This didn’t happen. Repeat: This did not happen. But what if…
A 72 year old black man living in Miami Beach was about to be evicted from his condo. He was arrested in the act of trying to burn the building down. He had already dumped gasoline down a trash chute. He was caught in the parking garage with two gasoline containers and had 28 more in a storage unit. He said his goal was to “kill the white people” in the building. In his apartment, he had speeches by Louis Farrakhan, black nationalist and leader of the Nation of Islam, and posters from the Black Panther movement of the 1960s.
As I said, it didn’t happen. We know that, because if it did, Fox News would have grabbed hold of the story and run it on a loop for days, complete with mug shots, scare graphics, ominous old photos of Black Panthers and archived statements from leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement. The Tweeter In Chief would have been on it as fast as his thumbs could carry him. Newspapers would have picked it up soon after. On CNN and MSNBC, serious talking heads would try to decide if it should be called an potential act of terrorism, mass murder or mental illness. “Was this a random act or part of a larger social phenomenon?” the earnest heads around the table would ask each other.
But here’s the thing. Most of the events I described actually did happen. The 72 year old man, the condo, the eviction, the plan to burn the building down, the gasoline. Those are all for real. I just changed three details.
The 72 year old man is white. He said he wanted to “kill all Jews” in the building. And police found swastikas and books about Nazi ideology in his apartment.
Did you hear about it?
If you did, you might have caught it on July 13 or soon after in the Miami news media, a short New York Times article or a low tech digital news piece on Fox. That’s as far as the news spread. An antisemitic old white guy who wants to burn down a condo full of Jews isn’t especially newsworthy.
I’m tempted to draw some conclusions here, but, nah. I’ll leave that to the reader.
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2018.
I sympathize, David. There is precious little besides TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP!!! that DOES get reported these days, and its not just the indenturing of the next generation to the banks, the rollback of any meaningful labor protections and entitlements, and / or the malfeasance of corporate America, Wall Street, and the two mainstream political parties that fail to garner significant public attention while the TRUMP obsession rages.
I pasted a link to an excellent cover story just published in the distinguished progressive journal *The Nation* in the comment stream on your *False Equivalence* piece, but not many will see it there. It is a truly outstanding piece of media analysis, spot-on from start to finish, and very relevant to the troubling lacunae in coverage you mention here. Here again is the link:
https://www.thenation.com/article/journalism-age-trump-whats-missing-matters/
What a depressing story reflective of a depressing state of affairs.
AGREED: the Nation piece looks interesting, and I think Noam Chomsky has made comments to somewhat similar effect. He says that focusing on the so-called Trump show (dumb tweets, weird remarks, etc.) is a distraction from the policies that are actually being enacted.
Where were CNN and MSNBC?
And, yes, focusing on Trump is a distraction.
Second quarter growth will likely be over 4% maybe as high as 4.8% the first such over 4% growth quarter in 4 years. Something all of the liberal “credible” economists have been screaming is impossible without raging inflation. Yet, the implicit inflation rate in five year inflation adjusted bonds is 2%. Full time jobs are increasing at a 3.7 million annual pace up from 1.56 million in 2016.
Yes indeed, let’s focus on policy and results instead of the freak show which is about to get even freakier yet if that can be believed.
Only a tone deaf jackass would post economic statistics on a piece about a hate crime and the institutional racism of the media.
Loading dislikes onto comments falls somewhat short of demonstrating the legitimacy of a contrasting point of view. But then, here and elsewhere, wholly or largely inarticulate and destructive (and entirely ineffective) displays of temper by Democrats seem to be becoming the order of the day.
A Whig once wrote accurately about the dangers in the violent “liberalism” (?!) of his own day, “The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes, between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral dimensions.”
It appears with the two political parties in this country we really are in a situation these days where it’s a choice between evil and evil, and the Burke-ian computing trick is to discern which is the lesser evil that may need to be used to contain the greater evil. For some time now it has been clear that the majority of Dems have no intention of ensuring responsible governance of the public institutions they favor and no intention of implementing the types of economic policy that could improve the situation of their former base, those who work for a living. The few Dems who DO intend it have no power to do it.
The truth of their situation being as ugly as it is, irrational bullying and thuggery increase as a means of trying to shut down accurate commentary that Dems DISLIKE. The commentary and policy progress by their opponents continue, while the thuggery, unsuccessful in silencing critics or changing the policy agenda, only serves to amplify and broadly advertise Party “leadership’s” ineffectiveness and the Party’s dysfunction and lack of internal discipline.
Well done, Dems. Keep up the good work.
(The thugs will no doubt manipulate this medium to load multiple DISLIKES on this post, 69, 100, 1000 (!) times, thereby accomplishing — nothing. It is already well known how much those folks dislike accurate descriptions of the current state of their Party and / or the expression of opinions with which they disagree. Ongoing demonstrations of same don’t add anything to the public dialogue, but if that’s how they like to spend their time while their opponents continue their takeover of the country, well, what can be said of it? “Thanks for the ongoing reminders of how we ended up here,” would seem about the most appropriate comment on the behavior.)
Oh, here’s a fact…the people you so graciously label as thugs will make sure you get the dislikes which you deserve. Not because of manipulation, because of the fact that your boring, non-sensical, long-winded rants make the disliking necessary. Nobody else on this site has the time and energy to waste spewing out the nonsense which you have. Congratulations Stretch, you have earned credit for what you have accused others of accomplishing — nothing.
Gee, Skinnyman: do you really think hate crimes, racism, resentment of minority ethnic and religious groups, and economic policy are unrelated? Seems like high school social studies curricula usually get across the fact that widespread economic distress and the success of right-wing populist politics are regularly co-occurring phenomena. They also tend to mention that it’s hard to unseat a sitting president or the governing party in Congress when the economy is booming.
Y’all go ahead and talk about TRUMP and racism and fascism as much as you want. If you can’t get your economic policy act together and stop giving the general public the impression that the biggest achievements you’re capable of are harrassing the opposing party’s representatives in restaurants while at the same time you run interference between your own party’s representatives and constituents’ legitimate question about their records in office, you will continue losing.
And will deserve to.
Some of us accomplish expressing a point of view, though we may do it in more words than some like to read in one sitting. Others don’t seem to HAVE a point of view to express (unless insulting other commenters and hitting the “dislike” button multiple times can be considered a sort of nihilistic point of view). On which of the two behaviors is more worth engaging in, we’ll have to agree to differ. I’ll persist in mine as long as Dem behaviors seem worth commenting on, and Tucson Weekly, good Southern Arizona Dem medium that it is, will no doubt continue structuring these comment streams so those who don’t want to exert themselves by framing arguments have a way of showing just how much they DISLIKE the arguments of people who don’t buy their Party line and who criticize some of their Party’s behaviors.
When that is all you’ve got,…it’s all you CAN do.
Oh yeah and yell Russia.
The socialists can have my old party. I am done with it.
I am not a democrat Stretch. Nice try though. Just because I point out the fact that your rants are long-winded and dull doesn’t make me a lib or a dem. Pay attention. All I’m doing is pointing out that your rants are long-winded and dull. Please don’t make me say it again. It’s better to burn out than fade away.
I seem to recall that you recently commented that you were orchestrating massive dislikings not because of your intolerance for long-windedness, but because you and others were tired of negative commentary about Dems and TUSD.
“Wow! It’s a good thing for you that you have no concern whatsoever for the dislikes you receive on your posts Former Dem, you know, the dislikes which you brought up in the conversation you had with Rick Spanier because you don’t care about them. Because if you were concerned with that stuff, you might actually be devastated with your post above. Somehow you raked in 69 of them in less than 10 hours, that has to be a record! If it’s less than 10 hours, that’s definitely not someone using 7 devices daily to pile them up. I’d wager that it’s just several people who are tired of your long-winded anti Democratic and/or anti TUSD rants. Care to bet?”
That comment and your other comments in that thread are available here:
https://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2018/07/03/if-the-high-stakes-tests-dont-make-sense-neither-will-the-results
So it seems more likely that you are a Dem — and perhaps a member of a particular faction of Dems — who is lying.
Sad, but true: it is a thing that has been known to happen.
Well Stretch, I thank you for reposting previous comments which actually strengthen the assessment I made in my most recent comment before this one. It appears as if your reading comprehension skills need sharpening. Example: “…you and others were tired of negative commentary about Dems and TUSD.” If you go back and carefully re-read the penultimate sentence of that post, you will NOT find the words me, myself or I anywhere in that sentence. How do you expect anyone to take your snide remarks and general harassment towards David Safier seriously when they see that your reading comprehension needs improvement? I am neither a Dem or a TUSD supporter and that’s why I did NOT include myself with those groups in my sentence. You need to sharpen your comprehension skills if you want to be a better troll.
David Safier is a big boy. I doubt he needs trolls following him around and loading dislikes onto posts that take a counter position to the arguments he chooses to make. If he felt he benefited in some way from that behavior, I would be surprised.
David is a retired teacher and from my point of view that makes his perspective on education policy more valuable than most of what we get in the local media: the largely uninformed observations and opinions of reporters who do not have degrees in in education and have never taught. Worth noting, though, is that David was never a teacher or parent in local schools. He has chosen to retire here, mix into the local Dem scene and, among other more worthy projects like analyzing Basis’s attrition rates, produce regular justifications for and obfuscations of the mismanagement of one of our local public institutions of “education” that serves tens of thousands of other people’s children. This being the case, it would seem reasonable for him to expect that some people who’ve had kids enrolled in that school district would occasionally show up and provide some counter-commentary. The real surprise is that MORE people do not do it.
But then we see that the networks of Dems that support and excuse TUSD orchestrate aggressions against those who do: excellent data that helps people understand why there is so much silence around the topic of whether the local emperor of education (and city and county governance) has clothes or does not have clothes.
Trolls can blow smoke as much as they like: it’s a Southern Arizona Dem thing to do. People with any interpretive skills at all — and any knowledge of the local political scene — understand what 69 dislikes on every comment that raises questions about Dems and TUSD means.
As for that question raised earlier in this thread about which of the two Parties is the lesser evil that should be used to contain the greater one — each person needs to answer that one for themselves, and the question may have different valid answers in different regions. Wherever the question is being honestly asked and answered, it should be done with data on the actual BEHAVIORS of the partisans, not just their ideologies. The tough part is that in order to gather that data, you have to spend some time paying close enough attention to the local political scene and the institutions it runs to understand what the behaviors actually are.
And in some regions that will be a very distasteful and miserable job indeed. Almost as miserable as what hundreds of thousands of unfortunate parents have been subjected to here for decades now: watching their children’s education be bungled by an ideologically “FABULOUS! INCLUSIVE! DEMOCRATICALLY GOVERNED!” but behaviorally depraved, dishonest and massively dysfunctional school district like TUSD.
“David Safier is a big boy.” Is that what you tell yourself every time you harass him with demeaning comments towards his blogs? I find it hilarious that you can dish it out, but you’ve proven that you sure can’t take it.
And the dislikes! But you don’t care about those, right? Funny, common sense would dictate that you keep bringing up that dead as a doornail fact because you OBVIOUSLY care about it. In fact, at one point you claimed to be delighted about it. But of course, common sense isn’t common; neither are you. Also, you definitely don’t have common sense. So why would I expect you to start exhibiting it now?
Also, you failed to apologize for the fact that your reading comprehension skills are weak. I pointed this out to you and you glossed over it. Par for the weak comprehension skills course.
Please, work on getting your stories straight. It would reduce the headache that the rest of get when we try to actually make sense of your nonsensical rants.
Yep, its a problem that some people cannot tell the difference between disagreeing and harassing. Some commenters DISAGREE with Safier and state why, occasionally with sarcasm. Some HARASS those who disagree with Safier. Just in this thread alone we have several examples of harrassment, none of them authored by the commenter you dub “Stretch.”
As for obviously orchestrated massive dislikes, like systematic sign stealing in the last TUSD Board election, like the recurring practice of blocking constructive questions to public officials about their records in office, like rigging embarrassments of public officials in public places and then arranging for disparagement to be dumped on the officals in comment streams…
https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/the-skinny/Content?oid=7371725
…they are examples of a behaviors that discredit the faction of the Party that practices them. But, as I’ve written elsewhere, from the point of view of showing the public how portions of the local Party currently operate, they are very helpful. You never know who’s being directed to read these comment streams as they decide how to affiliate, vote, and donate.
Yep, it’s a problem that you will not acknowledge the fact that your disagreements towards David Safier are most certainly harassment, because of their frequency. They also, more times than not, include snide and demeaning remarks; and saying that you use sarcasm only occasionally is an understatement.
I get it though, in order to keep with your holier than thou attitude and not damage that thin skin of yours, you really have to believe in the stuff you said in your latest post. Like I already stated, you can dish it out, but you sure can’t take it.
Also, your last paragraph, wow, what a stretch.
There’s a lot that’s a “stretch” to the serial harasser of this thread: taking the time to make reasonable counter-arguments to disliked comments, disagreeing with the party line as dispensed from on high by David Safier, reading “long winded” and “nonsensical” comments that show “poor reading comprehension.” The biggest stretch of all — really impossible to do — may be trying to imagine the way “defending” (?) David through serial insults and belittlements looks to people outside of that commenter’s charmed circle.
There have been tens of thousands of students on the receiving end of the Party-excused, Party-enabled mismanagement of TUSD. I know some of them because I spent some time teaching in a West side TUSD school. Whether or not regulars of these threads LIKE commentary on the way the district has been managed and the weakness of the local Party in defending the cohorts it purports to serve, they will keep coming. They are not about David Safier, personally. They are about the way the positions he takes and the political actions and policies he defends relate to the quality of services delivered to kids in those schools. And, in recent months, more broadly, they are about how Democrats are botching the “resistance” to the implementation of federal policies that damage the majority of citizens in this country, including my own family.
Go ahead and dump a few more insults into your reply. I think I’ve been given ample opportunity to understand your perspective here, and I won’t be checking back to read the latest batch of insults. But in the run-up to November I may refer a few friends to this thread and a couple of other threads so they can get a quick read on some of what goes on in David Safier’s extended network of local “defenders-of-the-poor.”
You’re not coming back here? Do you promise? Well, if not, then…
Hallelujah!
If your friends are annoying trolls such as yourself, then you should refer them to this thread. Your posts which reside in it are great examples of the art of deflection.
If you could take what you dish out, I would have respect for you. Our little conversation here proved that’s definitely not the case. Please don’t let the door hit you on the way out.