 30 years in prison on what appears to me flimsy evidence. The lawyer who represented him at the trial might as well have been somewhere else for all the good he did. From the start, the boy's confession was considered absolute, and does not seem to ever have been challenged. Had Florida chosen to execute this boy, it would have been the capital conclusion to a disgraceful, legal mess in which justice was incidental to an act of revenge by people who took no interest in the circumstances of the crime.

So, no -it is wrong to murder in response to murder, the opportunity for forgiveness and repentence or remorse must be allowed, and the legal process that leads to a conviction and execution is too flawed to be trusted. And there are alternative forms of punishment that do not require execution.

[filghy2]

I believe in the death penalty for certain crimes. Not as a deterrent, but because I believe those crimes are so heinous that a death sentence is the appropriate punishment.

If it's not a question of deterrence then I assume your argument is that certain crimes mark a person as so irredeemable that they can only ever be a menace to society. In other words, the rationale is to remove the probability that the criminal will commit similar offences in future. I guess there's a certain utilitarian rationale to that, rather than expending resources on keeping them in jail for life, but it depends on a very high degree of certainty that they are guilty and will never reform.

[filghy2]

Philosophically, it is a logical contradiction to condemn murder, and then murder the person found guilty. If it is wrong for a man to hit another man over the head with a stick, hitting him back with a stick must also be wrong. If it is wrong for a man to rape a woman, or another man, it must also be wrong for the punishment to require the rapist to be raped. Murder is wrong, hitting people with a stick is wrong, rape is wrong. Replicating the crime does not resolve it.

I'm not sure this logic holds up. After all, the state routinely applies punishments that would be illegal if one individual did them to another. It confiscates the assets of people who illegally confiscate other peoples' assets. It also imprisons people who illegally deprive others of their liberty.

I'm not disputing that the US sets the bar too low on capital punishment, but I'm not sure its useful to apply moral absolutes to issues involving trade-offs. There's a trade-off between the certainty that the offender cannot commit further heinous crimes, and the possibility of greater deterrence, versus the chance that the person might be innocent or might not reoffend. Execution can be seen as a further step along the spectrum of severity of punishment beyond life imprisonment. The question is whether having such a further step is justifiable, given that it's irreversible. I see that as more a utilitarian issue of the benefits and costs to society than a moral one.

[blackchubby38]

If it's not a question of deterrence then I assume your argument is that certain crimes mark a person as so irredeemable that they can only ever be a menace to society. In other words, the rationale is to remove the probability that the criminal will commit similar offences in future. I guess there's a certain utilitarian rationale to that, rather than expending resources on keeping them in jail for life, but it depends on a very high degree of certainty that they are guilty and will never reform.

These are crimes that I have in mind:

Rape and/or murder of child under the age of 12.
Mass Murderers*
Serial Killers

*-This includes terrorists who acts result in the injuries and deaths of multiple people.

[broncofan]

We can agree that capital punishment is not a deterrent, but I cannot agree with the rest of your argument. The objections to Capital Punishment can be made on three levels -philosophical, religious and legal.

Philosophically, it is a logical contradiction to condemn murder, and then murder the person found guilty. If it is wrong for a man to hit another man over the head with a stick, hitting him back with a stick must also be wrong. If it is wrong for a man to rape a woman, or another man, it must also be wrong for the punishment to require the rapist to be raped. Murder is wrong, hitting people with a stick is wrong, rape is wrong. Replicating the crime does not resolve it.
.
Are there other reasons killing might be a punishment for killing when rape is not seriously proposed as a punishment for rape?

One reason may be that death is seen as the ultimate negative consequence, whether it is in fact or not, and also takes the responsibility off of the state to incarcerate someone who is exceptionally dangerous. Execution is also a 100% effective form of specific deterrence as an executed man cannot kill a guard, another prisoner, or a medic.

The fact that killing is the punishment for killing is not an attempt to teach an object lesson to the murderer by mimicking the crime. A murderer may kill someone in the most cruel of ways and the state will not copy that method. The consistency between the results only shows some proportionality between the punishment and the punished act.

I also am not convinced that when someone carries out an action as a response to a wrong that it has the same character as the wrong. It would be a technicality if I argue that when the legislature makes execution legal it is not murder but I can argue that at least some of the characteristics of murder at common law are stripped from the act. Not every intentional killing is murder and exceptions have been made for self-defense, defense of others, and lack of capacity to have a culpable mental state. In Dudley v. Stephens a court even wrestled with exempting killing and cannibalism under extreme duress.

We don't make judgments about culpability simply based on result. One example of this would be the distinction that the American legal system made between first and second degree murder. Both were intentional and neither could in any sense be justified but first degree murder requires proof of some deliberation and planning because legislatures thought that someone who committed the act coolly was more culpable than someone who may have acted out of anger.

Anyhow, I am against the death penalty because it is applied in clearly biased ways and in practice I can't imagine any value that outweighs the potential for innocent people to be executed and thereby never be able to exonerate themselves. I do think it plays into a vindictive mindset though I am not convinced the state that executes a person for a heinous crime has committed the same monstrosity.

[broncofan]

Are there other reasons killing might be a punishment for killing when rape is not seriously proposed as a punishment for rape?

Stupid joke but the perp who wanted to avoid punishment could simply consent.

[Stavros]

I also am not convinced that when someone carries out an action as a response to a wrong that it has the same character as the wrong. It would be a technicality if I argue that when the legislature makes execution legal it is not murder but I can argue that at least some of the characteristics of murder at common law are stripped from the act. Not every intentional killing is murder and exceptions have been made for self-defense, defense of others, and lack of capacity to have a culpable mental state. In Dudley v. Stephens a court even wrestled with exempting killing and cannibalism under extreme duress.


Ending a life is what it is, be it the murder or the execution of the murderer. Human societies have argued that killing a human being is morally wrong, which is why the philosophical argument is impeccable. What you are arguing about, is not some 'technicality', but the excuses societies make to justify what they have previously argued is wrong. Thus, you sub-divide all murders into categories so that you can then excuse some from execution but not others.

Philosophy has no role to play here, it is simply a form of discrimination, and it changes over time. Thus, women who have murdered abusive and violent husbands, are now more likely to be released from prison rather than executed, or detained with life sentences, an example of how a contextual understanding of the crime can lead to a less punitive sentence, though it cannot excuse the murder.

This parade of excuses parallels the contradictions in Religion, where God can comand Thou Shalt not Kill, in one part of the Bible, yet sanction stoning to death in another. The law on judicial murder or the laws of war, again, are just excuses that enable men and women to kill each other without having to bother with the pre-existing prohibition of the act (setting aside the fact that for many in uniform, killing is profoundly traumatic).

For centuries we have agonised over wars in which it is 'fair game' for Combatats to kill Combatats, but not civilians, even as the Combatants often never made the distinction, and even as I write this, men, women and children are being murdered in the Yemen, and legal cases being presented in Courts with regard to conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq where 'war crimes' are alleged to have been committed.

To me it is unfortunate that people shrug their shoulders because 'shit happens' in wars, regardless of the Military Code or the Laws of War, just as the diet of films and tv programme in which bad people get killed, has massaged the public into beiieving that what Dirty Harry does is what the cops ought to do, being moroally justified, and capital punishment in all but name. But they don't in fact identify what capital punishment is, namely a demonstration of failure, and an inability to understand the context in which crime takes place, and do something about that, be it mental health, alcohol or drug dependency, homelessness and so on.

Crucially, in the US, not only are most State executions carried out in the former Confederate States, they are proportionally more likely to be of Black prisoners. Taken as a whole, the judicial system in the US appears at times to be so incompetent in its judgement of the accused, the guilty sentence is without merit, and with a system so biased and unpredictable, the ultimate punishment might not be justified.

In a field so crowded with contradictions and incompetence, the best thing to do is stop it.

[Stavros]

These are crimes that I have in mind:

Rape and/or murder of child under the age of 12.
Mass Murderers*
Serial Killers

*-This includes terrorists who acts result in the injuries and deaths of multiple people.

Your list illustrates one of the problems -what is the difference between the rape and murder of a 12-year old and a 13-year old, or an 80-year old?

My country, like yours, has no respect for the lives of children, the bombs we make and the drones we fly kill them every day. Maybe the people in the UK and the US who make the bombs that spray the walls of a house with the brains of a two-year old should be forced to go to Syria, or Afghanistan, or the Yemen with a mop and bucket, and wash it all away.

[broncofan]

I see that as more a utilitarian issue of the benefits and costs to society than a moral one.
I have never studied philosophy though I know what utilitarianism is. I never assumed codes of morality should be absolute so that an action could never be justified if it is harmful even though it produces a better outcome than inaction. Such a system only tries to preserve the "clean hands" of the actor and seems obsessed with purity of conduct rather than long-term outcomes.

Under that system of morality killing someone in self-defense would be an immoral act. The act of intentionally killing someone produces a harm and the result of inaction cannot be used to mitigate it. The utilitarian justification is that if one doesn't act their own life be lost. But wouldn't that make us indifferent between the two outcomes in utilitarian terms when we shouldn't be? All told I like the utilitarian analysis better than one focused on absolute morality.

Maybe one can look at killing in self-defense as a positive utility outcome because the person defending himself is less likely to kill again because he acted only in exigent circumstances.

[filghy2]

Ending a life is what it is, be it the murder or the execution of the murderer. Human societies have argued that killing a human being is morally wrong, which is why the philosophical argument is impeccable. What you are arguing about, is not some 'technicality', but the excuses societies make to justify what they have previously argued is wrong. Thus, you sub-divide all murders into categories so that you can then excuse some from execution but not others.

Are you saying that If we'd had an opportunity to assassinate Adolf Hitler and thereby save potentially millions of lives we should not have taken it? That seems to me the perfect illustration of the problem with your "impeccable" philosophical argument.

I'm surprised at the primacy you are giving to the religious/moral "thou shalt not kill" argument when you would presumably object to that sort of reasoning in other contexts. Most human societies have also had strictures against homosexuality and adultery, for example, until fairly recently.

[filghy2]

The utilitarian justification is that if one doesn't act their own life be lost. But wouldn't that make us indifferent between the two outcomes in utilitarian terms when we shouldn't be?

I doubt it would be reasonable to expect someone to weigh up the value of their own life against their attacker's before deciding whether to defend themselves - though it would be reasonable to assume the attacker is less likely to be a well-intentioned person. I think the value of utilitarianism is primarily in thinking about public policy issues rather than individual actions.

[broncofan]

I doubt it would be reasonable to expect someone to weigh up the value of their own life against their attacker's before deciding whether to defend themselves - though it would be reasonable to assume the attacker is less likely to be a well-intentioned person. I think the value of utilitarianism is primarily in thinking about public policy issues rather than individual actions.
Fair point. I guess I was trying to work out what my intuition tells me about why the various examples of crimes and punishments Stavros provided don't seem morally equivalent and find a framework for that difference. I would say the person who defends himself is justified in using force because he has a reason, to protect his bodily integrity. The person initiating the confrontation is the aggressor and I don't value the harm that comes to him the same way I would the non-aggressor.

Although the justification for self-defense can be evaluated at the individual level by the person being attacked, whether the state decides to allow it to prevent blame for harming someone is a policy issue. For instance, the authorities may find that disallowing self-defense has a generally pacifying effect and causes there to be fewer instances of violence and escalation that outweigh the harm of people being unable to defend themselves lawfully. In that case I would still support the use of self-defense because it seems unjust to require someone to be helpless.

Anyhow, I agree with your analysis and the set of interests you balanced for the death penalty. Still, when I hear people talk about the hypocrisy of an actor (even the state) using force against someone who has done something abhorrent I am slightly puzzled. I think most people's first instinct is that the actions are not the same and it's not just a way of saying when I do it it's okay but when you do it we condemn it. It's because the aims of the actions are different and that qualitative difference matters to me.

[Stavros]

Fair point. I guess I was trying to work out what my intuition tells me about why the various examples of crimes and punishments Stavros provided don't seem morally equivalent and find a framework for that difference. I would say the person who defends himself is justified in using force because he has a reason, to protect his bodily integrity. The person initiating the confrontation is the aggressor and I don't value the harm that comes to him the same way I would the non-aggressor.


I agree that self-defence is a difficult one -the key must be whether defence of the self requires the death of the attacker, or attackers, because self-defence need not result in fatality. In the case of a woman physically and emotionally abused for years, it would appear the logical solution is for the woman to leave the home. In cases where it does not happen, a variety of expanations are offered, from the lack of financial independence, lack of a support network ouside the home, threats to the lives and/or custody of children, and so forth. If the State offered long-term assistance to women in such relationship the violent, fatal climax might not happen. But even if we think it is morally right that such women be released from prison, the subtle distinction in law that is being made is an example of how a crime can be re-constituted if not to excuse it, to excuse it from the consequencs other murders have. It is cherry picking, and an example of how people who make law prefer to turn themselves inside out rather than admit the law, and some of the ideas that shape it, is wrong. We cannot escape from the fact that for all its rational intent, murder is a moral issue and thus punishment will be shaped as much by emotion as by reason.

With regard to hypocrisy, on one level the State has every right to kill people- but that doesn't mean that it should do so. The modern Liberal State trades the liberty of the individual in return for protecting that individual from harm, either from external attack or internal chaos/civil war resuting in loss of life and property. It is what Max Weber called the 'legtimate monoly of the use of force' or violence, though not all states arm their law enforcement officers. Moreover, that violence is, or has become a rare event, with the possible exception of the USA, where the level of lethal force used by LEO has become a national issue generating BLM and counter-protest movements. If it has become more common in the UK than it was in decades gone by, some woud argue it is because there are more guns avaiable to criminals than was common before. When armed poiice shot dead Mark Duggan, they claimed they had intelligence that he was en route to a crime which would involve firearms, which they claim he threw out of the window of the car he was in befoe he was shot. It may be the case he was shot dead by 'trigger happy' cops, but it is also the case that he ought to have been arrested without a shot being fired, as was also the case with Jacob Blake, who could have been arrested without a shot being fired, using the legtimate force of the State, namely handcuffs.

The hypocrisy exists because the State, in the case of the UK, has a national faith, and it is Christian, and much of our law has been shaped by Christian values, but as I have pointed out, the reality is that whether it is the whole of the Bible, or the New Testament, the emergence of secular law based on reason rather than faith, has undermined the moral or religious foundation of the State. It is acute in the US because the Revolutionaries of 1776 were practising Chistians, de Tocqueville in his book on Democracy in America records his view that the communites he visited were bound together by their Christian faith, and we have had a steady diet of all this 'God Bless America' stuff since Ronald Reagan began it. Yet virtually zero application of Christian belief in the formation and prosecution of the law, which enables Christians to violate the most profound of their beliefs, that the Crucifixion be the last example of man killing man. One is left with the feeling that when it comes to judicial killings, Dirty Harry has the edge on Jesus of Nazareth, though to be fair to Eastwood and Siegel, there are issues in that remarkable film that go beyond the simple argument about whether or not it is right to kill, such as the Miranda Rights which motivated and shape the story of the film

The US is in a crisis on this issue, because there is a contradiction between the 2nd Amendment, and the right of the Liberal Democratic State to own the monopoly on the use of force -indeed, having so many citizens armed when the State exerts its monopoly at three levels -the armed forces, the National Guard, armed Law Enforcement Officers- undermines the authority the State has, given to it by the People. For that reason, citizens must by definition be disarmed, though to do this, the 2nd Amendment must be repealed in its entirety.

As for executions, none of them are necessary once a criminal has been secured in prison. There is no moral justification for it, no relgious justification, no rational or philosophical justification. It must end.

[Stavros]

Are you saying that If we'd had an opportunity to assassinate Adolf Hitler and thereby save potentially millions of lives we should not have taken it? That seems to me the perfect illustration of the problem with your "impeccable" philosophical argument.

I'm surprised at the primacy you are giving to the religious/moral "thou shalt not kill" argument when you would presumably object to that sort of reasoning in other contexts. Most human societies have also had strictures against homosexuality and adultery, for example, until fairly recently.

The philosophical argument is secure, because it is about language and ideas, rather than specific historical examples. The Hitler analogy is weak. Millions were sent to their death, had their homes destroyed, their lives ruined through injury and permanent displacement, because Kaiser Wilhelm had ambitions for Germany and an emotional loathing of the British, but at a time when there was a strong element of 'Social Darwinism' among military types and nationalists who could not be stopped because so many approved, and indeed, millions willingly volunteered on all sides in the First World War. It could not be stopped before it happened, even though from a strategic point of view, the South African War of 1899-1902 like the First World War that followed, was supposed to be a short sharp shock to recalcitrant Boers, but slithered into a war lasting years, costing millions even the Empire didn't have, with an unsatisfactory outcome. Far from learning from their mistakes, the Generals marched into Belgium and France to make the same mistakes all over again.

As for Hitler, look at it this way: imagine someone asks -is it right to kill one man to save the lives of 1,000? Then, is it right to kill 1,000 to save the lives of 100,000? You can then ask, is it right to kill six million to save a civilization numbering multiple millions? Unless you provide a philosophy that argues in favour of the extinction of human life, there is no argument to be made, and if you do wish to consult such a philosophy, then the 'Race' based ideas of Adolf Hitler -which he did not develop himself alone- not only justify mass murder, but in their application, prove that it produces an outcome worse than the problem it intended to solve. This is not a philosophical paradox, it is just bad philosophy.

Once you argue that it is right to kill, there is no reverse in the discourse, all that follows must then twist and turn in its variations of the definition of murder, of punishment, and for what purpose, when the end result is one person as an individual or the State, murdering another?

[broncofan]

Once you argue that it is right to kill, there is no reverse in the discourse, all that follows must then twist and turn in its variations of the definition of murder, of punishment, and for what purpose, when the end result is one person as an individual or the State, murdering another?
Ultimately we have to be able to reason about the quality of people's actions and about what is true or not. It was true that Hitler was a threat to mankind who annihilated millions and would have annihilated millions more if unopposed. It wasn't true that Jews controlled the world or were responsible for the things he claimed.

I know everyone is aware of that and isn't the point of the analogy but it is the reason I don't think the justification for killing Hitler somehow leads to wanton killing. I don't see how a fictitious motive for killing is the same as a motive to avoid the harm of someone who would kill more. There's either some basis in truth to the claim that someone is a threat or there isn't.

That is to say I understand there's a risk that justifying killing can lead to the kind of murder Hitler engaged in, but if we're not worried about the slippery slope, and we are concerned with human welfare, would killing him with the intention of avoiding further atrocities be harmful? And to whom?

[filghy2]

As for Hitler, look at it this way: imagine someone asks -is it right to kill one man to save the lives of 1,000? Then, is it right to kill 1,000 to save the lives of 100,000? You can then ask, is it right to kill six million to save a civilization numbering multiple millions? Unless you provide a philosophy that argues in favour of the extinction of human life, there is no argument to be made, and if you do wish to consult such a philosophy, then the 'Race' based ideas of Adolf Hitler -which he did not develop himself alone- not only justify mass murder, but in their application, prove that it produces an outcome worse than the problem it intended to solve. This is not a philosophical paradox, it is just bad philosophy.


If you are familiar with philosophy you ought to know that this argument is an example of reductio ad absurdum, which is definitely bad philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

In essence, you are arguing that because if is hard to know where exactly to draw the line the only correct place is at the extreme end of the spectrum (absolute prohibition). In general, that is a dubious position, both logically and ethically. Almost every legal and public policy issue involves difficult questions about where to draw lines and where to allow exceptions to general rules. Absolutist solutions don't actually resolve these difficulties; they just attempt to ignore them by removing human judgement.

[broncofan]

Almost every legal and public policy issue involves difficult questions about where to draw lines and where to allow exceptions to general rules. Absolutist solutions don't actually resolve these difficulties; they just attempt to ignore them by removing human judgement.
On the last page you said the U.S. sets the bar too low for capital punishment. I was curious whether you mean procedurally, in terms of making sure the person isn't innocent, or legally, in terms of what acts qualify for the punishment.

Also, since we're talking about this issue in the abstract it's difficult to know what is means in the real world. Have you seen a country that has applied the death penalty in a way that its benefits exceed the costs? If not, do you think it could be feasibly administered in such a way that it is beneficial?

For my part I think the U.S. does try to reserve it for especially heinous crimes. Procedurally there are many opportunities to challenge guilty verdicts by proving actual innocence or rights violations. Yet it is difficult for people to agree about what makes one murder so heinous as to deserve the death penalty while another is not. That is, it's difficult to do it categorically and without any human judgment. And in practice the doubt often exists about guilt, even if the procedures to prevent unjust conviction are ample. Given the frailties of any legal system the potential for innocent people to be executed seems like it would always be too great for whatever meager benefit it might provide.

Yet I've seen cases where I've thought if the institution were reserved specifically for such instances I would not object.

[Stavros]

If you are familiar with philosophy you ought to know that this argument is an example of reductio ad absurdum, which is definitely bad philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

In essence, you are arguing that because if is hard to know where exactly to draw the line the only correct place is at the extreme end of the spectrum (absolute prohibition). In general, that is a dubious position, both logically and ethically. Almost every legal and public policy issue involves difficult questions about where to draw lines and where to allow exceptions to general rules. Absolutist solutions don't actually resolve these difficulties; they just attempt to ignore them by removing human judgement.

Let me try to clarify this by drawing a distinction between he act of killing, and the punishment that might follow. By its nature, killing is an absolute condition, there is little else one can say about it, other than to describe the way in which the act was committed, and then ask why. As we have seen, it then becomes a matter of sophistication in which the killing is either justified, or excused, even though the moral argument is without blemish- it is, and always has been wrong to kill.

We then watch people tie themselves in knots in an attempt to justify or explain the killing, and in the case of Hitler and those who shared his idelogy, killing millions did not disturb their sleep because they first re-classified human beings as Untermensch, thus may have believed they were not exterminating human beings at all, but an inferior version.

What this debate thus pivots on is the multiple excuses that are brought into play to excuse the killing, or class the killng as beng so horrible it deserves a different kind of punishment to other forms. Thus we have Murders in the Degrees 1, 2, and 3. We have Crime Passionel; Self-Defence; honestly, I didn't mean it, guv; serial killers, terrorists -these are the lines that are drawn, and all of them are just excuses to justify punishment.

I accept that society has created these excuses in an attempt to resolve what often are profound dilemmas -I am note ignoring that- but it seems to me that if the original position is solid, namely that killing is wrong, then by definition capital punishment is wrong. The volume of hypocritical garbage that seeks to justify death is merely that. At least if we can understand why one person has killed another, we might be able to deal with the consequences without repeating the crime.

[filghy2]

On the last page you said the U.S. sets the bar too low for capital punishment. I was curious whether you mean procedurally, in terms of making sure the person isn't innocent, or legally, in terms of what acts qualify for the punishment.

Probably both, but I haven't studied the issue enough to be sure. To be clear, I don't have a firm view either way on capital punishment, for the same reason. My concern has really been about the right way to frame the issue. I can see a theoretical case for capital punishment in limited circumstances, but it turns on some empirical questions that I don't know enough about.

[filghy2]

Let me try to clarify this by drawing a distinction between he act of killing, and the punishment that might follow. By its nature, killing is an absolute condition, there is little else one can say about it, other than to describe the way in which the act was committed, and then ask why. As we have seen, it then becomes a matter of sophistication in which the killing is either justified, or excused, even though the moral argument is without blemish- it is, and always has been wrong to kill..

I remain puzzled why you keep asserting this point (which is central to your argument) as if it were a truism, when it is far from self-evident.

To my mind, your argument is tautological:
1. Killing is inherently wrong.
2. Therefore, no act of killing can be justified, even if it might result in outcomes that are desirable (eg saving innocent lives).

The problem is that point 1 is an a priori axiom, rather than something that is established by reasoning.

Contrary to your assertion that killing is killing, there are many shades of grey, which the laws recognise and try to deal with. Your own acceptance that it may be justified for self-defence acknowledges that. Even self-defence has shades of grey - eg what is a proportionate response to a threat?

[broncofan]

Probably both, but I haven't studied the issue enough to be sure. To be clear, I don't have a firm view either way on capital punishment, for the same reason. My concern has really been about the right way to frame the issue. I can see a theoretical case for capital punishment in limited circumstances, but it turns on some empirical questions that I don't know enough about.
I know you were discussing how we should analyze the decision rather than stating it should be implemented. It is an interesting discussion even in the abstract and I didn't mean the questions as a challenge but just thought it might be interesting.

One of the things I've noticed when I've read case histories of the appeals someone on death row has filed is that you can convince yourself they've had opportunity to present anything exculpatory or challenge the evidentiary rulings in the initial trial, but you're not that much more certain they are guilty. For instance, if you're 98% confident they are guilty and that is a number generally considered higher than estimates of what "beyond a reasonable doubt" means, ten years of them having a chance to challenge the evidentiary rulings or find new evidence doesn't move that number much. On the other hand, there are some cases where the evidence is so overwhelming to begin with. I think if I could find instances where I think the death penalty should be implemented it would be this subset of cases and for murders that were especially cruel.

I suppose nobody here thinks some people who have committed heinous crimes should be executed based on a notion they "deserve it". I found some old notes on theories of punishment and theorists try to make a distinction between retribution and revenge, the former thought to be a more objective attempt to mete out a fitting and just fate for the criminal and the latter based on anger and a desire to inflict pain. I can see the distinction between the two but I'm not sure what role someone getting what people believe their actions warrant unless its impacts are more than psychic.

[broncofan]

I think if I could find instances where I think the death penalty should be implemented it would be this subset of cases and for murders that were especially cruel.

I guess this point is pretty obvious since the two relevant factors are certainty of guilt and severity of the crime. I guess I mean that while procedural protections are important I would want there to be a much different burden of proof for death penalty cases. The review shouldn't simply be that they had a fair trial, that a rational jury could believe they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and that there were no violations of their constitutional rights during the trial. It might be for instance that of cases in which a capital crime has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, there is substantially more corroborative evidence and substantially fewer doubts that exist than in most cases in which a guilty verdict is rendered.

[Stavros]

I remain puzzled why you keep asserting this point (which is central to your argument) as if it were a truism, when it is far from self-evident.

To my mind, your argument is tautological:
1. Killing is inherently wrong.
2. Therefore, no act of killing can be justified, even if it might result in outcomes that are desirable (eg saving innocent lives).

The problem is that point 1 is an a priori axiom, rather than something that is established by reasoning.

Contrary to your assertion that killing is killing, there are many shades of grey, which the laws recognise and try to deal with. Your own acceptance that it may be justified for self-defence acknowledges that. Even self-defence has shades of grey - eg what is a proportionate response to a threat?


I agree with a lot of your points, but the key to me is that having decided killing is wrong, human societies then seek to justify killing, or the termination of life, by making excuses, or producing reasonable justifications. I think you agree that justifying the exterminatiion of humans having first re-defined them as 'sub-human' is wrong, because the science is wrong, it is morally wrong, it is politically wrong, indeed, wrong in every aspect.

If we move away from killing in terms of criminal law, then obvious cases that present themself occur in medicine, where a physician must make a life or death decision, or the case of Abortion. The Hippocratic Oath burdens all physicians with the injunction to save lives, but medically, I think we all recognize this is not always possible. Someone who has a cardiac arrest and fails to respond to resuscitation efforts dies, not because the physicians failed to keep him alive, but owing to the cardiac arrest, yet it is still the responsibility of the lead physician to call a halt to proceedings and pronounce the person dead. Choosing not to operate on someone with cancer so advanced there can be no useful medical remedy is again not killing,and yet in the medical as well as human context many, probably most doctors regret their choice of action. Maintaining life support systems on someone who has had catastrophic injuries or malfunction of the brain, classing them to be in a 'persistent vegetatve state' is another example, where physicians can often be challlenged by relatives who insist that one day the patient may regain consciousness. The US case of Terri Schiavo is well documented here.

Abortion is an intriguing problem, and one that I have wrestled with without ever satisfying myself on what is right. Again, if we take the killing is wrong position, and the reigious argument supports it, then terminating a pregnance must be wrong. But, just as there is a context with abused women who murder their partner, pregnancy itself, though it is not an illness, can create medical complications that threaten the life of the mother and/or the child. Using your Hitler analogy, the argument would be that a termination is justified if it will save the life of the mother. A further argument can be made with regard to the foetus, if for some reason its gestation has failed to produce a being with limbs and organs that will sustain it after birth, and thus a decision is made that its life is not 'viable' or some other term, and a termination takes place.

I think these are different arguments from those which have recently proposed that life begins with conception. The arguments I refer to have a basis in medical science and relate directly to the medical condition of the mother and the foetus, whereas the religious arguments take one simple fact of science -life begins with conception- and remove all other scientific considerations to rest on a political argument. The obvious science fact is that the life conceived may not survive the gestation period, and women do miscarry. The poltical point is that in the US, according to the 'life is sacred' lobby, as soon as a woman becomes pregnant, she appears to lose her rights as a citizen, and the 'rights of the child' assume greater importance in law and morality. This is where I find my attachment to the principle that killing is wong, detached from the surrounding politics, because I cannot accept that a foetus has either equal, or superior rights to the citizen in which it resides. Moreover, the same people insisting that their argument is right, have no respect for the life of the child once it is born, do little or nothing if that child is born in poverty, little or nothing if the child is disabled, and in some cases, Abort the life if it is living in Baghdad or Afghanistan or Syria or anywhere else a bullet or a bomb can detect it.

If there is a distinction, it is between ending a life because there are no existing alternatives in medical terms, and ending a life through an act of violence. Abortion presents a challenging case if the reason is that the woman concerned doesn't want the pregnancy to continue because it would interfere with her career choices, because the pregnancy would prove she had been unfaithful to her husband, in other words, all but medical reasons. I don't know how to resolve this, because the woman must have rights as a citizen, while the criminalization of Abortion or the creation of term limits that make it all but impossible in some US States, removes all debate on the reasons a termination might be justified, though some have conceded a termination might be justified if the pregnancy was the consequence of rape, or incest, and in the past there is the shocking case of the 11-year old who was raped, forced to give birth to child, and by her parents to marry the man who raped her.

We have burdened ourselves with a noble declaration that life is sacred, and proved time and again that we as humans are chronic violators of our own laws and values, seeking as many excuses as justifications as we can, sanctioned by God or Man. I have not been able to solve the problem, which might be one of 'human nature' though I think, pace Steven Pnker, humanity in general may be less violent and lethal in the 21st century than we were in the 1st or 2nd. But it does also mean, I believe, that when it comes to punishment, there can be no justification for the State to kill, and on the basis of what I have said before, I see no argument in favour of execution. But as a character once said in the feeble Graham Greene book that bear's its title, 'It's a battlefield'.

[broncofan]

I agree with a lot of your points, but the key to me is that having decided killing is wrong, human societies then seek to justify killing, or the termination of life, by making excuses, or producing reasonable justifications. I think you agree that justifying the exterminatiion of humans having first re-defined them as 'sub-human' is wrong, because the science is wrong, it is morally wrong, it is politically wrong, indeed, wrong in every aspect.
In law, defenses to murder are categorized as excuses or justifications. When someone kills but is not guilty by reason of insanity that is categorized as an excuse. If they are mentally incompetent or have severe psychosis and don't understand the nature of the act most people would think they are not as culpable as someone who has killed in order to rob his victim. It is an excuse not in the colloquial sense but in the legal sense because the act itself is not justified but they are not held accountable for it.

Self-defense is a justification. And it's very difficult to argue that someone who had a subjective belief they were going to be killed which is objectively reasonable should not be able to kill to save their own life.

Since we've found justifications and excuses that are exculpatory, we can't just say it is too difficult to assign degrees of culpability. The belief that a person is sub-human can't be used to justify killing but it is also a false premise. Most true premises would not provide a justification for killing.

It is difficult to codify degrees of culpability and determine which instances of killing might not be culpable but I can't imagine a good outcome if we didn't try.

[filghy2]

I agree with a lot of your points, but the key to me is that having decided killing is wrong, human societies then seek to justify killing, or the termination of life, by making excuses, or producing reasonable justifications.

But isn't it normal that we hold certain actions to be wrong in general, but allow that there are some circumstances in which such actions may be justified? I suspect this applies to just about every ethical standard you can think of. For example, lying is generally wrong but may be justified in some circumstances (eg if telling the truth would put someone at risk), Stealing is generally wrong, but most of us would accept that it may be justified if the alternative was starvation.

You seem to be concerned that we are on some ethical slippery slope, where more and more exemptions to the rule are being allowed. I don't see much evidence for this. In most countries we are probably more careful about human life now than we have been at any time in history.

[Stavros]

But isn't it normal that we hold certain actions to be wrong in general, but allow that there are some circumstances in which such actions may be justified? I suspect this applies to just about every ethical standard you can think of. For example, lying is generally wrong but may be justified in some circumstances (eg if telling the truth would put someone at risk), Stealing is generally wrong, but most of us would accept that it may be justified if the alternative was starvation.

You seem to be concerned that we are on some ethical slippery slope, where more and more exemptions to the rule are being allowed. I don't see much evidence for this. In most countries we are probably more careful about human life now than we have been at any time in history.


I agree, but re-iterate the cardinal point, which is the prohibition on killing that has been fundamental to 'Western Civilization', whether it is derived from Greco-Roman Law, or the Bible. You say that it is normal for humans to condemn an act which they then enact, and as Broncofan points out, the Law has devised a language which either excuses -in the legal sense of the word- or justifies the murder it also says is wrong. This seems to me to be the key problem with murder in general, and murder as a form of punishment enacted by the State.

Yes, we set ethical standards of behaviour we then fail to meet, but look at what this has meant, historically. It means, for example, that the Christian faith which has The Lord's Prayer as one of if not its most succinct statement of belief, has failed to honour it, and in spectacular fashion, whether it is the slaughter of over a million devotees of the 'Cathar heresy' (as defined by the Roman Catholic Church), the gruesome public executions of Tudor England, or the combined actions of the Spanish, the French and the British from the Americas to Africa and Australasia that led to the estimated slaughter of 100 million.

Fundamental to this is the concept of Civilization, not a neutral concept, that embarked on a global mission to replace one form of behaviour by another, in which Christian priests and followers based their mission on the basic assumption that the people they encountered, for example in the Australia integrated into a European Empire, were heathens and savages. As recently as 1919, Genral Jan Smuts, when devising the Mandates system of the League of Nations, justified Germany's African and Pacific colonies in the lowest tier, Mandate C, because "the German colonies in the Pacific and Africa, are inhabited by barbarians, who not only cannot possibly govern themselves, but to whom it would be impacticable to apply any ideas of political self-determination in the European sense".

This is not some everyday flaw in human nature, but a deliberate use of the theory and practice of civilisation that in both undermined the very principles on which it was erected. On such a basis, for the State to then arrogate to itself the right to execute may be seen as merely the icing on the inedible cake -as Christians we forgive your sins, or maybe we don't, but are going to kill you anyway.

At the very least, we ought to acknowedge that Capital Punishment has no connection to Christianity, indeed, contradicts it. As for your statement "In most countries we are probably more careful about human life now than we have been at any time in history", again, this might be true inside the State, but the indiscriminate bombing by 'us' of numerous countries around the world, suggests a complete indifference to human life and the suffering incurred, thus Western Civilization finds a way to replace its Religious values with the actualité that is the nihilism of 9/11, ISIS, and the Cartel violence of Mexico and Central America, majority Catholic countries.

This is the focus of most of my critique, so I understand your points and agree with most of them with regard to the everyday violations that on one level, make us 'the crooked timber of humanity' -but do we not also need fundamental values and ethics as human socities, and if we set ourselves such elevated goals, can we not try to at least strive toward them? And in doing so, stop Capital Punishment in all its forms, everywhere, from the head chopping monsters of Saudi Arabia -Israel and the USA's closest allies in the Middle East- hanged by crane in Iran, lethal injections in Texas -and so on. And it is easy to achieve, because in an hour from now, all countries can issue a declaration saying it will not longer happen.

[broncofan]

A cost benefit analysis will often hinge on how one values different interests. It can then be defended even when a straightforward application of it would produce a result many find repellent because of the injustice it exacts in particular cases.

If the death penalty results in 5 innocent people who are executed but deters 10 killings should we support its implementation? Would you rather be someone who is murdered in random circumstances or spend 10 years on death row for a murder you didn't commit, face mental anguish at all of your last ditch efforts to exculpate yourself, receive false hope while waiting for a last minute pardon and then be clinically killed in front of a gallery of people who believe you're a murderer? I guess a utilitarian analysis could subsume these justice concerns by valuing this experience as more than twice as awful as the average killing that's been deterred, but it still signifies some difficulty in its application.

The design of our criminal justice system, which has been described by the maxim of let 99 guilty men go free for every one innocent man convicted also seems to weight the concerns in ways that are not mathematically straightforward. I can actually think of many more examples, including one that I mentioned, which is the possibility that providing a justification of self-defense causes more people to overreact than to successfully defend themselves. It's still possible to believe that while harms flow from allowing for the doctrine it provides a measure of justice in individual cases that is indispensable.

None of this is to say that abstract ideas of justice are more important than a cost-benefit analysis of which punishments we support but that just as there are ways in which we can carefully dissect the wrongfulness of similar acts, we can also be especially vigilant about the harm done by wrongful convictions and other difficult to measure injustices.

[broncofan]

Hypothetical: ten people in a room and authorities know that one of the ten people plans to kill 100 people (you could also say 1000 people with a 10% chance of success or 100 people expected value) in an explosion at some later date. They do not know which person it is and each person has an equally likely chance of being the guy. If the law allowed authorities to apply for a warrant subject to a thorough review process to kill when such killing is likely to save lives, would they be justified in shooting 10 people to save 90 people net?

If not why not? And no I'm not designing an essay exam. I think the question relates to the use of utilitarian theory for every criminal justice question. But perhaps not. Maybe we just use different multipliers for things;.

[Stavros]

Hypothetical: ten people in a room and authorities know that one of the ten people plans to kill 100 people (you could also say 1000 people with a 10% chance of success or 100 people expected value) in an explosion at some later date. They do not know which person it is and each person has an equally likely chance of being the guy. If the law allowed authorities to apply for a warrant subject to a thorough review process to kill when such killing is likely to save lives, would they be justified in shooting 10 people to save 90 people net?

If not why not? And no I'm not designing an essay exam. I think the question relates to the use of utilitarian theory for every criminal justice question. But perhaps not. Maybe we just use different multipliers for things;.


This debate is getting lost, I think, and I am not sure how much more I can contribute or just repeat myself. Your proposition has already been tried, as with the justification for the aerial bombardment of Afghanistan in 2001-2002, and the regime change in Iraq in 2003, all designed to 'kill them before they kill us', in which the majority of the victims had nothing to do with terrorism, and if you saw the brilliant but agonising documentaries, For Sama, and Once Upon a Time in Iraq, you shoud ask how you think your country benefited from its collective punishment of Arabs and Muslims, how much it cost (guesstimate -trillions of dollars) and why it has resulted in a dangerous instability in Iraq and Syria, while the Taliban who were the target in 2001-2002 because they gave a safe haven to bin Laden, are still just a proverbial inch away from being part of if not the Government of Afghanistan -your President was even prepared to invite these mass murderers to talks at Camp David.

Americans are fed a diet in film and tv of 'kill the bad guys' to the extent that when a cop kills a black man, it is instantly followed by the 'revelation' that the victim was a thief, a career criminal, a wife-beater-anything to justify the act. Marvellous Super-heroes don't negotiate, they don't convene summits to sign peace treaties, they kill.

It feeds into the mentality in which options are narrowed, it is either/or, and on balance, the guns have it. For a country whose population brays as it prays, this sickening, craven submission to violence is not going away, it stains the nation, and offers little hope for progress, unless and until it is stopped. No amount of sophistry or utilitarian bollocks is going to sort it out. The mere fact your President ran away to play golf 100 times when millions of Americans fell victim to Covid-19 and hundreds of thousands died sums up the cultural swamp into which you have sunk over the last four years, with the Federal Executioner adding to the toll for a simple reason: he doesn't care. And that is, in the end, the summary of much of this debate. Thank you and good night.

[broncofan]

I will just state my last view and move on. I enjoyed the discussion for the most part.

I probably should have stated why I included the hypothetical. It was intended to cast doubt on whether utilitarianism will always point in the right direction, namely because most people would respond to the hypothetical by either refusing to accept its premises or be certain that authorities should not knowingly kill innocent people to save lives (which is my position). The U.S. criminal justice system does seem to try to avoid extremely unjust outcomes with rules of evidence, burdens of proof, and multiple layers of appeal. If one simply wanted to achieve the greatest overall utility the focus for punishment would be more on recidivism rates than whether someone had an especially malicious mindset. I think for most crimes the two are often consistent with each other. If someone commits a willful and wanton act the assumption is they're more likely to do so again.

People who are sacrificed to save lives will often be the most vulnerable. People who are wrongfully executed are often minorities and poor, and the person the shipwrecked sailors decided to eat to save three lives in R v Dudley and Stephens was the cabin boy who was the most sick and didn't have a family. The court in that case decided not to accept an excuse that eating the cabin boy would result in one death rather than four. I agree with them there, even though four lives is better than one, nobody volunteered to be the sacrifice and nobody ever does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens

I read a few articles on theories of criminal justice and altered my view slightly to a combination of retributivist and utilitarian. Utilitarian in the sense that I think deterring bad outcomes should be the focus of punishment but retributivist in that I don't think it should only be forward looking but also consider how malicious an act is and how just a punishment is in individual cases. I'd have to read more on the subject to know how these two theories can be synthesized.

[filghy2]

Here's a couple of articles on why we shouldn't worry too much about government borrowing.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-12-04/federal-deficits-don-t-work-like-credit-cards
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/opinion/biden-republicans-debt.html

Basically, governments are not like households in that they don't have to ever repay their debt. (Individual bonds may have to be repaid, but new bonds can always be issued to someone else.) The only real constraint is that the debt cannot grow indefinitely faster than the economy. The cost of servicing the debt is actually low at present because interest rates historically low, and this is likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future.

The real issue is whether the debt is being used to finance something socially productive. Borrowing for public investment and/or to support the economy when it is weak is likely to be good - borrowing to give your donors a tax cut when the economy is already doing well is not.

[Stavros]

Here's a couple of articles on why we shouldn't worry too much about government borrowing.

Basically, governments are not like households in that they don't have to ever repay their debt. (Individual bonds may have to be repaid, but new bonds can always be issued to someone else.) The only real constraint is that the debt cannot grow indefinitely faster than the economy. The cost of servicing the debt is actually low at present because interest rates historically low, and this is likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future.

The real issue is whether the debt is being used to finance something socially productive. Borrowing for public investment and/or to support the economy when it is weak is likely to be good - borrowing to give your donors a tax cut when the economy is already doing well is not.

Thus spake the Prince of Pragmatism! I agree with you on one level, but have questions and points to make on others.

First, there is a practical reason. The whole basis of a loan is that it is paid back, indeed, that the person or the bank making the loan also make a profit from the interest charged on the loan. The US Government might be able to borrow trillions at low-to zero interest rates, no such blessing is awarded to Malawi or Chad, because when the investors look at the condition of those economies, they know that loans are too much of a risk. If the State does not have the natural or human resources to generate the money to pay back the loan, an additional, political fact, corruption in government, might also deter. Moreover, debt is internatonal -who actually owns the US debt? Not all Americans.

There have been numerous arguments that the Chinese could dispense with their American investments, and the US economy spiral into free-fall, as was said of the Petro-Dollar dimension to the US investments by Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf in the 1970s and 1980s. I don't know if this would be done, I think the argument is that if the Chinese or the Arabs 'pulled the plug' as it were, the rest of the world economy would also be adversely affected. As you know more about this aspect of economics, your view on it would be most welcome.

Second, debt goes to the heart of the capitalist economy. You don't need to agree or disagree with either Smith or Marx, but it is clear that what the circulation of capital does, is create the conditions for a profitable return on the investment, while the speculation on the size of that pure profit enables the capitalist to borrow more to fund more investments, the assumption being that nothing will interrupt the circulation, an economic blood clot in the artery, or, as happens to Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, a ship sinking out at sea, taking all his investments with it. When Shylock asks for his share of the investment to be returned, he is merely giving capital investment the moral dimension that libertarian economists try to avoid, which Shakespeare does not.

And yet, these American libertarans, like Rand Paul and Paul Ryan, created a 'debt clock' during the Obama administration to demonstrate the immorality of using 'other people's money' to fund a, b and c when their view is that these decisions ought to be made by the market, and not by Government. Indeed, I read somewhere the other day someone in either the House or the Senate intends to hold Biden's feet to the fire by reviving this dimension of Beltway politics.

What strikes me about the current situation, is that we have rarely in the last 100 years (not sure of the time-line but a long one) ever had such persistently low interest rates in advanced capitalist countries, indeed in some areas negative interest rates.

There is a chapter by the often brilliant, often controversial economic historian, Charles Issawi -Why Japan? (in Ibrahim Ibrahim [ed] Arab Resources: the Transformation of a Society -Croom Helm, 1983) in which Issawi asks why Japan has been economically more successful than Egypt. One of the reasons is that interest rates encourage peope to save. By saving so much of their money in the post-1945 era, and not spending it on foreign holidays, fancy houses and so on, Japan accumulated enough capital to fund private and public investments without having to go deep into debt or borrow from other governments. You could argue it was based on massive investments in Japan by the US for reconstruction after 1945 which Egypt did not -and could not receive- but Issawi then brings in other factors -Japan's hostility to immigration being a salient/controversial one- to offer an intriguing profile of one country in conrast to another.

And thus it would seem that States that did borrow beyond their means, that their debt did indeed grow faster than the economy- African states following the end of Empire have had this problem, compounded by weak state structures and corruption permeating all levels of society. At one point in the late 70s, America's buddy (and Muhammad Ali's too, though let's face it, he was a political moron) Mobutu Sese Soko pleaded with the people of Zaire, 'look, if you are going to steal, at least don't steal so much' - and coming from one of Africa's most disgusting thieves, this was not even outrageous.

So, somewhere in this argument, is a dose of pragmatic financing for wealthy countries like the US -I almost added the UK but let's no tempt fate- where debt is a nightmare from which other countries are trying to awake. It will become a political baseball in the US over the next four years, but I return to this peculiar problem of interest rates, because like taxes, I don't think we can carry on without raising them. The UK it seems to me, has got to raise interest rates, and also raise income tax or there will be an endless level of debt, and if economic growth does indeed decline over the next, say five years, then we will have the kind of crisis that you imply in the relationship between debt and growth.

Lastly, one wonders how much longer Trump can finance and re-finance his loans. He may have made over $100m profit from the Presidency, we don't yet know, and one wonders why a Billionaire needs to borrow a dime, but I would not be surprised if his Hotels and Golf clubs have lost a substantial amount of revenue this year, given that they were losing money for the three years before this one. A year or two ago I also read of a tenant in Trump Tower Manhattan who complained his condo though not worthless, was not attracting buyers, so it may be that the Brand, on which Trump bases so much of his loot, may be tainted and in danger of undermining his legacy. For years, this rent collector from Queen's got lucky, now it seems, his luck is running out. Well, I have tissues, if he needs them. But I shall pretend to be a selfish capitalist on this occasion, and deny him access to them.

[broncofan]

Thus spake the Prince of Pragmatism!
I was thinking the caustic count of consequentialism and you the acerbic archduke of alliteration (or dispassionate deacon of deontology maybe). If it helps I earned the title of smarmy sultan of syncretism honestly, though I don't love the adjective.

Have a good holidays everyone. Interested in discussing whatever Trump and his legal team are doing next week, though perhaps in the election thread. We'll see what the news cycle is by then. Be well!

[sukumvit boy]

"Now boys,be nice!" And happy holidays to you two.

[Stavros]

It was a light-hearted remark as I think most people know.

I also wish everyone the best possible Christmas you can have in these challenging times. I decided to roast half a leg of lamb this year having eaten other people's food for the last 5 Christmases. Smoked Salmon from the Orkney Islands (a gift from old friends), roast potatoes and yes, Brussel Spouts will be washed down with what I hope is an impressive Barolo (because the price was impressive!) and for the seafood, a Gewurztraminer from Alsace.

One last thing before we all head off to the -library, the kitchen? Thomas Friedman in today's New York Times speculates that if Trump retains control of the Republican Party then 'responsible Republicans' may have to form a new party of their own. This puzzles me, because it means abandoning 'the Party of Lincoln' to take a major gamble that if they leave the existing Republican Party they will take their voters with them. When, in the UK MPs from the Conservative and Labour Parties who either left in disgust or were thrown out by their leaders created a new Party, it fell apart within months and as far as I know no longer exists (Change UK). Crucially, the MPs lost the seats they contested in the 2019 election because the voters did not support them.

Surely, it is Trump and his followers who ought to set up a new party?

Anyway, I was struck by this response from a reader called Socrates (!) whose comment to Friedman's article is cut and pasted below.

Times Pick


Evan McMullin: “... there is still no home for Republicans committed to representative government, truth and the rule of law, nor is one likely to emerge anytime soon.” In actuality, there is a political party committed to representative government, truth and the rule of law: the Democratic party....and in Europe, Canada or Australia, the Democratic Party would qualify as the 'Conservative' party in all those countries.... because America has been so hijacked to the extreme right for the last four decades that the Democratic Party is now conservative...and the Republican party is simply Crazytown.Name a Republican public policy that resides in evidence-based reality and you'll get the null set.Today's Republicans don't even want to conserve the Earth; Democrats do.Today's Republicans have no fiscal discipline; the Democratic inclination to 'tax and spend' is actually much more conservative than the Republican record of 'borrow and spend'.The #1 successful way to reduce abortions is....providing free and low-cost modern contraception to poor women....that's a Democratic solution.....as opposed to defunding all contraception, which makes the problem worse.How about the one-person-one-vote principle ? Sounds pretty conservative, right ? And yet the Republican Party has been attacking that principle with a vengeance for decades.The Democratic party is actually more conservative than today's Republican Party, which is little more than a radical cult of resentment.
44 Replies2744 Recommend

Opinion | Will Trump Force Principled Conservatives to Start Their Own Party? I Hope So - The New York Times (nytimes.com) (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/opinion/trump-republicans-party.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage)

[filghy2]

Thus spake the Prince of Pragmatism! I agree with you on one level, but have questions and points to make on others.

First, there is a practical reason. The whole basis of a loan is that it is paid back, indeed, that the person or the bank making the loan also make a profit from the interest charged on the loan. The US Government might be able to borrow trillions at low-to zero interest rates, no such blessing is awarded to Malawi or Chad, because when the investors look at the condition of those economies, they know that loans are too much of a risk. If the State does not have the natural or human resources to generate the money to pay back the loan, an additional, political fact, corruption in government, might also deter. Moreover, debt is internatonal -who actually owns the US debt? Not all Americans.

There have been numerous arguments that the Chinese could dispense with their American investments, and the US economy spiral into free-fall, as was said of the Petro-Dollar dimension to the US investments by Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf in the 1970s and 1980s. I don't know if this would be done, I think the argument is that if the Chinese or the Arabs 'pulled the plug' as it were, the rest of the world economy would also be adversely affected. As you know more about this aspect of economics, your view on it would be most welcome.

Second, debt goes to the heart of the capitalist economy. You don't need to agree or disagree with either Smith or Marx, but it is clear that what the circulation of capital does, is create the conditions for a profitable return on the investment, while the speculation on the size of that pure profit enables the capitalist to borrow more to fund more investments, the assumption being that nothing will interrupt the circulation, an economic blood clot in the artery, or, as happens to Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, a ship sinking out at sea, taking all his investments with it. When Shylock asks for his share of the investment to be returned, he is merely giving capital investment the moral dimension that libertarian economists try to avoid, which Shakespeare does not.

And yet, these American libertarans, like Rand Paul and Paul Ryan, created a 'debt clock' during the Obama administration to demonstrate the immorality of using 'other people's money' to fund a, b and c when their view is that these decisions ought to be made by the market, and not by Government. Indeed, I read somewhere the other day someone in either the House or the Senate intends to hold Biden's feet to the fire by reviving this dimension of Beltway politics.

What strikes me about the current situation, is that we have rarely in the last 100 years (not sure of the time-line but a long one) ever had such persistently low interest rates in advanced capitalist countries, indeed in some areas negative interest rates.

So, somewhere in this argument, is a dose of pragmatic financing for wealthy countries like the US -I almost added the UK but let's no tempt fate- where debt is a nightmare from which other countries are trying to awake. It will become a political baseball in the US over the next four years, but I return to this peculiar problem of interest rates, because like taxes, I don't think we can carry on without raising them. The UK it seems to me, has got to raise interest rates, and also raise income tax or there will be an endless level of debt, and if economic growth does indeed decline over the next, say five years, then we will have the kind of crisis that you imply in the relationship between debt and growth.

To be clear, I was talking about the situation for advanced economies that borrow in currency that they issue. Developing countries are different because they have little capacity to borrow in their own currency, which makes them more vulnerable because a fall in the currency increases the value of the debt. I'm not aware of any advanced economy having a crisis due to government debt issued in its own currency (and this has been tested to extremes in Japan). All such crises in recent decades have involved foreign-currency debt (including Greece, which had no way to issue more euros).

I don't think owing money to foreigners is inherently bad - again, it depends on what it is used for. People have been worrying a crisis caused by foreigners pulling their money out of the US for at least 50 years, as your example suggests, and it hasn't happened. The problem with the idea that China might pull out to punish the US is they they can't do that without also punishing themselves, because the value of their investments would plunge.

The capitalist economy does depend on the flow of credit, and that makes it vulnerable to a credit crunch, as occurred in 2008 (and was a regular feature until the Great Depression led to a change in economic policy thinking). However, the real problem there is private borrowing, not government borrowing - in particular because the banking system (which borrows short-term to lend long-term) is inherently vulnerable to panics. The fact that governments were willing to borrow and issue guarantees to support the economy was what prevented the 2008 financial crisis for becoming another Great Depression.

The underlying reason interest rates are so low is that there are not enough profitable private investment opportunities to absorb the supply of saving. This seems to be generally attributed to structural changes such as technology and the shift toward a services economy. It's not clear why interest rates would rise unless something changes those underlying factors - otherwise trying to increase interest rates would just increase the imbalance.

Incidentally, I'm not sure why pragmatism should regarded as less worthy than idealism. To my mind pragmatism means viewing issues in terms of the balance of positive and negative effects of alternative options (informed by empirical evidence), rather in terms of some overarching 'big idea'. I'm pretty sure that far more misery over the course of human history has been caused by idealists than by pragmatists. The Nazis and Communists were both idealists. Religious fanatics are idealists. The libertarians you refer to are idealists.

[Stavros]

The underlying reason interest rates are so low is that there are not enough profitable private investment opportunities to absorb the supply of saving. This seems to be generally attributed to structural changes such as technology and the shift toward a services economy. It's not clear why interest rates would rise unless something changes those underlying factors - otherwise trying to increase interest rates would just increase the imbalance.

Incidentally, I'm not sure why pragmatism should regarded as less worthy than idealism. To my mind pragmatism means viewing issues in terms of the balance of positive and negative effects of alternative options (informed by empirical evidence), rather in terms of some overarching 'big idea'. I'm pretty sure that far more misery over the course of human history has been caused by idealists than by pragmatists. The Nazis and Communists were both idealists. Religious fanatics are idealists. The libertarians you refer to are idealists.

Thank you for this intriguing post. You probably know there are claims that we are in the fourth wave of the industrial revolution, chracterised by digital economics. But to me this is not an industrial revolution, and as an ageing idealist with pragmatic tendencies, my view is that the industrial revolution ended in the 1960s and petered out in the 1970s, if by industrial we mean the mechanical or manufacture of goods -this does not mean that hard goods are no longer produced, but it does mean that entirely new industries have not emerged, merely changes to the means of production.

Since the 1980s services and telecoms have outpaced traditional industry, but I don't see this as an industrial revolution, and the question is this: have developments since the 1980s taken Capitalism to a new level, of global particiation in global markets -allowing for the industrial expansion of China which in my view rescued the global economy from a decade of low-growth- or has the consequence been an end to Capitalism as we have known it since 1776, with no coherent replacement other than State-directed economics?

The point about interest rates is not just that they are at an all-time low, but that there are now below zero interest rates, which begs the question: what is this capitalism that does not return a profit on an investment, and proclaims in advance it will not do so? One of the many flaws in Marx's critique of Capitalism, is that the worker had nothing but his labour to sell, and in return received as wages nothing more than he could survive on. In reality, and ironically because of militant worker's Unions, even a modest increase in wages has enabled some workers to put money in an interest-yielding account, so that, at least in theory and allowing for a stability in interest rates, a worker doing so at the age of 25 would have more money in the account when 60, whereas the contemporary situation suggests there is no point saving money at all, that any money in a below zero-interest account is merely pure profit for the bank. This is not Capitalism, but if so, what is it?

On another level, low-to-zero interest rates are a trick which Governements have been using since 2008 to use 'Quantitative Easing' to find financial solutions to the problems they created without having to lose their hair worrying about when and how to pay it all back. Thus Marx again, but correctly so -as he described Capitalism as a fish eating is own tail, we see Governments encouraging the Banks to lend money they can't get back, and then themselves borrowing money to give to the banks so they remain solvent -Murray Rothbard, Von Mises, maybe even Adam Smith might have said,'let them fail', indeed, let the banking system collapse, and then re-build it from zero, because what they would see if they were alive, is the State taking command of the economy even when the Marshals are self-declared free market -or in Trump's phrase, 'Fair Market'- actors, as crystal clear a contradiction of Capitalism as you can find.

Thus for all of Boris Johnson's jolly-wallah optimism for Brexit Britain, the questions that undermine it concern fundamental aspects of the Free Market Capitalism on which Brexit is based, economically -where are the jobs going to come from that sustain a Capitalist economy? What is the long term impact of low-to-zero interest rates on an ageing population if, 30 years from now, the mean cohort of working people have no savings for their old age at a time when the State too might not have the funds to sustain pensions? Surely as the whole point of Saving is to set money aside for the future, low-to-zero interest rates for individuals is little short of a kick in the face? Not to enjoy one's retirement -and a retirement in which spending has been based on savings as pensions rather than income. From what I see now, in 30 years time if not before, there will be an incomes crisis as pervasive and destructive as Covid-19.

Interest rates must rise, or the economy is doomed, though I suspect the British economy as we have known it is doomed anyway, at least the one that I have known since I started work in 1968. What replaces it, I don't know, but it seems to me that for all the glad morning bullshit of Libertarians like Steve Baker, the State is going to be in command of the economy for some time to come. But I could of course be wrong, and everyone will be rich in the course of time. But long after my time.

[broncofan]

https://twitter.com/keithedwards/status/1345796238722129923

This is 4 minutes of the audio. This is a felony and he really has to be prosecuted. I don't care what the political fallout is. Either you can legally threaten election officials to "find" votes for you or you can't. And if you can then we are not a country of laws. For fucks sake.

[KnightHawk 2.0]

https://twitter.com/keithedwards/status/1345796238722129923

This is 4 minutes of the audio. This is a felony and he really has to be prosecuted. I don't care what the political fallout is. Either you can legally threaten election officials to "find" votes for you or you can't. And if you can then we are not a country of laws. For fucks sake.Completely agree 1000% that Donald Trump actively interfering in an election and pressuring
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to change the results in Georgia is a felony, and he really should be prosecuted for this criminal act. And it's time for the spineless cowards in the GOP to stand up and do what's right.

[filghy2]

Interest rates must rise, or the economy is doomed.

I don't understand your logic, but you seem to have it the wrong way around. If you want interest rates to be higher then we need to restore the economy to healthy growth first. We can't restore the economy to healthy growth by raising interest rates.

Interest rates are just the price of money. Like any price, their purpose is to balance demand and supply. It makes no more sense to say the interest rate should be at some arbitrary level than it would to say the price of apples should be kept at some level even if there was a glut of apples. The only 'natural' rate of interest is the one that would balance the economy at non-inflationary full employment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rate_of_interest

If you want interest rates to be higher to encourage saving you should actually be in favour of more government borrowing because that is the only feasible alternative. Otherwise we have the problem illustrated by Keynes'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift If everyone tries to save more at the same time the result will be counterproductive because the impact on the economy causes incomes to fall. Somebody (ie government) needs to spend more to avoid this outcome.

[broncofan]

This is about 10,000 on my list of complaints right now but since the first 9,999 all deal with Trump and the Republican party I figure I can discuss it to avoid being repetitive.

There are people who insist the slogan "defund the police" means something and is useful. Defund literally means that you remove all funding from an institution. When people respond by saying they don't want to live in a society without any police force they are told that the phrase means something else. Invariably if they say, "why not choose a phrase that means what it says?" they are subjected to personal attack.

What does the phrase mean? If the phrase doesn't evoke that meaning in the listener why is it a good slogan?

[Stavros]

I don't understand your logic, but you seem to have it the wrong way around. If you want interest rates to be higher then we need to restore the economy to healthy growth first. We can't restore the economy to healthy growth by raising interest rates.

Interest rates are just the price of money. Like any price, their purpose is to balance demand and supply. It makes no more sense to say the interest rate should be at some arbitrary level than it would to say the price of apples should be kept at some level even if there was a glut of apples. The only 'natural' rate of interest is the one that would balance the economy at non-inflationary full employment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rate_of_interest

If you want interest rates to be higher to encourage saving you should actually be in favour of more government borrowing because that is the only feasible alternative. Otherwise we have the problem illustrated by Keynes'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift If everyone tries to save more at the same time the result will be counterproductive because the impact on the economy causes incomes to fall. Somebody (ie government) needs to spend more to avoid this outcome.

My unsatsfactory reply is to broadly agree with you. I think the dilemma is one of the short-term versus the long-term and the fact that short-termism is politically expedient but merely delays sensible decision making to later and probably someone else. A balanced economy allows for spending and saving, the original point I made being that interest rates are essential for capitalism in the long term.

This article in the FT looks at this current problem with regard to Pension Funds, and illustrates why I think interest rates must rise at some point over the next 12 months.
https://www.ft.com/content/c95deea4-03e2-11ea-9afa-d9e2401fa7ca

An additional oddity is the claim that lockdown's have helped people save rather than spend money, not sure about that. Brexit too will probably lead to a decline in income in the UK over the next five years, so I see a decade of depression looming, and can't see how sub-zero interest rates help anyone, as it would mean low spending plus low levels of saving, and that makes recovery harder to achieve and slower. On the other hand one reads that when we are released from the Covid prison, people are going to spend like crazy, but will they? The future looks as miserable and messy as the present, but I am probably wrong, and in a way I hope I am, as I would also like to go places other than my local high st before I die.

[sukumvit boy]

I was recently reading about how the 'Black Death' in the 16th century revitalized the economy of Europe creating new jobs and significantly improving the lives of the 'middle class' and actually creating the first real 'middle class. Of course they lost as much as half the population so it doesn't really apply to the Covid-19 pandemic in the same way ,but I think we will see some significant changes related to more people working from home , attending meetings and conferences online ets.

[blackchubby38]

This is about 10,000 on my list of complaints right now but since the first 9,999 all deal with Trump and the Republican party I figure I can discuss it to avoid being repetitive.

There are people who insist the slogan "defund the police" means something and is useful. Defund literally means that you remove all funding from an institution. When people respond by saying they don't want to live in a society without any police force they are told that the phrase means something else. Invariably if they say, "why not choose a phrase that means what it says?" they are subjected to personal attack.

What does the phrase mean? If the phrase doesn't evoke that meaning in the listener why is it a good slogan?

Anytime you have to explain what your slogan really means, then its not a good slogan. But that's not even the worse one that I have heard. Here are some other ones:

All Cops Are Bad.
Abolish the Police
Abolish Prisons.

[broncofan]

Anytime you have to explain what your slogan really means, then its not a good slogan. But that's not even the worse one that I have heard. Here are some other ones:

All Cops Are Bad.
Abolish the Police
Abolish Prisons.
Why would anyone ever want to make a policy proposal sound more extreme than it is? Isn't it enough to do justice to the policy? Bernie does that a lot. He will propose a policy that is much more reasonable than he makes it sound.

He'll then say, "billionaires shouldn't exist!!!". I'm not offering an opinion one way or another but I saw his tax proposals and many billionaires would continue to be billionaires while paying a wealth tax. I'm not saying our agenda has to be predicated on not spooking super rich people but if you're proposing that people have to give back so that we can fund healthcare and college tuition then just say that. If you're proposing that we reform the police, don't say defund the police. If you're saying some police officers are racist, don't say all. And then don't dig in when people try to correct your asinine statement.

[blackchubby38]

Why would anyone ever want to make a policy proposal sound more extreme than it is? Isn't it enough to do justice to the policy? Bernie does that a lot. He will propose a policy that is much more reasonable than he makes it sound.

He'll then say, "billionaires shouldn't exist!!!". I'm not offering an opinion one way or another but I saw his tax proposals and many billionaires would continue to be billionaires while paying a wealth tax. I'm not saying our agenda has to be predicated on not spooking super rich people but if you're proposing that people have to give back so that we can fund healthcare and college tuition then just say that. If you're proposing that we reform the police, don't say defund the police. If you're saying some police officers are racist, don't say all. And then don't dig in when people try to correct your asinine statement.

Have you gotten called a racist yet because you disagree with the notion that all cops are bad?

My favorite is when Mayor De Blasio once said, "There is a lot money out there, but its in the wrong hands". So who gets to decide whose hands are wrong and how do you propose making sure it gets in the "right" hands.

[sukumvit boy]

I was recently reading about how the 'Black Death' in the 16th century revitalized the economy of Europe creating new jobs and significantly improving the lives of the 'middle class' and actually creating the first real 'middle class. Of course they lost as much as half the population so it doesn't really apply to the Covid-19 pandemic in the same way ,but I think we will see some significant changes related to more people working from home , attending meetings and conferences online ets.
Sorry , I meant the 14th century ,around 1350.

[Stavros]

I was recently reading about how the 'Black Death' in the 16th century revitalized the economy of Europe creating new jobs and significantly improving the lives of the 'middle class' and actually creating the first real 'middle class. Of course they lost as much as half the population so it doesn't really apply to the Covid-19 pandemic in the same way ,but I think we will see some significant changes related to more people working from home , attending meetings and conferences online ets.

The context is intriguing because of the ways in which Capitalism has adapted since the end of the Industrial Revolution. The Black Death in England took place when the Wool trade had created lucrative markets for English products in Italy and the Low Countries as they were known (Holland, Brabant, Flanders etc), but the depletion of so many people and the natonal income seems to have encouraged the King to raise money through taxes which in turn led to Peasant Revolts, notably that led by Wat Tyler in 1381. There is a theory that English Kings were in fact weak in this era- there were plenty of them through the Plantagenet era, not that any died a natural death, and relied too much on local Barons, who were as weakened by the Black Death as everyone else, with the additional problems that erupted in the Wars of the Roses in the succeeding century. Thus it is argued the Plague and the Wars established land as a commercial rather than a political value, based on its products, and laid the basis for the transition out of Feudalism and into mercantile capitalism which expanded in the Tudor period with Henry VIII and the effective nationalization of the Monasteries and their wealth to the King's benefit, with Henry's creation of market towns offering local people a larger share of the wealth they produced (one by-product being the school in Stratford-upon-Avon that Shakespeare attended, staffed by reasonably well-paid for the time, and well-educted teachers from nearby Oxford). The formation of the Honourable East India Company in 1600 and the previous expeditions to America thus mark the transition from mercantile to industrial capitalism albeit interrupted by the Civil War of the 17th century. Barrington Moore has tried to chart the developments out of Feudalism into Capitalism in England (and other countries) in his ambitious and maddeningly long and often incoherent Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966).

The big difference between then and now, is that industrial capitalism required a huge mass of workers, whereas even contemporary industry requires only a fraction of that labour -think of the car plants that employed thousands which now employ hundreds, plus robots; and the services industry which may employ substantial numbers of people in aggregate, but often in small clusters.

I am not sure what will change, but I thik we have talked before about the way Cities might change if the daily commute to an office block changes radically, and suburban areas become more important for people working from home. Interestingy, if companies survive and thrive, but don't have costs relating to the rent and utility bills of large city-based office space, does this mean the workers will receive a larger share of the company profits not spent on rent, water, electricity and gas?

A digital, online economy requires people with computing skills, but does it also mean a more alienated workforce that does not share the same space with other workers and create a sense of common endeavour? Marx's argument that the collective consciousness of the proletariat be a pre-requisite for a worker's led revolution might, as the means of production has evolved, become closer to Durkheim's concept of anomie- in the future there might be no strikes or worker's protests and marches -workers might just not turn on their computer, drop out, work at a slower rate, or give up and commit suicide.

Because I think humans are social animals, I wonder how atomized labour can be before it causes distress and mental illness. Psychologically people need human contact through family, work, friends and neighbours, and if one disappoints then the others can compensate. If none do, there is a problem. We are also living through an era when the gap between rich and poor is vast, and the argument that wealth should be re-disributed more equally written off as 'Communism' or 'socialism' -so at the moment I am not sure that the long term economic growth that followed the Black Death will follow Covid-19. Those lucrative market relations between England and Italy for example, did not survive the decline of the Port Cities or Venice and Genoa in the 16th century -at one time the Mayor of Southampton which had a buoyant trading link to Genoa was an Italian called Cristoforo Ambrosio who married an English woman and changed his name to Christopher Ambrose. The fracture in the English-European trade that resembles Brexit to an extent, also begs the question if China and the 'West' can maintain the momentum of globalization that has characterised the last 30 odd years, and right now it looks like, globally, we may be entering a decade of depression- but that's my glass half empty view.

[broncofan]

Have you gotten called a racist yet because you disagree with the notion that all cops are bad?

I do think that while occasionally you will find someone call someone bigoted in bad faith, often reckless accusations are a good barometer for how many people within a group feel their viewpoint and experience is not well understood. So while I'm not defending someone saying a person is racist for not agreeing all cops are bad, I think it comes from a place of anger and frustration rather than malice. There is also the suspicion that some people are only offering a placating response that defers a solution and that urgency is needed. Urgency may be needed but the response still needs to be calibrated.

If all cops are bad, then one is bad by virtue of becoming a cop rather than because they've abused their authority. Yet I know there is a legitimate way for police to use their authority and protect vulnerable people. It's therefore also possible to recruit more people who are motivated by that mission than who seek to abuse their authority.

Yes I agree that De Blasio's statement is typically useless. I'm more interested in solutions that are based on ensuring ethical conduct, fairness which can be promoted through regulations, and opportunities for mobility. The last concern is promoted by education, healthcare, and a good social safety net.

[sukumvit boy]

The context is intriguing because of the ways in which Capitalism has adapted since the end of the Industrial Revolution. The Black Death in England took place when the Wool trade had created lucrative markets for English products in Italy and the Low Countries as they were known (Holland, Brabant, Flanders etc), but the depletion of so many people and the natonal income seems to have encouraged the King to raise money through taxes which in turn led to Peasant Revolts, notably that led by Wat Tyler in 1381. There is a theory that English Kings were in fact weak in this era- there were plenty of them through the Plantagenet era, not that any died a natural death, and relied too much on local Barons, who were as weakened by the Black Death as everyone else, with the additional problems that erupted in the Wars of the Roses in the succeeding century. Thus it is argued the Plague and the Wars established land as a commercial rather than a political value, based on its products, and laid the basis for the transition out of Feudalism and into mercantile capitalism which expanded in the Tudor period with Henry VIII and the effective nationalization of the Monasteries and their wealth to the King's benefit, with Henry's creation of market towns offering local people a larger share of the wealth they produced (one by-product being the school in Stratford-upon-Avon that Shakespeare attended, staffed by reasonably well-paid for the time, and well-educted teachers from nearby Oxford). The formation of the Honourable East India Company in 1600 and the previous expeditions to America thus mark the transition from mercantile to industrial capitalism albeit interrupted by the Civil War of the 17th century. Barrington Moore has tried to chart the developments out of Feudalism into Capitalism in England (and other countries) in his ambitious and maddeningly long and often incoherent Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966).

The big difference between then and now, is that industrial capitalism required a huge mass of workers, whereas even contemporary industry requires only a fraction of that labour -think of the car plants that employed thousands which now employ hundreds, plus robots; and the services industry which may employ substantial numbers of people in aggregate, but often in small clusters.

I am not sure what will change, but I thik we have talked before about the way Cities might change if the daily commute to an office block changes radically, and suburban areas become more important for people working from home. Interestingy, if companies survive and thrive, but don't have costs relating to the rent and utility bills of large city-based office space, does this mean the workers will receive a larger share of the company profits not spent on rent, water, electricity and gas?

A digital, online economy requires people with computing skills, but does it also mean a more alienated workforce that does not share the same space with other workers and create a sense of common endeavour? Marx's argument that the collective consciousness of the proletariat be a pre-requisite for a worker's led revolution might, as the means of production has evolved, become closer to Durkheim's concept of anomie- in the future there might be no strikes or worker's protests and marches -workers might just not turn on their computer, drop out, work at a slower rate, or give up and commit suicide.

Because I think humans are social animals, I wonder how atomized labour can be before it causes distress and mental illness. Psychologically people need human contact through family, work, friends and neighbours, and if one disappoints then the others can compensate. If none do, there is a problem. We are also living through an era when the gap between rich and poor is vast, and the argument that wealth should be re-disributed more equally written off as 'Communism' or 'socialism' -so at the moment I am not sure that the long term economic growth that followed the Black Death will follow Covid-19. Those lucrative market relations between England and Italy for example, did not survive the decline of the Port Cities or Venice and Genoa in the 16th century -at one time the Mayor of Southampton which had a buoyant trading link to Genoa was an Italian called Cristoforo Ambrosio who married an English woman and changed his name to Christopher Ambrose. The fracture in the English-European trade that resembles Brexit to an extent, also begs the question if China and the 'West' can maintain the momentum of globalization that has characterised the last 30 odd years, and right now it looks like, globally, we may be entering a decade of depression- but that's my glass half empty view.
Barrington Moore couldn't be more "maddening and sometimes incoherent" than Hannah Arendt ,could he? she certainly could have benefited from a read of William Strunk Jr. or E B White.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Strunk_Jr.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._B._White

[filghy2]

I was recently reading about how the 'Black Death' in the 16th century revitalized the economy of Europe creating new jobs and significantly improving the lives of the 'middle class' and actually creating the first real 'middle class. Of course they lost as much as half the population so it doesn't really apply to the Covid-19 pandemic in the same way ,but I think we will see some significant changes related to more people working from home , attending meetings and conferences online ets.

There are other historical instances where destructive events led to changes for the better - the post-WWII recovery is one that comes to mind. I'm sure there are also many cases where such events exacerbated existing problems. It depends on whether the qualities of the system promote resilience - particular, the capacity to learn the right lessons and make necessary changes. I'm sure I don't have to tell that your own country has big problems in that regard.

Jared Diamond has a recent book (Upheaval) on how countries have been able to emerge from crises and change for the better, though I haven't got around to reading it yet.

[Stavros]

Barrington Moore couldn't be more "maddening and sometimes incoherent" than Hannah Arendt ,could he? she certainly could have benefited from a read of William Strunk Jr. or E B White.


As I have said before, Arendt's essays and her book on Eichmann are her best work. It is a pity some academics splurge -Michael Mann's formidable volumes on The Sources of Social Power (4 volumes, over 2,400 pages) are anchored on a robust theory which is one of the most useful tools for analysing power with reference to States and Empires -but it takes a lot to read through such a dense thicket of information and analysis. It is often worth it, but I wonder how many people have actually read the volumes in their entirety?

Never heard of Strunk and White before. A model of historical writing is Kenneth Robinson's The Dilemmas of Trusteeship (1965) -a superb condensed appraisal of the British Empire in 95 pages.

[Stavros]

There are other historical instances where destructive events led to changes for the better - the post-WWII recovery is one that comes to mind. I'm sure there are also many cases where such events exacerbated existing problems. It depends on whether the qualities of the system promote resilience - particular, the capacity to learn the right lessons and make necessary changes. I'm sure I don't have to tell that your own country has big problems in that regard.

Jared Diamond has a recent book (Upheaval) on how countries have been able to emerge from crises and change for the better, though I haven't got around to reading it yet.

There was an interesting discussion on cars on Radio 4's consumer programme, You and Yours, mostly about the vogue for renovating classic cars, how lucrative it can be, and how the high volume manufacturers (rather than amateurs, or the niche producers like Aston Martin) are now looking at this market.

It raised questions about how the end of the combustion engine will change the retail profile across the UK and other countries as electric vehicles don't need to fill up with gas/petrol, don't need spark plugs, or engine oil. In terms of volume, can they have a future? The arguments also raised the prospect of classic cars becoming luxury items that people will use for pleasire driving rather than functional things like transport for work, the school run etc. This in turn raises the question, if we move away from fossil fuelled transport, will non-electric vehicles with carbon emissions be banned? I assume a viable business servicing electric vehicles will emerge to take the place of traditional cars, but will it compensate for what is lost as we move away from what we have known?

But then arises the question- where does electricty come from?

[broncofan]

https://wvmetronews.com/2021/01/06/w-va-delegate-just-sworn-in-among-the-rioters-storming-u-s-capitol/

I have much more faith in Biden's DOJ to charge and prosecute this motherfucker than the current DOJ. Can't wait to hear the outcome of his case.

[broncofan]

The company that makes voting machines that have been the center of conspiracy theories is called Dominion. They are suing lawyer Sidney Powell for defamation and have said they're not interested in settling. They want to proceed to trial and are suing for 1.3 billion dollars.

When Trump is no longer in office and no longer is immune to suit he's going to have to be a lot more careful than he's been as well. Should be fun to watch the Dominion case.

[sukumvit boy]

As I said earlier I wouldn't be surprised if he tries to pardon himself and/or flees the US to someplace like the UAE . Someplace without an extradition treaty with the US,and he does have 'properties' in the UAE and he would certainly want someplace with gold plated bathroom fixtures ,not on of those "shithole countries".

[sukumvit boy]

Also, I was really surprised to see how easy it was to break into a building on Capitol Hill ,WTF. I heard that the White House security director resigned.

[Stavros]

So much outrage from the usual suspects now that Trump's Twitter feed has been halted. But is this an attack on free speech?

1) Presidents of the US managed to communicate with the public without Twitter for over 200 years, and are under no obigation to use it. It is a case of 'nice to have, not need to have'.

2) Twitter is a private company, not a media outlet of the US Government, it can permit and ban any user it wants to.

3) As President and Citizen, Trump can use multiple other outlets to express himself without being censored, and can, as a multi-billionaire, invest in his own social media platform and/or website/blog, create his own Newspaper, TV and Radio Stations, build his own Library, Museum- there are multiple options. So will he dip into those $3 billion and fund his own campaigns?

[filghy2]

3) As President and Citizen, Trump can use multiple other outlets to express himself without being censored

I don't think he will ever lack for platforms on right-wing media. Why should he care about anything else given those are the only people he tries to appeal to, and all he wants to hear s uncritical adulation?

[filghy2]

Also, I was really surprised to see how easy it was to break into a building on Capitol Hill ,WTF. I heard that the White House security director resigned.


There's a good discussion of the failures here. There seem to have been some unaccountably bad judgements made.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/08/capitol-police-failure-456237

I notice the usual suspects are arguing that it's really the fault of the left because police were afraid to respond forcefully after the outcry over their response to BLM protesters.

[Stavros]

Here is a question, what do the supporters of Trump actually want from Government? We know there are a diverse group of Christian Fundamentalists, New Wave Fascists, Neo-Nazis, Armed Militias, QAnon conspiracy bots -but in practical terms what do they want?
-To impose Christianity as the official religion of the USA?
-To expel all Black people from the US, followed by Muslims, Asians, Jews and Latinos?
-To make same-sex relations illegal?

We know what they are agains, but what are they in favour of?

[filghy2]

Here is a question, what do the supporters of Trump actually want from Government?

I doubt that many of them have any clear idea how to get there, but I think what unites them is that they want to return the USA to something like its 1950s state, when the predominance of white heterosexual Christians was unquestioned, before civil rights, before feminism, before environmentalism, before political correctness, before big government and its 'nanny state' restrictions - a time when (in their minds) people like them were free to do as they liked.

[broncofan]

I notice the usual suspects are arguing that it's really the fault of the left because police were afraid to respond forcefully after the outcry over their response to BLM protesters.
I'm curious how a fully erected gallows made its way to the foreground. How people were able to plan to hang Mike Pence without the FBI noticing some planning on usual forums. We're still waiting to find out who brought the pipe bombs and whether the guy arrested with napalm in his truck had coordinated with everyone else. I'm not suggesting authorities intentionally let it happen but we're going to need some time to figure out how there were so many failures. And not just with capitol police.

The DOJ will be under the control of Biden in 11 days. I expect finding out everything about the planning that went into this and the institutional response by our law enforcement agencies will become a greater priority then.

[broncofan]

I'm also not suggesting there was one plan or that everyone there was a co-conspirator to the same thing. Everyone who entered the capitol committed a bunch of federal crimes, but I think we will find some whose plans were more explicit and violent.

[broncofan]

One last thing: for those who are curious about the progress of identifying the people involved in the attack you can follow this guy on twitter
https://twitter.com/jsrailton

His work was featured in a new yorker article by ronan farrow that came out yesterday or something. I don't have a link but I'm sure it comes up with google search. The story was about a recent identification but more are coming in.

[Stavros]

I doubt that many of them have any clear idea how to get there, but I think what unites them is that they want to return the USA to something like its 1950s state, when the predominance of white heterosexual Christians was unquestioned, before civil rights, before feminism, before environmentalism, before political correctness, before big government and its 'nanny state' restrictions - a time when (in their minds) people like them were free to do as they liked.

I think the past is a major factor, but if one looks at the issues around the Bundy successes (he is still grazin' his steers on public land) , it seems more like a 'frontier' mentality that doesn't believe in Government, full stop. Cliven Bundy looks more like one of those robber ranchers in Wayneless Westerns, laid low, eventually, by the Man with No Name, who sucks a cheroot and shoots to kill - only this time, the Bundy's have won. Moreover, this has emboldened the militias who see that when they seek confrontation with the armed forces of the Government, it is law and order's fear of massacre that lets the cowboys go, to roam across the range free of the Government's laws. But, this is a rural movement that idolises the Land, and cannot be effectively transorted to the urban areas that dominate the USA. Yet the Bundy Clan and people like them are satisfied if they can carve out their autonomous zones within the USA where 'the Feds' choose not to reach them.

Indeed, by letting them go, 'the Feds' have enabled the Bundy's to consolidate their 'freedom' and become a baseline for the other Militias to emulate, with impunity. The Oath Keepers and the III Percenters have built on these foundations to threaten local state officials, often with some success. Indeed, the canny thing to do was to confront 'the Feds' locally, rather than nationally, so though I doubt Bundy would have chosen to attack the Capitol, they must approve of it, as any attack on Govrnment is an attack on 'the Feds' who are opposed to the individual liberty and tax-free life established by the Pioneers of the 17th century. The problem with a direct attack on 'the Feds' is that too many Americans have a stake in Government, but for Cliven and Ammon Bundy, my guess is they don't care, as long as they are free to do what they want without the irritating intervention of the law.

The Guardian has an article on this here-
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/09/us-capitol-attackers-violence-rural-west

[broncofan]

There are questions about how the U.S. can avoid becoming a failed state. The simplest answer is that those who have threatened our form of government can stop acting in bad faith and engaging in corruption. In the past year we've seen our President bribe a foreign leader to investigate his future adversary, spread health misinformation that cost tens of thousands of lives, and spend two months inciting insurrection with conspiracy theories.

There are people in every society who have resentments and are disgruntled. To the extent we can point to any systemic unfairness or inequity our political system can provide solutions. To the extent that people will believe anything no matter how easily disproved and believe patriotism means subservience to a cult figure they cannot be accommodated. We cannot bribe the seditionists with a brand new gallows out of fear they use the old gallows they erected. We cannot lend credence to their lies or pretend maybe they have a point when they don't. We cannot pretend that maybe some extortion is okay or that they've found the righteous version.

We have primed ourselves to believe that everything in politics is a matter of perspective and to find the right answer one takes the average of the existing views. But what if one view is extreme and the other only points out that it's extreme? I am reminded of Hannah Arendt's observation, "the ideal subject of the totalitarian state is not the convinced Nazi or Communist but people for whom...the distinction between true and false no longer exist."

If our legal system can rebut 60 different theories about election fraud and people can still believe that their view is true, then we have to blame the purveyors of this information. We can try to adopt policies that give people greater hope for the future but I can't see that people carry around racist insignia and flags and scale walls and erect gallows because they are out of work. They do these things when they've been radicalized into a belief system that consistently inflames them and requires them to deny reality in order to justify themselves. Republicans can stop inciting these people and they can be held accountable for their failure to respect our democracy. But I'm not sure what other option there is.

[Stavros]

If our legal system can rebut 60 different theories about election fraud and people can still believe that their view is true, then we have to blame the purveyors of this information.

But, as discussed on the BBC news this lunchtime, does this mean the regulation, by law, of social media? And if platforms become engines of hate, misinformation, lies and incitement, shut them down? At what point does free speech become a threat to freedom itself?

[Stavros]

I don't know if it was provoked by Arnold Schwarzenegger's video in which he referred to the events in Washington DC last week as America's 'Kristallnacht', but Jeanine Piro has taken this analogy into the gutter-

She went on to say of Democrats: “And now that they’ve won, what we’re seeing is the kind of censorship that is akin to a Kristallnacht, where they decide what we can communicate about.”
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/jeanine-pirro-parler-kristallnacht-183152559.html

If it means anything, it means she is ignorant. Kristallnacht was not censorship, it was not a stunt, it was a deliberate, planned and violent attack that changed the relationship between the German State and its Jewish population and, indeed, the non-Jewish population, and was another step forward in the consolidation of Nazi power and the implementation of its laws on 'Racial Purity'. It was a major event in what became the Holocaust, and cannot be separated from it.
What happened in DC last week is not comparable, even if Schwarzenegger had cause to reference his father and his father's generation's acquiesence in the Third Reich. I don't know much about Piro to be honest, but this is not the time to make idle comparisons with the Third Reich when the only reference points she needs are provided by the relationship her own TV station has with the truth. And if she says in response, 'well this is my opinion', then her opinion is worthless, and she has made a fool of herself for broadcasting it.

[broncofan]

I think this does a good job of summing up Trumpism. Republican lawmakers refusing to wear masks in close quarters with others hiding from an insurrection they incited with lies and a Democratic lawmaker who wore a mask ending up testing positive for Covid.


https://twitter.com/RepJayapal/status/1348871117407203328 (https://twitter.com/RepJayapal/status/1348871117407203328)

[filghy2]

What happened in DC last week is not comparable, even if Schwarzenegger had cause to reference his father and his father's generation's acquiesence in the Third Reich.

The more relevant comparison is with the failed Munich putsch 0f 1923. That event was also notable for the lenient treatment of the participants. Hitler was sentenced to 5 years prison but was released after only 9 months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch

[broncofan]

The more relevant comparison is with the failed Munich putsch 0f 1923. That event was also notable for the lenient treatment of the participants. Hitler was sentenced to 5 years prison but was released after only 9 months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch
It is peculiar that people would conjure up Kristallnacht instead of the Beer Hall Putsch. It must be because Kristallnacht is the more well known and memorable event. It was roughly a decade between the Putsch and Hitler becoming Chancellor and another five years before the German state was prepared to invade Poland. It takes a lot of propaganda to radicalize a population but people become desensitized to right-wing lies.

What's terrifying to me is the extent of the delusion that has gripped so many segments of society. Trump telegraphed in advance that he was going to lie about the election. Now on right-wing forums they plan another round of violence while they blame antifa for the last wave of violence. How to hold so many contradictory beliefs? "We were justified in storming the capitol but it was really antifa. We'll do it again."

It was like the people whose family members swore covid was the flu, died of covid, and the family blames the liberal media because they couldn't be convinced by the truth. I read an article where the family blamed the media for being so polarizing. That's what I think of when I hear this polarization talk on the other thread. They are listening to conspiracy theories and the truth sounds truculent to them.

The Republican Party has got to find a way to rein this in. That means that they disavow this movement and go back to principles, whichever they want to support. If they don't do it now the inertia will be too hard to overcome because those who have taken a bipartisan approach are already subject to threats and intimidation. It really is an inflection point because this wall of stupidity will be too tough to break through if they don't make some difficult choices.

[broncofan]

And of course I could point to things the Democratic Party should do, but I am not entirely sure what the right approach is but I'm pretty sure it's not just moving on without accountability. Winning the Presidency, holding the House, and getting to fifty seats in the Senate was an extraordinary effort under the circumstances. If the worst outcome is avoided this election victory will have played an enormous role. Another four years of Trump would have been devastating in ways that are impossible to predict but given who he is we avoided a lot more pain.

[filghy2]

What's terrifying to me is the extent of the delusion that has gripped so many segments of society. Trump telegraphed in advance that he was going to lie about the election. Now on right-wing forums they plan another round of violence while they blame antifa for the last wave of violence. How to hold so many contradictory beliefs? "We were justified in storming the capitol but it was really antifa. We'll do it again."

I guess if your overarching organising principle is that the left is evil and responsible for all problems, then you end up with all kinds of cognitive dissonances. If there is further violence you can bet that the usual suspects will be blaming the second impeachment for the failure to heal wounds - as if this was the responsibility of the victim rather than the perpetrator. Yet those same people claim to be law and order supporters who normally tend to blame crime on liberals being too lenient on criminals.

[Stavros]

One of the oddities of the alliance that Trump has forged with the 'alt-right' is that while he has on occasion played to their deep anti-Semitism, mostly in relation to George Soros, his hostility to Soros is not really a 'Jewish' thing. He displays a deep insecurity owing to the fact that Soros has made more money than him, and invested some of it in the Central European University, as well as the Open Society Network. The risible alternative, Trump University, was a scam from the start and in the end it cost Trump over $25 million to shut it down in disgrace, whereas the CEU has been recognized as a real educational institution. It is an example of Trump convincing himself he can do something better than a rival, and proving that he can't.

That said, the evidence of the deep anti-Semitism of his supporters sits oddly with his family's connections to Israel, and in particular to Benjamin Netanyahu, who as a young diplomat in New York became friends with Fred Trump. Here, for example, are how Trump's supporters planned to recruit new members, it comes from a 'playbook' that had 6,000 subscribers on the Telegram site-

"The four-page document encourages recruiters to avoid being overtly racist or antisemitic initially when approaching Trump supporters, stating: “Trying to show them racial IQ stats and facts on Jewish power will generally leave them unreceptive... that material will be instrumental later on in their ideological journey.
The document adds: “Not every normie can be redpilled, but if they’re receptive and open-minded to hearing what you have to say, you should gradually be sending them edgier pro-white/anti-Zionist content as they move along in their journey.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/17/how-trump-supporters-are-radicalised-by-the-far-right

At what point do these people pause to consider Trump's Jewish family -his daugher and son-in-law, his friendship with Netanyahu, the financial investments in Israel and the Occupied Territories? And at what point does he reject their support because of their anti-Semitism? I am not sure, but I don't think at this stage he cares, because his only interest is in the personality cult that he has created, and he can always issue a statement rejecting his supporters anti-Semitism, presumably because he knows they will support him on other issues -he managed to survive the Charlottesville riots even though he lost some 'very fine people' in his own camp.

Maybe he is their vehicle, and when their great day comes, he will be as dispensable as everyone else not committed to their cause? Many did denounce him as a traitor when he appeared to reject them on the video message after the siege.

As for his supporters in Congress, will they ever openly denounce their own supporters for their views about Jews, Black people and the Media? And if not, why not?

[Stavros]

I have been looking at the candidates for the USA's National Garden of Heroes, a Trump project which Wikipedia says might not now be built.

It has an eclectic list of candidates, some obvious, many not known to me. I am puzzled why Europeans who became Americans are included -eg, Einstein, Hitchcock, Hannah Arendt (a hero/heroine?) -whereas John Singer Sargent was born in Florence to an American family and as far as I know rarely or never lived in the US -after years on the continent he settled in a house on Tite Street in London's Chelsea.

The obvious poets are on the list, but three of the best -Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell and Allan Ginsberg- are not. Some figures from entertainment are there, but some of the best known from US film (Samuel Goldwyn) and TV are not -I am thinking of US TV programmes of the 1950s and 1960s that had millions of viewers though I can't remember their names, particularly the ones who hosted music shows. Some artists are listed, some of the best -George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, and (not a favourite of mine) Edward Hopper, are not.

The Presidential list is also one for specalists to argue about- Eisenhower, JFK and Reagan make the cut, LBJ who arguably was one of the most influential Presidents since FDR (on the list) is ignored. As for 'Other Historical Figures', it includes Andrew Carnegie, but not his robber baron mates, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Mellon, JP Morgan, but Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett make it.

Who should be in, and who should not? And, is there any real purpose to a 'National Garden of Heroes'? I am just glad we don't have one in the UK, as I can't think of more than five or six worthy of the elevation.

The list is here-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Garden_of_American_Heroes

[sukumvit boy]

Interesting article about the enduring allure of conspiracy theories here:
https://knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2021/the-enduring-allure-conspiracies?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=64539fc790-briefing-dy-20210118&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-64539fc790-46056558&

[Stavros]

There is conspiracy as theory, but what about Conspiracy as fact? In the Cold War in Europe, for example, Operation Gladio, or the alegations of Clockwork Orange in the UK, in which a secretive cabal of intelligence officers planned a coup against the Labour Government of Harold Wilson, with an extension of intelligence 'mind games' in Northern Ireland and the controversial figure of Colin Wallace?

If a secret project is organized by Government, is it a conspiracy or a domestic/foreign intelligence/military operation that is secret for strategic reasons, ie can they be classfied as Conspiracies?

I used to buy Lobster, a parapolitics journal which has investigated the 'unofficial' worlds of what Governments and their agencies do, with or without support 'from the top' -many of the articles contained inaccuracies (eg, the available article on the Coup in Iran in 1953), some are far-fetched, but some do relate to past experiments, such as MKULTRA, the article -available on subscription suggesting Sirhan Sirhan cannot remember why he murdered Robert Kennedy because he has been involved in a chemical experiment organized by the CIA (an extension of TOPHAT).

Lobster is here-
https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/

Colin Wallace (and Clockwork Orange) here-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wallace

Operation Gladio (numerous sources on the web)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio#Giulio_Andreotti's_revelations_on _24_October_1990

[blackchubby38]

So much outrage from the usual suspects now that Trump's Twitter feed has been halted. But is this an attack on free speech?

1) Presidents of the US managed to communicate with the public without Twitter for over 200 years, and are under no obigation to use it. It is a case of 'nice to have, not need to have'.

2) Twitter is a private company, not a media outlet of the US Government, it can permit and ban any user it wants to.

3) As President and Citizen, Trump can use multiple other outlets to express himself without being censored, and can, as a multi-billionaire, invest in his own social media platform and/or website/blog, create his own Newspaper, TV and Radio Stations, build his own Library, Museum- there are multiple options. So will he dip into those $3 billion and fund his own campaigns?

I was interested to see how many people who have been banned, whether temporarily or permanently by Twitter to see if Trump or his supporters have a leg to stand on when it comes to the cries of it being an attack on his free speech.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions


As you can see from first glance, some of the people who had their accounts suspended by Twitter were for the same reason why Trump had his. So for the most part, no one can cry that its attack on free speech.

Having said that, I have mixed feelings about whether or not people should have their accounts suspended. Yes, Twitter is a private company and it can be viewed as a luxury and not a necessity. Although depending on what industry you work in, that's not always the case.


I have always viewed Twitter as the digital version of the town square or a street corner. In essence, you're going to hear and see some crazy shit. In those instances, we usually ignored the batshit ramblings of the individual and went about our day. But what do you about people who chose to stand there (or in this case follow the individual(s)) and continue to listen and start to believe the ramblings. Who should be digital version of the officer on beat who goes, "Okay, break it up nothing to see here."

Should it continue to be the private company that runs site. I'm good with that. But I think instead of suspending the account or permanently banning the person, I say just remove the questionable post and/or tweet. Especially when it comes to ones that are considered to be spreading misinformation.


"But, as discussed on the BBC news this lunchtime, does this mean the regulation, by law, of social media? And if platforms become engines of hate, misinformation, lies and incitement, shut them down? At what point does free speech become a threat to freedom itself?"

To answer your other question, I would only be in favor of temporarily shutting down a platform if law enforcement becomes aware of its incitement leading to criminal activity. Other than, I'm not in favor of deplatforming an individual or a site. I rather these people be out in open where their nonsense can be seen and challenged when need be. Its been a couple of weeks since Parlor has been shut down and I'm not sure if the world is a better and/or safer place for it.

[filghy2]

To answer your other question, I would only be in favor of temporarily shutting down a platform if law enforcement becomes aware of its incitement leading to criminal activity. Other than, I'm not in favor of deplatforming an individual or a site. I rather these people be out in open where their nonsense can be seen and challenged when need be. Its been a couple of weeks since Parlor has been shut down and I'm not sure if the world is a better and/or safer place for it.

I think temporary shutdowns only work if the problem is relatively limited and the offenders are open to changing their behaviour. My understanding is that discussion of violence on some of these sites has been rife because they don't do any moderation, which is the very reason why extremists use them. What would you propose to do about sites like Parler that refuse to do any self-regulation?

As for the idea that you let the crazy talk run free and just try to debunk it, that is what we've been doing and it hasn't worked too well (exhibit A: the stolen election lie). The problem is that the effort required to debunk a lie is much greater than the effort required to initiate it - and some people are happy to believe any lie that suits their prejudices. As Mark Twain may or may not have said, a lie can travel halfway around the world and back before the truth can put its shoes on.

Here's where your analogy with the town square or street corner breaks down. In the pre-digital world there was small percentage of crazies but most of them were lone nutters because it was difficult for them to find fellow crazies with similar ideas. The internet has made it so much easier for them to find like-minded people who can reinforce each others ideas and coordinate activities.. Trying to apply pre-digital rules to this situation seems like trying to apply horse and cart rules to the era of the motor car.

So I think we do need a different approach. I don't know what that is exactly, but it has to involve websites being forced to take more responsibility for content posted by their users. It's not at all clear why conventional book or newspaper publishers are held legally responsible for what appears in their publications but internet publishers should be completely exempt.

[Stavros]

Having said that, I have mixed feelings about whether or not people should have their accounts suspended. Yes, Twitter is a private company and it can be viewed as a luxury and not a necessity. Although depending on what industry you work in, that's not always the case.
I have always viewed Twitter as the digital version of the town square or a street corner. In essence, you're going to hear and see some crazy shit. In those instances, we usually ignored the batshit ramblings of the individual and went about our day. But what do you about people who chose to stand there (or in this case follow the individual(s)) and continue to listen and start to believe the ramblings. Who should be digital version of the officer on beat who goes, "Okay, break it up nothing to see here."
Should it continue to be the private company that runs site. I'm good with that. But I think instead of suspending the account or permanently banning the person, I say just remove the questionable post and/or tweet. Especially when it comes to ones that are considered to be spreading misinformation.


"But, as discussed on the BBC news this lunchtime, does this mean the regulation, by law, of social media? And if platforms become engines of hate, misinformation, lies and incitement, shut them down? At what point does free speech become a threat to freedom itself?"

To answer your other question, I would only be in favor of temporarily shutting down a platform if law enforcement becomes aware of its incitement leading to criminal activity. Other than, I'm not in favor of deplatforming an individual or a site. I rather these people be out in open where their nonsense can be seen and challenged when need be. Its been a couple of weeks since Parlor has been shut down and I'm not sure if the world is a better and/or safer place for it.

I think we can agree that the growth of social media has outpaced the ability of the law to control it, and that so far it has been the 'self-regulation' of the platforms that has censored content or banned users if they do not comply with the values of the owners -I have had posts deleted by The Guardian not because of the content as much as the use of a word or a phrase that their algorithm has identified as being objectionable. The Guardian has amended it to enable posts to include the F word, whereas in The Telegraph this is not possible, just as it is not possible to identify the Metropolitan Police Commissioner (the Senior Police Officer in England) by her name, Cressida Dick.

This is a trival example, but does show that Online newspapers in particular attempt to edit their online content as they do their print version, and this is in stark contrast to what happens elsewhere, though I believe Instagram does not allow the nudity that Twitter does. It means that there is no integrated approach to onliine content, and most people believe this is as it should be, and I think to some extent yes, it helps to know what people are saying, if, as was the case of the various militia groups who broadcast their intention to 'get rough' in Washington DC, their plan seems to have been ignored by the law enforcement who, forewarned might have done a better job of protecting the Capitol.

Foucault would probably describe it as the horizontal expansion of power, and in a democracy, because everyone has a voice, and an equal voice, it would appear to be wrong to shut it down. The dilemma that exists, and existed before social media, is that democracy gives everyone a voice, including those who don't believe in it. We had this fruitless debate in the last 20 years when so-called 'Radical Muslims' were using an open democracy to campagn against it, raising questions still pertinent to some, about the loyalty of Muslims to the State in which they live, though the people raising these questions just don't like Muslims and ignore the polls in the UK that reveal most Muslim immigrants love the Queen, and tend to be conservatives with regard to taxation, same-sex marriage, and tend to think they are safer in a country that has nuclear weapons.

In the US, the threat needs to be identified. I don't know if Trump wants to create a new party, or is using it as a threat to bully Republicans into supporting him. He has no real interest in politics, though, but is obsessed with hiimself as a major figure, and doesn't seem to care if he relies for his support on people who don't believe in its current form, American Democracy meets their needs and desires -but what are they? Are these not people who don't believe in Government because they would not know how to govern if they were 'in power'? Do they believe they can re-create the Frontier days when there was no law, no government, no taxes in those parts of the West where they went to get away from politics? It seems to me to be a form of political nihiism, and I don't object to them expressing their views though I suspect the practical result is that they don't vote, and resent Government and taxes and all that.

The really dangerous people either don't use social media, or opt for the 'dark web' or an equivalence of anonymity and cryptic messaging, and are most likely to take the route Timothy McVeigh and his supporters took, in inflicting maximum physical damage they can, being otherwise impotent. This time, the 'mob' that stormed the Capitol was either too scared, or just not properly organized and armed enough to murder the people they wanted to -assuming the 'Hang Mike Pence' was a real threat, and that some had they been able to, would have targeted Nancy Pelosi and membes of the 'Squad' -they failed this time, but will they try again?

I don't think censoring Trump will make much difference in the long run as he can find other ways to appeal to his followers, though I wonder how much more rage and indignation the Americans can deal with, and think four years of shouting is enough, already.

One other option is for Biden to restore the Fair Broadcasting Rules that forced broadcasters to balance opinion, it is ironic or not that Murdoch was a key mover of this in 1987, yet his precious Fox News is now under attack from the very people he wanted to give a voice to.

Thus, the two outstanding issues are the covert organization of anti-Democratic forces in the US, which I assume are infiltrated by the FBI, and the ongoing attempt by Government -not it seems, the Biden Administration- to control the Internet -in this regard I would appreciate a view from filghy2 on Scott Morrison's conflict with Google and Facebook in Australia. India cut off the internet in Kashmir a year or so ago, and it is regularly shut down or websites made inaccessible in China. Trump wanted the law changed so internet platfroms could be sued, and so on. Whatever it is, democracy to survive has to find a way to deal with extremists, and to the extent that the platforms themselves are asked to do it, why change their control of their rules?

[broncofan]

A private company's actions are not treated like the actions of the government for good reason. There is a special danger when the government regulates the content of speech because they thwart the ways in which people can resist their tyranny.

But that comes at the cost of being able to limit the dissemination of views that are undoubtedly harmful: that racism is justified, that Bill Gates is trying to put transponders in people's heads, or that the world is run by a cabal of Jews. In the case of the government, such a cost is worth the benefits. But what is the consequence of preventing private parties from disassociating from repellent views? Or even worse forcing them to broadcast them? It is an epistemological crisis and quite possibly the end of any sort of discourse.

The number of restrictions we place on private companies are limited. It took us nearly two hundred years to pass the civil rights act. It is an incredible twist that the party that has many members who are skeptical about civil rights laws want racists to have protections they would deny their victims. But imagine even thinking their treatment should be the same. One person excludes a Black person from their business. Is this the same as a proprietor excluding someone for saying Hillary Clinton is a pedophile who molests children in a pizza parlor? It's offensive and incoherent.

I don't see twitter as having more obligations than a book publisher. The government can't prohibit people from speaking but they also can't force people to help disseminate their views. If a person is on a street corner, they might see hundreds or thousands of people in a day. If they are on twitter they are broadcasting to millions. Do radio channels have to broadcast neo-nazis? Do book publishers have to publish everyone who can't afford to self-publish? Does twitter have to publish or allow people to remain on their site if they find their views dangerous? No.

The people being banned from twitter are being banned for spreading conspiracy theories, spreading public health misinformation, and saying racist things. Nobody has to host that and the way to deal with companies being too large is through anti-trust regulation perhaps but not forcing companies to host nonsense.

[filghy2]

It is an incredible twist that the party that has many members who are skeptical about civil rights laws want racists to have protections they would deny their victims.

It's also interesting to contrast the treatment of right-wing extremism with the treatment of Islamic extremism. The potential threat from the former appears to be just as great - maybe greater because the number of sympathisers is larger. Since 9/11 there has been a zero tolerance policy towards Islamic extremism, with little consideration for the rights of those affected (even basic due process rights have been set aside). Yet very few of the freedom advocates have offered any word of complaint.

[filghy2]

Thus, the two outstanding issues are the covert organization of anti-Democratic forces in the US, which I assume are infiltrated by the FBI, and the ongoing attempt by Government -not it seems, the Biden Administration- to control the Internet -in this regard I would appreciate a view from filghy2 on Scott Morrison's conflict with Google and Facebook in Australia.

That's a different issue because it's about forcing them to pay news providers for their content rather than actually controlling the content. I don't think that is about internet freedom any more than it would be if the government was forcing them to pay more tax. It is actually the companies that are threatening to reduce our internet freedom by deplatforming the whole country for the sake of their financial interests. I think the government will call their bluff, becasue if they make good on their threat they may find that people can do without them.

[broncofan]

It's also interesting to contrast the treatment of right-wing extremism with the treatment of Islamic extremism. The potential threat from the former appears to be just as great - maybe greater because the number of sympathisers is larger. Since 9/11 there has been a zero tolerance policy towards Islamic extremism, with little consideration for the rights of those affected (even basic due process rights have been set aside). Yet very few of the freedom advocates have offered any word of complaint.
100%. What Muslims faced after 9/11-violations of 4th amendment rights (search and seizure), 5th amendment (due process), and 6th amendment (right to speedy trial). These were real constitutional violations that our Justice Department made excuses about and invoked all sorts of novel arguments to try to get around. The freedom advocates, as I'm sure you suspect, have an argument only under a reading of the Constitution that no federal court to my knowledge has adopted.

I find it interesting that many of the arguments on the right are kind of post-modern when it comes to whether there's such a thing as absolute truth. They object to critical race theory, for example, because it includes techniques such as "naming one's own truth". But I've heard a number of them saying we should place some value on the fact that they have a bona fide belief that there was election fraud. Republicans who are now unwilling to support these bogus allegations will say stuff like "but confidence about elections is at an all time low" or "the voters really believe there are discrepancies". It's like they want us to accept their personal truth and in this case there's no objective evidence supporting it.

Even their objections to "cancel culture" seem to rely on the fact that we can't trust anybody to make any fair judgment about anything. It's like, have you considered that this Neo-Nazi just has a viewpoint? Who gave you the power to say they are wrong?

In closing I really find their view of what private business owners have a right to do repugnant. What kind of society is it they want? A private business owner

can-exclude gay people

cannot-exclude people refusing to wear a mask during a pandemic

cannot-ban someone from a website they own and manage for inciting violence

[filghy2]

In closing I really find their view of what private business owners have a right to do repugnant. What kind of society is it they want? A private business owner

can-exclude gay people

cannot-exclude people refusing to wear a mask during a pandemic

cannot-ban someone from a website they own and manage for inciting violence

It says a lot about some peoples' warped values that they are more concerned about people of the same sex loving each other than they are about bigots threatening violence. Also, that they care more about unborn foetuses than they do about saving people's lives once they are born.

[blackchubby38]

It's also interesting to contrast the treatment of right-wing extremism with the treatment of Islamic extremism. The potential threat from the former appears to be just as great - maybe greater because the number of sympathisers is larger. Since 9/11 there has been a zero tolerance policy towards Islamic extremism, with little consideration for the rights of those affected (even basic due process rights have been set aside). Yet very few of the freedom advocates have offered any word of complaint.

This puts it into perspective. On 9/11, the passengers of Flight 93 fought back and crashed the plane in Pennsylvania because the hijackers planned to crash into the Capital building.

19 years later, citizens of this country stormed the same building in an attempt to stop the democratic process from taking place. I can guarantee that many of those individuals rightfully celebrated the actions of those passengers.

[filghy2]

This report shows that the great majority or terrorist incidents in the USA are committed by right-wing extremists. https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-united-states
Apart from the single event of 9/11, they have also been responsible for the most deaths.

"In analyzing fatalities from terrorist attacks, religious terrorism has killed the largest number of individuals—3,086 people—primarily due to the attacks on September 11, 2001, which caused 2,977 deaths. The magnitude of this death toll fundamentally shaped U.S. counterterrorism policy over the past two decades. In comparison, right-wing terrorist attacks caused 335 deaths, left-wing attacks caused 22 deaths, and ethnonationalist terrorists caused 5 deaths.

To evaluate the ongoing threat from different types of terrorists, however, it is useful to consider the proportion of fatalities attributed to each type of perpetrator annually. In 14 of the 21 years between 1994 and 2019 in which fatal terrorist attacks occurred, the majority of deaths resulted from right-wing attacks. In eight of these years, right-wing attackers caused all of the fatalities, and in three more—including 2018 and 2019—they were responsible for more than 90 percent of annual fatalities. Therefore, while religious terrorists caused the largest number of total fatalities, right-wing attackers were most likely to cause more deaths in a given year."

[filghy2]

Here's another thing that epitomises the moral black hole the Republican Party has gone down. Republicans who hold Trump accountable for inciting violent insurrection are being threatened with punishment while an odious conspiracy theorist is rewarded with committee positions.
https://www.vox.com/22254103/marjorie-taylor-greene-david-hogg-obama-hillary-facebook-posts

[KnightHawk 2.0]

Here's another thing that epitomises the moral black hole the Republican Party has gone down. Republicans who hold Trump accountable for inciting violent insurrection are being threatened with punishment while an odious conspiracy theorist is rewarded with committee positions.
https://www.vox.com/22254103/marjorie-taylor-greene-david-hogg-obama-hillary-facebook-postsThe Republican Party is in the mist of a civil war between Conservatives like Liz Cheney,Adam Kinzinger and 8 other Republicans who voted to impeach the Demogouge And Malignant Narcissist Donald Trump for causing an insurrection,and those who continue to defend him like the Qanon Supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene and others. Marjorie Taylor Greene comments are dangerous,despicable and vile,someone like her should not be allowed to continue to serve and should be stripped of her committee assignments and expelled from congress along with the other members of the Conspiracy Theorist Wing of the Republican Party.

[Stavros]

On one level, free speech means that to some extent Representative Greene can say what she likes, but in her case some of her comments (and she seems rather keen to delete social media comments from a few years ago now she is an elected member of the House) might be actual or borderline illegal.

The question that puzzles me about some of her claims is that they are not only daft, but verifiably so, as with her claim that Ruth Bader Ginsberg died years ago but was replaced by a body double, one that fooled all of her staff and collegues on the Supreme Court- unless they were in on it, which is implausible and not just in the case of Justice Thomas.

Always ask the question, Why? If it was to maintain a Liberal justice, that makes no sense because she could have retired in 2014 and a Liberal nominee by Obama have taken her place. If it was to maintain a Liberal presence on the Court because she failed to retire before the end of Obama's tenure, a) that didn't matter as McConnell and the Senate refused to even consider Merrick Garland for the Court, and b) no Liberal was going to be nominated once Trump was elected.

Mass murders perpetrated by 'Right Wing' men with guns, instead of proving the dangers of the 2nd Amendment, are instantly dismissed as 'false flag' operations designed by 'Liberals' to repeal it, or a 'hoax', it doesn't even require an effort. That Greene has personally engaged in the harassment of people involved in the murders was her problem when she was a citizen, now she is a Member of the House it becomes a House problem. What stands out, as with the 9/11 'Truthers' is absolute contempt for the victims and their families. But at what point does the right to be offensive become illegal? It may never be, but the legal cases against Alex Jones brought by relatives of the victims of Sandy Hook may establish the extent to which Defamation is the means whereby the outrageous comments of people like Jones and Greene can be made liable for prosecution and punishment.

Again, to sustain a paedophile ring in Washington DC dating back to the 'murderous' Clintons requires too many people to maintain it as a covert operation. Here, the paedophile angle is one that has become almost a staple of conspiracy theories. I am not sure when it began, but there was mass hysteria in the UK in the 1990s with newspapers printing stories, such as the one in the Mirror in 1990, 'Kids forced into Satan orgies' -though in the years that passed no evidence of orgies, sacrifices etc was ever found; you can read about it here-
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/18/satanic-child-abuse-false-memories-scotland

Or the PhD by Rosalind Waterhouse here-
https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/11871/1/Satanic%20abuse,%20false%20memories,%20weird%20bel iefs%20and%20moral%20panics.pdf

My guess is that for religious nuts, when something happens that is bad it must be the work of Satan, so if a Politician is considered bad, he or she too, must be in league with Satan. But guess what, when they do or say bad things, they are not Satan's body double, just tellin' the truth...

Here the irony of Conspiracy Theories is that you can set aside the claims about JFK, 9/11 and Sandy Hook, because on the 6th of January an actual Conspiracy materialised -the point being that the men and women who stormed the Capitol had openly conspired to do so on social media platforms, and became known to each other as well as law enforcement reading their posts, were filmed and photographed outside and inside the Capitol building, their affiliations identified. In this case, the actual conspiracy worked because law enforcement either did not believe it, or failed to act in time or with sufficient seriousness to prevent it. And yet in spite of these facts, the very same people who stormed the Capitol, we are now told were in fact part of an Antifa/Fed 'false flag' operation -a fake conspiracy designed to discredit an actual one.

I don't know if Represenative Greene can be expelled from the House, I am not sure what the rules are, but she seems to be flouting some basic norms of behaviour by harassing other members and their staff, not wearing masks, etc, so the question now is how far the extemists who appear to have succeeded in placing their fringe ideas at the centre of the news, may now succeed in making bad behaviour in the Capitol a fact of daily life.

But is it not also an example of failure in politics when someone, unable to justify their position on a matter of policy and principle, dismisses rational debate and argument by referring to an unverified claim that shuts down the debate?

[trish]

The conspiracy claims against left are daft, crazy, horrendous and hateful. (Okay, I may occasionally enjoy feasting on a human baby, but I definitely do not worship Satan. I don’t even believe in God let alone fallen angels.) The fact that people believe these things is not only a measure of how stupid they are but also of how much they hate anyone with any other political, religious, racial or sexual perspective. What they’re willing to believe of us is what they want to believe...what they need to believe in order to justify their burning hatred of us. They know our actual disagreements don’t warrant the emotions they feel. Hence, we’ve become baby eaters, demon worshippers, pedophiles and lizard aliens to justify the insane passions that alt-right fear mongers have stirred in their hearts while those in office sat back and fanned the flames.

[filghy2]

It looks like the Republican civil war might be over with barely a shot fired. After a week or two of soul-searching, the party establishment appears to have decided that they can't do without Trump and his supporters, so they've reverted to their old habits of appeasing him.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/28/republicans-need-trump-463684

[filghy2]

The question that puzzles me about some of her claims is that they are not only daft, but verifiably so

I think once you lose the anchor of some notion of objective truth there is no limit to where you might go. The only standard for something to be believed is whether it suits your pre-conceived view of the world.

The attraction of conspiracy theories for some people is that it's a ready-made framework for explaining everything - as you suggest, it's analogous to religion. There is no need to confront awkward questions or to reconsider anything. If your messiah is a political failure, it was a conspiracy to rig the vote and he didn't really lose. If your messiah makes a mess of handling a pandemic, there has been a conspiracy to exaggerate the problem which hasn't been a crisis at all. If you can't explain why you policies will help more people than your opponent's policies, it's because they have an evil plan they are keeping secret.

[broncofan]

I think once you lose the anchor of some notion of objective truth there is no limit to where you might go. The only standard for something to be believed is whether it suits your pre-conceived view of the world.
.
I used to think a good liar was one who could craft tales that are plausible but simply don't match up with reality. But if the audience is sufficiently radicalized the best liar is audacious and not restrained by shame or conscience.

Once the people have accepted a liar who doesn't insist on telling plausible lies you know you're in trouble. Look at how quickly the Republicans admitted they were lying as soon as people started getting killed over their lies. It is a weird dualism.

I saw a tweet that had over 90 thousand likes that said, "I found a shredded ballot that had a Chinese shipping receipt on top of it." When I first saw it I thought it was a parody tweet about how credulous people are. But in the comments you could see people with names like DebbieMAGAfreedomeagle saying "I knew the Chinese were involved in this." A normal, somewhat curious person would ask for more information I assume. I had no questions because I don't know what it would mean if someone did observe this: The Chinese government shipped one torn ballot, placed it in a dumpster and put a receipt on top of it?

Over the years I've noticed this with antisemitic conspiracy theories that for someone to believe them they have to have already taken leave of their sanity. They know their ideas can't stand up to scrutiny but they hate you for not allowing them to live in the temporary refuge of their lies. Not to be melodramatic but eventually those lies will destroy us.

[broncofan]

My memory wasn't exactly right. The tweet I mentioned has about 53,000 likes and one of the top responses says "I just popped a freedom boner." Very disturbing.

[Stavros]

Robert Reich in today's Observer/Guardian argues that Biden's best hope is that his Administration and a Democrat Congress succeed in seeing the US out of the Covid-19 crisis, establish some level of economic growth with a corresponding decrease in unemployment, and thus prove that Government works. I suspect that for a large proportion of the Trump supporters, nothing much the Democrats do will satisfy them, as was evident when Obama's record of rescuing the US banking system from collapse, and restoring economic growth was dismissed as if it never happened.

The key for me is that while the armed militias may bark loudly, they are wary of biting, as was seen in the sloppy invasion of the Capitol building. It seems to me that if they want to register their discontent with the Federal Government, the real battleground must be within the States. Republican States have led the campaign to take voting rights away, and are now more motivated than ever to ramp up voter suppression, purges of electoral rolls, the imposition of ID requirements, confident that the Supreme Court will not intervene to stop it. I don't know if extremists have been registering as Republicans in order to take part in the various processes that govern the selection of candidates in States and confirm it as a 'Trump/QAnon Party', but it is one way of 'taking over' the party even as some 'old style' Republicans are leaving -30,000 are know to have changed their affiliation since the 6th of January, and the true figure may be higher.

Within the States, members of the various armed militias -Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, Oathkeepers, Three-Percenters, also have the option of infiltating the armed branches of Goverment. Three-Percenters in some States are Law Enforcement Officers -policemen, mostly- who sew the III Percent Emblem on their Uniforms to broadcast their affiliation, which they can use to harass minority citizens and maintain their 'knee on the kneck' tactic -but if they are, or were to be regarded as Domestic Terrorists, the States would have to engage in a purge of officers with dual loyalty, while some would remove their emblems as 'stay behinds' to maintain their internal campaign against that 'other America' they don't consider to be their equal.

But there need be no insurrection, rather, just as States can shred as many voters as it can, re-define term limits to make Abortion all but impossible, so the longer term aim among the extremists could be, not secession, as happened in 1861, but a form of autonomy, in which States decide to either ignore Federal law, or find ways of tinkering with the mechanics, as with the Voter Registration Act of 1965, to make the law all but irrelevant. But within the State, and particularly if it is run by Democrats, the extremists could 'opt out' of the Federation by refusing to pay taxes en masse, and like the Bundy Clan that continues to graze herds on public land, just ignore the law when they can. The point would be, not to take the confrontation with the Feds to Washington DC, but to establish pockets of resistance across the country and in effect, dare the Feds or the State to bring the confrontation to them, as in 'every town its own Waco'. Thus, if there are confrontations that turn violent, the protestors can present themselves as 'victims', the State, the Fed, the 'Liberals' the enemy.

If the Democrats succeed in expanding their representation in the mid-terms, with the GOP dis-united, even in disarray over its candidates and its future, conventional politics will have failed the 'Pioneers', just as they condemned Trump for abandoning them on the 6th of January, because even Trump is not enough to satisfy their needs and desires. And, though they may still be a fringe movement, they are large enough, and well armed enough to cause a lot of trouble, and a permanent sore for the country. They have learned the lesson of a defeated Confederacy -'fight the power' within, autonomy not secession is the solution. And much harder for the Federal and State government to deal with.

[broncofan]

Very good post Stavros. All of those phenomena you mention are real things to be concerned about. I think rather than achieve autonomy for the states or the accomplishment of any positive objective, this will partially obstruct effective governance by the majority. The fact that Republicans have not moved towards the center to try to win elections fairly really harms this country. Instead of creating a broader coalition they have doubled down on voter suppression and obstructionist tactics. Without a majority in either house of congress or the Presidency, their attempts at obstruction have to be even more extreme to be effective.

I do think that since there are a range of political views in this country we need a Republican party that can hold itself to a higher standard. I'm not hopeful that it can transform itself from a party for disaffected conspiracy theorists into a party that represents some coherent conservative movement. But I do see the need for people who have different political views than I do to have a party that will at least hold itself to the standard of honesty, decency, and basic fairness.

[Nick Danger]

Very good post Stavros. All of those phenomena you mention are real things to be concerned about. I think rather than achieve autonomy for the states or the accomplishment of any positive objective, this will partially obstruct effective governance by the majority. The fact that Republicans have not moved towards the center to try to win elections fairly really harms this country. Instead of creating a broader coalition they have doubled down on voter suppression and obstructionist tactics. Without a majority in either house of congress or the Presidency, their attempts at obstruction have to be even more extreme to be effective.

I do think that since there are a range of political views in this country we need a Republican party that can hold itself to a higher standard. I'm not hopeful that it can transform itself from a party for disaffected conspiracy theorists into a party that represents some coherent conservative movement. But I do see the need for people who have different political views than I do to have a party that will at least hold itself to the standard of honesty, decency, and basic fairness.

Without starting some big thing, I would like to point out that if we're going to talk about political parties "holding themselves to a higher standard," it is quite disingenuous to apply this demand to Republicans while ignoring the behavior of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY for the last 4 years - in particular its behavior since the George Floyd incident.

Democratic elected officials have promoted rioting, sedition, and murder. The party's adherents have turned some parts of this country into literal war zones. For 4 years they have behaved like 4-year-olds, utterly failing to accept the results of the 2016 election. "Not My President" has been the cry from these naive children.

The Republicans, in defeat, have been quite tame compared to the violent excess of the Democrats. Stricly objectively, it's the very limit of hypocrisy for Democrats to act as if they suddenly occupy the high moral ground of political methodology. Half of the people crying out for Trump's post-presidency impeachment should rightfully be in prison right now, and probably would be if the election had gone the other way.

Anyway, again, not looking to start some big debate. We all know nobody here is going to change anyone else's mind about politics. But let's not act as if Republicans have the monopoly on political temper tantrums. If anything, they are mere plebs compared to the Democrats when it comes to showing one's ass.