Week of September 20th, 2020

Howdy,

My semester has finally kicked into gear as tests roll around and projects ramp up, but I think my hardest semester is behind me. I'm really just trying to stay sane and graduate and see what professional has to offer. Oddly enough, my social life is kind of flourishing during the pandemic semester. It's a bit easier to manage when the standard for a positive social interaction is a Zoom call where I don't have to go anywhere, and folks don't seem to have much else to do, so they tend to be down for longer conversations. By a total fluke, I've been talking quite a bit with a girl my year in CS, a partner on a project, whom I discovered lived only a few miles from my house! I didn't think this would be the semester to meet new people. Film club is fine, but, obviously, we can't really make the same kinds of movies, so we've been trying to do other things. I ran for president of the club, and I'm pretty glad that I lost by a vote to be honest. I hope you're finding good ways to occupy your time, and I'd love to hear from you. A great deal has happened this week, so I'll jump into it and try not to ramble on about anything. This'll probably be a pretty unfocused one.

College COVID Recap

I don't have any big update here. There were over 1,500 tests this week, a great deal above average, due at least in part to the mandatory random testing they've implemented, though I'm still not sure it's enough. We're nearly at a thousand positive cases since move-in. Growth certainly hasn't stopped, but it's still not blasting off in the way that I had feared. Hopefully, I'll have pretty much the same non-story next week.

Election Recap

To try to repeat what I did last time, I'll start with something funny that doesn't make me want to die. Joe Biden—or, more accurately, his campaign—actually made a funny Twitter campaign ad. Orange Man Bad™ really is a perfectly fine campaign method in this election and being even a little self-aware about it helps.

Later, in a classic Biden gaffe, he stated that over the course of his speech 200,000,000 people would die. Okay, I guess elder abuse isn't that funny, but let me have this. Okay, onto the existential dread.

I should start where I left off: the vacant seat in the Supreme Court. At this point, I have to acknowledge that I might have been dead wrong about Judge Amy Coney Barret. I thought that President Trump wasn't considering her very closely since she didn't appear on the list of considerations published mere days before Justice Ginsburg's death. And I still hold that early speculation about her nomination was totally unfounded. However, reportedly, there are now inside sources confirming that she has already been selected and that an official announcement will be made today. If he does select her, I'll eat my words and discuss her views and record, but I'll wait until there's an official statement one way or the other. Perhaps more important than the selection itself is the question of whether the Senate will actually fill the seat. Folks were very angry with Senator Romney this week after he said that he would consider whomever President Trump nominates. Everyone angry with him is way off base. Senator Romney never said any of the stupid shit other Senate Republicans said about the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland, so it isn't hypocritical. He's just doing his job as a Senator. And we shouldn't expect that he would assent to anyone President Trump could nominate. Senator Romney voted to remove him from office for Christ's sake. There's no way President Trump wants to cut this vote any closer than it already is, and with Senator Susan Collins now joining with Senator Murkowski to dissent from any nomination before the election, albeit with some vague and ambiguous language, President Trump really wants to keep Senator Romney's vote, which may force a more moderate nomination. This is how the system is supposed to work. Of course, a whole lot of people have lost their minds over this whole thing and understandably so. Here's a positively deranged video of Speaker Pelosi.

President Trump did quite a bit of campaigning this week and said quite a bit of crazy shit while he was at it. Here's an unbelievably racist clip in which he discusses Congresswoman Omar. Here he is praising police for shooting MSNBC Contributor Ali Velshi with a rubber bullet. But the biggest Trump story this week was probably his comments, or lack thereof, about a peaceful transferal of power come January. When questioned about the subject, he said, “Well, we'll have to see what happens,” and made the same bullshit complaints about mail-in ballots he's been making since the start of this pandemic he's helped to prolong. Obviously, no one backed him up on this, but even as empty words, this kind of shit genuinely degrades our republic. It's not just empty rhetoric just because it's an empty threat. That being said, if he refuses to leave office when Biden is elected—okay, okay, I should say “if,” but Biden is going to win—whether by force of will or by some hypothesized elector bullshit, I'll be taking a road trip to Washington D.C. with a gun or two, and I won't be the only one. It isn't going to happen, but it isn't really an overreaction to prepare for it when the President indicates that it's a possibility.

Police

A grand jury made a single indictment in the Breonna Taylor case: wanton endangerment for shooting into a window with the blinds on without a line of sight. No charges were made for shooting a totally innocent woman in her own home. Obviously, people have taken to the streets once again. I'm not going to be able to discuss everything in this email, but I want to take a minute to talk about this case since I wasn't writing these when it first became well-known and since it's so important to the way we talk about police accountability. This case has already had an impact on police procedure, including bans on no-knock warrants, which is a good thing. In case you're not familiar with the details of the case, I'll run through the gist. I think that's important to do since so much of the information getting spread around is unverified or flatly false. A judge signed off on a search of Breonna Taylor's apartment as part of an investigation into her ex-boyfriend who had never lived there whom they believed was selling drugs out of a house about ten miles away. They were speculating that drugs had been delivered to or stored in the apartment. Her ex had been seen taking a package from her apartment to the house they believed drugs were being sold from. There were other crimes that the ex had committed that related to Taylor, but they were not the evidence given for this warrant, so I don't give a fuck. An hour before the planned raid, the cops tell the ambulance on standby to leave, counter to standard practice. Apparently, they don't think anybody could get hurt. Around midnight, three plainclothes officers started pounding on the door with a fucking battering ram. Obviously Taylor's boyfriend Kenneth Walker, who like Taylor herself has absolutely nothing to do with the run-of-the-mill drug case taking place ten miles away, and Taylor, who was not asleep despite the popular narrative, think they're being robbed, so he grabs his legally-owned pistol. And then the three men in plain clothes break through the door, so he shoots one of them in the leg—one shot. Remember that Kentucky is a stand-your-ground state. Then the three jumpiest cops in America indiscriminately fire 32 shots between the three of them into the apartment—just unloading those mags—and with Star Wars Storm Trooper precision, manage to hit Walker a grand total of zero times and hit the unarmed Taylor standing in the hallway five times. So the cops render medical assistance... to the police officer who had been shot in the raid. They call back the ambulance. Not only do these cops have terrible aim, but they claim that they didn't even notice that they'd shot Taylor until at least 5 minutes after they did it. 5 minutes is a long time not to realize you've shot someone. The cop was fine. The woman trying to sleep in her own apartment was not. They charged Walker with assault and attempted murder. Those charges were dropped, obviously.

So much stuff went wildly wrong here. First, none of this happens without the war on drugs. This isn't that much of a hot take these days, but the war on drugs is one of the great evils of American domestic policy and leads inevitably to deaths like this one. When more shit is criminalized—for unambiguously racist reasons, I might add—there are more crimes to investigate, warrants to sign, and doors to knock down. Even people who don't commit these victimless crimes inevitably are harmed by and die due to their enforcement. We cannot be blasé about this. Second, holy shit that was a stupid warrant, but not an uncommon one. All over this country, too many warrants are getting approved. We can't just trust the judgment of state judges to dictate when it's acceptable to break into someone's house in the middle of the night. Remember, they were investigating her ex-boyfriend who had never lived there for doing shit somewhere else, and their evidence connecting the crimes to that apartment was video of him at the apartment holding an unidentified box. It's good to eliminate no-knock warrants (though police say they announced their presence in this case, though none of the neighbors heard it), but we need to eliminate no-good-reason warrants, too. Third, the officers were in plainclothes. Why? I'm actually asking here. Why on earth were they in plainclothes? They were performing a raid. If someone breaks into your house in plain clothes, you're going to think you're being robbed. There's a certain kind of presumption of guilt here. Walker's mistake was aiming at their legs. Fourth, these police officers were incompetent. I don't know what kind of readiness training these dudes go through, but they emptied their magazines and hit just about everything but their target. Per the indictment, one of them was shooting totally randomly. It's fucking pathetic. This part in itself is an indictment on police training and culture.

So the outrage about this case is totally justified. But calling to end policing in America isn't a solution. We need to resolve the actual problems here. I also understand anger at the lack of other indictments, but that's where this case gets a lot trickier. I believe that self-defense is #1. It's among the most fundamental rights a person has. However—putting aside the indiscriminate gunfire for a moment—we want law enforcement to be able to respond when they get shot at while carrying out a warranted search. That starts with not signing bullshit warrants and not wearing plain clothes to a raid, but should these officers really be charged with murder? According to precedent, no. We afford a huge amount of leeway to cops in these kinds of situations. And supposing that it were Walker who died, I'm not sure the officers should have been charged with anything—though I would certainly hope they would be fired. Of course we want to make these situations as rare as possible by decriminalizing nearly everything, signing far fewer warrants, uniforming all officers executing warrants, and ending no-knock raids. However I think that higher charges were justified in this case since the unarmed, non-aggressive Breonna Taylor was the one who died. Three men broke into a house and recklessly shot an uninvolved third party. In Kentucky, I don't think that meets the standard for murder, but it should absolutely be considered first-degree manslaughter. This case is the perfect counterargument to qualified immunity.

So hopefully you can understand when I fucking seethe when I read right-wing shills writing shit like this. Yes, the liberals who get the facts wrong and call for overblown murder charges are annoying and sometimes destructive, but they're reachable (note that I'm not talking about the communists looking for any opportunity to burn cities down). I've lost interest in sharing a planet with people like this. I think that the civil unrest this year has greatly clarified my political allegiances. I have no place on a side that houses these folks. They are utterly unconcerned with truth. The shit they say can be discredited by a Google search. I'm still typing words to fit more links. THE DRUG-DEALING EX WASN'T THE ONE WHO SHOT AT POLICE, YOU FUCKING MORONS. All these people want to do is protect the police and the status quo where innocent black people die. I have even more links, but I don't want to type about this anymore.

This wasn't the only police-related story this week. A mom called 911 when she lost control over her white, autistic 13-year-old Linden Cameron who was having a mental breakdown and making violent threats. She told police he didn't have access to a real gun. Police showed up, chased him down, and shot him eleven times in the back when he didn't follow commands to get on the ground. He's currently hospitalized. I'm not going to discuss this case in any more detail because it makes me feel ill. A lot of right-wing idiots have been saying, “Hmmmm, why isn't BLM talking about this?” They are. BLM are kinda the only people talking about this. Imagine a world where these people actually took a stand in this case instead of using it as a nonsense prop to attack BLM. These people literally think this is a race war.

Everything Else

Fucked-up new FDA policy.

Fucked up “LGBT-free zones” covering a third of Polish households.

Finally, you gotta watch this cringe Jimmy Kimmel video where he lets himself be totally walked over to score woke points.

Thanks,

Jacob Morris