Why does the right say it, then?
They literally think the police are the bulwark between order and chaos, as the phrase implies?
I'm asking why we shouldn't take them at their word. If progressives say "teachers shape the future" enough that it becomes a cliche that their enemies use to describe their position do we need to wonder why progressives are still on the pro-teacher bandwagon despite obvious problems with the educational system? Do we need to wonder what progressives mean by this? Shit happens, no institution is perfect but if you believe in it you don't throw out the baby.
If I had to guess at a bog-standard conservative belief… The average Republican voter probably thinks policing is difficult and unpleasant but necessary for a social contract, that they’d prefer a heavy hand to an absent one, and that the consequences of policing mostly fall on criminals who asked for it.
More or less my model but, as with anything in America, sharpened by partisanship and the perception of bad faith on the other side.
I think you can get many conservatives on board for certain things like civil forfeiture being bad. Or even that something like what happened to George Floyd Sonya Massey was wrong. The problem is that it's an iterated game and it never stops at that cop.
Same reason progressives don't want to yield on teachers or public schools.
Tanista
1yr ago
I'm not sure exactly why people on right in the USA are till on the "thin blue line" team. Perhaps its because the median cop is more conservative. Perhaps its being more comfortable with authority and generally being more conscientious - leading to less altercations
You clearly know why the right says it's for police.
"Thin blue line" is not a content free slogan, it doesn't just mean "pro-cop". It says something about the right's view of society that explains why they're pro-cop. The right has told you why and you clearly heard them.
Is the right so insincere that their given explanation doesn't suffice and we need to speculate ?
That's already covered by the "shrill Karens are less capable than 192lb men" clause, no matter what absurd statements came out of the bird-watcher or Citibike situations.
Tanista
1yr ago
Practically speaking, Harris can't win, she can only lose.
Then why take the debate?
Tanista
1yr ago
Currently rereading R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing series .
Got sucked into reading some passages across both trilogies since I haven't toughed it since the second trilogy wrapped up and finally decided to bite the bullet and just do the whole thing from The Darkness That Comes Before.
Can't be that hard. I managed it for a good four years of college.
Tanista
1yr ago
Do we have any blocker app even close to ColdTurkey in terms of flexibility and robustness for Android without jailbreaking?
I love how over the course of this forum's lifetime we went from criticizing conservatives for freaking out over "just a couple crazy kids on college campuses" to "being late to discover wokeness".
I think it's fairer to say that it took them this long to come up with any theory of the case or solution besides pointing and yelling about campuses being woke.
Everyone knew but conservative activists today like Rufo tend to take a very different tack than just complaining and hoping to win the cultural battle the way they perceived the wokes to have won it . Or appealing to "classical liberal" values and expecting the dam to hold.
That's now being done by left-wingers closer to the center like Haidt and Yascha Mounk. With a similar rate of success.
Tanista
1yr ago
Men are clearly getting something out of the voluntary side of dirty, violent, tough jobs.
Yes. Status and achievement. Which is useful for...acquiring and providing for a family. Men have these drives because sitting around is probably a less successful strategy towards those goals.
There's a reason one of the benefits of jihad is a bevy of heavenly hotties. There's a reason the "cliche" male action movie involves bravery and/or violence followed by being rewarded by a objectified love interest. There's a reason many societies become less stable and men engage in more risk-seeking behavior when the number of available partners are low.
Most people don't get whatever sort of grand satisfaction from their job elite feminists think all women are being denied by being reduced to mothers and partners. It's a toll to secure status, life and family. Men do certain difficult jobs because it's just a niche they in particular can slide into to pay their way.
Discussed a couple of days ago in the latest "why does Hollywood suck now" subthread and now finally here: GRRM goes into business for himself and criticizes House of the Dragon Season 2. Reddit link with text, in case archive goes down too
He also spoils the Season 3 outline, just to salt the Earth. The talk of the butterfly effect is telling me that this is a man that regrets biting his tongue after Lady Stoneheart & Aegon lol.
It was taken down immediately but I'm shocked he even published it, given his status as producer and how unprofessional it is to reveal season outlines for an ongoing show. HBO had long enough to take him into a darkly lit room and threaten his royalties.
Tanista
1yr ago
Less schooling. Schooling is a big driver of child cost so reducing it seems to make sense. Ideally you wouldn't just get rid of college but bite into secondary education as well. Most people should be, by age 16, out of school and into a paid apprenticeship that offers a career path (so, not tomato-picker-forever type things). I think our world is too complex for this to be possible, we wouldn't be able to decide who's worth putting the apprenticeship training into.
And yet we can somehow decide who needs to go into a 4 year degree and tens of thousands in debt when they're seventeen? We're already putting people in essentially extremely expensive and extended apprentice training!
Either we do have some way to tell, in which case we can use it. Or we don't and the huge amounts of support for a system that is not only costly but damaging to fertility (especially for people who don't then even end up with a useful degree, or a degree at all) becomes much more dubious.
Tanista
1yr ago
A society that respects elders has kids naturally and almost subconsciously slow down to meet their speed. My grandmother took care of me and managed it because she knew to let us run sometimes and we knew when to behave.
The bigger problem is that a society full of people who're expected to move for work can count on grandparents less.
That and there was a lot of slack picked up by extended family that Americans may just not be able to depend upon both because of the moving and the small family size.
Tanista
1yr ago
There were definitely dark veins and they could have tried to balance things (or just kept "classic" SG and then added things like Universe).
But I think they were just embarrassed, it's a status thing. Stargate was essentially the sort of show people mean when they say "I don't like fantasy besides Game of Thrones". BSG and the praise it got gave them an alternative/pretext.
A shame it wasn't actually as popular or well-regarded as Game of Thrones.
Tanista
1yr ago
We Stargate fans blame it for killing that franchise too, except it was more the network wanting a series that focused more on the melodrama BSG had in its later (arguably worst) seasons than the classic SG technobabble optimism.
Tanista
1yr ago
Reading those articles, they're pretty neutral - or ambivalent - towards those claims.
His office has issued repeated statements in recent weeks and days stressing the importance of maintaining control over the Philadelphi Corridor. “The need for sustained control of the Philadelphi Corridor is a security one… If Israel withdraws, the pressure to prevent its recapture will be enormous, putting our ability to return in significant doubt,” read the most recent one issued on Tuesday.
The remarks drew hostile responses from other ministers, as well as from Netanyahu, according to reports.
“If we give in to Hamas’s demands, like Gallant wants, we’ve lost the war,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was quoted saying.
However, the outlet claimed that Netanyahu also said he was willing to compromise in other areas aside from the Philadelphi Corridor, maintaining that a hostage deal with Hamas was still possible.
Both Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Foreign Minister Israel Katz reportedly accused Gallant of creating a dynamic in which Hamas would receive concessions from Israel as a result of murdering hostages.
These all seem like reasonable concerns that aren't really answered in the article.
Of course, how well that works depends on how much the normies trust the expert class
And the expert class being united in a belief that such measures are bad. That can't be taken for granted either.
Those comparisons would be more meaningful if Israelis could just take the suitcase or death deal. Even if we wrote off the ones of European origin, the Mizrahi Jews certainly can't/won't go back "home".
It bodes ill that the Palestinian cause seems to depend on a very narrow equilibrium where Western nations are both decadent and secure enough to just eat a loss or two, given the disanalogies.
It's not worth wondering about for Westerners but I often wonder if Palestinians actually think the Algerian deal is viable. Or if they're just lying for their audience and know deep down that, when it comes to it, Madagascar really isn't an option but they'll burn that bridge when they get to it.
Problem is that we've gone so far down that road people said "fuck it" and now you have spicy social democrats claiming to be socialists now and kids larping as pro-Soviet communists because they follow Hasan Piker on TikTok.
There is no justifiable defense of our capitalistic system on moral grounds,
You can defend it on the grounds that it has generated the greatest amount of wealth in human history, something even socialists grant. And that this is good.
The problem is precisely that it has done this, and it has continued to do so despite some deviations from some purer form of free market capitalism. Quite natural for people to then think "well, just a little more fiddling and we'll have it really fair", especially when the downsides of the previous round of fiddling can be very diffuse, the benefits seemingly clear while inequities remain very visible. Everyone knows how much the CEO of Starbucks makes.
I don't think you have to sell most people on avoiding collectivization or central planning at this point. But this sort of slow slide into an allegedly "fairer" capitalism? Very hard. I think people just naturally distrust the market and are biased towards action.
Especially since no one wants to hear that their subsidized X is part of the distortion causing problems or, even worse, they're just not as productive as they think they are. "Skill issue, gg no re" doesn't really work as an argument.
Which Israel can't do. So the reluctance there at least makes sense.
The fatal problem with the radicalization thesis imo is that it's all well and good for America, but not everyone can go home and stop radicalizing people.
A lot of Biden's decisions seem to treat this as an issue of balancing domestic messaging, without considering if parties other than US citizens are seeing and/or being emboldened by the ambivalence.
Edit: "America's" to "Biden's"
Frankly I can’t understand why any westerner thinks this is a good deal - unless they don’t actually know the details of the deal and just assume it’s some form of reasonable.
Lots of Westerners are:
- Convinced Israel is in the wrong overall so all the onus is on them when it comes to ending the conflict.
- Suffering from some GWOT-hangup where insurgents can't be beaten and fighting them makes everything worse.
- Bad at game theory. You know those "they're just stealing baby formula for their kids", criminal justice reform types? Now imagine they've been seeing videos of dead children forever.
This is fair, which is why I have tried to reserve some judgment. I don't like LibsOfTikTok style nutpicking, finding the very worst and most deranged examples of trans people and blasting them as examples of what "trans people" are like. Graham Linehan does the same thing - for all that I sympathize with a lot of his grievances, "Here's a trans person who committed a crime" is like 90% of his output at this point.
This becomes much more sympathetic when the media is actively trying to mislead via the headlines of the "Brighton woman guilty of flashing genitals" variety.
It's unfortunate that we have to depend on Twitter-deranged people for counter-messaging but it really shouldn't be allowed to stand imo.
Tanista
1yr ago
in stark contrast to the modern understanding of the divine, which is philosophizing for the theologian and assertions (with maybe some music) for the congregant
Because all other gods are dead. Yahweh's deeds were his resume in a competitive market. But the market has shifted.
The choice now is one God of varying flavors or the No-God. Everyone arguing for the former takes divine potency as fact so the debate is on other lines (whether God is moral, which God is coherent). The No-God simply puts forward a rival theory to divine potency. You have to start with philosophical argument and assertions to even make room for God.
I suppose the more naive and unpoisoned by modernity a religious community is , the more we should expect unabashed glorying in God's potency. Some people do still think hurricanes are just a form of divine moralizing so...
Even this is not really true. The right wing gives police grace in the face of criticism because they, imo rightly, don't believe their opponents are acting in good faith.
The discussion is not really about whether there're bad cops, anymore than the education debate is about there're bad teachers (where I'm sure a right-winger can accuse progressives of refusing to grant this when it comes time to defend teacher's unions)
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