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The bodycam footage of Henry Nowak was released. Mostly peaceful protests ensue.
A summary of the story (most of this info is in the PDF I'm about to link, feel free to skip this section and read it yourself): Henry Nowak had had a few beers (still under the legal limit), saw the Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, pulled out his phone and started recording, and called out to him a few times "Are you a bad man?", with Digwa replying "I am a bad man." The recording ended shortly after Digwa grabbed Nowak's phone. The judge giving the sentencing said that Nowak was not asking this with hostility in his voice (warning, PDF download); he likely was drawn to ask about it upon seeing the larger of the two knives that Digwa carried. Yes, two knives. Digwa was carrying two ceremonial knives that are permitted to him as a religious article, one of them being a kirpan, an 8 inch one, on a sheath over his waistband.
There is no video record of the struggle after the video ended, but Digwa stabbed Nowak 4 times. The stab to the chest was the fatal one, passing through all of Nowak's clothing and penetrating upwards, between the two uppermost ribs, puncturing a lung and penetrating even deeper to cut a vein behind the collarbone, a wound of 8 cm in depth. There was no apparent injury to Digwa himself, though he claimed his eye had been bruised when the police officers arrived. Digwa took some of his own videos of the dying Nowak after stabbing him, telling him he had not been stabbed. His brother, Gurpreet, made the call to 911. Before the officers arrived, Digwa handed his kirpan to his mother and told her to take it away. He also kept Nowak's phone, and didn't tell the officers he had it. Nobody told the officers that Nowak had been stabbed, certainly not Digwa, who might have been the only one present who would know that.
As shown in the bodycam video, the police arrive for Gurpreet's complaint, briefly listen to Digwa's complaint, and quickly determine that Nowak should be arrested, so they drag his limp body into a better position to be handcuffed. Nowak weakly tells them that he's been stabbed, which the arresting officer impassively denies. The other officers investigate this claim a bit more; the female officer can tell that he's in rough shape, and notes that his pupils aren't even reacting to the light. They tried CPR on him after this, presumably; in the judge's remarks, one officer was horrified to learn of the chest wound after having done chest compressions on him.
So, there's rioting. The BBC doesn't frame it quite as sympathetically as they framed the anti-racism rioting from 6 years ago, though. Which brings us to our George Floyd comparison.
George Floyd was accused of using counterfeit bills. He had been arrested many times before. When they arrested him this time, they knelt on his (neck? upper back?) as he slowly died, claiming, as Henry Nowak had when he died, that he couldn't breathe. The public saw it as an execution of Floyd just because he was black, even though Floyd actually died from the fentanyl in his system, and the kneeling was department protocol (inadvised protocol, if the suspect is having trouble breathing).
In this case, the police presumed guilt of the nearly-dead unarmed man, even as his murderer was still upright and telling all kinds of lies. The public broadly sees this as anti-white bias, paralleling the racial claims from Floyd. Unlike Floyd, Nowak was actually murdered, and he was murdered with a knife that the white members of the public can't even own or carry for self defense. They can't even carry pepper spray. That Digwa as a racial and religious outsider to Britain is also an enhancing factor.
I will interject a brief defense of the police in this case: I took a concealed carry class recently, and I have also watched a few Paul Harrell videos on the subject. In self-defense situations, you want the police on your side. The way to do this is to call them first, before the real attacker does, and establish that you are the injured party, the complainant, and he is the injurer, even if he's lying in a pool of his own blood. Digwa did these things, and hid information from the police, so it's a little more understandable that they made a mistake. In light of the Pakistani rape scandal, however, I also find it understandable if the public doesn't find it understandable, and really do suspect that the police have an anti-white bias. And of course, it's completely unacceptable that they dismissed his claims of being stabbed, especially since he was on the ground when they found him.
For me, there's a lot more meat to these protests than the 2020 BLM protests. If I lived in the UK, I would probably be protesting too (peacefully!). If liberal societies continue along their outgroup-favoritism path, they might find that the post Civil Rights Movement atmosphere, whose protocol they were acting in accordance with, has completely evaporated, and they must forge a new and uncertain path forward. That's the human condition.
Would it be socially acceptable at this point for somebody living in the UK to purposefully avoid brown men wearing turbans in the streets?
Apparently a lot of them carry deadly weapons and are afforded a degree of social and legal leniency while using them.
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The one thing I'll say in the police's defence is that the policewoman saying "Oh no, but we have to check, don't we?" might not have believed what she was saying. It's plausible she was just saying that to the Sikhs so that they didn't interfere while she was trying to examine him for wounds - the old "in dangerous situations, police will flat-out lie to you if they think that's what will get you to do what they want" playbook. I have certain misgivings about said playbook, since it causes its own problems with people who know about it and thus can't trust the police in such situations, but "certain misgivings from universalisability" sure as hell beats "literal racial stereotyping" so I feel it needs to be pointed out.
This doesn't excuse anything else, though.
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ooof, yep, that would do it.
The bongs being so anal about bladed weapons yet allowing random sikhs to carry is a complete farce.
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Moldbug is correct when he says leftists understand power and the right does not. I bet these protests go nowhere, despite being entirely justified (especially compared to the Floyd protests). In fact, this justification is why they'll go nowhere: the right can only rally when something verifiably bad happens, and even then barely muster the gumption to care. The left, in contrast, doesn't give a rat's ass about the facts on the ground: the incident is useful to the cause, and we're going to milk it for all it's worth because what we actually care about is The Movement, not the incident.
There really is nothing similar to The Movement on the right. The left retains all moral authority to itself: as long as your actions are in service of the movement, nobody cares whether your actions are legal or not. Loot the Nike store, raze the Starbucks, shoot the United Health CEO, whatever: you may be a criminal to The System, but to The Movement, you're a hero! The right does not retain any moral authority to itself. All it can do is appeal to the existing laws and say, "See, the immigrant with a knife stabbed somebody! That's against the law! The police should ARREST him, and and... maybe even DEPORT him." Yeeeeah, one of these two teams is going to trounce the other.
I think the reason for this is that the left does actually have an overarching narrative that compels the assent of and motivates the actions of its adherents. That's not to say it's true or accurate, any more than Islam being able to compel suicide bombers means Mohammad actually flew to heaven on a winged unicorn. But the narrative is there, and it inspires loyalty and action.
The right, in contrast, has no Movement, especially not one that compels moral authority over the state to any relevant degree in #currentyear. There are two wings of the right: the actual tradcons (which look like this), and the Nazis (which often LARP as tradcons and look like this). If you bomb an abortion clinic or a migrant detention center, there will be no rallying to your defense by women with hundreds of thousands of likes inquiring when the conjugal visits will begin in your prison, there will be no photographer taking Renaissance photos or featuring your drip in Time magazine. Now, I know Luigi is unusually attractive, and the Clavicular worldview is to attribute the fanfare to that. But let's be real: if Luigi had shot a leftist figurehead, this is not the reaction he would have received. Luigi's cuteness is useful to the movement: the movement is not subservient to the actions of the most cute, as the Clavicular model would contend.
Can the right figure out how to claim moral authority? In its current incarnation, I doubt it. What the right is missing is the right side of the Bell curve: they have plenty of Zerglings, but no Overmind. In fact, I'll go so far as to say a lot of the Overminds they do have are false, in the sense that I think incidents like Jan 6 are setups to get rightoids to clown themselves into getting arrested. They think they're crossing the Rubicon with Caesar, but they're really just being goaded into making fools of themselves by agents more intelligent than they are running circles around them in their fog of war.
Moldbug is wrong (as he often is) in that he is trying to cram a fundamentally anti-technocratic and anti-materialist ideology into a technocratic materialist frame-work.
Yes, the left defines morality in terms of what what helps the movement, as long as your actions are in service of the movement they are good and just. And that is why they often end up building mountains of skulls.
Moldbug (and yourself it would seem) see the failure of "the right" to follow a similar playbook as proof that they are "stupid" or just "don't understand" when the truth is that they simply have vastly different ideas about from whence power comes, and what constitutes "morality" and "moral authority". If HlynkaCG or David Friedman were still here they would be banging on about Hobbes, and the diverse origins of assorted legal systems, but they aren't, so in their stead I pose to you the following questions...
Why would anyone feel a need to "claim moral authority" when they know for a fact that they already have it?
What value is there in an "Overmind" when every man is an agent in his own right?
Nah, I'm not a Moldbug fan, but he is correct here.
The right historically has not had such difficulties with this. The US colonists said, "You will not tax my stamps and tea, and if I catch you doing so, I will shoot you." These are not envious leftists or commies. They had a sincere, coherent political model that they were willing to pursue -- not just to the point of sacrificing their own lives, but to the point of sacrificing the lives of those who disagreed with them. They prioritised their movement and their vision above that of the governing state, and they were willing to back that with as much violence as they could muster.
That is, in fact, what winning looks like.
What are you talking about? The "Founding Fathers" were absolutely leftists. They were liberals, the left of their day. The Sons of Liberty and the Boston Tea Party were left wing acts of terror. Sam Adams was the Luigi Mangioni of his time. George Washington was the exact same sort of leftist filth as Tyler Robison. Every single signer of the DoI was a vile traitor to their rightful king.
Remember how the terms "left" and "right" in politics came to be in the first place. That these people are at all considered "right wing" nowadays is only because of how much further left Cthulhu has swum. The very existence of the USA is one of the prime examples of how the left has been winning for centuries. Indeed, for the past 250 years, America has been the primary font of the leftist cancer eating away at Western Civilization.
I mean, if you want to define any insurrection against the established order as innately leftist, sure. From a monarchist viewpoint, there's little difference between 1776, 1789, and even 1917. But the Americans -- both now and then -- view their revolution as quite distinct from these others. Call me a liberal if you must, but I find their case compelling.
The problem with Monarchists is they have to answer for kings like, well, the current king of England, who is overseeing the replacement migration of his own people and outright celebrating it with foreign holidays. Is rebellion against this monarchy "leftist" or "liberal"? Who is the left and who is the right here? I think the terms just lose all meaning.
And it's not like "Oh, well this is an exceptional case, nobody historically could have imagined having an idiot monarch like Charles," because, yes they could. This happens all the time: finding yourself in the position of having an idiot as monarch is the problem with monarchy, and has been so for all of recorded human history.
No, not any insurrection; just those in the direction of the "Enlightenment" project. An insurrection against a modern, liberal democracy — yes, even one with a powerless, figurehead "king" (in name only) — to restore the pre-liberal order, and install a real monarch, would be the exact opposite of leftist.
I am an American — at least by birth and citizenship.
Charles is not a real king. No figurehead "monarch" deserves to be considered such. A real king does not merely "reign" in some symbolic sense, he rules. He wields real power over his kingdom. Of all the so-called monarchs of Europe, only Prince Hans-Adam II appears to be the only real one. Indeed, I'd say Kim Jong-Un is more of a king than any in Europe.
This gets at one of my deepest disagreements with Curtis Yarvin. Not to go all "no true monarchist" and all, but he continually shows that he doesn't understand kingship or aristocracy at all. His CEO "King" who answers to a shadowy cabal of anonymous "shareholders" (everyone forgets that part), and who maintains the loyalty of his troops through tech tricks like "cryptographic weapons locks" is not a king. And Yarvin has repeatedly waxed poetic about the "aristocratic qualities" of himself and his social class, while never even holding back his disdain for all thing martial.
A real aristocrat is, first and foremost, a knight. It is their martial virtue that makes them "the best." An aristocratic class always begins as elite warriors, and even when reduced to mere administrators, they still thought of themselves as warriors first. (I could go on about this at length, from Tang China's sword laws, to Hagakure, to Downton Abbey, and to why World War I utterly devastated the aristocracy of Europe.)
And every new royal dynasty begins with a warlord. Liu Bang. Augustus. Alfred the Great. Charles the Hammer. William the Bastard. Temüjin. Abdulaziz Al Saud. (Even Kim Il-sung, depending on how you define it.) Nobody sat around armchair theorizing in an ivory tower coming up with "the divine right of kings" or "the mandate of heaven," then set out to establish a new form of government on the basis of those theories (the way liberal and leftist governments have been made). No, men forged kingdoms with the sword, and then the legitimating theories like the above were created to justify them later. The deed precedes the creed. To quote this tweet:
The way we get a real right-wing government isn't by convincing people to become trad-caths, an entryist "long march" through academia, silicon valley billionaires building charter city "network states," or posting youtube videos droning on about Gramsci and repeatedly boasting about how much smarter this makes you than the "slopulist" plebs. No, it's the current order collapsing into anarchy and civil war, followed by one or more strongmen bringing order at the point of a gun. (And thus, the proper thing for a monarchist in the west is either to 1. join the military, the police, or otherwise develop martial skill; or 2. do whatever he can to accelerate the inevitable decay of our system to hasten than collapse (traditionalist accelerationism).)
Charles III going the way of Charles I would almost certainly be a step in the right direction for the UK.
Was there some dynastic mishap or did you meant to write Europe rather than England?
Yes, I meant Europe. Sorry, that was a brain hiccup. Fixed.
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I agree with your presentation on kingship and the origin of its authority, and that Moldbug doesn’t really "get" it.
That said, you're still left with the age-old problem of "What happens when the sun sets on the sun-king?" Enlightenment philosophy was developed and trounced everything in its path for a reason! In the same sense that true kingship is ultimately grounded in conquest and social Darwinism, I point to the triumph of liberalism over older thought modalities and say, "Behold, your king."
Finally, there are a lot more problems with kingship today than there were in the Enlightenment era, because the nature of battle has changed. What is a knight in the face of an autonomous drone swarm, where each unit that can kill him and his brethren costs less than his monthly salary? What is a knight when his bank account can be frozen on the whims of a bureaucrat?
Whatever a knight is in 2026, it looks nothing like a knight from medieval Europe. And a true king surely more unrecognisable still.
But then again, I suppose a true king, by definition, would figure all this out.
"O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel"
Well, the Dreaded Jim has actually had a lot to say on this, particularly with the lessons of the Ukraine war. Specifically, the limits of communication links and autonomy means that drone swarm proves most effective with a skilled, mobile elite operator providing human guidance from nearby on the battlefield. Specifically, he's argued that these men in fact represent the emerging "new knights."
How did knights historically deal with either a lack of cash on hand, or an obstructive clerk? For that matter, need I mention traditional aristocrats' disdain for commerce (and banking)? How many were cash-poor? How much of their wealth was in either land holdings, castles/fortresses, and their military equipment? How Germanic kings were described in sagas as "breaker of rings" or "foe of gold"? What need does a king have for a bank account — when he needs something, he just holds out his hand, and some loyal subject places it in that hand.
As others have pointed out, money isn't power, power gets you money. The wealthy never truly rule, because wealth is too easily expropriated; and thus, the rich end up beholden to whoever defends them from expropriation (either with the sword, or with a faith that condemns such taking). Thus, society is ruled by either warriors or priests. Our modern problem is priestly rule.
(Again, this is a problem with Moldbug. He spills enormous amounts of digital ink detailing exactly how the current priestly "brahmin"/"elf" elite are ruling terribly… and then proposes solutions that are all about making that very same elite's rule permanent, while trying to design technological mechanisms to exclude warrior rule forever…)
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Except they didn't. As David Friedman and many other Libertarian Scholars are fond of pointing out, the end-result of the American Revolution was not a transfer of power from the King of England to the Continental Congress, but rather a rectification of De Jure (on paper) authority with the reality on the ground.
A "rectification" settled by shooting the British army until they fled back to England.
The point is that a Venn diagram of the most wealthy and influential men in the colonies pre Boston Massacre in 1770 and post Constitutional Convention in 1787 is practically a circle, thier power didn't come from "shooting the British army until they fled back to England" they already had it.
How many wealthy and influential Royalists lived in the Colonies before the Boston Massacre? How many lived in the Colonies after the revolution?
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"(We) Live Free or (You Will) Die" works great, I don't think anybody doubts that. The problem is that it's mythologised until people believe that standing up and declaring your willingness to die for freedom makes you free, rather than being able to back up that declaration with overwhelming and coordinated force.
This is why conservatives are constantly trying to do what the Left does (protests, pointing out hypocrisy, public mourning of horrible murders) and are baffled when they don't get the results the Left gets.
EDIT: Whatever power those men might have thought they had was on sufferance from the British until they were able to fight off the British, if you prefer to put it that way. If the British had put down the American Mutiny (as it might have been dubbed) then things would have been very different, and we would now agree post hoc that those wealthy and influential men in the colonies had been standing on unstable ground.
And this is where Friedman and his disciples would point out that "the myth" is true. There is a very real sense in wich being willing to die does in fact make make you free. Someone can put a gun to your head but they can't make you do anything if you are sincerely prepared to eat that bullet.
Nor would i say the right is "baffled" so much as we have different reasons and motives.
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Bro, come on ... you're not exactly making an effort to hide that he's very much still here. You have the same writing style & opinions as Hlynka, you frequently speak as if you are a long-term part of the community even though you're a relatively new user, your account was created almost immediately after Hlynka's last one was banned, you even spell "their" wrong with the same frequency as Hlynka (and TequilaMockingbird) did!
And I say this not to have the mods ban you again, since I disagree with the permaban and find your posts interesting, but if you want to pretend that you're gone you need to change up your writing, for better or worse (mostly better!) you've got a very distinct voice that is immediately clockable.
[Of course, if you aren't Hlynka then I'm ready to eat crow and apologize]
For the record, as much as I would love to take credit for the excellent pun/dad-joke, I am not @TequilaMockingbird and everything I said in this post about taking a year off and why I chose to "rejoin" is the absolute truth.
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Well, if they win we'll find out. And if they lose they'll be reduced to chunky salsa and I won't have to hear about it ever again. So either way really.
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Minor nitpick, but the animal on which Muslims believe Muhammad flew to heaven was not described as a 'winged unicorn'; it is usually depicted by less fundamentalist denominations as a winged horse with a human face.
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There are Overminds available, but the right just can't seem to muster obedience. They insist on following stupid scammers who have no right-wing qualities (like, they are Jewish or latino, and homosexual on top of that). I think Hanania, Cofnas, and Spencer and others who became disillusioned with the right's refusal to reward really top tier minds have written about it on Substack. The left meanwhile heavily funds its think-tanks and professors and listens to them a fair amount, despite supposing to be the side of equality. The right preaches hierarchy and then the hierarchy is the most egalitarian thing you've ever seen, that props up the most mediocre, ugly, dumbest impure losers like Chris Rufo, Trump, Fuentes, BAP, etc. Meanwhile the left has overmen like Obama, Newsome, Ivy League geniuses, etc. The right just isn't worthy of opposing the left imho and they deserve all of their losses.
I think you're correct, but I think another key aspect that is underdiscussed is Overmind assassination (both literal and de facto; the most effective way to knock a piece off the board is often not to kill them and turn them into a martyr).
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I think the problem is ultimately grift and the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
More generally: any movement’s leaders grift so much, it kills motivation to fight for them (because they’ll take the spoils and leave you with the consequences). When people become desperate and willing to sacrifice more for less, the movement’s leaders grift more. The leaders who grift less and try to leave any spoils or protection to followers, have them stolen (protection abused and ruined) by the less charitable leaders; it’s a prisoner’s dilemma. In this way, grift destroys itself even aware it’s doing so.
For better or worse, this is happening to The (left’s) Movement: as it’s losing influence, it’s losing the ability to defend low-level fighters, and has not been (at least economically, and I believe culturally below a surface level) rewarding supporters. People didn’t vote for Kamala, the woke wouldn’t fight hard for Newsome. A woke Donald Trump figure may emerge, but like Trump, I also expect them to benefit themselves over the ideology, even if they don’t intend to (because they must outcompete or will be subsumed by Iron climbers).
The only solution is a new movement, as the old ones collapse. In the same way that the only solution to aging is rebirth.
EDIT: I also think it’s important to note that Luigi didn’t shoot a rightist figurehead. That would be Thomas Crooks, Tyler Robinson, or Cole Allen; none seem to have been presented positively even implicitly in the mainstream left (though extreme left has some supporters). Luigi shot a health insurance CEO (who may have been Democrat or Republican but is only really known as a health insurance CEO).
The class movement is maybe interesting, because it has far more support than any left or right movement (because obviously most people aren’t top ε%) but is especially corruptible (because anyone who rises in this movement becomes its target themselves, and if they try to stay genuine, have less money and therefore less power than Iron climbers). It’s basically impossible to eliminate rich people (or more specifically powerful entities…AI slavery would do it), although not to replace them, like Brian Thompson. I don’t know a good mitigation.
Wrong, rightists grift more and keep more of the money. Leftists grift less and then pass out the money to NGOs when they do grift.
But do these NGOs spend the money on their publicly stated goals, or more grift? Particularly those most backed by establishment Democrats, not necessarily those most promoted by grass-roots advocates.
Note that "grift" includes self-preservation, luxuries are usually only a small fraction. An NGO that spends the majority of its money advertising and infecting government is spending a minority on its mission; in their defense, that may be necessary to avoid dying and further the mission at all during famine (e.g. Republican control), but do they revert during Democrat control without getting outcompeted?
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The NGOs are just more leftists.
Yes, but the point is that leftists grift to help The Movement whereas rightists grift for a new car.
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I think the main reason is the same reason why the US Christian Right is averse to Rod Dreher's concept of the Benedict Option, namely that they've been generally convinced for a long time that they are the mainstream, or at least part of it, and thus it naturally follows that legislation and law enforcement will serve their interests.
Nah, it was decades of the tv telling them that there was no greater good than to be seen as "not racist," that changing demographics were a good thing, diversity is our greatest strength, anyone saying otherwise, or saying something that could remotely be construed as being against this narrative, was a Nazi. I know, because even as a late Gen-Xer, this was what I grew up with, and was already a sacred value of my church - part of the Southern Baptist Convention, and thus, seen as "staunchly conservative" relative to most - you could not be seen as having any qualms about racial minorities, especially Black people. As Chesterton noted, "conservatives" don't need very long at all to adopt Progressive beliefs as "tradition"
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This is my parents. It's been very stressful to us all every time I've tried to suggest to them that the US is no longer majority white Christians.
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I saw a post on YouTube from "Stipey UK" and it didn't look very peaceful. People encircling police and throwing trash cans at them, light property damage to residents.
Mostly peaceful is a meme from the George Floyd era of protests
For the uninitiated: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cnn-fiery-but-mostly-peaceful-protests-parodies
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This is consensus building. [A jury convicted Chauvin of murder 2] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Derek_Chauvin). I am sure that his defense made pretty much the same arguments as you did, and obviously did not convince the jury.
Generally, you want to deter people from doing stuff which contributes to bad outcomes even when it is unclear if their contribution alone would have caused the bad outcome. If three people stab a victim and cause it to die from blood loss, we are not generally going to determine if the any of the assailants caused woulds which would have ensured death on their own, or if perhaps the victim might have survived if he had not taken an Asprin beforehand. Instead, we say that they all maliciously contributed in an attack which predictably resulted in death, so they are all murderers.
For Floyd, it seems plausible that Chauvin contributed to his death. He certainly acted with reckless disregard for his life. I do not give a rats as if his behavior was department policy, he can join the illustrious group of all the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg defense who were convicted despite claiming superior orders.
--
I will grant you that the optics in the new case are almost as terrible as for Floyd. But while the police response was inappropriate in hindsight, it certainly lacks Chauvin's recklessness, the contribution to the death is less likely and there is a convenient guilty party on which to focus the ire.
Personally, I think that an absolute no-brainer would be to cancel the religious exemption to the laws forbidding knives. An openly carried weapon is a promise of violence. Religious exemptions are for stuff like keeping the sabbath or covering your hair on your passport photo, not for rules society really cares about, like bodily integrity of kids or public safety.
IIRC his defense was gagged and could not argue the truth, which was that Floyd died of a drug overdose.
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I'm sure Chauvin contributed to his death via arresting him for a crime which was very stressful for Floyd, but the position he placed him in was coached by department policy and you cannot choke somebody out over 8 minutes of them being able to talk in a position like that.
The myth that if you can talk you can breathe.
For 6 minutes? Unless Floyd had gills he had oxygen incoming
There's some amount of chest compression that will kill a person. As they beg minute by minute saying they can not breathe.
I'm imagining a Roman looking up at a criminal on a cross and saying "if you can talk, you can breathe" as the criminal very slowly asphyxiates.
He began that whilst seated by himself in the back of a car and has been taught that that particular claim is the magical go away spell with Policemen, though.
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Has anybody been able to reproduce rendering somebody in reasonable health unconscious in that position? I could imagine it compounding with drugs, stress and Floyd's health issues but positional asphyxiation in that spot for anybody in typical condition is a huge stretch
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That's not consensus building, that's genuinely how I view the situation. Juries make dumb decisions all the time. They're easy to manipulate. It's why Lee Kuan Yew did away with them in Singapore. But regardless, you should view a death by overdose helped along by negligence differently from a person stabbed to death.
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Reform UK have pledged to do exactly that if they achieve a majority in the next election. Strange that Labour haven't scooped them.
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Chauvin judged that Floyd was in a state of excited delerium and placed Floyd in the officially taught prone restraint position (ctrl-f “Minneapolis police training slide”) for cases of excited delerium. Restraining subjects in ExDS was department protocol. Actually there’s a recording of Chauvin and another officer articulating this, and that the reason they had him in this position was because of ExDS. And Floyd’s behavior was classic ExDS. You should probably care if Chauvin was performing departmental policy conscientiously because otherwise you’re punishing the innocent, which is 100x worse than failing to punish the guilty. Why would you want a police officer to be deciding on the fly a new restraint technique? He’s not an expert in restraint, and he’s not a medical expert, and he is being placed in an extremely high stress situation. Would you be okay with sending doctors to the Rape Dungeon if they prescribe something that is only proven to be deadly post-hoc?
I thought this was a fake thing cops made up. I'm sure their internal documentation refers to it and recommends methods of dealing with it. Pretending as though it was a medical diagnosis they are sensibly dealing with. That way when they get caught behaving in an unjustifiable manner they can use procedure as a shield from criticism. A procedure they made up and may not be legal if actually applied. As seen by this cop following procedure and then being convicted of murder.
Oh let me tell you, it's real, i've experienced it. It sucks a lot.
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The reason ExDS fell out of fashion is that it’s overwhelmingly a phenomenon of young black men on drugs. For progressives, this means it can’t possibly be real. But it’s possible that there is a rare gene that makes some populations violently resist confinement which, when in combination with certain drugs, results in a heart attack. Why would that be impossible? We can imagine that such an instinct would confer an evolutionary advantage in violent regions of the world and in regions which did not face cold winters where confinement and close proximity would have weeded such an instinct out. And indeed certain Arcticism theorists note that East Asians have 12x less claustrophobia than Arabs, a population with African admixture. So the mere fact that Blacks experience it more frequently is not actually valid grounds for the illegitimacy of the psychiatric state, though this is the primary reason why doctors have become uncomfortable with the syndrome / state / diagnosis.
Unfortunately, multiracial jury trials are a meme.
Or it's totally fake, and "excited delirium" is just a medicalization of people fighting cops.
“People fighting cops to the point of a heart attack” could have a genetic etiology, in the same way “pitbull biting hard and never letting go” is a trait you can breed in dogs. This is a useful medicalization because it explains why these people are dying in custody sometimes. Please describe what you would like police to do about the 0.001% risk of ExDS death when they are arresting people. Should they refrain from restraining everyone altogether, and let them run amok? Do you want them to be restrained in a hogtie position, like Chauvin’s colleague suggested, which has a higher rate of death? Personally, I’m fine with police using enormous net guns to restrain anyone who resists, just like a canon that shoots a heavy net at the subject. Do you think the image of white police officers capturing black people in nets and then dragging them to jail would assuage the public’s tendency to crash out at racism?
If people die when fighting cops, such is one of the risks of that course of action. But defiance is not a medical condition; that's "sluggish schizophrenia" by another name.
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That's a discussion for the police force policy manual though? Chauvin went to prison since the politics of the day demanded that he be railroaded. You can't do anything resembling state sanctioned violence if one can just arbitrarily toss out the official rules for use of force
Their policy manual and official department rules do not supercede the law. A cop can follow their procedure to the letter and also be convicted for his actions. Their procedures are something they made up and very much not the law.
We can have sanctioned violence with law enforcement follow the law rather than the "official rules" their department made. State legislation defining murder is not inferior to department policy.
How do you feel Chauvin should have handled the situation otherwise? They'd already tried to place him inside the vehicle at which point he began violently resisting arrest and screaming that he couldn't breathe.
It's also worth noting that Floyd was a much larger man than Chauvin.
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I think it's a term coined to describe a regularly observable phenomenon, rather than something with a specific, well-understood underlying medical theory. "Sometimes people go pants-shitting crazy when getting arrested, usually involving a novel cocktail of unknown drugs. How the fuck am I supposed to describe this in the reports?"
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The standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt", actually.
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Does anyone have any insight into how white male British cops sleep at night? I don't mean that rhetorically. It's become almost cartoonish at this point, you are literally siding with a colonial overlord to oppress and maliciously neglect people who look, talk, and act like you, your family, your parents, your brother and sister, while protecting people who can't even speak English properly, looking nothing like you, and openly express contempt for people like you, your country, your history, your national symbols, etc. How does that cognitive dissonance not drive a man mad?
I read something somewhere that cops, especially executioners but generally any state hired sociopaths, are asked this all the time, and they usually laugh and roll their eyes. The answer is they sleep at night like Ted Bundy after his n-th raping, which is completely peacefully. They also get to look forward to their paycheck and another day of consequence free skull-bashing, unlike Bundy.
You're vastly, vastly, vastly overstating the degree to which the vast majority of police careers have to do with any particular usage of violence or sociopathy. About 75% of US Police Officers (which honestly seems low to me and I'd expect most other countries to be in the 90%+ range) have never discharged their firearm on active duty in their careers. Like the military, people are prone to vastly overestimating the amount of actual combat that takes place when most people will never have any occasion to actually engage in a firefight or violence otherwise.
Sorry, no. By both temperament and training, the thing police officer find most important in interactions with citizens is in making damned sure the citizens know who is boss. And they're quick to go to physical force if the citizen gets at all uppity.
Stop being an uppity shit head then. There are forces far scarier than the police that would be wrist-deep in your asshole if we hadn't settled on this broadly suitable meta for state deployment of power.
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Can't say this doesn't match my experience.
I was once accosted for almost three hours (though not technically detained) by a couple of cops who'd decided I was doing something wrong, though they weren't sure what exactly, and seemed to think that if they just badgered me enough they'd figure it out. Long story and I don't want to get into the details but eventually I figured out a way to make them lose interest and leave. In the meantime it was just dominance display after dominance display.
Too much "respect" to ever get uppity, I suspect.
A friend of mine once told a friend of his, a cop, that what the cop interpreted as respect was in fact mainly just fear. Seemed to blow his mind, he said.
It's the same picture. That sort of "respect" and fear are in fact the same thing. People who exhibit it call it "respect" to make themselves feel better.
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A lot of 'anonymous' police sources seem to be telling influencers they aren't happy with the DEI policies, but they need to eat. Here's a front page Times article showing how some are feeling pressured by DEI guidance. One officer of the four attending has resigned, although this was after the damning bodycam footage was released.
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IMO the event is a politically-useful red herring, and the more pertinent question is why one group in the UK gets to use tribalism to increase their wealth and influence but not the actual natives. The Sikhs in the UK rally around their ancestry and their race + homeland (cf Khalistan movement) to increase their in-group preference in business, to fund advocacy groups, and to energize their members who have a strong biological instinct to work for their blood and land (as all human males do). This gives them a variety of extra psychological and social boosts over the deracinated British, whose members are taught not to favor their own kind in business, who have no mainstream advocacy networks, and who do not dance around with swords and guns while hoping for purified and sovereign Bongistan. These things constitute a huge advantage and you can see the consequences in economic performance. Allow the native British to be as ingroup focused as the Sikhs, otherwise you’re just allowing a foreign group to have an eternal advantage over you in your own country (while using your resources to fund their own sovereignty movement back home), which is ridiculous and embarrassing. Of course, I’m not a Brit or Irishman or Scotsman, I am just embarrassed on their behalf.
Oh, I see; you're Welsh.
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I truly think this cannot happen until Boomers and maybe part of Gen X dies of old age or is disenfranchised. Just as in America they still seem to think the country is 97% white and that we need to "level the playing field" and that lynchings and the Holocaust are right around the corner if we ever turn the ratchet backwards one click. They were so successfully propagandized that they literally cannot believe their own eyes, I see this with my own parents who have moved from right to far right over the last decade, but for whom race is still a third rail and the dream of 90s colorblind racism is still very much alive.
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One last comment before I stop talking about this because it's making me too angry and depressed.
Between this, the Southport stabbings and the grooming gangs, it's becoming increasingly difficult for me not to believe that Enoch Powell was the most prescient English politician of the twentieth century. Nearly sixty years later, it's remarkable how little the progressive script has changed when dealing with conservatives voicing uncomfortable truths about immigration:
I have just reread Powell's speech to make sure I don't put words in his mouth, and I'm sorry but I still think it's petty, get-off-my-lawn prejudice disguised as argument, and only looks prescient by accident.
Above all else, I remain baffled that of all the sob stories he could have quoted to make his point - and I do not doubt that legitimately sympathetic stories existed - he chooses one about an old lady who courts destitution by stubbornly refusing to rent rooms to non-white customers, and then has the nerve to complain that she is denounced as a "racialist" because of it. That he expected his audience to parse her as a sympathetic rather than pathetically self-destructive figure speaks volumes.
And in much the same way what sticks in my craw about the main, demographics-based thrust of the speech is that he isn't "voicing uncomfortable truths". In fact, he's leaving key parts of the argument unspoken, either because even he couldn't bring himself to say them out loud, or because he somehow considered them literally self-evident. To wit, he leaves the statistics about immigrant demographics to speak for themselves; he writes as if the mere prospect of there being more brown than white people in England is self-evidently repulsive. He is not making an argument that if this process is allowed to happen then nice Polish young men are going to be stabbed in the street by crazy Sikhs and the police will turn a blind eye. Either he is assuming that everyone already understands browns to be violent savages by definition but doesn't want to say it out loud, or else, as near as I can tell, the whole of his argument must come down to "there are soon going to be more brown than white people in England, and then the browns will be in a position to outlaw racial discrimination on the part of white business owners, which would be illiberal; it is the God-given right of racist old ladies to refuse service to Negroes if they want".
From a 21st century vantage point, this is just… such a deeply parochial argument. It's so quaint. It somehow manages to simultaneously be almost unthinkably bigoted in its basic assumptions, and comically optimistic about the kind of problems that runaway immigration would actually cause. Religious extremism is not a twinkle in this man's eye. Rape gangs do not follow from anything in this speech. Spurious, witch-hunty accusations of racism are not even what he's talking about, and God help us, he's not even discernibly talking about HBD. He literally just thinks that if there's too many brown people the brown people will "oppress" your basest, most vulgar, I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racist by outlawing that kind of racism, and that this would be a great blow against freedom in England.
It's honestly kind of embarrassing (though it's a testament to his sheer skill as a writer that the flow of his prose almost disguises the underlying vapid stupidity of the argument).
I'd think that the example of the old lady refusing to rent to non-whites would be particularly pertinent given the modern dynamic where hotel owners rent out every room to the government so it can house migrants in them. And then these migrants rape women and children. Just search 'uk migrant hotel rape'. It's practically a sport at this point.
I think you are not paying the respect prejudice deserves. And that this is a cognitive and moral failing on your part. You are looking at the words, not the emotion.
I saw this a lot in the aftermath of the big purge of the Alt-Right from YouTube. Where lefty youtubers could claim, after the fact, that they ultimately won and that the alt-righters had always been kind of stupid. And to an extent that's not an inaccurate observation. There were a lot of 'vapid' and 'stupid' creators in that space. They didn't really understand HBD to any relevant extent, they didn't do well in debates and they certainly could not predict how bad things could get. But they did get an audience. How? Principally because their attention was on the same gut wrenching worry others felt. That the current state of affairs was bad. They could not necessarily articulate why. But they had a gut feeling and others could emotionally resonate with that.
To that extent, it should be a source of embarrassment, continuously, for every person that was more intelligent, erudite, or otherwise better equipped to handle reality, that they are continuously shown up by random racists when it comes to identifying threats. The trajectory of the western world has been so comically bad the past three decades that it's hard to imagine how it could have gone worse.
Turns out, almost every economist is a retard, actually. Along with every educated person that can read, write and reason yet fail to recognize that no, importing the third world will not be an economic benefit, colonialism didn't make Africa poor and 'poverty' doesn't make black people rape. The racist could not necessarily articulate why he knows what he knows or believes what he believes. But they had a gut feeling that has outshone every alternative. Sure, they continuously fumble the moment, make bad arguments and otherwise embarrass themselves, but ultimately they've not been the ones who've been wrong when it counts.
Smartdick sophistry is for fags dickwaving intellectualism in geneva tea halls, not real fucking life. If listening to whites complaining about brown's is untoward then how about asking browns themselves whether they would be happy living next to other shades of brown. White racism has nothing on brown or yellow racism, pakistanis lacked the institutional capacity of nazi germany and still successfully purged their hindus, the Japanese annihilated the Christians and tried their best to genocide the chinese, the Sinhalese reduced the tamils to a rump, every arab state expelled the jews (dont fucking morocco me pedants). Foucault could write wistfully about the nobility of the african experience because he had a coterie of boytoys eager to metaphorically and literally fellate him in exchange for his crumbs of comfort. Now the europeans let themselves be raped by these same browns, and the other browns are baffled and increasingly jealous that they didn't take the gora for what they had when the opportunity presented itself at first.
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That's the racism that prevents cops from taking the brown people's side when they attack you.
'First they came for the I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racist...'
The funeral pyre is burning for Nowak, 'you' and you's family are next.
Okay, but the thing is, I dislike the I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racists. I dislike them intensely. They disgust and appall me in much the same way that blacks disgust and appall them. I and people of similar political and moral principles to mine would be liable to "come for them", in the sense of wanting to outlaw racially discriminatory refusal-of-service on their part, even if the racial minority they discriminated against made up an irrelevant 0.01% of the population and had no electoral weight of their own. The "first they came for the XYZ, but I did not speak out" rhyme breaks down when the XYZ are not merely a group to which I don't belong, but a group that I already considered enemies regardless.
Of course, you can have a maximally libertarian setup, where the old lady is allowed to refuse to rent to Negroes because she thinks they're icky, and I'm allowed to call her names for being a bigot because I think bigots are icky. But Powell seems to think we should be shedding tears for the old lady because children follow her around calling her a "racialist" (which I stress again, she objectively proudly is), so permit to doubt his principled commitment to freedom.
Again, I do not think there is any sensible reading of the speech which suggests that Powell is concerned about browns enacting genocidal violence on whites. His "funeral pyre" is a purely demographic/cultural one, his doomsaying prophecy is that one day there'll be so many brown people about that white racists will be ostracized. He puts forth no evidence - no argument - that the new brown majority will treat the white minority unkindly, except specifically in the form of cracking down on white bigots.
Mark: I am not saying that no such argument can be made - Nowak's murder alone is an argument written in blood - I am saying Powell does not make any such argument. He is not talking about the same thing you are. The thing he's talking about is rather more stupid, and infinitely less serious.
Uhh... no it doesn't? This is the entire principle behind defending scoundrels. Just because X is currently oppressing group Y (a group you consider your enemies), doesn't mean they won't eventually turn on your in-group too.
The author of the "first they came" poem was an anti-communist priest who hated Jews, and yet two groups listed in the poem are communists and Jews. Your claim that the logic breaks down when the group is a group you consider your enemy is literally the exact reverse of the intended meaning of the poem.
Thank you, however, for giving me a presumably unintended insight into your worldview. The message you took from that poem was not "you must defend the civil rights even of people you consider your outgroup, because if you don't, there'll be no one left to defend your civil rights". The message you took from it was "you must defend the civil rights of groups you feel no animosity towards, because if you don't, there'll be no one left to defend your civil rights. However, if someone wants to trample on your outgroup's civil rights, that's 100% A-OK and not at all a cause for concern." By your logic, the priest who wrote this poem was right to look the other way when the SS were rounding up Jews and communists.
Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud.
sigh Again, it depends on what you mean by "came for". I do not think that my outgroup should be oppressed or have their civil rights ignored. But this does not mean "you can't anything at all against your outgroup, ever". The poem was not intended as anarchist apologia that says you can never outlaw, or even oppose, any evil behavior whatsoever because "coming for" anybody in any way, ever, is too much of a slippery slope.
To put it another way, if you think "first they came" applies to "first they came for the people who refuse to rent rooms to Negroes, but I did not speak out, because I was against refusing to rent rooms to Negroes" then I do not see how you cannot extend it all the way to "first they came for the people who lynched Negroes in the streets, but I did not speak out, because I was against lynching Negroes in the streets", or "first they came for murderous paedophiles, but I did not speak out, because I was not a murderous paedophile", at which point it loses all meaning. I think clearly the poem only works if by "came for" you mean "sent to a gas chamber en masse"; if you mean enabling the government to do unconscionably awful things to your outgroup, things it should never be allowed to do to anybody for any reason. But no one was suggesting sending the racist old lady to a gas chamber in a cattle wagon.
Well, the reason I think Powell's speech was so prophetic was that he understood perfectly the kind of slippery slope the UK had begun toboganning down. You are entirely correct that, at the time of writing, no one was calling for the execution (or even imprisonment) of white Britons who don't want to rent out rooms to black people. But in modern Britain, plenty of people have been arrested, convicted and even imprisoned for vastly less severe "infractions" than this, "infractions" which amount to thoughtcrime against the prevailing regime.
Maybe you think that a woman who doesn't want to rent out rooms in her boarding house to black men is just a racist and if she doesn't like it, tough. But you don't have to sympathise with her in particular to recognise Powell's broader point: if you think it's going to stop there, you are staggeringly naïve. And he was absolutely right – it did not stop there.
As I mentioned in the above links, a man was jailed for eight weeks for the "crime" of sharing a meme depicting Pakistani men armed with knives arriving to the UK in boats, with the caption "coming to a town near you". In my view, he should have not been sent to prison, and the fact that he was is a grotesque, unconscionable violation of his civil rights. Maybe you think forcing women to rent out rooms to black people doesn't inevitably lead to white Britons being arrested and imprisoned for any and all criticisms of diversity, immigration etc. Maybe it doesn't lead "inevitably" to police officers handcuffing a white stabbing victim while his Indian murderer gloats about how he done a racism. But at this point, whether the one "inevitably" leads to the other is sort of academic. Powell predicted that, at least in this case, one would lead to the other. He was right and it did. That's why it's called the "rivers of blood" speech, because Powell felt a great foreboding: not that the anecdotes he described are bad in and of themselves (they are, as you put it, almost quaint), but that they bode extremely ill for the direction the UK would take in the coming decades.
Right, it's not the slippery slope fallacy if you're pointing out that the slope is in fact a waterslide.
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That does seem pretty analogous to the communists. "First they came for the omnicidal would-be-tyrants".
This is why I think "came for… and I did not speak out" has to mean something like "they got sent to Auschwitz, which no one ever should be for any reason, and I let it happen", rather than "I myself did something, anything, to oppose them". With the benefit of hindsight, the writer does not think he should have allowed the Nazis to do whatever they wanted to the communists; but I don't think it follows that he regrets ever criticizing communists in any way, and I don't think it even follows that he thinks no amount of police action against communist terrorists was ever justified.
Therefore I do not think "first they made laws preventing bigoted old ladies from renting rooms to Negroes…" is a valid application of the poem, because I am not a hyper-libertarian and I do not think that 'the power to forbid people to rent rooms to minorities based on personal prejudice' is an inherently immoral weapon for the government to wield. I am not turning a blind eye to unconscionable evil being done to my enemies. I can conscion outlawing discriminatory business practices, I can conscion it just fine. It's what I would have been campaigning for already, no ominous "they" required.
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What exactly is the problem with these people?
Is it the 'black' part? What do you think of racists who call the police to get their dying victim arrested? Ironically, present-day Britain likely has more brown 'I-don't-like-looking-at-them-garden-variety racists' than white ones at this point.
'already'? When we are at iteration 1000th of the rhyme? We're all way down the list, not at the start. The anti-racist rhyme is the water and you are the fish.
Oh the 'rivers of blood' are purely metaphorical then? Same as this part, I suppose?
What is a whip used for again?
Either that, or he has smuggled in the implication that browns are inherently liable to be physically violent to whites without actually justifying it in any way whatsoever, which again makes his entire rhetoric founded on silently assuming the most crucial conclusion. Pick your poison, but he doesn't come out looking good in either case, intellectually speaking.
I think the argument is that you're bringing in invaders who are going to radically alter your society. Anybody that stands in the way of that is going to get cut down. I suppose that this is something that needs to be explicitly spelled out to people like you explains why the globalists have been so successful in their reshaping of the West.
You are, again, skipping crucial steps. It's not inevitable that a demographic change will lead to physical violence against the old majority. If, say, Belgians or Koreans moved to my town en masse I would not expect them to start stabbing the locals, whatever the scale of the migration. To believe otherwise would be sheer, paranoid xenophobia. It may very well be the case that if you replace my Belgians and Koreans with Pakistanis or Sikhs, the murder rate will in fact go up, but this is a specific claim about the cultural (or, if you must, genetic) dispositions of Pakistanis and Sikhs, which requires evidence to back it up; it's not the null hypothesis about any generic group of foreigners.
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Since experience seems to be solidly backing him up - as I never tire of reminding people, blacks in London are 8x as likely to commit murder as whites according to statistics quoted by the former chief of London police - this is less an assumption and more of an observation.
But again, FttG originally praised him as "a conservative voicing uncomfortable truths about immigration". Even if I we grant that he had those kinds of statistics in mind, he just comes across as a mealy-mouthed coward for not having the guts to explicitly discuss his most important claim or the evidence for that claim. He would be leaving the most important "uncomfortable truth" unspoken.
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Enoch was hardly prescient, he was simply honest. It takes special effort to pretend mirpuris and yoruba are as similar to the Londoner as a Welshman is. The labour union leader and liberal elite were at odds with each other but both knew they wanted to break old tory power bases and were happy to bring in migrants to weaken UK fabric. That it was only yardies that were problematic in the 60s was convenient since the sikh and muslim and the hindu could be pointed to as behavioral exemplars but that simply delayed the bad actor surge till critical mass was achieved.
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Such incidents are bound to happen in any country where the police force as well has been indoctrinated for decades with the idea that white racism is the worst evil to ever exist in the universe.
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Now available as a Substack post.
Some years ago, I wrote an article complaining about an irritating tic wherein progressive journalists will assert "Alice has faced controversy in the past for her problematic opinions" but will refuse to tell the reader what those opinions are, thereby allowing them to draw their own conclusions. I argued that this should always be taken a tacit admission that the problematic opinions in question are ones that the average reader can be assumed to agree with. If there was a smoking gun (e.g. Alice has consistently argued that the Holocaust didn't really happen), the journalist would say that outright. Their reluctance to tell the reader what the opinions in question are illustrates a lack of confidence in their own opinions to win in the marketplace of ideas.
I now think this is a specific example of a general rule: if a political partisan doesn't want to talk about a particular story, it's because they know that it favours their ideological opponents' worldview more than their own.
Andrew Doyle has an article called "Henry Nowak and the politics of deflection" in which he notes that a Spanish newspaper, El País, has published exactly one article about the case, which takes Nigel Farage to task for cynically "weaponising" the case to further his supposedly far-right agenda. (The article doesn't even include a photo of Nowak, but does include a photo of Farage.) The woke gobshite I mentioned a couple of hours ago insists that, because Digwa was arrested, convicted and sentenced to life in prison, therefore there's nothing to see here and anyone who wants to talk about it is a "racist idiot".
The reason this man wants to focus on the fact that Digwa and his mother were convicted is because it's the only aspect of this case which is remotely flattering to the British establishment, and to the progressive worldview more broadly. In every other particular about this case, progressives know they haven't got a leg to stand on, and that it vindicates just about every complaint conservatives have been making for years about immigration, ethnic enclaves, clannishness and two-tier justice. Consider:
Read down through the numbered list above: there is no element of it which casts the progressive worldview in a positive light. (Even the fact that Digwa and his mother were convicted is far from a slam-dunk: although his father and brother have appeared in court on weapons charges, they really ought to be charged with obstruction of justice or whatever the equivalent crime in the UK is.) In other words, this is an anti-scissor statement: there is no possible way you can spin it that is remotely flattering to the progressive worldview. In this scenario, short of admitting that a stopped clock is right twice a day, the only winning move you can make is to ignore the case altogether and loudly proclaim that anyone who wants to talk about it is either a far-right racist, or "legitimising" complaints made by far-right idiots. Goodthinkers do not Notice™: they ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears.
And he is correct. A society doesn't normally prosecute soldiers for murder, because they are killing that society's enemies. Why else do you think only that group is de facto allowed to go around armed? (Canada at least requires you to have it zip tied to the sheath so it can't be drawn, but in fairness that was 10 years ago.)
Here, though, English society gets to have its cake and eat it, too- killing its enemies while at the same time being able to claim murder is bad. Certainly confusing for the soldier in question- because here his claims that he was acting on society's general orders (to kill its enemies for their crime of existing, or "racism" for short) won't save him from prosecution.
Then again, soldiers get thrown under the bus all the time.
C’mon.
This has none of the hallmarks of whitewashing a vigilante. The perpetrator didn’t make that argument. The state certainly didn’t.
Yes, it does. Sometimes even when they have explicit orders and state support, which this guy emphatically did not. Contrary to popular belief, killing enemy combatants is surprisingly regulated.
Western countries have a reasonably long history with something called “freedom of religion.” The British version was usually more concerned with Papists, but it has adopted the usual suite of protections for sincere religious beliefs.
Who, exactly, do you think is calling the shots here? Have you actually seen people calling him a soldier, or are you overfitting your own model?
An absurd sleight of hand. I think you’re assigning a whole package of beliefs to a nebulous group of your political enemies, none of which are particularly coherent. Would it be reasonable to call that “stupidity”?
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"Violent Sikhs are just modern UK soldiers" is a hot take, but if he is getting convicted, isn't that evidence against the entire idea? And what you're left with is just inflammatory rhetoric?
I think there's an argument to be made that those from honour cultures find that 'fighting words' are sufficient to prompt violence. I clearly don't agree with this, but I believe that this is the cultural operating system that the family is running. It explains their 'you're racist' outbursts 1 2 3 against the judge and Nowak's family after sentencing. They find the killing justified because of the words they were told were spoken by Digwa.
I dont think they actually believe the judge is racist. The words are unimportant compared to the ease of employment of a thought terminating cliche to expatiate the consequences of chimping out. Honor and izzat and respect and culture are words that can stop castigation when employed by minorities, and they use it to be assholes not to live their lives in a special way. Indians in management use 'culture fit' to justify firing everyone nonindian and bringing in a village of their own kin to parasite off the organization till it fails. Its just whichever magic word has weight and we are still living in the shadow of st floyd
I agree. I think its just 'arguments as soldiers'. Tools to be used or discarded according to how convenient they are in the moment.
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Hence "have cake and eat it too".
Just because they're throwing the killer away does not imply [those who define UK society] are not in complete agreement that what the killer did was justice.
It might not imply it in a strict sense, but I would hope that you can at least bring a concrete example of someone "who defines UK society" saying that what the killer did was justice.
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The aftermath of the case seems like a classic Toxoplasma of Rage situation - not the controversial, toxoplasmic one that gets everyone whipped up, but the Eric Garner style. The murder, the police behaviour, the family behaviour: everything is so cut and dry terrible that there is no controversy. Even on UK reddits, which are as fortified progressive as you can get, there is almost universal outrage here.
Unlike George Floyd, where his past criminality and the fentanyl accusations gave plenty of meat for culture warriors to help spiral it into a national emergency, Nowak's murder looks destined to fizzle out. There's not even some low sentence for the murderer, while the authorities have been quick to recognize the blowback against his family and sought to charge them with related crimes.
Ironically, if the police had actually found some spicy memes or similar in Nowak's phone, it probably would have helped the overall cause.
I think this is a case where you can sell it to leftists based on how you frame it. If you stick to "police bad", they'll agree, no questions asked. The moment you introduce the "white people are disfavored in two-tier policing" or "deport the immigrants", they'll sour pretty quick and condemn the entirety of the protests.
Some extremely stunning loss of message control going on there where the usual suspects are denying that two-tier policing is real while the UK government itself is desperately pleading with the public that it'll review its explicit two-tier policing policies.
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Instead of "white people being disfavored," maybe "shitty people who happen to be People of Color will take advantage of the special protections afforded to them to victimize others or avoid consequences. They know that if they say 'Racism' people like those cops or you will immediately jump to their defense. So maybe be slightly less credulous when someone cries wolf/racism." might be more convincing?
There are no shitty people of colour, only victims of microaggressive/genetic/societal racism that they have no choice but to react with violence. The teenage Ukrainian refugee girl who was murdered by Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr is not a cause celebre, she is a victim of white societies racism that forced Brown to stab her and scream "I GOT THAT WHITE GIRL". Murals honouring Iryna are taken down, Saint Floyd is still honoured. Agency only exists for white people, who by simply existing are the cause of all sins blacks and browns endure and commit.
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I don't think this works, because I think that many people reconcile such cognitive dissonance by never admitting a single crack in the facade. Antiracism, like any religious/ideological belief with mountains of apparent evidence against it, starts to fall apart as soon as you allow a single crack in the facade. I'm not singling out leftists here, honestly, this is a pretty common human trait. It's epistemically sustainable to close your eyes and cover your ears and say "LALALA I'M NOT GOING TO LISTEN TO YOU BIGOTS/SINNERS/COMMUNISTS" while it's extremely uncomfortable for most people to hold nuanced or qualified versions of deeply held moral beliefs.
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I'm fairly keyed into rightwing stuff, and I don't remember this being reported until well after the rioting was a Thing.
Well yeah because Toxicology reports take weeks.
Yup. In regards to the Toxoplasma thesis, the Summer of Love kicked off in full spite of basically the entire right openly agreeing that the situation (as presented in the initial video) looked heinous.
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Its a sad situation but nothing here seems unique or even too particularly culture war. Police have a bad tendency to trust the first calm person to talk to them, which is Digwa claiming that he got attacked first. They especially trust the calm person over the one who is clearly panicking or having some sort of unidentified issue. This is a problem that gets brought up in domestic abuse circles sometimes, that the abuser seems cool and collected when the cops get called in by a neighbor while the victim will often be emotionally frazzled and angry and look like they're a hostile aggressor.
So given this, the police approach the scene and find a calm guy who says he got attacked and another guy who is panicking and freaking out and is like almost every other situation you see a guy freaking out in, probably on drugs. Violence cases are rare, drug guy being crazy or having an overdose is common. They make the assumption this is like every other case. His wounds were in such a way that they weren't easily visible so even when he's saying he got stabbed, they assume it's the insane mutterings of a druggie high off whatever.
The solution is to check anyway but that doesn't necessarily help unless you constantly reinforce it, since the officers will eventually default back to ignoring it again. Heck one of the cops even acknowledged it, like "oh well I think we have to check anyway don't we?". They knew better but they were used to just ignoring it. They really didn't believe he was stabbed and defaulted to their base assumptions and base behaviors
Now this is something I think is always ridiculous. Religious exemptions are a nonsense idea.
Either a rule is genuinely important to have and exceptions shouldn't be given out (because it's important!), or the rule isn't actually important and therefore shouldn't exist. Almost everything that has a religious exemption to it should just be gone! Why should you lose more freedoms than someone else just because you believe in a different sky man?
I agree for the specific case. If a society decides that knives are bad, it seems silly to make exceptions.
Other things are more general rules than hills society is willing to die on. If you get a court date, there is a strong expectation that you will appear on that date, but you can probably get an exemption if your best friend is marrying on that day or you have an important medical appointment scheduled. There is little lost in also making "it is sabbath and it would be really inconvenient for me to get to court" also a valid excuse. Likewise, if Christians want to take a sip of wine with the Eucharist, it would be an asshole move to require their church to get a liqueur license. If kids miss a day of school a year for an important religious holiday, we can probably make an exception from the rule of mandatory school attendance, nor does there seem much point to require someone to take PE classes during Ramadan (or ever, but sadly society disagrees with me on that one).
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Yes, but are you willing to fight for it? I don't necessarily mean e.g. murdering people (though that happens too) but actively and consistently pursue the change as a major life goal that is so important you are willing to put yourself and others in danger to achieve that? Religious exceptions, at least in theory, are born when some people are, and it's more convenient to let them be as they like than fight with them. However, it turns out that virtually nobody in Britain is willing to fight for the right to bear arms. So, they don't get it. Except for Sikhs which apparently did fight for it, one way or another, and got it. But I haven't heard anybody in Britain saying "we also need this right!" - only "they are not good enough to have this right, take it from them!". With this attitude, no wonder they don't have it.
People have tongue in cheek started pushing for ethnic weapon carrying. For the English this would be the Seax.
So, for those of us with mixed ancestry, do we pick one, or turn into a Wayne Reynolds character?
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Unfortunately this gives me the choice of two guardless folding knives, and the jawbone of an ass.
Carrying a donkey's jawbone on your hip would certainly lend a certain gravitas in the courtroom.
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In America, it would be the KA-BAR combat knife, wielded by our most deadly warriors.
I personally would broaden that to any kind of Bowie knife, of which the Ka-bar is a superlative example, in honor of our frontier heritage.
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This is the exact element that makes it culture war. (I don't mean to pick on you by saying this.)
Basically, there's a moral and spiritual shift in how the right perceives crime. Violent crimes like these used to be seen as tragedies. Now they are seen as injustices. The difference is that that a tragedy is something that you have to endure and an injustice is something that cries to heaven to be addressed.
Take the murder of Iryna Zarutska. She was stabbed by a career criminal who had been let out of jail before. If this is just a tragedy, there is not much to do except arrest the perpetrator and try to put him in jail. But if this is an injustice, it's an indictment of the entire judicial system that the criminal was not already in jail. The murder isn't just something that happens but is something that was "allowed" to happen.
Anyways the divide is precisely between those who feel apathetic and those who don't. It's not a culture war divide between two opposing interpretations. The scissor statement is whether you care, or whether you don't.
This is just a reversion to the - at the time successful - Willie Horton strategy.
You forgot to attach the gigachad.
In all seriousness, your comment implies (derogatory) but should instead be read (admiring).
It was more that I was skeptical that the mindset is actually new. I think people just have way more channels to spread this stuff outside of respectable media.
And whether it'll stick this time. The left didn't win on Horton at the time, but they attempted to frame all such measures (including Clinton's crime bill) as modern racism and they succeeded well enough to get themselves a repeat experiment in coddling criminals for a couple of years.
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I remember seeing a video, I want to say it was in Germany? of a non-white person engaging in a mass stabbing act of terrorism, the police arrived on scene and assisted him because they assumed he was being attack by the native white Germans (and got injured in the process).
This is a pattern.
The white German was attempting to stop the terrorist. The police arrived on the scene and immediately tackled and began cuffing him, at which point the terrorist started stabbing one of the cops while he was restraining the white Good Samaritan.
Honestly, it was poetry.
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The Mannheim stabbing (iconic photo included). The police officer actually died as a result.
Despite American police giving it a go and this recent valiant effort from British police, I say German police still holds the title of most cucked police action via the Mannheim stabbing. Total Axis Victory.
Nature is healing.
That’s what upsets me most about Muslims committing violent crimes against the native populace, the backlash against peaceful Muslims.
One of our own was killed by a violent terrorist. We must therefore make sure to never make violent terrorists upset and make every effort to accommodate them so they are spared the trauma of murdering our own people.
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Without commenting on anything about the actual facts of the situation, I think the very fact that one side of the metaphorical culture war believes that it's particularly culture war means that it's necessarily culture war. As in the case of Floyd & Chauvin, it doesn't matter if the killed/killer were unfairly treated because of their race or status or whatever, all that matters is that enough people on any given side believe that it's particularly culture war, and it seems evident to me that enough people do, among the people who do know about it. The absolute total number of people knowing about it is also, of course, particularly culture war, due to how issues like this tend to get covered in mainstream media, and it seems to me that the people who do know about it are trying to increase that absolute total number, which is, again, also particularly culture war.
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If it's not unique, please provide the other examples of this happening, but with white/non-white flipped.
I don't believe you're saying these things for remotely principled reasons. Based on the many, many comments of yours I've read, I don't believe for one second that you'd view a race-flipped version of this as: sad, but nothing to see here.
As I said in another comment, I already did! In the original comment I gave a whole category of crimes where it's common.
domestic abuse victims.
It's common enough to make this mistake that some more experienced officers and departments have adopted the practice of arresting both in response and sorting things out after.
Meanwhile, in my actual comment -- not the more convenient one you're invented to respond to -- I was asking about where this has happened with the ethnicities flipped.
In my reply to your comment, I was aware of the examples you gave in your comment; this is how time works. Those are not examples to my actual question, as you know.
A brown man stabbed a white man. The police showed up and arrested the white man. I can't imagine a good-faith version of your comment where you transport this into "Well, sometimes the police arrest both people in domestic abuse cases!"
Fortunately, I know now not to waste time attempting to imagine the hypothetical good-faith version of such a comment.
There's barely any of those, in the same way there's barely any of white victims with colored aggressors being left free. In reality the ordinary large majority of cases of police believing an aggressor over the victim are same race friends/family who knew each other beforehand and the aggressor calmly lies while the victim responds "inappropriately" and stupid cops assume calm = innocent while not obeying orders/being emotional/whatever = guilty.
It is a real documented and known issue, but most violence works that way. It's almost always people you already know. And therefore almost every case of cops making stupid assumptions is in situations of violence between people who knew each other.
Are there... more than zero?
Because you're the one saying this isn't "unique", it's not representative of a pattern, yawn, it's an everyday occurrence, nothing to see here.
You present a completely unrelated category of domestic abuse as if it proves your position.
When asked for evidence (by two different people!) you pretend that your previously-presented unrelated category is the thing they asked for, and they apparently just failed to read your comment correctly.
When pressed further, you say "there's barely any of [the thing you asked for]". Well, sorry, but I don't even believe you have any of the thing I asked for, or you'd have triumphantly presented it.
I restate that you wouldn't be putting in a fraction of this effort to obfuscate the truth if the ethnicities had been different. I don't pretend to understand why you do this, but I see you doing this.
One of the most common categories of violent crime seems pretty relevant to violent crime discussions. Feel free to disagree, but clearly we're talking past each other at that point.
We're not "talking past each other"; you are being deliberately obtuse.
As has been explained to you multiple times, by multiple people: "the police sometimes arrest both people in domestic violence" cases has nothing to do with "the police arresting solely the guy who had been stabbed instead of his murderer".
Fortunately, as you continue to pretend not to understand what people are telling you, we can defer to ChatGPT. Normally I wouldn't do this, but you, specifically -- magicalkittycat -- as a poster, have previously claimed that AI output is "impartial" and "neutral", which you then use as evidence for your positions ("the robot agrees with me!"). So let's see what it says:
So, would you prefer to (a) retract your claim that the domestic violence thing is relevant, or (b) retract your claim that AI is neutral and impartial, and never use it again to try and score points on TheMotte?
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Why is domestic violence a "category" of crime, instead of simply being rolled into the non-specific whole? You don't see people talking about near-fire-hydrant crime, after all.
I think it's categorized separately because it's different. And because it's different, it might not make for a good basis for comparisons.
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I fail to understand how the claim "police officers are sometimes unsure of who to arrest in domestic abuse calls" somehow proves your contention that there's nothing remarkable about police officers only arresting a clearly incapacitated man while making zero effort to arrest the man who stabbed him in what was not a domestic abuse situation. They are entirely unrelated claims.
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You could apply this retort to 90% of political opinions on the Motte. On that matter, I don't believe you have any real principled reason behind making this post either - I don't believe for one second that you'd view a tribally-flipped version of this as a case of "the poster needs to provide tribally flipped examples, or else he's a dirty hypocrite".
Right-wingers will continue posting that things that make the Right look good are actually a big deal, and things that don't are actually nothingburgers. Left-wingers will continue doing the same with s/right/left/. Should we all just pack up and go home?
I mean, sometimes the race/gender flipped version never actually happening is a part of the reason people are pissed off. There is not, nor will there ever be, a story in which a white male attacks a bunch of brown people in Germany and the cops defend the white guy while arresting the brown guy who tries to stop the mass stabbing. That is part of the story which is the quiet part out loud: the cops are so concerned about looking racist that they will assume the white guy is guilty before even bothering to realize that the brown guy is actually the perpetrator.
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It's worth pointing out that the various UK subreddits, even the typically left-wing ones, are seething with rage at this. It really has cut across the political divide. Nobody in Britain thinks this is a nothingburger (although left-wing politicians are trying to 'depoliticise' it in the expected way).
Tourists and lurkers break silence at moments of intense rage. Let it die down and the normal posters will go back to asserting the teenage student deserved to die because he had racist thoughts.
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I could; and if I did, I would be incorrect.
I thought the words in my comment made this clear, but I wasn't generically responding to a comment I disagreed with: I was observing that magicalkittycat, consistently, as a poster, is not a person who I would believe is (1) making that comment honestly, and (2) makes comments honestly.
That's fine; you are wrong.
Like, you're welcome to hold that belief, but you are factually incorrect and holding it for poor reasons. "I can invoke a superficial symmetry" is not a universal counterargument. Happy to expand on why you're wrong -- I obviously don't expect this comment to suffice as reasoning.
That's fine; again, this reflects on a flaw in your reasoning process, not mine.
Yes, this is true. I don't believe it's true of "90%" of posts on TheMotte, and I don't believe you really believe that either. Otherwise, what's the point in us being here? I'm happy to be here because I don't believe it's true. If you believe it's true, then you're the one who needs to explain that.
No, I think that would be an absurd and stupid thing to think. Why would you ask that?
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I wish more people would come to this conclusion in light of his posting history.
"Prison abolition" has long meant "let my friends out, but we need somewhere to lock up my political enemies so keep the institution."
"It's bad when cops randomly kill people" has long been less popular than "it's bad when cops kill friends, good when they kill enemies." (With the caveat that most take "enemy" and "not person" as synonyms.)
His comment history is freely available and speaks for itself. Why bother pretending to discuss it one more time? We all know what people like that do with power, whatever nice words they say when they haven't got it yet. And whatever anyone else might be willing to say in public. If you prefer life to death, act accordingly.
It is telling that many voices that advocate for not incarcerating for non-violent crimes also declare white-collar crime (which is almost definitionally non-violent) something that needs more prosecution and jail time.
"You may not like it, but Bernie Madoff and Ken Lay are what these non-violent criminals look like" isn't exactly wrong. Although I don't know if it's really a modal example of such: perhaps our attorney members could weigh in.
The modal white collar criminal is probably a homeowner knowingly paying a contractor cash under the table to help the contractor avoid taxation.
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Well, I think a lot of people have come to that conclusion; I'm certainly one of them. But you can't win them all. Some people don't use this forum as much as others, and some people don't diligently read the usernames of posters.
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Why bother? Anyone who can't contain their urge to use a term like 'sky man' is outing themselves as too obnoxious to worry about. If it were marginally easier to do so I'd probably just hide all comments with such strings.
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I was actually in the process of writing a post on this story myself as I was genuinely surprised when a search for "Henry Nowak" turned up nothing given how throughly this story has dominated the right-wing/MAGA media space for the last week.
Here are some of the links I had collected for the post i was writing:
For me the most disturbing thing is how the cops are just chatting amicably with each other the whole time. No apperant concern for the man coughing up blood, no attempt to assess his injuries or render first aid, no call for back-up or an ambulance, just 2.5 minutes of casually watching an 18 year-old gurgle and choke on his own blood like this is just another day at the office.
The video here is not someone defending race-based policing. It's someone from the opposition (not sure if Tory or Reform) attacking the government (i.e. Labour) for race-based policing and asking them to stop it. The reply could well have defended it, but it's not included in that video.
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Yes, this is the same impulse that caused me to write what I did. I was talking about it with a friend I talk about politics with in a Discord server and found that there was actually a lot to say about this one. Too bad I beat you to the punch! You had a lot of good links there.
Don't worry about it.
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There's so many stories that I just gloss over nowadays. It's been years since I noticed that somehow, no matter how egregious the situation, we never get a reaction symmetrical to the MeeToo / BLM / Smirkening / PrettiGood cases, so I don't even put pen to paper unless there's something I find personally interesting in a story.
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This is one of those multicultural, creedal national, propositional nation fault points. The way to not "inflame division" is to ensure there's no other side. Not "inflaming division" would entail Digwa's family turning him in. It would involve his community turning on him, condemning and outcasting him. That's the bare minimum buy-in for a post-racial or multicultural society. You have to be willing to put the common good, including for non-ethnics, above base tribalism and ethnic nationalism.
Instead, Digwa's family actively helped him lie and cover up his murder. They were screaming "Racist!" at the judge during the trial. The Sikh community online seems to be largely pushing the completely counterfactual story invented by Digwa, in which Henry was a violent racist and Digwa was only defending himself.
If I were British, I would demanding that every member of that community who wasn't willing to side with the outraged native Briton protestors against their own co-ethnics be deported, regardless of immigration status. The other acceptable option would be fedposting in Minecraft.
Its too late. Too many minorities have fucked over the community. We need to bring back the death penalty. Him, his brother and his mother at a minimum need to be executed. Sikhs need to lose their privilege of wearing knives. They can wear a harmless knife (i.e. plastic or restactable or something. If they don't like that, honestly they can fuck off. I'm sick of white people in their own country having to bend to accommodate immigrants. I'm sick of white people being blamed for everything.
If this community wants to survive in Britain it better bend like the fucking willow tree.
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In fairness, Digwa had already been barred from his local gurdwara at the time the stabbing took place, and in response British Sikh leaders are revisiting their policies around ceremonial blades:
Maybe nothing will come of it and these are just empty statements made under the advice of a lawyer until the case leaves the public imagination. But I've been legitimately impressed by the Sikh community's response, and think they've handled this a lot better than Britain's Muslim community would have done.
Yeah it does sound like Digwa/his family were outlier-level belligerent and weapon-hoarding amongst the Sikh community. Afaik the brother had also had some legal troubles due to being armed?
Yes, the brother and father have both appeared in court on weapons charges.
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Actually the bigger issue that stuck out to me is the calmness the police exhibited in bringing Digwa to jail. He had a knife on his person, had just stabbed the guy who by this point was dead. Why didn't the police immediately cuff him or at least make him surrender his knives. Is it religious exemption? Maybe once muslims say raping little girls or killing infidels is religiously sanctioned the police will back off and oh my I just remembered it IS religiously sanctioned. Looks like I'm gonna set up a religion where white people are obligated to transfer 10 quid to my bank account every time they breathe, and if they don't its racism. I'm shitskinned enough to pass off as an oppressed minority this could probably work.
I believe the actual murder weapon had already been taken away by his mother, though I'd imagine he'd probably still have had his other smaller legal knife on him as a Sikh.
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AIUI, for stealing from them. He was banned for intra-group anti-social behavior. Now, if they follow-up by banning and outcasting the whole family, I'll happily call them good people.
Yeah, I'd say that's the least they could do.
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Show me an example of a white Briton (or hell, let's make it easier for you: a white person from anywhere) stabbing a brown man, the police arriving on the scene to find the white aggressor clearly uninjured and the brown man visibly incapacitated, the white man claiming to have been attacked first, and on his word alone, the police handcuffing the visibly incapacitated brown man. If you can show me that, or even something vaguely analogous, I will consider the possibility that there are no real CW aspects to this awful case.
Nowak was not "panicking and freaking out". He was lying on his side, clearly incapacitated, and summoning what little strength he had remaining, he claimed that he'd been stabbed and couldn't breathe. Vickrum's father even told the officers that Nowak kept falling over. I believe the family made up some silly cover story about Nowak attacking Digwa, attempting to flee and cutting himself on a fence. Even if that was how Nowak got injured, it was obvious from the first that he was injured and Digwa wasn't. They should have attempted to render medical care to the clearly injured or incapacitated person. Instead, they put him in cuffs because he allegedly did a racism.
Oh, so in other words there are culture war aspects to this story? You changed your tune from one end of the comment to the other.
Also, even assuming this really was a legitimate self defense situation, YOU STILL HANDCUFF, SEARCH, AND ARREST THE KILLER. This is standard procdure and it was drilled into me when I did the training for my CCW: if you shoot someone for any reason, the cops have to assume (for their own safety, if nothing else) you are a dangerous criminal and will arrest you with 100% certainty. They will not calmly take your statement and leave. They will draw weapons, order you to the ground, cuff you, and place you under arrest. Only after an investigation will you be allowed to leave, and you should assume you will be spending at least the night in jail.
The fact these cops are just hanging out shooting the shit with someone who they know, at the very least, just laid some dude out on the ground after a physical confrontation is fucking insane. I've seen enough bodycam footage to know it's only by the grace of god that nothing happened to them as well, with how carelessly they acted.
I think I read somewhere that the Digwa family told the police that Nowak had attempted to climb over a fence, on which he'd cut himself, hence his injuries.
To be fair, this claim is significantly more plausible if you've seen UK fences.
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A closer match (though still much more ambiguous) than the domestic violence red herring:
https://sfpublicdefender.org/2024/08/06/charges-dismissed-against-black-crime-victim-who-was-wrongfully-charged-and-jailed-after-muni-altercation/
Old white guy took black guy's dropped money, black guy asks for it back, white guy refuses, eventually reaches out and scratches black guy's face, after which the black guy pushes the old white guy to the ground. Police arrive and arrest the black guy. Security camera recording confirms that sequence of events (though SF Public Defenders office is infamously unreliable in their narrations).
Thank you. Clearly, the Nowak case is not quite as unique as I had erstwhile believed.
A bit different when there's a noted disparity of age.
If this had hypothetically been a 75 year old Digwa and a 20 year old Nowak I feel like the optics would be slightly better
The even more obvious dissimilarity is that Digwa was clearly uninjured, while at the very least Nowak was obviously immobile and incapacitated. But I am nonetheless pleased that someone was able to find a case which fit the broad contours of a case like Nowak's with the racial valence reversed.
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In my original comment I gave a whole category of this, domestic abuse victims.
It's common enough to make this mistake that some more experienced officers and departments have adopted the practice of arresting both in response.
Are there really so many domestic abuse cases in which the aggressor is a white man and the victim a brown man? I had no idea there were so many interracial gay couples.
Which, you'll notice, is not what happened here. They put the victim in handcuffs despite him clearly being immobile and incapacitated, and didn't put the aggressor in handcuffs, even though he was standing, lucid, talkative and showing no signs of visible injury at all. If they were unsure of how the altercation had gone down and decided to cuff both parties out of an abundance of caution, that would be one thing. Only cuffing the party who clearly poses no threat, claims to have been stabbed and is acting in a manner entirely consistent with that claim, while declining to cuff the other party? Inexcusable, and you know it.
Are you trying to claim there's a widespread epidemic of white victims being left lying on the ground while colored attackers are left alone? That's not true at all, a case like this is extremely rare. The only reason it's generating so much discussion, just like the Floyd case, is because such extremes are very rare.
The ordinary large majority of cases of police believing an aggressor over the victim are same race friends/family who knew each other beforehand and the aggressor calmly lies while the victim responds "inappropriately" and stupid cops assume calm = innocent while not obeying orders/being emotional/whatever = guilty.
Of course not! This sort of issue being rather common is exactly why some more experienced and smarter officers and departments do dual arrests. Lots of cops are stupid or uncaring and don't do that. It happens often, and is a well documented recurring issue.
Nice judo flip, but -- like you're doing with my comment -- you're deliberately trying to mislead anyone reading.
You claimed this isn't unique. Both FtttG and myself asked you for examples of it happening with different ethnicities. You don't get to then go "Oh, you're claiming that there are a thousand Henry Nowaks?!?" to distract from your failure to actually answer the question, twice.
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No: I asked you for a specific example of the reverse, wherein a brown victim is handcuffed while the white aggressor is left alone. I don't know why you brought up domestic abuse calls, as that doesn't seem remotely relevant to my request.
Okay, but again – why are you bringing this up? What does that have to do with this case?
"This man got stabbed, and when the police came they put him in handcuffs without bothering to cuff the man who stabbed him."
"Yeah. Sometimes when responding to domestic abuse calls, police will arrest both parties just to be safe."
That has literally nothing to do with this case. I don't know why you're bringing it up. It's completely irrelevant. We're not talking about police arresting both parties out of an excess of caution. We're talking about the police arresting one person, and it being the wrong one.
I share your frustration with magicalkittycat's rather confused line of argument as I'm reading through this comment thread, but if I may steelman the basic point just to satisfy my own OCD-esque tendencies: I think the valid argument that magicalkittycat has been failing to make in an intelligible way goes something like "mistaking a rational-seeming attacker for the victim and a panicked, incoherent victim for the deranged attacker is a standard police failure mode, as shown by this error's prevalence in domestic abuse case, which is so great that steps have sometimes been taken to circumvent it ie dual arrests. Therefore, the null hypothesis in the Digwa case should be that the races of the parties is flatly irrelevant, and it was just an example of this welll-known, non-race-based failure-mode at work."
To which you're essentially preemptively objected that if that were so, then we should expect to see instances of this race-neutral bias affecting cases with a rational-seeming white attacker and a frantic POC victim. Which is sensible, though I don't think it necessarily suffices to defeat the argument. (It may be, for example, that pro-minority bias is involved in cases where police officers are confronted with a visibly distressed person of color in a way that 'cancels out' the usual 'believe the more put-together person's claim' bias - but that in the Digwa/Nowak-shaped case, race never becomes a relevant factor because the pro-minority racial bias would simply have been reinforcing the already predetermined outcome, and can thus be discounted.)
My other objection to his explanation is that it's simply untrue that Nowak was panicked. Rather, he was incapacitated, not moving, and lying on his side (unlike Digwa, who was standing, lucid, talkative and uninjured), which should have immediately raised the police officers' suspicions that Nowak was severely injured and hence not the aggressor. Likewise, he was not incoherent: every factual statement he made with what little strength he had left ("I've been stabbed", "I can't breathe") was both true and articulated clearly enough to be easily understood via heavily compressed bodycam footage.
The police officers did not accept the word of a calm actor over a panicked and incoherent one. They accepted the word of a calm actor over one who was visibly on death's door, presumably for reasons of their respective races. That's what people are so enraged about.
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It barely happens in any racial direction!
Almost every bit of violence is done by people who knew each other beforehand. Therefore, almost every case where this stupid assumption gets made is done in cases where people knew each other beforehand.
But also nice changing your words
As you said
You don't think that one of the most common forms of violence regularly having this exact issue is even "vaguely analogous"? I would say it's not even vaguely! It's one of the most common forms of violence!
Yes, cops do that pretty often. Which is why the smarter departments and officers take a dual arrest approach, cause they don't want to make that common mistake. There are still plenty of stupid or lazy or uncaring cops who just assume calm = good.
Dude, apparently it didn't get through when FtttG said it, so let me try (using his exact words):
It's not "vaguely analogous", and he explained exactly why. The words in people's comments are there to explain things to you; they're not just for decoration.
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So, you can't cite an example of the thing I requested? You mean (contrary to what you earlier claimed) this case is unique?
When I said "vaguely analogous" I was referring to the white aggressor/brown victim component of my request. I would have accepted, for example, an instance in which a white aggressor non-lethally assaulted a brown victim, and the police arrested the brown victim while leaving the white aggressor alone. But it seems you can't even produce one of those.
If it's the case that cops arrest the wrong party pretty often, show me one. Show me a case where the cops arrested the wrong person, and that person was non-white while their aggressor was white. Otherwise I don't even know what we're doing here.
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Not a clear example but your question makes me think of the Ahmaud Arbery case, where the killing was video-taped and no charged for months.
The video shows he got shot at only as he charged the shooter, and only actually got shot after he landed a few punches.
The video shows a violent confrontation initiated by the McMichaels. Their legal argument was that they were making a legal citizen's arrest, not that they were acting in self defence. Based on the video alone, the McMichaels were obviously guilty notwithstanding Arbery throwing the first punch - indeed if the case had somehow ended with the McMichaels dead, Arbery would have had a decent self-defence claim. The reason why they were not charged until the the case attracted media attention was that the local police in a Georgia small town thought that it was normal pro-social behaviour for a retired cop to round up a posse in hot pursuit of a jogger who trespassed on a construction site.
Where? They weren't hitting him, they weren't even threatening him. You can make the argument that they shouldn't go around armed, and "arresting" people, but the fact remains he's the one that initiated violence.
In what world is detaining someone with a drawn gun after you chased them down in trucks, not threatening them?? Such a weird position to take. Considering the McMichaels were convicted of this one, its also a wrong position to take. and I say this as someone who was originally on the McMichaels' side when it first all went down.
I meant threatening in the "I'm going to fucking kill you" way. "Wait here with us until the police arrives" may qualify if we're being autistic, but doesn't belong in the same category, in my opinion.
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I believe the legal argument is that by trying to detain him whilst armed they were initiating the confrontation.
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The fact that their base behaviours seem to be to trust the brown guy levelling accusations of racism over the white guy who's dying on the ground is basically what people are upset about.
The culture war aspects are:
And that's just for starters.
To be clear here, they didn't know he was dying. The wound was not visible from their perspective.
I don't know if they ever said it anywhere but most likely they just assumed that he was pretty much every other case of a guy freaking out, an addict having an issue.
Are you okay with George Floyd's death, since the police were clearly not aware of his drug ingestion?
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What constitutes "knowledge" here? The victim clearly articulated several times that he had, in fact, been stabbed and could not breathe. If you invoke enough skepticism, nobody can truly "know" anything.
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At the minimum, they knew Nowak was lying on the ground, immobile and incapacitated, while the man who claimed to have been attacked by him was standing, talkative, lucid and displaying no signs of injury whatsoever (absurdly pointing to a fictitious bruise on his eyelid to bolster his claim to have acted in self-defence). I don't think you need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that a) however the altercation might have transpired, Nowak did not pose an active threat to anyone at the time the police arrived on the scene (so cuffing him was unnecessary); and b) Digwa and his family weren't being entirely truthful in their versions of events.
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They should have known he was dying. They should certainly have managed to notice his injuries while they were handcuffing him for doing a racism. And they need to be extensively and explicitly re-trained that:
And that's just lessons for individual policemen to learn. The police force and the government is a whole other story.
The problem for police is that they constantly have to deal with hardcore defectbots, so when they end up with a cooperate bot they habitually hit defect because 9/10 it's the sensible move.
"I know my rights" "You can't touch me that's assault" "I've got mental health" "Fucking racist police" "Stop touching me up you pervert" "She stabbed me" "I didn't do nothing" "He's the one who started it" "I can't breathe" "I get claustrophobia" "You should catch the real criminals" "I need my medicine" "These handcuffs are too tight" "You have to let me go" "You like to pick on little people don't you" "Those aren't mine" "Why aren't you helping me" "I've never seen that before" "He's a liar" "I need a doctor" "I haven't touched a drop" "They're getting away" "I got lost and I thought this was my house" "It's only a little bit" "He was filming me" "I'm allergic" "You're making my baby cry" "I'm dying" "Why should I" "Don't tase me bro" "I didn't see him" "It's cos I'm black" "I want him to leave me alone" "According to the magna carta" "You're giving me anxiety" "She told me she was over 18" "I'm not resisting" "Watch out I'm HIV" "You've got the wrong person" "I paid full price for that" "You're hurting me" "Do you know who I am" "I swear to god I'm telling you the truth" "This is fascism" "You're making a mistake" "I thought it was legal" "It was an accident" "I bet you can't even count to a thousand with your eyes closed"
Which ones are genuine? Did you read all of them and give each one careful individual consideration, or did you tune out as they blurred into ambient whining?
I assume that police have enough training and common sense to provide first aid or call for an ambulance for anyone who appears to be badly injured. I also assume they have enough negative experiences to be sceptical of a suspect who doesn't appear to be badly injured claiming they are. Since they treated Nowak with scepticism instead of medical attention I assume that his injuries appeared to be minor and in the context more akin to a drinker who had just lost a fistfight.
If you train police to check suspects for unseen injuries all you're going to find is the majority of suspects don't have any unseen injuries, but they do have a propensity to attack or try to escape while you're distracted because they've learnt that saying they're injured creates that opportunity. Of course if you can see they're injured you can make your own assessment and don't need to factor in their honesty.
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I agree! Cops can suck and be poorly trained and we should ensure that they take each situation seriously instead of defaulting to "'calm person I spoke to first is being truthful and unresponsive person is just on drugs".
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A skinny 18 year-old with combed hair wearing a white shirt and tie is so unlikely to be a drug addict that you have to already be profiling like a progressive to consider it. Kid is calling out that he can't breathe and that he's been stabbed while one of the officers tells him that he has not been.
The likeliest explanation is that they believed the stabber because progressive values encourage righteous fury at any accusations of racism. The next likeliest explanation is that they profiled the kid on some other class basis, which is one of those bizarre Britishisms that does come up again and again whenever Britain's new minorities attack lower-class whites. Both of those possibilities are far likelier than a simple misunderstanding.
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How could a man with four stab wounds, one of which is 8cm deep, not have any visible injuries? What's the source for this claim?
It was winter so he wore a heavy jacket, and the bleeding seems to have been mostly internal. From the linked PDF:
Though I saw some mention of witnesses saying his mouth kept filling with blood (though after my first comment turning out to be false, I should point out it's only something I saw skimming the feeds, and don't have link for).
EDIT: Oh, actually it's kinda in the bodycam footage. One of the first things the killer's father says is "he has a mouth full of blood". Also you can hear him choking on his own blood.
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It's obvious the injuries were not very visible to the officers just by looking at their behavior! They don't see any wounds when first addressing him and they don't believe him when he says he was stabbed, being actively dismissive towards it at first.
His face had been slashed, according to the closing judicial remarks. Even if we assume it wasn't obvious, they can't have looked even slightly closely.
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This is equally well explained by the police being trained in systemically racist ideological terms to presume the worst of anyone accused of racism. They didn't even check. They didn't even ask "where". They just denied it without a moment's thought. "Don't think you have, mate" is a term that is going to live in infamy.
Derek Chauvin also didn't see any wounds.
I really think people underestimate how much being drowned in these "trainings" for years and years impacts you. I'm pretty damn not-pozzed but I have to do trainings multiple times a year* and it makes it hard not to unconsciously buy their frame on things.
The "anti-racist" training is incredibly racist and it works and it results in stuff like this...
*One employer took us off clinical duties for a full week yearly to indoctrinate us in social justice. And it's one you've heard of.
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Assuming the officers acted reasonably when arguing that they acted reasonably is questionable.
Nothing the cops said suggests they saw the wounds and then decided to ignore it, as opposed to them just not seeing the wounds to begin with.
Maybe they didn't see it because it wasn't visible, or maybe they were all incompetents with 20/200 vision. I don't know why they didn't see it, but it seems like they just didn't.
What could they have said to suggest this? "okay m8, I see you're coughing up blood, but I'm going to ignore that, you haven't been stabbed, mmmkay?" Kind of an unreasonable expectation on your part. It's obvious that they wouldn't say they're ignoring the wounds if they're ignoring them.
What part of their behavior and words indicates they saw the wounds and purposely chose to ignore them?
The fact he said I was stabbed multiple times. The female cop said his irises were dialating and not responsive. He wasn't resisting, and the "victim" was completely unharmed should have been a fucking clue.
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The fact that the guy's mouth was full of blood and his skin was of a cadaverish shade would be suggestive of injury in my view.
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Quick sanity check: what is a "particularly culture war" situation. Was George Floyd one?
@magicalkittycat, hey bro, how come you answered pretty much every comment except this one?
I haven't answered lots of replies, there's way too many! Just doing a quick check there has been >40 replies to me in 9 hours. I have a busy life with work and my kids and this is just something I'm going to check and reply to casually if there's too many going on.
But sure I'll answer yours
I don't think it's much of a culture war situation because basically no one has been on the side of "police should just make up their mind based off the first person they talk to and police should ignore a stabbing victim's pleas by assuming they're just a druggie or hallucinating or whatever the police assumed there". I haven't seen anyone argue that it is good for police to do that.
For a culture war, certainly there must be a war element to it. Some sort of disagreement on if this behavior was responsible policing or something. But nope doesn't seem to be much, pretty much everyone left and right wing I know seems to agree, police should actually check instead of just assuming it's nonsense.
There it is, the Darwin tell:
@ArjinFerman, just in case you were unaware, you are talking to one of Darwin's alts. (The last one was called @guesswho.)
I have an alternate theory, that Darwin runs a school of rhetoric and we're seeing some of his students.
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By this definition you are a Dean Alt.
It might shock you but not everyone here is a no-lifer who's primary hobby is arguing on the internet. You are kinda telling on yourself, go touch grass. Furthermore when you take a stance that is opposite to the Motte's consensus you tend to get a lot of shit. Not everyone is worth responding to and not getting to someone is not indicative to being an alt.
Just cuz you and MKC got into it in another thread doesn't mean you need to follow them to hear to start shit again.
EDIT: after reading this new thread you both need to get modded, holy shit.
Yeah, no. You're in the wrong here.
In your other comment, you say:
... and then here, you say:
You're reusing the exact antagonistic, insulting language magicalkittycat was using against FtttG, while simultaneously pretending to be some kind of enlightened neutral party going "hey guys, you both need to calm down".
You obviously don't want to calm things down, or get anyone to "cool their jets"; you're just shit-stirring. Like when you called the dead man a "retard".
If you sincerely want people to cool their jets, maybe don't deliberately be as antagonistic as possible.
Apparently not. Maybe you should update your priors about what constitutes good behavior in this place and what is not. They were clearly both rage posting at each other personally, which is frowned upon.
I think its far clear you are pissed that I have a disagreeable opinion, that dares to disagree with you in another thread. As such you feel the need to follow me around and make low effort snipes.
I don't feel the need to shit-stir online, I can do it in person to a far more enjoyable degree. I express my honest 100% opinion. It is always weird to me that there exists a class of people who essentially assume any opinion not agreeing with their own is a troll. And then comes to a debate forum filled with heterodox thinkers.
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What?
How am I telling on myself?
You are essentially pissed at MKC for that other thread around finding a white perpetrator and a minority victim. You are following them around to start shit with them. You both need to cool jets. You are accusing them of being an alt because they used the same sentence as someone else...
By your accusation, Dean has also accused them of being a darwin alt and followed them around to start shit. Ergo your logic makes you a dean alt. (its shit logic) Pot meet Kettle.
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I swear to god.
Kindly stop with the melodramatic callouts. Perhaps you missed the last round. If you really think Arjin is missing key information, send him a DM.
And you, @magicalkittycat. I know you were paying attention. Falling back on personal attacks does no one any favors.
The closest thing to it was saying that I have a job and a busy life and that it's not unique to do so, and thus assuming that it is so unique or strange to fit the category of "employed with family" that giving it as a response to a question as why I don't reply to every comment is not indicative or whatever weird conspiracy theory he has in his head.
Now I don't know why it comes off as so unique to him. Maybe he's currently unemployed. Maybe he's a NEET and most people in his life are also unemployed.
I don't care, I'm not passing judgement. I have an aunt who lives off social security because she's disabled and hasn't worked for almost two decades. That's fine.
It's just a very strange thing to assume "job with kids makes me busy" is unique. It's not, it's normal and common.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear.
Do not respond to accusations with personal attacks. Block them, address the substance, I don’t care, but do not take the opportunity to speculate on your interlocutor’s life story. Especially do not respond to a warning about personal attacks by making more guesses about what’s going on in his head.
One day ban.
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As I've made ABUNDANTLY clear to you, I never claimed the fact that you have a job and a family is remarkable in and of itself. I was pointing out the specific pattern of behaviour in which you 1) write a lengthy comment in which you employ some extremely specious reasoning 2) multiple people push back on it 3) you airily announce that you don't have time to reply to all the comments because you have a job and a family (and, in a staggering coincidence, the only times your professional and familial obligations present an obstacle to you posting here is when people are criticising your specious reasoning). This was a very specific thing that @guesswho did on multiple occasions, so it would strike me as a massive coincidence if you are not the same person as @guesswho.
You know something else @guesswho did a great deal? Pretending not to understand something which has been repeatedly explained to him in exhaustive detail, as you're doing now. Something else? Denying that he's engaging personal attacks while engaging in personal attacks. You think you're so clever ("Maybe he's currently unemployed. Maybe he's a NEET and most people in his life are also unemployed. I don't care, I'm not passing judgement...").
I'm not unemployed. I have a good job. Most people in my life also have good jobs.
Seriously, mods – if accusing me and everyone I know of being unemployed losers with no prospects (with the fig leaf of "I'm not passing judgement" wink wink) doesn't qualify as "antagonistic, uncharitable or unkind" behaviour, what the hell does?
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You're right, I should have DM'd him, I apologise.
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Wow incredible! I have a job and family and other hobbies and don't prioritize replying to every single comment here.
I feel like you're telling on yourself, and what you think of the userbase, really hard here if you think being a well adjusted individual with an active life is an odd thing. No offense but you might really need some grass touching dude.
This convinces approximately no one, by the way.
No offence (as, apparently, those are magic words that allow you to cause offence), but trying to smear FtttG like this is pathetic.
Well either having a job and family and other hobbies and being busy with them most of the day is a weird thing to do on this site like he claims, or it's not a weird thing and his accusation (that me saying those things is proof I'm some other user who also says those things) doesn't make sense.
It's like if I said
"Sorry, I eat sandwiches for lunch" and he went "you knew who else ate sandwiches? Joe"
Like ok? Tons of people eat sandwiches. That doesn't make sense unless he doesn't eat sandwiches and doesn't think other people do.
That would make sense if me and Joe were the odd guys out for eating sandwiches. It would be wrong, tons of people eat sandwiches but it would make sense as an accusation if that's what he believed.
Like that's fine, I don't judge people who don't eat sandwiches (don't spend lots of their time doing other things and come on here in between stuff on various days (like right now it's decently early before work gets really heavy and sometimes spend days without checking at all.)) He could be a NEET for all I know and care.
But it's still weird to use "you eat sandwiches" as some sort of accusation. That is just telling on yourself.
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I am a well-adjusted individual with an active life. I was pointing out that you and @guesswho (if we're still maintaining the pretense that you are separate individuals) have an eerily similar tic where you have seemingly limitless time to expound on your opinions (seriously dude, you post an average of 2.5 comments per day here, you're in no position to throw stones), but the second you get any significant amount of pushback, you instantly claim to be far too busy with your other responsibilities to reply to them. I'm not criticising you for not replying to every comment (I routinely have more important things to do than to be posting here). I'm pointing out that the pattern of behaviour is so uncannily similar that I would be flabbergasted if you aren't yet another Darwin alt/sockpuppet. And I really, truthfully, do not understand this weird urge you feel to periodically flounce off, only to reappear some time later under a new username. It's just such phenomenally strange behaviour. I wonder what your next username will be.
Damn are you me too then?
I also regularly go days without posting too and when I do post it's generally in bursts centered together.
Woah, you are a Darwin alt. Your pattern of behavior claiming you have other things to do is just what he did! Holy shit.
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I remain skeptical that he's Darwin. I understand what you're getting at, I recognize the similarity, but I maintain there are also differences in their styles.
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There's still an important part of this question you're not answering for some reason.
George Floyd? It should be obvious he is because people were actually arguing about it. There was a war element to his death.
Some people said police shouldn't kneel on a man's neck for 9 minutes as the man pleads that he is struggling to breath, and others think it is an acceptable restraining method.
There is an actual disagreement over police behavior.
Just adding my 2c, without necessarily disagreeing with you.
The George Floyd saga has permanently warped how people process crimes along racial lines, even if racial motives are marginal or non-existent in the actual facts of a case, both sides now instinctively torture the evidence to cram it into their preferred meta-narrative. The right has been hunting for its own George Floyd (a galvanising martyrdom moment) ever since 2020 to mobilise society against the liberal scolds and their holy cows, who have been hectoring an entire generation of young white men with moral screeds about racism and sexism since childhood, and permanently demolish Floyd's status as a modern day saint.
But there is crucial context that most analysts tend to overlook, BLM 2020 was a 3-standard deviation phenomenon. The scale of the explosion had less to do with the specifics of Floyd’s death or even the popular narrative (unarmed black man murdered by racist white cop) and far more to do with the timing. It detonated in the middle of the COVID lockdowns, when mass boredom, economic despair, social atomisation, and psychological fragility had already pushed people to extremism. Those conditions created ideal kindling for nationwide (and global) hysteria. The racial angle provided the perfect pretext for the rioters to engage in violent acts with total impunity (because only a racist would criticise the so-called resistance). This was also the time when Andrew Tate became the most googled guy. We’re unlikely to see anything on that scale ever again, including from BLM itself. 6 years on, it seems even the kids are joking about it.
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Was there? I'm honestly not seeing one, unless I apply a completely different standard between that case and this. No one was saying the police should never be allowed to restrain a suspect, or on the other side, that they should be allowed to arbitrarily murder black people.
Not really. What I recall from the conversations here was a reaction that was essentially identical to yours: "Its a sad situation but nothing here seems unique or even too particularly culture war". It wasn't until the toxicology report came out that people started making the argument that the method of restraint he used had nothing to do with Floyd's death, and therefore was essentially fine. Progressives never really disagreed with that statement either, they just didn't address it.
So where's the war?
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So Derek Chauvin did nothing wrong?
I wouldn't say "nothing" - he probably should have noticed the suspect is ODing and modify his behavior accordingly, and then maybe the whole debacle wouldn't happen. But he is certainly not guilty of murder. He was sacrificed because the politics demanded it.
Because at the end of the day conservatives are willing to give a W to their culture war enemies and throw one of their own under the bus to keep their city from burning down. Same as for James Fields. And you can see the incentive problem there from Pluto.
And the worst part is, the cities burned anyway.
Not after the verdict they didn't.
Well, in some narrow understanding of "after" it is true, the riot activity, while remaining ongoing in the worst places (like Portland) generally subsided in 2021, owing to the loss for Trump in the presidential election, easing up of COVID restrictions, etc. However, since the trial and the verdict were in the spring of 2021, the major burning of the cities - the "summer of love", etc. - happening in 2020, could not have been influenced by it. One could argue that maybe an opposite verdict could re-ignite the riots, but I kind of doubt that, with Democrats back in the White House, they now needed the picture of "we are building back better", with localized pockets of racist insurrectionists stirring shit up and being justifiably suppressed. By that time, the narrative shifted from "rioting is good and righteous" to "public protest against the government is insurrection and justifies lethal response, including using the military". So I don't think there was even anything to pay for by that time with that sacrifice. But it was made anyway, because there was no other way it could happen.
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I never said the police behaved appropriately. In fact the last paragraph should suggest I believe otherwise and this is a failure in both police behavior and in training. They should not just be assuming everyone having a crisis is just a druggie or a schizo.
Floyd was actually a druggie. So how was the police reaction to him worse?
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And your first three paragraphs apply much more directly to the George Floyd incident.
Do you not see the parallel, or are you experiencing a pathological nervousness about inadvertently making an argument that could get you fired (or killed and your pleas of help mocked by the police)?
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I think the entire family is complicit in detestable tribalistic behaviour here. They deliberately tried to pervert the course of justice by conspiring to hide the murder weapon. The brother and the murderer spoke punjabi about their need for an alibi in the back of the police car on the way to the station. The mother removed the weapon from the crime scene.
Beyond the failure in the police response, the largest thing that makes me upset about this is that while the encounter between Digwa and Nowak occurred at around 11:17pm, the police did not arrive on the scene until 11:37pm. The family knew that Nowak had been stabbed. They called the police and either did not describe the serious wounds of Nowak, or otherwise did not call an ambulance.
All of this talk from the pathologist about how the police's actions could not have prevented Nowak's death are irrelevant in so far as an ambulance could have been requested by the family and saved Nowak's life.Instead they let him bleed out.If leaving the scene of a car accident can be considered gross negligence to the point of manslaughter, why isn't this family being adequately punished along those lines? The system is impotently stacking weapons charges on the murderer, his father and brother, but nothing about how they let him bleed out for an hour before the police arrived.
Edit: I should add there is viral picture of henry being handcuffed floating around with his anemic, sliced hand visable (SFL, but pretty chilling).
2nd Edit: Changed times to match telegraph article, after reading pathologists comments, death was certain.
To be fair, being tribalistic about your literal family is quite natural. I think quite a few people who aren't very tribalistic otherwise would help their literal brother hide a body.
The culture war fodder is that they chose to do so by shouting "racism", which suggests that being too uncritically accepting of racism accusations might let people get away with murder.
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That's an AI "upscale". The bodycam footage is far lower quality, and quite a bit less demonic.
Yep, but as usual the original isn't always the one that goes memetic.
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I believe the mother has been convicted, but you're absolutely right that the father and brother are also complicit in perverting the course of justice.
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sorry, what culture war aspect is there here? UK speedrunning institutional paralysis when the magic word of racism is invoked was the grooming gang case, chris kaba proved that the first instinct of the UK establishment is to find blane in the whites for not letting themselves be victimized by the browns who must have had cause to harm whites if harm was inflicted. Is there anyone who believes that the UK of all places has any appetite to reverse the charities extended to brown minorities? Consideration is the privilege of browns, rich whites can fob off the harms of lacking consideration with the shield of money, and the UK establishment whose primary enemy is the poor native whites will continue happily bringing in either muslim or antimuslim browns depending on whichever flavour of ghoul occupies downing street. Liberal societies will not accept that their axioms were blown apart by reality, they will simply redefine what reality meant so that the outgroup remains noble even when bragging to their kin that the gora are cowards that let their women be raped freely and willingly offer their own as exp for murderhobos.
The Sikhs are still crying racist in the goddamned courtroom. They have no shame and don't even think any crime has been committed.
That's the culture war angle.
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I feel like this being like street-level instantaneous paralysis in the face of 'racism' is a bigger indictment than it being bureaucratic/legal policy. If a judge lets off a random serial criminal it's bad, but if police flat-out decline to arrest or disable them in the first place it's very very very bad
The Macpherson Report is literally the reason for institutional paralysis. It gave basis for the IOPC to censure police for doing a racism, the specific mechanics escape me but all that matters is the first instinct of police officer now when encountering a brown MUST be "oooh mustnt offend the criminal"
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Is the video taken by the victim available anywhere? All I see is bodycam footage. Or the videos taken by the perp where he says the stabbed guy isn't stabbed?
Neither of those videos have been released. @FtttG already told you about the murderer's video, but I can't find any reason why the Snapchat videos are not public. I guess they must have been shown to the court, but not made public.
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According to Millennial Woes, even the jury weren't shown some of these videos because they were considered too disturbing.
Another reason why these people should face the death penalty. Its well beyond time to bring it back
What are you quoting from?
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I got into an argument this morning with some woke gobshite who insists there's nothing to see here and is more concerned about a hypothetical far-right backlash against the UK's Sikh community than he is about Henry Nowak and for the love of God will that one Norm Macdonald clip ever stop being relevant.
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Now available as a Substack post.
I made the mistake of watching the bodycam footage yesterday. Just reading about this case made me feel angry and upset enough. Watching the bodycam footage was ten times worse.
The murderer smugly claiming to have been assaulted, pointing to a non-existent bruise on his eyelid as evidence. With his last few breaths, Nowak begging the police for help and insisting that he's been stabbed, only to be calmly told by them that he hasn't been. The police officers' inexplicable insistence on cuffing him in spite of the fact that, even if he hadn't been stabbed, he was clearly incapacitated and posing no active threat. One of the police officers calmly instructing his colleague to get the Digwa family's details, apparently not even considering the possibility that one of them might have stabbed Nowak and that perhaps they ought to be arrested.
I don't know how anyone can look at this case and claim in all seriousness that the UK doesn't have a two-tier justice system.
Yes, that's another parallel to Floyd. That bodycam footage was really, really infuriating. I had to remind myself that the kid was already as good as dead when the police showed up, rather than that they caused his death.
No he wasn't. If he got timely medical assistance things could have been different.
The reason I say that he was basically already dead was that he was about three minutes from expiring before the cops got there. The cops didn't have an ambulance with them because the caller didn't mention there had been any injuries, no medical emergencies, nothing.
If they had had an ambulance, I'd argue that he'd probably still have died, in that timeframe. The way the wound was described, it seemed like it was basically impossible to fix in the field.
@self_made_human @Throwaway05 If he had received that wound while in the operating room of a hospital surrounded by ready surgeons, could he have survived? Here are sentencing remarks describing the wound:
As a rule I don't trust reporting of medical issues (which important vein? that matters a lot and who knows if that is even accurate!), and the UK has a lot less experience with penetrating trauma of all kinds. We can also do miracles if you managed to get stabbed in an operating theater with shit ready to go.*
None of that changes that this happened out in the field with help far away and that any 8cm stab wound into thoracic cavity is going to require a million things going right to be survivable.
*Like given how long it took him to decline I can't imagine that he wouldn't have survived if he was immediately put on ECMO but that is not a reasonable expectation by any means (given their description ECMO could have been impossible but how the fuck did he take so long to die then wasn't it like a half hour?).
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I'm not a trauma surgeon, and he'd definitely have died if I was the one responsible for his care. I'm definitely not qualified to gainsay the pathologist here. If that's the subclavian or axillary vein, my hunch is that the odds were very poor, but I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert here. I suppose it also depends on if they had blood products, if the lungs were punctured, and whether a chest drain was available.
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It’s incredibly hard to emotionally ignore the fact that his last moments were so hopeless and alone
Millions of people (millions of Britons) will just ignore it, just as they tried to ignore the story entirely. Because it's inconvenient. Because it makes them look bad. Because if their own logic about systems were applied consistently, they would have to grapple with the fact that they were and are complicit in the murder of Henry Nowak. The Be Kind people who think they embrace empathy are literally out in force doing the Norm McDonald meme and I've yet to see a single one offer more than the stingiest, passive voice PR statement - and that only under duress.
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Also worth mentioning, after Nowak died in their custody, they thought it important to search his phone for racism. When that turned up nothing, they went to his father to inform him of what happened, and searched his phone as well, hoping they can find some racism there. Whatever you think of their behavior in the heat of the moment, their action afterwards is not indicative of an honest mistake, in my opinion.
This specific claim appears to be the product of Chinese whispers; Millennial Woes's exhaustive account of the entire incident can find no evidence for it.
Damn what an infuriating read. I'm torn though, everything the murder and his family did is beyond evil. However is there any evidence that Novak was accosted without any provocation on his part? It sounds like he was drunk and drunkenly his called out to the non-drunk guy with a big fucking sword, and tried to banter with him in an insulting way. Like does he have any survival instincts? You do not insult the guy with the sword. You don't acknowledge them, you just keep fucking walking, silently. I've seen people with guns, knives, or just general dangerous dispositions while drunk, out and about, you better believe I don't engage, interact or acknowledge them. I definitely don't try to be funny and insult them.
Maybe brits are just stupid and coddled to the point that they can't survive in a world filled with non-coddled, tribal savages. Maybe its an American thing to have at least some danger sense and self awareness. Assume everyone is carrying, be nice, and ignore them.
EDIT: This is the part I'm talking about, like dude just shup up and keep walking.
It's clear to me Digwa is a malcontent, angry at the world, angry at society, and not in a good mood. Some drunk white guy starts talking shit and he just snaps, right to murder, torture, gaslighting, etc. Novak is the effigy for all his hate at the world.
Nowak wasn't that drunk. What you are basically saying is that we shouldn't let shit into western countries, somehow thats racist and this is the result. Two tiered policing. Gang rapes, and now murder attempted to be excused as racism. I'm sure glad my ancestors expended the countries wealth and their lives on defeating natzism. Its served Britain so well. How much better would we have been if we didn't fight in WW2?
Sure idk what your point is, you seem to be malding/ranting at some belief you are falsely attributing to me.
I think WIERD countries have won so hard that they don't realize how abnormal their cultures are to the rest of the world. Letting in and failing to assimilate non-WIERD tribal cultures is going to result in severe cultural clash problems. If the avg resident of a WIERD-culture doesn't want to have to deal with tribal honor cultures then maybe they should wake up and stop voting for universalist humanitarian belief systems that feed their white savior complex. Otherwise, some basic self awareness, common sense, and a pragmatic danger sense are a must because honor-systems respond aggressively to perceived slights, and unlike the cucked word-cells, violence is always on the table.
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He was clearly provoked (but not racially), and probably a little tipsy.: "Henry Nowak had had a few beers (still under the legal limit), saw the Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, pulled out his phone and started recording, and called out to him a few times "Are you a bad man?""
So I think Nowak was a little obnoxious (though I'm willing to overlook that given the murder)
Echoing @Corvos - other than the "stupid" bit - yes, and that's a good thing! In a functional civilisation "tribal savages" should be excluded, executed or imprisoned. People should be free to walk the streets at night, and they should be free to speak to other people they encounter on the street (if the other person is offended, they can be verbally offensive right back to them, ignore them, or just leave the situation) - it would be very bad if the lesson (white) people take away from this is that they should give extra respect and deference to (brown) violent thugs, lest they get Nowaked.
This logic seems to be part of a more general pattern of coping regarding slipping standards:
They imply that the old state of affairs was in some sense fake, and the new (worse) situation is somehow more authentic, or real. Living in a world where you wouldn't have to worry about getting stabbed by some criminal if you got a little tipsy and made an ass of yourself, and then bleed to death in handcuffs due to "two-tier" (i.e. anti-White racist) policing? That's a "bubble", "boring", "basic", ...
The new state of affairs is "real", "enriched" and "vibrant". As if the England of the early 1900s (sans rape gangs, two-tier policing, etc) was some computer simulation broadcast on VR headsets, whilst only the non-European peoples lived life in the real physical world.
What purpose does being able to coexist with "tribal savages" serve? Why is it a bad thing to not be able to live with them? It seems there is no limiting principle to prevent this logic being applied to literally anything that erodes civilisation. How coddled the British are, that they live in brick houses instead of huts like Australian Aborigines. What a bunch of namby-pamby morons - does the modal British person even know how to make a hut?
I'm not sure I would put myself in this category. I think I disagree with the overall idea about how we should organize society around quokka-like behavior. My ideas on this topic are still a bit protean. But they are influenced by FromSCC's stance on rule-based systems being very vulnerable to exploitation. But I'll give it a go.
It seems to me that this rule: "Personal Violence is verboten" is very vulnerable to exploitation by smug assholes who's verbal intelligence allows them to insult, provoke, coordinate violence and other behaviors. They seem to take for granted that this rule exists, and it allows them to succeed at the expense of everyone else. That smacks as unfairness to me. The problem is that rule, is not natural. It only exists due to a strong centralized authority that will "Swing it's dick around". Now the motte/Chesterton's fence for this rule, is that in tries to prevent the interpersonal violence. The anti-violence norm is one of the pillars of mass society. But it is not a natural equilibrium because it's missing the other side of interpersonal violence.
A society needs more than a “no hitting” rule. It also needs a serious norm against provocation without accountability. Otherwise, the society privileges people whose aggression is deniable, verbal, procedural, or reputational. The thug says, “I’ll beat you.” The civilized predator says, “I’ll make everyone hate you, destroy your reputation, get you fired, humiliate you in public, bait you into a reaction, then appeal to the rules when you snap."
This is the cancel culture people claim to hate. It comes across as masculine vs feminine norms in society. We seemed to be in a phase of punishing the masculine and supporting the feminine. I don't think a society can survive without balancing these norms.
And while a lot of this idea is prescriptive, I think a large thrust is actually also descriptive. I think many lay people just intuitively grasp this idea. They grasp that if you verbally start shit out at a bar in the sticks, it is expected that you are going to get beat unless you can back it up with physical might. It's only in more urban, high-class, environments that people seem to not grasp this natural reality.
US law/precedent has the concept of 'fighting words,' that can legitimize a physical response. But I think that in societies (also the US) this is mostly just handled informally by the people themselves, police and the legal system, where seeking legal remedy for somewhat proportional responses is discouraged. I think that the feminization of society that you perceive is in large part a cultural phenomenon that extends far beyond the legal system.
However, this feminization only affects part of society, while another part is moving in the other direction, due to immigration, creating the quokka vs honey badger dynamic.
I also think that the legal system can only gradually change norms for the better, and thus cannot resolve this, although it can greatly accelerate the downfall. Modern progressives seem to believe that behavior comes from the environment and that transplanting people to the West immediately makes them adopt norms and values that are almost the same as the natives, and to the extent that this doesn't happen, it is caused by racisms and thus is the faults of the natives. So their solution is to beat the natives until
morale improvesimmigrants start behaving better. This just further encourages the quokkas and honey badgers to stick to their behavior, although the natives obviously have little reason to accept this state of affairs.More options
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Ok, I see what you're saying. I guess I see things from a different angle - I think the root cause of the serious problems in society are the overtly violent thugs. And the badness caused by them is so bad the civilised predators aren't worth worrying about while there are violent thugs.
I think it's better if we just stick to the simpler "no hitting" rule, and accept that there may be cases where someone will be able to bait an otherwise decent person into becoming violent - otherwise a lot of bad stuff could be argued as justified under some sort of "provocation".
Like, I exist in the sort of environment where actual violent thugs are non-existent, but there are sometimes these sorts of "civilised predators". And it's just much nicer this way than living "in the sticks" or something - not being able to punch an obnoxious person in the face (or even be verbally rude or obscene to them) is a tradeoff I'm willing to make to maintain such a relatively nice environment.
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Probably ironic that if Digwa had been a stereotypical roadman that Nowak likely wouldn't have commented on the sword. Sikh license to carry probably made him presume that Digwa was less antisocial than the average knife toter
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Henry had drunk so little that he was still below the drink-driving limit.
But you're right, this is what happens when a high trust society interacts with a low trust one.
I mean if so thats posteriors in the direction that Henry was being very stupid. With drunkenness there is some level of excuse to be made for making a bad decision as you have imbibed a substance that is known to cause impaired decision making. Taunting a sword-wielding gangster while sober is Darwin-Award level behavior. Maybe BC is right and a sizable portion on the native British population is just retarded.
Ehh this is what happens when an honor culture meets a legalistic culture. I don't think high/low trust has anything to do with the outcome of taunting weapon wielding strangers at night.
The assumption behind the law allowing Sikhs to wield these daggers is exactly that they will not use them, even in response to far greater verbal abuse than what Nowak did, or in response to a physical altercation with no weapons.
If it is not a reasonable assumption that Sikhs will act this way, then the law is discriminatory, being biased in favor of a group based on ethnicity.
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The UK has, in the past few decades, generally been a place where you can assume you're not going to be murdered by a man with a sword.
People in the UK have adapted to the social reality that you are not going to be murdered by a man with a sword.
We can call this quokka behaviour, but I think it's quite reasonable to expect -- once your society has established that murder-by-men-with-swords is a completely bizarre and outlandish thing to happen -- that you are not going to be murdered by a man with a sword; any more than you're going to be mauled by a dinosaur or beamed up by an alien.
Calling the guy who was murdered "very stupid" for not expecting to be murdered by a man with a sword, in a culture where being-murdered-by-a-man-with-a-sword is extremely unexpected, is itself Very Stupid, and in rather poor taste.
Calling him "retarded" is also retarded.
Although the weapons are normally improvised, this general type of violent crime is endemic in the rougher parts of the UK and has been for decades, and predates mass immigration. (My wife had a student summer job typing up the indictments in an ethnically homogenous town in northern England).
"If you get lairy with random strangers in the streets around pub closing time, you will probably get beaten up, and might get stabbed" is something streetwise Brits are aware of. "If you get lairy with random armed strangers in the streets around pub closing time, you are a lot more likely to get stabbed" is a logical corollary. The sword is something of a furphy here - the incident looks like a conventional dumbass-on-dumbass post-pub fight until the police spectacularly screw up the response.
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The common talking point about low-trust and high-trust society is a high-truster saying, "Why can't we just have fistfights? Why is everything a fight to the death?" and a low-truster replying, "Of course everything is a fight to the death." Another fun fact: didn't people used to just walk around armed (whether with guns or with swords)? They still insulted each other right?
I suppose you can insist on calling this honor culture and legalistic culture, but i think now we're just arguing over meaningless words.
I have never heard high/low-trust used to describe "Why can't we just have fistfights? Why is everything a fight to the death?" that seems so misattributed that I think you are making it up. I have heard it used to describe things that have to do with... trust.
Fundamentally high-trust societies make anonymous cooperation feel normal. Getting into fist fights instead of death fights literally has nothing to do with that. "Fist fights instead of death fights" can happen in both low-trust and high-trust environments. Making it independent of the high-trust/low-trust axis, and likely orthogonal. Realistically its describing the concept of bounded conflict vs existential conflict.
Honor Culture vs Legalistic Culture is also different. I'll amend legalistic -> dignity/rule-of-law culture, I think that's more precise. An honor culture treats reputation as something that must be individually/tribally defended. Public insults or slights demand a visible response, sometimes including violence otherwise it signals that you are weak. A dignity/rule-of-law culture treats personal worth as more inherent and less dependent on immediate public reputation, so private retaliation is discouraged and serious disputes are expected to move through courts, institutions, or formal procedures and let the state take action.
If you want to say we are arguing over meaningless words, that is your right, however by your standard we should just grunt at each other because anything more complex is just being made up.
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It seems obvious to me that Nowak was probably somewhat drunk and belligerent, and probably in some way taunted Digwa. Of course I am wholly on the side of the right in this incident; in any case, whatever Nowak did ought not to be used to justify a death sentence.
But, let’s be real, violent criminals of the non-homeless-schizo type (and Digwa wasn’t in that group, if anything heralding from a moderately competent minority, probably average IQ) don’t randomly murder people with zero provocation.
Digwa was caught on video previously in a road rage incident in which he seemed to be threatening the other driver with his weapon out. He was reportedly obsessed with bladed weapons, and had gotten in trouble (charges dropped, obviously) for stealing some from his local Sikh temple.
"He's from a moderately competent community" seems less relevant than "He seems like a wannabe violent asshole". There were a few guys I knew when I was younger, where if I heard they'd done something like this, my response would be "Yeah, I can see Dale doing that." Talking about the low crime rate in our town in general would be silly.
It's interesting how much of the discourse is centered around Sikhs-as-good-'uns.
Some implications for how people see other cases in their heart of hearts.
I feel like 'Sikh culture hews closer to European norms and is generally less a cause of friction than other subcontinental groups' doesn't negate Digwa being a particularly argumentative individual.
I'd still rather have a median Sikh neighbor than a median subcontinental neighbor even in light of this particular happening
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Sure, normal people don’t murder strangers (or indeed anyone), every murderer is an extreme outlier by the very fact of their crime. This is true even for “violent assholes”.
But I don’t think this is an unprovoked random killing. I don’t think he sees this kid walking by himself from a distance and decides “I’m going to kill him”. The nature of the crime, the time, and the perpetrator don’t match that.
Where young men obsessed with weapons do just go out and use them (some school shooters, for example), they usually plan their “mission” extensively. They either go for huge impact / publicity / casualties and/or plot some kind of escape route (Digwa’s strategy was clearly thought out after the event). The same is true for most racially and/or religiously motivated attacks by angry young men.
To me by far the most plausible type explanation is that this was some young white ‘frat bro’ (the UK equivalent are probably these university sports teams) type who taunted Digwa (who probably had some racial prejudice given his immediate reaching for that excuse) and he reacted extremely violently, seeing it as a ‘just’ response. This lines up with eg Nowak filming the interaction (probably not out of fear), “what are you gonna do little guy, stab me?” style.
You can’t say things like this without people thinking you’re justifying the killing, which I’m most definitely not, but I find it extremely implausible this was a completely random (or random racially motivated, in that he picked a white guy at random) attack. The outrage is the police response, and maybe more broadly mass immigration in general (although the Southport murders were more impactful there).
I remember reading a satire article (which I'm unable to find now) where the title was something like "'What Are You Looking At?!' Says Man Who Has Been Trying to Get Your Attention for the Last Fifteen Minutes".
I routinely encounter ferociously angry and frustrated people like this who are clearly spoiling for a fight and actively looking for any pretext, no matter how feeble, to start a fight with someone smaller than them. My guess is that Nowak said something utterly innocuous that a more level-headed person would have responded to with good humour, but he had the poor fortune to pick the most mentally unstable young man in Southampton.
The quoted bit from the article/videos sounds like he essentially was telling Digwa, "What a right proper gangster you are, I bet you think you are such a naughty boy and all the bollocks". How innocuous you think that is up to you, but that would start shit across the pond in America if you said it to some inner-city wannabe gangster too.
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There's a lot of room between "completely random" and "accidentally provoked because the attacker required neglible provocation". Maybe Digwa was already in a seething rage for unrelated reasons, and some mild comment after bumping into a stranger (or just the bumping) set him off. My point is that the plausible, likely area of their potential interactions includes quite a bit of "Henry did literally nothing wrong".
Do you have any fucking idea how insane you sound? Just slightly change what you say and see if its still appropriate
"Maybe that woman said something that provoked the man."
In modern society thats okay to say that about women. Why the fuck do you think because he is a sikh that its okay?
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If we were to tsk-tsk at Nowak, at some point we’d just be reinventing the “something must had triggered the pitbull’s reactivity” when a child got mauled or the “someone must had said the n-word” when a senior American citzen got bustled in the street by an urban youth, but for the Sikh edition when a white Brit got stabbed to death.
If one were to apply inebriation standards from other domains: to the extent Nowak had a few drinks, he was intoxicated and could not consent to the initial conversation with Digwa, much less the interaction that followed. Thus further exonerating Nowak and further implicating Digwa for taking advantage of a drunk young man’s mental state.
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I think this is accurate. He's a thug, which a chip on his shoulder looking for an excuse to pop off. Clearly has anger issues. As Catsnakes said, he's a wannabe gangster with a sword.
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Agreed, just because the victim was an idiot does not make the crime permissible. Having lived in a major metro and needing to take buses and subways home while drunk, even the schizo's generally (as in I nor any friends have ever seen/heard of this) won't physically attack you if you don't acknowledge them.
There is random schizo violence, NYC homeless schizos pushing people onto the subway tracks for no reason as the train arrives, but Digwa clearly doesn’t fit this psychological profile.
I think I agree with your framing that this boils down to a UK frat bro vs angry honor culture immigrant type-situation.
Novak misunderstood the rules of engagement in these types of situations and thought he could spout off words because violence is so verboten in modern society. Digwa comes from an honor culture where violence (even lethal violence) is an adequate response to slights, and tribal family loyalty outweighs societal notions of fairness that WEIRD people have. This created a lethal situation for Novak as Digwa responded to his taunting with unrestricted levels of violence. His family backed him up by closing ranks, as is expected of community oriented values. A tragedy of multicultural origins with all too human details.
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The accounts I had read gave the impression Digwa was considered by his own community as overly enthusiastic about knives and swords, in that context, the provocation that led to him murdering Nowak might have been a mere pretext for doing something he's always dreamed of doing.
And yet his community continued to allow him to carry a knife, knowing he was a threat to the broader community. They are not exacltly covering themselves in glory if that was the case.
I think this justifies revoking their religious exemption. They can't be trusted.
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I think that’s very plausible, yes.
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Sounds like Nowak accurately identified what kind of guy he was dealing with (a coward who wanted to think he was hard, worthy of ridicule) and his only mistake was being drunk enough to verbalize it.
His mistake was that he didn't just keep walking. Say in this drunken haze, you correctly identify the guy with the shortsword and the honor culture, is just a pozer who thinks he's tough. Do you really need to insult his honor and force him to do something about it? This is the shit I'm talking about. Like just shut up and walk, its not your problem.
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Note that Brits will never see an armed man in the course of ordinary life. What Digwa was carrying was highly illegal... for anyone except a member of his I'm-so-special religious group.
Until the turn of the century Britain had, mostly, successfully made the country a reasonably gentle society for decent people. It was not designed for tribal savages. This was a good thing and its unraveling is a tragedy.
It's really not. A society that educates out bloody survival knowledge from its populous is a failed society. You don't need to have a society that is designed for tribal savages to also have a society that acknowledges how the real world works. Creating a bunch of quokkas is not a good thing. Also we are talking about the same Britain right? The one with football hooligans??
Its a fucking shortsword, I don't need to see a man with a shortsword and a scowl on his face to know I'm not going to interact with him in any but the most polite and avoidant manner.
They had a society that was designed for the well-heeled and gentile yet also knew how the real world works, and they psyopped themselves into giving it up. They gave their brains and balls away along with the rest of their colonial possessions.
Fuck off. Britain gave all go their military secrets to the US to get them into WW2. After WW2 they were supposed to share technology, instead the US stole jet technology and withhold nuclear technology. The brits then engaged in the Suez conflict after Egypt's seizure of the canal. After Britain tried to restore the status quo, the US threatened to bankrupt them unless they relented. The US feared that Egypt would fall into Russian influence.
Britain did not voluntarily give up colonial possessions. They US forced them to give them up.
Somehow brits have been brainwashed into believing they have a "special relationship" with the US.
There is no special relationship. The US are untrustworthy cunts. You can not, nor should not rely on them. History proves that. Trump reenforces how unreliable they are. We are fucked for being stupid enough to become dependable on the US. For that all politicians should be shot.
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That's an unfair characterization. They sold their brains and balls and the rest of their colonial possessions to Uncle Sam, because the European powers (and the UK) were back-to-back World War losers.
The Allied powers like to delude themselves into thinking their contributions made a difference but, uh, no? Most of the materiel came from American factories, and Americans accepted the price for that materiel in mineral rights and real estate.
It wasn't "giving away". It was war reparations. The rest of Western Europe has paid similarly.
The UK had more military deaths in the European theater than the USA. War is not just fought with materiel, but also people. And having English land to fight from was also very important.
War reparations are only made by the defeated nations. The materiel and goods that the US sent to (partially) unconquered allies was mostly covered under the lend-lease program, which ironically meant that allies who contributed the most, also had to pay back the most.
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I think lumping balls and brains along colonial possessions is the likely incorrect assumption. The post WWII UK still tried to pull stuff like the Suez Canal. I think the loss of the "balls and brains" has happened much more recently vs the colonial possessions being, as you said, war reparations of the Americans for needing to come in and save the Brits.
America definitely isn't holding Europe's balls or brains. A case can be made that America likes a weaker Europe so as to not challenge the American Hegemony, but internal matters like immigration and culture seems to be a nutcracker the Euro's designed all on their own.
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I'm pretty sure this is both a total non-sequitur and historically inaccurate. Go derail the thread with nonsense elsewhere.
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Apparently. I'm not sure its possible for the British to un-psyop their society back. It would require acknowledging some very-uncomfortable realities about the world that would be impolite and ungentlemanly. I can't imagine the culture of the stiff upper lip can have that sort of honest dialogue
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Who's 'they'? This is like 10% of the population max. They've just got a stranglehold on the organs of power.
And that's quite sufficient. The ones without power don't matter.
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I can only assume the knives Digwa was carrying weren't visible on his person when Nowak ran into him. If so, I doubt the possibility even occurred to him that Digwa was armed. I certainly wasn't aware of religious exemptions to the UK's LOICENSE laws prior to this case, and Nowak probably wasn't either.
More cynically, one might say that a lifetime of antiracist education completely compromised Nowak's ability to assess threats in a sensible way. It simply did not occur to him that the scary-looking Indian in religious garb walking around with a scowl on his face (and perhaps visibly carrying ceremonial weapons) might not respond too favourably to playful banter.
You are aware the massive dagger he used to kill him was visible on his chest when the police were speaking to him, right?
My understanding is that Digwa had two blades on his person, the larger of which he used to kill Nowak, which his mother then removed from the crime scene and brought back to the family home (for which she was convicted). The blade in the photo you linked below is the smaller one which he did not attack Nowak with.
Even if Digwa was openly brandishing the weapons, I can imagine that Nowak might not have noticed. The bodycam footage was filmed in front of a house with a floodlight, but if Nowak and Digwa encountered each other in a dimly-lit street, the weapons on Digwa's person may not have been as obvious. Also consider that Nowak had had a few drinks and was distracted filming a Snapchat video before and during the encounter.
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No, it wasn't. The dagger he used to kill him was on a sheath on his belt. But it wasn't even present when the police arrived, as the original post says. He gave it to his mother to take it into the house so it wouldn't be found. As for the blade on his chest, the bodycam footage is too low resolution for me to identify a knife there.
However, you are correct that Nowak might have seen the blade, considering that location.
https://i.imgur.com/b8FD0Bb.png
Where did you get this image? It's not a frame in the bodycam video. In the bodycam video, I can't see any dagger in that location. For the image, I have no idea when it was taken, or who that is. The person looks similar, but blurry enough that I can't tell if it's the same person. And the sentencing remarks tell a completely different story than anything like this. They charged his mother explicitly for hiding a murder weapon before the police arrived.
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I buy this, I think the article points out the 8-incher was externally carried and is what Novak got stabbed with. I'd bet that is externally carried. But it would make sense to me that a lifetime of not-noticing + mainstream British education has made an entire generation of kids be unable to exist in a world with any sort of real-world aggression.
Note: however, a lifetime of multicultural education should inform you that Sihks as a religion are specifically armed. I learned this shit decades ago in social studies, in a fly-over state in America. Long before I actually ever interacted with a Sihk in person.
If anything if Nowak had had other interactions with Sikhs it might have made him assume that Digwa wasn't as automatically antisocial as other knife wielders are. The Sikh religious requirement does mean that they're probably the most normally distributed knife wielding demographic in terms of social agreeableness.
I've had Sikh friends who are fairly liberal with joking about it, though I also wouldn't accost a random one about their kirpan.
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Wow, what a great account! I will have to check Millennial Woes in the future, as the quality of that post is much better than my own and tells me many details I did not know.
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Oh damn. Thanks for the correction.
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The amount of meat has never been an issue. Tony Timpa was just as bad as George Floyd, but Floyd was manufactured into an outrage during an election season by sympathetic media wanting to whip up a race war to discredit the sitting President.
People have noticed the differences, but I need to remind everyone that the difference in coverage is because the official propaganda only ever goes one way: anti-white.
Floyd's optics were the issue and most people being completely ignorant about how chokes are even applied. I wouldn't necessarily want to be in Floyd's position since it'd be painful but there is no positional asphyxiation possible there.
Based on Minneapolis police rules, Chauvin was probably in the clear until Floyd went unconscious ~5 minutes in, at which point he definitely should have gotten off his neck.
It's hard to tell if another officer was holding down his legs, but either way a knee on your neck while lying chest down can very easily restrict your chest from expanding enough to get air. When people OD from fent they usually passively conk out instead of panicking about being unable to breathe.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007159353/george-floyd-arrest-death-video.html
It's not going to take 5 minutes whilst you're actively vocalizing. I don't mind Chauvin getting hit for potential negligence/failure to check on Floyd but I do not believe that that position is a chokehold
It's not a chokehold, but the chest needs to expand to take in fresh air. The amount of breath you need to vocalize is a lot less than the amount needed to get sufficient oxygen into the lungs.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11036158/
The MPD training specifically told officers to put suspects in the recovery position (lying on side) once they were handcuffed to alleviate positional asphyxia.
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He was complaining about being unable to breathe before Chauvin put a knee on his neck.
And being put on your chest and having a weight on your neck/upper back makes breathing a lot harder. Guy had massively clogged arteries and was high, but his blood fent level, especially for a long time addict, did not suggest overdose.
What doomed Chauvin was keeping his knee on well past the point where Floyd was actively resisting. The other cops found Floyd had no pulse and he kept his knee on. Cops are often really dumb.
One of the key points is that we do not know if he was a long time fent addict. We know he was an opioid user, but if he thought he was getting regular stuff and it was cut with fent and that difference killed him, well, that happens tens of thousands of times per year.
I'm no doctor, but his autopsy reported 11 ng/mL of fentanyl and 5.6 ng/mL of norfentanyl (an inactive metabolite of fentanyl). This indicates the dose was recent. He had a habit of doing this (based on a 2019 arrest where he tossed back a handful of percs while in the passenger seat of a car being pulled over for having an invalid plate). And there were meth/fent pill fragments in the car with Floyd's DNA. That being said, opioids via oral route generally take longer to cause an overdose compared to injection, obviously, and the entire arrest took slightly over 20 minutes. And another expert testified that Floyd didn't show the classic signs of overdose. Fent is much stronger than oxy or morphine, but the chemical pathway is identical, so tolerance to one should affect the other.
My assumption would be that he took way more than 11 ng/ml, and that was just how much had metabolized by the time bio-activity stopped. Plus he had multiple other heart/lung health issues and was obviously having the kind of crashout that can make a fat middle-aged man die.
And I'm not a doctor either, but my understanding was that fent was something like 50 times stronger than oxy, processed faster, and there was only a partial carryover for tolerance, which is exactly why "Expected oxy, got fent, ODed and died" is a cliche that happens tens of thousands of times per year.
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And Daniel Shaver was so much worse.
That bodycam video to this day enrages me like no other. I'd bring back Scaphism for that cop.
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Never forget: the cop having "you're fucked" written on the dust cover of his AR-15 was a fact not heard by the jury.
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Another bodycam video I wish I hadn't watched. I can still hear him drunkenly begging the police not to shoot him. For the life of me, I cannot fathom why they didn't just tell him to lie face down and put his hands on his head.
It's something that seems not uncommon in tense, high-stress police interactions. Multiple cops screaming unintelligible and contradictory orders at people. Midwits screaming at individuals with room-temperature IQs. While screaming in tense situations is common, I think it also comes from police "verbal judo" training; which was even discussed in the Chauvin trial. I’m sure being in control is central, but I bet “being authoritative” is a big part of it, and for midwit cops that just turns into yelling.
Shaver taught me that in the unlikely event I get in a situation where I'm being screamed at by multiple cops I'm just gonna kneel with my hands on my head and let them do the rest of the work. They'll probably throw my face into the ground, maybe break my arm, but better than playing death Simon says until they shoot me.
The thing I want the most from police reform is a script for people interacting with police. Figure out the motions/actions a police officer is the most concerned about, figure out how a citizen can make it clear they're NOT doing that, broadly publish it as a best practices and teach it in school, then train the police to be expecting the script at least as a "this person seems to be cooperating".
For example, it seems like traffic stops can get scary because it's hard to tell if someone's reaching for a gun. Maybe the script should be "person being pulled over keeps their hands on the wheel until the officer comes over and can see what they're doing". And now if I'm pulled over, I can do that, the officer knows what to do with it, and my action isn't something he's worried about.
Standardize behavior on both sides as much as we can, and it decreases tension in most situations and makes it easier to see when things might heat up.
I've seen a decent amount of bad cop interactions (as in, the interaction went bad). It often times is,
Cops have different information than suspect, making the cop think the suspect is dangerous
Suspect doesn't know what to do.
Cop interprets innocent thing as bad thing, shoots.
What I think is most practical is a playbook for cops that assumes civilians will sometimes do irrational things but aren't necessarily dangerous. I keep thinking back to Philando Castile. A cop is informed of a situation involving a black guy with a white shirt (in other words, a very broad description). He stops a black man with a white shirt. The man informs him he has a gun and the cop tells him not to reach for it. The problem being that his gun is on his right hip, and his ID is in his right pocket. So how do we prevent this?
Let's say the cop stops Castile, and is informed of the gun. He is told to step out of the car slowly and put his hands on the hood of the car. The cop takes the gun and explains he will return it at the end of the stop if there are no issues. Proceed from there.
At the end of each bad interaction, do a root cause analysis if there is a reasonable way to prevent the issue from happening again. Have a database where districts can compare policies.
I want to target "suspect doesn't know what to do" specifically here: my goal is for the default behavior when interacting with cops to be things that don't worry said cops.
It seems like asking about weapons first before asking them to do anything else makes a lot of sense: Castile can respond before having to get anything, the cop now knows he's got a weapon to worry about but Castile's hands are still clearly visible, and the officer can temporarily disarm him as you mention. But maybe we should have it on the citizen side (or both): if you as a citizen are asked to do something that puts your hand near your own weapon, maybe there should be a standard of not doing that and explaining the problem. That could be an issue right now because from the cop's side you're not complying, but if we make that the norm it'll be less of an issue.
I do wonder if this starts cutting into rights though: obviously from the police side they'd rather you just incriminate yourself of whatever they might get you for, and it's possible the eventual script gets a little too "volunteer information that the police don't necessarily have rights to, or you're considered a threat". But I'd at least like it to be something we're working on, and it seems far more realistic than "defund the police" or "just shoot the gun out of his hands".
My goal is that I think the lion's share should be on the cops. There are about a million cops in the U.S. There are 340 million non-cops. Training 1 million people seems easier, plus just learning something once doesn't mean much until you've put into practice, whereas the cop puts his knowledge into practice every day.
In Castile's case, he did tell the officer he had a gun. The officer still gave him a predictably stupid order to present his ID and not consider the gun. Could Castile have taken a different line and said he couldn't comply? With the benefit of hindsight, sure. But for the crime of not knowing the perfect thing to do, he ends up shot.
Or John Crawford. John holds a BB gun he plans to purchase and starts talking on his cell phone. Someone calls the cops and claims he was waiving a gun around. The cops show up while he's talking on his cell phone and pretty much immediately shoot him. Here's their testimony and here's the video (Sorry, best I can find). He doesn't know cops have been called, he panics and gets shot despite the first thing he does before running is drop the gun.
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I mean near term, the most important thing for anyone to remember is that if he can’t see your hands empty in a situation, he assumes that you have a weapon. If you make a move with your hands into a place where he won’t be able to watch what you are doing with your hands he assumes you are reaching for a weapon.
The most important thing to do when dealing with police is keep your hands where he can see them, Do not have anything in your hands, and do not move your hands to any place that your hands would be hidden from view. So if you’re at a traffic stop, you put your hands either straight up or on the steering wheel, and do not move until the cop is there and can see your hands. Do not reach for your license, your insurance information, your proof of ownership or anything else until the cop can see you and has directly told you to do that. If you need to reach into your glove box, a bad or a purse ask him if it’s okay, or hand over the bag.
The main thing here is that cops are trained from day one with one fact in mind: if you miss the guy going for a weapon, you’re probably going to get seriously injured.
I find it this whole conversation interesting. It wasn't long ago that people online were linking Chris Rock's video How not to get your ass kicked by the police and sagely nodding that black men simply reacted foolishly to policemen, who were lawfully going about their jobs. Various examples were used as illustrations, including the notorious pepper spray incident. The lesson was, don't be an idiot and you have nothing to fear from law enforcement.
In this thread you have presumably right-leaning posters now suggesting that the police departments have some systemic bias against whites (due presumably to political pressure, a sea change in departmental ethos, or similar). I'm not commenting on this specific case or any of the ones mentioned, simply pointing out an odd irony.
It's a pretty common statement that the rise of body cams have just generally revealed that the vast majority of police uses of violence are very much justified
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I seem to recall being literally taught this in my drivers ed class, although admittedly that was a while ago now. In particular, do not go digging in your glove box for proof of insurance.
Although the "don't talk to police" lecture is related, and also worth teaching.
But it would make sense to explicitly teach expectations in schools.
I can imagine some friction around teaching kids not to talk to police, but I like this a lot because it would make the effort pretty politically neutral.
Here's what you should do to make an officer feel as safe as possible in terms of you getting violent... and now here's what an officer is and isn't allowed to do, and here's a detailed description of your rights. Look like you're going for a lawyer, not a gun.
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I wasn't handed a script when I was studying for my driver's permit/license, but this very thing was exactly what was drilled into me as the thing to do when pulled over by the police. Both hands glued to the wheel unless or until instructed otherwise. In general, the fact that you need to always show both your hands, don't reach for something that's hidden, and don't make sudden movements are what I'd consider the basic "script" for interacting with police which I had picked up growing up. I didn't grow up in an environment that had much police interaction, and I haven't had any meaningful interaction with police as an adult, so I can't remember where I picked up this "script," though.
I think I've made a similar post to this in the past. I'm sure I was told about hand placement by someone, but it wasnt officially drilled into me. Ambient culture, context awareness, and (frankly) a baseline of intelligence? The rationale for keeping hands visible at all times just seemed intuitive and sensible.
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We have such scripts. The problem is that they are so degrading to the non-police person that many self-respecting people simply cannot manage to engage in them.
If you think keep your hands visible, voice neutral, and movements slow and deliberate is "so degrading to the non-police person that many self-respecting people simply cannot manage to engage in them" I think it stands to reason that you are part of the problem.
You have to think about the is the context of an honor culture person who perceived their honor to be challenged by the police officer. In this frame, any voluntary act of cooperation is a sign of submission and humiliation. Honor can only be satisfied by defeating the officer or frustrating his activities.
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In past discussion, he has claimed that police officers in his area demand that citizens call them "sir". That definitely is degrading in the casual modern age, where people laugh at you for even calling your coworkers "Mr. Lastname" rather than "Firstname".
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Huh, that's interesting to me, I must have missed them growing up.
I have some vague heuristics (no sudden movements, don't reach for things at your waist) but I was never actually taught them, I just kind of picked them up, often from watching people do very badly by not following them. Details like "would the officer prefer I already have my license and registration ready, or should I just wait until he comes up" I still don't know, and I wouldn't be surprised if different police have different answers.
The degradation aspect in particular is interesting to me, because my interactions with police (even while being in the wrong, albeit for minor things) have generally been as pleasant and respectful as they could be, and I genuinely would like to make their job easier in the future if I can. I'd much rather interact with an officer who's not worried about what I might do, and I respect the job he's doing even if I'd rather not be part of it in the moment. Can you give examples of the kind of thing that people wouldn't do?
I guess a reminder to me that police officers differ: I know you've talked before about the frustrations with NJ cops, and I am in a different state and level of urbanization than that, so it's probably not surprising that I have different experiences.
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Every single hyperlink about "verbal judo" claims it's about using positive language to de-escalate tense situations, not screaming at your opponent.
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