Ohio
JTarrou
2yr 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.
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
The Ohio train spill was kindof right on the edge between nothing burger, and massive disaster, and a key demonstration of the media and influencers rank incompetence to do even basic research.
Vinyl Chloride is nasty and carcinogenic as hell at any reasonably large concentration and its airborne. So whats the area where it'll be concentrated enough that you're fucked if you're exposed to it?
You actually have to do the math or atleast eyeball it to figure that out.
So 10 DOT 11 Tank Cars is 1,139,790 Liters of Vinyl Chloride or 1038 metric tons.
Doing the math thats 1 ppm if evenly distributed over a cubic kilometer of atmosphere.
Ok what the hell does that mean? Well then you have to look up the OSHA safety data sheet for vinyl chloride and see that do to its carcenogenic effect the maximum safe exposure OSHA allows 1ppm over an 8 hour shift and 5ppm for only 15minutes maximum during emergency exposure.
So now suddenly you have the scale of the disaster. In the immediate locality of the crash 1-5 km they should be evacuating people since you could absolutely get larger concentrations than that, and living somewhere 24/7 is a more intense exposure than an 8hr shift.
But people 100kms away shouldn't be worried, and as it dilutes it really shouldn't be a concern unless you get areas of extreme concentration or it builds up in like the the regional water, or local fish people subsequently eat.
Then there's what they're doing to mitigate it. Burning mostly breaks it down into CO2 and Hydrogen Chloride, two "pollutants" that aren't carcinogenic and are both byproducts of the human body (Your stomach acid is hydrochloric acid (what hydrogen Chloride becomes on contact with water))... Sure you'll also get incomplete burn and some nasty byproducts, but on the whole this is vastly reducing the danger and long term toxicity, and even the low level acid rain the hydrogen chloride will become will be one mild day compared to what heavy industry produced for decades in the 20th century. Might hurt be rough on your garden for a week unless you're at the epicenter.
From all that you can conclude a lot and raise a lot of questions, people 100s of kilometers away are almost certainly fine, but was the evacuation as wide spread as it should have been? How accountable should we hold authorities if those near the crash develop nasty symptoms from not being evacuated?
Presumably someone at somepoint did these calculations... but they've utterly failed to communcate any of this and everyone is rightly primed to assume the company and the government is going to lie to their face and act with reckless indifference for their well being because.... well have you payed attention to anything ever?
So an authority or media figure has to actually show their work, and break down the above, Ie. Highschool math just basic unit conversion, a safety datasheet we'd expect any industrial worker to be comfortable with, enough highschool science to describe a combustion reaction... And not one of them is capable of or at all cares to do it.
Meanwhile hydrogen Chloride is the chemical that makes Volcanic clouds dark and ponderous, and hundreds of tons of it are visibly darkening the sky... So it looks like fucking Armageddon.... And not a single media figure of county official, or authority figure would ever be competent enough to say "Hey here's a photo of an volcanic eruption in Fiji, the village in this photo was fine... if you're asthmatic you should probably stay inside, but the chemical composition is largely comparable, its not a major concern as long as the immediate plume doesn't blow in your face".
.
Like this all would be so basic for a competent to explain to give the scale of the disaster... but we live in a society where not a single competent human being works in government or media, and so I had to do the math and look it all up when my mother and half the internet was freaking out 600km away from the crash thinking this would take years off our lives, and all the media could do was scoff and call you a conspiracy theorist for not trusting the company and locality that would be liable.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
Does this remind you of anyone?
I am glad to hear the Governor call it desert -- it is desert -- it is pretty good desert.
It is good to be back again in Nevada and get a chance to see things again. It seems to me they look a lot better than they did a few years ago and as you know, your Government in Washington knows that this State is on the map which is something. Some administrations didn't know it was on the map. And, I have been very glad that your State administration, from your Governor down, work so well with all of us on the other side of the continent. We have had real cooperation from the State Government. We have not had any dissention or cross words, and when all of us decided things had to be done, they have been done.
You people know I am water conscious -- although not a strict prohibitionist --
When I was down on the Ohio River the other day I told them I would catch bigger fish than grew in Ohio, though I don't think I will get anything that tastes better to eat than Nevada trout -- the Senator gave me some Nevada trout for lunch -- it was delicious.
It is good to see you all and I hope to get back here again some day. I hope some day to come in an automobile and stay longer and get to know you better.
It is good to see you.
I elided the header, which specified that these were
People like to feel listened to. They like to feel part of a conversation, and be reminded that the person is a real human rather than an unfeeling automaton. The kind of performance which successfully conveys that humanity doesn't always translate so well to a recording or especially a transcript. In the 30s, FDR was winning over the populace with informal remarks and fireside chats. Today, a politician can still cultivate that relationship with his base. But every casual remark is a risk. It will be carefully catalogued, preserved in cheap and ubiquitous recordings, and mined for any advantage. When a detractor watches a 15-second clip on evening TV, there is no suspension of disbelief. None of the casualness with which we'd listen in person. It's not just "two screens." It's one team watching a screen, and one holding a conversation.
Epstein's Unanswered Questions
In a recent speech at the Turning Point USA conference, Tucker Carlson criticized the administration's recent closing of the book on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Carlson alleged that there was 'no answer' to his central question, namely how a "high school math teacher at Dalton" became a "billionaire" who owned the largest private residence in Manhattan "by providing accounting advice". Apparently, this is a question for which no answer has ever been provided. According to him, the truth is that Israel provided Epstein with his money.
In this comment, I will suggest
(1) By far the most plausible explanation for the source of Epstein's wealth
(2) Implausibilities in the Mossad agent theory
How Did Jeffrey Epstein Get Rich?
Jeffrey Epstein was born in the early 1950s to a working class family in Coney Island. He was an extremely smart student with a talent for maths and physics, and graduated high school two years early.
"He was just an average boy, very smart in math, slightly overweight, freckles, always smiling"
He pursued a major in math at Cooper Union and then at NYU (for just under three years), which he dropped out from, then took a job as a math teacher at Dalton aged 21. Dalton, which as I noted recently is the most progressive of Manhattan's old prep schools, was undergoing a time of transition. It had become co-ed a decade earlier, and - in the long aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 1960s - liberalized in other ways too. Unlike the city's public schools, subject to the strict demands of NY's extraordinarily powerful teachers' union, private schools can hire who they want.
In the 1970s, with the city in slow-motion financial crisis, tuition at elite private schools was also much lower than today, in inflation-adjusted terms about a quarter of the price. As youth became prioritized above all else and the peak of the baby boom in education led to increased demand for teachers (the boom itself had peaked in the late 1950s, meaning the mid-70s were peak demand for high schools) hiring a 21 year old NYU math dropout as a math and physics teacher was less unusual than it might seem to us. At Dalton, Epstein quickly made an impression and a name for himself as an intelligent, charming and handsome man.
Epstein was at Dalton for around two years. At parent-teacher conferences, a parent who knew Ace Greenberg of Bear Stearns (whose own children also studied at the school, but weren't taught by Epstein) was repeatedly impressed by him, thinking he was a smart and capable young man. When Epstein was fired by the school as enrollment numbers dropped, the city-wide spillover from the financial crisis continued to dent confidence in NYC and drive the UES wealthy out to the suburbs, he begged that parent for an introduction.
“This parent was so wowed by the conversation he told my father, ‘You’ve got to hire this guy,’ ” recalled Lynne Koeppel, daughter of the late Alan “Ace” Greenberg...Greenberg, son of an Oklahoma City women’s clothing store owner, rose from Bear Stearns clerk to CEO and had an affinity for employees he called “PSDs” — poor, smart and desperate to be rich.
As Bloomberg found, Greenberg offered Epstein a job - not as a trader, as has repeatedly been falsely alleged - but as a trading floor assistant, essentially a clerk to a trader. This was a clerical job that required no particular education, certainly not a degree (which wasn't necessary even for traders until the mid-1990s).
Epstein arrived on Wall Street in 1976 at an auspicious time, even though the decade was poor for equities. Options on securities had existed for centuries, but had always suffered from a fundamental problem with liquidity because they were largely specific bets made between individual buyers and sellers, with no standardized pricing, each arrangement a custom contract, traded over the counter if at all, with price discovery difficult. From 1973, the CBOE allowed the easy trading of options as a hedging tool which, coupled with the slow emergence of computerized valuation and ledger tools, allowed investment banks and brokerages to offer a much larger and ever more complex array of tools to their corporate clients. This tied into growing financialization that made intermediaries like Bear more important than ever after the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the oil crisis and growing globalization of American firms who wanted to hedge huge swings in fuel prices, FX rates and so on.
Epstein made partner at Bear in four years. This was not unheard of at the time for an exceptionally talented young man. Even today, while progression is much slower in most of finance, it can still be that fast in booming sub-fields for very smart people. I know of someone at a leading quant firm who made partner at 28, in his first job, after four years, in the early 2020s. In 1981, Epstein was asked to leave Bear for a violation of securities law, possibly for failing to register products with the CFTC. Avoiding an expensive revenge-driven regulatory case would have been the firm's overriding interest, meaning that even for Epstein's brief partnership and overall tenure he would likely have received a decent payout.
In the early 1980s, Epstein floundered as an 'independent' financial consultant. A huge amount of drivel has been written about his activity between 1981 and 1986/1987. He used his looks to embark on brief relationships with a couple of heiresses he ripped off, most notably Ana Obregon. Her father had been caught up in the collapse of a short-lived firm playing games in the reverse repo business; Epstein merely facilitated her family's addition to an already-extant lawsuit with Chase, who were caught up in the affair, and who eventually repaid most of those involved. Epstein took a modest cut for pretty much no work. At around this time, Epstein socialized with some moderately influential people in New York. This was hardly surprising; he had met many advising corporate executives at Bear Stearns. They were also usually new money or outsiders to NYC; not UES generational New Yorkers.
Epstein told some of these people that he was a secret agent for the CIA, and perhaps Mossad. He told others he was deeply involved with Adnan Khashoggi, the world's richest man at that time, who had made his fortune taking a cut of arms deals between the UK, US and Saudi Arabia. Epstein had a fake gimmick Austrian passport, likely of a low quality and kind you could order in gray-area magazines at that time, and carried around a fake handgun sometimes, to impress party guests. He claimed he was an arms dealer, and lated claimed he was involved in facilitating Iran-Contra. There is no evidence of any of these claims, which are regularly repeated by the credulous. Khashoggi was famous at the time and Epstein was a compulsive liar; Khashoggi was one of the most photographed men in the world, his parties and debauchery attracted the world's press, he loved the media and was happy to appear on TV shows about the rich and famous. Epstein does not appear to have been part of his circle, just a liar who pretended he knew him.
My guess is that the occasional cut of a deal with the poorly informed, his payout from Bear and his winnings from Obregon tided Epstein over through to the mid 1980s. According to Vanity Fair, he lived in a small one-bedroom apartment; other sources suggest that he had no office at this time other than a temporary space he occasionally rented. Not exactly the lifestyle of an ultra-rich international arms dealer man of mystery.
The true source of Epstein's fortune dates to 1986, and his meeting with Les Wexner. Wexner had taken over his parents' clothing store in Ohio and built it into a chain of discount stores, which he then leveraged to buy and found a number of other store chains, including Victoria's Secret and Bath and Body Works. Wexner didn't need to move to New York (he could easily have run the conglomerate from Columbus, as he now does), but he chose to, and chose to buy a series of ever more extravagant homes in Manhattan as his fortune grew. In 1986, Wexner was an almost-50-year-old billionaire who had never been associated with any woman, was unmarried, and was widely considered a 'confirmed bachelor'. He was on magazine covers as 'the bachelor billionaire', with all the implicit subtext. There was rumor in both Columbus and Manhattan.
That year, Epstein met an insurance executive named Robert Meister on a flight from New York to Palm Beach. The insurance executive was taken in by Epstein's charm and bluster (no doubt full of stories about Khashoggi, international deals, arms, scandal) and invited him to an event also attended by Wexner after Epstein repeatedly showed up to his racquetball games and begged to meet Wexner. Epstein charmed Wexner, and within a year they were 'business partners', with Epstein increasingly directing Wexner's investments. It is impossible to do more than speculate here, but Wexner's business partner's thoughts, followed by some other anecdotes from the Vanity Fair piece:
Robert Morosky, who had been the vice chairman of The Limited [Wexner's holding company], was surprised Mr. Wexner took to Mr. Epstein so readily. “Everyone was mystified as to what his appeal was,” Mr. Morosky said.
Jeffrey said, ‘See all this stuff? I don’t need any of it. I could live in a tent. But Les gave this to me for a dollar. Les would do anything for me.’ ”
“Les would defer to him in any meeting…. Les would put his hand on Epstein’s shoulder.”
Wexner's own friends, according to several sources, believed that Wexner and Epstein were in a romantic relationship, and referred to him as "the boyfriend". Epstein denied he and Wexner had a sexual relationship in a filmed deposition.
Wexner and Epstein soon became virtually inseparable. They were an odd pair. Wexner was in his late 40s, with a round face and big ears. Epstein was in his early 30s and dashing—from the right angle he looked like Richard Gere. Wexner’s public image continued to grow after hiring Epstein. A 1989 Boston Globe profile that detailed Wexner’s rise reported that his September 1 diary entry that year read: “I finally like myself". Wexner’s physical appearance changed. A former Victoria’s Secret executive recalled Wexner dyed his hair. He hired a live-in personal trainer and adopted a new wardrobe. “Les would wear the tightest jeans you saw. I don’t know how he didn’t cut off blood supply to his private parts,” the former executive said.
In the early 1990s, well into his fifties, and at the urging of his elderly mother (who abused him in company meetings and was his unspoken co-CEO) Wexner married a London-based corporate lawyer in her early 30s. Epstein wrote the prenuptial agreement. The couple moved back to Ohio and had four children. Wexner stayed close with Epstein, and gave him control over his finances and investments. Even very rich people regularly make terrible financial decisions, especially when love is involved. Anyone who has been in the presence of that rare, 99.9th percentile charisma knows that very few people are immune to it, no matter their usual sobriety.
Merritt recalled once asking Wexner why Epstein was so well compensated. “Les just said, ‘Because I got more money than I can ever spend,’ ” said Merritt. “Les gave him free rein over his checkbook.” In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported Epstein earned $200 million from Wexner. Merritt puts the number at $400 million.
The bond between an older and younger man, protege and elder, can be particularly strong in cases. Unlike some thieves, Epstein didn't even take all the money, because as will become clear, he didn't need to.
Behind the BS, Wexner was Epstein's only ever client. Which brings us, at long last, to the money. Epstein 'stole' $46m from Wexner according to Wexner, and made at least tens of millions more in asset management fees in which he was paid (as is common practice) a percentage of the money he made his client. Wexner’s business was already turning over $3bn a year by the early 80s, with exceptionally high margins for the already lucrative clothing retail business. Of course, Epstein didn't invest the money himself. Instead, he just handed it (as was made clear in the recent Jes Staley case) to JP Morgan and a handful of other banks and firms, who did the work for him. Fortunately for him, Epstein was again lucky. The bull market of the age mean that even an index fund for the S&P 500 would have returned almost 500%, meaning that Epstein's loot, plus his share of Wexner's own gains, could easily have amounted to over a billion dollars by the early 2000s in a 2-and-20 arrangement, without Epstein doing anything more than acting as a middleman between private wealth teams at a few big Wall Street banks and his dear friend Les.
Was Jeffrey Epstein an Agent for Israeli Intelligence?
It is important to be clear about the specific nature of this allegation. By the late 1990s, many of the social connections Epstein had fantasized and lied about the in the 1980s were real. He really did know Bill and Hillary Clinton, Oprah, and various other important and famous people. He was not the most well-connected man in the country, and there were social scenes in which he was less widely known, but the combination of his relationship with Maxwell, who had been raised into the British elite and had connections he didn't, in addition to Wexner's money, had been good for him. Now well-connected in Washington and internationally, in part because Wexner had introduced Epstein to his social club of Zionist activist billionaires (the Lauder family etc) who Epstein had tried and failed to pitch his 'financial advisory' services to, Epstein made friends with Ehud Barak, the Labor Prime Minister of Israel. Barak's influence in the Israeli state was already declining; he would be the final left-wing Israeli leader.
It is to me entirely plausible that Epstein trafficked gossip to Mossad, and likely also American intelligence agencies. It is possible, although unlikely, he was paid for it, and I suspect anyone who did pay would have found out, as so many of Epstein's associates did over the course of his life, that he was full of shit, but it may have happened. This is different, however, from the Israeli state being the source of his wealth and power. I will summarise some reasons here:
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The substantial majority of those alleged to have been victims of Epstein's supposed blackmail scheme were Zionist Jews. Consider this logically. You do not need to blackmail rich Jewish-American billionaires to support Israel. They will do it for free. The idea of Israeli intelligence spending a huge percentage of their budget on destroying the goodwill of their number one supporters who already spend billions lobbying for Israel is absurd. Step One: Gather prominent people who already support Israel, often fervently. Step Two: Film them having sex with underage prostitutes. Step Three: Tell them to keep supporting Israel Or Else... Anyone who approves that operation likes burning money.
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Even the gentiles allegedly involved in the scheme had no natural hostility toward Israel. Most were old-school WASPs uninvested in either the socialist or Islamic angles of Palestinian liberation. Almost no Muslims were involved. If you were Mossad and wanted to blackmail people ambivalent or hostile toward Israel into supporting it, you'd target rich Chinese, Indians, gentile Russians, and above all rich Sunni Muslims, particularly in the Gulf. You would not target Alan Dershowitz. The blackmail argument betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic purpose of blackmail. It also betrays an understanding of diaspora Jewish politics and Mossad's influence over it. Most critically, those rich Americans who were more skeptical of Israel do not appear to have associated much with Epstein (likely because that isn't really their crowd). Epstein bragged about working for intelligence agencies; that is the one thing you don't want your agent of blackmail to be doing.
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Epstein had no ingrained loyalty to Israel beyond that he was ethnically Jewish (like 7 million other Americans), and so there is no good reason for Mossad to trust him with one of the most expensive intelligence operations in history. There were and are plenty of charismatic Israeli-American businessmen, who have served in the army and who in some cases have connections to intelligence, that Mossad could would have prioritized for an overseas influence operation. Many were - unlike Epstein - actually successful on Wall Street or in other industries. A random conman and compulsive liar who had been fired from every real job he ever had isn't a good target for this kind of operation. It is telling that while "Mossad wanted to blackmail Americans into doing Israel's bidding" sounds like a clever plan, nobody can even present a compelling case for why Jeffrey Epstein's inviting of various influential pre-existing zionists into his social circle would actually serve the goals of that plan. Was there some great mass of principled Anti-Israel (largely Jewish, presumably) Americans just waiting to go full BDS if Mossad didn't have the sex tapes? A poor argument at best.
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Much of the argument for Epstein's supposed connections to Israel involves either Ehud Barak (whose influence in the country was again on the decline, who was PM for a very brief period, and who was 'collected' by Epstein as just another famous political or media figure to show off at events like the Clintons, Prince Andrew etc) or an alleged connection to Robert Maxwell. There is no evidence that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell beyond hearsay by anonymous callers into a popular Epstein grifter podcast that they 'supposedly' met in London in the late 1980s. Again, no photographs exist, no record of them being at the same social event or party exists (interesting given that there are tens of thousands of pictures of Epstein at big social events over the last thirty years; he didn't shy away from a camera, and neither did Maxwell). Maxwell was considered a hero by Israeli intelligence because he facilitated weapon and plane part shipments, illicitly, from the Soviet Union, France and elsewhere in the early years of Israel's existence. He was badly connected in America, such that his takeover of the New York Post was a desperate attempt to try to lobby for a bailout for his failing media empire, which collapsed upon his death.
It's Different When We Do It, Chapter 27
or
Did I Just Get Trolled?
tw: old news, unapologetic whataboutism
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have a free essay at the (reportedly centrist!) Foreign Affairs: "The Path to American Authoritarianism: What Comes After Democratic Breakdown." (Archive link.) You may notice the URL has "trump" in it, despite that word not appearing in the title. Curious.
But wait--who are Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way? After all, one can scarcely throw a cursor across a website these days without hitting, say, six or seven hyperlinks to "think pieces" about Trump, fascism, fascist Trumpism, or even Trumpist fascism. But never fear--this is no Average Andy/Joe Sixpack collaboration. This is professional work by a team of scholars whose most famous contribution to the canon of political scholarship is the term "competitive authoritarianism." What, you may ask, is competitive authoritarianism? Read on!
Steve Levitsky, according to his employer (Harvard University, naturally), is a
Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America.
His focus is not exclusive--he also writes on Israel policy while calling himself a "lifelong Zionist" (admittedly, in an article endorsing something like BDS)--but his interest in Latin America is apparently more than skin-deep:
Levitsky is married to Liz Mineo, a Peruvian journalist with degrees from the National University of San Marcos and Columbia University who currently works at The Harvard Gazette.
Lucan Way is no less distinguished. Well, maybe a litte less--the University of Toronto is not even the Harvard of Canada, much less the Harvard of, well, Harvard. But his title--his title! He is literally a Distinguished Professor of Democracy. Where Levitsky's focus is Latin America, however, Way's might best be described as "Cold War and Cold War adjacent." He credits at least some of that interest to family ties to historical events:
My stepfather's family were Jewish socialists, and his grandfather, Henrik Ehrlich, was a Menshevik during the 1917 revolution. This familial link to such a pivotal historical moment gave the chapter on Russia a deeper, more personal resonance.
This is an academic power couple, right here. Get one expert on authoritarianism in the New World, one on authoritarianism in the Old World, and baby, you've got a stew going! A book stew. An article stew. A bottomless cornucopia of cosmopolitan political commentary and analysis. Their 2010 text, "Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War," focuses on democratization (or its lack) under authoritarian regimes. David Waldner gave a blurb:
Regimes that blend meaningful elections and illicit incumbent advantage are not merely resting points on the road to democracy; Levitsky and Way guide us along the multiple paths these regimes can take and provide powerful reasoning to explain why nations follow these distinct paths. This deeply insightful analysis of an important subset of post-Cold War regimes is conceptually innovative and precise, empirically ambitious, and theoretical agile, moving fluidly between international and domestic causes of regime dynamics. Read it to understand the dynamics of contemporary hybrid regimes; then read it again to appreciate its many lessons for our general understanding of regime change.
So: you've literally written the book on how democracies are (or are not) born. What are you going to do next? No, no, you're not going to Disneyland--you're going to witness the election of Donald Trump and stop telling people that you study the birth of democracies, but instead the death of democracies. From the Amazon page for Levitsky's (but not Way's) How Democracies Die:
Donald Trump's presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we'd be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes.
That's the preliminaries. This week, Levitsky and Way published an article, and I have to say, I found it... kinda convincing? Except, I couldn't help but Notice some things that gave me pause. The thesis of the piece, as I mentioned, was that the United States is headed toward "competitive authoritarianism." The article provides a small explainer:
The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country's professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them.
But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism--a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori's Peru, Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Under competitive authoritarianism, the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact. Opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they contest seriously for power. Elections are often fiercely contested battles in which incumbents have to sweat it out. And once in a while, incumbents lose, as they did in Malaysia in 2018 and in Poland in 2023. But the system is not democratic, because incumbents rig the game by deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics. Competition is real but unfair.
(As an aside, Way seems to think India is doing alright, actually? Not sure where that fits in with the above but, co-authored pieces do sometimes result in these little puzzles.)
What actually struck me first about this description was my memory of posters here in the Motte discussing "Brazilification," the process by which the U.S. is, as a result of economics, immigration, and identity politics, gradually adopting the political norms of South and Central American nations. But my experience has been that it is usually more conservative, even arguably nationalist people expressing this concern. While Levitsky and Way do not use the term "Brazilification," they definitely seem to be placing the United States on that trajectory.
They elaborate on the problem at length:
Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. As Trump's early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders made clear, the cost of public opposition will rise considerably: Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. Americans will still be able to oppose the government, but opposition will be harder and riskier, leading many elites and citizens to decide that the fight is not worth it.
This is where I started to wonder, just a little, whether I was being trolled. While Trump's second term has indeed set a record pace for executive orders, Joe Biden's early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders was a greater departure from the norm. Most readers here will be well-acquainted with the IRS targeting of conservative groups. Many will also be aware of the time regulators inappropriately targeted the NRA. Conservative media outlets faced expensive defamation lawsuits (losing some, winning others). The fit with the Biden administration just seems too close in this paragraph, to be pure coincidence... but what am I supposed to conclude from that? Am I supposed to be doing a Straussian reading?
The piece continues:
[M]uch of the coming authoritarianism will take a less visible form: the politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy. . . . Even in countries such as the United States that have relatively small, laissez-faire governments, this authority creates a plethora of opportunities for leaders to reward allies and punish opponents. No democracy is entirely free of such politicization. But when governments weaponize the state by using its power to systematically disadvantage and weaken the opposition, they undermine liberal democracy. Politics becomes like a soccer match in which the referees, the groundskeepers, and the scorekeepers work for one team to sabotage its rival.
Republicans have long complained against the weaponization of government against conservatives, and Democrats have long ignored those complaints. Whether it's a county clerk jailed for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses or the throw-the-book-at-them attitude toward January 6th protesters, conservatives regularly find the scales of justice thumbed against their interests. Similarly-situated Democrats need fear no prosecution at all.
Levitsky and Way have more to say about this sort of thing:
The most visible means of weaponizing the state is through targeted prosecution. Virtually all elected autocratic governments deploy justice ministries, public prosecutors' offices, and tax and intelligence agencies to investigate and prosecute rival politicians, media companies, editors, journalists, business leaders, universities, and other critics. In traditional dictatorships, critics are often charged with crimes such as sedition, treason, or plotting insurrection, but contemporary autocrats tend to prosecute critics for more mundane offenses, such as corruption, tax evasion, defamation, and even minor violations of arcane rules. If investigators look hard enough, they can usually find petty infractions such as unreported income on tax returns or noncompliance with rarely enforced regulations.
Tax evasion, you say? As for minor violations of arcane rules and rarely enforced regulations, well, the whole "Trump committed a felony" charade in New York was recognized well in advance as "novel" and "built on an untested legal theory."
The argument continues!
Moreover, much of the Republican Party now embraces the idea that America's institutions--from the federal bureaucracy and public schools to the media and private universities--have been corrupted by left-wing ideologies. Authoritarian movements commonly embrace the notion that their country's institutions have been subverted by enemies; autocratic leaders including Erdogan, Orban, and Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro routinely push such claims. Such a worldview tends to justify--even motivate--the kind of purging and packing that Trump promises.
Why would the Republican Party embrace the idea that America's institutions have been corrupted by left-wing ideologies? After all, just 63% of senior executives in government posts are Democrats; only 58% of public school teachers identify as Democrat; fully 3.4% of journalists identify as Republicans, and the ratio of liberal to conservative college professors is a measly 17 to 1!
I guess "believing facts about the ideological makeup of our country's institutions" qualifies as authoritarian, now?
There's more to the article--I invite you to read it. But maybe some of you want to ask, in total exasperation, "What difference, at this point, does it make?" Maybe none! I am not here to do apologetics for Trump. I was just really struck by the idea that this article could have been written, almost word for word, about Biden, or even Obama. Maybe Bush! Maybe others--FDR for sure, right? But I can find no evidency of Levitsky or Way ever actually noticing, or worrying, about American competitive authoritarianism, until Trump. They think he's special. I don't think he's special! I think that, so far, he has actually committed far fewer of the sins on their list, than Biden did. That doesn't mean I endorse Trump's actions, so much as I am confused that a couple of highly-credentialed experts on the matter only seem to recognize American authoritarianism when it is coming from their right (or, more accurately, even when it might eventually be coming from their right).
Aside from that, I don't see any obvious problems with the picture that they paint. Having pundits on both sides of the aisle say similar things about our nation's political trajectory serves to increase my worry that "Brazilification" might be a real thing, and makes me wonder how quickly it might happen, and how seriously I should take the possibility.
(Insert butterfly meme: is this authoritarianism? Insert spaceman meme: always has been.)
Young men commit the vast majority of violent crime in every population on earth.
And are we going to acknowledge the flip side of this, too? I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men.
Even in non-dangerous scenarios, you can see greater male helping behaviours in a public context.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2786599
"One hundred forty-five experimenters "accidentally" dropped a handful of pencils or coins on 1,497 occasions before a total of 4,813 bystanders in elevators in Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. In picking up the objects, females received more help than did males, males gave more help than did females, and these differences were greatly exaggerated in Atlanta."
In addition, this study does a review of the literature surrounding gender and helping.
"Many previous studies have found that males are more likely to give help than females and/or that females are more likely to receive it than males (e.g., Bryan and Test, 1967; Ehlert et al., 1973; Gaertner and Bickman, 1971; Graf and Riddle, 1972; Latane, 1970; Morgan, 1973; Penner et al., 1973; Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972; Piliavin et al., 1969; Pomazal and Clore, 1973; Simon, 1971; Werner, 1974; Wispe and Freshly, 1971). A few studies have found no main effects due to sex (Gruder and Cook, 1971; Thayer, 1973) and in one case males were more likely to receive help (Emswiller et al., 1971). Two studies have found cross-sex helping to be more frequent than same-sex helping (Bickman, 1974; Thayer, 1973), one has found same-sex helping to be more common (Werner, 1974), and most have found no difference. Although the relation of sex to helping may depend on the specific type of help requested, it is clear that in the preponderance of settings tested to date, males help more than females, and females receive more help than males."
Heroism is likely mostly engaged in by men. As this article notes:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369/full
"To this end, we investigated reactions to newsworthy, exceptional social roles that are often dealt with in the media: hero and murderer. Both social roles attract much attention and have similarly low percentages of women (ca. 10–20%). In the US, only 9% of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving others are women, and in Germany only about 20% of similar medals are awarded to women. This may be because there are fewer women in professions such as firefighters, soldiers, or police officers—jobs involving dangerous situations where jobholders can act heroically."
I would differ from the authors here. Fewer women in dangerous professions is likely not a very big reason for the difference in heroism found between men and women, because the Carnegie Hero Medal excludes from awards of persons such as firefighters whose duties in their regular vocations require heroism, unless the act of heroism is truly outstanding. "The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued, which precludes those whose vocational duties require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty; and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hero_Fund
This article in Men's Health notes "nine out of every 10 Carnegie heroes have been men".
"Heroic rescuing behaviour is a male-typical trait in humans ... This study looked at news archives of local papers in the UK in order to discover what kind of characteristics rescuers possess. It was found that males were highly more likely to rescue than females were".
When it comes to men there's very much a misleading tendency to focus on the negative manifestations of their tendency towards public sphere agency and ignore all the positive ways it manifests. I think in the past we had a more balanced viewpoint surrounding it, and there's been a very motivated attempt to stamp out positive perceptions of men due to an idea that these perceptions are problematic. It's very hard for me not to see the slow erasure of positive male qualities from the public discourse as being intentional.
And also the next problem with your point is that it basically ignores the role women play in creating violence. Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women. And you can easily see plenty of instances throughout history of women weaponising that social expectation and openly cajoling men into performing violence against others, as I mentioned in a previous comment of mine. But violence by proxy perpetrated by women is, again, largely a topic that is taboo in the public discourse.
Quantumfreakonomics
10mo ago
What is going on in Springfield, Ohio? 20,000 Haitian arrivals into a town of 60,000 seems insane, but the New York Times seems to back it up. I definitely don’t trust the NYT to give an honest portrayal of what the situation is like on the ground, but I don’t really trust a lot of the rumors going around Twitter either. I am seeing reports of Haitians killing the ducks at the park and eating them. There are even secondhand reports of Haitians eating pet cats.
What I am not seeing however is geolocated footage or images. How hard can it be to send a guy to the park to see if there are any ducks left? I am legitimately confused. None of this seems to make sense.
Presidential Ballot Access: Ohio Edition
As of today, a state is currently set to only have one of the two major parties candidates for President on the ballot, but it's not the one you might expect.
Ohio law requires that presidential candidates be certified – that is, the state must be notified that presidential candidates have been officially nominated – 90 days before the general election in order to get on the ballot. That is the earliest deadline of any state.
But the Democratic National Convention that will formally nominate Biden won’t open until nearly two weeks after Ohio’s Aug. 7 deadline. The Republican National Convention will wrap up nearly three weeks before the deadline, so Donald Trump won’t have a problem getting on the ballot...
Ohio laws generally take effect 90 days after passage. So a change to the deadline had to pass by May 9, but the Legislature wound up doing nothing.
To be fair, this law has existed since 2010, albeit with a couple past temporary exceptions (probably a compromise number downstream of a 2006 court case over a third-party candidate 120-day deadline; see references to Blackwell and progeny here). and the Ohio legislature (majority Republican) has done nothing less out of explicit desire to screw over democracy and more because the Ohio GOP's House and Senate are fighting each other, and a GOP interest in getting some sort of Red Tribe value out of it (the closest bill, HB114, also bans some foreign contributions to ballot initiatives, for about the reasons you'd expect). DeWine, the (Republican) governor, is pressing pretty hard to find some sort of solution, whether that ends up an emergency legislative fix, hoping the courts can and will step in, or a more dubious executive branch intervention. And it's not like there's any plausible situation where Ohio would be the turning point for the 2024 election.
((There's some theories that Ohio Dems are trying to bolster Sherrod Brown's chances, though I don't think that's very likely or even particularly coherent.))
To be less charitable, nice motive, still excluding a major political party from the ballot. It's not going to be doing any wonders for society, and as we get closer to the election, the available options, whether taken or merely proposed, will only make the mess clearer. The current planned resolution looks to be a 'virtual Democratic National Convention call', officially nominating Biden before the actual Chicago disaster convention. Hopefully, that's enough of an excuse for the Ohio legislative special session to also clean things up, but more likely the virtual call gets counted as close enough for Ohio law (less optimistically, it leaves no one able to challenge it). But the whole thing has just been a parade of one group after another absolutely certain that someone else will fix the problem that they're rolling directly into, and 'it wasn't my fault' is an awful epitaph.
Fauci et All Foiling FOIA
One email refers to a “private gmail” supposedly used by Fauci. Morens also referred others to a “secret back channel” for communicating about certain issues. He also frequently directed others to message him on his personal Gmail account to avoid FOIA requests. Morens also noted he had “learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d.” That individual, who he identified as Marg Moore, “also hates FOIAs.”
The emails also reveal Morens made a series of crude comments about women, female coworkers and his drinking habits which indicate he “is not qualified to hold a position of public trust,” the committee wrote. Morens testified to the subcommittee Wednesday that he didn't remember if he used a personal email to conduct government business, but conceded it was "wrong" if he did so.
None of this is particularly surprising, from a cynic's perspective -- government employees fucking with FOIA requirements is a day ending in Y. There's a steelman where certain scientists involved in climate change research were getting spammed with so many duplicative FOIA requests that it edged on harassment, though given neither Morens nor Fauci every worked in environmental stuff that that's leafspring-grade steel.
There's no serious chance of serious punishment, here: Morens was already investigated and found not guilty of anything that the NIH cared about, and if anyone has problems with him lying to Congress, well, there's some fun legal realism questions about whether the law is the statute or the enforcement, but the enforcement still comes from one place.
On the other hand, it does seem enough to have pissed off no small number of partisans aligned to that One Place, if, cynically, more in the sense that Morens et all got caught. HHS is at least moving against EcoHealth Alliance. If you were to ask what one would consider a good sign, well, there's certainly end results that could point to people taking this seriously.
Title VII Religious Freedom in California
Another day, another VanDyke dissent:
In its stubborn insistence on ruling against Chief Hittle, the panel has twisted the record into knots and badly misstated Title VII law. Its decision (1) abdicates its responsibility to read the record in the light most favorable to Hittle at the summary judgment stage; (2) allows employers to escape liability for repeating discriminatory remarks simply by hiding behind those who say them first; and (3) mangles Title VII’s “motivating factor” analysis.
Perhaps most glaringly, its original opinion also incorrectly heightened the showing a plaintiff is required to make to demonstrate disparate treatment. In the panel’s view, Hittle bore the burden of showing that the City’s discriminatory conduct was “motivated by religious hostility,” notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s admonition that such a plaintiff need only show he was “intentionally treat[ed] … worse because of” a protected characteristic, Bostock v. Clayton County.
Recognizing at least this last mistake, the panel’s amended opinion retires its former use of the word “hostility,” replacing it with the more accurate (but less specific) “discriminatory animus.” Not only do those changes not fully fix the original opinion’s legal errors, but they also put the panel, which apparently remains as determined as ever to rule against Hittle, in a pickle.
Notwithstanding its many other errors, the original opinion correctly acknowledged that the “gravamen” of the “notice terminating Hittle was the religious nature of the leadership event.” But if attendance at a religious event was the “gravamen” of the firing and Hittle need only show that he was “intentionally treat[ed] … worse because of” religion, Bostock, 590 U.S. at 658, it would seem the panel would have no choice but to reverse its previous decision in favor of the City.
But it won’t.
We've had discussions here about a more expansive framework for discrimination, but this seems the punchline. Title VII has prohibited religious discrimination in hiring and firing of employees for sixty years, and while the exact borders of the doctrine have ebbed and flowed from one jurisdiction to the next, or as courts have pushed at the very edges, trying to bring them to these style of cases has been an expensive shitshow, where even the lucky winners spend decades for minimal defenses. Even defining this class of cases is a mess: I want to say discrimination against the 'majority' (but anti-woman discrimination is clearly covered!), or 'non-subaltern' (but trite agnosticism is protected, he says as a trite agnostic), rather than just Groups Progressives Want To Discriminate Against, and that's kinda the problem.
However, that punchline's also a bit of a repeat: not just that VanDyke is writing his dissent at an en banc appeal that had no chance of victory, or that the original opinion had to be edited to not be hilariously wrong, but that Kennedy went to and was decided by SCOTUS almost a year before the original appeal decision came from the 9th Circuit. The facts in Hittle are different, sure -- Stockton alleges, not very credibly, that they 'really' fired Hittle for endorsing a consulting business and for not disclosing closeness to a union president -- but the courts were (supposedly) not yet deciding facts, but merely the motion for summary judgement.
Instead of motions for summary judgement focusing on questions of law, various balancing tests and excuses can fall into play where judges don't like the plaintiff's perspective. Instead of protecting Hittle against employers that were outraged by his place in a complaint-named 'Christian coalition', the law in California now holds that there is a "legitimate concern that the City could violate constitutional prohibitions and face liability if it is seen to engage in favoritism with certain employees because they happen to be members of a particular religion." Sure, that anti-endorsement test had been explicitly rejected contemporaneously to and previously by SCOTUS, but SCOTUS "can't catch 'em all", and increasingly doesn't seem interested in trying.
That failure mode isn't and wasn't inevitable: despite my expectations, Fulton hasn't come back to the courts (yet). But it's a problem that haunts any attempt at legislative or executive branch 'fixes'.
((At a more concrete level, Hittle was fired in October 2011, at a time where he was nearing age 50. The unusual length of the court case here reflects Stockton's bankruptcy rather than overt malfeasance specific to him, but it still means he's in his mid-60s today. Even should, SCOTUS hear this case, overturn it, remand with direct instructions, no further interlocutory appeals or weirdness occur, and the trial occur speedily, he might see a court room on the facts before he self-moots by old age, but probably not before he sees his 70th birthday.))
An Appeal to Heaven
Compare February and to May. Diff, context. Also see here, and here.
The Cloud is Someone Else's (Broken) Computer
Unisuper is an Australian superannuation fund, which is close enough to a psuedo-mandatory version of American retirement funds. AshLael might know the more specific differences. It has 600k members, about one in fifty Australians, with over 125 billion AUD (~88 billion USD) funds under management. It also fell off the internet on May 5th, only restoring full functionality May 20th, allegedly as a result of a 'one-in-a-million' bug in Google Cloud services dropping both the main Unisuper database and all Google Cloud backups.
UniSuper had duplication in two geographies as a protection against outages and loss. However, when the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription occurred, it caused deletion across both of these geographies.
Restoring UniSuper’s Private Cloud instance has called for an incredible amount of focus, effort, and partnership between our teams to enable an extensive recovery of all the core systems. The dedication and collaboration between UniSuper and Google Cloud has led to an extensive recovery of our Private Cloud which includes hundreds of virtual machines, databases and applications.
UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration.
This is a little weird, and not just for having an actual benefit from multicloud. Google Cloud Platform doesn't have the best reputation, but 'keeping multiple copies of long-standing data' is one of those things cloud providers are supposed to excel at, and having first disclosure come through the client rather than the cloud provider is a decision that Google Cloud didn't have to make. There are even arguments, a la Patio11-style, that part of what a client Unisuper's size is buying from a cloud provider is to have a name to fall on a sword. This has lead to no small number of people reading tea leaves to conclude that the fault 'really' reflected an error by Unisuper (or a separate smaller contractor) making a configuration mistake. Unisuper was migrating from VMWare, which has its own mess, and is exactly the sort of situation you would see greater vulnerability to client developer error. That still wouldn't be great for Google, since most cloud providers at that scale claim a lot of safety checks and emergency backups, but I could understand if they just failed to idiot-proof every service.
Nope :
During the initial deployment of a Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Private Cloud for the customer using an internal tool, there was an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank. This had the unintended and then unknown consequence of defaulting the customer’s GCVE Private Cloud to a fixed term, with automatic deletion at the end of that period. The incident trigger and the downstream system behavior have both been corrected to ensure that this cannot happen again.
We probably won't get a full breakdown until the Aussie regulatory agency finishes an investigation (if then), so there may always be more to the story, and a lot of fun questions about what, if any, data was out-of-date or lost from the backup. But this is pretty damning for Google, as things stand.
On one hand, this probably is a one-in-a-million bug, and readily closed. On the other hand, as anyone with network engineering or statistics or X-Com background can tell you, one-in-a-million means a lot less than the naive expectation, and Google Cloud Platform has an estimated just under a half-million business customers, and this is an embarrassing bug.
Does that mean that they're got it out of their system for another million customers? Or that this is just the first time it happened and was big enough a deal to make the news?
((Okay, the real answer is I'm being pedantic and reading too much out of a turn of phrase.))
The bigger problem is that Cloud has long been sold as The Professionals Doing It Right. That was always a little more true at the margins than the center. As bad as rando small businesses trying to maintain a Gitlab instance can get (and it can get bad: even by web software standards, it's a masochist's tool), no small number of seemingly-legit smaller cloud providers have gone belly up, wildly revised their offerings, or just plain disappeared. It's quite possible that Unisuper moved to Google Cloud in part because the Broadcom buyout of VMWare (only finalized in December 2023, but after 18 months of regulatory review) raised concerns that they'd start lopping down product offerings.
(But to move to Google?)
It's increasingly tenuous, here, though. Unisuper are not fresh college grads confused by the difference between a RAID and a backup, but a massive company that maintains many sites as a matter of course. Google is one of the Big Three when it comes to cloud provisioning. One can imagine counterfactuals where a self-run or classically-hosted Unisuper herped the derp, but the factual here makes them look like the competent ones. And that's not alone.
Which would be one thing if Unisuper were the only people pressed into cloud services.
How's everyone feel about OneDrive integration in Windows, or Google and Apple cloud in their phones?
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
I worked as a title attorney for a decade. It's not a scam. Most of what you're paying for isn't to theoretically pay off future claims, but to pay for work done up front to prevent future claims. This requires them to send someone down to the courthouse to gather all of the title documents, which are than sent to an attorney who looks for issues and drafts a list of exceptions that the policy won't cover. If the exceptions are minor things like utility easements and the like that don't really affect the value of the property, the company will write the policy. About a third of the time, though, there are major issues that require the insurance company to do further curative work before they'll move forward. The reason such a small percentage goes toward paying out claims is because the vast, vast majority of your premium is spent on getting assurance that there won't be any claims.
Now, theoretically you could forgo the insurance and research the title on your own, but this will inevitable cost you more than just getting the damn insurance because you're now paying the full hourly rate for an attorney who may or may not have any significant experience doing title work, whereas the insurance company has an attorney on its payroll for a lot less, and this guy does nothing but titles. And they'll also be able to delegate a lot of the legwork to other staff, who also do nothing but titles. So you're paying less for a superior product. Theoretically you could also do the research yourself but I highly, highly would not recommend even thinking about even attempting this. Even having spent ten years doing titles that were much more complex than typical residential real estate transactions, there's no way in hell I wouldn't buy title insurance. I've seen too much.
Other countries (not the US) have central land registries and dispense with title insurance altogether.
The problem there is that we would have to essentially run a full title for all land going back to patent. Most title insurance companies only do a 60 year search, because claims beyond that are rare enough that occasionally having to pay one isn't a big deal. But it becomes important if you're making ironclad assurances. You could theoretically get around this by passing a marketable title that acts as an effective statute of limitations on claims, but you stil don't avoid the basic problem: It would still be really expensive. How long and how much do you think it would cost to run full title on all 585,000 parcels in Allegheny County? You're probably talking billions, when you consider that a lot of these are going to be industrial and commercial properties that have much more complex titles than a simple residential subdivision lot. Rural counties have fewer parcels, but rural work poses its own problems; those titles are almost never easy. Then there are the associated costs of curing all those titles (a buyer can always walk away), developing and implementing the system, and dealing with the inevitable lawsuits that follow. I did a lot of work in Ohio right when oil and gas was starting to take off. The state had passed a dormant mineral act that sought to simplify things: Rather than having to track down the innumerable hard-to-find heirs of someone who severed a mineral interest in 1919 and then forgot about it, any interest that hadn't seen any action within the past 20 years would merge with the surface. Seems simple enough on its face. This led to a decade of wrangling and counting, with the Ohio Supreme Court getting involved on several occasions, to determine when an interest is actually terminated. We basically had to hold off on interpreting it for a while while the cases worked their way through the courts. I doubt the wholesale termination of old surface interests would be that much different.
WhiningCoil
23d ago
Never Meet Your Heroes, Even Posthumously
When I was a kid, I discovered Harlan Ellison on Sci-Fi Buzz during his Harlan Ellison's Watching segments. They were my favorite segments, and I was crushed when an episode didn't have one. I would have been about 10 years old at this time. Luckily enough, they are all still available on Harlan's youtube. This one in particular I remember, being a comic card collector in middle school, along with most of the boys in my boy scout troop.
For me at that age, there was a lot to look up to in Harlan. He was witty, funny, charismatic, and never gave up on his childhood passions. More over he seems important and respected, his awards always preceding his name. I thought he was simply the best as a young nerdling. But I never read his stories. I can't even remember wanting to. Maybe I wasn't there yet, in terms of reading level. I honestly have no memory of what I was reading at that age. I do recall that by the time I was a freshman in highschool, I had read ample Ray Bradbury collections, and had been dabbling in Iain M Banks. For whatever reason I never circled back to Harlan until much later, picking up a ebook copy of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and being blown away by every story in it, especially Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.
Over the last month, I've been working through The Essential Ellison: A 35 Year Retrospective. It's completely changed my view of the man, and not for the better. The tome really lays bare how autobiographical much of Ellison's short stories are. The barely disguised self loathing, the tireless hatred he feels for all of humanity, but seemingly goys above all others, and the immaturity disguised as worldliness. Qualities I admired as a child watching him on Sci-Fi Buzz I'm profoundly glad I did not grow up to emulate as an adult.
The facts are Harlan's father died when he was very young, he was constantly in and out of trouble, he ran away from home, he worked a smattering of tough sounding blue collar jobs, he spent 2 years in the army, he was expelled from college, he was married 5 times, divorced 4, and he had no children.
Through his fiction, you further learn that he was, imagines, or romanticizes, being the only jewish boy in a small Ohio town relentless victimized by it's shitty irredeemable goy population. He loathes goys, and it rears it's head in story after story after story. He hates their dumb kids, their dumb churches, their dumb music, their dumb bowling leagues, you name it, he hates it. And he hates that they're all bigger and stronger than him at 5'3". Does he really feel this way, deep down? Who's to say. But after 1000 pages, probably 500 of which riffed on that theme, I'm left with the impression some part of him must. Often cloaked in humor, or the virtue of the civil rights movement of his day. But in his fiction, he seems less interested in the humanity of Southern Blacks, and more interested in the inhumanity of the goy.
He returns to his childhood repeatedly in his fiction, and how much better things were then, when radio plays lit his imagination on fire and his father was still alive. This is a strain of stunted growth I too suffer from, as my grumpy rants about video games will attest. I find ample share of compatriots in this regard. But something about Harlan's inability to take on the masculine burden of supporting and raising a stable family casts a darker tint to his nostalgia.
Harlan Ellison's entire public persona was a fraud. Or at least, in many of his writings, his fear that he was a fraud came through. Stories about a 4 times divorced celebrity manufacturing a shameful charismatic and funny public persona to hide how much he hated everyone. Stories about a shameless womanizer who has worked all sorts of rough and tumble blue collar jobs... but only for a few weeks so he could say he did. In reality he (I mean his character of course) has soft hands only barely acquainted with manual labor. Which reminds you Harlan the author never draws on all the odd jobs he claims to have had in his fiction, beyond name dropping them. Lastly, multiple stories where a four times divorced main character convinces his first wife to get an abortion she doesn't want, resulting in her emotional destruction which he treats as a personal offense to himself.
Are all these details that sound curiously autobiographical true? Or angles Harlan plays up for want of something to do when seated at his typewriter? At this point, with enough dots connected, I suspect the worst.
After making it through The Essential Ellison, I'm hurt. Hurt that someone I looked up to so much as a kid was in reality a hateful, developmentally stunted man. And I mean emotionally, not physically, though I suppose there was that too. A man who for 35 years picked his wounds in public, on the page. He kept them fresh, knowing it's what put food on the table. I feel sorry for him, but I also sincerely wish I hadn't known all that. Ah well.
Rov_Scam
1yr 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.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2yr 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).
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.
FarNearEverywhere
2yr ago
The left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade and wants trans people to be left alone
And I might even have believed that, were it not for things like the Kermit Gosnell case, and now the whole "Drag Story Hours" rubbish. Are trans people disproportionately represented in modern drag is a theoretical discussion I have no idea about. But taking primary school children to drag shows for some nebulous notion of "allyship" or even worse is stupid. If anyone suggested "let's bring kids to strip clubs because sex work is real work" then they'd be pilloried. "Let's bring kids along to a club with signs like this in the background, but oh no it's nothing sexually-tinged at all, how dare you say that you bigot" is the new orthodoxy.
And then we get stupid, stupid clashes like antifa versus Proud Boys because both sides want an excuse for a rumble, and some UU church was dumb enough to provide them with one.
So "the left just wants trans people to be left alone" is not going to wash anymore.
jeroboam
10mo ago
NBC's Lester Holt: "Today's apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants" in Springfield, Ohio, resulting in bomb threats.
This just hits so hard to me. I want Trump to win (even though he's a terrible person) because I want these people to lose so much.
Harris will give bizarre word salad non answers to half the questions, but the other half she'll have a nearly flawless rehearsed answers for.
Trump will mostly ignore the questions and just go on about whatever topics he feels he's strongest in. His answers will also be too online, and assume you know what he's talking about. At some point he'll bring up the 20,000 Hattians in Ohio, but it will be in the most confusing way possible. You'll either know what he's gesturing at and nod along, or think he's an absolute crazy person.
Despite the mics being muted while the other person is talking, at some point Kamala will try to shoehorn in "I'm talking now", because the "vote blue no matter who" crowd loves it when she says that and it gets them all fired up. But in context it will make almost zero sense.
If the debate rules break down at some point like they did with Biden, and they stop muting the mics, I have no fucking clue what sort of chaos will break loose. Pretty sure Harris' entire strategy is to just bully Trump into shutting up with girlboss energy, but I'll be extremely disappointed if he lets her. But I wouldn't be shocked if the moderators put their finger on the scale and start selectively muting Trump so Harris can speak in that situation, even if it's supposed to be his time to speak, like for his 2 minute rebuttal or however they structure it.
jeroboam
1yr ago
Thursday's debate was the gift that keeps on giving for political horse race junkies like me. 2024's campaign was shaping up to be the ultimate snooze-fest. Neither party fielded competitive primaries. Neither candidate provided any sort of vision for the future. Two geriatric candidates were fighting a rematch over a tiny sliver of undecided voters. Despite the heated rhetoric, it was boring.
Everything is different now, and this is shaping up to be one of the most dramatic campaign seasons in history.
Biden's chances to win the Democratic nomination keep plummeting. On PredictIt, he is down to 50%! Kamala Harris's stock is surging - now up to 33%.
But while many within the Democratic media complex have called for Biden to step down (he even lost Brian Stelter!) elected officials have been much more circumspect. Nearly all prominent Democrats continue to support Biden in public. The knives are being sharpened, favors are being called in, backroom deals are being made. But the party unity hasn't broken. Somebody (Obama maybe) will have to strike the first blow. Until then, it's far too risky to stick one's neck out.
Biden's political instincts are stronger than many give him credit for. I've mentioned before how he's used the SPR to keep gas prices down, knowing that simple things like that matter a lot. Now he has a new mantra. Trust no one. Increasingly relying on his wife Jill, he is now apparently bringing in Hunter as an advisor as well.
Biden only needs to last a few more weeks. To appear on the Ohio ballot, Democrats must nominate someone before August 7th. He just needs to run out the clock. Big public speeches or appearances are a no no, as every senior moment will now be dissected in minute detail. Once he's the nominee, the media will come back onside to save democracy.
In any case, I can't get enough of the drama. Make election season fun again.
Here
1yr 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.
I think men are violent by only insofar that men are agentic. I don't think it's really possible to separate men's propensity towards violence from their tendency to exert agency in other ways and other parts of societies.
Related to this, I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men.
Even in non-dangerous scenarios, you can see greater male helping behaviours in a public context.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2786599
"One hundred forty-five experimenters "accidentally" dropped a handful of pencils or coins on 1,497 occasions before a total of 4,813 bystanders in elevators in Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. In picking up the objects, females received more help than did males, males gave more help than did females, and these differences were greatly exaggerated in Atlanta."
In addition, this study does a review of the literature surrounding gender and helping.
"Many previous studies have found that males are more likely to give help than females and/or that females are more likely to receive it than males (e.g., Bryan and Test, 1967; Ehlert et al., 1973; Gaertner and Bickman, 1971; Graf and Riddle, 1972; Latane, 1970; Morgan, 1973; Penner et al., 1973; Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972; Piliavin et al., 1969; Pomazal and Clore, 1973; Simon, 1971; Werner, 1974; Wispe and Freshly, 1971). A few studies have found no main effects due to sex (Gruder and Cook, 1971; Thayer, 1973) and in one case males were more likely to receive help (Emswiller et al., 1971). Two studies have found cross-sex helping to be more frequent than same-sex helping (Bickman, 1974; Thayer, 1973), one has found same-sex helping to be more common (Werner, 1974), and most have found no difference. Although the relation of sex to helping may depend on the specific type of help requested, it is clear that in the preponderance of settings tested to date, males help more than females, and females receive more help than males."
Heroism is likely mostly engaged in by men. As this article notes:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369/full
"To this end, we investigated reactions to newsworthy, exceptional social roles that are often dealt with in the media: hero and murderer. Both social roles attract much attention and have similarly low percentages of women (ca. 10–20%). In the US, only 9% of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving others are women, and in Germany only about 20% of similar medals are awarded to women. This may be because there are fewer women in professions such as firefighters, soldiers, or police officers—jobs involving dangerous situations where jobholders can act heroically."
I would differ from the authors here. Fewer women in dangerous professions is likely not a very big reason for the difference in heroism found between men and women, because the Carnegie Hero Medal excludes from awards of persons such as firefighters whose duties in their regular vocations require heroism, unless the act of heroism is truly outstanding. "The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued, which precludes those whose vocational duties require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty; and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hero_Fund
This article in Men's Health notes "nine out of every 10 Carnegie heroes have been men".
"Heroic rescuing behaviour is a male-typical trait in humans ... This study looked at news archives of local papers in the UK in order to discover what kind of characteristics rescuers possess. It was found that males were highly more likely to rescue than females were".
When it comes to men there's very much a tendency to focus on the negative manifestations of public sphere agency and ignore all the positive ways it manifests. I think in the past we had a more balanced viewpoint surrounding it, and there's been a very motivated attempt to stamp out positive perceptions of men due to an idea that these perceptions are problematic. It's very hard for me not to see the slow erasure of positive male qualities from the public discourse as being intentional.
Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women.
And you can easily see plenty of instances throughout history of women weaponising that social expectation and openly cajoling men into performing violence against others, as I mentioned in a previous comment of mine. But violence by proxy perpetrated by women is, again, largely a topic that is taboo in the public discourse.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Wise To The World
Ohio Capital Journal reports:
Westerville City Schools Board of Education voted 4-0 last week to end a religious release time policy that allowed LifeWise Academy to take public school students out of class to conduct Bible instruction during school hours. [...]
In Ohio, school districts may choose to allow students to earn up to two high school credits, during non-'core' education school hours, subject to a number of limitations such as on funding (solely private) and parental consent (written).
Why are they popular? My impression from what I've been able to gather of their curricula -- admittedly, the full contents of which they play pretty close to the chest -- is more Lutheran Sunday School than anything Hellfire Baptist. I'm not hugely tied into the fundie religious parents, but what contacts I do have, these programs are seen as offering a good compromise. Unlike homeschooling, the student is still getting core curricula and socialization with the general public (uh, for better or worse). Unlike the school's non-core programs, there's some integration with religious processes. Why not just do those things outside of school hours? The growth of after-school extracurriculars and increased reliance on those successes for college acceptance or scholarships have made 'traditional' afternoon or weekends religious programs harder and harder to maintain, while the reduced presence of religious programs elsewhere has made transportation overhead more costly.
What were the big arguments against these policies? Parents Against LifeWise has a more varied set of issues on their web page, for those who want a (very) deep dive. At least from my read, the vast majority of concerns are hypotheticals and/or trivialities, but perhaps a more critical eye will pick up something I've missed. OCJ offers:
“I was raised to know that religious teaching belongs in the home, at the church, with your friends, with your family, and those various people that believe the way you do,” said Dr. Allison Baer, an Associate Professor at the University of Findlay, and mother of Center for Christian Virtue President Aaron Baer. “If this program, and this teaching, is so vital to their Christian life, why isn’t it offered after school, which would help working parents with free after school child care?”
“Westerville City Schools preaches diversity, equity and inclusion. But diversity, equity, and inclusion does not call for every human being to be a Christian,” said Luke Bauman, a Westerville resident. “It is the goal of LifeWise, tied closely with Project 2025, to dismantle public education from the inside out.” [...]
LifeWise is a gold level sponsor of the Essential Summit, a two-day conference organized by religious lobbying organization the Center for Christian Virtue, who’ve helped craft school choice laws and anti-trans bills in Ohio. CCV is listed as a hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center [ed: good luck figuring out why?]. The keynote speaker of the CCV summit was Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts.
Which... seems more to cut to the quick, here. Opponents are not driven by the terror of a slightly disrupted school schedule, or a flyer mentioning a religious organization being printed on a school printer. They're appalled that broad-scale religious organizations exist in the public square, and have defenders. And a purple town in a purple-leaning-red state agreed.
Well, is this just a one-off? Each school board covers a relatively small area, so it's not that weird if some random people did something kinda meh.
The Huron City School Board decided in a majority vote to end their released time policy on Aug. 20 this year. Prior to them, the Vermillion Board of Education also voted on June 29 against starting their own program. Bowling Green City Schools, Johnson-Monroe City Schools, Gahanna-Jefferson City Schools, and Sylvania City Schools have also come out against the released time policy.
There's some !!fun!! legal discussion about how this sort of policy change based on a fig leaf of organizational difficulty on top of overt disquiet with religious belief -- there's a certain comparison to the animus in Cleburne that I don't think either side of this debate would find particularly complimentary. But in practice school boards outside of Florida have pretty free reign to pick and choose supported programs, and courts can and will treat that fig leaf as if it were substantial when they want.
There's a bill in the state house requiring schools to permit released time programs, but it's unlikely to go anywhere and poorly written enough that it has no enforcement mechanism against school boards that defy it or find 'secular' cause to ignore it. And, again, courts can and will treat that fig leaf as if it were substantial when they want.
What sorta solutions might come up, instead?
ProPublica [bleh] reports:
Following Hurricane Katrina and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal taxpayer dollars went toward repairing and improving private K-12 schools in multiple states. Churches that operate schools often receive government funding for the social services that they offer; some orthodox Jewish schools in New York have relied on significant financial support from the city, The New York Times has found. But national experts on education funding emphasized that what Ohio is doing is categorically different.
“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center and the author of a new book on the history of billionaire-led voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to be able to build their schools, Cowen said, or they’ve held fundraising drives or asked their diocese for help.)
The Ohio One-Time Strategic Community Investment Fund, a widely available fund of the type that Trinity Lutheran expressly prohibits governments from blocking out religious organizations. You might make one of many arguments that this is a graft (why is the dayton airshow getting state grants?). Opponents might argue that puts an increasing wide and variety of education funding outside of the domain of electoral control (uh, admittedly with a little bit of hypocrisy).
What did you think "teacher's unions are unambiguously and emphatically against the Republican Party" meant? Vibes? Papers?
I Told You Those Stories, So I Could Tell This One
[way more]
Come for the Gender Unicorn; stay for the hilarious claim that Donald Trump would simultaneously call all undocumented immigrants animals but not use the word 'illegal immigrant'. Okay, that's trite, and there are some distinctions, here. Lifewise operated in school hours with solely private funding; the New Haven Social Justice Academy program operated during the summer with at least some of public funding. Lifewise is a religious organization, the Social Justice Academy is... well some of these programs get a little on the nose with the extent that they're replacements for religion, but afaict the New Haven Program here avoids direct reference to the topic except to call George Floyd an austere religious scholar mentor.
There's a lot of snark to be made, here, but there's also a more serious point.
A complete rando talking about Lifewise offers :
"Whether Lifewise is a good program or a secretly evil program with a long term goal of eroding the public school system and the separation of church and state, the way that it has emboldened the Christofascists in my town to speak without a hint of self awareness makes me extremely wary of my neighbors (and one of them... lives on my street.)"
The DailyWire's piece quotes a complete rando "Director of Outreach" from an aligned political group :
“This summer program should have been advertised as an indoctrination camp where ideologues who spell the word ‘women’ with an x feed students propaganda about defunding the police, transgenderism, and oppression."
These programs all say a lot about fragmentation. I'm writing about them -- I'm reading about them -- because people want each and every one from the other team removed. Deleted. Unalived in minecraft lava, if you will. The possibility that someone might take the wrong choice, or defend the possibility of taking the wrong choice, is enough.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
WhiningCoil
8mo ago
I mean it's nice the head of the Democratic party is finally just dispensing with subtlety and is being honest. If concerned parents being added to FBI watchlist, people defending themselves being thrown in prison, functional communities being utterly destroyed by federal human trafficking didn't already give it away. How is it not manifestly obvious these are policies of hate and destruction? They consider felons and illegals more legitimate constituents than people who want property rights, safe communities, and schools that won't teach their children to sterilize and mutilate themselves.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr 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.
You're spot on. It's $8.6 billion. Like any good student, you guessed the teacher's password!
The point I was making is that despite this company being "essential" to the U.S. economy, it's worth 1/5th as much as an energy drink company. In fact, the energy drink and burrito sectors of the economy are 10x the value of the steel sector.
The U.S. economy has been so hollowed out that these remaining old economy companies linger on like zombies and political footballs, basically forbidden from ever making a dollar of profit for their investors.
But I think there is a genuine difference between Trump and Harris here. In the Trump world, tariffs go up, regulation goes down, and U.S. steel might actually reward its patient investors. In the Harris world, regulation goes up, and maybe the steel industry gets a bail out or something, but 100% of the value is captured by unions so the company continues to exist as a zombie like it has for half a century. In the Harris economy, nobody in their right mind invests in steel, or autos, or any heavy industries. Detroit, Ohio, and western PA exist as pitiable charity cases while the smart money starts another energy drink company such as Celsius (market cap $8.7 billion).
I'm not sure Trump's tariff plan will work. It might not. But it's at least trying to let the industrial regions stand on their own two feet again.
AP News reports:
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
prosecutionpersecution. 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.
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