USA Politics (redux)

[milk]

As already commented upon ... in Canada Rittenhouse would have been immediately arrested for carrying a gun as he did because it is manifestly against the law here.  At least as fundamental as systemic racism in this case are the ludicrously permissive US gun laws.

what's the systematic racism in the Rittenhouse case? White guy with a gun gets chased by white guys, one of whom has a gun, two are criminals who had no business in Wisconsin. They tried to take his weapon. I agree with your first point: it's reckless to allow these guns in public, whether Rittenhouse or the other guy with the illegal gun. But there's nothing about systematic racism in this case.

[JBS]

what's the systematic racism in the Rittenhouse case? White guy with a gun gets chased by white guys, one of whom has a gun, two are criminals who had no business in Wisconsin. They tried to take his weapon. I agree with your first point: it's reckless to allow these guns in public, whether Rittenhouse or the other guy with the illegal gun. But there's nothing about systematic racism in this case.

The riots were sparked by the Jacob Blake shooting, for one thing.
Rittenhouse was "defending" against people who were protesting systemic racism and the system that maintains it. So he was defending racism, and the American Right has lionized him as a result.

[greg]

So the main difference is that the US is very rich and most Latin American countries are poor?
Well, that is very true indeed. And I'm sure that the millions in the US that are living below the poverty line will be relieved to hear that good news.

We still have a large middle class, even if it is shrinking over time. I believe that's why they want to come here, at least out of the ones I know. (Usually it's locals in the dirt poor areas far so more than immigrants).
Pretty sure poverty in the US and Latin countries is not even in the same ballpark, though. There are probably better similarities to make between them than this.
But if you were to say that the gap between rich and poor is growing in the US (and the rich and poor gap in Latin American countries is wide), then yeah, totally true.

Rittenhouse was "defending" against people who were protesting systemic racism

You mean like the pedo that got shot, who was yelling at him repeatedly, "Come at me, shoot me, n***!"?

Totally respectable gentleman, quality peaceful protesting in support of innocent black people. Surely during his prison years his heart softened and he became a BLM supporter, upholding righteous social values and committing his vision towards ethics and peaceful demonstrations.
I mean, that's totally all there is to it, no other details needed. Just protesting systemic racism like a good boy.

btw, the idea of making a really small statue of him is still making me laugh. Maybe actually he wasn't a pedo, but at his size the children looked like adults, so he got confused for a second.

[Que]

But if you were to say that the gap between rich and poor is growing in the US (and the rich and poor gap in Latin American countries is wide), then yeah, totally true.

Yes. And it is a large degree of socio-economic inequality that breeds social tensions, violence, crime, corruption and authoritarianism.

[milk]

The riots were sparked by the Jacob Blake shooting, for one thing.
Rittenhouse was "defending" against people who were protesting systemic racism and the system that maintains it. So he was defending racism, and the American Right has lionized him as a result.

there might be another point of view on this. Blake was not a victim of racism but a criminal, in commission of a crime, with a dangerous weapon - by admission. You say Rittenhouse was defending racism? Huh. The case didn't probe his brain but I guess there were businesses burnt to the ground. We're those businesses defending racism as well? You can justify anything if you know what goes on inside people's brains.
I do think it's very stupid to carry guns around, especially to rallies. Rittenhouse deserves some moral blame - legally innocent though he obviously was. The people he shot aren't blameless either.

[Spotted Horses]

BLM is, in my view, almost irrelevant to this. In the U.S. any breakdown of order, such as a power failure, will bring out mobs that violently riot and loot. There were peaceful demonstrations during the day, and mayhem, including looting and arson, at night. I doubt there was a great deal of overlap between the daytime and nighttime crowds.

Controlling the rioting was the responsibility of the police, and the national guard had been called out. The fact that right-wing militias organized on social media to "patrol the streets" means that there were two lawless gangs on the streets, one heavily armed. It is technically correct that the three individuals were trying to take Rittenhouse's weapon away and he was technically acting in self defense. The first rule off carrying a weapon is that if you can't let your adversary take it away from you, lest your enemy use it on you. From the point of view of Rittenhouse's victims, they were disarming an active shooter situation involving a panicky child with a military-stye weapon. In my view Rittenhouse is morally responsible for their deaths, because he provoked a situation where he would have no choice but to shoot people to death.

[Fëanor]

BLM is, in my view, almost irrelevant to this. In the U.S. any breakdown of order, such as a power failure, will bring out mobs that violently riot and loot. There were peaceful demonstrations during the day, and mayhem, including looting and arson, at night. I doubt there was a great deal of overlap between the daytime and nighttime crowds.

Controlling the rioting was the responsibility of the police, and the national guard had been called out. The fact that right-wing militias organized on social media to "patrol the streets" means that there were two lawless gangs on the streets, one heavily armed. It is technically correct that the three individuals were trying to take Rittenhouse's weapon away and he was technically acting in self defense. The first rule off carrying a weapon is that if you can't let your adversary take it away from you, lest your enemy use it on you. From the point of view of Rittenhouse's victims, they were disarming an active shooter situation involving a panicky child with a military-stye weapon. In my view Rittenhouse is morally responsible for their deaths, because he provoked a situation where he would have no choice but to shoot people to death.

I think all this is entirely correct, including that Rittenhouse has moral responsibility.

I'll point out again the absurdly liberal guns laws in the USA made the event possible.  In most other nations Rittenhouse would scarcely have had the chance to be provocative because he would have been immediately arrested for the illegal position and/or gross misuse of a  firearm.

Inevitably it will take a long time to stamp out systemic racism:  it isn't something that can be eliminated by changing a few laws, (though it would help).  OTOH, a few changes to Federal and state gun laws would entirely have prevented the Rittenhouse incident.  Unfortunately the 2nd Amendment is a convenient alibi for inaction.

[Karl Henning]

I think all this is entirely correct, including that Rittenhouse has moral responsibility.

I'll point out again the absurdly liberal guns laws in the USA made the event possible.  In most other nations Rittenhouse would scarcely have had the chance to be provocative because he would have been immediately arrested for the illegal position and/or gross misuse of a  firearm.

Inevitably it will take a long time to stamp out systemic racism:  it isn't something that can be eliminated by change a laws, (though it would help).  OTOH, a few changes to Federal and state gun laws would entirely have prevented the Rittenhouse incident.  Unfortunately the 2nd Amendment is a convenient alibi for inaction.

And makes "thoughts and prayers a black comedic punchline.

Breaking: Kevin Strickland is exonerated after 43 years in prison, one of the longest wrongful convictions in U.S. history

[Karl Henning]

Posting because it ends well.

Lost someone to Fox News? Science says they may be addicted to anger

By Linda Rodriguez McRobbie May 1, 2019, 12:58 p.m.

IN THE 1980s, Frank Senko found himself behind the wheel of his car for several hours each day, commuting. He didn't really care for music, but he didn't want to be bored. So he tuned into talk radio.

And then he started to change.

Frank had always been the neighborhood "fun dad," goofy and friendly; he was a Democrat and a "hippie before there were hippies," his daughter said — happy to live and let live. Not anymore. "He became more irritable, cranky, irascible, a little more judgmental with people," said Jen Senko, his daughter.

It got worse. After Frank retired in the early 1990s, he discovered Rush Limbaugh's immensely popular daily radio show. "He began having these three-hour Limbaugh lunches in the kitchen," Senko said. Her mother couldn't stand the sound of Limbaugh's voice — "He always seemed to be yelling," she'd say — and so she had her lunch in the living room. Not long after, Frank installed heavy sliding glass doors between the two rooms so he could listen undisturbed.

A man who'd made his children read for an hour before bedtime, who always told them that higher education was the most worthwhile thing they could do, became suspicious of universities as liberal incubators. A man who used to stop people on the street when he heard an accent he didn't recognize to say hello now didn't like immigrants or Hispanic people. A man who'd welcomed his children's gay friends into his home "didn't want it in his face" anymore.

"He became a person we hated being around and we didn't know. It was like that movie [Invasion of the Body Snatchers]: 'What happened to Dad?'" said Senko. "It was a really horrible period of time for us . . . It was a nightmare, both my brothers blocked him, I blocked him." Senko's stomach clenched every time she thought of visiting. Her dad was angry all the time. And Senko knew exactly what was to blame: The steady drip-feed of outrage he listened to every day.

Senko turned the story of her dad's descent into anger into a 2016 documentary called "The Brainwashing of My Dad," narrated by Matthew Modine. The film was partly funded by 947 Kickstarter donations, many from people who had dads, moms, and loved ones who had plunged down the rage-filled rabbit hole of talk news and emotionally predatory media platforms. Exposure to angry media had turned loved ones into angry people, cloaked in righteousness, their families didn't recognize. "It was insane — you understand how cults operate," said Senko.

It's still happening: Actor Mark Ruffalo recently tweeted that he'd lost an uncle to Fox News.

Anger's ubiquity, its stickiness, indicates that we get something out of it. Frank Senko's anger had become a habitual response to perceived threats and cues, a repeated behavior for a specific reward that led him to abandon the values he'd taught his own children and isolate himself to simmer in the vitriol coming over the airwaves. Senko had another way to describe her dad's behavior: "He was addicted."

PUT SIMPLY, SCIENCE agrees that we can get fixated on our own anger; the actual mechanism of this addiction is fascinatingly complex.

When we feel outrage, we're responding to a potent cocktail of neurochemical reactions, physiological sensations, and conditioned responses. It's a survival mechanism linked to our deepest, oldest brain system, the limbic system.

Any perceived threat — physical, metaphysical, ideological, or imagined — causes the amygdalae, the two almond-shaped bundles of neurons in the medial temporal lobe, to alert the brain to prepare for a fight (or flight). This signal causes the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, as well as the stress hormones cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline, which kick-start our sympathetic nervous system, causing oxygen levels in the blood and glucose levels in the brain to rise. Our heart rate, blood sugar levels, and blood pressure go up — energizing us for a fight.

This rush of neurochemicals has a transformative effect on our behavior. We might yell, clench our fists, or fume, signaling to everyone around us that we're ready to blow up. At the same time, more subtle changes are happening. Notably, the mix disrupts our ability to think logically and makes a mess of our short-term memories. Noradrenaline and cortisol in particular suppress function in the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain tasked with executive decision making. Cortisol also diminishes activity in the hippocampus, which is implicated in making short-term memories; this might be why it's hard to remember what you were going to say during an argument, or later, what you said in a fit of rage. "The nature of anger is that it shuts off your cortex, your logic center, your thinking — it's literally overriding that center of your brain," said Dr. Jean Kim, a psychiatrist for the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Consider the Incredible Hulk, the green and grunting embodiment of unchecked fury. When mild mannered Bruce Banner becomes the Hulk, the normally careful and thoughtful scientist suddenly has the power to smash his way through injustice. The Hulk gets things done when Banner can't; there's an expediency to his anger.

But even if we don't start swinging, expressions of anger force others to pay attention; this can be a shortcut to resolving conflict, but it can also reinforce the idea that rage equals power. A 2018 study from the University of Geneva found that humans notice and identify an aggressive voice much more quickly than a normal or happy voice.

All of this — the neurochemical rush, as well as others' respect or fear of our rage — can be intoxicating. Humans are primed to perceive people who express anger as more competent and confident, and the more we use anger to dominate or control others (or to protect ourselves), the more this outrage shapes our identity: "People get a literal rush from getting angry," Kim explained. "It feels good. It feeds into your sense of self and you end up liking it."

Locking in the addictive effects of anger is dopamine, the neurochemical that hangs around after a flare-up, creating a post-tirade glow. Dopamine is a "feel good" hormone — it's released when we have sex, eat good food, cuddle, exercise. Certain highly addictive drugs, such as methamphetamines, mimic dopamine in the brain. It tells us to keep doing that thing again and again, often leading to behavior patterns consistent with addiction.

It should be noted that some mental health professionals reserve the word "addiction" to describe substance abuse only, yet compulsive behaviors — too much sex and porn, hoarding, gambling, eating or not eating — share many substance abuse characteristics. If you can't stop chasing the rewards despite devastating consequences — broken relationships, job loss, isolation, physical harm — then you're mimicking addictive behavior.

That would certainly describe Frank Senko's transformation from mellow dad to raging talk show junkie. "Anger is intoxicating," his daughter observed when Frank went on daily anger benders. Those infusions of righteous anger — stoked by Rush Limbaugh and later, Fox News — gave him repeated hits of neurochemical stimulation, as well as a sense of purpose. In other words, the anger made him feel alive.

ANGER ACTS LIKE a virus, spreading quickly from talk show host to passive listener, in part because all human emotions are contagious. We experience emotional contagion every day — when our partner is in an irritable mood, we're more likely to feel flashes of irritation; when we go to a ball game, we're lifted by the good cheer of the crowd (or depressed because . . . insert Cleveland Browns joke here).

In the 1990s, a series of studies demonstrated the power of emotional contagion. When subjects saw pictures of happy human faces, they reported feeling happy; when they saw sad faces, they were sad. Further research revealed that the stronger the emotion, the more easily it is transferred between people. One 2009 study found that when people who weren't lonely spent time with lonely people, they became lonelier.

Emotional contagion has been observed in other primates, birds, even in dogs: One study from the Clever Dog Lab at the University of Vienna found that dogs became uneasy when they heard recordings of other dogs or, fascinatingly, humans in distress.

For humans, emotional contagion makes evolutionary sense: Our success as a species evolved out of our ability to function and cooperate in groups; rapid emotional communication would keep groups safe and cohesive. If there's a danger — a herd of wildebeests heading straight for the camp, another tribe's raiding party — it was crucial that panic and fear be communicated quickly. Equally, emotional mimicry helped people understand one another better and improve bonding. And though emotions are best communicated through face-to-face interaction, according to researchers, they easily traverse our modern networks of digital connections.

And guess what? Rage goes viral quicker than any other emotion. A study from Beihang University in China found that on Sina Weibo, China's answer to Twitter, joy spread faster than sadness, but outrage outran them all. Researchers from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania who analyzed the most emailed New York Times articles over a three-month period for their emotional tone found that the only feeling that outpaced anger was awe. "Anger is a high-arousal emotion, which drives people to take action," Jonah Berger, the marketing professor who conducted the study, told Smithsonian. "It makes you feel fired up, which makes you more likely to pass things on."

AN EMERGING BODY of work suggests that media outlets, finely tuned to capitalize on our emotions, are affecting how we feel about every aspect of our lives.

Outrage is certainly proliferating. It's an attention-grabbing emotion that pushes engagement, which makes it easy to exploit by social media and news outlets. A 2018 Pew Research survey found social media users are most often amused online, but nearly as often, they experience anger; the same survey found that 59 percent of users frequently saw other people online looking for opportunities to start arguments.

Indeed, fury is thriving in the current media landscape, argues Tufts University sociologist Sarah Sobieraj, co-author of the 2014 book, "The Outrage Industry." In the scramble for listeners and clicks, vitriol sells, and sells, and sells. "Things that give you a strong emotional reaction are pretty effective [at attracting attention]," she says. "So yes: Anger, fear, moral indignation, these types of things are the news equivalents of what we see in the entertainment industry — sex and violence."

And there's a clear trajectory, notes Sobieraj, from the 1987 repeal of the Federal Communication Commission's Fairness Doctrine — the mandate requiring TV and radio broadcasters to present a spectrum of relevant viewpoints on controversial issues — to the increase in anger-fueled rhetoric. Deregulating the media allowed disturbingly polarized content to dominate the airwaves, and then the Internet. Indeed, all kinds of emotionally charged content has proliferated.

While all partisan news outlets follow the emotionally exploitative playbook, Sobieraj says, right-wing outlets have so far deployed it with more success — talk radio is around 90 percent conservative. Rage disrupts logical thought, reducing complex issues to black and white answers: build the wall, lock her up, make it great. However, the polemical nature of right-wing rhetoric may be pushing people on the left to react accordingly. When anger addicts find a medium that resonates with them, they may not recognize how emotionally affected they are by the fiery rhetoric. "It doesn't sound like outrage when you agree with it," says Sobieraj. "It sounds like someone truth-telling and so it feels great — that's why this content is successful."

Inundated by extreme viewpoints designed to stoke emotions, Americans may be feeling more threatened, and therefore, more irate. A 2016 Esquire/NBC survey found that half of all Americans were angrier than they had been the year before; 31 percent of respondents were enraged by something in the news a few times a day, while 37 percent were angry once a day. Meanwhile, acts of road rage involving firearms have more than doubled since 2014, according to The Trace.

Perhaps related, perhaps not, there has also been a sharp rise in hate crimes in the US — up 17 percent in 2017 from the previous year. Even pop music appears to be trending negative: A study of the Billboard Top 100 pop songs between 1951 and 2016 found that anger in lyrics increased by 232 percent, while joy decreased by 38 percent.

OUR EMOTIONS HELP us engage with the world; they make us care about what we're reading, hearing, and looking at. And good news does sell, which is why stories about adopting kittens or helping homeless people go viral. The problem is that we, as humans, are primed to respond with more focus and attention to negative arousal emotions like rage. It's easy to fall into a big, angry feedback loop of outrage and reward.

Substance abusers often need to increase their dosage to feel the same high; the anger machine works the same way. "If you're used to seeing a lot of highly emotional language that triggers emotions like anger, you're probably going to need increasingly sensational language to get your attention because your standard, your baseline changes," said Dr. Julia Shaw, a London-based psychologist whose new book, "Making Evil," examines why people do bad things. Shaw didn't agree that anger could technically be an addiction, but she did agree that the feeling can inspire compulsion. "In that sense, [engagement with angry media] mimics what we might consider addictive behavior in that we need more of the same hit to get the same high."

Senko, however, would argue that her father was addicted to the anger. Hearing people rant for hours every day, Frank began mirroring that behavior; then he needed it more. "We're not as unmalleable as we like to think we are. Media has a powerful effect on we humans," she said. "You are what you watch, eat, and read."

But there is hope. You can quit anger. Senko's dad did, before his death at the age of 93 in 2016 — with a little help. After his radio broke, he stopped listening to the talk shows; he and Senko's mother started eating lunch together again. He stopped watching Fox News when they got a new TV and his wife programmed the remote with all her channels. And while he spent a week in the hospital recovering from kidney stones, his family quietly unsubscribed him from the right-wing emails he'd been getting.

"He became happy. And adorable. And we became friends again. And he and my mother got along really great," said Senko. "The last couple years of his life, he was himself again, and we had him back."

[Karl Henning]

Jury holds pharmacies responsible for role in opioid crisis

By JOHN SEEWER The Associated Press, Updated November 23, 2021, 38 minutes ago

CLEVELAND (AP) — Three retail pharmacy chains recklessly distributed massive amounts of pain pills in two Ohio counties, a federal jury said Tuesday in a verdict that could set the tone for U.S. city and county governments that want to hold pharmacies accountable for their roles in the opioid crisis.

The counties blamed pharmacies operated by CVS, Walgreens and Walmart for not stopping the flood of pills that caused hundreds of overdose deaths and cost each of the two counties about $1 billion, their attorney said.

This was the first time pharmacy companies had completed a trial to defend themselves in a drug crisis that has killed a half-million Americans over the past two decades.

Lake and Trumbull counties were able to convince the jury that the pharmacies played an outsized role in creating a public nuisance in the way they dispensed pain medication into their communities.

Attorneys for the three pharmacy chains maintained they had policies to stem the flow of pills when their pharmacists had any concerns and would notify authorities about suspicious orders from doctors.

They also said it was the doctors who controlled how many pills were being prescribed for legitimate medical needs.

Two other chains — Rite Aid and Giant Eagle — already have settled lawsuits with the two Ohio counties.

Attorney Mark Lanier, who represented the counties in the lawsuit, said during the trial that the pharmacies were attempting to blame everyone but themselves.

The opioid crisis has overwhelmed courts, social services agencies and law enforcement in Ohio's blue-collar corner east of Cleveland, leaving behind heartbroken families and babies born to addicted mothers, Lanier told jurors.

Roughly 80 million prescription painkillers were dispensed in Trumbull County alone between 2012 and 2016 — equivalent to 400 for every resident.

In Lake County, some 61 million pills were distributed during that period.

[Karl Henning]

On the nailing of neo-Nazis:

Spencer, Kessler, Cantwell and other white supremacists found liable in deadly Unite the Right rally

[milk]

BLM is, in my view, almost irrelevant to this. In the U.S. any breakdown of order, such as a power failure, will bring out mobs that violently riot and loot. There were peaceful demonstrations during the day, and mayhem, including looting and arson, at night. I doubt there was a great deal of overlap between the daytime and nighttime crowds.

Controlling the rioting was the responsibility of the police, and the national guard had been called out. The fact that right-wing militias organized on social media to "patrol the streets" means that there were two lawless gangs on the streets, one heavily armed. It is technically correct that the three individuals were trying to take Rittenhouse's weapon away and he was technically acting in self defense. The first rule off carrying a weapon is that if you can't let your adversary take it away from you, lest your enemy use it on you. From the point of view of Rittenhouse's victims, they were disarming an active shooter situation involving a panicky child with a military-stye weapon. In my view Rittenhouse is morally responsible for their deaths, because he provoked a situation where he would have no choice but to shoot people to death.

maybe the guy with the skateboard. Rosenbaum was a mentally ill criminal who made multiple threats and chased Rittenhouse for no reason. He yelled some nasty stuff I won't repeat but to the effect of, "you won't do anything" and, "if I get you alone I'll kill you." In his unbalanced state, he thought he could get the weapon. He'd been doing destructive illegal things all of that night. The other guy who got shot but survived also had an illegal weapon. I don't know what he thought he was doing but he's morally responsible for thinking it's ok to wave guns around. I'll agree about the guy with the skateboard. He may have thought he was acting heroically. He may have thought Rittenhouse was an "active shooter."

[Karl Henning]

With guilty verdicts for Ahmaud Arbery's murderers, a whisper of justice

[milk]

With guilty verdicts for Ahmaud Arbery's murderers, a whisper of justice

"How a Prosecutor Addressed a Mostly White Jury and Won" is the New York Times headline. How did the prosecutor get the jury to see through their whiteness? It's some kind of miracle.

[BasilValentine]

"How a Prosecutor Addressed a Mostly White Jury and Won" is the New York Times headline. How did the prosecutor get the jury to see through their whiteness? It's some kind of miracle.

Sarcasm I hope ^ ^ ^. If not: The case was open-and-shut and exceptionally well-argued by the state. It's just insulting to think that sane adults of any race or disposition would fail to reach the obvious verdicts under the circumstances.

[Karl Henning]

Sarcasm I hope ^ ^ ^. If not: The case was open-and-shut and exceptionally well-argued by the state. It's just insulting to think that sane adults of any race or disposition would fail to reach the obvious verdicts under the circumstances.

If this case had taken place in 1965 Georgia. The obvious verdict would have proven to be something different. Even now, I hesitate to hope that we are in a much better place.

[BasilValentine]

If this case had taken place in 1965 Georgia. The obvious verdict would have proven to be something different. Even now, I hesitate to hope that we are in a much better place.

This case wouldn't have taken place in 1965 Georgia for the same reason it almost didn't today — the prevalence of white supremacists in law enforcement. I think your hesitation is well warranted but we can hope because perhaps they're less prevalent in the general population(?)

[Karl Henning]

Incidentally, "It has been another week during which a reporter asked whether Joe Biden will run for president in 2024" gives us poster children of "journalists" determined not to do their work properly, i.e. there are far more important question they should be asking.

For Democrats, whether Biden will run in 2024 might be less relevant than these 3 underlying questions

By James Pindell Globe Staff, Updated November 26, 2021, 7:34 a.m.

It has been another week during which a reporter asked whether Joe Biden will run for president in 2024. And another week that saw the answer to that question not exactly resolved.

"He is. That's his intention," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki aboard Air Force One as the president was on his way to celebrate an early Thanksgiving with troops in North Carolina on Monday. Psaki's comments echoed what Biden himself said shortly after taking office, when he told reporters during his first press conference in March that it was his "intention" to run again.

But in many ways the "will Biden run in 2024?″ question is the version of the "what is up with Trump and Russia?" question during the previous administration. Each question was always around, always driving chatter inside Washington, and never fully resolved. Remember, for Biden, the questions about whether he would be a single-term president began before he even ran in 2020. The question was then repeatedly asked and not totally answered several times before a primary vote was cast. It then came up again in the general election.

Unlike all the Russia probes, however, there will eventually be a clean answer on Biden and 2024. He will either be on the ballot or he won't.

And while Trump set up his formal reelection campaign the moment he was inaugurated, that was an unprecedented move. Barack Obama didn't formally announce his reelection plans until the April after the 2010 midterm elections. If Biden were to follow Obama's timeline, then he has nearly a year and a half to make a decision. Then again, no one seriously doubted Obama was going to seek reelection.

Beyond all the speculating, the questions beneath the question about Biden and 2024 are probably more important and instructive for Democratic politics in 2021.

Question 1: But why wouldn't Biden run?

Very few American presidents have openly taken reelection off the table: One of them, James K. Polk, announced it the moment he received his party's presidential nomination in 1844. His decision was part ideological — as a believer in limited government power — and practical: agreeing to only serve one term was likely the only way he could build a coalition of party power brokers to back him for the nomination.

Biden has different issues. The reason people talk about him serving only one term is largely due to his age. At 78, he was the oldest person ever elected to serve as president in 2020. He could break that record if he ran again in 2024 at age 82.

Mental and physical capacity to serve as the leader of the free world is something that voters must determine for themselves. While plenty of data is available from Biden's doctors, it is still a subjective decision by every voter in how to read the data.

But lately, there is a second reason that people, including Democrats, are asking whether Biden will run: his poor poll numbers.

Now 10 months into his presidency, Biden's approval ratings have never been this low. A Marist poll out on Wednesday showed him at just 42 percent, in line with other recent polls. This means Biden is the most unpopular president at this point in his presidency, other than Donald Trump.

Question 2: Can anyone other than Biden win?

Aides have already signaled in anonymous quotes to the press that if Biden does run it might be out of a sense of duty. The 2020 election turned out to be much closer than Democrats thought it would be. It is possible that among all the Democrats who ran in the 2020 primary — the most diverse field in history and one of the largest — only Biden could have defeated Trump for reelection.

With Trump looking more likely than not to run again, the Trump factor is not off the table. And the field of potential candidates is basically the same crew that ran in 2020.

And, yes, if Biden doesn't run it likely would be a crew. The most obvious heir apparent to Biden, his vice president Kamala Harris, had a 28 percent approval rating in one recent poll.

This has led to open speculation, even this week, that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg could run. Buttigieg would not only be among the youngest people to be elected president, but also the first openly gay person.

Let's be clear here: Even after winning the Iowa Caucuses and coming in a close second in the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic electorate didn't think Buttigieg could win (or that he sufficiently understood the Black vote). It is unclear whether a stint as transportation secretary would change that.

Question 3: If Biden doesn't run how badly will tensions within the party explode?

As anyone could see during the Democratic presidential primary season or witness this year during negotiations over infrastructure and "Build Back Better" legislation, there is a lot of tension within the party.

The party's base has moved left and wants leaders who are not old white men. There is also an establishment, led by Biden and South Carolina Representative James Clyburn, who feel like they are more in tune with Democrats and the electorate as a whole.

That next year the Republicans could win big because of Biden, prompting Biden and his allies to say that only proves that Biden has to run, is the conundrum.

[Karl Henning]

Exonerated former inmate Kevin Strickland won't get compensation from Missouri, so donors raised $1 million

[amw]

It is actually interesting to follow the online white supremacist right—the "anime nazis" who have largely replaced the III%ers and Oath Keepers and Knights of the White Camellia at neo-confederate rallies—and their reaction to three high-profile trials in which some degree of white supremacy was implicated. They were extremely keen for Rittenhouse to become a martyr so they could riot, but practically as soon as he walked, immediately began to dismiss him as a plant, a liberal roleplaying as a white supremacist, a BLM supporter, etc (with one account spending significant amounts of time analysing his skeletal structure and fat distribution and concluding that he was secretly transgender and therefore an agent of the New World Order); they meanwhile completely ignored the Arbery and Charlottesville trials except for the usual mutterings about how the Tyrannical Government is persecuting them, the Unite the Right organisers were all RINOs and neolib cucks anyway, and Someday There Shall Be A Race War and so on. IOW, it seems like the fact that not all three trials ended in convictions took a great deal of the wind out of their sails, whereas if Rittenhouse had been convicted, they would have hailed him as one of their own and promised to avenge him in blood. As a movement, they evidently cannot exist without the conspiratorial belief that the political system is repressing them somehow, and without this victimhood complex, can't really achieve political unity.

Instead, Rittenhouse has become a beloved figure of a particular breed of ex-liberal (e.g., Glenn Greenwald, Bill Maher) who delights in contrarianism for the sake of it. These people can still claim victimhood by complaining about how their media friends don't invite them to cocktail parties anymore now that they no longer profess liberal views; in their view the real victim is neither Rittenhouse nor the people he killed, but themselves, for being "cancelled". Plenty of prominent conservatives have also attempted this over the years (e.g., Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern, etc.) with a lower degree of success.

This is not 1965 Georgia because things no longer break down cleanly on racial lines but similar kinds of repression still do exist. Class relationships have become somewhat more important; the Atlanta Police Department is approximately 80% black and still kills, hurts and arrests black people at elevated rates compared to their share of the population. Why? Most of the victims/arrestees come from poor inner-city neighbourhoods in South Atlanta, whereas the average salary for the police officers is in the six figures and the majority of them live in neighbouring suburban DeKalb County, the second-wealthiest black-majority county in the USA. Essentially, while there are not as many white supremacists in law enforcement, white supremacy was only ever a proxy for class supremacy and that's still very much real. The white men who killed Ahmaud Arbery could (if I recall correctly) be accurately characterised as working-class; Brunswick, GA remains a town divided between a declining post-industrial urban core where no one (white or black) is particularly well off and wealthy, fast-growing carpetbagger coastal enclaves, and if it was someone from the latter who'd been found responsible, it's unlikely there would have been a criminal trial at all, or at best the charge would have been something like involuntary manslaughter and punished via community service.

edit: people on Twitter have also claimed that the police responding to the call initially didn't arrest the killers, and in fact it was not until video footage was leaked to the public that they were actually taken into custody and charged. Twitter is of course not a reliable source but that does seem to be true, although it's unclear exactly what happened (and incompetence—police have historically had a very low clearance rate for murder—seems more likely than malice).