https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01/12/keenan-anderson-police-taser-death-los-angeles/

(1) I’ve seen videos of people getting tazed in training or playing around. It looks excruciating for just 2 or 3 seconds. How does a police officer taze somebody for 30 seconds?

(2) How many people get tazed like this as part of business as usual without making it into the news?

Update, Jan 15: well, there’s this, buried in the story:

«The incident in Los Angeles joins a long list involving police use of Tasers in recent years. A 2017 Reuters investigation found that more than 1,000 people in the United States had died after they were shocked with Tasers or other stun guns by police. In 2021, two former Oklahoma police officers were convicted of murder for using their Tasers more than 50 times on an unarmed man who died in 2019.»

Welp… learned a new word today. “Agnotogenesis” (and “agnotology”) which is fanciness and dignification of the old “FUD” concept (less the fear, I guess).

It’s the intentional creation of doubt, the “just asking questions” of right-wing media. I guess it’s a real thing in epistemology.

@ct_bergstrom 🔗 https://fediscience.org/users/ct_bergstrom/statuses/109679731373424542 – «I’ve always appreciated Bostrom for what I thought was a brilliant if challenging book he wrote on observation selection effects. But his non-apology for his racist post is appalling. Most of the letter focuses on the motives of those who would hold him accountable or throws up low key smokescreens with claims of unsettled science—agnotogenesis—around the statements he had been making in the first place. http://www.nickbostrom.com/oldemail.pdf »

(Bergstrom is the author of Calling Bullshit, which I have yet to read.)

13-year-old blog post that seems to be still right on target (except Douthat now seems to be one of those who doesn’t realize the true thrust of “conservatism” since 1964): https://crookedtimber.org/2010/05/08/ignorance-is-strength/

«He described “the horror on people’s faces – and you can literally see it on people’s faces in focus groups – when you talk about going back to Brexit debates”, adding: “The big reason they don’t want to touch the ‘rejoin’ thing is that they think it would be four more years when that’s all we would talk about.”

….

“EU leaders are not stupid. They haven’t forgotten who they were dealing with for the last three years. They’re never going to let us in the door until both Labour and the Conservatives are committed to doing it,” he said.

He believes support for rejoining would have to settle at perhaps 70-75%, and have the backing of both main parties’ leaderships, before the EU would risk investing precious political capital in negotiations that could be unpicked by a change of government.

….

Yet among those who voted Conservative in 2019 – the potential swing voters on whom Starmer’s team are focused – only 16% said they would be more likely to back a Labour party promising to rejoin, while 48% said less likely.

….

“The main thing for Labour is that there is no need to shout about it at the moment,” she said. “There’s a a sense of, well, the voters will come to their own conclusions on this, and then there might be some space later.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/13/meanwhile-brexit-second-thoughts-take-voters-where-parties-wont-follow

Don’t tell anybody this intrigues me.

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-ending-of-this-survival-game-is-the-most-tension-filled-fun-ive-had-in-ages/

#playLater #pcGame

Republicans.

«In the November elections, Republicans gained seats in the House and came one seat shy of gaining a supermajority in that chamber. So Democrats hold enough votes in the House to protect Cooper’s veto. But with the new rules in place, Democrats fear Republicans will call surprise votes to override Cooper if a couple of their members are absent.»

https://www.wral.com/nc-house-republicans-scrap-rule-on-veto-override-votes/20667372/

Hey, David Brooks and Bret Stephens: it was the racism. Not the “post-Reagan decay of the Republican party” or whatever you want to call it. Not Gingrich. Not Fox News. Go back to 1964 and “hunt where the ducks are”.

«[David:] I walked into the polling booth that November genuinely not knowing if I would vote for McCain or Barack Obama. Then an optical illusion flashed across my brain. McCain and Obama’s names appeared to be written on the ballot in 12-point type. But Sarah Palin’s name looked like it was written in red in 24-point type. I don’t think I’ve ever said this publicly before, but I voted for Obama.

Bret: I voted for McCain. If I were basing my presidential votes on the vice-presidential candidate, I’d have thought twice about voting for Biden.»

Seriously, I rest my case (Bret).

«Trump had kept hundreds of classified documents across his office and a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, as well as a separate storage unit in Palm Beach, Florida, compared with 10 classified documents found at the UPenn Biden Center in downtown Washington.»

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/11/trump-biden-classified-documents-serious-mar-a-lago

Also:

«The obstruction applies particularly to Trump because of his repeated refusal to fully surrender classified documents, including when he only partially complied with a grand jury subpoena issued in May demanding any classified materials, that led to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last August.

And Trump for months also resisted conducting a search for any classified documents that the justice department suspected were still in his possession even after the FBI seized hundreds of classified materials, only for that second search to turn up at least two more classified documents.

By contrast, the classified documents found last year at the University of Pennsylvania’s Biden Center for Diplomacy in Washington, where he was an honorary professor until 2019, were returned to the National Archives as soon as they were discovered when the office was being closed down.

ibid.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/dining/in-defense-of-cabbage.html