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Recently the US city of New York, decided that BLM protestors that felt victimized by the police preventing from running amok, deserve 21500 USD (28267877.5 KRW) each.
Such a payout somewhat changes the calculus of participating in protests, peaceful or otherwise. Previously by joining a protest one showed willingness to sacrifice time and risk being temporarily detained.
But now the what the Hot Coffee Incident was in common perception notable for, harm suffered being greatly outweighed by compensation, has come true. Thus making protesting a net-gain, unless one views publicly supporting BLM to be so immoral, as there existing no sum high enough for which one would do it.
In related olds, DisruptJ6 protestors, despite alleging molestation going on for a longer period of time, and interfering with bodily autonomy in much more invasive ways, have yet to be given money.
the irony of the hot coffee incident is that liebeck was totally in the right and the mainstream consciousness was that mcdonalds was so unfairly punished
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And a week after the Jan 6 defendants sent their letter, this happened: EDIT: I misread the date; this was re an earlier complaint making the same claims.
And shockingly, the Biden Justice Department found that the conditions their political opponents were being held in were perfectly fine.
... even as a long-term skeptic of journalism, I'm amazed how bad even the Associated Press is, given that this is all public info.
AFAICT, Worrell didn't have a broken wrist but a fifth metacarpal fracture according to the (iffy) doctor's notes or a "broken hand" by his lawyer's claims. Which is kinda a trivial thing, but come on. (and the bigger concern was about what this might predict for the minimally-treated cancer the same defendant was dealing with.)
More seriously, the US Marshall's inspection summary is here. It did not "found the building where 30 Jan. 6 defendants are being held to be sufficient". Indeed, the building's quality itself was very, very far from the top concerns that the Marshall's inspection brought at either the CTF (housing J6 defendants) or the CDF (which held more and more varied defendants. At the CDF: it found poor food quality and limits to food being used punitively, punitive disabling of water for entire blocks for days leading to standing sewage, injuries without corresponding medical or incident reports, and concerted effort by guards to threaten 'snitches'. The DC Deputy Mayor for Public Safety tried to maneuver this as about the CDF building's construction, but he also denied that water had been shut off for days.
This eventually lead to a (toothless) MOU.
Similarly, none of the concerns for the CTF (which housed the J6 defendants) focus on the building's quality, and instead the report just found that "The U.S. Marshal's inspection of CTF did not identify conditions that would necessitate the transfer of inmates from that facility at this time." And the judge's summary makes that distinction pretty clear:
((And that's despite the jail barring entry to the Marshalls during a later day in the inspection, wtf.))
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From the linked NYT article
It does seem like the sort of technicality that could win you a lawsuit if you were arrested for failing to comply with a curfew you were prevented from complying with. That said I haven't carefully read the lawsuit and don't know how accurate the NYT's summary is.
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Why give a conversion to won, of all things? Do we even have regular posters/readers residing in South Korea?
Might be bait to get more replies, which makes no sense in a sequentially sorted forum but neither does anything else I can think of.
Specifying that NY is a city in the US is also kind of odd. Im wondering if a certain language model wrote this comment.
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and at least throw some commas in there for legibility!
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I’m aligned with you politically and share your basic perception of riots and the disparities in the way they’re handled based on political valence. That being said, this is a low-effort and uncharitable post, lacking in argumentative rigor, which does not develop its thesis sufficiently to merit a top-level post.
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Part of a seeming trend of the left benefiting from participating in their protests. Had a girlfriend who got intentionally arrested at a Bay Area protest years ago, maybe for Trayvon Martin, I don't recall. Not only did it not hinder her career to have that on her record, it bolstered her credentials.
Woe be unto thee who is discovered to have been at January 6th or Charlottesville however. I recall news of a guy who worked at a hot dog shop in Berkeley who lost his job after it was discovered he attended the latter.
I think it’s the institutional power differential. People with power like the branding of most blue tribe protests, so they can and often do protect those who protest for the right causes in ways the disempowered right cannot really do. It kinda makes for an interesting tell of which groups and ideologies are ascendant. If people are not harmed socially for participation in a protest, the protest is for a cause the elites agree with. If people get punished socially for protesting, they’re actually fighting the entrenched powers.
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I’ve no doubt that getting arrested is an occasionally valuable social signal. I hear MLK was a criminal, too. Is your only complaint that white supremacists can’t figure out how to leverage it?
Here’s the source for your Berkeley anecdote. Nominative determinism claimed another victim; maybe he was just confused, and thought “It’s okay to be White” meant him in particular?
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Details are needed here, where and how does she detail this incident to bolster her credentials? On her résumé? In what industry?
Nonprofit and tech adjacent Bay Area stuff. Lean In Foundation.
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The police in NYC were pointedly less interested in stopping rioting and looting than in attacking anti-police protestors. Their handling of Floyd protests was textbook anarcho-tyranny, deliberately allowing the spread of lawlessness while concentrating their efforts on the law abiding in order to deter criticism.
The failing here is that the systems of accountability are so anemic that police can continue to routinely violate civil and human rights while obliging taxpayers to foot the bill.
As I noted the last time this was brought up, these are normal conditions. If you have a problem with how Jan 6 rioters have been treated in detention, you have a general problem with how the detention of accused criminals is handled in the US.
This presumes that the Jan 6 protesters are in fact criminals. If they are not, and are being treated like criminals anyway, that is objectionable.
No, it presumes that they have been accused of being criminals. The current process is the process (according to Skibboleth) by which we treat those whose guilt we are still in technical doubt about.
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So, when Group A files a lawsuit and reaches a settlement, some other group which has not filed a lawsuit has somehow been treated unjustly? Perhaps you should wait until Group B files a lawsuit and we see what happens, before you get all outraged.
If we observe disparate outcomes between two social groupings, it's possible that these disparities arise from different behavior on the part of the groups' members. Alternatively, if we also observe that one of the groups enjoys a position of power over the other, and demonstrates strong antipathy for the other, we might consider the hypothesis that the disparities arise from some form of discrimination and oppression.
With a system as complicated as modern society, outcomes are the yardstick by which processes are judged. Failure to design, maintain, and enforce these systems results in people losing confidence in them. Once lost, such confidence is difficult to regain. Priors are established, and shape perception moving forward.
Yes, but only if the two groups are similarly positioned. If Group A gets $X from the settlement of a lawsuit while Group B gets $Y, the difference might have arisen from some form of discrimination and oppression. But if Group B has not yet filed a lawsuit, the hypothesis is nonsensical, because it is premature. That’s why I said OP "should wait until Group B files a lawsuit and we see what happens, before you get all outraged"
It’s also possible that they don’t file a lawsuit because they know how skewed the system is. In a situation where the groups are already obviously treated differently, it makes little sense to go to the expense of hiring a lawyer. A black guy denied entrance to an elite university because he lives in South Africa under apartheid isn’t going to sue the school for it.
Given the judicial system's response to the letter sent by the Jan 6 defendants, color me skeptical.
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Filing a lawsuit is done when the people doing it have a reasonable expectation of winning. I would not have expected to win a lawsuit like the one described in the OP. If right-wing protestors file similar lawsuits, I certainly do not expect them to win. Then too, there is the problem that every situation is perfectly unique. To truly make a claim of equivalence, we need right-wing protestors in the same city, protesting in exactly the same way, at the same time, responded to by the same cops, with the same lawyers arguing the case before the same judge.
Alternatively, people can note that they cannot imagine right-wing protestors being treated in this fashion, and support that argument by looking at the ways right-wing protestors are actually, observably treated, relative to their methods of protesting.
You are appealing to the processes of the system, but people do not trust the system or its processes.
The problem with this is that it is premised on the conclusion being true. More importantly, that was not OP's claim. And even more importantly, see here. And even MORE importantly, a lawsuit has indeed been filed
Well, it was a settlement, not a win, and the amount settled for was quite small, as these things go. The City of Columbus agreed to pay $179,000 each to 32 protestors. Excessive force lawsuits are successfully litigated every day. That's why there are many lawyers who make a living pursuing them.
That is not at all true. As I said, we should wait to see the outcome of their lawsuit. I was criticizing the logic of OP's claim, which is las bad as that of a leftish feloow I knew, who claimed that the courts are biased against his group, because the US Sup Ct rejected an argument that a red state's gerrymandering was unconstitutional, but courts held that New York's map was an illegitimate gerrymander. Never mind that NY's constitution explicitly forbids partisan gerrymandering. Stupidity crosses team lines, apparently.
I understand the argument you're trying to make, but these seem incredibly bad examples.
Worrell's case is available here. Not everything is public, but the available documents and especially the contrast between the the official submitted timeline and this DoC e-mail exchange don't look particularly good for the DoC. The contempt order was transmitted to the Attorney General for the United States, which received the update... and as far as I can tell, has done nothing specific to this case since.
That could even be reasonable: the government has been making various claims portraying him as a the jailhouse equivalent of a vexatious litigant, though I don't know how much the judge believes that. And given the behavior of the DoC, and conditions involving other people at these jails, it's hard to come to a separate conclusion:
Now, that's not Worrell with fingers turning black, or even in the same block as had to be completely pulled of all prisoners. And I hope that the DC Jail victims get some compensation (and some jail officials get some prison time), though from my understanding this can be a bit of a shitshow. But the best he's gotten so far from this was bond and GPS monitoring. Which isn't a small deal! But it does not look like a particularly unusual or severe allowance, either; there's no shortage of cases with far worse than pepper spray getting immediate release on recognizance across the United States, without having to spend multiple months in jail in the meantime.
Quaglin's suit simply didn't survive the motion to dismiss phase, many months ago, and was then mooted by transfers for other cause while he was trying a motion to alter judgement. None of the prayers for relief in the initial complaint (cw: probably a nutjob) involved monetary compensation. I'm having a hard time tracking down the exact status of his case, but it looks like he's lumped under this and his trial may have been delayed by picking a nut of a defense lawyer.
I'm not going to overstate this: these people could be (and probably are) morons on the actual merits. But these are very awkward fits to the sphere of "wait until Group B files a lawsuit and we see what happens".
And the connection to the J6 Defendant Letter seems incorrect. That letter or series of letters was recognized by the courts in September 2022 (see Document 168 Attachment 3, again cw: nutjobs); the Worrell Contempt order was Oct 13, 2021.
Well, the claim was that the about the judicial system's response to complaints about mistreatment, so I think that the judge's response is more germane. After all, NYC didn't agree to do anything, either, until after substantial litigation
Yes, thanks, I misread the date.
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Unjustly? Outraged?
That sure sounds like what the OP was going for, yeah.
I don't see it. I'm not sure how the facts stated in the OP could have been expressed in a more dry and less outraged manner without outright sounding like (the old-school scifi stereotype of) an AI.
From OP:
What it says in the article they linked:
So...prison? You can't expect me to believe that in a forum where people routinely express a desire to murder carjackers and other petty thieves that someone being outraged about moldy food and dirty clothes without pushback is evidence of anything other than blatant tribalism*. Not to mention the use of the word 'molestation' without providing any evidence that they were sexually assaulted in prison - which, for all I know, exists, but they don't link to it and (lest I be accused of not doing my homework again) some basic google searches of 'january 6th protestors prison rape' or 'january 6th protestors sexual assault' only turns up a few cases of the protestors themselves raping children or assaulting women. Or perhaps you'll claim that they used the word 'molested' per the dated 'Alice and Bob arrived at their destination unmolested,' but now the level of mental gymnastics you're expecting from me to imagine that the OP is being fair or charitable exceeds my modest IQ.
From OP:
From the article they linked:
You can also follow a link to videos of the protestors being beaten. Why would you frame them as 'feeling' like they were victimized when they were beaten with batons and pepper sprayed?
From OP:
Between 15 and 30 million people protested that summer. Three hundred are eligible for a payout. Based on the estimates in the NYT article, 180-230 will collect and some other undefined number have already settled. From the evidence provided, OP's argument is that some minute fraction of BLM protestors being paid out makes protesting liberal causes anywhere in the United States a net positive, which is frankly idiotic and ignores all the jail time that BLM protestors did receive:
Do you think OP's inflammatory claims brought a reasonable amount of evidence?
We could have an actual conversation about events - the ping-ponging hypocrisy of conservatives swinging from prison inmates FAFO'd to moral outrage at the in-group suffer, and liberals salivating over the possibility of January 6th rioters being prison-raped. From conservatives being hostile or apathetic towards women's sports to suddenly being outraged that the purity of women's sports might be compromised by trans athletes, and liberals who went from supporting cis-women's leagues to dogpiling women who dare to suggest that trans athletes might have an unfair biological advantage. We could have, and have had, more nuanced discussions about both the January 6th and BLM riots - although I admit that I was disheartened by them at the time, at least they were better than this.
This is what the community has come to - low effort, inflammatory posts bashing left wing topics du jour with minimal evidence receiving virtually no pushback or rebuttals. And frankly, most posts along these lines aren't even worth engaging with.
*For the record - prison rape and poor prison conditions are bad, and neither the J6 or BLM rioters should be raped, starved or otherwise abused.
More nuanced is a relative term, not a full-throated endorsement of the discourse. There's plenty of dogs to go 'round, and failing to clear even that bar is impressive.
I used to try harder, particularly when I was temporarily stuck in an easy job that was a waste of my time. These days, too many pokers in the fire, too many buns in the oven and a general questioning of whether arguing on the internet (even in a place like this) is the most prosocial thing I could be doing at the moment.
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Oh my goodness. They weren’t masked? The humanity! Imagine not using a device that had about zero chance of doing anything especially when outside! Clown world.
Yeah, I chuckled at that line too. It seems a bit late in the game to be clutching pearls about unmasked police officers.
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Carjackers are not petty thieves by any standards.
I apologize, I meant it in the colloquial sense. I was unaware there was a strict legal definition.
I can either edit my post or you can take this as an admission of error. @desolation
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You know, those numbers for jailed BLM protestors are also really, really, small.
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Please spare us the sneering that you found insufficient push back on a top level post you disliked in, checks watch, 4 hours in the middle of the week during American working hours.
Have you considered that
and
are related? Consider that rather than us all being frothing culture warriors that many people just didn't have much productive to say about this topic or interest in details and collapsed the post. Criticize what is said for sure, I find value in your posts when you do so, but do you not see the failure mode of chastising this place for not pre-emptively steel manning every possible argument? Should we take your lack of comment on some hot topic as tacit approval of some terrible argument?
Yes. I had written a long rebuttal, but maybe we'll let another comment wither on the vine and for today and I'll knock off complaining about the community for another 6 months or so until I lose my temper again.
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... yeah. Selective outrage of prison mistreating Jan 6 protestors just sets you up to get owned by "... Yeah, that's what prison is like, coercive authority is inherently oppressive, we on the left support better prison conditions for everyone (e.g. this), while you only support it for your team". “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.", specifically. Sure, that quote is, when examined, a contentless dunk (most reactionaries are conservatives are ok with harsh treatment of white or rich gangsters too), basically just "conservatives are mean therefore they hate minorities" ... but it doesn't help anyone to believe dumb things and it fuel!
Prison is supposed to suck. What we all gain from coercing people to not steal, commit fraud, or undertake any one of the tens of thousands of harmful activities proscribed by law is a thousand time the harm done to those imprisoned, however you account for it. And the harm done by being in prison, being unable to work and play, is a hundred times worse than any extra harm done by moldy food or occasional health problems. So "the food is moldy", "it smells like piss", "medical care is a few decades behind the state of the art" - maybe they should be fixed, but it's just not that bad, whether for j6 protestors or random criminals. Things like this are used to stoke passion by any political team for those 'mistreated in prison' - but even if prisoners were kept in pristine conditions with spotless white walls to stare at, that's still equally terrible for anyone innocent and equally necessary for the guilty.
This isn't a prison. It is a jail, where people, in particular the people in question, are being held pending trial. Such persons, who have not been convicted of anything, should not be subjected to conditions which "suck" more than is inherent in being imprisoned.
Even in prison, people have the right to a minimum level of decent treatment.
Bottom line: If the claims are true, the conditions should be ameliorated and those who have been subjected to them should be compensated.
I’m curious what that standard should be (not as a matter of law but policy)
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But what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Less pithily, if you want to suggest that the OP was framing things in a misleading way, likely in a naked attempt to fit things into a false narrative he prefers, that seems perfectly cromulent and also likely correct, and I didn't need you to help me figure that out. That's still a very very far cry from stoking outrage.
You asked how it could be less edgy. CPAR quoted the actual text, which was less inflammatory, no? Not seeing the problem here.
No.
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From the post you replied to:
From your first post:
From your most recent post:
So, what's your argument? Is it that Gdanning is unfairly accusing the OP of being outraged/claiming that the J6 protestors are being abused? Is it that OP didn't use inflammatory language in their post? Or is it that OP isn't stoking outrage?
My reply illustrated how the facts could have been expressed in a more neutral and less outraged manner. I pointed out specific words that misrepresented the facts in an inflammatory way, and gross overinterpretation of facts to 'stoke outrage' (see section on argument about protesting being a net-positive activity). I conclude with ways we could have had a more nuanced conversation rather than angry, low-effort posts.
By my lights, you're conflating less neutral with more outrage. You illustrated how it could have been more neutral, less biased, more accurate, all those things. I disagree that this means that somehow it's less stoking outrage than the existing overwhelmingly milquetoast OP.
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Yes, I remember the "conversations" on reddit, because they were a lesson in effective gaslighting and manipulation. Month after month of tactical arguments msde in bad faith by accounts that went back to their home subs and gloated about how good they were at propaganda.
Those tricks don't work here, thank god.
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I have stated in a number of conversations that I believe that powerful people on the left wanted the residents of cities to suffer from riots and looting during the summer of 2020 and I consider this further evidence of that belief. Riot control forces are capable of preventing most of these riots from getting out of control, but they are often prevented from doing so either by direct orders, deliberate understaffing, or disincentives to action. For example, recall the Kenosha riots, which started after Wisconsin governor Tony Evers egged on unrest, stating that, "what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country. Following that:
So just enough was done to say, "boy golly, gee whiz, I sent the Guard when they asked", but only after encouraging riots and spending days treating the burning as basically deserved, and even then they were wildly understaffed. Only when a few of the rioters were shot was anything done to stop this.
It's actually something of a credit to DeBlasio that he apparently didn't want his city to be burned and looted, but it turns out that there are plenty of people on his side that are more than happy to provide some further disincentives for officers that attempt to stop rioters.
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