Don't celebrate too much that Wisconsin has renegotiated that almost-$5 billion corporate welfare scheme with Foxconn and thus saved that state from pissing away more than half that money, for as Greg LeRoy at Good Jobs First reminds us, the close-to-a-billion dollars that the Village of Mt. Pleasant and Racine County put up just to accommodate Foxconn's empty shell of a manufacturing complex ain't never coming back. And let's not praise Gov. Evers too much for mitigating that harm, either -- with approximately zero good Wisconsinites favoring corporate welfare über alles, I think he should have done better.
Another day, another "anti-riot" bill designed to stifle actual free speech becomes law. We shame them for their violence and then they say 25 of us in the street are a "riot"! Here's the thing: blocking a street with a protest isn't actually "violent," it's just inconvenient, and our Constitution doesn't actually guarantee convenience. If it did, I dare say we'd never grow as people.
The NYPD has apparently deployed a robot dog inside that city's public housing projects, a headless dog described as "creepy," "a fancy toy in search of an actual use case," and a "prop() from a bad Black Mirror episode," an entirely sympathetic sentiment even though there are actually no bad Black Mirror episodes. These robot dogs collect a boatload of private data, can tow an 18-wheeler, and costs $70,000, in a time when people go hungry and teachers have to buy school supplies. And of course they're nowhere near as charming as this futuristic dog.
Two men die test-driving the Autopilot feature in a Tesla Model S -- and these men are, as you know, not the first to die at the hands of a driverless car -- and I'm reminded that some folks love saying that people cause a lot more accidents than driverless cars do. The problem with that, of course, isn't just that you can make cars safer so people cause fewer accidents, but that you can bring a person to justice if you need to. Just try bringing a thing to justice for killing someone. Why, it's almost like that's the idea.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) argues that the supposed deadness of D.C. on Wednesday night (a deadness disputed by at least one commenter!) after the Derek Chauvin verdict means that "BLM is the strongest terrorist threat in our country." Yikes, you riot, they yell at you, you don't riot, they still yell at you. I'm beginning to think nothing will ever be good enough for people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Finally, I have a bit to say about the Chauvin verdict. I remember saying, a few years ago, that even though George Zimmerman got off for shooting Trayvon Martin, Mr. Zimmerman had become approximately the most hated man on Earth, and Black lives would be saved merely because more wannabe cops would think twice before becoming such a pariah. But if Derek Chauvin had gotten off, and become an accursed wanderer himself, I'd have accepted that far less -- not as much because it's cooler to be a racist asshole now as because Jesus Mary and Joseph we have to come farther than that in seven years. I guess I'm relieved that we did, in fact, come that far. But we still have far to go.
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