Gdanning
1yr ago
According to CNN, "Officials said there are currently no Americans serving prison time solely on federal simple marijuana possession charges." So, no one is actually being released because of the pardons.
Gdanning
1yr ago
The very first paragraph of the Executive Summary has red flags: "the uncontrolled issue of cash" instead of "issuance," "dollar supply" rather than "money supply."
Also, "loss in the position of the Democratic Party in Congress" is odd phrasing, and I doubt that RAND would refer to "costs for us" rather than "costs to the United States."
And "the" is omitted in "a major obstacle to it is growing independence of Germany," and is used unnecessarily in other places. Classic English language learner errors.
Gdanning
1yr ago
I think perhaps the root of your inability to understand why Jim Crow laws existed is that you seem to have a misunderstanding about what they were. You seem to think that they were simply residential segregation laws. But, that goal could be served by restrictive covenants, and the quintessential example of a Jim Crow law was, of course, the requirement of separate water fountains. That was obviously not about fear of crime. Nor were laws requiring separate dining facilities. Nor laws requiring separate cemeteries. Nor laws requiring separate swimming pools. Nor laws requiring bus companies to have separate ticket windows for each race. Nor laws requiring separate hospital entrances.
And, of course, there were the cultural aspects of Jim Crow, such as this one:
The white owners of clothing stores did not allow blacks to try on clothing as a general rule, fearing that white customers would not buy clothes worn by African Americans. Some stores did allow blacks to put on clothing over their own clothes or to try on hats over a cloth scarf on their heads. Shoes were never tried on as a general rule, but most white clerks did allow exact measurements to be made.
As should be obvious, much of Jim Crow was about trying to maintain "purity."
Gdanning
1yr ago
That seems to be a complete misrepresentation of the ad. The ad is narrated by Nate Boyer, who is apparently an ex-Green Beret and a football player who played one preseason game for the Seahawks. This is the narration of the ad in its entirety:
"I'm Nate Boyer. I served as a Green Beret. The first time that I heard about Colin Kaepernick I thought, the guy hated America. I chose to do an open letter to Colin, and Colin ended up reaching out. He said, 'Would you kneel with me?' I said, 'I can't do that, but I will stand next to you.' You don't always have to like how people choose to express their freedoms, but we were both willing to just have a conversation. That's what freedom of speech is. You know, the right to speak out. That's what we fought for."
The visuals are brief clips of the two of them, a picture of someone holding a BLM sign, and a picture of someone holding a sign which says, "We [heart] our police."
That's it. How you can interpret that anodyne message of "everyone should have the right to speak / let's have a conversation" as an endorsement of Kaepernick's message, or as "conveying that Kapernick didn't intend the protest to disrespect the military or the country" seems quite incomprehensible to me.
Finally, you are certainly entitled to your opinion re whether Kaepernick's kneeling was not protected because it was really a time/place/manner restriction, FIRE filed an amicus brief in favor of the high school football coach who was fired for praying on the field, so their position that Kaepernick's speech should be protected is perfectly consistent with their past position, which tends to undermine the claim that they are somehow becoming woke.
Gdanning
4mo ago
In Georgia, a "terroristic threat" has little to do with terrorism; it includes includes a threat to commit any crime of violence with the purpose of terrorizing another, and is a misdemeanor unless the threat suggests the death of the threatened individual.
Gdanning
1yr ago
There are certainly red flags indicating that he is not a particularly rigorous thinker. Eg:
Landlords in poorer areas earn “basically double” those in more affluent districts . . . There are caveats: the relationship is not true in a few top cities, such as New York ...
If you are worried about housing affordability, the opposite of NYC is presumptively a good thing. And if landlords can make more money renting to poor people, that is good, because it encourages building more housing in poor areas, or building a building with many small apartments, rather than a handful of giant apartments, as often happens in Manhatten.
He lived on a mobile home park in Milwaukee — about 130 trailers in “a really poor place in a really poor city”. Desmond calculated that the owner earned about $447,000 a year after expenses. “That blew me away. His tenants are getting by on $600-$700 a month.”
Assuming his numbers are correct, it actually a good thing that people with income of $700 per month can afford housing, and it is a good thing that someone can earn a living providing it to them.
And it turned out that the mum had just died, and after the funeral the kids just went on living in the house. Mattresses on the floor, eating what they could. They just evicted the kids. Put the kids out, called social services, put their stuff on the curb, changed the locks, moved to the next house. That’s a level of deprivation that I never experienced — a level of cruelty.”
It is cruel to refer orphans who are "eating what they could" to social services?
The poor might have cheap consumer goods, but rents are more expensive and prison more pervasive. In the US of the 1930s and 1940s, “eviction was often a very rare, ...
If you are even hinting that the poor were better-off in the 1930s, ie, the Great Depression, something has gone wrong.
Gdanning
9mo ago
The song is about shooting rioters.
The music video notwithstanding, the lyrics don't mention rioting at all:
Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk; Carjack an old lady at a red light; Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store; Ya think it's cool, well, act a fool if ya like; Cuss out a cop, spit in his face; Stomp on the flag and light it up
Gdanning
1yr ago
It is pretty undisputed that Alex Jones repeatedly falsely claimed that specific parents, who he named by name, were "crisis actors" who were lying about losing children at Sandy Hook, and that those parents were rather viciously harassed (death threats, etc) by some of his listeners. Whether he is liable for those actions is a different issue, and I don't know enough about the facts to know, but of course normally much of the actual damages from defamation are the result of actions by third parties who hear the defamatory statements, so it is not exactly a stretch.
Snyder v. Phelps is not going to help him: In that case, the Court emphasized that the speech was not directed at a particular person, and for that very reason Snyder was not a defamation case (the trial court dismissed the count alleging defamation). Snyder was basically about the right to make non-defamatory statements which cause emotional distress.
Gdanning
1yr ago
This article states that the fire started in a single car and spread to the others, and that the car in question, a Ford Expedition, has been recalled beause of a propensity for engine fires.
Gdanning
1yr ago
That paper did not predict an outbreak in May. It is a wargame that seems to have chosen its start date arbitrarily, as is the norm for these sorts of things. And, note that under the scenario discussed, the initial outbreak is in June of 2022, not May. Note also that the monkeypox variant in the scenario is airborne, since the paper states that measures like social distancing and mask mandates were effective at reducing transmission.
Gdanning
6mo ago
Now someone may counter by saying that it doesn’t matter how much material prosperity you may have if you don’t have political rights and “freedom”, defined in some nebulous way that aligns with how westerners think of it. Except that empirically, people behave in the complete opposite way, gladly sacrificing those things for higher prosperity.
Except that empirically, many people also gladly sacrifice prosperity, or even their lives, in an effort to obtain or preserve civil rights and, more importantly, the dignity that recognition of rights entails. Your analysis is way too neat; it fails to explain, among other things, the actions of the Hamas fighters who died in the attack; surely, if they valued prosperity above all things, they would be pushing for the recognition of Israel's right to exist, or staying home playing video games, or doing anything other than risking their lives. It also fails to explain why people ever quit jobs when they are treated in a way which they consider unjust. Nor even why people will often refuse to patronize a store with the lowest prices, but rudest employees, in town. Nor why some people choose to sacrifice income and comfort to live in rural areas where they are left alone.
Not all actions are instrumentally rationality; there is such thing as value rationality as well ["Value-rational behavior is produced by a conscious “ethical, aesthetic, religious or other” belief, “independently of its prospects of success.”6 Behavior, when driven by such values, can consciously embrace great personal sacrifices. Some spheres or goals of life are considered so valuable that they would not normally be up for sale or compromise, however costly the pursuit of their realization might be."].
Bottom line: Whether Arabs in Israel are "better off" overall simply because they have greater material comfort is a normative question that has no single correct answer.
The point is that there is all sorts of protected speech that increases the likelihood of criminal activity. Flashing gang signs, for example, as well as all sorts of advocacy of crime. As well as, possibly, sharing animated pictures of fictional children having sex with adults [edit: I say "possibly" because I don’t know if that actually encourages recipients to share actual child porn]. Heck, even agreeing with another person to commit a crime is generally not itself a crime; more is usually needed.
Nevertheless, attempting to censor those typs of speech is "addressing criminal activity," specifically, it is an attempt to reduce the incidence of crime, which is why social media companies do not allow it, and why many other countries censor or punish that type of speech.
Hence, preventing govt from notifying a social media company about speech which is both protected speech and which increases the risk of crime X does indeed hamper the govt's ability to address crime X. Please note that I am not advocating that the govt should do that. To the contrary, I believe that social media companies should be forbidden from censoring users' speech which is protected from govt censorship. But I am not going to pretend that such a policy would not make crime prevention more difficult.
Gdanning
6mo ago
And what of all the similar conflicts which were resolved without engaging in full-throated war? Northern Ireland is an obvious example. More importantly, this claim:
you cannot expect certain groups to coexist in the same space peacefully for long
Is empirically false, because violence between such groups is the exception, not the rule
an atrocity in the present may prevent a greater atrocity in the future.
That is a great argument for assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, but not so great for killing all 2 million residents of the Gaza Strip, "everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers," in order to avoid 600 deaths of Israelis, or even 60,000. Because the latter is not a "greater atrocity" than the former.
Gdanning
1yr ago
The chair of the school board, Barney Bishop III, insists that the David incident was only a small contributing factor, but when asked to elaborate why the board decided to pressure the principal to resign, he says: "based on counsel from our employment lawyer, I’m not going to get into the reasons.based on counsel from our employment lawyer, I’m not going to get into the reasons."
Refusing to comment on personnel matters is standard procedure, and in fact school boards always go into closed session when discussing personnel matters. And, removing a principal in the middle of a school year is a big deal, and is not usually done lightly. So, I find it quite credible that there were other underlying problems, and that this was simply the last straw.
An article in the BBC relates this to the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, AKA the "Don't Say Gay" Bill
I guess it is good to know that journalists in the UK are as stupid as journalists in the USA.
Gdanning
1yr ago
I don't think reddit or any social media should be censoring anyone, but if reddit banned a subreddit about black people committing crimes that called itself "great apes," I rather suspect that reddit was motivated by something other than the desire to hide the truth, and that those who created the subreddit were motivated by something other than pure truth telling.
Gdanning
1yr ago
Sebastian Junger has a much better piece about this in the National Review. As he makes clear, the criticism is not about Islamophobia bur rather is yet another claim about who is permitted to make what art, a claim made by people who do not understand what art is.
Gdanning
1yr ago
My 401k is actually down overall over the last 3 years.
On Sept 18, 2019, the SP 500 closed at just under 3007. Yesterday, it closed at 3873. If your 401K is down over the last three years, I fear that you have only yourself to blame.
Gdanning
5mo ago
takes shots at carjackers
If the car was unoccupied, it was not a carjacking, which requires the threat or use of force against a person. It was merely an attempted theft or auto burglary.
Link includes a photo of him sitting around with an embarrassed smile on his face while Kessler is splayed out on the pavement waiting for an ambulance.
An ambulance which, according to the sheriff, he himself called. I don’t know exactly what happened nor what exactly this guy's level of moral culpability is (though he probably is guilty of at least involuntary manslaughter, but if his post-crime conduct is to be used to assess that culpability, then all of conduct should be included, not just some of it)
I think if you consult the linked source, you will find that a 7.5% unemployment rate for African Americans is in fact quite low in historical terms. The data starts in 1972, and from then until Jan of 2017 the African American unemployment rate had almost never been below 7.5%, and then only very briefly.
More importantly, the issue is not whether Obama is a good guy, or did a "good job." It is whether OP's specific empirical claim is correct, and it does not seem to be.
Gdanning
9mo ago
The footnote says:
The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.
No cynical take is needed. The Court spent pages and pages on whether the interests served by affirmative action at regular universities are substantial enough to survive strict scrutiny. The interests of military academies might well be different and hence might survive strict scrutiny,and the issue was technically not before the Court, so it makes sense to leave that question for another day.
Gdanning
1yr ago
At appears that three of the eleven members of the Court were appointed by Lula. Not a supermajority. The most recent member of the Court was not on the bench at the time; he replaced someone appointed by Fernando Collor de Mello.
Leaving aside the issue of the amount of damages, surely, this was a textbook case of defamation; if these parents were not defamed, then no one can be a victim of defamation. Do you mean that most of their damages were not caused by him?
Gdanning
10mo ago
Rather than relying on memory, it is easy enough to google the case and discover that they were in fact selling coffee hotter than the norm, that they had previous injury complaints, and that the jury took into account the plaintiff's own negligence and found her 20 pct responsible.
Whether damages were excessive is a separate question, but she did have to undergo skin grafting and was hospitalized for 8 days.
This is nothing new. Virtually all censorship, and indeed virtually all limits on civil liberties, are premised on the claim, usually false or overblown, that it is necessary to prevent harm. That is true on the right as well as the left, and everywhere, not just the US.
And the proper response is not to argue that the threat is not real, but rather, the response is, so what? See, eg, this colloquy at oral arguments re a state law requiring that all arrestees give DNA samples:
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