DL Open Thread: Friday, June 4, 2021
The Second Amendment And Slavery: Perfect Together? Worthy of a REV podcast…here’s the gist of this historian’s argument:
In her new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, Anderson traces racial distinctions in Americans’ treatment of gun ownership back to the founding of the country and the Second Amendment, which states:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The language of the amendment, Anderson says, was crafted to ensure that slave owners could quickly crush any rebellion or resistance from those whom they’d enslaved. And she says the right to bear arms, presumably guaranteed to all citizens, has been repeatedly denied to Black people.It was in response to the concerns coming out of the Virginia ratification convention for the Constitution, led by Patrick Henry and George Mason, that a militia that was controlled solely by the federal government would not be there to protect the slave owners from an enslaved uprising. And … James Madison crafted that language in order to mollify the concerns coming out of Virginia and the anti-Federalists, that they would still have full control over their state militias — and those militias were used in order to quell slave revolts. … The Second Amendment really provided the cover, the assurances that Patrick Henry and George Mason needed, that the militias would not be controlled by the federal government, but that they would be controlled by the states and at the beck and call of the states to be able to put down these uprisings.
Facebook plans to announce Friday that it will no longer automatically give politicians a pass when they break the company’s hate speech rules, a major reversal after years of criticism that it was too deferential to powerful figures during the Trump presidency.
Since the 2016 election, the company has applied a test to political speech that weighs the newsworthiness of the content against its propensity to cause harm. Now the company will throw out the first part of the test and will no longer consider newsworthiness as a factor…
Blatantly-Racist Allegheny County DA Orders No Plea Bargains With Black Attorney Who Criticized Him.
Five days after well-known Black attorney Milton Raiford spoke out against racism in the criminal justice system, Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. emailed all of his deputy prosecutors forbidding them from offering any plea deals to Raiford or his clients.
Zappala’s email, obtained by the Tribune-Review, went on to say that effective immediately, “no plea offers are to be made.”
Zappala, who’s served for more than two decades as Allegheny County’s top prosecutor, has been criticized as a racist long before he sent an email all but cementing his planned discrimination. Under his leadership, the district attorney’s office charged Black juveniles as adults 20 times more frequently than their white peers, the Pittsburgh City Paper reported. He also backed a decision to refile “failure to disperse” charges against 16 Black Lives Matter demonstrators even after the Associated Press unearthed a Facebook group of current and former cops calling the protesters “terrorists” or “thugs.”
Dog Bites Man: Trump’s Grasp On Reality ‘Startling’. He’ll be back in office by August, with the MyPillow guy as his new Veep.
How NC Cops Trapped And Tear-Gassed Peaceful Protestors. Literally no way out. No dispersal order. Just aimed and fired into trapped crowd.
Japan ‘Cornered’ Into Holding Olympics? Nobody thinks it’s a good idea. The vast majority of the Japanese people oppose it. However:
The Switzerland-based IOC derives almost 75% of its income from selling broadcast rights. Its income has been stalled since the one-year postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, and estimates suggest it could lose $3 billion-$4 billion in broadcast income if the games were canceled…
…The IOC’s plan is to get 15,000 Olympic and Paralympic athletes from more than 200 countries and territories into Tokyo, sequester them in a bubble at the Olympic Village, let them compete and then get them out of Japan within two days of their finish.
What could possibly go wrong?
What do you want to talk about?
That Pittsburgh DA, Zappala, graduated from Pitt, but only after transferring out of UD, where he was a linebacker on the1976 football team until he injured his back.
The genius of the far right wing has always been their ability to enlist poor whites (through naked appeals to racism) into zealously working against their own economic interests.
It’s too easy.
About 10,000 of Japan’s 80,000 Olympics volunteers have quit, reports the NYTimes.
I would argue the world no longer needs the Olympics.
I don’t know if anyone would argue with you. I have to think that a whole bleepload of the athletes won’t come.
“Claire DeMatteis will be tasked with overseeing federal stimulus funds sent to the state in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. She’ll also assist with “crisis management” projects across state government.”
Let the graft continue
Will the prisons just run themselves?
Trump Off Facebook Until At Least 2023:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-04/facebook-bans-trump-for-two-years-responding-to-board-criticism
I am aware that Claire DeMatteis has held many appointed positions in Delaware over the years. However, I cannot name a single accomplishment. Can anyone?
Her accomplishments have been in knowing the right people. She and Carney have known each other forever. Both St. Mark’s lifers. She HAS had a lot of high-powered jobs, and has moved on from a lot of high-powered jobs.
She has a reputation of competence, which may just be that she’s skilled at keeping the bodies buried and out of public view. In other words, Carney’s type of bureaucrat. A ‘team player’.
Her MOM, though, has at least one proven accomplishment: She successfully worked with Mike Ramone to make the Maypole Dance Delaware’s official dance. I am not making that up.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/bizarre/trump-fan-busted-for-serial-pooping-spree-547906
“Trump Man” Busted For Serial Pooping Spree
…A 70-year-old Ohio man who told cops he was a “Trump man” confessed to repeatedly urinating and defecating in front of a neighbor’s home because the residents “are Democrats and support Joe Biden,” according to a police report.
Here’s yet another Trump winner. Poor guy’s getting the shit beat out of him in jail:
https://www.inquirer.com/news/ryan-samsel-capitol-riot-bucks-county-pennsylvania-beating-20210604.html
What I want to know is, what was a guy who did this doing out of jail in the first place:
“A decade before prosecutors say Ryan Samsel, of Bristol, was one of the first in a mob of rioters to attack police Jan. 6 outside the U.S. Capitol, he was convicted of smashing a hot pizza in the face of his pregnant girlfriend, pouring beer over her head, and then shoving her into a canal and holding her head under water until she told him she loved him.
Two years before that, he was convicted of holding another woman against her will for five hours and choking her to the point of unconsciousness.
And three years before that, he pleaded guilty to running yet another woman off the road, punching her windshield and threatening to kill her in a dispute over $60.”
“Trump Man” Busted For Serial Pooping Spree
That’s the conservative movement.