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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Who is my neighbor? [1]
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Date: 2023-05-18
Sometime during the summer of 1990, I was making out with someone in a el station (the Blue Line at Damen, I think). A very tall bald white man came out from behind the attendant booth. (The booth was normally empty at those early morning hours, as you paid your fare on the train.) He started yelling, called me “ni**er” two or three times, and then begin beating on me. My make-out partner (who was white) ran out of the station.
The bald white man (I assume now that he was a skinhead, as Wicker Park was a known skinhead hangout in those days) continued pummeling me until someone, a Black (probably gay) man, came into the station and told the man to leave me alone. The skinhead ran out of the train station. I was bloodied, puffed up, dazed, and very drunk. The man who saved me from possibly being killed asked me to go home with him and I said yes.
I woke up the next morning in a lower bunk. There were seven or eight other guys living in the apartment with the guy who took me home (thinking about it today, it was probably a sober house; it had the same layout of sober houses that I was to live in a few years later). He gave me a bowl of cereal to eat, asked again if I was OK and gave me a few bucks to get home.
What is so totally disgusting to me about DeSatan’s description of Daniel Penny’s actions as the actions of a “Good Samaritan” is that I have actually met a Good Samaritan.
Whoever that Good Samaritan was over 30 years ago, I thank him and I hope that he’s stayed sober.
It also occurs to me that in no classroom in Florida’s K-12 schools and, perhaps, even Florida’s colleges and universities would I be allowed to even discuss my Good Samaritan story.
Chelsia Rose Marcus of The New York Times writes about the legal and ethical obligations of the bystanders to the killing of Jordan Neely.
The legal standard is clear: No U.S. state explicitly requires civilian strangers to physically intervene when they see an adult in danger, though some impose a duty to report wrongdoing and two set an ambiguous standard of rendering assistance. The value of such legislation has been debated for years, according to people who study the intersection of ethics, the law and bystanderism — the phenomenon of being less likely to intervene when there are others present. In New York, where residents rub shoulders in corridors, crowded sidewalks and packed subway cars, the decision of how to respond to an uncomfortable situation is a daily dilemma. There is an unspoken code in the city: “You do not get involved, you cannot solve every person’s problems. We learn to be very guarded,” said Ken Levy, a professor at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University, who studies bystanderism and who lived in New York for years. “The closest we can come to undoing a tragedy like this is by blaming the people who did it, and those who didn’t stop it,” he added.
Hannah Knowles and Josh Dawsey of The Washington Post report that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will enter the presidential race after the Memorial Day holiday.
The second-term governor, widely considered at present to be the most viable GOP challenger to former president Donald Trump, has been laying the groundwork for a campaign for months. In speeches around the country, he has touted his landslide reelection win last year and his sweeping legislative agenda in Florida — passed this spring by GOP supermajorities — and also implicitly pitched himself as a better bet than Trump in the general election. Representatives for DeSantis’s political team declined to comment. DeSantis is also expected to hold an event launching his candidacy in Dunedin, Fla., his hometown, according to one of the people familiar with the plans and another familiar with the kickoff gathering. That event is expected to take place after Memorial Day, according to the first person. [...] Doubts about DeSantis’s presidential prospects have grown in recent months as Trump has surged in national polls of the GOP race and attacked DeSantis, and as some donors have voiced concerns about the governor’s policy moves. But the governor has rebuilt some momentum over the past week, rolling out large slates of endorsements from state lawmakers in Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida.
The editorial board of The Philadelphia Inquirer writes about Cherelle Parker’s historic win in the Democratic primary for mayor of Philadelphia.
It was a history-making election. While Parker still needs to defeat Republican nominee David Oh in the fall, the significant Democratic registration advantage, combined with the rightward march of the national GOP, make that race much less of a challenge than the grueling primary. That means that after 341 years, a woman is now poised to lead Philadelphia. Parker wasn’t this board’s pick. Nor was she the choice of the city’s burgeoning far-left progressive movement. In the city’s more affluent, white, and college-educated areas, Parker’s broadsides against “academicians” found little support. Yet, clearly, many Black and brown working-class voters were inspired by her own lived experience as a Black woman, and as a product of the city’s school system and neighborhoods. And while this was the most expensive election ever in Philadelphia, the candidate with the least personal wealth won. What seemed to give Parker the edge? Philadelphia certainly has a long list of problems that need to be solved, but as columnist Jenice Armstrong found during a walk down Broad Street last week, public safety was the top priority for most Philadelphians going into election day. On Tuesday, those living in neighborhoods most affected by gun crime overwhelmingly selected Parker, the only candidate who pledged to both hire more police officers and lean into stop-and-frisk.
Ernest Luning of the Colorado Springs Gazette analyzes the “seismic shift” in Colorado Springs made evident by Yemi Mobolade’s win in the mayoral race.
That sound you heard Tuesday night in Colorado Springs was a seismic shift in the political foundation under Colorado's second-largest city. Yemi Mobolade, an unaffiliated, first-time candidate, didn't just beat veteran Republican politician Wayne Williams by double digits in the city's mayoral runoff — the Nigerian immigrant upended the board in a once reliably right-leaning city that has been moving toward the center by leaps and bounds in recent elections. [...] Running as a business-friendly moderate in the nominally nonpartisan election, Mobolade appears to have energized voters from across the political spectrum, while Williams battled critics from all sides, including fellow Republicans. None of that would have mattered, however, without the city electorate's leftward shift.
Elisabeth Rosenthal writes for The Washington Post that denials of health insurance claims are increasing.
Millions of Americans in the past few years have run into this experience: filing a health-care insurance claim that once might have been paid immediately but instead is just as quickly denied. If the experience and the insurer’s explanation often seem arbitrary and absurd, that might be because companies appear increasingly likely to employ computer algorithms or people with little relevant experience to issue rapid-fire denials of claims — sometimes bundles at a time — without even reviewing the patient’s medical chart; a job title at one company was “denial nurse.” It’s a handy way for insurers to keep revenue high — and just the sort of thing that provisions of the Affordable Care Act were meant to prevent. Because the law prohibited insurers from deploying a number of previously profit-protecting measures such as refusing to cover patients with preexisting conditions, the authors worried that insurers would compensate by increasing the number of denials. recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) of plans on the Affordable Care Act marketplace found that even when patients received care from in-network physicians — doctors and hospitals approved by these same insurers — the companies in 2021 nonetheless denied, on average, 17 percent of claims. One insurer denied 49 percent of claims in 2021; another’s turndowns hit an astonishing 80 percent in 2020. Despite the potentially dire impact that denials have on patients’ health or finances, data shows that people appeal only once in every 500 cases. Sometimes, the insurers’ denials defy not just medical standards of care but also plain old human logic...
Aallyah Wright of Capital B News looks at the movement against the prevalence of “dollar stores” in Black communities.
Over the years, dollar stores have expanded their food options, which tend to be mostly packaged, higher in calories, and lower in nutrients, a Tufts University study found. Researchers wrote that the dollar stores may be filling food voids where local grocers do not have enough businesses to support maintaining a store, leaving residents with fewer food options, especially in rural areas. For more than a decade, dollar stores have been the fastest-growing food retailers by household expenditure share, with an increase of nearly 90% from 2008 to 2020 according to Tufts University. In rural areas, the increase was 103%. In rural and low-income areas, people, on average, spend more than 5% of their food budget at dollar stores. In rural Black households, they spent nearly 12%. One reason: They are likely to be located further from grocery stores. The limited healthy food offerings is a major criticism of the stores. It is why some Black leaders have been leading the charge to stop dollar stores from suffocating their communities.
Finally today, Guy Delauney of BBC News reports that in spite of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s largely successful disarmament program in the wake of two recent mass shootings in the country, tens of thousands of Serbians remain in the streets protesting.
The public and political reaction to such a disarmament programme in the country which tops the list, the United States, can be imagined. In Serbia, says Bojan Elek, it has been a different matter. The amnesty has been mostly positively accepted, he says, and by the second day of the amnesty, more guns and ammunition had been handed over than in the previous three amnesties put together. "The number of illegal guns is definitely being reduced - even some weapons from World War II have been handed in. But we haven't got a credible figure of how many there were to start with, so it's hard to say how many are remaining." [...] Given the government's swift action to reduce the number of weapons in circulation and the lack of widespread objections to their proposals, the question is: why are tens of thousands of people still motivated to hit the streets in protest?
Have the best possible day, everyone!
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