I agree that retired generals primarily carried this message to avoid a formally "rogue" military. Possibly unprecedented, would be interesting to know if there are any parallels. — boethius
↪ernestm Data across counties for a single year doesn’t help, we need data over time, for anywhere besides the US, or for the world globally.
The point of all of this is that there is already a well-known explanation for violent crime dropping (in principle anywhere, but definitely in the US) since 1990, one independent of anything to do with police or guns. That is a counterpoint to your claim that it went down in that time period because of increased police in that period.
You claimed that is hasn’t gone down elsewhere. (Which it should, if it is all about atmosphere lead). I can’t find any data on trends over time elsewhere. You presumably have some, if you’re making a claim about it. I’d just like to see it. — Pfhorrest
The sheer volume of work involved can be overwhelming at times. I remember working 64-hour weeks doing mandatory overtime. That’s not healthy. That’s why eventually I made a choice between my job and my health, and I chose the latter. You can see how qualified candidates will leave their job or lateral to other police departments because of the underfunding situation. — Wolfman
(from here).During my tenure in law enforcement, I protected women from domestic abusers, arrested cold-blooded murderers and child molesters, and comforted families who lost children to car accidents and other tragedies. I helped connect struggling people in my community with local resources for food, shelter, and counseling. I deescalated situations that could have turned violent and talked a lot of people down from making the biggest mistake of their lives. I worked with plenty of officers who were individually kind, bought food for homeless residents, or otherwise showed care for their community.
The question is this: did I need a gun and sweeping police powers to help the average person on the average night? The answer is no. When I was doing my best work as a cop, I was doing mediocre work as a therapist or a social worker. My good deeds were listening to people failed by the system and trying to unite them with any crumbs of resources the structure was currently denying them.
....And consider this: my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender? Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?
To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it’s hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn’t have prevented a problem before it started.
f you take a knee does that help any black that you know? Would it not be better to act in a way that directly helps someone black, to reach out and touch them? But to do that you would need to know someone black or live within the vicinity of blacks. If that was the case then to take a knee would be superfluous.
If you’re taking a knee as an act of rebellion then what’s been achieved? Taking a knee only works if the media report on it. If it was effective then it could be done at your gate?
So are such gestures meaningful or feel-good moments for people who having nothing to do with the lives of blacks? — Brett
So one breaks that tradition as a black man by kneeling, to show that one is not on an equal footing, but shows a subservient service. In this way it shows respect but also inequality. — unenlightened
In the past I don't think there would have been enough of a temptation to re-write the narrative in real time (it's all very well denying history, but denying the present is a lot harder). But in the modern age, dictating reality through filtered social media images has become not only easy but the standard. I think this changes the way these symbolic actions are used, hence the hypocrisy we see. — Isaac
What I cannot respect is claiming to be outraged and insulted - that gesture symbolises a guilty conscience and a complete lack of respect for humanity. — unenlightened
Who do you mean by this? Those who are outraged at Kaepernick’s actions or those who conceal their guilty conscience by being too fervent in their protests? — Brett
I'm arguing about ideas on a philosophy forum, your impact on the world is a complete irrelevance. — Judaka
A narrative on race differences that assigns attributes, intentions and actions to races. Which elicits, promotes and validates opinions on races - and racism. — Judaka
There's been a LOT of discussion of race relations in recent weeks, and as usual the vast majority of the discussion focuses on emotion and vague calls for various kinds of largely unspecified change. We are told we are supposed to take race relations very very seriously, which is good, but apparently not seriously enough to actually do anything big and specific about race relations problems.
So, this thread will attempt to replace a pattern of vague emotional statements with a policy proposal which is both ambitious and specific.
In the spirit of getting serious, let's try to do more than just fire off some opinions and on the spot analysis provided as fast as we can type. Read that sentence again please.
Instead, I'm hoping you can help me nail down the price tag for the following proposal.
PROPOSAL: Every black American and American Indian should be provided totally free education (tuition, books, living expenses, everything) for any educational experience which can boost their income earning potential. This plan should continue until such time as the vast wealth gap between these groups and whites is erased. The plan should be funded by the richest 1%, that is, those who have most of the money and who have benefited most from America's rigged system.
Here are the kind of questions I hope we will address:
1) How much would such a plan cost? How many people are we trying to serve and approximately how much money is required to serve them as defined above?
2) What would the impact of such a plan be on the 1%? Would they barely notice? Would their economic position be crushed? How much money do they have, and how much of that would such a plan take from them?
If you don't like this plan and would prefer another one, ok, no problem. In that case, please start your own thread outlining your own plan. Thank you. — Nuke
Yes I absolutely get that. And to stand next to him, but not imitate him. When Democrats go down on at knee in the Capital then you know the gesture has been stolen.
. (Essay One)Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism. Such expressions are not a threat but rather a bulwark to the neoliberal project that has obliterated the social wage, gutted public sector employment and worker pensions, undermined collective bargaining and union power, and rolled out an expansive carceral apparatus, all developments that have adversely affected black workers and communities. Sure, some activists are calling for defunding police departments and de-carceration, but as a popular slogan, Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism. And the ruling class agrees.
(Essay Two)The focus on racial disparity both obscures the nature and extent of the political and strategic challenges we face and in two ways undercuts our ability to mount a potentially effective challenge: 1) As my colleague, Marie Gottschalk, has demonstrated in her most important book, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, the carceral apparatus in its many manifestations, including stress policing as well as the many discrete nodes that constitute the regime of mass incarceration, has emerged from and is reproduced by quite diverse, bipartisan, and evolving complexes of interests, some of which form only in response to the arrangements generated and institutionalized by other interests. Constituencies for different elements of the carceral state do not necessarily overlap, and their interests in maintaining it, or their favored components of it, can be material, ideological, political, or alternating or simultaneous combinations of the three.
Challenging that immensely fortified and self-reproducing institutional and industrial structure will require a deep political strategy, one that must eventually rise to a challenge of the foundational premises of the regime of market-driven public policy and increasing direction of the state’s functions at every level toward supporting accelerating regressive transfer and managing its social consequences through policing. 2) It should be clear by now that the focus on racial disparity accepts the premise of neoliberal social justice that the problem of inequality is not its magnitude or intensity in general but whether or not it is distributed in a racially equitable way. To the extent that that is the animating principle of a left politics, it is a politics that lies entirely within neoliberalism’s logic.
If you want to move the Overton window any way or to do something to correct social injustices or problems, I think the way isn't to go full forward to a situation where idiotic culture wars discourse prevails. This is the way how to lose focus, how start eroding that consensus that would exist in condemning excessive use of force. To Put this in a different way, in order to erode the consensus of outrage and keep the status quo, anything that will divide people to the old lines we've seen will do the trick.If we care about the rightward shift of the Overton window, we should care about things that shift it left too. — fdrake
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