chasfh

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

History is lousy with examples of an entrenched minority ruling over a majority basically against their will. Just because it’s the 21st century doesn’t mean were beyond the possibility of that happening again. And the current minority here in America is methodically undertaking the process of entrenching themselves by using the system itself to destroy that very system. That’s the first chapter of the autocracy playbook.

Right. There are a few different ways to handle this and it's up to the business owner to make the call that's best for them. Point being, it's not always as simple as, "I'm being forced by the government to pay higher wages, and no way I'm cutting my own comp, so I'll just raise prices to cover the wages increase so my customers pay for the whole bump, which sucks for them but hey, everything will work out nice and neat for me". For many businesses, there's a good chance that they wouldn't be able to pass all, or even some, of the wages increase on to their customers, who may simply flee to cheaper competitors, or buy less, or quit the product altogether. In that case the business would have to absorb at least some of the loss by having only a nominal price increase, or maybe even no increase at all, in a bid to maintain sales volume. #CapitalistBlues

That’s one way. You could also lower prices in order to move product to try increase profit or cut losses through volume.

The 2020 election was the most secure election in American history. https://apnews.com/article/top-officials-elections-most-secure-66f9361084ccbc461e3bbf42861057a5

You're the one who specified milk and bread. I was just asking whether those are the only products you were talking about. Anyway, back to the question: when prices rise, people tend to buy less, or trade down to cheaper alternatives. This is also Economics 101. My question to you is, what happens to the company that raised the prices in the first place when people buy less or buy from someone else? How will they respond?

So we're talking only about milk and bread?