“There’s been a problem in the building, the official police are investigating, but they’ve asked me to step in and advise on some technical issues. I need to ask you a few background questions.”
“What kind of a problem?”
“I’m a specialist in socio-medical criminal investigations.”
Which sounds very white-collar, pushes everyone to think of liability and doctors making side money selling oxy, and they get happy and forthcoming. That is not what happens if you say there is a corpse on the other side of the hall.»
«I look Rufus in the eye and I offer him cash. Rufus says it happens he is having a particularly bad month owing to some poor financial investments in the field of canine athletics. I help out with this shortfall.»
«In 1144 Zengi appeared outside Edessa with troops, siege towers, and professional diggers. The miners tunneled beneath the city walls while artillerymen used giant catapults known as mangonels to bombard the citizens from above. It did not take long for the Turks to break Edessa’s resistance. When they broke in, civilians panicked and women and children were crushed to death in a stampede to flee. For Zengi this was a useful victory. But for the crusaders it was a disaster. The territorial loss was one thing. Much worse was the sense that nearly half a century on from the victories of 1096–99, God had ceased to smile on them.
When news of Edessa’s capitulation filtered back to Europe, it prompted general dismay. Yet it also presented an opportunity. Pope Eugene III was not enjoying a peaceful papacy. He was struggling with a continuing schism and attempts to set up antipopes against him. Communards had been rioting in the streets of Rome.» (Emphasis mine.)
Maybe snag a copy before it becomes the first book banned and burned by the current government.
«Under the landmark Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan, defamation of a public figure requires “actual malice,” defined as proof that the speaker either knew that that the statement was false, or spoke with reckless disregard for the truth.»
«Giles Gratton, sick as a dog from nineteen years spent sleeping in the off hours between bloody murder rooms and the aldermen’s bullshit, doesn’t knock.
“Get your coat,” he says.
“Hi, Captain.”
“Yeah, all that.”
I get my coat and hold the door for him.
“Hi, Cal,” Gratton says.
We go down the stairs together. No need to waste a perfectly good bit of bad news with conversation.»
I love a good opening. I bet authors put special effort into their openings. I can only dream of stuff this good.
Like… the entire first chapter of Cold Mountain. Or the opening of Moby Dick.
«Ms. Hidalgo said her reason for retirement was that she did not want to hold onto the office for its own sake, rejecting what she said was the “empire mentality” of some politicians. She planned to announce her decision officially in a video on Tuesday.
“A lot of the problems in our politics these days come from this obsession with staying in power,” she said in the interview with The Times.»
«But I’ve seen two forms of reaction that are misguided, however comprehensible the rage or horror that provoked them. One is a move on the left to wrap Kirk’s death around his views — after all, he defended the Second Amendment, even admitting it meant accepting innocent deaths. Another is on the right, to turn his murder into a justification for an all-out war, a Reichstag fire for our time.
But as the list above reveals, there is no world in which political violence escalates but is contained to just your foes. Even if that were possible, it would still be a world of horrors, a society that had collapsed into the most irreversible form of unfreedom.»
(gift)
«But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this.
Kirk claimed that his Turning Point USA sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to the January 6 insurrection. Turning Point USA has also run a “Professor Watchlist,”and a “School Board Watchlist” for nearly a decade.
….
One professor on the watchlist who 404 Media is granting anonymity for his safety said once he was added to the list, he started receiving anonymous letters in his campus mailbox. “‘You’re everything wrong with colleges,’ ‘watch your step, we’re watching you’ kind of stuff,” he said, “One anonymous DM on Twitter had a picture of my house and driveway, which was chilling.”
….
At Arizona State University, a professor on the watchlist was assaulted by two people from Turning Point USA in 2023.
“Earlier this year, I wrote to Turning Point USA to request that it remove ASU professors from its Professor Watchlist. I did not receive a response,” university president Michael Crow wrote in a statement. “Instead, the incident we’ve all now witnessed on the video shows Turning Point’s refusal to stop dangerous practices that result in both physical and mental harm to ASU faculty members, which they then apparently exploit for fundraising, social media clicks and financial gain.”»
Yglesias thinks we need to be less pure about social & cultural issues, and he has evidence.
«… in most countries, there is a large minority bloc of voters with extreme right-wing views that are echoed by few if any M.P.s, especially from mainstream parties.
In proportional systems, that creates an easy space for new parties to fill. In the U.S., it created space for Donald Trump to remake the G.O.P. I don’t think “the center-left should become more right-wing on crime and immigration” is the only possible conclusion to draw from this data, but I think that everyone ought to take the data seriously and consider the tradeoffs involved in their own choices.
….
If decent people decide to shun everyone who fails to embrace certain progressive cultural values, then we end up with a bunch of very indecent people winning elections and everyone standing around wondering what happened.
….
The only way to beat authoritarianism, though, is with actual democratic politics. And I think that requires elected officials who take the vocation of politics seriously enough to represent the authentic values of the electorate, rather than ceding all power to people who disdain democracy.»
It occurs to me that ending vaccination requirements is like cutting education funding: the consequences won’t be noticeable until the politician(s) who did it are long gone and have already profited. In the case of vaccinations, consequences will probably also be highly deniable.
Here, Read This 