site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

14
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Let's talk shitty policing!

The story starts back in August, when police (specifically, Adams County Sherriff's Department of Ohio) raided the home of Joseph "Afroman" Foreman on a warrant for narcotics and kidnapping. Perhaps they thought that the author of "Because I got high" would be a slam dunk, but they walked out with a couple roaches and a few grand in cash.

https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/adams-county/rapper-afromans-ohio-home-raided-by-adams-county-sheriffs-office

When they discovered a grand total of jack and shit, they were forced to return most of the money, except the stuff they stole.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/adams-county-sheriff-comes-up-400-short-returning-cash-to-afroman-after-home-raid/ar-AA14IJPa

Reason covered the case here:

https://reason.com/2022/12/05/cops-return-cash-seized-from-afroman-in-bogus-drug-raid-with-400-missing/

And the man himself has weighed in with a music video that is all security footage of the raid titled "Will you help me repair my door?"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y

Down with qualified immunity, the legalized piracy known as civil asset forfeiture, and the self-funding militarized security state.

How are they $400 short? Money is fungible. If you seize a guy's money and then "lose" some of it, pay him back out of the police department budget.

Of course they're never going to do that, but they could.

No actual disagreement with the general thrust of your argument, but the last attempt at police reforms either didn't have noticable effect (body cams) or resulted in the worst increase in violent crime ever recorded (BLM). I see zero evidence that anyone who matters is willing to engage with the evident consequences of previous interventions. That reality makes signing on to new interventions a very bad idea.

Sure, the police are corrupt. Every system we have is corrupt. What evidence is there that there's actually a fix on offer?

What evidence is there that there's actually a fix on offer?

Countries where things work differently and better are the evidence, mostly.

Can we get there from here? Different countries have different conditions. What's your evidence that conditions can be imported from one country to another?

didn't have noticable effect (body cams)

Care to elaborate please?

Body cams were supposed to solve (or at least significantly ameliorate) the problem of police misconduct. They did not do that. There did not seem to be any perceptible change in either the numbers of police prosecuted for misconduct, or in the public perception of the police as lawless. Within a year or two, Black community activists were claiming that body cams needed to be banned because they were a violation of privacy.

In other words, the arguments for them were mostly fake, I guess.

No, police officers just turn their cams off/have them conveniently 'malfunction', and aren't getting punished for it when they do. The body cams function just fine when the evidence exonerates them though.

This is not something I am ever seeing progressives complain about, so I conclude that this almost never happens: if it did happen on a regular basis, I'd have seen NYT editorials complaining about this endlessly.

The reality is quite the opposite: the cameras show that the police misconduct is very rare, NYT is quite aware of that, and so it doesn't want to bring attention to bodycams.

Is anyone looking at the warrant? I want to hear about the whole "kidnapping" thing. Regardless, I can't imagine anything that would justify how they did the raid and seizure.

Imo it should be strictly illegal for them to disable monitoring devices unless they're specifically named in the warrant ("the computer with evidence on it is also the NVR for the cameras")

The evidence required to get a search warrant is less than what is required to convict someone, so it's unavoidable that some people who have their houses searched will be innocent. Is there something particularly egregious here other than the missing $400? I agree that's bad and should be investigated and he should be compensated, but it just doesn't sound like that big of a deal to me. If you scale back policing so far that nobody is ever wrongfully searched then you're going to see a massive crime spike like in 2020.

If you scale back policing so far that nobody is ever wrongfully searched then you're going to see a massive crime spike like in 2020.

a crime "spike" usually implies that the crime rate goes back down. Ours hasn't, to my knowledge.

Hey, it appears to be down 5% from last year. That's... Measurable, I guess.

Searching in and of itself is not egregious. But they didn't just search. They broke down his front door, went around the place with weapons drawn, and disconnected his security cameras (which just screams shady). In short, they acted like jackbooted thugs for something which should have been a simple and polite "Hello sir, we are here to execute a search warrant, we need you to let us in to search your property".

The article said the warrant was for kidnapping (among other things) but didn't give many details. I agree if they're just looking for weed that seems excessive, but if they had reason to think he had somebody tied up in the basement then it makes sense.

Even in that light their actions don't make sense, imo. As Afroman humorously pointed out in the song he released, were they really expecting to find kidnapping victims in his suit pockets or his binders of CDs? Not that you can't gather evidence from such a place, but then you don't need the urgency they used. So the level of escalation just doesn't fit with what they actually searched for.

The only reason to literally break down the door with guns drawn is if you think he has actual hostages who would be in danger. But then, they went looking for a bunch of stuff that wasn't victims in imminent danger, a search which could (and should) have been handled much more civilly. And in no case should they have shut off the man's security cameras like they are criminals who are afraid to get caught doing wrong. So while I am by no means against executing a search warrant, the police behavior in this case seems to me to be rather excessive.

They sure said they have a reason, but they also said they returned the money when they didn't.

The evidence required to get a search warrant is less than what is required to convict someone, so it's unavoidable that some people who have their houses searched will be innocent.

Exactly. The fact that the search did not turn up evidence of illegal behavior says little about whether the warrant was supported by probable cause and hence was perfectly legal, just as the fact that a search successfully uncovers evidence of illegal behavior says little about whether it was supported by probable cause. That is both obvious and well established. See Bumper v. North Carolina, 391 U.S. 543, 548 n. 10 (1968) ("Any idea that a search can be justified by what it turns up was long ago rejected in our constitutional jurisprudence."), citing cases going back to 1927.

This is a pretty shitty thing to be able to do, and this would absolutely be a cause worth fighting for...

...the problem is that the whole concept of police reform is now inextricably linked in the minds of at least half the populace with total police abolition, lighter sentences, less bail, decriminalising hard drugs, violent criminals out on the streets by lunchtime, rioting, arson, looting, violent takeover of city streets and public areas and anti-white ideology. The whole subject is fucking radioactive now. I wouldn't lend my name to any such cause, for fear that it would, like nearly all causes, massively expand its mandate beyond the very specific issue I want to correct. I don't want to empower any of the other garbage.

In the UK, we have different problems, in that our police don't spend any time investigating actual crimes like burglaries, but will happily waste days and weeks chasing down speech crimes on twitter or illegal football stream watchers, but there's the same obstacle to overcoming them. To even breach the subject would require, at least to me, some kind of cast-iron guarantee that whoever was overseeing the reform was 120% free of any sort of wokery whatsoever, and that's something I can say about almost nobody in our political class. Myself and a lot of other right-wing people I talk to sense the formalisation of the two-tier quasi-racialised justice system that we already suspect exists is pretty imminent.

The trust is completely gone, and there's very little I can think of that would bring it back.

Are/Were there even any politicians and activists out there who are/were a) anti-woke b) proponents of police reform?

Truss made noises about "streets, not tweets" but of course nothing actually happened with that, as per the usual Tory party MO of talking big about issues and then doing nothing, or even the opposite.

In the UK, I'd gladly take defunding the police, even if it's woke that wants to defund them. Functioning police > No police > woke lockdown-enforcing thug squad.

with total police abolition, lighter sentences, less bail, decriminalising hard drugs, violent criminals out on the streets by lunchtime, rioting, arson, looting, violent takeover of city streets and public areas and anti-white ideology

Good news: Most of these positions have effectively zero public support, with the possible exception of bail reform.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/26/growing-share-of-americans-say-they-want-more-spending-on-police-in-their-area/

This poll was done at the height of the Floyd riots.

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/reuters-ipsos-civil-unrest-george-floyd-2020-06-02

Four in five Americans (82%) report that peaceful protests are an appropriate response to the killing of an unarmed man by police, while 22% say that violence and unrest is an appropriate response.

A similar number of Americans (79%) say that the property damage caused by some demonstrators undermines the original intent of the protest’s call for justice in George Floyd’s death.

Republicans (83%) and Democrats (77%) agree that property damage ultimately undermines the cause of the demonstrators.

And yet it all happened anyway, with the media cheerleading it on while running cover, and authorities tripping over themselves to declare racism a pandemic to enable people to break coof rules to go out and continue doing it.

When you're talking about "effectively zero public support", effectively supporting is very different from explicitly supporting. People can say "I don't want violence", but have standards which, in effect, enable violence.

No, I mean that these positions are as likely to ascent to power as the Mises wing Libertarian party. Sure, some people probably want their neighborhoods looted and burned to the ground. I'm not especially worried about them gaining a consensus.

My understanding is that, while plenty of the rioters were tourists, it was mostly poor majority-minority neighborhoods that took the brunt of the damage, with the rest hitting downtown areas and almost none in affluent suburbs.

My takeaway was 'guns remain an amazing deterrent against mob violence, at least as long ss you're the local majority'

And when the next round of race riots erupts will the police and national guard be allowed to put them down or not?

Floyd was after the original Fergusson riots. There were the LA riots in the 90's and of course the 70s race riots. It seems like the consensus is to let them happen. Any electoral victories the Republicans get will be temporary if even that. Even after The Floyd riots; Biden won the election, and the Republicans couldn't even take the Senate in the mid-terms.

Biden is one of the architects of civil asset forfeiture in the first place. There are many reasons why any one person may have voted for him, but criminal justice reform is not going to be at the top of their list.

The point is that people may not want their neighborhoods burned down, but they may support policies whose effect is to make it easier to burn down their neigborhoods.

(And it's not as clearcut as that anyway, or you'd never get even 20%. 20% isn't big, but it's far more than the lizardman constant.)

What does polling matter when the policy we got are the things you say poll poorly.

Part of it is we did have a George Soros coup of DA offices. Where relatively modest money could win those offices when no one was paying attention.

And places like San Fran have legalized hard drugs.

I mean it’s cool people say they don’t like the stuff but it’s become the policy of the land.

What did Soros or his foundation do?

This conflates national and federal polities. And at the Federal level, you have the Koch and Federalist cartels to undermine the public for conservatives, balancing things out. The US is a divided nation, but its between 60/40 and 50/50. Nevertheless, what flies in California won't pass muster in Alabama.

What have the Koch and federalist cartels done that balances out the progressive sweep of da offices? Or the capture of academia - hell, all of education?

The US is a divided nation, but its between 60/40 and 50/50

Also what do you mean by this?

hell, all of education

Yeah. Something like 90+% are liberals, which is super unhealthy. I imagine its not that different in Hollywood.

Also what do you mean by this?

I think echo chambers like themotte have a skewed perception of reality ie lots of doomerism over the intellectually bankrupt ideology that can broadly be described as "wokeism". It's a problem, but polling suggests its near the fringes.

The nation is approximately 50% Democrat; 50% Republican. The commenter I was responding to was hesitant to endorse legislation he agrees with because it is too ideologically aligned with people who want to see more arson, looting, and violent crime. This strikes me as insane, and, at the very least, is contradicted by whatever data we have. Unsurprisingly, only a small minority of people want their neighborhoods burned to the ground while they are hunted by violent criminals.

These things don’t poll well anywhere but yet they happened. Black communities wanted more policing but less and more murder.

Also everyone is going to say they don’t want anti-white ideology. But many support affirmative action or picking a Supreme Court justice because she’s black and female. Promoting blacks ahead of whites is just anti white ideology yet no one is going to come out and say they are anti-white.

The goalposts were

police reform is now inextricably linked in the minds of at least half the populace total police abolition, lighter sentences, less bail, decriminalising hard drugs, violent criminals out on the streets by lunchtime, rioting, arson, looting, violent takeover of city streets and public areas and anti-white ideology

The data indicate that, for most of these things, public support falls a far south 50%. ~85% of Americans want police funding to remain the same or increase. More people want it to increase substantially than to decrease substantially.

Ok so what’s your point? I agree public support is lower. But we got those policies anyway.

Imagine describing to an alien that the official policy of the US is to abolish the police, decrimnalize hard drugs, endorse looting, arson, rioting, the release of violent criminals, and the violent take over of streets. Do you think they would have a accurate picture of policy in the USA?

More comments

~15% tracks pretty well to the places that got such policies. The ones where people would rather not, largely didn't.

When the French government abolished the death penalty in 1981, the majority of the French people opposed this move. Yet it still happened. A democracy steamroling popular opinion, to be lenient towards criminals isn't unprecedented.

Mentioning for our American readers just because it's a fun fact... The guillotine continued to be the French method of execution until the end of capital punishment. The last person to be guillotined in France was in 1977.

I'm sure exceptions to the rule exist, but we should deal in probabilities and stive for accurate piors. The president ran on being against the death penalty, and was elected. In my examples, I'm talking about sub 20% popular support. I don't know what it was in France.

They still do by the way, a 2020 survey put it at 55% support.

When some claim the death penalty to be "Sensible Centrism" they're not kidding.

I'm only tenuously familiar with policing in England but i think America has a pretty uniquely dysfunctional policing system. While it's probably true that police reform is a nonstarter for some conservatives for the reasons you mentioned, it also doesn't matter. When localized police reforms get passed the cops can straight up decide they don't wanna do things differently and there's nobody to tell them to do otherwise. Presumably there is some systematic machinery in place to wrangle openly rogue police chiefs but i don't know that i've ever seen it in action. I know a sheriff can be voted out but that's a pretty limited and late type of solution. Governors can try to cut their funding, but that's exactly the point we are at right now, and i think having a pressure valve that comes before "public struggle over funding for necessary utility" would be extremely useful.

Police and their unions are also extremely averse to being burdened with additional accountability and responsibility. Take bodycam legislation for instance, what stance should the union argue for? It's not always in the best interests of the officers to be required to have body cams on, but cameras provide valuable evidence that is hard to surreptitiously tamper with. The union is now at a crossroads between defending clearer justice or arguing for the benefit of its members. I don't fault cops for acting in their own interest, they are human after all, but when we're talking about Civil Forfeiture it's hard for me to separate "i should be able to take this as evidence and then keep it" with "i should be allowed to steal shit".

To your point about the wokeness of the justice system, it frustrates me that progressives have provided such an idiotic target to fight against. Wanting to perform restorative justice by underpolicing ethnic communities is such a bad idea that i have a hard time understanding how its supposed to work even in an intersectional feminist worldview. Luckily we are unlikely to find out because hardcore progressive police reform ideas get almost no traction in the voting booth.

With that out of the way

The trust is completely gone

There never was trust between conservatives and police reform- the police have been in near perfect alignment with conservative political goals for as long as i can remember. Thinking some recent breach of trust is causing the tension between conservative voters and police reform seems extremely misguided to me.

resumably there is some systematic machinery in place to wrangle openly rogue police chiefs but i don't know that i've ever seen it in action.

In many cases the problem isn't chiefs (who can usually be fired and are often under political pressure) but union leaders (who can't and are incentivized to stand up for their members, even if that means defending questionable behavior or outright malfeasance).

I don't fault cops for acting in their own interest, they are human after all, but when we're talking about Civil Forfeiture it's hard for me to separate "i should be able to take this as evidence and then keep it" with "i should be allowed to steal shit".

As with many circumstances, moralizing about the people involve is not particularly useful. Whether or not all cops are bastards is less relevant than the kind of behavior is incentivized. A system needs to be able to stand up to some degree of bad faith participation and anti-social behavior; both in the sense that it can't crumble if people behave less than ideally, but also in that it needs to be able to prevent bad behaviors from entrenching themselves. Self-policing has a poor record for accountability for a reason - bad actors don't like whistleblowers, and if you don't have a culture of accountability on top of a decent system of accountability it's easy for whistleblowers to get tarred as traitors while bad behavior gets glossed over or rewarded. I would not be surprised if effective police reform in the US requires de facto purging of of problematic departments concurrently with creating separate oversight bodies. Not because everyone involved is particularly evil but because resistance to accountability has become entrenched.

Re: bodycams in particular, IIRC there is evidence that bodycams don't do much to reduce police misconduct, indicating that either perpetrators aren't concerned about being disciplined or that they're not the kind of person to take it into account.

Re: bodycams in particular, IIRC there is evidence that bodycams don't do much to reduce police misconduct, indicating that either perpetrators aren't concerned about being disciplined or that they're not the kind of person to take it into account.

Or the third option, where the police have succesfully gotten all their benefits of bodycams(exonerating them if they do wrong) without any of the costs(catching their abuses). This has been ongoing for a while.

That's what I meant with my first point: if the disciplinary process is dysfunctional (misconduct gets excused or soft pedaled, prosecutors don't want to bring charges against officers, "my camera malfunctioned", etc...) the supposed incentive to behave better is lost, even if you have video of the incident.

what abuses? They're wearing a camera, so unless it's turned off, you get any abuse they engage on tape to charge them with.

Maybe they aren't actually abusing people that much?

They get to turn them off or cover them up just fine, is the issue. A cop who wants exonerated will leave his on and have the evidence released. A cop who's shady will turn his off/cover his up and cheerily proceed as normal.

Body cams can also really help cops accused of untoward behavior. In fact, some anti cop organizations have pushed eliminating body cams purportedly in the name of privacy but one wonders if it is because the footage can contradict the narrative (eg body cam in Ohio where girl was shot right before she stabbed another girl).

Body cams can also really help cops

absolutely, and some anti police organizations are super insane. In a vacuum i can understand privacy concerns with some slice of police bodycam recordings (we can call these PBR's and make jokes about cracking open a cold one). Say you get a noise complaint, the cops show up and end up recording the inside of your home, this seems like a bit of a violation of your right to privacy, but not something that i think sours the whole idea of bodycams.

The trust is completely gone, and there's very little I can think of that would bring it back.

Here is a good punting off point for this video. It's Robby Soave and Briahna Joy Gray at The Hill arguing over a 13 year old carjacker that was shot and killed. Frankly, they get off in the weeds super quick with their speculation. The key exchange happens around 2:39 when Robby says nobody is obligated to stand by and allow themselves to be victimized, and Brie emphatically insists yes you do.

I see Brianha's perspective echoed endlessly from progressive sectors. They think the slow, plodding, overburdened criminal justice system should be the sole arbiter of criminal consequences. Criminals shouldn't even suffer the immediate physical consequences of their own criminal acts.

And it gets even worse when they argue about the severity of the crime, with Brie taking a perspective that carjacking isn't so bad around 5:15. It happens all the time. You shouldn't get killed over it. Robby of course retorts horrified that carjacking has become so normalized, that people need their cars. A world were you never know if your car will be where you left it is a worse world.

But it's not the Robby's of the world that will determine what the police reform will be. It's the Brie's. We see that amply in every American city post BLM. It's not even a question. The policies are already being experimented with, or just rolled out unilaterally, to disastrous results for normal people. So yeah, I can't be for "police reform", and I no longer trust anyone promoting it.

The key exchange happens around 2:39 when Robby says nobody is obligated to stand by and allow themselves to be victimized, and Brie emphatically insists yes you do.

I wonder if she'd be so quick to agree that women have an obligation to stand by and allow themselves to be victimized, eg was Cyntoia Brown in the wrong in her worldview?

At 3:00, Joy Gray repeatedly asks whether a car is worth more than someone's life. I'm more than happy to bite that bullet and say, "yes, my car is much more valuable than the life of a robber, the robber's life has negative moral value and ending their life is a net good". I don't really know where to proceed from there in any conversation with someone that doesn't share that moral intuition because it seems entirely clear and obvious to me.

"If you choose to try and rob me knowing there's a chance I will shoot and kill you, you have already decided that my stuff is worth more than your own life. By shooting you, I am simply agreeing with you."

At 3:00, Joy Gray repeatedly asks whether a car is worth more than someone's life. I'm more than happy to bite that bullet and say, "yes, my car is much more valuable than the life of a robber, the robber's life has negative moral value and ending their life is a net good". I don't really know where to proceed from there in any conversation with someone that doesn't share that moral intuition because it seems entirely clear and obvious to me.

The correct rhetorical move here is to say "give me 100$ right now or I'll kill myself. What? Is my life not worth it?" On the off-chance they give it to you, immediately ask for another 100.

That should drive home the point of this idiotic emotional blackmail.

It's worse than that, because aside from that being shitty rhetorical dark arts, even if you take it at face value and buy into the premise, it's not the car owner making that valuation, it's the criminal. It's the criminal seeing a car they plan to joyride for an evening and wreck on the side of the road who is making (poorly) the cost benefit analysis of "I guess this is worth maybe dying for." After that, it's the natural consequences of their actions.

What makes this exchange between Robby and Brie all the more shameless on Brie's part is that teenage carjackers murdered a man not even that long ago in DC! One of them was even also 13! But these are the immutable priorities of progressive "police reformers". The criminal is always more important than their victims. If you got punched in the face, and punched the person back, they'd be on your case that "the punishment for assault shouldn't be having your nose broken!" or "They are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty!"

teenage carjackers murdered a man not even that long ago in DC!

There really ought to be a distinction between trying to break into a car with nobody in it (the OP) and jacking a car with a weapon while someone is driving it.

And it’s worth noting lots of people would agree with you, even if it may not be a within-Overton view. One of these days the motte should have a discussion about widely popular but outside the Overton window views, and what they generally reflect about society. But today is probably not that day.

deleted

Those are some interesting polls. 64% think the death penalty can be morally justified, 60% say they favor it, so only 4% are balking on practical grounds ... despite 78% saying they don't think there are adequate safeguards to ensure that no innocent person will be put to death. I guess that means a minimum of 75% of Americans think there aren't adequate safeguards to ensure that no innocent person will be put to death but also that the safeguards are adequate to ensure that not too many innocent people will be put to death? I guess that might still be self-consistent, but only if we ascribe a level of non-binary thinking and consideration-of-tradeoffs that I don't usually associate with polling of the general population.

Where are you getting 75% from? The minimum overlap of 64% and 78% is 42%

Where are you getting 75% from?

From a pair of embarrassing mistakes. 73% would be the minimum (counting "64% was really 64.5% rounded down and 60% really 59.5% rounded up" cases) number of people who think there aren't adequate safeguards against a single innocent death but who didn't let that make a difference to their practical vs their theoretical opinions ... but of course I shouldn't have counted people who already think the death penalty is morally wrong in that number, plus I thought about rounding in the wrong direction.

The minimum overlap of 64% and 78% is 42%

It would be even more interesting if every person who thinks the death penalty isn't morally justified also thinks that its safeguards are perfect, but you're right, there's no inherent incompatibiilty there.

I’m totally willing to believe that the red tribe elite thinks this way but doesn’t have the vocabulary to express it. An actual conversation I overheard between regional red tribe elites- lower gentry or upper kulaks and their family members here- was almost literally that, it just happened to use a different set of words.

IIRC France and the anglosphere all have majority popular support for bringing back the death penalty without it being particularly close, too, so elite-populist splits on this issue appear reasonably international. And I don’t believe the death penalty loses at the ballot box very often, if at all.

I despair for the cause of police reform. There was a window where it might have been possible, but anywhere past the 2000s I just don't see it happening.

Put frankly, nobody really cares about this man. Nobody really cares about the median CAF victims: poor people, strippers, general lower-class coded individuals. Nobody really cares about people jailed on bogus charges, put through the justice wringer for ill-conceived reason, or shot to death by trigger-happy psychopaths. It's the just world fallacy in full effect: they probably had it coming anyway.

The median voter has never in his life gotten in trouble with the police. You'd need a hundred Uvaldes to meaningfully dent this - the sorts of tragedy I wouldn't wish on any nation. The median voter is a middle-aged comfortable person with a steady job and living who thinks everything in society basically works as it should. Oh, sure, some politicians are greedy, the kids these days are bad, but the police? Protect and serve. They keep us safe and things steady and that's all we want. If they beat up or imprison or kill someone, well, I guess that's just what their job is.

I don't know what any one nation can hope to do about this, for as long as the median age in wealthy countries keeps rising. The people who vote don't care, the people who get elected have no reason to care, and the police have made more than clear they have negative interest in policing their own.

What's a downtrodden person to do? What is anyone to do? For as long as the median voter really loves the police, I don't know that I see a way out.

Put frankly, nobody really cares about this man. Nobody really cares about the median CAF victims: poor people, strippers, general lower-class coded individuals. Nobody really cares about people jailed on bogus charges, put through the justice wringer for ill-conceived reason, or shot to death by trigger-happy psychopaths. It's the just world fallacy in full effect: they probably had it coming anyway.

I totally believe you're right about this, but it still frustrates me. Even from a purely selfish perspective, this should matter to people. Holding people in prison or putting them through the justice system for stupid reasons is a waste of my tax money. Ruining people's lives by sending them to prison for no good reason means they're likely not going to be contributing to the economy (or, worse, become criminals and contribute negatively). We do this at a really large scale in the US, so this isn't exactly a small effect.

The blackpilling thing, to me, is that I don't think people are that selfish. They aren't without empathy. They don't have zero care for justice. I think it's the aforementioned just world fallacy: they really think they have it coming. If they didn't have it coming, why, the police might be wrong. The law might be wrong. Society may be doing wrong by them. Everything may be wrong. The lower classes may in fact not deserve their fate.

It's a lot to take in and figure out and, genuinely, I don't think normal people are really in a mood to consider if maybe the whole criminal justice system is that big of a dumpster fire. Better to insist everything is fine, everyone falling afoul of it is a Bad Person, and to try your hardest to ignore all the signs it ain't so.

To put it bluntly, very few of the people suffering from police misconduct are model citizens.

I know. I still don't want them to be at the justice system's cruel mercies.

Sounds to me like you are falling for the unjust world fallacy. The mistaken belief that every misfortune is the result of undeserved oppression and victimization.

I don’t see why only one side should get to unilaterally create a “fallacy” to diagnose their opposition with.

Plenty of people think that ruining life for strippers, drug addicts, petty criminals, and the homeless so that they’ll go do their thing somewhere else is a good use of their tax dollars.

Honestly pretty hard to think of a better one

If you want someone's life ruined, surely you'd prefer them dead? I get consistently down-voted for my 'kill all the drug dealers' policy proposal. But surely that's preferable to just ruining the lives of drug addicts, petty criminals and homeless. What if they don't do their thing somewhere else? What if their lives are already ruined? What if they strike back against you?

If we're trying to make things hard for people, why not just bite the bullet and kill?

The problem is that these kinds of policies A) don’t work very well and B) wind up pushing terrible people into the same neighborhoods which turn from ‘poor’ to ‘festering shitholes of crime depending economically on drug and human trafficking, which then export maladaptive mores to broader society’.

What's a downtrodden person to do?

The "downtrodden" themselves often tread on others. Even Mr. Floyd, saw it fit to rob and forge. Personally, the greatest victims are those that are harmed, but do not harm others.

The median voter is on the fence between "minor changes needed to make policing better" and "major changes are needed to make policing better". "No changes are needed to make policing better" is only 11% of the country.

What to do? Figure out something realistic that would qualify as "changes"..."to make policing better". The motte of "defund the police"=="pay social workers instead" isn't going to apply to cases like this; nobody's sending a social worker to investigate an alleged kidnapping. The bailey of "defund the police"=="abolish the police" was, if not DoA, at least shot along with those teens in CHAZ. I personally thought that mandatory bodycams were a nice improvement, but there's even been pushback on that from people whose pleasure at the "evidence when police misbehave" outcomes has been outweighed by their displeasure at the "evidence when non-police misbehave" outcomes.

My only wild idea would be to break up all larger police departments into smaller (but overlapping) jurisdictions. I have no solid plan details for how to best implement it. But if everybody knows that the East Metro cops are on the take, and the South Metro cops are brutal, but the West Metro cops are competent and the North Metro cops even helpful, there ought to be a way for the results there to end up expanding the latter jurisdictions and budgets at the expense of the former. This should extend even to enlarging good departments to the point where they could be broken in two (with corresponding promotions and budget increases to compensate for losing economies of scale), and/or disbanding bad departments entirely. "Abolish the (crooked) police" would be a legitimate threat and incentive source, not just a left-wing joke, if there was always a nearby non-crooked (or even just less-crooked! gradient descent works!) police force nearby ready to pick up the slack.

I don't see how that would have helped in this case, though, unless a better police culture in general had spillover effects. You're not going to have much jurisdictional overlap in "literally Amish country. Many miles from anything."

My only wild idea would be to break up all larger police departments into smaller (but overlapping) jurisdictions.

This is similar to what we have in Allegheny County, PA, and it's not a model to emulate. In the county there are 130 municipalities, of which 109 have their own police departments. Allegheny County Police and PA State Troopers have blanket jurisdiction over the entire county, but that jurisdiction is somewhat limited. Then add in all the various special-use police departments—university police, transit police, housing police, etc. Then add in the various state agencies with sworn enforcement arms that regularly conduct law enforcement activities in the county like the PA Fish and Boat Commission, which is responsible for patrolling the rivers, and PA Liquor Control Board, and there are over 150 entities within the county that could conceivably be called police departments, each with its own jurisdiction that may or may not overlap with another jurisdiction or jurisdiction, whether in geography, subject matter, or both. The end result is that there are a ton of tiny police departments that only field a few officers and are woefully underfunded and provide their employees low pay and inadequate training. The guy who shot Antwon Rose had been dismissed from the University of Pittsburgh Police, essentially for being an asshole, and took a job with the East Pittsburgh Police (East Pittsburgh is a separate borough from the City of Pittsburgh), a community of less than 2000 and a median household income of around $30,000. Though he was ultimately acquitted, there was general agreement that he wasn't cut out to be a policeman and that he wouldn't have been one if these small boroughs weren't so desperate for warm bodies that anyone with prior experience was automatically given a job.

This is where the

way for the results there to end up expanding the latter jurisdictions and budgets at the expense of the former

bit, which I haven't figured out at all, would have to come in. Market competition works because consumers have both incentive and ability to switch to a better competitor. If it's not easy to switch then you don't get competition, just fragmentation.

I jokingly suggested Shadowrun's private police forces before as a solution to police unions, maybe I'll do it again here--if each of those PDs has to compete on service quality, it will definitely cut down on the number of departments Allegheny has, making it sound like less of a tollbooth kingdom after some point.

The median voter in the US voted for Biden, who played an important role in getting civil asset forfeiture passed in the first place. His opponent is the guy behind 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts'. I don't even care to defend literal looters - it's kinda whatever - but Trump is no criminal justice reform candidate either. I can think of lots of changes that might improve policing! It's getting them in the public consciousness and dealing with the nationwide tantrum police departments seem to throw that's the real issue.

I don't. It just got conflated with anti-white racism for a few decades, but if we can ever end that shit, I think police reform is a real possibility.

Do you have specific policy reforms in mind? I think there is certainly room to drop the hammer on major rights violations like the case you mentioned, but I find a lot of cases people complain about seem like the products of expecting perfection from a numerous, moderately-paying and unpredictable job: sometimes people mess up, and not all unfortunate results are the result of malice (although that should be rooted out).

I've wondered if policing needs neutral after-action review of bad outcomes without inherently assigning blame with the aim of improving training and public awareness. Similar models have improved aircraft and industrial safety over the last few decades.

Eliminating or greatly reducing qualified immunity (for prosecutors more than cops, actually) is a big plank.

Independent investigative bodies to handle police misconduct rather than subsections of existing police forces.

Civil Asset Forfeiture has to go, and so does the excessive militarization (though my definition and most people's definition might differ here). The two impact each other, because CAF funds a lot of military gear.

I'm actually of teh opinion that use-of-force is one of the least pressing issues for American policing. There's certainly bad behavior, and even pockets of systemic problems, but nothing like there is with the casual civil rights violations, the scummy plea dealing, the near-constant lying on warrant applications etc. Some of this, the reform needs to be in the direction of allowing police more, rather than less autonomy. I am also of the view that we need vastly more police, rather than fewer, and a narrowing of the criminal scope (i.e. ending the drug war, streamlining and rationalizing the criminal statutes etc.).

I want more police focusing on fewer crimes with more training and more oversight. I want every unsolved murder to have a mini task force. I want better witness protections.

I know that there is a virtuous spiral to be joined here. We've seen that we can massively decrease the most serious crime rates in a decade or two, and are now in the process of trying to reverse. We can stop anytime, but it's going to take decades to get back on the path.

Eliminating or greatly reducing qualified immunity (for prosecutors more than cops, actually) is a big plank.

Won't that just mean every cop getting constantly sued by everyone they ever put in jail?

Getting jailed tends to mean going to trial anyway. That's kind've the point. I'd be disappointed if the majority of people in jail didn't see a courtroom to get their dose of justice, be it in their favor or not.

I live in a nation where the anti-white racism thing functionally doesn't exist. If anything, it's made the pro-reform block smaller. I just don't think you're right.

Do you also live in a nation where the primary victims of police malfeasance (by raw numbers) have been so thoroughly erased from the discussion by the "pro-reform" block that most of that block think they are actually the most privileged demographic when it comes to police/justice system encounters?

Does being "erased from the discussion" matter more than the actual injustice being committed in the first place? Also the discussion isn't erased, you are having the discussion right now and we both seemed to be able to find out about white people getting fucked over by the police just fine. Should we let the police slide because MSN talked about the wrong cases too much?

Should we let the police slide because MSN talked about the wrong cases too much?

The ways progressives talk about police reform to combat injustice make me believe that they think it is fine to "let police slide" when it is people like me who are impacted by it, that it is not actually injustice in that case. If you want me to support your solution to "actual injustice", you damn well better prove to me that the injustices committed against my demographic are also going to be solved by it. Progressives seem to go out of their way to avoid doing so and expect to gain my support solely through emotional blackmail. Fuck that.

It doesn't matter what the progressives talk about. The police aren't progressives, the voters by and large aren't either, and nobody is capable of criminalizing being white. Using twitter progs as an excuse to do nothing about real police overreach seems like looking for an excuse to me.

The police aren't progressives, the voters by and large aren't either

As a whole, true, but I think you need to look specifically at the areas that have the biggest crime problems. Someone who happily lives in the suburbs has almost no say over what policing looks like in the urban core.

I wouldn't care what progressives talk about if they also didn't come in and disrupt local government planning meetings, sabotaging years of bipartisan efforts that had been steadily making progress (eg, on topics like @what_a_maroon brought up) by being an intransigent minority insisting that any solution involve directly confronting racism and sexism.

I get that it's real satisfying to talk shit about your outgroup, but I really don't care about that. I want for policing to be just, and the American custom of anti-white racism just isn't a factor.

What country are you in?

I'm from the Netherlands.

Everyone just wants policing to be "just". The problem is that not everyone agrees on how to make policing more "just" or even what "just" policing is. The "pro-reform" block in the US currently claims that the primary reason that policing is unjust is racism and sexism, and thus focus on policies that they believe would reduce racism and sexism. They also claim that white men, the largest demographic victimized by police malfeasance, categorically cannot be victims of racism or sexism. They regularly erase them from narratives about justice reform (eg see my comment on the old site discussing declining white support for BLM) and strongly overestimate victimization of other groups. Do you really think that alienating the largest group of victims by implying their victimization is "just", unlike the "unjust" victimization of other demographics, and downplaying their victimization while exaggerating others' "just isn't a factor"?

The "pro-reform" block in the US currently claims that the primary reason that policing is unjust is racism and sexism, and thus focus on policies that they believe would reduce racism and sexism.

While there's certainly a lot of that, I think a lot of the policies that are proposed actually are orthogonal to the -ism angle. Yes, hiring more black or female cops is unlikely to do anything. But things like removing qualified immunity and civil asset forfeiture, body camera policies with actual teeth, a separate body and prosecutor for investigating allegations, etc. would help all victims of police abuse.

Yeah. Cool. And if the pro-reform block didn't do these things - such as they don't here, because white people are (even more of) a majority of people around, they'd still get nowhere. It's a red herring. Take away BLM, take away the Bezos-sponsored Huffington post-tier editorials, take away the identity politics, and you still don't get reform. It just isn't the kind of cause normal people are going to identify with, because the chief victims of this injustice aren't average people so much as those down on their luck.

Well, no, the chief victims of police injustice are the perpetually badly behaved who are not serious criminals. Saying that they are ‘down on their luck’ implies they have ever had good luck.

We WERE getting some reform. Body cameras were the main thing driving it; either cops were behaving better with the cameras or the cameras exposed that there was a less of a problem than expected; either way, they were having an effect. BLM opposes body cameras.

More comments

The fact that Afroman lives in Adams County, Ohio is the craziest part of this to me. That's literally Amish country. Many miles from anything.

Miller's Bakery out there has one of the largest selections of jams and jellies that I've ever seen anywhere.

...God, there's gotta be a way to work "Amish Paradise" into this...

Him and Dave Chappelle, I guess.

Chapelle's in more of a yuppy private college sub/exurb area.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats