The situation so far: improved, but a few glitches remain

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been working on fixing the “comments not showing up” problem, and I think I’ve made progress.

But some things remain to be solved. So I’m going to describe some of the details, and maybe some of you brilliant, brilliant tech-savvy people out there might be able to suggest some steps to eliminate the remaining glitches.

As far as I can see, these problems started in a mild fashion maybe a week ago, but then a few days ago they got quite noticeable. I’ve newly-updated the blog and now have all the newest versions of the blog and the spam filter, so needing to update either is not the problem.

Can anyone make sense of the following set of symptoms?:

(1) There is sometimes a delay between the time a person posts a comment and the time the comment becomes visible to the public and reflected in the comments count.

(2) A similar delay sometimes takes place when I publish a post.

(3) The delays are generally worse when viewed on a cell phone. I don’t know about tablets. But laptops and desktops seem to do better at catching up, although I don’t know if that’s a general rule.

(4) If a person manually refreshes the blog, that often corrects the problem and everything suddenly shows up properly. But not always. Particularly on cell phones, the problem can be a bit more “sticky.”

(5) I don’t know whether the following is related, but I suspect it may be. I used to get tons and tons of spam that was caught by the spam filter. It wasn’t a problem when the spam filter was working, which was virtually always. So every day I’d clear the spam filter, which usually had caught many thousands of spam comments—ordinarily between 2,000 and 10,000 spam comments a day. But then, just a little while ago—I don’t know exactly when, but it predated my noticing this “comments not displaying properly” problem by a few days—suddenly the flow of spam comments nearly stopped. Since then I’ve been getting maybe 100 spam a day caught in the filter. And it’s not that other spam is getting through, either; very little spam seems to be coming to the blog in the first place. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a problem; it would be great to get so little spam. But it’s curious to me that the reduction in spam roughly coincided with this comment-display change that is a problem.

Any theories on any of this? Thanks!

Just in case—here’s some information about my back-up blog

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m still working on fixing the comment-loading issue I mentioned earlier today. I think it should be solved soon. But just in case you have any problem reaching this blog at any point (I always get nervous about these technical glitches, because I’m not a techie sort) remember that I have a back-up blog.

It’s my old blog. Those of you who’ve been around here a long time may remember that I started blogging at a blogspot blog. I still can post there, so if there’s ever a problem accessing this blog, please check it out at http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com/ . That should be extremely easy to remember, because it’s just the “neoneocon” name but with a hyphen, and then it follows the “blogspot.com” format, which is the same for all blogspot blogs.

I don’t expect to have to use it. I hope not to have to use it. But I think you should bookmark it, just in case.

Is anyone having trouble loading comments?

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATE 2:20 PM, 1/8

Still working on a solution.

Just to describe the problem in a bit more detail—when I tried to view this post on my phone, it said there was one comment. And when I viewed it on my computer, it said the same thing. However, when I logged into the blog, I could see that there were actually eight comments.

So there are several problems going on. One is that some posts aren’t displaying, or are only displaying many hours after I publish them. Another is that comments aren’t displaying. There are also many fewer comments than usual, which makes me suspect some people are being blocked in some way.

In addition, when I tried to view this updated post on my computer, it only showed the older post without the update (at least, as of this writing). My guess is that in an hour or a few hours, the addition will show up as well.

Weird.

I hope to have this resolved soon. In the meantime, I apologize for the inconvenience. I hate, hate, hate these technical glitches. I guess occasional ones go with the blog territory, though.]

There seems to be some sort of mild on-again-off-again problem with comments. Not a problem with making comments, but a problem with viewing them, particularly on a mobile device but also on some computers.

If you’re having any sort of trouble like that, let me know. And if your comment isn’t showing up, please send an email. I’d like to figure out what’s happening and get it fixed, pronto.

Robert Frost on “new” poetry

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been reading this collection of essays about the poet Robert Frost. It’s an older book that I took out of the library, and although it was edited in 1962 the essays in it are mainly from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

As usual, the quotes from Frost himself are a combination of wisdom and humor of a special and playful Frostian sort. Here he is on the newer, and more supposedly “experimental,” poets of his time:

Frost carried on his own distinct experiments, emphasizing speech rhythms and “the sound of sense.”…In Frost’s theory of poetry, the self-imposed restrictions of meter in form and of coherence in content…[are] limitations which work to the advantage, not to the disadvantage, of new and lively poetry.

The restrictions of the experimentalists, ironically seeking liberation, have amused Frost. With pleasant banter he has teased his contemporaries by jesting about their desperate “quest for new ways to be new.”

Sounds like today, doesn’t it? The essay from which that passage is taken was written in 1942 by Lawrance Thompson (who later turned on Frost, by the way, when he wrote a biography of Frost; see this for some of that fascinating story), and the Frost quotes in it are mostly from 1935.

To continue:

Behond the fantastic variety of restrictions in their freedom, [Frost] said: “Poetry, for example, was tried without punctuation. It was tried without capital letters. It was tried without any imge but those to the eye…It was tried without content under the trade name of poesie pure. It was tried without phrase, epigram, coherence, logic, and consistency. It was tried without ability….It was tried premature like the delicacy of unborn calf in Asia. It was tried without feeling or sentiment like murder for small pay in the underworld. These many things was it tried without, and what had we left? Still something.”

I hope that “still something” is still true. We still have Frost, anyway.

More from Frost, in a lecture he gave at Amherst, published in 1931:

I had it from one of the youngest lately: ‘Whereas we once thought literature should be without content, we know l know it should be charged full of propaganda.’ Wrong twice, I told him. Wrong twice and of theory prepense. But he returned to his position after a moment out for reassembly: ‘Surely art can be considered good only as it prompts to action.’ How soon? I asked him. But there is danger of undue levity in teasing the young…We must be very tender of our dreamers. They may seem like picketers, or members of the committee on rules, for the moment. We shan’t mind what they seem, if only they produce real poems.

I don’t know that I’d be as kind to them as Frost was. I definitely know I wouldn’t be as witty.

Congress, Republicans, and history: can they play offense?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a comment from “SteveH” in August of 2015, about the future political prospects of the GOP. I noted it down at the time and planned to discuss it in a post, a post that I drafted but never got around to publishing.

Here’s the quote:

“Now we get to wait with bated breath to see if a republican can get elected. So we can recall how they suck worse on offense than they do on defense.

And here’s the response I drafted back in August of 2015, much of which I reproduce now with very little editing.

I believe the prognosis for the future depends on how you define “offense.” I contend that, although the GOP inspires no particular trust, and the current leadership of Boehner and McConnell inspires even less than that, nevertheless it is of the utmost importance that we elect a strong conservative president and give him/her the GOP legislature by which to accomplish the job.

And then we’ll see about “offense.”

I define real “offense” this way: having control of both houses of Congress and the presidency. Without that, there are a million ways for Democrats in power to block a minority GOP party agenda. The minority party is limited to blocking the majority’s agenda, and even that is predicated on continual use of the filibuster to prevent cloture (and by the way, the Republicans under Obama blocked quite a bit of his legislation). I’ve already written about these issues (and the idea of closing down the government by cutting funding) many many times (see this, for example).

Right now I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about something in history that is often forgotten. If you study Congressional history in terms of party control (see this important chart), you will note that, ever since Coolidge and Hoover, Republicans have only had that “offense” opportunity (control of the presidency and both houses) twice. The first time (and then they barely had control) was in 1953-1955 under Eisenhower. That was a long long time ago, I think you would agree, and Eisenhower wasn’t exactly a conservative. Also, the reason I wrote “barely” is that the GOP’s “control” of the Senate balanced on a razor’s edge, with 48 Republicans to 47 Democrats plus one Independent (the Independent being Wayne Morse, who basically was no Republican).

The second time was much more recently, and it’s the one most present-day readers remember: under George W. Bush, and in particular the years 2005-2007. He also had majorities in 2003-2005, but a much weaker one (especially in the Senate), so weak it could be undermined by just a couple of senatorial RINOs. Those Bush years were also dominated by the war in Iraq, and unfortunately Republicans did not capitalize on their very rare moment of being in control and thus able to play “offense.”

That rankles, I know, and it does with me as well.

But I think it’s wrong to pretend there’s some long history of Republicans being in control and not taking advantage of it. I’ve just recounted the sum total of times Republicans have been in control of Congress and the presidency since the days of Hoover. What’s more, it’s actually the Democrats who’ve been in control of both far far more often ever since FDR, and therefore able to play real “offense” in the sense I’m talking about.

In addition, many times that the Democrats have held presidency and Congress, their majorities in both houses have been overwhelming, featuring numbers that Republicans haven’t rivaled since before FDR and have not come close to rivaling after (even during the Bush years when they did have control for a few years). All of the presidents in my lifetime whose party has held both houses at any time during their presidency (other than the aforementioned George W. Bush and briefly and weakly Eisenhower) were Democrats. All the ones who had very strong majorities for much of the time were Democrats as well. Besides FDR, we have Truman, JFK, LBJ, Carter, and early Clinton,. Actually, Clinton was the only post-FDR Democratic president who had to face a divided Congress for a substantial (at least half) portion of his presidency. The only one.

Check out the numbers; it’s quite astounding how large the Democratic margins in Congress were during the last two-thirds of the 20th Century. As an example, from 1935-1937 the Senate was about 72% Democratic and the House 74% under FDR, and those margins increased in 1937-1939 to 78% and 76%. Hard to see what Republicans could have done against that. During 1945-1947, Truman’s Congress was very close to 60% Democrat in the Senate and about 56% Democrat in the House (for the next two years he had to deal with a Republican Congress, however). JFK? 64% of the Senate was Democratic during his first two years, and that margin increased to 67% for the next two years (some of which, of course, became the LBJ years). At the same time, the House was 60% and 59% Democratic. The margins increased still again during LBJ’s first elected term, 1965-1967, to about 68% in both branches of Congress.

In contrast, Nixon (and then Ford) had to deal with an enormous Democratic majority of around 58% for both branches (although the margins reduced somewhat during the later years of his/their terms) the whole time he was in office. Carter was initially given a 61% lead in the Senate and almost 67% of the House, later reduced to a still-strong 57%/64%.

I’m doing all this math very quickly, so you might find errors, but that’s what I get when I try to figure it out.

Study it all you want, but you won’t find margins anything like that—not even remotely like that—for any Republican president since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, and Coolidge. And Coolidge only had 53% of the Senate and approximately 52% of the House at first, which went up a bit in the next election before it went down in the subsequent one, with the Senate Republican lead in the Senate fading to one vote. With Hoover, the Senate went back up to 58% GOP (then down again to a one-vote margin during the last two years of his term), while the House was 61% Republican and then down to a tie during those last two years.

So, that was the situation for Republicans controlling the presidency and Congress during the 20th Century, except for the aforementioned brief times during the Eisenhower years when they barely controlled Congress. And then in the 21st Century, more slight control for the GOP under Bush.

What a contrast! For nearly a hundred years Congress has mostly been in control of Democrats, often very strongly in control, and that’s also been when there’s a Democratic president. Republican control has been weak and extremely sporadic, and therefore most Republican presidents have faced an oppositional Congress.

That’s was pretty much it for the original post. Now, of course, we have another of those rare times when Republicans control Congress and the presidency—although control of Congress is nowhere near as strong as what the Democrats have enjoyed many many times (including, by the way, the first two years of Obama’s first term, during which he had close to 60 votes in the Senate and 59% of the House, as well—which is why Democrats were so eager to push through legislation such as Obamacare during those two years, and which led to the backlash election of 2010).

And that’s why I was so elated this past election night when I realized that the Republicans had retained control of the Senate (and the House, which hadn’t really been in dispute) to go along with their presidency. It’s a rare rare moment in history.

When I was writing the first draft of this post back in August 2015 I had added the following:

One of the many sad things about the 2016 campaign is that this is probably the first time since Coolidge or Hoover that Republicans have a chance of obtaining a strong majority in both houses and the presidency as well. And yet many so-called conservatives seem determined to throw it away in their ire at the GOP in Congress and the myth that the GOP can’t play offense. Yet, the only real evidence of that is a few years during Bush’s presidency.

I’m certainly willing to give them another chance. I don’t have any illusions about Boehner and McConnell, but with the leadership of a strong conservative president plus control of both houses, I think a great deal can be accomplished and quite a bit actually would be accomplished. I want a chance to find out.

Well, we’ve been though a lot since then, haven’t we? For a while I thought we’d thrown away the chance to have a Republican president and Senate at all. Then I thought we’d thrown away the chance to have a “strong conservative president.” Now I am entertaining the idea that—although the lead in Congress isn’t really what I’d call enormous (52% and 55% aren’t exactly FDR- or JFK- or LBJ-type numbers)—’tis enough, ’twill serve (perhaps). And although Trump never looked especially conservative while campaigning, his post-election choices have been quite conservative indeed.

So maybe I’ll get my chance to find out. And so will you.

That would be astounding. Let’s hope they use that power wisely.

Should “hate” be a separate category of crime?

The New Neo Posted on by

I often cross-post at the blog Legal Insurrection, but most of the time my posts there are just slightly-edited versions of posts here.

However, today I have a post up at LI which is related to one I wrote here recently on the topic of the torture of a mentally disabled white man in Chicago, but is a substantial expansion on it. So I’m calling your attention to this post I wrote at Legal Insurrection on the subject of how the charge “hate crime” relates to the recent incident, plus some of the history of the “hate crime” offense, and a discussion of whether “hate crime” should be a separate category of crime.

Feel free to comment here, there, or at both places.

The Ft. Lauderdale airport shooter

The New Neo Posted on by

This time, a terrible act of violence at an airport resulting in five deaths seems to have been perpetrated by a person who was mentally ill, perhaps schizophrenic:

[The shooter Esteban Santiago] visited the FBI’s Anchorage, Alaska, office a few months ago and told authorities that an intelligence agency was telling him to watch ISIS videos, according to law enforcement officials.

The officials said Santiago’s associates were concerned because he said he was hearing voices; they had accompanied him to the FBI office in Anchorage.

On Friday, Santiago flew into Florida on a Delta Air Lines flight from Alaska via Minnesota, officials said. He had declared his handgun in a firearms carrying case, law enforcement sources told CNN…

Santiago had purchased two handguns — a 9 mm Glock and a Glock .40-caliber — in the past, according to a law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation. It is unknown whether either of these pistols were used in Friday’s attack.

Santiago’s criminal record in Alaska includes three offenses: having no proof of insurance in 2015, a taillight violation in 2015 and a criminal mischief charge, causing property damage of more than $50, in 2016…

The FBI looked into Santiago’s background and saw his military history but found no information to indicate radicalization, officials said. The FBI asked local police to take him to the hospital for a mental health evaluation. Santiago voluntarily checked himself in.

Much more information at the link.

There doesn’t seem to have been much of a failure by authorities here, except the failure to predict human nature perfectly. Unless we are going to lock up every unstable person indefinitely, and search for and confiscate the weapons they already own, or ban flying with legal weapons legally stowed in the baggage area, or have an armed guard every few yards in all airports, I don’t see how this one could have been prevented.

In terms of concealed carry of weapons acting as a deterrent, an airport is obviously a zone where an assailant can be pretty sure that only law enforcement officials will be carrying. It’s a conundrum, and I don’t see a solution.

Obamacare: what’s good for the Democrat gander is good for the GOP goose

The New Neo Posted on by

Back in 2009-2010, the Democrats couldn’t be bothered to try to fashion a health care reform bill that would get some bipartisan support. So when the people of Massachusetts warned them against a unilateral one, by electing Scott Brown as senator to replace Ted Kennedy and to block the passage of Obamacare—becoming the first Republican senator from Massachusetts since Edward Brooke in 1972—the Democrats just said “Full speed ahead!” and used reconciliation to get around the cloture problem and pass the final bill.

Remember those exciting and outrageous days? Seems like only yesterday, although it was actually seven long years ago.

But guess what? Reconciliation is the tool that can undo what was done back then:

Senate Budget Committee Chair Michael Enzi (R-WY) introduced a budget resolution Tuesday that includes “reconciliation instructions” that enable Congress to repeal Obamacare with a simple Senate majority. Passing a budget resolution that includes those instructions will mean that the legislation can pass through the budget reconciliation process, in which bills cannot be filibustered.

That means Republicans will only need 50 of their 52 members in the Senate, and a bare majority in the House, to pass legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act. According to the Wall Street Journal, the budget resolution could be passed by both houses as early as next week.

The Democrats really thought it would all work out.

Obamacare would be a wonderful success.

Or…

Obamacare would be a dependency people would never want to give up.

Or…

Obamacare would fail and a Democratic Congress and president would replace it with single payer.

Or…

Whatever happened, the presidency would remain in Democratic hands in perpetuum and any Republican efforts to change things against Democratic wishes would be met with a presidential veto.

As David French writes:

So now the Left lives with the world it made. The outgoing administration’s signal legislative achievement can be undone through simple majority. Key progressive social reforms ”” implemented through letters and memoranda ”” can be undone at the stroke of a pen. The most controversial judicial nominations will escape filibuster. In other words, if the Republicans have the will, they actually have a way to not just unwind much of the Obama legacy, they can reform the judiciary without fear of Democratic “Borking.”

One of the principal rules of politics is what goes around, comes around. Another is that majorities are never permanent. The Democrats seem to have forgotten both.

It’s not smooth sailing for the Republicans, though, in doing away with Obamacare. Not at all. There are possible deficit hitches. There is the huge task of passing something better to replace Obamacare, agreeing on how it should be structured and on what principles, and when it should take effect in order to avoid the greatest hardship and backlash.

Russian hackers, CIA leakers

The New Neo Posted on by

Lots of news today about the Russians, the 2016 election, the hacking, and the leaks.

The Russians celebrated the Trump victory. The DNC refused to give its servers to the FBI for an investigation. Trump says it’s a politically motivated witch hunt. The CIA is mad at Trump. And on and on and on.

One of the many problems with this story is that we have grown to distrust MSM reporting almost as much as we distrust the Russians, so Trump’s accusations (right or wrong) have a certain ring of believability. Another is that there is so much leaking from intelligence agencies these days that it’s truly alarming, whatever the political slant that leaking has and whatever side it benefits.

So here’s my effort to sort it out—at least for today. I assume three things. The first is that Russians have had an interest in the outcome of every American election for a long long time, and probably a favorite as well. The second is that they probably have long done whatever they could to influence those elections and to spy on many aspects of the US (and although, in the olden days of my youth, those efforts certainly could not have included cyber-spying, I have long assumed that the Russians have been cyber-spying ever since computers have become our dominant mode of communication). In fact, on that second point, I seem to remember bugging of embassies between the two powers, and the like. Why should that sort of thing have ended when the USSR fell? Wouldn’t the mode of spying merely have shifted towards the cyber world?

And the third is that, as Romney said (and for which Obama and the chorus of Democrats mocked him back in 2012), Russia is our “number one geopolitical foe.” China is in there somewhere, as well.

You know who else tries to influence the outcome of elections by releasing information, including information that is supposed to be secret? Why, Julian Assage of Wikileaks. Also, the leaking members of the CIA. Not to mention the MSM, which includes everyone to whom the others are leaking—that same MSM that is publishing today’s stories, shaping them and deciding what slant to give them.

Everybody has a dog in this race. Heck, even I tried to influence this election (actually, to influence the primaries: I thought Trump was the weakest GOP candidate and argued against nominating him) by writing my little blog.

I don’t think that the Wikileaks information which was released actually did influence the election. I don’t think that blue collar workers in the rust belt gave two hoots about it. But is it the effort that counts?

And why would Russia want Trump as president rather than Clinton? Why would they want the Russia-fearing GOP in charge? Didn’t Obama and company show enough “flexibility” after the 2012 election towards the Russians, as he had promised them? Wasn’t Clinton going to follow in his footsteps? Why Trump? Are we really to believe it’s because he called Putin a stronger leader than Obama?

Seems to me that, if the Russians were celebrating after the Trump win—and if they wanted Trump to win in the first place—it was mainly because they bought into the idea (an idea shared, pre-election, by much of the world) that Trump was some sort of idiot, and that he’d screw things up for the US. It also seems to me that the Russians wouldn’t have been so sad, either, if the eminently hackable Hillary and the demonstrably penetrable DNC had been in charge instead.

Somehow from all of this we are supposed to understand that there is something especially unusual, new, and nefarious about what the Russians did this time (as opposed, by the way, to Obama administration attempts to unseat Netanyahu in the Israeli election). We are supposed to understand that the Russian action caused Trump to be elected, which may not have happened otherwise. We are supposed to understand that Trump is in league with our enemies the Russians, now that Russia really is our number one geopolitical enemy. We are supposed to understand that anonymous CIA leaks are fine in this case, and that the WaPo is just trying to inform us of the truth and not trying to influence anything.

[ADDENDUM: Speaking of the WaPo, veracity, and influence, see this. Note, also, that Glenn Greenwald, the author of the piece, is one of Snowden’s main confederates in the press.]

Macy’s: going, going…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and I hope not “gone.”

Macy’s is closing a great many of its brick and mortar stores:

Macy’s said Wednesday it’s shutting down 68 stores and cutting more than 10,000 jobs.

The announcement was issued alongside an unfavorable earnings report, showing comparable store sales dipped 2.1% last quarter. The news caused its stock to plunge nearly 10% during after-hours trading Wednesday.

Macy’s (M) said it expects to layoff about 3,900 workers as a result of the upcoming store closures, and another 6,200 jobs will be cut as the company works to streamline its management team, according to a press release.

I remember decades ago when Macy’s was very much in the ascendance, as other giants like Filene’s paid the price.

I happen to love Macy’s. Well, maybe “love” is too strong a word, but it’s where I do most of my shopping—in the brick-and-mortar store, rather conveniently located, inexpensive, at least moderately stylish, and full of variety.

And where I still can actually try things on.

Yes, we ladies need to see what it looks like and what it fits like, because there are myriad differences in cut and style and comfort, as well as variance between what a photo looks like and what the real fabrics and colors look like. For those reasons, I almost never buy clothing online unless it’s a duplicate of a garment I’ve already purchased. Even then I’m wary, because sometimes it seems to be the same garment and says it’s the same garment but really hasn’t been, particularly in terms of fit.

I hate paying the postage to send and/or return. I hate the back-and-forth. I like browsing around in an actual store with real garments, looking at what’s available and getting ideas. Sometimes I even like interacting in the non-virtual world with salespeople.

I spend so much time at my computer already that I don’t want to do all my shopping on it, too. I’ve noticed that, with clothing in particular, it only seems convenient and time-saving to do so. But there’s an endless online supply of goods and of places to get them. That may seem good at first blush, but it can be exhausting and very time-consuming. The pages with the little photos take forever to load. You have to click and click and click to see the colors and make those little photos bigger.

It’s not fun at all; not for me, anyway. Shopping in a store for clothing may not be the funnest thing in the world either, but it’s a tactile and visual and social pleasure compared to online shopping. And my local stores are almost never crowded (I suppose that’s part of the problem, as far as the stores are concerned). Granted, they’re also understaffed, but I don’t like salespeople bugging me and asking me whether I’ve found everything I want, anyway.

That’s why I want my relatively-local Macy’s to stay put, thank you very much. So far, so good. But I don’t have a good feeling about this whole thing.

And it’s not just Macy’s, it’s the whole concept of non-online shopping. Amazon is great for books and a host of other things (buy through neoneocon; Amazon portal on the right sidebar!!)—even refrigerators, it turns out, as I’m in the market for one that doesn’t appear in my local stores. But please don’t take my Macy’s away!

When is a hate crime not a hate crime? [UPDATED]

The New Neo Posted on by

UPDATE 5:50:

The four perpetrators—two 18-year-old men and one 18-year old and one 24-year-old female (the women appear from their names to be sisters or otherwise related)—have now been charged, and “hate crime” is among the charges:

Authorities have charged three teens and a 24-year-old woman with a hate crime after a Facebook Live video showed four people torturing a man who authorities say has mental health issues.

Jordan Hill, 18; Tesfaye Cooper; 18; Brittany Covington, 18; and Tanishia Covington, 24, also face charges of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated unlawful restraint and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, according to WGN. Hill, Cooper, and Covington were also charged with residential burglary. Hill was also accused of robbery and possession of a stolen motor vehicle.

I think the video was so clear and the offenses so egregrious that they had no choice but to include “hate crime” among the other offenses. If there must be a category known as “hate crime,” this would appear to be a textbook case.

It gets worse, too. Another video has emerged:

In the first 30-minute video, which apparently was posted live on Facebook on Tuesday, the victim is backed into a corner, his mouth duct-taped shut. The victim’s clothes were cut, he was peppered with cigarette ashes, and then his hair cut with a knife until his scalp bled.

Several people can be seen laughing and eating during the attack, in addition to making disparaging remarks about President-elect Donald Trump and using racially charged language. At one point, while the victim is backed into a corner, someone is heard shouting “F*** Donald Trump. F*** white people.”

Thursday morning, Chicago police confirmed they are investigating a second video, which surfaced on Twitter, and appears to show the suspects grabbing the victim’s head, shoving it into a toilet, and forcing him to drink.

Someone can be heard yelling “Drink that s*** right f***ing now. ”¦ Drink the toilet water, b****! Say f*** Trump! Say f*** Trump!”

What follow is my original post on the subject.

John Hinderaker at Powerline notes that the original AP story about an apparent hate-motivated assault perpetrated in Chicago and documented in a video that was posted online was mum about the races of the parties involved.

But Fox reported the story this way:

Chicago investigators are questioning four African-Americans after a Facebook Live video shows a group of people torturing a white mentally disabled man while someone yelled “F*** Trump!” and “F*** white people!”

Chicago police were made aware of the video Tuesday afternoon. A young African American woman streamed the video live on Facebook showing at least four people holding the young white man hostage.

The AP story has now been updated. As of this moment, the headline is the rather neutral “Police: Charges coming in Chicago beating aired on Facebook.” The opposite of inflammatory or racial. Here are the first few paragraphs:

Chicago police don’t believe a man beaten in an assault broadcast live on Facebook was targeted because he was white despite profanities made by the accused assailants about white people and President-elect Donald Trump, a police spokesman said Thursday.

Charges are expected later in the day against four black suspects, Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told The Associated Press.

Guglielmi acknowledged that the suspects made “terrible racist statements” during the assault, but that investigators believe the victim was targeted because he has “special needs,” not because of his race. Still, Guglielmi said authorities are looking at whether the attack falls under hate crimes statutes.

Guglielmi said it’s possible the suspects were trying to extort something from the victim’s family. Investigators said the victim was with his attackers, including one who was a classmate, for up to 48 hours, and the attack left him traumatized.

Excerpts of the video posted by Chicago media outlets show the victim with his mouth taped shut slumped in a corner as at least two assailants cut off his sweatshirt with a knife, as others taunt him off camera. The video shows a wound on the top of the man’s head, and one person pushing the man’s head with his or her foot. A red band also appears to be around the victim’s hands.

Off-camera, people can be heard using profanities about “white people” and Trump.

As with many stories of the “possible hate-crime” type, there are at least three stories here: the initial event (or in some cases, hoax), the manner of its coverage, and the reaction (both of law enforcement and the public) to it. Another issue is that of the category “hate crime” itself; whether there should be such a special category of crime at all.

As far as this particular initial event goes, I think most people would agree that it was egregiously vicious and chilling (I haven’t watched the video and don’t intend to do so, but I don’t think it’s necessary to view it to come to that conclusion).

As for the police reaction, I think they’re doing the right thing in announcing the facts and being rather cautious about characterizing it. I think that should always be true. This event appears at first blush to have been a crime with many motivations, one of which might indeed be hatred of whites and one of which might be hatred of mentally challenged people (the “F*** Trump” part may be more gratuitous than specific; I doubt the victim was identified as a Trump supporter). There seems to be plenty of hatred to go around on the part of these perpetrators, who appear to have proudly documented their own crime (although the person who posted it online was unlikely to have been one of the perpetrators; perhaps a girlfriend or friend? UPDATE: It apparently was one of the female perpetrators).

Then there’s the press coverage of the story. It is obvious that so far this has been in tremendous contrast to what would be going on if the races had been reversed, and if the perps had yelled “F*** Hillary.” The races would then have been identified in a sensational headline, and the first stories would have led with the racial angle as well. And I very much doubt that AP lede would have read like this had the races been reversed:

Chicago police don’t believe a man beaten in an assault broadcast live on Facebook was targeted because he was black despite profanities made by the accused assailants about black people and President-elect Barack Obama, a police spokesman said Thursday.

No, it’s hard to imagine that sort of lede being written by the AP these days (or back in 2008), except in an alternate universe.

In contrast, of course, there are the many hate crimes that have been reported recently against Muslims and others, some of them supposedly committed by Trump supporters, crimes that have often turned out to be fake (“trumped up,” you might say) in the end. And yet, they were so well-publicized in the media and social media that most liberals probably believe to this day that they occurred. Those same people may have missed the details of the present story, which at least at this moment appears to be only too true.

Then there’s the whole question of whether there should be a special category of offense known as a “hate crime.” After all, we already have perfectly good charges in our criminal justice system. In general, hate crime laws were originally passed in order to provide for a federal remedy in cases in which states either couldn’t or wouldn’t prosecute, or when states didn’t have penalties considered serious enough.

Another argument for separate hate crime laws is this:

Penalty-enhancement hate crime laws are traditionally justified on the grounds that, in Chief Justice Rehnquist’s words, “this conduct is thought to inflict greater individual and societal harm…. bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest.”

I happen to think that there is no special need for hate-crime laws. Interestingly enough, quite a few hate crimes committed against white people have been prosecuted, although that’s a controversial area, too:

Hate crime statistics published in 2002, gathered by the FBI under the auspices of the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, documented over 7,000 hate crime incidents, in roughly one-fifth of which the victims were white people. However, these statistics have caused dispute. The FBI’s hate crimes statistics for 1993, which similarly reported 20% of all hate crimes to be committed against white people, prompted Jill Tregor, executive director of Intergroup Clearinghouse, to decry it as “an abuse of what the hate crime laws were intended to cover”, stating that the white victims of these crimes were employing hate crime laws as a means to further penalize minorities.

Jill Tregor seems to be a charter member of “white lives don’t matter, unless the whites involved are the perps.” Apparently Tregor is not alone in her views; enough people seem to have shared her opinion to have prompted this rejoinder:

James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter note that white people, including those who may be sympathetic to the plight of those who are victims of hate crimes by white people, bristle at the notion that hate crimes against whites are somehow inferior to, and less worthy than, hate crimes against other groups. They observe that while, as stated by Altschiller, no hate crime law makes any such distinction, the proposition has been argued by “a number of writers in prominent publications”, who have advocated the removal of hate crimes against whites from the category of hate crime, on the grounds that hate crime laws, in their view, are intended to be affirmative action for “protected groups”. Jacobs and Potter firmly assert that such a move is “fraught with potential for social conflict and constitutional concerns.”

That should be glaringly obvious. But apparently it’s not.

Then there’s this on the differential reporting:

Analysis of the 1999 FBI statistics by John Perazzo in 2001 found that white violence against black people was 28 times more likely (1 in 45 incidents) to be labelled as a hate crime than black violence against white people (1 in 1254 incidents). In analyzing hate crime hoaxes, Katheryn Russell-Brown propounds a hypothesis explaining the disparity in how hate crimes against whites are viewed with respect to hate crimes against blacks. She hypothesizes that the prevailing view in the minds of the public, that hate-crimes-against-blacks hoaxers intend to take advantage of, is that the crime that whites are most likely to commit against blacks is a hate crime, and that it is hard for (in her words) “most of us” to envision a white person committing a crime against a black person for a different reason.

There will be tremendous reluctance to label the current Chicago incident a hate crime. This doesn’t bother me, actually; as I said, I would prefer that the entire category “hate crime” be removed at this point. Assault, aggravated assault, deprivation of civil rights, kidnapping, attempted murder, manslaughter, murder—nothing wrong with those tried-and-true categories of crime, which are all avenues for vigorous prosecution of offenses.

[NOTE: If you want to take a look at a debate about whether hate crime laws are a good idea or not, see this.]

The 10 steps to Trump acceptance for liberals

The New Neo Posted on by

Molly Hemingway has written a great post with an excellent list of ten things to point out to the liberals in your life who might be exceedingly upset over the Trump victory.

Just a sampling; the first two:

1) It’s Okay to Be Sad

Technically, on January 13 I predicted Trump would win the presidency. But I didn’t really internalize the belief that he’d secure even the GOP nomination until February. When he won the South Carolina primary after a debate in which he accused George W. Bush of letting the 9/11 attacks happen, I realized he was unstoppable. And it depressed the heck out of me.

No, I hadn’t been reflexively anti-Trump, but to say he wasn’t my preferred candidate is a profound understatement. I walked around in a funk for a couple of weeks. I hung on every word of my pastors’ sermons. I read a lot of Holy Scripture. Word to the wise: the Psalms were written for times like ours.

I was also sad about how things were shaping up in the Democratic Party. I looked with horror upon a country that had sunk so low as to nominate two people of such low moral standing. We’ll get to how sadness should not be the only reaction one has to Trump, but it’s important to note that this is a perfectly valid feeling.

2) Accept the Rules of the Game

One of the sillier responses to the 2016 election is to point out that Hillary Clinton won the “national popular vote” or some such. Here’s [a tweet from] Stephen King:

Clinton won the election by 3 million votes–that’s MILLION–and that idiot Trump is going to be president. What’s wrong with this country?

This is very much like saying the Cleveland Indians tied the Cubs in the 2016 World Series because they both scored 27 runs over the course of the seven-game series. It’s a statistic without any meaning at all. We don’t elect presidents via a national vote ”” very far from it ”” so the idea that California and New York going big for Clinton is somehow meaningful is a non sequitur.

I did this same thing during the primary. I would always point out that Donald Trump kept winning thanks to oddities and quirks. There were 17 candidates splitting up the vote! Trump wasn’t winning majorities! There were open primaries!

Here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter what your excuse is, the game is played according to the rules set out at the beginning. If you want to change the rules for a future contest, feel free to write a constitutional amendment and get enough states to ratify it. But wishing it were otherwise is about as worthwhile as wishing you were an Olympian. Get over it.

Much, much more at the link.