Today in Responsible Gun Ownership

The dude in the SUV has just killed the other dude lying there on the street, and he's going to shoot the third dude, the one who's taking the photo, through both legs, shattering one of his femurs.

The story turned up in my Xhitter feed the other day as a "OMFG CRIME IN PORTLAND!!!" headline (except without the actual headline, of course,  because Elmo don't roll that way anymore...).

It linked to this story in the digital version of our "local newspaper", which you can't read because it's behind a fucking paywall - local news, my ass - but trust me; it plays all the hits; it mentions "downtown violence", "unrest", "drug use" and "homeless".

In the Xhitter comments we filled in the last of the bingo card: "Democrat city" and "gun control" (as in "how's that gun control working out for you now, libs?!?")

Y'know what it DIDN'T mention?

"Financier". (or "Banker" or "Rich Prick" - y'know, coded words for "wealthy white dude"), or

"Legally owned handgun".

 Because that kinda kills the whole Portland Is Over - Downtown Hellscape Edition vibe, dunnit?

You can't gin up the whole Scary Doper (Probably Colored) Hoboes theme if the nutter shooting is being done by some rich white normie with a legally-obtained concealed carry permit who's just a fucking hair-trigger asshole with an anger problem and a round under the fucking hammer, amiright?

So it's critical to rope in all that other stuff, so the rubes and MAGAts and the other FAUX-addicted ClackaCrackers can continue seamlessly hating on Portland, liberals, and the smelly poor.

But I might as well ask a dog to stop licking it's balls as expect the so-called "news" media to stop throwing this red meat to the numbskulls. I've been ringing this bell a loog, looooong time. It does no good at all. The 2nd Amendment has become why people like this rich fuckstick get to drive around fully loaded and kill people.

And, short of solving the sort of people who keep voting for "2nd Amendment Rights" over everything else?

It's not going to be solved, either.

Mourning the lost

 

A friend of mine and I were drinking and the conversation turned to the disaster that is the former Ottoman province of Palestine. We both agreed that it was all just hell and fucking disaster and that neither of us could see a way out.

I mourned that I as an Army-mad kid had idolized the Tzahal, the Israeli Defence Forces. I'd repainted my little plastic model Sherman and M3 halftracks in IDF colors to wargame the Six Day War with the Israelis as the heroes, and that it hurt to see my old heroes fighting women and kids and guys who just wanted the land they, too, grew up in.

My friend replied that he had been raised to see Israel as heroic as well, as a vision of strength for a kid growing up Jewish. But even more, that he - as a child and an adult - had been confident that Judaism was different from the other religions. That the long history of persecution, that the long tradition of thoughtful rabbinical exegesis surrounding the Torah, would defend his faith from the sorts of sectarian horrors that had so often visited so many other religions. That Jews would be better.

"It turns out..." he mourned, "...that we aren't. We just lacked the opportunity."

My ancestors were used by their English masters to help them run their apartheid state of Ireland. That's what "Scots-Irish" means; Scottish imported to Ireland to be reliable Protestant muscle for the English project to keep the Irish down. I'm the spawn of the "settlers" of 17th and 18th Century Ireland, no different from some ultraorthodox swinging dick gunning for Arabs in the West Bank.

My gaffers didn't lack the opportunity, either.

I was lucky; some time along the road my clan escaped that ugly cycle, came here to the US where the earlier wave of "settlers" had done the ethnic cleansing of the original natives for them, so no need to bloody their own hands.

Is that what we are? Is that all we are? Just one wave of conquerors after another? One more round of oppression and murder and rape and ruin and merciless hatred?

I honestly don't think I want to know the answer.

I do know this; no matter how much killing Hamas has done this past week it will not kill the problems of the people of Palestine.

And no matter how much killing my old heroes of Tzahal will do in the coming weeks it will not change the problems of Israel with the people of Palestine.

And yet the killing will go on and on.

I can do no better than Wright did, ending his long discussion with a quote from Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz:

“Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

As it was written...

 I thought it was worth reposting this. I wrote it initially as a comment over at Nancy Nall's joint.

"What frustrates me most about this Gaza mess is the obvious fact that it IS an Israel problem, or at least it was. If the new country was going to be a “Jewish state” (and my memory of the first sabras was that there were many pretty secular Israelis in the early days, but the goal was still “Jewish”) then anyone who was not-Jewish was gonna be by definition not-100%-Israeli. So the danger of what the Occupation made a fact – Israel as an anti-Arab apartheid state – was always kinda baked in.

If the Arab states had been less shirty about the issue, if Israel had been less threatened, if the Great Powers had been more concerned…well, they weren’t. So here we are.

And here we’re gonna be. All the killing, all the hate, all the vengeance…there’s no undoing any of that. There’s no getting around it. Too many people now see hating on the “others” as giving their own lives meaning…and Israel is caught inside their own history. They fear giving up the Territories (I had a friend tell me flat-out “Israel cannot survive without the Golan” and that’s a widespread belief about the West Bank, too – they’re strategic depth) but to keep at least the West Bank means continuing apartheid at best, and flat-out ethnic cleansing at worst.

And for the Arab subjects? How galling it must be to look at how the world reacted to South Africa, how Mandela is revered and the armed wing of the ANC is overlooked no matter how many white farmer families they murdered (“one Afrikaaner, one bullet”), compared to how their own Bantustans are viewed.

Nope. It’s just grimdark no matter where you look…"

That's the saddest part.

There might have been another path...if people were different than they are. Kind, gentle, thoughtful...to those others not their own.

But we're not, most of us. We're the same fang-baring monkeys we've always been.

So, no. The moment you set yourself up as a "......" nation; white, black, Christian, Mormon, sun-worshiping...is the moment you make the other the Other, a danger and a threat, the Outsider.

So it was written.

So it is being done. Selah.

Update 10/13: Jim Wright has a thoughtful rumination on the same subject.

A hazy shade of winter

 

The summer has finally left, and the rains returned.

The winter is not far off.

I love the autumn, the somber, reflective mood fits me very well...although I sometimes miss the crisp dry chill of the Octobers of my Midwestern childhood. The Northwest lacks the fiery colors, as well; our deciduous trees are dominated by the bigleaf maple, Acer macrophyllum, which does turn a handsome golden-yellow but briefly; the leaves wither and brown up as quickly as they turn.

The days grow short, the shadows long, and another year draws to a close.

Into the Ghetto

 

As an addendum to my post below, a reminder: this, I think, is Hamas' goal.

My Bride is right; the latest military action is hopeless militarily. It cannot possibly "win" in the conventional sense. Any more than the airliners of September 2001 could "win" anything.

It can do what those airliners did, and what this photo does; firmly affix the image of a brute with a rifle destroying a helpless innocent family. Making that brute a hissing and a byword for horror.

Over at Nancy Nall's joint I said that, and was called out for cheap-shotting Israeli soldiers.

I replied:

"When you swing a butcher’s cleaver, you should not be surprised when people call you a butcher.

When Israel made the political choice to treat their Arab subjects like the apartheid regime treated its black citizens, it chose the mantle of apartheid.

When Israel goes into Gaza it will have to use the exact same methods the Germans used in Warsaw in 1943 and the Soviets in Berlin in 1945. It makes them neither Nazis nor Communists, but it will make them monsters in the way the SS in Warsaw and the Red Army in Berlin were monsters.

That’s not a cheap shot. That’s war, which, as Bill Sherman reminded us, is all Hell. And urban war, as I remind you, is a specially awful Hell that earns the maker the kind of bloodyhanded mantle that stains for generations.

That, I think, is Hamas’ entire intention. They want to generate a photo as iconic as the infamous one of the German soldiers herding the little kid with his hands up down the Warsaw street. They want the Arab world to associate that with Israel.

Feel free to call it what you like. But if Israel goes ahead with what I’m sure they will, that’s what they risk; becoming not just apartheid Afrikaaners but joining history’s great butchers."

And, thinking on this further, I see no reason to alter so much as a syllable of that reply.

There is no peace

 ...in Israel today.

That's from 2012, by the way. Same shit. Different day.

I don't see a point in writing a deeper dive into this Gaza-Israel disaster than I already have multiple times.

Here, back in 2006 (and the other three parts of that series are worth a look, because I was a fun read back in those days. Glib and snarky, but funny...)

And here and here, the last time a bunch of people died in and around Gaza in 2012.

Here's my conclusion from 2012:

"Now I'm more than willing to own my own country's atrocities and vileness in genociding the pre-1492 residents of the place I live. If a native American "terrorist" organization started rocketing North Portland and blowing up Tri-MET buses I'd shake my head in grim sympathy - before arming up to exterminate them like vermin. In that fight I'd completely understand WHY my enemies were fighting, and at the same time understand that there was no middle ground there; we both wanted exactly the same thing, and for them to win I and mine would HAVE to lose. And I'd choose for their women and kids to die rather than mine.

But at the same time, I'd also understand that that would make me a monster. I wouldn't make excuses for myself. I would be doing wrong, and willingly, because that's the nature of colonialism.

The very nature of Israel and its situation in the Middle East makes for monstrous choices.

But here's the thing; as a citizen of the U.S. I don't HAVE to make a choice. I can blithely wish a curse on both the houses in this colonial mess. I can wish that everyone involved in the business had made better choices. I can wish that Truman had offered Utah to the Zionists. I can wish that David Balfour had choked on a kipper at the age of 16. I can wish a lot of things, and none of them will made a half-damn's worth of difference."

In the ensuing decade nothing has changed. 

In the decade to come nothing will change, either. 

Last night my Bride asked me "They can't possibly win, right? What does Hamas expect? And why now? "

Here's my guess.

1) I think that the Arab residents of the former Ottoman province of Palestine see that their Muslim co-religionists are wearying of the endless expenditure of blood and treasure on the Palestinian bloody shirt. The Saudis are cozying up to Israel. The Syrians and Egyptians have their own problems to worry about. The old grievances are losing their appeal, so...

2) I think that Hamas see this as a sort of grand scale suicide/martyrdom - dying on their feet rather than living on their knees - AND the chance to hand the Israeli government their Own Personal Atrocity; a Warsaw Ghetto that will help make more anti-Israeli warriors.

My friend says that the whole Occupation is a horror for the way it exposes and destroys one of the most comforting tropes of many American Jews; that there is something uniquely thoughtful about Judaism that makes it resistant or even immune to the sorts of Inquisition/Crusade/Pogrom sort of evils. As he points out, what the apartheid state of 2023 Israel makes clear is that the difference was just that prior to 1967 organized Judaism simply lacked the opportunity.

And I think this is a chance for Hamas to goad Netanyahu's Israel into a Final Palestinian Solution that will stain it the way the original stained the Nazis. Before Treblinka there were fascists. But after Treblinka and Auschwitz and the sonderkommandos? No. Nazism became a uniquely awful evil. The taint of genocide could never be removed.

And Hamas wants to paste that label on Israel. Along with the satisfaction of killing as many Israelis was they can.

Is that insane and pointless bloodshed?

Ohfuckyes.

Is that just another day in the nightmare that is the eastern Levant?

Ohfuckyes, too.

As I saw when I looked out over this field of blood 17 years - and eleven years - ago, I see no "good" outcome here. The horrific conclusion was written...back in 1917 when Arthur Balfour promised away a piece of the Ottoman Empire he had no right to speak for...or in 1948, when Harry Truman jumped in and wrote a check that my country has been paying on for more than half a century.

And I still don't.

"Ruin and merciless hatred..."

Chaos agents

When radical right-wing nuts run wild and destroy the functionality of the People's House it may be all in good fun.

But when they do the same thing in the public square?

No, it's not. 

These wingnuts aren't elected, though. They're bought and paid for, hired supposed-servants of the public, our "Thin Blue Line" of coppers that supposedly stand between us the Good People of the Earth and anarchy.

What's their beef?

Well, mostly, it seems, that lots of even the Good People don't like them. Here's their spokescop from the linked piece:

“They’re doing what they were asked to do. The public said they wanted less police involvement. The (Portland) School Board kicked them out of the schools. At some point, people should look in the mirror and take responsibility for who they voted for.”

Okay, first; fuck you runnin', you lying Dick Tracy wannabe.

No, the coppers weren't "asked to do" less policing.

They were "asked" to do less shitty, racist, violent, assholish policing. The kind of policing that the Portland Police Bureau had (and has) done for decades. The kind of policing that got them in dutch with the feds and won them a sort of supervised parole agreement that they've conspicuously ignored.

So, yes; I agree with one point Duin makes in his piece; part of the problem is that the Portland cops are way understrength. There's just too few cops for the number of troubled people running around in public.

But one big reason the PPB is so understaffed is that nobody wants to work for the outfit that a large number of Portlanders neither trust nor respect, largely because of that outfit's own shitty behavior. The Bureau attracted lots of violent, racist assholes because that's how they rolled; those people felt welcomed and at home there.

When large numbers of Portlanders weren't okay with that anymore, those sorts of people had a little hissy and left, or never joined.

And the Bureau has not changed enough to attract any other kind of person.

But here's the thing; like I pointed out earlier in this series; even before their little quiet quitting the Portland cops didn't do a pantsload of "policing". In Duin's piece he cites what's supposed to be a devastating statistic:

"As officers focus on homicides and shootings in the city, property crimes are generally ignored: The bureau’s clearance rate for property crimes dropped from 17.1% in 2009 to 4.4% in 2021..."

Okay, now, four percent is pretty crap.

But notice the clearance rate in the Good Times?

Yeah. Less than a fifth of all thefts - burglaries, car clouts, thievery in general - got solved. That was the "big time" stat for Portland cops. That was their championship season. That was them killing it.

And the perps?

Largely dopers and hoboes. "Professional" thieves, like all professionals in any field, probably make up a pretty small minority of all thieves.

So basically these are poor people who can't or won't work for a living stealing stuff to by food and dope.

And what have We the People done to make that less attractive as a way to get by?

I'll wait.

Here's the point.

It's not fucking rocket science. How do we move towards making this problem less of a problem?

Well, having better cops would help. Burning the existing Bureau to the ground and rebuilding it with fewer shitty, violent, Proud Boy-loving MAGAts and racists.

Then getting the new coppers better, smarter training and methods to deal with people. Getting them more help; Portland Street Response - a program designed to give public safety options other than sending armed coppers to deal with loonies and drugged-out whackos - has been underfunded and mis- or un-used since it was set up. Duin notes correctly that the Detox Center - the tank where narced-out gomers used to get dumped in to get them off the street - has never been reopened.

(Possibly because it's worth noting that the coppers used it as an unlicensed jail. People who didn't meet the bar for actual jailing used to be dumped in Detox, where they could be held for a day without charge. It was partially that sort of abuse that got it closed in the first place.)

But, again...and I know this keeps coming back around every time I write these things...the real issue is money.

Money to find these dopers and hobos work. To get them off the dope. To make places to live. To pay for more courts and diversion programs and Street Response unarmed intervention squads and rehab centers and social workers and daycare and school programs and...well, about a gajillion other social services.

And, yes; cops. And jails.

The bottom line out in Portland Streets isn't really that much different than in the U.S. House of Representatives.

We know what needs to happen to make our lives in general better.

But there's a vocal minority who refuse to consider that loudly being short-sighted, greedy, selfish assholes is not, actually, good public policy, and they continue to stand athwart those things shouting "stop".

In Congress they posture and preen and shove their prejudice and superstition into legislation to prevent anything they hate from happening. Far better to do nothing than to do anything the 14th Century wouldn't approve of.

In Portland they refuse to tax themselves and to allow anyone else to consider how best to use those tax monies to make those changes I've laid out. Far better to piss and moan about homelessless and crime than to make Nike go short a dime.

And until those chaos agents - in both places - are ignored and despised and discarded, we're going to be stuck right where we are.

As Duin says; welcome to the jungle.

The problem being, the problem that he doesn't mention, is that among us are those who are objectively pro-tiger.

If you can keep it...

 

Fun meme.

But the actual reality is less amusing.

I rag on the GQP a lot because...well, they play stupid games for stupid prizes. More plutocracy. More THEocracy. Made-up nonsense about sex and gender. Ignorant prejudice and idiotic things like their anti-vaxx shiny object.

The stuff they want is objectively loathsome for anyone not already in a two-yacht family.

And, frankly, they gyre and gimbel in the most ridiculously fatheaded ways. The contemptible farce they enacted when they hucked this lamebrain into the Speakership was a perfect example.

But.

There's a dark side to their lunacy, and it's that enough other lamebrains in this benighted nation elect them to local, regional, state, and federal office. There they can do a shit-ton of damage to the sane and thoughtful who want nothing so much as for these goofballs to go scrawl their shit-screed on their OWN walls.

Well, the Angry Children's Caucus has taken their pound of flesh, and now the rest of us will have to see how they cook it up for us. As Scott LEmieux says at the link:

"It’s...very plausible that whatever chaos agent eventually ends up getting the job will simply discredit Republicans further and create a more favorable political climate for 2024. On the other hand…there are a lot of ways in which an even more insane and inept Speaker than McCarthy can do material damage to the economy, and that will hang to some degree on Biden. I can’t predict with any confidence how this will play out but there’s a lot of potential dangers here."

 Very much yes.

We're fortunate here in Oregon in that our Republicans are so utterly revolting that anyone within sightlines of "normie" will scurry away from them like they would a rotting carcass (which, come to think of it, is a pretty good metaphor for the Oregon GOP's moral and political flavor...). All they can do is marinate in their rural styes and run from the legislature whenever anything remotely like "legislating" is proposed.

But the federal government is infested with these gomers and their nonsensical, 18th-Century-Articles-of-Confederation-cosplay of what the government of a ginormous complex industrial nation is supposed to do...other than ladle tax monies to rich fucksticks.

And now they're going to compete to see which looney gets to run the People's House.

I can't wait.