Dave's Daily Dose 11/12/2021

This is what Al Gore warned us about.

• Zillow’s crisis is entertaining, but the real story is not as obviously silly. Housing is a fundamentally broken market where we treat them like commodities. Zillow was just another entry in the endless history of shitty housing speculation.

• All I’m going to say about this Rittenhouse trial is that even if he’s technically innocent of murder 1, we already have a definition of “recklessly causing death” that pretty much covers what he did: manslaughter.

  He wasn’t protecting anyone, let alone their property, when he allegedly was attacked. He came prepared for a fight he had no business being in, and he just happened to meet other people who were also looking for that same fight, and won it.

  That’s not heroic. It’s not “self-defense” to finish a fight you wanted to have, just because you didn’t make the first move.

  It seems that much of our legal system disagrees with me that this should count as manslaughter. Fine, but they’re morally wrong. People shouldn’t be able to skate from fights they wanted to have. There’s a moral difference between the concealed-carrier who shoots someone holding up a liquor store, and what Rittenhouse did — or even what the officers who killed Tamir Rice did, when they came in so hot that they basically guaranteed they would be able to say “I feared for my life”.

  This is why the “stand your ground” mentality is so dangerous. It absolves morons and assholes of any responsibility to avoid provoking fights. Fuck them, fuck the purveyors of the propaganda that feeds them, and fuck any legal system that says what they do is OK.

• RE last Friday’s Bulwark: Charlie was complaining that Democrats are simply just trying to do too much on too small of a margin of control in Congress.

  But the problem with Build Back Better isn’t as simple as a mere mismatch between the size of the majority and the size of the objective. It’s the fact that the margins of Congressional majorities have been shrinking for decades now.

• They’re also right that Democrats can’t keep counting on retreads like McAuliffe and even Biden. But they’re wrong on the reason why Democrats keep going with them. Biden proved to a lot of the establishment that “90’s Democratic politics can work again” IE, in particular that the retreads can bring back rural Americans who are now culturally dominated by Appalachian influences.

• What scares me about Youngkin is that he genuinely may be the “Trump, but more competent and in a better-fitting suit” we’ve all been fearing, or at least a blueprint/prototype for a more successful one. He’s particularly dangerous because he co-opts a lot of the same rhetoric about division that Obama used to, but has figured out how to slip back in all the same dog whistles that Trump turned into bullhorns.

  He’s best at what Republicans like George Bush and Mitt Romney have been for the past 50 years, and what Woodrow Wilson was before that: Being a cipher. He allows people to project their hopes and fears onto him, much like Trump did, but instead of promising everything to everyone, he falls back on the old reliable strategy of simply refusing to be defined. This is historically-speaking probably the single most effective strategy in American politics.