Ohio
JTarrou
1yr ago
Let's talk shitty policing!
The story starts back in August, when police (specifically, Adams County Sherriff's Department of Ohio) raided the home of Joseph "Afroman" Foreman on a warrant for narcotics and kidnapping. Perhaps they thought that the author of "Because I got high" would be a slam dunk, but they walked out with a couple roaches and a few grand in cash.
When they discovered a grand total of jack and shit, they were forced to return most of the money, except the stuff they stole.
Reason covered the case here:
And the man himself has weighed in with a music video that is all security footage of the raid titled "Will you help me repair my door?"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
Down with qualified immunity, the legalized piracy known as civil asset forfeiture, and the self-funding militarized security state.
Frequent_Anybody2984
4mo ago
I've been thinking about Indians today. In my current management position in tech, I deal with a lot of Indians. On one hand, Indians are some of my most trusted colleagues and friends who I rely on who have a CS degree from a legit US college like University of Colorado Boulder or Ohio State. These people are the best and I love working with them. These are people who went to school in the US and are legit. Not only that, but my favorite two teachers in college in math and CS were both Indians who taught CS.
On the other hand, the Indians we hire as support are absolute trash. You compare them to Philipno or Eastern European people we hire as support, and they are so bad. The funny thing is that the Indians that are in the US are our best people for support. Obviously, there is a massive selection bias, but what the hell is going on with this?
I actually have a real world example. I worked at a telecom company as a software engineer and most of the managers were former Army or Air Force people. The majority of the people in the US who were doing support are/were Indian. But these people were Indians in America and everyone liked them and they all eventually got promoted. But the overnight people in India were again absolute trash.
What is going on in India with their leadership? Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good? I know this is probably a best fit for the questions thread, but this legitimately puzzles me.
And obviously Indian-Americans I don't include in this. They are just like all other Americans.
Eetan
8mo ago
Since religion is also part of culture wars, it is time for sharing some latest religious culture war battles, this time on Judeo-Christian front, originating from the crucified bird site.
1/ Case of Lizzie Marbach
Lizzie Marbach, Republican and anti abortion activist from Ohio, person with 7k followers and otherwise not notable, posted this.
There's no hope for any of us outside of having faith in Jesus Christ alone.
This is Christianity 101, this is exactly what Christian is supposed to say and believe. There is no reason for anyone to be surprised.
Except Max Miller, Jewish Republican representative of Ohio with 52k followers who was not amused.
This is one of the most bigoted tweets I have ever seen
Mega dead bird storm ensued, and many people came to Lizzie's side to support her.
Including Ilhan Omar.
Things went so far that Max Miller was forced to apologize.
GOP lawmaker apologizes for ‘religious freedom’ tweet
But, nevertheless, Lizzie Marbach lost her job.
By sheer coincidence, Miller’s wife, Emily Moreno Miller, sits on the board of Ohio Right to Life.
This thing will continue, and it is not looking good for official GOP.
2/ Case of Darryl Cooper, rather lighter one.
Darryl Cooper, known as Martyr Made on the interwebs, substacker, podcaster on several sites and dead birder with 173k followers.
So this is rather important person, in internet terms, who suddenly decided that this is the time, of all things, to preach to Jewish people and convert them to Christianity.
It turned out that lot of his followers are Jews who do not appreciate being evangelized, especially by such D- apologetic piece. Massive dead bird storm ensued, and DC doubled, quartupled and octupled his efforts.
Darryl Cooper himself seems to be rather unorthodox Christian of somewhat Marcionite tinge. This makes the whole thing more confusing, what exactly are his Jewish followers supposed to convert to?
What have these cases in common? They illustrate the difficulty of actual interfaith cooperation between sincere believers in different faiths. If you really believe in truth of your religion, it is realy hard to desist from preaching and evangelizing, and even harder to do not take offence if you are (or perceive to be) preached at and evangelized by your fellows.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
The responses by various commenters here reveal severe contradictions at the heart of “the case for Trump”. I think that this profoundly confused tweet by Martyr Made is illustrative.
People underestimate (or are not in a position to understand) how powerful it is for people to see Trump being attacked by the same people who have been maligning them in media and politics for years. Critics can say that that Trump is not a true enemy of the Establishment since he did x, y, or z, but it’s obvious to Trump supporters that the same powerful people who hate them also hate Trump, and that they hate Trump for taking their side.
I remember one middle-aged woman somewhere in Ohio being asked why she supported Trump. Was it his immigration policy, trade policy, what was it? She said: “Because he sticks up for us.”
It’s like the cool kids - the varsity QB, the homecoming queen, etc - sitting in the front of the class, forever bullying and mocking the “losers” in the back of class, who don’t play sports or cheerlead because their families are poor and they have to work after school. One day, one of the offensive linemen from the football team picks up and moves to the back of the class and starts giving it back to the cool kids. All the cool kids attack him, but he doesn’t care, he’s from their world and knows they’re nothing special, and anyway, they can’t threaten him because he’s too big, so he just keeps giving it back to him on the losers’ behalf. That guy would be a folk hero to the kids in the back, no matter how much of an obnoxious, vulgar buffoon he might be.
The kids in the front of the class - i.e. a pretty blonde woman who glides through life with door after door inexplicably opening before her - will never get it. They will always assume evil or irrational motives behind the linemen’s move, and they’ll imagine that the kids in back only support him out of jealousy and resentment toward the cool kids.
In this framing, Trump is the champion of the weird, socially-unpopular kids - the ones shut out of bourgeois normal society. The jocks and the pretty girls snub and bully them, but by banding together in a coalition with disaffected members of the social elite who have become awoken to their plight, they can launch a liberatory strike against the privileged upper crust who have historically marginalized them.
This is textbook leftism! This is literally the ur-narrative of the cultural and political left. It’s also the opposite of reality. Blonde jocks and rich cheerleaders are one of the core voting constituencies for Donald Trump! The weird alienated kids who got bullied in school, meanwhile, are a core Democrat constituency! One bloc of Trump voters are now apparently attempting to re-brand themselves, or re-contextualize themselves, as oppressed victims - the marginalized Other.
However, this is blatantly at odds with the original core appeal of Trump, which is that he was a champion of normal, well-adjusted, classic and confident America, here to take the country back from the freaks and faggots and pencil-necks who have essentially usurped control through subterfuge and used that power to resentfully force their unpopular obsessions on the mass of normal popular people.
And of course, it is manifestly risible for Trump voters to claim to hate bullying. Whatever else you want to say about the Trump phenomenon in 2016, it clearly involved a substantial amount of bullying, derision, and even rough-housing/violence at some of the rallies. (I’m not absolving the Clinton campaign, which of course also involved a different type of bullying and derision.) Trump supporters have also ruthlessly mocked and derided “DeSantoids”, using classic nerd-bashing behavior; see Scott Greer’s (admittedly amusing) unflattering impression of DeSantis’ nasal voice and spergy affect.
Trump voters have no leg to stand on if they wish to wear the mask of the oppressed and marginalized. That sort of maudlin victimhood-signaling has never been what conservativism or right-wing values are about. If anything, Trump voters should be proud to be the jocks and cheerleaders rightly excluding the maladjusted weirdos; playing this “no, you’re not the underdog, I’m the underdog” game is just totally conceding the left’s frame.
If anything, Trump voters most closely resemble the oppositional culture cultivated by blacks. When they are a minority or are relatively disempowered, they cry victim and throw out accusations of cheating and unfair privilege. When they are a local majority or gain any sort of power, though, they ruthlessly bully whites and Asians; they also bully those within their own ranks who “act white” by refusing to wallow in victimhood and who aspire to earn a spot in the majority culture via self-betterment and the adoption of bourgeois values. Blacks as a cultural-political constituency would rather destroy the mainstream American establishment - supposedly for excluding and “othering” them - than try to prove worthy of being embraced by that establishment. And when they don’t get what they feel they’re owed, they riot.
I say this all as someone who voted for Trump in 2020 and who will vote for him again this November, assuming he’s the GOP nominee. I just hate liars and cope. The people in power in Washington DC and in the media and academia are certainly not Chads and Stacys. They were not jocks and cheerleaders. They see themselves as champions of the marginalized and disempowered, the same way that [the Trump who exists only the minds of his ardent supporters] does. Oppositional populism is a great way to drum up votes and guilt your way into power, but it’s also the sign of a catastrophically unwell society. Give me a candidate who is proud to represent normal, productive, intelligent people, and maybe then I’ll start getting excited. That’s what Ron DeSantis was supposed to be, and Trump supporters called him a fraud and a sellout for not going to bat hard enough for J6 rioters or agreeing that the 2020 election was stolen.
Our country is fucked.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
Ohio Republicans' Inexplicable & Baffling Abortion Blunder
I support expansive abortion access purely as a matter of practical considerations because of how legal prohibitions encourage horrific black market alternatives. I part ways with the pro-choice crowd when they respond to a difficult morality question with flippant dismissal. So at least from that standpoint, I sympathize with the earnest pro-life crowd because they're helplessly witnessing what is (by their definitions) a massive genocide made worse by the fact that it's legally-sanctioned.
So if you're in that unenviable position, what are your options? The major practical problem is that abortion restrictions have been and continue to be extremely politically unpopular. The Dobbs decision generated a lot of what basically amounted to legislative reshuffling at the state level. Some states had trigger laws banning abortions, that awakened from their long slumber only for courts, legislatures, or voter referendums to strike them back down to sleep.
Ohio's law banning abortions when a fetus heartbeat could be detected (typically occurs within 6-7 weeks of pregnancy) was struck down by a court last year, and so currently abortions there are legal up until "viability" (typically understood to be 22 weeks). On top of that, a referendum was set to be voted on this upcoming November election which would solidly enshrine abortion access within the Ohio state constitution (worth noting that this is the only referendum on the ballot). Given where public opinion is at on this issue, the amendment is virtually guaranteed to be approved by voters. What can you do to stop this train?
Ohio Republicans responded in a very bizarre and inexplicable manner (part of a pattern it seems). Apparently aware that the November referendum was going to be a shoe-in, they organized a whole special election in August as a preemptive maneuver to increase various thresholds for constitutional amendments, including raising the passing percentage from 50% to a 60% supermajority. That measure failed in the special election held yesterday, with 57% of voters against it.
Where to start? First, asking voters to vote against themselves was always going to be a challenge, and Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes the rhetoric supporters of Issue 1 had to resort to:
One talking point has been that it protects the Ohio Constitution from out-of-state interests. (For instance: "At its core, it's about keeping out-of-state special interest groups from buying their way into our constitution," Protect Women Ohio Press Secretary Amy Natoce told Fox News.) Another has been that it signals trust in elected officials to safeguard citizen interests, rather than letting a random majority of voters decide what's best. (The current simple-majority rule for amending the state constitution "sends the message that if you don't like what the legislature is doing, you can just put it on the ballot, and soon the constitution will be thousands of pages long and be completely meaningless," Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, told Politico in a prime example of this tack.)
Some of the TV ads the supporters ran were so incoherent. I don't know how representative this particular example is but the 30-second spot avoids saying anything at all about abortion and instead argues that voting yes on Issue 1 would somehow...protect kids from trans drag queens in schools? The fuck? I guess they knew that "vote yes on Issue 1 to keep abortion restricted" wasn't going to be a winning message so this tangent was the only option.
Even if somehow Issue 1 had anything to do with gender identity indoctrination in schools or whatever (if anyone can explain this please do!) it bears repeating that the only referendum on the ballot in November was about enshrining abortion access. Voters are dumb but they're not that dumb.
Just this last January Ohio Republicans passed HB 458 which eliminated almost all August special elections, but then they insisted on passing another law walking that back specifically to make sure Issue 1 got its very own election. The gambit apparently was to help its chances by leveraging low voter turnout in special elections. This too is baffling, because the timing gimmick very likely energized the "Democrats' highly educated neurotic base" as my boy Yglesias so eloquently put it. Also, the type of voter that is willing to show up to a special election is not going to be the type that is inclined to wrest control away!
None of these decisions made any sense. By investing into a preemptive referendum to raise the threshold, they loudly advertised they knew their issue was going to lose in November. By carving out an exception for an August election, they demonstrated they knew they couldn't win unless they act like a Turkish ice cream man with voters. By conspicuously avoiding talking about abortion, they're acknowledging their policy position's unpopularity.
I'm again acknowledging that the pro-life crowd faces an unenviable challenge in advocating for their position, and clearly their attempts at persuasion over the last several decades have not been panning out. But who actually thought the blatant gimmickry described above was actually going to work? All it did was showcase how weak they must be if the only tool in their arsenal was comically inept subterfuge.
Here
4mo ago
A (potentially former?) staffer for allegedly Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) is making news for filming gay sex in the Senate hearing room. He also, allegedly, yelled "Free Palestine" at Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio).
I include the last sentence only to clarify the full context for a statement the staffer posted on his LinkedIn about the matter:
This has been a difficult time for me, as I have been attacked for who I love to pursue a political agenda. While some of my actions in the past have shown poor judgement, I love my job and would never disrespect my workplace. Any attempts to characterize my actions otherwise are fabricated and I will be exploring what legal options are available to me in these matters.
As for the accusations regarding Congressman Max Miller, I have never seen the congressman and had no opportunity or cause to yell or confront him.
I'm struggling with his statement because it seems like the "filmed sex tape at work in the Senate hearing room on Amy Koobuchar's desk" is more of the issue here than the staffer's sexuality itself, but the language used insinuates that he is using his sexuality as a defense for an act that straight people also probably could not have "gotten away" with.
The utter lack of understanding of consequences is also throwing me a little bit. Culture war discussions about sexuality dip into accusations of degeneracy and pleasure-seeking not associated with, necessarily, love that this video emulates. This video will of course be used to further those accusations onto "all gays" instead of the particularly privileged ones who work in the Senate.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence.
The firearms suspension, classified as an emergency public health order, applies to open and concealed carry in most public places, from city sidewalks to urban recreational parks. The restriction is tied to a threshold for violent crime rates currently only met by the metropolitan Albuquerque. Police and licensed security guards are exempt from the temporary ban.
Violators could face civil penalties and a fine of up to $5,000, gubernatorial spokeswoman Caroline Sweeney said.
The summary, if anything, understates the brazenness. There's a delightful video of the release press conference that starts out with Grisham highlighting the emergency order as a state-wide message to "start arresting people", and "just arrest everyone", and goes downhill from there to outright state intent to violate her oath of office! For an order she does not expect criminals to obey. The order declares the city off-limits for public carry, nearly exactly mirroring a specific hypothetical from Bruen.
I went to bed on this last night after trying to find a way to discuss it at a deeper level than 'boo, outgroup', and I'm still hard-pressed this morning. It's not like this is some unique and novel approach: I've written before on the prolonged efforts to provide massive resistance to Breun, or to otherwise violate the law, exploiting the nuances of standing and court timelines. Federal administrations have played footsie with overtly unconstitutional or illegal actions at length as delaying tactics over any coherent principle for matters as serious as the rental economy and as trivial as cancelling Easter. There were even a few efforts from the Red Tribe in early COVID days.
There's some tactical and logistic discussions that can be had, here. Most obvious, there's a ton of fun questions involved when the state can throw around multi-thousand dollar fines against people with no more warning or notice than a press conference late Friday night, should it ever come to that, though it's not clear that the specific stated punishment here matters. There's no evidence that the shooters in any recent murders motivating this order were carrying lawfully. There will almost certainly be open carry protests by mid-week, a completely foreseeable result that someone who actually worried about bunches of lawful gun carry causing violence would at least have planned around; the people going should plan around what happens if and when they're arrested and cited, but it's not clear that will actually happen.
The Bernalillo County police have already stated that they have not been charged with enforcing this: a sufficiently cynical reader should expect that the state police may not consistently 'enforce' the order either rather than tots-unrelatedly harassing the hell out of anyone who disobeys it.
Grisham signed a law abolished qualified immunity in some cases, but the precise text of that law and the New Mexico constitution make this unlikely to apply in the specific nexus of carry. The 11th Amendment makes federal 1983 lawsuits particularly complex, and unlikely to be renumerative or punishing.
They're also pretty boring. So I'm going to make a few predictions. Maybe I'll be wrong! Hopefully!
Grisham will not be impeached for a very simple reason. She will not be indicted, and I think it's more likely than not she never pays in her personal capacity. There will be no grand jury leaking embarrassing details, or FBI investigations doing the same, whether honestly or fraudulently established. New Mexico allows citizen grand juries, and it won’t matter Grisham will not be frog-marched before a tipped-off news media for a predawn raid, nor will we have arrest mugshots on national or local news. There won't be a long series of supposedly-unbiased news programs calling her a fascist, no baldly coordinated smear campaign to distract from someone else's failures, nor will some random employee become a minor celebrity by breaking the law to embarrass her and then claiming prosecution persecution. There will not be a New York Times article or The View segue fearful about how this undermines reasonable public health policy, nor will Lawrence Tribe be writing a characteristically incoherent argument about how this disqualifies her from any future elected office.
We will not have an injunction today, or a temporary restraining order the same day as a complaint was filed, to mirror the DeWine overreach linked above. The courts will not make a final determination before the order expires, even if the order extends beyond the thirty-day window. If the courts issue a TRO or preliminary injunction before the policy expires, people will still be harassed for carry, and no one will find themselves in jail for contempt of the court's order, even and especially if they Tried To Make A Message out of their disobedience. There will be a perfunctory mootness analysis when asking whether the state will do the same thing again, and in the unlikely even that threshold and standing can be achieved, the courts will instead notice that no colorable relief can be granted.
We will instead have taught a city's portion of gun owners that they can and should violate the supposed law, at length; that the government will quite cheerfully do the same and get away with it; and that the courts will shrug their shoulders and ponder what can you do thirty days later. And that is what happens if they are lucky.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5mo ago
Election night thread?
Reading accounts like this make me glad to live in a state that (1) mails everyone a ballot every election and (2) also mails everyone a voters guide a week or more in advance of any election. I get text of initiatives, statements for and against, candidate statements, all kinds of stuff delivered to my door well in advance of having to make a decision.
Election logistics aside, the actual elections were pretty boring. Bunch of state level judges (electing judges is dumb as hell) running unopposed. About half the local races also involved candidates running unopposed. The other half were against incumbents who'd been in the position a decade and would probably win in a landslide. No initiatives or ballot measures or anything interesting.
Looking outside my own state, Bolts has a massive round up of stuff to watch tonight. Big ones so far:
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Andy Beshar wins re-election as governor of Kentucky.
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Ohio passes Issue 1 and Issue 2. Enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution and legalizing marijuana respectively.
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Dems projected to control Virginia Senate, denying Youngkin a trifecta.
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Loudoun County School Board looks likely to be won by Democratic Party endorsed candidates.
Here's a Patton Oswalt stand-up bit from 2011 (NSFW!) where he talks about being asked to audition for the role of "Gay best friend" in a romcom and him saying that he would only do it if he was allowed to play the character as really, really dumb, because he was tired of seeing all gay characters in media being portrayed as impossibly awesome and flawless.
The flip side of this is Weak Men are Superweapons. I've definitely started noticing recently that, at least in the media I consume, fundamentalist Christians (or deeply religious people in general) are never depicted as anything other than evil. Examples: the "Crackstone" character in Wednesday, the antagonists in Devil in Ohio (well, those were actually Satanists, but they sure looked like a standin for Puritans or Amish people). Can anybody think of an example of an important (main character or recurring supporting character) character in recent mainstream media that is depicted as a good person who does good things, but who is also explicitly a fundamentalist Christian?
Consolidated Markets in Healthcare
In the old place we talked about doing regular analysis of emerging legislation / happenings on the Hill, so this piece is in that spirit. Yesterday the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee had a hearing on “Why Health Care is Unaffordable: Anticompetitive and Consolidated Markets.” This isn’t a major hearing or anything, it’s just a topic I’m interested in so I thought I’d share it here.
If you’ve never watched Congressional hearings I actually recommend it. When I started I was surprised how generally intelligent and reasonable most Congressmen appear, even the ones who act like clowns on social media, how much they tend to ask the kind of questions you would want them to ask, how often Republicans and Democrats actually agree. The panelists are listed below, hyper linked with their written testimonies. Q and A is in the video.
Dr. Barak Richman, Professor, Duke Law School
The Honorable Glen Mulready, Commissioner, Oklahoma Insurance Department
Mr. Joe Moose, Owner, Moose Pharmacy
Mr. Frederick Isasi, Executive Director, Families USA
Dr. Benjamin N. Rome, M.D., M.P.H., Instructor in Medicine, Harvard Medical School
It probably needs no introduction how borked the US healthcare system is, but a few stats from the hearing: according to the Kaiser Foundation 30% of Americans say they didn’t pick up pharmaceuticals because of cost, almost half of all Americans must forego broader medical care due to cost, and over 40% of Americans live with medical debt. Other countries often pay half or less of what we do.
Panelists attribute this to anti-competitive practices coming from consolidation in three interconnected markets: pharmacy benefit managers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and hospitals.
PBMs
Pharmacy Benefit Managers, or PBMs, are middlemen companies that represent a bunch of healthcare customers collectively in negotiations with pharmaceutical companies. On net PBMs are believed to decrease drugs costs, but there is no way for PBM customers to see what prices were negotiated, and frequently rebates aren't passed onto consumers. In Ohio for instance PBMs passed on the full difference of what they paid pharmacies to Medicaid managed plans, and in Delaware PBMs overcharged the State by $24.5 million. The latter practice is called “spread pricing” and has become increasingly common as PBMs buy up pharmacies themselves.
Currently three PBMs - CVS Health, Cigna, and United Health Group - control 80% of the market, with zero pay transparency.
Pharmaceutical Companies:
Often drug prices are pretty arbitrary themselves because brand name drugs make up 75-80% of costs, and patenting laws allow pharma companies to raise those prices as high as the market can bear. One panelist cites that in 2015 over $40 million was spent on drugs that big pharma held excessive patents on, and that the top 12 drugs have over 120 patents for 38 extra years of exclusivity.
Clearly some degree of patent protection is reasonable, but I’m not sure why i.e. the 12 year biologic patent period Trump created offered anything better than the previous 8 year period. Also, see one of my favorite old Scott posts, “Busiprone Shortage in Healthcaristan,” for stories of Sanofi protecting nominally off-patent Insulin by issuing 74 patents for the biological processes to create insulin - not to use these processes themselves but just to prevent any competitor from ever using them.
The Inflation Reduction Act changed Medicare’s ability to negotiate prices somewhat, but pharma companies still get their market exclusivity and even then Medicare can only negotiate the 20 highest cost drugs. Giving Medicare greater ability to directly negotiate prices would likely help quite a bit; this is the model practiced in much of the world and by the US Veterans Administration, which also pays about half of what everyone else does.
For context though, pharmaceutical prices are, shockingly, only about 8.9% of healthcare spending...
Hospitals
...with physicians and hospitals making up over 50%. The hospital panelist thought it was funny the PBM folks were complaining about there only being three major market players. Most hospitals don’t even have one competitor!
According to Representative Claudia Tenny from New York, from 1983 to 2014 the percentage of physicians practicing alone has fallen by half, while the rate of physicians joining practices of 25 or more people has quadrupled. Often when hospitals acquire these physicians they charge high facility fees for seeing doctors “off-campus,” even though the services are the same. The very fact that hospitals can get away with doing this only further encourages consolidation, because they know they can mark up prices for any new acquisitions. Representative Kevin Hern from Oklahoma proposed in the hearing a bill that would supposedly combat this practice.
Hospitals typically make physicians sign non-competitive clauses, meaning they can’t leave and work for a competitor, even in areas as large as the entire state. From 2007-2014 hospital prices increased twice as fast as inpatient physician’ salaries and four times faster than outpatient physician’ salaries.
Often hospitals also lobby State Legislatures for monopolist laws. Nineteen state have Certificate of Public Advantage laws allowing hospitals to evade anti-trust laws and merge in already-concentrated markets. Another Thirty-five states (and DC) have Certificate of Need Laws forcing providers to obtain regulatory permission before they “offer new services, expand facilities, or invest in technology”. These laws act as huge regulatory barriers to entry for small competitors trying to challenge major hospital systems, and the DOJ and FTC have long condemned them for their anticompetitive nature.
Interested to hear people’s thoughts and would love if we could get a regular thing going.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu told CNN that he's [considering running for president] (https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/29/politics/chris-sununu-2024-president-cnntv/index.html). Although this isn't an announcement, I'd put Sununu's chances of running at >50% since the usual playbook is for suspected candidates to deny that they have any interest in the job at all right up until they make a formal announcement. For those unfamiliar, Chris Sununu is among a group of moderate Republican governors from liberal northeastern states, which group also includes Phil Scott of Vermont, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, and Larry Hogan of Maryland. Unlike the others, though, Sununu didn't waffle as much over support of Trump.
Will Sununu win the nomination?
Not a chance. While firmly anti-MAGA sentiment exists within the Republican party, it isn't wide enough or concentrated enough to have the necessary impact. If that sounds contradictory, that's because the unusual nature of our primary system makes it difficult for someone like Sununu to win. If his ideas were more widely popular then he'd be able to run a national campaign where he was competitive in every state, or at least most states. If his appeal were concentrated enough he could make enough of an impact in a few key states to gain an advantage. Sununu's base of support is in the Northeast, and it's hard to see him doing well outside of there and maybe the Upper Midwest or the West Coast, but those are stretches. He also might get some support from Independents and Democrats in states with open primaries if Biden is the nominee and there aren't any interesting downballot races, but I doubt this will have a significant effect. Even in the northeast, support outside of New Hampshire is far from certain. I live in Pennsylvania and I kind of doubt his chances here, even though this is probably one of his better states.
So then why do we care?
Because he's from New Hampshire, and while his lane isn't exactly a large one, it's still a mainstream one (i.e. he's not running as the fringe hippie or the tax protestor or the craziest motherfucker in the room). He also at least has a lane; at least John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennett were going for the sensible moderate at a time when there was no obvious frontrunner there. I'm not sure why people like Nikki Haley and Tom Steyer try to run for president. They aren't beloved enough personally for there to be a groundswell of popular support based on name alone, and they aren't really proposing anything significantly different from more established candidates. They also aren't horning in on a competitive lane. I digress, but my point is that being from New Hampshire wouldn't be enough if Sununu were merely a fringe candidate or a guy stepping into an overcrowded field. Additionally, it should be noted that Sununu isn't merely from New Hampshire but is an extremely popular governor from a political family that includes his father, who was also governor, and his brother, a former Senator.
So why is being from New Hampshire important? For those of you not familiar with the American presidential nomination system, New Hampshire plays an outsized role in the process, by virtue of being first. Okay, technically it's second but it's the first primary and ultimately more important than the Iowa Caucuses. Candidates who are able to win in New Hampshire don't always go on to win the nomination, but they do stick around long enough to make a difference in the primary. Let's look at every competitive primary since 1992 where the winner didn't get the nomination:
1992 Democratic: Paul Tsongas wins but ties Bill Clinton in the delegate count. Tsongas remained competitive until Clinton swept all of the Southern primaries on Super Tuesday, and dropped out of the race on March 19 after losing a couple non-Southern primaries to Clinton by wide margins. Jerry Brown would later rally but Tsongas was the clear second at the time he dropped out of the race.
1996 Republican: Pat Buchanan wins a surprising victory. Buchanan was (and still is) a fairly extreme right-winger who's taken a few unorthodox positions and is widely regarded as anti-semitic. Bob Dole was the expected front-runner but Buchanan and Steve Forbes gave him a run for his money, and made it a three-way race early. Dole eventually bounced back and won every subsequent primary (and Buchanan never won another one after New Hampshire, though he won the Missouri Caucus), but Buchanan was still the number two man, to the extent that a number two existed. This was a weird race in that Dole was a foregone conclusion and it was surprising that he had any real competition at all.
2000 Republican: John McCain was the "maverick" moderate (in places) alternative to George W. Bush's more traditional family values conservatism. Probably the closest analogy to Sununu (though McCain is much more conservative overall). McCain wins his home state of Arizona plus New Hampshire, Michigan, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The crux of his campaign came in South Carolina, where he aggressively campaigned in an attempt to show that he win in the heart of Bush Country, and for a while it looked like he could pull it off. He dropped out of the race March 9th after losing California, New York, Ohio, and other states he needed and were realistic for him to win. He was still the only credible challenger to Bush that year.
2008 Democratic: Hillary Clinton won, but she was expected to win the nomination. She obviously didn't, but she hung in and the race was competitive up until the final primary in June.
2016 Democratic: Bernie Sanders actually was a fringe candidate, or at least he would have been if the Democratic Party hadn't cleared the field to ensure her nomination. Instead he wins New Hampshire and is able to stay into the race up until the convention, again making June primaries relevant.
2020 Democratic: Bernie Sanders narrowly wins the vote total, but ties Mayor Pete in the delegate count. Sanders will be the last credible candidate to drop out, exiting on April 8. Pete would leave ahead of Super Tuesday, but this wasn't so much because his campaign was doing poorly but was political gamesmanship in cooperation with Amy Klobuchar; both were running in the moderate lane and Pete was leading there for a while, but it became clear after South Carolina that Joe Biden was the moderate with the best shot of boxing out Sanders and Warren.
So in 30 years of primaries we have yet to see a New Hampshire winner who doesn't play a major role in the nomination. The state has a legitimizing effect that other states don't; Sununu winning New Hampshire won't be like Wesley Clark winning Oklahoma in 2004 or Marco Rubio winning Minnesota in 2016. Additionally, the schedule in 2024 is favorable to whoever wins New Hampshire. The New Hampshire primary is January 30, and there are no further primaries until Super Tuesday on March 5. Even if the media discounts Sununu's win as a fluke of his being the beloved native son, that's still more than a month where he is technically in the lead and can clearly establish himself as the moderate to beat.
The upshot of all of this is that it's bad for DeSantis. If Desantis decides to run, his bases of support are in Florida and other more moderate parts of the South, and in left-leaning states. If Sununu establishes himself as a legitimate candidate, he's going to siphon DeSantis votes from more moderate areas. This doesn't mean that Sununu is going to win these areas, but the vote split might be enough for Trump to come out ahead. And that's important due to the winner take all nature of a lot of the GOP primaries. And this is not merely splitting the moderate vote; Sununu's strategy would revolve around pointing out that while DeSantis isn't exactly Trump, he's far from moderate. Sununu hangs his hat on Republicans getting away from culture warring and back to responsible governance, and DeSantis made a name for himself by waging the culture war. Hence, to Sununu, DeSantis is simply a more refined version of Trump. Culture War without the tweets and incompetence. But if you want to get away from MAGA DeSantis won't do it. Additionally, I wrote a while back about how DeSantisn's real weakness is that at some point he's going to have to comment on the 2020 election and Jan 6—go full MAGA and he's just another Trump, say Biden was legitimately elected and alienate a large part of your electorate, equivocate and look like a coward. He'd already have Trump criticizing him if he doesn't offer anything other than an unequivocal endorsement of MASSIVE FRAUD. Now he could have Sununu on the other side using his equivocations as proof that he was still to beholden to MAGA and the MTGs of the world to be anything other than a Trump clone.
To get back to the calendar, it doesn't look great for DeSantis. On Super Tuesday, Alabama, South Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Utah are going to be Trump blowouts. DeSantis has a chance in Texas, North Carolina, and Tennessee, but it's going to be a two horse race with Trump that's going to be close. DeSantis would normally have a chance of winning California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont, and Virginia, but he'd have to contend with substantial support for Sununu, and Trump isn't exactly going to have a poor showing. He isn't going to get a blowout win in an important state until Florida votes on March 19, and by that time the momentum advantage of winning early isn't as pronounced. His situation up to that point is Trump getting blowouts in most of the states he wins while he's splitting votes with Trump or Trump and Sununu in states he wins. If Desantis could go into blue and purple states and blow Trump out of the water he could campaign on being able to attract voters outside of MAGA Country who will be necessary to win the
Mewis
6mo ago
The latest craze on Youtube? A guy called Sam Sulek. Sam Sulek is a 21 year old bodybuilder and mech eng. student from Ohio who has, over the past six months, gone from about 50,000 to over 1.7 million subscribers. I've heard dudes at work that don't lift mention him, either. He is, for his age, ridiculously large, and has already attracted accusations of not being 'natty' (i.e. he's using PEDs). Regardless of how he gets his gains, his appeal, however, seems pretty genuine. Unlike the deluge of overedited, attention-grabbing garbage on Youtube, Sulek's videos are lightly edited and mostly show him driving to, working out in, and then driving back to the gym with occasional meals, while he provides a kind of stream-of-consciousness of his thoughts on training and diet. There's very little groundbreaking stuff here, his videos are nearly entirely unscripted (like his workouts themselves) and Sulek saves all his intensity for his lifting. In fact he comes off as a fairly charismatic, positive, intelligent student. More than that, though, his videos scratch a desire for society and friendship. Commenters describe them as relaxing, and Sulek as authentic, but really what they are is parasocial. Sulek isn't acting as a coach or source of information or salesman (though he does have a deal with Hosstile), but more as the lifting buddy that millions of people wish they had. And though it can hardly be any good for my very poor self-esteem and body image issues, it's difficult to stop watching.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
The decimation of the last vestiges of humanistic culture at the hands of our technocratic society continues: The End of the English Major
According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.
Reasons given by students for choosing STEM majors over humanities majors are in line with what you would expect: STEM majors teach you economically useful skills that translate directly into gainful employment, and humanities majors don't. Especially because ChatGPT just put a lot of copywriters out of business over night.
Although the crisis of university humanities departments has frequently been blamed on recent events like the 2008 Great Recession and the covid pandemic, these trends are not exactly new. In a collection of lectures delivered at Princeton and published in 1938 entitled The Meaning of the Humanities, the sense of crisis was already palpable:
Granting that the humanities are so interwoven with the fabric of society that the world cannot be entirely "dehumanized," a modern humanist can hardly help feeling that his position is far from being secure. In fact, the humanities are attacked on every side; they are losing ground every day; the host of their enemies is legion and their defenders a mere handful. When they are not in danger of being starved and annihilated, they risk being absorbed or annexed by peaceful penetration through the inroads made into their rightful domain by specialists on "human relations," psychologists, educators, and humanitarians.
There was also an acknowledgement that, unfortunately, most people do have to work for a living:
The easiest way to solve the problem is to ignore it, namely, to follow the line of least resistance and to continue along the old traditional lines. It is easy to declare that some studies, called disinterested studies, a polite euphemism for useless studies, will remain accessible to a chosen few, while useful studies, studies preparing for life, meaning by that equivocal term, for a profession, trade or business, shall become the lot of the masses.
It turns out there was never a time where the majority of people could decide on a whim to spend their formative years of education studying fictional events that never happened. Who would have guessed?
There is certainly something to mourn in the gradual erosion of the traditional support structures for western elite culture. I don't take it lightly. But I also believe that there is a fundamental resilience to what one might call the "humanistic mode of thought" that will ensure its survival, even if there were no universities at all. Humans will continue to do philosophy, and make art, and reflect on art, for as long as there are entities that are still recognizably human. There has never been any other time in history when narrative fiction played such a large role in the lives of so many people - it just comes in the form of TV shows and video games now, rather than novels. Although some Rationalists are prone to triumphalism about science and self-perfection through technology, a significant percentage of the output of LessWrong is dedicated to the analysis of philosophical questions, and the single most famous work to come out of the Rationalist movement is a work of imaginative literature. The call to authentic reflection may only be the purview of a small minority of individuals in any given society, but to those who are attuned to that call, it is ineluctable.
I suppose what ultimately saddens me the most about the fall of the English major is that it seems to be yet another indicator that the world I once knew - the world that extended roughly from the end of World War II to the 2008 financial crisis, the heyday of middle class consumer capitalism - is dying, if not already dead. As the linked article alludes to, the internet itself may be partially blamed for the decline of traditional university studies:
Shapiro picked up an abused-looking iPhone from his desk. “You’re talking to someone who has only owned a smartphone for a year—I resisted,” he said. Then he saw that it was futile. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” He waggled the iPhone disdainfully. “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” Assigning “Middlemarch” in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.
It made sense for academic discourse on literature to be centralized at specialized locations called "universities", back in an era when all information was not free and infinitely reproducible. It still partially makes sense for STEM as well, since there must be a centralized governing body to certify that students have gained the requisite skills. But for the humanities? Why go to college to read Shakespeare when I can just read him on my own time? I have the whole western canon available for free in my pocket, I don't even need to buy all the books one by one. If I have questions about the reading, I have youtube and blogs, I can instantly ask questions of anyone in the world, I can even access most major works of academic criticism for free or relatively cheap. The image of students actually gathering in a physical classroom, with paper books, for the privilege of hearing the opinions of someone who may not even be as insightful as the average 4chan /lit/ poster, starts to look woefully antiquated.
It sucks that it's antiquated. I am a hopeless nostalgic. But it is antiquated nonetheless.
I would argue this is mostly coincidental on the personal level — the exogamy rate of Jews and especially in academia is a great disproof of any conspiracy. Now, on the financial level? On the financial level it is indeed possible that leading ethnic-nationalistic Jews (religious zionists) would fund both pro-Jewish eugenics and be against eugenics applied to other people at large. Consider the case of Efrat
Senator Chuck Schumer, a noted pro-choice champion who has used the issue of abortion to secure his New York Senate, attended a 30th anniversary gala for Efrat. Schumer has been lauded by Planned Parenthood who called him a “hero,” with “a 100% pro-choice, pro-family planning voting record,” but in 2007 Schumer put his pro-choice position aside and joined his anti-abortion foes at the celebration. (Schumer’s office was contacted, but did not provide a comment for this story.)
American Friends of Efrat, the U.S.-based fundraising arm of Efrat (no relation to the settlement of the same name), is an Israeli anti-abortion group with hundreds of volunteers that counsel Jewish women against abortion and provide support for the first year of the child’s life.
According to IRS 990 tax reports, the American Friends of Efrat pulls from mainstream foundations including matching donations from Deutsche Bank, The Goldman Sachs Foundation and the Prudential Foundation. But the heftiest sums come from the Jewish community. Despite the fact that 89% of American Jews support abortion rights, the Federation Foundation of Greater Philadelphia sent the group $100,000 in 2004 and 2006, while the Jewish Community Foundation of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles gave C.R.I.B. just over $5,000 in 2007 and $10,000 in 2008. In addition, the Madav IX Foundation, a charitable organization funded by Jewish family foundations but administered by the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, gave the C.R.I.B. program $10,000 in 2008. The Madav IX Foundation shares the same Ohio address of the Bennet and Donna Yanowitz Family Foundation that gave the C.R.I.B. program $2,000 in 2004 and $1,000 in 2007.
”Israel is currently fighting a demographic war for her survival. As we go to print Israel’s borders are in jeopardy. The Arab birthright is about double the Jewish birthrate. General Uzi Dayan speaking as the Director for the Council of National security announced: ‘Demographic projections forecast an Arab majority in Israel by the year 2020 less than 15 years from now”
It’s really important we understand what anti-semitism ought to mean. Anti-semitism in the form of hating the Old Testament religion or hating a race or hating a language is always and forever bad. But what do you call someone who says, “I feel uncomfortable with a fiercely in-group ethno nationalist network that has high level donors who only fund their own bloodline”? Whatever you call this latter thing, it is utterly justified IMO. The problem is that there’s an element of Judaism that is literally just that; they believe that their race and DNA is infinitely more important than any belief or practice, and they believe their existence on earth is to secure the Jewish People and a future for Jewish children. Should such a group be free from criticism? Only if we want the world to devolve into tribal infighting in 200 years.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
The culture war about euthanasia in Canada has been roaring a bit, almost a decade after they began implementing the program. However, I'm not particularly interested in the current Canadian culture war on this topic; instead, I'm curious about a related topic in the US culture war.
I saw this chart being bandied about, describing the procedure. I hadn't really thought about how the procedure actually works. It seems that you can either choose a route like this, where a series of chemicals are injected by a doctor, or a route where you self-administer some oral drugs. My first thought for this route was, "That sounds a lot like what they use in the US for capital punishment." My Duck-Duck-fu quickly hit my lack of knowledge of pharmacology as I was trying to figure out if they were actually the same drugs or not. It seems like they're at least quite similar. From here, they list midazolam, propofol, and rocuronium as being used in MAID. Some examples from my searching includes things from Wikipedia like, for midazolam:
The drug has been introduced for use in executions by lethal injection in certain jurisdictions in the United States in combination with other drugs. It was introduced to replace pentobarbital after the latter's manufacturer disallowed that drug's use for executions.
For propofol:
The US state of Missouri added propofol to its execution protocol in April 2012. However, Governor Jay Nixon halted the first execution by the administration of a lethal dose of propofol in October 2013 following threats from the European Union to limit the drug's export if it were used for that purpose. The United Kingdom had already banned the export of medicines or veterinary medicines containing propofol to the United States.
For rocuronium, I can't even figure out if it's the same thing as rocuronium bromide or if they're different, but while Wikipedia doesn't have an article for the former, it has for the latter:
On July 27, 2012, the U.S. state of Virginia replaced pancuronium bromide, one of the three drugs used in execution by lethal injection, with rocuronium bromide.
On 3 October 2016, the U.S. state of Ohio announced that it would resume executions on January 12, 2017, using a combination of midazolam, rocuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. Prior to this, the last execution in Ohio was in January 2014.
On August 24, 2017, the U.S. state of Florida executed Mark James Asay using a combination of etomidate, rocuronium bromide, and potassium acetate.
I followed the litigation in the US some years back around the death penalty, and I was aware that there was a concerted effort to pressure drug manufacturers to stop selling whatever drugs were used to states who would use them for executions. I also remember many of the arguments being that such injections constituted cruel and unusual treatment, particularly focusing on the X% or whatever risk that something went wrong or something didn't work quite right for this person or that person. (As an aside, literally none of the Canadian websites I've seen on MAID say a single word about any risk of things not going swimmingly.)
My question is if anyone is familiar with more recent developments in the US. Have there been any reasonably big cases that are more recent (than probably 5-10yrs ago)? In any of those cases, was a US state able to successfully point to Canada's program in order to argue that the risk was low and that it should not constitute cruel/unusual punishment? Are there actual meaningful differences in the drugs used that have been argued in court? (Are those differences due to the pressure on drug manufacturers?) Have the anti-death penalty advocates just given up on that argument and focused their efforts more on pressuring the manufacturers? Basically, if we were to draw a "territory control map" for the US litigation/culture war, what does the current state look like?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Send your kid to an all black school in Baltimore or a suburb of Paris then and then report back to me if your opinion has changed.
So what? Send a black kid from a nice family to an all white school in a trailer park in West Virginia, middle of nowhere Quebec, a shitty part of Ohio. They're going to have a bad time.
You're right: Poverty is bad. A relative lack of morality or culture or whatever you want to call it is bad. Crime is bad. Drugs are bad. African Americans don't have a monopoly on any of these things, but we have double standards for crack-dealing superpredators/innocent white victims of opioid overdoses. Unemployed whites in the midwest are innocent victims of globalization who had their jobs ripped away from them, while blacks living in deprecated inner-city slums are shiftless, lazy and sucking at the welfare teat.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I don't know that Vance is the best example. While he called out hillbillies (and I use that term loosely because the Rust Belt white trash he's describing in Ohio are decidedly different from Appalachian white trash) in his book, his actual politics started veering into the "lack of agency" lane as soon as Trump's success made it a veritable requirement for him to do it. I can't tell you how many times I heard from conservatives that nobody owes you anything, stop whining, buck up and take that menial job because you aren't above working at McDonalds just because you have a college degree, nobody wants to work anymore, etc. (not to me personally, but the sentiment). One night I was at the bar and a bunch of them were bitching about immigration. They weren't white trash, but obviously successful guys from a wealthy suburb. My view on immigration are complicated, to say the least, but when they started about Mexicans taking jobs from Americans it pissed me off so I turned it around on them: "Why do we owe them jobs? Why should I pay more for stuff because some whiny American doesn't want to work for what I'm willing to pay. Those Mexicans are damn glad to get my money, and besides, they do the work and don't complain. Besides, they're the only ones who seem to want to work anymore." Or something along those lines. It didn't work, of course, because as soon as anyone brings up market forces to a conservative in an argument about immigration, they just do a u-turn and talk about welfare instead, not realizing the inherently contradictory nature of those arguments. And, as a putative conservative, I couldn't really argue back.
The same thing applies more directly to employers. There's one older guy I know we call "Pappy". He's big in the whitewater community arouind here and is an excellent boater, and teaches free lessons at the park and cheap roll lessons at a scum pond on his property (only charging to cover the insurance). He's very generous with his time, especially considering these lessons are always 8-hour marathons. Not so much with his money. He owns a garage and auto body shop and refuses to pay his employees. He also constantly bitches about the quality of the help he gets. I once couldn't help but comment that maybe if he paid more than ten bucks an hour he'd find decent people. I knew this would get him fired up, because he was great at going on these kinds of rants; "Hell, when I started out I made 2 bucks an hour and was glad to get it. When I opened this place you couldn't ask no god damned bank for any money because they wouldn't give it to you. I had to save my money to buy all this and earned all of it. These people don't want to work, they just want to sit on their asses and collect a check. And you lawyers are half the problem. When my wife and I bought our first house the mortgage was one page. One. When I took out a loan last year it was a god damned book. And it's all because you lawyers found lazy fucks who didn't want to pay and tried to weasel out of it, and now the banks have to make sure that you can't."
I wasn't thrown by the change of tack because he never missed an opportunity to dunk on my profession. I would note that my brother was an inspector for a major industrial company that does global business and they had him paint some equipment. The quality steadily deteriorated over the years to the point they had to cancel a very lucrative contract because nothing he did would pass. I've known a few people who took their cars to him for work and now aren't on speaking terms after the work was so bad they had to withhold payment. His intransigence is literally costing him money, but he won't budge on principle.
I bring up these examples because they're evidence of this mentality not among the white trash that Vance talks about, but among normal, successful people. As for Vance himself, he plays into the same ethos wholeheartedly, and doesn't seem to understand the contradiction with the argument that gave him fame. If he continued in the Reagan mold of bold free market principles, or took the opposite tack of siding with the lefties in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" sense, I could take him at face-value. But instead he's latched onto the same victimization worldview of those he previously complained about. He was once a moderate and anti-Trumper; now his "National Republicanism" is just an amalgamation of the worst protectionist ideas Trump had to offer. Maybe it's a cynical response to give him more political credibility, I don't know. But it's certainly a contradiction with what he used to be.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
10mo ago
Most of them probably have no idea about the case beyond "fire in a crowded theater" and "clear and present danger". But someone did mention the case by name, and as far as I can tell given the limitations of the Post's execrable (technically) comment section, nobody pointed out it's no longer good law since Brandenburg v. Ohio.
And I'm sure they'd agree that distributing anti-draft pamphlets about the Vietnam War or the Gulf Wars (yeah, I know, there wasn't a draft) would be fine but it's absolute treason and not protected to do so about WWII or the Ukranian War (again, I know there isn't a draft in the US).
An empire by definition means being global and enforcing its interests abroad.
what the empire looks like or should look like and what are its interest are subjective; part of "the right" soured on the middle east adventures and when asked they tell you why and it's some mix of what I listed: they don't believe the empire benefits them, they don't like what the empire is and who it benefits, and they don't like a lot of what it pushes, consuming their blood and wealth to keep running
If trump were replaced by someone else, his replacement would get probably the same # of votes
no, this couldn't be more wrong; Trump wins because he motivates non and low likely voters to show up when they otherwise wouldn't
the reason why the GOP loses despite great metrics is because they do not motivate voters while Democrats have bottom-up get-out-the-vote machines going in every small city and larger across the United States who deliver ballots to friendly counting centers
in a state like Ohio where Trump won by over 8 points, the last election had a Biden +2 electorate; where did all of the Trump voters go? they didn't show up in his absence
Trump voters are not GOP voters and to the extent they vote GOP it's because Trump gets them to show-up
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
How did the feds make J6 look like an attempt to overthrow the government without getting anyone to do anything wrong?
Who decided that Ray Epps was a "lesser offender"?
The Supreme Court of the United States, in 1969, when it decided in Brandenburg v Ohio that the First Amendment protected speech so strongly that it became nearly impossible to convict a person of inciting a riot. Alternatively, the framers of the First Amendment itself.
I agree that the feds are charging people with more for less, but the rules they have to play by say they probably can't convict Epps for inciting a riot. Personally I think the First Amendment should be abolished which would make it much more possible to prosecute the kind of egregious behaviour Epps engaged in. But a lot of Americans disagree with me and it's their country.
Bleep
1yr ago
just to render him ineligible
if you're concerned with the law, nothing he's been charged with or investigated for is even in the realm of something which would render Trump constitutionally ineligible
that being said, the law hasn't mattered thus far so no reason to think it would going forward
Even if De Santis loses in the generals
desantis will certainly lose in the general
desantis must win the midwest to win the general, but I will tell you midwesterners do not like desantis and he will not appeal to them because he's an uncharismatic dork with a long history of being a neolib neocon who votes for forever wars and disasters like TPP
he wouldn't even win Ohio let alone Wisconsin
seeing him as the opponent will force democrats to prefer a moderate candidate
Joe Biden was the moderate candidate. So was Hillary Clinton. Democrats, as opposed to the GOP, are far more capable of forcing through moderate candidates, and they have, irrelevant of whatever "Democrats" think generally.
Rov_Scam
25d ago
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
For a while I've wanted to do a comprehensive survey of a city to examine it in terms of urbanism and the principles of what make a place a good place to live. In particular, I want to examine what makes certain places "trendy", and what causes some neighborhoods to gentrify while others stagnate or even decline. Most examinations of the urban environment are merely case-studies of a few neighborhoods that have seen change in the past several decades, for better or worse. But I think that those kinds of studies, while instructive, miss the big picture. Most cities are composed of dozens of neighborhoods, each with its own story and its own potential, and most are simply forgotten about. I've selected Pittsburgh for this exercise, for the simple reason that I live here and can talk about it as an insider rather than someone relying on news reports. You can talk statistics until the end of time, but the only way to properly evaluate a place is if you have a pulse on what the common perception of it is from those who are familiar with it. Before I get to the neighborhoods themselves, though, I want to give some preliminary information about the city so those who are unfamiliar (i.e. almost everyone here) can get the view from 10,000 feet. It also gives me the opportunity to present a few general themes that I've noticed during the months I spent researching this project. Note to mods: A lot of this survey will touch on a number of culture war items like crime, homelessness, housing, density, traffic patterns, etc. For that reason, I'm posting this in the culture war thread for now. That being said, there will be large sections where I look at nondescript parts of the city where I expect the discussion to be more anodyne, and I don't want to be hogging the bandwidth of this thread, especially in the unlikely event that I can crank out more than one of these per week. I can't really anticipate in advance what's most appropriate where, but I'd prefer to post these as stand-alone threads once I get past this initial post. If the mods have a preference for where I post these, I'll adhere to that.
I. The Setting Pittsburgh exists in a kind of no-man's land. It's technically in the Northeast, but people from New York, Philadelphia, and the like insist that it's actually more Midwestern. They may have a point; we're six hours from the nearest ocean, and the Appalachian Mountains are a significant barrier to transportation and development. No megalopolis will ever develop between Pittsburgh and Philly, and we're much closer to places like Cleveland and Columbus. We're also not assholes. That being said, nobody here thinks of themself as Midwestern. First, it's possibly the least flat major city in the US. Second, most Midwestern cities act as quasi-satellites of Chicago in the way that Pittsburgh simply doesn't. Additionally, being in the same state as Philadelphia makes us much closer politically and economically to that area than we are to places that may be closer geographically. Some people try to split the difference and say that Pittsburgh is an Appalachian city, but this isn't entirely correct, either; Pittsburgh is at the northern end of what can plausibly be called Appalachia, and is a world away from the culture of places like East Tennessee. There are close ties to West Virginia, but these are more due to proximity than anything else; for most of that state, Pittsburgh is the closest major city of any significance, which is reflected in things like sports team affiliation. And the Northern Panhandle (and associated part of Ohio) is practically an exurb of Pittsburgh, with a similar development pattern around heavy industry. But for the most part, West Virginia swings toward us rather than us swinging toward them.
The physical landscape can best be described as extremely hilly. For reference, I describe a "hill" as any eminence that rises less than about 700–1000 feet above the surrounding valley, with anything in that range or higher being a mountain. The area is built on a plateau that has been heavily dissected by erosion. Relief is low to moderate, ranging from about 200 feet in upland areas to 400 feet in the river valleys. The natural history results in an area where the hilltops are all roughly the same height, about 1200–1300 feet above sea level, while the valleys range from a low of 715 feet at the point to about 900–1000 feet at the headwaters of the streams. And there are streams everywhere. The most prominent ones are the three rivers (the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio), but there are innumerable creeks that spiderweb across the landscape. The upshot is that flat land is rare around here, and traditional patterns of urban development are difficult to impossible. Most people live on hillsides since the little flat land available is often in floodplains. Roads are windy and difficult to navigate; you may miss a turn and think that if you make the next turn you'll eventually wind up where you want to be. Instead, you find yourself winding down a long hill and end up in one of three places: In view of Downtown from an angle you've never seen before, at the junction with a state highway whose number you've never heard of, or in West Virginia.
What this means for the urban environment is that neighborhoods are more distinct than they are in other cities. While flat cities have neighborhoods that blend into one another seamlessly, Pittsburgh's are often clearly delineated, with obvious boundaries. The city is defined by its topography. One advantage of this is that a lot of the land is simply too steep to be buildable, even taking into consideration that half the houses are already built on land that one would presume is too steep to be buildable. The result is a lot of green space. Another advantage is that it means you get views like this from ground level. The actual green space itself is typical of a temperate deciduous forest, but with a couple of caveats — there's plenty of red maple, sugar maple, red oak, white oak, black cherry, black walnut, and other similar species, but not as much beech as you'd see in areas further north, and not as much hickory as you'd see in areas further south. There are conifers but most of them are planted landscaping trees. White pine and eastern hemlock are native to the area, but they're much more common in the mountains to the east. I should also note that the topography means that there are some weird corners of the city that have an almost backwoods hillbilly feel.
II. The Region
I'd describe the larger region as a series of concentric rings. First is the city proper, which is small for a city of its size. While that seems like a tautology, what I mean is that the actual city limits are, well, limited, giving the city itself a proportionately low population compared to the total metro area. This is because PA state law changes in the early 20th century made it difficult for the city to annex additional territory. The result is that the boundaries were fixed relatively early in the era when America was urbanizing rapidly, and only sporadic additions were made thereafter. The next ring would be what I call the urban core. This is the area where the density and age of the housing gives what are technically suburbs a more urban feel than traditional suburbs; in many cases, these suburbs feel more urban than the later-developed parts of the city proper. These would include typical inner-ring streetcar suburbs, though Pittsburgh has fewer of these than most cities of its size. Most of the areas thus described are towns that developed as the result of industrial concerns, or suburbs of such towns. These are most prominent to the city's immediate east, and also include the innumerable river towns in the river valleys. These towns extend along the rivers for a considerable distance, but there's an area close to the city where they form an unbroken geographic mass. If not for limitations on expansion, they would likely be part of the city itself.
Next, we obviously have the true suburbs, by which I mean areas that developed after World War II but still revolve around Pittsburgh more than a regional satellite. Then we have the exurbs, which I define as areas that are developed, but more sporadically, and are often revolve around a satellite county seat rather than Pittsburgh itself. This is the area where couples looking for an extended date will get a hotel in the city for the weekend (My family makes fun of my brother for doing this because he lives in one of these areas but always insists that he's close. Nevermind that it would be ridiculous for any of us to get a hotel room in Pittsburgh if we weren't planning on getting seriously wasted.) Finally, we have the much broader greater co-prosperity sphere, which is roughly everywhere that falls within Pittsburgh's general influence, be it rooting for sports teams to being the destination when you need to go to a hospital that isn't crappy.
III. History I'll try to make this as quick as possible, since there are obviously better, more comprehensive sources for people who want more than a cursory review. The city was ostensibly founded when the British drove out the French during the French and Indian War and established Fort Pitt. The war began largely as a contest between the British and the French for control over the Ohio Valley, a vital link between the interior northeast and the Mississippi River. The site of Pittsburgh was particularly strategic, as it was at the confluence of two navigable rivers. The surrounding hills were rich in coal; combine this with the favorable river network, and the location was perfect for the nation's burgeoning iron and steel industry. This new wave of prosperity attracted waves of immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe, who later came to define the region. A number of satellite industries developed as well, including glass (PPG), aluminum (Alcoa), chemicals (Koppers, PPG), electrical products (Westinghouse), natural gas (EQT), etc. Pittsburgh's place as an industrial powerhouse continued until the triple whammy of the energy crisis, inflation, and the Reagan recession sparked a wave of deindustrialization that turned America's Rhineland into the Rust Belt. By the '90s the region was bleeding jobs, and much of the working-age population decamped for the Sun Belt. The outright population loss has stabilized in recent years, but the region is still slowly losing population.
The odd thing about this, though, is that in 1985, at what should have been the city's nadir, it started ranking high on the "liveability" lists that were becoming popular. The city had been making a concerted effort to reduce pollution since the '50s, and by the early 2000s it had become a bit of a trendy place to live. I don't want to speculate too much on why this is, but I think there are a few factors at play. First, the crime is low for a rust belt city; there aren't too many really bad areas, and the ones that exist are small and isolated. What this means is that there is a certain freedom of movement that you don't have in other Rust Belt cities like Cleveland or Detroit with large swathes of ghetto. Even in the worst areas, the only time you might find yourself in trouble is if you visit one both at night and on foot. Even the worst areas are fine to walk around in the daytime and I wouldn't worry about driving through anywhere, which is more than I can say about friends of mine's experiences in Cleveland or Chicago. Second, the housing stock is more East Coast than Midwest. Many of the neighborhoods have architectural character, as opposed to other Rust Belt cities that are nothing but rows of nearly identical derelict frame houses (though we have plenty of those, too). Third, the housing is actually affordable. People have been bitching in recent years about significant price increases, but it's still nowhere near the level the major East Coast cities or the trendy western cities. Years ago I met a girl who moved here from New York because she wanted to live in a brick row house but it was simply unattainable where she was. She looked at Baltimore and Philadelphia, which are true row house cities, but the ones she could afford were all in the endless expanses of ghetto. In Pittsburgh, meanwhile, you could snatch a renovated nee in a good area up for well under $200k, and rehabs were being sold for under $50k. You aren't getting them for anywhere near that now, but $500k gets you a nice house in the city, and if you want to do the suburbs you pretty much have your pick of 4BR 2000 square foot homes in excellent school districts. Finally, the outdoor recreation is better than you're going to get in a city of comparable size or larger anywhere east of Denver, and the hotspots don't get the crowds that the western areas do. In the Northeast you have to drive a lot father to get anywhere, and the places are busier. In the Midwest the cities are surrounded by corn, and the areas worth visiting are few and far between. In Pittsburgh, the mountains are only about an hour away, and the general area is hilly enough and forested enough that a typical county park has better hiking than anything within driving distance of Chicago. The mountain biking and whitewater are nonpareil, and that's still a secret to most locals.
I've gone a bit off track here, but I want to make one general observation that I've noticed when studying the history of the city: Everything changes all the time, and there are no meta-narratives. The first statement may seem obvious, but when discussing urban dynamics, people often act like there was some golden era where everything was in stasis, and if we're still in that era then any change is bad and disruptive, and if we're not in that era then any change should be aiming to get back to that era. The meta-narrative is simpler: American cities developed in the 19th century, and grew rapidly during the industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was largely due to high immigration. Few had cars, so people needed to live close to where they worked, and public transit networks were robust. Blacks lived in segregated neighborhoods, and this was a problem. After The War, people started moving to the suburbs, a process which was hasted by not wanting to live alongside black people, who were gradually getting better access to housing. This white-flight drained cities of their economic base, and the new suburban commuters demanded better car access to the city core. Once decent neighborhoods were turning into black ghettos. The response of municipal leaders was to engage in a number of ill-advised "urban renewal" projects that which were blatant attempts to lure white people back into the city by resegregating the blacks into housing projects so they could build white elephant projects and superhighways. Then in the 90s hipsters were invented and they looked longingly at the urban lifestyle. Hip artist types moved into ghettos because they liked the old architecture, could afford the rent, and were too cool racially to be concerned about black crime. Some of them opened small businesses and white people started visiting these businesses, and the neighborhood became a cool place to live. By 2010, though, that neighborhood was expensive and all the cool spots were replaced by tony bars and chain stores and all the bohemes had to find another neighborhood. Meanwhile, the poor blacks who lived here before the hipsters showed up started complaining about being displaced from their homes, and now the same hipsters who "gentrified" the neighborhood are concerned about the effects of reinvestment on long-time residents.
This narrative probably fits somewhere, but the reality is often more complicated. One common refrain I heard from older people in the '90s was "neighborhood x used to be a nice place to live and now it's a terrible slum". Usually, the old person in question was the child of an immigrant who grew up in the neighborhood but decamped to the suburbs in the '50s. She'd return regularly to visit her parents, and watch what she saw as the decline of the neighborhood firsthand. The problem with this is that most of the neighborhoods I heard people talk about like this growing up were always slums. The only thing that changed about them was that they got blacker and don't have the business districts that they once did. Second, in Pittsburgh at least, the changing demographics in some neighborhoods is more in relative terms than in absolute ones. While some places did see an increase in the black population in the second half of the 20th century, most places did not. Before World War 2, Pittsburgh only had one truly black neighborhood, and even that was more diverse than one would expect. Blacks normally lived in racially mixed neighborhoods alongside Italians, Poles, Jews, etc. of similar economic standing. The changing demographics were oftentimes caused more by whites leaving than blacks moving in. It's also worth noting that some areas went downhill long before any of the factors cited in the meta-narrative really kicked in. People tend to be ignorant of urban dynamics in the first half of the 20th Century, which is viewed as this juggernaut of urban growth. No one considers that a neighborhood might have peaked in 1910 and gone into decline thereafter, because the meta-narrative doesn't allow for it. But in Pittsburgh, I see these sorts of things time and time again.
IV. The Housing Stock I mentioned housing stock in the last section, but I want to go into a bit more detail here because it's important when evaluating a neighborhood's potential for future growth. When Pittsburgh was first settled, most of the housing was simple frame stock. Most of this is gone, but, contrary to what one might think, the little that's left isn't particularly desirable. These houses tend to be small and in bad condition, essentially old farmhouses from when most of the current city was rural. Later in the 19th century, brick row houses were built in the neighborhoods that were relatively flat lowlands. Almost every row house neighborhood in the city is desirable, as these neighborhoods have a dense, urban feel. It should be noted, though, that through most of the 20th century this was housing for poor people, as most middle-class and above felt these were outdated.
Also from around this time is the Pittsburgh mill house. These are similar to what you'd find in most Rust Belt cities, and are proof that not all old housing has "character". These were houses built on the cheap and have often been extensively remuddled to keep them habitable. Most of these in the city aren’t exactly true mill houses, as they weren’t built by steel companies as employee housing, but most 19th and early 20th century frame houses fit the same mold. These were mostly built on hillsides and hilltops where building row houses was impractical. Not a particularly desirable style.
Combining the two is the frame row. These were built during a period in the early 20th Century when the area was experiencing a brick shortage. They aren't as desirable as brick rows but still have more cachet than mill houses, although the purpose for which they were built is similar. Most of these were remuddled at some point (by this I mean things like plaster walls torn out in favor of wood paneling and drop ceilings, window frames modified to fit different sizes, wood siding replaced with aluminum siding or Inselbric, awnings, etc.). By the 1920s and 1930s, the classic streetcar suburban style took over. These include things like foursquares and bungalows, the kind of stuff you see in old Sears catalogs. The brick shortage had ended by this period and the houses were larger and better-appointed, making them popular for middle-class areas. The remuddling on these was limited, and they’re highly desirable. After the war, more suburban styles took over, though by this point the city limits were mostly built-out so they aren’t as common as other styles. Most of the suburban stuff was built during the first decade after the war in odd parts of the city that were too isolated to have been developed earlier, though a fair deal was built in neighborhoods that were rapidly declining into ghetto in an attempt at stabilization. There’s nothing wrong with these houses in and of themselves, but they aren’t particularly desirable, as this is exactly the kind of development urbanists hate most.
There are obviously other styles, but the rest of the housing is either multi-family or infill housing that may or may not have been built with consideration given to the vibe of the existing neighborhood. The city has gotten better in recent years about building new houses to match what’s already there, but there are plenty of hideous miscues out there.
V. Neighborhood Dynamics
Pittsburgh is roughly divided into four geographic quadrants, based on the points of the compass. The East End roughly includes anything between the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, and is where most of the trendy neighborhoods are. The North Side is anything north of the Allegheny; the neighborhoods in the flat plain along the river are mostly desirable, if less obnoxiously trendy. The South Hills are roughly everything south of the Monongahela; most of it isn’t trendy at all. The West End is everything south of the Ohio, and is beyond not trendy; it’s basically terra incognita to most Pittsburghers, as the neighborhoods are boring and obscure.
Pittsburgh officially recognizes 90 distinct neighborhoods, but the official geography isn’t entirely accurate. First, the official boundaries are based on census tracts that don’t always line up neatly with a neighborhood’s generally-accepted boundaries. Second, there are a number of bogus or semi-bogus neighborhood designations. Large neighborhoods are often split up into smaller geographic divisions (e.g. North Haverbrook, South Haverbrook, etc.) that may or may not line up with the way people actually talk. Conversely, some neighborhoods include areas that everyone treats as distinct neighborhoods but are officially unrecognized. Some neighborhoods had their names changed because the residents didn’t want to be associated with a declining part of the neighborhood; in some cases these new names caught on but other times they didn’t. For this project, I will be discussing the neighborhoods based on what makes sense to me based on having lived here all my life and knowing how people actually treat the matter. When necessary, I will use historic designations that don’t necessarily match up with the official maps, but this is rare. I will always make reference to the official designations to avoid confusion for those following along at home.
As I was examining the neighborhoods in detail in preparation for this project, a few things jumped out at me with regard to gentrification, stability, and decline. First, a gentrifying neighborhood needs a relatively intact business district. This could be nothing more than boarded up storefronts, but the physical structures need to be there; there has to be some indication that the place has potential, and it’s much easier for businesses to move in when they don’t have to build. Some depressed areas lost practically their entire business districts to blight, while others never really had a business district to begin with. This second scenario decreases the chances of gentrification even further, as there is often no logical place to even put a business district. The presence of a business district is important for two reasons. First, walkability is a huge selling point for people who want to live in a city as opposed to suburbs, and an area that’s dense but unwalkable is the worst of both worlds. Second, neglected neighborhoods don’t get “on the map”, so to speak, unless there’s something to draw in outsiders. Related to the above, there are two general kinds of businesses that can occupy a business district. The first are what I call Functional Businesses — grocery stores, dry cleaners, corner bars, banks, professional offices, hardware stores, etc. The second are Destination Businesses — restaurants, breweries, boutiques, trendy bars, specialty stores, performance venues, and other miscellaneous stuff that will actually draw people in from outside the neighborhood. There's obviously a continuum here, as, for example, a coffee shop could be either depending on how much it distinguishes itself, but you get the idea. Both are essential for a neighborhood to fully take off. There are plenty of areas with perfectly functional business districts that don’t get a second look because there’s no reason for anyone who doesn’t already live there to go there. But if a neighborhood consists exclusively of destination businesses then it will feel more like a tourist area than a real neighborhood; it’s a hard sell for someone to move to a place where they can get artisanal vinegar but not a can of baked beans. Often, the presence of a robust functional business district will stymie a neighborhood’s potential for gentrification. One thing I’ve noticed is that destination businesses rarely replace functional businesses, usually moving into abandoned storefronts or replacing other destination businesses. Functional businesses just sort of exist and don’t move out until the neighborhood has declined past the point of no return.
As I mentioned in the previous section, housing stock is another major contributor to gentrification potential. Urban pioneers have to look at a neglected neighborhood and see the potential to return to a faded glory. Houses that are worth restoring, not dumps that should have been torn down ages ago. The one exception to this is the spillover factor; if a neighborhood with bad housing stock is close to other gentrified neighborhoods that have great amenities but have become too expensive, nearby neighborhoods will get a boost from this, especially if they have intact business districts.
On the other side of the equation, decline follows displacement. The story of declining neighborhoods in Pittsburgh follows a pattern. First, in the 1950s and 1960s, civic visionaries sought to clear slums by replacing them with ambitious public works projects. Forced out of their homes, the residents of these slums needed somewhere to go, and moved to working class neighborhoods that were already in a state of instability, if not minor decline. (It should be noted that slum clearance was much rarer in Pittsburgh than in other cities, though some wounds still run deep). More recently, the city has demolished public housing projects that had become crime-ridden hellholes, but their problems only spilled out into low-rent, working class neighborhoods. What results is a game of whack-a-mole, where revitalization of one area simply leads to the decline of another. That’s why I’ve been less critical of low-income set-asides than I was in the past. I used to be totally free market on the housing issue, but it seems like an inflexible standard only ensures that poverty will remain concentrated, which does little to improve the situation of the poor. Section 8 was supposed to address this problem by getting people out of public housing hellholes and into regular neighborhoods, but it’s only worth it for slumlords in declining areas to accept the vouchers, and the result is that entire neighborhoods go Section 8. I grant that it’s better than things were previously, but I think things could be better still if we agreed that every neighborhood was going to subsidize the housing of a certain number of poor people. That way we can at least make it so the honest, hard working people don’t suffer unnecessarily, and the kids grow up in a more positive social environment. Maybe I’m being too idealistic, but it seems better than any of the existing alternatives.
Finally, a brief note on stability. Stable middle-class or working-class areas tend to be boring areas that are too far away from bad areas for any spillover or displacement to affect them. There may be some long-term factors that may lead to their eventual demise, but there are no obvious causes for concern. The flip side is that as much as some of these places have been touted as the next big thing, the same factors that keep them from going down also keep them from going up. One factor playing into this is the number of owner-occupied houses and long-term rentals. New residents, whatever their economic condition, simply can’t move into a neighborhood if there are few rentals and little turnover in ownership.
VI. The Neighborhood Grading Rubric
The initial goal for this project was to discuss what the future holds for these neighborhoods, and to discuss special considerations that factor into the whole thing (actually, it will mostly be about special considerations, at least for the big neighborhoods). One thing that’s important to this exercise is to discuss where the neighborhoods are at now. I initially developed a complex classification system, then scrapped it because it was too complicated and still didn’t explain everything. But as I got to thinking about it, I decided that some sort of grading was necessary to put things in proper perspective rather than rely on qualitative description. So I developed a much simpler rubric that should catch everything. I would note that the below isn’t to be construed as a ranked desirability ranking, although it will be made apparent that some of the categories only describe undesirable areas.
Upper Middle Class: This includes upper class as well, but truly upper class areas are rare enough to make this a distinction without a difference. These are highly desirable but may have gone past the point of trendiness to the point of blandness (though not necessarily). These include places where gentrification reached the point where it’s all chain stores, but also places that never really gentrified because they were always nice.
Gentrifying: These are the hotspots that everyone knows about. What separates them from the upper middle class areas, even if they are more expensive, is a sense of dynamism and a raffish air. Students and bohemian types still live here. There may be older working class homeowners who never left, and poor renters who haven’t been forced out yet. There may still be a few rehabs for sale at somewhat decent prices. Most of the businesses are locally owned, and it probably still has a functional business district from the old days.
Early Gentrification: This is the point where a neighborhood starts making the transition from working-class or poor to middle-class or trendy, but isn’t quite there yet. Most of the businesses are functional, but there are a few cool places for those in the know. The hipsters are starting to move in. People are buying derelict houses at rock-bottom prices and fixing them up. But the normies don’t know about it yet; tell most suburbanites you’re going to a bar there and they either think you’re going to get your wallet stolen or wonder why you want to hang around old people. The neighborhood is still rough around the edges, and may still have a decent amount of crime and a high minority population. It probably still looks rather shabby. It’s perfectly safe for those with street smarts, but it’s still sketchy enough that you wouldn’t recommend it to tourists.
Stable: Not necessarily boring, but not going anywhere. There’s probably a good functional business district, but few destination businesses. Every once in a while one of the destination businesses might become popular enough that people think the whole neighborhood is going to go off, but it never seems to happen. And that’s if it’s lucky. The upside, though, is it’s very safe, and affordable to buy here. This also includes middle-class black areas that suburban whites assume are hood but are actually rather quiet.
Early Decline: These are the neighborhoods that just don’t seem like they used to. Crime is up, property values are down, and the houses are starting to get unkempt. Most of the long-term residents are elderly, and the newer residents are transients who are of a distinctly different class than the elderly ones. They may be blacks who were displaced from nearby ghettoes, or they may be white trash. There’s increasingly conspicuous drug activity, but no gangs yet. There still may be a functional business district, but there is rarely anything destination, maybe an old neighborhood institution that is still hanging on. These are perfectly fine to rent in if you don’t mind a little excitement in your life, since they’re still relatively safe for normal people, but they aren’t places you want to commit to.
Rapid Decline: This is the point where gang activity has become a problem, and gunshots are no longer a rare occurrence. If there was a white working class here they’re now dead and gone, and if there was a black middle class they’re very old. Residential sections are starting to see blight and abandoned houses. There’s still probably a reasonably intact business district, but it’s entirely functional at this point and mostly caters to stereotypical ghetto businesses. It is, however, still well populated.
Ghetto: A neighborhood that has bottomed out; it can’t get any worse than this unless it disappears entirely, which seems almost inevitable at this point. Few intact blocks remain. If there’s any business district left it’s scattered remnants (though there’s almost always some kind of newsstand). There’s probably gang activity, but there’s little territory worth defending. The atmosphere is desolate and bleak, as the remaining residents are only here because there’s nowhere else to go. Crime, while still a problem, is probably lower here than one would think, simply because there aren’t too many people here to be criminals, and equally few available victims.
The below ones are special cases that don’t fit into the above continuum particularly well.
Deceptively Safe: These are areas that look sketchy as hell but are actually decent places to live. They are usually poor neighborhoods where the properties are in somewhat shabby condition but are occupied. Unique to Pittsburgh (probably), this also includes places that look like part of West Virginia was transported into the middle of the city. These are mostly very small micro-neighborhoods that are poor but just don’t have the population or foot traffic to support any serious crime. Buy low, sell low.
Projects: Pittsburgh has a few “project neighborhoods” that only really exist because it built most of its public housing in odd places where nobody wanted to build before. Most of these projects don’t exist anymore, so saying these are invariably bad areas is a misnomer, especially since one of the few remaining projects is a senior citizen high rise. Most of these are an odd mix of different uses that merit individual treatment.
Student Areas: Transient population, unmaintained properties, exorbitant rent for what you get, multiple unrelated people living together common, noise, public drunkenness, vandalism — everything a real ghetto has except violent crime and gang activity. This doesn’t describe all student areas, but areas where the percentage of students reaches a certain threshold have a much different dynamic than regular neighborhoods. First, these areas are relatively safe considering how dysfunctional they are in every other respect, and second, while the properties are in poor condition, there is little blight or abandonment because the slumlords know they have a captive audience. Also, the presence of a university usually means that the area sees a lot of outside visitors so more destination businesses develop, and there are plenty of places catering to students. Altogether a unique dynamic, though no one not in college would even consider living here.
That’s it for the preliminaries, stay tuned for Part I, where I discuss Downtown and the other “tourist areas” in its vicinity.
Quantumfreakonomics
10mo ago
nobody pointed out it's no longer good law since Brandenburg v. Ohio.
I mean, with the current Supreme Court, who’s to say Brandenburg v. Ohio isn’t next on the chopping block? Brandenburg is just one of a laundry list of cases from that time period which changed longstanding precedent. Those cases are being rolled back one by one as we speak.
Students from various campuses have occupied the Columbia University campus in New York City in protest of Israel. There reports and videos circulating of protestors harassing Jewish students on or near campus grounds. The NYPD has deployed officers to surround the campus and has established filtration checkpoints to prevent outside agitators from entering campus. Various Columbia alumni have expressed concern with Columbia’s handling of the situation. All classes are now online at least for today. Similar protests are happening at Yale and various other campuses across the country.
Edit: Congressman Josh Hawley has called on President Joe Biden to deploy the National Guard to Columbia and other universities to protect Jewish students on campus.
Edit: NYU has ordered their encampment to disperse and the NYPD is moving in to clear the demonstrators.
Edit: I’m seeing footage of NYU professors being marched out of the campus in zip ties. Cal Poly Humbolt students have barricaded themselves inside a campus building with furniture.
Edit: University of Texas, Austin student protestors are being dispersed by police. And possibly vanned. Protests now seem to be nationwide.
Edit: Mass arrests beginning at USC protests.
Edit: Tasers and rubber bullets being deployed against protestors at Emory University in Georgia.
Edit: There appear to be police snipers monitoring protests at Ohio State University.
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