Generally agree with what you said, but "Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs" is a terrible thing to say completely unqualified like that.
If you don't understand why, consider that crime rates are known to be higher among the black population in the US but generalizing that to "black people are known to be abusive, violent thugs" would be equally wrong and hateful. You can make a point about the potential for abuse without name-calling an entire group of people like that.
That's exactly why I didn't use Republicans as an example; because I know there's lots of people on the Democrat side who consider that perfectly acceptable rhetoric as long as it's not targeting them.
I maintain that this sort of vitriolic language is unacceptable no matter what group it's targeting, unless your goal is to start a flame war (or a real war) rather than actually solve problems.
So your position is that it's also unacceptable to say "cartel members are violent, abusive thugs"? I don't think I agree with that.
I do think it's a bit strong to say police are all violent, abusive thugs.
But there are many police officers who share unfortunate characteristics with violent, abusive thugs, and nearly all of their fellow supposedly-good officers are unwilling to call them out and enforce any sort of consequences for being violent, abusive thugs. That's nearly as bad, in my book.
So maybe let's stop policing (heh) people's specific language, and instead talk about the actual issues.
Well for one thing, I don't think "starting a war" against the cartels would necessarily be a bad idea.
And my concern isn't with the language used, but the casually hateful attitude being expressed. It's not constructive, and probably actively harmful to just be casually demonizing your neighbors like that.
Great question! I wouldn't call it acceptable (thought it sure seems to be widely accepted), but I would argue it's certainly not equally bad. Put differently: I take issue with your specific example but agree with your larger point.
I think bringing race into it conflates separate issues. On the other hand, I really like the "cartel members" vs "[opposing political party]" example! It feels like these obviously shouldn't be equally bad, but explaining why is harder than I expected...
> Generally agree with what you said, but "Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs" is a terrible thing to say completely unqualified like that.
That's true, it should be qualified “within a subculture of violent thuggery, in organizations which lack any unifying focus other than the application of force, and which both protect them from and are themselves insulated from effective accountability for abuses.”
"Black people are abusive, violent thugs, within a subculture of violent thuggery, in cities which lack..."
Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in order to demonize an entire group of people.
If you want to talk about systemic issues in our policing system, then talk about those issues. Calling people groups derogatory names isn't constructive.
And honestly, given the struggles police forces in the US are having with staffing, it does appear that cops are becoming increasingly marginalized. Especially since the primary driver behind the decline in recruitment seems to be the risk of social stigmatization.
Or maybe there's something to the idea of police being a corrupt, rotten profession, full of people who either a) do violent, thuggish things, b) help cover up the abuses, or c) stand by quietly, too cowardly to ensure the awful ones among them face consequences for what they've done.
I think police as a job, as it currently exists, absolutely should be socially stigmatized. They have the ability to clean up their act, and show that they are worthy of the power and authority we give them, but they choose not to.
Or maybe people like you just hate authority and will always portray anyone in positions of authority as being corrupt?
Except if it was you in charge, of course?
Like I asked you in a different reply: what's the prevalence rate of these bad behaviors? "Full of people" seems to imply that you think it's a majority? I can confidently state that you cannot back this up with evidence, because it appears the only evidence you have is anecdotal, and likely anecdotes you actively select for in order to feed your confirmation bias.
I'll note that you didn't answer my question, either. Coordinated deflection like this is not a sign that you have a well-formed argument
define "anecdote" as it pertains to your argument - because i have literally hundreds of videos of police misconduct, from just 2020-2022. I stopped collecting them because i can't move the needle.
here's where people go "oh but there's 800,000+ uniformed law enforcement in the US, and you have 100 videos, big whoop". How many videos would it take? We've only been able to really easily record the police doing misconduct for 15-20 years, depending on how you parse "easily record." So how many videos would it take? And of those videos, how many would i have to listen to someone say "the victim of police misconduct should have just [...]"?
How many lawsuits against cities and departments would you need to read before it made a dent?
because using mean words to talk about the police isn't punching down. There's a difference between punching down on marginalized groups, compared to speaking against / badly about authority figures.
That doesn't really answer the question. Perhaps I should rephrase:
You were replying to someone who stated this, I believe:
> Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in order to demonize an entire group of people.
To which you responded:
> Cops aren't a marginalized group.
Why does being a marginalized group matter in this context? Why does not being a "marginalized group" mean it's okay to overgeneralize and/or demonize? What is a "marginalized group" in this context? Why is one not allowed to overgeneralize and demonize a marginal group, but one is allowed to for groups that do not hold this status?
The more meta question is: Why is overgeneralizing in order to demonize a group of people acceptable in any circumstance? I don't think it is, because once you start carving out exceptions, all you end up doing is just justifying and reinforcing your own biases.
Nope, doesn't clear anything up. Redeclaring your statement doesn't really answer any questions that arose from your original statement.
I still have these questions: What is a marginalized group, and why is that important? Why does being an "authority figure" mean it's okay to overgeneralize?
You're declaring these to be important factors in whether or not it's "okay" to overgeneralize specifically for the purposes of demonizing an entire population. I'm arguing that generalizing like this is never acceptable. In fact, I'm arguing that doing this is actively harmful to the goal you ostensibly are serving by demonizing this group in particular (unless you have ulterior motives, I suppose).
You have yet to explain why it's acceptable, and what makes it acceptable. Further, you should explain why overgeneralizing like this is useful, and how it actually furthers your goal.
Actually, I'm not sure what your goal is, other than to spread hate?
this is a really poor comparison. mentioning crime rates by race is considered highly racist because it's a dog-whistle to frame it as "this person is more likely to do this because of their race" instead of framed in a socioeconomic context and the result of long-term systemic racism and oppression.
cops are not a race. cops have extremely high levels of problematic behavior across all ages, races, etc. it's a good thing to call out the problematic nature of cops as a group since they have a literal monopoly on violence and are massively unaccountable for the use of that violence.
the argument "you can't call black people violent, therefore you also can't call cops violent" makes absolutely no sense to me
There's a difference between "black people in x city are y% more likely per capita to commit violent crime" and "black people are violent thugs". One is a statistical reality that can be used in a constructive context. ("Okay, so what can we do to reduce this crime rate? Better education? Community outreach? Etc.") the other is probably just bigotry.
The same goes for the difference between "Police departments in the US have y% higher rate of excessive use of force than other countries" and "police are violent thugs".
No black person chooses to be born black. Casting judgement on any individual black person for the actions of other black people is unethical for that reason.
Every single cop chose to be there, chooses to continue being a cop every day despite constant and repeated examples of blatant corruption, bad behavior, literal thuggery, planting evidence, and the Good Ol' Boys network endemic to the institution. They are culpable for that choice. Continuing to be a cop in this environment (specifically where there is zero chance to "reform it from the inside" due to structural problems). Ask any ex-cop why they left. The system is completely broken and designed to empower cops to be thugs without consequence.
"Good cops" don't stay cops because they get bullied by literal cop gangs to either become a bad cop and do thuggery or to get the fuck out. There are no Good cops.
> No black person chooses to be born black. Casting judgement on any individual black person for the actions of other black people is unethical for that reason.
Casting judgement on any individual for the actions of other individuals who share characteristics with them is generally unethical, period. The individual's ability to choose the particular identifying characteristics shouldn't be relevant.
I'm pretty sure you don't want to be making the argument that it's ethical to judge people based on elements of their identity, so long as those elements have been selected by that person's choice!
> I'm pretty sure you don't want to be making the argument that it's ethical to judge people based on elements of their identity, so long as those elements have been selected by that person's choice!
That's a strange argument to make. If the chosen identity element is associated with negative characteristics, then it stands to reason that it's, well, reasonable to judge them based on those characteristics.
If it quacks, it's probably a duck. If it wears a police uniform it probably a) does bad stuff, b) enables cover-ups of that bad stuff, or c) lacks the courage to speak out against the bad stuff. This isn't because of their identity, it's because this is a characteristic that is widely documented to be incredibly common among cops.
People can choose to not adopt identity elements that have bad reputations. People can't choose not to be black.
So, someone who chooses to undergo gender reassignment therapy can be judged based on the characteristics of all people who have made the same choice?
Someone who chooses to wear heavy makeup and revealing clothing while standing on the street waiting for their Uber can be fairly judged to be a prostitute?
I don't think this is the argument you're making, but this is how the standard you are setting can be applied.
I don't think the element of choice in identity elements makes a difference either way. I think you should just avoid overgeneralizing, period.
Instead of, you know, inventing reasons why is fine to overgeneralize when you want to, but not when you don't want others to.
> If it wears a police uniform it probably a) does bad stuff, b) enables cover-ups of that bad stuff, or c) lacks the courage to speak out against the bad stuff.
"Probably"? Based on what prevalence rate? What percentage of police officers engage in each of these behaviors? You're making a wild assumption here, likely with nothing more than your own anecdotal understanding of these issues.
I think it's more likely you just have a media diet that is high in examples of these behaviors happening, but without the context that explains exactly how often they're actually happening.
I'm not denying that these things happen, and happen frequently! But there are a lot of police officers in the US alone, and even 1% of them doing each of these things is a large number of absolute cases. But a rate of 1% isn't sufficient to generalize to the entire population. At a rate of 10%, I would probably still refrain from extrapolating to the whole, but would start to question individual interactions, and would start to be sympathetic to this kind of generalization.
But due to the lack of evidence around prevalence of bad behavior, I'm skeptical of anyone who generalizes to this degree, especially given the poor quality of information anecdotally collected from the Internet.
> People can choose to not adopt identity elements that have bad reputations. People can't choose not to be black.
If people never adopt identity elements that have bad reputations, how can those reputations ever be improved? If you want the quality of policing to improve, the last thing your want to do is convince everyone who wants to make a difference that they shouldn't even try. If you want policing to improve, you should be encouraging the best people you know to join up and to force out the bad behavior through reform.
People cannot choose to be black, but they can choose to make an effort to destroy the negative stereotypes associated with their race.
You seem to be arguing that generalizations are always externally imposed and immutable, neither of which is true. Your argument is actively damaging to any efforts to improve the perceptions of both groups.
People don’t choose to have gender dysphoria, and you can’t judge someone for receiving healthcare to manage their well-being. If you want to make the argument that gender affirming care isn’t healthcare then kindly don’t respond because I’m not trying to invite hate and transphobia.
I really cannot be bothered to respond to the rest of this because you’re starting from a place of not being familiar enough with this topic at all for this to be a meaningful exchange. I really hope you make time to educate yourself better on this topic and do so with an open mind and compassion
> People don’t choose to have gender dysphoria, and you can’t judge someone for receiving healthcare to manage their well-being.
I phrased what I said much more precisely than this. I said nothing about gender dysphoria, and was instead specifically talking about a therapy one might choose to undergo as treatment. Medical treatments should always be a choice, right?
But no, instead you decide to completely misrepresent what I said, and used then use that single misrepresentation as basis to dismiss my entire argument.
You claim to want a meaningful exchange, but this is how you choose to do it? This makes me skeptical you're interested in "meaningful exchange" in the first place.
If you don't understand why, consider that crime rates are known to be higher among the black population in the US but generalizing that to "black people are known to be abusive, violent thugs" would be equally wrong and hateful. You can make a point about the potential for abuse without name-calling an entire group of people like that.