The News Thread
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“All these kids are about to go back to school. No mask mandates are in place at all, 70% of Alabama is unvaccinated. Of course, no kids are vaccinated for the most part because they can’t be,” Cobia said. “So it feels like impending doom, basically.”
Christ, yeah, that’s going to be horrible.
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Ivey ended the state’s mask mandate in April, at the time favoring personal responsibility rather than a government mandate.
…because we all know the good people of Alabama will always do the right thing. Remember “Bloody Sunday” in Selma? Rosa Parks’ arrest in Montgomery? The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham? Yeah, Alabama is big on personal responsibility…
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Did FBI Informants Thwart or Encourage the Plot to Kidnap Gretchen Whitmer? | The New Republic
In an investigation of the Michigan plot, BuzzFeed News’s Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison conclude, “informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a far larger role than has previously been reported. Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.” At least 12 informants played a role in the Justice Department’s conspiracy case. According to interviews and documents reviewed by the reporters, those informants did everything from organize meetings of alleged plotters, cover their hotel and travel costs, and encourage them to collaborate and advance their plans.
The FBI and federal agencies have been doing this since cointelpro. After 9-11, these same sting operations scooped up a lot of generally innocent Muslim Americans as well.
I have a friend who was active in the Vietnam War and Civil Rights protests in the 60’s, and they quickly learned that the protestors and organizers advocating for bombings and inciting riots usually turned out to be working with or for the FBI and police.
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But unlike other states, Alabama has not used the federal relief money for an incentive program, scholarships or lotteries, AL.com has reported. Earlier this month, Ivey said there was no need for an incentive plan for vaccinations.
On Thursday, Ivey insisted that she’s done “all I know how to do” in managing the situation. When asked what it would take to get more people to get shots, she replied, “I don’t know, you tell me.”
Wow. That’s aggressively incompetent.
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By virtue of time zones, Sydney (which is currently in week…4? 5? of our harshest lockdown) was the site of the first anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine protest on this supposed worldwide day of resistance. This is kinda embarrassing.
Anti-lockdown protesters have marched in major Australian cities, as Covid cases spiked to record numbers in Sydney and authorities warned of a “continuing and growing problem”.
Thousands of angry, unmasked people marched through the Sydney central business district on Saturday afternoon demanding an end to the city’s lockdown, which is entering its fifth week.
After protesters were dispersed, the New South Wales police minister, David Elliott, announced the formation of a strike force to identify each of the 3,500 protesters at the “super spreader” event.
Elliott said 57 people were arrested and several police officers had been assaulted.
“If we don’t see a [Covid] spike in the areas these protesters came from in the next week I’ll be very, very surprised,” Elliott said.
“It was just a whole lot of halfwits.”
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Alabama is big on personal responsibility…
But on the plus side, the skies are so blue (ooo ooo ooo)!
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#Breaking @DallasPD Eddie García apologies to Bessie Rodriguez for the murder of her 12-year-old son Santos Rodriguez by a Dallas police office in July 24, 1973. Apology is clear and firm in Spanish and English. A first. pic.twitter.com/jBfdXVfvQK
— Dianne Solis ✍🏽 (@disolis) July 24, 2021
Better late than never, I suppose.
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Imprisoned ‘Dating Game Killer’ Alcala dies in California
He was waiting for execution. He saved the state of California some money.
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…because we all know the good people of Alabama will always do the right thing
this reminds me of a joke
A group of my friends used to play miniature recreations of civil war battles. There were from Colorado so there was no bias. They played the north because they wanted to be on the winning side. This was long before Trump and the GOP pulling out all the stops but my favorite joke from way back then was “How do you tell the difference between Alabama and Mississippi? Alabamans eat white lead based paint and Mississippians eat red lead based paint.”
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About damn time:
At the F.D.A.’s urging, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are expanding their studies of children 5 to 11.
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About damn time:
At the F.D.A.’s urging, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are expanding their studies of children 5 to 11.
What happened to the first four?
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This is a strange story.
Matt Damon reveals he only recently stopped using homophobic slur
Outrage after actor reveals he retired word only after his daughter told him that it was unacceptable
On the one hand, I don’t know how a grown man can get this far without realising that an obviously derogatory term isn’t acceptable.
But on the other, there are a lot of people responding to him acknowledging that (and saying he’s going to stop using it) by complaining that he ever used it in the first place.
It reminds me a bit of the Liam Neeson comments acknowledging his past racism a while ago. At this point I think any celeb is pretty brave/foolish to admit to past missteps even if they’ve subsequently changed their ways.
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Headline has changed:
Matt Damon denies using homophobic slur ‘in personal life’
And I assume this part is new:
Matt Damon has reportedly denied using a well-known homophobic slur “in his personal life”, after being widely criticized for revealing in a recent interview that he “retired” the term after his daughter told him it was unacceptable.
So, you know, shit’s hit the fan. But honestly, he may be a bit behind the curve, but it’s not like we haven’t heard words like that very commonly used, not as direct insults to homosexuals but as a “friendly” kind of swearword. “Oh, that was so gay”, “You’re such a faggot” and so on. It really was very normal back in the nineties when Damon came up. And a lot of people kept using it that way even though they’d been aware it was offensive to gay people to use it like that.
The Oscar-winning actor had told the Sunday Times that the word “was commonly used when I was a kid, with a different application”.
He said his daughter had taken him to task after he used the word in a joke “months ago”. “She went to her room and wrote a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous. I said, ‘I retire the f-slur!’ I understood,” he said in the interview.
Honestly, I don’t think that’s an uncommon story and the outrage about it is somewhat disingenious and over the top. His story could’ve been one encouraging other guys in their fourties to rethink the way they use these words from their youth, and it could’ve had a productive effect. Instead, you probably now have a lot of people outraged by the outrage and feeling attacked and insisting on their right to use whatever words they want and it’s all just a big fight once again.
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Honestly, I don’t think that’s an uncommon story and the outrage about it is somewhat disingenious and over the top. His story could’ve been one encouraging other guys in their fourties to rethink the way they use these words from their youth, and it could’ve had a productive effect. Instead, you probably now have a lot of people outraged by the outrage and feeling attacked and insisting on their right to use whatever words they want and it’s all just a big fight once again.
Completely agree. Yet again it’s a case of people looking for the negative angle of condemnation rather than the positive one of growth and change, and deliberately driving division while pretending to do the opposite.
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Oh God:
5-year-old fatally shoots 3-year-old in Minnesota, officials say
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Guns don’t kill people. Five-year olds do.
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The study in that article isn’t peer-reviewed, it’s likely a load of bollocks.
Not to mention that IQ is a terrible measure of intelligence to begin with – it tests the ability to take a very specific kind of test and assumes that result in turn measures your ability to be smart.
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Hey, don’t knock my skull shape, I made that myself you know!
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The study in that article isn’t peer-reviewed, it’s likely a load of bollocks.
Not to mention that IQ is a terrible measure of intelligence to begin with – it tests the ability to take a very specific kind of test and assumes that result in turn measures your ability to be smart.
Well we’ll see I guess. There have to be oodles of studies that are going to double check this. But if thius is actually happening…a lot of people are going to be pissed. We would have essentially stunted a whole generation of kids. There would be no forgiveness.
The problem is that you can’t just say IQs have dropped by 20 points. Like does it mean that a child who’s IQ would be 69 outside of being born during the pandemic, indicating severe learning issues now suddenly has an IQ of 49?
It also presupposes that a drop of IQ is directly linked to a drop in intelligence, when IQ as it’s currently used is more of a moving target to begin with, as the ability to take the test improves, the average IQ reported rises, leading to a trending upwards of scores overall and a resulting redefinition of what an average IQ is.
On top of that, the article is written to make it sound like a 20-point drop in IQ in infancy is irreparable damage when it’s not. IQ as measured changes over time in people, and at worst this means that the effected children will need some additional attention.
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We shall see but from my experience I have extreme doubts on the conclusions made here.
We’re talking very very small babies here, as a parent I can tell you they have very little interaction with other children of the same age until they reach nursery school age which is after the scope of the study. They typically only get the ability to walk very tentatively at age 1 so what they were meant to be doing in playgrounds is a bit of a mystery.
They will spend 95% 0f their time at home with a parent, with the odd walk in a pushchair which has never been curtailed during lockdowns, in the west at least.
It seems more an indictment of the US maternity/paternity leave system if the issue is they are being ignored by parents having to work and mind them at the same time.
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effected children will need some additional attention
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We shall see but from my experience I have extreme doubts on the conclusions made here.
We’re talking very very small babies here, as a parent I can tell you they have very little interaction with other children of the same age until they reach nursery school age which is after the scope of the study. They typically only get the ability to walk very tentatively at age 1 so what they were meant to be doing in playgrounds is a bit of a mystery.
They will spend 95% 0f their time at home with a parent, with the odd walk in a pushchair which has never been curtailed during lockdowns, in the west at least.
It seems more an indictment of the US maternity/paternity leave system if the issue is they are being ignored by parents having to work and mind them at the same time.
Nah, it’s the fucking smartphones I tell ya! Bloody Tiktok babies tweeting incomprehensible garbage on their facebooks…
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Developing story:
Police probing report of explosive in truck near Capitol
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A 10-minute leaked video showing a group of Thai police officers allegedly manhandling a drug suspect by putting a plastic bag over his head to extort money from him has gone viral, sparking outrage on social media.
Thailand’s police chief Pol Gen Suwat Jangyodsuk told reporters on Tuesday the force will build the case and press charges once ready.
Suwat said a dozen officers were linked to the case and he had ordered all units to monitor border crossings to prevent the suspects from fleeing Thailand.
According to the police, a station superintendent from Nakhon Sawan province in central Thailand, Colonel Thitisant Utthanaphon, and six officers were involved in the alleged fatal assault on the handcuffed male inmate.
In some ways, it is darkly comic how this was exposed. One of the officers involved was disgruntled against the commander so instead of deleting the camera video as instructed, he sent it to a famous Thai lawyer figuring the lawyer would expose it. Instead, when the officer came to work, they were all instructed to provide money to pay the lawyer off – – so the lawyer decided to use the video to blackmail the cops. So the officer sent copies of the video to another lawyer who then posted it on their facebook.
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This Saturday will mark an anniversary of the death of Emmett Till.
Emmett, as some of you know, was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman in a store.
For further information this is the Wiki link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till
It was later on that the woman Carolyn Bryant admitted that she lied about her story:
She is still alive and her address is undisclosed for obvious reasons.
For anyone who argues that this was a long time ago, Nazi war criminals are still being hunted down and taken to trial for what they did in the Holocaust.
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That case and Carolyn Bryant is the textbook case of the danger of “the fragile white woman and her tears”.
One of the first popular movies ever was “Birth of a Nation” where there was a scene of a seemingly black man chasing and trying to rape a white woman. I won’t go in detail, but in the end, the KKK were seen and glorified as these champions of white virtue, defenders of white women and causes, and so on. It was a propaganda movie.
Anyway, the whole thing of a white woman being frantic and crying over an “attack” kind of reflexively raises the white men to come to her rescue etc, EVEN IF IT IS BLATANT WELL ACTED LIE!
So many times in US office settings, a white woman’s frantic complaint will bring about reprimand, disciplinary action, even a firing on a minority employee. That’s why a lot of actions, microaggressions, witnesses, have to be recorded for confirmation and the proverbial covering your … backside. It is part of office politics and proper navigating one’s way through.
Case in point is that whole Megan Markle thing… Her wedding preparations caused a small schism between her and the sister-in-law Kate Middleton and the word spread around that Megan was this big bully. The “truth” … or what Megan said in the Oprah interview was that Kate was the one who made a big brouhaha about it, and Megan speaking up and defending her stance led to her being seen as a bully.
It is about who controls the narrative. That determines a lot.
See… Stuff like that never ends and a person of color has to be careful.
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BlackKklansman is an excellent way to see just how goddamn awful Birth of a Nation is without seeing the film itself.
If you haven’t seen how representation matters, Lee makes a very strong case for why it does.
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I’m not sure exactly what the point is about singling out white women as complainants as though they are a special breed, but generally I think that in the case of complaints of this kind (whether in work or outside) they need to be investigated fairly and thoroughly to gauge what has really gone on.
Wow…
Ok then… Questions:
Are you American? Are you familiar with the history of all this?
I did mention US office settings. Fortunately, to my knowledge, more of an effort is being made to get to the bottom of a situation, yet it still remains that a white man or woman’s testimony carries more weight, benefit of the doubt.
In fact, in the States there is a buzz term these days about it called “white privilege”.
That is why non-white office staff members have to work a little more (documentation, witnesses) to validate their side of any incident.
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I’m not American, but these issues go beyond America. Racism is a problem in the UK too and these kinds of problems exist here too. Albeit in a slightly different cultural context.
Happy to leave it for Americans to discuss exclusively though.
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Thing is Al, this isn’t a purely US-based board, some of this stuff does look very different outside of the US.
From just about everything I’ve heard, the US office system comes across as both very hierarchal and a blame culture. Not a good mix.
There are similarities between US and UK racism, but there’s pretty major differences too. With it being quite difficult to describe the US experience to those outside of it.
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hierarchical and a blame culture. Not a good mix.
Exactly. Quoted for truth.
There is another thing called colorism. I’ve had lighter skinned black people feel they were better (had one over on me) because they were lighter. The same thing on with Hispanic people, it goes on and on.
This being lighter and feeling superior goes with this hierarchy as you put it. There are cases of lighter skinned people getting jobs/positions over more qualified, darker skinned applicants.
In Hollywood, the singer/actor Tyrese from the “Fast and Furious” movie franchise said of roles he casted for but the roles went to lighter skinned actors like Terrence Howard.
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Wow… I am really spilling the beans here, am I? 😂
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In terms of acting, the US is likely doing better than the UK. Idris Elba has said in interviews he would never have had a chance of getting a role like Stringer Bell in the UK.
The big difference between the US and UK looks to be that the UK version is still more covert, despite the last few years of it becoming more overt.
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MedPage Today on Twitter: “The number of states with obesity rates of at least 35% almost doubled from nine in 2018 to 16 last year. By @JustineColeman8 via @thehill. https://t.co/SDssfjxqZ7” / Twitter
I think the covid lockdowns carry much responsibility for this. We’ll also see an increase in cancer, there was a news item in Italy that the national oncology institute expects a 20 % increase in cancer diagnoses by 2040 because of covid.
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This recent missing person story that is in the US news is somewhat reminiscent of the Natalee Holloway story years ago:
Her name is Gabby Petito.
In connection with some of your posts above, Al-X, the Gabby Petito case is a classic example of racism. There have been well-documented cases of Native American women disappearing and/or being found dead in upper Michigan and other areas of the United States, with little or no coverage in national television. But a pretty blonde white girl goes missing and it’s the main story on all the major channels every night and morning for the past week.
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In terms of acting, the US is likely doing better than the UK. Idris Elba has said in interviews he would never have had a chance of getting a role like Stringer Bell in the UK.
There’s a wider context to that too. Prejudice will of course play a part but a stumbling block has been the material being made. When it comes to exporting TV drama the UK does best with period drama. Downton Abbey as the most obvious example. This stuff dated before mass immigration to the UK means both the number of parts and quality of those parts for people of colour is very low. It’s not realistic that you’d see a great deal of diversity in a rural English village in the 1920s.
Eddie Marzan commented on it a while back as he graduated drama school and shared a flat with Benedict Wong and he saw how he struggled to get parts because roles for Chinese characters were so rare.
Others saw the issue too and Kenneth Branagh particularly, when he was running the Royal Shakespeare Company, saw how it created a no-win scenario when only one lead part in Shakespeare is a black character. How do you learn the craft without exposure, how can you lead the play if you are a woman of colour and none of the characters are? He introduced colour blind casting, regardless of the plot and continued that in his movies – hence Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington playing brothers in Much Ado About Nothing or in fact Elba himself in Thor.
There have been moves to improve things that way and last year Michaela Coel turned down $1m from Netflix for ‘I May Destroy You’ because they wanted ownership and editorial control, the BBC gave her free rein to make it. Which in the end is where I see progress best coming from, that people of colour are making the shows themselves and commissioning them. It is often a case of neither overt or covert racism but rather institutional bias, everyone at the top is white and middle class so they don’t perceive the issue.
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He introduced colour blind casting, regardless of the plot and continued that in his movies – hence Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington playing brothers in Much Ado About Nothing
This one is interesting as I think that to some extent that specific relationship is actually strengthened by the difference.
In Much Ado, Keanu’s character Don John is the “bastard” half-brother of Don Pedro (Denzel’s character), with only their father in common. So making them visually/racially distinct makes quite a lot of sense for the story and creates an effect that wouldn’t be true for a traditional all-white cast.
One of the best examples of colourblind casting that I have seen is Armando Iannucci’s recent adaptation of David Copperfield, which is about as clear an example of “just pick the best actor for the role” as you can imagine, and pays off beautifully.
Although I know some people did complain that it took them out of the reality of the film – I think the audience has to want to make that leap with the filmmakers for it to work.
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In connection with some of your posts above, Al-X, the Gabby Petito case is a classic example of racism. There have been well-documented cases of Native American women disappearing and/or being found dead in upper Michigan and other areas of the United States, with little or no coverage in national television. But a pretty blonde white girl goes missing and it’s the main story on all the major channels every night and morning for the past week.
Also, look at what happens:
In the US, it is only when something happens to a white person or some social problem spreads to the white community does it get all this attention, “national outrage”, etc.
Then communities of people of color say “Told you so…” and begin to groan and sigh.
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Shonda Rhimes took the approach on Grey’s Anatomy and then into her other shows that no character in script would have an ethnicity.
They’d cast audition anyone for the parts and just cast the best one and then take it from there (of course exceptions were when they cast siblings/parents etc). Then on Bridgerton when she did a period piece she just adopted the same ‘fuck it’ approach as Branagh and Iannucci.
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One of the best examples of colourblind casting that I have seen is Armando Iannucci’s recent adaptation of David Copperfield, which is about as clear an example of “just pick the best actor for the role” as you can imagine, and pays off beautifully.
This kind of casting happens fairly regularly in Broadway and Off-Broadway theater, where audiences seem to be more willing to appreciate the live performance regardless of the color of the actor. HAMILTON’S original cast consisted primarily of Hispanic and Black actors playing America’s Founding Fathers who were all (if I recall from my history lessons) very White. Somehow I don’t think the show would have achieved the success it has, if an all-white cast tried performing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop-heavy songs.
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Somehow I don’t think the show would have achieved the success it has, if an all-white cast tried performing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop-heavy songs.
They should have done that for the Disney+ version just to watch people lose their minds.
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One of the best examples of colourblind casting that I have seen is Armando Iannucci’s recent adaptation of David Copperfield, which is about as clear an example of “just pick the best actor for the role” as you can imagine, and pays off beautifully.
This kind of casting happens fairly regularly in Broadway and Off-Broadway theater, where audiences seem to be more willing to appreciate the live performance regardless of the color of the actor. HAMILTON’S original cast consisted primarily of Hispanic and Black actors playing America’s Founding Fathers who were all (if I recall from my history lessons) very White. Somehow I don’t think the show would have achieved the success it has, if an all-white cast tried performing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop-heavy songs.
I think some people get wrapped up in the permanence of recorded media vs theatre. You know, you can have whoever you want play a character or person on stage because it’s only a play and it’s only temporary and thus somehow doesn’t count, but films and TV shows can be viewed infinitely after they’re recorded so they somehow count more and thus have to be more “accurate”.
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Body found in river identified as Jelani Day, missing Illinois State University student
The body of a missing Illinois State University graduate student has been recovered after a month-long search that drew criticism from family members, who said law enforcement officials were not taking his disappearance as seriously as that of Gabby Petito, a 22-year-old white woman.
On Thursday, the LaSalle County coroner identified a body found floating in the Illinois River this month as that of Jelani “JJ” Day, 25, of Bloomington.
Day, who is Black, was in his first semester of graduate school in the communication sciences and disorders department at Illinois State University in Normal. He was studying speech pathology.
Day was last seen on campus Aug. 24, and his last known location was at Beyond/Hello cannabis dispensary in Bloomington, law enforcement officials said. Two days later, his car was found about an hour north in Peru, Illinois.
Authorities combed the area for several days using dogs, drones and ground search and rescue teams. A cause of death has not been determined.
His family is one of several who told NBC News it has been painful to see the disparities between the cases of their loved ones and Petito’s, whose disappearance and death drew national attention.
“I understand what [Petito’s] family is going through, because we are going through that right now,” Day’s brother, D’Andre Day, has said.
“Jelani just didn’t disappear. Somebody knows what happened. Somebody needs to report what happened,” he said. “We need everybody involved, the same way they were involved with Gabby.”
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I think some people get wrapped up in the permanence of recorded media vs theatre. You know, you can have whoever you want play a character or person on stage because it’s only a play and it’s only temporary and thus somehow doesn’t count, but films and TV shows can be viewed infinitely after they’re recorded so they somehow count more and thus have to be more “accurate”.
I think that’s a valid point and I’d add that in theatre there is an automatic suspension of disbelief. You have to embrace that the stage is a room and that window they are staring out of isn’t a painting and you all pretend that the audience isn’t there until the end when viewers and players acknowledge each other with the bow. It’s less of a stretch then to add on one little extra level of artifice, like the Hamilton example.
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This reply from Trevor Noah is classic:
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Oh, joy:
USPS mail delivery is about to get permanently slower and temporarily more expensive
I wonder how they kept a straight face while announcing the “temporary” additional costs.
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No way she’s the only one.
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Funny how some of her fans outside the courthouse with their protest signs actually think that what they are doing is real activism.
If they want real activism they need to get onto Tiktok.
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If they want real activism they need to get onto Tiktok.
OOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Touche
😂😂😂
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Merck says experimental pill cuts worst effects of COVID-19 (apnews.com)
Well that’s some good news. It cut hospitalization rates in half in the trials
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Yes, that’s exactly what was coming from the Oxford group.
It probably won’t go away any time soon but will become less dangerous. Viruses have a biological drive to survive and a large part of the reason something as deadly as Ebola didn’t spread widely was it was too fatal. If you kill most of your hosts quickly then you can’t spread far.
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One of my employees tested positive for COVID this week. He’s already gotten his two shots, so we don’t expect him to show symptoms, but by law he is still required to quarantine for 10 days, and other staff who work closely with him have gotten tested (so far all negative).
Hopefully in the next year even this kind of requirement will dissipate as the virus becomes weaker and our defenses/treatments get stronger. I just wish there was a way to FORCE the anti-vaxxers to get a COVID shot so the rest of us could relax and breathe easier.
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Eindhoven terror suspects were out to get Rutte, Wilders and Baudet: Report | NL Times
Nine guys were arrested allegedly with plans to hit some of our politicians
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/oct/02/the-81-women-killed-in-28-weeks
People said something had changed with the awful death of Sarah Everard. But the message certainly hasn’t reached the men who rape, harm and kill women. And I can’t see a difference in the government, police, Crown Prosecution Service or the judiciary either.
Since Sarah Everard was abducted, raped, murdered and, in the words of her mother, “disposed of as if she were rubbish”, at least 81 other UK women have been killed in circumstances where the suspect is a man.
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It is almost always the young, conventionally attractive, middle-class white woman killed by a stranger, the perfect victim, that makes the front pages. Not the 50-year-old from a council estate in Leicestershire, killed by the father of her children after a 30-year marriage
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We’ve made Freedom of Information requests going back to 2009 about men’s fatal violence against women. From this we’ve identified that 62% of women killed by men are killed by a partner or ex-partner, and that at least a third of these women were in the process of leaving, or had left him; that teenage girls, as well as women in their 80s or 90s, can be killed by men who were supposed to love them; that 92% of women who are killed by men are killed by someone they know. One in 12 is a woman who is killed by her son.
Black women are disproportionately victimised, yet more likely to receive a sub-standard response from state agencies. And Sarah Everard was the 16th woman to be killed by a serving or former police officer since 2009.
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Has something changed since Sarah Everard was abducted, raped, murdered and disposed of by Wayne Couzens? The government has published the third national strategy to tackle violence against women
So, um, what went wrong with the first two national strategies?
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So, um, what went wrong with the first two national strategies?
This time they’re advising women to flag down a bus if they feel unsafe on the streets. They didn’t think of that the last two times
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Of course, buses only stop at bus stops but the Met don’t know that.
The other really stupid line from them has been that women should stand up to police if they try anything.
This is mind numbingly stupid “advice”.
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I’m somewhat baffled that some of these lines have come out as official police advice, but at the same time it’s difficult to imagine anything they could really say that would meaningfully reassure people immediately after an event like this that so (further) damages trust in the police.
Some of the assurances (like the policy of always having plain-clothes officers paired up, and encouraging people to immediately call 999 to check if a lone person approaches them claiming to be police) are a little more reasonable, but have been secondary to the dumber lines of advice in most of the reporting around it.
Ultimately the uncomfortable truth is that there’s no way to be 100% effective in preventing a serving police officer from committing a crime like this. And there’s nothing they could say to convince people of that.
And no matter how unlikely another event like this is, the fact that it has happened at all is going to damage trust for people.
I do think they have to be careful though that the lines of advice they give don’t hint that victims of this kind of crime are in any way responsible for what happens to them. I don’t personally feel that the police advice goes as far as to do that, but I’ve had friends who feel that just by pointing out options that a victim could take to verify the motives of a potential police attacker, there’s an implicit criticism there.
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And Sarah Everard was the 16th woman to be killed by a serving or former police officer since 2009.
To put this in perspective, there have been roughly 8,400 murders in the UK since 2009, so only around 2% of these have been women killed by police officers.
There are around 150,000 serving police officers in the UK, or around 0.2% of the adult population. Add in former police officers (which I can’t find a figure for) and the figure must be more than that, but not vastly more.
So if my maths is right, a police officer is statistically 10 times more likely to murder you than any other adult in the UK.
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Hold on, my maths is wrong. I seem to have decimal point blindness.
Only 0.2% of murders have been by police officers. So statistically the amount you would expect from the general population.
Which is still a problem in a body of people you expect to hold to higher standards.
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It’s fair to say there probably is no easy way out for the Met on this, but they could try not to make it worse. Instead of stopping digging, they’re getting out a digger.
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Wow… Facebook
If Facebook’s monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should’ve been (perhaps around the time it started acquiring competitors like Instagram), the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now. Break them up.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 4, 2021
It’s almost as if Facebook’s monopolistic mission to either own, copy, or destroy any competing platform has incredibly destructive effects on free society and democracy 🧐
Remember: WhatsApp wasn’t created by Facebook. It was an independent success. FB got scared & bought it 💬 https://t.co/dGVwza9leR
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 4, 2021
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I don’t see him living out so much as the first week of his sentence.
Honestly, he’s likely to live to see release and probably only serve half his sentence (which is still incredibly long). Prison in the United States is one long, ongoing human rights violation, but it is actually harder for a lot of criminals to get killed in prison than out of it. There are like 80,000 pedophiles in prison today and if they were all getting murdered, that would be much bigger news. Likely, the majority of the violence is really racial and gang related rather than any sort of moral outrage. Few people would be willing to add a few years or face a life sentence to kill the guy except for some idiots who think it will raise their reputation.
It probably won’t be easy at least the first few years, but it’s prison. It’s like saying it’s hotter in the middle of the frying pan than on the edge, but you wouldn’t want to touch any part of it.
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I don’t know how it works in the US but in the UK they tend to keep sex offenders and the like in a separate wing/area, so that kind of ‘disgust attack’ doesn’t happen because to put it simply, they are all disgusting together.
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It’s difficult to do that in the United States as we try to keep our prisons as fully occupied as possible and then some. Usually it would just be solitary confinement 24/7 with occasional 1 hour increments in a walled off outside area. Which, again, is probably a human rights violation anywhere else in the world except China, Russia or North Korea.
but actual information about prison policy is not widely available but we’re learning more every day because it’s such a growing part of the US population.
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According to that report, much of which seems to be based on allegations coming direct from the family’s lawyer, Walgreens gave a family of four (including the two kids) covid vaccines instead of flu vaccines by mistake.
The lawyer says that they have taken the kids to a paediatric cardiologist who is willing to attest that the children are now having “heart issues” as a result of the mistake.
All of this is in the context of the family’s lawsuit against Walgreens.
I leave you all to draw your own conclusions.
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