Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’m reconsidering my position on reparations for slavery.  I’d be willing to have the United States government pay every person who was held as a slave in the United States.  The proof could be DNA, family records, distinctive cheekbones or even oral family history.  Once qualified, the applicant would be eligible to receive a reparations payment of $1 million.  If the eligible person is deceased, the payment would be distributed to his/her heirs, per stirpes.

True, after a few generations, the payment amounts will be insultingly small but that’s because the relationship between the recipient and the harm is increasingly distant.  My kids can expect a modest inheritance from me; my grandkids less so, my great-grandkids probably none at all, and the same for reparations.

By making the million-dollar payment, the United States would settle all accounts with the former slaves and the books would be balanced.  Accepting the payment would include a waiver of entitlement to preferential treatment on account of race.  Society would no longer entertain complaints about school discipline having a disparate impact, would no longer offer affirmative action in college admissions, would abandon goals and timetables for employment, and would outlaw set-aside quotas for minority owned businesses.

Any person who took the money and then tried to play the race card would be incarcerated for life without possibility of parole in prisons located in Siberia, operated under contract between our governments, since they have the infrastructure already built and trained personnel ready at hand.

Yes, it would cost a fortune.  But if we could finally put the legacy of slavery behind us, it might be worth it.

Joe Doakes

There are times I wonder if paying the issue off with prejudice as Joe describes forty years ago might not have saved money.

Being a conservative is traditionally a fairly solitary thing. We tend to have higher priorities in our lives than politics.

With that in mind – know what I miss the. most from blogging’s brief, ephemeral “Glory Days?”
The social life. It’s a little ironic that “social media” cut the heart out of the actual social life that built up around blogging.

And by “social life”, I don’t mean *just* the MOB parties – although those were pretty epic, in their heyday. And not the crowd of really awesome people I met via blogging, back then – some of whom are still the core of my social circle, 17 years later.

What I – and society, I think, misses today – was the hard edge to that little home-made social network we built back then.

Back then, when somebody – a reporter or columnist, a politician, a bureaucrat – said or did something ignorant, harmful, defamatory or stupid, the answer would be a “crowdsourced” response from several, maybe dozens, of people who had some knowledge of the issue, directing the energy of dozens, sometimes hundreds, occasionally many more, to respond in a way that even the high and mighty couldn’t ignore.

The ultimate example, of course, was Rathergate; when Dan Rather tried to defame President Bush using a “letter” from a Texas Air Guard general as evidence. My friends and, at the time, cohosts at Power Line led a horde of thousands of people who pointed out facts about the “letter” that meant it could have been nothing but a forgery, and a really clumsy one at that. Dan Rather and Mary Mapes paid with their careers – and almost two decades later, and even after Hollywood put out a scabrous fabulist movie to try to rewrite the history, they remain disgraced.

And that was one of many such episodes, both earth-shaking (my friend and former co-host Ed Morrissey’s reporting leading to the toppling of the Chretien government in Canada) and minor league (me and an army other other lilliputian bloggers, bit by bit, showing the Star Tribune that Nick Coleman’s hackery was going to hurt them more than it helped).

I wouldn’t say that “Big Left” [1] created “Social Media” to divert energy, talent and effort from the DIY world of blogging. But if they had intended that, I don’t know how they could have done it better.

And I think it’s important; back when conservative blogs (and our other alternate media) *were* a major social medium, then there existed a powerful counterbalance to “cancel culture”. Now, the counterbalance has all but evaporated.

And we see the results. “Cancel Culture” is a cancer that is gutting American intellectual, social and even vocational life.

Glenn Reynolds points out that the way to fight cancel culture is “never apologize, punch back, and bring friends”. I suggest that one can’t skimp on any of the three. Which means you need friends.

Since blogging, as Brad Carlson notes, has gone pretty passé in the past ten years or so, it’s time – and imperative – for the good guys to recapture, if not the organic media we all built (although that’d be great, too), then at least the strength in numbers that allowed the Army of Davids to punch upward, and do it effectively, back in the day.

Something – an organic social group, a club, whatever – to bring some raw, motivated numbers to the fight. (And it is a fight, like it or not).

It’d be a shame to lose the culture war because nobody showed up where it mattered.

Thinking…

[1] You got Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Steel? You got Big Left.

…get the whole “Balance of Power” thing right.

One of the alternate jurors from the Chauvin trial admits the flamingly obvious (in an interview with KARE11’s Lou Raguse):

Raguse: Did you want to be a juror?

Christensen: I had mixed feelings. There was a question on the questionnaire about it and I put I did not know. The reason, at that time, was I did not know what the outcome was going to be, so I felt like either way you are going to disappoint one group or the other. I did not want to go through rioting and destruction again and I was concerned about people coming to my house if they were not happy with the verdict.

So there’s your evidence that, by accident or design or pure social fact, the jury’s attitude was affected by the, er, social disruption of the past year.

I’m not going to say “It’d have been utterly impossible for Chauvin to get a fair trial under those circumstances”.

I’m going to say we can see that state from here.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We’ve heard a lot of legal expertise tossed around lately.  Let’s see how easily our resident legal scholars handle a first-year law school exam question.:

Criminal Procedure quiz, essay portion:

A man is accused of committing a crime in Minneapolis.  The prosecuting attorney spends a year tainting the jury pool with pretrial publicity.  Defendant moves for a change of venue citing his Constitutional right to a fair trial but the judge concludes the State’s actions have been so widespread, so pervasive, so completely corrupting, that the Defendant cannot get a fair trial anywhere in the state.

The judge’s choices are:

A.  Hold the trial in Minneapolis since that’s where the alleged crime occurred, even as the mob outside the courthouse threatens to burn the city if the man isn’t convicted;

B.  Dismiss the charges on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct in violation of the Defendant’s Constitutional rights.

If the judge chooses A, he opens the door for the State to violate future defendants’ Constitutional rights in a similar manner.  If the judge chooses B, the mob burns down the city. What should the judge do?   Explain your answer in 100 words or less giving citations to relevant statutory, case-law, and rule authority.

You have one hour.  Begin.

Joe Doakes

Er..Racism and White Privilege and the Patriarchy?

Those seem to be the answers for everyone question one can’t answer these days.

Babylon Bee tries to parody the hypocrisy of the Twin Cities political class.

They’re running a solid four years behind the Twin Cities pollitical class’s ongoing self parody.

One of the traits of Urban Progressive Privilege – being the beneficiary of a double standard makes no more impression than the concept of “water” does to a fish.

… that lumber prices are completely out of control…

… but while driving through Dayton‘s Bluff yesterday, I saw a house that had been stripped down to nothing but copper pipe.

Minnesota is decisively out of the mainstream. When will Governor Walz and Democrat legislators bring Minnesota into line with other, more enlightened jurisdictions? 

Joe Doakes

And the bitch of it is, we are so close.

Submitted without comment:

OK, not completely without comment.

Good kitty.

DAD (to son): “Bevyn? What’s the matter?”

BEVYN: “Dad, this mean guy is writing satire about “January 6”, apparently mocking “Progressives” constant deflection of all accusations of their own bad behavior with “what about January 6″ . What does it all mean?”

DAD: “First, Bevyn, satire is racist…”

MOM: “Unless Steven Colbert does it.”

DAD: “And there are bad people who think that there was ever political violence in this country before January 6.”

MOM: “They don’t recognize that if that mob had overwhelmed the Secret Service, taken the Vice President and Senate hostage, and held them while interdicting government rescue attempts with targeted bombinghs and ambushes, they could have taken control of the country”

BEVYN: “Aren’t you describing a Tom Clancy novel, rather than a riot?”

DAD: “I”m going to hit you with my belt”

MOM (to DAD, sotto voce): “What in the holy name of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has gotten into this kid?”

REPORTER: “Maxine Waters called for violence”

EDITOR: “Did she do it on January 6?”

REPORTER: “No”

EDITOR: “Then it wasn’t violence”.

TEACHER: “Marco, can you gell us what the ‘Holocaust’ was?

MARCO: “Er…January 6?”

TEACHER: “Correct…”

PLAY BY PLAY ANNOUNCER: “Gascoigne checks O’Reilly into the boards…”

COLOR GUY: “Oh, wow. Cheap hit, there…”

PLAY BY PLAY ANNOUNCER: “Aaaaand off come the gloves. We’ve got a donnybrook going here”

COLOR GUY: “Hockey used to be such an artistic game. How far hockey has fallen, since it’s first ever fight, last January 7”.

PLAY BY PLAY ANNOUNCER: “RIght you are, Guy”.

MOM: “Why isn’t your homework done, Junior?”

JUNIOR: “January 6”

MOM: “Fair enough”.

GUY A: “Who was that woman who got arrested here in Highland a few years back for being a terrorist?”

GAL B: “Sarah Jane Olson. She was arrested for being involved in January 6″.

GUY A: “I thought it was from in the Symbionese Liberation Army, back in the seventies?”

GAL B: “Couldn’t be. There was no political violence before January 6”

GUY A: “Doh. My bad”.

TOUR GUIDE: “Welcome to Volgograd – formerly Stalingrad”.

TOURIST:”Excuse me – will we see any monuments to the Battle of Stalingrad?”

TOUR GUIDE: “What?”

TOURIST: “The epic battle between the Nazis and Soviets, in 1942-43?”

TOUR GUIDE: “I don’t understand. There was no war or violence of any kind before January 6”.

KOMMISSAR (yelling from off-camera left (where else?)): “Or since!”

GOVERNOR WALX: “Any questions?”

REPORTER: “Tell us why you moved people with Covid into nursing homes?”

WALZ: “It was January 6. It was responsible for everything“.

REPORTER: “Thanks!”

BOSS: “Er, let’s talk. You’ve turned in no work yet this year.”

PROGRESSIVE EMPLOYEE: “After January 6, how could I?”

BOSS: “Fair point”.

TEACHER: OK, Chad, what do the Gulf War, World War 2, World War 1, the Civil War, the War of the Roses, and the French Revolution have in common?

CHAD: Um…

TEACHER: Besides being called wars.

CHAD: Um…I don’t know?

TEACHER: None of them existed. Because there was no violence of any kind before January 6.

COP (PULLING WOMAN OVER): “Do you know how fast you were going, ma’am?”

WOMAN: “After January 6, does it even matter?”

COP: “Good point. You’re free to go”.

PROGRESSIVE PARENTS: “Now, Barack, eat your lima beans…

CHILD OF PROGRESSIVE PARENTS: “After what happend January 6?”

PROGRESSIVE PARENTS: “Damn. He’s right”.

We’ve talked about orders of effect.  The first order effect of a railroaded guilty verdict is X but what are the second-order and third-order and further order effects? 

Sarah Hoyt has an insightful column up: “Sparing the Rod.“

Joe Doakes

I don’t think our society has any idea of the long-term effects of a massive loss of faith in law enforcement, the judiciary, the media and the rest of the institutuions.

In the wake of the verdict yesterday, Speaker Pelosi thanked George Floyd for his “sacrifice”:

“Thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for justice,” Pelosi said Tuesday outside the Capitol where she was joined by the Congressional Black Caucus.

“Because of you and because of millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous with justice. And now we have to make sure justice prevails in the sentencing.”

Has there ever been a more perfect symbol of what black people really mean to the Democrat party?

Here, in one of the most “progressive” cities in the country:

• The “achievement gap” is the biggest in the nation, and getting worse even as the districts get more “woke” every year (not that those are in any way contradictory
• In cities controlled by Democrats for generations, the wealth gap is among the highest in the nation
• “Black” neighborhoods (we don’t really have them in the sense they exist elsewhere – which actually reinforces the point) are basically social service warehouses. Compare this with places like Atlanta or Jacksonville – Minneapolis doesn’t come across very well at all.

These same patterns are true across all of “blue” America. Quick – think of a “blue” city where that’s not the case? Atlanta is an arguable exception.

Indeed, the decline of the black middle class and the black family coincided – and, let’s be honest, were caused by – the Democrat Party’s ongoing campaign to bring all of black society under its social wing.

So yeah. Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for doing the one thing she expects of any black man – providing her a crisis to not waste.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The “vaccine” is perfectly safe.  Any claims to the contrary are misinformation spread by science deniers. 

I mean seriously, who are you going to believe: the shills paid to sell it to you, or your lying eyes?

Joe Doakes

If the general public took the message it should from this past year, Big Government would never recover.

When “Karen” tells me “I follow science”, I’ve taken to silently appending, often (but by no means always) in my mind, “you absorbed a CDC announcement a little over a year ago”.

The people maniacally scrubbing surfaces? As re Covid, it’s largely a wasted effort.

Via the Atlantic, which nearly along among periodicals has done a good job of actual journalism as re public health:

Whenever I’ve written about hygiene theater, some people have responded with the same objection: “Hey, what’s the matter with washing our hands?” That’s an easy one: Absolutely nothing. “Pandemic or no pandemic, you should wash your hands, especially after you prepare food, go to the bathroom,” or touch something yucky, Goldman said.

But hygiene theater carries with it an immense opportunity cost. Too many institutions spend scarce funds or sacrifice scarce resources to do microbial battle against fomites that don’t pose a real threat. This is especially true of cash-strapped urban-transit authorities and school districts that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on soap technology rather than their central task of transporting and teaching people.

Hygiene theater also muddles the public-health message. If you tell people, “This disease is on surfaces, on your clothes, on your hands, on your face, and also in the air,” they will react in a scattered and scared way. But if you tell people the truth—this virus doesn’t do very well on surfaces, so you should focus on ventilation—they can protect themselves against what matters.

Of course, if you read this blog (and, to be fair, this blog’s citing of writers in The Atlantic), you had a solid hunch about this nearly a year ago.