To be perfectly honest, I am less concerned about violence between folks like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer and their ilk, versus "antifa" however that term is construed.
What I am most disturbed by is the violence brought by federal law enforcement, most especially ICE.
You can walk away from a Proud Boy vs. antifa fight. If they really insist on bringing to you, which is only likely to happen in situations you can pretty easily avoid, you can fight back to the best of your ability. Or just run away.
If ICE or the FBI or similar come for you, the options of walking away or fighting back are not really available. They'll get you jailed or shot.
This is explicit, unlawful, and unaccountable state violence - in some cases extreme - toward harmless people. It is utterly unnecessary for purposes of finding and dealing with people who are here without legal status.
It's terrorism, by the government, directed toward peaceful residents, both legal and not. It's not something we have seen here at this level, and as far as I can tell we have no means of curbing it.
Libertarians can become outrage exhausted since they can be continuously outraged regardless of who’s running the government.
And yet, with the exception of Radley Balko, the exhaustion always seems to kick in just before they raise their voices against (R) excesses.
On one hand, some activists yelling at ICE all night long with a bullhorn. Yes, that's a PITA.
On the other hand, federal agents invading an apartment complex, breaking into any apartment they can force their way into without AFAICT presenting warrants of any kind, rousting people out into the street in the middle of the night and making them wait zip-tied in their pajamas (if that) for hours while they "look up their records", tossing the contents of people's apartments into the halls, leaving doors broken open, and throwing many folks into vans to be whisked away... somewhere.
Same / same.
Antifa isn't gonna do anything to you if you're not a declared fascist, white supremacist, Nazi, or similar, or possibly open and vocal supporter of same.
The feds are gonna come after you if you're brown.
I've been listening to libertarians and right wing folks talking for decades - literally, for decades - about how they're gonna rise up against government overreach and abuse of power.
When it actually arrives, nothing. Silence. Or open acquiescence.
What I look for in comments or concerns about antifa is some sense of balance.
First, "antifa" and the related term "radical left" have become so vague as to be almost meaningless. There are people who self-identify as antifa, and who will fight - physically fight - people who they consider fascist. Less commonly, they will engage in acts of vandalism, most often toward state property - cop cars, ICE facilities. Most of what they do is not directly violent, although it can be harmful to people they consider fascist - doxing, outing them to employers so they get fired. A lot of their work is tracking the actions of people they consider fascist, many of whom are themselves violent.
There are also folks who are basically anti-capitalist anarchists. They are less commonly involved in fighting and more commonly involved in acts of vandalism and sabotage, often directed at financial institutions. See also the WTO protests of 1999 in Seattle.
And there is also a general rabble of randos who are attracted to public disruption of whatever type. It's often not clear what their goals are, or if they have any, other than being publicly loud and disruptive. Some people just like riots.
All of these folks get labelled "antifa" but they're a sort of overlapping Venn diagram of communities with perhaps related, but distinct, goals.
Real, honest-to-god antifa folks are not that common, and are really focused specifically on f***ing with fascists. Everybody who shows up at a protest wearing black with "big A" armbands and a balaclava are not antifa. A lot of them are just young kids cosplaying some kind of stick-it-to-the-man drama.
We all go through our phases in life.
The randos are probably the most generally dangerous of the above, because their actions are often not focused. They are the looters, folks who set fire to stuff just to watch it burn, folks who smash windows just because they can.
The black bloc folks generally don't want to physically fight anyone, they mostly want to do expensive damage to big corporations. I don't see them around so much anymore.
The real antifa folks will definiely engage in physical fights. Mostly with obvious hard-core right wingers, who themselves like fighting. Sometimes with folks more on the periphery of the hard-core right wing - supporters, etc. They also often bring trauma medical skills, which have been helpful to folks, and not just to antifa folks. During the Charlottesville "Unite the right" mess they provided a buffer between extremely violent right-wing actors and non-violent counter-protestors, likely sparing them a lot of harm and even saving some lives. A service the police on the scene were unable or unwilling to provide.
FWIW, I do not support or endorse any of the above. I think the occasions when violent action are justified are very, very rare. Occasions when they are constructive, even rarer. I suppose things here could get to the point where some kind of organized forceful resistance would be appropriate, but I do not believe we are there yet, and hope we do not get there. And the violent actions of the broad spectrum of folks referred to as "antifa" only play into the violent fantasies and actions of their counterparties on the right.
On the other side of the fence, we have groups like the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters and the Oathkeepers, who among other things have organized the January 6 violent insurrection attempting to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power. They are part of a broader movement that includes the patchwork of militias, self-appointed homegrown private armies who regularly threaten the rest of us with deadly force. And often go beyond threats.
And now we have Trump's ICE agents, who come into peaceful communities wearing full military kit and violently kidnap anyone they care to with no regard for the law or due process.
So there's all of that.
I'm sorry that some folks in Portland are kept awake at night by black-clad youngsters with bullhorns. I'm also sorry for the folks who have been shot in the face by "less than lethal" ordinance. And I'm sorry for the people who have been kidnapped while going about their daily lives - mowing somebody's lawn, taking their kids to school, going to appointments to fulfill the requirements of trying to immigrate "the right way".
I'm sorry for the people who have been assaulted while engaging in legal peaceful protest. I'm sorry for the people who have been murdered while attending services at synagogues and liberal christian churches. I'm sorry for the people who have been, and continue to be, assaulted or murdered for being brown, Muslim, gay, trans, or whatever other thing is today's conservative bete noire.
I'm sorry for the kid who was killed by cops for being black while holding a toy pistol in a playground. And for the guy who was killed by cops for holding an air gun in a Walmart.
There is a lot to grieve. A lot to be sorry about. This is a violent country, there is no getting around it, and it gets worse when things get tense.
I hope you will forgive me if I just can't get that outraged by somebody yelling at ICE all night in Portland, even if it keeps the neighbors awake. It would piss me off, too, if it was in my neighborhood, but there are things that piss me off a hell of a lot more.
I think it must be a weird time to be Ezra Klein (or similar). His gig is basically to have insightful things to say about where we're at, politically. And I'm not sure anyone can really make sense of it all.
We're dealing with a very strange group of political actors at the moment, people driven by weird and somewhat opaque personal agendas. Or maybe not opaque as much as inexplicable.
They really are a crew of weirdos. I guess that may sound kind of judge-y, but it would take a much better mind than mine to make sense of it all.
Better days, y'all. They will come. We're mostly olds here, so maybe not before we peg out, but they will come. In the meantime, hold fast to what is worthwhile.
LJ thank you for keeping things going here. I haven't been posting all that much but I appreciate the work you do to keep something on the front page every day.
Thank you!
And many many thanks as well to Michael and Janie and anyone else who made the transition happen.
I have at very best a journeyman's experience with MySql but it was all a few years ago at this point, and when I retired I made a commitment to myself to only get myself engaged with living things. Or at least analog things. I'm sorry I haven't been of greater help in keeping the lights on.
I will promise to deliver non-concise rants when stuff just gets too maddening. Or even when not.
And it's been a minute but it would be great to see old pals like Eric and Slarti jump in now and then. Although I think Slarti may be even deeper down the living thing / analog well than I am, at least in his free time.
But I ain't gonna speak for either of those guys, other than to say it would be great to hear from them here.
My guess is that people who prefer preventable deaths over government assistance have been convinced that resources are so scarce that we can’t afford to have a government that prevents those deaths.
Maybe. But what I take away from all of it is less a concern about scarce resources per se, and more a feeling that folks don't want their money going to help "that person over there". For various definitions of "that person over there".
So less a matter of scarcity, and more a matter of "why should I pay for that guy?".
And to GFTNC's point, I do think all of that is related to folks feeling (correctly or not) that government is helping "that person over there", but not them. So, not that *government* lacks resources, so much as *they* lack resources, and nobody is helping *them*, so why should they support it?
That doesn't really explain the guy who'd throw his sister under the bus, but I do think it applies to a lot of folks. And they're not always wrong.
I do think that a lot of working class people were left behind by the neo-liberal triangulation stuff of the Clinton and (to a lesser degree, but still) Obama administrations. And I also do think that the (D) party of those years was tone-deaf to those folks' concerns.
I guess it was a way to win elections, but a lot of folks got left out in the cold.
He was making a transactional bet. A bad call, all of the "college educated moderate (R)'s in the Philly suburbs" did not suddenly decide to vote (D). Some likely did, many did not, because tax breaks and 401k's.
I find nous @5.56 extremely fascinating and thought-provoking, particularly the comparison with his college God squad and the whole concept of a transactional view of people.
seconded
It’s not that I think deep discussion about our shared issues is not worthwhile, it is that my instinct is to save the lives first
I'm not sure it's always possible to save the lives without engaging in the deeper discussion.
My thinking about where we're at as a country took a turn a while back, based on two events.
The first was during a (R) candidate's debate in 2011. The topic was health insurance, and Wolf Blitzer posed a hypothetical scenario - a healthy 30 year old man declines to buy health insurance, has an accident and falls into a coma, requiring intensive care.
Ron Paul said this was an example of people taking responsibility for themselves - "That's what freedom is all about - taking your own risks". To which Blitzer replied, "So should society just let him die?".
And the room erupted in a chorus of "Yeah!" and applause.
Paul's response to Blitzer was more measured - he felt that this was where charity (not government) should step in. But that was a room full of people who were very enthusiastic about the guy being left to die.
The second was an interview in the NYT with a guy in the upper midwest who was opposed to government involvement in health insurance. The guy's sister had a chronic illness and was being kept alive through a federal health insurance program, I forget if it was Medicare or Medicaid.
The interviewer pointed out that, if the guy's preferences were enacted in policy, his sister would die. The guy said he understood that, and still felt programs like the one keeping his sister alive shouldn't exist.
Long story short, I realized that a large number of people in this country were not operating from the same basic moral or ethical basis as, for instance, me. The differences were not matters of policy, but were much, much deeper and more fundamental.
It more or less gets back to Thatcher's idea that "there is no such thing as society". People sharing a polity have no obligation toward the safety or well being of others.
Root hog or die.
That is the divide that you have to cross if you want to save lives. If you want public policies and actions that get folks fed and housed and gets them access to health care, you have to get past the millions and millions and millions of people in this country who are basically OK with letting their neighbors die as long as it isn't government helping them out.
You might be able to do that a la Ezra Klein, by trying to meet them halfway - "just run some pro-life (D)'s". Or similar. But as Coates calls out, you can't get very far with that without throwing some set of folks under the bus.
So who gets thrown under the bus, and who gets to have their life saved?
In the podcast, Coates calls out the history of the social safety net stuff introduced by the New Deal. The way FDR made that happen was basically to make it available to everybody *but* black people. That was the transaction.
It's good that it happened at all, for most people, but a lot of folks were screwed.
I guess we could continue to try to inch forward, expanding the scope of "who counts" bit by bit. But we're going to continue to bump up against the folks who think the idea of a guy having an accident and dying because he was foolish is an applause line.
You can only get so far without having the deeper conversation. The harder conversation.
To Tony's question, and Michael's reply, yes, there are likely millions who think Kirk was "doing Christianity the right way".
And there are many, likely millions, who see Christianity in it's nationalistic form as falling somewhere in the range from harmfully misguided to plainly idolatrous.
So, no single point of view there.
My own perspective, FWIW, is that Kirk's America is not my America, and I do not hear the voice of Jesus in anything he had to say.
Thanks for sharing this LJ, I had not seen it. I have a lot of thoughts, I'll try to boil them down and be concise.
First, my general impression of the podcast is that Coates is very clear about his positions, but Klein seemed to be struggling to be as clear - to articulate the points he was trying to make. Some of this may be due to the different roles they see themselves in - Klein seems to see himself more as someone who is politically active, trying to find ways to persuade other folks to his point of view. Coates is very clear that he is not a political strategist, he is here to speak truth as he sees it. Those are really different jobs.
I think Klein is correct to say the (D)'s as a party are flailing. My personal take on why they have lost "the heartland" - the "common people" - is that with very few exceptions they've kind of stepped away from the parts of the country, and the demographics, that we normally associate with those folks. I mean, literally - they have failed to fund and support local (D) organizations and infrastructure in lots of places. They've basically written off a lot of the country. That worked for a while, now it doesn't. And hasn't.
Just show up and listen would solve a lot of problems.
He's also correct to say that a lot of folks feel that the institutional (D) party basically doesn't like them. They don't. Don't understand them, aren't interested in them, think they are idiots for voting for (R)'s and don't seem highly motivated to figure out what those folks are about.
There are a lot of places they could be winning, that they likely don't even know exist.
All IMO. And so, enough from me about the (D)'s as a party.
Klein is correct to say that Kirk was "doing politics the right way", if you assume the goal of politics is to amass power. Kirk was an ambitious, even driven, hard working dude, and he built an electoral organization that kicks ass. He was very very good at *politics*. At creating the conditions to win.
What Kirk was absolutely *not* about was engagement and dialogue with his political opposites. After his murder, I felt obliged to at least watch some of his debates and other appearances. Kirk was not there to hear or understand any point of view other than his own, other than as a means of building his own counter-arguments. He was there to repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat his talking points. And he was there to make conservative young people feel like it was cool to be a conservative on campus.
And much of what he had to say was straight-up bigotry. White supremacist sexist bigotry. Full stop.
No amount of "civility" - a sort of observance of debate-team rules - can white-wash that.
Folks say he was "reaching out to the other side". He was not. He was reaching out to folks who agreed with him, or thought they might, and were uncomfortable out it in a campus environment, so that they could feel like they weren't alone.
A thing that folks don't seem to want to say, because it will seem like they're being mean to college conservatives, is that the whole "militant Christian nationalist capitalist western civilization strong men do big things" mythology doesn't stand up well to critical thought. Which is sort of the point, or at least one of the important points, of higher education.
It's meant to teach you to think. Some ideas don't survive critical thought.
I appreciate the good intentions of folks who believe the solution to where we are at is to let the marketplace of ideas play out. The best ideas will win out, right?
But that requires an openness of mind, and a willingness to engage your opposites in good faith and with respect. And that is not on offer.
I'm with Coates when he says there are folks who have crossed a line, and that a fruitful conversation with them is not likely to happen. I have my own lines, which are pretty much summed up in Coates' "not at the expense of my neighbor's humanity".
I won't, as Clinton did, call my political or social opposites "deplorables". But I will say that many of the things they believe and say and so are, in fact, deplorable, and I'm not interested in debating them about it.
Blacks are prowling the streets looking for whites to prey upon.
Blacks have descended into criminality and dysfunction since desegregation.
SCOTUS justice Jackson is intellectually inferior and is taking a white man's place.
Transgender people are mentally ill freaks.
And so on.
No. No to all of that. And no, I'm not going to debate about it with you as if we were discussion "who's better, Beatles or Stones?".
There are conversations I won't have, because I'm not going to give the time of day to that kind of delusional toxic nonsense. Not least because it supports and engenders some of the cruelest policies and actions we've seen in a long time.
I also second Coates when he points out that political violence is absolutely nothing new in our national history. The folks who say "this isn't who we are" are... mistaken.
The Republican party message is a fairy tale about how the good Republican party will save the good people from the existential threat presented by the rest of us.
My sense is that MAGA people are generally full of fear.
They're gonna take my guns. They're letting a lot of brown people in so that white people are outnumbered. Some Mexican is gonna take my job, or, if you're white collar, some South Asian is gonna take my job. They're gonna chop my kid's genitals off. They're gonna let great big guys play on my daughter's soccer team and she's gonna get run over (my (D) House Rep came out with that one).
There are actually some legitimate concerns in all of the above, and there are sensible conversations to have about them. Those conversations are not available because everybody is so freaking hyped up.
And then there are the folks whose point of view basically my life's good, I'm making money, I want to keep it that way, and if it means tasering some brown person mowing somebody's lawn or working in a restaurant kitchen or mopping floors in a hospital, I'm OK with that.
I have a friend who's an academic, a professor of psychology, who has been involved in this project for a few years trying to find ways to "bridge the divide". His approach is to get people to talk to each other, listen to each other, and try to establish some kind of empathetic connection.
My question to him is always, where the hell is that going to happen? And how are you going to scale that to a level that is going to have an actual effect on the situation we find ourselves in?
It's a mess. I have no solution. Find whatever ways are available to you to mitigate whatever harms you can, and do those.
But I don't see a path to persuading committed MAGAs to change their minds. Even if it all falls to shit around them, they'll find a way to blame on somebody, anybody, other than Trump.
He's their champion, their idol, their savior. That's no exaggeration.
I generally do not engage in discussions about politics with Trump supporters. I'm fine with talking with them about pretty much anything else.
There are a couple of people - long time friends - that I have had short political conversations with. In those cases, I haven't really brought up facts etc. I just say "I have no use for Trump, he's an asshole and a crook." Or something to that effect. And the conversation moves on to other topics. They're not really that curious about, or interested in, why I think that, it just places me in one bucket or other in their mind and the topic is done.
Once in a while I'll engage with someone online, usually FB, but that also doesn't get to the point of something like conversation. It's more you stated your position, I've stated mine, and move on.
The thing is, I don't think that many Trump supporters are that invested in arguments from fact or reason. It seems more vibe-y. Trying to persuade someone away from that position is less like engaging in thoughtful discussion of ideas, and more like trying to tell someone they shouldn't support their favorite sports team.
People have to experience the real human cost of this stuff before they'll change their mind. Like, someone they care about getting grabbed by ICE, or getting kicked off of Medicaid. Even then, they may find it difficult to impossible to give up their "team" identity. They'll just blame fate, or the "deep state", or similar.
I really don't know what the way out of all of this is. To some degree, all of the toxic stuff that Trump et al traffic in is stuff that's been part of the American consciousness since day 1. And people love being told they are special, they are the best, anyone who doesn't see that is just picking on them.
I don't think Trump et al have the resources or the wit to make the big agenda - Project 2025 and stuff like it - happen in full. There are too many different agendas going on with these guys, the country is just physically too large and various to lock down, and too many of the folks in the administration are just plain stupid.
But they're gonna break a lot of stuff before they are through, and I have no idea what things will look like when they're done.
So I've kind of arrived at the point of not trying to change anybody's mind about anything, I'm just waiting for this particular fever to run its course and hoping that something worthwhile is left when it's over.
He can't be wrong about everything all the time... :)
Yes, based on his public utterances, he is demonstrably able to do so.
I don't think Vance is wrong in the sense of being mistaken or misinformed. He's an intelligent person, he understands the reality, and he understands what he is saying.
He's lying. Bullshitting, gaslighting, whatever you want to call it. He speaks intentional falsehoods to obscure the truth and mislead people.
He's a liar.
Trump is also, but I think Trump half-believes his own bullshit. By "half believes" I mean I think his thought process is something like "I want this to be true, so I'm going to act like it is true".
Vance seems, to me, profoundly more cynical than that. He knows what he's saying is false and just says it anyway.
most Germans (or Central Europeans in general for that matter) can't grasp the English/US paranoia about national ID cards*.
Can't speak for the UK. In the US folks who object to / are afraid of national ID cards are conservatives who think the government is going to exploit national ID to round them up and do horrible things to them.
Irony is dead. Or, if not dead, laying in a gutter somewhere bleeding.
There are activists on the left bringing books into schools that are, at best, not age-appropriate or shouldn't be in schools at all.
It strikes me that if removing books from a school library doesn't amount to banning books, the presence of a book in a school library doesn't amount to advocacy of whatever point of view it presents. Or a requirement that any given kid read them.
If people don't want kids reading about Heather and her Two Mommies, then mom and dad should sit junior down and explain that they don't want him or her reading it. If they are concerned that their kid is gonna sneak a copy from the library and read it sub rosa, they can talk to the librarian and let them know they don't want their kid checking it out.
Or, you know, pay attention to what your kid is reading.
As opposed to, not only can my kid not have it, but *nobody's* kid can have it. Books that are banned tend to be about (a) sexuality or (b) race. I respect parent's wishes to have some control over how those topics are presented to their kids. Those parents don't have the right to deny *every freaking kid* access to them. I don't listen to Vance and care very little about anything he has to say.
And yet, you have somehow absorbed his talking points and have brought them here to share with all of us.
I blame ChatGPT.
GIGO
Here, as far as I know, hundreds of ordinary people are not being arrested
"ordinary" is carrying a hell of a lot of water in this phrase.
ICE is currently arresting tens of thousands of people a month. Perhaps they are all extraordinary.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Where are the 5 words?”
I'm not a mind reader and I don't wish to speak for Charles.
All of that said, his comments here strike me as an attempt to be even-handed. And to the degree that is so, I appreciate it.
The problem, as nous notes, is that the "two sides" aren't really comparable at this point.
On “Citizenship”
Because, of course, everybody (even Steven Miller) has ancestors at some remove who were immigrants.
Stephen MIller.
tl;dr - Miller's great-grandfather came to the US in 1903.
On “Where are the 5 words?”
To be perfectly honest, I am less concerned about violence between folks like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer and their ilk, versus "antifa" however that term is construed.
What I am most disturbed by is the violence brought by federal law enforcement, most especially ICE.
You can walk away from a Proud Boy vs. antifa fight. If they really insist on bringing to you, which is only likely to happen in situations you can pretty easily avoid, you can fight back to the best of your ability. Or just run away.
If ICE or the FBI or similar come for you, the options of walking away or fighting back are not really available. They'll get you jailed or shot.
This is explicit, unlawful, and unaccountable state violence - in some cases extreme - toward harmless people. It is utterly unnecessary for purposes of finding and dealing with people who are here without legal status.
It's terrorism, by the government, directed toward peaceful residents, both legal and not. It's not something we have seen here at this level, and as far as I can tell we have no means of curbing it.
It's out of control.
"
Not so different from previous administrations
With all due respect, this is utter nonsense. Full stop.
A profile of Andy Ngo
Andy Ngo waded into a riot and got beaten up. I'm not justifying the violence, I'm just pointing out the obvious.
"
Libertarians can become outrage exhausted since they can be continuously outraged regardless of who’s running the government.
And yet, with the exception of Radley Balko, the exhaustion always seems to kick in just before they raise their voices against (R) excesses.
On one hand, some activists yelling at ICE all night long with a bullhorn. Yes, that's a PITA.
On the other hand, federal agents invading an apartment complex, breaking into any apartment they can force their way into without AFAICT presenting warrants of any kind, rousting people out into the street in the middle of the night and making them wait zip-tied in their pajamas (if that) for hours while they "look up their records", tossing the contents of people's apartments into the halls, leaving doors broken open, and throwing many folks into vans to be whisked away... somewhere.
Same / same.
Antifa isn't gonna do anything to you if you're not a declared fascist, white supremacist, Nazi, or similar, or possibly open and vocal supporter of same.
The feds are gonna come after you if you're brown.
I've been listening to libertarians and right wing folks talking for decades - literally, for decades - about how they're gonna rise up against government overreach and abuse of power.
When it actually arrives, nothing. Silence. Or open acquiescence.
So I don't believe you. Any of you.
Over and out.
On “Japan unleashed”
immigration, which seems like a rather temporary solution
This is a bit puzzling to me. Why temporary? Don't immigrants stay (if they can)?
On “Jane Goodall RIP”
R.I.P. Jane Goodall. A life well spent.
And apparently she had a better sense of humor, and took herself less seriously, than either her Institute or that hothead chimp Frodo.
On “Where are the 5 words?”
While "antifa" is annoying the neighbors in Portland, the feds are doing this.
I look forward to the expressions of libertarian outrage about the abuse and overreach of government power.
"
What I look for in comments or concerns about antifa is some sense of balance.
First, "antifa" and the related term "radical left" have become so vague as to be almost meaningless. There are people who self-identify as antifa, and who will fight - physically fight - people who they consider fascist. Less commonly, they will engage in acts of vandalism, most often toward state property - cop cars, ICE facilities. Most of what they do is not directly violent, although it can be harmful to people they consider fascist - doxing, outing them to employers so they get fired. A lot of their work is tracking the actions of people they consider fascist, many of whom are themselves violent.
There are also folks who are basically anti-capitalist anarchists. They are less commonly involved in fighting and more commonly involved in acts of vandalism and sabotage, often directed at financial institutions. See also the WTO protests of 1999 in Seattle.
And there is also a general rabble of randos who are attracted to public disruption of whatever type. It's often not clear what their goals are, or if they have any, other than being publicly loud and disruptive. Some people just like riots.
All of these folks get labelled "antifa" but they're a sort of overlapping Venn diagram of communities with perhaps related, but distinct, goals.
Real, honest-to-god antifa folks are not that common, and are really focused specifically on f***ing with fascists. Everybody who shows up at a protest wearing black with "big A" armbands and a balaclava are not antifa. A lot of them are just young kids cosplaying some kind of stick-it-to-the-man drama.
We all go through our phases in life.
The randos are probably the most generally dangerous of the above, because their actions are often not focused. They are the looters, folks who set fire to stuff just to watch it burn, folks who smash windows just because they can.
The black bloc folks generally don't want to physically fight anyone, they mostly want to do expensive damage to big corporations. I don't see them around so much anymore.
The real antifa folks will definiely engage in physical fights. Mostly with obvious hard-core right wingers, who themselves like fighting. Sometimes with folks more on the periphery of the hard-core right wing - supporters, etc. They also often bring trauma medical skills, which have been helpful to folks, and not just to antifa folks. During the Charlottesville "Unite the right" mess they provided a buffer between extremely violent right-wing actors and non-violent counter-protestors, likely sparing them a lot of harm and even saving some lives. A service the police on the scene were unable or unwilling to provide.
FWIW, I do not support or endorse any of the above. I think the occasions when violent action are justified are very, very rare. Occasions when they are constructive, even rarer. I suppose things here could get to the point where some kind of organized forceful resistance would be appropriate, but I do not believe we are there yet, and hope we do not get there. And the violent actions of the broad spectrum of folks referred to as "antifa" only play into the violent fantasies and actions of their counterparties on the right.
On the other side of the fence, we have groups like the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters and the Oathkeepers, who among other things have organized the January 6 violent insurrection attempting to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power. They are part of a broader movement that includes the patchwork of militias, self-appointed homegrown private armies who regularly threaten the rest of us with deadly force. And often go beyond threats.
And now we have Trump's ICE agents, who come into peaceful communities wearing full military kit and violently kidnap anyone they care to with no regard for the law or due process.
So there's all of that.
I'm sorry that some folks in Portland are kept awake at night by black-clad youngsters with bullhorns. I'm also sorry for the folks who have been shot in the face by "less than lethal" ordinance. And I'm sorry for the people who have been kidnapped while going about their daily lives - mowing somebody's lawn, taking their kids to school, going to appointments to fulfill the requirements of trying to immigrate "the right way".
I'm sorry for the people who have been assaulted while engaging in legal peaceful protest. I'm sorry for the people who have been murdered while attending services at synagogues and liberal christian churches. I'm sorry for the people who have been, and continue to be, assaulted or murdered for being brown, Muslim, gay, trans, or whatever other thing is today's conservative bete noire.
I'm sorry for the kid who was killed by cops for being black while holding a toy pistol in a playground. And for the guy who was killed by cops for holding an air gun in a Walmart.
There is a lot to grieve. A lot to be sorry about. This is a violent country, there is no getting around it, and it gets worse when things get tense.
I hope you will forgive me if I just can't get that outraged by somebody yelling at ICE all night in Portland, even if it keeps the neighbors awake. It would piss me off, too, if it was in my neighborhood, but there are things that piss me off a hell of a lot more.
Let's look at the bigger picture, please.
"
Also, too: honey badger mom hates antifa, but loves her some Ethan Nordean.
So her concern does not appear to be violence and public disruption per se.
"
At times, there have been several hundred protestors at the ICE facility.
Looked like about five in the video.
On “Ezra Coates DESTROYS Ta-Nehisi Klein!!!”
Apropos of nothing in particular:
I think it must be a weird time to be Ezra Klein (or similar). His gig is basically to have insightful things to say about where we're at, politically. And I'm not sure anyone can really make sense of it all.
We're dealing with a very strange group of political actors at the moment, people driven by weird and somewhat opaque personal agendas. Or maybe not opaque as much as inexplicable.
They really are a crew of weirdos. I guess that may sound kind of judge-y, but it would take a much better mind than mine to make sense of it all.
Better days, y'all. They will come. We're mostly olds here, so maybe not before we peg out, but they will come. In the meantime, hold fast to what is worthwhile.
On “Ad futurum”
LJ thank you for keeping things going here. I haven't been posting all that much but I appreciate the work you do to keep something on the front page every day.
Thank you!
And many many thanks as well to Michael and Janie and anyone else who made the transition happen.
I have at very best a journeyman's experience with MySql but it was all a few years ago at this point, and when I retired I made a commitment to myself to only get myself engaged with living things. Or at least analog things. I'm sorry I haven't been of greater help in keeping the lights on.
I will promise to deliver non-concise rants when stuff just gets too maddening. Or even when not.
And it's been a minute but it would be great to see old pals like Eric and Slarti jump in now and then. Although I think Slarti may be even deeper down the living thing / analog well than I am, at least in his free time.
But I ain't gonna speak for either of those guys, other than to say it would be great to hear from them here.
Also, too - hi!
On “Ezra Coates DESTROYS Ta-Nehisi Klein!!!”
My guess is that people who prefer preventable deaths over government assistance have been convinced that resources are so scarce that we can’t afford to have a government that prevents those deaths.
Maybe. But what I take away from all of it is less a concern about scarce resources per se, and more a feeling that folks don't want their money going to help "that person over there". For various definitions of "that person over there".
So less a matter of scarcity, and more a matter of "why should I pay for that guy?".
And to GFTNC's point, I do think all of that is related to folks feeling (correctly or not) that government is helping "that person over there", but not them. So, not that *government* lacks resources, so much as *they* lack resources, and nobody is helping *them*, so why should they support it?
That doesn't really explain the guy who'd throw his sister under the bus, but I do think it applies to a lot of folks. And they're not always wrong.
I do think that a lot of working class people were left behind by the neo-liberal triangulation stuff of the Clinton and (to a lesser degree, but still) Obama administrations. And I also do think that the (D) party of those years was tone-deaf to those folks' concerns.
I guess it was a way to win elections, but a lot of folks got left out in the cold.
Don't believe me, let Senator Chuck Schumer break it down for you.
He was making a transactional bet. A bad call, all of the "college educated moderate (R)'s in the Philly suburbs" did not suddenly decide to vote (D). Some likely did, many did not, because tax breaks and 401k's.
Schumer made a bet, and lost. As did we all.
"
I find nous @5.56 extremely fascinating and thought-provoking, particularly the comparison with his college God squad and the whole concept of a transactional view of people.
seconded
It’s not that I think deep discussion about our shared issues is not worthwhile, it is that my instinct is to save the lives first
I'm not sure it's always possible to save the lives without engaging in the deeper discussion.
My thinking about where we're at as a country took a turn a while back, based on two events.
The first was during a (R) candidate's debate in 2011. The topic was health insurance, and Wolf Blitzer posed a hypothetical scenario - a healthy 30 year old man declines to buy health insurance, has an accident and falls into a coma, requiring intensive care.
Ron Paul said this was an example of people taking responsibility for themselves - "That's what freedom is all about - taking your own risks". To which Blitzer replied, "So should society just let him die?".
And the room erupted in a chorus of "Yeah!" and applause.
Paul's response to Blitzer was more measured - he felt that this was where charity (not government) should step in. But that was a room full of people who were very enthusiastic about the guy being left to die.
The second was an interview in the NYT with a guy in the upper midwest who was opposed to government involvement in health insurance. The guy's sister had a chronic illness and was being kept alive through a federal health insurance program, I forget if it was Medicare or Medicaid.
The interviewer pointed out that, if the guy's preferences were enacted in policy, his sister would die. The guy said he understood that, and still felt programs like the one keeping his sister alive shouldn't exist.
Long story short, I realized that a large number of people in this country were not operating from the same basic moral or ethical basis as, for instance, me. The differences were not matters of policy, but were much, much deeper and more fundamental.
It more or less gets back to Thatcher's idea that "there is no such thing as society". People sharing a polity have no obligation toward the safety or well being of others.
Root hog or die.
That is the divide that you have to cross if you want to save lives. If you want public policies and actions that get folks fed and housed and gets them access to health care, you have to get past the millions and millions and millions of people in this country who are basically OK with letting their neighbors die as long as it isn't government helping them out.
You might be able to do that a la Ezra Klein, by trying to meet them halfway - "just run some pro-life (D)'s". Or similar. But as Coates calls out, you can't get very far with that without throwing some set of folks under the bus.
So who gets thrown under the bus, and who gets to have their life saved?
In the podcast, Coates calls out the history of the social safety net stuff introduced by the New Deal. The way FDR made that happen was basically to make it available to everybody *but* black people. That was the transaction.
It's good that it happened at all, for most people, but a lot of folks were screwed.
I guess we could continue to try to inch forward, expanding the scope of "who counts" bit by bit. But we're going to continue to bump up against the folks who think the idea of a guy having an accident and dying because he was foolish is an applause line.
You can only get so far without having the deeper conversation. The harder conversation.
"
To Tony's question, and Michael's reply, yes, there are likely millions who think Kirk was "doing Christianity the right way".
And there are many, likely millions, who see Christianity in it's nationalistic form as falling somewhere in the range from harmfully misguided to plainly idolatrous.
So, no single point of view there.
My own perspective, FWIW, is that Kirk's America is not my America, and I do not hear the voice of Jesus in anything he had to say.
"
Thanks for sharing this LJ, I had not seen it. I have a lot of thoughts, I'll try to boil them down and be concise.
First, my general impression of the podcast is that Coates is very clear about his positions, but Klein seemed to be struggling to be as clear - to articulate the points he was trying to make. Some of this may be due to the different roles they see themselves in - Klein seems to see himself more as someone who is politically active, trying to find ways to persuade other folks to his point of view. Coates is very clear that he is not a political strategist, he is here to speak truth as he sees it. Those are really different jobs.
I think Klein is correct to say the (D)'s as a party are flailing. My personal take on why they have lost "the heartland" - the "common people" - is that with very few exceptions they've kind of stepped away from the parts of the country, and the demographics, that we normally associate with those folks. I mean, literally - they have failed to fund and support local (D) organizations and infrastructure in lots of places. They've basically written off a lot of the country. That worked for a while, now it doesn't. And hasn't.
Just show up and listen would solve a lot of problems.
He's also correct to say that a lot of folks feel that the institutional (D) party basically doesn't like them. They don't. Don't understand them, aren't interested in them, think they are idiots for voting for (R)'s and don't seem highly motivated to figure out what those folks are about.
There are a lot of places they could be winning, that they likely don't even know exist.
All IMO. And so, enough from me about the (D)'s as a party.
Klein is correct to say that Kirk was "doing politics the right way", if you assume the goal of politics is to amass power. Kirk was an ambitious, even driven, hard working dude, and he built an electoral organization that kicks ass. He was very very good at *politics*. At creating the conditions to win.
What Kirk was absolutely *not* about was engagement and dialogue with his political opposites. After his murder, I felt obliged to at least watch some of his debates and other appearances. Kirk was not there to hear or understand any point of view other than his own, other than as a means of building his own counter-arguments. He was there to repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat his talking points. And he was there to make conservative young people feel like it was cool to be a conservative on campus.
And much of what he had to say was straight-up bigotry. White supremacist sexist bigotry. Full stop.
No amount of "civility" - a sort of observance of debate-team rules - can white-wash that.
Folks say he was "reaching out to the other side". He was not. He was reaching out to folks who agreed with him, or thought they might, and were uncomfortable out it in a campus environment, so that they could feel like they weren't alone.
A thing that folks don't seem to want to say, because it will seem like they're being mean to college conservatives, is that the whole "militant Christian nationalist capitalist western civilization strong men do big things" mythology doesn't stand up well to critical thought. Which is sort of the point, or at least one of the important points, of higher education.
It's meant to teach you to think. Some ideas don't survive critical thought.
I appreciate the good intentions of folks who believe the solution to where we are at is to let the marketplace of ideas play out. The best ideas will win out, right?
But that requires an openness of mind, and a willingness to engage your opposites in good faith and with respect. And that is not on offer.
I'm with Coates when he says there are folks who have crossed a line, and that a fruitful conversation with them is not likely to happen. I have my own lines, which are pretty much summed up in Coates' "not at the expense of my neighbor's humanity".
I won't, as Clinton did, call my political or social opposites "deplorables". But I will say that many of the things they believe and say and so are, in fact, deplorable, and I'm not interested in debating them about it.
Blacks are prowling the streets looking for whites to prey upon.
Blacks have descended into criminality and dysfunction since desegregation.
SCOTUS justice Jackson is intellectually inferior and is taking a white man's place.
Transgender people are mentally ill freaks.
And so on.
No. No to all of that. And no, I'm not going to debate about it with you as if we were discussion "who's better, Beatles or Stones?".
There are conversations I won't have, because I'm not going to give the time of day to that kind of delusional toxic nonsense. Not least because it supports and engenders some of the cruelest policies and actions we've seen in a long time.
I also second Coates when he points out that political violence is absolutely nothing new in our national history. The folks who say "this isn't who we are" are... mistaken.
And so, I fail to be concise.
On “Guestpost from Wonkie”
The Republican party message is a fairy tale about how the good Republican party will save the good people from the existential threat presented by the rest of us.
My sense is that MAGA people are generally full of fear.
They're gonna take my guns. They're letting a lot of brown people in so that white people are outnumbered. Some Mexican is gonna take my job, or, if you're white collar, some South Asian is gonna take my job. They're gonna chop my kid's genitals off. They're gonna let great big guys play on my daughter's soccer team and she's gonna get run over (my (D) House Rep came out with that one).
There are actually some legitimate concerns in all of the above, and there are sensible conversations to have about them. Those conversations are not available because everybody is so freaking hyped up.
And then there are the folks whose point of view basically my life's good, I'm making money, I want to keep it that way, and if it means tasering some brown person mowing somebody's lawn or working in a restaurant kitchen or mopping floors in a hospital, I'm OK with that.
I have a friend who's an academic, a professor of psychology, who has been involved in this project for a few years trying to find ways to "bridge the divide". His approach is to get people to talk to each other, listen to each other, and try to establish some kind of empathetic connection.
My question to him is always, where the hell is that going to happen? And how are you going to scale that to a level that is going to have an actual effect on the situation we find ourselves in?
It's a mess. I have no solution. Find whatever ways are available to you to mitigate whatever harms you can, and do those.
But I don't see a path to persuading committed MAGAs to change their minds. Even if it all falls to shit around them, they'll find a way to blame on somebody, anybody, other than Trump.
He's their champion, their idol, their savior. That's no exaggeration.
"
I generally do not engage in discussions about politics with Trump supporters. I'm fine with talking with them about pretty much anything else.
There are a couple of people - long time friends - that I have had short political conversations with. In those cases, I haven't really brought up facts etc. I just say "I have no use for Trump, he's an asshole and a crook." Or something to that effect. And the conversation moves on to other topics. They're not really that curious about, or interested in, why I think that, it just places me in one bucket or other in their mind and the topic is done.
Once in a while I'll engage with someone online, usually FB, but that also doesn't get to the point of something like conversation. It's more you stated your position, I've stated mine, and move on.
The thing is, I don't think that many Trump supporters are that invested in arguments from fact or reason. It seems more vibe-y. Trying to persuade someone away from that position is less like engaging in thoughtful discussion of ideas, and more like trying to tell someone they shouldn't support their favorite sports team.
People have to experience the real human cost of this stuff before they'll change their mind. Like, someone they care about getting grabbed by ICE, or getting kicked off of Medicaid. Even then, they may find it difficult to impossible to give up their "team" identity. They'll just blame fate, or the "deep state", or similar.
I really don't know what the way out of all of this is. To some degree, all of the toxic stuff that Trump et al traffic in is stuff that's been part of the American consciousness since day 1. And people love being told they are special, they are the best, anyone who doesn't see that is just picking on them.
I don't think Trump et al have the resources or the wit to make the big agenda - Project 2025 and stuff like it - happen in full. There are too many different agendas going on with these guys, the country is just physically too large and various to lock down, and too many of the folks in the administration are just plain stupid.
But they're gonna break a lot of stuff before they are through, and I have no idea what things will look like when they're done.
So I've kind of arrived at the point of not trying to change anybody's mind about anything, I'm just waiting for this particular fever to run its course and hoping that something worthwhile is left when it's over.
On “Hyudai, meet ICE”
I wonder what the local people in the area think about this.
"It's Joe Biden's fault!"
On “What to do?”
Woot!!! We made it!!
Huge props to Michael Cain especially, also to wj, LJ, and Janie for making this happen.
Thank you all!!
On “The Schadenfreude Express”
He can't be wrong about everything all the time... :)
Yes, based on his public utterances, he is demonstrably able to do so.
I don't think Vance is wrong in the sense of being mistaken or misinformed. He's an intelligent person, he understands the reality, and he understands what he is saying.
He's lying. Bullshitting, gaslighting, whatever you want to call it. He speaks intentional falsehoods to obscure the truth and mislead people.
He's a liar.
Trump is also, but I think Trump half-believes his own bullshit. By "half believes" I mean I think his thought process is something like "I want this to be true, so I'm going to act like it is true".
Vance seems, to me, profoundly more cynical than that. He knows what he's saying is false and just says it anyway.
"
most Germans (or Central Europeans in general for that matter) can't grasp the English/US paranoia about national ID cards*.
Can't speak for the UK. In the US folks who object to / are afraid of national ID cards are conservatives who think the government is going to exploit national ID to round them up and do horrible things to them.
Irony is dead. Or, if not dead, laying in a gutter somewhere bleeding.
"
There are activists on the left bringing books into schools that are, at best, not age-appropriate or shouldn't be in schools at all.
It strikes me that if removing books from a school library doesn't amount to banning books, the presence of a book in a school library doesn't amount to advocacy of whatever point of view it presents. Or a requirement that any given kid read them.
If people don't want kids reading about Heather and her Two Mommies, then mom and dad should sit junior down and explain that they don't want him or her reading it. If they are concerned that their kid is gonna sneak a copy from the library and read it sub rosa, they can talk to the librarian and let them know they don't want their kid checking it out.
Or, you know, pay attention to what your kid is reading.
As opposed to, not only can my kid not have it, but *nobody's* kid can have it.
Books that are banned tend to be about (a) sexuality or (b) race. I respect parent's wishes to have some control over how those topics are presented to their kids. Those parents don't have the right to deny *every freaking kid* access to them.
I don't listen to Vance and care very little about anything he has to say.
And yet, you have somehow absorbed his talking points and have brought them here to share with all of us.
I blame ChatGPT.
GIGO
"
Here, as far as I know, hundreds of ordinary people are not being arrested
"ordinary" is carrying a hell of a lot of water in this phrase.
ICE is currently arresting tens of thousands of people a month. Perhaps they are all extraordinary.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.