#jtarrou

[arcticdementor]

A bit of fluff here, but I ran across a meme on FB recently, took the basic facts as gospel, and engaged in a debate for a while before doing my research, and found that the entire thing is based on lies and misrepresentation. The meme compares the relatively short sentence of Ms. Huffman for the college bribery scandal to a five year sentence purportedly handed down to a homeless black woman for enrolling her child in the wrong school district. There was some back and forth about "privilege" and whether it was race or wealth that was the relevant axis, but once I read the local reporting, it became clear that it was neither. Basically, the five year sentence was a plea deal to a raft of charges, including pimping, selling crack to an undercover officer, and possession/sale of major quantities of drugs in a school zone. In addition, these are not first time offenses, Ms. McDowell has also served time for bank robbery and illegal firearms. This is all well known at the local level, but somehow at the national level, this turned into "five year sentence for sending her kid to a better school". Even Snopes backs this narrative, even though they clearly know about the package plea deal, they try to make it seem like the five year sentence was for the school issue only, and the drug charges were separate. So yes, this is a "Murder, Arson and Jaywalking" case, and the memes and national media coverage are claiming that the sentence for the murder and arson are really only about the jaywalking. A reminder that when you read outrageous stories, the reality is likely to be far less outrageous.

JTarrou

[arcticdementor]

"Part of Seattle seceded from the union. But we did get a great natural experiment in anti-racist policing, which started shooting unarmed black kids in just under two weeks."

—JTarrou

[arcticdementor]

I hope this comes across as the faint praise it is, because I find Trump personally irritating, aesthetically displeasing, and absolutely of a piece with the fame-grubbing dirt merchants that populate our ruling class. Obama ran guns to the drug cartels, destabilized a half-dozen countries, oversaw the reintroduction of open slavery to North Africa, tampered with foreign elections, and spied on his party's domestic political opponents. With that as a baseline, how shall I condemn Trump?

JTarrou

[arcticdementor]

This isn't about excluding women, it's about treating them the same. People keep trying to meld feminism and chivalry and it doesn't work. Women will never hold the 100m world record. But then, neither will anyone other than west africans. Get past that part and to where the vast majority of sport is played, and where there is space for women to compete.

JTarrou

[arcticdementor]

I'm supportive of criminal justice reform, but anyone talking about "ending mass incarceration" had better acknowledge the trail of skulls from the last time we did that. If your plan is to dump a few million violent felons on the street and expect there to be no bad consequences, or expect the public not to notice, that's how you get Death Wish movies.

JTarrou

[arcticdementor]

Reason had the best take. If this is how the FBI operates on the highest profile possible case, against their own potential future boss, imagine what they do when it's nobodies in the dock. My own take: There was election meddling, and it was our own intelligence services that did it. Then they tried to turn two dollars worth of Russian facebook ads into the scapegoat for their own actions.

JTarrou

[arcticdementor]

Democracy lives in a sweet spot of cultural institutions and scale that we may look back on as relatively brief. Or perhaps not, we shall see. It is my opinion that representative democracy requires much in the way of social infrastructure beneath it to work, and does not scale past a certain size (what size that is, I couldn't say). We see already in larger democracies like the US the decline of the elected bodies and the rise of the bureaucratic state and executive as the real powers. I suspect that the representative governments of major western nations will continue to become more sclerotic and useless, the executives will take more and more power (by default if nothing else) and distribute it to the unelected bureaucracy, sometimes called the "deep state" when it develops its own political consciousness and goals. In this manner we move imperceptibly toward non-democratic rule, until we are left with a Roman Senate voting pointlessly while an emperor rules. We see already this process. One of the most important powers that Congress has is the sole power to declare war, yet they have failed to declare any war we've been involved in for eighty years. And they've failed to put a stop to these undeclared wars, and voted to fund them. Congress in the US is already virtually without power, largely by their own delegation of that power to various branches of the executive.

JTarrou