A new regular feature on CT! Once a week, we’ll be posting an open thread, where you can post on any topic you like, subject to the usual moderation rules.
The other purpose of this regular post will be to deal with thread derailment. An example is a recent thread on Brexit which deviated into a lengthy analysis of labelling rules for marmalade and chocolate. Disputes of this kind will be directed to the open thread, where the participants can argue to their hearts’ content.
The first suggested topic for discussion: what should we call this feature? The current title is not very imaginative, so feel free to suggest something better. Is Marmalade and Chocolate too obscure?
{ 81 comments }
notGoodenough 12.31.20 at 1:33 pm
Well, there are the obvious thematic choices to go with this site’s name, e.g.
Branch Management; Offcuts; etc.
Or potential cultural references, e.g.
The Argument Clinic (in reference to the Python sketch)
Or obscure references to the intended nature, e.g. since it is intende to avoid threads becoming unravelled, why not Gordian Knot?
Though, FWIW, Orange and Chocolate sounds perfectly OK to me (though perhaps it does sound a bit like a Netflix series…)
Bruce Baugh 12.31.20 at 1:55 pm
Swiping from Paul Simon: Incidents & Accidents, Hints & Allegations
Eszter Hargittai 12.31.20 at 2:36 pm
I was joking when I suggested Marmalade and Chocolate. It will make no sense to people who weren’t reading the Brexit thread (and may barely make sense to those who were;-).
I like NotGoodenough’s idea to riff off CT’s name. Bruce’s ideas are good, too.
I like to see people getting creative on here. :-)
marcel proust 12.31.20 at 2:55 pm
In keeping with all the internet traditions, what’s wrong with Open Thread?
nastywoman 12.31.20 at 3:01 pm
I still like –
”And Now for Something Completely Different”
– the best.
nastywoman 12.31.20 at 3:31 pm
Or how about just: ”trump”?
Don A in Pennsyltucky 12.31.20 at 4:12 pm
It’s hard to dispute “And Now for Something Completely Different” unless one is into puns in which Diffident could substitute for Different.
andres 12.31.20 at 4:29 pm
“Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?”
Alan White 12.31.20 at 4:58 pm
While I like several suggestions above, Room for Debate seems to fit just right.
Jim 12.31.20 at 5:25 pm
Loggerheads?
Cervantes 12.31.20 at 6:40 pm
Covfefe
Omega Centauri 12.31.20 at 6:40 pm
Modification to Jim’s
Loggerheads? And it ain’t turtles…
mike shupp 12.31.20 at 7:19 pm
Rag Bag.
Kiwanda 12.31.20 at 9:35 pm
I don’t know about names for open threads, but I think Caroline was entirely within her rights to use that broccoli casserole recipe; Helen should just learn to let go.
Plarry 12.31.20 at 9:57 pm
On the riffing idea, perhaps something along the lines of “Mere Wilderness”?
Trevor 12.31.20 at 9:59 pm
Joking or no, ‘Marmalade and Chocolate’ is perfect.
nastywoman 12.31.20 at 10:13 pm
nothing entirely straight
Steve Finch 01.01.21 at 12:16 am
Quirks?
Gordon Travers 01.01.21 at 3:16 am
Miscellaneous Rantings
bad Jim 01.01.21 at 8:42 am
I think not Goodenough may have been referring to this familiar meme.
Variations on “twig” strike me as most apt, if only because the commenters are predominantly not Whigs. Perhaps “stray twigs” is a pun too far.
Forgive me, I’ve had too much champagne.
Mike Huben 01.01.21 at 2:14 pm
Perhaps the most appropriate name would be Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick. Nowadays, it refers to a contorted hazel tree but originally it referred to the Scottish entertainer’s crooked cane.
William Roark 01.01.21 at 7:20 pm
While I do find myself partial to Marmalade and Chocolate (as I’m in the know on this),
I like the idea that we find something that riffs more directly on (or off) the blog’s name, esp. as suggestive of topics that are possible tangents.
Gnarled Twigs and Branches (or just “Twigs and Branches” or “Gnarled Branchings” or “Gnarled Branches”)
Knotty Pinings (a curious play on words there)
Against the Grain
Rinds and Finds too esoterically riffs off of the esoteric Marmalade.
anynameleft 01.01.21 at 10:45 pm
How about
Transient Trueism’s from meandering minds.
EWI 01.02.21 at 11:02 am
‘The Pub’
PerfectStranger 01.02.21 at 1:34 pm
“Let Me Get This Straight”
oldster 01.02.21 at 3:11 pm
Is this thread the inaugural member of the open-thread series? Or is it a topical post about what to call a future series, of which this post is not a member? Is this “Marm & Choc #1”, or is it “A Prolegomenon to Marm & Choc”?
If the first, then my question is licit. If the second, then my question is off-topic.
I ask in part because the previous posters have stuck to the topic of naming with a discipline that is comically perverse if this is an open thread, but makes more sense if it’s a Prolegomenon.
oldster 01.02.21 at 3:50 pm
And back on (what seems to be the) topic:
I propose, not a name, but a schema for names, which may be varied from week to week at the whim of the OP who puts it up.
The schema is simply “X ‘n’ Y”, where the variables should be replaced by single words or parts thereof. So, “Marm ‘n’ Choc” or “Twigs ‘n’ Branches,” or “Bread ‘n’ Roses,” or whatever seems appropriate to the week.
Jim 01.02.21 at 4:21 pm
@21 Harry Lauder’s Walking stick was carved out of God’s wooden leg.
oldster 01.02.21 at 6:15 pm
The point of the somewhat artificial
” ‘n’ ”
is both to provide a clear indication that the thread so-titled is an open thread in the series, and also to facilitate the continued use of conventional conjunctions for titles that are not open threads.
If someone wants to write on “Brexit and NATO,” they can do this without looking like they are starting an “Odds ‘n’ Sods” thread.
CHETAN R MURTHY 01.03.21 at 4:01 am
Since this is “room for debate” I’m gonna take the oppty to dredge back up and destroy some bullshit that Kiwanda spread back in https://crookedtimber.org/2020/12/11/trumpism-and-crony-capitalism/
They wrote:
What Kiwanda is referring to, is the idea that all that “idpol” consists of, is language-policing, affirmative action, anti-bias training and other forms of thought-policing, etc, etc. It’s all tendentious bullshit, per Kiwanda.
So I’ll say right here: I think Kiwanda is right. I think they’re 100% RIGHT! You see, the epidemic we have seen, of videos of law-abiding black people (and esp. children) getting beaten and murdered by cops is NOTHING SPECIAL. Indeed, it happens to white people ALL THE TIME. The difference is that white people and their allies NEVER, EVER post videos about it.
Kiwanda believes that white people don’t care when their friends, relatives, neighbors, and children are murdered by the police, beaten by the police. Kiwanda believes that only black people care, even in the face of what is arguably a long history of white people getting murdered by the po-po. It’s gone on for more than a century, but no white person complains. It’s a small price to pay, for safety and security, after all, right? Because that’s the content of his argument that BLM isn’t about stopping some epidemic of black people getting beaten and murdered by the po-po.
Oh, except … maybe Kiwanda is wrong. And just like UFOs and Sasquatch [h/t to XKCD for this], what the absence of any significant number of videos of white people getting unjustly murdered by the po-po shows, is that there IT DOESN’T HAPPEN VERY MUCH. Y’know like UFOs don’t exist, and neither does Sasquatch, b/c if they did, we’d have smartphone video of it.
So y’know, Kiwanda, Thomas Beale and all you racist white supremacists, man up and find us the stream of videos to match what we know and see of the unjust murder of Black people.
Or, y’know, STFU.
bad Jim 01.03.21 at 6:30 am
In consideration of the term “open thread”, note that “ravel” and “unravel” are paradoxically synonymous, both describing fabrics which have come undone. So:
unraveled revelry
unrivaled raveling
unraveled ribaldry
revealing unraveling
&c
bad Jim 01.03.21 at 8:52 am
Sending out Christmas cards is a fraught endeavor if you’re as old as I am and if your list, like mine, includes your parents’ friends. I’d already marked the loss of one, in fact attended a gathering just before California shut down, at which I learned of the demise of one frail but resilient acquaintance who’d made it to 105; I don’t know the details of the deal with the devil she’d made to live so long And of course a card just arrived to note another loss.
My father’s brother made it to 90, a record for his side of the family. He exhibited some dementia at the end. His parents didn’t; his siblings died young. My mother and grandmother suffered from dementia for years and didn’t seem to mind it all that much.
nastywoman 01.03.21 at 9:04 am
@
”all you racist white supremacists, man up…
YES!!! –
PLEASE!!!!!
– but as I (WE) have found out – that there is something… ”different” –
which seems –
currently? –
to be even more… ”deadly” than racism – and it is called ”Science Denying”
and my homeland has become FIRST in the Science of Science Denying
and today I read that –
”the Super rich are hedging their citizenship – and that ”UK-based passport broker Henley & Partners saw a 42% increase in overall citizenship applications this year. “’Investment migration’ has shifted from being about living the life you want in terms of holidays and business travel to a more holistic vision that includes healthcare and safety,†the company said.
The most popular “pandemic passports†or permanent residency programs are those of Australia, Antigua, St Kitts and Nevis, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Austria, Switzerland, Portugal, Cyprus, Malta and Montenegro.
AND that made me think? –
I – WE just want to BE
and
LIVE –
forever in a country where ”the gubernment” care for it’s people –
DON’T Y’ALL THINK?!
(and why the hell is Australia on this list?)
Kiwanda 01.03.21 at 4:48 pm
Chetan R Murthy:
Well, no. I was just hoping that you were following the
modern definition of “white supremacy”. My comment (in response to someone else’s) was:
The motte definition of "white supremacy" is Mirriam-Webster: "the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races".The observation that white supremacy, under this definition, has been influential in American history, is not controversial. (Controversial: claiming that the American revolution was fought to protect slavery, as claimed by the 1619 Project, before the, ah, <em>clarification</em> was issued.)
A bailey, if not "hidden", definition of "white supremacy" from the <a href="http://www.cwsworkshop.org/about.html" >Challenging White Supremacy (CWS) workshop organizers</a>, comments that <a href="http://www.cwsworkshop.org/PARC_site_B/dr-culture.html" >White Supremacy Culture</a> includes "Perfectionism....Sense of Urgency....Quantity Over Quality....Worship of the Written Word..."
This outlook is influential; it, or something much like it, is part of the training of all New York school employees, as <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/when-the-culture-war-comes-for-the-kids/596668/" >George Packer notes:</a>
<blockquote>
De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them “silence†him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled "White Supremacy Culture." It included "Perfectionism," "Individualism," "Objectivity," and "Worship of the Written Word" among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.
Or as SF School Board member A. M. Collins
says,
<blockquote>
"merit" is an inherently racist construct designed and centered on white supremacist framing
Or from the NYT:
<blockquote>
The meaning of the words has expanded, too. Ten years ago, white supremacy frequently described the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, the neo-Nazi politician from Louisiana. Now it cuts a swath through the culture, describing an array of subjects: the mortgage lending policies of banks; a university’s reliance on SAT scores as a factor for admissions decisions; programs that teach poor people better nutrition; and a police department’s enforcement policies.
So Mirriam-Webster is behind the times on the evolving and ever-expanding meaning of "white supremacy"; an update is anticipated.
dbk 01.03.21 at 4:50 pm
Many good suggestions above.
My humble proposal: “Have at It,” since that’s what CT commenters seem to favor in OT threads …
Kiwanda 01.03.21 at 4:51 pm
(Sorry, I find it difficult to reproduce the needed html (and non-html) to quote previous comments. My prior comment is linked at the beginning.)
Kiwanda 01.03.21 at 4:56 pm
As to videos of unarmed white people getting shot by cops, who then
face no consequences? Well, I gave a few examples
in the comments for this post. They weren’t enough examples for nastywoman, perhaps not for Chetan R Murthy. Here are those comments in one place. Chetan R Murthy, enjoy.
Here’s some:
Chetan Murthy:
Daniel Shaver was killed while crawling toward officers and trying to obey their confused shouted commands; the officer involved was charged with second-degree murder, but acquitted, and was reimbursed for the PTSD he suffered due to his own actions, and received a pension. Here’s the video of his violent death.
Joseph Hutcheson was killed in custody: “Witnesses said Hutcheson ran into the Dallas County jail pleading for help. Police restrained Hutcheson and at one point a deputy’s knee was allegedly placed on his neck. Police handcuffed Hutcheson and authorities said he became unresponsive shortly after. His death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner’s office.” But, his killing was ruled justified. His brother prays for justice for George Floyd. Here’s the video of his death by suffocation.
Dylan Noble, shot while lying on the ground. Apparently no consequences for cops.
See also Troy Goode, dead after being left hogtied for ninety minutes. Apparently no consequences for cops. Sorry, no video.
Matthew Russo, tased four times and probably suffocated. Sorry, no video.
Again: in the U.S., police kill half as many white people as black, per capita. (NB: 1/2 is not zero.) The whites living in the poorest 20% of census tracts are killed by police at the same rate as black people as a whole. So, yeah, race matters a lot, and poverty matters as well. But everyone would be helped by reducing qualified immunity and increasing accountability.
Here’s some more:
nastywoman:
Sorry, my time is limited. (Translated to wokespeak: I can’t enact the labor to educate you.) Also, I would consider overall data more important (for at least the third time: according to one study, whites are killed by police at about half (40%) per capita of blacks, poorest one-fifth of whites comparable to blacks overall).
Working from a list by Radley Balko of cases of at-best-dubious police killings that “barely made the news at all”, here’s some cases, one with a video. Almost all articles I came across do not mention the victim’s race in the text (I guess their races were “unmarked”), I can only guess from photos. If you’re genuinely interested, Balko lists maybe a hundred more, I haven’t guessed the races of those.
Kelly Thomas. Homeless, schizophrenic, tased / beaten to death by police. His race is not generally mentioned, photo suggests white. Video here.
John Wrana, age 95; had a knife, surrounded by five cops. Most news stories I came across mention neither his race nor the officers’; linked article has a photo, I’m guessing he’s white.
John Winkler….
His race is not mentioned that linked article, but is here.
Jason Wescott, botched drug raid. His race is not mentioned in the article, but there’s a photo, so, guessing he’s white.
Allan DeVillena II, unnecessary police escalation of a traffic stop. Race not mentioned in article; judging from photo, maybe east Asian.
Eugene Mallory, age 80. Race not mentioned in article, maybe white, judging from photo. Botched drug raid.
…all I have time for. But perhaps, like Brienne of Snarth, you’re “so finished with white entitlement that you’re really not sad about a 2yo eaten by a gator because his daddy ignored the signs”. Sorry, no video for that one.
Here’s some more, more:
Since there’s a demand to see videos of cops murdering white people, e.g. from nastywoman, here’s a few more. Race is not mentioned in the articles, either of victims or cops, that I could find, but all victims light-skinned (some I would guess Hispanic), since that’s the question here.
(See also here, in response to Chetan R Murthy’s mention of “that white Australian lady” as a rare known example of “police unjustly murdering otherwise completely unremarkable and law-abiding white people”, the same “Australian lady” he mentioned here.)
Deven Guilford, age 17, a traffic stop. Tased and shot.
Gilbert Flores, shot to death with hands up.
Paul Castaway.
James Boyd, homeless, schizophrenic.
Caroline Small, in her car, after a brief chase; she’s boxed in.
Jeremy Mardis, age six. (But maybe this doesn’t count: one cop served two years, the other is serving 40.)
Here’s some discussion of the more significant issue, rates:
p>sean s.
You’re comparing apples and oranges: one is individual stories and videos, where the killing was clearly dubious; the other is total number killed for whatever reason. I’ve given both: examples, and also statistics (from one study).
Putting the numbers for 2020 from here with a U.S. population that’s 13% black, 73% white, I get that in 2020, the number of whites killed by police per capita is 35% that the number of blacks, a bit less than the 40% I’ve been quoting (and quoting, and quoting, and quoting) from that study. What do your sources say?
nastywoman 01.03.21 at 5:19 pm
@
”They weren’t enough examples for nastywoman”…
I never should have written that –
told me my aunt from North Carolina –
as my aunt told me: That’s why GOD killed punished ME –
and all of US –
by now killing over 350 000 of our fellow Americans –
and supposedly in a very racist way…
BUT
NOW!
To ”something completely different”
Do you guys know – that the Virus completely changed ALL of our Lives?
nastywoman 01.03.21 at 5:25 pm
OR-
Wait?
an Idiot CovidTruther just tweeted:
”DEATH TOLL ‘FAKE NEWS!’
So Kiwanda –
could you please post ”the piles and piles” of ALL the brown and black Americans
who where killed by ”trump”.
(the Worlds Words for: ”Utmost STUPID”)
CHETAN R MURTHY 01.03.21 at 8:49 pm
Kiwanda: I’m so glad that you have this list of white people who’ve been murdered by the po-po at your fingertips. Truly, it’s wonderful, the selflessness of White people, isn’t it? They’re willing to give up so much, so much, see their children and neighbors murdered by po-po, and ASK FOR MORE. Color me impressed, truly.
Here’s the thing: maybe you’ve heard of this practice called “cherry-picking”? Where some motivated person will gather together examples that prove his point? See, we don’t need to do that for the case of police brutality against Black people [or for that matter, Karen and her male counterpart trying to get Black people killed] because the people reporting these incidents come from all walks of life, all races: they’re pretty much randomly selected by being near an incident. But you’re not them, old boy. You’re an interested party with an axe to grind, just like me.
So again: that hundreds of thousands of people, Black and also white, can and do march for the end of police brutality toward Black people, would seem to speak to a level of either violence against Black people, or ….. well, callous indifference on the part of White people against their own children, relatives, neighbors. Your listing some white people that got murdered by the po-po only makes this case stronger, not weaker.
Penultimate: your adducing some outlier school administrator in SF [I’ll set aside the actual analysis of her statement, which I’m going to guess you took out of context] is like me citing [noted neo-Nazi] Richard Spencer on the attitude of the average white person regarding race. Outliers are outliers.
And last: yes, one could say that these Black people being murdered are outliers, too. But (1) it’s murder we’re talking about, and (2) there is well-established and widespread testimony by Black people from all walks of life, wherein they attest that they are subjected to greater scrutiny by po-po, and that they teach their children to behave in a more-careful way around po-po, for fear that their children will be unjustly murdered. There is no such testimony fro any nontrivial number of white people to this effect.
KT2 01.03.21 at 11:33 pm
The Trolley Problem. TTP.
Derailed thread! Off to the TTP with you.
Saw Pit.
As in ‘the old saw’ and sandpit.
IM(h)O
Shooting the breeze
Char & coals
Lumber(ing) Room – as in “my timber IS STRAIGHT!”
Straight timber – the thread where no opinion is as straight as mine
Marmalade & choc, whilst a good in joke and highly amusing, will make it a bit in / out requiring all you regulars needing to educate newbies. Forever.
I seriously urge you JQ /CT, to consider an ‘ideas open’ thread to allow for, as seen here, ideas to illuminate, amuse, and support other disciplines to make cimment and a case for a new path or idea (those idea butterflies are hard to catch) to allow CT to catch and develop ideas triggered by articles / comments.
Ideas Thread name:
The Flying Leopard
Butterfly
I, dears…
Physisicts Revenge
Hey!Hay
Thanks as always.
Jim Sweeney 01.04.21 at 9:35 am
On other forums, discussions are threaded, such that some may be collapsed or expanded at the reader’s choice. Such a facility would, I think, be welcome here. Most of us would prefer to avoid stale controversies when fresh ones are on the menu.
(frivolous bad Jim -> serious Jim Sweeney)
The tape of Trump’s talk with Georgia’s Secretary of State, Raffensperger, has nearly a one-to-one mapping to his talk with Ukraine’s president Zelensky, by turns wheedling and threatening. Its corruption is blatant and blunt; the president has already been impeached for the previous breach, and the foulness, the stench of this despicable act will not in the least discourage his acolytes come Wednesday, disputing the voters’ choice, because they are utterly shameless.
Kiwanda 01.04.21 at 11:28 pm
Chetan R Murthy:
I’m not clear on what you’re trying to say here; why would you think that white people “ASK FOR MORE”? As to why I have this list “at [my] fingertips”, well again,
you said four months ago:
The implication of this, I think, was that white people are rarely killed by the police, and when they are, the cops are punished. I then found multiple counter-examples to “the rule”, plus the usual stats (the rate per-capita is about a third for white people as for black people). Hence, “at my fingertips”, from earlier discussion.
You’re comparing the reports of eye-witnesses to my doing a little googling for news reports. What does one have to do with the other? So, I find counter-examples to your extremely broad claims, and disagree with you; that means I have “an axe to grind”. Well, no. (And, “po-po”: that’s adorable.)
I can’t tell you why Daniel Shaver’s murder (and many others), and civil asset forfeiture, “killology”, qualified immunity, prison conditions, excessive charges to force plea bargaining, cash bail, junk forensics, prosecutorial immunity, no-knock raids, “drug-sniffing†dogs, and disproportionate sentencing, have not lead to street protests exclusively by white people, even though black people bear the brunt of every one of these problems.
It could also be that street protest is not the only way to have and register an opinion. For example, <a href=””https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/defund-police-slogan-election-polls-democrats.html”>38 percent of black Americans view “defund the police” unfavorably, vs. 44 percent who view it favorably. I don’t see black people in that 38 percent in the streets, demanding continued funding of the police.
Meanwhile, as of June 2020, white Americans supported protests against police violence two to one; I’m not seeing universal “callous indifference”, to anyone’s death.
Not only am I a racist white supremacist, but I’m an “old boy” who takes things out of context. You guess, without clicking the two links needed to look at her twitter thread, that gives the context. OK then. And, say her name, it’s Alison Collins. You’re denying the lived experience of a black (or at least mixed-race) woman, a member of the San Francisco Board of Education (54K students)? She’s an “outlier” to you? To say nothing of the NY city school system. Did I cherry pick that tiny institution’s use of the new meaning of “white supremacist”, as well? Is the NYC school system just an outlier as well?
Not sure who you’re talking to here; it isn’t me. One third is not zero, is all I’m saying, all I’ve ever said. The point being, making reform of the cops and courts solely a racial issue is both morally and tactically wrong. And probably a part of the reason the anticipated 2020 blue wave didn’t happen. (Again: “po-po”. Just, adorable.)
Bob 01.05.21 at 1:13 pm
Can someone from moderation comment on why comments on the Stock OBE have been removed?
oldster 01.05.21 at 1:33 pm
I suppose it’s an ambiguity in the word “on,” then. Or, more holistically, it’s an ambiguity in the phrase “comment on a post.”
A post appears on a page, with a given url; and a post generally has a topic or theme.
So, a comment can be “on” a post in two different ways. One, in that the text of the comment appears on the same page as the text of the post, at the same url (“on-sub-url”, we might call this sense). Or a comment can be “on” a post in that the content of the comment refers to or discusses the topic or theme of the post (“on-sub-topic”).
Accordingly, “comments turned off on this post” can describe or prescribe a lack of comments that are on-sub-url or on-sub-topic or both. More fully, “comments turned off on this post” can mean:
1) “there will be no comments on-sub-url this post, though comments on-sub-topic are permitted”: the page (url) on which this post appears will not host any comments (though the topic or theme of the post may be referred to and discussed on other pages);
2) “there will be no comments on-sub-topic this post, though comments on-sub-url are permitted”: the topic or theme of this post may not be referred to or discussed (though the page on which this post appears will host comments that discuss other topics);
3) “there will be no comments on-sub-topic or on-sub-url”: the page (url) on which this post appears will not host any comments, and the topic of this post cannot be referred to or discussed on other pages, either.
I had never noticed that ambiguity before. I suppose I had always taken “comments turned off on this post” only in sense (1), i.e. as the claim that a particular url was not hosting comments, rather than in sense (3), that the topic of the post cannot be discussed or referred to elsewhere, either.
Well. Live and learn.
John Quiggin 01.06.21 at 3:17 am
@Oldster (and others) In the absence of the brand-new Room for Debate thread, there would be no issue here. Somebody using (say) Eszter’s thread on books to comment on Chris’ post would clearly be out of line.
Given that Chris has closed comments, I don’t think it’s appropriate to use Room for Debate to get around this. But if there is another post on the same general topic, I don’t think it would be off-limits to respond to points made by Chris.
JimV 01.06.21 at 2:54 pm
I’ll drag out an anecdotal example I’ve used before: while driving through a side street in Schenectady, the driver (who grew up there) noticed a parked police car and did a double-take at the person inside it. He then exclaimed, “That does it! Every single bully and punk I knew in high school is now on the Schenectady police force!”
So I think there might be a general problem with the sort of people attracted to police work in a country with a macho gun-culture, acerbated by by racial discrimination. Perhaps weeding out the ones who are racially discriminatory might go a long way toward solving the general problem, though.
CHETAN R MURTHY 01.06.21 at 8:01 pm
Kiwanda @ 43: Oh yes, it’s all about your cherry-picked examples. Meanwhile, as I write this, seditious terrorists attempt to overturn a legitimate election in the USA, and don’t get shot, kettled, beaten, gassed, nothing. They take over the Capitol, halt an in-progress session, and …. bupkis. Gosh I wonder why, when we know that demonstrably nonviolent protests this summer in DC were met with all of the above responses.
Gosh I wonder why.
Kiwanda 01.06.21 at 9:40 pm
nastywoman:
Usually, I ignore your effluvia, and when I don’t ignore it, I can’t make heads or tails of it. Can you (or somebody) tell me what this means and how it’s relevant to anything being discussed here, in particular by me? I think it might be that you’re pointing out the vast and horrific dead from covid, including especially people of color, and how much of that suffering is due to the disastrous mis-leadership by Trump. Yes, of course. This is not news, nor I think does anybody here doubt it. Could you squeeze out a few more dribbles, to at least confirm or deny this interpretation?
Alex K. 01.06.21 at 11:03 pm
I’d suggest Cocktails this time around – I’ve just found out that the comments to The Day After Brexit are closed but hope my comment wouldn’t be out of place here.
@J-D (57, 61), Tm (79):
The British regulatory state is a complex and convoluted subject. There’s more literature on it than I’d be able to consume, let alone digest, if I had the time and willingness. I can only claim with some confidence that it did not spring into being ex nihilo in 1972 or 1992. It probably owes its existence to the world wars, especially WWII.
Sometimes looking at just one small segment helps cut the corners and get a feel for the workings of the whole system. Prof. David Jukes at the University of Reading maintains a website that’s a treasure trove of food-related laws, orders and regulations going back decades. It would also be nice to browse the archives of the British Food Journal but they are behind a paywall.
The Ministry of Food, responsible for food rationing during WWII, was still in place in 1953 – headed by a Liberal politician under a Conservative PM. It was Gwilym Lloyd George, the son of the last Liberal PM and a National Liberal himself, who signed the marmalade and chocolate codes mentioned above. Here’s another snippet from one of his regulatory orders (approved by Parliament), this time on drinks, from December 1953:
This is a machine-code level of detail, almost: statutorizing an old Scottish cocktail in perfect bureaucratese. Note that the minister is amending his own order from the same year – the need to constantly adjust those regulations was becoming obvious if it hadn’t been from the start. Still, instead of letting manufacturers label drinks based on a brief set of general principles (the commonsense, “Common Law” approach), the minister keeps digging deeper.
Kiwanda 01.07.21 at 2:43 pm
Chetan R Murthy:
The major difference was race, probably it was that. Were you not aware of the different treatment of protesters due to race? It’s well known. Although it’s not hard to find videos of police brutality against white protesters, as well. It’s not a contest. (Well, it shouldn’t be.)
I see that you’re not trying to say anything in support of your claim that a San Francisco Board of Education member is an “outlier”, or that I took her out of context, and that you continue to ignore the NYC school’s use of the “modern” idea of “white supremacy”, and that you continue to have blithe disregard for the “cherry picked” killing-without-consequence of Daniel Shaver, Joseph Hutcheson, Dylan Noble, Troy Goode, Matthew Russo, Kelly Thomas, John Wrana, Jason Wescott, Allan DeVillena, Eugene Mallory, Deven Guilford, Gilbert Flores, and more. We all agree that black lives matter. The difference is, you seem to think that other lives don’t.
(But please, use the word “po-po” one more time, if you don’t mind.)
nastywoman 01.07.21 at 2:45 pm
@49
”Could you squeeze out a few more dribbles, to at least confirm or deny this interpretation”?
Yes I can –
AND I can confirm your ”interpretation” – adding – perhaps? – that my most important point was the reference to your ”piles and piles” –
you never delivered –
and so I tried to make a… a ”connection” to the real existing ”piles and piles” of killed Americans.
(very much so in the spirit of this thread about ”thread derailment”and how it’s relevant to anything being discussed here, in particular by YOU)
And as Crooked Timber is a blog where commenters are pretty familiar with ”poetic” or ”philosophical” references –
(or even with ”rapping” if they are younger)
YOU probably understood ALL of my reference – contraire to what you wrote in your introduction – and otherwise you just wanted to be…
NOT NICE
to
ME!
And see –
that even ”rhymed” –
AND how about using:
NOT NICE
to
ME
as the title for the Open Threads?
Like it even better than:
”But now to something completely different”!
reason 01.07.21 at 2:56 pm
@Alex K 50
Re regulations and marmalade – I haven’t actually seen if anybody pointed out that “Marmalade” is actually the common German word for jam and that if anybody should be put out about the EU regulation it should be the 100 million or so German speakers in the EU. This regulation was almost certainly put in for the sake of the English.
@Chetan Murphy 48
Exactly, the contrast wasn’t exactly hard to miss and makes denial of the bias look pretty stupid.
nastywoman 01.07.21 at 3:00 pm
OR –
should we call it:
Insurection?
(Alles mit Absicht)
reason 01.07.21 at 3:02 pm
As an aside to the point about marmalade – what has always been a puzzle to me is what groups take hold grudges about something, there seems very little logic to it. For instance the French have this massive grudge against the English that is hard to understand (the early wars between the English and French were basically internal squabbles related to the English Norman aristocracies claims to territories in France) as the English several times came to the aid of the French, whereas the Dutch have every reason to hate the English, but don’t. Why?
Hidari 01.07.21 at 3:23 pm
I don’t meant to get involved in this heated ‘debate’ but: ‘. Meanwhile, as I write this, seditious terrorists attempt to overturn a legitimate election in the USA, and don’t get shot , kettled, beaten, gassed, nothing.’
This is obviously false. Indeed, the news that a Trump supporter got shot by a cop is the main lede in almost all of the corporate news coverage of this ‘coup’.
I really cant be bothered getting involved in yet another freak out by white male middle class Americans about alleged ‘threats’ to their ‘democracy’, but see here:
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1347039064046886912
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1346984386881871874
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1346935308189921280
outpup 01.07.21 at 4:21 pm
I have to say, I think a hierarchical comment section (comments to comments are recursively contained in a tree structure) would be far superior to CT current linear structure. Much easier to locate comments, off topic sub-threads tend to segregate themselves. And additional open thread not a bad idea though.
CHETAN R MURTHY 01.07.21 at 7:46 pm
Kiwanda @ 49: Hey Kiwanda, you gonna answer me? Or maybe seeing the evidence laid out for the entire world to see, that white people get treated differently by po-po than black people, that white people can try to overturn a -government- and walk away with their bodies intact, where black people can’t even exercise their first amendment rights peacefully[1], has shut your menacious yap? Probably not: you’ll be back with the same gaslighting.
[1] and yeah, peacefully. The evidence is clear that the vast, vast majority of protestors this summer were peaceful, indeed that the ones perpetrating violence and crime were often white, and that violence escalated when po-po started in with it. Oh, and the testimony of lots and lots of white [because nobody trusts the testimony of Black people, amirite? heh heh] people that the po-po were out-of-control, the testimony of lots and lots of journalists, is pretty dispositive.
But hey, what’s a little insurrection between friends? You, your white supremacist friends, it’s all good.
Hidari 01.07.21 at 8:36 pm
https://mtracey.medium.com/only-in-your-imagination-was-that-an-attempted-coup-8bb8cc9fb39b
CHETAN R MURTHY 01.07.21 at 8:56 pm
Alex K @ 50: “instead of letting manufacturers label drinks based on a brief set of general principles (the commonsense, “Common Law†approach),”
Yes, and I’m sure we’ll all furrow our brows, when ketchup is declared a vegetable, too. The reason manufacturers aren’t allowed to use their own “common sense” is that they invariably come down on the side of cheating, poisoning, or murdering the general public.
Libertarians. Always with the gaslighting.
Tm 01.07.21 at 10:36 pm
Btw there just happened a violent fascist coup attempt at the Capitol in Washington DC.
Oops sorry, that was “Gonzo constitutionalism on the right” in response to “norm erosion on the left” (thanks, Corey Robin! thanks Crooked Timber!).
https://crookedtimber.org/2020/10/21/gonzo-constitutionalism-on-the-right-norm-erosion-on-the-left/#comment-805875 (October 2020)
“Now, the coup was incompetent, run by a bunch of yahoos… But this needs to be a serious warning to all of us, as does the entire four years. Despite being both incredibly lazy and amazingly stupid, Donald Trump has nearly broken American democracy. This is the culmination of 26 years of a fascist rise …”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/01/it-was-always-going-to-end-like-this, January 6, 2021
Trump’s brownshirts force evacuation of the Senate
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/01/trumps-brownshirts-force-evacuation-of-the-senate, January 6, 2021
“All of this was to grossly underestimate Trump. He may have done plenty of the cheeseburgers and Fox News stuff. But he also kept his eye on the great strategic prize: the creation in the US of a vast and impassioned base for anti-democratic politics.”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/12/idiocy-and-autocracy. December 28
“… the claim that somebody isn’t a fascist, or an aspiring fascist, or a nascent fascist, or fascist-adjacent etc. etc. because he doesn’t have a coherent ideological program seems odd, given that fascism itself as a historical phenomenon doesn’t normally manifest itself as a coherent ideological program, but rather as a set of more or less shared ideological tendencies, one of which is to positively celebrate ideological incoherence…
the fact remains that anybody who is promoting an authoritarian ethno-nationalist xenophobic anti-intellectual strongman cult, based on restoring a glorious mythical national greatness, that must now be recaptured because it has been sabotaged by both external and internal enemies, is at a minimum playing around with a Fascism 101 Starter Kit.
Trump is currently trying, with dead seriousness, to nullify the results of a presidential election he unambiguously lost. Even more strikingly, the entire Republican party is either doing absolutely nothing to discourage his efforts, or in many cases is actively aiding them…
Trumpism is a fascist movement, Trumpism has taken over the Republican party completely, and the Republican party is trying to nullify the presidential election it just lost, so you do the math regarding whether that all adds up to some sort of nascent or not so nascent fascist plot against America.”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/11/asking-the-wrong-questions-about-trump-and-fascism, November 19
“I also don’t get why examples of American illiberalism, racism, and militarism – past and present – should lead us to shrug our shoulders about active effort to push the United States much further down the path toward a herrenvolk political community.”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/11/defeat-the-fascist-snake, November 3
“The GOP may try to hide behind the constitution but they are openly attacking democracy in a way that I think is unprecedented, and does constitute norm-breaking.
Regarding violence, while there is no comparison to the 1930s, Trump did encourage violence and several people have been murdered by racists and fascists. Most observers do consider that a breaking of established norms, perhaps you disagree.”
https://crookedtimber.org/2020/10/21/gonzo-constitutionalism-on-the-right-norm-erosion-on-the-left/#comment-805811 (October 22, 2020)
CHETAN R MURTHY 01.07.21 at 10:43 pm
Kiwanda: here ya go: President-elect Joe Biden calls it out:
“used to say in the Senate, excuse a point of personal privilege. Well, over an hour and a half after the chaos started, I got a text from my granddaughter Finnegan Biden, who is a senior in her last semester at University of Pennsylvania. She sent me a photo of military people in full military gear, scores of them lining the steps of the Lincoln Memorial because of protest by Black Lives Matter. She said, “Pop, this isn’t fair.†No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that storm the Capitol. We all know that’s true and it is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable. The American people saw it in plain view. I hope it’s sensitizing what we have to do.”
J-D 01.07.21 at 11:00 pm
If Spain insists that Scotland be given no guarantees about special treatment for an application for EU membership, it is unlikely in the extreme that other EU members will oppose this strict technical compliance with bureacrautic requirements.
However, if Scotland does become independent, and if its application for EU membership proceeds in strict technical compliance with all the formal requirements, any attempt by Spain to veto it notwithstanding would be so unpopular with other EU members that it is extremely unlikely that any would be made.
Hidari 01.08.21 at 11:51 am
I’m old enough to remember the last time that there was an ‘attack’ on the structures of American ‘democracy’ and lots of middle class white guys got terribly terribly angry on the internet.
On 9/11.
Then we had middle class white male Christopher Hitchens telling us all with a straight face that ‘we’ were faced with the threat of ‘Islamo-fascism’ and, well, civil liberties, that’s old news.
After the grim pointless farce we yesterday, Oligarch Zuckerberg immediately banned the democratically elected leader of the United States from Facebook and Oligarch Dorsey did the same for Twitter (both men have no democratic legitimacy whatsoever of course).
The New York Times, of course, immediately published an article calling for (what else?) more repression and censorship to defeat the fascist ‘threat’ which is of course equally as vacuous and made up as the ‘threat’ from the non-existent ‘force” of Islamo-fascism.
And the chatterati will go along with this, as they always do, as this thread demonstrates.
Incidentally the white males on this thread who are so terribly terribly angry about ‘fascism’: you might care to think about this. All throughout this summer, Trump’s goons engaged in well documented attacks on BLM protesters, leading to deaths. The Democrats harrumphed and did nothing of course because they stand for nothing and are nothing.
A bunch of redneck idiots ‘broke through’ into an inadequately guarded building, did nothing except got shot and were quickly herded out. Necessitating a bunch of corrupt old white guys having to leave their seats for an hour or so (none of them were harmed, nor did any of them face any threat of any form at any point). Immediately, the Democrats are talking about another impeachment,* or even using the 25th to remove Trump from office. So for poor African Americans the Democrats do nothing, but for rich, corrupt white males they do everything (or at least they say they will).
Does this give us any inkling into the ironically named ‘Democrats” real aims, real objectives, and real concerns?
*They probably won’t do this, incidentally. It’s probably just more cynical grandstanding to inflame the base and avoid doing anything to help the starving millions of Americans dying of Covid and facing hunger and grinding poverty, very very far away from Washington, or Washington’s concerns.
Alex K. 01.08.21 at 12:31 pm
@reason 53: To shamelessly quote my original comment: “After the UK joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1972, it insisted that its traditional understanding of marmalade be reflected in EEC regulations… This went against the traditional German understanding of marmalade but compromises had to be made.” (On a side note, in Russia and most of the former Soviet Union, “marmalade” refers to dry fruit jelly with a water content of 33% max, so fruit jelly candy is the most common type of “marmalade” in those markets. Haribo gummy bears are sold as “chewing marmalade” in Russia.)
One can question, as Tim Worstall does, the wisdom of having uniform labeling laws for a market of 500 million consumers. I’ve been trying to make two points here. First, pulling out of the EU won’t exempt the UK market from the rules of the European trading block, whatever they may be. (The EU approach to regulation may become more rules-based and less detail-oriented over time, especially if the union expands further, but it would have little to do with Brexit.) Second, the UK’s domestic regulations are far more likely to revert to 1953 than to 1913 in terms of their intrusiveness and level of detail.
nastywoman 01.09.21 at 5:15 am
And this:
”Far-Right Protesters Stormed Germany’s Parliament. What Can America Learn?
It might be time to crack down, rather than reach out.
BERLIN — When the first pictures of rioters mounting the steps to the Capitol started to beam across the world on Wednesday, many Germans felt an unpleasant twinge of familiarity.
On Aug. 29, during a demonstration in Berlin against government restrictions to rein in the spread of the coronavirus, several hundred protesters climbed over fences around the Reichstag, the seat of Germany’s national Parliament, and ran toward the entrance. They were met by a handful of police officers, who pushed the crowd back and secured the entrance.
Things went differently at the American Capitol, of course. Still, even if the German protesters weren’t able to enter the building, the shock was similar: an assault on a democratically elected legislature. Some of the German protesters were far-right activists; several waved the “Reichsflagge,†the black, white and red flag of the German Empire, the colors of which were later adopted by the Nazis.
In the days that followed, Germans asked themselves a series of questions: Was this “a storming of the Reichstag,†evoking dark memories of the building being set on fire in 1933, which led to the suspension of the Weimar Republic’s constitution? Was it a sign that our democracy was under threat? Or was this just a bunch of extremist rioters exploiting a blind spot in the police’s strategy?
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
In a way, it feels inappropriate to compare what happened in Berlin in August to what happened in Washington on Wednesday. The crowd here was much smaller, it did not enter the building, and luckily, nobody was hurt, much less killed. The goals were different, too. American protesters wanted to overturn an election; Germany’s wanted to overturn a set of policies. And most importantly, while some far-right populist politicians backed the Berlin demonstrations, they did not have the support of the country’s leader.
And yet, the similarities are too big to ignore — and I fear that they indicate the arrival of a new phenomenon that may be found in many other countries, too: the decoupling of protest from the real world.
Related
Opinion | Jochen Bittner
1918 Germany Has a Warning for AmericaNov. 30, 2020
What connects the protesters on both sides of the Atlantic is a deep distrust in officials and a belief in conspiracy theories. In fact, many in both countries believe in the same conspiracy theories. The QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that President Trump will defend the world from a vast network of Satanists and pedophiles, is shockingly popular with many in Germany’s anti-lockdown movement, as it is with the president’s fiercest partisans at home.
The woman who uttered the decisive call to storm the stairs to Reichstag claimed in her speech that President Trump was in Berlin and that the crowd needed to show that “we are fed up†and would “take over domestic authority here and now†and to “show Donald Trump that we want world peace.†She was referring to QAnon”.
nastywoman 01.09.21 at 5:36 am
And a response to ”Greenwald”:
”KnoBrainer2 hr ago
There is no valid comparison between the country’s response to 9/11 and the response to Fascist Trump/Trumpism. Greenwald, Taibbi, Mate and the rest of you will be forever remembered as those who were more upset about social media refusing to fully amplify the Hunter Biden laptop October Surprise the way they did HIllary’s server/email nothingburger in 2016, helping Trump secure his first victory, then you were interested in helping pull our society back from the brink of violent, racist chaos, at the hands of the most destructive President in our lifetimes, and maybe in the history of this country. Our tattered oligarchy/democracy has barely survived 4 incredibly destructive years of Trump and Trumpism, during which almost half the country was lured into an anti-democratic, anti-science authoritarian pre-fascist, illogical conspiracy theory spasm that came within a whisker of giving him 4 more years to complete his destruction of our society, and permanently destroying any hope of holding the climate crisis down below a truly apocalyptic threshold. It will take a long time to address the damage he and his corrupt minions have done in every nook and cranny of Federal government, his packing of the Supreme Court with young religious zealots who may sustain a conservative majority for the rest of our lives, the hollowing out of the checks and balances such as independent watchdog AGs in government departments, the politicization of every government agency, the destruction of basic norms of democracy that underpin a commitment to the peaceful transfer of power, and lastly, but not least – the complete abdication of the responsibility of the Federal government to protect its citizens from the first worldwide pandemic in a 100 years. He has set an example of avarice, personal greed, cronyism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny and cynical politics that has resonated throughout the world. He has emboldened the racists, encouraged violence aimed at political figures, promoted lie after lie and you’re more concerned about liberal media censorship. Trump has fractured our country in a way that 9/11 did not, not even close. There’s no such thing as an absolute right to free speech. What would be your solution to the anti-science, anti-mask misinformation about the virus that has proliferated on social media and probably cost our country alone 100,000 lives?? What do you have to say about plots to kidnap the governor of Michigan? to Trump’s goading of people to oppose the BLM demonstrations, and his support of violent, racist policing of people of color (when the looting starts, the shooting starts)? Up until recently you and Taibbi were hiding behind your absolutely erroneous analysis of Trumpism, that the possibility of violence was overblown – I’ve seen people of your ilk pull out a Trump quote to the effect that (paraphrasing because it’s not worth the effort to look it up) “of course he’ll cooperate with a peaceful transfer of power. You losers were sucked in by him! You’re like a cabal sitting up on a hill somewhere, twiddling your thumbs while the gates of the city are breached by the barbarians. A month ago I posted here that you were completely wrong in your assessment of how evil and violence prone Trump is, and this week was the coup de grace moment proving it”.
nastywoman 01.09.21 at 12:20 pm
AND as I really…
loved –
what CHETAN R MURTHY had to say on the January 6 thread –
I would like to ask – if he minds if I quote him in a discussion on TI about the insurrection?
Especially the comment which started with:
I know your “Dems suck, heh heh fart†reflex is firing so fast you’re in danger of burning out those neuronal pathways, so I’ll be brief, try not to ovvertax your nervous system…
PLEASE?
Tm 01.09.21 at 5:37 pm
I have called out many times here on CT the attempt to minimize Trump’s threat to democracy by the anti-anti-Trumpist, anti-anti-fascist pseudo-left. (https://crookedtimber.org/2020/10/21/gonzo-constitutionalism-on-the-right-norm-erosion-on-the-left/#comment-805875). I was mildly curious whether this fraction would continue its denialism in the face of the Capitol ransacked by a fascist mob, fired up by Trump himself. As this thread demonstrates, they do. What I didn’t quite expect was that some of them would now openly take the side of Trumpism against liberal democracy in depicting the fascists as victims of “repression and censorship”. At least we now won’t have to take this fraction seriously any more, it has ultimately disqualified itself from any serious political debate.
Happy new year to y’all! A year that I trust will bring a promising new beginning. Let’s not miss this chance!
Hidari 01.09.21 at 5:53 pm
How are we all with the Defund the Police rallying cry, incidentally? I seem to recall, it must have been, oh, only last week, that a lot of people on CT comments threads were getting terribly excited by this phrase.
Now that it seems that the police are going to be concentrating on arresting (and doing who knows what else) to people with whom we politically disagree with, I take it that we have pretty much turned 180 degrees on that one, and that ‘give the police and, especially, the Feds and the CIA/NSA as much money as they want’ will replace it?
Kiwanda 01.09.21 at 6:35 pm
(This may be a duplicate, apparently some moderators have the novel policy that links are bad; in the absence of further guidance, here’s another try.)
Chetan R Murthy:
me:
Chetan R Murthy:
??? I did answer you: the major difference was race. Again (again (again (again))): 1. Black people bear the brunt of misconduct by cops, and in the courts. 2. Plenty of white people suffer in that system as well. These are both true. Why do you insist that 2 is false, or maybe, that 2 makes 1 false?
(And “po-po” again, that’s so cute. )
Hidari 01.09.21 at 8:42 pm
‘I have called out many times here on CT the attempt to minimize Trump’s threat to democracy by the anti-anti-Trumpist, anti-anti-fascist pseudo-left.‘
Oh the excitement! I haven’t been called a member of the ‘pseuo-left’ since the demented ‘Maoists’ of ‘Lastsuperpower.net’ used to term me and my comrades with that very name! At that point, the ‘genuine left’, according to them, was also fighting fascism and Naziism. The Naziism and fascism, that is, of Saddam Hussein, the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.
http://www.lastsuperpower.net/docs/analyse-pseudos
This discourse was quickly taken up by the Decent Left (so-called) of Harry’s Place (see the link above with its links), and was instrumental in beating down anti-imperialist resistance to the annihilation of Iraq and the Bush administration’s extraordinary evisceration of what was left of American democracy.
Neoconservatism is back , baby, and this time it’s personal!!
I can scarcely contain my excitement, although doubtless this time it will be different, just like all the other times.
CHETAN R MURTHY 01.09.21 at 8:52 pm
nastywoman: heh, please feel free to quote away, I’m flattered.
Hidari: have a care, you’re going the way of Glenn Greenwald. It is not for nothing that political scientists point out that the far left and the far right have a lot in common.
Oho, now it’s a political disagreement, to attempt the assassination of the Vice President, is it? Or are we supposed to take these “protestors” seriously but not literally? Is that it?
Dude, you’re skating pretty damn close to apologia for armed insurrection [yes, a number of those folks carried firearms].
CHETAN R MURTHY 01.09.21 at 8:53 pm
[oops, how could I have missed it?]
Dear Hidari, I’m writing you to let you know that some unhinged lunatic is posting under your nym. Sincerely, a concerned citizen.
KT2 01.10.21 at 3:33 am
Niceywoman, (my pref – happy to call you nasty if nec.)
where is the link for:
“Up until recently you and Taibbi were hiding behind your absolutely erroneous analysis of Trumpism, that the possibility of violence was overblown”.
Thanks.
nastywoman 01.10.21 at 10:52 am
”As scenes of carnage unfolded on the television in his private dining room off the Oval Office, President Trump was raging. Surrounded by a handful of loyal consiglieres, he watched as the rioters stormed the US Capitol – astonishing images that shocked the world and would signal the brutal denouement of his four-year presidency. Yet it was not the mayhem and violence that caused Trump to roar in fury – not the dead bodies, including a Capitol police officer who died from a massive brain bleed after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.
Far from it.
As a White House source told The Mail on Sunday last night, Trump was ‘apoplectic’ in embarrassment because the ‘white trash’ mob on screen made him look bad. ‘He was angry, not at the appalling crimes they were committing, but because he felt embarrassed,’ said the source. ‘When they first stormed the Capitol he was enjoying it. These were “his peopleâ€.
‘But when he saw pictures of the half-naked guy in the fur hat he started complaining they looked “cheap and poorâ€.
‘The Mail on Sunday can today reveal what the aide described as ‘the final hours of a deranged president in his bunker’. Fuelled by hamburgers and endless cans of Coca-Cola, Trump ignored calls from his closest political advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, who begged him to make a televised address and call off the mob. ‘He was shouting: “Why should I? These people are my supportersâ€.’
In desperation, aides sought out First Lady Melania Trump, one of the few people whose advice the president still heeds. Yet, almost incredibly she was in the East Wing of the White House overseeing a photoshoot for a new coffee table book about presidential artefacts”.
nastywoman 01.10.21 at 5:23 pm
@75
”Niceywoman, (my pref – happy to call you nasty if nec.)
where is the link for:
“Up until recently you and Taibbi were hiding behind your absolutely erroneous analysis of Trumpism, that the possibility of violence was overblownâ€.
Thanks”.
I think I posted it all?
Right here on CT –
and perhaps it will show up? –
as sometimes comments of mine show up after quite some time –
or
perhaps?
I didn’t post it at all? –
OR –
was far too ”nasty” –
AGAIN?
nastywoman 01.10.21 at 5:32 pm
@73
”heh, please feel free to quote away”,
thank you –
but as it took moderation here such a long time – that commenters on
TI already have derailed so many times –
that I believe –
we now discuss something completely different there….?
Or –
wait?
We might be back to Greenwalds efforts to write about something completely different?!
Hidari 01.10.21 at 8:12 pm
‘It is not for nothing that political scientists point out that the far left and the far right have a lot in common.’
Literally, the exact phrases from the cliches of the ‘Decent Left’ (AKA the Keyboard Kommandos) being regurgitated now, in the apparently never ending battle by middle class white males who spend too much time on the internet, against ‘Fascism’.
Ah…. Christopher Hitchens,’wert thou here. …Still in mine ear sounds, as of yore,
â Thine every word, thine every tone.’
CHETAN R MURTHY 01.11.21 at 4:44 am
Hidari@ 79: You’re invoking Christopher Hitchens? Maybe you’ve forgotten he ended his life as a cautionary example to all leftist/progressive folk? As, y’know, a racist abomination?
Hidari 01.11.21 at 9:32 am
Er….no I was saying that this is ‘our’ 9/11, and that, as with 9/11, there is a huge amount of hysteria in the media as to how ‘our’ institutions are under threat from a ‘fascist threat’ and how ‘we’ must all ‘come together’ and ‘work together’ to fight this ‘threat’.
It is highly likely (surprise!) that the actual definition of ‘working together’, when it comes to it, will be ‘we must all be prepared to lose a little freedom to gain a little security’. Which was, by no coincidence, the implicit motto of Hitchens after his rightward turn (and we will hear a lot more in the next few months, as with post 9/11, of ‘why are you left wingers defending fascism?’
Everyone is choosing to forget it now, but I am old enough to remember the 1990s when the Clinton administration, with the help of the corporate media, was very much into stating (and exaggerating) the ‘threat’ from white militias.
Indeed, the threat (unlike the threat from Trump) was real. Timothy McVeigh, a far-right terrorist, carried out the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people. And there were other militia atrocities at around the same time.
Clinton’s response was the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which gutted habeas corpus. So we have literally been here before.
Comments on this entry are closed.