Insufficient training

Shortly after the insurrection in January several corporations said they would not give campaign donations to seditionists. A lot of people wondered, yeah, how long is that going to last? The answer turned out to be less than ten weeks. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported no, they aren’t donating directly to seditionists. They are instead donating to the National Republican Campaign Committee. About two thirds of the people the NRCC supports are seditionists. Or they donate to a candidate’s PAC, not to the candidate. Eleveld concluded:

Only one party in this nation's two-party system spent over a month systematically stoking distrust of election results without being able to produce a shred of evidence of voter fraud. Only one party in this nation's two-party system is now systematically working to disenfranchise the kinds of voters it doesn't like. Only one party in this nation's two-party system is systematically working to undermine American democracy—Intel, AT&T, and Cigna now enthusiastically support that Republican party. Other corporate PACs will soon follow suit—that's one way to lead.

The New York Times published a lengthy report on the police tactics in response over protests of police racism. The conclusion: “Insufficient training.” Dartagnan of the Kos community isn’t buying.

Thirty-eight paragraphs into a story examining law enforcement’s heavy-handed overreaction to these protests—protests with the very purpose of highlighting racial disparities in policing— and The New York Times “in-depth” report on the police response includes one small, oblique snippet containing the word “racism” or “race.”

The reviews did not examine protesters’ complaints of racial bias in policing. But activists in Indianapolis told reviewers they wanted an acknowledgment by the department that systemic racism exists. The Portland Police Bureau said it was planning anti-racism training for all officers.

Gosh, you’d think that racism might be a factor in the way these protests were handled. You’d never know it from this report. Not one word about how the nature of the protests themselves may have impacted law enforcement’s response. No, it was all just poor planning. The cops will do better next time.

Darrell Lucus of the Kos community discussed Johnny Enlow, a pastor in Atlanta, who has called for a military coup to get rid of that usurper Joe Biden. Enlow has repeated a claim that other insurrectionists have been making: They weren’t carrying out a coup, they were trying to stop one. Lucus wrote such an argument, if it went before a judge, would declare it “frivolous” or “ridiculous.” He explained:

Cliff Notes version: When a judge says your argument is frivolous, he’s saying that you have no argument, no case, nothing. Claiming that you’re mounting a violent coup in order to stop a coup is the very definition of frivolous.

That’s why a lot of these lies are being presented in the court of public opinion and not before a judge. Georgia Logothetis, in her pundit roundup for Kos, included a couple interesting quotes. First from Jeffrey Rosen at The Atlantic, writing about the insurrection and the distinction between mob violence and political protest.

As it happens, this was a question the Founders thought about extensively. Their political and moral philosophy was based on what they considered a self-evident truth: Only by using our powers of reason to moderate our selfish, ego-based passions and emotions can we achieve the classical virtues—prudence, temperance, justice, and courage—necessary for personal and political self-government. A mob, by contrast, is animated by vices: rashness, self-indulgence, vulgarity, vanity, ambition, boastfulness, buffoonery, and envy, as listed by Aristotle. These are just the sort of traits inculcated online, with likes and clicks rewarding the worst of human instincts.

David Rohde of The New Yorker discussed what approach AG Merrick Garland should take when investigating the nasty guy. Crack down or be more centrist to avoid stoking conspiracy theories? Rohde reminds us:

A core part of Trump’s political project was the discrediting of the idea that nonpartisanship is even possible. In his dark vision of public life, nonpartisan public servants, from public-health experts to prosecutors, were politically biased, incompetent, or corrupt.

When Garland was confirmed he vowed to pursue leads wherever they take us. Close to a year now I’ve been going to a restaurant for takeout for Sunday lunch. It provides a nice change of diet (much tastier than the food I make myself) and it supports restaurants. I wish I could say I support local restaurants, but the good ones in my area (generic suburbia) are chains. The package I take home usually comes with a little packet with utensils and napkin – even when I specifically uncheck the box so they would be left out (though once when I did check the box – because I was going to eat lunch in a park with friends – there were no utensils). So now I have a pile of utensil packets. Laura Clawson of Kos says all these takeout meals in their plastic boxes over the last year are causing a big trash problem. Clawson talks a bit of what can be done about it. Brother, who lives in Germany, told me he sometimes takes his own containers to a restaurant for them to fill. My immediate response was how would a restaurant know the container is clean? Do they handle things properly if the customer has COVID and hands over a container with COVID all over it? There are places that turn that concept around. You take their container of food and bring it back for them to clean. GO Box offers that service in Portland, OR. They supply containers to restaurants and food carts. When you’re done eating you return the container to a GO Box drop site. So far they’ve kept 200,000 containers out of the trash. Other places have or are considering similar services. From the personal end we can nudge our favorite places into more eco friendly choices – like leaving out the utensils (see above) and switching to better packaging. The first comment to this post was from Bender Rodruguez who asked:

Unless you have a medical reason, once you hit 8 years old, why are you using a straw?!

Since I don’t buy drinks I’m not given a straw (though when back to indoor dining I should remember to refuse straws with my water).