Please do not post Andy Ngo's content. He orchestrates with white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys to create these stories by selective editing and replacing context with his desired bigoted message payload.
He has been caught doing this many times the last couple summers here's been here with Joey Gibson and his band of goons. Go look up that story if you wanna find out just how reliable Andy is about who the "good" guys are.
I watched Police brutality videos on Github, someone put together a compendium of it.
We need a similar compendium of brutal protestors instigating violence and promoting things like this, too? No?
I feel like there is a lot of momentum behind BLM movement, I personally support the cause and social changes. But, I am getting an impression of hypocritical aspects of this momentum and not addressing problems when they arise. Saying anything against BLM in the bay area is like a social suicide, I would lose friends. I personally think that BLM is extremely disorganized and doesn't have good leadership to make the change happen. BLM is doesn't know diplomacy and strategy.
That's because BLM isn't a single organization. There doesn't appear to be leadership because there is no power structure or organization from which one could lead. It's literally grassroots.
As for diplomacy and strategy, we're talking about a subset of society that has been systematically failed by society for centuries. That they don't have diplomacy that meets the expectations of the powers-that-be should not be a surprise.
If a few bad apples discreet an entire social movement, shouldn't a few bad apples also discredit the entire law enforcement apparatus (and even the entire criminal justice system) in the US? Can't have it both ways, at least not while maintaining a logically consistent argument.
> But, I am getting an impression of hypocritical aspects of this momentum and not addressing problems when they arise
The GP's article is terribly written and dripping with bias and it still has a large section covering other protestors stepping in, helping the man, and policing their own.
> We need a similar compendium of brutal protestors instigating violence and promoting things like this, too? No?
A basic internet search would yield this for you.
> I personally think that BLM is extremely disorganized and doesn't have good leadership to make the change happen.
The sibling comment already covered this, but if you find yourself thinking about things like this, it could help to do some research. Searching for "BLM leadership" to figure out who you think won't be effective at making a change will yield sources like [1] and help give better background on what is actually going on here.
> How do you get people to obey the law, in a way that is safer for all concerned?
Start by not shooting at them, especially when the protest is legal.
Escalation is the big problem here, nobody is complaining about using rubber bullet against dangerous armed people. They're complaining about using rubber bullet against people in a non-violent protest. If the police is using significantly more force than their "targets", there's an escalation problem
I don't think they are using significantly more force. Looking at the riots across the US, the police appear in general to be showing an almost saintly level of restraint, and being killed and severely injured as a result.
Wow, you'll have to provide extraordinary proof to this extraordinary claim that goes against so much evidence.
What I've seen (from outside the US) is the exact opposite, police shooting, beating and killing protestors while they were peacefully protesting (or medics, or journalists, or people in their own homes).
This has to be trolling. The whole thing started because of the police literally committing murder, and in most cases closing ranks and getting away with it.
I strongly disagree. Footage from protest after protest shows police firing weapons into crowds, causing permanent injuries with zero accountability.
As far as I am aware, no active police officers have been killed by protesters. (One was killed by a right wing extremist.) Meanwhile, several protesters have been killed by police at these protests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests#Violence...
The police aren't supposed to punish people. The courts are supposed to determine guilt and and punishment, as everyone has a right to a jury trial.
Tear gas, rubber bullets, and any other form of violence is only supposed to be used when people are somehow in real danger. That's why the police often insist they are "protecting themselves", as they tear gas protesters who weren't doing anything remotely threatening. They're pretending that they're obeying the law.
The medical tent targeting is currently being investigated by the Seattle OPA, and has several eyewitness accounts. We'll see where the OPA lands (though, the OPA is composed of mostly police officers, so....)
What would be better? Stand down. Let the protests protest. Listen to the concerns, make changes.
What would be better, from the perspective of a non-US person, would be having a de-militarised police force who were trained in de-escalation and the application of force (any force) as a last resort.
> How do you get people to obey the law, in a way that is safer for all concerned?
When the law states that you cannot leave your home after 1pm in the afternoon, or after 7pm at night, I do not think that any level of enforcement, of any kind, will prevent Americans from breaking the law.
Most of the lethal and harmful force used by the police in the US recently was at the excuse of the peaceful protesters being out "past curfew" even at 2pm in the afternoon. The simplest way to prevent that violence would have been to not employ a curfew to the citizens at insane and unruly hours - or frankly, at all.
The next simplest way would be to reduce the anger felt by the population at the police. That would mean that nationwide, there would have to have been coordinated police action to not needlessly harm and kill peaceful protesters. The last month saw the opposite strategy from police, seemingly coordinated because it was so ruthlessly violent across the country, nearly all stemming from unprovoked police actions.
Even better actually, would be to stop the systemic racism and police terrorism and brutality in the first place. Ensure that no police officer is likely or even able to randomly kill someone they have detained, like George Floyd. Especially when there is clear racial bias in the police departments across the country that harms black and minority groups.
Less police violence, less racism, less systematic oppression of the already oppressed == A lot more law-obeying citizens.
Gassing and shooting innocent civilians indiscriminately after killing an unarmed-and-already-detained black man is not a path to peace or an orderly, law-obeying society.
What world am I in Christ. You got a bunch of people protesting. The cops put their boots to their throats. And you’re hemming and hawing about them “breaking the law actually” by protesting.
I can’t even begin to see your perspective. These jackbooted thugs suck and all this deflection is weird as hell. You don’t need to beat the living shit out of someone to arrest them that shouldn’t be radical.
>There are a lot of people breaking the law, and we need to reduce that with as little harm as possible.
Cops are the ones breaking the law. The way to "reduce that with as little harm as possible" is to abolish the police and replace them with a public safety department that isn't systematically power hungry, racist, and violent.
You should start looking at the videos. I've seen a couple of unconscious people being kicked in the head this week by "protesters". These people are nothing like law-abiding.
This sounds incisive, but I'm not really smart enough to follow it. Certainly narrative as "story-telling" seems crucially important. And probably like many, it's hard for me to see a really satisfying story coming out of what we're going through. People screaming madly, people being senselessly maimed and killed. It seems more like tragic chaos.
A rough summary: narratives are a form of lossy compression that enable us to make sense of events so that we can plan actions and coordinate with others. In the past, influential and powerful individuals would compress events into a Narrative (basically an authoritative version of history) which although it might have been "false" in some objective sense, and probably oppressed certain groups of people, nevertheless enabled social consensus. But today, much more of what happens is recorded (on video, on social media, etc) into what the author calls the Database. This makes it easy for anyone to point out the flaws in the Narrative. As a result, there is conflict over which of many narrative options should become the authoritative Narrative. This can play out in various ways like censorship (deleting/blocking entries from the Database), rejecting certain items from the Database as being not true, and even faking entries in the Database.
"Lossy compression" is a succinct description. Humans, constrained by finite time and cognitive resources, cannot understand reality at its full resolution. Narratives are compact maps of the territory.
We're living in a second Gutenberg moment. I think that epistemic ecosystems, like biological ones, have information carrying capacities — the aggregate ability of its members to produce, exchange, and use information. We all live in one or more such ecosystems. Think: liberal university-educated Bay Area millennials in technology and the kind of information they produce and exchange within that ecosystem. When the information carrying capacity is exceeded, the ecosystem becomes unstable (Narrative collapse) and has to stabilise by splitting into smaller ecosystems that can support coherent, authoritative Narratives.
I think it's useful to look at the first Gutenberg moment. The mass production of books caused an information explosion that exceeded the information carrying capacity of the Catholic ecosystem and resulted in its fracture into smaller Catholic and Protestant ecosystems that can exert enough power to control Narratives (new capacities). We can see a similar scaled-up phenomenon today where countless novel virtual communities and ideological factions that don't conform to the traditional Left-Right dichotomy emerge and offer people various new, coherent maps to the vastly expanded information territory.
I don't think that availability of more data than what the mainstream narrative can handle in a coherent way is new, nor the existence of people having an inclination to find them and get into trouble due to their will to point to such incongruous "facts".
The main difference, to my mind, is that we now have more direct connections between people all around the world, so the laymen direct inter-influence is potentially greater – although mainstream propaganda also gained much power in width, depth and granularity in the same time.
Yes, there are a larger diversity of data easily accessible with the internet. It doesn't necessarily mean there is a proportionally larger interest in looking at them, let alone time to consult them, digest, and synthesize.
I'm trying to think of some good historical examples of Narrative Collapse before and all I'm coming up with is the Gutenberg Bible and the Protestant Reformation. If that _is_ the pattern, then I really hope it doesn't take the %40+ death toll that the 30-years-war inflicted on Central Europe.
think of the 'cold war'. it's always framed as a 'battle of good and evil' - this is the narrative. hopefully you might agree that the reality was far, far murkier than that - more senseless maiming and killing, so to speak.
unfortunately, as we see currently, simply dismantling narrative itself doesn't seem like a solution to anything, because narratives are more or less the very thing which have driven so much of our history.
you sort of touch on the vital task: making a satisfying story out of what we're going through. the challenge is always finding ways that this story won't justify or entrench shitty elements of society. (one might even say we are in the process of challenging a narrative concerning the role of police)
These charts point out a lot of issues, most real problems, in my opinion. It's far less clear that this is the result of "systemic racism", though. The idea that "poverty begets poverty" could explain a lot of it more simply.
Also, I am very dubious about survey questions. Asking someone how they feel about the police is going to draw a lot of noise and crosscutting motivations. It would be far more useful to know what they do in a situation where they need a policeman.
No doubt, and at least anecdotally, that seems to be happening in real time.
As to the larger question, I'm having a very hard time seeing adding knowledge and science as a bad thing. Without those, any proposed improvement to policing (including abuse) is simply flailing guesswork.
What they want is everyone's butts back in their chairs, in the office. The rest sounds like pretext.
It remains to be seen how that will play out at my job, but I am very seriously considering a "100% remote" policy myself (as in, no office, no travel at all), even if I have to switch jobs.
My impression is the reason is that there really isn't widespread agreement on the harmfulness of such communities, so they're sort of trying to split the middle. And perhaps also to advocate for seeing them as awful, per corporate sentiment.
The principal example that comes to mind is TD, which seems more obnoxious and tasteless than some sort of evil.
Subs that truly are beyond the pale by wide consensus seem to get dropped immediately and without objection.
As to not wanting to win, well, yes, dropping everything controversial means losing a lot of page-hits, and as a business, they're likely wary.
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/watch-man-tries-to-help-...