So that Second Amendment thing is kinda…flexible, huh?

Once again, the Minneapolis police flaunt their fascist behavior once again. Using a no-knock warrant, they burst into a person’s apartment in the early hours of the morning, and 9 seconds later, when a man stirs under his blanket and reveals that he has a gun, bang-bang-bang they shoot him dead. His name was Amir Locke. He was not named in the warrant. He was not associated with any criminal investigation. Maybe it was stupid to be sleeping with a gun, but the body-cam video shows a sleeping man abruptly awakened and disoriented, and killed within seconds. I guess that’s what a no-knock warrant is, permission to barge into someone’s home and murder the occupants.

The police statement is amazing.

An officer fired his duty weapon and the adult male suspect was struck. Officers immediately provided emergency aid and carried the suspect down to the lobby to meet paramedics, the report states. The suspect was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center where he died.

Huffman tried to explain the police tactics used during the raid, stating that the footage shows the barrel of the gun from under the blanket forced the officers to make a split-second decision.

The chief also admitted that Locke was not named on the warrant the officers were executing—and said it was not immediately clear whether he had any connection to the original St. Paul homicide investigation that prompted the raid.

Boy, the passive voice is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. “An officer shot a man, killing him” would be a lot shorter and cleaner. They call him a suspect to make it sound like he was suspiciously bad, when he wasn’t a suspect in anything at all, just a guy sleeping. It wasn’t the officer’s fault, he saw a gun and was forced to kill him. Those good Samaritan officers then provided emergency aid — how kind of them — to deal with the two bullet holes they had just blown in Locke’s chest.

There is, of course, no expression of remorse, no recognition that maybe they’d been a teeny-tiny bit overzealous and trigger-happy, and that, just maybe, they’d fucked up big time, again.

You can actually buy this flag for $11.66 at Amazon. America!

Well, now they’re in trouble. They have just criminalized owning a gun in your own home, a crime that earns an instant death penalty. I’m sure all the white Republican gun nuts are going to march on Minneapolis en masse to protest this abrogation of their constitutional rights. At the very least they’ll be tearing down their thin blue line flags, and politely discussing reforming police policy. Right?

Oh, wait. Amir Locke was black.

Never mind, they’re frantically searching police records right now to find out if he had a parking ticket in 2015, in order to justify the murder.

Not hard

Have you ever seen this stupid slogan?

It’s bullshit, through and through. It’s wishful thinking by meatheads.

I agree with Abe:

An obsession with “hard” masculinity is a very old trope, but one that continues to plague us. It’s often supported by facile historical comparisons that fall apart upon closer inspection, but it remains one of the most reliable tools for manipulating men into a whole array of harmful behaviors. Self-destructive showing off, domestic abuse, abusive relationships between friends, violence, support for political “strong men”, support for war, hatred of “weakness”, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia – all the traits we currently categorize as “toxic masculinity” tend to be supported by the notion that being a “hard man” is a good thing, and being not that is a bad thing. I think this Lonerbox video is a good companion piece to Thought Slime’s earlier look at the same topic, from a different angle. The reality is that this psuedo-historical “ancient wisdom” is both a-historical and (in my opinion) instrumental in creating hard times.

He has the link to the Lonerbox video, which is a must-watch. The whole thing is great, but the last line in particular is a killer.

Even prehistory refutes the claim. Look at Neandertals: bigger than us, more robustly boned, strong, active hunters of big game, truly hard men. Then they got supplanted by a bunch of sneaky, gracile, skinny (relatively) boys from the south. Humans have never relied on being a more muscular species than anyone else.

So how’s Brexit going?

Everything the critics predicted seems to have taken place. Wasn’t it obvious from the beginning that abandoning a trade alliance would hurt your economy?

From the EU, the drama of the Brexit negotiations was watched with mixed feelings. Initial regret shifted to a desire to limit the damage. Some economic opportunities to fill the gaps left by the UK opened up. Brexit was clearly going to be a loss for everyone, but far greater for the UK than for any continental European economy.

The negative impact on trade, so far, is substantial for the UK. The Centre for European Reform recently estimated that there has been an 11.2% negative impact on trade as a result of Brexit. The UK share of world trade has fallen by a further 15% compared to pre-referendum projections.

Assessing the impact of Brexit on the EU presents a challenge, as macro-economic data is contaminated by the pandemic shock. However, digging into the details of trade flows, there has been a noticeable negative effect on some countries, sectors and firms. This has been especially sizeable for small producers who used to have unbounded single market access to the UK. Now, the extra paperwork puts off firms that lack the critical mass to absorb the extra fixed costs of handling non-EU trade procedures. Over time, the situation may well improve, but some companies have already given up. British consumers have paid the price, EU consumers far less.

And yet, even now, the Tories and that idiot, Boris Johnson, are in charge of the country. The rest of Europe is sitting back and watching in amazement as the Brits punch themselves in the face, over and over again. Here in America, we’re also impressed at how much self-harm is going on, but we’re less surprised since we’re experiencing our own ongoing madness.

Monitoring our grandchild’s media consumption

We had learned that our granddaughter Iliana is getting into My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, so last night my wife and I watched a couple of episodes so that we could talk intelligently about it with her. I was shocked. The show is clearly socialist propaganda intended to promote communal solidarity and mutual aid. The whole story is antithetical to its capitalist origins as a marketing tool for a toy line.

We approve of this subversion.

The one question I have, though, is why haven’t the Republicans banned it yet? It’s a brilliant attempt to infiltrate the minds of our children.

P.S. I think Iliana is a real Pinkie Pie.

The EO Wilson saga continues into the depths

Old letters from and to EO Wilson were donated to the Library of Congress after his death, and now historians are digging into them. To say that what they reveal about the distinguished environmentalists views on race is disappointing is an understatement. It seems he was frequently and quietly supporting the ideas of horrible racists like Philippe Rushton and others. It seems that the criticism of Wilson’s racism, which had the “scientific” racists up in arms recently was not misplaced. What a way to poison your own legacy!

There is a battery of letters from Wilson endorsing racists and racism. He seemed to think that a black-white difference in IQ was sufficient to justify blaming it on heredity, when defending Rushton.

Wilson’s letter continues, “To be sure, you and Professor Cain have found fault with Professor Rushton’s writings on race, but some noted specialists in human genetics and cognitive psychology have judged them to be sound and significant.” Wilson asks Vanderwolf to consider a poll that “found that a large minority of specialists of human genetics and testing believe in a partial hereditary basis for black-white average IQ differences.” Further, Wilson states that the National Association of Scholars (a right-wing advocacy group) is soon to publish an analysis “concluding that academic freedom is the issue in this case and that Rushton’s academic freedom is threatened.” The National Association of Scholars remains actively involved today in fighting affirmative action in higher education admissions and against the teaching of critical race theory.

Wow. That sounds familiar. Not allowing racists to publish bad science is an attack on academic freedom! The people who oppose these racist ideas are Leftist McCarthyites.

Wilson’s aforementioned July 1990 letter to Professor Vanderwolf, while ultimately inconsequential, calls attention to a message of support for Rushton from the National Association of Scholars through their publication Academic Questions. What Wilson does not mention is that Wilson himself solicited support for Rushton from the National Association of Scholars in a letter to its founder Stephen Balch on November 6, 1989 (box 143 folder 10). On December 5, 1989, Wilson writes to Rushton, copying Balch, with the following message: “I am very heartened by the response of the National Association of Scholars (Academic Questions) to your case… Much as they like, your [Rushton’s] critics simply will not be able to convict you of racism, and there will come a day when the more honest among them will rue the day they joined this leftward revival of McCarthyism.”

The only reason Wilson was less vocal about his racism while he was alive was that he was a bit chickenshit about his beliefs, and he was afraid of two fellow Harvard professors.

In Wilson’s September 1987 letter declining to sponsor this paper, he states, “You have my support in many ways, but for me to sponsor an article on racial differences in the PNAS would be counterproductive for both of us.” He recounts an incident of being attacked for his views and continues, “I have a couple of colleagues here, Gould and Lewontin, who would use any excuse to raise the charge again. So I’m the wrong person to sponsor the article, although I’d be glad to referee it for another, less vulnerable member of the National Academy.”

How was he vulnerable?

There is no reason for a tenured Harvard professor to fear the criticisms of other professors — all they could have possibly done was scathingly expose the fallacies in his arguments, and maybe turn the attention of the media against him. If he had any confidence in his racist ideas, he should have been willing to discuss them. You know, that free speech thing. He preferred to keep his endorsements on the down-low, though, perhaps because his understanding of genetics was actually not particularly impressive.

I remember the big battles between Gould/Lewontin and Wilson, though, and to be honest, I thought they were a bit much. I liked Ed Wilson’s support for the environment, I didn’t know how deeply his racism ran, and Gould and Lewontin seemed a bit…mean. But now that I am seeing the inside story, it’s clear that they weren’t mean enough. Dump more buckets of water on Wilson’s head!

While Wilson was cautious to rarely mention race publicly, Davis clearly had no such reservations. Davis was a professor at Harvard Medical School who was an outspoken opponent of affirmative action, particularly when it came to Black students earning admission to Harvard. Wilson’s papers reveal a close relationship with Davis (Box 50, 2 folders, Box 51, 6 folders), finding common ground and supporting each other against criticism leveled by Richard Lewontin.

Davis frequently had Wilson’s back, especially throughout Wilson’s most high-profile controversy: the debate with Lewontin and Gould, who were outspoken and relentless critics of Wilson’s Human Sociobiology. By Wilson’s own account in the previously quoted September 1987 letter to Rushton, the two Harvard colleagues and critics had a chilling effect on his ability to support Rushton’s race science. One might wonder whether Wilson would have been far bolder, like Davis, without constant pressure from scientists like Lewontin and Gould.

This feud is well documented and has been the subject of much discussion about the nature of politics and ideology among scientists. But for Davis and Wilson, the “correct side” of the debate was obvious. In a letter to Davis (box 51, folder 5), Wilson provided some commentary about their “favorite anti-racists of the Left.” Wilson pontificated that arguing for equity among groups of people was ideologically similar to racism, adding the evocative phrase “my way of putting it would be that anti-racism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

AAAAAARGH. What an asshole. I won’t be polite about Wilson in the future.

While EO Wilson has just taken a nose dive in my esteem, I can at least see that two of my heroes, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, have substantially risen in my appreciation.

Wilson should have stuck with ants, and if he was concerned about his posthumous reputation, he should have had all of his papers burned. They’re damning. I guess he was so racist he didn’t realize how racist his letters were!

DILLIGAF about defending the police?

Oh, look, I learned a new acronym. Handy!

There’s a pointless wrangle going on in this thread about the slogan “Defund the police”, which CripDyke also addresses reasonably on the Pervert Justice blog. DILLIGAF, people. ACAB. Defund the police, whatever that means to you. Change is necessary. That’s where the focus ought to be, not on the pedantry of how the demand is phrased, but recognizing the reality of how awful the police are in this country.

For example, here’s the story of the NYPD police squad rousting black teenagers on Halloween, even hitting one of them with their car. A civilian review board found that the police were out of line, so the police voided their conclusion and said they’d handle it entirely internally. These are the kinds of people we’re looking at.

One of the officers, the report noted, was wearing a sweatshirt with a logo of the Punisher, a Marvel character who kills lawbreakers, which is popular with cops and white nationalists. The sweatshirt also had a blue line over the American flag and the acronym DILLIGAF. (“Do I Look Like I Give a Fuck.”) The officer told investigators he hadn’t known the meaning of the logo or the acronym on his sweatshirt.

Isn’t that charming. That’s the face of the police they are proud to present.

You might wonder what’s happened to the bad cops. Here you go:

Officer Christopher Brower drove into the boy, according to the report. Officer Christopher Digioia wore the Punisher sweatshirt and is the one officer still facing a disciplinary trial, for allegedly swearing at the teens. A search of their respective CCRB files shows they were also disciplined for another case together. Investigators found that, in April 2019, about six months before the Halloween incident, the two had refused to provide their names or badge numbers to a civilian. The NYPD penalized them for that with “instructions.”

The precinct commander who the CCRB concluded oversaw the wrongful arrests is Inspector Megan O’Malley. She told investigators she believed the arrests were justified because the boys ran and one had dropped a kitchen knife. O’Malley has since been promoted and now heads a precinct in midtown Manhattan.

The officer who, the report said, first ordered the boys to be stopped and then pointed a gun at one of them is Lt. John Dasaro. He told investigators he had been worried that the boy was armed. Dasaro was moved to work at the internal affairs unit that investigates use of force against civilians.

It’s not just big city problems. Here’s the story of Brookside, Alabama, a little tiny town like a model Mayberry.

The town of 1,253 just north of Birmingham reported just 55 serious crimes to the state in the entire eight year period between 2011 and 2018 – none of them homicide or rape. But in 2018 it began building a police empire, hiring more and more officers to blanket its six miles of roads and mile-and-a-half jurisdiction on Interstate 22.

By 2020 Brookside made more misdemeanor arrests than it has residents. It went from towing 50 vehicles in 2018 to 789 in 2020 – each carrying fines. That’s a 1,478% increase, with 1.7 tows for every household in town.

The growth has come with trouble to match. Brookside officers have been accused in lawsuits of fabricating charges, using racist language and “making up laws” to stack counts on passersby. Defendants must pay thousands in fines and fees – or pay for costly appeals to state court – and poorer residents or passersby fall into patterns of debt they cannot easily escape.

“Brookside is a poster child for policing for profit,” said Carla Crowder, the director of Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, a nonprofit devoted to justice and equity. “We are not safer because of it.”

Defund the police. Does anyone want to argue that at least Brookside is one place that needs savage cuts to police funding? Anyone? They expanded the police force ten fold, and the town wants to increase it even more. Look at what they have now!

This is indefensible. Defunding is the answer.