Film review: Rebel Ridge (2024)

I have written multiple posts about the menace in the US of what is known as ‘civil asset forfeiture’. This is where police can seize the assets of people (cash, cars, even houses) even before they are convicted of any crime and make it well nigh impossible for them to get it back even if they are completely innocent. This has become just another way for some local jurisdictions to raise money to fund their operations, particularly their police departments.

John Oliver highlighted this abuse ten years ago.

A couple of days ago, I watched a new film Rebel Ridge on Netflix that deals with precisely this issue. A young black man Terry Richmond rides his bicycle into a small rural Alabama town with $36,000 in cash, with $10,000 meant to bail out his cousin who was arrested on a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge, and the remainder for both to buy a truck and start a small hauling business.

But he is stopped by local police who find the money and confiscate it on the grounds that it might be drug-related even though they had no evidence at all. When he tries to get it back he is threatened by the sheriff. Summer McBride, a paralegal in the county courthouse, tells him that she has unearthed evidence that the police department and the judge have a scheme going where people get arrested for minor infractions, the charges get elevated, their property confiscated, and they are thrown in jail with high cash bail. She says that fighting to get their money and property back will take a long time and often cost more than what was confiscated so most people, who are poor and cannot afford a lawyer, will simply give up and walk away.
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How social media messages can escalate rumors

The recent scaremongering about Haitians in Springfield, OH arose from someone on Facebook passing on a fourth-hand rumor that turned out to be false. It illustrates how dangerous it can be to pass along rumors that can adversely affect identifiable groups pf people.

The neighborhood message board Nextdoor is one that I am a member of and even that I rarely read the posts. But yesterday I saw one that immediately brought the Springfield incident to mind.

It started when one person posted the following:

Hello everyone, I just wanted to ask if anyone has heard about people snatching up children? My daughter overheard a man on his phone telling the person on the other end to be on the lookout and to keep an eye on the children! This is very scary! Any thoughts on this?

It is also not clear what response the poster was seeking or what she was scared about. But the post spawned a variety of responses, with others responding that people should always be vigilant about their children. Then one person made the leap to sex trafficking and Mexico.
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The Cybertruck in the wild

There has been a lot of buzz about the benefits and dangers of the new generation of AI software but one thing is clear is its potential for humor. The closest I get to nature are the excellent documentaries put out by David Attenborough and so I really enjoyed this short clip of ‘David Attenborough’ describing the behavior of the Tesla Cybertruck.

Apparently there is a whole reddit section devoted to hating on the Cybertruck.

Chatting with Jehovah’s Witnesses

On Saturday morning there was a knock on my door. This is unusual since the condominium complex that I live in is not on a through street and hence the only people who knock on doors tend to be delivery people and I rarely order anything. When I opened the door, there were two women aged 65 or thereabouts standing there and I immediately guessed that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

After saying hello, one woman (let’s call her A) asked me whether I read the Bible and I said that I used to but no longer. She asked me why and I said that it no longer made any sense to me. The other woman (let’s call her B) then asked me whether I stopped reading because of the way that the world was these days and I said no, that was not it, but that I could not reconcile the idea of a god with what the laws of science said about how the world works. B was curious and asked me what scientific field I was referring to and I said physics.
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The psychology of conspiracy theory believers

Conspiracy theories, by which I mean beliefs that lack any solid evidentiary foundation but are believed by a surprisingly large number of people who sustain them by postulating elaborate explanations that involve powerful people and organizations colluding to hide what they believe is ‘the truth’, have been around for a long time. The internet has enabled much greater awareness of such beliefs, in addition to allowing them to flourish.

Naturally, this has provoked curiosity about the phenomenon, such as what makes a particular theory catch hold of the imagination of some people, what kinds of people are drawn to them, what kind of dangers they pose, and how they might best be combated.

Not all conspiracy theories are pernicious and need to be countered. Some are mostly harmless and can be ignored. The belief that the moon landing was faked, for example, does not do much harm. Neither does the belief that the Earth is flat. The belief that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job also seems largely innocuous. This is because the people who are thought to. be engaged in a conspiracy to hide the truth are not clearly identifiable or are so big (‘the government’ or ‘the deep state’) that particular individuals and communities are not placed at risk.
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When does Elon Musk do any work?

Nick Robins-Early spends an entire day reading Elon Musk’s tweets just for that day. He says that reading just the ones that make it into the news do not do justice to how extreme and frenzied her really is.

Over the next 24 hours, Musk will post over 145 times about a range of obsessions, projects and grievances to his 195 million followers. He will share anti-immigrant content, election conspiracies and attacks against the media. He will exchange tweets with far-right politicians, conservative media influencers and sycophantic admirers. He will send a litany of one-word replies that say “yeah”, “interesting” or simply feature a cry-laughing emoji.

You have to read the article to see how weird Musk is.

This obsession with tweeting seems really unhealthy to me. It looks like an addiction. Even if Musk spends only a couple of minutes reading and reacting to tweets, that already amounts to about five hours.

Furthermore he has businesses to run. Surely they would benefit from him spending his time dealing with them? Or maybe not. Given his mercurial and impulsive nature, maybe the businesses and the people working in them are glad that he is not paying much attention to them and just letting them do their work

The source of the false Haitian rumor apologizes

I am not active on social media but do have an account on Nextdoor, that connects people living in a small geographical area and thus supposedly consists of one’s neighbors. In theory it helps people get to know their neighborhood by sharing information about it. I do not check the feeds that often but occasionally see posts where people report something that they ‘heard’ about and asking if anyone else has too. Some of these posts contain speculations that are bigoted or at least sail close to that line. Sometimes other people call them out on it but often it just disappears into the ether. Some posters seem to see themselves as small-time investigative journalists and deliver ‘scoops’ by being the first to relay some juicy morsel of information, often in the form of a rumor.

Apart from so-called ‘influencers’ who use social media to try to reach huge audiences as part of their business model, most social media users tend to use it largely to communicate with friends, family, and affinity groups of people who share similar interests. This can give a feeling of intimacy, that you are only talking to a small group, and thus one might be more inclined to spread baseless gossip, not realizing that your network is connected to the much larger internet and could, given the right conditions, explode your post into the general public consciousness, if it is picked up and relayed by people with much larger audiences.

That seems to be what happened with the ugly story about Haitians in Springfield, OH eating people’s cats and dogs. The person who first posted a rumor without any evidence on Facebook now regrets what she did.
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The puzzling allure of extreme diets

I was astonished to read of yet another new dietary fad that seems to have attracted adherents. They call themselves ‘carnivores’ and that label alone should give you some idea about what their diet consists of. I expected a variation of the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets (such as Atkins) that were in vogue some decades back. But I was not quite prepared for how much more limited and extreme this diet was. It consists almost exclusively of beef, bacon, butter, and eggs. Just reading it made me feel queasy, even though I eat each of the items. It was the thought of eating almost only those four things that made me feel sick.

For some reason that I cannot quite fathom, there are people who are drawn to the idea that what most of us think is a good nutrition habit of eating balanced diets that avoid highly processed foods (food writer Michael Pollan memorably encapsulated the idea in just seven words: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”) is a myth foisted upon us by government and scientists and the food industry, and that they have discovered an alternative healthy way of eating that only they know about and now wish to promote. There seems to be something appealing about seeing oneself as part of a small community of people who have special knowledge that the vast majority of people are unaware of. It seems to be even more appealing if the ideas are so extreme that ordinary people would never have thought of it.
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Hating on the Haitians

During the debate, creepy Donald Trump lied about many things but the only time that I actually slapped my forehead in astonishment was when he brought up the story about Haitian immigrants eating the pet cats and dogs of people in the small town of Springfield, Ohio. There are some wild things that he regales his followers at his rallies that are utterly preposterous (windmills causing cancer, children being given gender changing surgery in schools without their parents’ knowledge, talking of Hannibal Lecter as if he were a real person, being forced to choose between being electrocuted by the batteries in electric boats or being eaten by sharks) that I felt that even he would not bring up at the debate as being too nutty for anyone but his devoted cult.

I had heard about this Springfield rumor that had been debunked even before the debate and I placed it in the category as too extreme for prime time and could not believe that he would bring it up during the debate. But he did. Clearly the moderators had anticipated that he might do this and immediately fact-checked him, saying that the city manager had said that there was no credible evidence of this. But that did not stop weird JD Vance from doubling down and saying that his office had received calls from people asserting this. Since anyone can call and say anything, that is an extremely low bar for spreading such malicious and dangerous rumors that could well result in crazy people harming Haitians, not just in Springfield but across the country.
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The morning after the debate

The reviews are in and the general consensus supports my own immediate reaction last night which was that Kamal Harris cleaned creepy Donald Trump’s clock in the debate. At many points she was openly laughing at his nonsense.

Stephen Colbert gave his hot take soon after the debate ended and did a pretty good job at identifying the key points.

Jon Stewart also gave gave his hot take but it was not as good as Colbert’s.


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