So: as for this. I can’t and don’t speak for anyone else here, so these thoughts are only mine.
Let me just say a few things to Mr. Balko.
- Nowhere on the poll or post was there any indication that it was private, only for the regular readership of that blog, or in any other way intended for a limited response.
- People voted on an Internet poll that has, at best, an entirely tangential relationship to police violence and civil liberties. From Balko’s self-aggrandizing, aggrieved post, you’d think the Balloon Juice community had personally participated in police misconduct. Settle down.
- I don’t know why libertarianism tends to attract that particular kind of Internet tough guy, the deeply sensitive Internet tough guy. Balko likes to engage with both barrels, and then turns around and pouts when people treat him similarly. Preemptive complaining about the rebuttals you think you’re going to receive are always an indication of a weak stance, incidentally.
- Allow me to introduce you to my friend, the Internet. The Internet is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Asking the Internet to play fair and nice is to demonstrate that you don’t understand the Internet. If I posted a poll on Balloon Juice and said “now please only regular Balloon Juice commenters vote,” and the cretins from Reason started voting, would Balko shed any tears for me? Of course not.
- Police misconduct is an extremely important issue. Even a cursory glance at this blog’s history will inform you that it is taken seriously here. How best to serve that cause is, as most are, debatable. It’s true: I, and presumably others here, doubt that the Cato Institute does have or will have a positive impact on the cause of preventing police misconduct. Character is important and Cato doesn’t have any that can’t be bought, or pushed out the door if it treads to far from Republican politics. It is frankly inarguable that Cato’s political presence benefits authoritarian conservative politicians whose reactionary policies keep the victims of political misconduct in a state of material and political powerlessness. That’s a fact. And that was true before corporate oligarchs with no track record of interest in stopping police misconduct undertook an effort to squash whatever vestiges of evenhandedness existed at the think tank. Sorry: just because you say your buddies want to help doesn’t mean that they do, or that they can, or that they will. Balko’s whole complaint is based on a juvenile vision of the politics of personality: I think these are good dudes, so therefore they will do good deeds.
- One of the best, most certain ways to help those who are frequently the subject of police misconduct is to remove them from the poverty and political dispossession that makes police misconduct against them possible. That is an effort that both Balko and the Cato Institute have worked tirelessly to oppose. If he’d like, Balko is perfectly able to ask what the preferred policies are of the poor black and Hispanic people who are most likely to be the victims of police misconduct and police violence. In large percentages, they favor a redistributive social policy that he abhors. If he bothered to ask them, he might even be compelled to ask why the people he purports to speak for have such little interest in his politics.
Hey, look: no snark or tired Internet cliches. Just somebody who disagrees.
catclub
apparently no one has ever heard of the mirror option
in lftp.
Everybody could have a copy of it.
JGabriel
Freddie deBoer @ Top:
NO FAIR DISAGREEING RESPECTFULLY! NO FAIR LEFTIES FIGHTING BACK! WAHHH!
.
Culture of Truth
Most of the best pundits can found there.
jibeaux
Oh, man, they’re bitching about vote rigging.
Of an internet poll.
Awesome.
JGabriel
Radley Balko:
“… and is entirely different from my principled knee-jerk contempt for Balloon Juice.”
.
R Johnston
If libertarians understood why people doubt their claims that they really want to do something about civil liberties abuses then they wouldn’t be libertarians claiming to care about civil liberties.
Empirical reality matters, and empirical reality is that libertarians support politicians who are the worst of the worst on civil liberties and they support economic policies that are empirically incompatible with widespread respect for civil liberties. Libertarians are not empiricists, not even the tiniest bit.
elmo
Fighting between my favorite site in all the intertubes and my favorite exposer of police abuse and misconduct.
I haz a sad.
4tehlulz
inb4….
“no snark or tired Internet cliches. ”
..m_c…
R Johnston
@jibeaux: Oh Noes! A poll on the internet done gone bad! The universe is broken!
Balko may as well come out as a gold bug or a birther.
Zifnab
Well, there’s your problem. You think Balko cares about police violence, when in truth he just cares about Rich White Male entitlements. That’s why you see regular stirring defenses for corporate thuggery, glibertarian wisdom on employer/employee relations, and tirades against consumer protections. Because the police state is fine and dandy so long as we privatize it first, and everyone knows who the bosses are.
Balko is throwing a hissy fit because he saw another golden opportunity for him and his Koch-funded cronies to piggy-back in on an otherwise respectable site’s credibility. And BJ dared to buck him on it.
Screw that guy.
R Johnston
@elmo: Balko is good with the police abuse anecdotes. Data, however, confuses him to the point of glazed over eyes and drool. Poverty, political disempowerment, and police abusiveness can’t be disconnected from each other no matter how hard he wishes the libertarian fairy to make it so.
Forum Transmitted Disease
I admire Balko’s work.
That being said, I think that Cato has no business being in the business of documenting police misconduct/brutality/overt murder. Cato is on the side of money, in the end, and the side of money is always the side of cops, no exceptions.
I wish Mr. Balko nothing but the best in his future endeavors.
@Zifnab: What you said.
Ruckus
I like that the right can not even discuss what they are on about. Like the proverbial vampire, the light of day shows exactly why they need to hide behind a veneer of bullshit. It is so hateful, vile, evil and greedy, any truth or light of day shows it to be exactly that.
jibeaux
Libertarianism is ironic because you want to beat the smug wankers up so bad, only the fear of being arrested can keep you from it sometimes.
BGinCHI
A libertarian, a cop, and a Haitian immigrant walk into a bar….
Steve
I think it was pretty clearly stated that the poll was for the readers of that blog. I guess you can argue “hey, it’s on my screen right now, therefore I’m reading it” but I think the implication was pretty clear that they wanted their blog community to decide.
The argument that nobody respects such protocols on the Internet is a separate point. But “there are lots of assholes on the Internet” isn’t actually a defense to the charge of behaving like an asshole.
jibeaux
@Steve: Dude, they didn’t “want their blog community to decide”, they wanted Cato to win. The guy who would get the job if it went to Cato, sent around a link to the poll to favorably disposed recipients, trying to keep it on the DL a bit, vote for Cato. It didn’t fucking work, because it’s on the fucking internet. Rigged poll backfire.
Steve in DC
Libertarians, mainly Ron Paul supporters, are the kings of highjacking internet polls and making them worthless.
Balko does good work, that’s fine. However Cato, and libertarians in general, advocate the nastiest economic policies on the planet that put people in a situation to be abused by the police. Until they start to favor less extreme capitalism and a social safety net that is actually paid for all the talk about police issues is frankly fucking stupid.
R Johnston
@Steve: What makes you think CATO was winning without outside votes in the first place? Balko did, in fact, link to the poll himself directing his own readers there. For him to then complain that someone else linked to it in opposition to his preferred candidate is preposterous.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
maybe it would be a totally retarded idea if packman made the poll binding, given how dedicated he is to the cause. there is nothing wrong with asking him to consider “anyone but cato”. i mean right off the tip, cato can ask, beg, plead and promise, and if they really want the project, trust me they are. that goes to what packmann is already thinking. maybe he is looking for someone outside of cato to show interest. of course cato, at anytime can shift priorities and bury the project. as was noted in the comments, cato could fund packmann, if they so choose.
also, too. since when is cato not allowed to support whomever takes the project and runs it independently?
Mnemosyne
@Steve:
IIRC, the way people here even found out about the poll was that one of the guys in that blog’s community suspected that Cato fans were freeping the poll and was requesting reinforcements. It was several hours after the initial request in the comments that Anne Laurie put up a post about it.
So, to me, Balko’s complaint comes across more like, “Hey, no fair — we were the ones who were supposed to be freeping the poll, not you guys!”
Lee
Yep someone does not understand the internet.
Lee
I pointed out at Radley’s blog (I read both) that the calls for ‘anyone but Cato’ actually started out prior to the post here.
Steve
@jibeaux: I see nothing wrong with counter-freeping a poll. But I sorta think you’re mixing up the intent of the blogger who posted the poll with the intent of the guy from CATO who freeped it. When Freddie says “nowhere was there an indication that it was private,” I disagree with him, and in fact that should be the first point people make to the guy who was responsible for freeping it.
Jamey
This encapsulates the condescension and arrogance that has led me to distrust self-described Libertarians.
Mnemosyne
@R Johnston:
This. Balko’s pissed because he tried to fix the poll in his own favor and was thwarted. Now he wants to whine about how meeeeaaannnn we all are for not letting him steal the poll.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
@Steve:
anything wrong with asking respondents to e-mail? or do an email opt in? i mean if the poll has almighty power in the decision in the first place.
Tim Connor
@JGabriel: Cato is just another “think tank” where opinions can be purchased for a price.
Knee jerk contempt? It doesn’t rate that high. For money, they are participating in the destruction of the Republic and the West.
Forum Transmitted Disease
From Balko’s epic whine:
Let me take care of that for you, sir. Libertarian organizations like Cato are just fronts for the Republican Party. So is the entire “libertarian” movement.
We good, bro?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
So let me get this straight: this case involves a bunch of private individuals crowd-sourcing their collective wisdom to make a very simple, very straightforward decision, without any govt involvement, without any central authority infringing on anyone’s liberty by telling people what to do, and it got all fucked up. And the libertarians are crying foul.
__
So their governing philosophy is (if they are to be believed) fully up to the task of running every aspect of a complex, pluralistic modern society with 300 million people in it, but they can’t figure out how to have a few hundred like-minded folks pick out a new webhosting solution without the decision making process blowing up?
__
Ohhhhhhkaaaaaay!
Mnemosyne
@Steve:
If the blog owner wants to complain about outside people freeping his poll, that’s one thing. For Balko to take up that complaint when he apparently was the one who started the freeping in the first place is pretty much the height of hypocrisy.
Skipjack
Police misconduct is Balko’s beat, and pretending that anyone here bothers to pay the kind of attention to it that he does is ridiculous. He’s a self-identified libertarian, and identifies that with the kind of concerns about centralized power that we should all have but infrequently reject. I don’t say condemn, I mean reject, as in don’t vote for the people who enact it, don’t equivocate or stand for it.
I’m a proud Obama voter and will be again but there’s no good in pretending that the Democratic party is on the side of the angels on the issues he’s highlighting. We are only the best choice by comparison between the only two parties which matter. It happens to be the case for me that those aren’t the issues I swear by, social justice, fairness and rejecting imperialism take precedence for me.
The weakness of his response is in marginalizing the possibility of corruption of institutions like Cato by the Koch brothers and their like. The weakness of this response to his response lies in laying responsibility for the downside to Balloon Juicers actions at the door of the people objecting to it. If he cares more about the issue and thinks his vote should matter more than people who are admittedly only voting tactically regardless of facts then he’s perfectly entitled to call the damage done as being just that, it’s not whining.
It is true laziness to declare that some libertarians suck therefore Balko must support them and suck himself. No more than Hilary Rosen is an Obama campaign mouthpiece, though she’s quite right, is Balko a spokesperson for libertarians, Cato, or the Koch brothers.
PS the reason I think Radley Balko hates Balloon Juice is I believe down entirely to DougJ’s tireless trolling. It’s humorous but not right.
jibeaux
@Steve: Well, I’m talking about Balko being a whiny ass about someone freeping the poll he was trying to freep. As to your point about the blogger posting it, I’m having a hard time trying to figure why a researcher ostensibly hoping for accurate feedback, would post an open internet poll. Okay, JC could probably post a poll on whether the BJ community wants to hear more stories on rodent innards and get a fairly accurate picture from the readership, but, see, unlike “Cato”, rodent innards aren’t really a lightning rod for the internetz community.
gorram
From Balko’s blog: “He didn’t want it to look like Cato was using its institutional might to overwhelm the poll with people who aren’t already familiar with what Packman has been doing.” (emphasis added)
Isn’t that basically an admission that they were already doing what Balloon Juice did but on a smaller scale? They just didn’t want people to realize the poll was being publicized to Cato-related people, whereas BJ was willing to overtly say there are reasons for people to organize against a Cato takeover.
I’m actually just disappointed any one interested in any serious political analysis allowed libertarians to put in a proposal (and pulled the plug once they complained). These people have been trying to kill our country for as long as I’ve been alive, and we’re just supposed to lie back and take it? In any case, if that’s how you react to upset libertarians on the internet (what a rarity!), then how the fuck do you respond to police beating the shit out of people and deliberately falsifying evidence to “prove” their innocence?
Yutsano
@Steve: Your concern is duly noted.
@Mnemosyne: It’s a good excuse to get his BJ hate on though. Plus for a supposed long-time reader his not knowing Anne Laurie’s actual name is telling.
the Conster (f/k/a Cat Lady)
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
This. Now you know why they
wantneed Big Daddy Koch to make things “fair”.b-psycho
On the poll itself: yeah, Poll rigging A vs Poll rigging B. The poll should’ve been wide open in the first place. Feh on both sides on that one.
As for this:
…um, yeah, that’s what’ll stop police misconduct, unrelated welfare policy. Great call, Freddie.
jibeaux
@b-psycho: Yep, crime and poverty, unfuckingrelated all right.
Snowwy
Libertarian good faith –
“We need to hold a vote on this issue.”
“Hey guys, come vote for our preferred candidate.”
“Hey, these other guys are rigging the vote by asking people to come vote!”
“I’m sorry the voting fiasco requires me to make a decision independent of and probably contrary to the voting results as of the moment I shut down the voting.”
And they wonder why non-Libertarians refuse to trust them or take them seriously.
Steve
@Mnemosyne: We don’t disagree.
@Yutsano: We apparently disagree. GFY.
pragmatism
my fave part of radley’s temper tantrum:
radley, you gobshite (h/t pierce), that is part and parcel of people’s objection to Cato taking over the project. fucking hell.
fastandsloppy
So the rules were loose and someone used the looseness of the rules to game the system to the results they desired?
Hello, welcome to the very, very predictable results of Libertarianism in practice.
It just like communism. It sounds all very neato, simple, fair and easy when you glib it out. but in practice it’s rife with corruption. This has been your teachable moment. Use it wisely.
Forum Transmitted Disease
What this boils down to is a dick-measuring contest, and Balko lost.
For all their Koch money and supposed gravitas, Balloon Juice has more readers who give a shit about police brutality than Cato. The numbers do not lie.
You picked the wrong horse, Radley.
jibeaux
@Snowwy: Srsly. People are just exercising their freeeeeeeeeedoooommmmmmm
geg6
@JGabriel:
Heh. Just read that and had the exact same reaction.
Radley Balko is a crybaby. Pretty much like any conservative or libertarian I’ve ever come across.
geg6
@jibeaux:
This.
R Johnston
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: You win my internet for the day.
IM
Libertarians can’t handle competition well, it seems.
Tonal Crow
Ya wanna support civil liberty? Then ya join the dangerous radicals at the A.C.L.U., get bashed right, left, and center, and come back and do it again and again and again, cuz “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”.
Ya wanna pat yourself on the back for being “concerned” about “advancing” liberty, all the while systematically undermining it? Then ya join the Randroids, sop up wingnut welfare, vote Republican, and team up with the Koch brothers.
It’s all very simple.
b-psycho
@jibeaux: No, I was not saying that crime & poverty are unrelated. Of course they are. I don’t see where the welfare policy shift is supposed to magically stop cops from beating the shit out of people though, unless you take the standard police excuse of blaming the crime rate for their routine abuse of power seriously.
Egg Berry
Haven’t read all the comments, but FUCK the Cato Institute.
Brachiator
Hell, I never thought that Cato merited even casual, knee-jerk contempt.
replicnt6
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
You don’t understand. In the libertarian paradise, people will uniformly behave with integrity. They just will, okay? I mean, look at Hank Reardon!
kth
The sum total of the writings and activities of the Cato Institute make it more likely, not less, that individuals of any and every ethnicity will have their civil rights abused by police officers.
Brachiator
OT, but on target.
Anyone planning to see the newly released Three Stooges movie?
Mnemosyne
@fastandsloppy:
Fix’d for accuracy. But you’re absolutely right that this is the easily predictable result of libertarianism. It’s just that people like Balko assume that they’ll always be the winner in these contests and get very pissy when they get beaten at their own game.
Trinity
@Mnemosyne: This.
They are WATB.
Chuck Butcher
I’m sure Libertarians will be able to follow the logic demonstrated there and agree with it. I’m also pretty sure that says a hell of a lot about Libertarians.
Lessee:
we vote – good
you vote – bad
because…
we not BalloonJuice…
yup – Libertarianism at its best
gex
@R Johnston: Listen, we all know only the right kind of people should vote. If the right kind of people just so happens to be rich straight white men from the Christian tradition, that’s just a weird coincidence.
gex
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Beautiful summary. And it’s telling too, because they would like to basically throw out the results of this democratic activity because it didn’t go their way. Maybe check the IP addresses and give provisional votes to DFHs.
ETA: They needed to make some robo calls and tell the DFHs the poll was somewhere else and some other day.
PeakVT
If anyone ever deserved the wanker of the day award, it’s Balko.
TooManyJens
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
No, no, but you see, if you voted against Cato, you don’t really care about police brutality. Seriously, that seems to be Balko’s point.
I think Balko does good work on bringing police abuses to light, but he’s dreaming if he expects his good work to make us forget about everything harmful that Cato stands for. And that’s without even bringing the Koch brothers into it.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Egg Berry:
__
I prefer Cato delenda est myself. It has, how does one put these things, a certain poetic symmetry to it.
Tonal Crow
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: This, this, one thousand times this.
Jewish Steel
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: A-fucking-men.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Dick Face makes enough qualifications in that statement to claim he’s correct but police militarization has been discussed widely since Seattle ’99. Balko and the libertarian children don’t own this issue exclusively even if he thinks the world revolves around him and his clique.
General Stuck
Libertarians believe in the right of every citizen to starve to death, to freeze to death, and otherwise die an early death, for all sorts of Reason, all for the crime of being poor. They can share a room in Grinch Hell with Dick Cheney, for what I care.
Joey Maloney
Am I naive for being surprised that my simple blog comment has turned into such a complete clusterfuck?
Calouste
@Skipjack:
No, we’re not that lazy. All libertarians suck. By definition.
Stoopid liberal
Youz guyz dumbs. I shuld no, me pubic skool taght and demckrat votr. Cee, me likeyouz tuz! :)
James Hare
You’re forgetting an important rule of Libertarian argument: anyone who disagrees with a Libertarian is either a) a mindless idiot or b) an evil statist. There is only black and white and anyone who questions that is a deluded fool. There’s really no point to answering anything Balko says — he isn’t interested in argument. He wants to say “NEENER NEENER NEENER, I’M NOT LISTENING YOU IDIOT.”
He could have been kind to his readers and added a TL;DR at the end — something along the lines of
TL;DR — I’m too immature to answer my critics with anything other than insults so they’re a bunch of poopy-heads.
Clime Acts
Jesus Christ, you people need to get lives outside of blogs.
These intertubes interblog wars are stunning in their inanity.
Too many fucking front pagers are wrecking BJ.
General Stuck
@Joey Maloney:
Well, Radley made it known you were banned at his site, on shenanigans for various and assorted misdemeanors. And apparently have earned a permanent spot underneath his skin. I have no idea how you did it, but here is yer internets.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Tonal Crow: Between this and ALEC’s wailing a few threads down, it’s a wonder the cheese supply hasn’t flatlined. You’d think conservatism and libertarianism were linked somehow.
Maybe someone should look into that.
plutosdad
Your comments are all about the Heritage institute, not CATO.
If CATO is bought by Republicans, why have they consistently been against the wars overseas (something most prominent Democrats cannot even claim) or why have they consistently been against the war on drugs?
Now, if the Kochs get their way, we may seem some pressure and problems with honesty. But so far, every time they just go their own way.
come on, you can hate on CATO for their libertarian positions, and the outright selfishness of much utilitarian ethics, but don’t just make stuff up.
Joey Maloney
@General Stuck: You’re fucking kidding me. I’ve commented there, like, 6 or 7 times total. Got deleted once for calling Dick Cheney a douchebag or some such. I read it fairly regularly but by no means daily. And now I’m banned somehow?
What a fucking WATB. I had thought better of him.
samara morgan
@Clime Acts: yeah…lets get rid of the firebagging ones at least.
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): all libertarians are crypto-conservatives.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@plutosdad:
Pretty sure we know the difference.
Not everyone is as stupid as you think they are.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Joey Maloney:
__
Well, this place is where clusters come to fuck, a veritable bordello of bombast and backlash as it were, with Tunch playing Cole like a piano in the downstairs parlor and pretending that he doesn’t know what is really going on upstairs.
__
So maybe just a little bit.
samara morgan
aww freddie….Balko isnt gunna respond to you any more than MattY or TNC or the other A-listers that you are constantly trying to goad into one of your kangaroo slapfights.
you are a C-lister.
that is all you are ever gonna be.
Yutsano
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: That is probably the most elegant LOL I have ever seen. Well done good sir.
Egg Berry
@Clime Acts: Coming from you, that’s fucking rich.
Citizen Alan
@b-psycho:
You say that like it’s an absurdity, but it seems to me that the most egregious abuses of police authority are almost always perpetrated against the lower classes. Against people whom an asshole cop can abuse freely, secure in the knowledge that the victim of his abuse will never be in a position to call him to account or seek either justice or retribution. If every black person in America enjoyed the rights George Zimmerman had by virtue of being a judge’s son, I think a lot of the police abuses Balko talks about would disappear.
Villago Delenda Est
Libertarians are the ultimate authoritarians, because they insist that everyone must bow before their monstrous egos. They have no fucking clue that the reason you have governments is because there are cases, many cases, where the liberties of two parties are in conflict (say, the resident of a house and the pig rendering plant next door) and a modus vivendi must be reached that violates the liberty of one party or the other.
R Johnston
@Villago Delenda Est: A libertarian is a person who each night before he can fall asleep slips on his ruby slippers, clicks his heals three times, and thrice repeats “There are no collective action problems!”
lee
Looks like we broke his site.
The Agitator is no longer accepting connections.
ooops
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Yutsano:
__
Thanks. I’m here all week. Be sure to tip the veal and eat your w…oops, wait a minute, I think I messed that up somewhere. Hmmm
samara morgan
@plutosdad: Hertitage and the Kochs are TRYING to buy Cato. julian sanchez says he’s quitting if they succeed.
patrick II
@Brachiator:
They made a movie about John, Joe, and Lindsey?
Villago Delenda Est
@R Johnston:
Well, this is in fact true, if they are Tom Hanks marooned on a small South Pacific island with only a volleyball around to put a harsh on the mellow.
samara morgan
@lee:
no kangaroo slap fight FOR YOU!
lol
Omnes Omnibus
@Tonal Crow: This. The ACLU has been fighting the good fight for a long time.
samara morgan
can’t Anne Laurie fight her own battles?
she has to have Firebagger Freddie fight for her?
Protip, freddie, AL….Cato is trying to fight off a takeover attempt by the Kochs and the GOP.
one of these things is not like the other.
samara morgan
hmm….what does Balko’s Lament remind me of….ah yessss
from l’hote.
did you say that freddie?
now who does that sound like……hmmmmm
kay
So I followed his link to see what CATO had to say about the ‘inequalities of juvenile justice” because I’m interested in that, and the CATO author ends his piece by mentioning the 2005 SCOTUS decision outlawing the death penalty for juveniles.
I mean, I agree, big win, but it was 5/4.
Liberals did that.
That’s the decision where Scalia was ranting about “alien law” because the majority quoted furriners.
So I’m still not getting what libertarians have achieved for juvenile justice, besides writing essays about liberal SCOTUS decisions.
Arguably, a person did quite a bit for juvenile justice simply by voting for Bill Clinton, if that decision is the big win.
John Cole
I think my favorite thing about Radley randomly losing his shit about this website is that the overwhelming majority of the time I mention Radley is when I am praising his work, like I did just the other day:
I’ll just keep linking him when I think he is right and watching him explode into a frothing rage about our hive-mind here. We aren’t the ones coming off looking like idiots.
Skipjack
@John Cole:
I think what drives Balko up the wall about Balloon Juice is how you might praise what he says then turn around and reject his audience. It’s not fair.
samara morgan
@John Cole: @Skipjack: why that is what drove de Bore up the wall before Cole made him a front pager too!
why don’t you offer Balko a front page slot? he’s a much better writer than freddie.
lee
@John Cole: I’ve read Radley for years (probably close to a decade by now). He has even attributed some of my stuff on his posts. I ran a third party MB for his site for awhile when he shut down comments because of all the trolls.
I’m not sure why he loses his shit about BJ. I have a sneaking suspicion that a post slightly critical of him hit a little too close to home.
I understand why he defends Cato as that was (I believe) his first job out of college.
Mark S.
Christ, that’s a lot of horseshit right there.
I’m sure it will be as sycophantic as everything Balko writes about the Kochs.
John Cole
@samara morgan: Why don’t you start your own blog? Or at the very least, stop reading this one if it bothers you so much. Or at least stfu and stop derailing every comment thread in posts by authors you don’t like.
I swear to god, half of you all need to be in lithium.
James Hare
@John Cole: Why oh why won’t you make your blog exactly the way I want? Dammit, I don’t want to have to go the trouble of attracting readers based on my own talent!
John Cole
@Zifnab:
This is the kind of stupid shit that drives me crazy. Did you look into Radley’s eyes and observe his soul? This kind of comment is as dumb as the people claiming Obama passed Obamacare because he wants the government to control you or that Obama is just playing a long game so he can really unleash his reign of terror in the second term.
You don’t like his pieces on issues other than police violence? Fine, critique them. But this guessing of people’s true motives drives me nuts.
Balko writes about police violence and police misconduct because he cares deeply about the issue. Period.
Tonal Crow
@kay:
Not to sound like
a broken recordlike I’m re-tweeting myself, but those dangerous radicals at the A.C.L.U. submitted a strong amicus brief in this case. I’m pretty sure Cato did not. Hmm.lee
@John Cole:
Not sure what is up but it looks like Radley took down his post.
It could also be that his site crashed and reverted back to its last saved state.
Mark S.
@John Cole:
Radley:
trollhattan
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Please tell me I have a waitress, not a waiter.
lee
Never mind. My browser must have used a cached version. It is still there.
kay
@Tonal Crow:
Well, and not to be a pain in the ass about it, but conservatives did it again on LWOP for juveniles, 5/4 again, 2010, so I’ll have to see something else on CATO/ juvenile justice.
So far, just voting for Clinton and Obama may be the best route for juvenile justice, CATO or no CATO.
Maybe their hearts are in the right place, but we may need a little more than that :)
b-psycho
@Citizen Alan:
For the most part, yes.
Sure. What I don’t get is how redistributive policy leads to this goal. Making being poor marginally less difficult economically is one thing, the political status gap is still there.
BTW: when it comes to welfare, I’m far more concerned about the massive corporate kind than the table scraps we may get. Get rid of the stream going upward and maybe there’d be less need for it the other way. Simply because I’m disagreeing with Freddie on this one point does not make me a minion of the Kochtopus.
Mark S.
Thank God for Cato. Before that, black people had no idea that cops were beating the shit out of them.
Suffern ACE
@Mark S.: Oh please. I like the “mainstream” qualifier. Like he’s the first to notice that police have uniforms and ranks and no one noticed how much alike the two forces were becoming until Waco.
Mark S.
@kay:
I remember in one of Radley’s other epic hissy fits about Balloon Juice, he said there wasn’t any difference between Dems and Reps, and we were all being really naive in thinking there were.
R Johnston
Almost certainly true.
However it’s just as almost certainly true that the economic and social policies advocated by Balko make the problem of police violence significantly worse, and it’s absolutely true that people in power listen to people like Balko only about those economic and social issues, not civil libertarian issues.
Balko just isn’t that smart. That’s also why he gets so upset in cases like this. He wants to be seen as smart, not as some guy who’s useful for pointing out and publicizing police misconduct but who can’t analyze his way out of a paper bag. He wants to be seen as a problem solver, not just a problem spotter, so any time he’s reminded that he’s the latter and not the former he gets really pissy.
TenguPhule
And naturally will have a place in line on the wall right after the worst of the scum ahead of them are disposed of.
Cacti
Here’s yet another beef I have with glibertarian wankers.
They rhapsodize about state and local government with a hand down their pants, and yet…who the hell do they think is brutalizing people at the street level?
Hint: it ain’t the feds.
The Sailor
Major fail. Progressives have cared about this issue since we founded the Constitution.
Major Fail has been demoted to Minor Fail, with loss of of all benefits, and possible jail time. The Article 32 hearing may impose a life sentence. We’re still discussing whether just being that ignorant is a blessing or a curse.
The Moar You Know
And that is all that really needs to be said. Radley can say anything he wants, nothing will change this fact.
the fugitive uterus
good lord, who is this smug, self-important little prick? i just read his profile page. it’s hard to get past that point.
it makes a me a little depressed to think i would have to go back and try to read more of that pile of tedious horseshit.
The Sailor
“Balko writes about police violence and police misconduct because he cares deeply about the issue.”
Libertoonians only care about what has happened to them. Did Radley Balko get mugged by cops?
samara morgan
@John Cole: so ban me again you fucker. you know you want to. i screwed up your glibertarian bromance with Kain and killed his new blog and I’m gonna do the same thing with Firebagger Freddie if you don’t stop me.
how can you frontpage someone that spews shit like this?
i kno ABL called you on it too.
;)
samara morgan
and lissen cudlips.
Cato is fighting for the last scraps of autonomy it has.
the Koch bros are trying to stack the board with WECs like Rod Dreher.
Poor old julian sanchez has said he’s quittin’ if that happens.
and he’s my favorite writer there.
Firebagger Freddie is just trying to leverage off Coles blog and start a kangaroo slap fight with Balko.
sukkahs!
samara morgan
@the fugitive uterus:
you mean Firebagger Freddie?
samara morgan
@James Hare: i just don’t think Balloon Juice needs a firebagger on the front page.
but if there HAS TO be one, why not get GG?
At least he can write.
Jewish Steel
@samara morgan:
Really? How?
b-psycho
“cudlips” doesn’t appear to be a word.
samara morgan
@John Cole: I’m working to get Obama re-elected.
firebagger freddie offends me.
So heres a deal Cole.
kick freddie off the masthead and revoke his privs and I’m outa here.
the fugitive uterus
again, who’s liberty are we talking about exactly? liberty to do what and to whom?
Suffern ACE
@The Sailor: That’s not true. He was once harassed by the PC thought police. He’s the first person to be concerned about police militarization who managed to break free of the PC thought police prison.
Mark S.
Oh man, Cole, whatever you do, DON’T GET RID OF FREDDIE!
Just Some Fuckhead
I like the commenter that made the point that this whole sordid ordeal is glibertarianism in action. Teachable moment for the win.
You should make him a frontpager.
FWIW, I could kick Balko’s ass.
Just Some Fuckhead
But he is right about the community here: simply awful.
BethanyAnne
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: OK, that’s damn beautiful. You win the internets for the day.
Jewish Steel
@samara morgan: Srsly, dude. I gotta know. How do you kill a blog? I’ve got two or three marked for death right now.
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I had the same thought.
ed
The whiners at Reason’s H&R say you guys are like the worst blog-commentators ever. Discuss.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Jewish Steel:
She hugs them to death.
Efroh
@samara morgan: Balko’s really not a better writer than Freddie, sorry. I do read and enjoy Balko’s work re the police state we’re living in though.
samara morgan
@Jewish Steel: Kain’s new blog died on the second.
it was simple. i cut off his blog-oxygen.
every time he said something stupid here i cc’d it to sully.
;)
Jewish Steel
@Just Some Fuckhead: Ha!
@samara morgan: Awesome. You are going DOWN 1912 Craftsman Bungalow!
The prophet Nostradumbass
@ed: Who cares what they say?
BethanyAnne
@samara morgan: Isn’t it obvious? Cole’s doing it to troll you.
lee
John not sure if you are paying attenting but if I understand correctly, if Freddie makes another post samara morgan is going to leave.
Seems like an easy solution to your problem. How quick can Freddie knock something out?
lee
OT:
Your modern Catholic Church in action.
Man charged with blasphemy for pointing out the science of a miracle
Just Some Fuckhead
@lee:
Since he started here, he’s averaged about one post every two months.
R Johnston
That’s not worth much. If you let my pet rock kick you in the gonads I’ll relieve you of the burden of kicking Balko’s ass, but I wouldn’t pay more than that. Balko’s just some schmoe who’s wrong on the internet. They’re worth a dime a dozen only if you’re filthy rich.
lee
@samara morgan:
Didn’t Erik get picked up by some large site around then?
Are you sure you killed his blog and not got him promoted?
LOL
wetcasements
My god Libertarians are fucking infantile and annoying.
dollared
@Joey Maloney: Dude. You have made my entire day. Along with El Duque de
Alburquerque providing the perfect summary.
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
samara morgan
@lee: no. last year he went to Forbes to be their “education blogger”. He’s not. He’s their Game Boi. He still posts at the League of Incredibly Boring Glibertarians too.
this year he quit his day job to go full time blogger, and started this blog.
American Times — Because the inmates have taken over the asylum.
its been dead for over a month.
samara morgan
@lee: Freddies blog was dying too. Sully cut off the linkage after freddies last slap fight with the Sully-borg.
But Cole put L’hote on life-support by letting Firebagger Freddie post here for some reason.
Praps Cole secretly hates Obama too.
samara morgan
@Jewish Steel: i killed TAS too….according to Reihan.
;)
praps i can do the same for BJ.
who can say.
;)
Just Some Fuckhead
@samara morgan: You should change yer nym to Bloghis Khan.
stratplayer
The whole problem here is that civil liberties and universal democratic suffrage empower the poor and propertyless, which puts those liberties in direct conflict with the economic liberties of the wealthy and propertied, over which econo-libertarians endlessly obsess. As Michael Lind so ably pointed out last year, the economic libertarianism of the right is ultimately incompatible with democracy and much more at home with thuggish autocracies such as Pinochet’s Chile or Batista’s Cuba. The remarkable phenomenon of “libertarian monarchism” nicely illustrates the problem. People like Balko are in pathetic denial about the reality of right-libertarianism.
Pete
“One of the best, most certain ways to help those who are frequently the subject of police misconduct is to remove them from the poverty and political dispossession that makes police misconduct against them possible.”
You totally lost me here. Well, to be honest, I’m a frequent reader of The Agitator and a huge fan of Balko’s tireless efforts to expose police militarization and abuse, so you sort of already lost me, but this was just the cherry.
You don’t think “one of the best, most certain ways to help those who are frequently the subject of police misconduct” would be to REIGN IN THE POLICE?
No, apparently the police hate poor people (a premise I do not fundamentally disagree with) so the best way to fix that is give everyone money.
That’s ridiculous. How about trimming the power of police unions to shield officers from repercussions from blatant misconduct? How about trimming the power of prosecutors to throw five hundred charges at the wall to see what sticks? How about requiring more transparency from police departments about just about everything they do?
And that said, I think you folks need a primer on the different flavors of Libertarians (vs libertarians) and how the sort you despise are probably actually in the minority.
I’m the sort that hates protectionist legislation designed to shield existing businesses from competition from newcomers. Pick a large city within 100 miles of where you live and try to open a pretend one-man taxi company, or look into the laws on opening a funeral home and the sale of funeral accessories like caskets. You’ll find that most of the regulations that are touted as ‘serving the public and protecting the consumer’ actually just protect the industry heavy-hitters.
I also believe that it’s ridiculous that we have rampant poverty and horrible education here at home yet we’ll spend trillions on wars both vague and specific that really do nothing other than… consume trillions.
Personally? I consider myself libertarian, but I’m not against social programs that provide a safety net, while I’m very much against pork, protectionist and cronyist legislation, and the military-industrial marriage, all of which are looting this country dry. These are legislative agendas that are just as likely to come from Democratic candidates as conservatives, by the way.
One last thing – “Allow me to introduce you to my friend, the Internet. The Internet is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Asking the Internet to play fair and nice is to demonstrate that you don’t understand the Internet.”
You realize you more or less admitted that what happened here wasn’t “fair and nice”, right? Ok. Just so we’re clear.
Obsidian
Balko and the Cato institute claim to be concerned about police brutality and want to end the Drug War. And yet, they want increased power to the very corporations who make the Drug War possible and benefit from it (private prisons that make money from sticking people in jail, banks that benefit from asset forfeiture laws they themselves support, and so forth).
And that ‘War on Drugs’ is responsible for the increasing militarization of America’s police forces, and with it the corruption and abuse by those same police. The lack of regulations and oversight they support enables the very things they oppose. Ironic, no?
Thus is the flaw of libertarianism. Two things they believe in are diametrically opposed to each other. Unfortunately, Balko and Cato are not self-aware or logical enough to realize that.
Another Halocene Human
@Tonal Crow: Amen, amen, amen.
I felt like I was in bizArR0 world for a moment there, libertarians very seriously chiding me about how little I care about police overreach while my brain is whispering “Innocence project? Who funds/works for/volunteers for that? Liberal me and liberal NE college grads and basically not Cato at all.”
I didn’t even think about ACLU but yeah, at least in Florida, big overlap there with Florida AFL-CIO, FEA (teacher’s union), and other “radical” pro-working-family groups, at least going by who crossposts what on FB, nooooooot so much marching with the Tea Party.
180 degrees between going out there in the trenches (and being ridiculed, undermined, and attacked by libertarian frat boy wannabes) and ragging on the internets about the police state and your precious liberties.
Another Halocene Human
@Pete: Non-unionized police have such a shining, human-rights-respecting record historically.
What we could do is impose a bigger measure of democracy on unions to make them more accountable to their members. After all, some states have closed shops, so it’s only fair to make the leadership accountable to their rank and file. The problem is that more accountable unions would put a halt to our union-busting rat-f*cking projects.
Hence Jimmy Hoffa Jr being appointed head of the Teamsters by the US government. And so on.