CSotD: Curiouser and Curiouser
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I wonder if Buffalo is large enough that Trump’s secret police can get away with disappearing people without raising objections?
It is, on one hand, New York’s second-largest city, but, on the other, it’s not quite 3.5% the population of Gotham and even less so if you include the entire NYC metro zone. NYS demographics are completely skewed by the presence of that huge city in what is otherwise a relatively quiet blue-collar state.
Buffalo’s not small enough that everybody knows everybody, but it’s small enough that people there have a sense of neighborliness, that when someone goes crazy and shoots up a grocery store, they take it personally. It’s not Sackets Harbor, where the town rose up to protest seizure of a local family, but it’s not as prone to the “First they came for” syndrome that obtains in more populous places.
Point being that a repressive government does well to operate in places where people will say “tut tut” but turn their backs, where the bad things are happening to someone else, and where they can believe the people being sent to gulags truly are “people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
And some, I assume, are good people, but maybe that’s only noticed in situations where you know the gardener or construction worker or farm worker being sent without a trial to another country to be tortured.
As it happens, one of the Buffalo raids was at a grocery store in a suburb of Buffalo, and locals don’t seem to like people being kidnapped at grocery stores any more than they like them being shot there.
Ramirez, meanwhile, pushes back against Trump’s claim that the DC area is crime-ridden, noting that lenient sentencing has halted crime in the area. The illustration relies on a much-debated idea that putting your finger over a gun barrel will make the gun explode, which seems dubious, but the fact is that crime is down in DC to a level not seen in 30 years.
I didn’t find anything crediting lenient sentencing with the improvement in the crime rate, but if that’s what’s doing it, I’m all for it.
I’m also not entirely sure that was Ramirez’s point.
Still, the fact that Donald Trump happened to know a victim of crime doesn’t change the fact that DC is a much safer place today than it has been in the past. It certainly doesn’t justify sending federal troops in to do a job the local police appear to be handling quite well.
I thought it was conservatives who went on about states’ rights and the 10th Amendment and all that, but I guess that was before they gained federal power.
No questions about Benson’s intentions, which are almost always to back up the Trump administration.
The Justice Department is investigating Adam Schiff for alleged fraud in claiming both his California apartment and his larger Maryland house as primary residences, which sounds clear-cut until you dig into it a little and find that there are several legislators who make a similar claim, and that it depends on state laws and knowing what is permitted. And that this is not a new attack on Schiff.
Once again, we get into the topic of whether political cartoonists need to be journalists, or, perhaps, whether they need to be the kind of journalists who perform research rather than stenography. The notion that this is an open-and-shut case depends on believing what the White House and DOJ tell you rather than digging in to find out how things actually stack up.
It doesn’t take a lot of research to remember that, in his debates with Hillary Clinton, Trump claimed that cutting his tax burden through dubious means meant that he was smart, and it also doesn’t take much to realize that DOJ is also investigating New York Attorney General Letitia James, also someone Dear Leader doesn’t like very much.
It’s not that the claims against Schiff and James are clearly false, but the fact that DOJ is going after two of Trump’s most active and effective adversaries ought to make a journalist’s spidey senses tingle.
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.” — Ernest Hemingway, former reporter for the Kansas City Star.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Benson also goes along with the official story that casualty reports from Gaza’s ministry of health are not to be trusted, but Hajjaj points out that, even when journalists were permitted to go along on food drops over Gaza, they were forbidden to photograph the moonscape below them.
It’s not a question of whether the health ministry is being truthful. Most sources consider them the best source because they are essentially the only source.
Not only are they right there on the ground, but the Israeli government has blocked foreign journalists from going into Gaza to see for themselves, and Israeli media has, until very recently, declined to provide its own people a lot of information on the war going on in Gaza.
The result is having to rely on Gaza’s ministry of health in the absence of other sources, and good journalists get uncomfortable when forced to report single-source stories.
The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi expresses serious doubt that the ministry’s numbers are accurate, not because they may exaggerate the deaths but because they may underreport them.
I would love to be proved wrong on all this. I would love to find out that Israel has “only” killed 60,000 people. I would love to find out that all the children who are being shot in the head just carelessly walked into bullets and weren’t being deliberately targeted.
But nearly 200 Palestinian journalists have also carelessly walked into bullets, so it’s hard to know what’s going on there.
OTOH, it seems perfectly natural to be curious about why a government would keep foreign journalists from covering a well-run military operation.
Here’s a tip for world leaders, business leaders and others: Making good journalists curious is a bad move.
That includes political cartoonists and topical folksingers.
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