There are two serious problems in this country that might not seem to be related, but they are.
On May 25 in Minneapolis, a black person, George Floyd, was arrested – apparently for trying to pass a $20 counterfeit bill – and during the arrest, officer Derek Chauvin, guarded by three other police, restrained Floyd by putting his knee to Floyd’s neck, a maneuver that most police departments disavow precisely because it is likely to cause breathing problems. The incident was caught on video and the officers were yelled out at the time. As a result of his restraint, Floyd was pronounced dead by paramedics after they got him to the hospital.
The Minneapolis Police Department did immediately fire the four officers involved in the arrest, but outrage in the city continued to build as Chauvin was not arrested, even after the Mayor said that should happen, and the FBI had a Thursday press conference to announce an investigation. It got worse when it turned out that Chauvin in his time as a police officer has had at least 12 complaints against him, including use of excessive force.
(It turned out that in at least one of these incidents, Amy Klobuchar was the state prosecutor who declined to press charges on Chauvin, and this revelation has made it a bit less likely that she will be Joe Biden’s running mate, which would be a crying shame.)
The public outrage might seem to be an overreaction, IF one believes this is an isolated incident.
Thursday on Facebook I saw a clip from 2019 about a case that actually occurred in 2016. The Dallas Morning News posted it in 2019 because it took them three years to get the records in court. In the incident, a disturbed man – a white man – named Tony Timpa called the police himself in an adult store and told them he was off his meds and couldn’t control himself. By the time the cops got there the site security had already handcuffed Timpa and got him on the ground. However rather than simply wait for the paramedics, the cops first pushed Timpa down, keeping him in a “controversial” hold and lying on his chest. Paramedics then gave him a sedative. After a few minutes they realized Timpa was unconscious. A few minutes later they got him in the ambulance, but he died afterward.
Which is ultimately proof that the cops don’t JUST fuck with black people. They fuck over whomever they can get away with fucking over.
Most free speech advocates – and other people who study how democracies become authoritarian – have observed that if we do not think of rights as universal, if we can say that “certain people” don’t deserve them, then certain people become test cases and legal precedents for what the authorities can get away with. This is why anybody who thinks that all lives matter – or that their lives matter – ought to think that black lives matter, because if the authorities don’t have to care about black lives, there is no reason, other than social conditioning, why they have to care about yours either. And on a political level, such authoritarians often start with an unpopular target whose punishment would have some level of popularity, in order to make an example of them and show that they can do so.
Which leads to the second serious problem: Donald Trump.
The Heather-in-Chief, as part of his snitfit feud with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski on MSDNC, continued to make sleazy insinuations on Twitter that Scarborough was behind the death of an aide, even as Brezinski claimed she was talking with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over the subject of Trump’s tweets. And so, possibly because letting the issue go on might end up in legal liability for either Twitter or Trump, Twitter announced this week that it was going to post fact checks in questionable tweets. This outraged Trump, which is perfectly understandable, cause it’s not like Dorsey had EVER imposed Twitter’s own standards on him before. And yet, after Trump twitted out another misleading statement that vote-by-mail leads to voter fraud (since after all, it would not be subject to hacked ballot machines or coronavirus health orders), Twitter did in fact post links, not censoring Trump’s words, but saying in so many words that this position was incorrect. In response, Trump cried like Lucille Ball and said that Twitter was violating his “FREE SPEECH!”
So, in order to (ahem) protect free speech, Trump excreted an Executive Order declaring the authority to review and revise protections given to social media, attacking Twitter specifically because social media outlets have “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences.”
Which is to say: “Not treating Your President, Donald Trump, as an omniscient, omnipotent GOD whose every word is objective Truth and whose every desire is an unbreakable law of Nature, at least until I change my mind again.”
By at least January, Trump knew from government contacts in China that the Chinese hadn’t contained the Wuhan virus. He didn’t stop travel from China until the virus was already a pandemic in Europe, so when he closed travel there, it was like closing the barn door after the horses had run out. We have never had federal containment orders. We have (officially) 100,000 dead and counting from coronavirus. We STILL don’t have a national testing regime.
But Twitter puts a fact check link on just two of Trump’s tweets, and they get an executive order in 48 hours.
I ask again: How DID this man sire five kids with that mosquito dick?
Pretty much every news article is saying that Trump’s premenstrual political maneuver is not going to get anywhere in the courts, but most of them are saying that’s not the point. Jack Shafer said in the centrist Politico: “Even if a state attorney general assures a governor that Trump can’t legally punish his defiance, what governor wants to force the test match? No less a liberal luminary than Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, who has been savaged by Trump, just admitted she censors herself when talking about him publicly.
“Trump doesn’t pay a political price for his threatmanship for a couple of reasons. First, even though we act like we think Trump means all of the wild things he says, 3½ years of his presidency have conditioned us to understand that much of what he says is bluster and that we should wait for action before we scramble the jets. Second, we tend to let many of the outlandish things Trump says slide because the last thing Democrats want to do is hold his feet to the fire and force him to make good on his threats. In a weird sort of gentleman’s agreement, Trump gets to say wild things and the Democrats get to shout back their displeasure until the portable outrage generator runs out of fuel and a peaceful silence returns. Except for when it doesn’t.”
The implication that Shafer doesn’t spell out is that even when the “portable outrage generator” doesn’t do anything concrete, Trump’s caterwauling sets a precedent that allows him to do what he wants, even if legally he can’t. Part of this is simply because he’s the president, and we are all technically obliged to treat him as the president, which means that his job (ostensibly) is to protect the government and the country, as opposed to screaming like a retarded ape-boy that he is the Most Exalted Potentate while acting as though he were the paid stooge of a hostile power whose real job is to fuck this country in every manner possible. And part of that means that the government officials underneath him are obliged to take his Jackson Pollock-meets-Dada art and translate it into geometric forms. So even if legal experts tell us that Trump’s whim has no more enforceability than the hormone shifts of a teenager, it’s kind of the government’s job to make what the president wants enforceable. There’s a good piece on Trump’s Executive Order in Reason’s website: “Somehow, out of Trump’s several paragraphs of paraphrasing Section 230 with random erroneous asides, federal officials are supposed to intuit a new paradigm and “apply section 230(c) according to the interpretation set out in this section.”
“The FCC is also tasked with defining this bit of Trumpian gobbledygook: the conditions under which content moderation will be considered “the result of inadequate notice, the product of unreasoned explanation, or having been undertaking without a meaningful opportunity to be heard.”
If you’ve ever wondered why Internet companies don’t follow their own rules, this is it. The one time Twitter attempts to elevate social discourse by experimenting with moderation that goes outside the binary leave up/takedown scheme, it’s met with an #executiveorder.
Which gets to the point that Trump is gaming the system just as much as Twitter is. He can say that none of his twits are an official presidential statement (ex cathedra, so to speak), because they’re on his personal Twitter account. But Jack Dorsey will never enforce the same Code of Conduct on Trump that applies to other users, cause he’s the president, so what he says is newsworthy!
Well, in this brain-dead celebrity culture, Kylie Jenner is newsworthy. Does she get to quote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as fact without being called on it?
Of course, as Jello Biafra might say, we’ve got a bigger problem now. On Thursday, after 8 pm local time, the police protests in Minneapolis turned violent. There is no report on if anyone has died, but there is a tremendous level of property damage and the 3rd Precinct police building was put to flames. And if Mayor Jacob Frey seemed to be a bit deer-in-the-headlights at his press conference and unwilling to use the National Guard, certain other authorities seem a little TOO willing to use force.
Libertarians like me are often criticized – usually by the Left – because we don’t give enough deference to government. But at times when people lash out in reaction to something that is the fault of government, and in their nihilism destroy their own neighborhoods, it’s the “conservatives” and “liberty lovers” who complain that libertarians are anti-police because we don’t give enough deference to government. If anything, Americans on the whole give too much deference to government. And actually, that’s because in order for government to even work, there needs to be a certain level of deference to it. We understand that the police have a tough job. You never know who’s got a gun. And we know how important the national government is, even if we might want it to be smaller. A national disaster, like the spread of a pandemic to this country, is something beyond the power of a state government to handle, and you would want to assume in such case that the federal government is run by competent and conscientious people, as opposed to a tweezer-dick Putinya suka who literally doesn’t care about anything but himself.
People like me are cynical because as much as we want and need government to be run by competent and conscientious people, they are likely to be run by the worst of us: People who see public responsibility as a means of using the public to their will. And they prey on the herd need for order and stability by holding us hostage to their malice and incompetence. They game the social contract in order to expand the range of what they can get away with.
But the political bargain assumes that those with a monopoly on force are better than us. When it becomes clear that they are not, and that they will not follow the rules they enforce on the rest of us, people start to realize that there is no reason for the public to follow the rules either. You can only game the system for so long before there is no longer a system to game.
In 2014, it was Ferguson. In May, it is Minneapolis. In November, it may be Washington DC.