I guess these are the same judges who preside over mass-shooting cases???
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Country attempts to organise society according to documents written 300 years ago. Chaos ensues.
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Yep - Defunding the Police is a really good idea.
“Crime has skyrocketed. Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country. Preliminary Federal Bureau of Investigation data show that the U.S. murder rate increased by 25% in 2020. Between Dec. 11, 2020, and March 28, 2021 (after the Minneapolis City Council unanimously approved a budget that shifted $8 million from the police department to other programs), murders in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, rose 46% compared with the same period the year before.”
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There’s a lot of hyperbole on both sides. ‘Defund the Police’ is a useless, meaningless and unhelpful slogan. However, it’s clear that policing in the US needs massive reform. There needs to be much better training, more police on foot patrol in neighbourhoods, less expenditure on quasi military hardware and a recognition of the police’s role as public servants, there to serve all elements of society. Vested interests have prevented any meaningful reform and that is unlikely to change. It’s 20 years since ‘The Wire’ and no visible progress has been made.
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Agree entirely, but as the old saying goes - “you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater” and that seems to be exactly what they did in Minneapolis.
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So, a summit between Biden and Putin takes place next week in Geneva. For this occasion, they gather in a city park near to the lake, and in order to get there, they need to cross the whole city center from the airport. Thus, the whole center will be shut down completely. No people allowed in the streets. Thousands and thousands of body guards, armed police and military high-tech protection everywhere.
All this just to allow two half-morons to speak with each other, with probably zero tangible result at the end of it. In the midst of a city, ffs. They could have chosen a quiet place outside somewhere, or at least within the palace of the UNO, but no, they need to disturb an entire city to go on with their shit-show. 
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A trend is indistinguishable from that across the country including cities that maintained or increased funding. The amount of funding has essentially, within practical limits, zero effect on crime, which is actually an argument in favour of the sorts of reforms the defund movement, and those ideologically if not rhetorically aligned with them, are making - if more money doesnt improve things, how do we spend our money better.
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Tbh most countries are dodgy about their history, look at the UK, France, China, Japan etc etc. The problem in the US is the way that so much of its identity is tied up with events in the late eighteenth century. The deification of the ‘Founding Fathers’ and veneration of their deeds is stultifying 250 years later. Coming to terms with past crimes and atrocities is painful for all nations, and most of them avoid it. For the US, a nation built on stolen land through the exploitation of stolen people, this process is excruciating, but at least there is some attempt to face up to what happened.
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that’s the problem with this ‘democracy’ thing - everyone wants to vote
Nit picky point here, but I think it underscores the confusion over what the filibuster actually is - this bill did not get voted down, it failed to even go far enough to even get to a vote. All legislation only needs a majority of votes to pass when voted on. The issue is that the way the filibuster is currently used, it requires 60 votes to allow an issue being debated to go to a vote. This is not an issue of the constitution or the framers’ view of how to run government, it is merely an issue of procedural rules the senate writes for itself. On this specific issue it has changed considerably over time, and drastically so in the last generation. It is now something that is anathema to what the framers’ actually conceived of for the senate.
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He was comedy gold though. Hair dye, Four Seasons etc
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I don’t even truly understand what Critical Race Theory is, but police training seems to need some of its apsects.
But, putting CRT into police training, and probably Republicans will start supporting Defund the Police all of a sudden.
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It’s a decades old approach for examining the intersection between race and the legal system that is taught almost exclusively in law schools, and even then typically only in programs that have a civil rights focus. It is related but distinct from more actionable ideas like anti-bias training. It is also completely distinct from ideas like the need to update school history curricula to remove the Disney like whitewashing of American history that most school teach.
Basically the current fuss is a way for the American right to combine resistance to being honest about history with their love for demonizing universities as institutions that exist solely to indoctrinate an intolerance to conservatism into students.
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Critical race theory is also big in sociology; IR and psychology. To be honest all social science disciplines have engaged with it and its core arguments have been swallowed whole. There is debate around the edges but it is fast becoming a very mainstream (IE boring) part of academia. Of course the RWNJ have just discovered it.
Surely it’s something that requires thought so goes against everything RWNJ stands for. 
So the prick that is Donald Rumsfeld is dead …
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Ffs!
It was the known unknown that got him in the end!
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