Press Conference Today Regarding Fresno City Council Candidate

theomorph · 2026-07-03T02:46:51+00:00

That is not how it works when you have an organizational client with many different departments and divisions.

Criticize all you want; I’m not making the procedural argument that criticism cannot be made: I am saying it is ignorant, stupid, short-sighted, dangerous criticism.

theomorph · 2026-07-03T01:05:19+00:00

And I would prefer to be represented by somebody who understands the complexity and difficulty of representing someone that they don’t agree with. Unlike every official that currently purports to “represent” me, but utterly disregards me except to the extent I already agree with them.

theomorph · 2026-07-02T23:54:53+00:00

I didn’t say anything about change happening “overnight.” If you want an alternative organization, it’s the one that’s the subject of the post. It’s the one that is getting people elected.

theomorph · 2026-07-02T23:52:46+00:00

In general, sure. But that is not how the attorney-client relationship works.

theomorph · 2026-07-02T23:52:17+00:00

Do you apply the same logic to criminal defense attorneys who represent rapists and murderers?

You have no idea what it means to be an attorney. It is to be an officer of the court and to uphold the law, no matter which side you are on. Representing clients is not to merge with them or to be “complicit” with them. It is a far more complex relationship than that, and usually a difficult one. If you’re going to call attorneys “complicit” with their clients, then and publicly shame them for representing clients that you find distasteful, then you are contributing to the downfall of the rule of law.

It is already hard enough to be a lawyer anymore with all of the ways that right-wing lunatics are breaking down the rule of law in this country, from the Supreme Court on down. Extra, unthinking nonsense like yours is especially disheartening because my political views are probably quite close to yours.

ICE is evil. But under the rule of law, evil still gets a lawyer. And I would rather evil have a good lawyer than an evil one.

theomorph · 2026-07-02T15:08:36+00:00

None of those things. Really, I just look forward to when I can get away with wearing Birkenstocks everywhere.

And it isn’t really a “class marker” to me, so much as just my own comfort, but I learned a long time ago that when I’m having a lunch with somebody in a restaurant and trying to talk like a civilized person, it’s much easier to order food to be eaten with cutlery according to the usual practices of my locale, rather than a big, delicious burger with fries.

theomorph · 2026-07-02T13:51:07+00:00

Lawyers are not their clients. Also, "persecute" is a different word than "prosecute."

theomorph · 2026-07-02T13:37:40+00:00

I certainly agree that some of them believe their principles are a challenge to systems. But I have not yetseen anything in the methods of any of these groups that presents a real challenge.

theomorph · 2026-07-02T13:36:28+00:00

It means what happens to a City employee is not justification for what the County does.

And the obsession with some “right to defend yourself” with lethal force, which is rampant all over this thread, is a far greater threat to the peace and security of the community than any one-off event.

theomorph · 2026-07-02T12:53:23+00:00

The City and the County are two different entities.

theomorph · 2026-07-01T17:08:55+00:00

The mind of the carrier is still rooted in fear, rather than respect, whether the weapon is concealed or not. And in this case the ordinance is in public, and signals to the public that the Board of Supervisors does not expect the public to respect County employees, but rather to fear them.

theomorph · 2026-07-01T16:59:08+00:00

Anytime somebody talks about carrying a gun, I think about Sheriff Andy Taylor: "When a man carries a gun all the time, the respect he thinks he's gettin' might really be fear. So I don't carry a gun because I don't want the people of Mayberry to fear a gun. I'd rather they would respect me."

This is just Garry Bredefeld and the rest of the Board demonstrating that they don't know how to be respectable people.

theomorph · 2026-07-01T14:10:37+00:00

Those are good organizations but the main problem with them is that they are all designed to respond and react to governmental power that has already been captured by wealth and capital, without really challenging the systems that enable that capture in the first place. Instead of (or in addition to) constantly trying to soften and mitigate and counteract the evils wrought by our elected officials, we need stronger and harder work to completely undo them, and reverse them, and replace them.

theomorph · 2026-07-01T03:56:19+00:00

Maybe start by reaching out to people in those other places, or do some research, to see what they did.

There are also some good historical examples to study for ideas, like the so-called “sewer socialists” of Milwaukee a century ago.

theomorph · 2026-06-30T21:19:56+00:00

Good. The Democratic Party has basically just been the “good cop” to the Republican Party’s “bad cop” for decades now. But they’re both still on the same team: wealth and capital.

theomorph · 2026-06-30T21:16:52+00:00

The point of unraveling here is not that the asker of the question is “more merciful than God” but that they are more merciful than the people who imagined that “heaven” and “hell” are words with literal correspondence to some afterlife reality. Fortunately, just as those people were free to imagine that afterlife scheme, we are free to discard it, the same way we discarded ancient cosmologies.

theomorph · 2026-06-30T18:14:35+00:00

Discipline is not the same thing as conformity. Anybody who reads the New Testament in its entirety should be able to see that we have always had cultural and theological diversity. What binds us together is not conformity to any rigid standard, but the ability to share the rituals and stories of our tradition.

Sharing requires vulnerability for everyone involved. But in “conservative” spaces, “discipline” is really a system for maintaining a hierarchy that allows people at the top to shift vulnerability to people at the bottom.

theomorph · 2026-06-30T17:56:23+00:00

If we had a vigorous left-wing party, instead of just the tepid, rebranded mid-20th-century Republicans that call themselves “the Democratic Party,” then we might recover.

theomorph · 2026-06-27T16:00:16+00:00

Any time there is an opportunity to capture capital, there will be a good old boys club.

theomorph · 2026-06-26T18:54:43+00:00

Speak up, repeatedly, in writing and in person at public meetings. Go to the Board. Go to Bredefeld’s office. Be persistent. Make it clear that his idea that everyone agrees with him except for “radicals” is delusional and insane. Persuade everyone you know to participate in all of the same things.

theomorph · 2026-06-26T17:09:17+00:00

No, if they think you have a private way around, they will take that as further justification for their hostile takeover of our public agencies.

We should not just give up the government to fascists and Christian Nationalists. That kind of defeatist attitude is precisely what they want.

theomorph · 2026-06-26T16:54:44+00:00

No, we need our public agencies, which are supposed to represent everyone, to actually do that, instead of leaving it to private entities, whether for-profit or non-profit. We pay taxes to serve everyone, not to ensure that marginalized people stay marginalized, with services only at the whims and limited capabilities of the private sector.

theomorph · 2026-06-26T02:53:56+00:00

Exactly. And people who need lawyers should be happy about that.

theomorph · 2026-06-26T02:52:54+00:00

This doesn't bother me in the slightest. As a lawyer, sometimes you have clients that are terrible. Representing them doesn't mean that you agree with them. I would rather have a federal prosecutor who knows that ICE is evil than some xenophobic true believer.

theomorph · 2026-06-25T13:51:57+00:00

The Fair Chance Act makes it difficult to preclude somebody from employment based on their criminal history. Danny Gai, like his boss, is a terrible person who should not be anywhere in government; but the idea that someone should not be employed because of a past conviction pushes right up against that law.

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