The author here is making a mistake that happens a lot with this kind of situation: conflating effectiveness with overreaction. He cites to infection rates leveling off in other countries, but fails to consider the fact that they've also implemented significant restrictions. China lowered its own infection rate by basically closing an entire province, and it seems to have worked. Italy is now seeing the start of a leveling-off as well, and that's about 2 weeks after putting the whole country on lockdown. The comparison to South Korea is also inapt, given that they reacted much faster and more prudently than the US did.

On the death rate: there are three problems here. The first is that his number is wrong; the WHO estimates a fatality rate of 3.4% worldwide, not 1%. Next, he conveniently leaves out Italy, which has seen a fatality rate of 5%. At least part of this is attributed to an overwhelmed healthcare system: in China's case, the death rate was 5.8% in Wuhan province, but only 0.7% in the rest of the country. Finally, 1% is still far from insignificant. If we had half the country infected, which is on the lower end of the estimates I've seen for doing nothing, a 1% death rate means 1.8 million people. That is a lot.

As for the economic impact, it's the usual "think of the job creators" nonsense. He's right that the economic impacts will be significant, but why is it only a choice between accepting a few (hundred) thousand more deaths from COVID-19 and trying to return to business as usual? If nothing else, the last few months should be showing us just how unsustainable our current economic system actually is. Shocks like disease are inevitable, and if our system is too brittle to handle them, it deserves to fail. If we'd listened to progressives 10 years ago, we'd already have measures in place that would've handled the economic effects far more effectively.

It's strange, it feels alternately like this election is both hugely momentous and completely meaningless. In truth I'm not sure which outcome will be worse in the long term. Biden will put the mask back on and eat around the edges, but he's not going to do shit for most people; the systemic issues predate Trump by a long time. While I do think a Biden administration will be less harmful overall, I am concerned that it will put the populace to sleep. We're tired, we want a break, and a Biden presidency seems like a good excuse to do that. I have zero hope of anyone being able to push Biden to the left, but Trump's incompetence and just general terribleness has opened up the Overton Window some. In other words, I think a Biden victory will allow short-term improvement, even if that's just un-doing some of the damage Trump has done, but the long-term effects are far less certain.

Trump gave us a chance to actually confront some of our deeper issues as a country, but we've instead spent our time hand-wringing about how he's uncouth in public. As long as the gun is shiny, we don't really care where it's pointed.

I finally seem to be on an antidepressant that works, so that's pretty cool. We just upped the dosage a few days ago, and so far it's been that much more effective. I'm able to get a lot more clarity about what's going on in my head; rather than lifting my mood per se, it's instead making things quieter so that I can just relax more. It's easy for me to get lost in thought in a bad way, and this has helped with that a lot.

In other news, I got my newest tattoo finished last week as well. Here is a brief "fly-by" of it on my artist's instagram. The background music is a little loud on my default volume (and instagram doesn't seem to offer a volume control), although most other things in Firefox are too. It's the biggest and most visible one I have, and I'm super happy with how it turned out.

Not much else going on right now. I'm trying not to go crackers now that I feel like I can "do" more, and to let things happen more organically. Time management is a big problem for me: I tend to take on too much too quickly, but then lose interest equally fast. I think there's a fight in my head between the logical side and the emotional side, and I've been working on finding more of a balance between the two.

Shower thought for the day: a passion is something that becomes more interesting the more I understand it, not less.

I always wonder about the workflow for these folks. Like, do they look at your attachments at all, or just have a pre-made response whenever someone sends an image with a positive-seeming reply? They had to look at your e-mail enough to get the name of the picture and the cost, but beyond that.... I mean, at this point it could all be bots.

Then you have legends like Jim Browning and Kitboga who take scam baiting to even greater heights.

This is the way it's supposed to work: a locality tries something, and we all get to learn from seeing what works and what doesn't.

A Japanese bioethicist named Masahiro Morioka has done some interesting writing on this (one example). One of his arguments is what he calls "the fundamental sense of security," which is the inherent belief that we are loved and welcomed into the world unconditionally. He questions eugenicist practices to the extent that they demean existing disabled people by saying that, in essence, they shouldn't have been born. But the fundamental sense of security goes beyond that, in that he suggests that this kind of screening makes us all feel like our being welcomed into the world is conditional, and wouldn't have happened if we were too far out of some window of acceptability. In a society that regularly practices this kind of screening, he writes, "people talk about unconditional love; yet they know that they themselves were allowed to be born because they satisfied certain »explicit« conditions imposed by their parents."

I don't know to what extent this is right (and I don't know how firm on it Morioka is for that matter), but I think it's worth thinking about. In particular, the effect on those already-living people with congenital conditions seems much likelier to me. I also think, and this is another thing Morioka touches on in some of his writings, that we have to be careful in boxing ourselves in in terms of defining what "happiness" can and does look like.

I went to a CLE (continuing legal education) thing at my alma mater last week. The theme was restorative justice, basically the idea that there may be better responses to crime than just throwing people in jail. It was good to see the work being done, and also that it was being done by people actually in a position to do something (some of the speakers included a local trial judge and a prosecutor). The last speakers were a couple of guys who had only recently gotten out of prison for murder, and who helped co-found a local group trying to stop street violence before it starts. They were really amazing, and I had a good conversation with one of them afterwards. You can tell when people get It, even if you couldn't explain what It is, and these two get It.

The keynote was given by Dr. Johonna Turner, who is with the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University, just up the road. To start with, and I recognize the unfairness of this, she was the first person I've ever heard use words like "intersectionality" without making it sound like all the ills of the world are my fault as a white cisgendered male. She managed to talk about these things and somehow make it feel like everyone in the room (or me, when I was talking to her later) was in it together. I probably spent an hour talking to her after the main event ended, and even ended up giving her a ride back to her hotel afterwards. She was very patient with my fumbling attempts to talk about issues of gender and race.

Meanwhile, I'm in the market for a new psychiatrist, as the one I had is leaving practice (or at least the local one). I was able to get in with one earlier this week, but I was not impressed. Apropos of nothing he started talking about how when he did inpatient work, most of his job was in sussing out fraudulent requests for hospitalization, and spent a good chunk of our appointment bemoaning drug-seeking behavior. He doesn't take depression seriously as a thing, totally blowing off my own issues with that particular condition (which are getting worse of late). He talked about the low success rate of a given antidepressant as if that were meaningful, especially given that it's basically impossible to know if a given drug will work for a given person ahead of time (and objectively measuring the effectiveness is super difficult). It was all very surreal, and I get the impression that he's out on his own because of anger at The System. But it's also clear that he's very stuck in his ways, and is more interested in them than listening to me. (This was further supported by the fact that he kept talking about out-of-pocket costs despite my having insurance, and that we spent half my appointment going through the questions that I'd already filled out on the intake paperwork.) Ironically one of the things that I was excited about was that, according to his intake person when I made the appointment, he typically avoids stimulants in treating ADHD. I'd be glad to change, because the med crash is a bitch. He instead prescribed a stimulant. To be fair, he did say that this one tends to be a more gradual come down, although I'm skeptical of his statement that I wouldn't notice it wearing off. I still have a couple months of meds from my previous doc, so at least I have some time.

Name: johnnyFive

Place: Richmond, VA

Age: Halfway through my three-score-and-ten

Current Preoccupation: Training, growing my own teaching, and trying to find my writing niche.

I'm trying to compile some beach reads for when that time comes, but also just plugging along. I've started two of these (Living Hell and Salvation), the rest are on deck.

Nonfiction

- Living Hell. Seeks to de-glorify the Civil War by showing how horrible it was for all involved.

- Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution. This was recommended by my new academic advisor as a good general history of the period.

Fiction

- The Algebraist by Iain Banks

- Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton

- A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

It started as a joke, but I'm beginning to wonder if we're going to see some noticeable shift in the ratio of extroverts to introverts. I remember hearing once that there's a spike in violent crime about a week into a heat wave, and we're about to finish week 2 of significant social distancing in the U.S.

I'll be very curious to see what changes in mental health we see over the next few weeks. I'm finding myself free of this weird pressure that I was previously unaware of. Our culture was driving me to question whether I was secretly interested in a more active social life, and whether I was secretly miserable because I didn't have one. My wife and I have been talking a lot about how little this has really affected our day-to-day, other than our daughter being home full-time now. But we're both doing the same jobs, I'm working from home every day instead of three days per week, but that's about it. I guess we're doing a tad more planning about when to go to the grocery store?

We won't know a lot of effects for years to come. The economy may be different, also our government's role in our lives. All we can do is wait and see.

We analysed data on 414 societies from 30 world regions, using 51 measures of social complexity and four measures of supernatural enforcement of moral norms to get to the bottom of the matter.

This is where research of this ilk loses me. Looking at the measures of "social complexity," it's attempting to systematize specific aspects of a society. But it's not clear, even after checking out the study that it's based upon, how this actually works. They seem to be saying that certain things correlate with a more "complex" society, but it's more that they're defining what a complex society is and then saying that certain factors make this so.

That this never happened in all of the Americas, for example, makes me question how universal this truly is. They also do not sample any religions that cropped up in the southern 2/3s of Africa.

Hoo, prepare for too much information :)

So you have a couple different big categories, and then sub-types within that. For more on how whiskey is made and the types, see here.

My personal preference is generally Kentucky bourbon, followed by Irish whiskey. I'm not typically a fan of Tennessee whiskey (with some exceptions) or Scotch. I prefer some combination of bite + sweet, and so tend to avoid the more peaty or smoky flavors common in Scotch. I also don't generally like rye, as they're too bitter for my taste.

To my experience, there is a stronger correlation between price and quality with whiskey than with wine. But this isn't 100%; older (and thus more expensive) tends to be smoother, with a potentially more interesting flavor, but you may find you prefer a cheaper kind from one distillery versus something more expensive from another. Pricing is here in Virginia, but we can only get liquor by the bottle from state-run ABC stores (so YMMV). What I'm listing is for a 750mL bottle. That said, this is only true to a certain point, with many of the super-expensive ones not really worth it.

There are also a couple different "standard" ways of drinking it. When I first started getting into whiskey, I'd drink it on the rocks (i.e. with ice), but now I prefer it neat (meaning with nothing added). That's sort of in keeping with my palette generally; I'm not a big condiment person, for example, as I want to taste what I'm eating.

First, I'm not really willing to go lower than mid-range, which I consider around $40 per bottle. If I want to spend less, I'll buy something that isn't whiskey and mix it. But depending on your area, you may be able to find the same stuff for less. I'm also not going into detail about "tasting notes" or whatever, since I don't really have the vocabulary. I've linked to reviews wherever possible, but as with wine (or anything else you drink, really), it's going to require some experimentation to find what you like.

Starting with the Irish, regular ol' Jameson is probably the cheapest thing I'll mention ($30), and is quite good. It's what got me into whiskey, and is a little lighter so is a good introduction. Eagle Rare 10-year, made by Buffalo Trace, is in the same price range and is also quite good, and would make an excellent starter bourbon given the taste-to-price ratio.

Next is Makers 46. It's a variation on Makers Mark (and is made by the same company), whereby they take a fully aged barrel of Makers, add a different kind of wood, and then let it age a few more months. It sweetens it a tad, and adds a hint of vanilla. Regular Makers Mark is also good, and is a tad cheaper. (Here in VA, the 46 is around $40, and regular Makers is about $10 less). Also in this range would be Jameson Black Barrel ($40), which is regular Jameson that is then aged further in barrels that were formerly used for stout beer and sherry.

At a similar price point ($45), Four Roses Single Barrel is excellent. Their Small Batch is also good (and is only $35), but I prefer the Single Barrel. Buffalo Trace is another great option for a similar price range. Elijah Craig's better stuff can be good (I liked their 12-year, but they've since replaced it with their Small Batch, which I haven't had).

Going slightly higher in price point would be Jefferson's Reserve Very Old ($53). It's my new go-to for special occasions, and is for me the best bang for the buck. Next up would be Blanton's, which is starting to get pricey ($60). It is superb, however. Another Irish shows up here: Red Breast 12-year ($62), which is pretty different from the bourbons here (tending towards fruitier and with less bite), but is also very good. They have some other variations (15-year, 21-year, and cask strength) that are more expensive still, but which I haven't ever tried.

Still more expensive is Jefferson Ocean. This is $80 for the regular stuff, $100 for cask strength. The conceit is that they literally put the whiskey barrels on a ship and sail that bitch around the world for a few months (the idea being different kinds of air and the rocking of the ship). Honestly, it's not worth it to me. It's definitely smoother than cheaper things, but it's almost getting too smooth for me, to the point that the flavor stops being interesting. I'd much rather have Blanton's or Red Breast at that point.

Finally, there are a couple local ones that are worth checking out, although they may not yet be available outside Virginia. Reservoir is made here in Richmond, and is quite pricey ($85). It's tasty, and is slightly unusual in being made from 100% corn. Another is Ironclad, made in Newport News (right where the James River meets the Chesapeake Bay). They only sells theirs in 375mL bottles right now, which run $38 here. Supposedly being so close to the water makes a difference in the taste, but I've never tried. I have had Reservoir, which is quite good.

You can have things like Johnny Walker Blue (which is Scotch) or Pappy Van Winkle that are a couple hundred bucks a bottle, too. I'm not willing to go that high for a drink, and to be honestly can't imagine that they're truly 4+ times better than something like Blanton's. I expect there's a (large) extent to which it's just about the prestige factor.

Anyway, that is your TMI on whiskey.

This sounds a lot like what happened after Sandy Hook -- lots of sound and fury, but little actual action. That said, the fears of a second Charlottesville are not unreasonable. Still, this is the first I'm hearing of any potential mass protests or whatever, despite living in Richmond.

In contrast to the "no Appalachian identity" idea, I submit Albion's Seed, which argues that it was actually four separate "countries" that colonized the U.S. In the case of Appalachia, it was the Scots-Irish (who were actually neither of those things), i.e. those who lived around the border between Scotland and Ireland. This part of the British Isles was pretty terrible, with England and/or Scotland invading the border areas constantly, plus lots of crime. As this review summarizes it:

In response to these pressures, the border people militarized and stayed feudal long past the point where the rest of the island had started modernizing. Life consisted of farming the lands of whichever brutal warlord had the top hand today, followed by being called to fight for him on short notice, followed by a grisly death. The border people dealt with it as best they could, and developed a culture marked by extreme levels of clannishness, xenophobia, drunkenness, stubbornness, and violence.

Some choice bits about Borderer (as the book calls them) society in America:

Colonial opinion on the Borderers differed within a very narrow range: one Pennsylvanian writer called them “the scum of two nations”, another Anglican clergyman called them “the scum of the universe”.

One of the first Borderer leaders was John Houston. On the ship over to America, the crew tried to steal some of his possessions; Houston retaliated by leading a mutiny of the passengers, stealing the ship, and sailing it to America himself. He settled in West Virginia; one of his descendants was famous Texan Sam Houston.

Traditional Borderer prayer: “Lord, grant that I may always be right, for thou knowest I am hard to turn.”

“The backcountry folk bragged that one interior county of North Carolina had so little ‘larnin’ that the only literate inhabitant was elected ‘county reader.'”

Rates of public schooling in the backcountry settled by the Borderers were “the lowest in British North America” and sometimes involved rituals like “barring out”, where the children would physically keep the teacher out of the school until he gave in and granted the students the day off.

“In the year 1767, [Anglican priest] Charles Woodmason calculated that 94 percent of backcountry brides whom he had married in the past year were pregnant on their wedding day.”

The Borderers really liked America – unsurprising given where they came from – and started identifying as American earlier and more fiercely than any of the other settlers who had come before. Unsurprisingly, they strongly supported the Revolution – Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty or give me death!”) was a Borderer. They also also played a disproportionate role in westward expansion. After the Revolution, America made an almost literal 180 degree turn and the “backcountry” became the “frontier”. It was the Borderers who were happiest going off into the wilderness and fighting Indians, and most of the famous frontiersmen like Davy Crockett were of their number. This was a big part of the reason the Wild West was so wild compared to, say, Minnesota (also a frontier inhabited by lots of Indians, but settled by Northerners and Germans) and why it inherited seemingly Gaelic traditions like cattle rustling.

What's especially interesting is how many of these attributes square with the stereotypical hillbilly. Also with later genetic research.

I'm here, but mostly lurking like once a week. I've found a discord server that I hang out on more regularly; I like the real-time nature, don't like the chat page here (for technical/logistical reasons, not personal), and don't really care about politics these days. I'm also trying to make peace with just plain not being that interesting, something that real-time chat is more compatible with than commenting on specific stories.

If, as it is unfortunately looking more and more likely, Biden is the nominee, then the debate(s) between him and Trump are going to be the greatest dumpster fire in American political history.

But since the survey question did not define political correctness for respondents, we cannot be sure what, exactly, the 80 percent of Americans who regard it as a problem have in mind.

This strikes me as a huge flaw in the study, and makes me question the results a great deal. It's an incredibly fluid term, and it's used differently by tumblr than it is by /r/the_donald.

So to me, all we can really read into is the vast majority being sick of the conversation period (and I'd count myself among them, by and large).

Really the only surprising thing to me in all this is how the author, ostensibly educated and engaged, could be so surprised by the results. All it would take is a 10-minute converstion someplace other than Twitter!

What's happeniiiiiiiiiing...........

Someone, somewhere has done the calculus and decided that we may be approaching some kind of tipping point.

I remember that when Trump was elected, Paul Krugman posted to Facebook that an outgoing Republican member of Congress told him that the Republicans were going to use Trump to get everything they wanted (deregulation, tax cuts, etc.) and then throw him to the wolves in favor of Pence.

First, I think you're overestimating the reach of the economic recovery. In aggregate things got better, but this was not universal. If you were a 40-year-old man in the midwest with no education past high school, your job prospects did not bounce back the way a 25-year-old with a master's degree's did.

But beyond that, it's a mistake to couch this in solely economic terms. There's a lot more going on than that, and I think there are often situations where our broader political language does not have the capability of describing it. I recently re-read this essay on James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. One of the key points is regarding legibility, and what happens when groups within a society simply cannot understand one another. After pointing out some researching showing the remarkably positive effects that a high density of "co-religionists" has on a community, the essay continues:

I know this is hard, but imagine actually being a conservative Christian in a dying town. Everything I just described is going away, nothing seems able to replace it, and things are just getting worse. The most noticeable difference by far is going to be “cultural” – what language would you use? “Loss of faith and family” is actually pretty apt. Let’s say that their arguments are identical to mine, just shrouded in local language. Fine – all that means is that In the final analysis, the conservative christian recognizes that they’re being deprived even of the power to complain, which is to say, even of the power to explain their powerlessness.

So when you talk about people thinking in "very bizarre and nonsensical ways," I think this is what you're really talking about. It really was people not being heard, but it wasn't that no one was listening, it's that the broader population didn't know how.

Because remember, populism doesn't have to look like Trump. Populist parties starting winning elections like crazy all over the western world after the Great Recession. But again, it wasn't just conservatives. For every Trump or Le Pen you also have a Syriza or Podemos.

More the latter. Our legal system is basically a giant case of hide-the-ball, in that we create rituals that make it seem like we're not doing what it is that we're doing.

Meanwhile, I disagree with the second statement. As Camus wrote in Reflections on the Guillotine:

Indeed, no one dares speak directly of the ceremony. Officials and journalists who have to talk about it, as if they were aware of both its provocative and its shameful aspects, have made up a sort of ritual language, reduced to stereotyped phrases. Hence we read at breakfast time in a corner of the newspaper that the condemned "has paid his debt to society" or that he has "atoned" or that "at five a.m. justice was done." The officials call the condemned man "the interested party" or "the patient" or refer to him by a number. People write of capital punishment as if they were whispering. In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don't dare speak of it directly. For a long time, in middle-class families people said no more than that the elder daughter had a "suspicious cough" or that the father had a "growth" because tuberculosis and cancer were looked upon as somewhat shameful maladies. This is probably even truer of capital punishment since everyone strives to refer to it only through euphemisms.

The thing is, nothing in here tells us anything about Trump we didn't already know. Mueller was not on a crusade, and he did what he is supposed to do. I question the DOJ's position that they cannot bring charges against a sitting president, but that was decided back in 2000 (under W) and isn't up to Mueller to decide. So he was careful to stay within the bounds of what he is legally allowed to do, although I think it comes through pretty clearly that he thinks Trump obstructed justice.

But to me, the left's hope in Mueller as somehow causing a great deal of change was always going to be misplaced. No one who supports Trump was going to be convinced no matter what Mueller said, whereas no one else was waiting on Mueller to conclude that Trump had colluded with the Russians. Mueller showed clearly that there was collusion in the common use of the term, but there's enough wiggle room here for any Trump supporters to justify saying that the whole thing was a political ploy.

As for what we do? Keep calm and carry on. Vote. Try to not be terrible to each other. Avoid pretending that we have more influence over broader events than we do.

Yep, I'm still around. I'd like to do the SCOTUS posts still, I'm just not as good at keeping up with when new decisions drop as I have been :)

The thing is, she's not wrong about the problem. The mob is very real, and it's as un-nuanced as she suggests. I've written about this before on hubski, and was not particularly well-received, and unfortunately I think that's true in a lot of communities. (What happened to Richard Stallman is a good example of how the mob can get ahead of itself.) All it takes is one edited screenshot or just a baseless accusation and we're off to the races.

Where she is wrong is about the consequences. I can't speak to what young people may be feeling; I'm in my late 30s and have basically no shame, so "holding back" isn't remotely in my wheelhouse, for better or worse. So the idea that I wouldn't say something for fear of being "called out" is just...weird. But as for famous people, I can't think of anyone who's been permanently forced out of the public eye absent going to jail (and even then it's debatable). Plenty of famous people have been sent to time out, which I think is the appropriate response, and is better than what I was worried about; I believe that redemption and atonement are always possible.

My main concern, though, is that culturally we'll begin to forget why due process is a thing. We already seem to have forgotten that you can't only protect "some" speech (in a legal sense). Someone on a leftist discord I frequent legit said that hate speech should be illegal. I also think this is going to allow us to not give a shit about reforming the actual criminal justice system. I get the catharsis about someone who was caught on social media being racist losing their job or whatever, but we have to think about what our goals actually are. I'm not convinced that that kind of shaming will actually change anyone's mind. Meanwhile, the mob is fickle, and it can turn on you easily. We forget that our system is specifically designed so that minorities are protected (ideally, that is), but it's easy to forget that "minority" in this instance just means "someone who has a minority view." Popular speech never needs protection.

Quoting one of the tweets from the article:

[Sanders] is a broken-down bitter and racist old man.

This is why Democrats keep losing. It's especially stupid to call Sanders racist, given his start in politics. Sanders was an organizer of CORE and SNCC in Chicago while in college, and organized a protest of segregated campus housing ("We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments"). Dude saw MLK speak at the March on Washington.

When the bar for the "racist" label becomes so low it becomes meaningless, and this does a huge disservice to people who have actually experienced racism. When it becomes a magic argument-ender, it no longer means anything.

Stories from my own life, and some ranting follow.

First, I spent a couple of years hearing unemployment cases for my state. Basically, my job was to do a hearing if someone (either the company or the ex-employee) appealed the lower decision. I fast became incredibly cynical when it came to charges of racism, because every single time it was a shitty employee who was trying to blame the employer for their own failures. Now you may wonder how I know, and the simple reason is that I would ask. This is paraphrasing from memory, but is indicative:

Claimant: I was harassed.

Me: What did [employer] do that you felt was harassment?

Claimant: They wrote me up after I was late 37 times in 2 months.

Me: ...

I'm sure racial discrimination at work still happens, but shit like that (which happened every couple of weeks) makes it impossible for the legitimate claims to be taken seriously. I pity people who work for the EEOC.

Second. I volunteered at our local legal aid organization while in law school. This was a group funded by a combination of private donations and the Legal Services Corporation, and provided civil representation to low-income people (so not criminal defense). We did a lot of housing stuff (Richmond sadly has plenty of slumlords), some divorce and custody (but only if there was abuse, so those were fun), just kind of whatever. We'd go after anybody: our state's sole power utility (a lawyer for which once accused me of legal malpractice for suggesting that they can be sued, which even as a lowly 1L I knew was ridiculous), Wells Fargo, whatever.

Random aside: knowing tenant's rights served me well as a tenant myself. If any of you still rent, do some research on what your state's laws are if you haven't already.

Anyway, the "high" point of my time there was being told I was a racist while standing in the clerk's office of Richmond Circuit Court because our client had spent over a year (I worked on this case both summers of law school) ignoring everything we told her. We'd arranged a way to solve her mortgage problem by having a private investor take over the note, but she was convinced she could get the money together. She was wrong, got foreclosed on, and then this was our fault (and we were racist).

Now I get it, people (in both examples) often look for someone else to blame. It is what it is. But it doesn't excuse it either, and ultimately does more harm than good.

One, you get more flies with honey than with vinegar. As cathartic as it may be to yell at a racist, there's no evidence (whether anecdotal or more formal) that this actually helps. MLK didn't do it. There was a guy who has converted a bunch of white supremacists by simply sitting down and talking to them, which is a hell of a counterexample. And it's consistent with the conclusion that most racists have very little actual experience with the people they hate. I saw a stat awhile ago looking at Germany, and the folks who were most afraid of immigrants were also the ones with the least contact with them.

And second, as I mentioned earlier, it cheapens claims of racism. It's easy to be dismissive of someone crying race when your overwhelming experiences have been of people using it as excuse. For white folks, we don't generally see racism the way other races will, and it's difficult for anyone to trust a stranger over our own lived experiences. It took me until the shooting in St. Louis and all these protests to think that where there's smoke there's probably fire. Plus, talking to some folks there (mostly cabbies and the janitors in the building I was working in) really helped, and I am grateful to this day for their willingness to share their impressions and their fears with some white stranger who for all they knew could've been wildly unsympathetic. It was an interesting time, actually, and I'm hoping to write more about it one of these days.

Ultimately, we're all in it together, and none of us can solve this problem alone. It sucks that so much of the onus is on the same people who are taking the brunt of it, but pretending reality is other than it is doesn't lead anywhere. We can complain or we can get to work, but I don't think any of us have the energy to do both.

"Antifa" has been a favorite target/scapegoat of the alt-right for awhile. That it's not actually an organized group just makes that easier, because boogeymen are more effective when they're amorphous.

In the short-term, I question the extent to which this will make any real difference. But it does set a longer-term precedent of using "terrorist organization" to get rid of a group that is politically opposed.

All lives matter, haven't you heard? (They just leave out the part where it's not the same amount.)

I love it! I hope this is something that becomes a more regular thing, even if I can certainly appreciate the amount of work that it takes. Great job thenewgreen!

What about all the people under 30 who couldn't be assed to vote in the primaries?

However, I predict that Bernie would have been a poor President because good legislation cannot pass ideological purity because it is by nature a product of compromise.

I don't think this is true. He was able to get stuff done in the Senate, and despite his strong ideological standing I haven't seen any evidence he couldn't work with members of both parties. The other thing is that he wasn't as blindly idealistic as he was painted to be: I remember him saying in an interview once that, since you'll always get less than you ask for, you're better off asking for the moon.

Some fun facts:

- the rate has been increasing steadily, up 30% since 1999

- 77% of suicide deaths are men (and the ratio is higher in every country in the world except for China)

- The rate for white and Native American men is double that of black or Hispanic men