Muskegon

Good comment, but this bugs me:

*Reagan

Regan was Reagan’s chief of staff for his last couple of years in office.

I like the metaphor of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of flotsam in the cold water a mile from shore. He’s losing body heat, and eventually hypothermia will set in and he will drown. But if he lets go and starts to swim for shore, he’ll lose body heat even faster, use up his energy, and he probably won’t make it. The “harm reduction” argument says that he should reduce his heat loss, and stay clinging to the flotsam. He’s safe right now, while attempting to get to shore is difficult and dangerous.

Of course, by the time that the fallacy of that strategy becomes apparent (*gestures at current events*), he’s too cold and weak to even attempt the swim.

In my city, we have a barely-there progressive, third party with a presence in the city and county government. It’s all that remains of an attempt to in the 1990’s to launch a Midwestern political party based on an electoral reform called “fusion voting,” which would allow a candidate to get the endorsement of multiple parties, and appear on the ballot multiple times as a candidate under each of those party banners. That way, the candidate would know where their support came from, without the “spoiler effect.” I learned from the Wikipedia page that it was an important tactic in the movement to abolish slavery.

But, in this case, the Democratic Party (technically, the Democratic Farm Labor Party) went to court to shoot down that idea, arguing that it was too confusing to voters. The American left isn’t just sitting here waiting for someone to start a revolution, it has two major political parties actively suppressing it.

Amusingly, one tidbit of information that I just now learned from that Wikipedia article, presented without further comment:

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the heyday of the sewer socialists, the Republican and Democratic parties would agree not to run candidates against each other in some districts, concentrating instead on defeating the socialists. These candidates were usually called non-partisan, but sometimes were termed fusion candidates instead.

Voters do have a say.

That’s why I vote third party.

Not at all. Making families buy life-saving medicine, at whatever price, is in fact the opposite of left-wing policy. Universal, single-payer health care is just centrist policy in many countries.

Same deal, you’re not wrong. At the same time, it has to be done. Voting Democrat to hold off the fascists was, at best, a holding action rather than a viable, long-term strategy. A slow track to fascism, as it were, as they were going to win an election eventually. Democrats weren’t going to fix the problem. For example, we voted for Biden in 2020 to hold off the fascist threat, they attacked the Capitol because they lost, and Biden did next to nothing about it. Hence, the depiction of the party as the pawl in the ratchet mechanism.

Let me say again, the FPTP voting system leads to two dominant parties, but nowhere in mathematics or law does it say the those two have to be Democrats and Republicans. We’ve always had the choice of a different two parties. That the Blue and Red duopoly would lead to fascism via the ratchet effect been clear for nearly 30 years.

I wouldn’t claim that Democrats don’t see the people of Palestine as human, exactly. They may just put it out of mind. Denial is a very potent force.

Honestly, this argument comes across to me as a horrible mangling of different pop-sci concepts to construct a victimology. There’s good evidence of the mechanism by which stress and trauma induce epigenetic changes in organisms. (Selective methylization regulating expression of genes.) There’s some evidence of epigenetic changes due to physiological trauma passed down through germ cells. But it’s a huge leap to ascribe mtDNA damage to psychological experiences.

The mitochondria have a degenerate genome, a tiny amount of DNA with (looking it up) 37 genes to support the processing of energy into ATP to power the cell. It is susceptible to epigenetic changes, which leads pretty directly to a number of metabolic disorders, but I can’t find any evidence that those changes result from life experiences of an animal. The idea that mtDNA has accumulated generations of damage from sexist trauma beggars logic, too, because there’s just not a lot of room to collect damage, and that damage leads to health problems fairly directly. If one got every cell of life from one’s mother, in turn, she got it from her mother, and so on all the way back to the first eukaryotic life. All of those generations of trauma, how are we even still living?

Furthermore, the assertion that “men created the patriarchy” ignores actual history and context. One simply cannot ascribe a singular intent to a class comprising billions of individuals across time and space. At best, one could describe patriarchy as an emergent phenomena of societies and cultures. About half of the individuals in those societies and cultures were women, so you’d have to conclude that women helped create patriarchy, unless you deny their agency or intelligence.

Should we also show “empathy” to Klansmen who joined up because they claim to feel disenfranchised by society?

Well, yes. No qualifiers. Full stop. Ask anybody who’s successfully done it. Arno Michaelis is particularly good at turning white supremacists back to the light because he was one, and knows the mindset.

Changing somebody’s mind and world-view always starts with listening empathetically. What you don’t offer is sympathy for abhorrent beliefs. It’s hard to make the distinction, but that old saw about education granting the ability to hold a notion in one’s mind without accepting it is relevant. I would argue that maturity means learning to offer kindness while maintaining strong personal and moral boundaries. Self-righteous fury might feel good, but it’ll never get through to a Klansman, or an incel.

So, yes, you have to show empathy, but certainly not a pat on the back. Those are two different things. It’s hard to hold the line between them at times, but it’s the only way to effectively reach people with backwards belief systems. Frankly, I feel like a lot of people would rather be self-righteous than effective, because it’s easier and feels good, and that’s what I see in the too-common conflation of understanding with approval.

According to Wikipedia, the earliest property tax records are from 6,000 BCE.

Definitely illegal in the parts of Wisconsin I’m from. Zoning codes generally include a list of permitted uses for each zone, a list of conditional uses that need approval from the local zoning board or officer, and everything else is not allowed. If this structure were classified as a permanent structure, it would not meet building codes anywhere. If not a permanent structure, staying in it would be considered camping, which is not a permitted or conditional use in the zones of the county where I live. (Or maybe it is somehow; I just glanced over the ordinance.) I do have a bit of land in a county that does allow camping in certain zones, but for a maximum of 10 nights per year.

It seems to me that there’s this pervasive sense that the landscape and lifestyles (cars, single-family houses, lawns, etc.) in the United States are what they are because that’s what its citizens want for themselves. The reality is that just about anything else is illegal. Remember, the United States is the country that invented loitering (a.k.a. existing in public without a specific objective) as an offense in order to force (mostly Black) people into working degrading jobs. This is actually the kind of dwelling that Cornish miners built when they came to Wisconsin to mine galena. They got the nickname of “badgers” for it, and that’s why we’re the Badger State (and not due to the animal). So it’s not like this is a new idea that nobody has thought of before, we just can’t do it anymore.

It turns out that, despite allegations to the contrary, the United States is actually small. Like, really, really tiny. We just don’t have the room to put supermarkets in places near where people live.

Disable the ad block, wait for all of the ads to load so the text stops jumping around like a crack-addled wallaby, accept the cookie notice, try to hit the tiny X to close the inevitable video overlay with shaking fingers, try to hit the tiny X to close the ad overlay, too, decline signing up for email alerts, decide whether to accept notifications, and then read the article one sentence at a time while scrolling past ads.

Maybe your local news sites aren’t as insane as mine?

I see what you’re saying. If they convicted Mangione, and the real killer confessed, they’d likely just ignore it and double down on his guilt out of vanity. That’s what usually happens in reality.

But it would not be a good idea for the real killer to confess. Yes, the video shows that one physical human wielded the gun, but as I am pointing out, that doesn’t matter. That’s the fucked-up part here: The legal system would allow two people to be convicted for it, unless somebody took deliberate action to overturn the first conviction.

It might go like this: The NY prosecutors get a conviction, and send Mangione to prison. Then, the real killer confesses. Being the real killer, the confession is very, very credible. The prosecutors can’t brazen it out, and decide to charge and try him. If he pleaded guilty, wham, bam, done. The matter would go right to sentencing. If he pleaded not guilty, the judge might rule that the conviction of Mangione for the same for crime is not admissible evidence, as it might bias the jury. Even if the previous conviction was brought up at trial, they have a very credible confession; it’s clear the real killer did it. And, even without a confession, the jury in the second trial is supposed to consider only whether the defendant is guilty of the crime charged. And if the evidence is strong enough, they probably would. The conviction of Mangione for the same crime would be a matter for another court.

Since the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that innocence is not grounds to have one’s case heard before an appeals court, this scenario could easily result in two men in prison for the same crime. The outcome of both going free is highly unlikely.

Yes, in reality, the NY prosecutors probably would at least have enough integrity to move to overturn Mangione’s conviction if they had a credible confession from another man. But they don’t have to.

Then I don’t know what I can say more clearly. If they convict Mangione, and the real killer confesses, they can convict the real killer, too. They wouldn’t even have to free Mangione to do it.

And there isn’t. If prosecutors file a new case against a second person for the same crime, and get a conviction, there’s no mechanism by which that second conviction overturns the previous conviction. Depending on the circumstances, the first person convicted may not even have grounds to have their case brought before a court to be re-examined.

Sure, a conviction can be overturned, but what I’m pointing out here is that it doesn’t have to be in order to convict somebody else for the same crime.

There’s no mechanism to release a conviction. Usually, if prosecutors have convicted somebody for murder, they won’t pursue a case against a second person only for reason of not wanting to admit that they may have got it wrong. But there’s no legal barrier, and it has happened for other crimes. The Ninth Circuit even ruled that it’s legal.

Here’s an in-depth article from Slate.