I have been informed that the Mayor’s office were the ones that looked at all the CORA requests over the last two years and tried to figure out who I am based on CORA requests and my posts (based on who was requesting them).
The Mayor’s office narrowed it down to three names and FED the story to the @denverpost
and told their contact at the Post to CORA the CORA requests in hopes of outing me and getting the media and my followers to turn on me.
The Mayor’s office said that @mikejohnstonco wants DoBetterDNVR gone because ‘I am ruining his narrative’. Is it legal for government officials to try and silence me via doxxing? Or engaging the Denver Post to do so?
I live in Denver. 10 blocks from my house yesterday there were people shooting up in the street, and wandering into traffic etc. Yesterday a high driver started doing donuts in a local park that just had been renovated at taxpayers expense. He passed within 10 feet of people sunbathing in the park when he jumped the curb on to the grass. Today a 12 year old boy was doing donuts in the park, on the grass, on a quad bike going 40mph on a public lawn. None of this is on Do Better Denver. This is just my “Lived Experience”. Meanwhile our CAPEX budget is high so the place has more and more shiny bits and more and more human tragedy every day. Both are happening here.
Sounds like the Denver Post needs to be a regular topic of investigation on the X channel! I mean, how often does the Denver Post: investigate the homeless problem? Investigate the organs of city government about their responses to citizen concerns? I suppose that would mean more citizens doing unauthorized self-journalism! After all, who is journaling the journalizers?
Never. They Never do it. That's what Do Better Denver does. He does not just cover urban decay but also has demonstrated, with evidence, that dangerous criminals are regularly released back into the community. I had this pattern personally confirmed by contacts at DPD that this is the policy of the Denver County Judges, to release felons back into the community with minimal processing. The first step is to vote NO on re-electing all of the judges on your municipal ballots. That's the first act of resistance from the people and it will have a real tangible impact if enough people do it.
The Cops seem like they are on the verge of giving up to be honest. They don't aspire to solve any of these problems any more, they are just trying to maintain some sense of order and do a good job given that there are only 5,500 of them! I talk to them fairly frequently to "take the pulse" of the community as part of my informal community role here in Denver. A lady cop recently responded to the conversation I was having with her about it all by asking me about my Dog (who is admittedly very cute, actually make that adorable). She found the conversation too hard and wanted to be happy in that moment, so we talked about my dog instead. She petted her and then we went our separate ways. She presented as a decent person in a tough situation. That's been my experience with DPD over the years. They are decent people in a tough spot. They want to do the right thing but they are not supported by City Hall. They are not mean or vindictive. They are all good citizens first and cops second. I've met over 50 of them in the past few years. None of the ones I spoke to really support the political leadership of the city. I have yet to find a single one who does.
I agree with strategic plans against these judicial saboteurs.
But the real issue in this catastrophe is that these judges are NOT upholding their constitutional responsibilities. Therefore they are aiding and abetting sedition against our country, our Republic.
Somehow a mass psychosis has taken hold of free speech narratives that suggest violating the public safety is not happening unless there is an immediate felonious act on the release of criminals from detention. Could it reasonably be said that the society we live in has become infected with litigious narrative that has redefined ‘public safety’ and ‘at will’ release of dangerous people for political and social experiments being conducted by seditionists? It seems to me that the law has become such an example of jurisdiction sovereignty by locally entrenched jurists that the Constitution is now more of an original touchstone in the foundation of justice than a living principle of reality. Or, the definition of reality has been so thoroughly distorted that assumptions of right and wrong are strictly grade/evaluated by legal ‘experts’/professionals almost exclusively. So our society has evolved from an overly litigious system to a power-based lawfare system. One of the revelatory features of the coup against Trump and MAGA supporters over the course of the last 10 years plus.
Without common justice for the average man, not just those on the up side of two-tier justice or those whose resources of defense can in some random way match big ‘G’ government resources, rebellion and revolution are stirred deeper and deeper into We the People — setting up the confrontation between the haves and the have-nots as never before, or maybe as classically and repeatedly as always.
This marshaling of power as it has evolved through our civic lives, our chambers of commerce as well as corporations, and legalese drift has brought us to this ‘Fourth Turning’ of core political power. We the People face monumental challenges in the change of course to the core of this power. Ideological seditionists have seized many moments of opportunity, almost establishing precedent for anti-constitutional practices in law that we have been experiencing.
But — Here’s the thing; and there IS a thing. Those who would be pleased with the erosion of constitutional protections and rights face massive realizations of what they have been doing. Now is the time — to take America back. MAGA — USA USA
"this is the policy of the Denver County Judges, to release felons back into the community with minimal processing"
I'm over near the border with Utah, and that seems to be the policy of the courts around here, too. They (the cops, the judges, the DA, etc.) won't admit it, but repeat offenders somehow get continually released back into the population, and no adequate explanation has been offered.
We literally had a county DA come out to my town to tell us that we need to invest in mental health services, as a way to deal with our criminal element. This is because we keep complaining and asking why the criminals aren't going to prison.
Yes. The cops here are more open about it. They don’t like it because it renders their work meaningless and incoherent. Also, what you are describing is the same logic that says that to solve the border crisis we need to go to El Salvador and eliminate poverty there first. In other words, rather than enforcing a border we are responsible for eliminating the conditions in other countries that lead to the crisis. This sounds like “root cause analysis” but really it’s just morally vapid abrogation of duty. This (btw) was literally what Kamala Harris argued after being handed the poisoned chalice of “border czar” by Biden at the start of their term together. She deflected all border security conversations into conversations about our responsibility to do nation-building in Central America. It’s not so much that was repudiating her constitutional oath, more that she was ignoring it in favor of projects she found more interesting and less accountable for any kind of tangible results, which is the preferred path of “peak simulation layer” politicians, of course.
Living in the Denver metro, I can say it's not just downtown. The burbs have this now too. As does Colorado Springs, Ft Collins, and so on. They should change the name to "Do Better Colorado."
Everyone sees it. I just can't understand how the Post journalists make themselves not see it. They all work downtown. When they walk past these scenes don't they feel a bit of fear, nervousness, anything? Or have they so brainwashed themselves that basic animal instincts of self-preservation have been ripped out? I just can't get in their heads.
Read a few books about the Soviets, it will all start to become clear. Sacred ideology plus tribalism plus being aware of severe penalties for dissent along w incentives for obedience will make people say or do anything.
I don't remember where I just read about American leftists visiting the Soviet Union in the 1930s and gushing at their Soviet handlers about how beautiful and successful everything was, while the Soviets kept trying to figure out if the Americans were really THAT stupid.
There were so many Western dupes of the Soviets—almost all artists and "intellectuals"—that it's hard to guess which ones you're talking about.
The Cold War taught me all I needed to know about the "engaged intellectual": those trapped on the east side of the Iron Curtain risked their lives to escape, and those on the west side of the Curtain wrote love songs to dictators and police states and cashed large checks and lived lavishly while denouncing capitalist imperialism.
Often there's no one more stupid (i.e. gullible and deluded) than the "well educated".
I used to have lively discussions with a former Eastern bloc Soviet who had subsequently emigrated to Canada. He wasn't a Russian, but rather from one of the former Warsaw Pact countries. It was informative. He did come out with a few very specific instances to defend his position, which might just about work on a small scale using the co-operative model, and unlike most Leftists his critiques on capitalism were relatively sound- given that he was really critiquing crony capitalism as though it was the general rule, rather than a specific problem found in a small percentage of the market, and fundamentally a flaw of government, rather than markets.
From my read, crony capitalism was more prominent Eastern Europe after the fall of communism for the simple reason that they had large state-owned companies with few initial competitors and because their systems were inherently prone to corruption. They had lived under systemic State corruption for decades, after all, and corruption was all but in the water.
Anyway, I once asked him whether he was a former dachas party elites. He seemed very annoyed by the question and wouldn't answer it (which was an answer in itself). The reason why intellectuals and artists have an inherent fondness for communistic totalitarian systems is because they always believe that a communist system will see their hidden talent and visionary insights. They imagine themselves as one of the dacha dwellers, designing policy to implement the future utopia.
If one were to stipulate that communism must always be led by proletariat works committees, with only workers with twenty or more years experience on the job eligible to stand for elections to the works committees, they would suddenly lose their enthusiasm for communism. Ban the intellectuals from making decisions or informing them, and socialism might just work. It wouldn't produce anywhere near the living standards of market-based systems, but it does tackle the single biggest problem with socialism or any centralised government system- preventing intellectuals from making decisions about subjects of which they know little, or are motivationally disinformed, with the latter being a far greater problem than the former.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain
Since the inspiration for Marx' ideas of communism (which must be separated from Engels' analysis of capitalism) was the French "communitards" who using a modern parallel most closely resembled secular Amish more or less, your inkling that it only works up to a certain scale is correct.
Anyone who has lived in a collective, as I have, can testify to that too: up to a certain scale, dep. on circumstances, but no larger than that you can personally know or know someone who knows the third party, and is built on voluntary solidaric sharing of basic resources - works.
Go larger, and drop the voluntary-ism, and also drop the direct democracy-part in favour of committees and so on, and it immediately starts to collapse and fail.
It very much mimics the difference between small and medium-sized companies, and large-scale corporations for that matter.
Another factor oft forgotten is "politics is downstream from culture"; this has quite the severe impact when trying to reshape a society according to a political norm, rather than teasing out a political formula /from/ the pre-existing culture. That's why Social(ist) Democracy worked so well in Scandinavia, initially: the original ideas were largely based on pre-existing cultural norms and mores that the system of that day (late 1800s laissez faire-capitalism; i.e. what amounted to the eq. of robber baronsand their debt-slaves) were in violation of.
Same as with USA of today: the values and norms spewed forth for decades now by Hollywood, progressive press and liberals-in-name-only are - from this foreigner's perspective - 180 degrees or so from mainstream American culture and idea(l)s.
And thus the whole things totters, as it tries to find a new equilibrium.
—"The reason why intellectuals and artists have an inherent fondness for communistic totalitarian systems is because they always believe that a communist system will see their hidden talent and visionary insights." 🎯
The best description of why intellectuals can never resist the siren song of Marxism I've read comes from Bakunin in "Statism and Anarchy" (1873):
—The words “learned socialist” and “scientific socialism,” which recur constantly in the writings and speeches of the Lassalleans and Marxists, are proof in themselves that the pseudo-popular state will be nothing but the highly despotic government of the masses by a new and very small aristocracy of real or pretended scholars. The people are not learned, so they will be liberated in entirety from the cares of government and included in entirety in the governed herd. A fine liberation!
They say that this state yoke, this dictatorship, is a necessary transitional device for achieving the total liberation of the people: anarchy, or freedom, is the goal, and the state, or dictatorship, the means. Thus, for the masses to be liberated they must first be enslaved."
Marxism calls for the total rule of a vanguard class of philosopher-kings, who will at last get to directly sculpt living human clay to their specifications. This is just too rich a temptation for all sorts of insecure petty tyrants and utopian "theorists" to resist.
The irony is that even in the absence of Marxism, technocratic decision making doesn’t work. Both the African aid NGO blob and effective altruism drastically underperform compared to directly giving funds to African communities to invest for themselves.
This doesn’t mean that expertise isn’t valuable, far from it, but two ‘tethers’ are required to keep the expertise grounded in reality: 1) Direct interaction with the ‘coal face’, whether it’s the shop floor or a doctor engaging with the customer 2) market mechanisms to maintain accountability for basic service delivery failures down to the level of individual employees.
When the Toyota experts were brought in as consultants to teach German auto their radically improved approach, they were highly annoyed to find that German managers were in the habit of resoling their work shoes. Apparently, in the past it had been a basic metric of competency to see whether a manager had grit and oil embedded in his sole.
Have you heard of Sir John James Cowperthwaite? He served as the financial secretary of Hong Kong, and more than any other person was responsible for its subsequent prosperity. He also has some great quotes:
“In the long run, the aggregate of the decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is likely to do less harm than the centralized decisions of a Government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.”
“I largely agree with those that hold that Government should not in general interfere with the course of the economy merely on the strength of its own commercial judgment. If we cannot rely on the judgment of individual businessmen, taking their own risks, we have no future anyway.”
“I am afraid that I do not believe that any body of men can have enough knowledge of the past, the present and the future to establish ‘development priorities’ – which presumably means procuring some developments as being good and prohibiting others as being bad.”
“One of the things that most surprises me about my honourable Friend’s remarks is that he characterizes his proposal for state intervention in, and control of, industry as ‘innovation and a spirit of adventure’ and condemns free private enterprise as ‘prosaic precedent’. This is a strange paradox. I would put it precisely the other way round.”
“One trouble is that when Government gets into a business it tends to make it uneconomic for anyone else.”
Doing as you’re told means you never have to take responsibility for a bad decision. The only time these types of people push back is. WHEN they are in a spot where they have to make a decision- that’s when they feel most oppressed.
And the idiot bosses are exactly the same way. Socialism and technocracy provides more hiding places for these chicken shits than any other system, and an increasingly litigious society only encourages more people to find things to hide behind.
Laws and regulations provide many of those shields, which is why they are so afraid of cutting regulations and legal protections for special groups. I suppose if i had spent 20 years trying to find a protected group that would take me I would be upset too at the thought of personal responsibility.
They still do the same thing with Cuba. They don't cover the hour long queues for gas or the fact that when it comes to fruit in a supermarket the choice is between tinned mango... and tinned mango- in an island paradise! Instead, they focus on the rare few services on the ground designed to appeal to the sensibilities of gullible Western journalists.
I have read one of these. The woman eventually returned, hence the book. The most shocking thing was her treatment of the arrest and imprisonment of friends she knew hadn’t done anything wrong. She decided they must have though, because why else would they be arrested? And carried on with her life, which had to do with indoctrination of schoolchildren. And making regular reports to the security services whenever asked. This was not told as a mea culpa. At all. It was if her idealism made it all just fine and dandy.
Brings to mind Karen Bass's frequent trips to Cuba, though in recent years she's claimed that she was well aware of the lack of freedom that the citizens had (not that she necessarily disapproved of it) after catching some flak for eulogizing Castro: "The passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba."
Its a mistake to assume Post journalists work downtown. The majority likely work from home, soliciting “experts “ for their opinions via email rather than actually using shoe leather to talk to people on the scene.
And any twenty-somethings working there LIKE the decay and since they don’t actually own anything they have nothing to lose - if their apartment is broken into they blame the landlord rather than the actual burglar.
Of course they see it. But if they reported anything remotely close to the truth they would lose access to the pols. Which in of itself is so fucking sad I almost feel sorry for them.
Had to go all biblical today. Part of Tuesday's reading is Matthew 15:10-14, but really, read from verse one for full context. Jesus replies to the disciples who tell him what the Pharisees just said about him. His answer: "Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them [the offended Pharisees] alone; they are blind guides of the blind. If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit."
They don't do it because they're defending it. They're doing it because they're in league with local government and part of the cool kids' club. It's pure social engineering.
Anyone criticizing one of the sacred cows (illegal immigration, homelessness, lgbt, etc.) is a threat to that club. So they attack it.
I used to live in Colorado. It was much better there when it was under more Republican control.
However, even twenty years ago they had a lot of problems with gangs, witness killings, uninsured illegal alien motorists, and car theft rings, many running out of Mexico. If the federal government refuses to police the border or deport gang members, it creates a much more dangerous environment for the regular cops.
I am not excusing the judges for releasing criminals almost immediately or the cops for a laissez faire approach to patrols. I can’t imagine how they think that’s a good tactic for reducing crime. However, this is now a national problem, which is measurably worse in ‘blue states’.
Denver is a rapidly descending dystopian carnival of human degradation. You have millionaire tech a-holes and the seething mass of homeless and illegals, but the middle has vaporized and left town. When all the teachers and nurses and regular folks leave, you end up with California 2.0.
California here. The machine that has its hand up our governors backside is most likely also running Colorado.
The Decay is part of the plan, as are the dutiful academics that endocttonate the unsuspecting and vacant youth, that the "teachers" pass along regardless of capability.
Preach, Lisa. Academia and public schools are a huge vector for the mind viruses. I hope the DOE is wiped from earth never to return and federal tax money is cut from universities.
About what you’d expect from someone who looks like Shelly Bradbury.
Check the replies to her tweet about her big doxxing story on X. She is getting excoriated.
What is the alleged benefit to the journalist for this type of reporting? That’s what I can’t figure out. They hardly ever get a career boost out of it. Is she just satisfying her inner HR officer?
It's all about receiving praise and accolades from the right people. She probably thinks she can be the next Taylor Lorenz by punching down at people out of the club and get a sweet deal at the NYT or AP. Given the mass layoff of "journalists" recently, I think she may have missed the bus though.
"What is the alleged benefit to the journalist for this type of reporting?"
As long as Shelly remains loyal and obedient to Team Social Justice and makes sure that she never (even accidentally) supports any opinion or issue that could be right-coded, Shelly ensures her place as a loyal member in good standing of her chosen tribe, which means she gets to keep her social life, sex life, professional life and connections etc.
No matter how many mistakes made or stupidities repeated, as long as the anger is coming from the opposite team/tribe, it's fine.
What are they paying these hacks nowadays, though? It seems like the Shelly Bs of journalism get paid less than they would if they just collected cans for deposits, even if they faithfully cluck the party line.
Shelly will be ok, she will end up in marketing or sales if nec. But by being a loyal hack she gets to keep her friends, boyfriends, and connections (and sense of superior moral rectitude). Only doing or saying anything MAGA-adjacent could jeopardize this, which explains her actions.
I could be wrong, but I have read that it’s only fairly recently, post World War II, that reporters generally had journalism degrees. Before that they were simply people who landed jobs at a newspaper and worked their way up. No doubt they could read and write well in school. That had the advantage that many had much more diverse backgrounds. Perhaps being in the army in World War II for instance and many had had other types of jobs before that.
This is true. It was considered a working class job, almost blue collar, no degree necessary, just an ability to write and curiosity. I think it was Walter Lippman, an influential writer, who advocated professional journalism education.
Denver used to be a beautiful place and then…liberals, sanctuary city, woke ideologies, legalized everything, crack down on nothing save for crack heads doing crack and God knows what else. Chaos rules the day in Denver and most of the surrounding areas. It’s a first rate s*it hole.
1. Helped move my Mom out of Ft. Collins to Texas about five years ago. She was in an apartment by the river that had a whole parallel ecosystem of people living in tents nearby. These worthies were all over downtown, lined up for free food, reeking of cannabis. The decline is real.
2. I was the publisher of Altadena (CA)’s first news website. The established media didn’t understand it for the longest time. The reporter for the Pasadena daily called me once and demanded I turn over my sources on a particular story, explaining that she was “a real journalist” and I wasn’t. I’m thinking my career was ten years along before she was born.
I’m sure the Post has the usual established media contempt for online citizen-journalists, but it sounds like they’ve gotten too cozy with the Powers, too. If a citizen journalist scoops them, you think it would be a wake-up call to do better - rather than a search-and-destroy mission against the scooper.
I wasn't aware of Do Better Denver until the Denver Post told me that they were engaged in crimethink, at which point I immediately hit the "follow" button.
Imagine the poor folks that actually pay for the Denver Post expecting to be kept informed on what is going on in their city. Instead of reporting on the issue, they are "reporting" their opinions on someone who is trying to make sure folks realize how really bad things are in the City. Meanwhile, the "press" and the Mayor want to shame the truth tellers. Anxious for karma to take over the Denver Post and Denver political scene.
People don’t pay for the Post to be informed, they pay for it to be told that they’re good boys and girls who have all the right opinions and only believe “the experts”.
At least it has a nickname that’s easier to remember: The High City. As The Ramones might have sang, “Five thousand two hundred eighty feet to go, I want to be sedated.”
Colorado's a deep blue state, just like Cali. It's only a matter of time until people start stealing anything that's not nailed down at the local walmart.
China Miéville wrote an excellent book called The City & the City, about two realities that existed in the same time and place but were not permitted to see each other. Breach was the organisation that enforced this separation; the mainstream media are our version of Breach.
The difference for us is that we can see the other reality — and we’re openly discussing it.
The only thing missing in this Post content creator's story is the tagline used broadly these days especially in visual media in response to everything "against their narrative" are the words "and there is really/literally/actually no (not a shred) of evidence."
I was just about to spin something up about this, but instead I'll pass along this tidbit and you can include it if you want:
https://x.com/dobetterdnvr/status/1952780473815687574
I have been informed that the Mayor’s office were the ones that looked at all the CORA requests over the last two years and tried to figure out who I am based on CORA requests and my posts (based on who was requesting them).
The Mayor’s office narrowed it down to three names and FED the story to the @denverpost
and told their contact at the Post to CORA the CORA requests in hopes of outing me and getting the media and my followers to turn on me.
The Mayor’s office said that @mikejohnstonco wants DoBetterDNVR gone because ‘I am ruining his narrative’. Is it legal for government officials to try and silence me via doxxing? Or engaging the Denver Post to do so?
So it's much much worse than just the Post going after the anon behind the Twitter account -- they did it at the behest of government officials.
Exactly right. These clowns keep trying to pretend like all is well, but we have eyes.
And phones.
And noses.
This is the problem with non-serious people demanding to be taken seriously.
Heaven forbid that you ruin the Mayor's "narrative" with facts. What do you think this is, a free country?
/s, just in case
LOLOL
I live in Denver. 10 blocks from my house yesterday there were people shooting up in the street, and wandering into traffic etc. Yesterday a high driver started doing donuts in a local park that just had been renovated at taxpayers expense. He passed within 10 feet of people sunbathing in the park when he jumped the curb on to the grass. Today a 12 year old boy was doing donuts in the park, on the grass, on a quad bike going 40mph on a public lawn. None of this is on Do Better Denver. This is just my “Lived Experience”. Meanwhile our CAPEX budget is high so the place has more and more shiny bits and more and more human tragedy every day. Both are happening here.
You can take photos, can you not? Are you unable to post to social media? If you can post here, you can post on other public forums.
I don’t understand the point. I’m just saying Do Better Denver is posting what we all see. I don’t post urban decay to social. That’s his thing.
Sounds like the Denver Post needs to be a regular topic of investigation on the X channel! I mean, how often does the Denver Post: investigate the homeless problem? Investigate the organs of city government about their responses to citizen concerns? I suppose that would mean more citizens doing unauthorized self-journalism! After all, who is journaling the journalizers?
Never. They Never do it. That's what Do Better Denver does. He does not just cover urban decay but also has demonstrated, with evidence, that dangerous criminals are regularly released back into the community. I had this pattern personally confirmed by contacts at DPD that this is the policy of the Denver County Judges, to release felons back into the community with minimal processing. The first step is to vote NO on re-electing all of the judges on your municipal ballots. That's the first act of resistance from the people and it will have a real tangible impact if enough people do it.
Not going to happen. Mail in voting is the end of any kind of rational political balance. Denver is dead and won’t recover.
The Cops seem like they are on the verge of giving up to be honest. They don't aspire to solve any of these problems any more, they are just trying to maintain some sense of order and do a good job given that there are only 5,500 of them! I talk to them fairly frequently to "take the pulse" of the community as part of my informal community role here in Denver. A lady cop recently responded to the conversation I was having with her about it all by asking me about my Dog (who is admittedly very cute, actually make that adorable). She found the conversation too hard and wanted to be happy in that moment, so we talked about my dog instead. She petted her and then we went our separate ways. She presented as a decent person in a tough situation. That's been my experience with DPD over the years. They are decent people in a tough spot. They want to do the right thing but they are not supported by City Hall. They are not mean or vindictive. They are all good citizens first and cops second. I've met over 50 of them in the past few years. None of the ones I spoke to really support the political leadership of the city. I have yet to find a single one who does.
I agree with strategic plans against these judicial saboteurs.
But the real issue in this catastrophe is that these judges are NOT upholding their constitutional responsibilities. Therefore they are aiding and abetting sedition against our country, our Republic.
Somehow a mass psychosis has taken hold of free speech narratives that suggest violating the public safety is not happening unless there is an immediate felonious act on the release of criminals from detention. Could it reasonably be said that the society we live in has become infected with litigious narrative that has redefined ‘public safety’ and ‘at will’ release of dangerous people for political and social experiments being conducted by seditionists? It seems to me that the law has become such an example of jurisdiction sovereignty by locally entrenched jurists that the Constitution is now more of an original touchstone in the foundation of justice than a living principle of reality. Or, the definition of reality has been so thoroughly distorted that assumptions of right and wrong are strictly grade/evaluated by legal ‘experts’/professionals almost exclusively. So our society has evolved from an overly litigious system to a power-based lawfare system. One of the revelatory features of the coup against Trump and MAGA supporters over the course of the last 10 years plus.
Without common justice for the average man, not just those on the up side of two-tier justice or those whose resources of defense can in some random way match big ‘G’ government resources, rebellion and revolution are stirred deeper and deeper into We the People — setting up the confrontation between the haves and the have-nots as never before, or maybe as classically and repeatedly as always.
This marshaling of power as it has evolved through our civic lives, our chambers of commerce as well as corporations, and legalese drift has brought us to this ‘Fourth Turning’ of core political power. We the People face monumental challenges in the change of course to the core of this power. Ideological seditionists have seized many moments of opportunity, almost establishing precedent for anti-constitutional practices in law that we have been experiencing.
But — Here’s the thing; and there IS a thing. Those who would be pleased with the erosion of constitutional protections and rights face massive realizations of what they have been doing. Now is the time — to take America back. MAGA — USA USA
"this is the policy of the Denver County Judges, to release felons back into the community with minimal processing"
I'm over near the border with Utah, and that seems to be the policy of the courts around here, too. They (the cops, the judges, the DA, etc.) won't admit it, but repeat offenders somehow get continually released back into the population, and no adequate explanation has been offered.
We literally had a county DA come out to my town to tell us that we need to invest in mental health services, as a way to deal with our criminal element. This is because we keep complaining and asking why the criminals aren't going to prison.
Yes. The cops here are more open about it. They don’t like it because it renders their work meaningless and incoherent. Also, what you are describing is the same logic that says that to solve the border crisis we need to go to El Salvador and eliminate poverty there first. In other words, rather than enforcing a border we are responsible for eliminating the conditions in other countries that lead to the crisis. This sounds like “root cause analysis” but really it’s just morally vapid abrogation of duty. This (btw) was literally what Kamala Harris argued after being handed the poisoned chalice of “border czar” by Biden at the start of their term together. She deflected all border security conversations into conversations about our responsibility to do nation-building in Central America. It’s not so much that was repudiating her constitutional oath, more that she was ignoring it in favor of projects she found more interesting and less accountable for any kind of tangible results, which is the preferred path of “peak simulation layer” politicians, of course.
"lived experience" sorry but if it's not leftist, it's just anecdotal
FFS. That was a joke. Read the room
sounds like you're the one who can't read the room. enjoy living in Denver
Thanks for your contributions to this important debate. Have a great weekend. 🎉
Living in the Denver metro, I can say it's not just downtown. The burbs have this now too. As does Colorado Springs, Ft Collins, and so on. They should change the name to "Do Better Colorado."
Everyone sees it. I just can't understand how the Post journalists make themselves not see it. They all work downtown. When they walk past these scenes don't they feel a bit of fear, nervousness, anything? Or have they so brainwashed themselves that basic animal instincts of self-preservation have been ripped out? I just can't get in their heads.
Read a few books about the Soviets, it will all start to become clear. Sacred ideology plus tribalism plus being aware of severe penalties for dissent along w incentives for obedience will make people say or do anything.
I don't remember where I just read about American leftists visiting the Soviet Union in the 1930s and gushing at their Soviet handlers about how beautiful and successful everything was, while the Soviets kept trying to figure out if the Americans were really THAT stupid.
There were so many Western dupes of the Soviets—almost all artists and "intellectuals"—that it's hard to guess which ones you're talking about.
The Cold War taught me all I needed to know about the "engaged intellectual": those trapped on the east side of the Iron Curtain risked their lives to escape, and those on the west side of the Curtain wrote love songs to dictators and police states and cashed large checks and lived lavishly while denouncing capitalist imperialism.
Often there's no one more stupid (i.e. gullible and deluded) than the "well educated".
I used to have lively discussions with a former Eastern bloc Soviet who had subsequently emigrated to Canada. He wasn't a Russian, but rather from one of the former Warsaw Pact countries. It was informative. He did come out with a few very specific instances to defend his position, which might just about work on a small scale using the co-operative model, and unlike most Leftists his critiques on capitalism were relatively sound- given that he was really critiquing crony capitalism as though it was the general rule, rather than a specific problem found in a small percentage of the market, and fundamentally a flaw of government, rather than markets.
From my read, crony capitalism was more prominent Eastern Europe after the fall of communism for the simple reason that they had large state-owned companies with few initial competitors and because their systems were inherently prone to corruption. They had lived under systemic State corruption for decades, after all, and corruption was all but in the water.
Anyway, I once asked him whether he was a former dachas party elites. He seemed very annoyed by the question and wouldn't answer it (which was an answer in itself). The reason why intellectuals and artists have an inherent fondness for communistic totalitarian systems is because they always believe that a communist system will see their hidden talent and visionary insights. They imagine themselves as one of the dacha dwellers, designing policy to implement the future utopia.
If one were to stipulate that communism must always be led by proletariat works committees, with only workers with twenty or more years experience on the job eligible to stand for elections to the works committees, they would suddenly lose their enthusiasm for communism. Ban the intellectuals from making decisions or informing them, and socialism might just work. It wouldn't produce anywhere near the living standards of market-based systems, but it does tackle the single biggest problem with socialism or any centralised government system- preventing intellectuals from making decisions about subjects of which they know little, or are motivationally disinformed, with the latter being a far greater problem than the former.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain
Since the inspiration for Marx' ideas of communism (which must be separated from Engels' analysis of capitalism) was the French "communitards" who using a modern parallel most closely resembled secular Amish more or less, your inkling that it only works up to a certain scale is correct.
Anyone who has lived in a collective, as I have, can testify to that too: up to a certain scale, dep. on circumstances, but no larger than that you can personally know or know someone who knows the third party, and is built on voluntary solidaric sharing of basic resources - works.
Go larger, and drop the voluntary-ism, and also drop the direct democracy-part in favour of committees and so on, and it immediately starts to collapse and fail.
It very much mimics the difference between small and medium-sized companies, and large-scale corporations for that matter.
Another factor oft forgotten is "politics is downstream from culture"; this has quite the severe impact when trying to reshape a society according to a political norm, rather than teasing out a political formula /from/ the pre-existing culture. That's why Social(ist) Democracy worked so well in Scandinavia, initially: the original ideas were largely based on pre-existing cultural norms and mores that the system of that day (late 1800s laissez faire-capitalism; i.e. what amounted to the eq. of robber baronsand their debt-slaves) were in violation of.
Same as with USA of today: the values and norms spewed forth for decades now by Hollywood, progressive press and liberals-in-name-only are - from this foreigner's perspective - 180 degrees or so from mainstream American culture and idea(l)s.
And thus the whole things totters, as it tries to find a new equilibrium.
—"The reason why intellectuals and artists have an inherent fondness for communistic totalitarian systems is because they always believe that a communist system will see their hidden talent and visionary insights." 🎯
The best description of why intellectuals can never resist the siren song of Marxism I've read comes from Bakunin in "Statism and Anarchy" (1873):
—The words “learned socialist” and “scientific socialism,” which recur constantly in the writings and speeches of the Lassalleans and Marxists, are proof in themselves that the pseudo-popular state will be nothing but the highly despotic government of the masses by a new and very small aristocracy of real or pretended scholars. The people are not learned, so they will be liberated in entirety from the cares of government and included in entirety in the governed herd. A fine liberation!
They say that this state yoke, this dictatorship, is a necessary transitional device for achieving the total liberation of the people: anarchy, or freedom, is the goal, and the state, or dictatorship, the means. Thus, for the masses to be liberated they must first be enslaved."
Marxism calls for the total rule of a vanguard class of philosopher-kings, who will at last get to directly sculpt living human clay to their specifications. This is just too rich a temptation for all sorts of insecure petty tyrants and utopian "theorists" to resist.
The irony is that even in the absence of Marxism, technocratic decision making doesn’t work. Both the African aid NGO blob and effective altruism drastically underperform compared to directly giving funds to African communities to invest for themselves.
This doesn’t mean that expertise isn’t valuable, far from it, but two ‘tethers’ are required to keep the expertise grounded in reality: 1) Direct interaction with the ‘coal face’, whether it’s the shop floor or a doctor engaging with the customer 2) market mechanisms to maintain accountability for basic service delivery failures down to the level of individual employees.
When the Toyota experts were brought in as consultants to teach German auto their radically improved approach, they were highly annoyed to find that German managers were in the habit of resoling their work shoes. Apparently, in the past it had been a basic metric of competency to see whether a manager had grit and oil embedded in his sole.
Have you heard of Sir John James Cowperthwaite? He served as the financial secretary of Hong Kong, and more than any other person was responsible for its subsequent prosperity. He also has some great quotes:
“In the long run, the aggregate of the decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is likely to do less harm than the centralized decisions of a Government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.”
“I largely agree with those that hold that Government should not in general interfere with the course of the economy merely on the strength of its own commercial judgment. If we cannot rely on the judgment of individual businessmen, taking their own risks, we have no future anyway.”
“I am afraid that I do not believe that any body of men can have enough knowledge of the past, the present and the future to establish ‘development priorities’ – which presumably means procuring some developments as being good and prohibiting others as being bad.”
“One of the things that most surprises me about my honourable Friend’s remarks is that he characterizes his proposal for state intervention in, and control of, industry as ‘innovation and a spirit of adventure’ and condemns free private enterprise as ‘prosaic precedent’. This is a strange paradox. I would put it precisely the other way round.”
“One trouble is that when Government gets into a business it tends to make it uneconomic for anyone else.”
Am still waiting for the NYT to apologize for Walter Duranty.
Sounds like Bernie Sanders could’ve been part of that cadre as he and his wife honeymooned there. The 1930 time frame kinda fits too. 😏
And yes. I do believe Bernie is THAT stupid.
I laughed at Bernie Sanders until I realized that I also honeymooned in the USSR (just before its collaspe.)
Doing as you’re told means you never have to take responsibility for a bad decision. The only time these types of people push back is. WHEN they are in a spot where they have to make a decision- that’s when they feel most oppressed.
And the idiot bosses are exactly the same way. Socialism and technocracy provides more hiding places for these chicken shits than any other system, and an increasingly litigious society only encourages more people to find things to hide behind.
Laws and regulations provide many of those shields, which is why they are so afraid of cutting regulations and legal protections for special groups. I suppose if i had spent 20 years trying to find a protected group that would take me I would be upset too at the thought of personal responsibility.
They still do the same thing with Cuba. They don't cover the hour long queues for gas or the fact that when it comes to fruit in a supermarket the choice is between tinned mango... and tinned mango- in an island paradise! Instead, they focus on the rare few services on the ground designed to appeal to the sensibilities of gullible Western journalists.
Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928-1978, by Paul Hollander.
I haven't read the book, but it's probably full of those accounts.
(Hollander also wrote From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez--probably the same idea.)
Good growing weather for the house of Pulitzer Prizes!
https://historic-times.com/walter-duranty-holodomor-cover-up/
Pete Seeger - Exhibit A
He adored the Hitler-Stalin pact until the Great Betrayal.
I have read one of these. The woman eventually returned, hence the book. The most shocking thing was her treatment of the arrest and imprisonment of friends she knew hadn’t done anything wrong. She decided they must have though, because why else would they be arrested? And carried on with her life, which had to do with indoctrination of schoolchildren. And making regular reports to the security services whenever asked. This was not told as a mea culpa. At all. It was if her idealism made it all just fine and dandy.
Brings to mind Karen Bass's frequent trips to Cuba, though in recent years she's claimed that she was well aware of the lack of freedom that the citizens had (not that she necessarily disapproved of it) after catching some flak for eulogizing Castro: "The passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba."
Its a mistake to assume Post journalists work downtown. The majority likely work from home, soliciting “experts “ for their opinions via email rather than actually using shoe leather to talk to people on the scene.
And any twenty-somethings working there LIKE the decay and since they don’t actually own anything they have nothing to lose - if their apartment is broken into they blame the landlord rather than the actual burglar.
The entire enterprise has become a fraud.
"Experts say..."
Of course they see it. But if they reported anything remotely close to the truth they would lose access to the pols. Which in of itself is so fucking sad I almost feel sorry for them.
Had to go all biblical today. Part of Tuesday's reading is Matthew 15:10-14, but really, read from verse one for full context. Jesus replies to the disciples who tell him what the Pharisees just said about him. His answer: "Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them [the offended Pharisees] alone; they are blind guides of the blind. If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit."
They don't do it because they're defending it. They're doing it because they're in league with local government and part of the cool kids' club. It's pure social engineering.
Anyone criticizing one of the sacred cows (illegal immigration, homelessness, lgbt, etc.) is a threat to that club. So they attack it.
I used to live in Colorado. It was much better there when it was under more Republican control.
However, even twenty years ago they had a lot of problems with gangs, witness killings, uninsured illegal alien motorists, and car theft rings, many running out of Mexico. If the federal government refuses to police the border or deport gang members, it creates a much more dangerous environment for the regular cops.
I am not excusing the judges for releasing criminals almost immediately or the cops for a laissez faire approach to patrols. I can’t imagine how they think that’s a good tactic for reducing crime. However, this is now a national problem, which is measurably worse in ‘blue states’.
Denver is a rapidly descending dystopian carnival of human degradation. You have millionaire tech a-holes and the seething mass of homeless and illegals, but the middle has vaporized and left town. When all the teachers and nurses and regular folks leave, you end up with California 2.0.
California here. The machine that has its hand up our governors backside is most likely also running Colorado.
The Decay is part of the plan, as are the dutiful academics that endocttonate the unsuspecting and vacant youth, that the "teachers" pass along regardless of capability.
Preach, Lisa. Academia and public schools are a huge vector for the mind viruses. I hope the DOE is wiped from earth never to return and federal tax money is cut from universities.
And the teachers unions confine themselves to representing their members, not Democrat politics.
> The Decay is part of the plan
Buy cheap, sell dear!
A race to the bottom - and the winner is…Seattle? Denver? LA? San Francisco? Portland? And that’s just the west coast.
About what you’d expect from someone who looks like Shelly Bradbury.
Check the replies to her tweet about her big doxxing story on X. She is getting excoriated.
What is the alleged benefit to the journalist for this type of reporting? That’s what I can’t figure out. They hardly ever get a career boost out of it. Is she just satisfying her inner HR officer?
It's all about receiving praise and accolades from the right people. She probably thinks she can be the next Taylor Lorenz by punching down at people out of the club and get a sweet deal at the NYT or AP. Given the mass layoff of "journalists" recently, I think she may have missed the bus though.
This.
They've allied with a team (in this case, city authorities), and attack anyone not on side.
Look at all the bleeding hearts that do journalism. It's a type.
"What is the alleged benefit to the journalist for this type of reporting?"
As long as Shelly remains loyal and obedient to Team Social Justice and makes sure that she never (even accidentally) supports any opinion or issue that could be right-coded, Shelly ensures her place as a loyal member in good standing of her chosen tribe, which means she gets to keep her social life, sex life, professional life and connections etc.
No matter how many mistakes made or stupidities repeated, as long as the anger is coming from the opposite team/tribe, it's fine.
Nothing else matters.
What are they paying these hacks nowadays, though? It seems like the Shelly Bs of journalism get paid less than they would if they just collected cans for deposits, even if they faithfully cluck the party line.
Shelly will be ok, she will end up in marketing or sales if nec. But by being a loyal hack she gets to keep her friends, boyfriends, and connections (and sense of superior moral rectitude). Only doing or saying anything MAGA-adjacent could jeopardize this, which explains her actions.
The government told her to jump, so she jumped.
Because “How dare you point out the Regime is the ‘Guardian of Decay’ for this once great country.”
Never hire a reporter who majored in journalism.
As a journalism major, I endorse this. The average journalism major has well-off parents and is quite stupid.
I could be wrong, but I have read that it’s only fairly recently, post World War II, that reporters generally had journalism degrees. Before that they were simply people who landed jobs at a newspaper and worked their way up. No doubt they could read and write well in school. That had the advantage that many had much more diverse backgrounds. Perhaps being in the army in World War II for instance and many had had other types of jobs before that.
This is true. It was considered a working class job, almost blue collar, no degree necessary, just an ability to write and curiosity. I think it was Walter Lippman, an influential writer, who advocated professional journalism education.
My first job at a paper was straightening and bundling the papers after they came off the press. Every day I looked like a tattoo factory accident.
Actually...ARE there any j-schools even left in the US? I thought they'd all been subsumed by the marcomms departments.
Denver used to be a beautiful place and then…liberals, sanctuary city, woke ideologies, legalized everything, crack down on nothing save for crack heads doing crack and God knows what else. Chaos rules the day in Denver and most of the surrounding areas. It’s a first rate s*it hole.
Former Coloradan here. Two points:
1. Helped move my Mom out of Ft. Collins to Texas about five years ago. She was in an apartment by the river that had a whole parallel ecosystem of people living in tents nearby. These worthies were all over downtown, lined up for free food, reeking of cannabis. The decline is real.
2. I was the publisher of Altadena (CA)’s first news website. The established media didn’t understand it for the longest time. The reporter for the Pasadena daily called me once and demanded I turn over my sources on a particular story, explaining that she was “a real journalist” and I wasn’t. I’m thinking my career was ten years along before she was born.
I’m sure the Post has the usual established media contempt for online citizen-journalists, but it sounds like they’ve gotten too cozy with the Powers, too. If a citizen journalist scoops them, you think it would be a wake-up call to do better - rather than a search-and-destroy mission against the scooper.
One good thing is that the hit piece will likely send more people to the site.
I wasn't aware of Do Better Denver until the Denver Post told me that they were engaged in crimethink, at which point I immediately hit the "follow" button.
Streisand Effect FTW!
“Legacy journalists regard themselves as a retaining wall for the support of existing authority — the criticism police”
Slow clap…👏🏼…. Exactly! 👍🏼
Be a good citizen and comply with all compliant requests to comply with compliance. Sincerely, The Denver Post
Imagine the poor folks that actually pay for the Denver Post expecting to be kept informed on what is going on in their city. Instead of reporting on the issue, they are "reporting" their opinions on someone who is trying to make sure folks realize how really bad things are in the City. Meanwhile, the "press" and the Mayor want to shame the truth tellers. Anxious for karma to take over the Denver Post and Denver political scene.
People don’t pay for the Post to be informed, they pay for it to be told that they’re good boys and girls who have all the right opinions and only believe “the experts”.
"Newspapers" (they may be more read in digital editions, hence the scare quotes) covering what's being posted on the Internet is always funny.
At least it has a nickname that’s easier to remember: The High City. As The Ramones might have sang, “Five thousand two hundred eighty feet to go, I want to be sedated.”
Colorado's a deep blue state, just like Cali. It's only a matter of time until people start stealing anything that's not nailed down at the local walmart.
China Miéville wrote an excellent book called The City & the City, about two realities that existed in the same time and place but were not permitted to see each other. Breach was the organisation that enforced this separation; the mainstream media are our version of Breach.
The difference for us is that we can see the other reality — and we’re openly discussing it.
“When in Besźel, see only Besźel!”
The only thing missing in this Post content creator's story is the tagline used broadly these days especially in visual media in response to everything "against their narrative" are the words "and there is really/literally/actually no (not a shred) of evidence."