domain:mattlakeman.org
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6m ago
I wouldn't personally trust any media to any particular degree, but that's still an odd point of comparison to the most powerful man on the Earth.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
8m ago
We could, on a good day, probably have a nice and well-thought conversation on police reform, and I get the feeling that we'd agree on more than you might expect, though certainly not everything. Unfortunately for both of us, basically no one out in the real world wanted to have a well-thought and careful conversation; they all wanted to go insane or turn a blind eye to the insanity. So whatever I say here is less about police reform in general, and more about a particular form of racism and insanity that afflicts American culture and had an explosion in 2020.
the fact that we have anti-police riots in the US is a strong signal that there are serious problems with American policing
No, it's a strong signal that there is the perception of serious problems with American policing. The reality of the problems is, afaict, almost entirely disconnected from the perception and reactions to it.
Do you genuinely think that this arose from a singular incident?
Ehh... sort of? I think, clearly, bad police exist, but BLM and in particular the 2020 riots weren't really about bad police. BLM is about pie-in-the-sky pro-criminal advocacy, the about-face on bodycams being my primary evidence for this sentiment, and the 2020 riots were about people looking for a socially-sanctioned excuse to go out and get crazy on a spectrum between "block party" and "looting and revolution."
Video is powerful, everyone had cabin fever, and white-on-black crime makes American media go full stupid. If Chauvin had kneed Floyd in some camera-free back alley, it probably wouldn't have risen above local news. If Alexander Keung had been the primary cop instead of Chauvin, it probably wouldn't have risen above local news.
There'd be a lot less resentment and hostility if brutal or reckless cops were consistently punished for transgressions
I agree that they should be, but most of the resentment and hostility is downstream of other problems (ie, disparate impact and the confrontation clause). I think if cops policed themselves perfectly we'd still see much of the resentment and hostility.
The unarmed aspect doesn't really matter much.
I'm just commenting there on well-meaning liberals that have an aesthetic and moral privileging of certain populations based on race to being orders of magnitude wrong about reality.
No, Blue Tribe wanted there to be protests. Most people fell on a spectrum going from "sincerely believes that the reports of widespread violence are Republican lies" to "grants that some protests devolved into riots, but thinks it's more important for protests to remain untouchable than to stop the riotous excesses".
The spectrum very clearly continued on to "riots are good, actually" for a large plurality of Blue Tribe, and this was not an anomaly that started with Floyd's death. Consider the phrase "No Justice, No Peace", and where and how it has been used in American politics. Further, this was not a preference for riots in general, but specifically for their own riots.
In any case, you are correct that there is a spectrum. This spectrum is best encapsulated by the phrase "Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it". The evident sum of their desires was protracted rioting with as much of the cost as possible offloaded to their outgroup and as few consequences for their ingroup committing the violence as possible, and they were willing to break or ignore most laws to make it happen and to punish anyone who interfered. They demanded that their tribe be above the law in a way that directly threatened pretty much every member of the other tribe. They demonstrated that they were willing and able to enforce this preference in the long-term, regardless of the consequences. That is not a preference that allows for peaceful and prosperous coexistence, as I pointed out at some length at the time.
And they did all this based on a tribally-coordinated lie, and that lie killed thousands of additional black people and thousands of additional white people over the next few years.
charlesf
12m ago
A leftist doing what Charlie did, travelling around colleges to initiate debates, wouldn't really find debates all that often. This does kind of happen though, but they're just called guests, or maybe speakers. They get to use a theatre or or larger classroom and are generally welcomed.
Tanista
18m ago
Huh, seems like the traditional failure mode the right wing is accused of facing is the opposite. Just throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Fewer/no services, let people (even those who might prudently use any additional help) fend for themselves.
roystgnr
21m ago
simple edgy comedy like Maher saying the 9/11 hijackers were the brave ones
That part of his statement wasn't comedy, though; he was being serious. And that half of his serious-and-cancellable statements was actually correct!
The 9/11 hijackers were brave¹. Dying is scary. Flying a plane into a building is obviously going to cause immediate death. Overcoming a fear is bravery. Q.E.D. But we'd just watched them murder thousands of people, and our President (whose approval rating had just jumped from 50% to 90%; clearly logic was not the order of the day) said they were cowardly, so at that point the invalid syllogism "murder is bad, cowardice is bad, therefore murder is cowardice" wasn't a Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle to be avoided, it was practically mandated.
It probably really didn't help that Maher preceded his technically-correct statements with some much harder-to-justify ones. "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly." also wasn't edgy comedy, it was just a weirdly illogical insult. Overcoming fear of death is brave, but avoiding death when that's a good option isn't cowardly, it's just sensible.
It's also arguable to what extent either of these remarks were what got Maher cancelled. Some affiliates pulled him from the air for a week or two, but the show didn't finally get cancelled for good until half a year later, and ABC claimed it was due to declining ratings rather than the controversy. I'd guess most of the ratings decline was because of the controversy, but at this point the only evidence would be buried in some Nielsen database.
¹ Well, the pilots were brave, at least. The "muscle" hijackers were kept in the dark until just before they boarded the planes, and it's not impossible that up until the very end some were still expecting an old-fashioned "fly to Cuba, laugh at America, go home" hijacking. It's amusing (albeit probably just wishful thinking) to imagine box-cutter-waving psychopaths spending their last moments going "Hey, Marwan, we're flying kind of low now, shouldn't we pull up? Why's one of those skyscrapers smoking, Marwan? Marwan???"
Grant_us_eyes
23m ago
Count me amoung those that have a similar response. I can't really fathom why people think it's good or permissible to go up to someone and effectively nag them about a family member that just passed away.
I get that they think in their minds that asking about them or how they died a few scant days after said person just passed is being sympathetic, but to me it just comes across as ghoulish. Like, I really don't want to talk about this right now. Let me deal with my shit privately, thank you very much.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
24m ago
Thousand.
I was trying to go with the "safe" answer, but yeah, I think there's a lot of merit to how much the rioting affected the murder rate. But Beej did post a recent update based on a Brookings analysis that the murder rate was already increasing in 2020 before The Happening, starting in early to mid March.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
28m ago
When my father died people would try to talk to me about it, and I couldn't possibly change the subject fast enough. Maybe I seemed like a psycho, I don't know.
Not a psycho response. A friend lost both parents in a short amount of time (the second very unexpectedly), and he vented to me that everyone (aside from me) was trying to get him to talk about "his feelings" and that was the last thing on earth he wanted. So I was his designated driver for a number of evenings so he could get wasted and we could talk about everything but that.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
30m ago
Dan Snyder was infamous for having stars over to his home for meals. That was one of the many issues with the team, under his watch the players could go around their superiors to the owner.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
32m ago
I understand that defensive driving has always been necessary, but when I first started driving it didn't feel as much like every journey was a potential accident.
I find driving much more tiring than I used to because instead of playing the mental game of "how might this other driver try to kill me," it's the mental game of "no, seriously, all these other drivers are trying to kill me and I have to defend against them all simultaneously." A large part is cell phone use as you note, but part of it is that it feels like there are 2x as many cars on the road as 15-20 years ago, and the percentage of non-cell-phone-using-but-still-horrible-drivers has increased.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
42m ago
I have hinted vaguely exactly once. You are free to review comment histories just as I did. The shift in a month from "I'm a classical liberal 20something who wants to engage with ideas" to "presenting arguments constructed for maximum partisan convenience" is the kind of thing that gets detectors pinging.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
44m ago
It's the vestigial stub of dueling culture that used to exist in the United States. Legally consensual murder being made illegal brought up the concern that mouthy shits would push the line anyway, so intentionally aggravating bastards is considered to be a mitigating circumstance for a crime of passion.
Bartender_Venator
48m ago
Funnily enough, nowadays it seems like the tomboyish girls from conservative homes tend to swing right (I knew one who showed up for a coffee date holding Maps of Meaning, didn't own a single skirt), because if they go left they, uh, stop being tomboyish girls.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
49m ago
Left-wing media lies like dogs on an hourly basis, and even when they're technically not lying, it's in the manner or fae or Aes Sedai, where the limited sentence fragments are "true" in a narrow technical sense while the overall structure is still designed entirely to deceive and propagandize.
Would you care to drop an essay for the class about how bizarre it is that you guys tolerate that?
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
56m ago
acting with blatant corruption
By that you mean "moral" corruption, and that appears to be the root of the disagreement. Conservatives (and the average leftist is motivated by the same things per Haidt- after all, they [perceive themselves to have at least perpetuated if not] built the system, they are interested in that work meaning something) correctly observe that people who are unwilling to respect their prerogatives of decorum are probably unwilling to respect conservative framings entirely.
For instance, if a conservative redefines X to mean Y "because it's what decent people do" (read: because I make money hand-over-fist; business always marches alongside honor), a reformer might then redefine word X as Z and reject definition Y with prejudice, which will disadvantage and destabilize conservatives that built their fortunes around definition Y.
"Where my country gone?" is a conservative statement, it's just coming from the left now.
We had this really great thing going being not just the most economically powerful but also the most intellectually productive country in the world, and we acted as a vacuum sucking up all the intelligent and ambitious people from around the world and having them come here to build things with us.
Well, as long as they were the correct color. They had quotas for that, just like they did in the '50s, for the same reasons they had them in the '50s.
we’ve destroyed science funding in the country
Science that doesn't replicate isn't science, and the initiatives to do R&D were also suffering from the "so long as they're the right color" problem. I guess it's the age-old dilemma where you can either do science or you can sacrifice it to be anti-racist, just from the right's definition of anti-racism instead of the left's. Naturally, this is moral corruption to the left, just like ending racism the first time was to the right.
we’re letting China and the rest of the world
No, only China. Nobody else invested into the tooling to manufacture the panels for the same reason the US couldn't- too expensive. The West has already lost the battle for renewable energy sovereignty (and already won the battle for forcing Europe into a dependence on American natural gas by successfully provoking a war in Ukraine); the only question is whether we want to pay now to redevelop indigenous green energy generation capacity, or pay later by having to do that anyway when China starts making diplomatic demands in exchange.
Now, are tariffs the right way to do that given how long it takes to spin up manufacturing in a country that has largely forgotten how to do it? Well, maybe not (annexing the country with a good chunk of high-tech manufacturing immediately to the north is likely to be the better long-term plan here). But it does strike me as interesting that the Rs have pivoted into being the party of bad ideas and the Ds into the party of no ideas.
cartman
58m ago
You don't seem to believe that it was in actuality a private, independent decision. But then you assume that it is in this conditional without identifying it as such. That's why I was confused
Bingbong
1hr ago
The internet celebs are probably safer from their platforms but also have literal years of off-the-cuff streaming that can be inspected for anything crossing the punishment threshold which feels like a bigger issue legally.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1hr ago
Are "fighting words" even still a thing? Or does that only apply when protected classes allege the victims of their mob violence used a gamer word?
Yes. Kimmel's words were not a "micro" aggression, they were a full-on macro-aggression, legally, if someone said to your face they would be "fighting words" under classic constitutional doctrine. Imagine your friend had just been murdered, and one person asks you how you are doing but you don't want to talk about it so you say, "Great" and then change the subject and talk about an addition to your house, and then another person says in front of everyone there, "look at this guy, he's not grieving like he lost a friend, he's grieving like a four-year old who lost a goldfish." You would want to punch that guy straight in the face, and legally, the guy who said that would been committing incitement to a breach of the peace.
pigeonburger
1hr ago
Maybe they just want to grill Gaben as to when Half-Life 3 is finally coming.
07mk
1hr ago
This seems to be to be a very different ideological position from the belief that protests are very important and if the government's support of them is suspect, then it's better not to have them intervene at all than to risk their suppression. A moral stance of "I would rather (n) murderers walk free than have one innocent man behind bars" is not the same as support for murder.
That only works if you support actually investigating and prosecuting murderers and have credibly demonstrated that if the murderer is your friend murdering your enemy, you will stamp down on that murderer just as hard as the other way around. Blackstone's formula certainly can justify complete non-investigation of all murder - this will guarantee that no innocent man goes behind bars, at the cost of all murderers walking free. It's possible that these protests-turning-into-riots is a case where this applies; however, anyone who agrees with the protestors is obviously necessarily too hopelessly biased for making a reasonable judgment call on that, merely because they're human like the rest of us. This reality about bias is pretty much common knowledge, at least among the educated, and as such, anyone who's educated, supports these protestors, and trusts their own judgment that these protests are so important that it's worth letting riots happen so that legitimate protests don't get stamped down is someone who has figured out a way to support rioting without affecting their conscience.
So a single struggling group of radio stations decided to stop playing the Dixie chick's. The big one (clear channel) did not.
Certainly not a situation like, e.g., Kanye getting cut off by his record label, radio, social media, streaming and his bank.
I'd definitely call the latter censorship, particularly given that we know the govt is often pressuring these "private" companies behind the scenes. (I am not aware of Bush doing that, though Obama + Biden definitely did.)
More options
Context Copy link