Sorry, I wanted to embed the email Ken White sent to his list today, but the title is so shock-jock offensive, that I'm not going to put that out there without giving people some cw warning. My lesser title is just a crude gesture in its direction. It's about the Epstein emails so not hard to guess, though.
Anyway, Popehat is often great, but has become increasingly cranky and intemperate lately (who can blame him; so have I.) I'm sure he would still destroy me in any insult off dunk-a-thon, but that doesn't change the fact that these arguments he thinks are so important to save for his email list are terrible.
This one is a satire of the famous "Harper's Letter" in a quasi-"Modest Proposal" style, simple replacing the words "disagrees with progressives" with "ch*ld r*pists." I think there's a canard regarding this bothsiderisms that goes "when you change some of the words, yes, the meaning changes" but he's a lawyer so maybe he didn't get that memo. I was more put off by a much bigger problem.
In trying to be satirical, Popehat has demonstrated WHY group stigmatization is such a bad tactic.
The free exchange of information and ideas with rich and powerful people irrespective of whether they have raped children, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty that raping children is bad and that people who rape children are bad, even if they can give us rides on helicopters and make us feel important. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech against raping children from all appropriate and qualified quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought, such as socializing with and promoting child-rapists and treating them as cherished friends.
Har har. "Rich elites who were very obviously in a circle of partiers who hired and used underage prostitutes, will continue to be welcome in society, because there's a thoughtless, civil libertarian, kneejerk reflex to not ban voices based on what they've done."
Except we know why Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Donald Trump and Alan Dershowitz will continue to tweet in public with their head held high (at least I can't say the same for Prince Andrew: turns out the English monarchy has SOME standards the yanks won't meet.)
Because they're rich as fuck.
When not rich enough themselves, they're politically connected and have a slavish army of idolators behind them. You simply can't cancel someone like that, even if they were caught red handed paying their mistress a bribe and asking to be invited to pedophile island. That sucks!
If you crank up the heat on pitchforking ch*ld r*pists, then it turns out you don't hit the powerful fucks who were your intended target. Who do you hit instead?
18 year olds who were To Catch a Predator'd trying to hook up with a 15 year old.
Convicts of pedophilia when they were teens who still have to inform all their neighbors 40 years later.
People who have relationships with convicts helping them stay stable and not re-offending.
Teachers caught up in moral panics about Satanism and D&D.
Gay dude who downloaded the wrong thing and ran up against a DA who wanted to scare up some votes by being a hardass.
And of course, that old goodie, much higher rates of prosecution among minorities than white people.
Autistic people entrapped by TV producers, who have trouble telling the line between a fantasy online and real world consequences.
Those are the effects of zealously whipping up justified anger from famous elites, into generalized stigmatization. The billionaires are never gonna be the punching bags!
The United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, my former employer, has filed a criminal complaint against Alejandro Orellana, a local immigration activist in Los Angeles. They’ve charged him for distributing face masks to protestors. They specify that the masks are supposed to protect protestors from “chemical splashes and flying debris,” a goal they claim is self-evidently criminal.
The complaint is shameful, a propagandistic paean to authoritarianism. A quarter-century after I left that office it stings that the office brought the complaint, that a magistrate judge I respect signed it, and that a former colleague is prosecuting it. I am repulsed.
The Tellingly Pathetic Case Against Alejandro Orellana
Special Agent Persaud’s affidavit is in many ways a classic work of federal law enforcement braggadocio, demanding that the reader accept broad generalizations and law enforcement truisms about crime, suspected criminals, and law enforcement operations.
...
The affidavit, and the prosecution, are worthy of our contempt. They rest on the premise that the government’s conclusory descriptions of protests as violent are reliable. That’s manifestly not true; the government is complicit in widespread lies about the protests, including by the cynical and dishonest Attorney General of the United States. The prosecution and affidavit rely on the government’s laughable assertion that you can believe its characterization of which protestors are legitimate and which are criminals even as they eagerly implement the policy of a president who openly thirsted to shoot protestors to show strength. The prosecution and affidavit rely on the government’s assertion that anyone wanting to protect themselves from law enforcement’s “less lethal” crowd control measures is a criminal seeking to do violence. This is manifestly and offensively a lie; less-lethal measures are routinely abused to target and hurt protestors and journalists. In their swollen hypocrisy, they call masks self-evidently criminal as they send masked and unidentified ICE agents to sweep up men, women, and children in the street and disappear them.
The agents, prosecutors, and judges who participate in this are making a choice. The choice is to lie about what is happening around them and what they are doing. The choice is to prop up the administration’s narrative: the demonization of immigrants, the criminalization of protests, the normalization of government violence, the delegitimization of dissent. The choice is to present what the administration claims as self-evidently true and lawful even as the administration openly defies the law and gleefully lies to courts. They should be judged on that choice, by each of us, and by history. We should stop treating them as legitimate. We should stop believing them.
How The Worst Of Us May Somewhat Shelter The Rest Of Us
Many of Trump’s appointments so far seem to be made out of frailty and not out of calculation. Kristi Noem at Homeland Security is a lightweight whose dubious competence will interfere with plans to genocide immigrants. Pete Hegseth’s chief qualification to be Secretary of Defense is that Trump saw him on the teevee a lot and his tattoos are not, technically, Nazi symbols. Mike Huckabee is a wholly owned trademark of Jack Chick Enterprises Inc. All of these people are ostentatiously evil and shame the institutions they will lead and are a disgrace to the Republic and so forth but do they have the skills or patience to achieve their weird goals? Institutions are very difficult to change. The populist sentiment “send in an outsider and have them clean house” requires an outsider smart and disciplined enough to overcome the fact they don’t understand what they’re changing. Otherwise the inside stubbornly and passive-aggressively thwarts the outsider. You can burn the institution to the ground but that doesn’t leave you with an institution you can use effectively as a weapon.
