Quotulatiousness

January 2, 2024

Deplatforming the Substack Nazis

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Well-known Substack Nazi Freddie deBoer explains why “we” need to immediately throw all the Nazis off all the publishing platforms to save democracy:

Professional mediocrity Jonathan M. Katz has started a little bit of an echo of 2021-era media handwringing about what kind of content is allowed on Substack. You may remember that in early 2021, when Substack’s (now shuttered) advance program gave money to me and several other disreputable sorts — that is to say, writers who do not enjoy the approval of The Village — it kicked off a minor fuss about, like, male privilege or something. (These things are always a little vague.) Katz thinks Substack has a Nazi problem and should either aggressively prune every writer who doesn’t own a Kamala Harris t-shirt or else the company should be ostracized from the media community. This is a little funny in that it assumes that there will be a media community in another six months, which given financial trends is not a great bet. Mostly the piece just makes me very tired; The Atlantic is of course the perfect venue for such an essay, since 90% of the people who write there are elite liberal art grads who disappeared up their own ass twenty years ago and who derive the lion’s share of their self-worth from writing for a high-falutin place like that. The Atlantic published Frederick Douglass! But now I’m afraid it publishes David Brooks, and I think Spencer Kornhaber is chained to a desk somewhere, forced to churn out five pieces a day about how Beyoncé’s work constitutes a new Black dream imaginarium, or whatever else Tumblr thought six months ago. I’m not impressed, Jonathan, is the point.

Nevertheless, points must be made.

  1. This will blow over and no one will remember it. Most people who read and write on Substack have no idea there is a controversy and wouldn’t care if they did. If 2020 proved anything, it’s that even the loudest controversies have a habit of suddenly dying down as soon as the news cycle changes. Remember when we were having a racial reckoning, and it was the most important thing ever, and then people were back to blogging about fast fashion and Squid Game? I remember!
  2. All of this is always panhandling first — everyone who’s ever performatively quit this platform or any other has been doing so to juice subscriptions or generate sympathy that could lead to a staff writer job. It’s one of the most aggressively, shamelessly self-celebratory genres I can imagine.
  3. A basic part of the point is that, as the past decade and a half proves, contemporary liberals have an incredibly expansive view of what a fascist is. I am a pro-choice, pro-reparations, pro-trans rights, pro-Palestinian, pro-redistribution Marxist, and I am routinely called a fascist by the kind of people who are pushing this line. I promise you that if Substack started banning “literal Nazis”, people would make an effort to include me — it’s happened before on other platforms — and if that effort arose, a lot of people pushing the “we’re only talking about literal Nazis” line would have no problem pushing for me to be deplatformed. Because it’s “only literally Nazis” but then “well Tucker Carlson is basically a Nazi” and then “well Sean Hannity is just like Tucker” and then “well Glenn Greenwald is shrill” and the next thing you know anyone who doesn’t have an Obama bobblehead on their dashboard is banned by policy from these platforms. (Maybe if liberals wanted people to take the fascist threat more seriously they shouldn’t have spent the past fifteen years calling everyone they don’t like a fascist.)
  4. You cannot censor your way out of extremism, and that is an “is” statement, not an “ought” statement. I highly recommend you click that link. The question of whether we should censor far-right figures off of the internet is irrelevant in the face of the fact that we can’t do that. As I point out in the piece, Germany and France have very aggressive laws against Nazism, and they have never stopped having a significant Nazi problem in their societies. Those laws don’t work! The flow of information cannot be stopped, especially in the era of the internet! We couldn’t shut down ISIS’s communications. China, both one of the most repressive and most technologically advanced societies on earth, have not been able to stop digital communications by activists and resistance groups. There will always, always, always be some sketchy server farm in Chechnya that will host these people, and there will always be Indonesian crypto exchanges with no physical address that will facilitate payments for them. If they can’t stop terrorists, I assure you that they can’t stop those “manosphere” frauds. Whatever hope of total control of information died the day some computer science professor figured out how to send ASCII porn to a colleague. What is it going to take for you guys to understand that there is no button to push marked “shut up all the Nazis”?
  5. Before malevolent doofus Elon Musk bought Twitter, it was a hive of self-impressed pussyhat liberals who had hegemonic control over the conversation thanks to Twitter’s sympathy towards their position; after he bought Twitter, it became a cesspit of anime racists and crypto scams, and those useless liberals are big mad that their clubhouse got taken over. Now a bunch of people who think they’re entitled to an audience have sat around for a year typing “Guys? … is anyone there?” into Mastodon and they’re really wounded about it all. I absolutely, 100% believe that Twitter’s demise has contributed to the urge to attack Substack. People who enjoyed pride of place on that version of the network are now looking to throw their weight around in the old style, not seeming to understand that without Twitter functioning as the organizing committee, the juice just isn’t there anymore.
  6. Can someone please tell me who the actual “literal Nazis” are? Katz does a lot more broad gesturing in his Atlantic piece than he does actually proving that there’s a problem or its size. Shouldn’t there be some effort to a) quantify this problem, b) compare it to the size of the platform as a whole, and c) determine if the problem is growing? Is this a crazy thing to ask?

December 30, 2023

Social prosecution … because they can’t send you to the Gulag

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theophilus Chilton reposted an older article from 2019 that clearly still has relevance:

For the past few years, we have been seeing a tremendous increase in a phenomenon which I refer to as “social prosecution”. This has taken place as the Left finds itself in a position of increasing power over the culture and the means of cultural discourse (e.g. social media, flow of information on the internet, etc.). Yet, the Left has not been able to establish more than a relative parity with the nominal Right in the formal political arena. As a result, the Left has had to seek alternative means for punishing its enemies since they don’t have much ability to do so formally yet.

Before I proceed to the main discussion about social prosecution, I’d like to lay a little groundwork first. It’s often said that politics is downstream from culture. In other words, as trends, assumptions, mores, and whatnot within a society’s cultural milieu begin to change, these values will begin to be reflected in the political realm after a bit of lag time. However, an equally salient fact is that culture, in turn, is downstream from power – which is not to be confused with politics.

Power is the ability to shape or change your circumstances in a real way, one that is actually effective. As a result of the Left’s long march through the institutions, they have gained significant (and in some cases total) control over most areas of information control and influence – the academy, entertainment, social media, journalism, and much more. This allows them to alter the direction in which western cultures evolve, which then translates into political change on down the road. That is an exercise of real power, no matter how silly we may be tempted to think Clown World is. But, it’s necessarily a slow process.

We all know the Left would love to be able to persecute and destroy its opponents completely, if only it were in a position to be able to. We know this because that’s what the Left always does when it achieves political power. It even does this to the extent of cannibalising itself of those who are not the “right kind” of leftists, the sort of purity spiraling that was observed in the early portion of Solzhenitsin’s Gulag Archipelago, whereby the Bolsheviks were as quick to purge Social Democrats, Anarchists, and other leftists as they were those on the Right. It’s seen even today in the USA on a smaller scale in the form of intra-leftist fighting and virtue signaling between various intersectional special interest groups.

What we all need to understand is that when it comes to the Left, there is really no such thing as a “moderate leftist” or “left-leaning centrist”. There are only leftists who cannot exercise the power they would like, and therefore cannot reveal their radicalness to the extent they would wish to, but who WILL do so as soon as they sense the opportunity. The default setting for the Left is permanent revolution, whether they are currently able to act on that impulse or not. This is why Cthulhu always swims left – apart from nominal rightist opposition (which, let’s face it, has been purposefully tepid in most of the West for over a generation), there really are no brakes checking the Left’s movement in that direction.

So what can the Left do when it finds itself in the position of having “soft” power (through control of institutions, opinion-shaping, etc.) such that it can influence the culture, but their ability to exercise political power has not “caught up” yet?

This is where social prosecution comes in. It is a technique that the Left uses as a “cheat code” to harm its enemies, even though it would seemingly have no formal power available to really be able to do so (through being restrained by residual constitutionalism, control of political offices by political enemies, etc.). It does so by playing to its strength – power over culture dissemination (which is not the same thing as culture creation, we should remember) and the flow of “social information” via social media, “woke capital,” and so forth. It uses these to create social circumstances in which those with the wrong attitudes, who express the wrong opinions, or are even merely representative of the wrong demographic or cultural idea, can be targeted (akin to Alinksy’s Rule 12 – “Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it, and polarise it”) and neutralised.

December 19, 2023

Henry Dundas, cancelled because he didn’t do even more, sooner to abolish slavery in the British Empire

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Toronto’s usual progressive suspects are still eager to rename Dundas Street because (they claim) Henry Dundas was involved in the slave trade. Which is true, if you torture the words enough. His involvement was to ensure the passage of the first successful abolitionist motion through Parliament by working out a compromise between the hard abolitionists (who wanted slavery ended immediately) and the anti-abolitionists. This is enough, in the views of the very, very progressive activists of today to merit our modern version of damnatio memoriae:

Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville.
Portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

Henry Dundas never travelled to British North America and likely spent very little of his 69 years ever thinking about it. He was an influential Scottish career politician whose name adorns the street purely because he happened to be British Home Secretary when it was surveyed in 1793.

But after 230 years, activists led an ultimately successful a push for the Dundas name to be excised from the 23-kilometre street. As Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow said in deliberations over the name change, Dundas’s actions in relation to the Atlantic slave trade were “horrific“.

Was Dundas a slaveholder? Did he profit from the slave trade? Did he use his influence to advance or exacerbate the business of slavery?

No; Dundas was a key figure in the push to abolish slavery across the British Empire. The reason activists want his name stripped from Dundas Street is because he didn’t do it fast enough.

[…]

The petition was piggybacking off a similar anti-Dundas movement in the U.K. – which itself seems to have been inspired by Dundas’s portrayal as a villain in the 2006 film Amazing Grace, a fictionalized portrayal of the British anti-slavery movement.

Dundas was responsible for inserting the word “gradually” into an iconic 1792 Parliamentary motion calling for the end of the Atlantic slave trade. A legislated end to the trade wouldn’t come until 1807, followed by an 1833 bill mandating the total abolition of slavery across the British Empire.

The accusation is that – if not for Dundas – the unamended motion would have passed and the British slave trade would have ended 15 years earlier.

But according to the 18th century historians who have been brought out of the woodwork by the Cancel Dundas movement, Henry Dundas was a man working within the political realities of a Britain that wasn’t yet altogether convinced that slavery was a bad thing.

The year before Dundas’ “gradual” amendment secured passage for the motion, the House of Commons had rejected a similar motion for immediate abolition.

“Dundas’s amendment at least got an anti-slavery statement adopted — the first,” wrote Lynn McDonald, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, in August. McDonald added that, in any case, it was just a non-binding motion; any actual law wouldn’t have gotten past the House of Lords.

The parliamentary record from this time survives, and Dundas was open about the fact that he “entertained the same opinion” on slavery as the famed abolitionist William Wilberforce, but favoured a more practical means of stamping it out.

“Allegations … that abolition would have been achieved sooner than 1807 without his opposition, are fundamentally mistaken,” reads one lengthy Dundas defence in the journal Scottish Affairs.

“Historical realities were much more nuanced and complex in the slave trade abolition debates of the 1790s and early 1800s than a focus on the role and significance of one politician suggests,” wrote the paper, adding that although Wilberforce opposed Dundas’ insertion of the word “gradually,” the iconic anti-slavery figure “later admitted that abolition had no chance of gaining approval in the House of Lords and that Dundas’s gradual insertion had no effect on the voting outcome.”

Meanwhile, the British abolition of slavery actually has some indirect ties to the road that bears Dundas’s name.

The road’s construction was overseen by John Graves Simcoe, the British Army general that Dundas had picked to be Lieutenant Governor of the colony of Upper Canada.

The same year he started building Dundas Street, Simcoe signed into law an act banning the importation of slaves to Upper Canada – and setting out a timeline for the emancipation of the colony’s existing slaves. It was the first anti-slavery legislation in the British Empire, and it was partially intended as a middle finger to the Americans’ first Fugitive Slave Act, passed that same year.

December 13, 2023

QotD: Woke psychiatry

Filed under: Health, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s a popular narrative that drug companies have stolen the soul of psychiatry. That they’ve reduced everything to chemical imbalances. The people who talk about this usually go on to argue that the true causes of mental illness are capitalism and racism. Have doctors forgotten that the real solution isn’t a pill, but structural change that challenges the systems of exploitation and domination that create suffering in the first place?

No. Nobody has forgotten that. Because the third thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that everyone is very, very woke.

Here are some of the most relevant presentations listed in my Guidebook:

Saturday, May 18

  • Climate Psychiatry 101: What Every Psychiatrist Should Know
  • Women’s Health In The US: Disruption And Exclusion In The Time Of Trump
  • Gender Bias In Academic Psychiatry In The Era Of the #MeToo Movement
  • Revitalizing Psychiatry – And Our World – With A Social Lens
  • Hip-Hop: Cultural Touchstone, Social Commentary, Therapeutic Expression, And Poetic Intervention
  • Lost Boys Of Sudan: Immigration As An Escape Route For Survival
  • Treating Muslim Patients After The Travel Ban: Best Practices In Using The APA Muslim Mental Health Toolkit
  • Making The Invisible Visible: Using Art To Explore Bias And Hierarchy In Medicine
  • Navigating Racism: Addressing The Pervasive Role Of Racial Bias In Mental Health

Sunday, May 20

  • Addressing Microaggressions Toward Sexual And Gender Minorities: Caring For LGBTQ+ Patients And Providers
  • Latino Undocumented Children And Families: Crisis At The Border And Beyond
  • Racism And Psychiatry: Growing A Diverse Psychiatric Workforce And Developing Structurally Competent Psychiatric Providers
  • Sex, Drugs, And Culturally Responsive Treatment: Addressing Substance Use Disorders In The Context Of Sexual And Gender Diversity
  • Grabbing The Third Rail: Race And Racism In Clinical Documentation
  • Racism And The War On Terror: Implications For Mental Health Providers In The United States
  • The Multiple Faces Of Deportation: Being A Solution To The Challenges Faced By Asylum Seekers, Mixed Status Families, And Dreamers
  • What Should The APA Do About Climate Change?
  • Intersectionality 2.0: How The Film Moonlight Can Teach Us About Inclusion And Therapeutic Alliance In Minority LGBTQ Populations
  • Transgender Care: How Psychiatrists Can Decrease Barriers And Provide Gender-Affirming Care
  • Gun Violence Is A Serious Public Health Problem Among America’s Adolescents And Emerging Adults: What Should Psychiatrists Know And Do About It?
  • Working Clinically With Eco-Anxiety In The Age Of Climate Change: What Do We Know And What Can We Do?
  • Are There Structural Determinants Of African-American Child Mental Health? Child Welfare – A System Psychiatrists Should Scrutinize

Monday, May 21

  • Community Activism Narratives In Organized Medicine: Homosexuality, Mental Health, Social Justice, and the American Psychiatric Association
  • Disrupting The Status Quo: Addressing Racism In Medical Education And Residency Training
  • Ecological Grief, Eco-Anxiety, And Transformational Resilience: A Public health Perspective On Addressing Mental Health Impacts Of Climate Change
  • Immigration Status As A Social Determinant Of Mental Health: What Can Psychiatrists Do To Support Patients And Communities? A Call To Action
  • Psychiatry In The City Of Quartz: Notes On The Clinical Ethnography Of Severe Mental Illness And Social Inequality
  • Racism And Psychiatry: Understanding Context And Developing Policies For Undoing Structural Racism
  • Trauma Inflicted To Immigrant Children And Parents Through Policy Of Forced Family Separation
  • Deportation And Detention: Addressing The Psychosocial Impact On Migrant Children And Families
  • How Private Insurance Fails Those With Mental Illness: The Case For Single-Payer Health Care
  • Imams In Mental Health: Caring For Themselves While Caring For Others
  • Misogynist Ideology And Involuntary Celibacy: Prescription For Violence?
  • Advocacy: A Hallmark Of Psychiatrists Serving Minorities
  • Inequity By Structural Design: Psychiatrists’ Responsibility To Be Informed Advocates For Systemic Education And Criminal Justice Reform
  • Treating Black Children And Families: What Are We Overlooking?
  • Blindspotting: An Exploration Of Implicit Bias, Race-Based Trauma, And Empathy
  • But I’m Not Racist: Racism, Implicit Bias, And The Practice Of Psychiatry
  • No Blacks, Fats, or Femmes: Stereotyping In The Gay Community And Issues Of Racism, Body Image, And Masculinity
  • Silence Is Not Always Golden: Interrupting Offensive Remarks And Microaggressions
  • Black Minds Matter: The Impact Of #BlackLivesMatter On Psychiatry

… you get the idea, please don’t make me keep writing these.

Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder? Three times as many on immigration as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exaggerate this. There was still a lot of really meaty scientific discussion if you sought it out. But overall the balance was pretty striking.

I’m reminded of the idea of woke capital, the weird alliance between very rich businesses and progressive signaling. If you want to model the APA, you could do worse than a giant firehose that takes in pharmaceutical company money at one end, and shoots lectures about social justice out the other.

Scott Alexander, “The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-05-22.

December 12, 2023

La trahison des intellectuels modernes

Filed under: Education, France, Germany, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Niall Ferguson explains why the situation in Europe in the late 1920s persuaded Julien Benda to publish the famous La trahison des clercs … and how similar the situation in western academia is to a century ago:

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs — “The Treason of the Intellectuals” — which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics.

Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds”. And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence — with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.

A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction — leftward instead of rightward — but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we — unlike the Germans — can do something about it.

For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory”, and apologists for Islamist extremism.

Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?

Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny.

I cannot stop thinking of the son of a Jewish friend of mine, who is a graduate student at one of the Ivy League colleges. Just this week, he went to the desk assigned to him to find, carefully placed under his computer keyboard, a note with the words “ZIONIST KIKE!!!” in red and green letters.

Just as disturbing as such incidents — and there are too many to recount — has been the dismally confused responses of university leaders.

December 7, 2023

The only kind of conspiracy theories the media is interested in

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley points out the obvious bias legacy media polls bring to any investigation into the popularity of various conspiracy theories:

Readers, were you aware that polls show conservative Canadians are more prone to believing in conspiracy theories than liberal Canadians? I’m kidding — of course you were. The pollsters haven’t stopped asking about it since the pandemic hit: Insights West in April 2021, Angus Reid in November 2021, Abacus Data in June 2022, Leger Marketing in the spring of 2022, and again this week. And we in the media can’t get enough of it: “Conspiracy theories are popular in Canada, especially among conservatives, poll says”, was The Canadian Press headline for this week’s Leger poll.

The notion that the Conservative Party of Canada and some of its leading lights are inviting violence through unconscionably heated and conspiratorial rhetoric is endemic in the Canadian newsroom. While I’m no fan of unconscionably heated rhetoric, I very much doubt actual extremists, or potentially violent extremists, see anyone worth choosing among Canada’s federal political leaders. But in any event, it apparently needs saying that not all conspiracy theories are created equal. Some aren’t conspiracy theories at all.

To its credit, The Leger poll released this week mostly confines itself to proper conspiracies: 9/11 Trutherism, a faked lunar landing, etc. Somewhere between 36 per cent (the truth about John F. Kennedy’s assassination was covered up) and five per cent (the earth is flat) believe completely or somewhat in these notions.

But by far the most popular statement among those Leger presented to respondents was as follows: “Mainstream media manipulates the information it disseminates”. Fifty-five per cent of respondents overall agreed with that; the JFK coverup was in a distant second at 36 per cent.

What’s “mainstream media”? If it includes, say, Al Jazeera and Fox News, then the statement is obviously true. (What does “manipulate” mean, for that matter? It doesn’t necessarily imply bad faith.) And the belief is certainly not just confined to Conservative voters: 47 per cent of NDP voters and 53 per cent of Green voters agreed, compared to 69 per cent of Conservative supporters.

What the question definitely does, however, is boost the overall numbers and make them more newsworthy. So Leger (and media) can say “79 per cent of Canadians believe in at least one of the conspiracy theories we asked them about”, and “Conservative voters (94 per cent) are more likely to believe in at least one of the theories”.

That’s a quibble, really. Other polls have, in my view, been utterly shameless about this sort of results-padding.

Take this proposition, for example, which Abacus put to its respondents: “52 per cent think government accounts of events can’t be trusted”.

That is a true statement. It applies to every government in the world, ever.

Even to mention Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset in Canadian political conversation is to risk being branded a conspiracy theorist. But it’s a real-deal “world governance” manifesto, it’s absolutely bonkers from start to finish, everyone from Justin Trudeau to the King (in a previous role) has made approving noises about it, and to the very limited extent it should be taken seriously, everyone should oppose it.

November 23, 2023

Clown world is what you get when children run things in the real world

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theophilus Chilton on the overgrown children who populate what used to be the adult world in the West:

If you’ve been around dissident Right circles for any length of time, you’re probably seen the term “clown world” used to describe the modern Western world. If you’ve paid any attention at all to the state of the world around us, you know just how apt of a description that term really is. Modernity as it is expressed today transcends the types of degeneracy and corruption that have been seen in previous decadent periods and has plumbed to nadirs of human depravity that previous generations would have literally found unspeakable because they would not have had the vocabulary to even describe them. To any rational adult observer of any previous age, no matter how dissolute, today’s western social, political, and moral situation would seem completely clownish and unserious.

That this would be the case is practically inevitable given the type of people involved within the plethora of left-wing causes and intersectionality factions. As a general rule, the political and cultural Left are very childish, not just in their behaviour, but also in their worldview, demeanor, and mindset. Any normal person who has ever dealt with them on social media (or the real world, if you’ve had the misfortune) can abundantly testify to this. Now, I’m not really talking about the “boss lefties”, the people who really run the show concerning left-wing activism. Rather, I’m describing the rank-and-file lefties who fill out the echelons of “ground level” activism – ranging from the antifa street drek to the college students whining about microaggressions to the HR representatives in multinational corporations.

I sincerely believe that to understand the psychology of those on the Left, one must approach the issue from the standpoint of juvenile behaviourism. Observing how and why children – as in actual children – act as they do will shed light on why those on the Left are the way they are. I want to emphasise that what I’m saying here isn’t meant to be the usual derogation that people on opposite sides of the political divide routinely throw at each other. I am literally saying that, for whatever reason, the stunting of the emotional and rational growth of the minds of those who are drawn to the hard core of the Left results in similarities in psyche and behaviour between the two groups.

The first and most obvious similarity revolves around the acceptance of wishful thinking as a credible alternative to verifiable reality. This manifests itself in two related ways – the willingness to believe fantasies that have no credible claims to being truth, and the concurrent unwillingness to accept legitimate evidences which disagree with those fantasies.

Anyone who has kids knows that when a small child wants to believe something, they’re going to believe it, no matter what you say or show them to the contrary. Children do this because they do not have a firm grasp on the nature of reality, since they’re still essentially learning from the world around them what reality even is. They haven’t quite learned yet “how the world works”, so to speak, hence they’re still open to “other possibilities”, and assume that if they want these possibilities to be, then they can be.

Sadly, left-wing activists and SJWs operate on essentially the same set of basic premises. Despite all evidences to the contrary, they will believe that homosexuality is normal, people can actually change their sexes, adult-child sexual relationships are healthy, large-scale third world immigration is enriching, computer simulations that predict extremes of global warming are credible reflections of actual climatological science, and so forth. Instead of accepting that arguments to the contrary can even exist, much less penetrate their self-contained fact space, leftists will attempt to mold reality to their preferences by dismissing contrary arguments with one of more “signaling phrases” (i.e. racist, sexist, transphobic, etc.). In this way, they believe they have negated the very existence of those contrary arguments, thus preserving their preferred perceptions.

Another area of similarity is seen in the social dynamics of cliquishness, which both children and leftists display in social settings. We should understand that cliquishness involves much more than the mere existence of in-groups and out-groups. Everybody has groups to which they belong and do not belong, and that is a fundamental factor in human sociability. What makes cliquishness different is that it involves the purposeful engineering of social dynamics for the objective of establishing the power of and loyalty to one or a small group of actors within a set which normally would act as a broad in-group. In other words, it functions as a way of destructively dividing a body of people who you would typically find bound together by more commonalities than differences. For children, this could be classmates within a school setting. For adults, it could mean anything from an office or church environment all the way up to the national level. Ostensibly, children at a school are all there for the same purpose. In the corporation, workers are, in theory, all supporting the company’s stated goals. Within a nation, a sense of asabiyya, of social solidarity, is supposed to obtain.

The whole purpose of left-wing activism is to destroy social solidarity, and to do so in an ever-changing and unpredictable manner. Within cliques, the accepted in-group is ever-shifting and individual members can be subject to sudden changes in status among the group based on anything from personal whim to the requirements of a newly imposed ideological orthodoxy. This is seen regularly on the Left and serves to demonstrate the fragility of the Left’s intersectionality alliance.

November 22, 2023

QotD: American universities, “sportsball”, and wealthy alumni

Filed under: Education, Football, Politics, Quotations, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is, or at least used to be, a truth universally acknowledged, that the Athletic Department was the only bastion of sanity left in higher “education”. I love watching Marxists squirm, so the start of football season was always my favorite time back in my professin’ days. Every year, the doofus Marxoid faculty would write their annual complaint about sportsball — “not germane to the purpose of a university”; “takes away too many resources from academics”; “toxic masculinity” and so forth — and every year, the President and Board of Trustees would tell the eggheads to go pound sand.

NOT, I hasten to add, because the Prez and the Trustees (hereafter: The Administration) were some kind of normal folks. Oh God no — quite the opposite, in fact. No open conservative has been hired to any position in academia for the past thirty, forty years; to make it into the ranks of The Administration, you have to be #woker than #woke. Rather, it was because The Administration were among the few mortals privy to the college’s balance sheet. Seriously, those things are more closely guarded than our nuclear launch codes … but The Administration sees them, and draws the only possible conclusion: Without sportsball, the whole university system is toast.

But alas for the bottom line, Intersectionality is a jealous god, and xzhey will have none before xzhem. The Administration knows — they must know, they can’t not know — that all the stuff that makes big league college football go comes from “boosters”, i.e. rich idiots with way more money than sense, and their corporations. But since The Administration is full of even dumber Marxists than the faculty — yeah yeah, I know, I didn’t think it was possible either — they’ve apparently decided to assume, in true Leftist style, that since the money has always just kinda, you know, been there, it will continue to, you know, somehow, someway, continue to be there.

I mean, what are those rich oilmen from Texas gonna do, not watch football?

Severian, “Ludicrous Speed Update: The NCAA”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-14.

November 16, 2023

Why progressives love all forms of public transit

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Theophilus Chilton reminds conservatives and other non-progressives that trains, buses, and other forms of mass transit are beloved of the left at least partly because the more people depend on it, the more control the government gains over their freedom of movement:

TTCImages by Canadian8958
Wikimedia Commons

Ask most people on the broad Right what they think about public transportation and they’d probably tell you that they don’t like it. And it’s not just because of the smell and the gum stuck to the seats. Most of us, deep down inside, at least in some subconscious way, feel that mass public transportation is just a little bit communist.

[…]

This is probably much of the reason why we’re in love with the automobile. With the wide-open spaces and abundant road system we enjoy in America, most Rightists would never dream of trying to force everyone to use an archaic, 19th century technology like trains now that we don’t have to. The automobile is a symbol of freedom. You can go wherever there’s a road, no matter how big or small, when you’re in an automobile. You’re not boxed in with dozens of other people on a line that goes one place only. This is why we generally tend to view air travel as a necessary evil — if somebody invented a car that could get us from Boston to Los Angeles in six hours for a business meeting, we’d probably opt for that instead of getting groped by your friendly neighborhood TSA agent.

Progressive leftists know all of this. They know that the freedom to travel where we want, when we want, how we want, is a psychological buttress to our sense of liberty. Pod-people stay put and go where they’re told. Free men hop into their ’67 Mustang and lay rubber in front of a Dairy Queen three towns over from their own.

Hence, in their never-ending quest to gain total control over our lives, the Left has been putting into play a number of plans designed to limit our freedom of travel.

In case you weren’t aware, one of the purposes served by forcing gasoline prices sky-high is to make private automobile travel prohibitively expensive for more and more people. This has been a major thrust in the “global warming” nonsense that the Left has pushed as well — cars supposedly account for the lion’s share of carbon dioxide emissions (even though they actually don’t), so their use needs to be reduced. Way back in the Obama administration, somebody in the Congressional Budget Office accidentally let the cat out of the bag that it would be a great, absolutely smashing, idea to tax Americans for each mile they drive. Every so often the idea gets resurrected in the media, but thankfully doesn’t seem to have gotten much traction yet. Of course, this is essentially what already happens to us anywise, since we have to pay taxes on each gallon we buy to drive those miles. Presumably, this mileage tax would be added on top of the gas taxes already in place.

The whole point to this is not to “stop global warming”. Let’s face it, those in the know at the top of the progressive hierarchy know that global warming is a hoax. They know it’s just prole-feed for the useful idiots in their own ranks and for the easily swayable among the public at-large. The point to inducing people to stop driving cars is not to save the earth, but to reduce the freedom of movement that people have. Take away cars and you take away the ability of most people to travel for pleasure. You take away their means of conveniently conducting much of their commerce and other business. You would prevent them from being able to have forest hideaways and beach homes. In short, you prevent the middle and working classes from having the same things that the rich can have, you keep them from having lifestyles that even begin to approach the type, if not the extent, of the global transnational elite. Most of all, you would take away that psychological sense of freedom that the ability to move about unhindered gives to people. It’s about forcing us all into the Agenda 2030 “You’ll own nothing and be happy” scenarios that the globalist world-planners have prepared for us.

More recently, and more concretely, is the Congressional effort (which ineffectual Republicans failed to stop) that would direct automobile manufacturers to include a “kill switch” into all vehicles made after 2026, a device which would allow authorities to shut down a vehicle remotely. Ostensibly, the reason would be if the driver is acting like he or she is driving while impaired (i.e. it’s FoR yoUr SaFeTy!!1!). Of course, we know the actual reason is to provide bureaucrats and functionaries in the managerial state the means to freeze the movement of dissidents and others who run afoul of the Regime’s dictates. Don’t think they’d do that? Well, these are the same people who just put the infant son of a J6 defendant on the no-fly terrorist watch list.

So, what would have to replace private automobile travel, once nobody but the super-rich will be allowed it? Public mass transportation, of course. Buses, light rail, subways. This has already largely happened to those poor unfortunates who dwell within our large cities and for whom the lack of parking, expensive personal property taxes, and archaic road systems have already removed the automobile from being a viable alternative. The lefties work to extend this system even to places, such as smaller cities, the suburbs, and even the exurbs, where such systems normally would not be “needed” or desired. Make parking in the city so scarce as to be impossible to find, or so expensive that you’d rather take the bus. Provide “free” bus service (paid for by the taxes of productive, automobile-driving people, of course) to encourage people to stop polluting. In several places, the lefties keep trying to push their light rail boondoggles so that the system can be extended between cities — no more need to have people killing Mother Gaia with highway driving. These public systems are there to take up the slack once private transportation is turned into road pizza.

So how does this affect our freedom? Well, it’s because of the fact that mass transportation is inherently restrictive in its approach to people delivery. A bus route can’t include every single possible place that people might want to get on or off the bus. It only follows certain routes. Same with AmTrak, with light rail, subways, etc. It’s easier, then, to control the access which people have to transportation.

November 15, 2023

Can we criticize the Climate Goblin now?

Filed under: Environment, History, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill asks if it’s allowed to criticized Greta “The Climate Goblin” Thunberg now:

Can we criticise Greta Thunberg now? For a time, anyone who raised even the mildest objection to the pint-sized prophetess of doom risked being damned as a bully. Surely this moratorium on Greta-scepticism will end following her platforming – to use woke lingo – of an activist with very iffy views. An activist who has trivialised the Holocaust and seems pretty chilled about Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October. Calling out Greta for her fact-lite blather about the planet being “on fire” may have been forbidden – pulling her up for hanging out with Holocaust relativists must not be.

Thunberg has made waves by switching her focus from saving the planet to saving Gaza. Like every other Gen Zer with a TikTok and an insatiable urge to signal his / her / zir virtue to the world, she’s become an overnight authority on Israel-Palestine. She posed with a placard saying “Stand with Gaza“. She turned Fridays for Future – where pious rich kids bunk off school to raise awareness about climate change – into “Justice for Palestine” stunts. And on Sunday, she made a climate protest in Amsterdam pretty much all about Palestine.

She invited activists to the stage. One was Sara Rachdan, a Palestinian studying in Amsterdam. It didn’t take German newspaper Bild long to discover that Ms Rachdan holds views which – how should we put this? – are not very pleasant. On Hamas’s pogrom, Ms Rachdan said: “This is finally Palestinians taking action [against] the occupation”. She’s dabbled in Holocaust denigration. She shared a blood-spattered graphic comparing Israel’s actions in Gaza with the Nazis’ actions in Auschwitz. Repulsively, it implies the Jewish State is worse than the Nazis. Where 127 kids a day were killed in Auschwitz, 178 a day are currently dying in Israel’s war in Gaza, it alleges.

Shorter version: the Jews are more accomplished child-killers than even Hitler’s henchmen were. This is rank Holocaust relativism. Comparing the greatest crime in history to this horrendous war denudes that crime of its unique horror. It renders it ordinary. It was no big deal – just the same kind of thing you see on your TV screens every night from Gaza. The implication of moral equivalence between the Nazis’ minutely planned gassing of Jewish children and the deaths of Palestinian kids as a terrible byproduct of Israel’s war on Hamas is beyond immoral. It is the gravest of inversions, treating the Jewish State’s war against anti-Semitic mass murderers as indistinguishable from the Nazis’ acts of anti-Semitic mass murder.

Of course, there’s nothing to suggest Greta shares Ms Rachdan’s views. But isn’t her woke generation obsessed with “platforming”, with only rubbing shoulders with the perfectly politically correct and no one else? Indeed, Thunberg ostentatiously flounced out of the Edinburgh Book Festival earlier this year because it received funding from a firm that invests in fossil fuels. Take oil money and she’ll dodge you like the plague; describe an anti-Semitic pogrom as an act of resistance and she’s all over you like a cheap suit. Care to explain, Greta?

QotD: Enid Blyton not considered worthy of a commemorative coin

Filed under: Books, Britain, Bureaucracy, History, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the discovery by the Mail on Sunday that Enid Blyton — one of Britain’s most enduringly popular and influential children’s authors, creator of Noddy and the Famous Five series — was denied a commemorative 50p coin on the 50th anniversary of her death because a Royal Mint “advisory committee” declared that “she is known to have been a racist, sexist, homophobe and not a very well-regarded writer”.

Enid Blyton was born in 1897. Pretty much everyone of that generation — and of every one preceding it — would qualify as a “racist, sexist, homophobe” by the standards of the modern left.

As for “not very well-regarded”, well she has sold over 600 million books — which probably counts for something, no?

We do not know the identities of this Royal Mint “advisory committee” but we know exactly what type of person they are. They are the same type of people who make up the committee of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which has decided to make adverts that promote “gender stereotypes” effectively illegal in the UK.

[…]

There is no shortage of similar examples of the “political correctness gone mad” which has hijacked British culture. But the people enforcing it are a tiny minority of committed Social Justice Warriors — most of them educated in some worthless degree subject like gender studies, often “working” either in the human resources department or one with “diversity”, “equality”, or “sustainability” in their title — entirely at odds with the way most of the country still thinks.

Like the Soviet Politburo or China’s Central Committee, they are the very few who exert extraordinary — indeed, terrifying — power over the many.

True to Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s call for a “long march through the institutions”, these people have gained key positions of power the length and breadth of British culture.

James Delingpole, “From ‘Sexist’ Advert Bans to ‘Racist’ Enid Blyton, the Left Has Ruined Britain”, Breitbart, 2018-08-27.

November 14, 2023

QotD: Don’t bother trying to reason someone out of a position they never reasoned themselves into

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Forget political philosophy; that stuff is way down the line. The first thing to do is to counter Leftism’s emotional appeal. For as much as we all recognize that the Left runs on nothing but spite and envy, it’s remarkable how few people really acknowledge this. Trying to reason a fanatic out of his fanaticism is like asking your cat to factor quadratics — not only can’t he do it, he’s not even able to comprehend that you’re asking him to do something. It doesn’t compute.

We’re dealing with emotion, kameraden. Think of your last big fight with your girlfriend, and let me know how well your unassailable facts, your airtight logic, worked out for you.

That’s the reason the old Right (back when that term meant something) lost every fight with the Left. Even when they saw it, they didn’t really grasp it. For instance, there’s a reason I’ve never read a single other word by Henry Hazlitt, though he was a big league public intellectual in his day — he saw, but he didn’t know:

    The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects – his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.

That’s the best definition of “Leftism” ever penned. It describes Social Justice Warriors perfectly, though it was written in 1946. And still Hazlitt, like all his brethren on the Right, still kept trying to reason Leftists out of their Leftism.

Severian, “Crossing the Bar”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-06.

November 13, 2023

QotD: The “queering-the-museum” movement

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The so-called queering-the-museum movement, which was launched in Amsterdam in 2016, is all about contemporary identity politics. It rests on the assumption that museum curation is too “heteronormative”. By queering museum collections, activist curators claim they are including and representing gay and gender non-conforming people.

That at least is the objective. But the actual result is an exercise in narcissism. It turns the past into little more than a mirror reflecting the identitarian obsessions of the present back at us. It tells us less than nothing.

And no wonder. Understanding the past through a “queer” prism is profoundly ahistorical. In the 1500s, “queer” didn’t mean what it does today. It meant “strange, peculiar, odd or eccentric“, and had nothing to do with sexual or gender identity at all. Queer only started to be used as a term for gay men at the turn of the 20th century. And “queer studies” was not named as such until the mid-1990s. Viewing the Mary Rose collection through a “queer” lens is to obscure its historical specificity.

It’s not just the Mary Rose Museum that has succumbed to the cult of queer theory, either. Even more bizarrely, the British Library claimed during Pride month this year that the animal world can be viewed through a queer lens. And so Britain’s national centre of knowledge and learning staged events “celebrat[ing] nature in all its queerness”. In particular, it focussed on animals whose sexual behaviour breaks free from standard “gender roles”, from bisexual penguins and lesbian albatrosses to gender-bending fish. “[Researchers’] discoveries”, stated a press release, “show that animal sexuality is far more diverse than we once thought and has been limited by narrow human stereotypes of heterosexuality, monogamy and gender roles”.

This is obviously absurd. Animals do not experience or possess a sense of identity, sexuality or gender. For a fish to “bend” gender it would need to understand what gender is and how to subvert it – quite an achievement for a creature with a five-second memory recall.

Applying “queer” models to the animal world in this way does a disservice not just to our knowledge of animals, but also to our understanding of humans. Non-human animals aim to remain alive and comfortable and propagate their species. Human sex and sexual identity goes far beyond mere survival and comfort. While there may be many interesting reasons why two female penguins pair off, we can be certain that a sense of lesbian self-identity is not one of them.

As the cases of the Mary Rose Museum and the British Library show, queer methodology does not help us to understand history or nature. This is hardly a surprise. Applying a queer lens to species or epochs where it has no place simply exposes the banality of queer theory. It sees nothing but its own reflection. This narcissistic endeavour is now posing a threat to knowledge itself.

Ann Furedi, “The narcissism of queer theory”, Spiked, 2023-08-12.

November 12, 2023

“When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Sullivan on how our “elites” now live in a world that the renowned Oxford academic Charles Lutwidge Dodgson1 predicted in his writings a century and a half ago:

“Israeli flag, Tel Aviv, Star of David” by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

The word “genocide” may be the one rendered most meaningless in our discourse. It has some steep competition, of course. “White supremacy” now means asking someone to show up on time. “Trauma” means being referred to with the wrong pronoun. And “genocide” can, among other things, mean debating experimental sex reassignment procedures for children. (Go look up #transgenocide on Twitter and weep.)

But the supporters of Hamas and of the Palestinians have seized the g-word with particular zeal. And who can blame them? There’s a real, adolescent frisson in accusing the victims of the worst genocide in modern history of being genocidal themselves. “Israel, we charge you with genocide” is a common chant in many of the pro-Palestinian protests. “Genocide Joe” has been trending on Twitter. Eight hundred artists signed an open letter calling the Israeli counteract in Gaza “a genocide”. Yale professor Zareena Grewal channeled much of the “decolonizing” left: “Israeli [sic] is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle”.

It’s not just the activists. Congresswoman Tlaib has accused Biden of “funding Netanyahu’s genocide”, and said “We are literally watching people commit genocide” — referring to the blast next to a Gaza hospital caused by a Hamas rocket. Congresswoman Omar retweeted a photo of dead kids with the caption “CHILD GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE” — but the photo was from a 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria. A State Department official tweeted that Biden is “complicit in genocide”. A UN official just quit his post, adding:

    In just 4 weeks, Israel with US backing has cut off food, water, power & then brutally exterminated more than 10,000 imprisoned civilian men, women & children in Gaza, destroyed their homes, churches, mosques, schools & hospitals because they are Palestinians. Name it? #Genocide.

The devastation in Gaza is horrifying to watch, worse than horrifying. Anyone who isn’t deeply troubled by the mass death has lost humanity. But the UN official, and all those echoing him, are full of it. The basic definition of “genocide” provided by the State Department is “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”

The key, defining thing here is the aim. Horrifying massacres may or may not be genocidal, depending on the intention. The Hiroshima bomb, for example, was devastating, but it was aimed at ending the war, not obliterating the Japanese people as a race. And if Israel were interested in the “genocide” of Palestinian Arabs, it has had the means to accomplish it for a very long time. And yet, for some reason, the Arab population of Israel and the occupied territories has exploded since 1948, and the Arabs in Israel proper have voting rights, and a key presence in the Knesset.

This is not to exonerate Israel entirely. I’ve had strong words for the Netanyahu governments over the years. And Israeli politicians, on the far right, have used foul rhetoric and deemed the Palestinians subhuman in some respects. Bibi swiftly suspended a rogue minister for saying a nuke could be dropped on Gaza. There are anti-Arab maniacs among the West Bank settlers and in Bibi’s cabinet. But a policy of Arab genocide? Please.

The only people actively and proudly engaged in genocide are Hamas. The marchers on the streets this weekend will not be opposing genocide; they will be defending its perpetrators. It’s right there in the Hamas founding charter:

    [All of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank is] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. … The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

This is not mere rhetoric. On October 7, we saw what genocide is in practice. Hamas didn’t kill civilians as a tragic consequence of attacks on military targets. Its torture and murder of Jewish civilians was its core mission. And if Hamas had the capacity, they would gladly enact a second Holocaust, and they have proudly said so, with even more sadism than the Nazis. They would kill every Jew they could.

    1. Lewis Carroll, “an English author, poet, mathematician and photographer. His most notable works are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems ‘Jabberwocky’ (1871) and ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ (1876) are classified in the genre of literary nonsense.” (Wiki)

November 8, 2023

Reality will continue to be real long after you can keep on denying it

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

But, as Chris Bray illustrates, some people have truly heroic reality-denial complexes going on and they want you to deny reality along with them:

Hey, look, it’s the zeitgeist.

No one knows what to do. About this:

    Court records show the man who pushed Whitcomb currently faces charges ranging from harassment and menacing to assault and illegal possession of a knife. He has also been accused of groping and assaulting women on the north side of the neighborhood and is on the state’s sex offender registry for forcible touching and sexual abuse convictions in 2017 and 2021.

He hurts people a lot, and he’s a registered sex offender, and he sometimes carries a knife, and he walks up to strangers on the street and just hurts them for no reason, and he especially likes to hurt women quite a lot, especially in ways that seem pretty consistently sexual. It’s … complicated. Hard to know what to do!

Note that the story takes care to avoid identifying the person the story is about, because the reporter is concerned that identifying the serial aggressor will make it possible for someone to hurt him: “Gothamist has chosen to withhold the man’s name because of his mental illness and because he is at risk of additional attacks by people who want to take matters into their own hands”. And hurting people is wrong. To prevent attacks, see, you don’t tell people the name of a person who keeps … attacking.

The story warns that the constant aggression of [unnamed person] is a warning about “the systemic failures that allow people to fall through the cracks,” because what a man hurting people over and over again shows us is that the man who’s being forced to hurt all those people by society’s deep cruelty isn’t getting enough services. Greenpoint, an increasingly expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn, is represented by “some of the city’s most progressive lawmakers”, but they’re still struggling with these hard questions. America in 2023, ladies and gentlemen.

But finally, as a test of the reporter’s good faith, we get a broader description that contextualizes the problem. There are a lot of people in New York City who are being forced to hurt other people because they aren’t being given enough services, and here comes a famous example: “Earlier this year, Daniel Penny fatally choked Jordan Neely, a beloved Michael Jackson impersonator who Penny said was ‘going crazy’ and acting aggressively toward fellow subway riders.”

That’s it — that’s the whole description. Who was Jordan Neely? He was a man who impersonated Michael Jackson, and he was loved a whole lot, but then for some unaccountable reason Daniel Penny claimed the beloved man was going crazy, so he just suddenly killed the poor man. It’s strange that this Penny person would say something like that, right?

Now, in a city of eight million people, Jordan Neely was on a list, kept by the city government, of the fifty homeless people whose behavior is most persistently troubling. His case was regularly monitored by the “Coordinated Behavioral Health Task Force”, which “consists of workers from across city government, including the departments of Health, Homeless Services and Hospitals, along with representatives of the nonprofits that the city contracts with to try to connect homeless people to shelter and services, a process known as outreach”. At the time when the mean Daniel Penny suddenly killed him for no reason, Neely had an active arrest warrant. And other passengers in the subway car said that — well, let’s turn to the headline in the New York Times: “Witnesses in Subway Chokehold Case Describe Fears of Death and Violence“.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress