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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30572 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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What's baffling? The cops are trying to make them eat shit (that is, to yield in a monkey dominance game) with all the 'yes sir' and 'no sir' stuff, and in the moment they would rather take the risk of greater consequences than do so "voluntarily". Probably especially culturally relevant to blacks, though I suspect all but the most beaten-down milquetoast PMCs dislike showing their belly that way. Law-n-order conservatives claim to think it's fine, but I think mostly they don't envision themselves on the wrong side of that.

"When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong", or if you wanna be spicy its a Boondocks "ni**a moment".

Cooperating in civic engagement isnt monkey dominance games unless you make it one. If your entire culture treats every interaction as a dominance ladder stacking exercise - intra as well as interracially - then the bigger monkeys get called in to enforce the public standards. The lady tried requesting, then it escalated due to intransigence from one side.

The demand for Racism outstrips supply so every possible instance of black victimization is highlighted to portend an overwhelming trend. Youd think with so much camera footage around it would be easier to see all the evidence of antiblack racism published nonstop, but the paucity of such and the cornucopia of antinarrative evidence from Worldstar and Kick show that many of these offenders are being antisocial without any external prompting.

Do you feel the same way at the DMV when you learn from some bureaucrat that they can't give you what you need today because you need to get some piece of documentation that you didn't know about?

I view the police as basically the same as any bureaucrat - they want to keep it boring, get the forms submitted, move along. Maybe you messed up, maybe they messed up, but you both just want a functioning society so be polite and get through the encounter as smoothly as possible.

Having to say "yes sir, no sir" to a cop who rolled up with an attitude and is clearly looking for an excuse to fuck you over is one thing, but I have watched a lot of bodycam footage where the cop just asks "License and registration, please" from some guy who ran a red light and what should have been a routine stop turns into chaos and a felony charge because bro's monkey brain decides the cop is out to get him and he's not going to "show his belly." If you are barely restraining an urge to attack a cop because he pulled you over, you're not eating shit from an unjust authoritarian system, you have impulse control problems and you are poorly socialized.

This also seems to happen at airports a lot. Cops show up, tell an upset (often inebriated) passenger that they have to leave because the airline is refusing to board them, and give them every opportunity to leave peacefully until it's clear they aren't leaving any other way but being dragged kicking and screaming.

Can cops be power-tripping assholes? Sure, but I am skeptical that's what happened here. Especially in the age of bodycams and everyone around filming any public interaction with the police, I would bet money that O'Keefe wound up in cuffs only after refusing every opportunity not to escalate to that point.

Eh, in my adulthood I've never had a problem offering a cop the same level of courtesy and respect I'd give a receptionist, and never gotten anything but favors in return. Maybe there's a demographic thing there, but IME the cops's first impression of me is calm and polite and not going to make his day more annoying and that sets a nice tone for things.

I did see the dominance game once in college. And won it. Two of us tagged along with a driver to go pick up a fourth roommate from work. We get pulled over for "throwing something out the window", which was probably cigarette butts, but the cop suspiciously implied it was joints. Now, the two of us who were not driving or working were absolutely high, but the driver was sober (and recently off probation for getting caught with weed) and there was absolutely nothing sketchy in the car.

The cop calls for backup and angrily searches the car. The other smoker and I start arguing with the cops, while the driver quietly hisses at us to shut the fuck up. At one point the cop finds a plastic bag in the trunk and triumphantly rips it out only to reveal golf paraphernalia while the stoners laugh at him in front of his peers. They frisk us, which was hilarious because the guy who was working was 1. the only black guy on the scene, 2. a waiter, so his pockets were filled with hundreds of dollars in small bills, 3. and best of all, carrying some neon-blue double-bladed mall ninja knife.

The look of resigned horror on the recently-off-probation driver's face when the knife came out was spectacular. At that point we took pity on him, and I apologized to the cops for my argumentative beligerence, telling them that I was a strong civil libertarian (and even a member of the campus group), but that didn't mean I had to be a dick about it. They let us go soon thereafter with some vague condescending advice about how many people were necessary to give a guy a lift home from work and a warning about littering. Most of them seemed more amused than anything. I suspect the cop who instigated the whole thing was the "Farva" of his station.

"throwing something out the window", which was probably cigarette butts

A crime on which we are too lenient.

Anyone who generates additional work through paperwork or requests for backup is gonna be sandbagged by his team. You cant have the stereotype of cops being both lazy donut eaters (true) and violent hairtrigger murderhobos (thats the ATF). I believe some forces still use quota systems but smart cops pull over grandma for a chat about cookies to log encounters not needing paperwork.

See also: “do you know who you’re dealing with?” and “am I being detained?”

Lots of people will do unreasonable things when they sense a dominance game.

Aren't there a few cases where "am I being detained?" is actually a reasonable/correct response? Pretty sure it's followed by "if no, leave, if yes, ask for a lawyer".

It's definitely overused, though.

There's "am I being detained? If so, I would like to know what for" which is not the same at all as "AM I BEING DETAINED!?!?!?!? AM I BEING DETAINED!?!?!? AM I BEING DETAINED?!?!?!" and I would wager at least $100 that the former gets a lot better results than the latter, even in otherwise sketchy circumstances.

"I'd like to go. Is that alright?" is probably better, maybe followed by "is there anything specific you need from me?" However, you must wait to deploy this until some "reasonable" (ill-defined but it is what it is) period of time has passed and the "basics" are fulfilled. For example, you must show ID in most states IIRC when asked, and usually are expected to reasonably comply with stuff. But if it's been, say, 10 minutes and questions are going in circles, or you're waiting on some abstract officer task, I think it's actually a great moment to either save a little time and be on your way because it was just trivial, or discern if there's a decent chance you're going to be in actual trouble, in which case you can and should adjust your behavior and compliance accordingly.

The reason I emphasize the waiting and basics is because there do exist some reasonable tasks that are mostly harmless but may take a little bit of time - in those cases asking too early risks a false positive alert on your part. And again it helps to be a little more conversational, while still figuring out what's going through the cop's head, which is the half of the point. (The other half is the cop is just fishing for stuff, realizes it's only fishing and won't become something more, and cuts their losses and ends the interaction)

Edit: My comment mostly assumes that you are in fact following the law, or at least not notably breaking it. If you're potentially in deep shit, and the cop has a decent chance of discovering such, there's less harm to immediately clamming up, because any marginal benefit in the off-chance the cop leaves ignorant is outweighed by the chance of you fucking up with a continued interaction or cooperation. Also, you generally should be polite, but you're not required to be super helpful.

Yes, although I would avoid that specific language because it's a meme and will trigger some cops into thinking "oh, you're one of those guys." The key is to be calm while doing it instead of being belligerent.

The context of the "Am I being detained?!!@#!" meme is a SCOTUS case which held, laughably, that a person who every regular person would determine was not free to leave was determined based on a reasonable person standard to know they were free to leave. In that case, armed government agents boarded a bus at a scheduled stop and asked passengers questions and then asked one passenger if they could search his bag. They leaned on the fact in Bostick the police informed the person he could refuse the bag search (but not that he were free to leave). Another case followed 10 years later which emphasized the fact that the reasonable person standard is the test and that government agents are not required to inform anyone they can leave or refuse a search. I don't think I've found a single regular, reasonable person in the real world who would have thought they could have told the cops to move out of their way blocking the exit because they knew they were free to leave and like to go. In fact, this is patently ridiculous, but the SCOTUS soldiered forward. So lawyers recommended to people to ask if they were being detained to prevent that sort of silliness. It was picked up and turned into a meme so that anytime some belligerent person was arguing or resisting cops, they would shout "Am I being detained?" at the cops.

There are more cases from the SCOTUS which essentially require formulaic statements or else those pesky constitutional rights aren't so much rights, e.g., requiring affirmative declarations to trigger your right to remain silent or specifically asking for a a lawyer using that specific word. The last few decades of rulings on the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments are largely cases where the SCOTUS has gouged out exceptions to precedent so that police are protected and criminals are not protected.

It's been a long time since I spoke with police in a situation which didn't involve a client and on behalf of a client (and a while since I did that, too), but what I've always told others is to remain calm, tell the cops you understand they're doing a job, but that you do not answer any questions from police without an attorney present, that you do not consent to any searches whatsoever, and that you would like to leave and ask if you are free to go. If they say you cannot leave, tell them you would like to speak to a lawyer and will not answer any questions. Hell, given how bad some SCOTUS decisions in the last 8 years or so, you may even want to specifically say "I'd like to invoke my 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendment rights."

Does this mean you could increase your chance of getting a speeding ticket instead of a warning? Probably.

The only time I'd recommend asking that question is in a situation where the encounter has already gone on way longer than a normal traffic stop and the officer is doing something indicating he's fishing for something more than a traffic ticket, like asking a lot of unnecessary questions or asking to search the vehicle. But I see bodycam videos of people asking a few minutes into a routine stop, or refusing to answer normal questions, and I wonder why they feel the need to unnecessarily piss the guy off.

the "normal questions" during traffic stops are fishing expeditions

the reason a cop is asking you if you knew how fast you were going, if you saw that red light/stop sign, if you've been drinking, etc., aren't because they're interested in your day

furthermore, due to relatively recent SCOTUS decisions, telling someone they should answer questions from cops because otherwise you'll piss them off and I assume, perhaps, stop talking or ask for a lawyer if they cross some line from "normal questions" is just bad legal advice legal information (this is obviously not "legal advice" on this board)

I don't think you understand what a fishing expedition is. The questions you cited are directly related to either why you got pulled over or some related traffic offense. If he starts asking questions about illegal gambling or a string of burglaries apropos of nothing, that would be a fishing expedition. In any event, in nearly 25 years of driving I've never once been asked if I knew how fast I was going or why I had been pulled over. Traffic offenses are strict liability, and if they have enough to ticket me an admission isn't going to help much. I have been asked if I was drinking, though. And you know how often I was drinking? 100% of the time; the reason I was asked is because the officer already smelled alcohol. But I've never been asked that when I hadn't been drinking, and there have been plenty of times when I was drinking that I wasn't asked that, including on St. Patrick's Day at 11 pm.

Anyway, in these instances, refusing to answer questions doesn't get you anything that a simple "no" doesn't, other than irritating the officer. Telling a cop you didn't see the stop sign isn't going to be used in court later to nail your ass to the wall. Trying to maintain a cordial atmosphere is more important in some circumstances than asserting every single right you have.

For some questions that's true it's wrong to call them "fishing expeditions," but the cops are fishing for you to incriminate yourself with their questions. Regular people use "fishing expedition" in a different way and questions which may in some way relate to the reason a cop is asking the question would fall under it. A question like "Where are you coming from?" is not related to why you got pulled over for speeding despite it being a "normal question" which is regularly asked. The same is true for any number of other questions regularly asked by police to people they've pulled over.

Not admitting to the offense you're being pulled over may not "help much," but admitting to it does indeed make it more difficult to contest it. Answering "no" to a question which may be a lie does indeed make you worse off from any case which arises from the interaction. Government agents aren't asking questions in these situations because they're trying to be friendly or create a cordial environment, they're attempting to use social pressure and the power of their position to get you to put yourself in a worse position. Full stop.

Regular people, let alone lawyers, really struggle with what are "normal questions" or "fishing expeditions," and rarely know when they're harming themselves for no benefit. Giving them bright lines in these situations is far better guidance.

Being polite and calm and telling police officers you do not answer questions from police without a lawyer present may not create a "cordial environment," and it may even increase the likelihood some petty cop gives you a ticket over a warning, but it's better to get the ticket than stumble your way into serious problems. The more you talk the more chance mistaken cops can hear consent or reason to make your night even worse.

Your statements are just bad legal guidance.

It is difficult for me to imagine a situation in which refusing to answer any questions will improve your outcome unless you are at risk for uncontrollably blurting out “I have a dead body in the trunk of my car.”

Police have a lot of discretion in how to treat you. I’ve been pulled over several times for speeding and every time gotten off with a warning because I was friendly and polite. I am fairly confident that if I completely bunkered and insisted a lawyer be present my outcomes would’ve been a lot worse, at the very least they would’ve taken up much more of my time.

Assuming you are a normal person guilty of no more than normal traffic violations like speeding (no body in the trunk of your car) it is undoubtedly most advisable to be fully cooperative and polite, answering all questions truthfully and promptly without demands for a lawyer.

This 1000% 99 times out of 100, all the cop wants is to get through their shift without dealing with too many assholes, and they are perfectly happy to reward polite and cooperative behavior with not issuing a ticket. At worst you get a minimum-level traffic citation that you pay online the next day and never think about again.

Going the "am I being detained" route is a good way to get a ride in a squad car, a day wasted in bureaucratic purgatory, and an impounded vehicle (though more likely, you'll just get the max-level citations available for whatever minor traffic violations you've committed). It's a nuclear option only worth taking if you think you're plausibly at risk of consequences worse than a night in jail. It's advice intended to protect you from serious criminal liability likely to result in time behind bars, but for the vast majority of generally law-abiding Americans' interactions with law enforcement, the risk of that happening simply isn't very high. It's an important tool to keep in youe tool box for extreme situations, but massive overkill more likely to hurt than help in 99+% of cases.

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undoubtedly, I encourage you to do whatever you like

They've seen a YouTube video and don't understand. To actually pull it off you have to be on time of your game and people don't realize that 1st Amendment auditors often orchestrate the interaction from the start. They are purposefully being belligerent to try to illicit a lawsuit. The am am 'I being detained?' is an important demarcation point where they will alter their behavior. They will get very physically compliant and often verbally compliant once the words are said.

If you want to annoy a powertripping cop, giving him an excuse to do what he really wish he could do is not the way to go. Complying until he realises he's wasting his time and he's not going to get you to snap in a way that gives him licence to treat you as uncooperative and belligerent is a much smarter own.

No, this is cope devised to get people to submit. There is in fact no way to win against a powertripping cop -- the problem is coup-complete. If you yield, he wins. If you resist, he hurts you more and wins anyway.

If you yield, he arrests you. If you resist, he beats you up and possibly kills you. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. Sure your pride will take a beating in the former instance, but there are a limited range of circumstances in which I would literally rather be dead than having submitted.

You can rationalize submitting all you want -- and indeed, it is rational -- but nothing will change that it is submission.

If a certain course of action is rational, by definition you can't rationalise your decision to take it.

The winning move is to get the cop to beat you up without doing anything a reasonable-to-moderately unreasonable observer would construe as deserving (ideally while shouting "come and see the violence inherent in the system"). The insight of people like Gandhi and MLK Jr. was that while the Boot of Power does not tolerate face to face defiance, it ultimately derives its power from a body politic which can, very occasionally, be shamed or disgusted into punishing abuses done in its name.

Unfortunately, this also involves getting beaten up and has a pretty mixed record (bare minimum 1/3rd of the population will say you must have done something to deserve it).

Sounds like we're all in agreement then, resisting is the worse option.

You're being silly.

It's one thing to break out the civic resistance card for obvious government overreach. It's quite another to suddenly be a principled libertarian when one is getting a speeding ticket or being pulled off a train by the constables. It has all the sincerity of an atheist in a foxhole. It is transparently self-serving and no one is stupid enough to fall for it.

No shit, being arrested sucks. Being ticketed sucks. But, as you can imagine, that's part of the deterrent value. Why would it be pleasant? Do you envision a police force that politely writes letters of warning that can be easily ignored and have no power to detain you?

The modal person saying these things is not a martyr for civil rights against a overpowerful constabulary: they are habitual rowdies grasping at straws, hoping that saying the right words will get them out of crimes they know they committed. It never works, and then they physically attack the dully employed enforcers of the law. See: the entire run of COPS, liveleak, etc.

No shit, being arrested sucks. Being ticketed sucks. But, as you can imagine, that's part of the deterrent value. Why would it be pleasant?

Being arrested and being ticketed are not supposed to be deterrents at all. Actual deterrents are administered after a conviction.

I subscribe to the philosophy that the process is the punishment. There is no inherent way of making an arrest or a fine a happy event. No one in the history of the universe has ever been overjoyed to sit in the back of a police car or to pay a fine. Any other frame of viewing it is too idealistic for this sinful earth.

I subscribe to the philosophy that the process is the punishment.

It shouldn't be, since the process also affects the innocent, unlike the actual sentence.

You're being silly.

And yet my view can explain behaviors that your view cannot.

It's one thing to break out the civic resistance card for obvious government overreach. It's quite another to suddenly be a principled libertarian when one is getting a speeding ticket or being pulled off a train by the constables. It has all the sincerity of an atheist in a foxhole. It is transparently self-serving and no one is stupid enough to fall for it.

Rather the opposite. It's very easy to say one should only resist for "obvious government overreach" and then whenever one is in a situation where resistance is an option (though not a prudent one), chicken out by saying that one didn't involve enough overreach. Any libertarians resisting speeding tickets or being pulled off a train are living by their principles even when it is harming them.

But we aren't talking about libertarians here, just people who don't want to eat shit. Nobody, as I said, except the most beaten-down milquetoast PMC, likes to eat shit. Most people always do, because they don't want to be literally beaten and/or jailed -- although they'll rarely admit that this is the reason. Some people, for various reasons, have a higher tolerance for pain and social punishment and/or a lower tolerance for shit-eating. Or just a higher time preference. That's all there is to it, really.

Your view explains nothing other than belligerent and argumentative people don't like following rules or laws, which is so stupidly obvious that it is not notable or insightful to observe. Yeah, no shit. So what? I don't like going to my dentist, but that doesn't justify me punching her when I sit down in the chair, or not paying her a hundred bucks for a tooth cleaning.

It is generally accepted that the government, from time to time, can compel you to endure mildly annoying and discomforting situations for the benefit of the society it governs. That is how it has been since ante bellum.

Anyone who wants to pick a fight with dully appointed authority for no good reason is a moron. No, I don't need a strict definition. Gambling your life on the outcome of a speeding ticket or spreading your legs out on two seats on a subway is the province of morons. You are thinking that you are being clever, but you are actually being very stupid, enough that dismissing your opinion without debate is the most productive use of my time.

I see that you are one of those law-n-order conservatives who never expects to find himself on the wrong end of such a situation. I guarantee that if you ever do, you will feel the same visceral aversion to engaging in the appropriate submissive display as Mr. O'Keefe did; perhaps more so because you never expected it. And if you do indeed manage to engage in it, you will feel humiliated and ashamed over your submission, at least until you can concoct yourself some sort of rationalization.

You're leaving out the part where the person getting the speeding ticket actually was speeding. It's not knuckling under and being a cuck to admit that yeah going 50 in a 25 zone probably wasnt kosher, my bad.

I see that you are one of those law-n-order conservatives who never expects to find himself on the wrong end of such a situation.

But I would never find myself in such a situation precisely because I never engage in pointless dominance displays. I've been pulled over several times, I've always responded politely and it has neither been humiliating nor escalated. In fact, despite flagrantly speeding I have always gotten away with a warning and never actually received a ticket precisely because of unfailing politeness.

It is only humiliating if you choose to make it humiliating. I say yes sir and no sir to everyone I interact with in commerce, whether it is a cop or a taxi driver. And because I don't have a basketball mentality this doesn't cause me any psychological distress.

In high school, I bit a man because he was bullying me, in a sincere effort to do him harm.

But I didn't attack the teacher that was sent to collect me, and I certainly didn't scream at the police officer that I talked to.

It would have been very silly of me to do so. Childish.

I knew what I had done was shameful and wrong, but I didn't regret it. And since I had the intelligence of the average person, I didn't take it out on them. And I felt no shame for not quixotically attacking authority in the aftermath. I had already gained my satisfaction.

So you presume wrongly. I demand an apology.

I mean, hello officer, yes sir, no sir is, uh, not degrading. There’s cops that are assholes but it’s just common politeness for dealing with strangers is to use sir and ma’am and the like.

"Sir" is one thing, but you'd only say "Yes sir" to someone in a position of authority over you. Which, of course, cops are, but it's not just civility to a stranger. If a stranger with no authority tells me "Walk this way", and I'm inclined to do as he says, but don't want to acknowledge him as a superior, the formal thing to say is more like "Very well". "Yes sir" is what you say to a teacher or a CO.

This is wild to me: I'd say "yes sir" to the garbageman, assuming he was asking me a question where it made sense and being reasonably polite to me.

Or to someone I've actually hired to do a job for me, I'm pretty sure I actually have used it with the pest control people.

I'd use it for basically any interaction in a professional setting: if someone's working a job they deserve at least that much respect, assuming they're not being rude or disrespectful to me. I'd honestly expect both of us to be using that terminology back and forth.

you'd only say "Yes sir" to someone in a position of authority over you

I say "yes sir" to people not in a position of authority over me all the time. I even say it to people over whom I am in authority (e.g. people I hire to do work).

Never heard this. If someone I worked for told me "yes sir" I'd wonder what kind of mind games they were playing and how quickly I was about to be fired. Regional difference, maybe? Class?

At my white collar office, "yes sir"/"thanks sir" has become so overused I wouldn't be surprised if women are saying it to each other.

It's like a weird intersection of young people imitating "business speak" combined with frat dude culture combined with some actual respect, but taken to pantomime levels.

At my white collar office, "yes sir"/"thanks sir" has become so overused I wouldn't be surprised if women are saying it to each other.

Some kids occasionally say "yes sir" to me, I can't tell if they're joking or not. I keep trying to get them to use "ma'am," but they just seem confused, like they've never heard it before.

I pretty regularly use sir/ma’am with strangers, especially in commercial/business settings as a middle class American in the Midwest.

Sir and maam are the default for a formal, professional interaction. I'd rather keep the cops on that level. My boss calls me sir all the time- it's just a mark of professional respect.

Again I think there is a huge of difference between just calling someone "sir", and the specific phrase "yes sir". One is polite, the latter is subservient.

I could tell you "yes sir" in a way that's subservient, or exaggerated to absurdity, or contemptuous, purely based on tone.

I don't agree with this. If calling someone "sir" is not subservient, then saying "yes sir" is not subservient. It's simply giving an affirmative answer while showing respect.

My boss answers the phone with 'yes sir' to show he's paying attention and treating the interaction professionally.

I'm guessing you're a yankee, assuming you're American.

I'll say 'Yes sir' and 'Yes ma'am' to the janitor and maid, or anyone similar. It's basic politeness. So I'd say this is a definite regional thing.

I feel like there's no need to actually say, "Yes, sir." I'm sure you would get the same effect if you say, "Sure thing, man." The main thing is to remain calm, show whatever papers or cards you need to show, and comply with whatever the local rules are until the cop leaves.

No, they'll often insist on the "Yes, sir" or "Yes, officer". (and troopers get mad if you use "Yes, officer")

You can literally say “yes fuckface” and so long as they don’t have any provable crime to nail you with (other than the speeding ticket or whatever our hypothetical reason for being pulled over was), they can’t do shit.

The days where surly cops can kick someone’s head in for being insufficiently subservient are long gone. The smart phone/social media era put an end to that. Just ask Derek Chauvin.

You can literally say “yes fuckface” and so long as they don’t have any provable crime to nail you with (other than the speeding ticket or whatever our hypothetical reason for being pulled over was), they can’t do shit.

LOL. Believing that and acting on that is a great way to get arrested. Been there and done that. Got arrested for felony assault on a police officer.

You got arrested for felony assault for calling a cop 'fuckface'?

Not exactly, I called him a "fucking pig". But yes.

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I'm definitely willing to believe this, but most cops just want a low drama encounter where they fill out their paperwork and go on their way. I still don't understand why calling them 'sir' is groveling.

I've never run into that, but I live in the major-metro Midwest, am white, and the most unpleasant I get with cops is woe-is-me snark.

I find that difficult to believe. Are you saying that police officers regularly demand that people call them 'sir', and will insist upon it if addressed in any other way? That doesn't sound right to me. Why have I never seen this on video despite the fact that I have spent many hours watching videos of police officers misbehaving in various ways? This seems like the kind of thing that would go viral.

Not so common anymore.

I’m old fashioned. You should be too.

We should get a drink sometime. And that's mine, by the way.

though I suspect all but the most beaten-down milquetoast PMCs dislike showing their belly that way

Only a small fraction would have no dislike for it. But a much much broader class of people, actually the majority, would suck it up and do it anyway. Part of being a civilized adult is the ability to set aside your instincts and short-term desires and impulses in favor of the rational, long-term concerns. When I was a child and my brothers would annoy me I would hit them to make them stop. After getting in trouble enough times I learned not to do that. I don't enjoy obnoxious and annoying behavior any more than I used to, and if possible will seek non-violent solutions to end it such as politely asking, or avoiding people who do it. But at the end of the day if I am near someone being deliberately obnoxious and I can't extricate myself from the situation then I will suck it up and deal with it instead of violently attacking them. Because I am an adult and I have the emotional maturity to do that.

Every middle class white child is taught to be respectful and defer to the police. Because your natural instinct is to fight people who oppose you, especially when they're in the wrong, and this instinct leads to predictably bad results, so it requires being taught the correct behavior in this scenario so that you know when to suppress your instincts instead of following them. I am not black, I did not grow up as a black child in a black household, so I don't know first hand what they are taught. But it seems to be some combination of "the police are dangerous and will shoot you, they are your enemy" and "a real man fights their enemies instead of submitting to them like a weakling." Which even if taught as separate messages, and the latter is implicit in the culture rather than explicit, combine to create this sort of behavior.

Which makes it not exactly baffling that this happens, though it is baffling that nobody seems to be trying to fix it on the cultural level. There are lots of attempts to blame the police and reduce their aggression towards minorities, but I don't see the same level of impetus towards teaching minorities "Don't fight the police!" When this is the obvious and easiest solution to the issue. It's not that minorities need to be extra submissive towards police, it's that everyone needs to submit to police, but certain subsets of minorities haven't caught on yet and need to be brought up to the same level as everyone else..

Which makes it not exactly baffling that this happens, though it is baffling that nobody seems to be trying to fix it on the cultural level. There are lots of attempts to blame the police and reduce their aggression towards minorities, but I don't see the same level of impetus towards teaching minorities "Don't fight the police!"

Chris Rock: "How Not to Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police"

Of course it's a comedy, and some of the advice either blames the police and/or suggests mutual blame in some cases, but it's mostly comedy built around a kernel of just what you're suggesting.

But if you're trying to reduce your bafflement: note that the genre and source and date of that video are probably not a coincidence. It's long enough after the Rodney King incident that it wasn't going to start another riot, long enough before cancel culture that it was relatively safe there, it's from a comedian, and the comedian is African-American. Rock wouldn't have come up with the routine in the first place unless he was capable of intelligent nuanced thought, sure, but if he wasn't also relatively immune to racism and victim-blaming allegations then I don't think he would have gotten HBO to okay it.

Fun fact: showing this video during police training was considered by an appellate court to be evidence of that police department's "city’s custom surrounding use of force" in an excessive-force lawsuit, leading to a half-million-dollar settlement.

It's fascinating that, long before all the stuff about the raping came out, Bill Cosby was considered a traitor to the black community for arguing (in the form of his famous "pound cake" speech) that many of the African-American community's problems are of its own making, and nurturing the politics of racial grievance is doing them no favours. And yet, Chris Rock has consistently made the same point for decades (most notably in "black folks vs. niggas", but this sketch too), but to the best of my knowledge no one considers him a race traitor. It is really as simple as his including the obvious fig leaf of "if you're a black guy driving with a white guy in the passenger seat, the police are less likely to beat you up" that allows him to get away with the fact that most of this sketch boils down to "if you don't break the law and are polite and deferential to police officers, they will have no cause to assault you (ergo, most black Americans who were assaulted by police officers have only themselves to blame)"?

most notably in "black folks vs. niggas"

Rock stopped performing that joke

"I think a lot of people were thinking in those terms and hadn't been able to say it. By the way, I've never done that joke again, ever, and I probably never will," says Rock. "'Cause some people that were racist thought they had license to say n-----. So, I'm done with that routine."

That might be the difference. Rock was able to publicly acknowledge the issues making these sorts of jokes and how others could use them and toe the line of offering well-meaning criticism instead of validating racists

Cosby was apparently unapologetic, and was constantly lecturing black Americans despite the mother of logs in his own eye up until he was cancelled.

Rock didn't really get in any hot water over the bit in a way that compelled such a response, though. Even before his public acknowledgement about these potential issues, his bit was considered an absolute banger in the "funny because it's true" sort of way, and I recall his acknowledgement being a footnote, an interesting piece of trivia, in terms of how well publicized it was, so I don't think that had much of a factor.

I think the main difference was that Rock's thing was purely a comedy bit. He didn't have any extra messages before, after, or surrounding his stand-up act berating the black community or whatever. Cosby probably incorporated plenty of comedy to his messaging, but he was perceived as actually trying to push ideological and cultural messages as a comedian, putting himself into an oppressive patriarchal role. Rock was trying to make you laugh by hitting on a shared truth about culture that is taboo to say, which feels almost like the archetype of a stand-up comic - "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you" - "only one who's allowed to tell the truth in the king's court is the jester."

That was probably a fig leaf to HBO, but I think to Chris Rock it was just another instance of trying to wrap comedy around a kernel of truth!

When he was doing "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" with Seinfeld and their Lamborghini got pulled over (with Seinfeld speeding), Rock ad-libbed "It’d be such a better episode if he pulled me to the side and beat the shit out of me, don’t you think?" and "Now here’s the crazy thing: If you weren’t here, I’d be scared. ... I’m famous, still black. ... Right now, I’m looking for my license right now." pretty readily. Seinfeld is fucking around a bit with his answers to the cop's questions, and Rock is giving pure strait-laced advice. He's laughing, but it's a nervous laugh, and when he laughs later after "I was worried the whole time. I'm still worried." I think he's laughing as much at how the line made Seinfeld crack up as he is at his exaggeration. I don't think he believes cops are all overly eager to harass black people any more than he believes that everyone who gets beaten by the cops had it coming, but I think he's serious in suggesting that both situations can and do occur sometimes.

Personally, I (white guy) have only had respectful interactions with the police, but I'm not the one they'd be profiling the hardest, right? I do think it might not be a coincidence that I've gotten one speeding ticket in my life, while driving alone, and two "pulled over for speeding and let off with a warning" incidents while my wife or I were driving with our kids in the back.

ergo, most black Americans who were assaulted by police officers have only themselves to blame

You just need to view enough police cams of random stops with black drivers to see the pattern, it's either exits the car and flails about, refuses to give information, acts strange and reaches for a gun, or doesn't follow lawful orders. I'm sure there is some selection bias, like the normal interactions don't have a reason to be uploaded to the interweb, but it's absolutely baffling watching them interact that way with the cops. Even the ones who have nothing wrong going on still act like the cops are out to get them, and even thinking that instead of doing their best to give the cop an excuse they agitate the situation instead.

doesn't follow lawful orders

Yeah, lawful orders. Tell me, what does it mean to you when a man puts his hand on his club and orders you to turn around?

It means you're about to have a bad time

Its all about respectability politics. Cosby had the misfortune of being Wayne Brady without cool factor, a white persons idea of a safe black man. Chris Rock had that edge, the look of a man who if he said the N word wouldn't immediately look askance for white girls gasping at the offence. Its not like Jesse Jackson didn't have the same comments about sighing in relief when it was a white man behind him when walking down the street late at night. Black baptist churches are very open and vocal about the scourge of fatherlessness and crime. Its only white antiracism book clubs that refuse to acknowledge problems in the black community.

Which makes it not exactly baffling that this happens, though it is baffling that nobody seems to be trying to fix it on the cultural level. There are lots of attempts to blame the police and reduce their aggression towards minorities, but I don't see the same level of impetus towards teaching minorities "Don't fight the police!" When this is the obvious and easiest solution to the issue. It's not that minorities need to be extra submissive towards police, it's that everyone needs to submit to police, but certain subsets of minorities haven't caught on yet and need to be brought up to the same level as everyone else.

Is this really that baffling? The last several decades have seen the continual rise of an ideology that is based on dividing populations into groups, declaring some of them "oppressed" and others "oppressor" and declaring that the former has zero responsibility to improve things and the latter has full responsibility to improve things. A prominent example of this phenomenon in a different topic (with mostly the same players) is "rape culture," where even advising a woman against putting herself in a position of vulnerability around strange/potentially malicious men with alcohol or other drugs involved is considered full-throated justification for her being raped. Heck, even pointing out the fact (citation needed) that this raises one's odds of being sexually assaulted has been equated with explicit condoning of rape.

As such, any sort of recommendation that black people adjust their culture such that the rates of violent or otherwise troublesome encounters with police go down is verboten. That's condoning White Supremacy which we can always invoke as blame-worthy (of course, abstract concepts like White Supremacy can't really catch blame - people that you think of when you think of White Supremacy, such as white people, or brown people who disagree with you, OTOH...) in any troublesome encounter between any black person and any cop for any reason. Whatever culture that black people have, it's either innate - and good and to be supported in and of themselves, because everyone (that we've deemed sufficiently oppressed) deserves to be not just tolerated, but celebrated, intrinsically for who they are - or an adaptation that they had to take on just so that they could survive in this oppressive White Supremacist world they were unjustly thrust into, and so it's 100% the responsibility of White Supremacists to modify the policing system such that black people have to spend zero effort to change their culture and the rate of troublesome police incidents involving black people goes down to zero.

I think the simple but effective filter for "is this the bad kind of victim blaming?" boils down to:

  • Is victim blaming the only significant, or always first reaction? If so, it's at best tactless and at worst racist/sexist/callous/lowers freedom/etc.

  • Is victim blaming accompanied by other sympathy, solutions, or blame? If so, it's at worst tactless and at best good advice.

That's probably oversimplifying a bit, but I don't think the idea that "victim blaming can be bad" is wrong per se, just misapplied.

That's probably oversimplifying a bit, but I don't think the idea that "victim blaming can be bad" is wrong per se, just misapplied.

Indeed, absolutely. The key thing here, though, is that "victim blaming can be bad" was already the default state of modern culture, heck even BEFORE the 1st 2 waves of feminism. The idea that "X can be bad" no matter what X is is a pretty good default that almost everyone has about anything, and the idea that blaming someone for something can be bad had already been built into society for centuries, as evidenced by legal justice systems.

The part that progressive idpol added was the enforced misapplication.

where even advising a woman against putting herself in a position of vulnerability around strange/potentially malicious men with alcohol or other drugs involved is considered full-throated justification for her being raped. Heck, even pointing out the fact (citation needed) that this raises one's odds of being sexually assaulted has been equated with explicit condoning of rape.

Lately I have been reflecting on the strange parallels between this and the recent cancellations for improper reactions to Charlie Kirk's assassination. I have to admit I have maybe found a bit of hypocrisy in myself and I'm unsure how to feel about it.

When I was perusing Reddit in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, I saw a lot of reactions along the lines of "Well if you're spreading hate and antagonizing people you can't be surprised when somebody snaps and kills you shrug." And to be honest, yes, at the time this seemed to me to be a justification for his assassination and an expression of implied support for it.

But truthfully, this isn't that different from responding to news of a woman being raped by saying "Well if you're going out doing XYZ you can't be surprised if somebody rapes you shrug." I was never viscerally angered by people offering such rape commentary the way I was by the Kirk commentary I saw last week. Obviously, there are object-level objections that could be made here, Was Charlie Kirk really "spreading hate"? and so forth.

I think it has caused me to have greater sympathy for the feminist side. While I won't go so far as to say that well-meaning advice on avoiding rape is never appropriate, I think, like comments on Kirk's death, it should be done with exceeding care and sensitivity which I myself lacked in the past.

To be fair, there are/were indeed a handful of rightist/alt-right hardliners who dismissed Kirk as a cuckservative Zionist shill and did/do advocate for political violence and spread hate; if it were any of them who got assassinated, this sort of leftist reasoning would at least have some legs to stand on. But in this case, it really doesn't.

One thing that caused me to have more sympathy for women in particular is getting punched in the face.

No, really. Some crazy and/or homeless person, in the middle of an otherwise decent suburb, punched me in the face as he walked past me in a crosswalk in the middle of a street between the bus stop and my student housing half a block away. No, they didn't find him. Yes, it hurt like hell, but didn't break my nose thankfully. No, I didn't do anything to provoke him, I was looking down at my phone reading, surprised me completely.

I knew that this happening again was realistically highly improbable and irrational. But I couldn't help but feel vaguely nervous and vulnerable at the bus stop for a month or two afterward. And so I thought, "do women feel this way all the time?" Maybe? I still don't know. I'm sure some do, though, and it sucks, so my sympathy-meter got a minor tune-up that day.

There are political parties advocating for cracking down on such violent men but curiously single young women are precisely the demographic least likely to support them.

You're right, but also, this just fits more into the pattern of "They say lots of things, but anything that's good isn't new, and anything that's new isn't good." The idea that saying "Well if you're going out doing XYZ you can't be surprised if somebody rapes you shrug" to someone who's been raped is rude or bad doesn't come from progressive idpol, it was already baked in to the existing system as just a form of manners that much of American culture already bought into. The innovation that progressive idpol added is that even neutrally stating that, empirically and physically, certain behaviors can influence one's vulnerability to being raped, in any context even without any specific or hypothetical rape or rape survivor involved, is still exactly the same as explicitly saying that rape victims deserved it because they were asking for it.

Former moderator @ymeskhout pointed out that, 100% of the time when someone complains about their bike having been stolen, the first question everyone asks is invariably "did you lock it?"

Pointing out that the manner in which the victim of a crime comported themselves may have made them more vulnerable to being the victim of said crime is considered a perfectly legitimate thing to do, except when it comes to a woman being sexually assaulted after getting blackout drunk at a party full of men she doesn't know, or when a black man aggressively resists arrest and the officers attempting to subdue him unsurprisingly assault him - in which cases it becomes "victim-blaming" and beyond the pale. It's a bizarre identitarian carve-out.

I'm rather confident that there's virtually not one cyclist anywhere in the world who leaves the bike unlocked in any town or city with a known reputation for having bike thefts.

Not for long, anyway. Either they're pedestrians in very short order, or they no longer leave their replacement bike unlocked.

Or if they answer the question "did you lock it?" in the affirmative, the follow-up question will be "how good of a lock did you use?"

Not to disagree with your main point but I’ve never seen anyone get asked that after having a bike stolen. They might be asked how heavy duty lock and cable they used to lock it to a concrete holder etc but half the time this would be just to find out exactly how thick steel is niwadays vulnerable to cutters.

Yes, bike theft is a major problem over here and has been for years.

Rape is an unavoidable danger. Political assassinations are novel. Most men are suitably anti-rape already. Redditors are neutral to positive on assassinations.

It's also just that government officials are easy to blame while parents are at least technically your customers. On schooling this flips and the liberals are the ones defending schoolteachers and their unions from criticism for failing kids. You get it on both sides.

There is a significant difference in the degree of difficulty in avoiding misconduct. One person's job is legalized kidnapping, it is within the nature of mistakes that someone could be seriously injured or killed. Teacher misconduct is almost always intentional actions. I dont think any teacher has ever been giving a lecture, slipped on a banana and fell serendipitously getting impregnated by one of her lonely male students.

Cops are not just blamed for cases where there's misconduct. People of a certain ideological stripe assume there is misconduct in situations like the OP because of cops' failure to maintain equitable arrest records or to fix the underlying problems of those they police.

Teachers similarly get criticism for the state of students despite not having control of their lives for the majority of their time. The school might get leaned on for disciplinary gaps (as Obama did) or apparent bias, teachers might get blamed for being lazy or unmotivated due to the outcomes of some group of students and so on.

Most of those issues for teachers are self-inflicted wounds. If they stopped pretending school can solve social problems as part of their demands for ever increasing funding such expectations wouldn't be imposed on them

"rape culture,"

You know, I feel like I haven't heard this one in a while now. Odd how fixations on these things fade, sometimes surprisingly quickly.

Feminism was previously a class interest group for college educated women- that is, young women living away from the protections of their families. This is the demographic most likely to get raped(although feminists were generally not very concerned about the most vulnerable members of that demographic, such as enlisted women in the military- only college educated ones).

Feminism is now mostly concerned with 'women' whose rapists give up and switch to beatings instead when they discover the truth.

Oh, come on. This is a pretty lazy sneer, and it's barely even coherent. Do you think #MeToo was about college?

And I could have sworn I'd seen you arguing trans violence stats were fake. It's not happening, but they're fixated on it anyway?

Metoo was about professional women in high status settings. This skews educated even if the examples that are highest profile mostly arent.

I have not, to my knowledge, argued that ‘trans panic’ wasn’t a thing that ever happened(although I have argued that it has not applied to murder). I have argued that it’s less common and less random than trans activists like to portray. But MTFs getting beaten up/attacked by a potential partner is a very plausible thing.

My apologies, then.

I think if you’re rounding off Metoo’s most visible examples in favor of the modal supporter, the same standard should apply today. There just aren’t enough trans people to move the needle.

More broadly, I don’t believe you can gloss something as a class interest group just because its biggest support comes from that class. The demographics of soccer fans aren’t enough to make it a Hispanic interest group. They’re showing up for something else. College-educated women are disproportionately likely to be feminists because they’re wealthier, more independent, and better-informed. That doesn’t prevent them from having a broader interest. Feminism has a long history of backing women in different conditions. I don’t believe that’s changed.

What? A decent number of self-described feminists I know disliked the military primarily because they viewed most of them as potential or likely rapist douchebags. That's such a strange accusation to make. I'm sure feminist activists devoted less energy to enlisted women, but that's partly because there aren't many of them, it's not relatable, and a decent number were probably conservative anyways, so that's not really all that strange.

That's largely because trans subverted and devoured feminism wholesale

Whale cancer.

It's baffling that this progressive idealogy has been allowed to persist within the black community and survive contact with deadly consequences. Luxury beliefs are ones that privileged people can hold because someone else has to pay the costs. It does not baffle me that lefty white people believe that black people are oppressed and should fight back against the oppressive beliefs, because this doesn't cause lefty white people to get killed. It does not baffle me that college educated black people believe that they are oppressed and their lower class brothers should fight the police, because the college educated black people are much less likely to get themselves killed. It does not baffle me that black people believe that white people owe them and they should be given free handouts from the government or are morally blameless when they steal things, because this benefits them.

It does baffle me that lower class black people who get are at risk of being killed by police believe they should fight the police. This is not a luxury belief, this has deadly consequences. This is the kind of thing where skin in the game usually causes people to set aside their silly biases and obviously false platitudes and go "oh crap, this is wrong, something needs to change." Even if they verbally adhere to the same ideology, people at least turn hypocrite to avoid the consequences themselves. Someone who claims that homeless people should be given free homes balks at the thought of actually sharing their own home or neighborhood. People who want more government spending even if this requires higher taxes almost always want the taxes raised on someone else. The ideologies mutate into the most consistent and coherent form that just so happens to be compatible with avoiding negative consequences for the believer. I would not be baffled to have black people going on about how police are evil oppressors but you shouldn't physically fight them because they'll kill you. I would not be baffled to have black people going on about how police are evil oppressors that you should fight, and then not actually fighting them and hoping someone else will do it. I am baffled at them actually fighting the police in non-negligible numbers. The ideology, at least the version of it held and professed by black people, should have mutated to avoid this outcome the majority of the time. But it hasn't.

Most deadly police encounters are men and boys, young adults and teenagers. You know, the demographic group least likely to use their prefrontal cortex, most concerned about appearances, and least concerned with potential benefits of police help. It's totally skewed. It's not like their mothers and (non-criminal) fathers are telling them to confront police, and hell they probably tell them the opposite regularly. I hesitate to call it a broader problem because the people most likely to constitute the problem are also the least likely to heed said beliefs.

For example you can notice a bump in preference for decreased police spending in the 18-49 demographic. Now, they don't break out a figure of "among Blacks, what percentage of the 15-25 demographic prefer lowered police spending" but I bet it's an even bigger bump.

The people talking the biggest game on police oppression game are largely white knights, and are certainly not the people directly producing violence directly, much less those who are most affected (middle aged to older adults and women)

It's worth noting that lower/underclass black culture is just all about being confrontational and loud, and not doing this puts a young black man at a severe social disadvantage. I'm pretty sure that all of these people have more contact with their fellow lower class blacks than the police, and young males are really bad at backing down out of risk aversion.

Furthermore, I don't think it's actually the majority who get extra aggressive and confrontational with police. Most of them who get arrested get arrested peaceably.

I'm pretty sure the underclass is normally confrontational and loud everywhere it lives.

The difference is that white rural underclass lives in areas with low enough population density that the police learn their faces and treat them as neighbors, like the "I know my rights" guy.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1C58B3C1E08108CF

Good point. Now that I think of it, the white underclass is rarely seen on public transit or in inner cities.

I don't think it's directly downstream of progressive ideology, and is instead actually a consequence of the honour culture that many lower class black people seem to have grown up with in the hood. Honour cultures form in places where a strong central authority either doesn't exist, is unwiling or unable to enforce order, or is so resented by those subject to it that they're reluctant to call upon it and will punish any of their peers who do. This situation has occurred in many times and places historically, but today it often shows up in prisons, and everyone has experienced a kiddie version of it on the playground. It also seems to be common in black American ghettos.

Since people in these environments can't call upon a central authority to defend them, they have to defend themselves, and one method they use is to dissuade aggressors by signalling that they'll strongly retaliate against any attack. This is why they escalate to confrontations, threats or violence in response to minor, even unintentional slights. If they didn't they might look soft and be intentionally targeted for abuse or exploitation.

This is a potentially adaptive behaviour for people in such environments when dealing with their peers, but is at times maladaptive when dealing with authority figures. However, they can't simply choose not to behave this way towards authority figures like cops, because if they did then they would look like a bitch and a collaborator and be subject to ostracisation by their community, which would again endanger them. Besides, it's not as if this is necessarily a rational strategy they knowingly apply, it's often just a subconscious attitude they've learned and cannot simply unlearn at will.

TL;DR they fight the police because they fight everyone who challenges them to preserve their honour and reputation, even when it might have negative immediate consequences for their physical health or legal standing, and because they really don't want to look like a collaborator any more than a prisoner, a concentration camp detainee, or a middle schooler does.

Also it bears mentioning that for all the talk about US police brutality or discrimination, I'm pretty sure American police beat people up less on average than say an Eastern European cop. In other words, some other countries have police that directly participate in said honor culture directly, within the norms of such. Possibly, the normal expectation that American cops are more rule-abiding and lawful backfires in this kind of culture, where following rules is (mis)interpreted as weakness. Assuming your thesis is true, of course.

I'm pretty sure American police beat people up less on average than say an Eastern European cop.

I don't know. EE cops probably beat more people on average inside the precincts ("what other flats have you burgled? Tell us! smack 69 Freedom street, that was you, wasn't it?! smack come on, heartfelt confession means lenient sentence! smack").

But there's no such culture of individual defiance. If a Polish cop honks at a dres walking down the middle of the street and yells "move your ass, fuckface", the dude won't attack him to defend his honor if he's sober.

But there's no such culture of individual defiance. If a Polish cop honks at a dres walking down the middle of the street and yells "move your ass, fuckface", the dude won't attack him to defend his honor if he's sober.

There must be, though, a LOT of cases where the dude isn't sober.

It can look like a luxury belief to you, but a better way to look at it is low time preference. Sure, tomorrow you might be better off if everyone was more complaint with police, but today you has a gun or drugs or both and doesn't want to be arrested.

I am not black, I did not grow up as a black child in a black household, so I don't know first hand what they are taught. But it seems to be some combination of "the police are dangerous and will shoot you, they are your enemy" and "a real man fights their enemies instead of submitting to them like a weakling." Which even if taught as separate messages, and the latter is implicit in the culture rather than explicit, combine to create this sort of behavior.

Seems like there're three groups we discuss here when one of these cases pop off: simply mentally ill people who can't help themselves, underclass blacks who seem to have a reckless attitude towards what they may rightly see as their enemies if they're caught up in crime, and well-off blacks who fear being harmed less, despite all of the stuff about "The Talk", and so feel justified in making it an issue then and there. I suppose we can say the general PMC/celebrity disdain for being told what to do by a working class rando mixing explosively with the general sense that authority is racist.

I don't think these groups are the same or have the same motives. Henry Louis Gates and Tyreek Hill are closer to Karens than someone like Michael Brown.

Only a small fraction would have no dislike for it.

There's a rather larger fraction who claim they have no dislike for it and you shouldn't either.

But a much much broader class of people, actually the majority, would suck it up and do it anyway.

Sure; the argument from the nightstick is a powerful one.

It's not that minorities need to be extra submissive towards police, it's that everyone needs to submit to police, but certain subsets of minorities haven't caught on yet and need to be brought up to the same level as everyone else.

For certain minorities, there's strong cultural aversion to such submissiveness. I rather doubt this particular thing is genetic, since its source is so obvious.

I absolutely agree. I think the vast majority of discrepancies in racial outcomes and behavior are cultural, even if genes probably play some non-zero component (my personal estimate is somewhere around 80% culture 20% genes). Such that, even if cultural interventions couldn't completely solve every issue entirely, they could solve most of them and should be paid attention to more.

Probably especially culturally relevant to blacks, though I suspect all but the most beaten-down milquetoast PMCs dislike showing their belly that way.

In what way is being respectful towards the police showing your belly? This is low trust society talk. Yes, cops are humans and there will be some fraction of interactions where the cop is in the wrong or abusive. It's still preferable to default to an attitude of helpful cooperation - in what sense should I be on the side of the individual contributing to societal blight rather than an organization that is at least notionally opposed to it? Framing these interactions as a "monkey dominance game" and advocating for an oppositional attitude leads to worse outcomes.

It's still preferable to default to an attitude of helpful cooperation

Yes, but there's a difference between cooperation and utter submission. Some cops will be dissatisfied with the former and demand the latter, even when there's no logical cause for it. ("Come this way." "Very well, but you're making a mistake and you're going to regr-" "YES SIR." "Excuse me?" "Say YES SIR and DO AS I SAY. I don't want to hear another word or you're gonna get it.")

Far fewer cops than the media suppose are inclined to random acts of murder, but many like to lord over their power at a petty, schoolyard-bully level, without any practical necessity. I find it very plausible that lots of escalations of this kind are the fault of the cop for trying to "act tough" when measured, reasonable conversation was on the table before they started barking demands.

When ever was "you're going to regret it" a useful thing to say to anyone? They don't believe they're going to regret it, that's why they're doing what they're doing. Save it for when you do make them regret it.

This goes right along with "don't you know who I am" as the kind of phrase I only hear petty assholes on TV say.

I'm not saying it's a useful thing to say, but it's a harmless thing to say. So long as they're cooperating, let people be sulky when they're arrested, it shouldn't be cause for escalation - if only because this could be an innocent person who's getting ineffectually crabby, and there's nothing wrong about being ineffectually crabby at a wrongful arrest.

I mean, sure, police officers shouldn't beat you up just because you're being crabby and passive-aggressive. But I just don't see what you stand to gain by being crabby and passive-aggressive in the first place. Best-case scenario, the police officer ignores your griping; worst-case scenario, he interprets it as you resisting arrest and beats you up. Has it ever happened that a police officer has announced his decision to arrest someone, the would-be arrestee made a passive-aggressive comment, and the police officer immediately saw the error of his ways and decided to let the person off with a warning instead? Consider the payoff matrix.

Yes, certainly those are all good rational reasons not to act this way. But I think it's only to be expected that random people, upon being wrongfully arrested, will behave irrationally. It's a pretty upsetting, out-of-distribution crisis to suddenly have foisted upon oneself without warning. Even a normally-rational person might lash out in a counterproductive way - and most people aren't very rational to begin with.

This being basic human psychology, police guidelines should account for this. Cops should be taught to ignore meaningless non-physical threats and irritations of that kind. If the guy isn't trying to make a run for it or otherwise physically resist arrest, let him talk, remain stone-faced, carry on with procedure. Demanding one-on-one submission should not be the way.

I'm sure plenty of cops do ignore "meaningless" non-physical threats of this nature, and end up with bullets in the sternum for their trouble. In Europe, if a person gets pulled over by the police and is informed that they're being placed under arrest, if the arrestee rolls their eyes and says "you're going to regret this", the likelihood that the person in question has a handgun in their glovebox is somewhere around zero. This simply isn't true of the US, in which there are more guns than people and four police officers get shot every five days.

When a police officer pulls you over, he has no idea whether you're a normal level-headed individual or a short-tempered belligerent asshole, and is making a series of judgement calls on a second-to-second basis. There's no way a statement like "you're going to regret this" doesn't push a cop into thinking you're more likely to be the latter, not the former.

Sure, in an ideal world you could bitch and grumble without giving the officer arresting you legitimate cause to worry if he's about to find himself in a life-or-death situation. But we don't live in an ideal world, and that isn't the fault of the cop arresting you: it's not as if he personally ratified the second amendment.

There's also the point, while the officer is making a series of split-second judgement calls about whether you're about to ruin his day, he's updating his priors using the posterior evidence of how you interact with him. The priors here are your demographic markers: a comment like "you're going to regret this" will be taken very differently if spoken by an Asian woman in Prada driving a Beamer vs. a black man in a tracksuit driving a beat-up Volvo. Is it "fair" that wealthy white people can bitch and moan while getting arrested without having handguns trained on them, while poor black people can't? Maybe not - but again, it's not the fault of the cop arresting you that certain demographics are overwhelmingly more likely to assault or murder police officers than others. (Hell, black American women are more likely to murder people than Asian-American men, and possibly white American men too.) Cops may not be explicitly trained to let people's passive-aggressive comments slide depending on their melanin content, but a cop in a sufficiently diverse American city will quickly find himself becoming a race realist (and class realist, to a lesser extent) as a matter of practical necessity.

This being basic human psychology, police guidelines should account for this. Cops should be taught to ignore meaningless non-physical threats and irritations of that kind. If the guy isn't trying to make a run for it or otherwise physically resist arrest, let him talk, remain stone-faced, carry on with procedure. Demanding one-on-one submission should not be the way.

Cops are not taught to ignore "meaningless non-physical threats and irritations" because this concept as you've articulated it is nonsense. Cops have no reliable way to determine which guy whos getting verbally aggressive is going to escalate the situation to physical aggression. Sure there is some spectrum running from young black male to old asian lady where the threat level goes from high to low, but its still just probabilities not certainties. Verbal aggression commonly precedes physical aggression.

Anyways, its these bad apples that put the cops into the position where now they treat every traffic stop like they are pulling over Al Capone's hitman. Its not too much to ask fellow citizens (imo) to stop shitting in the commons and just take their speeding ticket and cross examine the officer in front of a judge in court.

And I think most cops react to 'Imma sue the shit out of you, lemme get your badge number, you're agunna regret this' with karen'sign the ticket this is not an admission of guilt etc etc'. But cops are human, some of them react badly.

You can pack it up in as much high-sounding talk as you want, it's still showing your belly and your monkey brain knows it. If you're in the situation, YOU will know it.

If the monkey brain had its way I'd still be in a cave subsisting on meager, non-artificially-cultivated fruit. Are you trying to explain the thinking of the underclass or endorse it?

It's really not, and I say this having had plenty of interactions with law enforcement - even one where I was questioned as a suspect. To use simpler words: the police and I are on the same team. I'm not being dominated by showing a baseline of respect and cooperation, that's just how you interact with teammates. The police are not perfect, neither are doctors; the fact that some doctors cause errors or are power tripping dickheads doesn't mean that I shouldn't be on the hospital's side if I'm in a car accident.

Anti-social people who bicker with the police over their attempts to enforce the law are not on my team. It is easy to see that worlds where I side with the anti-social against the police are worlds that are generally criminal. I do not like crime. I do not want to live in these worlds.

To use simpler words: the police and I are on the same team.

No, you are not. The police certainly don't think so.

But of course we are. A given officer in a given interaction may or may not think so - it's rational for them to be suspicious - but we absolutely are.

It's very simple. I do not like crime. I do not like low level anti-social behavior. I want the rules to be enforced. The police are the social / political organization responsible for preventing and responding to crime. We are on the same team.

The only way you get to be on the same team as the police is to be a cop, or close family of a cop. Or sometimes, a member of a few of the other related professions such as EMTs. Other than that, the cops view you as outgroup, probably a criminal, and definitely someone to fuck with. If they're questioning you they they think you're guilty, and if you don't answer their questions in a way that confirms that they think you're getting away with something. You may be the enemy of what you think is their real enemy (criminals), but you are not their friend, and they are not even your ally.

Perhaps you misunderstand what I mean about being on the same team. I do not mean that I expect that the police will give me a Junior Detective sticker, maybe let me turn on the lights and sirens or cuff a perp. I do not mean or expect that they would treat me any differently than anyone else they’re interacting with.

I mean that we have the same desired end state. They want to catch criminals and deter crime. I want criminals caught and crime deterred. Thus, I act respectfully towards them because they are engaged in a project worthy of respect and worlds where police are treated respectfully are - on the whole - superior to the alternative. It’s instrumentally useful to be polite, sure, but it’s also the correct action and has nothing to do with dominance games or submission.

You should see yourself on the police’s team too, even considering the reality that there are many substandard police interactions.

I mean that we have the same desired end state.

You have some goals in common. Probably not others. That doesn't make you on the same team. They'd be happy to throw you in jail in service of that end state, or just because they felt like throwing someone in jail that day and your number came up.

You should see yourself on the police’s team too, even considering the reality that there are many substandard police interactions.

Never. I mentioned above I was once arrested for mouthing off to a cop. If I had been convicted, I'd be dead today; a middle class guy has no way of living with a felony conviction. That's enough to remind me I'll never be on their team.

(The cop, though fired for unrelated reasons from the particular job he was doing when he arrested me, went on to have a long and illustrious career ending up as the chief, then went into semi-retirement as a school resource officer until he was arrested and convicted for child porn and let off with a 364-day sentence because judges apparently ARE on the same team as bad cops, and that sentence let him keep his pension)

Driving a commercial vehicle with proper registration and wearing a blue-collar uniform also gets you out of stuff.

You can pack it up in as much high-sounding talk as you want, it's still showing your belly and your monkey brain knows it.

Yes, and? I didn't like dealing with a cop the last time I was stopped for speeding, but since I have an appropriate level of impulse control and time preference, I was able to balance that feeling against how much I would dislike an involuntary trip to the jail. I got a warning, life went on.

Yes, and?

AND, it is an act of injustice for society to demand such.

Demanding such meaning talking like a normal person?

You said their behavior was baffling. It's not baffling; eating shit sucks. They merely have a far stronger aversion to yielding in monkey dominance games, and likely a lower level of impulse control and a higher time preference.

We're all monkeys, cops are the dominant monkeys (in at least a certain restricted sense), and yes, they do in fact have the right to make you eat a certain amount of shit. Civilization could not function otherwise. (Arguably, ceding that the state has a legitimate monopoly on violence already constitutes cuckoldry in a certain sense; but it's a necessary cuckoldry.)

(I made this comment because I’m interested in how notions of pride and honor are “centered” differently in different individuals, and I’m hoping that further responses will provide illumination in this direction…)

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