The reality of defunding the police

If you were wondering what "defunding" the police really looks like... it looks kinda like this (as reported by the Calgary Sun):

Shifting $20 million from the Calgary police budget to address gaps in crisis and outreach services will be on the table during city council’s budget deliberations later this month.

Council approved a motion late Tuesday night that asks city officials to bring information about reallocating $10 million of Calgary Police Service funding in both 2021 and 2022 for a new “community safety investment framework.”

[...]

Council voted 9-5 in favour of the motion, which was initially proposed by Coun. Evan Woolley and supported by Mayor Naheed Nenshi and councillors George Chahal and Gian-Carlo Carra.

[...]

Woolley said council needs to have a deeper conversation about the police budget after a July public hearing on systemic racism heard concerns from Calgarians who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour.

“The lived experiences for many of our citizens and their struggles have been taking place for generations,” Woolley said. “What started in July, though, was our public acknowledgment that racism exists in our institutions and in our government, and it is important that we not only make statements but take meaningful steps to respond.”

Police leadership broached the possibility of reallocation themselves in September as part of their commitment to anti-racism. [...] Chief Mark Neufeld has said police may not be the best first responders for things like a mental health crisis.

A few things struck me about all of this.

First, there's the way in which everybody involved here, including the Calgary Sun, the Calgary Police, and Calgary's politicians, are treating this as a totally normal and reasonable thing to be doing. Calgary is a more diverse metropolitan area than some parts of Alberta, but it's still pretty solidly Conservative country as far as the political spectrum goes, and there was a real possibility that Trumpian identity politics would infect the process; that didn't happen.

The second is the measured, just-the-facts-ma'am tone of the Sun's piece itself. The Calgary Sun is a right-wing tabloid, with a editorial slant that makes the New York Post look progressive by comparison. I was actually slightly shocked to realize that the Sun's masthead was on the article, but even the Sun just... reported on the facts, this time. I guess those facts must not be in dispute.

And third... we're doing it, people! Calgary is taking a leading role in this shift from heavily armed psychiatric response, towards something a little more compassionate and, dammit, just plain human. It makes me feel proud of my city when shit like this happens.

Calgary mayor throws shade at Trump, over COVID-19 vaccine claims

We totally have the best mayor in Calgary, period.

As reported by CTV News:

CALGARY -- Alberta is on track to record 1,000 new COVID-19 cases a day by the end of the week and that could potentially lead to lockdowns, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi warned Tuesday.

Speaking ahead of the regular update by Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the province's chief medical officer of health, Nenshi said numbers released Tuesday are "extremely troubling."

"We are on track as a province to having 1,000 new cases a day as soon as the end of this week. So this is extraordinarily troubling," he said.

"We're not just above where we were in the spring, we are far above where we were in the spring. And a vaccine apparently didn't come before the U.S. election today so it is months away.

"So we need to re-double our efforts to avoid a lockdown. We need to re-double our efforts to look after one another and to flatten this curve again, and it's not hard. The three things we need to do to flatten the curve have not changed."

[Shade highlighted in big, bold letters, by me.] 

I love this man.

I mean, it sucks to be going through yet another wave of this fucking pandemic, in a Canadian province whose Conservative government is all about keeping businesses open, "barring some absolute catastrophe," and never mind that a literal plague would normally count as a catastrophe. 

FYI, Alberta is Canada's Trump country; my downstairs neighbour was literally beaking off yesterday about how the pandemic was all fake news and lies, after weeks of case counts climbing in both Calgary and Edmonton... although, thankfully, our daily deaths number is staying in the single digit range, for now.

But it sucks a little bit less to have a civic leader, even in this Conservative stronghold, who not only tells it like it is, but who isn't afraid to throw a little well-deserved shade in The Donald's direction while he's at it.

I'm beginning to wonder what it says about me, though, that the actual COVID-19 news in that CTV piece wasn't what caught my eye; no, it was the throwaway line about The Donald's vaccine lies that was my big takeaway. 

2020, man... fuck this whole year.

A refreshing change, if true (but probably false)

As reported by HuffPost

Trump Says He'll Declare Victory 'Only When There's Victory'

The president previously refused to say whether he would accept the results of the election and whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would only declare victory in his reelection bid “if there’s victory,” following months of concerns and a recent report that he plans to declare himself the winner on election night even if it only looks like he’s ahead.

“I think we’ll have victory,” he said in an interview with “Fox and Friends,” when asked when he would declare it. “Only when there’s victory. There’s no reason to play games.”

I guess Trump finally tired of talking like a loser, and decided to start talking like someone who might actually have a chance to win. It must be noted, though, that Trump has done quite literally nothing but "play games," for weeks, about whether he'd accept an electoral result that went against him, and that he also stopped short of actually committing to a peaceful transition of power today. 

Also, there's the fact Trump's count of lies told since taking office currently stands at 22,247, so I don't think you can have any faith, really, in anything that Trump says. To paraphrase Rachel Maddow, it not what he says that matters; watch what he actually does, when the results come in.

Given that Trump was boasting just yesterday about how many lawyers he has ready sow as much electoral chaos as possible, and that the White House was demanding the personal information of poll workers and poll watchers in several states, possibly in preparation for a mass doxxing, it's hard to know what to expect, apart from the usual canard about expecting the unexpected.

Pay no attention to what they say; watch what they do. And remember that this is a marathon, and not a sprint.

AAAAND THEY'RE OFF!

Polls are open in some of States, and we're all waiting to see just how the chaos unfolds. Unlike previous elections, though, this one is being live streamed by multiple media outlets, so that you can watch the election madness unfold ALL. DAY. LONG.

Or, you know... don't. Although I suspect that non-election content is going to be a little hard to come by, on this day of all days, with so much riding on the outcome of these events. It's hard to credit, given that it was only a few years ago that we watched Barack Obama be elected President of the United States in what felt like it was sure to be the biggest Presidential election of my lifetime, but... this really might be the biggest Presidential election of our collective lifetimes, with the fate of democracy itself quite literally riding on the outcome.

2020... what a fucking year.

This week in Facebook: Hypocrisy, incompetence, and partisan political bias, and that's just one of their policies

[Reposted from my other blog.]

As reported by HuffPost:

Under mounting pressure to quell the flood of partisan misinformation coursing through its platform, Facebook announced a new policy in September: It would stop accepting all new political ads during the week preceding the presidential election.

[...]

In theory, as Zuckerberg touted, the policy would prevent political advertisers from spreading new messages to targeted audiences before fact-checkers and journalists had time to scrutinize them — reducing the risk of false and misleading claims going viral in the run-up to the vote.

In practice, it has been a disaster. [...] Chaos ensued almost immediately: Thousands of previously approved ads from Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign and multiple progressive groups were wrongly blocked due to a “technical flaw,” potentially costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.President Donald Trump’s campaign managed to launch new ads post-ban. And in violation of its own rules, Facebook approved ads from the president’s campaign prematurely declaring victory, as well as hundreds of ads bearing the misleading text “ELECTION DAY IS TODAY” or “Vote Today.”

Days later, Facebook is still putting out fires amid searing accusations of partisan bias and negligence. The company’s stunning failure to properly enforce its own high-profile policy at such a critical time has raised alarm about its preparedness for the fallout of the election — the results of which could be inconclusive for days or even weeks.

“[Facebook’s] implementation certainly has only inspired more fears over how they’re going to be able to handle these last-minute election-specific rollouts,” [Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of the nonprofit Accountable Tech] said. “It constantly feels like they’re dealing with optics — they’re thinking of everything as optical problems and never as structural problems.”

And that, friends, is Facebook in a nutshell, and why I think that the U.S. DOJ's antitrust action again Google was aimed at entirely the wrong target. Google might be problematic and monopolistic, but Facebook is actively evil. Google and Amazon are cuddly kittens by comparison; sure, they might be problematic in terms of business competition, but they have nothing on the corrosive toxicity and greed of Zuckerberg & Co.

Of all the Big Tech firms, Facebook is the most responsible for the deepening divisions in our discourse and society, structurally dedicated to encouraging the worst impulses of humanity for no other reason than their own material gain. Facebook is actively undermining civility, privacy, and democracy itself, and worst of all is that they aren't even doing it for ideological reasons; no, Facebook's undermining of civilization is being done, almost entirely, for the money.

Facebook is fairly begging to be broken up, but Trump's DOJ won't touch them; after all, their "mistakes" and "accidents" seem to trend entirely in one direction, and that direction mostly favours Trump and his supporters. Hopefully the DOJ of a President Biden, or a new Congress in which Democrats control both House and Senate, will take action against the most urgent Big Tech threat.

In the meantime, it falls to the rest of us to keep on doing what we've already been doing: deleting Facebook from our lives. Facebook is the problem; it's time for more people to stop being part of that problem.