EPTUS Politics Mega-thread - Page 2397
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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets. Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source. If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread | ||
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Jockmcplop
United Kingdom9486 Posts
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Sr18
Netherlands1141 Posts
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Velr
Switzerland10640 Posts
Antifa itself is not really a structured organisation. | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States22991 Posts
Who are people thinking they are going to turn to when the police and proud boys/neo-nazis/etc start fucking up their lives too? | ||
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ZerOCoolSC2
8960 Posts
On June 06 2020 04:02 IgnE wrote: You've put a lot of effort into evading questions while casting aspersions about lack of effort. I mostly see good faith questions being posed to you that you don't seem to know how to answer. I don't know why this is, and I don't expect you to write a treatise, but you could at least provide a limited answer that advances the discussion rather than repeating the same statements. If people don't understand those statements, repeating them won't help. If you don't want to talk about it then stop responding to all these people. I want to see your answers but I don't want to see 3 pages of people going back and forth saying "what do you mean tho." I take your reluctance to link an easily obtainable google result to be a reluctance to endorse any of the popular google results. And if that's the case, then googling a popular result won't help them figure out what your views are, will it? I for one think "abolish the police" is a stupid slogan to use in a popular campaign for sociological and political reasons. It might have a well-defined meaning in narrow contexts but tossing it around casually is just a way to stoke conflict and misunderstanding. Consider: you and others have already pointed out how little (suburban, educated, home-owning, white) people know about "real police work." That implies that "police" already has a flexible semantic content, and that just because people support "the police" there is no logical connection between unqualified support for the determinable content "police" and unqualified support for the determinate content "police" that you want to abolish. So people supporting the "police" (determinable) does not mean they support the "police" (determinate) and the conflation of these two has only led to (sometimes violent) misunderstandings. Look at the limited support libertarian-leaning republicans have given to reducing police budgets and limiting police mission statements recently. Anyone else waiting for a response to this or have we moved on? | ||
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ChristianS
United States3187 Posts
On June 06 2020 23:43 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote: Anyone else waiting for a response to this or have we moved on? I’m certainly interested in one but to be fair, I’d take my time to write it, too | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States22991 Posts
On June 07 2020 00:03 ChristianS wrote: I’m certainly interested in one but to be fair, I’d take my time to write it, too I'm happy to pick up the discussion on abolition (which seems centered on either better understanding my personal views on it or having me lecture [mostly field the thread's curiosities like an abolition concierge] on it). But the answer to why I haven't responded is right there in his post. If people don't understand those statements, repeating them won't help. If you don't want to talk about it then stop responding to all these people. To forward the discussion though, Trainrunnef was on the right track and I'd pick it up there. I suggested: On June 05 2020 23:49 GreenHorizons wrote: If people want to engage in good faith on abolishing the police we should start with the roles they think police are indispensable for and how much of police activity that composes. That way when talking about how to replace that function + Show Spoiler + (could replace it with giving people cotton candy, not seriously because it wouldn't be effective [probably not much worse than what we have], but to illustrate it doesn't have to be replaced with police) and because I foresaw a response like train's (which I appreciate btw and if you haven't found what you asked for in PM I'll give you a lead) I preemptively tried to clarify something I find important. ... it'll probably be useful to ask people if they see distinctions between a parking lot attendant, a bar bouncer, a hall monitor, a sports referee, the people behind the counter at the DMV, etc. and police? Or do people see those all as synonymous with "law enforcement" or "police"? Which led us to train's quality attempt to advance the thread in this discussion:I would add 2 new items to cover the rest of their responsibilities. the items you mention like enforcing civil writs etc. can be more or less covered by the revised #4. 1. Investigate crimes that have already taken place 2. Intervene in crimes currently in progress 3. Apprehend individuals currently wanted in suspicion of a crime 4. Apprehend individuals who have violated some court mandated agreement. 5. Assist members of the community 6. Provide security at large city/state run events This is better than dealing with 20 "what about psychos?!" "but muh stuff!?" type questions, which is why I opted to simply not respond on this until other discussions were petered out and there'd be no complaining for me engaging on the topic (there will be anyway). So I mentioned I'd like the roles they think police are indispensable for and how much of police activity that composes So the follow up to move this forward would be, is train's list that? If not let's get it there. The problem is that I can't impose onto you guys what it is YOU believe the police are indispensable for or how YOU believe police spend their time and resources. I also still don't know if people see distinctions between a parking lot attendant, a bar bouncer, a hall monitor, a sports referee, the people behind the counter at the DMV, etc. and police? Or do people see those all as synonymous with "law enforcement" or "police"? Which will clearly be important in discussing train's (5. Assist members of the community). IgnE and plenty of others have told me to drop it in situations like this (hence not responding to the previous mentions or his comment generally). How we move forward from here is up to you guys, but I'm fine with either. I'm just saying this so people don't feel as though I don't want to discuss abolition, I've just set my terms (and demonstrated it was for good reason now with train's comment) and am fine leaving it at that. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15473 Posts
https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2020/06/05/city-commissioner-jo-ann-hardesty-says-portland-will-defund-two-more-police-units/ The entire tree is rotten. Not a bad apple, a fundamentally shit institution filled with some of the worst people I have ever had the displeasure of speaking with. Chop the tree down and plant something ethical. | ||
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ChristianS
United States3187 Posts
I mean, not that I have any special insight or expertise, but I think there’s a few separate questions here, one being “what do we think state enforcement of laws should look like?” and another being “how do we get there?” To the first: it seems to me the modern police apparatus is born out of, essentially, military tradition. There’s obvious similarities in the emphasis on rank, following orders of your superior, and weapons training. But it also reflects a certain understanding about what lawbreaking behavior is, how lawbreakers behave, and why. That is, lawbreakers are “bad guys” who know what they’re doing is wrong and illegal, but do it anyway for personal gain. So you punish them. If they try to stop you from punishing them, you take them down with overwhelming force. I think a lot of people are just struggling to imagine any other way to enforce laws without such an apparatus. But my insurance company has rules and regulations too, and they manage to enforce them just fine without the ability to send men with guns to my house. Most non-government organizations do. I’m not saying their enforcement mechanisms are suitable to all law enforcement - some of them even ultimately depend on the ability to call cops to deal with noncompliance - but the point is that it is possible to simultaneously believe “our government needs to be able to set laws and enforce them” and also “this apparatus is not ideally suited to that enforcement task.” As an example of an enforcement task that I don’t think our current apparatus is well-suited to: I have several friends who are in various addiction programs (AA, NA) and a couple that have had DUIs. 12 step programs have more or less the same goal as the justice system here - prevent addicts from engaging in socially destructive behavior - but 12 step programs are geared toward helping people in overcoming their demons, where the justice system is mostly geared toward punishing criminals to deter future malfeasance. There’s been “reform” in this area, kind of. Courts often outsource it to 12 step programs directly by requiring a certain number of meetings, and even if they don’t, your attorney is likely to tell you that having some meetings to submit to the court record will help your case. Courts often also have mandated education programs for DUIs, which I hear are basically more authoritarian and less therapeutic meetings. But given the constant pressure to make DUI punishments more severe, these are usually in addition to, not instead of, fines and jail time. Not every problem is a nail, and not all crime should be addressed with mental health measures like group therapy, but to start, I think it’s worth re-examining the present framework for enforcing laws. | ||
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Uldridge
Belgium4714 Posts
Especially when the unequal society and the relative wealth argument (ferrari's roaring past poor people needs a violent police force) is something I resonate with. It's not AS apparant perhaps in Belgium, but I can see how relative wealth makes people commit crime. So I looked at the institution from a Belgian perspective. I think I did try to get more to the core of the issue by saying we need communities where at the very least - if it's equal and fair - and if we want to strive for that, we need people helping other people because some will always have it hard. But social control is also something important, like someone standing at a desk so people won't just be tempted to steal or not pay or something like that. We can build off of that I thought. However, I've given it more thought and tried to think from a more US perspective, where the glorification of violence, triggerhappiness and the way people in general (perhaps caucasians more than PoC - and men definitely more than women) are brought up from an early age. I'd like to say we've come a long way as a Western civlization and I don't live in the US so I can just look from afar onto the situation, but it seems too much of the state is focused on things I can only call perverse, which in turn outs itself in perverse behavior. Here are a few I can think of to start with which makes your society deeply troubled and needs to be solved before we can start to talk about a new way of law enforcement: 1) Pledging allegiance to the flag is something that feels absurd to me and seems cultish and unhealthy. 2) The entire way people talk about the amendments might be an analogous thing where people are inundated into it so they can cite them like the 10 commandments. I don't think I know literally a singular thing about our Belgium constitution (because there's no need to, we don't have that many issues about it I guess - except for the optimization of the way we live). So this seems to be a systemic issue where there are very large issues which still echo from a civil war that's never really ended. Maybe we can call this the cold civil war which is currently happening? 1 and 2 seem very related but I don't really know how these came about. It's a perversion of patriotism that's seeped into every day life perhaps? It's hubris from helping European countries with its wars and the economic powerhouse the US's become? Chanting USA is also something completely ridiculous to me, but feels like a symptom of this hyperpatriotism. 3) The American Dream, which might seem nice in theory (or not, since people have advocated working less hours makes poeple more productive and happier), has completely created a situation near infrastructural collapse. Especially since your economic model seemingly rewards people for hard work (which it mostly does I think) and many success-stories are based around wealth gathering, it seems that materialism and social status and money are what makes a person successful. It's kind of the same in Belgium, but I don't think we're that extreme in persuing this quest for materialism. Most Flemish people are happy with a house, a garden and a tree (is what we say here). This creates a negative spiral for people that can't keep up with the churning of the economic motor, or have bad luck and sadly, your social net has never developed properly because guess what, you just had to work harder to not be in this financial mess. The fact that medical insurance is still such a problem is a symptom of this fact. The fact you have a prison industrial complex is another one of these symtoms. 4) Relics from the civil war and immigration waves (forced or voluntarily) - I cannot comment very much about how this evolved (and I don't know how correct I am so please correct me if my impressions are wrong), but I think that certain infrastructures have not evolved to a more egalitarian state (legislation being discriminatory - this is something all societies have to deal with, but might be especially pervasive in the US) and segregation being so prominently present still (we have more or less segragated communities, but something like China Town is not a thing we have for example. For instance, in Brussels we have Matonge). All this (I can't think of any more at the moment, but there are probably more) creates a society which is hypercompetitive on an individual level and where everyone should strive for excellence, which creates an enormous burden on the individual which some can't cope with. Communities don't care about one another because "we have to take care of our own" to maximize the chances for certain individual and this has reflected in how the social net has developed (I don't know the intricacies of your bureaucratic institutions, so please correct me if I'm completely misguided here). Somehow police becoming this uncaring for other humans, their peers, might be a distillation of all, or just a few of these issues, which reflect on an individual deciding to become a police officer, which makes it much more likely for them to disregard the life of humans that just look different than themselves. In summary, your nation needs to need extreme cultural overhauls before it can even try to start changing the way a police (how do we stop criminals) does its job properly. I understand most of these things are either obvious to most US citizens or even flat out wrong and I'm happy to learn otherwise, but this is my impression of some of the systemic issues currently plaguing the US. | ||
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Sermokala
United States13816 Posts
Half of them or more have to work nights and never see their families and are constantly squeezed by cut budgets and obliged overtime. Then when they see dead bodies or have to tell a family member their kid or parent is dead the only people they can talk to is other cops. Police departments need a lot more money and to expect people to serve a lot fewer roles. You can renovate the house a lot quicker and a lot cheaper then just burning it down. | ||
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mikedebo
Canada4341 Posts
On June 06 2020 04:16 Wombat_NI wrote: As an aside I think it’d be nice to have a US Politics Megathread reading list. Plenty of books and articles that have helped inform and alter my worldview from this thread over the years but plenty I’ve missed too. Hi! Sorry for the inline necro, but I saw this idea yesterday and really liked it. As a lurker who occasionally jumps in and makes a smartass remark, I have really enjoyed coming back to this thread because compared to pretty much everywhere else I've been on the web, I feel like there's a lot of hard-work good-faith debate that happens in here. (I feel that due to a combination of both position and forum moderation, some posters probably bear more of the burden of making sure the thread stays on track while still being productively challenging than others.) One of the best things I've gotten from this thread has been a series of viewpoints and associated resources that I've been able to look into and start to learn from myself. As an example, early on I picked up this book because of zlefin, and I've poked around Paulo Freire's work due to GH's mentioning it several times. I think it would be pretty cool to have a link in the OP to TL politics "reading list" (from this and potential other politics threads) that we all maintain together. I'd be happy to start a Google doc that we can all request edit on or something, but if there's a more TL-appropriate wiki (like Liquipedia) that we all already have access to, perhaps someone could steer me in that direction and I could start something there? Anyone in for this? I'm happy to do the bulk of the 'admin work' on it. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15473 Posts
On June 07 2020 04:57 Sermokala wrote: It should be acknowledged about how shit of a job being a cop is and why its impossible to recruit people for an inherently mentally and emotionally damaging job. The pay is terrible the training is minimal theres no institutional accountability and everyone you meet hates you. Half of them or more have to work nights and never see their families and are constantly squeezed by cut budgets and obliged overtime. Then when they see dead bodies or have to tell a family member their kid or parent is dead the only people they can talk to is other cops. Police departments need a lot more money and to expect people to serve a lot fewer roles. You can renovate the house a lot quicker and a lot cheaper then just burning it down. Rather than give cops more money, we should be using different groups for different tasks. Cops currently handle a lot of situations and as you say, are not particularly well trained for any of them. We need to have some small number of armed enforcers, but we don't need as many as we have. There should be different people with different skills and background handling the vast majority of what cops actually do. We need to spend way less money on cops and reduce what cops do significantly. The one size fits all approach is clearly very bad for everyone involved. | ||
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Jockmcplop
United Kingdom9486 Posts
On June 07 2020 05:32 Mohdoo wrote: Rather than give cops more money, we should be using different groups for different tasks. Cops currently handle a lot of situations and as you say, are not particularly well trained for any of them. We need to have some small number of armed enforcers, but we don't need as many as we have. There should be different people with different skills and background handling the vast majority of what cops actually do. We need to spend way less money on cops and reduce what cops do significantly. The one size fits all approach is clearly very bad for everyone involved. Imagine how much work you could save cops with a high quality mental health system | ||
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AxionSteel
United States7754 Posts
On June 06 2020 12:45 Wombat_NI wrote: I’ll add my insignificant voice to it wholeheartedly, and believe that when vague equity is met that ‘all lives matter’ will be a topic that will be shifted to. It’s not insignificant, it’s pretty simply this. All lives won’t matter until Black lives actually do. | ||
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farvacola
United States18820 Posts
On June 07 2020 05:10 mikedebo wrote: Hi! Sorry for the inline necro, but I saw this idea yesterday and really liked it. As a lurker who occasionally jumps in and makes a smartass remark, I have really enjoyed coming back to this thread because compared to pretty much everywhere else I've been on the web, I feel like there's a lot of hard-work good-faith debate that happens in here. (I feel that due to a combination of both position and forum moderation, some posters probably bear more of the burden of making sure the thread stays on track while still being productively challenging than others.) One of the best things I've gotten from this thread has been a series of viewpoints and associated resources that I've been able to look into and start to learn from myself. As an example, early on I picked up this book because of zlefin, and I've poked around Paulo Freire's work due to GH's mentioning it several times. I think it would be pretty cool to have a link in the OP to TL politics "reading list" (from this and potential other politics threads) that we all maintain together. I'd be happy to start a Google doc that we can all request edit on or something, but if there's a more TL-appropriate wiki (like Liquipedia) that we all already have access to, perhaps someone could steer me in that direction and I could start something there? Anyone in for this? I'm happy to do the bulk of the 'admin work' on it. I would contribute to such a list fwiw | ||
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Artisreal
Germany9234 Posts
On June 07 2020 04:57 Sermokala wrote: It should be acknowledged about how shit of a job being a cop is and why its impossible to recruit people for an inherently mentally and emotionally damaging job. The pay is terrible the training is minimal theres no institutional accountability and everyone you meet hates you. Half of them or more have to work nights and never see their families and are constantly squeezed by cut budgets and obliged overtime. Then when they see dead bodies or have to tell a family member their kid or parent is dead the only people they can talk to is other cops. Police departments need a lot more money and to expect people to serve a lot fewer roles. You can renovate the house a lot quicker and a lot cheaper then just burning it down. Why hasn't that been done or at least started already? I hear police unions are strong? Idk if that's a naive question? | ||
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Danglars
United States12133 Posts
On June 07 2020 04:57 Sermokala wrote: It should be acknowledged about how shit of a job being a cop is and why its impossible to recruit people for an inherently mentally and emotionally damaging job. The pay is terrible the training is minimal theres no institutional accountability and everyone you meet hates you. Half of them or more have to work nights and never see their families and are constantly squeezed by cut budgets and obliged overtime. Then when they see dead bodies or have to tell a family member their kid or parent is dead the only people they can talk to is other cops. Police departments need a lot more money and to expect people to serve a lot fewer roles. You can renovate the house a lot quicker and a lot cheaper then just burning it down. It does suck for the good cops. It is a very trying job. Every call has potential danger, and all the blood and gore must wear. The trouble with the current era of reform is the police's image. It's all George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Gardner etc. It's all Buffalo, NYPD, LAPD, Minneapolis, DC(mix of agencies) acting cruel towards protesters and journalists. No amount of money spent gives anyone the idea that it will be spent well. Bad cops can be virtually unfirable and tarnish the name of the others. They also get the increased pay and/or benefits. I don't want police pay to increase until politicians and unions change their behavior to confront the lapses. I'm opposed to abolishing and starting over except as a means to put more options of reforming what's currently there on the table. The main reforms should be decertifying the worst police unions (See one writeup here) and changing legislatively/judicially the doctrine of qualified immunity (Bipartisan Legislation is currently being introduced, will hopefully be debated soon. Dissolving police departments in this heat of passion can end very very badly. Particularly for minority businesses and minority residences. | ||
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Nevuk
United States16280 Posts
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewdepietro/2020/04/23/police-officer-salary-state/#3b6a7ad32010 US average is $67,600, for a job that does not require a college degree, has minimal training, and does not have any unusual requirements. If the argument was "Mississippi cops are underpaid", that might be true, but generally speaking, they make really good money. They also get full pension (even if they ridiculously fuck up), can retire early, and have excellent benefits. (I'm not arguing to take any of those things away, just pointing out that compensation is not an issue, generally speaking). The job can be tough, but the prevailing "us vs them" attitude most cops have about themselves and other people is a major contributor to why the job can be so difficult. Thin blue line, qualified immunity, and general awful culture contribute to them being viewed so negatively. The hours definitely suck though, there's no debate about that. There is of course, major regional variance - a rich suburb near me has the average beat officer making at least $75k and doing nothing outside of traffic stops, as there's very little crime, while an inner city cop in MS state is probably dealing with gangs every day for half that amount. edit : I think Danglars has the right idea of how to go about reform, and would add increase the time spent training significantly onto it as well. | ||
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Dan HH
Romania9089 Posts
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