It doesn’t look nearly as bad as the images I see from New York, but it was noticeable in Columbus, Ohio yesterday. I was at a swim meet last night and, depending on how the wind was blowing, periodically felt like I was immediately downstream of a manufacturing facility. My wife and I also went home with really sore throats.
Current air quality index (did this even exist 5 years ago?) is 119, but I didn’t notice it when I was briefly outside this morning.
Rochester seems to be hit harder, so I’d imagine that general area is
But we all know that NYC is all that matters. Nobody has actually had bad smoke before NYC. Unprecedented, say many actual bigshots
What’s the national sentiment like on this? This is one of those spots where American sensibilities seem to be at odds with the rest of the world only this time I wonder if the US has it right.
I haven’t watched any TV this week - are the news stations sending out the weather people to stand in the haze and describe the smell?
This is kind of like if we had a major blizzard in SoCal, but in reverse.
A few years ago it was like 105 and the air was thick with smoke. Dog still has to pee so I took her out and somebody jogged by me.
On the brightside the memes are good.
https://twitter.com/ThePlanetaryGuy/status/1666265716658515969
https://twitter.com/youshouldaffirm/status/1666223706283057152
He was a guest on Sean Carroll’s podcast discussing some of this sometime in the last two years I want to say. I don’t recall enjoying the episode much, but I was probably expecting a more conventional discussion of the philosophy of causation. Also Daniel Pearl’s father, the journalist who was murdered in Pakistan shortly? after 9-11.
Reddit seems to be fucking around with their API usage and they’re going to start finding out soon. Their CEO is publicly lying about devs threatening them, unfortunately the dev recorded the entire interaction:
Huffman is doing an ama Friday. Going to take the most downvoted topic away from electronic arts.
Many subreddits are blacking out at least the 12th-14th.
This new smear campaign is a real amateur hour look for Reddit.
I think nobody really cares, I’m sure there are some freeze peach advocates who are in uproar.
I think the question of how far to go in codifying rights is an interesting one. Here in South Australia there were anti-organized-crime laws introduced a while back whereby the Commissioner of Police can apply to a judge to have an organization declared criminal. After that is granted, they can apply for control orders against members of those organizations. Here are some of the things those control orders can forbid:
Literally police can order you not to associate with other members of that organization and if you do, you’re committing a crime.
Obviously these are extraordinary powers and there was huge public debate at the time they came into force. But this is all out in the open. The police said “look we need these powers to deal with organized criminal gangs”, the government passed laws, and all the declarations and orders and so forth are a matter of public record.
Compare this to the US, where the way police get around onerous legal requirements is just to lie. They lie all the time, everyone knows they do it, there is a culture of tolerating this within the law enforcement and judicial establishment. It’s not clear to me that this is a better solution when police are trying to operate in conditions that they feel are restricting them from getting their job done. Here the police are able to just stop cars and search them if they want to. Did constantly having to be like “oh yea I could smell marijuana actually” foster the culture of lying among US police? I don’t think it’s a crazy argument. If the government had said “no sorry you can’t have the powers, it’s illegal” to SA Police, would that have been the end of it, or would the next step be internal agreement in SA Police that they were going to have to start bending the rules and telling a few white lies to get the job done?
Constitutional protections also did not stop civil rights abuses in the Bush era for example; instead, again, the government just did them in secret and when caught were like “oh that was a whoopsie”.
The other way the “is this meant to be your shield Lord Stark, a piece of paper” thing operates is legal “interpretation” at elite levels. The entire way Congress operates is underpinned by an obviously bullshit reading of the Commerce Clause. In Wickard v Filburn SCOTUS held that wheat production limits set by Congress applied to a farmer who had grown wheat on his land and had not merely not sold the wheat interstate, but hadn’t sold it at all. This is what happens when the demands of a system collide with the law; they just declare that “interstate commerce” applies to something that is very plainly neither interstate nor commerce.
That leads to the other issue with sweeping codified rights; they can be weaponized to take political questions out of the hands of democratic institutions. When it comes to the First Amendment, of course Citizens United is the obvious example.
I’m not saying I think constitutional rights are bad, I’m saying I think that whether they are the best way to ensure freedom happens in practice is a more complicated question than it appears.
USA police officially classify individuals as gang members all the time, with increased power over them for doing so
It’s really incredible how naive you can be about them doing this (and things like “smelling weed”) “in order to get the job done.” Unless you’re admitting some things about what their job is.
Like you have to be so far removed from anything related to the history of policing in order to think “these fellas came up with this out of frustration from being prevented from catching the bad guys due to legal and ethical limitations that had been placed on them.”
There are SO MANY things historically, factually incorrect about that sentence and its premises
You have to be simply “gaming this out in your head” rather than having read one paragraph about how police do or have done “their jobs” in US history
I’d like to say I’m surprised by your suggestions that 1) police became fascist as a response to laws written to curb fascism, and 2) the solution to this is to make the letter of the law more fascist
But I’ve read too many of your posts to be surprised by this
cracker barrel was the constantinople of fast casual restaraunts
Good case on what you’re discussing:
Clarence Thomas’ dissent seems in accord with your view.
I think 9/11 was a fairly unique event in American history and the civil rights abuses like “spying on citizens” which occurred were countenanced much more in the sake of national security when we didn’t know how vulnerable we were. Kinda like how liberty interests were sharply reduced during COVID, especially the first few months and prior to the vaccine, because nobody knew how vulnerable we were. Security state and whatnot.
In any event, the only comparable event in the last 100 years, Pearl Harbor, led to far more egregious civil rights abuse, e.g., internment of every person of Japanese descent, than occurred under Bush.
