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Notes -
https://www.newsweek.com/video-appears-to-show-new-ice-shooting-in-minneapolis-11411971
Ice shooting round 2 has kicked off. Numerous rumors already flying around but will be a bit before we have facts I imagine.
EDIT: I've been asked to add some relevant points, I'll say: this comment has links to various angles: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405295?context=8#context This comment mentions the "Sig misfire" angle that I've seen a bit: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405451?context=8#context
Walz has activatedthe national guard: https://x.com/MnDPS_DPS/status/2012614253090619619 The NBA postponed the Minnesota/Golden State game tonight.
This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?
It seems as though a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no. This is where the idea of disrupting police, "de arresting" people, rioting, etc. comes from. They don't agree that the state should have the ultimate power to enforce laws that they don't agree with. In this case they seem to disagree with immigration laws, and because of this disagreement they don't believe that ICE/DHS has a right to enforce these laws.
This is a big problem. An actual threat to democracy. Half the country voted in an almost single issue fashion to have our immigration laws enforced. A small (but growing) contingent of the left does not believe that that is legitimate, and therefore believe that they have the right to use force to oppose this.
The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here? These people (some of them) have convinced themselves that they are living through the rise of an authoritarian/fascist dictatorship and have precipitated some things that do pattern match to that. Aside from some sort of science fiction style deprogramming effort: how do you bring them back to reality?
This is a question that genuinely troubles me.
Of course it does, except when it doesn't.
Very few people have anything approaching a coherent political philosophy. I would assert that the vast majority of people never think about the state in terms of the monopoly of violence. Maybe they heard it in school, but they never internalized the concept.
I am and was always skeptical of how Trump would be able to pull mass deportations off because of this. Even if there wasn't actually violence, the media would manifest it like in Texas where they used forced perspective to make it look like the illegal aliens were getting whipped. Law enforcement is inherently violent, and with millions of interactions there was going to be violence, and scissors.
Not just inherently, definitionally violent. Every single thing the police do is something being done against the will of the person it is being done to.
I wasn’t aware that having my passport and ID card renewed or being granted a drivers license was ”definitionally violent”…
If you forgo the drivers license, and still drive on the road, the state will fine you. If you refuse to pay the fines, eventually the state will arrest you, if you refuse to come quietly because you don't recognize the authority of the state, the state will inflict violence on you until you comply. Your drivers license is the state's permission to drive without falling afoul of the state's monopoly on violence. Whether this is the non-central fallacy or not, it is practically how society works. We just abstract much of the unpalatable stuff away behind a veneer of civility so we don't need to remind ourselves of how violent the world is and how fragile peace is.
Nonetheless, the act of granting a drivers license is not remotely ”definitionally violent” and to even suggest that granting an ID card (for those rare situations where a drivers license isn’t accepted as an ID) is violent is completely ridiculous. The claim was that ”every single thing the police do is something being done against the person it’s being done to”.
Police do many things, some of which are violent, but police in the US leaning so heavily on that side does not mean that police is definitionally violent.
I don't see what's hard to understand about this.
By the state enforcing consequences - of violence - for not having a permit or not having an ID card, it granting people these things is still a violent act.
Of course it feels different in the moment. Or maybe "It's just a piece of paper". But it's all control at the barrel of a gun, even if it's a permit/ID regime I think is practically useful or even required in a modern western nation.
Ah, but here's the important bit: said ID card is entirely optional (around here). It's one way to identify yourself but not even the most common one. There are no negative consequences to not having one (in fact mine is past its validity date by a year or two). Nonetheless the police are the ones that grant it (because they have the means and existing infrastructure to verify the person's identity securely). If you claim that asking for an ID is an act of violence, does that mean the delivery guy who wanted to see my ID before giving me the parcel was violent? I don't think anyone reasonable would support that.
A claim that police is definitionally violent and that "every single thing the police do is something being done against the will of the person it is being done to", is like trying to prove a negative. Any counterexample invalidates it. In the case of an ID card, the thing being done is verifying that I am in fact me and it is done at my behest, not against my will. Likewise if I were to end up in a minor traffic accident, I'd call the police to witness the situation so that the other party can't make outrageous claims. They are not there in the capacity of violence (nobody is going to get arrested) but to act as impartial witnesses.
It may be that the police in US has degenerated so much that they are only capable of violence but that's a peculiarity of that particular style of policing, not a definitional feature of the concept of "the police".
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I'd disagree with the original poster that all state actions are definitionally violent. Like providing permits or ID cards. However the police are the agents of the state empowered to carry out it's monopoly on violence. The police do not issue you the ID card or the driver's license, that is done by different agents of the state that are not empowered with its monopoly on violence. All enforcement of the laws of a state by police are violent explicitly or implicitly and the job of the police is the fundamentally the enforcement of laws. What jobs done by the police do you think are non-violent?
Here the police are the ones that issue me the ID, not any other agents of the state. IOW, the police have multiple duties, some which aren't in any way related to their monopoly on violence.
The claim was notably about the police / law enforcement being definitionally violent, ie. police anywhere and everywhere is always violent which is very easy to find counterexamples for that invalidate the claim.
Granting that (entirely optional) national ID card for one. Another is acting as a witness in various situations (eg. someone hits your car and you or they call the police to take written statements and observations on the spot so that it isn't just your vs the other guy's claims two months later in court about who has to pay damages). Guiding traffic (as opposed to observing or giving tickets) in case of major disruptions (eg. an accident requires redirecting traffic to prevent further casualties). Taking criminal complaints. Handling lost and found goods (a typical example would be finding some person's lost wallet and taking it to the police station).
Yes, one of police's duties is to enforce the state's monopoly on violence but that's far from the only thing they do. It may be that it's the only thing they do in some places but that's not part of the definition of police, just a feature of policing in that specific place (the way police behave in US vs Europe differs massively and unless I'm severely mistaken even the difference between the police in US vs Canada is striking).
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