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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   37591 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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On Sunday I speculated that the Dems will use a George Floyd-like psychological operation to increase Democrat turnout in the election. Today, Kamala issued a statement about Sonya Massey, a black woman killed by police whose body cam footage was released recently:

Sonya Massey deserved to be safe. After she called the police for help, she was tragically killed in her own home at the hands of a responding officer sworn to protect and serve. Doug and I send strength and prayers to Sonya’s family and friends, and we join them in grieving her senseless death.

I join President Biden in commending the swift action of the State’s Attorney’s Office and in calling on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill that I coauthored in the Senate. In this moment, in honor of Sonya’s memory and the memory of so many more whose names we may never know, we must come together to achieve meaningful reforms that advance the safety of all communities.

The body cam footage shows two police officers answering a call from Massey about a prowler in her yard. Massey acts mentally unwell throughout the encounter, answers that she is on medication when asked about her mental health, and has a difficult time telling the officers what her last name is or retrieving her photo ID. The officers are somewhat friendly if impatient, but the vibe changes when Massey grabs a pot of boiling water after the officers requested she turn off the stove. The officers say they are stepping back while she grabs the boiling water (crazy people may use boiling water as a weapon, something that has lead Starbucks to ban giving patrons boiling water), and Massey says “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus”. Either because of this statement or because of a physical sign we don’t pick up on the body cam, an officer points his gun and demands that she drop the boiling water. She does not drop the boiling water but instead continues to hold on to it. Right before she is shot the body cam just barely picks up Massey throwing the boiling water toward the officers, with the water landing on the ground and steaming where it landed. I want to thank Twitter user Fartblaster4000 for turning that moment into a helpful gif.

Massey’s death is certainly not the preferred outcome of the encounter. Once the officers picked up on Massey being crazy, they should have mentally decided to leave her house if she did something like equip a plausible weapon. The three seconds that the officer gives for Massey to drop the pot of boiling water was insufficient — of course, the pot was in her hand and thrown toward the officer before the officer shot. Springfield is the third most criminal city in America, so perhaps the officers did not believe they had the resources to call mental health professionals in their place. In any case I do not think that the officers should have moved toward her but instead left the premises until they felt she did not pose a threat. Sadly, it’s not uncommon for crazy people to attack police officers with whatever is around, and it’s rational to be afraid of a crazy person who has a pot of scalding water in their hands, able to disfigure you for life.

According to a UPenn study, BLM may have been the political ingredient that shifted the election toward Joe Biden:

Mutz also notes that roughly 90% of voters reliably vote with their party, and only about 10% of voters are likely to shift their vote from one party to another. It was that group that she focused on, finding that as their awareness of discrimination against Black people rose, so too did their likelihood of voting for Biden. Interestingly, many voters who had voted for third parties in 2016 also shifted to major party candidates in 2020, and disproportionately moved toward Biden.

Concern surrounding COVID-19 caused voters on both sides of the aisle to favor their own candidate more, but it did not cause any significant vote change from Trump to Biden or vice versa. Nor, Mutz says, did factors relating to the economic effects of COVID. As levels of concern about COVID became increasingly partisan, the issue lost its ability to change vote choice so much as to reinforce it. Does that mean BLM decided the election? That question remains unanswered

If the relevant voters are swayed more by victimhood narratives than Covid, this explains why Republicans are bringing up the topic of migrant rapes. I predict we are going to see more victimhood narratives in the coming months!

Arbery's shooters were absolutely guilty, though.

Not according to the people I argued with online about this. That was here or in the culture war reddit threads.

The guilt or innocence of Arbery's shooters depends on weird technicalities of Georgia's (FWIW, not updated since the Jim Crow ear) citizen's arrest law. It was obvious from the video that this was a bad shoot, under normal circumstances, but it was also reasonably obvious that it would have been a good shoot if the McMichaels had been uniformed cops making a lawful arrest which Arbery resisted.

If you interpret a badly-drafted statute maximally in the McMichaels' favour, you can reach the conclusion that Arbery's trespassing on a building site was a felony and the McMichaels were engaged in legally justified hot pursuit of a dangerous felon, which means that the situation is legally closer to the uniformed cop scenario. Unless you are broadly supportive of white-on-black behaviour-corrective violence in the way that the Jim Crow era legislature that wrote the law was, this is an absurd legal result, and it isn't surprising that the Georgia courts didn't buy it.

But morally, the only argument for what the McMichaels were doing was "in a high-crime society, good ol' boys blowing away an outsider acting suspiciously in someone else's neighborhood is pro-social". That argument was, indeed, made on the pages of the Motte.

Arbery's trespassing on a building site was a felony

But the building owner says he has security cameras and doesn't think that Arbery trespassed. Other people did at previous nights. Including a black guy. But as best the property owner knows not Arbery and especially not on the day of his murder.

His murderers never saw him on anyone's private property. They saw him on the public road and killed him there. And people around here argued it was justified by adding a lot of fictional information to their description of what happened.

Relatedly, whatever the legal guilt or innocence of Arbery and his killers, I do feel worse for a crazy lady that got gunned down in her own home than a guy that was likely casing a neighborhood. If we're ranking relative badness of shoots, the legal distinction between the shooters being police or clumsily constructed posses isn't going to change my mind much about which victim is more sympathetic.

But morally, the only argument for what the McMichaels were doing was "in a high-crime society, good ol' boys blowing away an outsider acting suspiciously in someone else's neighborhood is pro-social".

You make it sound like they sniped him the moment he passed on to the property.

If you want to make the case that ordinary citizens shouldn't play cops, and go chasing criminals that are clearly retreating, than go ahead and make that case. The arguments for it are pretty strong by themselves, you don't have to act like they went hunting for the guy.

He wasn't on anyone's property. Given the private security cameras at the partway built home, we know he didn't visit there either that day.

He was jogging down the public street. Not trespassing anywhere. Maybe he had bad motivations for jogging down the street. Such as possibly taking a look at houses to remember later for burglarizing.

Given what they did, sure, you could describe it as them hunting him down.

"Hunting him down" would require an intent to kill him when he was posing no threat. The way they acted was extremely dumb, but their behavior does not match yours or MadMonzer's description.

They saw him jogging on the public street. They chased him in trucks for a bit until he got tired of running from them. When he turned on them, they killed him.

That is fairly characterized as hunting him down.

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This is a place where people pattern match 'leftists are upset about a white on black killing' to 'the whites must be innocent' a little too readily. Is the media often wrong about this sort of thing and only able to enforce consensus through sheer exercise of power? Of course. Were they wrong in that instance? Nope.

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