- A gallery of surreal paintings by Polish artist Igor Morski
- How One Law Banning Ethnic Studies Led to Its Rise. In your face, Arizona censors!
- Reflections on Our Obsession with “Calling Out” Cultural Appropriation
- ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES: Why Women “Prefer” Less Or Should Accept Less There’s some really sharp discussion here of the difference between an abstract personal preference and a preference in the context of available choices.
- FilmOn can use cable systems’ copyright license to stream broadcast TV on the internet | Electronic Frontier Foundation. This is a sensible and logical decision which might still be overturned.
- New Documentary “The Mask You Live In” Dissects Modern Masculinity | Bitch Media
- Another Troubling Police Encounter with a Black Motorist. A good summary of the arrest of Sandra Bland, and then her death by (alleged) suicide in jail.
- #BernieSoBlack: Why progressives are fighting about Bernie Sanders and race – Vox
- The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle – The New Yorker And Portland too, alas poor me. Not a short article, but very well-written – a page-turner, honestly. Living in Portland, of course, I had three people helpfully point this article out to me, starting with Grace, because it is apparently necessary that I live in terror. :-p
- “It’s important to note that there is no substantive difference between Walker and Bush on the nuclear deal.” | The American Conservative
- Oregon Sensibly Votes to Make Oral Contraceptives Available Without a Prescription | Mother Jones
- Shifts and living history | Comics212 Both in best-seller lists and in Eisner Awards, women in comics are a very big deal.
- Beyond the Model Minority Myth | Jacobin
- A.E.Brain: Gender Identity and the Brain – a Round-Table I haven’t watched this video yet, but it looks interesting.
- High schooler proves “No Irish Need Apply” signs existed despite denials – IrishCentral.com The best part is the extremely civil debate in the comments between Rebecca A. Fried (the high schooler) and Richard Jenson, the professor whose work she’s disputing.
- “I did indeed f*ck up”: How an online campaign against a transphobic comic completely changed the tenor of the debate – Salon.com
- Anita Sarkeesian On Why Women Don’t Talk About Online Sexual Harassment
- Paintings of the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian In Ascending Order Of Sexiness and Descending Order of Actual Martyring
- How 3-D printed arms are changing kids’ lives around the world – YouTube
- Scientists have discovered whether being a first, second or third child makes a difference – The Washington Post The answer: Nope.
- There’s a simple way to end gerrymandering. Too bad Congress made it illegal. – Vox
- ‘Hobby Lobby’ Is About Blocking Contraception Access, Not Religious Liberty
- The Unit of Caring discusses consent and the moral justification for statutory rape laws. There’s a followup post, too.
- Gardena Shows Why Police Can’t Be Trusted to Decide If Video Should Be Public – The Atlantic
- Don’t blame your expensive lunch on minimum wage increases | Joseph Mayton | Comment is free | The Guardian
- The Struggle of Female Carpenters – Lawyers, Guns & Money
- Labels, Not Identities | Thing of Things
- Sentencing Law and Policy: In praise of GOP Rep. Sensenbrenner making the moral case for sentencing reform
- Abigail Fisher, Please Stop Blaming People of Color for Your Mediocrity
- Fannie’s Room: Workplace Rule #3: White Male Privilege Is Real, and Yet Denied Against All Evidence
- How did he manage it? A man’s secret to a successful career, revealed.
- Link: Every Single Word | Consistent Panda Bear Shape A series of Youtube videos in which “every single word” spoken by a character of color in a popular movie is cut together into a single appallingly short video.
- The Debate Link: Executions and Their Alternatives
- The Debate Link: Aly Raisman’s Muscles “I was struck by this statement by [Olympic gymnast] Raisman, though, which is a stark commentary on how (female) bodies are viewed normally…”
- The Outrageous U.S. Role in the War on Yemen | The American Conservative
- Sentencing Law and Policy: Former US District Judge Nancy Gertner talks about drug war casualties she had to create
- Where the health care money is, in charts | The Incidental Economist
- Petition – Georgia: Add Outkast to Stone Mountain! How to improve “the confederate Mount Rushmore.” I signed the petition.
Re: #21:
I have two different reactions to the Vox article on gerrymandering. One is that I’m all for the premise that the existing laws against gerrymandering should be much more strictly enforced. Just about every State has a law requiring that districts should be compact and contiguous, but as you can see from the Vox article that’s not being enforced. Certainly Illinois is no exeception. A bill to change the law in Illinois to take re-districting out of the hands of the legislature and hand it over to an independent apportionment commission has languished for years. We need to amend our State Constitution if we have any hope to see it actually enacted.
Second, the article correctly points out that much of the disparity between, say, the U.S. House’s party balance and the overall vote across the country is due not to deliberate gerrymandering but to the fact that the distribution of party preference is geographically unbalanced, with a much higher skew towards the Democratic party in cities than the percentage of skew towards Republicans in the suburbs and rural areas.
However, I find this to be a false premise:
I reject the concept that the goal should be to be “fair” to the political parties. Unlike what you find in Europe et. al., there is no mention of parties as part of the political process in the U.S. Constitution. That was no accident. The Founders were no fans of political parties. From what I see in politics I agree with that judgement. Our political system is set up to minimize the influence of political parties and maximize the influence of individuals, both on the part of the voters and the part of the candidates. If we went to what I understand the article to mean by a proportional system, wherein each party runs a slate and then gets a number of seats assigned based on the proportion of votes the party wins, then a huge amount of political power passes from the actual candidates to the party bosses. Actual candidates in the end are directly responsible to the voters. Party bosses are not. In such a proportional system, the candidates are much more beholden to the party bosses than they are to the voters, and candidates would have much more trouble acting independently of them.
A good example would be my own district, in fact. Rep. Lipinski (D-IL) votes against provision of Federal funding for abortions and voted against the ACA. He fits the tenor of the district much better than someone who followed the Democratic party platform 100% – but my guess is that because of those issues he’d never make a statewide Democratic party slate.
I think that having a House of Representatives comprised of individual Representatives who are each beholden to particular localized geographical districts as expressed by their voters is a far superior system to having one made up of Representatives who are elected on the basis of an average of Statewide (or large region within the State) judgements on such things. Representing the interests of a given State as a whole is what the Senate is for. People should be directly represented in the House, not parties. It seems to me that parties would become much more dominant in a proportional system, and I think that’s a bad thing.
#15 –
I’m amazed that this was even a controversy. Born and raised near Boston as I was and with about 1/3 Irish ancestry, if you had walked into a group of my relatives and claimed that there was no such thing as “No Irish Need Apply” you’d have had a 50:50 chance of either being laughed at or punched in the face.
RonF, your concerns about representatives no longer being accountable is one of the resons why, in Germany, we have a two vote election process.
With your first vote, you vote for a candidate directly. The candidate with the most votes gets a seat, no matter how many votes their party gets (the issue of districts still exists in this case, but it is mitigated by the second vote). With your other vote, you vote for the party you want to vote for. The percentage determines how many seats the party gets, total. This works by having half of the total seats going to those elected directly, the other half distributed between party members according to a list that the party (statwide, citywide, etc, depending on election) agrees on – democratically – beforehand so that in the end, the total number of representatives equals the percentage the party got of the second votes. There is some complicated math in the system, and its not perfect, but it is still a lot more “fair” in the sense that it gives each vote equal weight in the final outcome regarding the percentage of representation.
Of course, we don’t have a two – party system, so the effect are different than they would be in the US.
(The US system, since it gives different weight to different voters depending on their district and state, would actually be unconstitutional here. But then, so would be the entire system of election of the president, since the vote is not cast directly. And, other than the history, I still don’t understand why with the modern media making sure people know the candidates, every American can’t vote for their preferred candidate for US-Presidency directly.) (This is not a judement of better/worse. I just find it interesting what different systems of democrathy prioritize.)
The American two party system results from our electoral process. If we switched to Germany’s process, we’d have more parties.
Short version- in a winner take all system, if there are three parties then it is tactically advantageous for the two smaller parties to band together into one bigger party that can actually win seats, because the alternative is winning nothing. Third parties can arise only temporarily before they dissolve in the acid of that reasoning.
Oh sure — it’s all about you and your anxieties, Amp. But what about those of us waiting for the next Mirka book, huh? When Portland is reduced to rubble, what will become of us? Could you at least pretend to exhibit a modicum of concern? We’ve been on tenterhooks about the Hunger Games movie ever since Philip Seymour Hoffman’s most inconsiderate departure; I don’t know how much more suspense we can take.
…sorry; that may have come across as a bit insensitive. We first-borns can be kinda high-strung. (Oh wait — crap!)
Actually, while I’m deep into making a book, that sort of thought passes through my mind a lot – “if I die tomorrow, will this book ever be finished? Who would finish it? Who would I choose to finish the drawing?” etc etc. The more exhausted and drained I get from working 12-hour days on the book, the more thoughts like that prey on me.
But I’m happy to say that the next Hereville book is complete and turned into the publisher. So even if the earthquake swallows Portland tomorrow, and me with it (no doubt emitting a giant burp afterwards), Hereville 3 will still come out right on schedule in November! :-p #silverlinings
Oh. That’s very different.
Didn’t mean to stress you. You know, Amp, we’re all quite concerned. You need to relax more, stop being so anxious. After all, who knows how many days you have left on this earth (or on the surface of it, anyway)?
So no worries. And even if the rumors are true and George Lucas is already planning for Portland’s demise by contracting with Miley Cyrus to play Mirka in the three prequils – that shouldn’t enter your thoughts even for a moment.
All better?
She’s an underrated talent, dammit! AN UNDERRATED TAL… tal…
(Goes and sobs.)
I mean, I would rather have a Jewish actress, but I’ll take Miley.
I’ve considered who I’d leave my drafts too. Probably a chunk ofeople with a “whoever feels like playing with stuff, go for it.”
My wife took drugs normally used for contraception as part of fertility treatments.
Those are powerful drugs, taken long term – just on medical grounds, shouldn’t a woman be checking up with a doctor while on oral contraceptives?
The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, as well as a bunch of other we-can-only-hope-they-know-what-they’re-talking-about organizations (including the AMA), have said that oral contraception is safe enough to be an over-the-counter drug.
As I understand it – from ten minutes of reading, so really, grain of salt – the biggest danger is that taking oral contraceptives could lead to a blood clot. But that’s extremely unlikely, and pregnancy carries a slightly higher risk of blood clot.
It’s been legal over-the-counter in a whole bunch of countries, as well, and apparently has been acceptably safe in practice.
New Video Shows Aggressive Arrest of Sandra Bland Prior to Her Death in a Texas Jail | Mother Jones
UPDATE: The video at Mother Jones no longer works, but here it is on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO1WROa4Aww
Sandra Bland death to be investigated as murder
Regarding cultural appropriation:
1. Some of my favorite things, like Spaghetti Westerns, are blatant acts of cultural appropriation.
2. The hair thing is interesting to me, because…
Okay, one of the sidebar links is to this piece:
Why it isn’t “Just Hair” Hair For So Many Black Women
Part of the thesis there, as I read it, is that adopting black hairstyles is an expression of privilege, because white hair isn’t politicized as black hair, “Wild, untamed hair is able to be a fun joke for the writer, Jenner and other White women.”
Except… well, white hair is politicized. These white women became the targets of twitter, had their hair analyzed and the morality of their hair deconstructed in an extremely public way by a legion of strangers.
Yes, it’s a different legion of nosy strangers than the ones that endlessly analyze and criticise the hair of black women, but their white hair is still considered a good topic of discussion, and their white hair is still subjected to demands that they wear it in a proper white way.
One thing that’s driving me further from mainstream internet politics is that people have this inability to recognize their own power in the media.
I’m also kind of moving away from seeing the concept of privilege for the same reason; it feels like theoretical ideas about idealized people often trump the actual reality of specific situations. The archetypal white woman may be able to wear her hair how she wants without having it politicized; the specific white woman in the center of this week’s twitter storm about cornrows most certainly doesn’t have that privilege, and we shouldn’t talk as though she does.
“Privilege to not be criticized” isn’t a thing.
Amp:
@ 13: The video has been taken down.
@ 14: Up to now, deaths of blacks at the hands of police have taken place in a confrontation, generally directly associated with detainment or arrest. Here the death occurred long after such a confrontation and there is no current individual policeman (or policewoman) that can be immediately shown to have been involved in the death. How this came about is a mystery, and needs to be investigated as such. The family – who have been on Chicago TV, since they’re from the Chicago area – claims that she was getting a brand new job and her life was on the upswing, so there is no reason for this and it must have been the police. But according to WLS-TV, the local ABC affiliate:
None of which proves anything, except that it’s too early to form any simplistic presumptions about what happened here. I think that treating this as a murder investigation is entirely appropriate, and I’m sure I’ll hear about any results ASAP around here.
RonF:
May I suggest “police officer” as a simple alternative?
Grace
Ron: Thanks for pointing out the dead video. Here’s a copy of the video that’s still working (for now, anyhow).
I’m certainly very interested in the results of the investigation, and it matters if Bland was murdered or committed suicide, obviously.
Nonetheless, if someone commits suicide in jail after a false or unjustified arrest, then part of the responsibility for that death is on the police. A very significant part.
Nothing I’ve read indicates that any officer Bland encountered at any time during or following her arrest has been eliminated from the on-going investigation into her death. She complained of injuries to her head during the arrest, and informed the arresting officer of her history of epilepsy. Because the dashcam video of her assault and arrest has been edited and the surveillance video of the hallway outside of her cell (which unfortunately does not capture the door and entrance to that cell) appears to be incomplete because it is only activated by motion, there’s nothing yet to indicate how many officers came into contact with Bland and no images to support what they may claim have occurred between them.
Edited to add that Bland also complained in the incomplete dashcam video of a hearing problem following the injury to her head, and of injuries to her wrist.
A few more links regarding Sandra Bland:
Sandra Bland’s arrest and death are a national scandal. Brian Encinia and the police are to blame.
Dashcam Video of Violent Arrest of Sandra Bland Was Edited — Vantage — Medium
Bernie Sanders becomes the first candidate to speak out on Sandra Bland: “We need real police reform” – Salon.com
It won’t surprise me if the edited video turns out to be some sort of technical glitch. But it’s something that has to be investigated and explained.
Grace: yeah, I tried to go there but drew a blank for some reason.
Amp:
We’re never going to know if that’s true or false. If she got physical with the officer and kicked him – as I believe he has alleged – then the arrest was justified. But there’s no way to tell, and likely at this point there will never be a way to tell.
Ms. Bland’s complaints of physical injuries should have been checked out at the law enforcement facility. I wonder what the records will show of that, and if she was checked out, what the doctor or EMT will say.
Mookie:
What I meant was that unlike previous cases that have been widely publicized, she was not killed at the site of the arrest. It’s not like we see her shot or tazed on video. Her death was some 72 hours removed from the encounter. Whether injuries she got then led to her decision to commit suicide 3 days later will have to wait for the results of the autopsy. I’m personally thinking the odds are low, though, that some cop went into her cell, beat her or otherwise killed her, and then hung her body.
I’m not clear what relevance epilepsy has to this. It’s not a mental illness and you don’t hang yourself as part of a seizure.
Understand that at this point I’m taking it as a given – absent the results of the autopsy – that she did, in fact, die from hanging. If the autopsy shows differently then all bets are off.
I thought it was standard procedure for the cops to take away from you everything you can use to do such a thing when they locked you up.
If Bland kicked the officer, it was after he put her under arrest, and therefore could not have been the initial reason for arresting Bland. Encinia put her under arrest while she was still seated in the car; we can see in the video that she hadn’t kicked him, and it wasn’t until minutes later that Encinia claimed to have been kicked.
BTW, HuffPost has a transcript of the video, which is easier to consult than the video itself because text search. It’s worth scrolling down to the end and reading Encinia’s account of the encounter to (it seems) a supervisor.
That’s not the only reason a suicide might be staged. If her suicide was staged (and I’m not assuming it was), one possible motivation would be if Bland died of injuries originally sustained during her arrest and someone wanted to cover that up. A similar cover-up is imaginable if Bland died of an epileptic seizure, especially if whoever staged the suicide believed that the seizure could have been set off by her head being hit during arrest. (Keep in mind that – as I understand it, I might be wrong – if Bland died as a result of being injured during arrest, and the arrest was bad, it’s possible Encinia could be charged with homicide.)
All of these are unlikely events. But that a woman who had just arranged for her bail and knew she was getting out, and knew she had good prospects (supportive family, new job starting), would commit suicide, is also unlikely. No matter what the truth is, something unlikely did in fact occur.
Melissa at Shakesville reports that the inevitable attempts to smear the victim, in Sandra Bland’s case, have begun.
I just watched that video – at least, the first 20-odd minutes of it, until she got put into the police car. Impressions:
1) She did not, in fact, signal a lane change. With a cop right behind her that she acknowledged seeing. I’ve had more than one cop tell me “You’d be surprised how often someone has a brake light out or something else minor and we find out they’re got an outstanding warrant or something when we stop them.” So you get stopped for piddly stuff like that, yes you do. White or black.
2) Everything from there to getting handed the warning looks routine. I know this from personal experience, unfortunately. But –
3) My Dad told me real early in life “It never pays to get shitty with a cop.” The first time was immediately after I, aged in the single digits, was in the car with my Dad when he got pulled over for speeding and observed how he dealt with it and the cop. And yes, I had occasion to pass that lesson on under the same circumstances to my son. If you want to not have something like this happen to you, practice these phrases and use them: “Yes, officer.” “No, officer.” “Sorry about that, officer. I won’t do it again.” Here is a public service video on the subject.. You may find parts of it offensive but it gets the point across.
4) Did the cop escalate this unnecessarily? Looks like it to me. I bet his Sergeant is telling him “You f’in idiot!” She was unhappy about getting a warning. Who isn’t? If he can’t deal with a little attitude, he needs alternative employment.
5) OTOH – it was just a warning. It wouldn’t even show up on her record. Throwing attitude towards the officer for getting a warning was just flat stupid. Yapping your head off to the cop about how unjust it is that he pulled you over (especially when he’s essentially doing you a favor by not giving you a ticket) and then throwing curse words at him is bound to get the cop to start looking for an excuse to give you some trouble.
6) What was up with that cigarette? Something she did with it set him off. And at that point, everything goes to hell. Did he give her a lawful order? Apparently. Did she defy it? Yes. At that point he was apparently legally justified in doing what he did according to that Slate article. It doesn’t look like he was too smart about it, though. I don’t see why the cop got so worked up that this ended up with an arrest.
7) I wouldn’t say her arrest was a “national scandal”. That’s a bridge too far for me. If she hadn’t died no one would have heard about it past her family and friends. I’d say her death is scandalous, but we’ll have to see why she died before we can go too much farther with this.
It’s clearly relevant because we don’t know the cause of death and suicide has not been proven. She reported multiple injuries on the scene and disclosed her pre-existing medical conditions. There is no indication, yet, if police followed protocol in reporting any of this or in providing her a mandated, post-arrest medical examination to check if her injuries could be life-threatening.
It’s also standard procedure to check on prisoners a minimum of once every 60 minutes. We now know it was nearly two hours between her last check and the point at which her death was officially reported.
Actually, please disregard my last post, RonF. I won’t be addressing you in this thread again.
The Shakesville article develops my question about why she had what it took to hang herself in that cell even further. Why does the intake form even ASK if you’ve attempted suicide before if it was not to be used as an indicator that they needed to keep an eye on you? I’m on board with the idea that once taken into custody, the police are responsible for your safety – even from yourself.
Oh, come on. Plenty of white women and white men have gotten knocked around for the exact same reason. It was a big scandal last year when a white female bartender got beaten up in a bar in Chicago by a white male cop because she decided he’d had enough and refused to give him more to drink. With other cops looking on and doing nothing, mind you. And if the bar hadn’t had video running nothing would have happened to the cop, likely.
Mookie, what we seem to have here is that Sandra Bland was right about her rights. Now she’s dead. Like it or not, every time you encounter a police officer you are at risk. Is that right? No. Is it real? Yes. Be smart and deal with reality. Doing something stupid – or foolish, if you prefer that word – shouldn’t cost you your life, but in fact people die every day after doing it. What happened to Sandra Bland should NOT have happened, and I hope that the cause(s) are determined and the responsible people suffer the consequences. But it that doesn’t change the fact that she did something foolish and now she’s dead and her family is devastated. The fact that the cop was stupid for arresting her and that the police should have kept an eye on her doesn’t change that. I’ve got kids, and you better believe I’ve told them both about things like this and how to avoid them. I’d rather have my kids alive with their dignity affronted than the alternative.
And that is exactly why I advocate restructuring the goals, strategy and tactics of policing. There is no reason that every encounter with the police should involve the risk of injury and/or death. We can have effective policing without that.
I read the transcript and it’s horrifying. It isn’t Bland’s actions that make it horrifying.
The problem with this line of thought is that it leads to the conclusion that we can never address racism, or admit racism exists, except in the minority of cases when a racist action is accompanied by an overtly racist statement (and even then only if it happens to be recorded).
There’s no way of addressing police bias, for example, if whenever a black person dies because of unjustified police actions, the response is in effect “well, the officer didn’t use the N-word, so it’s unfair to think that this case had any racial elements to it.”
No one is saying that police abuse NEVER happens to white people – of course it does. But that police abuse happens to white people, is no reason to say that when a black person is abused by police we shouldn’t talk about the racial aspect of that.
I believe smoking tobacco causes cancer. But that doesn’t mean that I could say that any specific case of cancer would not have resulted but for smoking.
I believe global warming causes tornadoes. But that doesn’t mean I could say that any specific tornado would not have occurred in the absence of global warming.
I believe racism causes the police to treat black people worse than white people. But that doesn’t mean I could say that any specific incidence of treating black people badly would not have occurred in the absence of racism.
If your goal is to find a villain for a morality play, then yes, epistemology is a bitch. But if your goal is to discuss social problems rather than individual problems, it’s not such an obstacle.
Nobody Really, with all due respect, I think that refusing to talk about the harm done to individual victims – whether it’s in the case of tobacco (many anti-cigarette commercials of my youth often focused on specific victims of lung cancer – sometimes recorded by the victims themselves prior to their deaths), global warming, or police violence – would be a guarantee of inaction.
Yes, I understand we can’t point to any single situation and say “this one! This particular incident would never have happened in a world without racism!” (Or very rarely can we do that.)
Epistemology is fine for academia – and would also be important in, say, a jury trial situation – but the quote Ron was objecting to was from Shakesville, a blog that is more of an activist blog than an academic blog. If activists want anything to change, then they’re going to have to be able to talk about the issue pointing to specific examples. And I think responding “but you don’t know for sure that THIS PARTICULAR instance is racist!” is missing the forest for the trees (or rather, for one particular nit-pick tree).
Please don’t attribute motivations to me. For the record, you’re completely off-base.
(Edited to de-snark by deleting one sentence. Sorry, Nobody!)
“We’re never going to know if that’s true or false. If she got physical with the officer and kicked him – as I believe he has alleged – then the arrest was justified. But there’s no way to tell, and likely at this point there will never be a way to tell.”
I find this line of thought common, and morally unsatisfying. When you give someone a warning, you don’t have to order them out of their car. You don’t have to start a whole chain of events that could lead to arrest. You could instead choose NOT to order them out of the car.
I don’t see why we have to say it is ok for a police officer to be able to cry “perceived danger” and get away with all sorts of crap that they totally didn’t have to do. This is why minority parents teach their children that you shouldn’t ever call the cops unless you are willing to see someone dead over the issue. But that isn’t ok.
Oh please, my remark was entirely snarky, so no need to hold back. That said — with snark or without, we’re articulating real issues here:
I believe (and I believe YOU believe) that racism is best demonstrated via disparate impact, e.g., Do blacks in custody die disproportionately relative to other ethnic groups in custody? But statistical inference does not capture the popular imagination. Rather, the public is motivated by a simple good vs. evil narrative. So we look for illustrative examples – such as this one.
But what if this DOESN’T turn out to be an illustrative example of racist violence? Now we’re feeding a different narrative: the narrative of the politically correct people who cry wolf.
I share people’s aversion to sexual assault. Yet I also cautioned against drawing a premature judgment about Tawana Brawley or the Duke Lacrosse Team. Stating a general proposition is very different than claiming that it applies in a specific instance.
So we face a choice: We can discuss the general social dynamic of disparate impacts based on race, with confidence of being reasonably fair and accurate – and ignored. Or we can draw attention by trumpeting dramatic examples of alleged racism, with substantial risk that people will accuse us of making allegations we will be unable to defend. Choose your poison.
I’ll stand by my original post: I have insufficient evidence to conclude that the police officer acted out of racial bias; for all I know, the guy was an even-handed asshole. Moreover, I find no special need to rush to judgment. The woman is dead, and the officer is working a desk job until an investigation is complete. If I had to identify someone who was in the best position to evaluate this merits of the police officer’s actions, it’s not obvious that anyone on this blog would qualify for the job. Thus I’m going to defer judgment until people who ARE in a better position to evaluate the matter issue a report.
No, my post may do little to promote a cause. So be it.
I’ve wondered about this.
I suspect the police office will have official immunity regarding the manner in which he executed his duties and exercised his judgment – provided he isn’t shown to have done anything SO crazy as to be deemed wholly outside the line of duty.
But what if he did, and thus lost his immunity? I could imagine people looking at the dashboard cam video and concluding that the cop had no basis to order her out of her car. So what if he did so, and this triggered a cascade of events that culminated with her suicide in a jail cell? Could the cop be held responsible for such an outcome – even if the outcome was not foreseeable?
In tort law, there’s a principle that “you take your victim as you find him” – that is, if you knowingly or recklessly harm another person, you are liable for the results of that harm even if the results were not reasonably foreseeable. The classic case involved schoolboys where one gratuitously kicked the other in the shin. Unbeknownst to anyone, the victim had bone cancer, and the blow was sufficient to 1) cause the shin to shatter, and 2) cause the cancer to metastasize, ultimately killing the victim. If I recall correctly, the kicker was held (civilly) liable for the victim’s death.
So we might conjecture that Bland, when stressed, was peculiarly vulnerable to suicide. If the police officer wrongfully put Bland into stressful circumstances, might he be liable for the resulting harm – even if he could not reasonably have foreseen it?
Disclaimer: The following response presumes that it was tortious to order her out of her car. I don’t believe that’s true. But presuming it was:
Harm must still be reasonably foreseeable. You’d have to convince a jury that every time a police officer orders someone out of a vehicle, it’s reasonably foreseeable that they’d commit suicide. Or you’d have to convince a jury that this particular officer in this particular instance reasonably knew that outcome was on the table.
If you kick someone in the shin, you’re liable for their kick related injuries, no matter how extreme. You can’t say that it wasn’t foreseeable to you that they would be particularly prone to that form of injury. The general idea is that you knew they would be injured by the kick, so you can’t beg off responsibility by claiming that you didn’t realize HOW injured they would be. But if they were injured in an entirely different manner than “impact to the shin” because of some strange idiosyncratic nature they have, you could probably avoid responsibility for that. Like, you kick them in the shin, and they get so angry and frustrated they punch a wall and break their hand. Barring specific knowledge of this tendency of theirs, you probably couldn’t foresee that outcome.
…to be honest, in my view, the rules on eggshell plaintiffs and reasonable foreseeability are not as principled as tort professors will tell you. I think they are much more ad hoc. But I think the ad hoc nature weighs away from that being an issue.
If there’s liability in this case, OPERATING ONLY ON WHAT I KNOW NOW AS SOMEONE WHO HAS CASUALLY READ ABOUT IT, it is my expectation that it will rest with the police department for failure to follow jail cell protocol specifically designed to prevent occurrences of this nature.
The responsibility for the policeman’s actions lie with the policeman. No question about that. I believe I’ve been pretty clear about my stance on the issue of individual responsibility over the time I’ve been posting here.
I disagree. We can do both those things in general any time we want to. And I think it’s fair to ask whether or not there is an aspect of racism in a given incident. But when the question is asked and the answer is that there was no overt racial aspect such as you describe (which at this point is the case), the simple fact that a given incident involved two people of different races does not support a presumption that racism was involved and that it is an example of institutional racism. The quote I cited from the blog you cited indicates to me that they are making just such a presumption. That’s not so much a discussion (which would be fine by me) as it is an assertion that needs no further discussion.
Ron, I think the problem with that is that pretty much everybody has subconscious prejudices that color their actions in ways they aren’t necessarily aware of. You’re assuming a neutral default, where race doesn’t necessarily enter into it until you can prove that it does. But I don’t think that’s the actual default. If everybody on that police force took the Implicit Associations Test and a large majority got neutral results regarding race, sure, that would be a good place to start from. But assuming a lack of racism in a racist society is like assuming that any given fish in the ocean is just as likely to be dry as to be wet.
I didn’t catch this, but Orin Kerr points out that the officer never ordered her to put out her cigarette, so it couldn’t have been a “lawful order.” It wasn’t an order at all.
“If you don’t mind” is not an order.
However, almost immediately he does giver Bland a “lawful order” – to get out of the car. Kerr makes an interesting first amendment argument about this – if the officer gave the order as retaliation, and in order to squash her speech, then it may not have been a lawful order as a matter of theory. But in practice, it was probably a lawful order.
I’m really not talking about what “your post” says or does. No one is demanding that you talk about the Sandra Bland case in any particular way, so your attempt to frame the issue that way is a strawman. The question at issue is whether it’s sensible to criticize another person’s post – in this case, a post at Shakesville – for calling the Sandra Bland incident part of a pattern of racism.
Your argument against this is that maybe future evidence will show that racism played no role at all in Bland’s arrest or treatment at the jail, and then anti-racist activists will wind up with egg all over their face. First of all, and least importantly, I don’t think this is pragmatically a reasonable concern (what sort of future evidence were you thinking might come up?)
Second of all, and more importantly, I’d say it’s a matter of priorities. I’m pedantic myself, so I understand the impulse to be a pedant, and to say “Melissa doesn’t know for sure that any particular actor was racist in his/her heart at the moment they acted in this one particular case.” But that’s trivial, and trivializing. Naming and shaming the racism in the justice system is, afaict, the only course that stands a chance of leading to anti-racist changes. Activists treating the Sandra Bland case as part of a racist pattern, rather than as a chance to be as pedantic as possible, are doing the right thing.
Third, it’s accurate to say the judicial system is racist. That the justice system – including but not limited to the police – has a problem with systematic racism has been well established. So it’s not like there’s any chance that activists are accusing an innocent, non-racist system of being a racist system. It is a racist system; there is no false accusation going on here.
Now, maybe you could say that even if the system is definitely racist, we don’t know if Officer Encinia is racist in his private personal heart, so maybe we’re being unfair to him. But the very best-case scenario about Encinia is that he’s a bullying abusive thug misusing his authority and acting out his heartfelt but non-racist desire to enact a police state. So, really, who cares? I’m not kept up nights worrying about the possibility that Encinia is a non-racist fascist scumbag who is being unfairly associated with racist fascist scumbaggery. Of all the injustices going on in the Sandra Bland incident, the remote possibility that Encinia’s choices were completely unaffected by racist bias is the least compelling.
On the subject of lawful orders, I’ve read one claim that the order to get out of the car was not lawful because no reason for it was given. The relevant passage (bold is the interviewer, regular text is Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project):
The whole interview is quite interesting (though, of course, the interviewee has a specific viewpoint on these kinds of issues).
There is a strong argument that Encinia’s choice to extend the traffic stop was illegal because it was unconstitutional, based on a Supreme Court decision from just 3 months ago.
ETA: But on the other hand, this blogger argues that the above analysis is mistaken.
Harlequin, of course I’m not a lawyer, but I think that Jim Harrington was mistaken – as far as I can tell, there’s no requirement that officers give a reason for ordering someone out of the car. The Supreme Court ruled on the “get out of the car” order in a 1977 case, Pennsylvania vs Mimms:
So it seems like police have pretty unquestionable authority to order someone out of their car during a traffic stop.
Some more Sandra Bland related links:
What police are saying about the Sandra Bland video – The Washington Post
Sandra Bland Death: Waller County, Texas’s Long History of Racism and Brutality – The Atlantic
A primer on jailhouse suicides – The Washington Post
Actually, in this context you’re not. Pedantic derives from the word pendant, meaning “attached to” or “ancillary.” Since you wrote the original post, your perspective is primary, not pendant.
Ok, I made that up. Still, I’m determined to show that in a war of pedants, nobody really wins. Just sayin’.
Not quite. My argument against this is that I currently have no evidence of racism.
Rather, I have evidence that an officer behaved badly toward a specific individual. Maybe he felt animus for that person’s race. Or maybe for that person’s sex. Or maybe for smokers. Or left-handed people. Or maybe he behaves badly toward everyone. Or maybe the man is an absolute saint who has never before treated another person badly in his entire life but this morning he learned that his daughter would not be getting the life-saving organ transplant after all yet had already burned through all his sick leave and vacation time caring for his daughter and so couldn’t take the day off and so was on the job even while being bit out of sorts.
I don’t know. Nor am I in an especially good position to find out. Nor do I imagine that anyone is waiting breathlessly to hear my judgment on the matter. Given these circumstances, I’m inclined to keep an open mind.
But as Amp observes, this isn’t about me. So let me add that if you find that you are similarly lacking in information, advantageous perspective, or duty to render a judgment, I encourage you to behave as I do. I will even be so bold as to offer this unsolicited advice to the authors at Shakesville.
Ok, fine, I’ll also offer a rhetorical hedge – a bit of a cheat: While I refrain from saying that smoking caused Joe’s lung cancer, I say that research shows that smoking causes cancer — so if you don’t want to end up like Joe, you should avoid smoking. I refrain from saying that global climate change caused Hurricane Katrina, but I say that global climate change models predict larger and more frequent hurricanes – so if we don’t want more Katrinas, we might want to mitigate climate change.
Similarly, I’d say that we have evidence that black people tend to receive harsher treatment than white people – so if we don’t like the kind of behavior we observed from Officer Encinia, we may want to take more steps to ameliorate racism.
I offer these rhetorical devices for other people’s consideration. If you find yourself tempted to commit to a causation argument when you really don’t have the data, try giving a head feint instead.
(Pedantic? Moi?)
So, “finding a villain for a morality play” is completely off-base, but “naming and shaming” is right on target? You know, this pedantic competition is harder than I thought….
But we are now arriving at the crux of the matter:
Sure, I’ll express concern for Encina. But in truth, he’s not the focus of my concern.
My larger concern is with managing societal racism. In short, is it optimal to treat racism as a loathsome disease, justifying shunning those who have been declared infected – and given everyone maximum incentive to live in denial of their own symptoms? Or could we achieve better results by suggesting that racism is not so much a characteristic of an individual, but of a society, warranting a social remedy?
So, in this case, how would you like the police officers’ union to react to this incident? Would we want them to say, “Hey, what’s with all the aggression on that video? Let’s get that officer into some appropriate training or he’ll give us all a bad name”? Or do we want them to say, “Racism? HOW DARE YOU SAY RACISM! What a vile thing to say. You’d better have a stack of supporting documentation ten feet high, ‘cuz we’re filing grievances at the very suggestion he engaged in racism….!” Pick the way you treat racism, and you can pretty much pick how people will react to allegations of racism.
I have a dream today. It is the dream that someday we’d treat racism much as we treat a lack of facility with math: In most walks of life people would freely acknowledge their shortcomings with neither pride nor shame, and could compensate by deferring to others. “If there’s no further business, we’re adjourned until next week’s lunch meeting. My office will pick up the bill this time. Julie, would you mind working out the tip? You’re good with that stuff. Plus our waiter is Hispanic; since I’m already under investigation for the Gonzalez incident, maybe it’s just as well that someone else make this call….”
MLK Jr. was not above calling people – including police officers — racists. But if I recall correctly, he also thought that the ultimate remedy to racism would lie not in shame, but in love. Maybe that was just romantic talk offered to garner good publicity for the movement. But maybe not.
I wonder if we could get the testimony of police officers about whether their choices are “completely unaffected by racist bias” – and, if not, what this says about their fitness for the job.
That said, sometimes it may be optimal to sacrifice individuals for the benefit of society. Maybe the public extends to officers too much benefit of a doubt, especially where members of suspect categories are concerned, and the video from this case will prompt society to rein in this deference. And maybe the social good that results will outweigh the harm to Encinia. To some extent, police officers volunteer to put themselves in harm’s way for the good of society, so perhaps this is all in the line of duty anyway.
It’s a viewpoint. It may be Shakesville’s viewpoint. I don’t regard it as a crazy viewpoint.
But it is not yet my viewpoint.
Amp is right: I have a penchant for certain kinds of precision (pedantry?) that not everyone values. But it’s not entirely right that my views toward Encinia are driven by a desire to avoid error at all cost. They are also driven by a desire to remove some of the stigma of racism in individuals and shifting the focus to racism in society — thereby enabling a more honest assessment of the situation and the appropriate remedial policies.
So, like Shakesville, I also have an agenda. Mine just differs from theirs. And while my perspective may not yet carry much weight, I would not characterize it as a strawman.
Amp @ 43:
Actually, that is not some new holding. I researched this issue on a case once and there was Supreme Court, Appeals Court (and State Court) precedent going back to the 80’s, and maybe earlier.
But, to your other point, I am not sure that this is a lawful order. First of all, as you note, some of these “orders” are not framed as orders. And, is it a lawful order to tell her to put out her cigarette anyway? What is a lawful order? And, if the stop was just about over (as is my understanding), he had no business telling her to get out of the car, even if he would have been justified in ordering her to do so at the outset.
-Jut
“And, is it a lawful order to tell her to put out her cigarette anyway?”
——
The police officer has an obligation to prevent unnecessary damage if he anticipates something happening and is also permitted to protect himself.
With regard to the cigarette, he may have foreseen a problem with this woman and didn’t want to have an unattended lit cigarette in the car, possibly being tossed around in a struggle. If he tried to pull her out of the car, she could use it as one of a number of weapons against him, burning his hand. Or face.
This officer should have de-escalated the situation instead of escalating it. That is clear. He is also the one with the gun and power and has a higher level of responsibility. He was in the wrong in his actions because of that. Having said that, this woman could have simply accepted the warning for the problematic lane change and be on her way instead of continually shooting off her big mouth. At some point, you are just stupid with those kind of actions, because you are on the shorter end of the stick.
That is all well and good SWA, but he had given her the warning. What more was there for him to do, but be on his way.
I agree, if he were going to get her out of the car, it would be lawful for him to tell her to put it out, or to keep her hands in plain sight, or anything safety related. However it looks like the only reason he told her to get out of the car was because she did not want to put her cigarette out.
And, while she may have been shooting off her mouth, he asked her why she was frustrated. If he did not want to know, he should not have asked the question.
Now, what I can’t get is why she was upset by getting a warning. A warning is a get out of jail free card. A warning is like a foul ball; you get to keep on swinging. It is the Holy Grail of all traffic stop scenarios. Give me a warning any day!
-Jut
#8 (#BernieSoBlack):
O’Malley, attempting to respond to the protesters, said, “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter” — a phrase that’s been used by critics of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and which activists see as an attempt to dismiss racial disparities in police shootings. O’Malley later told MSNBC that he wasn’t aware of the connotations of “all lives matter,” which is itself pretty illustrative of the disconnect between O’Malley and the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
It’s understandable that this hasn’t gotten as much attention because O’Malley isn’t getting as much attention, but… Come ON. He may not have been aware of the connotations of “all lives matter”, but responding to “black lives matter” with “white lives matter” and/or “all lives matter” communicates that you don’t think we have a particular problem with valuing black lives, so clearly he agrees with the other people using “all lives matter”.
Sanders has, in the opinion of the Black Lives Matter activists and IMO, overemphasized the economic contribution and discounted the racism contribution to the problem. But at least he recognizes that there’s a problem. Apparently, O’Malley does not.
I wish the people spamming twitter feeds with “Bernie marched with MLK!” would stop ‘helping’.
#3 (Cultural Appropriation): I think there is way too much calling out/policing of cultural appropriation, in particular by people who are not members of the culture being appropriated. I’m also kinda skeptical/heterodox about the idea of cultural appropriation in general. OTOH, some people seem to use it more narrowly, to mean something along the lines of “cultural appropriation where you learn almost nothing about the thing you’re appropriating and you look really stupid to people who actually know something about it” or “cultural appropriation where you pretend like you came up with it when you didn’t”. In those cases, though, it would be bad even if you were stealing from people within your culture, and the cross-cultural aspect either explains why it’s adding insult to injury, why it was easier to get away with (without many people in the appropriator’s culture catching on), or why the appropriator underestimated/didn’t bother learning about the complexity and history of the thing being appropriated.
I’ve been looking up some stuff about Bernie Sanders and immigration following the publicity about his anti-open borders quote. I’m surprised that it’s attracted this much attention, though–it’s not as though being opposed to open borders makes him stand out from the other candidates.
I thought that this article in The Week was a good piece about open borders; it uses Bernie Sanders’ comments as a springboard but is mostly about the idea of open borders and whether the benefits we see from increasing immigration would continue to hold true with completely open borders. This sums it up: “Constant material prosperity and a reasonably fast pace of immigration might conceivably lead to a Star Trek-style utopia eventually — but saying we can double world GDP with this one weird trick probably won’t.”
This article from Alternet and this article from Reason make very different claims about Sanders’ stance on immigration. But perhaps the headline of the article linked to as a source when Reason claims he “has a long history of fighting efforts to reform immigration laws” says it best: Bernie Sanders and Immigration? It’s Complicated. (The paragraph-long description in The Week of Sanders’ position also seems accurate.)
I think the Dylan Matthews Vox article (that many pieces are reacting to) leans pretty heavily on the idea that open borders will have similar beneficial effects for immigrants as a smaller increase in immigration would. I’m not convinced, and while this isn’t the issue that I feel best-informed on, news stories about countries experiencing a surge of refugees don’t make it sound like sudden large surges of immigrants are the best thing for either the host country or the refugees. Obviously in the case of the refugees it’s the lesser of two evils–but would that continue to hold true with economic migrants and open borders? What about the effects on the remaining people in the countries they are immigrating from?
At a certain point, I suppose that economic migrants, at least those with access to good information, would stop coming once wages for immigrant labor dipped low enough. (Illegal immigration to the USA decreased during the recent recession.) So I don’t think that we’d end up with an increase in our population to the size of China’s–at least, not a permanent one. But I think that, just as it might make sense to have a tradeoff of slightly fewer minimum-wage jobs in exchange for a higher minimum wage, it might make sense, even looking solely at the benefits for immigrants, to keep the number of immigrants in the labor force from increasing too rapidly.
Just back from a week at Boy Scout Summer Camp. I need my week in the woods every year. Slept under actual canvas this time, not ripstop nylon – which meant that I also slept under a mosquito net held up over my cot by a homemade frame made out of 1/2″ PVC. I took two training courses and got the certifications for both. Aquatic Supervision – Swimming and Water Rescue required a score of 40 out of 50 on a written exam on BSA safety regulations and techniques and then a 2 hour practical exam in the water on skills and rescue techniques (including how to handle suspected spinal injuries and how not to let a victim drown you). Aquatic Supervision – Paddle Craft Safety also required a similar written test (oriented towards watercraft) and then another 1.5 hour practical exam on and in the water to demonstrate that I can paddle a canoe both with a partner and alone, switch ends with a partner while out in the middle of the lake without ending up in the lake, rescue someone who has dumped their canoe over in the middle of the lake by pulling their canoe up over mine, emptying the water out, putting it back in the water and then getting them back in their canoe, and then finally rescue myself by swimming my fully swamped canoe back into shore from about 400 yards out. Besides those certifications, I also did the mile swim. So I was at the waterfront a lot.
I also took a fair amount of personal abuse from the other (all 40+ year old male) leaders when they found out that I spent all that time one-on-one with the waterfront director. It’s advanced training, so one generally DOES take those courses directly from the waterfront director – who in this case happened to be a very friendly and quite attractive 22-year old woman who repeatedly expressed pleasure with the fact that unlike other adult leaders earlier in the season I took the training quite seriously and had actually bought the 300-page manual and studied it before I came to camp.
The thing is, if you are going to be waterfront director at a Boy Scout camp that means that you are 21 or over, have been on staff a while, have taken a week-long course at a National Camp School on how to run a waterfront, and have accepted that you are ultimately responsible for the life of each and everyone one of the 1000’s of people who will be swimming, boating, etc. at camp that year – regardless of whether you were personally overseeing a given activity or not – in the place at camp where a fatality is most likely to occur (and is most likely to be an adult having a heart attack). And will be executing that responsibility through a staff made up mostly of teenage boys. I pointed this out and told the guys to have some respect.
The Scouts mostly cooked all their own food, earned at least 2 merit badges each, played ultimate frisbee (a game I joined a couple of times), shot rifle, shotgun and (for a few older boys only) .22 pistol, swam, kayaked, made neckerchief slides and bird houses (the latter out of cardboard and fiberglass for Composite Materials merit badge, a new one), built numerous fires (fire is awesome!), made things out of logs and lashings, and generally ran all over camp and had a good time and learned a few things. I made some apple cobbler in a couple of dutch ovens that was well received.
Hm. “Reform” as a verb means “to change to a better state, form, etc.; improve by alteration, substitution, abolition, etc.”. On that basis, I’d say that Sen. Sanders isn’t an opponent of immigration reform – he just disagrees with many others on the left on what proper reform of the immigration system is.
Heck, I support immigration reform. But I doubt that most of you would agree that what I propose would be a “change to a better state”. By my lights, though, it does.
So recently I read this article about negative comments on a liberal-leaning opinion piece: It’s weird how people correct me when they think I’m a woman. I’m curious what others here think about it. My gut reaction is that I’ve seen those kinds of comments aimed at men before, and the difference the author’s noting may be more due to content than gender–but, given the places I generally hang out, I’m not sure I’m actually able to separate those two effects. (And, of course, also the confounding factor of women being generally more liberal and men more conservative, though there’s lots of scatter.) Any thoughts from the rest of you?
In anecdotal gun news…
A coworker’s husband committed suicide last week with a gun they kept at home. This brings my anecdotal total to:
Lives lost to guns: 2 (1 suicide, 1 accident or murder)
Lives saved by guns: 0
Has anyone here saved lives with their gun(s) or known somebody who has?
Given her job, I won’t be at all surprised if Grace knows somebody who has (or even has herself).
Harlequin:
My reaction is the same – most of those comments seem like comments I’ve seen aimed at men, including at myself. Although it’s kind of interesting that the comments that were angry at him were the most likely to misgender him?
I do think there’s definitely a difference in the quantity of really nasty comments female political writers get, but honestly, the comments this guy got in this case don’t seem out of line for what any political writer who writes a high-profile piece would get. If anything, they were rather polite.
And I’d really like to hear that. Not necessarily the story itself, but affirmation. I’ve read the statistics (and the counters to those statistics), but anecdotes can help make statistics seem more real and believable on a personal level. Given my beliefs, I’m a lot more likely to take notice of gun deaths and that’s why I’d like to hear somebody I know say they know of lives saved.
Jake Squid:
Jake, before I answer, could you define your terms? Clearly, we all know when a gun is involved in ending a life. What does it mean, to say that someone saved a life with a gun?
Grace
I know someone who stopped an apparent carjacking by brandishing a bb gun pistol in a menacing fashion. The thing had so little power that you can literally observe not only the bb in flight, but the downward arc of the pellet. But it was a massive hunk of gun shaped metal, so the guy who walked up to my friend’s car at a light and tried the door rethought his life choices.
But other than that, every other instance of guns being used or brandished that I have experienced or anyone has personally relayed to me has involved someone inappropriately drawing a weapon and threatening someone with it, or hunting irresponsibly in a residential neighborhood, or getting out a weapon because of a perceived intruder that turned out to be a family member in an unexpected time and place.
It shouldn’t be surprising that this is the case. People are irresponsible idiots. Lots of them have guns. Crime is comparably rare.
https://www.math.hmc.edu/funfacts/ffiles/30002.6.shtml
The issue is pretty much that except with dumb misuse of firearms instead of rare illnesses.
It’s a good question and a hard one to answer, Grace. Patrick gives an example that I think would meet my definition. I guess it would be a situation in which death or serious injury was avoided by use (brandishing or firing) of a gun to deter an aggressor/attacker. Is that well enough defined?
I know someone who claims to have brandished a gun outside his bedroom in his own house and successfully scared off a burglar who either thought the house was empty or everyone would be asleep (and I have no reason not to believe him). Not clear if lives were saved, but certainly the threat of harm was there.
If you would include an attacker getting harmed or even killed, preventing or limiting harm or death to a victim(s), it seems like there are a decent number of these, generally involving the police (and maybe this is at least partly what Grace was thinking about with her question…? Or I could be talking out of my ass…?). Of course then you’re trading one death for another.
Commentary on recent articles about women’s language and how it affects them at work, etc.
Whether or not you buy off on the author’s thesis (and I invite your comment), the graphic alone is worth looking at the link.
RonF, I think that’s a good piece, thanks for the link! I do agree with the author’s thesis–many articles I’ve read on that topic seems to come more from a vein of “I know women’s speech sounds less reliable, so I think it’s something women do linguistically, and not something about how I perceive what they say”. In the grand tradition of anecdata, my favorite is Act Two of this This American Life episode, which talks about how all the young female reporters get nasty emails about their vocal fry, even though Ira Glass is as bad as any of them.
Freedom of speech for me, but not for thee.
No one I know who owns a gun (and I know a few …) has ever told me that they’ve used it to save a life or property with it. I also have not known of anyone who has used a gun to harm either themselves or someone else. So on the basis of your scoring system I am 0 – 0.
I would say that defending yourself with a gun would include an either implied or explicit threat to use it without actually firing it.
Part of the problem with statistics regarding the use of guns by civilians for defensive purposes is that they often do not wish to report such to the police. In many juristictions until quite recently that would have put the gun owner in danger of having their gun confiscated by the police.
The other problem is that a massive percentage of self reported uses of guns by civilians for defensive purposes are probably really criminal acts of violence.
http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/6/4/263.full
Jake:
In the course of my employment, yes. Also, I know many others who have. Most of them were police officers or soldiers acting in accordance with their duties, but not all of them. If you hang out at the range for long enough, eventually you’ll hear first-person stories from people who have used a gun defensively. Probably the first story you hear will be bravado, but if you wait until you’re alone with some of the more reticent and thoughtful shooters, eventually someone will be willing to tell their story. Stressful situations like that are often complex things, and in my experience the more thoughtful a person is, the less they discuss them casually, not least because they find it distasteful to dredge up details in response to both enthusiasm or skepticism for the topic.
My experience as a gun owner is mainly in predominantly liberal circles. There are a lot more of us than most people in those settings think, but we tend not to volunteer it because of the reactions we get when we do. This leads to sampling bias.
Definitely maybe.
A guy once related this experience to me: his family was away on a trip, and he was home alone. He had decided to take his shotgun apart all the way (not just field-stripping) and clean it. All his ammunition was locked away. As he was putting the shotgun back together, he heard the kitchen window go up. He had bolt carrier assembly together, so he slid it into the frame and walked down the hallway. He had in his hands the action of a pump shotgun, but with no barrel, no stock (so he could not shoulder it), and no ammunition. As he walked down the hallway, he pumped the action, which made that loud noise we all know from the movies even if we’ve never heard it in person. Shunk-SHUNK. He peered around the kitchen doorjamb and found an empty kitchen, with the gauzy kitchen curtains blowing in the breeze coming through the open window, which had been down a short time earlier.
So, very probably a burglar opened the window and started to climb in, and decided to decamp upon hearing the action of a pump shotgun, not knowing that said shotgun would have been no better than a candlestick as a weapon.
In my mind, that counts as a defensive use of a weapon. (The guy who told the story regarded it as a funny story, and told it in that light. He was not trying to make a political point, but he clearly regarded it as a successful deterrence.) Yet, there is no actual functional weapon, and there is no visual display, only a sound-effect. It’s a defensive use of a firearm in the same way that putting your hand in your empty pocket as though grabbing a gun and threatening to shoot someone is a threat (which it is, and in my jurisdiction, also a felony).
(Also, if you want to phrase the definition neutrally, I encourage you to discard “brandishing”, which has connotations of reckless waving-about, in favor of “display”, which is value-neutral.)
Likewise, I recall a situation where a property owner confronted a trespasser and told his teenage son, “Go inside and get the gun”. The trespasser left, post-haste… and the teenager came out and said he couldn’t find it (the father had apparently moved the storage location and forgotten to tell his son). No gun. No display of gun. But belief in the imminence of a gun by all parties involved. Defensive use?
I, personally, don’t recall ever using a gun defensively outside of the scope of my employment, not to the point where I displayed it. That said, I have often, off-duty, put my hand on my gun while it was still concealed, and been ready to draw it. Does my body language in such a situation convey a message? Probably. At the very least, it probably causes someone who is sizing me up to wonder, “What does she know that I don’t know?”
(In the course of my employment, of course, I have drawn my sidearm or held a rifle or shotgun many times, usually at a low-ready (so not pointed directly at anyone), but once in awhile with my sights lined up on torso or head of a human being. But most people would probably say those times don’t count in the context of a discussion about firearms in civilian hands.)
I had a serious surgery, last year. During my convalescence, I gradually took longer and longer walks, sometimes after dark. I live in a fairly rural area where all of my neighbors get along with each other, except one. For awhile, I was not my usual spry self, physically, and certainly not up to defending myself physically, but I was perfectly capable of using a gun properly. So, during my walks, I carried my sidearm, as always. Probably the walks would not have happened if I had not had a sidearm to carry, thanks to that one neighbor, at least not until I was fit enough to sprint and wrestle. Carrying on those walks probably doesn’t count in anyone’s books as a defensive use (certainly *I* don’t count it as such)… but it had a positive effect on my quality-of-life and on my healing process, so I count it as a positive result of the fact that I own and carry a firearm.
So, y’know, in my personal life firearms have been a net positive. I completely understand that others have had different experiences. I certainly would not require them to own or use a firearm.
Don’t know if this helps at all with the question.
—
Lee1:
In my opinion, that’s sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) the correct ethical outcome, and, for a much smaller subset, the required ethical outcome. The statistical analysis may be zero-sum, but, while all lives are sacred, in certain momentary circumstances not all lives are equally worthy of protection. For instance, in a hostage situation where the hostage taker is being sloppy about trigger discipline and is getting more and more upset, anyone who’s got the skill should take whatever shot is necessary and available the moment it becomes probably necessary in order to save the hostage. That may involve shooting a human being through the brain stem. (And, please remember, (1) as non-soldiers our objective is always to stop, not to kill, even if the most effective stopping method is likely to have a lethal result, and (2) the instant the threat stops, so must the threat and/or use of force.)
Grace
Thanks, Grace, I appreciate your response. Stories of successful defensive use of guns are not something I’m likely to hear from my social circle. My work circle is full of stories murder/manslaughter, suicide, and incredibly careless gun handling during hunting/cleaning/target shooting but not a single defensive use. My only personal experience handling a gun was an example of its owner ignoring all rules of safety (I later found out).
So. As I said earlier, I’ve read the statistics but it’s hard to really believe them when one’s personal experience runs entirely counter. That’s why I figured I’d ask here. I know there are several gun owners here who are more likely to have heard stories of or experienced such situations.
Thanks again.
While we’re on the subject, my coworker who killed his wife got 32 months for it.
I’ll always believe it was intentional, but that’s just one reason why I wouldn’t be allowed to sit on a jury for this crime. I’m actually really satisfied with the outcome. The prosecutor seemed to believe it was murder but didn’t have the evidence to back that up so went for the next best thing. This seems to me to be the justice system working as well as it can.
Grace:
I agree 100% – sometimes the best solution is the very imperfect solution of someone getting hurt/killed to protect innocent live(s). I just brought that up to point out it should be part of the moral calculus in the scenario I mentioned, or any scenario at all involving a firearm, which you obviously don’t need to hear from me given your experience….
Speaking of Patrick’s BB gun story, I shudder to think of the stupid shit my cousins and I did on my grandparents’ farm with BB guns and pellet guns. Imagine “home movies” involving one of us escaping on an ATV while another shoots at him (with the goal of missing, of course, but you want it to look at realistic as possible for the sake of the plot…). Thank God the worst that happened was an ATV accident, not a gun accident. Holy crap we were stupid….
@Jake (comment #56): Several years ago a close friend of mine (z’l) heard burglars breaking in to the ground floor of his home; his wife and daughters were asleep. He got out his carry weapon (from a bedside safe) and went to the top of the stairs; the burglars ran away when they saw him with the gun. This particular group of burglars had been working for some time, with increasing levels of violence against homeowners when present.
When I was a child I saw two successful defensive gun uses in our home, but since the person wielding the gun was a drug dealer, they were never reported.
My brothers would shoot at a metal pie tin that I would throw up in the air. No problem there, eh?
RonF:
I’ve been known to ask fellow officers to take a wooden target downrange and run back and forth. None of them ever take me up on it.
Grace
There was a YouTube video that purported to show Korean soldiers (N. or S. I forget) holding up targets for their fellow soldiers to shoot at on their training range. I need to find that ….
US Marines still train with targets that are carried and moved by hand. Granted the Marines holding the targets are safely behind the berm and the targets are held aloft on giant sticks. Splinters are about as bad as things get, although the tall Marines do have to be cognizant not to raise their arms too high.
I had a similar experience, though it didn’t work out as well for me – perhaps because the burglars had become so damned sophisticated.
Gloria woke me up in the middle of the night saying she’d heard glass breaking downstairs. So I fumbled with the gun safe and ammo, then stealthily went down. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, and crept into the kitchen and found … nothing. Ditto the living room. And den. And bathroom. And closet. It wasn’t until I’d searched the last room in the basement that I suddenly realized I don’t know anyone named Gloria….
The Boy Scouts of America has shifted to accepting gay scoutmasters – and as RonF predicted, the Mormons are threatening to dump the BSA, potentially triggering harsh consequences:
[This comment was originally posted on another thread, in response to a comment I wrote there. –Amp]
@Ampersand
Why did you not reprimand Grace when she said?:
“You come across as wanting to assert viewpoints without being responsible for having done so.”
In that case she also didn’t quote me in my own words, but decided my intentions for me. Is it OK when your friend does it, but not OK for me to do it?
1) Aapje, please don’t attempt to lawyer the moderation. If you don’t like the moderation here, then don’t stay here. If you stay here, then you’re agreeing to respect what moderators here say to you, when they are speaking as mods.
2) There are countless
ofexamples of me moderating people I agree with, and of me moderating my friends, here on “Alas.” You’d know that if you’d been here more than a couple of days or whatever.3) That said, I don’t even come close to moderating every single thing that I in theory should moderate. I’m a busy person with a life outside this blog (as are other mods); sometimes I don’t have time, sometimes I don’t have energy, sometimes things I should catch go over my head. The moderation is, pragmatically speaking, always going to be scattershot in approach. If you can’t accept that, then this isn’t the blog for you.
4) In the case you describe, I don’t agree that I SHOULD have moderated Grace. But I’m not going to get into a back-and-forth with you parsing her words and showing why the two cases are actually substantively different, because I think that the effect of those sort of rules-lawyering debates – regardless of your intent – is to raise the time and energy cost to me (and other mods) of moderating your comments, and in that way to encourage us to moderate less.
In general, my experience is that if I get drawn into those sorts of moderation-grubbing discussions, the result will be to make the experience of moderating “Alas” tedious and intolerable, and the result will be a blog that’s worse for everybody.
5) So this is my one and only comment on this: Grace said “You are using the passive voice a lot, and displacing concerns onto other unspecified people,” followed by quoting six examples of you doing that “in your own words.” The claim that she didn’t quote you is not true. (Admittedly, they were sentence fragments, which can be problematic if the quotes were altered by being taking out of context. But looking at them in context shows that Grace was being honest; most of her quotes were cases of you unambiguously using the passive voice and/or stating concerns that you attributed to unspecified people, just as Grace claimed.) And that IS how your overuse of the passive voice “comes across,” regardless of what your intent was.
I can see the basis of your complaint; Grace’s comment did border on being about your motivations, despite the use of the “comes across” phrasing. But it was rescued by the fact that the root of her comment – your reliance on the passive voice to state views that you’re not taking ownership of – was unambiguously true.
6) In contrast, your claim that Grace was playing oppression Olympics simply has no support at all in what she wrote. That might have been an innocent error at first, but now it’s been pointed out to you, and you’ve replied without withdrawing your false claim. Nor have you defended your claim with any substance; you just attacked the moderation. In short, you are not covering yourself with glory.
7) Also, Grace is a moderator here, and as such basically isn’t subject to being moderated, because she has demonstrated time and again her commitment to the kind of discussions we want to see on “Alas.” (Did you read the comments policy?) If this double-standard seems intolerably unfair to you, this may not be the blog for you.
8) That said, if you do think a moderation decision is unfair, and can make a substantive argument to that effect, then okay. But complaints of the form “why did you not also moderate X? You’re biased!” are not likely to be well received. (An example of an argument that would have been well received is “you must have missed it, but Grace did unambiguously engage in oppression Olympics in the comment I was responding to; here is the direct quote of her doing so.”)
It’s also causing contention in the Catholic Church. National Council’s statement seems to be an enactment of what has often been called internally “local option”, wherein the chartering organization (which would be the Catholic church) could decide whether or not to accept openly gay leaders as they now are free to accept or reject female leaders. On that basis, the Archdioces of Louisville has refused to accept the application of a gay man as a leader. And local option is not good enough for the Bishop of Bismark, North Dakota, who figures that even local option taints the BSA’s moral stance enough that he has ordered the Diocese’s parishes to disaffiliate from the BSA (affecting 8 units).
Is Dear Muslima a species of “oppression olympics,” does anyone know?
I’d say Dawkins’ “Dear Muslima” letter is definitely an example of “oppression olympics,” although it’s a bit of an odd case since Dawkins was not arguing that he himself is oppressed.
Since it’s often easier to hear the big blowups than the little ones, I thought I’d link this Slate piece about a (benevolent, admittedly) sexist comment made by a male astronomer at the closing of the International Astronomical Union symposium, a 2-week astronomy conference held in Hawaii this year. Got a little bit of play mostly among astronomers; guy made a blog post acknowledging some of the criticism and apologizing; mini controversy over. It’s not always Tim Hunt or Matt Taylor when this kind of stuff happens!
The article also has a nice short discussion of the reasoning behind wanting diversity in science (or, really, anywhere) and what it means to have it.
@Ampersand
What about this: “I really think that you are putting words in my mouth, and having the discussion/argument you want to have. At some length, too.”
Here Grace blamed me for building a straw man (even though I honestly thought I was addressing her beliefs & building a counterargument to those). Yet she didn’t explain what her real position is. This unwillingness to actually state her position is quite unfair as she refused to indicate where I supposedly misrepresented her beliefs. That turns this comment into an ad hominem. It also effectively derails the thread, when one debater refuses to clarify their position, leaving the other debater to guess what they meant (a guess which would most likely be dismissed as a straw man again).
Then in the second part of the sentence she again accused me, of ‘having the discussion/argument you want to have.’ This is a weird accusation in itself, since the entire point of a debate is having a ‘discussion/argument you want to have.’ I assume she meant that I was off topic or something. But whatever she meant, she didn’t explain what I did wrong according to her. So again an accusation with no clarification.
Then she called me uneducated:
“I don’t have the time it will apparently take to educate you to the point where we might have an interesting conversation”
In itself that is a personal attack. She also never explained how I am uneducated. So once more an attack without any argumentation to back it up.
Oppression Olympics refers to an appeal to authority, where a person claims that their group has a unique lived experience that others cannot understand. Like this:
“I’m talking about my lived experience, and the lived experiences of people I know, and the lived experiences of people I will never know because they’re dead.”
This entire sentence is an appeal to authority and devoid of facts.
Have you read his twitter lately?
I don’t know, I actually think that’s boilerplate for accusations of “oppression olympics” (diminishing the seriousness of your interlocutor’s claims by insinuating that they are spoiled rotten and that their oppression is not oppression but a minor inconvenience compared to being murdered, etc). You know, eat your veg because children are starving in Africa / how can I solve sexual harassment at my workplace when sex trafficking of children exists somewhere else / I am not capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time so sorry.
That’s actually not “oppression Olympics.” Dawkins was using “Don’t you have more important things to think about?” by suggesting that Western women’s problems are essentially trivial concerns which only unserious people would waste time complaining about.
Re: nobody.really @79, there’s new information:
The Mormon church will continue to use the BSA as part of it’s male youth program and
In other words, don’t expect to see any openly gay or lesbian leaders in Mormon-sponsored units. So that’s a bullet dodged for the BSA. We’ll see what the Catholics come up with.
So,
This is how I treat political polls these days. I think there’s millions like me out there, which is why political polls have so badly missed the mark in the 2014 American mid-terms and the recent British elections.
Thousands of back-issues of Dave Sim’s CEREBUS are being given away for free.
Also, I’ve been really enjoying this series of articles on Autostraddle called Love & Canada, which chronicle the emotional and logistical challenges of moving permanently to another country for love (in this case from eastern Canada to LA), getting married vs. getting gay married, and other issues. It’s written by one of my favourite writers on that site, and I think some of you might really enjoy it.
A good summary of some research on stereotype threat. The visual-rotation one was new to me, and very surprising (though of course it would be good to see it replicated).
So here’s a question I didn’t think I’d be seriously asking:
Who do you think the 2016 Democratic nominee for President will be?
I hope it will be Bernie Sanders. But I think it will be Hillary Clinton.
You?
Also, if you don’t mind saying, who do you hope, and who do you think, will be the GOP nominee? (I have no idea myself.)
For the Democrats, it will be Clinton. For the same reason that it will not be Trump for the Republicans. No matter whom the majority of the party likes, the candidate has to be electable. Sanders is perceived as too far on the left, and Trump is… Well, I don’t know what he is, but I would only vote for him if he were running against Palin.
I consider myself independent. I preferred Kerry to Bush, McCain to Obama, and Obama to Romney. This time, I will have the right to vote, although in California, there are few, if any, Republicans who have a chance against any Democrats.
I’m not sure. I just don’t think that America is going to embrace a candidate who has himself embraced the word “socialist”, even if he now qualifies it as “democratic socialist”. Clinton is turning out to be damaged goods, but the bench is just real thin behind her. And, compared to the GOP field, very white and very old. Sanders seems to be the only non-Clinton that has captured the attention of the media or the public. So I’m at sea on the question. Probably Clinton. In my opinion, a lot of her supporters frankly don’t care if she’s corrupt as long as she delivers what they want.
As far as the GOP goes, put me firmly in the not-Trump camp. After that I’m going to plead that I need more time. The problem is that the MSM sees Trump as a great way to discredit and defeat the GOP in general, so they concentrate on every word that drops from his lips and spend almost no time publicizing the positions or speeches of other GOP candidates. I especially love it when “journalists” gush about Clinton’s quest to become the first female President but never do the same when talking about Carly Fiorina. I’m tending towards Cruz, but that’s a first impression and don’t hold me to it – I need to do more research here.
BTW – (and not that you or Pesho did this) I’ve noted that people tend to refer to all the candidates by their last names – except Clinton. I think at this point in talking about Presidential politics, if you say “Clinton” no one is going to think that her husband has decided to try to run for a 3rd term. Is calling her and her only by her first name sexist?
To the extent that the MSM wants to do this (and I don’t think they really do, they just want a great story), they’re having it handed to them on a silver platter by GOP poll respondees – Trump is leading most polls as far as I understand (see http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ for example), and has actually increased in popularity following his incredibly obnoxious comments about Mexicans and about/to Megyn Kelly. You could argue that’s driven by MSM focus on him, but at some point potential GOP voters (as a broad group, not individually…) bear some responsibility, especially since his popularity continues to go up as his statements get more offensive. Also, FWIW I’ve heard quite a bit about Carly Fiorina and her chances and historical significance, including on that liberal bastion NPR (Political Junkie podcast – I love it and strongly recommend it to all)
Yeah, that’s been something that’s been commented on for a long time, and rightfully so IMO. At one point (years ago) it arguably made some sense, but that’s long since past. People who say “Hillary vs. Sanders” or “Hillary vs. Trump” or whatever need to think some about how and why they’re referring to her that way.
Am I completely off-base in thinking that lots of people call Jeb Bush “Jeb,” presumably to distinguish him from his brother and father? Like this NewsMax headline:
NBC Poll: Trump Dominates, Jeb Fades to 3rd in Iowa, 4th in NH
I feel like standalone Hillary is way more common than standalone Jeb, but maybe I’m mistaken.
This seems like a Catch-22. You say that the MSM is biased because they’re spending so much time reporting on the GOP front-runner. But if they didn’t report on what he said despite his front-runner status – or reported what he said only as much as they report what people far behind him in the polls, like Cruz or Rubio, say – wouldn’t that be said to prove that the MSM is biased and refusing to report on the GOP frontrunner?
If the GOP base’s choice of frontrunner gets quoted a lot in the press, it’s ridiculous to blame the press for that. Expecting the press to help out the GOP by failing to report what Trump says is ridiculous and unfair. If you want to blame someone for Trump’s prominence, blame the Republicans who are supporting Trump in polls.
That said, I do think there’s a problem with the way the MSM reports on frontrunners and tends to ignore other candidates, and reports on good soundbites rather than detailed policy proposals. But that problem isn’t ideological (as Lee1 said). It’s capitalism. News organizations report on sound bites and frontrunners because that kind of reporting makes them money; they try and pick out clear, simple narratives (“Clinton vs Sanders!”) because that kind of reporting makes them money.
I’d love to see that reformed, but I think that any significant challenge to news priorities being set by the profit motivation is no longer politically viable in the USA.