Comments

1

I'm elated to hold second place in my race but not entirely surprised...

2

But, but, but defund is so unpopular no one will ever vote for it!

Cheer up imaginary backlash crew. I hear rural Alabama is beautiful this time of year for all you law and order types. If you leave now you there's till time for you to get in on the anti-abortion and homophobic anti-trans movement, not to mention the homeless sweep they have planned for Christmas day.

3

Nicole Thomas-Kennedy is the Progressive version of Sidney "Kraken" Powell. 100% nuts.

4

It's disappointing to see these results but at this time it's still pointless to really draw conclusions other than what we expected to happen actually happened outside of the city attorney's race. Oliver-Nelson moved on as well as Mosqueda and some rando for the SCC and Harrell and Gonzales for mayor. It always felt like Davison was going to move on to challenge Holmes but The Strangers endorsement of NTK def tipped the scales in that race.

Outside of that you had only 41.4% of all eligible voters in Seattle cast a ballot. That means 289K registered voters couldn't be bothered or just didn't care. That's the real story here. If this were the actual election Oliver would win her seat on the council with support from a little less than 16% of eligible voters while NKT would be looking at a mandate of 14% for her policies. Hardly overwhelming.

Hopefully between now and November more voters come back from vacation or take a renewed interest in local elections (fun fact, the primary after a presidential election traditionally has lower than average turnout). I look forward to a robust campaign for the next 3 months and a debate about truly polar opposite approaches to public safety.

5

@4 41.4% voter turnout is "the real story?" Voter turnout in Seattle for the last two primaries following a presidential election were 40% in 2017 and 35% in 2013. It appears we've exceeded expectations in 2021. Cool story, bro.

6

@2 - no one said Defund was a loser here in our liberal bubble. The issue was how much it was going to hurt Dems in more moderate areas (like almost everywhere else). Winning in Seattle, Portland, Boulder, & Berkeley is not enough.

7

@5 40% turnout in any year is pathetic my friend. I mentioned that post presidential primaries are traditionally lower but that doesn’t mean it’s still not sad given the issues facing the city. Good to know you think 60% of people not giving a shit is cool though “bro”

12

@4:

That's the funny thing about democracy: it doesn't matter what the percentages of actual versus registered voters are, because the ONLY relevant statistic is how many people voted for which candidate; how many didn't vote - for whatever reason - is irrelevant. You can speculate or rationalize about low voter turnout until the proverbial cows come home, but if anyone in this state, where we literally have the ballot delivered to our mailbox and can deposit it just as easily, can't spare five or ten minutes to perform their most basic civic duty, that's their problem, not the problem of those who did.

17

yo prof don't forget to take your BP meds with your lunch. you seem upset.

18

@12 totally agree with you but it doesn't make it any less pathetic. My point though really is that there will probably be a much higher participation rate in the general come November (hopefully 70% plus at least) so using a low turnout primary to forecast what will happen at that time is pretty pointless.

20

@2: How are the names Bruce Harrell, Sara Nelson, and Ann Davison on the upcoming general election ballot proof that the Defunderpants Gnomes were correct? All three candidates could win, The Stranger's pathetic attempt to inflate Oliver's half-point margin over Nelson into Total Victory notwithstanding.

Good to know you've assigned to the (unidentified and unquoted, of course) persons who predicted backlash the unpleasant qualities of being violent bigots. It's just not possible for you to even imagine any good, honest person disagreeing with you, is it? With that attitude, I wish you the best of luck in the coalition-building which will be necessary for police reform in our democracy -- no matter who is elected in November.

22

@15, @21: Before you learn to spell "apparatchik" correctly, you might want to produce some evidence the Republican National Committee, or any local committee, engaged in Seditious Conspiracy by ordering the January 6 insurrection upon our Capitol. Unless the party officially ordered it, it does not matter how many Republicans engaged in it.

Your constant waving of the bloody shirt is even funnier than your spelling failure, even though the latter appears in a phrase which reveals how terrified you are of actual voters recalling CM Sawant.

23

@20 Hi Tensor/Toby II!

"All three candidates could win"

And if wisher were fishes we would all be fisherman.

The defund movement started from nothing after the SPD showed absolute contempt for the public over the Summer. Since then they have sent the largest contingent of police in the US to the "stop the steal" rally and now refuse to get the vaccine. I actually don't need to make the case to defund the police since they are doing far better at making the case themselves.

As for progress, It took Portland 5 years to get a civilian oversight board thanks to Jo Ann Hardesty. I would say we are moving in the right direction all thanks to the SPD and SPOG. If you are truly against defunding, you should probably tell SPOG to stop making public statements. After all, that's how Krasner in Philly got re-elected.

Given the showing of Nikktia Oliver and Kennedy in the primary, I would say it's your anti-police accountability platform that needs work. You should probably give career Texas Republican and arbitration counselor Davison a call and explain the difference between felonies and misdemeanors before she hits the campaign trail. Or, she could campaign along side Mike Salon and Andy Gno. You know, show they people of Seattle what she is really all about. The three of them can talk about how it was really antifa that stormed the capital on Jan. 6. The gift that keeps on giving.

I honestly thought the "give us mo' money or we'll let yo' girls be raped and city burn to the ground" SPOG campaign would have been more successful? It seems to be working in Oklahoma City after all?

You should probably drop @6: "no one said Defund was a loser here in our liberal bubble." He's apparently unaware of your fine working helping Kennedy and Oliver win the primary.

24

@10: Hillarious.

Cori Bush has lived in her car with her children on food stamps. Recently, she camped out on the Capital Hill steps to protest the end of the eviction moratorium.

https://invidious-us.kavin.rocks/watch?v=0gmQzBXSdtc

Here she is crying with a constituent after shaming President Biden in to not putting her and her children out on the street in the middle of a pandemic:

https://invidious-us.kavin.rocks/watch?v=CsGQnWN2osM

So what do you give us? A Bari Weiss article written by a white guy who has never been hungry or without housing in his life lecturing Cori Bush on what it's like to be in poverty and her security detail.

This reminds me of that Jared Kushner video telling poor people who lost their jobs during the pandemic they need to stop whining and put in the hard work to get ahead that he did......

I thought you people always talked about "pulling themselves up by their boot straps?" Are you angry she's a congress women, or because she is one of the few people in congress that give a damn about people who are struggling?

25

@23: "And if wisher were fishes we would all be fisherman."

Um, OK, that was a brilliant rejoinder. (By your standards.) It still fails to explain how voters selecting those persons for the general election means citizens won't vote against defunding the SPD.

Bruce Harrell has won city-wide elections. How is his drawing more votes (coming out of retirement) than González (currently in office) an indication voters actually want defunding? It certainly sounds like you've mistaken the puffery of self-described activists with the views of dedicated voters who hold real jobs.

You also seem determined to believe I'm against police reform. Maybe you're just in denial that I've already moved far past your supposedly radical de-fund cheering, and am actually in favor of abolishing the police (as we know it), and re-thinking our entire approach to public safety. This could lead to a much higher effective 'defund' than the tame 50% figure which was simply made up out of nothing, and will change nothing.

However the general election goes, the City will still have to negotiate a contract with SPOG, and the Council will still have most of the same Members it had during the Defunderpants Gnomes abortion of last year. (You know, the fail for which you fell so hard, you had to abandon your Luddite 5 nym after it utterly, miserably, and publicly failed.) Why the City does not seek SPOG's de-certification over the CHOP, I do not know; that threat would give the City far more bargaining power than the howling void which is the empty threat of defunding. Our current Council seems to have applied their usual brilliance at any of the things we actually pay them to do, and thus has mistaken "the voters can't find anyone competent who actually wants your miserable fucking jobs," for "we're all doing great work and should continue full speed ahead at that so-called iceberg, you so-called 'oceanographers'."

26

@25: Glad your only using one account in this thread. You're learning.

You missed the point about incrementalism entirely, which is no surprise. At least you understood the simple witticism that encapsulated your "but they could win" response. I will need to include more of those in the future to keep things at your level.

Again, there will always be politicians who resist removing responsibilities, or funding from the SPD. The SPD has a strong union and substantial support and that is not going to simply vanish. You don't need unanimity among city politicians in this area to make real progress. We are moving from a recent past where the council and mayor were only discussing pay hikes and the police guild was writing their own contract with the consent decree under Judge Robart nothing but a joke. We are now moving parking enforcement from the SPD and the mayor/city council have an opportunity to take an active role in the next police contract, which is significant progress.

This is not Cuba. You are never going to wake up one morning with everything you want, which is a good thing and does not mean you are failing. You will never have everyone on the counsel supporting reform and you don't need that to get to a civilian oversight board, which is the ultimate goal. There just needs to be enough pressure to keep them moving in the current direction. That is why I gave the example of Portland. It took them 4-5 years of pushing to eventually arrive at the civilian oversight board they now have. If in 4-5 years we are at the same place that's meaningful.

Given that you have portrayed anyone who supports any funding changes or reductions (quite a few people) as being for removing all police funding (practically no one) it's hard to be very sympathetic to the distinction you want to make between resisting all reforms and reforms that don't involve a significant change in funding, which has been tried and failed for some time. Still, I will take your claim at face value. That way only one of us will continue arguing against false accusations.

29

@26: For all of those words, you still haven't explained how a Mayor Harrell would support what you want. Yes, Mayor Durkan removed parking enforcement from SPD, (thanks to you and The Stranger for crediting her on that, it truly shows your gracious natures) but that was easy. Structural reform of the police is hard, and even though you recognize SPOG as an obstacle, you still won't even engage in dialog on removing that obstacle. To the extent you have any effect at all, your constant crowing about defunding simply antagonizes SPOG's members and gets them (even more) eager for a fight. You seem to get no small amount of jollies from imagining you're bullying the police by threatening to defund them, but that would just be another one of your many large, severe, and chronic misconceptions about how the real world actually works. For another:

"You don't need unanimity among city politicians in this area to make real progress."

Nor did I ever say we did. I wrote of "coalition-building," (really, I did; you can read it for yourself, right there @20) and that's what police reformers still need. (Here's a hint: relentless purity-testing is kinda sorta the opposite.)

For another:

"We are moving from a recent past where the council and mayor were only discussing pay hikes..."

And we'll keep moving in that direction, as reforming the police will need more money, not less, in the next decade or so. We need to build the infrastructure which will replace most police responses with other public-safety responders, and we've actually gone backwards on that of late, with our Council's removal of the Navigation Team. (Think of multiple dozens of Navigation Teams, each dozen dedicated to a slightly different aspect of public safety, and you might begin to imagine the cost involved.)

For another:

"You will never have everyone on the counsel supporting reform ..."

Again, I did not say we would need unanimity. But you're going to need more than the passive acceptance of a broken status quo which our Council has tolerated with respect to the police, homelessness, bridge repair, and pretty much every issue which needs more than just their virtue-signalling.

For another:

"Glad your [sic] only using one account in this thread."

Which is true of every thread, anywhere, ever. 'Tis pity your vanity, paranoia, or both won't let you know that.

30

@28: "You know no written decree from Hitler directly ordering the Final Solution has ever been found. So I guess all members of the Nazi Party are totally innocent!"

As for your self-proclaimed history degrees, I hope you didn't suffer too much tooth decay from chomping down on all of that Cracker Jack:

"The Posen speeches were two speeches made by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS of Nazi Germany, on 4 and 6 October 1943 in the town hall of Posen (Poznań), in German-occupied Poland. The recordings are the first known documents in which a member of the Hitler Cabinet spoke of the ongoing extermination of the Jews in extermination camps. They demonstrate that the German government wanted, planned and carried out the Holocaust."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posen_speeches)

31

@29: That's certainly a downside to anyone who responds to your endless gas-lighting. It takes three sentences to identify what you are doing, restate the point you intentionally skipped and point out where you went wrong. If you want shorter responses, end the constant bad faith arguments that waste all our time. As an example:

For all of those words, you still haven't explained how a Mayor Harrell would support what you want."

Setting aside for the moment that the city council controls the budget and can override the mayor's veto as they did with Jenny Durkin, my argument was for progress over time. That Nakkita Oliver is likely joining the CM and NTK the AG office is a sign things are moving in that direct. They would not even have been considered 10 years ago. You will of course respond with a "but what about right now!" bad faith argument as you continue to do with each response. You and I both know I'm talking about incremental change over time even if you pretend the election of a Harrel somehow changes that.. News flash, even if Harrel loses don't expect stunning progress post election. Your refusal to accept any time scale for change other than this very minute is not reality and not what anyone expects. It's just one of many bad faith arguments on your part.

There is no question we have wildly over invested in policing over the past 30 years, with a more than 50% increase in just the past 10 as there performance has actually dropped. Our return on investment is a police force that does not stop or solve violent crime, but does send the largest contingent of "stop the steal" cops to DC, is anti-vax, attacks peaceful protesters and in general shows complete contempt for the public they clearly despise.

Sure, hand them more money. That will magically fix everything.

Your proposal to fix their systemic failure is to give them more money to reward everything that is wrong with them. You seem oblivious to the fact that we tried that strategy for 50 years and it has not worked. Not worked is too mild. It has actually made the situation worse.
As they have shown for 50 years and counting, there is no system in place to make them spend new money the way they claim they will when they get it and even when they do, it's the type of training designed to have no impact in changing what they get wrong. I know you don't want to acknowledge this so will pretend like it does not exist, but Minneapolis already paid for and implemented all the pretty and expensive bells and whistles training you argue would improve things. When Chauvin killed George Floyd, a police officer with 9 previous violent use of force complaints against him at that time, and internal affairs ruled it a drug overdose, we was not just a student of all the training you imagine would fix things, he was a trainer!

When they executed Philando Castile and committed other routine atrocities against the people of Minneapolis, they did it in full compliance with the consent decree judge Robart has so much faith in.

To his credit, judge Robart has at least pointing out that the police unions have a history of using the type of ineffective and expensive performative training you recommend as a bargaining chip to undermine other police reform initiatives through the contract process along with constant pay bumps. We now have one of the most expensive and ineffective police forces in the county and your response is......"more of the same will fix everything!". Hold my beer while I laugh. I think your argument for rewarding bad behavior with an increased budget is not as convincing as it was 50 years ago, but you keep going with that. I know your primary goal is to ensure the police union loves you. At least you will have that.

I honestly don't have the energy or time to respond to the rest of the endless off topic bullshit you posted here. Your constant need to dodge the main point and substitute the argument you would rather make without ever addressing the point you either can't or won't address is exhausting.

Early on I was inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume a combination of poorly thought out moral values, authoritarianism, confusing personal experience for reality combined with a really stunning lack of data to support any of your opinions and arguments and an entire universe built on non sequitur's resulted in your consistent failure to make a credible point, but the pattern is pretty established at this point that while most of that no doubt remains true, you're also simply not interested in an honest conversation about these topics. I can see why some people resort to simply ridiculing and mocking your performative talking points. If you don't take your own thinking on these matters seriously, it's no surprise others don't either.

32

@30: The professor and I have our differences and I have no interest in this debate, but he clearly said "Hitler" and you responded with "Nazi Party" who had knowledge of the holocaust that lists several people, but no, you know, HITLER!!!!! Now go back and read the example he provided. See what you did there? Any all to avoid addressing the point he was making. Pathetic.

He likely won't because he knows you, but if he responds, he will need to explain what you got wrong, what the point was and address the main topic you avoided. You will of course respond with "well that was a long post saying nothing!"

You do this constantly. You need to stop it if you want to be taken seriously.

36

@31: Putting words in quotation marks and claiming I wrote them doesn't actually mean I wrote them. It's just a backhanded and dishonest way of admitting you cannot address what I actually did write. Again, if you want to ignore my clear and repeated statements about drastically reducing the mission and size of SPD, you can do that. I guess it beats explicitly admitting to yourself that you've lost. (Your nym change already functioned as your implicit admission.) Defunding failed miserably, created huge attrition within the SPD, and that attrition means the City must now spend more money, not less, on maintaining the SPD in the short term. In the long term, no one knows, but your counting on some unnamed magical force to bring reform tracks exactly with your previous nym's magical belief in defunding all by itself creating change. (As does your counting mere candidates as if they are already elected officals.)

@33: I think it's great you actually believe a high-ranking official in a totalitarian dictatorship would have undertaken any vast project without express authorization of The Leader. That shows your true grasp of actual history even better than any of the other contrafactual nonsense you've spouted here. Sir Toby II was giving you far too much credit.

Since you don't actually know how the Holocaust was planned and executed, I'll just note that the Nazis themselves hid it for as long as they could. Ever hear of the phrase, "Final Solution to the Jewish Question"? It's kinda hard to see millions of corpses in that phrase, isn't it?

(Also, the Royal Air Force and the US Army's Air Force spent a lot of time and effort bombing and burning every German city they could reach, so it's rather unsurprising there are gaps in the paper records.)

38

@31: "Putting words in quotation marks and claiming I wrote them doesn't actually mean I wrote them. It's just a backhanded and dishonest way of admitting you cannot address what I actually did write."

Quotes are not my preference when it is not an exact quote, but from personal experience with you I learned if I share the opinion of black women hurt by the criminal system about white female prosecutors and don't include quotes, you will attribute those statements to me. I'm obviously dealing with someone either too stupid or too dishonest to make the distinction between my opinion and the opinion of other people unless I give you quotation marks. What are my options? Rely on your intelligence or honestly? I tried that and failed.

"your previous nym's magical belief in defunding all by itself creating change."

I never said defunding by itself would create change and my change in accounts does not line up with the city council decision by a long shot, but I live in a realistic world and consider the outcome a long term success. After all, not only were we not talking about defunding in 2019, but your "reward them for failure" constituency was the norm. I don't disavow any of my opinions or deny my previous handle. I have said repeatedly I was forced to change my handle due to a lost email. Doesn't that seem like an odd admission for someone who was running from his previous opinion as you claim?

Of course, that's logic, which is not your thing. How many more times are you going to pretend there is something nefarious in my lost email and more importantly, doesn't your need to invent some false narrative around this and keep bringing it up prove just how disingenuous your position is? If your intent was to prove all my worst assumptions about you not being interested in an honest debate, your distraction and obsession with my previous account that I have never denied proves my point. I just wish you were as honest about the multiple accounts you run here that are not the result of a lost email, but I don't think anyone would fault you for an abundance of integrity.

Now that I've wasted paragraphs digging through all your dishonest bullshit, let me get to the main point I could have started with if you did not insist on being such a dishonest asshole. Fell free to whine about how your complete bullshit has "made my post so long!"

"Again, if you want to ignore my clear and repeated statements about drastically reducing the mission and size of SPD, you can do that"

The budget is up dramatically over the past 30 years with only a slight increase in the SPD personnel, but the decline of violent crime has resulted in more policing of bullshit they should not be doing. Now hold on to your hat. I am about to do what you never do, which is provide actual documented support for the opinion I expressed:

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/03/11/39551922/seattle-police-rescue-26-sex-workers-but-did-they-want-to-be-rescued

They have proven that with bigger budgets they spend more time no stupid shit despite the number of personnel, not less. But sure, tell yourself that despite literally every example until now over the past 50 years this time will be different. If we give a raise to cops making over $300,000 a year with overtime they will magically stop spending their time harassing the homeless and setting up bullshit overtime sex work reverse stings in the name of fighting "human trafficking." They have proven your solutions wrong for 30 years but sure, with no oversight and no accountability of a civilian board it will magically be different this time. Be sure to leave a tooth under your pillow.

"Defunding failed miserably, created huge attrition within the SPD, and that attrition means the City must now spend more money, not less, on maintaining the SPD in the short term."

The trouble with this is that not only has the SPD not been defunded, but if we add in overtime they have actually been given yet another pay bump, so we really don't know what the affect if defunding would be. We do no what the moral panic over the threat of anything but a pay increase would be, but frankly they were hardly policing before so no one has noticed a difference. We do know the constant pay raises regardless of performance you recommend had made things worse. Sure, lets keep doing that. Endless pay raises with no accountability always works!

Given decades of failure, I would say your argument that if we shovel more money at them that will magically fix everything is the "magical thinking." This has been tried all over the country since the consent decrees became a thing a decade ago and guess what? Not only have police departments from Baltimore to St. Louis to Seattle not improved in the face of huge budget increases, they have actually gotten worse.

Clearly the solution is less money. How about free trips to Bermuda? Do you imagine that will get them to care about violent crime they way they now only focus on harassing the homeless and expensive bullshit lifestyle crime stings?

39

Of course the board dirt-bag doesn't "really" care about violent crime; for example, if you read his misogynistic and shameless drool about this young woman who was brutally murdered at Greenlake. Then see how he dishonestly claims in one raspy breath, there's no evidence the (attempted coup, really, at the Capitol Bldg) went to the top - yet in another round of unrelated bullshit, he asserts that this could only could be the case with the Nazis. Bingo @34, and he's incapable of change. The soul is gone.

40

You can take that to the bank. Dirt bag is one sick MFer.

41

Is it better to be far left or far right? (Remember .. the partisans fighting in the mountains .. they were the far left.)

I'll be betting on the far left in the coming election. (Dirt bag of course is far right.)

42

@1 You didn't bother to fill out the questionnaire for the Urbanist. City planning and environmentalism too tough a subject?

43

In general, higher voter turn-out means more progressives. Last mayoral race, turn-out was roughly 50% - also not good - and we got Durkan. If turn-out was higher, we might have gotten Moon and we would have been in better shape, as a city, today.

Early returns on this election are promising for progressives. But they need a much higher turn-out for the general (than the last one).

44

Dirt bag of course wants low voter turn-out because he wants the furthest right possible to win. This was another stunning example of their tremendous dishonesty on the board when they claimed that their flimsy recall campaign was about democratically putting the choice to the voters of that district (and while funded by outside interests). That's why they'll be very undemocratically sitting on their petition to avoid putting it to voters in a general election when more people vote. They want it deliberately in the lowest and most undemocratic turnout count possible.

46

@45: Gee Prof., right now it's 90 degrees and the air quality is declining out there. I hope you don't give yourself too much agita when pounding out your sophomoric prose.

Think you can get the entire GOP on a RICO charge, or every Republican on Seditious Conspiracy? Go right ahead and try it. Best of luck to you, and even if ("when") you fail, your recent comments here strongly attest to your desperate need for a new, less stressful, hobby. Please let everyone know how it goes.

(Unknown to @39, I have in fact called for Trump to be charged with Seditious Conspiracy. But Pence? He was one of the intended victims! How would that work in court?)

47

I never said anything about Pence, one way or the other - let alone him being guilty (too) on that day. Though it's an interesting consideration, now that the dirt bag brings it up in another one of his dishonest strawmen ... let him continue ... Pence as their cover? As they hollered for his head, then conveniently zipped him off, and while leaving others in Congress behind to meet their respective fates ...

The left, though, is always an ultimate aim of fascists. They're quite the deceptive gamers, and as they move toward their real objectives. And they require total obeisance. They can't handle, for example, that police depts on some levels are changing across the country. You have more educated police, more diversity, more democratic police who oppose abuse and discrimination, etc. There's a long way to go, but there have been some changes - and for these far right-wingers, those changes are probably "traumatic."

And, to them, these police officers who were acting in a truly professional capacity -- no longer their personal hired thugs (as in "when America was great") -- or following the directives of their Great Leader -- became a object for their lynch mobs, and called, "traitors." And these multiple suicides? Likely murders. That many suicides is just too coincidental. They, too, were not willing to go along with the usual mafia-like brotherhood. And they made them pay with their lives, and to send a message to other police.

There was clearly collusion and corruption by other cops, and coordinated strategy in the building, notably in how they headed to the doorway where Babbitt The True Believer (who was an ex-military fanatic) was killed - and before she could allow the mob to breach the entrance. That was when the shit was really going to hit the fan, but they finally put a stop to it right there.

But right there at that doorway, she even conferred on video with that GOP weasel in the House ... forgot his name ... but he could care less that she was dead. They're all cultists.

The Republican Party has become a fascist death cult. Some are still hanging around with the tatters of their past, but anyone who joins today is aligned with what they are now - not what they once were. Like Davison, for example.

The camps were no big secret. Germans went about their daily lives with the stench of human flesh from the ovens from "the one down the road."

And while most of the U.S. public was unaware until later, the U.S. far-left papers reported on the camps - and Americans reading those papers knew about the situation earlier. Those far left-wingers the dirt bag hates so much.

48

P.O.S.!

49

@38: "Quotes are not my preference when it is not an exact quote, but from personal experience with you I learned if I share the opinion of black women hurt by the criminal system about white female prosecutors and don't include quotes, you will attribute those statements to me."

I already explained this to you, with emphasis on your culpability. Please do try to keep up:

'The quote of yours I keep mocking was itself either your paraphrase or entirely your own invention, and it could still be the latter, because you didn't actually attribute it to any original source: "Simply locking primarily black men in cages may satisfy the emotional needs of primarily white female prosecutors who run domestic violence divisions, but it has drawn ire from the black women who suffer the consequences of the incarceration first strategy." (https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2021/05/24/57632886/defense-attorney-challenging-pete-holmes-vows-not-to-prosecute-almost-all-misdemeanors/comments/11) Immediately after your statement, you give information on two books, without quoting anything from either of them, and with no other indication you were paraphrasing anything from either of them. Your failure to communicate here is not anyone else's fault.'

Please let me know if that explanation again easily defeats your attempt(s) at understanding it.

"I never said defunding by itself would create change..."

Wrong:

"Do you want more crime? Hire more police to create it.
Do you want less crime? Defund."

(https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/10/01/45875868/slog-pm-crime-drops-in-seattle-no-mute-button-for-trump-look-at-the-moon/comments/8)

"... my change in accounts does not line up with the city council decision by a long shot,"

No, as that quote above shows, it took you quite some time thereafter to discover that proffering "defund" as the omnibus solution was making you look silly, and so when the dog ate your homepage, you just created another account, with no reference to your failed one.

"I don't disavow any of my opinions or deny my previous handle."

You certainly did not take well having your two nyms identified as the same person, bizarrely accusing me of:

"... spinning my recent change into some wild Qanon level conspiracy theory about how this was all some clever ruse on my part to gain credibility.

"No explanation exactly how that would work,"

Um, you had no idea how quietly dropping your failed nym and adopting a completely new one would help you to escape the solid discredibility you'd so richly earned under your failed nym? Sure, that wasn't on your mind at all.

When Toby lost his old e-mail address, he named his new account here 'Toby II'. See how that works? You could have been 'Luddite V' or 'Luddite 6' for continuity. Instead you chose something completely different, and mentioned no commonality -- until I caught you at it. No, you don't get points for not being deceptive, especially not after you worked awfully hard to make yourself look deceptive.

"...my previous account that I have never denied..."

The point wasn't that you'd ever denied it; in fact, as quoted above, you exploded with rage a when I mentioned it. The point was you created a new account and tried to distance yourself from your old one, hoping no one would notice; hence, your rage when I caught you at it. (Your still-seething anger at me for my having caught you may also explain, in part, your persistent false counter-accusation against me along the same lines: "...the multiple accounts you run here...")

(Now that I've wasted paragraphs digging through all your dishonest bullshit, let me get to the main point I could have started with if you did not insist on being such a dishonest asshole. Fell free to whine about how your complete bullshit has "made my post so long!")

If you can find any quote from me, advocating more money for the police absent of any reform actions, please post it. You write long paragraph after longer paragraph after even longer paragraph about how I want to give more money to the police -- without ever quoting my having written any such thing. I have repeatedly explained how this was not true, but you simply ignore me, and continue to assign to me a position I do not hold. So, we're done. By definition, it is impossible to have a dialog with someone who so persistently makes such false claims.

You and I actually agree completely on most of what I've tried here to discuss with you: decriminalizing of drug and sex crimes, drastic reduction in police budgets and responsibilities, greater citizen oversight of police. None of that was enough for you. When I kept describing how much "defund!" actually hurt those efforts, you couldn't take such criticism, and even though you'd already abandoned your "defund!' nym, you started attacking me personally. I wish you the very best of luck in the coalition-building (oh look, that phrase again!) which will be needed to accomplish our shared goals, because your endless ad hominem attacks and purity-testing will themselves build very large obstacles for you to overcome.

Finally, one last response to your dishonest, bullshit, ad homiem attacks:

"Now hold on to your hat. I am about to do what you never do, which is provide actual documented support for the opinion I expressed..."

Please see my first quote, above. It relates how I quoted you (with url) to support my point. You're welcome.

Have a nice life.


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