The Dallas Morning News names Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins its “Texan of the Year.” You can read my interview with Watkins here.
Oh, Republicans. It’s sorta’ ironic how insensitive the GOP can be toward minorities, given that the way they’re going, that’s going to be their status in Congress for a good decade to come. It’s fine to oppose political correctness. It’s stupid to go out of your way to offend people, just to show how opposed you are to political correctness. A couple of days ago, I was listening to the right’s latest acid-tongued blonde, Monica Crowley. She too was playing some needlessly offensive parody on her show, this one about illegal immigrants stealing cars and spreading bubonic plague to the tune of “Feliz Navidad.” It wasn’t the least bit funny. Just mean.
You mean a public servant is warning that unless he gets more public funding, all hell will break loose? Imagine!
Nicholas Kristof is torn. If someone is able to make lots of money while at the same time helping others, is that person good, or evil? It’s unfortunate that there are people who even feel obligated to ask the question. I have a little parable I like to bring out on occasions like these. It’s the parable of Jack Welch and Aaron Feuerstein.
Add to the list of stuff banned by government: Snowzilla!
Here’s more on the city of Chesapeake, Virginia’s harassment of Ryan Frederick over code violations at his home and property.
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TheAgitator.com
Seeing Watkins so honored is nice, but it certainly gives pause to see that the Top 10 list includes T. Boone Pickens, Laura Bush, and Phil Gramm.
I thought the Republican party was supposed to be working on bringing minorities into the fold to get more votes, not ticking them off and losing whatever small voting block they already have.
There’s a fine line between being non-PC and being an a-hole. It’s a shame they don’t know where that line is…but, as the saying goes “go with what you know”.
The Republican party is living up to the worst suspicions of minorities by doing things like this. It’s odd to hear them trot out that they are “the party of Lincoln” as they often did during the recent election and then read of these sort of ploys right after the election.
I can be as non-PC as anyone, but this is definitely over the top. Do they really expect to win over blacks and Hispanics when doing such things? Of course, if you’ve spent the last 8 years running roughshod over every principle you allegedly hold, why not take the hypocrisy to another level?
I glad Watkins has been honored. When does he come for re-election? Will he be?
Most of the time, when I hear someone complaining about people being too “PC” it’s just an excuse for them to say something needlessly rude under the guise of “just telling it like it is”.
The big laugh I get is when people assume political correctness is somehow the sole property of the left. There are plenty of right wing “PC” topics that you bring up at your own risk.
You mean like their fairy tale worship?
I agree chance. PC is really just another term for our national consensus on what is and isn’t appropriate. As with any national consensus, it often goes too far, but it’s not completely baseless. While I almost universally oppose any sort of punsihment financial or otherwise (obviously including the slgithest hint of shaming from the government) for the words peopel choose, we are free to judge them as assholes and as idiots. Amongst my friends, I will make some awful jokes becasue we all know where we stand and what the intent is, but I would never say those things amongst strangers or, say, on the radio, because they are objectively insensitive and rude.
That this guy didn’t see how this would play out or that this would be hurtful to some people makes him, at best, pretty dumb.
I sent the Virginian-Pilot the blog post I wrote about the city harassment of Ryan Frederick the day after I wrote it. Ryan’s sister Mandy told me about it as sort of a throw away side issue to an entirely different conversation. I don’t get the impression she thought it was newsworthy at all. As soon as she told me about it, I asked are you kidding? They were there eight times?
I mean, if they weren’t making an effort to harass Ryan, why did they find these code violations two or three at a time, then come back to find more, after the last ones were fixed? Before Mandy moved back here, Ryan’s uncle, Chris had power of attorney, yet instead of sending the notices to Chris, they sent them to Ryan at the jail, where he couldn’t do anything about it.
But the city bureaucrat says they were treating Ryan’s house exactly the same as any other in the city? How stupid do these people think we are?
I dunno. Something about the Snowzilla creator sounds “judgement-proof” to me, and I WOULD hate to have that thing fall on my car. Or kid. Or self.
I’ll defend the city on the Snowzilla thing. It’s a 25 foot tall (!) snowman on the guy’s front lawn, in what is described as a neighborhood with small houses on small plots. It comes back every year, bigger than the one before. People come from all over the place to look at it and play around it and take photographs. I can imagine that it gets crowded on that street during the winter. If it topples over, there could be some real property damage or injury. If it is left to melt (rather than being disassembled), there will be a small lake in the front yard.
This is one of the functions of local government, right? To ensure the safe and orderly flow of traffic and (theoretically at least) the neighbors’ collective right of quiet enjoyment of their property? This guy could likely have gone to a local park or other common space and built Snowzilla, but he has chosen to do it in his front yard. I think it’s not inappropriate for the city to say “knock it off.”
With that said, Snowzilla looks pretty cool.
re: snowzilla.
I can see why you wouldnt want snowzilla, but wouldnt it be a better idea to have the city provide some alternative that allows the public to enjoy snowzilla while mitigating the harm: e.g. traffic cops etc.
In my old neighborhood, there was one street that decorated up the whazoo and eventually the city provided (a) extra transformers (b) traffic police. It is now one of the most celebrated things about Baltimore, a city that often needs something to celebrate.
Ok Eric, I’ll bite – why do the neighbors’ quiet enjoyment of their property outweigh Snowzilla’s right to do as he wishes with his. As far as the guy being “judgment proof”, you’re right – if that thing falls and injures anyone or anything he won’t pay damages.
Maybe the question is whether you give up your right to use your property as you see fit when you move into a “city”. The solution being if you don’t want to live next to Snowzilla, don’t live next to anyone OR if you want Snowzilla in your yard, don’t live next to anyone.
Radley, though Kristof’s column doesn’t get at them, there are some pragmatic worries about for profit organizations entering the charitable realm. They can undermine transparency about where contributions are going, or what percentage of the contribution actually ends up being given in aid. There’s also the concern that the marketing efforts lead to the wrong kind of competition for which charities receive money, based on the sexiness of their advertising, rather than the merit of the cause.
How bad are those concerns? The concern about transparency is very much parallel to the concern about overhead at traditional charities, and as for the marketing issue, it’s not as if most of the people who contribute now are really that well informed.
SusanK – the issue (for me, at least) is that Snowzilla is not “quiet enjoyment” of property. He could probably have built a mega snowman at a park, or even in his backyard, if the issue was his desire to build a mega snowman. But he built it in his front yard to create an attraction and tweak the city. If you click through to the earlier article that is linked in the later one, it says that crews came from Japan and Russia to film the thing, and that traffic was consistently a problem.
It’s like the old saying that your right to swing your fist ends at my nose; property owners (or people) should be able to do whatever they want to with their property (or their bodies) provided it does not materially affect someone else. Government often goes wrong when it overdefines what is material, but in this case preventing an impromptu tourist attraction, traffic snarl, and future flood/avalanche seems legitimate.
He should just be happy it wasn’t an HOA that was demanding snowzilla die. They make the government look charming in comparison.
Someone built a snowman picket line in front of Anchorage’s city hall, as a protest in support of Snowzilla. Whatever your stance on Snowzilla, you have to admit that’s pretty funny.
Sorry SusanK I have to be with Eric on this.
I can see your point however, in fact I think I’ll buy the property right next to yours, so we can enjoy each others company.
I must warn you that I have a 100,000 watt strobe light, that I turn on from 10pm till 6am (this tends to cause insomnia in some people).
I do tend to collect a lot of junk cars, refrigerators, scrap metal, and hubcaps in my front yard (I have heard this can ruin property values).
I have about 100 visitors a day (what they are doing is none of your business), so they will need to park in front of your property at times.
Now remember if this would bother you can always move.
Whats wrong with a midway position between SusanK and Eric/MacK?
Building a big obnoxious snowman might detract from quiet enjoyment. At the same time, other neighbors seem to feel that this adds something to the neighborhood and is only temporary. There needs to be some sort of balancing.
Take the analogy from drugs.
Snowman have potential to cause harm, but are often harmless enjoyment. Simply banning creates all sort of enforcement problems (how much snowman use, how big a snowman etc) and imposes a loss of liberty without a societal gain. Will we have SWAT team enforcement against snowmen?
In this case, the first approach should be an attempt at harm reduction. With drugs, most of the negative externalities can be controlled by treatment for serious addicts. With snowmen, perhaps mandate that they be built a certain distance from the curb etc in case it falls on people. For the cars etc: set up a roadblock with free entry for locals, and a $5 fee for visitors, with half the $ to go to the neighborhood.
As for the idea of building this in a city park, that is where you have more serious problems, because it is on city property where the builders have no right to build, and the city has an obligation to other users. The balance is different for building on your own property.
C’mon Mack-
you can’t really call this a reasonable comparison… a snowman vs a ‘100,000 watt strobe light, that I turn on from 10pm till 6am’
and Eric- I don’t buy the ‘It’s like the old saying that your right to swing your fist ends at my nose; property owners (or people) should be able to do whatever they want to with their property (or their bodies) provided it does not materially affect someone else.’ Outside of traffic issues, how are his neighbors ‘materially’ effected?
The govt is pushing the issue and this guy is calling their bullshit. The nannies are crying safety issues and traffic, but he does have community support, also. All I’m hearing is the govt telling the guy they don’t like it and he has to stop. I couldn’t find any stories about snowmen falling on someone or anyone drowning in a lake of melted snowman. It seems to me that traffic could be directed. Let’s get more out of the doughnut eaters than citations. There are better solutions than ‘we don’t like it so you can’t do it.’
This is a winter celebration. If the nannies would shut up, they wouldn’t get the fame and notoriety they’ve received and they’d probably get bored and find another way to amuse themselves.
Well i see one of the guys who wants to be the RNC chair sent out links to a video of a song called “Barack the magic negro”.
Does this party actually want to ever be elected to another office?
>>There are plenty of right wing “PC” topics that you bring up at your own risk.<<
You should provide some examples of what you’re talking about. Is maybe attacking the holiness of the Super Bowl a left-wing “anti-PC” position?
MacK, the problem is that the things you say ALL have externalities that are acknowledged by and caused by you. If you put up a strobe light that keeps other people up, you have exposure to damages from other people who are on their property: they don’t have to come onto your property to be damaged by you. If you keep hazardous materials and heavy metals (old cars) on your property, you have a good chance of contaminating ground water, again causing damages on other people’s properties. Your continual visitors have the same public hazards, as well as monopolizing areas that are not on your property (parking on public streets in front of other houses), which are actionable by the city. None of these are merely ‘quiet enjoyment of your property’.
Now, the guy making a 25-foot snowman is doing it for notoriety. And he enjoys having people come by. But that is causing a public nuisance. That’s where SusanK’s point falls down. It stops being a quiet enjoyment of his property when it becomes an attractive nuisance.
ICR,
Do we see a lot of discussion by politicians of Christianity and its merits? Of course not; Republicans have made sure that nothing about the religion can ever be criticized by elected officials lest they be painted as anti-religious zealots. Political Correctness is practiced by both sides, and anybody pretending otherwise has their head firmly planted in the sand.
(See also: criticism of the police, criticism of the military, criticism of war, criticism of particular Presidents, criticism of 9/11, etc.)
Call me callous but “Barack the Magic Negro” just doesn’t seem offensive. For starters the song was written well before the election (in 2007) and it wasn’t meant to be a protest of political correctness. If you listen to the lyrics it’s a criticism of guilty white liberals mesmerized by a guy with a meager resume.
Im really not interested in reading the lyrics to anything that has the title “Barack the Magic Negro”.
>>Do we see a lot of discussion by politicians of Christianity and its merits? Of course not; Republicans have made sure that nothing about the religion can ever be criticized by elected officials lest they be painted as anti-religious zealots. Political Correctness is practiced by both sides, and anybody pretending otherwise has their head firmly planted in the sand.
(See also: criticism of the police, criticism of the military, criticism of war, criticism of particular Presidents, criticism of 9/11, etc.)>>
Yeah, we could start by discussing the merits of the Rev. Martin Luther King.
Is anyone really getting into trouble at school or work for criticizing the war, Bush, the police, the warfare state, etc.
Maybe, but not too often.
PC is an entirely leftist construct that is inherently repressive.
See http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2008/10/aftermath-of-cologne.html, http://www.vdare.com/roberts/worry.htm, http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2008/10/aftermath-of-cologne.html.
Campus speech codes are (as far as I can tell) entirely the product of the PC left. See thefire.org.
Brutal police attack on right nationalist group http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4AKvyf2WYw Overall view Gottfried: http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried35.html
“…There are two arguments made in my book that should interest readers of this website. One, I refuse to treat political correctness as an academic eccentricity and present it instead as a tool of managerial control. Universities are not the only context in which pc and its accompanying mantra about diversity have taken over. Churches, corporations, and the media push the same partylines, but without government interventions we would not be worrying about the legal consequences of not paying sufficient respect to state-designated victims. This fact is so obvious that one has to speculate on the reasons it is ignored – particularly on what today passes for the Right. …”
Are there other localities that limit seasonal displays? I’ve seen many private Christmas light displays, Halloween displays, etc. that are large enough to attract swarms of gawkers. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that irritates some of the grinch neighbors (as it would me…being a grinch myself). But none of these localities in my home state have ever tried (to my knowledge) to limit/ban them on police power principles.
[...] Hat tip to the Agitator. [...]
Did anyone else read the ‘Missouri Meth-Lab Eradication Funding Crisis” article?
“It doesn’t do any good to have all the toys if you don’t have anyone to play with them,” said Detective Sgt. Jason Grellner, commander of the Franklin County Narcotics Enforcement Unit. Yeah, and “it’s all a game, until somebody gets hurt,” right? I’ll bet Grellner gets “exemplary performance” rewards all the time, as he takes his job so seriously.
To me, that’s pretty telling of law enforcements’ attitude. It’s why people like Ryan Frederick end up in jail by corrupt cops, and why cops like Jared Shivers end up dead with families left behind to mourn.
May as well just give them the money so they can hire some more toy soldiers, after all “We’ll be all right. We’ll survive…We plan to apply to use federal forfeiture funds to supplement that one position’s salary for a year.”
“We plan to apply to use federal forfeiture funds to supplement that one position’s salary for a year.”
Just curious, when did commenting become moderated?
“The signs were too large, and at least one of them was just propped up against a tree, he said.
“If we had a good storm, they may have gone sailing down the street,” he said.”
My word, someone might have actually been bruised! Oh the horror!
“Aside from the code violation, the signs had become distracting for the community, Johnson said. Television news crews stopped by frequently with their trucks. The signs were a “constant reminder that that’s where the police officer was killed,” he said.”
Exactly the point. When something like that happens, the community *should* be distracted. Distracted to the point of agitating for a change. A guy is killed, another’s life is likely ruined, but they want everyone to just go on like nothing happened?
Isn’t Barack more of a Black Best Friend than a Magical Negro anyways?
>>There are plenty of right wing “PC” topics that you bring up at your own risk.<<
“You should provide some examples of what you’re talking about.”
So we’re on the same sheet, I use the wikipedia definition of PC: Political correctness (adjectivally, politically correct; both forms commonly abbreviated to PC) is a term applied to language, ideas, policies, or behavior seen as seeking to minimize offense to gender, racial, cultural, disabled, aged or other identity groups. Conversely, the term “politically incorrect” is used to refer to language or ideas that may cause offense or that are unconstrained by orthodoxy.
One example: criticising the military in any significant way without first caveating your statements on how this criticism is directed at only a few bad apples, and in no way reflects on the heroism (nay, superheroism) of the vast majority of service members. In this example, the military is an identity group, and the language is clearly meant to minimize offense. This right may not be the only ones who would call someone out for this, but in my experience they usually are the first and the loudest.
Another example tends to be similiar to the example above, but towards police rather than military. Many of the links on this site go to news stories where the commentators are loathe to criticise the police, and caveat any critiques with more wrods about bad apples and heroics (another identity group, another use of minimizing language).
I would also argue that during the 08 presidential campaign, many of Govenor Palin’s supporters attempted to make many issues politically incorrect to discuss (e.g. daughter’s pregnancy). I will grant you they were not always fully sucessful in the attempt, but they weren’t complete failures either.
I’m sure others can come up with other examples. Now, to be clear, I don’t necessarily have a problem with using less offensive language or even avoiding certain subjects; that used to just be called “tact”.
This is what happens when Republicans try to be funny. Oh, and they forgot the bonus track: John McCain’s version of “Bomb Iran.”
Morons.
Those over the age of ,say, 30, may recall when it was the right that was most loudly objecting to police excesses. Those who don’t know what I’m talking about should google “ruby ridge” and “branch davidians”.
Rightist “Patriot Movement” Constitutionalists like that are still around. For some examples see republicbroadcasting.org. These people, odd as they sometimes are, are also anti-warfare state like the paleocons at places like Chronicles, Takimag and TAC.
>>Now, to be clear, I don’t necessarily have a problem with using less offensive language or even avoiding certain subjects; that used to just be called “tact”.>>
Oh yes, “tact” (aka civility) is most certainly one of the hallmarks of the current era.
P.S. I don’t think anyone is losing his/her job, deprived of civil rights or jailed for making Truther claims about Sarah Palin’s pregnancy. The most extreme examples of leftist PC oppression occur in Europe, but it does exist in the US, see: http://www.thefire.org/
“Those over the age of ,say, 30, may recall when it was the right that was most loudly objecting to police excesses.”
Hypothesis 1: There is no significant partisan difference in overall attitudes towards law enforcement. Extremes partisans on both sides object to police excess, albeit for different reasons.
Hypothesis 2. With exception to its more extreme practicioners, the right is more accepting of police excesses than the left.
Hypothesis 3. With exception to its more extreme practicioners, the left is more accepting of police excesses than the right.
Law #1: I’m too lazy to actually do any rigorous research on the topic.
“Campus speech codes are (as far as I can tell) entirely the product of the PC left. See thefire.org.”
And conservative Christian colleges have the right-wing equivalents. No holding hands, no dancing, no drinking, no sex before marriage and such certainly seem like more of an affront to personal freedom than banning whatever campus speech codes ban. (I went to Michigan State, where I never came across the existence of such things.)
And right-wingers biggest PC nostrum is Christianity, or anything a Christian says that they attribute to the bible.
Israel is another one, though that may have almost as many adherents on the leftish side as the rightish.
If these clowns want their funding, maybe they should learn what a real meth lab looks like first.
http://io9.com/5119166/teen-with-home-chemistry-lab-arrested-for-meth-bombs
“A Canadian college student majoring in chemistry built himself a home lab – and discovered that trying to do science in your own home quickly leads to accusations of drug-making and terrorism.”
Pretty soon it won’t be Shotgun News that’s declared a “subversive publication” but the CFC Handbook.
In other news, the city of Chesapeake is engaging in standard harassment tactics against a family who dares to stand up to their power. It will be used as evidence in the eventual lawsuit against the city. If it were me, I’d also be going after Shiver’s family for the survivor’s pension. He engaged in multiple felonies that resulted in his death — his family shouldn’t be getting one cent out of this.