1991

Dexter should’ve ended with season one.

1992

I think we should move on.

What about the please clap moment Klobuchar had?

Not quite as bad, it got a laugh, but… That was supposed to get cheers.

1993

I just think she delivered that poorly. I will happily cheer the demise of Bachmann, but didn’t seem clear that was an applause point (it wasn’t clear to me that she was finished with her thought). I don’t like her, but it was a good recovery IMO.

1994

Regarding some of the discussions about Pete’s actions in blight removal in his city, PA’s engaging the same issues. It’s a tough thing to deal with, because if you don’t address it, then the decline continues and whatever equity the lower income people in that area have continues to disintegrate.

1995

Per blight removal - I would assume that the city or state owns these properties due to non payment of taxes? If so, then turn them over to the fire department for training purposes, burn them down & clean them up.

I admit this is a slow process -with hundreds of houses / buildings on many cities’ roles, there’s only so much fire department training you can do, but it would move the needle a bit in removing these.

1996

Eh… the problem is that these houses are in close proximity to houses where people actually live. Not sure I’d really want them starting a bunch of fires around my house.

1997

They do it all the time. Many people donate buildings to the fire department to get the city to pay for removal, then they can rebuild.

1998

Felonies and voting are fundamentally about fitness to vote, a conversation not easy to have and not one had today as most people associate criminal incarceration with unjust laws. But in the past it seemed self evident that people who committed serious crimes (felonies) lacked the judgement necessary to participate in the serious business of government.

From the point of view of justice many today feel like losing the right to vote is not a just consequence of committing a felony, since some people are no longer bothered by questions of fitness.

From a practical point of view (ie how do we stop the world from falling apart) we should probably be further reducing the franchise at this point rather than the other way around, such as making a college degree a requirement to vote, since the problem we’re facing today are so far beyond the ken of ordinary understanding and require making long term plans and complicated economic and political changes.

There’s also that bothersome fitness problem; if you go down that road, you open all sorts of worm-cans. What if a voting adult is less intelligent than a 5th grader; should they lose the right to vote, or should the smart 5th graders gain it? Ect.

Judging people’s fitness (or lack thereof) was self evidently true in the past since political theories assumed that peoples were unequal to various degrees, so there was no problem lumping people who did crimes into category “non-voter”. Now people assume a kind of radical equality that is taken as a fundamental given and is completely uninterested in the fitness question.

1999

They do? I mean, maybe I’m mis-reading, but this sentence implies that when people hear that someone is in jail, the first thing they think about is “Oh sad, another innocent person locked up because they did nothing wrong.”

I mean, on an analytical level, I think that part of many people’s brains on the Left do think about unjust possession sentences handed down in the past, but I’m still not sure we’re yet to the point where we can say that any sizable amount of the general population processes – on average, mind you, not specific cases – “Person serving jail time” as “unjust”. Perhaps as criminal justice reform becomes even more prominent as an issue, that will at some future point be the case.

2000

Is this really true? I’d be interested in a pointer to learn more about how this came about, and I’m skeptical it was through a rational process of considering the judgment of felons. If I were to make a wild guess, I’d say it was franchise denial for the ‘wrong’ people from the start.

2001

Yeah, I don’t think this is a viewpoint that is going to resonate with the vast majority of voters. You might appeal to some folks on the extreme left, but you’re definitely going to lose folks in the middle with suggestions that everyone incarcerated is actually innocent and shouldn’t have their rights infringed upon.

This is not a good position for the democrats to take, electorally.

2003

This is not meant in any way to slight your contribution, just to edumacate myself; in what kind of neighborhood do you live? In my neck of the woods, neighbors would be suing just for smoke damage at the drop of a hat. I wonder if your area simply has more space between homes.

2004

This is fine for someone who actually owns the property. Although, in a lot of cases we’re dealing with in blighted neighborhoods, essentially NO ONE owns that property.

But the problem comes when the fire department starts a fire on the property next to yours. This seems problematic to me.

Ultimately, there are easier ways to demolish abandoned buildings.

2005

I agree that this is not a good fight for us for 2020. There are enough bigger issues for us to wait and deal with that post election.

I think the arguments are (mostly) sound, but for this election being framed as the party in favor of criminals is probably not good optics.

2006

It’s really weird to see folks on left describe Pete as just “another white man”.

2007

It’s kinda nice, in a way, to see his homosexuality being such a non-issue, at least so far.

2008

I’m not sure why Bernie decided to highlight the issue of felony disenfranchisement. There’s little indication that it has broad support, even with Democrats, when considering the currently incarcerated. I’d like to see the rest of the field ignore the issue.

Time and media attention are limited resources. We need that time dedicated to healthcare, climate change, student debt, etc. Voting rights are also critical – but framing that debate around incarcerated terrorists seems a uniquely terrible way to build support.

2009

I didn’t see it, so I may be completely wrong, but it came up on the CNN town hall, so maybe it was a question that AC was asking multiple candidates that night.

2010

Good point, and I don’t remember. Maybe it came from one of the students (virtually all of the questioners were students).

I now think that Harris may have had the best instincts on this, despite how awkward and unsatisfying her non-answer was at the time. It’s just not a helpful issue. It may be a just one – but there’s a long line of more important wrongs to right first.

2011

I’d argue they do but not as being “innocent”, and there’s a big difference between innocent and unjust.

I think only hardcore conservatives would say that if you took a random person in the criminal justice system and looked at them in the round their conditions and treatment were “just”. Whether it was the length of sentence, the conditions of their incarceration, as well as the justice of being incarcerated for the crime they committed, so the majority of people probably disagree with the criminal justice system overall or on average as being completely just. This doesn’t mean they’re innocent though and I point out here that in other contexts liberals sometimes forget the distinction when making points in other debates or contexts about criminal justice and it’s unequal application.

The fundamental premise of states restoring voting rights to felons is that, basically, most of them did not in practice commit a felony even if they did so by law. A felony is a blot, a mark against that person, a stigma that says what they did can not be entirely forgotten or forgiven. That we have schizophrenic relationships with different classes of felons - a felony drug possession might result in a shrug in New Hampshire, while a felony child sex offender might be pushed into homeless under a bridge in Florida - shows a pretty profound disagreement that the existing categories do not reflect society’s values overall.