Agreed, and I should think one of the benefits of homeschooling is precisely that if you figure out your kid is no reader - which would have doomed them to wasting a great deal of time in school, focused as it is on text and not on anything practical - you can give them a great education anyway, there being a universe of things to learn outside of school and outside of reading.
Putting on my armchair sociologist hat for a second: I think the tattoo thing is at least in part about identity. Prior to maybe 1980, most people with tattoos had gotten them to signal membership in some group or other, whether it be a prison gang, an Air Force squadron or some Samoan tribe. I think as other markers of collective identity like ethnic, national, and religious group memberships have declined in importance as part of one's individual identity over the last 40-50 years, a lot of people are hungry for something new to fill the gap, and getting tattoos provides a facsimile of that. It signals membership in the social class of people who get tattoos, which objectively seems like it isn't worth much, but I guess many people deem that better than nothing. In other words, it's a response to the social fragmentation Manning discusses elsewhere in that post.
Re: the "grandfamilies" issue, not all of this is entirely due to opioid use, but also has to do with high housing prices even in downmarket regions. There's lots of clan-style living in which multiple generations pile into a single family home or the clan members sort of circulate across different homes at different times.
You have lots and lots of old people with substantial cash incomes from pensions, retirement, VA disability, and so on, and then younger people without much in the way of viable income paths. But drugs are also a factor: my neighbor's daughter and her boyfriend/common law husband both died in the same overdose session, for example, leaving their child into the care of grandma and her boyfriend.
A respectable factory job, of which there are still many, might give one young person a gross income of a little under $4,000 per month, but there are a lot of attendant expenses that go with that like transportation, the need to be somewhat near the work plant, and daycare. They are competing on the housing market with old people who either own their homes outright or are on fixed mortgages that cost pennies per month and are earning more in income from various sources. Many of these old people just spend all of their money every month and live a carefree lifestyle poasting on Facebook and attending town meetings or whatever until they become too disabled or demented to care for themselves.
The older generations are playing a different game from the younger ones in which the rules are not terribly punishing and the difficulty is zero. Our system is a huge scheme for convincing young people to work really hard to pay taxes so that old people can shuffle from Facebook to doctor appointment, to another doctor appointment, to the store, to another doctor appointment, to the pharmacy, then to Applebees, then back home for more Facebook and Cable TV. It is not surprising that many young people are saying "no" to this and just getting high. Our best minds try to optimize this process so as to help their clients compete for a larger fractional share of the boomer personal budget.
Ed West, bless his heart, has a serious THING about immigration. There are a huge number of things that are changing European societies for good and ill. Why does immigration loom so large as a boogeyman?
I should think - apart from the sheer numbers which in real versus internet life people don't like so much, they don't really like to see open space turned into insta-slums - that it's because it means there will *never be* any addressing of those things you mention, whether or not they are identical for you and for Ed. It means that the West instead waived its agency, its power.
What someone like Tyler Cowen views as a Big and Wonderful Change is really much closer to - an end to change.
The elite took that Cavafy poem for an instruction manual.
And this can most clearly be seen in the reaction of someone I know well - someone who would score high on "openness", someone who's thoughtful rather than reactionary like me.
His feeling is simply - I liked my country. We had it pretty good. I didn't hate it. I didn't ask to live in another. And yet here I am, now living in a country that is decidedly not my own, among foreigners whose country it is really not either. It's a no man's land, the worst of all possible worlds, a culture-less bazaar of all nations.
All because some others in positions of influence, did hate my and their country and my countrymen - even to the point of insisting it was never a country at all.
As I read this reply, it recapitulates the sense that immigration is a very large (only?) thing that is producing negative and no positive change without really explaining it. At the level being expressed, it is hard to know what one would want policy makers to do -- Reduce certain classes of immigration? (Which?) Facilitate investment in infrastructure to better accommodate immigration? Promote faster assimilation of immigrants? (how?)
I have members of my extended family that are immigrants to the US and to the UK and I immodestly think both places are better for it. :)
Religions are important and will remain important Because most folk, sometime, want to know the answers to the Big Questions: Where did we come from? Why am *I* here - what is the meaning of my life? How can I live a moral life?
The Seabright list on what religions do is relevant, but incomplete: "They have channeled such diverse emotions as awe, fear, devotion, anger, excitement, and love. They cater to needs for ritual and transcendence, needs for peace and for striving to overcome a challenge, to needs for private and selfish fulfilment as well as the need to be needed by others…'
There's a superiority of prayer that I haven't seen others discuss, not merely the Placebo style of effect that thinking your prayers are helpful makes them helpful. In a case where the choice is for people to Pray, or else to support Govt doing something, all the cases where govt action is net negative would have been better had folk merely prayed, rather than support the net negative govt action.
Lots of govt programs are net negative in the long run -- praying only would have been better. Including those cases where the govt program starts out positive, but gets negative over time. Most religious folk understand that a lot of God's actions are done thru human hands acting in a Godly fashion.
"I bet it would be even rarer in my grandparents’ cohort (now mostly over 90 or departed) ..."
In that cohort it would be a sign that the person had been in the merchant marines or the Navy, I would think. Possibly prison.
I hate tattoos with a passion difficult to convey short of getting a tattoo across my forehead that read "I hate tattoos".
I hate them principally on aesthetic grounds.
I suppose like most I find my own conformity - sensible and conforming - while that of others (tattooing, purest, barbaric conformity; fake eyelashes; long clawlike nails that indicate you are a person who makes no use of her hands, thus alien to me; the celebration of body fat, etc.) - off-putting.
But the ways in which this particular class issue plays out are faintly amusing. I worked with women whose roots seemed kinda quasi-rural (that rural-to-suburban transition in my state) but who had received college educations, and were solidly middle class - yet who were fully "sleeved" and had moved on to the rest of their bodies, so many symbols of their current pop culture enthusiasms or "life" mementos did they wish to memorialize. I remember as particularly unfortunate the day one typically cleavage-baring co-worker showed up with an entire (Rumi?) poem written below her left collarbone, rather too long to take in at a single boob glance.
This seems to function so like an addiction - I knew a mother who complained about having to pay for her teenager's tattoo habit - that eventually bodies look much like Newspaper Rock, but with less meaning. That scrambled-ness and the muddy coloration are perhaps the source of my aesthetic distaste.
There simply can't be that many born narcissists - besides being imposed by the culture, maybe it is tied up with superstition (being "spiritual") and perhaps bewilderment, an understandable difficulty making sense of life's vicissitudes?*
I sat by a pool yesterday with a little Mexican couple/family. (Perhaps not married, though, because she was taking a great interest in each of the fellow's tattoos, which didn't seem like something a wife could muster.) Most prominently he had "Blessed" in big letters across his pudgy belly, as likewise probably across the rear window of his truck - which in the nature of things I took as a good sign, that he was signaling benevolence rather than hostility. The word "blessed" has come to be a sort of password down here; while I'd never say it, I don't mind hearing it. "Have a blessed day". In an atmosphere of cultural splintering, "blessed" means: all clear, things are going to hell but we're momentarily okay.
Curiously, this ties in to that hyperventilating about Grandma* hanging on to her house too long. Yes, Grandma's** got some staying power, I admit. But you can have her house for next to nothing if you're willing to live in a neighborhood full of tattooed people.
Some people view "schools" as the proxy for "good neighborhood".
There aren't enough good schools for that to be so anymore.
If you are a young person complaining about not being able to buy a house, you are complaining about not being able to buy a house amongst the people you'd feel comfortable living around. Your own little hibiscus tattoo on your lower back or above your ankle, signaling a sexual availability that was never really in doubt, notwithstanding.
Yes, it'd be nice if the GOP hadn't decided to offshore all the good (and somewhat manly) jobs.
But my impression is that it's the young and salaried, not the young and scurrying around McDonald's, who most often claim this problem with housebuying.
*I'd like to think it is that, rather than simply that all these young lefty women I used to know wished to ape the cultural style of the very men who tend to go to prison for raping and murdering young women. I mean, yes - it obviously began as a worship of those "least of us" - those loveable bloodletting norm-breakers - that's the inescapable logic of leftism, pushed to an extreme, and then a new extreme necessarily located - but it seems to have taken on a life of its own, a dreary, debased echo of "individualism".
**It's weird to me that the older people mentioned in the post as squandering their money, are not inclined to give the younger generation a nice sum of money for a mortgage payment-easing down payment. Maybe this is an unusual quality in the people I happen to know, who would uniformly be pleased to do this. Admittedly, the families of my acquaintance/relation are not large. And yes, for this to happen, you probably have to have avoided a complete break with your family. Which may not comport so well with having endured evidently so much trauma at their hands that you tattooed your pain all over your body.
RE Peter Gray - It seems like he is swimming against the current here and will be overwhelmed by all the people that want to believe Social Media is the problem and punish Big Tech. However, it seems to me that he is 100% correct and it's hard to come away from the evidence with anything other than an "acquit" verdict. I don't especially care for Social Media, but I feel sad that mobs of well-meaning folks can be mobilized despite excellent evidence that they are based on false premise. (If it's less clear-cut than I'm making it out to be, I'd love to know that. I haven't seen any counter-rebuttal.)
Tattoos are a topic that I'm confused / curious about. I have a strong reaction of disgust to big ones like sleeves and never saw the appeal myself. I would be sad if my children chose to get them and thus find it surprising / unpleasant(?) that child tattoos are incredibly common as party gifts. (The temporary ones that last for a few days). How in the world did something so strongly associated with dysfunction and drug use become so common? It's a permanent choice from a generation allergic to e.g. commitment of marriage. I find the trend perplexing.
Loved the link to Homeschool content. I taught my son to read with "100 Easy Lessons" and hadn't seen the math book yet. Purchased.
Macron is far more likely to try to form a coalition in the Assembly with LePen and Bardella. However, being President rather than a Prime Minister, he also has the option of simply letting the Assembly hang without a ruling coalition and blame everything bad that happens going forward on the Assembly.
Manning suggests that members of the Greatest Generation were even less likely than Baby Boomers to get tattoos. I think he may be mistaken: I'm 65, and while tattoos were definitely a white-trash thing when I was in my 20s, I had a number of middle-class uncles who'd acquired them while in the service. Indeed, I wonder whether their unpopularity with my generation was due in part to the fact that we'd seen how they look after thirty years, on late-middle-aged skin.
Seabright writes: "Religious movements are a special kind of business—they are platforms. Platforms are organizations that facilitate relationships that could not form, or could not function effectively, in the platforms’ absence."
It would be one thing to say that religious movements are a bit like businesses and a bit like platforms. Plausible enough. It is quite another to say, categorically, that religious movements *are* "platforms," which in turn are a species of the genus "business."
It is necessary to distinguish *analogy* from *natural kinds*.
Analogies sometimes help get nearer the truth by suggesting fresh research hypotheses. But they often mislead, because everything is somewhat like something else. Pick your analogy.
Natural kinds are concepts or categories that carve nature and societies at its joints. Analogies don't carve nature or society at its joints.
The specific analogies that Seabright draws to business and to platforms seem overdrawn and à la mode. Perhaps they will appeal to regulators and techies.
But I should read the book as a check on my intuitions.
And, yes, of course, technology shock, as always, will disrupt institutions and norms — religion, too.
Guest User, since you seem to collect instances of gang-like behavior among the LEOs, here's one you might enjoy, about our police chief's "protection detail". Note: La Palapa, the protection detail hang when the police chief "works out" (also on the clock? - a la that NY mayor whose name I've forgotten), is a friendly margarita and indifferent-Mexican place.
Note also the police chief has previously rejected a recommendation to discipline his "protection detail" for their "activities" on the clock:
I should add that SA doesn't get much attention because it is in no way a boom town or attractive to domestic in-migration for tech reasons or hipness reasons. Probably most American media people had never been here before the Uvalde shooting.
It is very sprawl-y.
And it was apparently the fastest-growing city in America last year. It probably should get more attention, because it's much more representative of the future - in ways not all bad, but by no means good - than other, showier cities.
What can I say? We basically incentivize dysfunction and make sure all the wrong people have all the babies, and make the job of police a pretty terrible one in many ways; then are surprised when we get who we get, or when they do things that seem very strange to us.
"Chauvin had 18 complaints on his official record, two of which ended in discipline,[38] specifically letters of reprimand.[13]
Eighteen complaints but the ones described are mostly as part of a group where his role is unstated. It didn't say which resulted in reprimand.
I'd argue his record shows involvement in more than average violent situations but it's not clear how much he created vs stepped into.
Question: after the incident with a knee in the back of the boy, do you think he was advised not to do this? I'd bet not but either way that seems a critical piece of info.
If your kid has the neurology for reading, it doesn't really matter how you teach them. If they don't, it also doesn't matter how you teach them.
If it becomes stressful, stop. The most important part of learning to read is enjoying it.
Agreed, and I should think one of the benefits of homeschooling is precisely that if you figure out your kid is no reader - which would have doomed them to wasting a great deal of time in school, focused as it is on text and not on anything practical - you can give them a great education anyway, there being a universe of things to learn outside of school and outside of reading.
Putting on my armchair sociologist hat for a second: I think the tattoo thing is at least in part about identity. Prior to maybe 1980, most people with tattoos had gotten them to signal membership in some group or other, whether it be a prison gang, an Air Force squadron or some Samoan tribe. I think as other markers of collective identity like ethnic, national, and religious group memberships have declined in importance as part of one's individual identity over the last 40-50 years, a lot of people are hungry for something new to fill the gap, and getting tattoos provides a facsimile of that. It signals membership in the social class of people who get tattoos, which objectively seems like it isn't worth much, but I guess many people deem that better than nothing. In other words, it's a response to the social fragmentation Manning discusses elsewhere in that post.
It's likely the answer is somewhere in the middle but the stereotypical tattoo of old was "mom." No group there.
As for today, I'd argue the primary reason of today is as a liked form of decoration. That might well be primary in the past too.
And I do not see anything close to a social class represented by those who get tattoos today.
Re: the "grandfamilies" issue, not all of this is entirely due to opioid use, but also has to do with high housing prices even in downmarket regions. There's lots of clan-style living in which multiple generations pile into a single family home or the clan members sort of circulate across different homes at different times.
You have lots and lots of old people with substantial cash incomes from pensions, retirement, VA disability, and so on, and then younger people without much in the way of viable income paths. But drugs are also a factor: my neighbor's daughter and her boyfriend/common law husband both died in the same overdose session, for example, leaving their child into the care of grandma and her boyfriend.
A respectable factory job, of which there are still many, might give one young person a gross income of a little under $4,000 per month, but there are a lot of attendant expenses that go with that like transportation, the need to be somewhat near the work plant, and daycare. They are competing on the housing market with old people who either own their homes outright or are on fixed mortgages that cost pennies per month and are earning more in income from various sources. Many of these old people just spend all of their money every month and live a carefree lifestyle poasting on Facebook and attending town meetings or whatever until they become too disabled or demented to care for themselves.
The older generations are playing a different game from the younger ones in which the rules are not terribly punishing and the difficulty is zero. Our system is a huge scheme for convincing young people to work really hard to pay taxes so that old people can shuffle from Facebook to doctor appointment, to another doctor appointment, to the store, to another doctor appointment, to the pharmacy, then to Applebees, then back home for more Facebook and Cable TV. It is not surprising that many young people are saying "no" to this and just getting high. Our best minds try to optimize this process so as to help their clients compete for a larger fractional share of the boomer personal budget.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submission_(novel)
Ed West, bless his heart, has a serious THING about immigration. There are a huge number of things that are changing European societies for good and ill. Why does immigration loom so large as a boogeyman?
Take some guesses.
As a foreigner, I'd rather just ask or wonder.
I should think - apart from the sheer numbers which in real versus internet life people don't like so much, they don't really like to see open space turned into insta-slums - that it's because it means there will *never be* any addressing of those things you mention, whether or not they are identical for you and for Ed. It means that the West instead waived its agency, its power.
What someone like Tyler Cowen views as a Big and Wonderful Change is really much closer to - an end to change.
The elite took that Cavafy poem for an instruction manual.
And this can most clearly be seen in the reaction of someone I know well - someone who would score high on "openness", someone who's thoughtful rather than reactionary like me.
His feeling is simply - I liked my country. We had it pretty good. I didn't hate it. I didn't ask to live in another. And yet here I am, now living in a country that is decidedly not my own, among foreigners whose country it is really not either. It's a no man's land, the worst of all possible worlds, a culture-less bazaar of all nations.
All because some others in positions of influence, did hate my and their country and my countrymen - even to the point of insisting it was never a country at all.
As I read this reply, it recapitulates the sense that immigration is a very large (only?) thing that is producing negative and no positive change without really explaining it. At the level being expressed, it is hard to know what one would want policy makers to do -- Reduce certain classes of immigration? (Which?) Facilitate investment in infrastructure to better accommodate immigration? Promote faster assimilation of immigrants? (how?)
I have members of my extended family that are immigrants to the US and to the UK and I immodestly think both places are better for it. :)
I can assure you I don’t want any more “policy making”.
???? That implies you re happy with the status quo!
Religions are important and will remain important Because most folk, sometime, want to know the answers to the Big Questions: Where did we come from? Why am *I* here - what is the meaning of my life? How can I live a moral life?
The Seabright list on what religions do is relevant, but incomplete: "They have channeled such diverse emotions as awe, fear, devotion, anger, excitement, and love. They cater to needs for ritual and transcendence, needs for peace and for striving to overcome a challenge, to needs for private and selfish fulfilment as well as the need to be needed by others…'
There's a superiority of prayer that I haven't seen others discuss, not merely the Placebo style of effect that thinking your prayers are helpful makes them helpful. In a case where the choice is for people to Pray, or else to support Govt doing something, all the cases where govt action is net negative would have been better had folk merely prayed, rather than support the net negative govt action.
Lots of govt programs are net negative in the long run -- praying only would have been better. Including those cases where the govt program starts out positive, but gets negative over time. Most religious folk understand that a lot of God's actions are done thru human hands acting in a Godly fashion.
"and an educated elite who have a reactive disdain for their country and its traditions."
Maybe I listen to too much BBC4 and read too much Ed West, and FT, but ???? The Daily Mirror loves the UK and its traditions???? :)
"I bet it would be even rarer in my grandparents’ cohort (now mostly over 90 or departed) ..."
In that cohort it would be a sign that the person had been in the merchant marines or the Navy, I would think. Possibly prison.
I hate tattoos with a passion difficult to convey short of getting a tattoo across my forehead that read "I hate tattoos".
I hate them principally on aesthetic grounds.
I suppose like most I find my own conformity - sensible and conforming - while that of others (tattooing, purest, barbaric conformity; fake eyelashes; long clawlike nails that indicate you are a person who makes no use of her hands, thus alien to me; the celebration of body fat, etc.) - off-putting.
But the ways in which this particular class issue plays out are faintly amusing. I worked with women whose roots seemed kinda quasi-rural (that rural-to-suburban transition in my state) but who had received college educations, and were solidly middle class - yet who were fully "sleeved" and had moved on to the rest of their bodies, so many symbols of their current pop culture enthusiasms or "life" mementos did they wish to memorialize. I remember as particularly unfortunate the day one typically cleavage-baring co-worker showed up with an entire (Rumi?) poem written below her left collarbone, rather too long to take in at a single boob glance.
This seems to function so like an addiction - I knew a mother who complained about having to pay for her teenager's tattoo habit - that eventually bodies look much like Newspaper Rock, but with less meaning. That scrambled-ness and the muddy coloration are perhaps the source of my aesthetic distaste.
There simply can't be that many born narcissists - besides being imposed by the culture, maybe it is tied up with superstition (being "spiritual") and perhaps bewilderment, an understandable difficulty making sense of life's vicissitudes?*
I sat by a pool yesterday with a little Mexican couple/family. (Perhaps not married, though, because she was taking a great interest in each of the fellow's tattoos, which didn't seem like something a wife could muster.) Most prominently he had "Blessed" in big letters across his pudgy belly, as likewise probably across the rear window of his truck - which in the nature of things I took as a good sign, that he was signaling benevolence rather than hostility. The word "blessed" has come to be a sort of password down here; while I'd never say it, I don't mind hearing it. "Have a blessed day". In an atmosphere of cultural splintering, "blessed" means: all clear, things are going to hell but we're momentarily okay.
Curiously, this ties in to that hyperventilating about Grandma* hanging on to her house too long. Yes, Grandma's** got some staying power, I admit. But you can have her house for next to nothing if you're willing to live in a neighborhood full of tattooed people.
Some people view "schools" as the proxy for "good neighborhood".
There aren't enough good schools for that to be so anymore.
If you are a young person complaining about not being able to buy a house, you are complaining about not being able to buy a house amongst the people you'd feel comfortable living around. Your own little hibiscus tattoo on your lower back or above your ankle, signaling a sexual availability that was never really in doubt, notwithstanding.
Yes, it'd be nice if the GOP hadn't decided to offshore all the good (and somewhat manly) jobs.
But my impression is that it's the young and salaried, not the young and scurrying around McDonald's, who most often claim this problem with housebuying.
*I'd like to think it is that, rather than simply that all these young lefty women I used to know wished to ape the cultural style of the very men who tend to go to prison for raping and murdering young women. I mean, yes - it obviously began as a worship of those "least of us" - those loveable bloodletting norm-breakers - that's the inescapable logic of leftism, pushed to an extreme, and then a new extreme necessarily located - but it seems to have taken on a life of its own, a dreary, debased echo of "individualism".
**It's weird to me that the older people mentioned in the post as squandering their money, are not inclined to give the younger generation a nice sum of money for a mortgage payment-easing down payment. Maybe this is an unusual quality in the people I happen to know, who would uniformly be pleased to do this. Admittedly, the families of my acquaintance/relation are not large. And yes, for this to happen, you probably have to have avoided a complete break with your family. Which may not comport so well with having endured evidently so much trauma at their hands that you tattooed your pain all over your body.
RE Peter Gray - It seems like he is swimming against the current here and will be overwhelmed by all the people that want to believe Social Media is the problem and punish Big Tech. However, it seems to me that he is 100% correct and it's hard to come away from the evidence with anything other than an "acquit" verdict. I don't especially care for Social Media, but I feel sad that mobs of well-meaning folks can be mobilized despite excellent evidence that they are based on false premise. (If it's less clear-cut than I'm making it out to be, I'd love to know that. I haven't seen any counter-rebuttal.)
Tattoos are a topic that I'm confused / curious about. I have a strong reaction of disgust to big ones like sleeves and never saw the appeal myself. I would be sad if my children chose to get them and thus find it surprising / unpleasant(?) that child tattoos are incredibly common as party gifts. (The temporary ones that last for a few days). How in the world did something so strongly associated with dysfunction and drug use become so common? It's a permanent choice from a generation allergic to e.g. commitment of marriage. I find the trend perplexing.
Loved the link to Homeschool content. I taught my son to read with "100 Easy Lessons" and hadn't seen the math book yet. Purchased.
The left alliance that won the most seats yesterday are basically full on Communists with a rump of the old Socialist Party.
Macron is far more likely to try to form a coalition in the Assembly with LePen and Bardella. However, being President rather than a Prime Minister, he also has the option of simply letting the Assembly hang without a ruling coalition and blame everything bad that happens going forward on the Assembly.
Manning suggests that members of the Greatest Generation were even less likely than Baby Boomers to get tattoos. I think he may be mistaken: I'm 65, and while tattoos were definitely a white-trash thing when I was in my 20s, I had a number of middle-class uncles who'd acquired them while in the service. Indeed, I wonder whether their unpopularity with my generation was due in part to the fact that we'd seen how they look after thirty years, on late-middle-aged skin.
Re: Paul Seabright, The Divine Economy.
Seabright writes: "Religious movements are a special kind of business—they are platforms. Platforms are organizations that facilitate relationships that could not form, or could not function effectively, in the platforms’ absence."
It would be one thing to say that religious movements are a bit like businesses and a bit like platforms. Plausible enough. It is quite another to say, categorically, that religious movements *are* "platforms," which in turn are a species of the genus "business."
It is necessary to distinguish *analogy* from *natural kinds*.
Analogies sometimes help get nearer the truth by suggesting fresh research hypotheses. But they often mislead, because everything is somewhat like something else. Pick your analogy.
Natural kinds are concepts or categories that carve nature and societies at its joints. Analogies don't carve nature or society at its joints.
The specific analogies that Seabright draws to business and to platforms seem overdrawn and à la mode. Perhaps they will appeal to regulators and techies.
But I should read the book as a check on my intuitions.
And, yes, of course, technology shock, as always, will disrupt institutions and norms — religion, too.
Guest User, since you seem to collect instances of gang-like behavior among the LEOs, here's one you might enjoy, about our police chief's "protection detail". Note: La Palapa, the protection detail hang when the police chief "works out" (also on the clock? - a la that NY mayor whose name I've forgotten), is a friendly margarita and indifferent-Mexican place.
Note also the police chief has previously rejected a recommendation to discipline his "protection detail" for their "activities" on the clock:
https://www.ksat.com/news/ksat-investigates/2024/07/09/member-of-mcmanus-security-team-sexted-with-woman-while-on-duty-records-show/
If it sounds a bit like a telenovela, well, it *is* San Antonio, where *amor* is still alive and well.
I should add that SA doesn't get much attention because it is in no way a boom town or attractive to domestic in-migration for tech reasons or hipness reasons. Probably most American media people had never been here before the Uvalde shooting.
It is very sprawl-y.
And it was apparently the fastest-growing city in America last year. It probably should get more attention, because it's much more representative of the future - in ways not all bad, but by no means good - than other, showier cities.
What can I say? We basically incentivize dysfunction and make sure all the wrong people have all the babies, and make the job of police a pretty terrible one in many ways; then are surprised when we get who we get, or when they do things that seem very strange to us.
Two medals of valor, two letters of reprimand.
"Chauvin had 18 complaints on his official record, two of which ended in discipline,[38] specifically letters of reprimand.[13]
Eighteen complaints but the ones described are mostly as part of a group where his role is unstated. It didn't say which resulted in reprimand.
I'd argue his record shows involvement in more than average violent situations but it's not clear how much he created vs stepped into.
Question: after the incident with a knee in the back of the boy, do you think he was advised not to do this? I'd bet not but either way that seems a critical piece of info.
Agreed. But I don't equate that with "thug." At least not that alone or even that and the rather limited Wikipedia details.
Agreed we don't know the details of what he did or didn't do. I already said that.
As for "The reason...", that's your opinion and you are entitled to it but it's nothing more than an opinion.