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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I disagree only in that I think rights do not come with responsibilities (and saying they do is a common way of vitiating rights, "You have the right to do X, you have the responsibility to only do X the way we say"), but privileges do -- and what the police have as a result of being police is the latter.
You want be a cop, you can't use "the criminals might shoot me" as a reason not to do your job in any given instance. You signed up for that.
I keep wanting to compare this to the recent ICE shooting, loathe as I am to discuss that more here. In that case "the officer should not have put himself in potential danger (standing in front of the car) so that lethal force wouldn't have been necessary" seems a common talking point (and I'm not interested in debating the specific facts of the case further). In the Uvalde case there seems to be plenty of ire that the officers did not place themselves in such danger regardless of the risk to the suspect, especially since it sounds like they were informed of a barricaded shooter, not a spree shooting.
Both sets of logic make sense to me in isolation, but I have trouble fully squaring them. "It's good that the Uvalde cops say around: if they had charged in someone (the shooter) might have gotten hurt" is plausibly true, but laughable. It somewhat works if you assume Good wasn't intent on ramming lots of pedestrians, but that isn't always true: there was a deliberate truck attack in New Orleans last year, for example. That driver didn't have priors, and we'd plausibly be having a similar discussion if officers had blocked the car and ended up shooting the driver there, 14 lives would have conceivably been saved.
Obviously the details are quite different, but I have trouble imagining generic bright lines that don't lean heavily on verboten characteristics: "of course the white woman wasn't trying to be a spree killer."
Why can't we lean on verboten characteristics? No middle aged white woman has ever killed a cop*, very few middle aged white women are good at driving SUVs in tight quarters and really know where their wheels are pointing at any given time.
*In the line of duty, some have killed boyfriends who happened to be cops
Name: Lynda Cheryle Lyon Block
Age at Crime: 45
Race: White
Incident Date: October 4, 1993
Victim: Sergeant Roger Lamar Motley, Jr. (Opelika Police Department)
Name: Cheryl Dawn Kidd
Age at Crime: 57
Race: White
Incident Date: April 22, 2011
Victim: Officer Chris Kilcullen (Eugene Police Department)
Name: Martha Donald
Age at Crime: 60
Incident Date: August 1, 2002
Victim: Officer Melissa Schmidt (Minneapolis Police Department)
There are a number of negligent homicides as well drunk / drugged driving, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes they are!
The best place to stop her if she was a spree killer would not have been to stand in front of her vehicle. Ross did only fire after she had hit him (slightly, because she was not aiming her car for him). If she had aimed for him, he would have been under her SUV before he had fired her first shot.
A person sitting in a car, even a bloody SUV, is not a similar level of danger as a armed suspect entering a school. You do not need to rely on protected characteristics to tell the difference. Some suspects are an imminent danger to the public and it is reasonable to require cops to risk their lives to stop them if it decreases the expected value of innocents dying. Some are not.
If Goods had already injured someone with a gunshot, then entered and locked a classroom, and shots had then be heard from the classroom, I certainly would have wanted Ross to breach that classroom and shoot her if she threatens him, not assume that as a liberal middle-class middle-age woman, she was likely only firing blanks from a prop gun and not trying to hurt anyone.
I suppose my interest here is that the two are at opposite ends of the "justified use of lethal force" scale: there is probably broad, but not universal agreement that the Good case is at least a regrettable case ("justified" is almost certainly more split), and that the Uvalde case is almost unconscionable in its lack of use of force (although this jury declined to convict in this specific case).
I was hoping to use this to better pin down clear boundaries for the acceptable range of force, but I don't see clear choices there still.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link