What Happened Today: June 7, 2022
Shooting surge on primary voters’ minds; Boris Johnson survives vote; faith in government drops to historic lows
The Big Story
A staggering number of shootings across the country this past weekend pushed the issue of public safety to the top of many voters’ minds as they headed to the polls Tuesday for primary elections in seven states. Since Friday alone, 300 shootings have left 124 dead and 325 wounded across the United States, including a Phoenix strip-mall shooting in which a 14-year-old girl died and eight others were wounded, and a gun fight Saturday night on Philadelphia’s bustling South Street that left three dead and 11 wounded. While the string of shootings has forced candidates on the campaign trail to stake positions on state-level gun reform legislation, surging violence in cities in particular has become a problem with no easy solution for several progressive district attorneys who were once the faces of criminal justice reform. Homicide rates in the United States, which hit their highest level in 25 years in 2020, according to data from the CDC, have continued rising. In Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner’s tenure could end after his current term if a new Pennsylvania state law limiting the Philadelphia DA’s tenures to two terms is passed this year. Similarly in California, where two contests have become referendums on public safety. In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin—who, like Krasner, came to office with funding from political activists, including George Soros—faces a recall effort led by Brooke Jenkins, a prosecutor who used to work in Boudin’s office and left because of what she and others in the city argue is a dereliction of the DA’s core responsibilities to prosecute repeat offenders and temper rising crime and homicides. Two recent polls found that 56% of likely voters support the recall. “Many people subscribe to the same sort of overarching goals that Chesa has,” said Jenkins, who identifies as progressive but sees Boudin as disconnected from the realities of San Francisco. “People have said, ‘Wait a minute. What we didn’t sign up for is rampant crime.’”
Read it here: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/teacher-14-year-old-among-hundreds-americans-hit-by-gunfire-over-weekend-2022-06-06/
In The Back Pages: How to Raise Weird Kids
The Rest
→ British Prime Minister Boris Johnson survived a no-confidence vote on Monday night, 211 to 148, leaving him to govern a bitterly divided parliament and party. The vote was triggered when 15% of British members of parliament withdrew their support from Johnson in the wake of the Partygate scandal, during which photos circulated of Johnson carousing with other political elites at 10 Downing Street while the rest of the country suffered through strict lockdown policies. While Johnson has called his victory “decisive” and “convincing,” the margin bodes poorly for his political future. Prime ministers who have previously survived such votes of no confidence, including Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Theresa May, all did so shortly before losing their national elections.
→ As mass was ending at St. Francis Catholic Church in Southern Nigeria on Sunday, four gunmen entered the church and killed at least 50 people in one of the deadliest attacks in this region in years. While such attacks are rare in Ondo, which is among the safest states in Nigeria, the country has seen a spate of such violence this year, with nearly 3,000 murders between January and March 2022. Sunday’s attackers remain at large, and no organization has taken credit for the massacre, but Nigeria is riven with rival militant groups, from the Islamist Boko Haram in the north to the Indigenous People of Biafra, a militant separatist organization, attacking government targets in the south. Some experts have also noted the similarities between this attack in Ondo and those conducted by the Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP), the African offshoot of ISIS, in the neighboring state of Kogi, where there have been four ISWAP attacks in the past month.
→ BY THE NUMBERS: At least 82 million COVID-19 vaccine doses—roughly 11% of the number of doses distributed by the government since December 2020—have been thrown away. The inefficiency of the vaccine rollout was due in part to a bungled distribution at the community level, with a quarter of all of those doses getting tossed out by CVS and Walmart.
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY: “In brief, non-lethal drones can be installed in schools and other venues and play the same role that sprinklers and other fire-suppression tools do for firefighters: preventing a catastrophic event, or at least mitigating its worst effects.”
From Axon’s press release announcing its pilot program to bring together the righteous power of Tasers, which the company created, and drones. Such a technology, Axon said last week, could help stop school shootings; after nine members of its ethics board resigned in protest, Axon announced that it would be pausing the program.
Read the resignation letter here: https://www.policingproject.org/statement-of-resigning-axon-ai-ethics-board-members
→ Israel’s ruling coalition, a union of convenience of right-wing, left-wing, centrist, and Arab parties, failed to pass a routine bill extending Israeli law to settlers living in the West Bank on Monday after former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu organized the opposition against the bill’s passage in a bid to humiliate the sitting government and its prime minister, Naftali Bennett. “Bennett—go home. It’s over,” the Likud Party, which supports Netanyahu, posted on Facebook. “The time has come to return the country to the right.” It has been less than a year since Bennett took office, and this power play from Netanyahu signals that a recall election might be close at hand. Some members of the ruling coalition, however, opposed passing the bill on principled grounds. Voted on every five years, the bill extends Israeli law to those Israeli citizens living in the occupied territories, which are not legally part of Israel and where the Palestinian population is subject to military law. The creation of this unequal legal system inspired a member of the Arab Ra’am party and the left-wing Meretz party to vote against the bill.
→ The public faith in government is hitting record lows, according to a new PEW study. Just 29% of Democrats surveyed said they trust the government most of the time, while only 9% of Republicans felt the same way—the lowest level of faith in the federal government for Republicans in six decades. Faith in elected officials isn’t much better, with 50% of Americans saying that most if not all people who pursue elected office do so to serve their own personal benefit. Regardless of their political party, just 19% of Americans believe that Washington, D.C., officials do what is right “most of the time.”
→ As if the creation of the Jan. 6 commission were not already enough of a politicized pseudo-event, the group has now brought in TV executives to choreograph a show trial. According to reporting from Axios and the New York Post, the committee’s televised hearings, set to begin on Thursday, will be a made-for-TV event with the help of the former president of ABC News, hired to turn the committee’s findings into “compelling” viewing, as the Post put it. The miniseries still seeks an ending, though, with the committee divided over what takeaway proposals it wants to endorse. Axios reports that some members, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), want to call to abolish the electoral college; others, led by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), seek more modest changes to the college than its wholesale abolition and worry that such dramatic policy proposals will undermine the committee’s legitimacy.
→ Life might become a little bit less tangled after European Union regulators agreed to move ahead with a new policy that would force electronics manufacturers to use one standard type of cable—the USB Type-C—as the charging port for everything from cell phones and cameras to headphones and digital tablets. Despite an intense lobbying effort by Apple, who would have to adopt the Type-C port for the tens of millions of iPhones it sells in Europe each year, the law is anticipated to pass with a final vote by the E.U. Parliament and Council this summer. The regulation would kick into effect in 2024, with the intention of reducing manufacturing e-waste and cutting costs on portable electronics, which would ostensibly no longer need to ship with a charger if most buyers have one, or a dozen, at home already.
→ More than $2 billion in illegal funds was laundered through Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, according to a report published on Monday by Reuters: From 2017 to 2021, “Binance processed transactions totaling at least $2.35 billion stemming from hacks, investment frauds and illegal drug sales.” This is not the first time Binance has been called out for such misdeeds. In 2020, the U.S. government hired Chainanalysis, a crypto research company, to track Binance’s potentially illegal financial flows. According to its report, Binance took in some $770 million in illegal money—an accusation that inspired Binance’s CEO to counter that Chainanalysis has “poor business etiquette.” In response to this more recent report from Reuters, the company was more muted. “Chief Communications Officer Patrick Hillmann said Binance did not consider Reuters’ calculation to be accurate,” Reuters reports.
Read More: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/fintech-crypto-binance-dirtymoney/
→ Air travelers are suffering from sticker shock as ticket prices, already on the rise, jumped nearly 17% in April. But don’t expect the extra expense to add up to an improved flying experience, as airline labor shortages are driving up last-minute flight cancellations, delays, and fully packed planes, with 12% fewer flights in the air this summer compared to the same time three years prior. Industry insiders say cancellations will likely continue, and prices are expected to keep climbing, at least for now, as airlines pass on the burden of rising fuel costs and increased expenses to travelers.
→ While The Scroll was off yesterday for Shavuot, a celebration of the giving of the Torah, we’d be remiss to not tip our hat to Rafael Nadal’s historic performance over the weekend in Paris, where he won his 14th title at the French Open and 22nd Grand Slam trophy, extending his lead in both categories. Nadal won the French Open despite a painful foot injury that required a battery of nerve injections for him to play and could mean his days are numbered for future tournaments. “I would be happy with my life with a new foot. Win is beautiful, but life is much more important than any title,” Nadal said this weekend. But even if he were to bow out now, his 137 match wins and three all-time losses at the French Open is unlikely to ever be surpassed.
→ MAP OF THE DAY: Created by BDS Boston and the Mapping Project is a new cartography of the secret relationships between Jewish day schools, the Anti-Defamation League, The Boston Globe, corporations like Apple and Google, and law enforcement agencies from the FBI down to local police departments—a global cabal that is really working to “to surveil and police Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples in the US as well as worldwide.”
Read More: https://www.jpost.com/bds-threat/article-708695
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
Today’s Back Pages grew out of an observation made by a Twitter user known as The Faceless Rando, who remarked hours before the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, “Socially awkward teens would be better off being forced to interact more with their socially adept peers.” We found that idea compelling and timely and asked him to expand on it. The result is the essay you find here.
How to Raise Weird Kids
I remember it well. My mother and I were returning home from a trip to see relatives that lived across the country. On the flight, I was in the middle seat, sandwiched between my mother and a boy about my age (12 at the time) who was traveling alone. He was talkative and had one of those big, perpetual smiles that disarmed most people. Not me. I was mortified. I wanted to pour through one of the X-Men comic books that I had already practically memorized. But when I asked my mom to switch seats, she shot me down with one of her characteristic glances. My fate was sealed.
After a while, it wasn’t so bad. We talked about stuff that millennials our age liked: music, movies, video games. He played sports and I was into art, but in spite of our differences, we managed an easy conversation—mainly because he was good at talking and could improvise when a topic went cold or I wasn’t sure how to respond. At the end of our flight, we shook hands and wished each other well. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” my mother said. It really wasn’t.
This was one of the experiences I had in mind when I tweeted on May 24, “Socially awkward teens would be better off being forced to interact more with their socially adept peers.” Very soon after I tweeted it, the shooting in Texas happened, the second mass shooting in as many weeks that was carried out by an 18-year-old. While these two shooters clearly had problems that went far beyond awkwardness, young men like them, who commit heinous acts of violence, occupy the extreme end of a continuum. They are part of a far larger social problem that affects millions of young people who are not killers.
The internet may seem to offer a refuge to the shy and weird kids who are often singled out and picked on in their peer groups, but catering to young people’s feelings of marginalization doesn’t ultimately do them, or the communities they live in, any good. In general, socially awkward kids would be far better off being placed in situations in which they are forced to interact with their more socially adept peers rather than languish in a simulation of life on their digital devices.
Several years ago, few of us had heard of neopronouns, sapiosexuality, or neurodivergence, but now these concepts are commonplace. These ideas proliferate in online spaces where shy and introverted children congregate. In these social media niches, self-diagnosis with various mental illnesses is typical, and identification with various disorders serves as a source of pride and community.
On TikTok, it’s easy to find people boasting about having dissociative identity disorder, popularly called multiple personality disorder, a rare and controversial diagnosis. These kids slip into their various personalities (some not even human, and each with their own genders and associated pronouns) at will and affect different voices and mannerisms. TikTok has also apparently inspired a wave of Tourette’s syndrome-like diagnoses in young people, primarily girls, who began exhibiting vocal and physical tics after being exposed to influencers on the app who displayed similar symptoms.
Although there are many online subcommunities with their own cultural rituals and fixations, one thing that all of them seem to share is an abundance of weird kids. These kids have often struggled to make friends and are socially awkward but deeply desire to be a part of their peer group. That they are able to find a group online shows they are not incapable of doing so and suggests that they could socialize off-line as well if they had the proper support and encouragement.
Weird kids benefit from having to adapt and find their place in a heterogeneous group of more sociable children. I know because I was one of them. But the popular kids also benefit. With the proper guidance and supervision, forced socialization provides everyone with a rehearsal for the adult world, where it pays to know how to get along with the popular kid who might end up being your boss, or the weird kid who could be your boss’s boss.
Parents of weird kids were often weird kids themselves and don’t want to see their child go through the same painful experiences they did, but many of those experiences are normal and necessary for their social development. If you have a weird kid, be honest with them about their strengths and weaknesses. Don’t tell them they are just like everyone else when they know they aren’t. But discourage them from interacting only with other socially clueless kids or turning their awkwardness into a badge of honor. Despite their shortcomings, weird kids are generally intelligent, imaginative, and goofy. All of these qualities can be valued by their peers if given the chance to develop constructively. Weird kids are not so weak that they can’t ever feel uncomfortable, and normal kids are not all so cruel that they can’t accept and learn from kids who are less socially adept than they are.
I can remember plenty of times some outgoing kid took me under their wing when they saw me trying to participate and struggling: the one who taught me how to shoot a basketball, or the friendly kid who struck up a random conversation and asked me to sit with them and their friends at lunch. Seemingly little things like this made a big difference. They used to happen more often before kids were parasitized by phones, and can still happen organically if we cultivate the environment for them.
If you see your weird kid being taken advantage of or abused by other kids, stick up for them and encourage them to defend themselves. Just don’t let them take the easy way out. When they are an adult with the confidence and skills to navigate the social world, they will thank you. Believe me.
You can find more musings from The Faceless Rando on Twitter @nonblankslate.
Nice essay at the end. We tend to focus on the bullies, in our chronically pessimistic society, but my childhood experiences mirrored the author’s. One popular, socially well adjusted child repeatedly made efforts to be my friend, inviting me and encouraging me to play sports I didn’t think I would enjoy. I never understood why. I still don’t and I still think about it. People can be good, children especially, and I’m afraid that we increasingly prevent them from doing their part in knitting society together, for fear of the rarer ones who would do harm.
Really great Back Pages this time.
A friend put it (with un-PC cruelty) as "cyberspace allows the weird to congregate virtually in a way they couldn't in real life" -- the socially awkward who would be better off learning to get more comfortable socially, the conspiracy theorists who need a more normal crowd to hang out and explore reality with, the depressed and anxious doomscrolling on their phones, and many others.
And it's not as if Tourette's syndrome (a neurological disorder) and dissociation (the core of psychological trauma) aren't real. They're just rare in spontaneous form. Apparently, social media can artificially induce far more on an industrial scale. Social media is magic!