All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Tami]

Laid off and now evicted amid Covid-19, a Houston father contemplates homelessness in a pandemic

Houston (CNN)Twenty-month-old Israel Rodriguez's tiny head peeked over the second-story Houston apartment railing. His 4-year-old brother, Fabian, emerged next to him, holding a package of toilet paper and an empty baby bottle.

Moments earlier, Deputy Bennie Gant of the Harris County Constable's Office had knocked on their door to evict them and their parents.
"Constable!" Gant announced.

The father, Israel Rodriguez Sr., answered the door.

"We ain't got nowhere to go," he pleaded with Gant and the other Harris County Constable deputies.

Rodriguez had plenty of warning about his non-payment of rent, both from his apartment manager and from the Harris County court. But the warnings didn't change his circumstances -- he still didn't have the thousands in rent money he owed.

"Since the Covid-19 issue, I've had no significant number of families that are crying like that, men and women," said Gant, shaking his head as workers threw the family's possessions onto the sidewalk. "It's tough. I've got six kids, six children myself."

Gant can't stop the eight court-ordered evictions on his plate today. They are among the estimated 30 to 40 million Americans living on the edge of eviction and already struggling with job losses in the Covid-19 economy.

For many Americans, a weekly $600 stipend from the federal CARES Act helped stall problems with paying rent and other bills. When those payments expired July 31, all the economic pain rushed in, just as eviction moratoriums lifted in the country.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

It's a bad look for a legislator to claim ignorance of the law. This is a bit like someone busting for drunk driving saying the bartender told them it was fine.

It's a bad look for the President of the United States to have said there were "Very fine people on both sides" after neo-Nazis ran amuck in Charlottesville. It's a bad look for the President of the United States to have suggested people inject themselves with disinfectants as a possible cure for COVID-19. It's a bad look for the President of the United States to have spewed a story about a mob of black suited terrorists on an airplane that was so jawdropping insane, it made even a Faux News host do a double take. It's a bad look for the President of the United States to suggest during a stopover in North Carolina that his followers vote twice in the upcoming election. Try again.

[Ragged Maw]

It's a bad look for the President of the United States to have said there were "Very fine people on both sides" after neo-Nazis ran amuck in Charlottesville. It's a bad look for the President of the United States to have suggested people inject themselves with disinfectants as a possible cure for COVID-19. It's a bad look for the President of the United States to have spewed a story about a mob of black suited terrorists on an airplane that was so jawdropping insane, it made even a Faux News host do a double take. It's a bad look for the President of the United States to suggest during a stopover in North Carolina that his followers vote twice in the upcoming election. Try again.

Looks aren’t everything, WPP............<pause>..........Let me think a sec about what to add to that.

[BeastieRunner]

It's a bad look for the President of the United States to have said there were "Very fine people on both sides" after neo-Nazis ran amuck in Charlottesville. It's a bad look for the President of the United States to have suggested people inject themselves with disinfectants as a possible cure for COVID-19. It's a bad look for the President of the United States to have spewed a story about a mob of black suited terrorists on an airplane that was so jawdropping insane, it made even a Faux News host do a double take. It's a bad look for the President of the United States to suggest during a stopover in North Carolina that his followers vote twice in the upcoming election. Try again.

Pelosi will most likely get Al Franken'd for this, too.

Meanwhile, Trump will coast to a second term on the (almost literally) bodies of the dead.

[babyblob]

It amazes me that so many people are making a huge deal about Pelosi. I mean pretty much every one on Fox news has brought it up as like the worst thing a politician can do. Meanwhile a sitting president encourages voter fraud.
And people are defending that!

Yes it was dumb of Pelosi. But to be honest I could care less. Not when there is so much other things going on.

[Kirby101]

It's a bad look for a legislator to claim ignorance of the law. This is a bit like someone busted for drunk driving saying the bartender told them it was fine.

I remember when you went after the GOP Congress people for flagrantly defying mask rules and laws. Oh wait, you never did.

[Mister Mets]

Writing for The Atlantic, Graeme Wood considers an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting. He is not a fan of the book or its argument.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...ooting/615925/

Last week, NPR’s Code Switch published an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. NPR summarizes the book as an argument that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.” If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders and crippling for a generation its ability to serve its poorest citizens, then I suppose I am forced to agree. Osterweil sees an upside. Looting is good, she says, because it exposes a deep truth about the great American confidence game, which is that “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” She came to this conclusion six years ago, and in her book, which is written “in love and solidarity with looters the world over,” she defends this view as ably as anyone could.

Osterweil’s argument is simple. The “so-called” United States was founded in “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist” violence. That violence produced our current system, particularly its property relations, and looting is a remedy for that sickness. “Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the ‘justice’ of law and order,” she writes. Ownership of things—not just people—is “innately, structurally white supremacist.”

The rest of the remedy is more violence, which she celebrates as an underrated engine for social justice. The destruction of businesses is an “experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom,” Osterweil writes. It is also a form of “queer birth.” “Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck,” according to Osterweil. “They rip, tear, burn, and destroy to give birth to a new world.” She reserves her most pungent criticism for advocates of nonviolence, a “bankrupt concept” primarily valuable for enlisting “northern liberals.” Liberal is pejorative in this book. Martin Luther King Jr. is grudgingly acknowledged as a positive figure, but not as positive a figure as he would have been if he had kicked some white-capitalist ass and put a few pigs in the ICU. The “I Have a Dream” speech was, Osterweil writes, “the product of a series of sellouts and silencings, of nonviolent leaders dampening the militancy of the grass roots” and “sapping the movement’s energy.” More to her taste is Robert F. Williams, who practiced armed resistance, and Assata Shakur, who murdered a New Jersey police officer and remains a fugitive in Cuba. The violence needn’t be in self-defense—Shakur’s certainly was not. Osterweil quotes the “wisdom” of Stokely Carmichael: “Responsibility for the use of violence by black men, whether in self-defense or initiated by them [emphasis mine], lies with the white community.”

By now you have guessed that I am not the audience for this book. I have a job, and am therefore invested in building a system where you get paid for your work and pay others for theirs, and then everyone pays taxes to make sure that if these arrangements don’t work out, you can still have a dignified life. (Easily my favorite line in the book was written not by the author but by her publisher, right under the copyright notice: “The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property,” it says. “Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.”) My job sometimes entails traveling to countries recently or currently destroyed by civil unrest, and that experience has made me appreciate the fragility of peace, and has not made me eager to conduct a similar experiment in my own city.

I am also from recent-immigrant stock. Osterweil euphemizes looting as “proletarian shopping,” and no one from a place that has recently experienced this phenomenon can take seriously her assurance that it can happen justly and bloodlessly. When I think of riots and smashed storefronts, I think of Kristallnacht. I think of American businesses built by penniless immigrants who preferred to forfeit their vacations and weekends for 30 years rather than see their children suffer as they did; I think of these businesses ransacked in 30 minutes and left in ruins. Osterweil at least has the psychology right when she says that looting can be “joyous and liberatory.” I have never seen a sullen looter, but I have seen plenty of shop owners crying next to the smoking remains of their children’s future.

Absent from this book is even fleeting recognition that anyone (or nearly everyone) might prefer the current nonrevolutionary arrangement. Osterweil does not say what property-less system of government or anti-government she prefers, but I suspect it is not democracy, a term she uses only sneeringly. Nor is it clear how she intends to move from the past disgraces and present unrest to her goal, whatever it is, other than by rioting and stealing things until morale improves. What do you do when the free stuff runs out, the businesses and ordinary people who invested in your city decide not to make that mistake again, and—oops!—a few shopkeepers get beaten to death? This messy process is the “new world opening up, however briefly, in all its chaotic frenzy,” she writes. To me it sounds like a prequel to The Road.

Osterweil is unable or unwilling to relate to anyone at all with anything resembling a sense of humanity. Comrades and enemies alike are described without compassion, emotional detail, or distinction as people endowed with feelings or moral complexity. Once cast as a villain, a villain one remains, with no intricacies of the human condition explored under any circumstances. In the NPR interview, Osterweil describes the Los Angeles convenience store where Latasha Harlins was shot to death in 1991 as the location of “white-supremacist violence.” That shooting, which came two weeks after the beating of Rodney King and contributed to riots that killed 63 people, was perpetrated by the store owner, a female Korean immigrant—an irony that surely deserves probing. But Osterweil’s great class war has only two sides, so a working-class Korean woman is effortlessly enlisted on the side of the white-supremacist cisheteropatriarchs. Osterweil quotes a communist magazine: “Just as Jews were in 1965, Koreans in 1992 were ‘on the front-line of the confrontation between capital and the residents of central LA—they are the face of capital for these communities.’” As explanations of communal violence go, this is contemptibly inane.

[numberthirty]

I remember when you went after the GOP Congress people for flagrantly defying mask rules and laws. Oh wait, you never did.

Which doesn't change that it seriously undercuts any attempt to get folks to take mask laws/orders seriously if you can't even be bothered with taking them seriously yourself.

It's not like you had to solve a riddle to figure out what the current mask law/order was that applied to that specific salon.

[Mister Mets]

Pelosi will most likely get Al Franken'd for this, too.

Meanwhile, Trump will coast to a second term on the (almost literally) bodies of the dead.

Pelosi's probably going to get what she deserves. People are going to make fun of her for a news cycle, and then move on to something else.

No one's perfect. Call me back when Trump actually endorses masks, eh?

We can simultaneously criticize two politicians who are in the wrong.

The Secret Service would still have an obligation to protect Trump. Ex-Presidents are entitled to Secret Service protection for the rest of their lives. However, it would be a lesser detail of officers. So while the Presidential detail switches out to protect Biden, the new former President detail could come in and drag Trump out.

The Secret Service are government employees.

If former President Donald Trump refuses to leave the White House, the secret service agents assigned to him aren't going to protect him from the agents assigned to Biden. They'll work together to remove an out of shape guy in his seventies.

[Kirby101]

Which doesn't change that it seriously undercuts any attempt to get folks to take mask laws/orders seriously if you can't even be bothered with taking them seriously yourself.

It's not like you had to solve a riddle to figure out what the current mask law/order was that applied to that specific salon.

Except it looks like she was set up, and I am sure you and mets would never condemn a Democrat before you had all the facts and were as accurate as you could be.

https://mobile.twitter.com/sfpelosi/...2F100214017776

[BeastieRunner]

If former President Donald Trump refuses to leave the White House, the secret service agents assigned to him aren't going to protect him from the agents assigned to Biden. They'll work together to remove an out of shape guy in his seventies.

Which one are you referring to?

[numberthirty]

Except it looks like she was set up, and I am sure you and mets would never condemn a Democrat before you had all the facts and were as accurate as you could be.

If we are actually talking "All Of The Facts..."?

The fact is that it should be incredibly simple for a member of Democratic Party leadership to actually get in touch with someone from government to work out exactly what the current mask laws/orders actually are.

It's not like we are talking about someone who has some sort of an excuse for not being able to work out something as "Basics 101..." as that.

If not?

Should everyone in America just be able to credibly use a "Well, The Owner Said I Didn't Have To Wear A Mask..." excuse?

[The Cool Thatguy]

Which one are you referring to?

The one incapable of using a peddle bike

[Kirby101]

Sure, we all consult local law enforcement before a haircut.

Lock her up! Lock her up!

This is much worse than the top US attorney saying he doesn't know if voting twice is against the law.

[numberthirty]

Sure, we all consult local law enforcement before a haircut.

Lock her up! Lock her up!

This is much worse than the top US attorney saying he doesn't know if voting twice is against the law.

I said that her lack of interest in actually making absolutely sure that she is in compliance with existing mask law/orders undercuts any attempt to actually get folks to take such laws orders seriously.

Which has nothing to do with what is in blue.

It is about if what you do hobbles attempts to get folks to take mask laws/orders that are in place seriously.