Rov_Scam
3mo ago
I have a proposition for you: We hand all political power in the US over to the blacks. As a white guy, you'll probably be forced to live in a designated area an hour outside a major city, where you'll be forced to take a bus in every day to do manual labor for ten bucks an hour. You will be barred from most public accommodations, and will have to get official permission before traveling anywhere outside your home; even going to work will require you to present proof that you actually have a job. Your own political power is nonexistent, and the government doesn't even pretend that you have anything resembling civil rights. The tradeoff is that the United States sees unprecedented GDP growth. Do you take this bargain?
Rov_Scam
6mo ago
This comes up every year around clock change time and perma-DST people and noon is noon people are equally moronic. The mere existence of this debate is proof that time changes are needed. Seriously, if you can't handle two time changes a year maximally coordinated to minimize inconvenience, then you should never be allowed to get on an airplane again in your life. Or stay up past your bedtime. Or sleep in. Or do anything else that results in any mild disruption to your precious sleep schedule.
Losing an hour of sleep on a weekend is something I can deal with once a year. But as a white-collar worker who gets up at normal o'clock, waking up in the dark is something I do not want to deal with on a regular basis, as it is noticeable harder to get going in the morning when it's still dark. I currently have to deal with this maybe a few weeks out of the year. Permanent DST would have me deal with it from the end of October until mid-March, and I really don't want to fucking deal with that. Conversely, if we eliminated DST altogether it would mean I'd forfeit the glorious hour between 8 and 9 in the summertime when it's warm and still light enough to do things outside in exchange for... it getting light a 4 am. To those early birds who think that it getting light a 4 is just as good as it staying light until 9, you either do not have a job, a family, or other real-world obligations. The average person isn't getting up at 3:30 am to sneak a round of golf in before heading to the office. For those of us who don't get out of work until 5 pm or later, that extra hour in the evening is a godsend.
So can we stop this perpetual bitching? Time changes were implemented for a reason, and people who think we'd be better off without them have never actually lived in a world without them. The benefits are all theoretical. When permanent DST was implemented during the 1970s, the program was cancelled within a year because people couldn't abide the first winter. And very few people want to end summer evenings early. This has to be the stupidest debate in American political discourse; just leave things where they are.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
Honestly, the immigration thing is the easiest issue on which to thread that needle. The people crossing the border are mostly normal people in really desperate situations who hope they can have a better life in the US. While there are practical reasons why we can't let everyone in, Trump and the Republicans lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and have dehumanized them almost completely, giving them license to enact whatever brutal policies they can dream up. His political career literally rests on his belief that the vast majority of illegals are rapists and fentanyl traffickers who are only here so they can commit crimes. Her earlier positions were merely a reaction to Trump's policies at the time, and she was also young and idealistic. Ten years in politics has taught her the practical realities of governance, but we at least need to acknowledge that we're dealing with real people here and not faceless monsters.
Some of her other positions are going to be harder to backtrack from, but she has the advantage of coming into office young enough that she both gets a pass for her earlier positions and develops into a shrewd politician by the time she needs to.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
This comment seems to echo the fantasy among some dateless conservatives that if only they were born in some bygone era where women didn't have nearly as many options then they'd surely get a girlfriend almost by default. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't get a date now, you weren't getting a date then. And I suspect that these guys never once consider that they're being just as selective as the women they're criticizing. I grew up in the Mon Valley, an area that's not exactly hot at the moment. If anyone here is seriously interested in getting married to a woman who is young enough to have a lot of children and doesn't mind staying home and not working, DM me and I will be glad to take them to the kind of bar where their chances of meeting an overweight, chain-smoking phlebotomy school dropout who's willing to date them are nearly 100%. Hell, you don't even need a good job; a steady, decent job is more than enough, considering most of the guys these women date are the kind of guys who quit because they got into an argument with their boss. Where I'm from these girls are a dime a dozen.
Rov_Scam
3mo ago
The left took over these institutions because the right couldn't be bothered to defend them. 25 years ago, while there was a clear left-wing bias in academia, you could still be a conservative and get tenure and publish papers without too much controversy. And conservatives were still telling my generation that if we pursued a career in academia, or government, or the nonprofit sector, or whatever, we were idiots, because those jobs were for people who couldn't hack it in the private sector. Hell, just look at their paychecks. Hell, I remember us joking after our first semester in law school that we could relax for a few weeks between the end of finals and discovering that we were all destined for the public defender (never mind that a year later working as a PD seemed like a pretty good deal).
Government jobs were for the mediocre, nonprofit jobs were for the bleeding hearts. But academia was the worst. At the age when your peers are all established in their jobs, have mortgages, and are trying to figure out how to coach a little league baseball team, you're living in a shithole apartment in a college town on a stipend, hoping that you'll get to move to rural Nebraska so you can teach history at a small liberal arts college that's not even offering tenure. And even that's such a long shot that it's pretty much your dream job at this point. The GOP at this time was preaching a civic version of the prosperity gospel: Taxes on the rich only serve to penalize the most productive/talented/innovative citizens. If you make a lot of money it's because you deserve it, and if you don't it's because you simply aren't as good. And God help you if you were on welfare or some other kind of public assistance, which was evidence that you were simply lazy and expected a handout.
This wasn't the case among Democrats. The important thing in Democratic families wasn't maximizing your paycheck, but having a job that made full use of your talents. So if a smart kid wanted to be a taxi driver, that was looked down on, but if he wanted to be a teacher, it was okay, even if they both made the same salary. So there was a period, probably beginning in the 1980s, where the number of conservative PhD candidates began dwindling, year by year, and as conservative professors retired, they were replaced by liberals. By 2015 you had a critical mass of leftist professors and new Republican orthodoxy that was repugnant not just to liberals, but to old guard conservatives, and has no intellectual foundation. At this point, it's hard to imagine what a conservative academic would even look like, since the tenants of conservatism are all dependent on the fickle whim of one man. So even the conservatives who have made it through probably aren't conservative in contemporary terms, since up until fairly recently no self-respecting conservative economist, for example, would ever wright an academic treatise on why 30% tariffs are actually good, and no conservative political scientist would write a treatise on why the US needs to invade Canada. As much as the right complains about this, the wound is entirely self-inflicted.
Rov_Scam
3mo ago
A lot of the pro-Trump/pro-deal faction on here like to describe themselves as realists and pat themselves on the back for understanding Realpolitik and not being squishy idealists. It seems to me, though, that the Realpolitik goes in the other direction. Russia is our biggest foreign military threat, and is the biggest threat to our allies as well. While I'd prefer a world in which they didn't invade Ukraine, they've proven both that they are too incompetent to score a quick victory and too bullheaded to call off their dogs. For their part, the Ukrainians don't seem to have any interest in capitulating.
What we have here, boys and girls, is a proxy war. Whether or not Ukraine has a shot at "winning" or regaining significant territory is irrelevant. Every day that the war continues is another day that the Russian military continues to deteriorate without any loss of American life? But what about the Ukrainians? As long as they're want to keep fighting, we should support them. They're morally in the right here, so I don't see what forcing a settlement on them accomplishes. If the war becomes unpopular enough that the situation changes, then I'm all for changing along with it, but other than a few anecdotal accounts of people fleeing conscription, I'm not seeing it. If there were mass anti-Zelensky protests in the street, we'd know about it. And the idea that Ukraine can't sustain these kinds of losses for much longer is hogwash. In World War I, Germany, with about the same population, lost close to 2 million war dead. Ukraine's population was similar at the beginning of World War II and they lost 1.6 million war dead, in addition to over 5 million civilians. In 3 years of fighting, Ukraine has lost about 100,000 soldiers and a few thousand more civilians. This war can continue for a very long time.
The thing that pisses me off the most about this, though, is that Trump makes it sound like a deal is ready to go and all that's missing is Zelensky's signature, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. All we have is Trump's word that Putin is willing to deal, but for all we know that could mean anything. There seems to be some suggestion that the front lines will be frozen, but I just don't see that happening. I don't see Putin letting the forces in Kursk who he's been unable to dislodge in 6 months being allowed to stay indefinitely. It wouldn't surprise me if, in addition to this, Putin were to start demanding additional concessions, like Ukrainian withdrawal from the entirety of the regions he wants to annex.
And at this point there's no reason for Puitin not to make such demands. If he gets them he gets them, and if he doesn't, then he's in the same position he was a few months ago. And what does Trump do in that situation? He certainly hasn't indicated that if Putin is the one that isn't willing to deal, that he'd send US troops or drastically increase aid or anything like that. In other words, I really just don't see how making this deal furthers American interests in the region. I can see how it furthers Donald Trump's personal interest, in that he wants credit for ending the war regardless of how bad a deal it is or whether the peace lasts longer than the end of his administration. I honestly don't see the point in all this.
And one final point: A bunch of people have said that it's better for Ukrainians that the killing stops and that they still have a country, period. First, if you're going to make that argument, at least acknowledge that Putin is more to blame for all of this than Zelensky. He could end this war right now if he cared to, but he's more concerned about pursuing his revanchist vision of Mother Russia. Second, if you want to do this, don't talk about realism, and don't talk about how you personally don't give a fuck about whether Ukraine survives because you only care about America. These views simply aren't compatible.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
I guess that explains why straight white males have such low incomes and high unemployment compared to minority populations.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
To be fair about the Anthony case, at least the initial wave of support wasn't for his defense per se. Anthony was initially given a 1 million bond, which was reduced to $250,000 after a hearing, and his family was able to post the bond. Some fringe right-wing websites decided this was unacceptable and protestors started showing up outside the family's home and sending death threats. The fundraiser was initially to pay for alternative lodging for the kid, since being forced into hiding isn't easy for people of modest means.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
If the Trump–Russia allegations were limited to Manafort and only Manafort, then you might have an argument. But there were several more people in Trump's circle who were indicted in connection with the Mueller investigation, and several more who were implicated due to having ties with Russia but committed no actual crimes. There ended up not being any fire, but there sure was a lot of smoke; it's certainly unusual for so many people in a presidential campaign to have connections to a country the US isn't exactly on great terms with. Combine that with Trump making statements about Russia that weren't exactly in line with what anyone on either side of the political aisle was saying at the time, and suspicion is understandable. If there were evidence that the conduct in question went beyond Sun and deeper into the Governor's office, I would expect there to be an investigation.
otherwise, frankly, I would have to chalk such a position up to pure partisanship.
I don't think Democrats have any qualms about hanging even more shit on Andrew Cuomo.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
It's only "indoctrination" when you don't agree with the outcome. When I was in elementary school in the '90s. There was plenty of material in reading class that would have been considered indoctrination in a prior era among those of a certain persuasion. A biography of Dr. King comes to mind; why is this being discussed in reading class and not social studies? What about all the other stuff we read that subtly or not so subtly tried to convey the message that it wasn't okay to judge people based on race? What about the story about the girl whose parents met while her father was stationed in Japan? Is this nothing more than indoctrination about interracial relationships and multiculturalism (the story itself was about dating where the dad learned to use chopsticks and the mother learned to eat with a fork, and why they switch between both at home)? For that matter, we also read other stuff about American history in reading class; is the story about a Revolutionary soldier not indoctrination? Shouldn't this be part of social studies class?
The crux of the matter is that the normalization of same-sex relationships is a culture war battle that the right fought and lost, and some of the losers are clinging to the last viable paths of opposition in a desperate attempt to reverse the tide. The problem with these books isn't that they're age-inappropriate due to sexual content, it's that they're presenting same-sex relationships in a manner that isn't sufficiently condemnatory. That the plaintiffs have to resort to bad faith references to leather is proof of this—it's presented in a way to make one think that the book is referring to bondage or gay leather boy culture, when in reality it's a picture of a woman in a leather jacket, which picture would be unobjectionable in a book about anything else.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Right now I prefer the term "gender & race communism" to "wokeness." And as such "wokeness" did not start in the 2010s or in the 19080s as Paul Graham posits, but was a growing trend the entire last two hundred years.
I'm not playing this game. Sure, you can trace the roots of any political or intellectual movement back hundreds of years or even further. But that's not what anyone is talking about when they mean "woke". I've been in enough online discussions to recognize that this is just an entree to claiming that Marbury v. Madison / The 14th Amendment / Women's Suffrage / The Progressive Era / The New Deal / The Civil Rights Act / any number of other things is the moment the true spirit of the founding was lost and America started to go to hell in a handbasket, but I'm not buying it, not least of which because most of the people complaining about wokeness aren't buying it either. Not least of which because a colorblind society a la Dr. King was anathama to a large enough segment of the population as to be a progressive idea for the time but is the essence of anti-woke ideology today.
The curriculum of the school system in the major US city where I live is a near total wreck. Up through eighth grade, they basically don't teach a single classic American text, they don't teach anything that would inspire a white American boy (and frankly the curriculum probably isn't that inspiring to the people of color it is supposed to represent). Even the unit on space exploration -- uses Hidden Figures as the main text -- the school is flat-out teaching "misinformation." The magnet schools that were previously a great option for the better students have been greatly harmed by the post-2020 equity craze that lead to a change in admission rules. The administrators talking about these changes explicitly said that these changes were a result of making equity and anti-racism a central focus of their mission.
I've been hearing complaints about the alleged intrusion of wokeness into the elementary school curriculum for years, but there's been a paucity of concrete evidence. It's never anything that anyone's kids are bringing home, but what they heard is going on at a school district that's close enough to seem familiar but not so close that there's a good chance of actually knowing anyone whose kids go there. I'd expect that in this era of cell phone cameras and social media that the people who are outraged over this would have no problem coming up with examples of worksheets, reading materials, etc. that is supposedly indoctrinating our children, but somehow the only things I've ever seen produced are copypasta obtained from Google Images.
As to why kids aren't reading the classics of American literature anymore, my cousin, an elementary school teacher, gave me the answer, and it's more boring than some communist plot to make every story about black people. Basically, the so-called "curriculum experts" who decide these things came to the conclusion that the reading material needed to be specially tailored so that conformed to the precise reading level that was expected of the children and contained all the necessary vocabulary words but not any that were too hard. The result was that none of the existing children's literature filled all of the specific requirements, so they essentially had to commission a lot of stuff that did.
Anyway, this isn't a new thing. I was in elementary school in the early 1990s, and while we read some of these books, it was always apart from the standard curriculum. In any event, most of the stuff (like Charlotte's Web, for instance) involved all animal characters, so I'm not sure what was supposed to have especially inspired me as a young white boy. the stuff we actually read from the provided textbooks had no shortage of multicultural influence, so I'm not going to chalk up the mere existence of stories that center around black characters and traditions to some woke mind-virus.
The police were told to stand-down, a huge crime wave ensued, and urban public safety in the major cities has not come close to returning to 2000s levels, far less 1950s levels (Don't talk to me about crime rates -- due to police capacity and risk homeostasis, crime rates don't actually measure changes in public safety in the medium-term -- you have to look at how people's behaviors have changed).
If you're going to jettison statistics in favor of vibes, you also have to consider how much the narrative contributes to those vibes. When I was writing the entry on the South Side for my Pittsburgh series, I discussed the increased perception that the South Side was unsafe, a perception that wasn't really supported by the statistics. At first, I thought that maybe the perception was being influenced by high-profile shootings that made the news. But I was surprised to find a similar number of high-profile shootings in 2014 as in 2022. The difference was that in 2014, there was no narrative about how the South Side was becoming increasingly unsafe in the wake of a post-pandemic crime wave. With the overall crime rate having gone down the previous few years, there was no reason to believe that anything was out of the ordinary, so the shootings were reported on, chalked up to bad dudes hanging around nuisance bars after-hours, and quickly forgotten about.
In 2021 and 2022, after a summer of protests, rising crime rates, and being told that police were at the end of their rope, a similar number of instances caused the widespread perception that the South Side was unsafe, at least late at night on weekends, and it accordingly prompted various police strike forces and visits from the mayor. Never mind that the crime rate in the neighborhood was roughly similar to 2014, including the number of shootings that made the news. Now it was dangerous when it wasn't before. Are people really responding to increased risk of crime victimization, or to a conservative narrative that says woke policies are sending our cities to hell in a handbasket?
The demographics of our elite colleges were greatly changed as a result of equity focused changes in admissions. This matters a lot for the future leadership of our country.
Just out of curiosity, I checked the demographics of Harvard. The class of 2010 is roughly similar to the class of 2023. The biggest gains for blacks in university admissions overall seemed to happen in the 1980s. But this is also concurrent with the biggest gains made by Asians. Not only did this change happen in the pre-woke era, it happened at a time when blacks made huge gains in closing the high school graduation rate gap. It's no surprise that the percentage of blacks in a certain college will increase at a time when the college-eligible black population is also increasing.
The nature of campus social life and dating has fundamentally changed, partly because of Title IX investigations and metoo, but of course, also for many other reasons.
Fundamentally? I can't speak to any changes that have happened since I was there in the early 2000s, but I'd bet they're nothing compared to the changes made in the 1960s, prior to which men couldn't even get into women's dorms and people had to sign in and out, or since the 1940s, when you add to that the fact that the overall college population was 75% male, and all-girl's schools were much more prominent than they are today, meaning that if you went to a big college like Ohio State or Notre Dame, you probably weren't dating any fellow students.
The demographics of the entire country changed because it became racist and xenophobic to do any border control which produced bad optics or "violated human rights"
Hispanics were 5% of the US population in 1970, 6% in 1980, 8% in 1990, 12.5% in 2000, 16% in 2010, and 19% in 2020. The demographics seem to be changing at about the same clip as they have for decades. As an aside, this is why people who are anti-immigration are often accused of being racist. the official explanations range between worrying about them taking American jobs (if you assume they work), and leeching off of the welfare state (assuming they don't work), which at least are credible economic concerns. But here you make it sound like the real concern is demographic, which is as much as most Trump critics suspect.
The replacement of merit-based hiring with DEI hiring has not been rolled back, our institutions are continuing to crumble as a result. We do have people claiming they saw explicit anti-white-male discrimination in hiring at companies like Google and Intel and I think it has something to do with the stagnation and decline of those companies.
If this really happened then Mr. Magire was a fool to not take the statement to an attorney. If Google was actually using minority hiring quotas then they would have settled for a pretty penny to avoid discovery and the attendant publicity. Even the all-in DEI grifter employment law firms around here are quick to warn that DEI is not affirmative action and that private companies need to focus their efforts on recruiting and "fostering an inclusive atmosphere" and steer clear of anything that could be construed as a Title VII violation. I'd be surprised if a company that can afford the kind of attorneys Google can would be this stupid about the whole thing. And who are these unqualified black senior executives I keep hearing so much about?
Cross-dressers went from being a joke, to something that will get you fired and ostracized if you don't play along with their false beliefs. School systems now teach multiple genders and you are a bad person if you don't acknowledge someone's chosen gender. Code-of-conducts across an enormous number of projects, conferences, and other institutions, now ban "misgendering" someone. Mandatory denial of reality across many institutions of society is an enormous concrete change.
School systems encouraging this kind of trans-affirmation or whatever you want to call it isn't so much a symptom of woke ideology as it is of administrators who are spineless when it comes to discipline. I hear it from high school teachers and parents in several districts that administrators are loathe to discipline all but the most troublesome students, because the parents all think their own kids are angels and can't be inconvenienced by after-school detentions or suspension. The teachers are basically told to stand down; they can send the kid to the principal, but he just comes back without punishment. The result is that bullying is rampant, and the bullied kids end up going trans because it at least gives them leverage over the teacher that they didn't have before. And this isn't happening in highly-rated PMC school districts in the suburbs; it may be happening in urban areas, but the stories I'm hearing come from rural parts of the rust belt where the parents in question aren't voting for Kamala Harris.
Rov_Scam
25d ago
If you're trying to analogize based on yesterday's event's, it's unclear what crimes, if any, were committed, besides normal low-level protest crimes like failure to disperse and whatever charges you can levy against people throwing objects at police. Getting someone for interfering with an investigation or official duties would require showing both that the agent were actually engaged in official duties and that the person took a specific action to interfere. Realistically, this would look like ICE trying to make an arrest and the protestors physically impeding the officer from doing so. The reports I've read suggest that ICE was merely staging for a raid (which is itself just an interpolation from the authors; there's been no official word that I'm aware of) so there's no official duty at this point to interfere with. At this point it looks like there was a raid that was about to go down but got called off because of the protests. Charging everyone present because their protesting made it inconvenient to undertake a planned future action is already stretching the law beyond anything it's been used for in the past, but it comes with the additional complication that actions that you are claiming are obstruction are core First Amendment activities. So even if you could show that the elements of the crime were satisfied, you still might not be able to get a conviction due to constitutional issues.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I think the concern is that if they rule on this case while the others are still pending (assuming they strike it down) they get one state law struck down and several others where the courts carefully craft their decision to avoid running afoul of whatever logic the Supreme Court uses to justify their decision, in which case they have to keep hearing the same kinds of cases over and over again. And even when they do rule on it, they're just going to get new legislation that tests the limits of the decision. This is what happens when you have a constitutional right that a sufficient number of states simply choose not to recognize as such; look at how many southern states kept passing more and more onerous abortion restrictions to get around Roe. The court simply doesn't have any interest in turning into the Gun Control Review Board or whatever, so they're just going to keep denying cert. Some people may wonder why they say they're too busy when they still hear tax cases and bankruptcy cases and approximately 16,000 cases per term involving the Uniform Arbitration Act, but it's because those cases involve questions that need answers, and they don't worry about state legislatures and lower courts trying to dodge their rulings.
This may seem like an unfortunate situation to gun rights advocates such as yourself, but it's better than the alternative. The entire reason the court is in this mess is because they want to preserve restrictions that almost everyone agrees are necessary, and while you personally may not care if fully automatic weapons or sawed-off shotguns are legal, as soon as there's a high profile incident with a lot of casualties, the anti-gun protests would make everything we've seen thus far look like a dress rehearsal. There's a reason that most gun-friendly NRA A+ congressmen aren't introducing bills to repeal the FFA, or the Gun Control Act of 1968, or whatever law makes post-1986 guns illegal. This doesn't even get into sales restrictions, or background checks, or any of that. At that point the argument about cosmetic features, or DFUs, or whatever go completely out the window, and whatever rights you think Heller isn't protecting are going to vanish along with Heller itself, and in the ensuing backlash states aren't going to be shy about clamping down the screws.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Before I start, I think we need to make it clear that by "woke" we mean a certain kind of racial and sexual politics rooted in the idea of recognizing oppression. It's a broad definition, but it's important that we distinguish woke politics from typical left-wing politics than have been around for decades, as a lot of right-wing detractors have lumped these policies together in an attempt at discrediting them. So, by my definition, simply arguing for stricter environmental regulations for the normal reasons isn't woke. Arguing for stricter environmental regulations because of the disproportionate impact of air pollution on communities of color is.
That being said, wokeness got a lot of press but it was never able to coalesce into a serious political movement, and while it certainly influenced the "national conversation", it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes. One only has to look at the history of the movement to get a feel for how unpopular it really was among Democrats. It started around 2012 in the wake of the Trayvon Martin scandal, but it didn't really have any appreciable influence on Obama's reelection campaign. The late Obama administration made a few changes regarding sexual assault on campus, trans people in the military, and the like, and while woke ideas were gaining greater prominence, the work "woke" wasn't even in the public consciousness yet.
That wouldn't happen until the 2016 primary season got into full swing in the summer of 2015, by which point a number of blacks killed at the hands of police led to riots and other expressions of outrage. But while these things were gaining media prominence, they hadn't coalesced into any real policy proposals. The 2016 Democratic primary was supposed to be a coronation of Hillary Clinton, whose style was straight out of the 1990s, but was met with a challenge by Bernie Sanders, whose ideas were more out of the 1960s. The woke set tried to glom onto Sanders as, being far to the left of Hillary, he seemed to have the most promise, but his ideas centered more around class and economic inequality than identity politics. He would occasionally give a nod to his new compatriots, but it was never a central part of his platform. In any event, he lost the nomination.
After Trump won the presidency, woke politics gained increasing prominence in the media, and would seem to be the future of the Democratic party. Yet the 2020 primary field, despite being the largest in recent memory, failed to produce a single credible woke candidate. The wokest was probably Kirsten Gillebrand, who identified herself as a “white woman of privilege” and promised to reach out to “white women in the suburbs who voted for Trump and explain to them what white privilege actually is.” Yet her campaign never got any traction and she was done by the end of summer, 2019. Beto O'Rourke's woke credentials didn't run as deep as Gillebrand's as he tried to unseat Ted Cruz in 2018 as a pragmatic centrist, but his presidential run saw him embrace wokeness in an attempt to distinguish himself. He too floundered, and dropped out in November. Kamala Harris actually had the best run of the woke candidates, but this is subject to some qualifications. First, her wokeness wasn't explicit; you had to squint to see it. Second, though she did get some momentum—in contrast to the other two, who got none—she couldn't sustain it and had to drop out in December.
What about the candidates who actually made it to the primaries? There was Sanders, who had more concessions to the progressive left but didn't really change who he was. There was Liz Warren, the darling of the woke media types. She was basically running a Sanders-lite campaign that had a few nods to racial and gender politics but was nonetheless centered around inequality and corruption. There was Mike Bloomberg, a former Republican and Independent who was nobody's idea of woke and who nobody voted for anyway. There were Amy Klobuchar and Mayor Pete, clearly vying for the centrist lane. And there was Joe Biden, ultimate winner of the nomination and the election, who was also running as a centrist. He was woke in the sense that he was the only candidate who could get a significant amount of black votes, but in this sense he seemed more like a throwback to Bill Clinton than the vanguard of racial politics. And as woke rhetoric heated up during the summer of 2020, he would take positions explicitly contrary to the worst woke excesses.
So there we were. In 2019, as wokeness was nearing its peak, the Democratic field could not support a single woke candidate. Liz Warren, the wokest candidate in the eventual primary field, did miserably. The eventual nominee didn't embrace it during primary season and didn't turn to it in the general, even as its public prominence was peaking. The most prominent advocates of wokeism in the political arena were The Squad, a group of lefty representatives from safe districts. While they got a lot of media attention, they were essentially freshmen who didn't hold any leadership positions and didn't have any real influence. The most prominent piece of legislation they produced was the Green New Deal draft, a document so widely ridiculed that most Democrats disowned it as an overenthusiastic preliminary draft b some plucky kids that was never meant to see the light of day, let alone become a serious proposal.
The biggest political successes of wokeness were in local governments in heavily left-leaning areas, particularly on the West Coast. But these are local governments, and for all the press their policies got, they never impacted more than a very small percentage of the total population. It's telling that when people are discussing the effects of woke culture it almost always comes down to a few things that don't really mean anything. For instance, I have yet to read a critique of wokeness that doesn't mention pronouns in email signatures. But what does this really mean? As much as conservatives would like to view it as a symbol of capitulation to radical ideology, it's really just the cheapest, lowest-effort thing a company can do to make it look like they're changing the status quo.
Which leads us to the biggest changes corporations made: DEI initiatives. Were these merely symbolic? Yes, in the sense that they aren't anything other than a spinoff of the HR department into something that sounds more impressive.But what did they actually do? Mostly investigate discrimination claims that HR would have to investigate anyway. Wed to this was the implementation of various training programs meant to counter this, which is why companies were spending large sums having people like Robin D'Angelo speak at all-hands meetings on Zoom. But the rise, and subsequent downfall, of these initiatives wasn't merely symbolic, or necessarily borne out of a sincere desire to combat racism, or sexism, or whatever.
No, they were borne out of the belief that there was a growing zeitgeist that would make them subject to additional liability for employment discrimination. So, in order to show juries that you're Taking Discrimination Seriously, you have additional trainings and a dedicated DEI staff and prompt investigation of complaints. But aside from the investigation of complaints, this additional stuff doesn't do much. Employment discrimination suits ended up being based on the same boring grounds they were before wokeness became prominent. Very few attorneys were willing to file suits based on microaggressions or implicit bias or whatever, and those who did couldn't find willing juries. And even if there was a jury willing to entertain these notions, few of them would reconsider because of some bullshit training the supervisor attended a year earlier. Now that it's clear that shit like that isn't going to play they can move the discrimination investigations back to HR where they belong and get rid of all the trainings that don't accomplish anything useful.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
You can talk about dubious IQ studies you read about in online articles all you want. As someone who has had to deal with them professionally for over 20 years at this point, everyone in West Virginia is fucking retarded. Okay, not everyone, but a high enough proportion that in order to accomplish anything you have to start from that assumption or else you're bound to be incredibly frustrated. My first encounter with this was when I was in college, and got a summer job delivering ice to convenience stores and the like. We were based out of Pittsburgh, but the college kids all got the shitty routes, drivine to far-flung rural areas and the 'hood. There was one week when they put me on service duty, which basically consisted of me taking a minivan around to our sites with an air compressor and blowing dust out of the mechanicals of the boxes and cleaning them up a bit. To avoid any confusion of why a guy in an ice uniform was there poking around the box and not delivering ice, I'd stop inside to tell the clerk what I was doing.
I started with the urban routes and worked my way outward. I never had any difficulty explaining that I was just there to clean the box out to anyone of any ethnicity. Some people would tell me they were low and ask if a delivery was forthcoming or if I could call someone to come out (I don't know and no), but no one was ever confused by my presence. Then, at the end of the week, I hit West Virginia.
"Just so you know, I'm not delivering any ice today. I'm just going to clean the box out with compressed air and make sure everything is working okay."
"Heh?"
"I'm not delivering ice, just cleaning the box."
"Heh?"
(repeat ad nauseum)
I understand that convenience store clerk isn't the most intellectually demanding position and that some places will hire people of limited cognitive capacity to do this work; if it happened once or twice I wouldn't have thought much of it. But it happened at every place I went to in West Virginia. One guy was confused why I was there because he'd already gotten a delivery earlier that day. It got to the point where I stopped telling anyone what I was doing because they were too dim to understand. Then I crossed the river into Ohio and went in as an experiment and everything was suddenly normal again.
After becoming a lawyer, I was told that if I got licensed in West Virginia it would increase my prospects, so I did. I assumed this was because, since Pittsburgh is close to West Virginia, companies in Northern WV or the Panhandle would use Pittsburgh firms. I soon came to realize that all West Virginia companies of a certain size, or foreign companies operating in the state, use Pittsburgh firms for their WV work. When these companies are sued it's common for hearings and the like to be held in Morgantown or Wheeling so the lawyers don't have to drive to Charleston or wherever. During the oil and gas boom most of the legal work was given to Pittsburgh firms. Even ones that opened satellite offices in West Virginia were almost exclusively staffed by people originally from Pittsburgh, excepting maybe one or two locals (usually higher-ups who got sick of having to drive to Pittsburgh).
Now that I have to depose a lot of people from West Virginia, but none of them know anything. I mean anything. Trying to get basic personal information is like pulling teeth. They remember their name, dob, address, wife's name, and maybe their kid's names and ages, if you're lucky. They'll know that their parents are dead, but won't be able to tell you when they died. And I mean that; it's pretty common that they can't even narrow it down to the decade. One guy said he thought his father died in the 1980s; I pulled the obituary and he died in 2016. "Well, I know it was a while ago" was his response. One guy was on disability but he didn't know what for. West Virginia judges are more or less forced to have lax evidentiary standards for the simple reason that if they didn't, no one could provide enough evidence to maintain any kind of lawsuit. I struggle to describe it properly, because it's literally ineffable how utterly moronic these people are compared to those of similar socioeconomic standing in Pennsylvania.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
So instead of trying to verbally convince me that the economy isn't actually that bad, why don't we instead come up with a plan of action to make my burger not cost $30 anymore? Is there anyone in November running on a platform of making burgers not cost as much? Because I'll vote for that guy.
Well, I wasn't planning on getting involved in politics, but if that's what you're concerned about, I have a plan that all but guarantees to get the cost of that hamburger down: First, we'll raise interest rates up to Volcker-era levels. If this managed to get inflation down by double digits, with inflation currently sitting at 2.5%, it should be enough to get double-digit deflation. Next, I'm going to raise taxes on practically everyone. Current middle class brackets are in the 21%–24% bracket, let's get them into the 25%-30% range they were at before the Reagan tax cuts. Next, we'll get rid of all tariffs. There's no reason for Five Guys to be forced to pay extra if they can get cheaper beef from Brazil. Finally, end all immigration restrictions. Farmers, food processing plants, and restaurants shouldn't have to pay anyone $15/hr when there are plenty of people who would work for the minimum wage and be glad to get it. Now, there's a decent chance that you might not have a job after my plan takes effect, rendering the cost of restaurant food a moot point, but that would do it.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I wonder why that is?
Two reasons:
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You may think that killing someone is the worst thing someone can do to them, but as a litigator, I can assure you that is not the case. Any case with a live victim who can testify and enjoy the proceeds of the suit directly will collect more than a wrongful death action where the injury is determined by extrinsic evidence and the proceeds go to the family. Garcia is currently in jail and the administration (presumably) has the power to get him out, and there is action in the court system almost daily. It has implications for the administration's policies going forward. Alaki wasn't in the news until several years after his death, and while the surrounding circumstances certainly had implications for policy, they weren't as salient.
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Criticism of the Obama administration came mostly from Democrats, and internecine wars aren't going to make the news as much as wars that have cross-party intrigue. The media outlet furthest to the right condemning the attack was the New York Times editorial board. Fox News, on the other hand, was going so far in the other direction that even the administration was telling them to stop. If the country is roughly split half and half R/D, and only half the Ds are making a controversy about something, it's not going to catch on, especially if see No. 1.
I don't know how old you are or the social circles you run in, but among left-of-center people at the time there was definitely a fatigue about Obama setting in. The whole Clinton–Kerry foreign policy machine seemed like a continuation of the failed Bush policies, or for that matter the 20th Century foreign spook shit writ large. And then on the other side, you had Republicans who said he wasn't being aggressive enough. I'm beginning to suspect that the whole turn toward what would become wokeness in late 2014 was largely an attempt to reconnect with a leftist base who had largely become frustrated with his schtick.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
I don't see what's so bad about it, and it's certainly less annoying than your making accusations and using them to paint half of the entire population with a broad brush. I'm not a huge fan of people announcing their exit, but this is certainly preferable to past users who have decided to end their time here with a long whinge about why they're leaving, complete with accusations about the mods not acting fairly since most of them were skirting perma-bans anyway.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
I can't take Trump seriously about the deficit when he openly plans on insulting massive tax cuts that will massively outdo whatever nibbling around the edges DOGE manages to accomplish.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Citing something that was implemented between 2009 and 2014 is hardly evidence of the woke explosion having influenced anything.
And they managed to make a small minority of Blacks to get away with killing more Blacks because policing them is racist if it leads to disparate outcomes.
This is based on the assumption that "defund the police" and other movements led to a conscious effort to decrease policing that resulted in a higher murder rate. But the increase in murder rate happened everywhere, and to much the same degree. I haven't seen any study that's attempted to grade cities based on how enthusiastic they were about implementing police reform and looking at how the murder rates responded. Hell, Dallas and Miami had Republican mayors and still couldn't avoid the crime increase, so I doubt that this phenomenon was solely driven by policy decisions. Until someone actually takes a look at this, it's nothing more than conjecture.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
Being eventually right isn't the same as being right. My grandmother had dementia in 2014. If I had continually said she had it beginning in 1995, I would've eventually been right, but only after nearly 20 years of being wrong. Additionally, the claims were always beyond anything that's been demonstrated thus far. While he clearly isn't as sharp as he used to be, nothing he's done publicly has shown any indication he has dementia. His debate performance was bad, but the actual answers he gave weren't anything one wouldn't expect from a garden-variety bad debate performance. The criticism was more on his energy and demeanor than anything substantive. From my experience with the disease, this is not what one would expect from someone with that kind of cognitive decline.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
In addition to prognostications, I'd like to voice my disdain for these postmortems. You can't expect to win every election. Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign. She wasn't a great candidate who ran a great campaign, but that's an unrealistic expectation. She won the states she was supposed to win and lost the battlegrounds by a few points each. Obviously not an ideal outcome, but far from cause to hit the panic button and start realigning your policies. The most annoying thing about these postmortems is that the inevitable conclusion is that the losing party needs to adopt more of the policies of the winning party. The second most annoying thing is that they act like one election is a real crisis point for the Democrats/Republicans and that the party is screwed long-term unless they make the necessary changes.
To the first point, I can offer an easy, lazy counterargument. Most of Biden's 2020 votes didn't go to Trump; Democratic turnout was down in general. The problem wasn't that they lost voters to Trump, but that they lost voters, period. Maybe part of the problem was that she didn't give her base enough reason to turn out? Maybe going full woke would have stirred the far lefties to action? Maybe the problem with black turnout could have been remedied by embracing BLM more? There was some discussion here yesterday about how blacks continued to vote 90% Democrat, despite claims that Trump was winning black men, and there was a post on Reddit today suggesting that the Democrats had a problem in that pandering to black voters turns off Latinos. The problem theories like this is that you don't want to alienate your base. Look at NASCAR. In the early 2000s it was gaining popularity at a breakneck pace. Bill France's though he could stoke this emerging market by introducing rule changes that would make it more palatable to the masses. The strategy massively backfired, as these changes didn't particularly appeal to the public, and most long-time fans hated them. The response was to dick with the rules even more. At this point, America's fastest growing sport has become a confusing mess that only total fanboys like my dad can follow. I'm not trying to suggest that making some changes toward moderation isn't a bad idea, but that there's an argument to be made to the contrary.
To the second point, there's no suggestion that the Democrats are screwed long-term because of one election. They ran an unpopular incumbent and were forced to change horses mid stream. Something could easily happen in the first half of the new administration that leads to a Democratic midterm blowout. Trump's stated economic policies put us at serious risk for inflation, and if that happens, people are going to want a change. Any number of things are possible. Following the 2006 midterms and 2008 Obama landslide, pundits were saying that without major changes, the Republican Party was doomed long-term. Two years later they did exactly nothing and got one of the biggest legislative reversals in history. But then they lost the presidency in 2012, and we were told that they were becoming the party of old white men and they needed to appeal more to minorities to have any chance. Then Trump came along and was massively more anti-immigration than any Republican in recent memory and won the presidency. Maybe if the Democrats had done things a little differently this time they would have won, but maybe not. If they keep losing elections by increasing margins I'll concede that it's time for a change, but we're nowhere near that point.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
Because there is a massive, massive discrepancy in the application of the law between these two groups of people, as well as the scope of what happened.
Is there? This is usually taken as an article of faith by conservatives, but no one seems to put any actual numbers out there. Based on the way Trump talks, you'd think nobody was arrested. In Minneapolis, for instance, there were about 100 people charged with felonies in the wake of the riots and another 500 or so charged with misdemeanors. That may not sound like a lot considering that those numbers represent two days of rioting during which over 100 structures burned, but the contexts of the arrests are rather similar. I'm hesitant to offer advice on how to get away with committing crimes, but I'd recommend against livestreaming your criminal activities or posting them to social media. the BLM riots took place at night and were distributed across a large area where there was minimal media presence. Jan 6 took place in the daytime, had a lot of people in a concentrated area, practically none of whom were trying to conceal their identity, and the area itself was swarming with media. The people who got arrested in Minnesota were largely those who decided to livestream looting or post their hauls on social media, and the same was true of virtually everyone who was arrested in connection to Jan 6. In an emergency situation, the police have higher priorities than arresting individuals. Practically nobody was actually arrested on Jan 6, but identifying he perpetrators was like shooting fish in a barrel. Not as many BLM protestors were quite this stupid, but the police didn't ignore those who were.
The other thing that makes this line of arguing particularly vacuous is that, even if the number of BLM protestors convicted is proportionally lower, I have yet to hear any Democratic politician suggest pardoning any of them.
Because the alternative is "we looked at this and decided you lose. No we won't tell you our logic." Does that seem like it's helping? If it's going to fail on the merits, show me the merits; allow the debate to happen.
I think you're confused about how the legal system actually works. First, I'm not sure if your complaint is that the cases should be heard on the merits or that the courts aren't issuing written opinions. If it's the latter, be aware that being told "you lose" without explanation has nothing to do with standing and is the norm in litigation; written opinions are very rare. Some motions are filed strictly to protect the record and won't be challenged if the opposing party indicates that they're going to contest them. In these cases the court won't even formally deny them. If we decide to argue a motion, we'll get some sense of the judge's reasoning based on how he responds during oral argument, but most judges don't say anything during argument and don't rule from the bench. A week or so later you'll get an order granting or denying the motion and that's it; you move on with the case. And yes, this includes motions to dismiss and motions for summary judgment where the judge is practically ending the Plaintiff's case, at lease against one defendant. And, not that it applies to the election cases, but jury verdicts don't offer any more insight. You either get a defense verdict or a bill, with no further commentary except in unusual situations.
Now, in some cases trial courts do issue written opinions, particularly in cases where there are novel issues and the court expects an appeal. In those cases, the court will occasionally write a brief opinion that isn't published and has no precedential value, but is in the records for the appellate court to look at if they want to. I agree that some of the trial courts could have done so here. There are two problems with this, though. First, these cases were all asking for emergency relief. You can't expect the court to act fast but nonetheless have time to issue opinions detailing their reasoning. The second problem is that this wouldn't do anything. The standing objections were obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with the law, and there was plenty of commentary available. The court issuing an 86 page opinion that acts more or less as a primer on standing and why this Plaintiff doesn't have it would have done nothing to shift public opinion.
Now, if it's the former, and you really want the cases to be heard on their merits, then it gets even worse. First, I don't know what you mean by wanting full discovery power. Most of these lawsuits didn't involve any factual disputes. For instance, Texas v. Pennsylvania (which is what I assumed you had in mind when talking about dismissals based on standing) didn't involve any disputed facts. The question was whether actions taken by various state election officials violated the Constitution; no one was arguing that these actions weren't taken. An "on the merits" ruling by in trial court in this case would have likely been "there were no constitutional violations, you lose". Would that be a better outcome? Would a 120-page opinion explaining why state legislatures are allowed to delegate ministerial responsibilities really satisfy the people alleging MASSIVE FRAUD?
And what do you expect to accomplish with this discovery, anyway? None of the lawsuits, save Sidney Powell's, made any actual allegations of fraud. "Full discovery" is essentially asking the court to let you go on a fishing expedition. Where are you even going to start? If you file the day the election is called for Biden, you're looking at a few days for the defendants to respond, and for the judge to hear motions to dismiss. If he denies these motions and sets the case for trial, you're normally looking at a discovery deadline around May 1, over three months after Biden has been sworn in. Of course, there's no way you're even making that deadline, because you're going on a fishing expedition, which means you need to conduct discovery just to get to the point when you can begin conducting discovery. What are you looking for? Do you want emails? Are you going to request emails involving official election accounts in all the affected jurisdictions? You better plan on giving them ample time to sort through these emails to get rid of irrelevant information. Or since you don't trust them to do that you can sort through them yourself. How many emails do you think this is? How many of them do you think you'll actually want to use as evidence in court? How much time and money do you expect it to take for you to sort through all of these yourself? How many depositions do you plan on taking? Who do you plan on deposing? How much do you think this is going to cost? Given the breadth of the allegations, two years seems like an optimistic timetable for discovery completion, and that's before you get into all the other stuff. With any luck you might uncover the fraud and get your verdict before the next election. Assuming there are no appeals, Trump might actually be able to serve a few days of his term before being constitutionally ineligible.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
The defense has to be proportional to the threat; deadly force can only be used if the perpetrator has a reasonable threat of death or serious bodily injury (serious usually meaning permanent disability, not a black eye). Based on the information available, if he hadn't been shot and were arrested instead, the charge would have probably been something like misdemeanor battery, which wouldn't usually even merit jail time. If the facts come out that the guy were being wailed on, he may have a good defense, but if it's a mere scuffle as described in the article, it's a long shot that should get pled down. This may seem unfair, but for public policy reasons the state prefers that scuffles don't escalate to shootings.
This is a total myth that was fabricated by the Right to excuse the absolutely inexcusable behavior of Trump supporters. If you spent the summer of 2020 watching Fox News point to a few high-profile incidences of police cowardice or listening to NPR's defund the police nonsense then it's understandable how you would get that impression. But if you watched local news or actually paid attention to what was happening you'd have seen that there was no shortage of people who were arrested and charged. Hell, here in Pittsburgh there were news reports on an almost weekly basis that consisted of a grainy photograph of people the police were looking for in connection to spray painting buildings, or throwing rocks at police, or some other minor crime that wouldn't even merit a mention in the newspaper let alone a media-assisted manhunt. I can't speak to this happening in every city, but I know the same was true for Los Angeles and Atlanta, and the Feds were looking for a ton of people as well, which is interesting considering that they only had jurisdiction over a small percentage of the total rioters.
The reason you didn't see many high-profile convictions is because the BLM protestors were at least smart enough to commit their crimes at night and make some attempt at concealing their identities. For all the effort police put into tracking these people down, if there's no evidence there's no evidence. To the contrary, the Capitol rioters decided to commit their crimes during the day, in one large group, in an area surrounded by video cameras. Then they posed for pictures and videos and posted it on social media. Were these people trying to get caught? Which brings me to the dismissals. Yes, a lot of the George Floyd riot cases were dismissed, and conservatives like to point to this as evidence of them being treated with kid gloves. But the prosecutors often had no choice. The tactics of the Pittsburgh Police (under the administration of Bill Peduto, no one's idea of a conservative) were to simply arrest everyone in the immediate vicinity the moment a demonstration started to get out of hand. Never mind that they didn't have any evidence that most of these people committed a crime. If a crowd throws water bottles at the police and they arrest everyone they can get their hands on, good like proving that a particular person threw something. Unless you have video or a cop who is able to testify, you're entirely out of luck. So they'd arrest a bunch of people and ten the DA "(Steven Zappala, no one's idea of a progressive) would drop the charges against the 90% against which they had no evidence. In any event, I didn't hear about Biden or any liberal governor offering to pardon any of these people.
Seriously. The Capitol rioters were morons operating under the assumption that their sugar daddy Trump would bail them out because he agreed with their politics. If he wanted to give clemency to people who got swept up in the crowd and trespasses where they shouldn't have, I could understand that. But by pardoning people who assaulted police officers, broke windows, and the like, he shows a complete disrespect for law enforcement and the rule of law. And all of it coming from a guy who is supposedly about law and order. It's absolutely disgraceful.
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