Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[CGVT]

Nobody is "defunding" police in the sense that the Repubs try to make it out to be. It is as big a bogyman as SOCIALISM! ARGENTINA! ILLEGALS VOTING! CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER! It is all bullshit.
There will be, and should be police reform, mostly in the form of demilitarization and tightening up use of force policies. It is much needed. There will still be well funded police forces.
Jesus.
It's the end of the world!!!!

[froot loops]

[lineygoblue]

Denying that localities are defunding police departments is like me claiming that OSU hasn't beaten Michigan in football since 1997.

Its just not true.

[Mike]

Exactly. This is one of the most ridiculous arguments of all time. Police haven’t been cut off from funding all together, but there is a sizable movement afoot to reduce their funding.

It is incontrovertibly true that major cities across the country are reducing funding for police almost entirely as a result of the George Floyd incident. And that is completely absurd.

Less money going into law enforcement = fewer police on the streets. Fewer police on the streets = higher rates of violent crime. It’s a formula as rock solid as the Pythagorean Theorem.

The Minneapolis City Council voted (unanimously, I believe) to ABOLISH the police department. They are currently 200 officers short of their full staffing level due to early retirements and people who have left for communities who actually value law and order. This does not serve the citizens of that city well. It makes them less safe and more likely to be victims of violent crime that falls disproportionately on the black community.

[iam416]

Defund the Police is a slogan where the actual activist Progs mean exactly what they say and the partisan, white Ds want it to mean something else like some sort of nonsense that "defund the police" really just means no more chokeholds. LOL. It means defund the police. Full stop.

Fortunately, reality and facts are fucking bitch so the activists can't realize their goal. Instead, they can only significantly defund the police -- merely reduce police presence instead of eliminate the police altogether. But, that's the goal. The white Ds who like to tell them black activists what they really think really crack me up.

To be fair, the police union is, as with almost every union and certainly every public employees union -- total garbage. They trade on the importance of their public job to get favorable treatment from people across the table that aren't negotiating with their own damn money. They are so much like teachers' unions. They actually don't have much interest in serving the public. Their interest is in serving their members. Things would be a lot easier in the police world if you could just fucking fire someone w/o question. But, instead, the worst are protected because that's what unions do.

In any event, I look forward to how reduced police departments and increased "community please don't do that safety people" will help reduce crimes in high crime neighborhoods. I'm sure it will work out splendidly because, as we all know, you criminals are far more deterred by kindness.

[iam416]

Also, as I said then, as I said after, as I say now -- it's up to every community to decide how they want to be policed. It's one of the great virtues of our federalist system. If Minneapolis wants to vote to abolish the police department -- which THEY DID -- then so be it. If Los Angeles wants to defund he police budget by $150M -- which THEY DID -- then so be it. If Portland wants to defund the police by $15M and not enforce any sort of law against protestors -- then so be it. I leave it to those communities to decide how they want to be protected. If a few extra murders are the price of a reduced police presence and they're happy with that -- then so be it.

I really only care about my local police department and, to the extent the City of Columbus could bleed into my locality, that PD -- but not really.

[Mike]

It's almost as if someone can't come up with hundreds of news articles chronicling the reduction of police funding in major cities across the country in a matter of seconds. I wish they weren't keeping all this a secret!

[iam416]

It's not what you think.

[Whitley]

Nobody is "defunding" police in the sense that the Repubs try to make it out to be. It is as big a bogyman as SOCIALISM! ARGENTINA! ILLEGALS VOTING! CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER! It is all bullshit.
There will be, and should be police reform, mostly in the form of demilitarization and tightening up use of force policies. It is much needed. There will still be well funded police forces.
Jesus.
It's the end of the world!!!!

And take some of that money and put into mental health and mental health facilities.

[CGVT]

The “movement” is dead except in the minds of paranoid right wingers and conservative news talking heads. Much needed police reform is coming though. It is about time

[Jeff Buchanan]

I'm finding it is increasingly difficult to get COVID facts and I believe that is because governments are filtering them. Two cases in point: (1) rates of vaccination/availability of approved vaccines. (2) Is the virus expanding or contracting?

Information in the first case - rates of vaccination/vaccine availability - gets purposely obscured by governments that wish to deflect blame for serious errors made in the procurement and distribution of them to their citizens. Contributing is competition between big pharmaceutical companies. Here, optimistic promises made are turning out to not be kept, e.g., it's been announced in obscure terms that J&J can't deliver what it promised just a few weeks ago. Reportedly, they've distributed what they had on their shelves and can't replenish supplies.

Based on reports of "flat" vaccine deliveries over the last week, Governor Desantis has put the breaks on expanding eligibility in FL. I expect reduced vaccine availability is going to coincide with increasing new case numbers on a state by state basis. We're already seeing reports of this in the US and Europe, her governing agencies having dropped the vaccine ball, is suffering both increased numbers and accelerating rates of new infections.

How virus reporting is done - the second case - was a problem at the outset of the pandemic and continues to be a problem. The one thing I do know is that it takes putting data in context to arrive at reasonable answers to the question - is the virus expanding or contracting? Governments don't do this and I believe the reasons are they want to shape messaging. The shaping has been, IMO, toward the pessimistic for reasons I can understand but have repeatedly stated are actually counterproductive. Private entities that gather COVID data, e.g., JHU, intentionally do not draw conclusions from the data leaving consumers to wade through piles of it to draw their own.

Of course, the "dire warnings" are going to resurface when COVID facts on the ground were forcing public health officials to tamp these down. So, brace yourselves. The data does seem to indicate that the virus is neither expanding or contracting but rather, on a global basis, is in a holding pattern. Regionally, it depends. For the most part, when I look at it, the reasons for either expanding or contracting new case numbers - the typical metric used to answer this question, though when taken out of context, results in bad conclusions - can be correlated with how successful a states or country's vaccine roll-outs are going. Is there definitive causality here? No one is looking at that and it takes big-data mining to validate that hypothesis. On the scale I can look at it, yes, absolutely.

The MSM is making a big deal out of vaccine hesitancy as a contributing factor in slowing progress v. COVID. This morning, public health officials were all over the morning news programs to tell us to get the vaccines, Even Trump made public statements encouraging his followers to get the vaccine yesterday. Frankly, I'm not seeing that. Anecdotally, it's not happening at the rate the MSM seems to make it out to be. Worse, it's an unnecessary message for PH officials to voice when there is other messaging that is way more important and blatantly absent ...... like, tell me how to go about life safely in the COVID environment.

The bottom line is that progress is being made v. COVID. All you have to do is look at declining death rates and hospitalizations - just these two metrics alone are very encouraging ... yet??? The frustrating thing to me is that PH officials and the MSM have other interests that seem to be defining the messaging.

[Mike]

The “movement” is dead except in the minds of paranoid right wingers and conservative news talking heads. Much needed police reform is coming though. It is about time

In your world has Michigan beaten Ohio State 8 times in the last decade? Because that sounds like a wonderful place to live. I'd move there.

[Hannibal]

Also, as I said then, as I said after, as I say now -- it's up to every community to decide how they want to be policed. It's one of the great virtues of our federalist system. If Minneapolis wants to vote to abolish the police department -- which THEY DID -- then so be it. If Los Angeles wants to defund he police budget by $150M -- which THEY DID -- then so be it. If Portland wants to defund the police by $15M and not enforce any sort of law against protestors -- then so be it. I leave it to those communities to decide how they want to be protected. If a few extra murders are the price of a reduced police presence and they're happy with that -- then so be it.

I really only care about my local police department and, to the extent the City of Columbus could bleed into my locality, that PD -- but not really.

I wouldn't be so dismissive about it. The thing about Marxism is that it is a cancer that spreads out from its point of origin and eventually sickens everybody. If you think that I am overly paranoid, then ask yourself whether you could have ever predicted that the military would be paying for sex change operations. It was a loony Left, San Francisco-only idea just a few short years ago. Now it's policy. In theory, it's OK that the dumbshits in Portland will suffer for being, well, Democrats, but they will eventually demand that you live under the same sets of retarded rules. To accomplish this, they will run "moderates" like Joe Biden at the federal level, who will pull a bait-and-switch and do at least four years worth of destruction before you ever get a chance to get him out of office.

And then there's the double standard for how Left and Right are treated when it come to civil unrest. Black Lives Matter gets billions of dollars from Corporate America for fomenting violent riots. Portland Antifa throws Molotovs at cops with no consequences. Leftist rushes Donald Trump on the stage with no consequences. Meanwhile, unarmed Ashli Babbitt gets coldly executed for climbing through a window into an empty hallway. Too bad for her she wasn't a black man high on fentanyl and meth. Her surviving family would be hitting the cash registers. To say nothing of Kyle Rittenhouse, who has the most obvious case for self defense in the history of self defense.

[AlabamAlum]

The defund the police thing was real. Many who espoused such things are hoping to quietly walk back the rhetoric. It’s kinda like Christians when you say Old Testament god was a petulant child at best and an amoral psychopath at worst (bears devouring children, telling Abraham to tie up and knife his son to death, etc, etc) you get a wave of the hand and “this is not the god you are looking for” as they segue into, “New Testament god is what we REALLY meant” and some “love revealed by Christ” mumbo jumbo.

On another note: the Atlanta massage parlor thing was horrible, but now we have “Stop Asian Hate!” with sports stars and actors talking about how Asian hate has to stop. To be clear: It was a deranged lunatic who targeted a group of people he was obsessed with - I don’t get this moron as the front man for some anti-Asian movement. To me this makes as much sense as saying “stop University of Texas hate!” after Charles Whitman climbed the bell tower at UT and started killing people in the late 60’s.

[Hannibal]

If Asians want to stop hate, they should start voting Republican. Only about 25% of them do. The rest of them vote Democrat, along with the black people who commit about 90% of the violent crimes against Asians.