johnfabian
1d ago
Saw a report that one or more of the agents were injured in the incident. Of course it could have been after the shooting and the person losing control of the car, but it does indicate that the person was driving towards an agent at the time.
This is de rigeur for police reports. These statements are issued reflexively as a means to pre-empt possible future negative consequences for police officers. Often it's a detail that is simply later dropped if it is no longer required. It only gets media attention if it happens to someone famous, like when Scottie Scheffler ruthlessly dragged a noble policeman dozens of yards the other year.
johnfabian
1d ago
One of the things about the Baltimore setting that has helped Simon and his works avoid being trite social justice fodder is that in a significantly majority black city the racial dynamics aren't oppressor/oppressed. The cops are black, the politicians are black, the wealthy are black, the criminals are black. So while the Gun Trace Task Force (and the Baltimore PD) victimize mostly black men, the GTTF itself is also majority black, and is ultimately investigated and brought to justice by (at least in the show) an all-white team. The white police commissioner who gets sympathetic treatment is fired and replaced by another corrupt black one. Simon has always seen the drug war and policing primarily through a class lens.
Culture war retrospective: We Own This City
I have a habit of not consuming contemporary media. There are so many TV shows, movies, video games, books, etc., and their number is ever-growing. There's an endless list of things you could or would enjoy, and a finite number of hours in your life. Trying to keep up with new releases is practically a hobby in itself. You can just have faith that the cream will rise to the top: quality will endure 5 or 10 or 50 years later, whereas conversely new releases tend to often attract uncritical praise and hype.
So over the Christmas break I watched We Own This City, a 2022 miniseries from David Simon, creator of The Wire. We Own This City was hailed as a sort-of companion piece to that show, a non-fiction story about Baltimore's infamous Gun Trace Task Force: a police unit that took it upon itself to beg, borrow, and steal as much money from the citizens of its city as it could. The show jumps around chronologically and across multiple plotlines, following both the development and deeds of the Task Force, its ultimate investigation and prosecution, reform efforts in response, and the investigation of a murder related to the Task Force. It got glowing reviews at the time, but that was to be expected given its critique of American policing and the bonafides of Simon. I decided to save it for a rainy day.
The show is really pulled together by a magnetic leading performance by Jon Bernthal as a sort of idiot savant corrupt cop Wayne Jenkins, replete with a fabulous white working class Bawlmore accent. He is the axis around which the whole show spins, and it’s hard to see the show working without him being so entertaining. He is simultaneously status-obsessed, disdainful of authority, resentful about a perceived lack of respect, and delusional about his own fallibility. But he also has a canny instinct about who to press and how hard, and things are going great – until they fall apart.
In stark contrast, the show grinds to an awful screeching halt whenever his counterpart (in every way) appears on screen. This is Nicola Steele, a (fictional) envoy from the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department to the city of Baltimore sent to spearhead police reform. She is in many ways an embodiment of the peak of “woke” politics in the United States, and given that I am not one to normally complain about these sorts of things that is an indication of how grating this part of the show is. It’s hard to judge exactly how on the nose this was meant to be, given that David Simon was and is very much not “woke” in the standard progressive sense, but it’s hard not to see a wealthy fat black woman (of course, played by a Nigerian!) delivering trite monologues of 2021-flavour social justice and fight off the urge to roll your eyes back into your skull. Ironically her role in the show as the deliverer of exposition and receiver of Long Monologues About What is Right makes her unintentionally seem like a naïve idiot who sucks at her job. But this itself is a trope of progressive art.
The contrast between her character and Wayne Jenkins appearing in the same show feels very bizarre in terms of how apart both the storytelling styles and quality is. The former is the embodiment of the worst of David Simon’s impulses: moral grandstanding, lectures to the audience, unimpeachable righteousness. The latter is proof of his genius: exciting, propulsive, complex storytelling with great characters and incisive social commentary. The other cast of characters are generally solid, though it doesn’t quite pop with the same kind of rich minor roles that Simon’s other great television work has. Some viewers and critics apparently had trouble following the show’s chronology, which I didn’t: there are a number of inventive ways the show informs you when a given scene is happening from the interstitials, appearance, and background details (something Simon’s shows have always excelled at).
It’s hard not to wonder whether the show turns out better if it’s made even a year or two later. The tidewaters would have receded just that extra little bit to take the edge of the moral righteousness. Certainly it would have been an interesting parallel to draw at the time as the US as a whole was experiencing the same pullback in policing that Baltimore had experienced 6 years previous that resulted in the Gun Trace Task Force being able to escalate its actions. Of course on the flipside, with the looming possibility of another Trump presidential run, things might have turned out worse. Simon has a particular loathing for Trump that makes for bad art (have I ever shared my thoughts on The Plot Against America here?) and he might have been tempted to make things more polemical.
My recommendation: if you enjoyed The Wire you should definitely check We Own This City out, and feel no shame in fast-forwarding through any of the Justice Department scenes. Regardless of the quality, you already know how that story ends! And if you don’t think you want to watch it, definitely still go to youtube and watch a bunch of scenes of Jon Bernthal as Wayne Jenkins. It’s a lot of fun. Here’s an example.
johnfabian
29d ago
The amount of data and effort it would require to a. constantly be passively listening and recording and b. uploading and analyzing it is simply too vast to be a workable conspiracy (at this point, anyways). It would simultaneously be too noticeable and not worth the cost.
The conspiracies you have to worry about are those that would be inconspicuous, simple, and easily-automated. Odds are you are far too unimportant to warrant active monitoring.
johnfabian
1mo ago
I read the first half of this book a month or so back on a friend's suggestion. I ditched it because I knew most of the public details already and the writing wasn't good enough to motivate me to continue. I must say that I echo your skepticism about the author's reliability: she starts the book with an anecdote of her getting attacked by a shark and a subsequent medical episode that is so unbelievable that I found it very hard not to narrow my eyes at everything that came after. It's the kind of thing where if you were reading the same story told by a source from 200 BC, your history TA would say "now obviously it didn't actually happen, but it serves as a literary device to introduce themes of the writer's concerns not being taken seriously by those in authority."
It did really feel like she just didn't get the problem. She keeps being aghast that these presumedly progressive, Good Thinking people would say they support Good Things, and then would actually act purely on avarice. Or that someone could pose as a feminist girlboss and then not actually act the part. She maintains that instead of doing bad things, companies should just say they are going to do good things, and then actually do them! And does not comprehend that she is part of the problem.
Unlike many memoirs, I can say I'm very confident this wasn't ghostwritten. The writing is very amateurish; it's awkward reading with very little flow. Example passage: "But things take a turn for the worse. Sheryl really wants the megaphone. Even though she knows Mark doesn’t. And she has a solution."
johnfabian
1mo ago
The very obvious rebuttal to this is India's murder rate. If the subcontinent is truly a hellish honour culture where maintaining face is prioritized above everything and pursued with fatal resolve, it's odd that its murder rate slots it in between Kazakhstan and Turkey. Obviously one could maintain that there's some massaging going on, but it's fundamentally tough to hide bodies and I can't believe that the official rate is that far off the actual rate.
I might be inclined to accept that there is a nugget of truth the post has been built around, this kind of petty zero-sum honour culture is not exactly uncommon in developing nations. But it seems greatly exaggerated.
johnfabian
2mo ago
I wasn't really paying attention to the NY election race, but for some of the World Series I was watching the Fox NY stream - and boy oh boy were some of the ads airing totally unhinged.
I'm vaguely aware that Mamdani is a sort of DSA-type, so I think it's fairly safe to bet policy-wise he's a bit out there, but also won't accomplish much. But it's hard not to root for him a little given the kind of frothing, incoherent rage he was generating.
johnfabian
2mo ago
Is it this, or that there hasn't been much demand for capital production of mass munitions in decades? The last war that used them in bulk was what, Vietnam? Every Western war since has been dominated my high-complexity munitions that often seem designed to separate the explosives from the fiddly bits. You can presumably build JDAM kits on any electronic assembly line.
I suppose one could quibble about what "in bulk" means, but there was plenty of use of artillery by western forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was the operational point of establishing firebases, outposts, and forward operating bases out in the hot areas: that's where you site your artillery, and then everything within a 30 km ring of that can be shelled within minutes.
johnfabian
2mo ago
This is a sort of pet interest of mine. I remember reading a book on the French revolution where the preface had a similar sort of comment: that every history of the French Revolution was really itself more a commentary on contemporary politics. It's an interesting way to go about looking at past media.
One I watched earlier in the year was Minority Report. For those unaware, it's a Spielberg film from 2002 starring Tom Cruise. In the near future bla bla bla, Washington DC comes up with a way to see murders before they happen, and arrest the perpetrators before they kill anyone. The suspects get sort of put into a coma and incarcerated forever. Then of course Tom Cruise gets framed for a murder he hasn't yet committed, and etc etc the program gets shut down.
This is of course was obviously pointed at US criminal justice, and particularly the debate over the death penalty which was a popular cause célèbre at that point. The problem is the film sets up the moral dilemmas very poorly. For one it turns out the "precogs" (who see the future) are never wrong; the film teases you with the notion that they're regularly making mistakes and imprisoning innocent people frequently but it turns out that the grand sum of their errors was literally just two times where the head of the program tricked them. The film tries to play around with this question of "fate"; can you really punish a man for a crime he hasn't committed yet? But because the program has been so successful at extirpating premeditated homicides most of the time they're stopping people who are literally in the act of killing someone in a crime of passion (in the opening sequence, they grab a guy just as he is swinging down to stab his wife for adultery).
So they try to make it out like this whole program is some clear moral wrong when they've actually succeeded in pretty much eliminating murder, and entirely without false positives. It's some real turn of the millennium optimism that the problem with the American justice system is that it is too effective at stopping crime. Easy to imagine this film being much different if it was adapted again today.
johnfabian
2mo ago
They imply murder, not very justified self-defence.
What I expected from the title was actually vehicular manslaughter.
johnfabian
2mo ago
It sort of comes from a period of time (1860s and 1870s) where the immediate success of the theory of evolution in providing an overarching material explanation for diversity of life on Earth engendered great enthusiasm in discovering similar sorts of grand theories that explained fully other disciplines. And while we eventually got some for certain of the "harder" scientific fields, obviously the softer sciences have resisted such attempts. Marx attempted to provide a grand theory of politics; it has clearly been about as successful as grand theories for history, criminality, economics, poverty, etc.
johnfabian
2mo ago
I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. [...] I wonder if the Churchill [approach] would have actually been healthier than the [Nuremberg trials].
Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.
Quite the opposite, really. Churchill of course wanted those involved in the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes tried and executed, but he was very hostile to any sort of indiscriminate mass revenge against senior German officers and officials.
In fact there was an episode during the Tehran Conference in November 1943 where Stalin made a "joke" about how they could just kill 50-100,000 of the most senior German leaders to prevent another war, and FDR responded (in a more humourous tone) that maybe 49,000 would be enough. Churchill, knowing of the Katyn massacre and much more cynical towards Stalin than the somewhat naïve FDR, stormed out and had to be convinced to come back and resume the conference.
johnfabian
3mo ago
This type of "hypocrisy gotcha" you see as a go-to defence mechanism is very frustrating to me. "OH, so YOU EXPECT ME to be BETTER than [my political outgroup]? Why don't you hold them to the same standard?!?!?!"
Well firstly, often people are. Not everyone is locked into a rigidly partisan mindset. Secondly if you proclaim you are better, loudly and repeatedly at all times, you have to walk the walk.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I'm gonna be honest, I'm fairly distressed over this.
Be honest and admit that these kind of "just joking" comments come from all sides. I don't like it, I think it's probably more insidious than people think, and at its core is corrosive to an open society. But if you think this is solely a "left-wing" or "Democrat" phenomenon and one couldn't trivially produce examples of Republicans doing the exact same thing, you're lying to yourself. Hell, it's not uncommon to see this kind of sentiment on this forum, albeit typically worded more fancily.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Suppose Hornblower is the obvious next suggestion, but the question is whether you want something in the same niche or something in the same spirit. The former is easy to find, the latter is hard.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Edit: FWIW I think Sanderson's world building in the Stormlight Archives is actually pretty good, it just gets dragged down by the plodding story.
I think people try to create some objective sense of what is "good" worldbuilding and what is "bad." Sanderson's worldbuilding is sort-of slapdash and relies heavily on rule-of-cool, which I don't think is a bad thing - it just doesn't work when paired with torturously meandering and overstuffed writing. It needs sharp prose and quick action.
johnfabian
3mo ago
The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence. Is there sufficient cause for resisting them on their own terms?
Your social media algorithms are almost certainly not feeding you opinions representative of "the left", just like "the left's" social media feeds are currently displaying the dumbest and most overwrought reactions from conservatives.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I think there is certainly a case to be made that following these kind of style changes are more ideological than abstaining from their use because they are fundamentally prescriptive rather than descriptive. It was not the common use of English speech in America or anywhere else to refer to males as she/her should they wish to identify as such, and neither was it common use to capitalize Black. Calling a human male he or a person of predominantly African ethnicity black is not some conscious political choice. Choosing to do otherwise, and beyond that making it an institutional requirement to do so, is what is ideological (for better or worse).
Yes you can argue that choosing not to rebel against convention is just as political a choice as doing what everyone else does yada yada yada but I think this misses the point, besides being needless sophistry. When describe things as being "political", they mean that the action in question done was with deliberate intent to make some kind of rhetorical or political point. Failing to try to make a point, or not even conceiving of your speech as political at all, is obviously inherently less "political" in nature.
I like to say that even if you must insist that a chocolate chip cookie recipe is just as political as, say, Das Kapital, you must at least be able to recognize that they are political to vastly differing extents.
johnfabian
4mo ago
"migrant" in the UK context almost exclusively refers to illegal immigrants, and often specifically the small boat kind
johnfabian
4mo ago
You might have been thinking of Ukraine, whose GDP per capita is a third of Bulgaria's.
johnfabian
4mo ago
KSR is very much a utopian socialist, and thinks that humans could - if we all sat down together in open conversation - Figure It All Out. I don't mind it, it's nice to have not everything you read be endlessly cynical. But this streak of his obviously runs through all his work.
johnfabian
4mo ago
I about wrote some of my reflections on the trilogy here last year.
johnfabian
4mo ago
A much more frustrating element of SecureSignals' writing is that he will often make some passing mention of some supposed ironclad consensus that exists on this one niche topic, that requires no sourcing or validation (after all, it is the consensus!).
He will then of proceed to conspicuously deny universally agreed-upon facts.
johnfabian
4mo ago
I finished four books over my holiday, including Pieter Judson's The Habsburg Empire which I wrote a short review of on reddit
Remember that "citibike Karen" incident that went viral a while back? Where a group of young black men accused a white pregnant woman of stealing a bike from them? I remember a lot of the response to that, even before it came out it was all bullshit, was "how fucking dumb can you be, how ideologically motivated, that your narrative of events could completely upend what everybody knows about how the world works." Or things to that effect. And they were right.
Now we have an incident where the same people who were making those (ultimately correct) mocking posts have turned around and decided that it was more likely that a mother of three decided to go out in a blaze of glory killing ICE agents with her car, rather than a bunch of twitchy gung-ho goons lit her up with little provocation.
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