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Perhaps he means last year and earlier this year on the other board. You can look it up. Oh, wait ... 🙄

That reminds me: I'm gonna have to grow a goatee before 2025.

Yes. Well, at least that part of the general population that works for the arms manufactures and their lobbies.

If you can get Sue swearing, that's when you know for sure it's serious.

And I'll say this about CWB Chicago: if I were doomscrolling that website every day, I'd probably think that Chicago is a lawless criminal hellscape on the verge of social collapse and maybe even civil war between the good guys and the subhuman scum, and in that case then hell yes I'd want unvetted vigilantes armed to the teeth patrolling the streets and alleys and rounding up anyone who looks at them cross-eyed.

Here's some more information I found, just from looking at the data. The 24-block area the neighborhood association wants to patrol did have an uptick in violent crime, it's true. In the ten full months covering February to November, the two beats covering the area, 1433 and 1434, experienced about 55% of its violent crime during this period within the most recent four months (i.e., 40%) of the period, versus the first six months of the period. Of all 274 Chicago PD beats, they ranked 7th and 4th, respectively, in percent of crimes over the ten months that took place during the last four. In the entire City of Chicago, the percentage of violent crime concentrated in those last four months was 42.6%, which is close to the 40% you might expect just based on even distribution of incidents across the months. This means that contrary to the declarations of some, particularly the bleed-and-lead local media, crime does not appear to be on a runaway trajectory throughout the entire city of Chicago. That makes the increase in violent crime in beats 1433 and 1434 outliers, based on the data. In terms of total violent crimes, for the first six months of the period, these beats respectively ranked 240th and 237th of 274. The spike in the last four months brings them up to 224th and 218th. There could be any number of explanations for the spike in these specific districts. Maybe the street gangs held an executive council meeting in which they targeted these beats for an increase in scary violent crime activity. Maybe a few bad guys decided to target the area recently all on their own. Or maybe it was simply a random spike in crime irrespective of any other consideration. Who knows. What I do believe is hiring a team of armed guards who nobody knows and who is accountable to neither the city nor the taxpayers, and whose prospective employers have been unreachable for questions, is at best an overreaction to the reality of violent crime in the area, which is among the lowest in the city.

I'm responding to the ideas presented. It's not personal for me. Let's just say I'm naturally skeptical of people who try to tell me they have the real information that the fake news isn't telling you.

Uninformed, am !? You want information? OK, here's information. There are about 7,000 people who live in the area these vigilantes want to patrol. For the year ending December 8, there were a grand total of 61 reported crimes that could be considered violent, including robbery, aggravated assault and battery, simple assault and battery, and two sexual assaults. There were no homicides. For the entire year. Of those 61 incidents, 27 of them took place inside residences, schools, bars/tavern, inside stores, and restaurants--in other words, off the streets and out of view of patrols. That leaves 34 violent crimes out of doors for a heavily populated area for an entire year, fewer than three per month. All this information is public, free of charge, downloadable, and available here: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Crimes-Map/dfnk-7re6 And for that, a shadowy group of individual going to hire a bunch of unvetted people, unaccountable to the city or taxpayers, allow them to take their guns onto the streets, and tell them to do ... what? Stop people walking around? Based on what? You can like that idea if you want. I don't.

This is exactly right. What do these vigilantes expect to be doing? When these armed paid rent a cops don’t come across all the muggings in the street and the rapes in the street and the murders in the street they hope to see so they can fulfill their dreams of becoming Dirty Harrys, what are they going to spend their time doing? You’ve given us a pretty good idea of that. I don’t care how many anecdotes of three-in-the-morning shootings and my buddy’s bars and stories from CWB Chicago (lol) people post, I will never think it’s a good idea to hire an armed crypto-fascist vigilante force accountable to no one but themselves and the few people who pay them, driving around looking for situations—or non-situations—to involve themselves in. And that goes double in a neighborhood that is as safe as many suburbs and who are hired by people who intentionally dodge questions about exactly what are these guys’ qualifications and who the people hiring them are in the forest place. Talk about sketchy!

BTW just looked this up on neighborhoodscout.com, and the neighborhood in question here is literally in the top ten percent of safest neighborhoods in Chicago. So not sure what this "neighborhood association" is trying to put across with this effort ...

A "neighborhood association" in Chicago is hiring "armed private security officers" to provide extralegal "nightly patrols", where it is left up to the “off-duty police officer” and “their years of training” as to what to do if they happen across a crime being committed, while the board members of the association are being intentionally cagey and providing few details about how the patrol would work. What could possibly go wrong?

FWIW, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of video games from the past couple of decades that are based on this very premise.

It's a poor governing philosophy because if libertarians were to win the day, they would remove the authority if the government to, among other things, regulate business in the interest of protecting the people from unsafe and predatory practices. Libertarians would have the federal government literally do nothing but maintain armed forces and negotiate interstate commerce disputes. In such a scenario, who do you think would rush in to take control in the power vacuum that would create? I think the only forces powerful enough to do so would be the corporations, specially a cabal of the largest corporations cooperating with and dividing the spoils among one another. Since they would be completely untethered in this scenario, they would become the de facto governing force in America, because who else would have the size, scale, influence and raw power that could match corporation worth hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars? That's my opinion, anyway. We can agree to disagree on that one. As far as I can tell, untethering business from government regulation is their #1 goal, which is probably why practically every billionaire and other captain of industry will tell us they are libertarians.

If you want to understand clearly how access biases journalism, spend just a week or two reading Tigers coverage in the Free Press, News, and MLive.

I think I might see what you mean, although I'm not sure it's a defensible philosophy even as a pass-through phase, at least to the degree to which someone puts any amount of serious, rigorous thought into it.

Me too, which surprises me, because I am usually left of Lenin when it comes to these kinds of quizzes. Must be getting more right wing in my old age. 😅 Although I gotta tell ya, this quiz hit one of my pet peeves pretty hard with one of the questions: synonymizing "great/greater/greatest" with "good/better/best". Here's the question: Because the United States is indisputably the greatest nation on Earth, in terms of scope, reach, influence, etc., but there is more of a debate to be had as to whether it is the best country on Earth, since based on some measures that is more of a subjective call , and based on others it is demonstrably untrue.

This makes me tear up, and not for happiness or joy.

For the record: libertarianism sucks.

OK, that's fine. Just so you know, it doesn't read like you're kidding until you explain it. But I understand now.

OK, so, for the record, you were the one that went off on oblong for his redhead wearing green comment, calling "bullshit" because ... well, I don't think anyone outside of you is clear on why, but which you did before anyone brought up the lesbian possibility.

Oh wait I get it! Jen Psaki looks like a minor child cartoon character who every thinks is a homosexual! So what does that makes Jen Psaki, amirite! Ahahahahahahahahahahaaaa! Good one?

lol

The filibuster won’t be eliminated until the Republicans are in the majority in the Senate with a rubber-stamp Republican president. I’m thinking 2025.

Because he cares about actual fairness, balance, and journalism.

pet peeve