How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change
medium.com"I’ve heard some suggest that the recurrent problem of racial bias in our criminal justice system proves that only protests and direct action can bring about change, and that voting and participation in electoral politics is a waste of time. I couldn’t disagree more. The point of protest is to raise public awareness... But eventually, aspirations have to be translated into specific laws and institutional practices — and in a democracy, that only happens when we elect government officials who are responsive to our demands."
Laws are just a consequence of an actual cultural change, and can only succeed (and not precede) the conversion of hearts and minds. Voting and democracy should not become a device to placate the dissatisfied masses into silence, make them lineup for ballot, to choose a lesser evil who, in most likelihood, will turn out to be a egotistical power-seeker. We shouldn't conflate voting with "will of the people."
MLK gave a speech at Silicon Valley's own Stanford and touched on this subject (the same one with the "riot is the language of the unheard" quote you might have seen circulating).
https://www.crmvet.org/docs/otheram.htm
See the bit starting with: "Now there's another notion that gets out, it's around everywhere. It's in the South, it's in the North, it's In California, and all over our nation. It's the notion that legislation can't solve the problem, it can't do anything in this area. And those who project this argument contend that you've got to change the heart and that you can't change the heart through legislation."
To summarize it, he disagrees with you.
To spell out the actual argument: "although it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. [...] Even though it may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, it can restrain him from lynching me."
Notice MLK is talking about specific legislature, and the poster above was talking about electing officials. They are correct that merely electing politicians is neither necessary nor sufficient--the laws must change.
It's uncanny how perfectly of this moment many of those quotes are. Of course that's because these are very long-term issues. But it's still uncanny.
Alternatively, it's extremely sad, because it means we haven't made progress on the issues of 50 years ago.
You didn't post the most badass part.
"Even though it may be true that the law cannot change the heart, it can restrain the heartless"
I never read MLK much and just realized how awesome of an orater he was.
If you have the time to read one more thing, I recommend https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
Can't change the heart with rioting either, and are you sure you know whose hearts need to change, and what change needs to occur? I think you could erase all racism from the hearts of humanity and end up with basically the same world, there's no reconciling the self-celebrating narcissism of moderns with universal love.
Can't take the mote out of your brother's eye until you remove the beam in your own. This applies to everyone, even anti-racists.
> Can't take the mote out of your brother's eye until you remove the beam in your own.
When there are sympathy protests outside the US, this is exactly what the sympathy protesters are attempting to remind you all. The US has nice ideals, eg "and justice for all"
Here's Bush Jr's take on eyebeams: https://www.bushcenter.org/about-the-center/newsroom/press-r...
(I haven't visited the States since his presidency, but although I found much to dislike about the man, this is an argument I could get behind)
One big problem is that the elected after being elected, choose to not follow or dilute those promises. There is no accountability. So time and again, democracy fails as they just change their minds after being elected.
There is this "damping" factor like a mechanical system, that takes the energy out of the people's hands and dampens it with lobbying, dishonesty, unaccountability and complete neglect for public interest. The response of the system is now steady state with little change. We need a public roster of each politician and their promises written in notarized documents, that can be used to strip them of relection and penalize them in some way so that future politicians cannot weasel their way out of promises.
I would also vote for public presentations with slides + data by each politician instead of these stupid debates and speeches. They should be documented and scrutinized for accuracy of data and their claims. We have startup decks, but yet politicians don't have to make presentations. Instead they trade blows on a debate stage with polished repertoire which has now become an entertainment show, at least at the presidential level.
I’m not sure it’s quite so simple as “they change their mind”. In a republic where deal-making has to happen, if you ran on W, X, Y, and Z, you might have to compromise on Z to get W, X, and a watered-down version of Y. Doesn’t mean you changed your mind on Z or strict-Y, but you can’t get everything you want because other Americans want other things and they can’t get everything they want either. Maybe a lesser politician would only have gotten W and half of X...
I’m not sure what penalty would be appropriate that would be better than standing for re-election and having the people weigh in. Voters who were strict-Y or any-Z might choose to not vote to re-elect. Voters who care about and got more X than par and a little bit of Y would be inclined to re-elect.
I think you're providing a great perspective into the complexity of the problem. If it was easy and straight forward, I presume it would have been solved a long ago. Penalty is tricky because the analysis of the problem has gray areas and its not strictly black or white. We need an umpire that can enforce and have oversight.
Even dictators often can’t get what they want. In order to maintain power they have to please others that allow the dictator to persist. I mean it’s a kind of symbiotic relationship.
In a republic it’s much much harder. People run on platforms but that doesn’t mean the rest of the legislators agree with them. Often people in HOAs can’t agree on things... and that’s the lowest form of government (well regulation).
> In a republic where deal-making has to happen, if you ran on W, X, Y, and Z, you might have to compromise on Z to get W, X, and a watered-down version of Y. Doesn’t mean you changed your mind on Z or strict-Y, but you can’t get everything you want because other Americans want other things and they can’t get everything they want either. Maybe a lesser politician would only have gotten W and half of X
If I owned a company and the people I hired to manage it were playing games like this, and if I asked them for insight into what, specifically, is happening behind the scenes, and they told me "it is literally not possible for us to provide you with that information" (and wouldn't say why it is not possible), I would be immediately launching a side project with the intent to replace the whole lot of them.
Yes, I realize "it's complex", but complexity is a continuum, not a binary.
With respect to the article, is it not true that the President has some substantial ability to float ideas into the public consciousness, that would put the heat on the state and municipal politicians to come up with some better systems to manage law enforcement and officer interactions with the public? And if the federal level truly has no power whatsoever in instituting reform or enforcing federal laws (what's the FBI do again?), I don't see why a comprehensive framework with recommendations for operational reform and greater transparency couldn't come from the top down. If there's nothing to be held accountable to, and no one to do the holding, I don't see why people are surprised when law enforcement restraint is largely left up to the goodwill of individual officers.
This whole situation and the way it is discussed seems rather absurd to me, but maybe there's something I'm not seeing.
There are 100 Senators and 435 Representatives. They don't all run on the same set of promises (or else we'd presumably get all of those outcomes). Often their platform promises are in conflict with each other.
They make deals with each other to get some of what they represent their constituents want in exchange for some of what the others' constituents want. This is necessary (and I believe by and large healthy) behavior when you're trying to govern ~350 million people.
Is it also necessary to have the precise level of transparency and style of media coverage we have now?
Is there precisely nothing that our massive improvements in information technology and widespread connectivity of the public to the internet can do to improve the state of our political process?
Is this situation optimal, no possible improvements can be made whatsoever?
> If I owned a company and the people I hired to manage it were playing games like this
Imagine that you get to hire 5 people to run the company on your behalf, and four other directors each also hire 5 people to further their interests. Some of those other four directors want things that are nearly enough exactly the opposite of what you want, and you can do nothing to expel them, and precious little to change their minds. Also, the best five people who are willing to fill the roles you control are not exactly the ones you would like to hire, but nevertheless, they're the best available and willing. Now what?
> Some of those other four directors want things that are nearly enough exactly the opposite of what you want, and you can do nothing to expel them...
I am the owner of the company, and there's nothing I can do to expel them?
> Also, the best five people who are willing to fill the roles you control are not exactly the ones you would like to hire, but nevertheless, they're the best available and willing. Now what?
Well in the short term, you're screwed. But how plausible is this imaginary scenario? There is literally no one better available, in a country of 300 million people? Are the politicians we have now the best of the best?
Take the choices we have in the next presidential election for example: Donald Trump vs Joe Biden. Are these the best "available and willing" candidates out there? Not one single person in the country more qualified than either of these fellows?
> I am the owner of the company, and there's nothing I can do to expel them?
Not if we're building a metaphor for representative democracy here. If we're doing autocracy / absolutism then expel away!
> Not one single person in the country more qualified than either of these fellows?
Well, it seems like nobody better is able and desires to endure the grueling, ridiculous, perverse eligibility and interview process the hiring committee demands.
>> I am the owner of the company, and there's nothing I can do to expel them?
> Not if we're building a metaphor for representative democracy here.
This statement seems incorrect to me. I could provide many examples, but one should do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_election
A recall election (also called a recall referendum, recall petition or representative recall) is a procedure by which, in certain polities, voters can remove an elected official from office through a direct vote before that official's term has ended. Recalls, which are initiated when sufficient voters sign a petition, have a history dating back to the constitution in ancient Athenian democracy[1] and feature in several current constitutions. In indirect or representative democracy, people's representatives are elected and these representatives rule for a specific period of time. However, where the facility to recall exists, should any representative come to be perceived as not properly discharging their responsibilities, then they can be called back with the written request of specific number or proportion of voters.
If you think about it a bit, you may also realize (or at least consider the possibility) that the variety of democratic implementations that currently exist (and have existed over time) were man-made, as opposed to being an artifact of nature. We can do whatever we want, in this domain - we are literally the masters of our own destiny. Or, we could be at least, but there seems to be significant rhetorical resistance to these ideas, from the strangest sources.
> Well, it seems like nobody better is able and desires to endure the grueling, ridiculous, perverse eligibility and interview process the hiring committee demands.
It may seem that way, but is it actually that way?
Both the Republicans and Democrats fielded numerous candidates - are you suggesting that Trump and Biden are the very best candidates from within those two lots (which implies that the processes by which they were chosen are perfect)?
And the "hiring committee" itself - is this literally the only possible approach that could be taken? Not one single improvement could be made there, or at any other stage within the entire electoral system?
>I am the owner of the company, and there's nothing I can do to expel them?
"I am the owner of this computer, yet I can't know whether it will run a certain problem in finite time?"
"We are the dominant species on this planet, yet we can't change its course towards Alpha Centauri?"
Ownership is more of a negative than positive good---that is, ownership means you own something more than other people, not that you're omnipotent regarding it.
A human can own a computer yet still be unable to get it to do something.
"Never attribute to scarcity what can be attributed to technical debt."
>> My original question: "I am the owner of the company, and there's nothing I can do to expel them?"
I notice that rather than answering my question, you seem to have chosen to instead reply with two other questions, both of which are rather absurd examples of things that are literally not possible, and have little relevance to the question I actually asked.
May I ask why you chose to respond in this way? My (speculative) intuition is that it is a form of rhetoric, that is often used in conversation to persuade third party observers of a certain thing. But to be explicit, this is only my intuition, I am not making a formal accusation of any kind...I am simply curious about what is going on in this conversation.
So, having said all that: is my intuition incorrect? And if so, I would very much appreciate if you could explain what is going on here, as it seems to have become a very common writing technique here and elsewhere, but I am personally unable to understand it at all - to me, it only makes already complex conversations even more confusing.
> Ownership is more of a negative than positive good---that is, ownership means you own something more than other people, not that you're omnipotent regarding it.
> A human can own a computer yet still be unable to get it to do something.
> "Never attribute to scarcity what can be attributed to technical debt."
This seems to suggest that it is not possible for an owner of a company to expel substandard management, at least sometimes, because it requires omnipotence. Is this what you are actually saying, or is my interpretation flawed? If it is flawed, would you be able to restate your beliefs in clear, unambiguous, non-rhetorical terms? And if it is not flawed, could you possibly post at least one example where omnipotence is clearly required to accomplish the task (or something reasonably close to demonstrating that)?
And I suppose I should also point out that the underlying issue of my analogy is whether the current political process in the Unites States of America could be improved, at all.
Do you think it is not possible to make any improvements at all, however small? If it isn't too much trouble, I think an initial discrete "Yes" or "No" answer would help in maximizing communication effectiveness, and after that you can include any rhetorical narrative that you believe adds to that initial answer.
Enter, O practitioner of conversational charity, and be welcomed.
Yes, I think it is possible to make improvements.*
>and have little relevance to the question I actually asked.
My point was that they are relevant, in the sense that inability doesn't necessarily imply malice.
My analogy is "off" in that it is not literal, hard barriers, as with Earth->Alpha Centauri---but then, so was yours, in the sense that the owner of a company is a single individual and doesn't have collective action problems, whereas an electorate has nothing but. But I'd contend that my analogy is more useful/relevant to the specific issue of "owner potency" than the company owner analogy--which was the point.
So no, this was not a display for third parties (not completely, anyway---who doesn't like upvotes?), but an honest attempt to communicate that yes, it is really hard, probably actually impossible, and certainly not easy or simple if approached naively, which the "company owner" analogy seems to do.
>This seems to suggest that it is not possible for an owner of a company to expel substandard management, at least sometimes, because it requires omnipotence.
No! A company owner can of course expel management any time they like. My point is that a country is not like a company, and more specifically, an electorate is not like an individual.
That last point is very important, and the crux of my argument. There are many many differences between working for a single owner, or even a board, vs an electorate:
- a company owner, as an individual, is less likely to make contradictory, impossible demands. For electorates impossible and contradictory demands are the rule rather than the exception.
- a company owner is concerned with a more responsive machine (the company) than an electorate (a country), and so is more likely to have a working feedback loop---which means if they do make impossible demands, they are more likely to connect the (bad) consequences to the demands.
- a company owner is able (at least in theory) to believably make commitments. If a company owner said, "What specifically is the problem stopping you from XYZ, I will fire you if you don't tell me, I will promote you if you do," there is a set of circumstances in which subordinates could believe and rely on that. Electorates, in contrast, are completely unreliable and cannot make believable promises. Individuals might---you might write your congressman and promise you'll vote for him if he does XYZ---but what does he care, you're one vote, he gets letters every week saying the equivalent, but for different things.
So I am perhaps not answering the question as written---is it possible for a company owner to expel bad management. Yes, it absolutely is. However, analogizing that to nation-state governance is a model with some very important flaws, the bulk of them relating to coordination/communication problems that electorates face. Just as adding more engineers to a project makes it later, adding more voters to a discussion of an issue (particularly complex issues) makes the electorate dumber and less reasonable.
There's also the issue that, and maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, what you're really talking about isn't "putting the right people in office." Because that begs the question: right for what? Say you replaced politicians with computers who would do exactly what they were told. Well, we can guess how that would turn out, because we have computers---having a perfect servant like that tends to spotlight the weaknesses in the programmer's thinking. How does one run a nation-state? Remember, we don't give the electorate power over this because we think they actually know how to do it. Rather we do it as a circuit breaker/safety measure to keep a functioning feedback loop in place---to put a lower bound on how bad things can get.
I have various suggestions on how things could be improved---they mostly don't matter because I am just one voice among 300 million, and there are lots of people with brains that function perfectly well. The shortage is not one of political philosophy! I tend to think the place where I can actually have impact is by building community with my neighbors, raising my family, and (I unironically believe this) writing good software.
* Though even the definition of "improvements" is up for grabs. Is a commit that improves runtime by 50% but also increases memory usage by the same amount an improvement? Governance is full of similar tradeoffs, and reasonable people can and do disagree on them.
> Enter, O practitioner of conversational charity, and be welcomed.
Hey, if you don't have fun in life, what's the point? :)
> My point was that they are relevant, in the sense that inability doesn't necessarily imply malice.
Valid perspective that I overlooked.
> My analogy is "off" in that it is not literal, hard barriers, as with Earth->Alpha Centauri---but then, so was yours, in the sense that the owner of a company is a single individual and doesn't have collective action problems, whereas an electorate has nothing but. But I'd contend that my analogy is more useful/relevant to the specific issue of "owner potency" than the company owner analogy--which was the point.
Completely agree. I do indeed realize there is a collective action problem (I happen to think that this is the #2 problem), but my point or strategy in using this very simplified approach, however flawed my performance was, was to try to "counter" the perception (to the degree that it exists) that:
>> In a republic where deal-making has to happen, if you ran on W, X, Y, and Z, you might have to compromise on Z to get W, X, and a watered-down version of Y.
...is "just how it is", &/or "cannot be improved upon", or "is being done in mostly a well-intentioned manner", etc.
We have absolutely no idea how true any of these (and the hundreds of other plausible excuses) beliefs are. Which brings us to my supplementary point:
>> and if I asked them for insight into what, specifically, is happening behind the scenes, and they told me "it is literally not possible for us to provide you with that information" (and wouldn't say why it is not possible), I would be immediately launching a side project with the intent to replace the whole lot of them.
Is it not true that the American public, even if they were interested, has extremely little insight into what is really going on in the political system? Oh sure, there are plenty of "facts", reports, newspaper articles, and various other forms of messaging they can avail themselves of, but how accurate and comprehensive are these things with respect to what is actually going on? My intuition suggests: "not very".
> A company owner can of course expel management any time they like. My point is that a country is not like a company, and more specifically, an electorate is not like an individual. That last point is very important, and the crux of my argument. There are many many differences between working for a single owner, or even a board, vs an electorate....
All of the points and constraints you raise are completely valid, and very hard problems! But think of it this way: you came up with these (and could surely come up with many, many more) after perhaps a few minutes of back of the napkin systems analysis, something you can do because you presumably have many years of system-agnostic experience in doing so. My question is: has a serious and thorough analysis been performed on this system complex system, in recent history, by people who are deeply familiar with the wide spectrum of powerful new capabilities mankind has at its fingertips, in the form of software, AI, and the networked nature of the vast majority of the population (let's leave aside the current(!) intelligence level of this population, which is another system that deserves some analysis). Based on unbiased observations (say, an alien with no priors) of casual forum conversations, one might easily think so. But is it actually true? Exactly(!) how optimized is our current implementation of democracy? Has anyone even taken a proper look at it? Is there any evidence whatsoever that this task has been performed in an honest, substantial manner, by a bi-partisan group of unbiased, arms length, highly skilled people? My intuition suggests: "No, this has not been done."
> Just as adding more engineers to a project makes it later, adding more voters to a discussion of an issue (particularly complex issues) makes the electorate dumber and less reasonable.
Right! But this project is distinctly different than all others: it has no written in stone due date. Theoretically, we have infinite time! Although in practice, it's completely possible that we may even have less than a decade, considering the multiple legitimate "existential" crises we have on deck - but this is no reason to not do anything! On the contrary, we should be sorting out the completely ridiculous & petty arguments we have on this very site, and then proceed to put our collective minds to work on solving the actual fucking problem(s) that present themselves for this country, and the entire world...should we not?
But what do we actually do with our minds? Have the same old arguments year after year, mostly in the same form as prior years, and of a quality not all that dissimilar to that which you would find on /r/politics. Which then raises an even more important question, perhaps the most important question: why do we behave like this?
Is our behaviour part of the problem? And to be clear, I'm not talking only about "those people" (you know the ones), I'm talking about everyone.
> There's also the issue that, and maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, what you're really talking about isn't "putting the right people in office." Because that begs the question: right for what? Say you replaced politicians with computers who would do exactly what they were told. Well, we can guess how that would turn out, because we have computers---having a perfect servant like that tends to spotlight the weaknesses in the programmer's thinking. How does one run a nation-state? Remember, we don't give the electorate power over this because we think they actually know how to do it. Rather we do it as a circuit breaker/safety measure to keep a functioning feedback loop in place---to put a lower bound on how bad things can get.
This is all just proper systems analysis - problems and constraints that must be accommodated. We do the analysis, and then we decide upon an initial approach, and then we adjust as needed, like literally every other competently executed project on the planet. And you never stop, because you are working within a dynamic, infinitely complex system.
> I have various suggestions on how things could be improved---they mostly don't matter because I am just one voice among 300 million
That yours is but one voice among 300 million is only one problem. Let's say you stumbled upon a genuinely brilliant idea - what would you do then? Write a letter to your political representative, sending that idea into the very system we're currently discussing?
I think the problem that mother nature has dealt us may fall under this category:
> “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos
For the sake of argument, let's assume that's the case. What then shall we do about it? It seems to me our ancestors found themselves in a rather similar predicament...what did they do?
One reason for this is because once elected, there is very little that the population can do to hold the official accountable.
You can’t remove officials for not fulfilling their promises. They can also delay until it’s too late by saying, “I’m working on it.” Then once out of office, they are accountable for nothing.
Job safety is built into the position for good reason. However, it’s been perverted to allow officials to do whatever they want. Fixing this balance is not simple, but I believe would be a crucial step towards realizing a functional democratic system.
I am curious, what would such a system look like?
I am thinking that a "promise" is not a quantitative term. It needs to be ratified into specific data oriented actions that can go through a litmus test whether it was fulfilled or betrayed.
After that, one idea is to have an accountability score tracked by bureaucracy and have that printed on the ballot along with their principle accomplishments in the supplement. Another idea is to have a penalty score of not meeting prior promises as a dilution factor to the number of votes. If a politician only met 90% of the promises, they will lose 10% of the voting power of the public (like a 0.X multiplier to the votes). Just thinking out loud, there may be major issues with these ideas.
A control theory idea: use continuous voting. When the support falls below some threshold (e.g. 50%), kick the candidate out.
But now you'll get an unstable system where candidates get kicked out all the time and are too populist because they don't expect to live long.
So add a low-pass filter. When the moving average of the candidate's support falls below the threshold and a definite other candidate's support is high enough, replace the incumbent with that challenger.
You might even increase the duration of the moving average with time, like the doubling trick in multi-armed bandits. The logic is that a candidate who has shown that he can weather the initial period without getting voted out can be trusted with more long-term decisions, i.e. actions speak louder than words.
If you have continuous voting it may be better to vote for decisilons instead of voting for people. Because politicians usually happily pretend to support whatever policies they think are popular. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23377423
Not a bad idea but it probably depends on a level of convenience and ease of access to voting that does not seem to exist currently.
Unrelated side note: when you are talking about a hypothetical politician, be aware of your choice of pronoun.
You might be the type of person who picks between he/she with a precise 50/50 split but I'm going to assume you are not that type of person. Similar to the way you seem to have assumed that if a person is a politician they are also a man.
Women aren't 50% of politics. It's not a terrible Bayesian prior to say he. (as someone who says "they" for hypothetical humans)
But when done systemically it likely creates the expectation that politics is done only or mostly by men, therefore discouraging women from entering politics now and in the future. Which, I would argue, is a substantial net negative.
FWIW, English is my second language, and my first language has grammatical genders that don't have anything to do with real genders. We were also taught that "he" is the default pronoun in English.
I guess some of that bleeds through: that I use "he" without reflecting on it because it wouldn't carry an implication of actual gender in my first language. I am definitely not assuming that politics is a men's only club.
Only on HN do you find a theory of politics based on Controls/DSP fundamentals. Nyquist plot of political instability would be nice. I applaud you.
Okay, so this is where I will bring my proposal for Modular Government.
Next ammendment: direct election of cabinet members.
Also, all changes to policies to be parameterized and adiabatic.
>Also, all changes to policies to be parameterized and adiabatic.
"No heat, only work". I like that proposal :-)
> I am curious, what would such a system look like?
Switzerland, people can always overrule politicians decisions there, no need to wait until next election. This means that the opinions of politicians is no longer as important so this issue doesn't even come up. So you place more value on finding the politician best fit for running the country, not the politician with values most aligned to your own.
The idea about presentations is very good, but it alone won't fix the problem. We need to be able to vote for individual decisions instead of people, and we on hn are best positioned to fix the democracy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23377423
> We need to be able to vote for individual decisions instead of people
What about this: for most decisions, people elect their representative, and don't directly participate. The representative votes on decisions in gov't, but their vote is weighted by the number of people they represent (let's call this V).
However, if there is an issue that a person deems important to participate in, then that person gets to directly vote for said issue. Then, the elected representative's vote _for that issue_ drops by 1, and thus their vote only weights V-1.
Hence, by this method, most people who don't give a shit can continue not to, and allow their electoral representative to make decisions on their behalf. But direct democracy is available for those who care enough.
Exactly, i had tried to describe this in the linked submission by saying "you can put your vote to follow someone else" and you described that better. The fact that many people come to the same idea independently means that time is ripe for that idea to become reality.
This is a terrible idea. I don't want policy decided by which proposed law has the most "feel good points" or "best intentions" or best marketing campaign to get people to vote for it.
Popular vote is a tool for demagogues and populists and will quickly lead to tyranny of the majority type situations.
Whenever I vote in local elections there are some ballot initiatives, and it's ALWAYS feelgood shit like "give elderly widows whos' husbands worked as a teacher a 25% property tax cut". I vote no for everything out of principle.
Now we pick politicians based on feelgood promises they make, which they do not intend to keep. This way we avoid "tyranny of the majority" only by lying to the majority of people which cannot lead to a stable situation. If you believe the majority of the people are stupid and will vote for policies harming everyone, then we need some other mechanisms to allow different people to experiment with laws, find compromises, or give different weights to votes of different people. The current mechanism of pretending everyone has equal vote, and not allowing that vote to be heard by making voting artificially hard, will not work forever.
It's interesting how the idea of some form of direct democracy never even comes up in conversation. Of course I wouldn't expect any current or former politician to suggest the idea, but even in conversation on HN or in the general public, I'm not sure if I've ever encountered it before.
Of course, there will be no shortage of overly enthusiastic (and absolutely confident) defeatism "We 'can't' do it because x, y, z" (complexities with security, ensuring the person casting the vote is indeed the actual person, excess amount of uninformed populism, etc.) So how about this: for the first <x> years, make it non-binding and simply observe the results. If the votes have no power, so much for the disingenuous claims that "we don't dare try it, and it won't work anyways", because it completely derisks the situation.
So then, when you have people still guaranteeing doom, I reckon there's a pretty good chance that would make a good shortlist of people who should no longer be allowed anywhere near the political process.
I would love to know why people are adamantly opposed to having a honest, transparent, and fact-checked public conversation on the idea.
Unfortunately most people do not really believe in ability of other people to make rational decisions, even though they say that they support democracy. There is zero hope that any politician at power to suggest an idea that would remove all of his power, but a few days ago i have realized that we do not need to implement this on government level from the start, a group of parties who do not have a chance to be elected can implement this on a party level and increase their chance of being elected.
This is what gets you Brexit. The entire future of a country changed on a 50-49 vote that 6 months later, would probably go at least 52-47 the other way.
I disagree, this will save us from situations like Brexit, because if referendum is not an expensive and slow process, you can hold it multiple times, until the vote stabilizes, you can require significant difference for decisions changing status quo, and most importantly you won't have to vote on a huge number of issues as one thing, people would be able to vote on small issues they care about, and use vote trading as described in the link to find a better compromise.
Now it is easy to spend lots of money to mislead many people right before the big and expensive referendum, but if a new referendum can happen any day, spending lots of money on campaigns would become unviable.
I like this idea of a transparent democracy. It seems that if we are to be surveilled and held accountable by inscrutable decisions. Then we should have the right to surveil back. Heck, maybe to be elected one has to wear a body cam in all non-top secret non-personal decision making sessions of legislating. Might end lobbying pretty quick.
> One big problem is that the elected after being elected, choose to not follow or dilute those promises. There is no accountability. So time and again, democracy fails as they just change their minds after being elected.
One solution to this is more direct democracy. When people can propose initiatives and vote on them in referendums, it is harder for politicians to ignore that agenda. This works pretty well in Switzerland.
>This works pretty well in Switzerland.
The place where women couldn't vote in federal elections until 1971, and in local elections as late as 1990?
The source which told you that should also have explained that you can actually have women voting in direct democracy as any other citizens, there is nothing preventing that. You don't need to do it in person on a square, either.
(It's a known fact, yes, in general, people do vote more socially conservatively in referendums, often backing up status quo. But that doesn't prevent progressive politicians to come up with better proposals.)
In any case, if we use your logic, US would be perfect country for this, being one of the last countries on Earth that doesn't have universal health care system.
Interestingly, many U.S. states do have some direct democracy provisions, courtesy of the progressive movement at the beginning of the 20th century. But what I heard it was sabotaged at federal level by the administration at the time, because U.S. wanted to get a bit involved in WW1 and it could potentially prevent that.
Do you think Switzerland is a bad place or what is the point of your rhetorical question?
> This works pretty well in Switzerland.
Democracy that works in a country of 8.6 million does not scale up to work for a country of 330 million.
Considering how often this is the explanation for why we can’t have nice things, I’m beginning to think our country is too big.
Yeah, I get it. It's lot more idiots. Also lot more people who don't know that vote counting can actually be done in logarithmic time.
> Voting and democracy should not become a device to placate the dissatisfied masses into silence, make them lineup for ballot, to choose a lesser evil who, in most likelihood, will turn out to be a egotistical power-seeker.
What else should you expect when people are limited to only two political parties? It could be worse with only one political party.
I think the real problem is that those two political parties represent factions of the population with incompatible values.
We don't need more political parties, we need solutions to manage the incompatibility.
There was nothing incompatible about our values regarding what we saw in that video. The idea that there was a political divide about this incident is a myth. Even the openly racist people I know were saying it was fucked up.
Even the police unions condemned it. It's literally the only thing we agree on, but certain people keep holding up this obviously false dichotomy that we can only care about this political violence or the Floyd murder.
They don’t have any choice once it is filmed. They weren’t condemning all the misconduct by the same officer that wasn’t filmed.
Well, the Minneapolis police union president has just gone off the rails.
Yeah, pretty much everyone was on the same page about that. What was incredibly and predictably divisive is burning down cities as a response to it, and naturally the American media have been spending a lot of effort fanning those flames.
The worst part is not going to be the brutality that is coming when police/military put a stop to this. That will be horrific, but temporary.
Six months from now, is the average white American small business owner going to be more or less likely to hire a black person? That's the fucked up shit that is going to last another decade. That's the stuff that maintains generational poverty. And there's a thousand other subtle, unspoken things like that which are going to broaden our divide.
As far as I can tell, the people burning everything down aren't even particularly likely to be black, efforts to spin this as some kind of necessary fight back against racism by people who've been suffering not withstanding. The folks cheering it on and advocating for this to their audiences definitely aren't - they're largely white, middle-class techies and journos and other well-off educated folks who aren't worried about their own communities burning.
The real pain - at least on the inter-generational poverty and deprivation side - is that in six months, the average American small business isn't going to exist in heavily-black neighbourhoods, and that probably won't change much in six years, and other businesses are probably going to be pretty thin on the ground there too. Apparently some places never recovered what they lost in the sixties race riots.
Though I expect that the consequences of the police actions to stop this will also be anything but temporary. It seems to take years of careful work to rebuild trust between police and the community they serve, and to restructure policing to be less hostile and dangerous.
I have noticed only one common demographic among rioters: age.
Rioters are almost always young. Especially now, when many young people are unemployed (Corona) or out of school for the summer.
I agree with you that it seems the people sparking the looting/fires/etc seem to be mostly white. I just don't think that will matter in the minds of the average person who barely watches the news. To the extent that they are watching anything, they will see tons of videos of black people committing crimes on social media.
What makes you believe that the looters are mostly white? I mean, the people you are talking against, they have all the video evidence they need of black people and others looting and causing destruction that they need. What do you have?
I'd really like to see some. I've been having some cognitive dissonance lately. Some portions of the media are telling me that the looters are white supremacists, but unless there are substantial amount of black/brown white supremacists in this country, the video evidence says otherwise...
The operative word in what I said was "sparking". It was a white guy who broke the glass at autozone, which kicked off the looting in Minneapolis. It was a white guy who was breaking up the sidewalk so people had rocks to throw before other protesters tackled him and handed him over to police. It was white guys who "stumbled upon" a bunch of bricks in one video and unwrapped them. Those are just the examples off the top of my head.
Small but important distinction: the people sparking the looting/fires/etc seem to be mostly white.
And the only place you're going to have a chance to see the truth on this is in conspiracy forums and on Twitter. How trustworthy is it? Well, it is typically video footage, and it is highly unlikely to be coordinated reporting, so judge for yourself how seriously you want to trust it. But I have watched and read lots on this, and anything I have seen is that the people stirring up shit and instigating violence or destruction, are white, and the people trying to stop them verbally or physically, are black or white.
Here is a good livestream that typically shows 5 to 9 streams simultaneously, depending on where the action is. This is as close to knowing reality as you are going to get. If you watch the "trustworthy" news media, you are maybe going to get some very small amount of truth, but you also run a very big chance of getting a framed version of reality that is often the opposite of what is true.
Look for yourself, think for yourself. Do not outsource these things to authorities who have well demonstrated that they are untrustworthy.
I don't know why you single out white business owners. ALL business owners should be looking into social media history and criminal history of every person they want to hire. There's nothing racist about figuring out if your potential employee has previously taken part of riots and looting to make a hiring decision. It's fucked up indeed, but hey...they made their choices. Jordans and gucci now, future on hold.
Looking into “criminal history” might be fine if the justice system didn’t systematically make sure minorities get harsher sentences than Whites.
After citing statistics right here on HN about how racial profiling and traffic stops and tickets targets minorities , people were making excuses because it didn’t affect them.
Right here on HN posts about the protests were being flagged left and right because people are more concerned about the freedom to side load apps on iOS than minorities getting harassed.
Yes, but the immediate aftermath of that showed deep disagreement about “what to do about that problem.” Leftists want to dismantle the “systems of oppression” they perceive produces that result. Libertarians want to get rid of qualified immunity and police unions. Conservatives are taken aback by the rioting and violence and for them the immediate need maintaining social order has overtaken the more long term desire to correct these abuses.
As normal, libertarians have the correct and rational solution to the problem :)
Please explain how just dismantling unions is the correct and rational solution? I'm less inclined to believe in qualified immunity, but I can see that it is based on a legitimate concern.
1. police union contracts in major cities routinely include provisions that erase disciplinary records and obstruct meaningful discipline (let alone prosecution) of police officers who abuse their authority. [1]
2. the strong majority of these 656 contracts have a similar disciplinary appeals process. Around 73% provide for appeal to an arbitrator or comparable procedure and nearly 70% provide that an arbitrator or comparable third party makes a final binding decision. About 54% of the contracts give officers or unions the power to select that arbitrator. About 70% of the jurisdictions give these arbitrators extensive review power, including the ability to revisit disciplinary matters with little or no deference to the decisions made by supervisors, civilian review boards or politically accountable officials. [2]
3. We look at the roll-out of collective bargaining rights for police officers at the state level from the 1950s to the 1980s. The introduction of access to collective bargaining drives a modest decline in policy employment and increase in compensation with no meaningful impacts on total crime, violent crime, property crime or officers killed in the line of duty. What does change? We find a substantial increase in police killings of civilians over the medium to long run (likely after unions are established) with an additional 0.026 to 0.029 civilians killed in a county each year of whom the overwhelming majority are non-white. [3]
4. Recent academic research further demonstrates that police disciplinary procedures established through union contracts obstruct accountability and (as I noted in this post) collective bargaining for police officers appears to increase police misconduct. This is not surprising. Through collective bargaining, police unions demand protections from disciplinary procedures that would not otherwise be approved, oppose consent decrees and other measures to increase police accountability, and (given the power of police unions in state and local politics) they receive relatively little pushback. [4]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli...
[2] https://crim.jotwell.com/the-power-of-police-unions/
[3] https://twitter.com/robgillezeau/status/1266834185055956997
[4] https://reason.com/2020/05/30/police-unions-and-the-problem-...
I could provide more as well, that was just a real quick look up of my bookmarks
Edit: 1 more source for good measure
[5] https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
This Article empirically demonstrates that police departments’ internal disciplinary procedures, often established through the collective bargaining process, can serve as barriers to officer accountability.
I think the libertarians are basically right in this instance. Apart from systemic racism (which I believe is a very real thing, but an abstract and not directly unactionable one), I see two problems:
1) The people with the power over the police have almost no contact with the people being policed. Neighborhood schooling reinforces that problem. It ensures that ability to afford housing segregates black people from white people. (Note: it’s not a question of funding. Here in DC, most of the shiny new LEED Gold schools are 99% black. Therefore, white parents won’t send their kids there, notwithstanding the gleaming facilities and lower housing prices in the surrounding area.) School choice gives black people the power to create integrated schools, instead of waiting for statistically wealthier whites/Asians to get woke enough to want to do it. I think people would be much more sensitive to policing issues if they didn’t just hear about these things a couple of times a year on the news, but were faced with people in their PTA suffering the consequences of police brutality. I would add that, unsurprisingly, a decisive majority of black people support school choice.
2) With notion of black people being “the other” rooted since childhood, qualified immunity and police unions eliminate the near term, immediate consequences of acting on those instincts.
The two things that make people think before they act are empathy and self preservation. The libertarian approach is a double-barreled solution that could hit both.
I think that school choice can certainly help but there are limits. District 1 in NYC has a form of school choice but segregation persists and is even driven by minorities in some ways. This article is really interesting:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/nyregion/a-manhattan-dist...
It touches on two NYC schools that share a building (The Earth School & PS64) but have remarkably different racial and socioeconomic makeups. I found it fascinating after touring Earth School earlier this year.
We can all take a moment of silence to curse at Justice Burger, who while he may have done a good thing in Lemon v. Kurtzman, really screwed the pooch in Milliken v. Bradley
I think the libertarian suggestions are certainly part of the solution but I don't think they're sufficient on their own. History shows us that racism is remarkably resistant to market forces.
It's not necessary to eliminate racism. Imagine if the citizens of a community had the power to pull some of their money away from ineffective police departments to hold them accountable. There could be competing police forces, all run by the government, and the citizens could fund the ones they prefer, not unlike charter schools allow parents to fund the schools they prefer, and food stamps allow the poor to buy the food they want from the grocery store they prefer.
If your police department sucks, but the one neighboring one is good, you could choose to move your funding to the other police department who would expand their operations to cover more territory.
We had this with fire departments for thousands of years. It didn’t go well.
Racism is not something that could even be solved with market forces, nor would any libertarian claim such a thing. At best we would say the market gives non-racists the best chance to isolate the push back against racists
History shows that if a society is racist the absolute WORST thing you can do is have a strong government, as that government will likely be filled with racists who will pass racist laws. (See The War on Drugs and/or Jim Crow Laws)
The idea that more government is the solution to racism denies the entire history of this nation. Government is not now, nor has it ever been the solution to the problem of racism (nor any other problem), Government is like it always has been and always will be the problem...
the Classic Libertarian saying "Government: If you think you have problems, wait until you see our [government] solutions"
How do you reconcile the fact that the US government is as big as it has ever been while at the same time we have made significant progress on racial issues? Further much of that progress was driven by government mandate: The Civil Rights acts, anti-discrimination laws for employment, affirmative action, etc.
>> same time we have made significant progress on racial issues?
Have we? the current riots / protest seem to indicate not.
>Further much of that progress was driven by government mandate: The Civil Rights acts, anti-discrimination laws for employment, affirmative action, etc.
There is / was a double edge sword to many of those issues. For example more than 50% of the civil rights act was rolling back and repealing racist government laws and regulations. People seem to have this perception that the population was racist and the government saved the day when in reality the government was racist and then rolled back some (not all) of their racist policies.
So the 60's you have the Civil Rights acts, then what do we see in the 70's and 80's? The War on Drugs, and "Tough on Crime" laws that were disproportionately enforced and impacted poor and minority communities. This trend continues to today with continues sentencing disparity, mandatory minimums, and various other things that at a minimum are Class based enforcement if not outright racist enforcement of law
So I can easily reconcile my position that government is the problem because that is a factually accurate analysis of the history of law in this nation
I wonder how accurate these old standby run-of-the mill memes we repeat ad nauseum really are. What data are they based on, really? And even if they are true, might it be possible that people that hold these opinions hold them because they've never been involved in any serious in-depth analysis & discussion on the topics? There's not even that much serious, accurate, unbiased material out there to base such conversations on, and I sure as hell don't know of too many people who'd be interested in getting involved in such things if purely left up to their own volition.
Perhaps if we had some serious, organized, factual discussions on some of these matters (as opposed to the all propaganda all the time approach we've become so accustomed to), people wouldn't continue to hold the same opinions they (supposedly) hold at the moment.
It's quite amazing how unpopular facts and fact based discussions are.
No, but there is a predictable political divide about the fallout.
Everyone has pretty much universally agreed that what the officers did was unacceptable. Even other Police. The officer was arrested, why things didn't move sooner was a local matter to take up with that mayor and that department. It should have been handled locally, not all departments are the same.
But you end up in a situation of further tragedy where people start destroying property and assaulting others, and they screwed up by doing so. The message has been diluted, lost in all the noise. Expanding it nationwide hasn't broadcast the message positively.
It's juvenile and short sighted, the people are on their side, saying yes this was wrong, yes this has to stop, murder is unacceptable, etc. They are now looking at the situation with a different viewpoint, asking themselves if the police violence may be justified with this group, look at what they did to our community when WE AGREED with them and were willing to help.
That isn't a political thought, that is a rational thought. Destroying communities, rioting, looting, killing people, it never brings more people into your corner. America is a civil society that respects law and order. Much of America now is just happy they don't have to live around anywhere where this is happening, that is going to be the only takeaway from this tragedy now. The chorus on social media doesn't reflect that. The riots turned average Americans against this event.
A barrier, metaphorically, was quickly slammed up between people, and now it's just noise and chaos.
Noise and chaos gets heard. You know what gets completely ignored in this country? Peaceful protest. The actions of the last week are far, far more likely to result in change than any mass protest. Just look at the anti-Iraq war protests - the largest protests in US history held in dozens of cities over months and accomplished precisely nothing at all. Civil rights, gay rights, women's right were all won with a lot more than voting and peaceful protest. A lot more.
There is no evidence of this. Disruption doesn’t work solely for the sake of being disruptive. If anything it just disenfranchises people resulting in opposite outcomes.
My child screams at me that he wants candy for dinner.
He throws a tantrum, screams, yell, slams his hand against the counter. Throws his toys, tells me he hates me.
It's noise and chaos. It doesn't go ignored, but it also isn't allowed. It isn't a compelling way to get me to give them what they want, unless I'm a bad parent with no direction and structure. Civility, good behavior, that gets noticed positively.
You don't understand the problem, you are emotionally invested in this, which is why you think harming innocent people is an avenue to positive change. You couldn't be more wrong if you tried.
In our system, you protest to raise awareness, to gain positive traction in the public awareness, you then vote and work within the system to enact the real mechanisms of change. When done with compassion, it brings everyone on board to your cause, even if a few bitch and moan about it.
Martin Luther King Jr. knew this. If you think physically harming others and their property, street mob justice, if you think this is an avenue to positive change, you don't understand our system.
@austincheney - Speaking as an American -- those in this country with the privilege of freedom have it because people have fought and died for it [0]. There actually aren't very many examples of people that have basic freedoms that have not at some point fought for it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War
I am aware more than most. I am a warrant officer in the US Army entering my 5th overseas deployment.
I thought that was mostly a navy thing these days. If you don't mind my asking, what kind of jobs does the Army have warrant officers do?
I am a signal (telecommunications) officer.
First deployment (Dec 2003-Dec 2004, E6) I ran the operations floor during night shift in 335th Theater Signal Command, which put me in charge of up time and status for all voice and digital communications in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Second (Jul 2009-Jul 2010, E6) I travel across Afghanistan performing information security audits of major and minor US Army bases. I was able to pick up my CISSP at the end of this.
Third (Dec 2012-Jan 2013, E7) I was NCOIC of Knowledge Management for 311th Sustainment Command in Afghanistan where I trained and coordinated with 24 staff sections to increase their information transparency and produce common/integrated products.
Fourth (Oct 2018-July 2019, CW2) I was chief of network operations for the 300th Sustainment Brigade in Kuwait.
Fifth, I will be there soon.
I wonder if things would be better if there was some mandatory thing like jury duty where you had to go meet and hang out for an hour with a different randomly picked person every a month at some center where they'd have something for you to do so it's not 100% awkward.
I realize that's a terrible idea, but not sure of any way of changing people's attitudes towards each other when they'd rather stick to their little groups and believe the worst about everyone else.
My co-worker who once worked in an Amazon fulfillment center, said that it was the most diverse place in terms of groups represented that he had ever worked. Conversely he said it was the most segregated environment he had ever been in, with different groups strictly regulating their interaction with other groups, say at lunch, to what they were required to do by work. I know it's anecdota, but I still don't know where I can square this information with the interactions and conversations we are having today. Maybe one-on-one interactions are the way to go, no group tribalism going on.
I tend to think people's attitudes come from too much diversity rather than too little.
The most diverse places I've ever been are also the most visibly segregated and racially aware (but not in a good way). Meanwhile, I see the most tolerance for others in homogeneous places.
I wonder if this is borne out in any studies.
I've observed that racial stereotypes seem to be borne out more often than not in the urban environments I've lived in, because minorities there tend to be disproportionately poor and uneducated. So I share your skepticism that "diversity" per se is the answer to prejudice. Canada for example is much more white on the whole compared to the US, and far more tolerant on the whole. Ditto with Scandinavia etc.
I think labeling the two sides as fundamentally incompatible is a real danger and quite possible a symptom of the two parties and not it's cause. I see enough similarity between the actions of both parties (maybe not as much their rhetoric) that I think if there is incompatibility, there is a deeper reason for it then "muh beliefs".
I disagree. I have never voted along party lines. I know there are stupid and insecure people who feel the need for echo chambers, like minded social groups, and other diversity destroying functions. That isn’t me or most people I know.
The more institutions gravitate towards factionalism, populism, or consolidation the less I trust them. I don’t need political parties to represent me. I am fully capable of forming my own opinions. I only need political parties to represent a diverse candidate pool and put pressure on other political parties.
I'm not sure we just need more political parties, yes it would be nice. But we really need to work on disentangling how deep economic anti-humanist incentives and policy have embedded themselves within both parties.
But with a 2-party system, how do you do that? As a Canadian, I've seen disaffected factions of our major parties splinter off and create viable alternatives. Often they don't get elected, but they attract enough votes to make the mainstream left/right party take notice and move in their direction.
>>It could be worse with only one political party.
Well I hate to break it to you, most of the protests, and police abuse seem to originate in major cities that have largely been controlled by a single political party for longer than most people have been alive...
I can't find the numbers right now, maybe someone else has them, but if I remember correctly, 2 examples - interracial marriage in late 1960s and same-sex marriage in 2010s - show that support for these kind of relationships grew much faster after they were made legal in all states in US.
So I partially agree with you - there must be a certain culture change happening, but it can and it should be supported by law in order to happen faster.
>show that support for these kind of relationships grew much faster after they were made legal in all states in US.
Because the people who were on the "no" side of things weren't really affected by it (because the were never going to do those things anyway) and the sky didn't fall when other people did. You see this same thing happen every time a state loosens its abortion, gun, alcohol, drug, etc, laws. People say the sky is gonna fall and then it doesn't.
Is this true?
According to Pew, gay marriage was supported by more people than opposed it in 2010, a full five years before legalization.
Not even leaders for the liberal party, like Obama and Hillary Clinton supported it until a few years later.
https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...
there are tangible ways that laws could be setup and practices adhered to that would make cops more accountable and, while maybe the same level of racist in some parts, help ensure that they get held accountable more often than not.
mandatory body cams rolling at all times unless they are in a bathroom.
turning off or a malfunctioning camera during the act of a police brutality event immediately pierces the qualified immunity defense and they are tried as citizens.
have an outside investigative body that has zero ties to the police department investigate any reports of abuse.
have another outside investigative body that has zero ties to the police department randomly sampling police stop footage to see if there are any instances of impropriety.
I am sure this list is non-exhaustive but it's a start. also, while we are here, fix the issue of civil asset forfeiture. the clear "we get to take your money because it looks suspicious and then keep it for the police department" is a huge conflict of interest.
I personally think body camera footage should be public. I would even go as far to say security cameras owned by public institutions should also be public. I think the answer to “who watchers the watchers?” should be a group of trustworthy people beyond reproach, but the absence of such a group necessitates that this responsibility fall upon the public at large [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...
I don't know about you, but I don't really want my various encounters with the police to be broadcast to the public. They would need to algorithmically blur out all of our faces or something in order to make that palatable.
I share the same discomfort at the idea, but I think if everyone is subject to the exact same treatment, then it should be a lot less so. I would not be opposed to algorithmic blurring as long as the raw, unedited footage remains available via system of approved requests with the appropriate access controls.
For what it is worth, I have not been questioned by a police officer for something I did or did not do. I do think that me having the mindset that I am always being watched in public helps me better police myself, so I think the more obvious and ever-present version might instill a similar feeling in others.
At the same time, I can see that having this footage available has a slippery-slope effect when it comes to privacy and authoritarian control. However, this issue of groups of people using technology to control or manipulate others is fundamentally a non-technical issue to me because these people exist irrespective of that technology's existence.
i'd be ok with at google maps street view approach where they blur out the faces. the original unadulterated should still be available though when the time comes for using it.
I would agree with you except basically everyone was on the same side as soon as the video was released. Everyone, right, left, and center agreed there was a serious problem. So what are we raising awareness about?
I don't think everyone knew that everyone agreed that there was a serious problem. The media were really boosting the usual divisive narrative, but I won't speculate here as to why.
If it wasn't for social media you would only see what the corporate press wanted you to see, framed how they wanted it framed, blamed on who they wanted it blamed on. We're winning.
(paraphrased from Michael Malice)
As for your first sentence, that's very true. A lot of white people think that since Obama was elected, there are no more racial problems.
> Everyone, right, left, and center agreed there was a serious problem.
Sadly, no they didn't.
It took until the pictures of uninvolved white women bleeding from rubber bullets for a whole lot of people to say "Holy shit. That could happen to ME!"
In addition, you had videos of cops with their badge numbers covered and press getting arrested.
These protests threw the fact that the police do this all the time and expect to get away with it into the faces of people who don't normally see it.
It also showed that certain police departments can handle this and really do function better thus undermining the arguments of police departments who refuse to change.
There's plenty of laws out there that are wildly unpopular and only exist because the people who make up the legislature wants them to even if the people represented don't. Legislatures can get away with doing this because no one law is enough of an affront to enough people to justify voting for "the other party".
Most laws making moderately dangerous things illegal or hard to get fall into that category.
We shouldn't conflate voting with "will of the people."
Especially when races can be so close and you have to wait up to 6 years to vote someone out. 6 years is a much different time frame politically today than it was in the 18th century. A term that long doesn't shield senators from political pressure, but it allows lobbyists to get more bang for their buck and further the power imbalance between rich and the rest of us.
They're both necessary for change, it's just often that direct action forces policy
A policy or law that enforces a certain behavior that contradicts culture, would, by definition be undemocratic. A policy or law that enforces a certain behavior that is already present as a strong cultural norm, would be redundant.
There is an extremely strong cultural and behavioral norm against murder. I do not find laws against it to be redundant.
Fair. Although, my point was to suggest checking the tendency of rushing into legislation. Laws are discovered, not made.
The only reason that "the will of the people" isn't interchangeable with voting is the two party system. Unfortunately the mechanisms that drive US politics into a two party system are baked into the constitution, which means this flaw is an inseparable part of the United States Federal Government.
did you just "actually" Barack Obama on how change happens in a democracy?
What if he did? Is he not allowed to have his own opinion?
Do you agree with Barack Obama on everything?
> So let’s not excuse violence, or rationalize it, or participate in it.
Taboos around violence for political are one of the crucial building blocks for a functioning democracy. If those taboos are broken, even for a good cause, you set a precedence that violence works. And the next cause won’t be as good. One only has to look at the lessons of the Roman Revolution that started with the murder of Grachus, and ended with an Emperor who everyone acclaimed as they were so tired of the bloodshed.
I cannot condone violence nor encourage it, but you have to admit that the first few protests and property damage drastically influenced the quick arrest of an officer that may not have been arrested or even fired if it didn't happen.
The non-violent protests of Colin Kaepernick were mocked and used to rally the other side and just weren't effective.
The problem here is not the violence, but a policing system that is so fundamentally damaged and has not been effectively reformed fast enough.
The MLK quote is trotted out pretty often, but "a riot is the language of the unheard".
> The MLK quote is trotted out pretty often, but "a riot is the language of the unheard".
MLK Jr was unequivocally non-violent. That quote was in the context of explaining the root cause of the rioting, not condoning or endorsing it.
Don't trust anyone trying to tell you MLK Jr would have supported violent protests.
They are either trying to manipulate you or sadly ignorant (or both, of course). In either case they have it wrong, in terms of history and in the implication that violent protest will lead to any kind of progress or justice.
Do note the reverse though. Don’t let everyone who labels violence as unequivocally wrong trick you into thinking that all riots are due to bad people. You’re right in that MLK Jr’s point wasn’t to promote riots. However, if you automatically label all riots as being bad, you’ve also missed the deeper point MLK Jr was trying to make:
listen to your fellow humans
When you see news about a riot, your first instinct should be to ask why? What are they rioting about? What was being said that led to this situation? Were people listening? How did they respond?
Not make a judgement of them.
This is where media has great power in controlling the narrative. If they don’t report on what happened prior to the riots (ex: peaceful protests, calls to representatives for action, etc), then it becomes very hard to see rioters as human beings with a voice.
Edit: note that I’m not making a judgement on OP. I writing this because I often see this reaction to riots and people often take away the wrong message both ways.
> I cannot condone violence nor encourage it, but you have to admit that the first few protests and property damage drastically influenced the quick arrest of an officer that may not have been arrested or even fired if it didn't happen.
I don't think this is a good thing. The office involved should be charged or arrested based on the circumstances and evidence, not to appease angry protesters and to attempt to quell riots.
In this case, it appears overwhelmingly clear that the office should be charged; but arresting people because their actions have inspired protests or riots is very dangerous.
> The office involved should be charged or arrested based on the circumstances and evidence
Obviously. But they weren't, and given precedent, probably never would have been. That's why this is happening.
The officer in question has been charged with murder. The Minnesota Governor and AG were both advocating for charges basically since day 1 and well before the protests so it's not at all clear the turmoil influenced his arrest.
There was more than one murderer. There were 4 murderers. The police chief said as such, which is unprecedented for a police chief to say.
To the contrary, the prosecutor had this to say about why he had not pressed charges:
'But my job in the end is to prove he violated a criminal statute - but there is other evidence that does not support a criminal charge.'[0]
This quotation is from a tabloid, but the quote--and the DA's failure to say unequivocally that he would prosecute Floyd's killer, Chauvin--contributed to the riots.
And then Chauvin was arrested the day after riots started.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8367221/Prosecutors...
Attorney General != District Attorney last time I checked.
DAs decide whether to file murder charges. AGs are not relevant to the process.
If I, as a citizen, went along with three cronies to murder a man, those three cronies would all catch murder charges as well.
There's lots of precedent of officers being charged and arrested. Not often enough, and they are especially acquitted too often, but the public perception that they aren't charged is a function of media narrative, not fact.
The cop in question had 18 prior complaints against him.
I don't know about you, but if I had 18 complaints against me at work, I would probably have got in trouble by now, and I'm not talking about two "letters of reprimand".
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/01/us/derek-chauvin-what-we-...
Yeah, I’d be in big trouble. My industry has yet to unionize.
This reply elides the fact that there are quite a few American police officers who have killed American citizens in similar circumstances to this one who are free and have never been convicted.
Yes, it would be great if the law worked as we intended it to. Yet it does not, and to suggest that we continue to sit here while these police officers continue to murder people undermines the ability of the people who are being murdered to stop it.
They usually don't even get charged.
It's the last way the people have for their voice to be heard. All laws come from the people governed; legislatures serve at their behest and for their interests. If you have SO MANY people decrying an action -- it's direct democracy in real time.
Voting? Anyway, there's pretty broad agreement that the riots are opportunistic violence, not connected to or motivated by a concern for justice.
Voting hasn't worked. Oakland PD still has half of its budget to brutality complaints. It's been 7 years since the movement started and 66 years since voting was allowed for Black people. Voting isn't going to change anything.
"Broad agreement" by who, exactly? I keep seeing videos of cops smashing windows then blaming it on protestors, cops attacking crowds with tear gas and less-lethal rounds, and now a shooting of a small business owner at a barbecue. It's not connected to a concern for justice because you're looking at the wrong side to blame.
> Voting hasn't worked. Oakland PD still has half of its budget to brutality complaints. It's been 7 years since the movement started and 66 years since voting was allowed for Black people. Voting isn't going to change anything.
Really, honestly, think about this rationale and think about what it would look like if people with different views than you applied this line of reasoning. Would you be okay with anti-abortion activists employed direct action and did to clinics what these protestors did to police stations?
Are you saying they haven't? The DOJ considers anti-abortion activists domestic terrorists and treats them as such.
And rightly so. That's my point: using force to override democracy is bad, and leads to a world where might makes right. The same scrutiny should be applied to the groups torching police departments.
No, for two reasons:
First, no one is forcing you to have an abortion you don't want. Anti-abortion activity is for the sake of others, and never yourself. This makes it no less noble of an endeavor for your personal beliefs, but since other people having abortions don't actually affect you one wit, it's hard to see abortion as having the same urgency as police brutality, where people at random are dying daily, and anybody could be the next target.
Second, because their voices are being heard. Between the banning of funding for Planned Parenthood domestically as well as internationally, and continued restrictions to constructively ban abortion in several states, it's clear that progress is being made, so voting is working. This is not clear at all for victims of police violence, where claims have been increasing over time, not decreasing.
Tell that to the people who genuinely believe that termination of pregnancies is murder. I don't deny that you see abortion in a different light (and so do I). That's the point. It's clear that the comment above is written without consideration for the fact that people have different worldviews.
Your comment is just as empowering for said activists to say "voting hasn't worked, murdering the unborn remains legal nationwide. We need to use direct action against abortion providers".
The idea that force is justified because democracy has not produced the desired outcome directly leads to a world where might makes right.
> Voting hasn't worked
What? If 10% of the people who turned out to protest actually voted in their local elections, they would have whatever they wanted. Voting has hardly been attempted, and there are voting data to prove it.
> "Broad agreement" by who, exactly?
Basically everyone who isn't an outside agitator, but if you don't already believe me I doubt I'm going to change your mind.
> I keep seeing videos of cops smashing windows then blaming it on protestors, cops attacking crowds with tear gas and less-lethal rounds, and now a shooting of a small business owner at a barbecue. It's not connected to a concern for justice because you're looking at the wrong side to blame.
I don't know what to tell you. Cops aren't using kid gloves any more for sure, but cities are descending into chaos and no one in good faith thinks its the cops that are out there doing the looting and burning.
> Basically everyone who isn't an outside agitator, but if you don't already believe me I doubt I'm going to change your mind.
Trotting out a nebulous, totally unsourced claim and then implying that anyone who questions you is wrong beyond help is… not exactly a convincing tactic.
>The MLK quote is trotted out pretty often, but "a riot is the language of the unheard".
Trotted out by ignorant woke dummies. In his 1967 Stanford speech MLK also says: "Let me say as I've always said and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I'm still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice."
Using MLK to defend or advocate violence is astonishingly ahistoric.
It's different to dislike it from a tactical perspective and to morally condemn it.
"They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."
the post you're replying too doesn't imply he advocated riots; if the quote is accurate (I'm no historian) it's simply attributing causality.
I'm explicitly talking about the people who are using the MLK quote to DEFEND the riots not explain them. If they actually supported the thesis of what MLK was saying they would post the entire quote with the relevant condemnation of riots, some are doing that but many aren't.
No one is doing that.
You cherry-picked just the MLK quote and added an ad-hominem which isn't a very productive argument.
Calling someone names is not an ad-hominem. Making accusations about a person's character can be a valid inference based on their behavior. What makes an ad-hominem is thinking that a person's character (or other attributes) has any bearing on the correctness of their argument.
For example:
"X is a bad person, therefore their argument is invalid" is an ad-hominem. Bad people can still make valid arguments.
"X's argument is both invalid and in bad faith, therefore they are a bad person" is a logical inference.
> Calling someone names is not an ad-hominem
It's not, but it also has no place on HN.
The insult was not directed at the commenter, rather to a group of people that popularized the quote.
It is the difference between "If you believe X then your school must have had brain-dead teachers" and "If you believe X you are brain-dead"
He literally added the context of the quote, without which MLK's views were misrepresented.
> The MLK quote is trotted out pretty often, but "a riot is the language of the unheard".
Does anyone really believe this applies in this case? Lots of protesters are openly condemning the riots as "patently not about justice but only personal greed and appetite for violence".
> The problem here is not the violence, but a policing system that is so fundamentally damaged and has not been effectively reformed fast enough.
Both? I don't understand this "either or" mentality. "Why is everyone condemning the riots instead of condemning Floyd's murder?" Literally everyone is condemning Floyd's murder. Even the police unions are condemning Floyd's murder. It's the one thing everyone agrees on. Murderer was arrested and charged. The "debate" is about the merits of burning/looting/shooting-up communities (with an apparent preference for poor, minority communities) on top of the criminal prosecution.
> I cannot condone violence nor encourage it, but you have to admit that the first few protests and property damage drastically influenced the quick arrest of an officer that may not have been arrested or even fired if it didn't happen.
I am deeply critical of this line of thought. There are so many negative consequences of properties destruction and looting that counterweight the benefits.
As far as I am concerned this is an argument that only someone that did not have a riot outside of their own house can espouse.
I apologize for the hyperbole of that argument, but it is something that I would personally say to everyone condoning the destruction, the looting, and the violence; even knowing that in some instances I will be wrong.
I a couple of months there will be one less evil cop around and also quite few stores destroyed, livelihood evaporated, family savings lost, destroyed buildings in historically minority and poor neighborhoods.
Once the dust settles hundreds of people will be in far worse conditions that they would have been otherwise AND those will not be the protesters, those will be the people, families, kids, that had the protest happen around them.
A mob demanding the arrest of someone is its own problem. You just tend to agree with the mob this time. When you disagree with the mob, you'll see the folly in the argument.
> but you have to admit that the first few protests and property damage drastically influenced the quick arrest of an officer that may not have been arrested or even fired if it didn't happen.
Why, is there evidence of this? It isn't very obvious to me that he wouldn't get arrested and charged otherwise, this case is way clearer than any other controversial police killing I've seen.
The state's autopsy claimed he died of hypertension and coronary artery disease. It never mentioned anything about asphyxiation and went on to speculate about how he may have been on drugs. The police also claimed at the time that he was resisting arrest. The police were fired after the video was released. The cop that murdered him had eighteen prior complaints, none of which were followed up on. Why do we assume #19 would be the one without the video and the protests?
> I cannot condone violence nor encourage it, but you have to admit that the first few protests and property damage drastically influenced the quick arrest of an officer that may not have been arrested or even fired if it didn't happen.
It is especially important for people to condemn violence that leads to outcomes they are in favor of. Otherwise, groups that are in favor of something else, decide "hey, violence works, voting doesn't" and you descend into horror as different groups all use violence to get their ways.
>I cannot condone violence nor encourage it, but you have to admit that the first few protests and property damage drastically influenced the quick arrest of an officer that may not have been arrested or even fired if it didn't happen.
But it's not clear that the violence/property damage component was worth it. Nationwide protests and all of the public outcry could have been enough. Hard to tell at this point.
Not to mention that the communities they are destroying don't have a great tax base to begin with. After destroying businesses and property its going to shrink even more.
The Loop in Chicago, which was recently smashed up almost as well as any, is probably one of the better tax bases.
> Nationwide protests and all of the public outcry could have been enough.
We've had protests, for separate occasions, happen years and years and decades ago, and it has not been enough.
At which point will it be enough? How many more protests will it take? How many more decades will it take? Is anyone still on the fence on 2020 about whether or not bad cops are being protected by their peers and superiors? Do you have a timeline for when this sort of thing will change?
1992 LA Riots caused over a $Billion in damage and 63 people died. Given that the scale of those riots far surpassed anything we're seeing now and given that nearly 30 years later another instance of police brutality preceded the current turmoil isn't it clear that your approach has failed?
LAPD underwent unprecedented reform in the wake of the riots. It’s certainly not a perfect department, but it is exponentially better than it was in 1992. You are making the opposite point you think you are. The riots and DoJ consent decrees are literally the _only_ tactics that have succeeded in the past.
The failure after the riots was that we didn’t treat it as a national problem and undertake systemic reform of our policing systems from root to stem.
>The failure after the riots
It would appear that you in fact made my point for me.
Credit assignment is a hard problem. Let's not trivialize it with post hoc fallacies.
The danger of violence is exactly that it's effective at producing change. People are much more willing to consider police reform than they were last week - but they're also much more willing to shoot thieves and deploy the Army than they were last week. The police reform message is not guaranteed to win if the dice don't fall correctly.
Is that chronology right? Were there protests before he was arrested? Was there property damage in those protests?
Even if so, 90% of the protests and property damage were after the arrest, so... they're pointless?
The protests started in earnest May 26 and Derek Chauvin was arrested and charged May 29. The Minneapolis PD third precinct building burned on the evening of the 28th.
The other three cops who helped to kill George Floyd have not been charged or arrested. Neither have the men who killed Breonna Taylor. That's hardly the limit of police violence that has gone unaccounted for. At this point it’s more of a protest against police brutality than just the one specific murder. So, no, not pointless.
The riots were mostly contained to Minneapolis until the weekend. The riots in my state and across the Nation mostly happened after Chauvin was arrested.
The riots are also a way to maintain pressure on the DA's office to not drop charges or fail to fully prosecute Chauvin.
"See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence." - Noam Chomsky.
I've been pretty happy that pretty much everyone (left, right, white, black, etc) agrees that the rioting and looting are just opportunistic violence and not actually part of the protest or "sending a message to people with power". Defending or promoting violence of any kind is repugnant, doubly so when it's directed toward impoverished communities.
The full quote is, however,
"See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence. If violence is effective, it's okay. But if violence loses it's efectiveness, then they start worrying and have to try somethong else." - Noam Chomsky.
They do. But you can't complain if they answer in that same language.
Like the current protesters who act surprised and offended when they get shot with rubber bullets after throwing bricks, rocks and enhanced fireworks at the police or people they deem opponents.
"Live by the sword, die by the sword" -Matthew 26, 26:52
>>a policing system that is so fundamentally damaged and has not been effectively reformed fast enough.
The problem is there has been ZERO actual reform to policing at all, there have been at best some lipstick measures but there has been zero real reforms to the fundamental structure of policing in this nation. Which includes the Paramilitary style, training, order, and even ranking with in the various dept's
The Militarization of the police force has been going on for decades, and this is what happens when you use a military for policing. It never works out well for anyone
I have no hope that the police departments of this nation have any desire to roll back that militarization at all, and I have no hope that the legislatures of this nation have any intention to force that rollback to occur.
Civil disobedience != violence. Illegal action is sometimes justified. Violence never is.
I'm sorry, but that rings hollow in a country with the Second Amendment and a gun culture that likes to wax poetic about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, or preach that school shootings are simply the price we pay for a free state.
You cannot tell a group of people that violence must be beneath them when they're facing a system that employs violence against them with impunity and often bends over backwards to justify it, in a culture which holds violence as one of the foundations of liberty itself. That would be suicidal.
Violence should be a last resort, but it can't ever be off the table, not in the US.
This is just false though. Sometimes violence is all you have left. Without violence, we wouldn't be a country. Without violence a black person would still be worth 3/5 of a white person. History shows us that violence is sometimes necessary. We arm police specifically because violence is sometimes required.
Violence was not the solution for any of the problems you mention, but the cause of a few. Maybe re-examine your rationale.
Better arrests and better prosecution may be helpful, not quick arrests.
For example, the bar owner that killed a protestor in Omaha, NE was arrested right after the incident. Tonight he has been released because the investigation determined the shooting was self-defense.
Omaha will burn brightly tonight.
violence speaks the language of the non-educated in the short term, but it does more damage in the long run.
On the other hand, the french revolution, the american revolution, and the civil war could be argued to be violent protests for reform that did some good. I think slow erosion of rights and safety nets through quiet periods of apathy does more harm to more people, and becomes harder to reverse in the long run.
Can we not make comparisons between revolutions against oppressive monarchies for the right to representation and opportunistic looting and rioting? People's homes and livelihoods are literally going up in smoke and these riots aren't even over yet--can we hold off on the vague defenses of political violence?
The American Revolution certainly included a good share of looting. Wealthy local townspeople who were viewed as sympathetic to Britain were brutally driven out of their homes, and whatever possessions they could not take with them as they fled to Canada or the Caribbean were plundered by the revolutionaries.
While the ideologues of the American Revolution were arguing for lofty Enlightenment-era ideals, on the ground things were much more opportunistic, with people joining the secessionist movement in order to plunder those Tory households, or to earn some money as a soldier or mercenary.
No doubt, but I don't see what this has to do with anything. The fact that opportunistic looting took place doesn't refute the fact that the American Revolution was overwhelmingly about independence and representative government.
"Protests of non-responsive oppressive governments and their agents that get accompanied by opportunistic looting" sounds like this last week to me.
Our government isn’t oppressive. There are actual oppressive governments. We have some bad police and a law that protects them too often. Mostly things are as good as they’ve ever been and getting better all the time. Everything else is the media money machine going brrrr.
If things are as good as they've ever been then how come on one side of the political spectrum there's a broad movement to "make America great again" and on the other there's a mass movement taking to the streets? Does anyone think things are as good as they have ever been besides the bankers?
Not an American. Can you share one or two reforms that you would like implemented. It is hard to grasp what is really going on from a distance.
Significantly expanding police training, and greater coverage of topics such as nonviolent de-escalation, community outreach, implicit bias training, and how to work with mentally ill individuals. Greater accountability through body cam programs, and community oversight boards for police departments everywhere. De-militarization of police, because right now, the police can legally buy surplus military gear and use it on American citizens, up to and including tanks. Frankly, I'd like to see most beat cops completely disarmed (but that seems unlikely to happen soon). I'd also like to see yearly community service requirements for police; make them volunteer their time in the communities they patrol, so they can feel invested in it and get to know the people there.
Your other suggestions may be good, but implicit bias training is a bad idea. The correlation between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior is weak to non-existent[1].
[1]https://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-We-Really-Measure-Impl...
Yeah, implicit bias training is snake oil. It’s something they can pay consultants for to look like they’re taking action, without asking any difficult questions about the structure of the department.
I'm generally on board with everything you've said, but
>like to see most beat cops completely disarmed
seems absolutely crazy to me as long as the general public has such easy access to guns.
The British model - and i know we have a much lower level of gun ownership than the US, but hear me out! - is to have bobbies on the beat not be armed, but to have rapid response units available which are very heavily armed indeed [1] [2]. So, if police on the street encounter an armed criminal, they fall back, radio for support, and wait for a group of colleagues with assault rifles, sub-machine guns, and proper training in using them, to arrive.
I wonder if a similar model, with different details, could work in the US? In the limit, that could involve police cars or foot patrols working in pairs, one unarmed and doing the actual policing, and another one following some way behind, but not getting involved unless a gun was spotted. Put body cameras on the unarmed unit, with the armed officers watching a live feed, so they don't even have to wait for a call.
That said, as the wikipedia article points out, the British model does not extend to the whole of the UK - police in Northern Ireland routinely carry guns, which in 2020 is rather depressing.
[1] https://www.eliteukforces.info/police/CO19/weapons/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_police_firearms_in_the...
That could work in Massachusetts, Maryland or some other states with very low firearms ownership rates. I don't think it's fair to ask police to go out and police without at least letting them have (at their discretion) the same level of armament as the local law abiding citizens and holding them to the same standards when they do use force. Allowing a civilian police force to have things the local civilians can't have doesn't make sense IMO.
What cops really need is more training to not shoot first and ask questions later. 18yo marines manning checkpoints in the middle east are expected to more or less hold their fire until they come under fire. Domestic police should be held to similiar standards.
A different argument in favor of disarmed police is specifically relevant for the presence of an armed citizen (at least in very urban and central area where reinforcements can be minutes away, not half an hour)
You could say that disarmed police in regular patrols can be safer as it is less of a threat to a criminal. this would obviously not apply to known cases of dangers or cases were reinforcements are unlikely.
Why?
For some reason some Americans believe police officers should respond to non-violent reports and crimes fully armed instead if reserving armed response for cases which justify escalation of force.
You suggestion make sense to me, why haven't they been implemented? Is it lack of political will or lack of money?
The police get unbelievably huge amounts of money (like serious amounts of money) so it's not that.
Yesterday police in Columbus, Ohio replaced the American flag flying outside of their headquarters with a "Blue line" police flag. Just hours ago representatives of our nation's largest police force, the NYPD, posted on twitter the home address of the mayor's adult daughter.
It's a lack of political will, but that's kind of putting it mildly- it would be more accurate to say that the politicians are afraid of the police.
I didn't believe the comment about doxing the daughter of the mayor of NYC, but here it is:
"The SBA [Sergeant's Benevolent Association], run by union boss Ed Mullins, the mayor’s fiercest critic, included a photo of a computer screen which appeared to be his 25-year-old daughter’s arrest report. The report included her date of birth, New York state ID number, and various biographical details, such as height, weight, and citizenship status. It also included an apartment number and home address, which appeared to be Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence (though the zip code did not match.)
"Twitter’s policies expressly forbid users from posting personal information, including identity documents, including government-issued IDs. Posting home addresses “or other identifying information related to locations that are considered private” is also forbidden.
"The SBA’s tweet remained up for more than an hour before eventually being taken down after a several users (including this reporter) flagged the tweet for abuse. The account was temporarily locked until the tweet was voluntarily deleted."
https://gizmodo.com/nypd-union-doxes-mayors-daughter-on-twit...
NYPD precincts and officers have all changed their twitter profile picture to a badge with a "thin blue line" band covering the area where the identifying badge number is:
Disturbing to see NYPD officers covering their badge numbers en masse like that (in the video a few tweets down).
There's just no procedure to implement police reforms nationally in the US right now; the police in each city are entirely independent, answerable only to their city government, and generally represent an important political bloc. In many cities, the reforms have happened and the general public doesn't really have a problem with the police. In others, there just hasn't been the political will to push meaningful reforms past the police union.
Other replies have some useful ideas, but I think it's important to strike right at the heart of the issue: lack of accountability and redress.
Something _like_: make police leadership legally accountable for the actions of their officers. I say something _like_ this because it's in the right direction, but probably not the exact solution necessary. Another similar approach is something _like_ forbidding police unions or otherwise completely neuter them [with respect to Officer's actions].
Ideas like community service are good, but I think it's important to have clarity of approach (drop racism as the driving force and focus on accountability) and efficacy (make real changes).
This issue is very murky even to Americans, but everyone will say they know what the problem is or they will deny that there is a problem. If their description of the problem aligns with predictable political leanings, they're likely taking an emotionally driven perspective.
We have a different problem in my country of residence in that policing is a federal/national function. There are two arms of police, crime is handled by national police and enforcing of city by laws is done by the city/metro police. It just feels like police don't have enough local leadership. I always thought the US system where the police report to the mayor enables the mayor (read local person) to have a fair say in how things are run. I guess mayors have enough on their plates and it must be hard to change a large body as big as the police. I am extrapolating my experiences moving large organisations to new IT systems which is often easier said than done.
In practice how it works in most large cities in the US is the mayor ends up deferring to police leadership because the police hold so much influence over local political conditions. Mayors that get tough on dirty cops find themselves riding a wave of crime atop the police deciding to simply stop policing certain sorts of calls or in particular areas.
Ah now that makes sense. Like most management jobs you don't really have as much power as you think you have. You need developers to be on your side otherwise you no going to achieve much with your team fighting you.
Americans would be safer, happier, and more prosperous if tomorrow we had half the number of police we have today. The various misguided "entrepreneurial" policies like forfeiture and federal drug war grants have swelled the numbers beyond what the populace can tolerate. We are a fairly violent nation, when compared to Europe (though not when compared to other colonized nations, like nearly everywhere in the western hemisphere), but for the most part violence levels are due to environmental and demographic factors, not police activity. The only exception, the Drug War, is a case in which increased police activity increases violence. So, far fewer police, please.
Taboo is the exact right word for that.
In particular, the Gracchi violated an unspoken and unwritten compact that governed the behavior of the Roman aristocracy. In particular, they attempted to secure power for themselves using avenues not considered "in bounds". There was no institutional mechanism in place to process violations of that unwritten compact (social opprobrium had worked for hundreds of years), so the senators (Scipio Nasica in particular) immediately transitioned to personal violence.
Once the taboo against aristocrat-on-aristocrat violence vanished, Rome descended into waves of high aristocrats raising private armies to secure their personal power. It was, more or less, a game of last man standing that Augustus "won".
I don't condone violence, but at the same time you have to acknowledge that modern American democracy was built on the foundation of political violence. It worked for us.
You do not use violence in a democratic protest. To use it is effective acknowledgement that you either want to destroy the democracy or do not believe that it actually exists on the moment.
> democratic protest
It seems like the protestors have lost faith in the democratic process. Can you still call it a democratic protest?
Then is it a revolution? What is the plan? The want to secede Minneapolis?
It is either a democratic protest, domestic terrorism, or a civil war. I hope with all my being that it is a democratic protest.
It's the same justification many people used for voting for Trump, which was that?
I am sorry, I am a bit lost, but if Trump election had to be one of those three it would have been a democratic protest against the establishment.
Or were you referring to something else?
Many Trump supporters (primarily the alt-right and white supremacist fringe) didn't simply protest against the establishment, and certainly didn't intend to do so democratically (as that would imply a belief in the legitimacy of the system and the views of their opponents.) They voted with the intent of seeing the system destroyed and an ethnostate emerging from the rubble. Reasonable people can disagree about the size and relative influence of this contingent on the election, but it exists.
Drawing too many parallels between that and the protestors would be unfair, particularly where motive is concerned, but it is hard not to notice the energy is the same in a lot of ways. One side doing violence against the system and another doing violence against infrastructure, each because they feel the system has been irreparably damaged by the influence of the other.
Ok, so what? I have no sympathy for violent far right extremism and I intend to denounce neo-nazist ideologies as much as I can. Especially since it has devolved into (mostly non collective) violence already.
On the other hand your comment is saying that one of the worst thing those groups collectively did was voting. I don't think you are making the argument you think you are making.
On the other hand, if you are saying that the other side might start rioting too; isn't that an argument for deescalation?
> You do not use violence in a democratic protest.
Tell that to the police. The current "don't use violence" rhetoric is cleverly being aimed at the protestors and seems to be giving a consistent pass to the other side's behavior. In many cases, these guys are suited up like shock troops, visibly excited and ready to bust skulls, and when they're unleashed they are going to find skulls (peaceful or not) to bust. This is a system that only knows how to use violent escalation to solve problems, and lo and behold, they're out there bringing on the violence. The protests are about police brutality, and the police are coming in and using the only tool they know: brutality. But it's OK because someone somewhere else is burning down a Target?
> To use it is effective acknowledgement that you either want to destroy the democracy or do not believe that it actually exists on the moment.
From your wording you seem to be agreeing that the police also "want to destroy the democracy".
The American revolution was a violent protest.
Yes, and the people participating on it were pretty sure they weren't living in a democracy.
I imagine that many people on those current protests believe they aren't in one either (or, at least, if one exists they are cast out of it). I'm in no position to judge if they are right, but on the case they are not, violence is no means to do a democratic protest.
It was actually seeking to overthrows the government, and it was treason from the eyes of the British. If the British had won, likely every one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence would have been hanged or worse.
If you want to change the way things are inside the system vote, organize, protest. But actually seeking to overthrow the government is opening a whole can of very, very bad things.
Gay rights, women's rights, civil rights were all won by combating unjust power using every tool available, including violence. Oppressors don't self-limit the tools they'll use to maintain power. Neither can those who are oppressed.
Against a tyrannical, non-representative government, and it was a last-ditch effort.
We have a democracy. People have opportunities to vote. Police policy is decided largely at the local level, so individual votes are powerful. Imagine if even 10% of protesters voted in their local elections...
Local elections can be rigged against local voters. I wish I could find the link now, but I recall reading an article recently (was it in The Atlantic?) about how one American town with a huge African-American population was unable to get a single African-American councilman elected, because back in the heyday of segregation the local whites had managed to do some gerrymandering-like trick that made most local citizens’ votes now count for nothing.
You can also see dirty tricks at local council meetings, where those in authority abuse the meeting’s rules of order to quickly shut down anyone speaking up about problems that those in authority don’t want addressed.
Why would you think that the voter turnout among protestors is less than 10%? That seems absurd and at least a little offensive.
>do not believe that it actually exists on the moment
Precisely. People have been voting and non-violently protesting for decades, and it hasn't worked.
People haven't been voting, which is why it hasn't worked.
Let's look at the subset of people that vote. If they consistently vote and encourage others to vote, and yet their candidates never win, they are effectively powerless. For them it is no different than living under a monarchy, except for the vague hope that maybe eventually their candidates will win and their policies enacted. Eventually that vague hope makes things even more painful, since they know that their government will never represent them, despite them theoretically having the power to decide their leaders. Either they will resent the system or they will resent their neighbors who either vote for the opposition or don't vote.
Think about all of the left-wing voters in a very Red congressional district or state. Think of all the right wing voters in a very Blue district or state. They are not officially disenfranchised, but their vote doesn't really matter either, so why vote at all? The equation changes somewhat for swing states/districts, but even then it's often a lesser of two evils choice, rather than any major progression towards policy goals. There are some democracies that mitigate some of these issues (getting rid of the electoral college and first past the post would go a long way in the US), but in general democracy leaves a lot of people dissatisfied.
If your major disagreement with the status quo is the tax rate, or certain business regulations, your dissatisfaction with the democratic process is manageable. If your major disagreement with the status quo is police brutality and injustice that make your life miserable, then what is the downside to rioting and destruction? Maybe there's only a tiny chance that something good will come out of it, but it's better than a zero percent chance of enacting change by continuing to vote and lose elections.
Not talking about national or even state elections here—talking about local elections. And if one can mobilize thousands in a particular locale to protest (to take off work and go out shoulder-to-shoulder during a pandemic no less), why can’t they mobilize enough voters?
How has it not worked?
Remind me again... how do we elect presidents that don't win the popular vote?
America rebelled precisely because we didn't have a meaningfully representative form of government? People couldn't vote for the reforms they wanted because there wasn't a democracy. Rebellion against an overtly oppressive tyrant as a last resort for the right to representation is different than the opportunistic violence that we're seeing today.
The violence of the American Revolution was targeted at the government institutions and military that directly threatened them.
These riots are targeted at innocent civilians. Destroying peoples livelihoods, setting fire to residences with people still inside (including children), etc.
I would not be so quick to draw such a comparison.
American revolutionaries targeted loyalist civilians for violence and property destruction. Let's not ignore the ugly parts of our national history. In some cases it was literally terrorism, at least by the modern definition.
It's fair to bring that up, but I don't think it changes my point. Defending against a military force which is threatening one's independence is worlds apart from violence towards innocent civilians. That the latter was committed during revolutionary period does not mean it was justified then, nor is it justified now.
>I don't condone violence, but at the same time you have to acknowledge that modern American democracy was built on the foundation of political violence.
This is incoherent. You can't claim to not condone violence and in the same sentence say but actually it works.
I think perhaps you're putting uneven amounts of weight on violence depending on who is participating in it. My understanding of the protests is that it (at least partially) is currently serving as a response to the accepted police's monopoly on violence.
I see in another of your posts you said something to the effect of "If (protests) become violent, don't be surprised when (the police) respond with violence."
This solidly frames the protesters as the sole provocateurs and the police as solidly the ones that are backed into a corner. It's almost as if your argument relies on ignoring the literal murder of George Floyd when looking at the timeline of events.
To paraphrase a joke I saw a while ago, "If a police officer were kneeling on my neck, I would simply vote that officer out of office." It's patent nonsense meant for amusement, but the line of reasoning is similar to what you can construct out of specially selected MLK quotes or whatever.
>I see in another of your posts you said something to the effect of "If (protests) become violent, don't be surprised when (the police) respond with violence."
You must have me confused with someone else. I've never made a comment like that.
Oops, I did get you mixed up, my mistake. I don't think I can edit my post now, but my point largely still stands as a response to this comment that you did make > ...isn't it clear that your approach has failed?
With that reasoning, anyone who supports the modern American state has to condone violence, because it was founded on it.
The police were breaking those taboos constantly last week. I've seen them casually macing people (not to move them, or to make arrests - they didn't occupy that space, they just sprayed the front of a line down, because they could) tossing tear gas and flashbangs into non-violent crowds (again, without any intention of occupying the vacated space), and shooting non-lethal projectiles at people who were sitting on their porches.
Police are people too and when you escalate to violence and destruction you might get answered with force. Making this an us vs them and not having any proper form of discourse between the parties is causing the explosive reactions on both sides.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gu3qq1/cop_just_ca...
Do any of the people who got gassed in this video look like they are committing violence or destruction? The cop who tossed the gas grenade is certainly committing violence, but that's about all I can see.
> I'm not a tough person, I'm not an aggressive person, I'm not a violent person. I was just standing there quietly alongside other peaceful protestors. I wanted desperately for the police to prove us wrong and show compassion and a desire to serve and protect the people. I was speaking gently to the officer who shoved me back before this...trying to look him in the face through his gas mask...telling him my name, about my wife and my family. I don't know why really.
> Then this gas was dropped and it went to hell. I was already blind within seconds. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see. When I opened my eyes the smoke was too thick anyway to see a way out. I shouted that I couldn't breathe several times. The police just told me to move. I yelled, "Where?" with my last breath, but no help. I stumbled through the gas. The whole time in a complete panic. I could not breathe, and my involuntary response when the gas hit was to push all the air out of my lungs. I felt like I would collapse within seconds, and nearly did.
> Somehow I got out, after going a couple blocks through the smoke. I was nauseous, I had vomit in my mouth. Snot poured from my face. I still couldn't breathe. Every instinct told me not to breathe, but I figured I needed to get the gas out of my lungs, and I forced some breath.
> I stumbled away for the next 30 minutes, trying to get home. Some kind people gave me milk to pour in my eyes and face to help with the burns. Someone sprayed me with baking soda and water. As I was leaving, I saw more and more people coming down silently to join the protests.
> It's the next day, about 20 hours later. I still feel the tear gas in my lungs. It still burns.
> Not being able to breathe is the most terrifying experience of my life. A little fucking ironic, isn't it, to have the police forcing tens to hundreds of protestors to not be able to breathe at this protest?
It is going to be an us versus them, because not a single cop broke line, to do anything about the one who threw the grenade. They are making this an us versus them, because they stand as a united block, protecting their own, regardless the circumstances.
The job of a peace officer is to de-escalate the situation. Not a single one of them in the video is de-escalating the situation. One of them is committing assault, and the rest are standing there, watching.
It's the same thing as the whole "resisting arrest" paradox I've observed. People have base instincts (and I guess crowds/large-area population groups by some extension) that they just can't override. E.g. it's very difficult to lie still and be flaccid when you're being pinned, possible hit, have your hands twisted, put in a claustrophobic situation, etc to not try "fight back". Especially now when everyone just assumes that if you submit to police in such a situation that you will be choked out on hot asphalt and may never wake up.
It has already escalated for one reason or another, and it's hard for violence to de-escalate as it feeds each side until one decides to be "the loser". Only then can it subside or de-escalate. Right now, the police can't leave things be as they are in some places watching protests turn violent. Personally, I would hold them accountable if they didn't try to stop violent protestors and to disperse large crowds that start getting unruly or have the potential to. And that says nothing of the message or the grievances that the protestors may have.
>A little fucking ironic, isn't it, to have the police forcing tens to hundreds of protestors to not be able to breathe at this protest?
Also in the midst of a pandemic that kills by making you unable to breathe, and which is going get worse in the next few weeks because of all this.
There is an expression that says "the state has a monopoly on violence" - the government has no issue using violence to get their way, in fact, the essentially have no other tactics. And that's exactly why everyone decided to go protest. Breaking that taboo is a way of taking power back from the state.
It's a bit more than merely an expression[1]. The point (as I understand it) is also not to say that the state is only capable of or always legitimate in administering violence.
Do not condone violence. But much like dealing with students who break the rules, your first reaction should not be to punish. Your first reaction should be to ask why.
> If those taboos are broken, even for a good cause, you set a precedence that violence works.
Violence like that does not work by itself. It only works if you have "legitimate" institutions that are willing to excuse or downplay the violence that occurs.
What are your thoughts on the Boston Tea Party?
The Boston Tea Party was very targeted. They destroyed the tea that they had an objection to. They did not destroy the ships. They did not burn down the customs houses or otherwise damage Boston Harbor. It also only lasted three hours. It was not a riot, but rather a well-organized and well-executed precise political statement. That was one of the reasons that it was so effective politically.
Functioning democracy is the key to what OP was saying.
Unacceptable destruction of property, the British were clearly in the right here
/s
I agree with almost everything Mr. Obama wrote.
But...
I feel the complete opposite of “hopeful” when I see these riots, when I see people so angry they will destroy their own cities.
Because it accomplishes the exact opposite of they hope it will accomplish:
1. Those who side with heavy-handed police tactics feel vindicated for their prejudices.
2. The communities of those who feel unheard and left out are torn down even further.
3. Every civilian-police officer interaction post-riot will be even more contentious, thus making violence more likely.
Don’t get me wrong I believe there are corrupt officials and police officers. Obama is right about how to fix that on the local level.
About the actual problem being protested: One of the themes of the protests is to say the names[1] of those have been killed at the hands of the police. Just using common sense tells me that if you can name off the victims it means the problem isn’t widespread or systemic across the country.
Try naming the victims of rape or suicide or even murder.
Name the police officers killed in the line of duty in the last ten years. You can’t there’s way too many.
George Floyd should not have died. And the police officer(s) who contributed to his death should be held 100% accountable for their actions.
But there will always be unnecessary deaths in law enforcement situations. Rioting and burning down your own city will not make that fact go away.
So, I feel a loss of hope when I see these riots. To me, it means we are so far from working together to fix the problems that can be fixed. It creates a bigger divide in our society.
[1]https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865261916/a-decade-of-watchin...
> Just using common sense tells me that if you can name off the victims it means the problem isn’t widespread or systemic across the country.
true, but the counterpoint is the problem is not the volume of errors, its how the errors are handled. people know those names because the issues were never closed. Public servants like police officers should be open kimono; if someone dies, it should be a big deal. where's the brutally honest post-mortem? we expect this out of meaningless things like $SaaS, why in gods name not our police forces?
The US imprisons roughly 5 times as many black people as a proportion of it's population than apartheid South Africa, it's volume too.
When people talked about blameless post mortems I never fully believed them.
I did however never fear ending up on death row.
And it will be even harder for the communities hurt by this to come back. When you burn down stores in the neighborhood, its very likely the services and taxes they provide are not coming back
It’s a vicious cycle. The rioters and looters pillage their own communities. This causes productive locals to flee, as it is now a safety issue and most of them were impacted financially by COVID-19 so they do not have the means to rebuild. Eventually all that’s left is rubble.
> But there will always be unnecessary deaths in law enforcement situations.
The goal is to bring that number as close to zero as possible.
That's easy: just remove all laws or all law enforcement.
Thankfully we are not robots and can take multiple things into account when optimizing :)
> Just using common sense tells me that if you can name off the victims it means the problem isn’t widespread or systemic across the country.
> Name the police officers killed in the line of duty in the last ten years. You can’t there’s way too many.
First of all, the number of people killed by US police is an order of magnitude higher than the number of police officers killed in the line of duty. I have provided sources about this here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23373468
Of course, not every death caused by police is unjustifiable. But let's keep the whole picture in mind.
Second, I don't think any reasonable person is arguing that police officers nonchalantly murdering random black citizens is the systemic issue. What is systemic is police misconduct and brutality, as well as bias towards minorities especially black people. In extreme circumstances, this can result in loss of life; but most of the time, it won't.
You may have heard of Heinrich's law. If you have not, please take a look at the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_triangle
The gist of Heinrich's law is that for each accident causing serious serious injury or death, tens of accidents had occurred previously causing minor injury. For each accident causing minor injury, there had been tens of accidents causing no injury. For each accident causing no injury, there had been tens of unsafe acts. To give an example, a drunk driver killing someone had probably driven drunk hundreds of time before. He had scraped the paint on his car a couple of times, and the rest, he had driven without any accident of any sort.
For every death on that list, how many people have suffered life altering injuries and permanent disabilities at the hands of the police, e.g. blindness [1] or paralysis [2]? For every person suffering life altering injuries, how many have suffered serious yet healable injuries, e.g. broken ribs, ruptured spleen, etc.? For every person suffering serious yet healable injuries, how many have suffered minor injuries, e.g. broken nose, broken teeth, bruises, cuts, etc.? For every person suffering minor injuries, how many have been harassed, targeted, unjustifiably arrested or carded?
This is the systemic issue people are protesting against.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/us/minneapolis-protests-p...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/assault-charges-d...
I would fully expect the numbers of people killed by police to be higher than officers killed.
I don't disagree that there is a likely (especially in some places) a systemic police brutality or at least heavy-handed approach. I don't know how widespread. Probably a small minority of cops create a large majority of the problems.
And that needs to be rectified at the local level. Just like Mr. Obama said in his article.
I also believe that there a small minority of police officers who either already are prejudiced or have developed an unhealthy prejudice as a result of doing their jobs.
Because let's face it, if you get a job policing an inner city predominantly African-American community and you are not African-American, you are going to have many opportunities to develop prejudice. The obvious reason is that you are going to deal with the worst people from the community on a regular basis. It would work the same if a black police officer was assigned to work a rural, low-income white neighborhood. It's natural to start building a stereotype in your mind. In fact, it might be a self-preservation tactic.
I think one path to a solution (which once again has to be developed at the local level) is that the police need to do more in the communities than just enforce the law. If there was some community involvement it would create a trust between the police and the community. This would cause the interactions between officers and law breakers to maybe not start out with such animosity. If you knew the officer's first name and he knew yours because you had been in the community you'd be a lot less likely to have negative interaction during a traffic stop.
> I feel the complete opposite of “hopeful” when I see these riots, when I see people so angry they will destroy their own cities.
I am confident that this reality check for people who are somewhat blindly supporting their ideologies will benefit everyone. Beginning with the wealthier people who supported these protests and are now seeing their gated communities burn and their "progressive" newspapers destroyed.
Are the gated communities burning or the high-density poor city blocks?
Looks like both, but poor areas first:
https://twitter.com/ChrisPalmerNBA/status/126741517304573542...
https://thepostmillennial.com/journalist-supported-protester...
Obama, the POTUS who ordered plenty of military actions that led to hundreds of innocent civilian deaths. Civilians who did not have white skin. The irony should not be too quickly dismissed.
"President Obama, who hoped to sow peace, instead led the nation in war"
If you haven’t learned about the US Civil War and Reconstruction, it’s required context for everything around this topic. I’d particularly recommend the recent Chernow biography on Grant and the Blight biography on Frederick Douglass. The civil war & reconstruction are the single most defining events in US history. They’re extremely relevant to today’s politics, racial justice, and identity based partisanship.
In short I think it’s crucial to get an accurate (not “lost cause of the valiant confederacy”) appreciation for how bloody it was and the real stakes (slavery, not “states rights”). How progress was made politically. How there were a few years of positive change before the US backslid into racial patterns of old due to moral exhaustion fighting the south.
Grant is a very dense, but very good book.
The period after Lincoln's death until Grant's election is nearly unbelievable. Johnson was an avowed racist and openly apologistic to southern gentry. The south and a sizable percent of the population was under armed guard and were essentially in military dictatorship under Grant. Grant was the obvious next pick for president and, wisely, was quiet about being the 'real' power in the US, physically right next to Johnson.
Then, as Johnson can't help himself but to be a bullheaded moron, he gets impeached by the radical left wing of the house: the 'newish' Republican party. His trial is wild, by the way. He gets impeached, and is then sent to the senate. Where the southern states, still under the war department, can't vote or sit; it's all Union states. Bribing was rampant in the senate, but not publicly known. Johnson misses conviction by one vote. The left-wing Republican senators that vote to acquit never serve in public office again.
Again, Grant is a dense read, but Chernow did a fantastic job on it. Big recommend
One thing I have found is having basically a PoV character to follow through history is really useful for learning the period. Maybe its the game of thrones in me :)
If you're looking for a great book like this, I cannot possibly recommend anything higher than Edmund Morris' The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Morris' writing is masterful and gripping. It seriously reads like an adventure novel.
https://www.amazon.com/Edmund-Morriss-Theodore-Roosevelt-Tri...
I think it’s time for America’s leaders to stand up and organize our citizens in order to make long lasting policy changes. Citizens are paying attention. I want there to be a great American debate about what these changes should be. The world is watching and the American system is being tested. Let’s meet the challenge and be the example we want to see in the world. Clearly America is nowhere near perfect but with effort we can improve.
> I think it’s time for America’s leaders to stand up and organize our citizens in order to make long lasting policy changes.
Ok, and one third of the people support those policies and one third doesn't, and both thirds will fight each other tooth-and-nail. What then?
I am disappointed by the lack of leadership from the white house. The president should address the nation, bring it together and create a strategy to resolve these issues.
Edit: I should say "disappointed" instead of "surprised". Agree with the responses, there is no expectation anymore from the Whitehouse after 3 years of incompetency.
What's surprising about that? I'm actually asking, not trying to provoke.
There are four years of precedent of the leadership specifically and intentionally dividing and radicalizing the nation to directly drive electoral support to maintain power. Cruelty to outside groups is historically a very effective means to consolidate power. This is completely in line with past behavior and will more than likely continue.
4 years? Probably closer to 40 on all sides of the spectrum
You honestly expect Trump to lead, strategize, and bring the nation together, to the point of surprise that he hasn't?
So you want the GOP President to convince liberal strongholds such as DC, NYC and Minneapolis to be less racist? They've made it clear the do not respect him as a leader from day one. Don't really blame him for focusing elsewhere
Seems to me everytime there is a groundswell of activism, there is some element of discord (looting / rioting) which becomes the new narrative and is used to discredit the entire movement. This story has been on repeat-loop for almost a decade now.
Here is a protestor in NY claiming that looters were actually undercover NYPD detectives https://twitter.com/AndrewSolender/status/126693546402143027... Another example I can think of is the video of Jon Jones taking the spray cans from couple of rioters. These rioters are caucasian and we can only assume that they were more interested in wreaking damage than on "protesting" and hence can only be incidentally related to the movement. While strictly anecdotal, this simply disproves the false narrative on conservative circles which are inevitably going to focus on the rioting / looting rather than how to improve society.
Police brutality is a real issue. It's less clear that racial bias in policing is a statistically significant issue, however, when accounting for obvious things. If someone has numbers that tell a different story I am all ears. Here are mine when I attempted to find it for myself:
black arrests (all crimes) a year: 2.2 million
white arrests (all crimes) a year: 5.6 million
black deaths by police: 4.5 per 100k
white deaths by police: 1.5 per 100k
USA black population: 13%
USA white population: 75%
Again, If someone has numbers that tell a different story I am all ears
For all the budding data scientists out there, can you describe your general methodology in more detail?
Here’s my summary:
1. Pick a complex issue.
“racial bias” in policing
2. Pick a (single) year. / Ignore history.
2017
3. Pick a metric, any metric.
“deaths by police”
4. Write conclusion to match your preconceived notions.
5. Congrats, you’re now “data-driven”.
Laws are disproportionately overenforced on black communities. Your numbers are collected after a large amount of the bias is already baked in and collected by the people perpetrating the bias. Maybe that didn't occur to you.
You're just asking questions right?
I welcome more data that has less sampling bias, but without some attempt to quantify the amount of sampling bias here we don’t know if it has a big impact on this data.
It is on you if you don't take the testimony of hundreds of thousands of black people that they're terrorized by the police as evidence of possible police brutality.
Does that sound absurd? Is it as absurd as presuming the police would incriminate themselves with the data they create?
All evidence you can gather will be indirect. You make your judgment based on which you consider relevant.
It's presupposing a negligible effect of racial bias on arrest data. That's a very good reason to not use it in showing a negligible effect of racial bias on another scenario involving police. I'm struggling to think of a better example of a circular argument.
How do the numbers shake out if we consider only homicides, where selective enforcement should be less of a factor?
This is the report for homicides (a different table from the one in the root comment that tracks arrests): https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Furthermore, this data is from reports not arrests. So selective enforcement is not a factor.
The post above cites "arrests (all crimes) a year", not reports.
Looking at murder, the statistics tell a different story — blacks are 13% of the population but over 50% of the murder arrests, while whites are 75% of the population but under 50% of murder arrests.
If times the police use force are correlated to violent crime, then it’s unclear that blacks are over represented in deaths by police — they may actually be safer than whites, once controlling for the distribution of crimes they’re arrested for.
One problem I’ve had in this analysis is that the ~60/1000 deaths per year that aren’t justified (fortunately) aren’t enough to do an analysis on that subset.
Of course, 60 deaths is tragic — but 60 wrongful deaths among 8+ million arrests may not be the problem the media portrays it as.
You’re an order of magnitude less like to wrongfully die from police while being arrested than you are to die from a car crash this year. Overall, police are safer than many things in society.
60/8M // 30k/320M = 8%
I'll warn that there really isn't any good data when it comes to use of force. The police departments haven't been required to report it to any national body. That link you have for deaths by police mentions using both official and unofficial sources, and having to fill in missing data.
The FBI has been making some efforts on the issue, but it's quire recent: https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-announc...
Wait, what’s your math here? Black deaths by police are 4.5/100k and white is 1.5, that’s a 3x or 300% difference.
I think it's "30%" (it's not). If p (pct population) is scaled to units of "people", and m as crimes/year and k as (deaths in custody) / (100k people), we want to compare the magnitudes of p * (k / m) for the two groups. Plugging the numbers in as cited, and putting the African American cohort over the White cohort, we get 1.3, i.e. "30%" increase in probability of dying during a police interaction if black.
But as has already been pointed out, it's way more than 30%. The numbers given in the original comment hide the real impact of the bias, since "arrest" was implicitly being treated as a fair event (which it isn't; as just one example, blacks in particular are many times more likely to be subject to a traffic stop than whites, while they tend to have contraband on their possession less often [1][2][3][4]).
Moreover, this isn't just about deaths in police custody. This is about inhumane and repressive policing practices that perpetuate a longstanding effort to deprive blacks of meaningful political power [5]. It is both foolish and cruel to see an entire population struggling and assume it's because they are bad people.
[1] https://sfdistrictattorney.org/sites/default/files/Document/... [2] https://chicagopatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Fina... [3] https://www.aclu-il.org/en/press-releases/traffic-stop-data-... [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traff... [5] See Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow
The NYC stop-and-frisk numbers should be considered.
I feel the need to point out that this is the president who spent eight years promising big-C Change, all while mostly just reinforcing and benefitting from the existing status-quo. I think it's that sunny, vaguely positive but cowardly and ineffectual brand of politics that set the stage for the wave of populist unrest we're seeing from both the left and the right right now. Politicians have been promising change without delivering on it for far too long, and voters are done. I would argue that politicians like Obama are the very reason people no longer believe democracy works.
The fact that Obama is almost universally loved by the rich, the famous, and the powerful should tell one a thing or two about how effective he was at bringing about big-C Change in America.
What are some actual laws we can pass from this situation?
I was thinking at the very least to get a citizen right where you can request to have any encounter with the police recorded.
‘Officer I request my right to have this encounter recorded’.
Harsher penalties for excessive use of force would be a good start.
The problem right now is that excessive use of force by an LEO rarely results in actual, hard time or fines for that officer. Consider the death of Eric Garner [1]. The city of New York paid 5.9 million to his family and the arresting officer was fired from the NYPD. Additionally, the Department of Justice declined to bring criminal charges against [the arresting officer] under federal civil rights laws.
If we reorganized our justice system to actually pursue officers who use excessive use of force, perhaps officers would be more careful about using it. But the current state of affairs has no penalties for the officers if they do use excessive use of force when it is not justified.
We may be able to achieve deterring physical escalation with serious penalties, but I don’t know if we will be able to solve the real possibility of the police community being rotten.
What do these cops do when these situations happen and there is no video recording of the encounter? They all back each other up and write up some bogus police report justifying the need for force. That’s exactly what would have happened if we didn’t get the recording this time around. These four cops would have straight lied.
Let’s say we effectively deter them from doing so with liberal use of cameras. I think if they are really rotten, they will find ways to drum up other charges.
There are two paths of discussion here, one path assumes the cops are mostly good and do bad things in very intense, escalated situations. The other is they are rotten, and do something bad in any situation such as wrongfully detain, concoct charges, forge evidence, or justify a violent escalation.
If we’re dealing with a rotten police community, where they operate with a clear power complex and mafia—esque collusion amongst each other, then we must confront that word, systemic.
Violence is just one by-product of a systemic problem. Lying, manipulation, imposition of unrestricted authority in any/all contexts, and so on.
If systemically there is a 20% prevalence of rotten behavior, numbers straight out of my ass of course, we’re talking 1 in 5 interactions are tainted with the public. We have to find out what the real number is, because I do believe that number exists and it ain’t below 10%.
Asking the police to provide us this data is about the same as asking the CCP for police data. We need serious transparency into this organization.
1. Community oversight through a board
2. Limit the use of force
3. Independently investigate and prosecute
4. Community representation
5. Body cams / film the police
6. Training in de-escalation
7. End for profit policing
8. Demilitarization of the police force
9. Fair police union contracts that remove provisions within police bill of rights that impose barriers to accountability
Look here:
Https://bit.ly/3cosVXM
I mentioned this in another thread, but I’ve heard the idea of putting cops on rotations similar to military deployments.
I don’t think a cop can psychologically hold up being on the street for years on end without losing some perspective. The job fundamentally blasts you with the worst of people, and it’s easy to develop a rotten world view if measures are not taken to handle that input.
A maximum limit of X months per year on the street or something, the other half in some other duty.
My take on the Floyd murder was there was definitely an element of a power complex that the cop devolved into over years.
Very good point.
I've worked in a consulting position with a German police union a long time ago (different than the US unions, they are regular trade unions here, generally left-of-center). The new guy running the local office told me that he was fortunate to discover exactly what you describe happening to himself and asked to be placed elsewhere so he won't start arresting every black person wearing baggy pants that he sees.
That would be nice, the "non-deployed" cycle could be used for more training.
Police (no fault of their own) are woefully under trained given what is expected from them.
Of course, it will never happen because of the cost.
Exactly this.
Additionally, this thread lists actual legislation that has been proposed and, in some cases, passed in cities and states to address police violence: https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1266855519425384450
It’s possible that the answer is “there are no laws that can be passed”, at least at the national level.
And as for state/local legislation, here are a few things that have been done, or at least proposed: https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1266855519425384450
My crazy ideas to stop this and violence/law-breaking in general. This should cause a huge reduction in these issues we claim we're having.
1. Body cams mandatory for all police inside & outside of the station, and they stay on 100% of the time and batteries should last the whole shift. No ifs/buts/maybes. If the need arises, bathroom breaks can be edited out after the fact.
2. National ID card, in all states and mandatory for everyone over 13/16. Put all biometric, facial and possibly DNA data on file, encrypted and only available for searches. Be creative.
3. Remove the need to arrest people for any non-violent crimes. People are positively ID'd via some tech (insert something wild here if you want). Cop files a report, includes evidence of positive ID, person needs to appear in court as they will be notified by SMS/Email/letter/lawyer-visit because that stuff should all be on-file and up to date. Send them warnings if they don't appear in court, meanwhile block their access to everything like cell-phones, bank accounts, etc. Start pro-actively messaging their family, or them, and let them know about the additional time/fines they are racking up by missing court dates. 3.a) Assume they're guilty if they don't show up for court and don't have a valid reason.
4. Disallow police from forcibly cuffing people for arrest. Procedure should be to throw two pairs of cuffs at the person while they're being pointed at with gun/taser, and they have to put it on themselves. Procedure allows for x minutes of that, then by default they have to taze this individual into submission and just arrest them. Once they're cuffed, just carry them in a car/van, or wait for support.
5. Punishment for disobeying orders by a policeman to do the above.
6. Very strict guidelines and sets of laws being broken that justify physical arrest. The default should be to just tag the person and tell them to appear in court. If it's a grey-area, just block their cellphone, bank-accounts, cards, etc.
7. Track all cell-phone locations, strongly-linked and verified to individual identities, and store permanently. Store it securely and allow court-orders to open for case investigations. Allow anonymized access to information-based researches that are told to investigate crimes. This one alone could solve so many crimes in my view that I am saddened to no end that people prevent it from happening safely at the recurring expense of innocent lives.
One could go on and on. But guaranteed the above sets of actions/laws are very unpalatable for the majority of people, and it would cause "human rights lawyers" to salivate at the potential for litigation and for "human rights activists" to salivate in protestual anger.
I have problems with #3, it incentivizes the wrong type of policing.
The goal of policing should be to make the community safe. If the goal of policing is to rack up violations, and you basically streamline it where a cop can go around and rack up tons of alleged infractions, then that’s what will happen. In fact, that’s exactly what happened when some police departments enforced quality of life infractions. Suddenly every cop had the mandate to write you up to meet their quotas, and they are able to internalize their value system organically since the word from above is zero-tolerance for even the smallest infractions.
I don’t want to live in that kind of society honestly. Take a look at this reddit thread if you want to see examples of this, and get anecdotes of how people get harassed by cops (regardless of race) for the smallest things (and this type of policing is a vector for physical escalation):
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/gu8xlv/cops...
This one here is particular infuriating:
Your point #1 is a must, tech has to really step up and make this one happen.
So the police never arrest someone for non-violent crimes, and the only disincentive is to get fined.
This basically just gives people a license to steal whatever they want and stalk and harass anyone they want, so long as they don't lay a finger on a person. The only consequences are fines, and non-payment of a fine is not a violent crime and thus not cause for arrest.
Of course they'll get arrested, after they've been convicted?
> Track all cell-phone locations, strongly-linked and verified to individual identities, and store permanently . . . . This one alone could solve so many crimes in my view that I am saddened to no end that people prevent it from happening safely at the recurring expense of innocent lives.
People stop it from happening (to some degree and at great cost) because this would hurt far more than it would help. Imagine if the police could do this now. They would use it to drag everyone who had been in the vicinity of the protests out of their homes and lock them up (at best). "Secure" and "court orders" would never hold up in practice, but "permanent" certainly would. Plus, all criminals would need to do to avoid it is not bring cell phones to crimes, or bring someone else's. Unless you want to mandate carrying government tracking beacons at all times? I'm no libertarian, but this is one of the worst proposals for fixing police brutality I've ever seen.
Local politics have the most impact on people, but get the least attention. Shouldn't it be easier to engage folks on a local level via social media, electronic voting, campaigns, etc?
Local politics have the most impact on people, but get the least attention.
FWIW, this is not a truism. First, the current administration in particular has been consolidating power.
Also, by many measures (ads, canvassing, town halls, discussion on community-based forums), the local elections get pretty much the same attention as the federal in my area.
The article agrees that local is where we can do things about these issues:
> Moreover, it’s important for us to understand which levels of government have the biggest impact on our criminal justice system and police practices. When we think about politics, a lot of us focus only on the presidency and the federal government. And yes, we should be fighting to make sure that we have a president, a Congress, a U.S. Justice Department, and a federal judiciary that actually recognize the ongoing, corrosive role that racism plays in our society and want to do something about it. But the elected officials who matter most in reforming police departments and the criminal justice system work at the state and local levels
On that note I will highlight that the reason that I get any local news is that Facebook makes me follow my local representatives after every election cycle
So I am actually quite up to date about what goes on locally
Some of those that work forces [0]... It's from 1992. 28 years old, little has changed. Still love that song.
Tangentially related: Alex S. Vitale's book "The End of Policing" is currently free in e-book from Verso: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2817-the-end-of-policing
Worth reading to familiarize oneself with leftist views on institution of Policing. Likely some eye-opening viewpoints for most.
His arguments for the origins of policing being a protector of private capital was an eye-opener for me.
I already was familiar with the argument that the police are more often deployed in the service of protecting private property rather than public protection (eg. these protests) but it was surprising just how blatant the relationship was between capitalists being scared of labour power and new police forces being created.
I need to look into it more.
I like this post because it avoids making provocative claims that are sometimes seen in the media, and I hope that this restores some of the lost trust between the people on two sides.
For example, unlike the media, Obama avoids saying that violence is partially justified, or claiming that some groups have a higher chance of being killed by police, and instead talks about the "recurrent problem of racial bias in our criminal justice system".
Indeed, people on the center and center right sometimes use the FBI crime stats to argue that there is no racial bias in police killings: since African Americans make up 27% of the arrests while constituting 13% of the population, it is consistent with the fact that they are twice as likely to get killed by police.
Much fewer people, however, would argue that there is no bias in the criminal justice system, given the evidence.
So I am hopeful that by making more moderate arguments, Democrats will be able to squeeze perhaps the extra 1-2% which is all is indeed to defeat Trump.
Don't get why you're getting downvoted.
I agree with you except on the "defeating Trump" part. Moderation is not enough IMO. Everyone with a progressive agenda who is not stongly distancing themselve from the rioters right now will have his cause collaterally defaced by them, just as they collaterally deface these neighbourhoods.
Disclaimer: Not a US-citizen nor resident.
Now I know this is old news, but it's not unheard of that law enforcement finds ways to infiltrate protests and make them turn into something else than a peaceful affair, even in tame ol' Canada.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/quebec-police-admit-they-went...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/quebec-police-defend-officers-actions...
So instead of condemning the few who 'incite violence', it might be useful to ponder if the game isn't rigged and external malicious actors could be acting as agent provocateurs.
The one group who is most on top of such things, the dread conspiracy theorists, have been the subject of an intense, coordinated slur campaign for many years now. There are several interesting quirks about this whole affair, but you'll sure as hell never see them on the 6 o'clock news, voluntarily at least.
A couple of thoughts:
Racism is an issue, but I wonder in the case of police the abuse the issue could be more generally described as one of class?
There was an incident a few years ago in my state were police picked a white guy up who had been convicted of methamphetamine possession a few times. I'll describe the guy as a "scraggly white guy". He was dirty, unkempt, skinny, poor spoken in an old vehicle. The cops I believe were Hispanic. So the decide he is hiding meth on him, search him, push him around a little. Then they drive him to the hospital and force several enemas on him. Which turn up nothing. Then the hospital sends him a bill for the "service". It's egregious and he is rightfully suing. Is this a race issue?
If George Floyd had looked like Obama or OJ Simpson, had been driving a nice car in nice clothes and was well spoken and had no priors would he have been treated the same? I don't think so, particularly if it appeared he had means to get a good lawyer.
Please don't misunderstand, I'm not saying racism isn't an issue. It is and it exists. But the problems with police brutality seem almost as much a class issue. In fact you can see no shortage of black cops. But the problems still keep happening. Addressing this is long overdue but perhaps the lens should be expanded?
Thought #2:
People believe and are suggesting to make their voices really heard engaging in violence and unrelated property destruction is appropriate. I guess the thinking goes this will force systemic change.
Here's the systemic change I see coming from that. Increased support for surveillance. Scaring the average joe middle class person into voting for law and order candidates. A few hundred people rioting aren't going to overturn capitalism. Capitalism is well embedded and a little scratch isn't going to harm it, nor is this kind of behavior likely to change public sentiment. However it does make it easier to lump everyone (rightfully) upset with police brutality into the camp of crazy destructive anarchists. So I think it's going to turn out to be a counterproductive move. The massive peaceful marches were much wiser and also get effects believe it or not. When elected politicians see that many folks that energized they ignore at their own peril.
Ross Douthat's opinion piece from two days ago backs your Thought #2: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/opinion/sunday/riots-geor...
FWIW, George Floyd was indeed driving a Mercedes, which is generally considered to be a nice car.
I think clearly USA is on a brink of a revolution. When I was a kid, I had a peaceful revolution in my country (Czechoslovakia). Here's roughly what happened and I think is relevant:
- A student protest was beaten by the police, which shocked the nation. More mass protests were organized. You're at that point now.
- A week later, there was a general strike. It was more a symbolic one (I think it was a day). I think it's good to organize it because it signals to the elites and everybody - this is serious, and the citizens are willing to solve the problem peacefully and constructively. The protests can be easily misconstrued in the media, the general strike cannot.
- In our case, the general demands (IIRC) were as follows:
1. Make constitutional changes to remove the single party (the communist party) from power.
2. Organize a free, special elections, which would allow newly formed parties and other candidates to run.
3. Free all the political prisoners, and honor the general declaration of human rights in practice.
- As a result of this, a provisional cabinet (kind of compromise between the current elites and opposition) was established, which realized these goals in the timeframe of half a year.
I think in your case, you should organize a general nationwide strike, and demand the following:
1. A constitutional reform to end dual-party system in the US, i.e. allow more candidates and parties to run, forbid all the shenanigans around voting (like electoral college and gerrymandering and queues at polling stations and obscure voting methods and machines), reform the campaign financing.
2. A special elections (starting on federal level, going down eventually) under this better system.
3. A constitutional police reform, which will put more oversight over all the civilian and military intelligence agencies that you have in the U.S., both federal and state level. (Possibly from an independent, randomly drawn body of citizens.)
I believe these are demands that most Americans can agree on, so the real change is possible.
love that guy. Great write.
>love that guy. Great write.
What makes you think this wasn't written by a professional speech-writer/think-tank?
The BBC is linking it now.
For those who have a different view (if that's allowed)
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/obama-administration-...
> if that's allowed
Please don't.
FWIW, I see little relevance of the article you just linked in what appears to be a conversation of the former president's writing abilities.
When Obama left office, he apologised to Argentina for the US involvement in the guerra sucia.
I read one of Hanson's books. He recalls that he didn't like academia because, unlike his own farm, he couldn't order people with whom he disagreed off his land.
After reading this article, I think Hanson probably is disappointed that there are not more lefties thrown out of helicopters, but I am not more informed as to what his counter-suggestions to "reform at the local and state level" may be.
Pat Buchanan, in my opinion, was a much more convincing National Review columnist.
Obviously they differ on how to get there, but can the US right agree with the US left on "with liberty, and justice, for all"? It's an excellent sounding ideal.
This really has become a convoluted issue about identity, coming from the perspective of a caucasion male.
Having no direct or indirect involvement with "class warfare" and "culture clashes", I think most individuals are trusting that government representatives (who many want to vote out anyways) will not milk a crisis for every penny, but instead inact meaningful reform.
Once we see autonomous delivery of work (physical production, not digital) spread in the developed world, it will be a great relief knowing that everybody can make a living without having to interact with groups that choose not to (if they desire).
The solution will provide a safety net for everyone (females, single parents, working aged adults, etc) and keep the emotions out of the equation.
Its already sickening...
Just downvotes and no retort?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/george-floyd-cup-foods-police...
It was all over a shop owner losing $20.
Fortunately, creative WFA solutions will allow individual freedoms to blossom again.
Time is still the most valuable Commodity in the 1st world.
Some amazing comments on this thread. Thank you!
If you're looking to take an actionable step to help with racial injustice consider supporting the Equal Justice Initiative. (eji.org). Inspiring org and a leader we would all be proud to support. I donated and my grad school class is pooling in together to do the same.
I'm also talking to my children about the role they can play in quelling racism when they see it. I need to do better myself. Change starts with us.
What significant thing did he achieve in his 8 year presidency regarding police brutality?
Malcolm X conceived of things much more honestly than Barack Obama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiSiHRNQlQo
I miss this guy
Are we headed for a system wide collapse (in the US, but perhaps elsewhere?).
The current environment is one of crisis mounting on top of crisis, each with increasing urgency and each never getting solved.
Just to count them
- issues of executive power concentration (pre trump even..), now alongside corruption and ignoring rule of law
- US overextended and largely illegitimately engaged militarily across the world
- mass surveillance without consent
- covid & associated economic devastation
- racial justice
- unending sense of riots, damage etc..
A friend of mine lived in East Germany when the Wall came down. I recall there was one event after another that eventually culminated in the collapse of East Germany and communism.
Is the US experiencing something similar? Not just in terms of government effectiveness but even legitimacy?
No, it’s just the media narrative you’re seeing. Not reality.
Which parts are the media narrative?
The “imperial presidency” is part of an ongoing trend of increasing executive power for decades. High unemployment from Covid is objectively true. Ineffectiveness combating Covid at a Federal level is hard to debate...
We used to have media that tried to be objective. They produced an Overton Window that was pretty centrist.
Those days are gone. Now we have Fox with a clear bias or slant, CNN with a clear bias to the other side, and NBC somewhat more centrist but still not objective. (If you want relatively unbiased US news, try Reuters.)
That's bad enough. But people don't just get "news" that way; they get it from Facebook and Twitter. The "news media" is now the people that you subscribe to, whether or not they know what they're talking about. If they feel like the system is failing, the narrative you see will be that the system is failing, whether or not it actually is.
Then you have people trying to manipulate that feed. Start with the two political parties. They try to get the feed to say "You have to elect us!" One way to do that is to manipulate the feed so that it indicates that the system is failing because of the other party. There are also far-right and far-left activists, who want to manipulate the feed so that people think that the system is failing due to both parties, so that people will turn to the extremists as the only hope.
And then you have foreign disinformation campaigns, deliberately trying to destabilize the US. "Your country is failing" is a great narrative for them to foster in order to destroy peoples' faith in the viability of institutions.
Look, the system isn't in great shape. The imperial presidency was a thing clear back with Nixon. It got beat back with Watergate, but it's been growing again. Competence in government has also been... let's be charitable and say "not always as evident as we would prefer". But it seems to me that there is a media narrative (or mostly "meta-media", if you want to use that term for Facebook and Twitter) that is far stronger than the circumstances warrant.
I recommend to everyone that they read jurgen habermas' "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere", we are eroding our ability to have rational communication. I won't say it's deliberate, but it feels that way.
I could be completely off base here, but I see a lot of discussion around how to elect the correct people when I personally think that a more important issue is "how the sausage gets made".
Politics is about compromise and deal making yes, but it should also be about looking at the problems that plague society and trying to find a solution that does the most good while incurring the least harm.
But when decisions are made that significantly affect the lives of a group of citizens is there any effort made to consult with them? Or do they just get to find out when their life get's turned upside down?
How much of the process is about what's convinient for who's currently in power or currying favour with them than trying to take apart problems that affect the citizenry and make a best effort at a solution?
Part of my thinking on this came from reading about and hearing how vTaiwan was used to try and decide how to legislate how Uber would be treated there.
Full disclosure, I've only read around the topic, I may get details or points wrong. I'm only mentioning it here because I've not spotted it being discussed and I think it's relevant.
An overview is here for you to look at [0], however please read around it yourself if you want more detail =)...
At a high level, they broke the process down into several stages: 1) Contact the stackholders and inform them a decision is being made and provide a place for engaged citizens to participate. This encompases fact finding as well as translating complex areas like legal information to be understandable to the general public. 2) Allow people to air concerns and highlight potential issues. Try and understand what groups exist and what they want, ensure that participants who will be significantly affected have a proportional voice. Treat this as a period of relflection so people can get a deep understanding of where things are. 3) Take subject matter experts as well as appropriate voices in industry and have them study what was produced in the prior stage, then have them put together a series of briefings and Q/A sessions designed to dispell common misconceptions brought up during the prior stage and put together a series of clear proposals that can be enacted outlining the pros and cons as such as feasible. This will help educate the public as well as give them a much clearer idea what the state of possible outcomes are. At this point the public are actively able to question and ask for more detailed information around the proposals on offer. 4) Take the proposals that were the outcomes of the prior stage and turn draft it into a law.
Note that I'm not saying tech is the solution here, just that we might want to think more broadly about what the problem is.
And now it's way past my bedtime, I'll respond to any replies after I get up =)...
- [0]: https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/building-co...
Flagged / dead again. As with most posts about current turmoils.
Possibly the article was considered too positive for some elements?
Now unflagged. Good.
META: Not sure why this was flagged/dead? I just vouched for it. Is it because it's political and not strictly about tech/hacker news?
I'd argue that current events have a direct impact on all of us and this absolutely warrants discussion. Furthermore, I'm not sure I know of any instance where a President has disseminated writing like this. It's an interesting change, since it means that former Presidents can continue exerting influence.
I think political content is discouraged here because of an assumption that politics is inherently unreasonable and trollish. But politics, government, society/culture are as much a system with dynamics as anything else, and we should be able to discuss that here. And as systems-thinkers, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard of thought and discourse.
I really appreciate this way of articulating it. There are responsible and constructive ways that we can discuss politics in this forum and I hope that adopting a systems mentality can help us sidestep tribalism and put problem-solving at the center of the discussion. There are obviously still questions to be resolved outside of a systems discussion, like values and the proper ends for politics, but I often find that if you dig into those with humility and curiosity, there's more commonality than most people realize.
Jimmy Carter has done a lot since leaving office, as a diplomat and as an author. I think Bush I remained fairly politically active after leaving office, as well. Wikipedia has several articles about "post-presidency of [ex-prez]" but it's a very incomplete list.
Then reflagged.
We can't pretend to maintain a strict separation between politics and tech, but this article is nothing but a direct call to specific political action. I generally hammer the flag button on that kind of thing, even when it's a good cause; I don't think HN is or should be a space for political organizing.
This is the discussion I wanted to have, rather than being downvoted.
I actually agree with you, but given that the article was posted by mwseibel, I wanted to see what everyone's thinking was. Just because he's a significant YC partner doesn't mean he knows/has authority over HN. It's a valid discussion to have.
But what's the appropriate line? A hard line with no room for interpretation, even in significant events? Where does Coronavirus land in that then? It certainly affects tech/hacking, but it definitely is being tainted by politics and belief structures. Are the only valid articles ones that talk about remote work?
Similar thing related to civic action. Keeping politics out of HN is a good rule, but man, that line is never going to be discrete.
It's certainly a fuzzy line. Like I said, there's no way to wall off politics from tech - many issues we discuss are inherently political, and in many cases a blanket refusal to discuss them would also be political.
This article clearly falls over that fuzzy line. It's not a discussion, or an analysis, or an evaluation of competing claims. It's not even an attempt to persuade. It's a call to action, a set of instructions from Mr. Obama on how to accomplish the political goals he presumes readers share. I do share his goals, and his instructions sound reasonable, but I don't see HN as an appropriate venue to publish them. Not every discussion forum should turn into a political action committee when there's important politics to be done.
Obama presided over the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and so many other black victims of police violence which sparked very similar protests/riots and birthed the Black Lives Matter movement. Then, as now, he had the same blanket denunciations of civilian violent resistance, support for militarized police crackdowns, and anodyne advice to vote your killers away.
Those responses clearly produced no real change from those turning-point moments. Why would we hope they will in this one?
> "So the bottom line is this: if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn’t between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform."
obama spends the first 7 paragraphs explaining the ideals of government and the vulgarity of violence, and somehow ends up on this "bottom line": let's both (peacefully) protest and politic.
with all due respect, his perspective is subverted by the unique privilege and prestige that only comes with being a past president, from having played the game and won, and reads as out of touch with the needs and desires of most black folks. those folks are tired of waiting and being told to be nice and polite and civil while the police kill members of their community at random.
let's appreciate the need to work the political system the way it was designed--to be slow, deliberate and inefficient--but let's not lose touch with the long violence and oppression of the system against people of color, principally black and brown folks. let's not lose touch with the immediacy and direction of the need that necessarily supercedes slowly meandering civil discourse.
> police kill members of their community at random.
I understand your emotion, but saying that the police walks in the street killing random black people is also unproductive.
You can imagine folks on the right showcasing your post as an example of the "loony left", then starting a discussion about the fact that more whites are killed by police, and so on.
Each time that happens, you lose a tiny bit of support, and that hurts what Obama thinks is important - the election outcome.
> saying that the police walks in the street killing random black people is also unproductive
It's unfortunately true though. We have seen countless examples in the last few years alone where the victim was murdered by a cop. And those are only the ones that were recorded and managed to go viral.
no, trying to dismiss the point as emotion or leaning on name-calling are non-sequiturs. people are mad, rightfully so, and being good little citizens doesn't change anything.
you demonstrate my exact point: obama cares about elections and the slow, meandering civil process. he's insulated from the consequences of having that position, unlike the people on the streets.
Perhaps some of your criticism is valid, but would you rather have Obama or Trump?
I think we rarely can choose between perfect and imperfect; we have to choose between two imperfects.
Both on the left and on the right, many people have to hold their nose and vote for the person they despise.
and the problem there is that the system is designed to present only 2 imperfect choices, so that the 2 parties can seize and hold power. they'd rather begrudgingly share power with each other than let any others join them in the sandbox. and both parties have been co-opted to serve the wealthy, not the people, hence their imperfection.
I think that level of disillusionment is a bit dangerous, because I've seen people starting to support the Chinese way of governance because they say the American one is broken.
please don't presume a state of mind. a lazy response might be "obliviously complacent" and then we get nowhere. you could leave out the direct reference, such as "I think disillusionment is a bit dangerous, because..." (although you still need to tie in the relevance of such a statement) and still make a similar argument that better elicits a charitable response.
but that argument is presumptuous and fallacious as well. being disillusioned doesn't lead most peole to support single-party, state-controlled communism. being insulated and comfortable does lead to complacency and being out-of-touch however.
Haha how delusional do you have to be to think the US is worse than a communist kleptocracy that dabbles in death camps?
Because we also have a kletptocracy where the government is designed to serve the wealthy, it's not about being worse by any margin, it's about pointing out what needs to change.