A graph indicating mass killings in public spaces since 1982. The size of the circle indicates the number of people murdered. The color indicates the location. The red line indicates when the federal assault weapons ban ended.
Means, motive and opportunity. All three matter. Making it more difficult to obtain the means will make it more challenging to commit impulsive acts of mass murder.
Rep. Raskin’s statement strikes the appropriate balance between self-defense and consideration for the lives of by-standers:
“Israel has the indisputable right under international law to engage in military self-defense against this explosion of mass terrorist violence. It may act to stop and repel the violence, completely secure its borders and people, and disarm and neutralize Hamas…
A just war undertaken in self-defense must be prosecuted justly, according to international and humanitarian law, the central purpose of which is the protection of civilian life from military violence…
The ultimate legitimacy of even the most just war depends not only on the original righteousness of its cause but on the legality of its prosecution and the military’s attention to the rights and lives of innocent civilians. The defense of innocent civilians on all sides is not an obstructive legal doctrine or battlefield annoyance but the entire purpose of a just war against an enemy that has set itself against humanity. Contempt for civilian life is the hallmark of terrorist regimes and actors, not liberal democracies.
David Von Drehle, A memorial restores humanity to the 146 ghosts of the Triangle Fire:
The Triangle Fire Memorial, a project years in the making, will be dedicated on Wednesday at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street near Washington Square in the heart of Manhattan.
The 146 fire victims — most of them immigrant women from Italy and Eastern Europe — will be restored as actual names of actual people, at the very spot where they passed into history. Their names are cut into the flowing steel of the monument, which… will stretch like ribbon to ninth-floor windows, then tumble back toward street level, where it will spread its arms to embrace the building where history happened. Light shining through the incised names will reflect on a polished surface, where they will appear as if glowing.
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
-W.H. Auden
COVID: Zero stars. Not recommended.
Foreign policy and politics: Read Dan Drezner’s Substack. Read Heather Cox Richardson’s on domestic politics.
Dan Drezner, America Has Changed Since “NYPD Blue” Aired:
In today’s more polarized environment, I don’t know if a mainstream audience can buy a character who starts out bigoted and ends up being a more constructive member of society. For progressives, the initial racism would be too much; for conservatives, it would be viewed as woke culture run amok. Which is a shame — because the United States could use more characters like Andy Sipowicz. The country is littered with flawed human beings trying to be better. However the show has aged, NYPD Blue understood that compelling point.
Andrew Spencer, Hope for a Humane Agricultural Future: A Review of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future:
Once someone accepts the significant human contribution to climate change, there are two possible options. The first option is to assume that things are too far gone so that exercising restraint is pointless. Based on this defeatist thinking we should either ride out the coming storm, hoping for the best, or accept that human extinction would be the best thing for the planet. The second option for those who recognize that the current form of human civilization is damaging the environment is to do something about it. What that something should be, however, is the subject of fierce debate.
One of my favorite local bands from back in the day.
“Rejecting identity politics doesn’t mean rejecting your own distinct culture. It means that cultural and racial differences shouldn’t be organizing principles.”
– Razib Khan
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed—that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence they hold that labor is the superior—greatly the superior of capital.
-Abraham Lincoln