I don’t think Republican opposition is the answer, as they’re demonstrably just as corrupt and self-serving. But California could certainly benefit from some primary challenges from the left. LA is seeing this happen with the election of Nithya Raman and George Gascón (who were vehemently opposed by mainstream Democrats). Interested to see how they might shift the terrain.
Democrats getting defeated in primaries from the left only results in Democrats being replaced by other Democrats. We would still have one party in charge of the state, with a veto-proof majority in the legislature.
One-party rule is bad no matter which party you like. Even if the party you like is the one that is in charge, you will see them become complacent and corrupt when no-one else is able to hold them to account.
Prior to some big court cases and changes to repatriation law in the 80s and 90s, the mafia was heavily involved with looting archaeological heritage in places like Italy. Criminals would dig them up and move them through Swiss freeports using false provenance records and auction them off to museums and private collectors in other countries. This caused irreparable damage to our understanding of these objects history and context.
It’s not often discussed, but much of what you can see of Greco-Roman artifacts in the permanent collections of American museums, for example, was likely to have been looted.
Pornhub was widely damaging to the “the vast majority of legitimate employees“ in the industry. It built itself by stealing their work using the paper-thin ruse of “user-uploaded” videos, pushing down wages, working conditions and establishing itself as a quasi-monopoly player who could further set terms to its advantage and against sex worker and smaller companies. This has all been quite well documented.
The conflation of puritanical objections to pornography with opposition to their regime of theft and worse is nothing other than a cynical maneuver meant to distract from the operation and consequences of their enterprise.
My experience in New York and Los Angeles is that the natives are perfectly pleasant, so long as you’re aware of the local mores.
The worst people are the people who move to cities and try and fit in by adopting some caricature of these customs, which is often accompanied by engaging in hideous games of one-upsmanship with their fellow new arrivals.
> My coworkers from mainland China were concerned about our well-being and started shipping us KN95 masks
My partner’s friend with family in China did the same thing for us. His dad was getting chemo and they had their family send a couple boxes of KN95s over to help protect him. Depressing, given how much America looks like a failed state relative to the two countries pandemic response, but good that interpersonal relationships trump all the BS “new Cold War” rhetoric.
You can just order KN95s quite easily in the United States and have been able to for a long time, and actually I have for personal use (especially during the CA fires), and they have almost identical nominal requirements to N95, but:
The reason we don’t have masks is because we’ve gone all in on China and lost our manufacturing base. If you think this happened in the past 3 years, you have to ignore all data and pretend history doesn’t exist.
Yes, it's not like I have any connection via heritage or anything either, but our Chinese friends and coworkers have been extremely kind to us. They seem mystified / embarrassed to ask about the way our country is managing.
Larian does a great job with their early access releases, soliciting the community to report bugs, play testing etc. I put like 70 hours into the new Baldur’s Gate on different builds and it’s only like a third of the game. There were a lot of bugs and some crashes I reported, but has otherwise been a blast. Don’t understand why CDPR couldn’t have done the same.
Jon Ronson's podcast "The Butterfly Effect" also does a great job of breaking down how damaging MindGeek's practices have been to workers and legitimate players in the industry:
I’d like to see some kind of platform penalties that are redistributed toward victims. Pornhub has made millions off things like pirated sex work and revenge uploads, while wiping out legitimate players in the industry and driving down wages and working conditions [0]
Now, having wrought all that destruction, they’re returning to what? Exactly what a regulated, verified industry looks like. It’s unconscionable that we’ve built an economy that equates to “do a lot of crime until you’re a monopoly and then behave as you should have in the first place.”
That's pretty much the MO of a lot of SV companies. I remember when Uber came to my city and there were news articles about police officers ordering a ride and ticketing the driver afterwards because unlicensed taxis were against the law. The city claims Uber never petitioned them to change the law, Uber just knowingly broke the law and paid the fines on behalf of their drivers until the city changed the law. Airbnb has done similar things in the past in cities where subleasing and short-term rentals are regulated, but they skipped the regulation and just broke the law until the law changed.
Youtube does the same, Facebook does the same. Laws and regulations are seen as things to disrupt rather than rules to follow or petition for changing. And if you have a billion dollars of VC money in your pocket, who cares about a $100 ticket?
If the government changed the law rather than stepping up enforcement, that means that public support was not behind the law. This is essentially civil disobedience, and I say that is a completely legitimate strategy.
Using chemical weapons is already a war crime, so governments just decided that the chemical weapons they use on their own people are not chemical weapons. Tear Gas was the first chemical weapon used in World War I:
The military can't use tear gas on the battlefield; military police can use tear gas against rioting soldiers and sailors. Soldiers can't use hollow point bullets even in those calibers, like 7.62x51mm, where that is by far the most common type of bullet used by civilians because of its effectiveness in hunting; but police use hollow point bullets all the time, in part because they are more effective against unarmored targets (though less effective against armored ones) and in part because they are much less likely to pass through a wall and strike someone the officer can't see.
These differences are not due to governments deciding that tear gas is not a chemical weapon or that hollow point bullets are not hollow point bullets, but rather because the laws of war apply in war and not elsewhere.
If you were serious about the war crimes thing, you'd have to acknowledge the Antifa and BLM committed war crimes by not having uniforms and clear insignia and by not distinguishing between civilians and non-civilian property when destroying things during their raids. There is no such thing as a body of law that applies to only one side. Talking about war crimes in this context really is disinformation: it confuses what those laws are about as well as the difference between international and domestic jurisdiction.
How does what you're saying make any sense to you?
Using non-lethal weapons like tear gas is not a lower standard of morality. Nor is using bullets that are less likely to pass through the intended target or the surroundings.
Military personnel are not actually held to a very low standard -- much lower than police -- when they are fighting unlawful combatants like citizens, because people who are not fighting as military personnel enjoy no or almost no protections under the laws of war.
Trying to draw a parallel here with the laws of war is silly.
None of these are non-lethal. They're less lethal. They still kill people. They still maim people.
But since many people share your view - that they're non-lethal and thus morally superior - these less lethal means are used frequently, and often inappropriately, when the use of force is not justified.
The parallel is clear: government funded and backed forces equipped with military gear, using military-developed weapons (chemical, sound, light, physical); some of which are restricted by international convention during war.
And there will be no trials to hold people accountable for mis-using these weapons; as pointed out in the article, the government is actively blocking such attempts.
Invoking the laws of war with reference to Portland doesn't make any sense unless you really believe that Antifa and BLM fall under the category of enemy combatants, which would mean that the government funded and backed forces were authorized to shoot them on sight.
It's not because there is tear gas that police are sent to disperse crowds. Without tear gas, they'd use some other non-lethal implement authorized for that purpose. Authorizing non-lethal force to disperse crowds is not holding police to a lower moral standard than that to which the military is held.
In fact, the military has the same kind of authorizations for dealing with (a) rebellious troops in its own ranks, (b) prisoners of war and (c) civilians in occupied territory. That is why the DoD does research on these incapacitating weapons. It's military forces that are held to police standards when these weapons are used, not the other way around.
As far as I understand it the ban on using tear gas in war is less about morality and more about preventing escalation into use of other chemical weapons in reprisal attacks.
As a practical matter, many countries published doctrine restricting the use of tear gas and other riot control agents as a result of the Geneva Gas Protocol of 1925. The language of the protocol is very general: "Whereas the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or any other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world..."
It is probably this very general language that lead to the restriction of riot agents. Although they do not kill by poisoning or kill by asphyxiation, their method of operation certainly involves some combination of poisoning and asphyxiation.
The USA has tended to hold that riot agents are not what is technically called a method of warfare because they produce "...merely transient effects...", and thus do not technically fall under the terms of the protocol, but has also long held that they are not authorized for general use, either. Per a field manual from 1956:
It is the position of the United States that the Geneva [Gas] Protocol of 1925 does not prohibit the use in war of … riot control agents, which are those agents of a type widely used by governments for law enforcement purposes because they produce, in all but the most unusual circumstances, merely transient effects that disappear within minutes after exposure to the agent has terminated. In this connection, however, the United States has unilaterally renounced, as a matter of national policy, certain uses in war of … riot control agents. The policy and provisions of Executive Order No. 11850 do not, however, prohibit or restrict the use of … riot control agents by US armed forces either (1) as retaliation in kind during armed conflict or (2) in situations when the United States is not engaged in armed conflict. Any use in armed conflict of … riot control agents, however, requires Presidential approval in advance.
In Vietnam, riot agents nevertheless saw very wide application.
The classification of war crimes just doesn't have much to do with what's needed in the context of domestic policing. Hollow-point bullets are the canonical example; they're illegal in war but required for police, because the fully jacketed bullets used in war are much more likely to hurt bystanders.
