Anne Barnard, the New York Times Beirut bureau chief, writes:

The world seems awash in chaos and uncertainty, perhaps more so than at any point since the end of the Cold War.

Authoritarian-leaning leaders are on the rise, and liberal democracy itself seems under siege. The post-World War II order is fraying as fighting spills across borders and international institutions – built, at least in theory, to act as brakes on wanton slaughter – fail to provide solutions. Populist movements on both sides of the Atlantic are not just riding anti-establishment anger, but stoking fears of a religious “other”, this time Muslims.

These challenges have been crystallized, propelled and intensified by a conflagration once dismissed in the West as peripheral, to be filed, perhaps, under “Muslims killing Muslims”: the war in Syria.

The war in Syria, and what the United States should do about it, is one of those issues where I’m not in strong disagreement with one side or the other so much as I’m bothered by anyone who think there’s an easy answer to it. The conflict has split the country into a multi-sided civil war with various extremist factions, created millions of refugees, and is blazing a path of destabilization through Turkey and up into Europe. Russia, Turkey, Israel, Iran, and the United States have all been involved militarily, each with their own disparate set of proxies and objectives. None of this will be fixed easily, or soon.

I’d wavered a lot on what should’ve been done back from 2011 to 2013 as initially peaceful protests led to a genocidal backlash from the Assad regime. Initially, I thought Obama made the right decision to hold back from a large scale effort to stop the bloodshed. But the years since have given me some pause. As Assad’s position has strengthened, the opposition has become more radicalized and violent in return, and millions of moderate civilians who were hopeful of American intervention, or were even willing to take up arms to protect their communities, have fled. The United States has intervened in small ways, mostly to fight an emboldened ISIS, but has held back from anything that could seriously threaten the regime. And to add insult to injury, we’ve now elected a President who’s trying to keep any of these refugees from re-settling here.

In Libya, we chose to go all-in on restraining Gaddafi, and this intervention led to his removal. And while Libya has it’s problems today, it’s nowhere near the catastrophe that Syria has become. Would Libya look a lot more like Syria if Gaddafi were still there commanding his army to massacre civilians? Would Aleppo still have become an apocalyptic hellscape had Obama intervened and been able to spark Assad’s removal?

Writing in the Atlantic, Shadi Hamid sees our lack of greater involvement in Syria as a profound failure and explains:

The alternative to a proactive and internationalist U.S. policy is to “do no harm,” and this might seem a safe fallback position: Foreign countries and cultures are too complicated to understand, so instead of trying to understand them, let’s at least not make the situation worse. The idea that the U.S. can “do no harm,” however, depends on the fiction that the most powerful nation in the world can ever be truly “neutral” in foreign conflicts, not just when it acts, but also when it doesn’t. Neutrality, or silence, is often complicity, something that was once the moral, urgent claim of the Left. The fiction of neutrality is growing more dangerous, as we enter a period of resurgent authoritarianism, anti-refugee incitement, and routine mass killing.

This logic has always resonated with me and keeps me from being reflexively anti-interventionist. This rationale was central to why I thought it made sense to intervene in Libya, despite all the potential downstream risk. And since then, I’ve seen this difficult balancing act presented in a very different context, but with a oddly similar dynamic – in Jill Leovy’s book Ghettoside.

In Ghettoside, Leovy discusses the history of homicide in the black communities in Los Angeles. That history involved mass migrations of African-Americans from the deep south of Louisiana and Mississippi to communities in the South Central part of Los Angeles. These transplanted communities were used to an environment in the deep south where the justice system would often be massively punitive against relatively minor crimes that affected the larger white majority, but barely responsive to crimes where members of their own community were the victims. In an environment like this, the police were viewed with suspicion and the vacuum created by this mistrust encouraged people to take the law into their own hands. It’s a more nuanced understanding of the roots of black-on-black crime, which Leovy summarizes and defends here:

This is not an easy argument to make in these times. Many critics today complain that the criminal justice system is heavy-handed and unfair to minorities. We hear a great deal about capital punishment, excessively punitive drug laws, supposed misuse of eyewitness evidence, troublingly high levels of black male incarceration, and so forth.

So to assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception. But the perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of a coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter. Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.

Leovy’s book is a masterpiece that dives into the lives of LAPD officers who’ve dedicated their careers to upending this perception and providing real justice to members of the “Ghettoside” communities of South LA. The lack of trust they encounter is deeply entrenched and impossible to understand without this historical view. It’s the heart of why attacking the Black Lives Matter movement over black-on-black crime is historically tone-deaf. Black-on-black crime has always been a direct result of institutional neglect when it comes to providing justice in black communities.

In America today, there’s little question about whether our law enforcement institutions have a responsibility to deal with crime in the black community. For many years, it wasn’t always a priority, and in many parts of America, that responsibility is still not being met. But if there’s a vacuum in local enforcement, or even outright malice, we’ll see calls for America’s federal law enforcement agencies to step in and fix it (notwithstanding the potential rollback of the DOJ’s efforts under Sessions). Outside of America’s borders, however, there’s no broad expectation for this, and while this seems perfectly rational, the downstream effects of those who experience the dichotomy in our military priorities are clearly being pushed in a direction of greater mistrust and radicalization.

Going back to Barnard’s NYT piece, she explains what this means in that region with respect to Islamist terror and state-driven violence:

In my decade of covering violence against civilians in the Middle East, mass murder by states has often seemed less gripping to Western audiences than far smaller numbers of theatrically staged killings – horrific as they are – by the Islamic State and its Qaeda predecessors.

It is hard to escape the sense that Western fears of Islamist terrorism have grown so intense that many are willing to tolerate any number of deaths of Arab or Muslim civilians, and any abuses of state power, in the name of fighting it.

The United States’ own “war on terror” played a part in making violations of humanitarian and legal norms routine: detentions at Guantanamo Bay, the torture at Abu Ghraib and the continuing drone and air wars with mounting civilian tolls in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere.

Making the argument that we need to be more involved in humanitarian efforts in the Middle East is nearly impossible right now. Intense political pressure against intervening in Syria influenced Obama’s decision to hold back. Both legally and politically, it’s easier to fight groups like ISIS (who openly threaten the west) than to fight a murderous dictator like Assad who’s only killing his own citizenry. But to those in Syria, Assad is the far larger threat. And this will continue to play into the impression Barnard writes about.

Terrorist groups like ISIS have come about for a number of reasons, but what sustains them is a pervasive feeling of powerlessness. Nothing fuels this pervasive feeling of powerlessness more than having to wage an asymmetrical war against an immovable and violent oppressor. It’s hard to really overstate how damaging our invasion of Iraq was in this respect. ISIS was born in that environment, but Assad’s onslaught gave it new life. Fighting ISIS without dealing with Assad is merely treating a symptom of the problem, rather than dealing with the root cause. And if you don’t deal with the root cause (the overbearing feeling of powerlessness that drives young men and women to radicalism), you never win that battle. This is why we’ve spent 16 years in Afghanistan continually driving back the Taliban and watching them come back months later stronger than ever. Once you become the oppressor, and the root cause of the powerlessness that drives the radicalization, you can no longer defeat it directly, you can only exacerbate that dynamic and make it worse.

Coming back to the question of what we should do in Syria, and the uncomfortable conclusion is that we should do more, and many people expect us to do more, but for many reasons, we can’t. We already lost the kind of trust we’d need in that region to really make transformative democratic reforms. And I find it extremely unrealistic that we’d ever be able to intervene in Syria in a way that puts the interests of the Syrians ahead of even the short-term political interests of our leaders. Even if Obama had aggressively implemented a no-fly zone and gave the opposition to the breathing room to overthrow the regime, there’s little doubt ISIS and other extremist groups would’ve celebrated his ouster and played a larger role in whatever came next. Even if this is a better outcome for Syria long term (and I’d argue it would be), it would be bad for us in the short term, and devastating politically.

All of this takes place in the shadow of (and is in no small part being driven by) growing isolationist sentiment in the west. Intervening in other countries’ internal battles has become an even more toxic proposition. It’s just “Muslims killing Muslims” to the American public and not worth the lives of our young men in the military to get in the middle of. It has always felt inevitable to me that when events across the world can readily be seen in real time, we’ll get to a point where we feel compelled and empowered to fix the things we see, but for the time being, we’re actually moving farther away from it. Instead, we’re growing numb and turning away. And despite the huge role America has played in lighting the fires that rage in that region, we now feel forced to step back and watch it burn. We’re simply content – as we’ve long been with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other places – to allow our proxy strongmen do the dirty work for us, rather than sticking our necks out for the rights of those who don’t make headlines in western newspapers when they’re being slaughtered. It’s this dynamic that leads to that Ghettoside mentality hardening and thereby making it even more difficult to intervene in the future.

I initially started writing this post about 18 months ago, and just gave up. When I dive into an issue, I tend to be an optimist and want to believe that there are paths forward that would work to solve things. Maybe that’s the engineer in me coming out. But with this issue, and with the larger question of how to deal with what Assad has done and continues to do, I don’t have any optimism about anything. It’s easy in this environment to look at America’s tremendous military prowess and believe that it can solve things, but as we’ve seen over and over again, moving this region towards both peace and stability requires more than that. It requires a level of trust and respect on the ground that we currently have no way to achieve. This is especially true now that we have a President who’s woefully unfit for the job and with a rudderless foreign policy apparatus. If there’s any reason to be optimistic about any approach, I don’t see it. And I say that fully knowing that not doing anything has it’s drawbacks. It does, but it’s still very likely the least damaging approach.

After the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis, the Trump Administration was finally prodded to make a public statement about rising anti-Semitism. Last month, they said next to nothing about a mosque shooting in Canada that killed six people. And this week, while the whole clown brigade has been talking about Sweden for who-knows-what fucking reason, they’ve barely said a thing about the shooting of two Indian-born engineers in Kansas, which has rattled one of our strongest allies. Trump, and a lot of the people he’s surrounded himself with, have taken the white ‘Christian’ persecution complex to a new level, to where it’s difficult for them even to acknowledge that other groups can be victims as well. This isn’t a white-supremacy worldview as much as an extreme white-victimhood one.

And while it’s not as if those two worldviews are separated by a wide gap, the distinction did play out at CPAC, where unabashed white supremacist Richard Spencer was shown the door while Wayne LaPierre ranted about ‘violent liberals‘ and attendees scooped up books warning of the dire threats of Islam and immigration. This is Trump conservatism, a belief that whites are under siege at home by an oppressive multiculturalism, while America is getting ripped off by a world that has swindled us into a myriad of unfair alliances and obligations. It’s a self-serving fantasyland that requires constant bullshit to fertilize the faithful.

One of those faithful, finding himself on the front lines of this dangerous war while watching basketball at a Kansas bar, shot and killed an Indian-born engineer and wounded his friend and another guy who tried to intervene. Somehow, this man with 51 years of life experiences behind him believed the men were ‘Middle Eastern’ and therefore acceptable to kill. He then drove about an hour or so into rural southwest Missouri and confessed to a bartender. We still don’t know whether this ignoramus just sobered up enough on the drive to confess his heinous act or if he thought the bartender would give him a fucking medal. The bartender called the police.

The widow of the killed engineer spoke about whether or not Indian-Americans belong here. As someone who’s worked in high-tech jobs for nearly 25 years alongside dozens of brilliant, wonderful Indian-born professionals, I’m paralyzed with frustration to hear this. It’s impossible to imagine an immigration bloc less threatening and more beneficial than the pipeline of talented people who come here from top Indian universities to help build so much of the technology we use every day. Even back before the election, I spoke with state Rep Roger Goodman, who represents large numbers of Indian-Americans in the 45th district. He was already hearing some of this wariness as he knocked on doors last summer and fall. And this was when most people didn’t even think Trump would win. This question becomes much harder to answer when you have a President who isn’t even moved to speak out about a tragedy unless it fits within the narrative of white Americans being under siege.

What remains to be seen is how this mentality of the Trump administration will fully play out on the world stage. So much of diplomacy is about being able to convince your counterparts that you and they can find common ground and interests. This becomes impossible to do if it’s on full display that you’re convinced that the rest of the world is taking advantage of you and that you’re owed something for it. This is how you delude yourself into thinking that Mexico will not only accept a border wall, but also pay for it. After all, Mexico should recognize how much they’ve been taking advantage of the poor downtrodden USA, right? Outside of America’s right-wing media bubble and their fringe European fellow travellers, portraying America and western culture as the world’s most aggrieved victim is a remarkable absurdity and there’s no path forward for the Trump Administration to act on any of it without it blowing up in our faces.

“It lists Hitler as a fairly stable veteran of the Great War.” – Crow T. Robot

About a decade ago, I wrote a series of posts inspired by quotes from the legendary MST3K movie ‘Space Mutiny’. In the mid-00s, something about that terrible 80s movie, a rebellion on a spaceship being put down by a single muscle-bound hero, resonated with our relatively new “war on terror”. I wrote five posts about random topics – now banished to the internet memory hole – but there was supposed to be a sixth.

The post was meant to be the finale of the series – about Godwin’s Law and the mountains of shitty Hitler comparisons that passed for political discourse at the time. But it was also supposed to be about the realization that sometimes the comparison fits and we shouldn’t be afraid to make it. I never finished it…fuck that, I never really even started it. Trying to put parameters around when you can and can’t make a Hitler comparison quickly felt like an insane undertaking. And I’m a goddamn engineer, well aware that no one reads the shit I write anyway.

—

A recent article in Politico about Russia has introduced me to an interesting term – “reflexive control”. The idea behind reflexive control is that you can condition people to act a certain way if you repeatedly put them on the defensive about doing the opposite. The example cited in that article is about the post-Cold War era, and how years of Russians accusing the west of wanting to revive the Cold War has caused westerners to reflexively to rule out the possibility entirely, lest they prove the Russians were correct all along.

I’m not totally convinced this happens as a matter of manipulation, but instead as a matter of hardened principle. The same thing can be said for all kinds of military undertakings right now. Many Americans have become reflexively against any kind of heavy involvement in actual ground combat anywhere in the world. The puppeteers driving that reflex aren’t any set of nefarious people who gain from our pacifism, they’re the never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a belief that these regional conflicts aren’t worth the deaths of American lives. We have a similar reflex to any politician who declares a war on drugs. This reflex isn’t conditioned by advocates trying to keep us from fighting it, it’s from the grim awareness that it backfires with all sorts of unintended consequences.

There’s also some reflexive control that drives the way we regard Godwin’s Law, and the desire to point out parallels to a time when democracy collapsed. It’s seen as a form of intellectual laziness and hyperbole to draw parallels between 1930s Germany and today. But I think now more than ever, we need to look to that time to have better context over the present, to be able to draw both parallels and contrasts.

A lot of scholarly articles have pointed at that Donald Trump isn’t a Fascist. It’s true. Fascism is a movement with a very narrow definition that many scholars think *only* applies to the movements under Mussolini and Hitler. Even movements that seemed similar enough had subtle differences in culture and style that made it not quite fit the label. By that narrow definition, Trump and his rabid follows aren’t truly Fascist, but that’s not to say there aren’t some pretty strong parallels that matter.

Reading through Volker Ullrich’s biography of Hitler, one of the many things that jumps out is how clear Hitler was about what he believed, yet how difficult it was for people to accept that his base motivations were genuine and that he’d follow through. The nationalism that drove his movement was fueled by a growing belief that Jews and other outsiders were parasites weakening the state from the inside. Disastrous economic conditions in the 20s and 30s caused that sentiment to spiral out of control, but the base sentiment that sank German democracy and drove the world towards war was a broad sentiment that multiculturalism was a cancer making Germany weak.

Michiko Kakutani’s review of Ullrich’s biography called out a number of other striking parallels that the book makes clear – Hitler’s narcissism, his stunning dishonesty, and his ability to play to crowds and appeal to the basest instincts of his followers. Trump’s campaign was also eerily similar to early Nazi rhetoric around cultural decay and the hope for national rebirth. So was their open disdain of a so-called “liberal media”. But it’s the backlash against a multicultural, socially tolerant, America that’s the cornerstone of the entire movement and the parallel that should concern us the most.

A number of the people that Trump has pulled into his inner circle – from Bannon to Flynn to Sessions – have a long record of projecting pathological anxiety over America’s increasing diversity. And his campaign drew support from all sorts of dark corners of America’s network of hate groups. His blanket portrayals of Mexicans as criminals, black communities as dangerous hellscapes, and Muslims as an existential threat to the west might seem like clownish rhetoric. But these sentiments have broader appeal than we like to admit, and even worse, they were not seen as disqualifying by an even larger subset of voters. Just as too many people ignored Hitler’s anti-Semitism as a mere side-show, we can’t do the same with Trump and his clearly bigoted worldview. As we learned back then, the anti-Semitism wasn’t just a side-show, it ended up being the main fucking feature.

But beyond that, it’s obvious that Trump himself is no Hitler or Mussolini. They’re very different people who took very different paths to their political success. Hitler was a failed art student who was briefly homeless as a young man before signing up to fight with the German army in WWI. Mussolini was a staunch socialist before taking his ultra-nationalist turn. Trump was a man born into extreme wealth who had a long life of fame and comfort before finally getting into politics. That’s not to say that there’s no concern about what Trump will eventually do, but that it’d be foolish to expect everything over the next few years to play out in a similar fashion to what happened in Europe nearly a century ago. Other extreme nationalist movements over the years have failed miserably in other places, including the United States. America’s democratic institutions, our wealthy urban areas, our open technology, and our culture of strident individualism gives us a better set of tools for taking on this kind of threat.

—

The first full week of the Trump Administration has done nothing but reinforce all of this. They’ve signed an executive order to build a pointless wall along the Mexican border and threatened tariffs as a way to pay for it. Trump continues to insist without any evidence that vote tallies in areas with large numbers of minorities are illegitimate. They’re re-orienting the State Department to deal more with Islamic terrorism. He casually threatened on Twitter to send federal troops into Chicago to deal with homicides after being triggered by a Bill O’Reilly segment. They plan to publish a regular report of crimes committed by illegal immigrants, something the Nazi’s did with Jews in the 1930s. They continue to insist that the media is dishonest and untrustworthy, as they tell outlandish lies. And yesterday, Trump signed a ban on nationals from 7 predominantly Muslim countries entering the US, even those who’ve risked their lives for American troops. This should set off alarms for anyone with even a passing knowledge of history, not just of Fascism, but of any type of nationalist authoritarian rule.

The next few years are going to be rough, but America has defeated this shit before. MLK said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I picture it more as a slowly rising sine curve, and we’re on a downslope. A large segment of this country is willing to believe that up is down and black is white merely because they hear it from powerful people who share their deepest fears about our increasingly multicultural society. It’d be extremely naive to believe that there won’t be a lot of collateral damage from all this. There will be. The Trump Administration will go after the most marginalized first and dare us to speak up for them. This compels us to stand up and be counted, and stay firm in our affirmation of the American democratic values of pluralism and tolerance.

I was hoping to say more about the latest in Syria, but Halloween weekend won that battle. I just finished this book as well, so no way to pull my thoughts together with two kids jacked up on candy and stuck in the house because of the rain. Hope to pull it off for a later one.

Here’s what’s been happening the last two weeks…
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Ideologies tend to get caught in a pattern where whatever set of data points you conjure up, there’s always a way to tie it back to the underlying ideology. That was my thought after reading these two posts from Cato and NRO on Bernie Sanders and Denmark. In the posts, the authors point out that Denmark isn’t what you’d expect if you think of it as a socialist paradise. Sure, they have high taxes and a robust welfare system, but they’re freer than the U.S. when it comes to doing business, and they have roughly the same levels of overall economic freedom.

In this telling, the data is supposed to convey the point that Denmark’s high levels of economic freedom aren’t ideal for someone with a more socialist outlook. But the data is telling us something very different – that bigger government and high taxes don’t automatically lead to a less free environment for people to start and run businesses. There’s an underlying assumption that less economic freedom is somehow an actual goal of the left, rather than a consequence of poorly conceived policies. It would be similar to arguing that if more restaurants open in Seattle, the left should view the minimum rate hike as a failure (“Haha! It didn’t kill people’s economic freedom like you hoped it would, silly liberals!!”).

The main distinction that separates smarter libertarian thinking (which I do believe exists) from this nonsense is understanding that it’s silly to be concerned solely with the size of government instead of focusing on the specific types of powers we allow government to have. Government using taxpayer dollars to provide affordable health care, education, housing, or a high quality transportation system shouldn’t be seen as a threat to liberty in the same way as turning police into a standing army, funneling billions into a system of mass incarceration, or building up a gigantic infrastructure for public surveillance. All are “big government” in a way. The threat posed to our freedom – both economic and otherwise – by each of these things varies widely.

The success of Bernie Sanders’ campaign so far is a growing recognition that the relationship between big government and economic freedom is far more complex than the tired notion that higher taxes and a bigger government automatically leads to less freedom. Looking at someplace like Denmark is a confirmation of that.

News from the last two weeks:
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In Johann Hari’s great new book on drug addiction and the drug war, “Chasing the Scream”, he recounted a story about Switzerland’s first female president, Ruth Dreifuss:

The police officer who accompanied Ruth Dreifuss had tears in his eyes. He was taking the future president of Switzerland through an abandoned railway station in Zurich, down by the river. All the local drug addicts had been herded there, like infected cattle.

Ruth had been looking out over scenes like this for years now. A few years before, she had been to the park in Bern that played the same role there. There were girls being openly prostituted out and there were addicts staggering around, out of control, incoherent. There were people injecting themselves “in places you couldn’t imagine,” she says, because every other vein couldn’t be traced, as if it was trying to escape. Above the bustle, dealers were yelling their prices at the top of their voices. As she heard them, Ruth thought of Wall Street brokers, barking on the trading floor. The threat of violence hung over everything as dealers fought for customers.

Most Swiss people had never seen anything like this. The police were not just crying; they were afraid. This was Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s, but it was an affront to everything the Swiss thought about themselves.

That was 20 years ago, and since then, Dreifuss went on to spearhead one of the most successful drug policy experiments in the modern world.

Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton released a proposal to deal with America’s growing heroin problem. In an editorial in the New Hampshire Union Leader, she wrote:

ON MY first trip to New Hampshire this spring, a retired doctor spoke up. I had just announced I was running for President, and I had traveled to Iowa and New Hampshire to hear from voters about their concerns, their hopes and their vision for the future. He said his biggest worry was the rising tide of heroin addiction in the state, following a wave of prescription drug abuse.

To be candid, I didn’t expect what came next. In state after state, this issue came up again and again — from so many people, from all walks of life, in small towns and big cities.

In Iowa, from Davenport to Council Bluffs, people talked about meth and prescription drugs. In South Carolina, a lawyer spoke movingly about the holes in the community left by generations of African American men imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses, rather than getting the treatment they needed.

Writing at Vox, German Lopez finds a lot to like about Clinton’s proposal:

Clinton’s $10 billion Initiative to Combat America’s Deadly Epidemic of Drug and Alcohol Addiction is the most ambitious attempt of any presidential candidate to tackle America’s struggles with drug abuse. It’s an approach that public health and drug policy experts have demanded for years. But Clinton is the first candidate to dedicate such a large sum of money to the cause — and if approved by Congress, it could help combat what some public health officials and experts have called a drug overdose epidemic.

The big idea behind Clinton’s plan is to shift public policy on drug abuse and addiction from the criminal justice system to the health-care system. It would also help fill a big gap in health care: Nearly 90 percent of people who have a drug or alcohol abuse problem don’t get treatment, according to federal data.

The need to move away from our criminal justice approach to drug addiction has been urgent for awhile. On this point alone, Clinton deserves a lot of credit for getting with the times and rebuking the old approach. Her proposals for diverting addicts out of prison into treatment, to provide first responders with overdose prevention drugs, and to compel insurance companies to cover addiction treatment costs are all important and long overdue. Cracking down on doctors who prescribe opioids makes me a little nervous as this power has been greatly abused by prosecutors, but on the whole there’s more to like than dislike in this proposal.

Here in Seattle, for instance, the promising LEAD program is something that could ideally be expanded with this approach. LEAD’s four year experiment in Belltown diverting addicts to treatment instead of jail has been hugely successful at reducing subsequent arrests. But the funding for it isn’t a guarantee from year to year. Federal matching funds for this and similar programs around the country could reduce both local health care and criminal justice costs.

Funding those types of treatment programs would certainly be a great start, but there’s more we could do, and some of it is already being done elsewhere.

Up in Vancouver, the inSite safe injection facility is a place where addicts can safely use drugs without fear of arrest. Medical professionals are on hand to deal with medical emergencies and to counsel those trying to quit. The efficacy of this approach has been studied for years now, and the results are overwhelming. Allowing addicts to have safe place to use heroin has led to less crime and more addicts diverting into treatment. It has also lowered the rates of AIDS and Hepatitis cases and greatly reduced the amount of overdoses. It’s worked so well that despite pressure from an ideological Harper government, the Mayor of Montreal is willing to break the law to open one in his city.

Would Clinton’s proposal allow for a facility like inSite in the United States? The city of San Francisco tried to open one in 2007, but South Carolina Senator and noted federalist Jim DeMint used his position in the Senate to force the city to abandon its plans. It’s possible that even if Clinton became President and supported it, a Republican-led Congress would have the power and motivation to kill it once again.

But let’s go back to Switzerland, where they did something even more radical and progressive than that. Again from Hari’s book:

It had been discovered a few years before in Switzerland that there was a clause in Swiss law that allowed heroin to be given to citizens provided it was part of a scientific experiment. So far that had been done with only a tiny handful of people.

So Ruth said–Okay, we are going to have a really large experiment. We are going to make it much easier for any addict who wants it to get methadone, and for the people who can’t cope with that, we will prescribe them heroin. Switzerland has a political system built on consensus. No one official can drive a policy on her own. She needed to persuade her colleagues, and the cantons. So Ruth fought for it. This is an emergency, she explained, and in emergencies, you take dramatic steps.

Everything Americans have been conditioned to believe about drugs and drug addiction leads us to believe that this approach is completely nuts. We believe that anything but a cold turkey approach to drugs invites complacency and encourages more drug use. But much to the surprise of strict prohibitionists, the experiment worked, and Swiss voters overwhelmingly voted to keep it legal in 2008. The number of Swiss who regarded drug addiction as a serious problem plummeted from 64% to 12% between 1988 and 2002.

Many myths of heroin addiction and recovery were shattered by this experiment. Addicts did not continually demand higher and higher doses. They didn’t become complacent and give up on trying to kick their addictions. In fact, the opposite happened. The addicts receiving maintenance treatment became more likely to slowly wean themselves off the drug or to seek alternate treatments like methadone.

An approach like this remains explicitly illegal in the United States. Doctors are prohibited from prescribing heroin to anyone. Many of them are targeted by prosecutors simply for not being stingy enough when prescribing legal opioids to pain patients. Moving us in the opposite direction would require a lot of political courage. Could Clinton do it? Would she fight for it the way Ruth Dreifuss did?

The prohibitionist mindset tells us that the availability of drugs is the main determinant of drug use. But this is completely wrong. It’s certainly one determinant, but many other factors play into the equation, and have a far greater impact. After doing the research for his book, Hari came away believing that the presence of deep emotional scars was the predominant precursor for addition. People in that situation had to be helped to help themselves. But trying to enforce a prohibition by sending countless people through our criminal justice system tends to have the opposite effect, along with a whole host of unintended consequences.

This remains difficult for many Americans to accept and understand. We still tend to think of addicts as freeloaders, and the act of taking drugs as a form of rebellion that we shouldn’t give in to. This mindset only becomes shattered when someone we know and love falls victim to an addiction. Maybe the Swiss are more able to see the addicts in Needle Park as their brothers and sisters in ways that we here in America can’t. Or maybe we’re finally reaching that turning point in public understanding, just as we’ve reached a major turning point on pot prohibition in the past decade. However close we might be to a truly progressive drug policy, Hillary Clinton seems willing to move us closer to that point, and that might be good enough for now.

Last week, a boat carrying migrants and refugees from North Africa sank in the Mediterranean. Of the 300,000 plus who’ve attempted the journey to Europe this year, about 2,500 have died. In Austria, children crammed into a van were rescued, while others weren’t so lucky. And after pictures of a young Kurdish child washed up on a Turkish beach appeared in newspapers around the world this week, the humanity behind this crisis seemed to jolt the world closer to the response required.

In Syria alone, the refugee crisis is enormous. But that’s still only a part of the overall influx of those desperate to find a safer home for themselves and their families. I really don’t have anything more to say about this other than that this is an enormous tragedy that the wealthy nations of the world helped to bring about, and one that it can and should fix. But I have very little confidence that they will.

More news from the past two weeks…
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Last weekend at Hempfest, the Sanders campaign had a booth passing out buttons and flyers. Hempfest is probably the only place you’ll ever see an anti-tax protestor in a Bernie t-shirt next to other campaign volunteers.

#SeattleHempfest this anti-tax protestor in a Bernie Sanders t-shirt is right next to the Bernie booth pic.twitter.com/pOBbqSbBny

— Lee Rosenberg (@Lee_Rosenberg) August 15, 2015

I stopped by for a bit and chatted with an older volunteer. When it comes to the long battle to reform drug laws, Sanders is better than many politicians, but still not that close to where I think he could and probably should be. As I left, they handed me a homemade printed flyer and I shoved it in my pocket. When I got home, I noticed that the flyer listing out his campaign’s positions had a line saying simply “All Lives Matter”.

This wasn’t official campaign literature, just a small flyer a volunteer made, but it was pretty tone deaf considering what happened about a mile or two from there the weekend before. Saying that ‘All Lives Matter’ in a political sense right now isn’t just some vanilla statement, it’s a response to the millions of African Americans fighting for a level of respect from the police and the criminal justice system that’s afforded to others. Responding with All Lives Matter is an attempt to brush over the fairly substantial gap that exists in how various forms of the government interact with black communities.

Our politics are defined by our fears. The Black Lives Matter movement is a response to the very legitimate fear among African Americans that they’ll become victims of the police or the court system. Many white Sanders supporters recognize that as a legitimate fear, but for most, it’s not the political issue that drives them. Most Sanders supporters are driven by their own fears over an economic system that favors the wealthy and often fails to provide basic economic protections for everyone else. And it’s the latter fear that’s been drawing large crowds to see Bernie, while Black Lives Matter rallies continue to be met with riot gear and spotty media attention.

I have to admit that my first impression after two activists stole the microphone from Bernie Sanders at Westlake was that it was obnoxious. I understand the powerlessness those activists feel when they see more abstract economic issues dominating the political conversation on the left, while the issues that many in their communities face are far more dire and direct. But the reality is, who the fuck cares what I think. It has no bearing on my attitude towards Black Lives Matter. I’ve long been beating this drum. I’m not really the target audience here. I’m not even sure Bernie was the audience that day. The audience was the cross-section of America who doesn’t personally experience the insecurity and fears that black America experiences and who doesn’t really think about it much.

For many of those who’d stood out on a hot Saturday afternoon to see Bernie talk about social security, the disruption of the event was an annoyance. The hope of the activists is that the crowd will weigh their own annoyance against the injustices faced in the black community and come away with some perspective. Does this work? Maybe. But it seems a lot more likely to work at a Bernie Sanders rally than a Donald Trump one.

I’ve been calling this strategy inconvenienceism. I hope someone can think up a better word for it, but that’s the best I’ve come up with. From blocking highways to disrupting public events, this strategy relies on an optimistic take on human nature, that most people have the ability to put aside their own discomfort to think harder about someone else’s. The name is an attempt to draw a contrast between it and terrorism, a strategy that comes from the same pit of powerlessness, but clearly doesn’t work to endear people to your cause.

Does inconveniencism work? It got the Sanders campaign to add a pretty solid racial justice page to their issue list. They hired black activist Symone Sanders and encouraged people to chant “We Stand Together” if there’s another disruption. So it certainly had an impact on the campaign. But does this really translate to better policies down the road? Or will it harden pockets of antagonism within the campaign inner circle and make the hard work of reform even harder?

When I was talking to the volunteer at Bernie’s Hempfest booth, I was tempted to ask him if he ever worried about pot activists disrupting one of his rallies. It was a funny contrast to me. Bernie’s official position isn’t much different from Hillary Clinton’s or even Rand Paul’s. He believes that states should be able to legalize, but hasn’t come out and said that they should. If a group of pot activists grabbed the microphone at one of his events and demanded clear support for legalizing pot across America, how would that play out?

I can’t think of a single instance where drug law reformers of any kind have used inconvenienceism as a tactic in the way that Black Lives Matter has. But maybe that’s why drug law reform has been such a slow process. Perhaps it would’ve sped things up and gotten us to this point sooner. Or maybe it would’ve played into negative stereotypes and hardened opposition. I have no idea. And I don’t think anyone else really does either. It’s a phenomenon that seems extremely difficult to study with any kind of scientific certainty.

My best guess is that it’s mostly a sideshow and has little effect on achieving real reforms. When Hillary Clinton met with Black Lives Matter activists last week, she seemed to echo that belief:

“Look, I don’t believe you change hearts,” Clinton said. “I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. You’re not going to change every heart. You’re not. But at the end of the day, we could do a whole lot to change some hearts and change some systems and create more opportunities for people who deserve to have them, to live up to their own God-given potential.”

What was understandably frustrating for Black Lives Matter activists is to hear this from someone who has long supported policies that created the crisis in our black communities in the first place, and still seems reluctant to engage in any self-reflection over it. But it highlights the fundamental challenge for this movement and others like it. It’s extremely difficult to get the powerful to fight for the powerless, or even to see the world through their eyes. I think many whites feel that Bernie Sanders can be an exception to that rule. But I don’t think many non-whites do. And I think how that dynamic goes forward will end up deciding the Democratic nomination.

In the news for the past two weeks…
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The anti-choice movement in America has a long history of violence, radical extremism, and hypocrisy. Over the years, GOP politicians and the media have nurtured this dysfunction, giving it support above and beyond the small group of religious extremists for whom this cause has been central to their political outlook for decades. At its core, however, the anti-choice movement is a thinly-veiled attempt to shame and punish women for their moral choices by trying to dictate their medical decisions. It’s the closest thing American Christianity has to the notion of Sharia Law, and it remains an embarrassment to this nation that we continue to take it seriously.

So when the recent videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood engaging in illegal activity surfaced, I didn’t even pay attention. The history of the anti-choice movement very clearly pointed to the likelihood that these videos were selectively edited and dishonestly presented. But after about a week, I decided that just because someone was bullshitting me the last 200 times, maybe they’re on to something in the 201st. So I took a deep dive into the controversy.

Nope, still full of shit. And maybe even more ridiculous than they’ve ever been.

The videos purport to show Planned Parenthood employees engaging in the sale of discarded fetuses for profit. This sounds like a horrible thing and one that could lead to perverse incentives on the part of an abortion provider. But it’s total nonsense. Instead, Planned Parenthood is simply taking advantage of a law (passed by many anti-choice Republicans!) that allows women to donate an aborted fetus for scientific research and allows abortion providers to charge for the costs of preserving and delivering the cells without making a profit.

Even beyond the basic level of idiocy involved here, the tax dollars that the anti-choice extremists want to strip from Planned Parenthood don’t even go to abortions in the first place (that’s actually illegal). They go towards a wide variety of women’s health care and contraception efforts, many of which make a huge difference in reducing the number of abortions that occur. So if your goal is to eliminate abortion, it would be difficult to conjure up a more counterproductive way to do it than what these lunatics are demanding in the name of eliminating abortion.

News from the last two weeks…
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At the beginning of July, I was out east visiting relatives and friends and took a break from the roundup. A few days before leaving, I was at Town Hall to see author Max Blumenthal speak about the latest war in Gaza. The next day, his latest book “51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza” was released and downloaded to my Kindle. The day after that, I had a 4.5 hour flight to start reading it.

Blumenthal’s book is maddening and depressing, but ultimately not all that surprising. Even following traditional news sources, the devastation and cruelty of that war was clear, and the hopelessness of the aftermath all too predictable. Civilians were deliberately targeted, even children. Entire apartment buildings were destroyed. Hospitals were blown up. Critical infrastructure left in ruins. And with promises for future retaliation, there’s little desire for the world to rebuild things that Israel will just blow up again in a few years.

The cynicism behind this military approach is clear, as Blumenthal writes in Alternet:

Behind the quasi-apocalyptic destruction exacted on Gaza by the Israeli military during Operation Protective Edge lies a sadistic strategy whose aim is to punish residents of the besieged coastal enclave into submission. The “Dahiya Doctrine,” named after a southern Beirut neighborhood the Israeli air force decimated in 2006, is focused on punishing the civilian populations of Gaza and southern Lebanon for supporting armed resistance movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. In “Disproportionate Force,” a 2008 paper published by the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank closely linked to the Israeli military, Colonel Gabi Siboni spelled out its punitive, civilian-oriented logic clearly: “With an outbreak of hostilities, the [Israeli army] will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.”

The level of death and destruction in this war was not an unavoidable aspect of urban warfare. It was a deliberate strategy of intimidation and terror. It was meant as a way to convince the population of Gaza to turn against its armed factions and stop resisting the occupation.

But this strategy is pure lunacy. Human beings don’t respond to having their homes blown up and their loved ones killed by agreeing to pledge their loyalty and respect to those dropping the bombs. It only solidifies the resistance behind the most radical elements of the resistance, and making compromises and mutual respect even more impossible. As a result, Gaza has transformed from a place where Hamas once challenged the Palestinian authority to be more militant into a place where Islamic State supporters now challenge Hamas to be more militant. It’s a strategy that continually backfires, but Israelis can no longer conjure up any alternatives.

Political outlooks tend to be defined by our fears. Progressives fear entrenched power limiting opportunity and progress. Conservatives fear societal change. Libertarians fear government abuses. Authoritarians fear criminality. Within different societies there can be differing levels of validity for each of these fears. But as long as the fears are rational, a democratic political process can arrive at a sensible compromise.

What’s broken in Israel is that their outlook is now dominated by fears that are largely irrational, and in a country where migrations to and from the rest of the world are common, it’s becoming self-reinforcing through those migrations. One of the striking things in Blumenthal’s recent work is how hostile Israeli society has become for those on the political left. Many are simply leaving. As Israel’s approach to the occupied territories becomes more extreme, its ability to moderate itself in a democratic process is slowly being washed away, not too differently than what happens in Gaza after weeks of bombing. The main difference is that in Gaza, the fears that work against political moderation are far more real.

In the aftermath of the nuclear agreement between the U.S. and Iran, the irrational fears that consume Israeli politics are being put on full display. Matthew Duss, one of the sharpest analysts on Israel and its place in the Middle East, explains it really well in this piece. Israel equates anti-semitic remarks by Iran’s theocratic rulers with a desire to use military force to destroy the entire state of Israel. That’s a huge logical leap, and entirely absurd. To demonstrate how crazy it is, he points out that Richard Nixon also once made a bunch of anti-semitic remarks, but had absolutely no desire to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

But this has also historically been the mindset in Israel when it comes to the Palestinian population and their desire for self-determination. We’ve always been told that the real goal of the PLO, and then of Hamas, is not mere self-rule, but to destroy the state of Israel. And they’ve always been able to point to instances of anti-semitism and other extreme rhetoric to make this claim. To some extent, the history of the Holocaust makes these fears seem more rational, but they’re not. The next Holocaust isn’t around the corner, and neither the Palestinians nor the Iranians have any ability to threaten the existence of Israel, nor do the vast majority of people in those places want that to happen.

This is what drives the largely incoherent opposition to the Iran agreement and the completely devastating military approach in Gaza. It’s an irrational fear of democratic rule and self-determination throughout the Middle East and it goes well beyond Iran and Gaza. It also stifles democratic progress in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and it played a role in our disastrous invasion of Iraq. Obama deserves a lot of credit for getting this agreement done, but it’s only a small step towards where we need to be.

As an American Jew, it’s hard to come to the realization that our blindness to the Israeli leadership’s irrational fears is so central to the various crises in the Middle East, but that’s where I find myself today. Yet no one has become a bigger lightning rod over this conflict than Blumenthal. The Amazon reviews for his book are amazing to read through, nearly all either 5 or 1 star. But the perspective he’s providing is a necessary counterpoint to Israel’s increasingly authoritarian mindset in much the same way that the Black Lives Matter movement has been a necessary counterpoint to America’s authoritarian police culture. I don’t know what works best to fix a society that has seemingly gone off the rails, but telling hard truths and not backing down is a good place to start.

In the news from the last two weeks…
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Didn’t have time for longer commentary this week, just a note about the scope of these roundups. When I initially started this, I didn’t intend to follow incidents involving government interventions over parenting. This tends to be a difficult area with respect to things like vaccines and extreme religious beliefs. In some of those cases, I fully support government intervention if there’s a clear public health justification. And in some cases, I can be convinced that a person’s religious beliefs cross the line into the abuse of a child.

But the recent incidents involving arrests over merely allowing young kids to play or walk alone go way beyond the line of what should be acceptable for the state. I plan to track incidents like these as well, as I think they warrant importance and belong in the same category as the other things I write about and link to here.

News from the past two weeks:
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Last week, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, a very modest reform of the NSA’s surveillance capabilities, still leaving much of what they can do intact.

The main reform is the end of the bulk collection of metadata under Section 215, which has been ruled illegal in multiple courts since Edward Snowden fully disclosed its existence two years ago. In its place will be a system where telecoms archive their data and NSA can only pull metadata after going through the FISA Court that will have a privacy advocate overseeing the proceedings. Although there’s a provision that could allow for a six month “transition period” to this new protocol.

In looking at these changes, Bill Scher argues that civil libertarians lost:

In an interview with Democracy Now just before passage, Edward Snowden confidant Glenn Greenwald triumphantly declared “the only reason why the Patriot Act is going to be reformed is because one person was courageous enough, in an act of conscience, to come forward.” But minutes later, Greenwald conceded that “it leaves overwhelmingly undisturbed the vast bulk of what the NSA does, and it’s very unlikely that there will be another reform bill, which means that the NSA’s core mission and core activities will remain unreformed and unchanged.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who opposed the USA Freedom Act as too tough on the NSA, thundered on the floor before the vote that the bill amounted to a “resounding victory for Edward Snowden.” But the civil libertarian two-stepping exposes the truth: Snowden lost.

As one former intelligence official told the Daily Beast, “What no one wants to say out loud is that this is a big win for the NSA, and a huge nothing-burger for the privacy community.” Turns out one of the main reform planks – having telecommunications companies instead of the NSA collect personal metadata in bulk – is a logistical efficiency, not a restraint on surveillance. “It’s very expensive and very cumbersome,” said the official. “Good! Let them take them. I’m tired of holding on to this,” said another.

What this reminds me of is the debate in the wake of Obamacare’s passage. In many ways, Obamacare fell way short of the ideal health care legislation. Obama conceded significant reforms in order to get something passed, making deals that left significant inefficiencies and profiteering in the health care industry intact.

But the passage of Obamacare was a victory in some real ways. It was a baby step in the right direction and it put to rest the idea that health care reform of any kind was impossible. The passage of the USA Freedom Act is a victory in the same way. It changes the longstanding dynamic towards giving government agencies greater leeway in national security matters and it put the defenders of an unrestrained national security apparatus on the defensive for the first time in many years.

The “former intelligence official” quoted above seems not to understand the significance of the reform as well. The main problem with the Section 215 collection of metadata wasn’t simply the existence of the metadata itself. It was the potential for that information to be abused. The changes implemented make it harder for NSA to cross that line. That’s a victory, even if it’s a small one in a giant box of other needed reforms.

News items from the last two weeks…
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From last night, maybe the most unintentionally hilarious tweet I’ve ever seen:

@lee_rosenberg magnified by the reality that Islam is a system of imperialism propelled by terrorism since inception. @eliottkroll

— ن CRUZADΞR ن (@AlphaRomeo223) May 30, 2015

Recently in Cairo:

An Egyptian court on Saturday [May 16] sentenced to death the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, along with more than 100 others, for fleeing prison during the 2011 revolt against President Hosni Mubarak.

Mr. Morsi’s conviction is the latest sign of the undoing of the uprising that overthrew Mr. Mubarak. Mr. Morsi, who was Egypt’s first freely elected leader, now faces the death penalty for escaping extralegal detention — a form of detention that many Egyptians hoped would be eliminated by the revolution.

The past few years in Egypt have been painful to watch. The 2011 revolution that seemed to give many moderate Egyptians hope for a more democratic future was snuffed out after a 2013 coup against their first ever elected leader. Morsi was clearly unpopular and his religious extremism arguably rendered him unfit for the office. But it should be clear now that Egypt would be much better off had they democratically replaced him rather than the extreme response from al-Sisi and the Egyptian military.

At the time of the coup, I chatted a lot with a former co-worker from Microsoft who’d gone back to Alexandria (and who Dana and I visited in Cairo in 2007). He was torn between his fear of greater Islamic control of the country and his desire to trust the democratic process. It’s hard for most Americans to put themselves in his shoes. He supported the coup, but hoped it would still lead to more democratic reforms. It hasn’t (and he’s since moved out of the country again).

Ebrahim Deen, a researcher based in South Africa, wrote about Morsi’s death sentence (which he believes won’t actually be carried out) at Informed Comment:

The trial verdicts –Mursi was sentenced to life in prison on the espionage charge as well– were procedurally flawed, defendant’s had irregular access to legal representation, and evidence gathering and cross examination procedures were severely compromised. The glaring fact that the initial arrests were carried out by the former Mubarak regime in early 2011 under emergency law and without detention orders was not considered and so to [sic] was the communication between Mursi and an Aljazeera journalist the day of the ‘breakout’ wherein he provided the name, and street address of the prison, asserting that they were not escaping and would remain at the location awaiting government officials responses. The prosecutorial process had been extremely and even laughably shoddy. Of the around seventy Palestinians sentenced, two (Hossam Sanie and Raed El-Attar) had already died –Sanie as far ago as 2008 and Attar, during Israel’s operation ‘pillar of defence’ in 2014, which caused the deaths of over 2000, mostly civilian, Gazans. Another, Hassan Salama, has purportedly been in detention in Israel since 1996 and could not have possibly committed the alleged crimes from inside an Israeli cell. Further in the espionage case, which saw Muslim Brotherhood leaders including Mohamed El-Beltagy and Mohamed Khairet El-Shater receive death sentences, Emad Shahin, a political science professor now based at Georgetown University, who has no real links with the Brotherhood was handed the same censure, and so to was Sondos Assem, a media liaison official employed by Mursi.

This is an insult to everyone’s intelligence. Morsi is being sentenced for breaking out of a prison that shouldn’t have had the authority to hold him in the first place. Al-Sisi has taken Egypt back to the pre-2011 authoritarian regime where illegal detentions are commonplace, torture is routine, and members of religious parties like the Muslim Brotherhood are presumed to be terrorists, regardless of what those individuals have actually done. Deen continues:

These sentences are the latest in a string of actions adopted by the Sisi regime to crackdown on opposition and descent. Following the 2013 ouster, thousands have been killed, and over 16000 political prisoners currently languish in Egyptian detention facilities. A protest law, which has banned sit-ins and severely curtailed other protest rights, was adopted in November 2013, while in April, the Cairo Administrative Court criminalised worker strikes. Liberals and secular activists have not escaped this purge, in December 2014 Ahmed Maher, Mohamed Adel, and Ahmed Douma, three influential members of the April 6 youth movement were sentenced to three years for organizing protests in contravention of the protest law, while in February Douma was amongst over two hundred who received life sentences for inciting violence and destroying a science facility housing precious artefacts. Shahin’s farcical conviction falls into this milieu. Being opposed to the military ouster, publically vocalising this through writings and interviews, and being somewhat more ‘reputable’ internationally were the main reasons informing his death sentence. In 2014 alone, over 1400 individuals were sentenced to death in mass trials, which usually took only a few days to complete, and lacked even basic prosecutorial and judicial impartiality. It is noteworthy that the judiciary was a key cog in the political structure which allowed and maintained Mubarak’s regime and that following Mursi’s ouster, Sisi has sought a similar role for the institution –Adli Mansour (head of the Supreme Constitutional Court) was even installed caretaker president following the coup.

At least it’s not a theocracy, I guess.

News items from the last two weeks…

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Thirty years ago today, on May 13, 1985, a part of West Philadelphia became a war zone. A group of radical residents called MOVE – who advocated a return to nature and strongly identified with their African roots – were holed up in their home on Osage Avenue in an armed bunker they’d built on the roof. Years of animosity had led up to this day. In a 1978 raid on their home, a police officer was killed (possibly by friendly fire) and several of their members were beaten by police and given long prison sentences. Since then, MOVE had been stockpiling weapons, terrifying their neighbors, and preparing for the next confrontation with police.

Before the raid that day, neighbors evacuated from their homes, many of them looking forward to finally being rid of this nuisance. But things would go a bit off the rails. Unable to raid the house or flush out the residents with normal tactics, Philadelphia police decided to do something a little more drastic.

They flew a helicopter low over the house and dropped a small bomb on the roof.
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