You're welcome. And maybe they are right. I cant see alot around me in the USA to give me any reason to care how many people get killed because they would prefer anarchy. If that's what people really need, let them kill themselves off, why should I be concerned about it further?

You shouldn't. You should probably take a break. Buy a new cat. Relax.

Im getting a passport again so I can go be with people in other countries who like me consider that the USA has driven itself insane with the desire to enable more irresponsible freedom. Have a nice day )

I agree that retired generals primarily carried this message to avoid a formally "rogue" military. Possibly unprecedented, would be interesting to know if there are any parallels. — boethius

There is one parallel I remember. During the height of "War on Terror" when a lot of troops were fighting the war both in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at the fulcrum of the neocon power, there was an outcry from old dinosaur politicians and retired generals not to invade Iran and that the White House was planning to invade also Iran and this would be absolutely devastating. Only the talented Seymour Hersh reported then of rift between White House and CENTCOM. Later the CENTCOM commander did abruptly retire later, so Hersh might been on to something. Bush didn't invade Iran. (And let's remember: The US only attacked Iranian personnel under Trump. And when Iran responded, a huge effort was made to declare that no US personnel had been killed...and to stop the escalation.)

But I think it is clear that the armed forces does voice it's concerns and disagreement through old retired generals who otherwise aren't giving their opinions to the public.

:smirk:

A politricksters' "Police Fix"? (w.t.f.) C'mon, sheeple.

Only two (4 & 7) make my list. :meh:

↪ernestm Data across counties for a single year doesn’t help, we need data over time, for anywhere besides the US, or for the world globally.

The point of all of this is that there is already a well-known explanation for violent crime dropping (in principle anywhere, but definitely in the US) since 1990, one independent of anything to do with police or guns. That is a counterpoint to your claim that it went down in that time period because of increased police in that period.

You claimed that is hasn’t gone down elsewhere. (Which it should, if it is all about atmosphere lead). I can’t find any data on trends over time elsewhere. You presumably have some, if you’re making a claim about it. I’d just like to see it. — Pfhorrest

In Latin America you have the out of control violence where the murder rates have gone way up. Honduras is a prime example. It has dealt with a huge political crisis and basically the state is losing it's ability to function. One outcome has been that people from these countries do seek shelter in the US. If I've said that Mexico is far worse than the US, then some Central American countries are even worse than Mexico.





And interestingly, there's an exception in Central America with homicide rates far lower than with the countries above: Costa Rica.



Their solution? For starters, Costa Rica doesn't have a military... :smirk:

Back to the US, a good question is what New York has done correct and where Chicago has failed?

When someone says, “Defund the police,” I usually want to ask them which police department they are referring to. Or do they mean police departments should be defunded in general?

The reason I ask is because every police department is different. If you ask me whether or not a rural police department in Montana with a population of 5,000 needs 30 police officers, a couple dozen automatic submachine guns, and armored personnel carriers, my answer is going to be no. Defund them.

If you ask me the same question about Oakland Police Department — and certain larger cities like Oakland (there are numerous) — the answer is going to be different. On paper, we have around 750 sworn police officers. Of those 750 officers, about 600 (at best) are patrol officers. If we bear in mind that only about a quarter to a third of those officers are on duty at a given time, that means there is only one police officer available for every 2,175 to 2,900 people.

Why is this a problem? Because when an officer goes off duty at the end of their shift, there are still a lot of calls for service that remain unanswered. They pile up in large numbers, and they pile up quick. Often times officers aren’t even able to answer calls that aren’t non-violent in nature because they simply do not have the manpower to do so. California Highway Patrol actually had to come in to help us with patrol functions because we were so inundated with calls. Even that wasn’t sufficient.

We are short-handed in the technician department as well, so sometimes patrol officers have to take their own pictures of a crime scene as well as play the role of a detective during the preliminary phase of an investigation (because we are short on those too). We have rape kits piled up from years past, because we don’t have enough techs to process them. This means a rape victim sometimes has to wait years to see “justice” finally realized.

Our emergency response team (SWAT) is bare bones. We have to get help from the county sheriff’s emergency response team in many situations because we simply don’t have enough people.

As I mentioned in another thread, we have one helicopter and two pilots for a city of 435,000 people. This means when the pilots aren’t available, normal patrol officers are expected to pilot the chopper.

That last one was a joke. But you can see what I’m getting at. The sheer volume of work involved can be overwhelming at times. I remember working 64-hour weeks doing mandatory overtime. That’s not healthy. That’s why eventually I made a choice between my job and my health, and I chose the latter. You can see how qualified candidates will leave their job or lateral to other police departments because of the underfunding situation.

That’s why my question is, where exactly do we cut funding? Cutting police salaries seems intuitive but it destroys an already dwindling level of morale in addition to encouraging lateral movement even more (no qualified candidate is going to do this job for less than 30 some odd bucks per hour — at least not for long). Many officers are already dissatisfied and look at these departments as a way to earn their stripes on the street just so they can later transfer to a police department in a safer city where they are treated better. Overtime salaries for many police officers can be bloated to be sure, but to cut down on these massive amounts of overtime, that would again require more officers.

I think each department needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis, because one-size fits all solutions are rarely workable on such a grand scale.

In any case, I think there’s other places we can cut funding to in order to free up money for domestic infrastructure. How about cutting down on our military expenditure? The United States spent 732 billion dollars on its military last year, which is more than 2.8 times the amount of the next biggest spender, China (261 billion dollars). The US Navy has 11 modern aircraft carriers, while the country with the second most carriers has only two (and they are technologically outdated at that). I can go on...

Another great post. Thanks.

The sheer volume of work involved can be overwhelming at times. I remember working 64-hour weeks doing mandatory overtime. That’s not healthy. That’s why eventually I made a choice between my job and my health, and I chose the latter. You can see how qualified candidates will leave their job or lateral to other police departments because of the underfunding situation. — Wolfman

One of the things involved in defunding/refunding (I going to couple the two from now on: defunding police and refunding other public services), from what I understand, is a concomitant need to scale down the scope of a cops job. That is, to lessen to workload by offloading much of it to other, perhaps more qualified resources - which would also mean allowing cops to focus on things like investigative work or even more training for actual threats. There's a piece doing the rounds, ostensibly written by a former police officer, and one of the points I think was incredibly striking was this:

During my tenure in law enforcement, I protected women from domestic abusers, arrested cold-blooded murderers and child molesters, and comforted families who lost children to car accidents and other tragedies. I helped connect struggling people in my community with local resources for food, shelter, and counseling. I deescalated situations that could have turned violent and talked a lot of people down from making the biggest mistake of their lives. I worked with plenty of officers who were individually kind, bought food for homeless residents, or otherwise showed care for their community.

The question is this: did I need a gun and sweeping police powers to help the average person on the average night? The answer is no. When I was doing my best work as a cop, I was doing mediocre work as a therapist or a social worker. My good deeds were listening to people failed by the system and trying to unite them with any crumbs of resources the structure was currently denying them.

....And consider this: my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender? Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?

To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it’s hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn’t have prevented a problem before it started.

(from here).

So a defund/refund call is more than just taking away money. It's about transforming the scope of what a cop should be doing, making the policing role more specialized and less sweeping, and then putting that money into alternate sources which would tackle crime at their source, rather than being reactive about it.

Also, what you said about defunding the US military is exactly on point too. If some of the city budgets for police are obscene, the share of military funding for the US national budget in general is even more so:

You may have already seen it (it might even have been linked already), but the MPD150 report provides an outline of what defunding means in terms of the effect on police departments and the replacement services they think will serve the community better. It covers a remarkably similar range of issues about the range of services police are required to attend (without proper training) to the ones you raise. It also gives a very good overview of the alternatives.

Of course, Minneapolis have only promised to defund the police as things stand, so the well-thought out recommendations of MPD150 and the the political reality of what happens to the left-over money, where the cuts are actually made etc remains to be seen.

f you take a knee does that help any black that you know? Would it not be better to act in a way that directly helps someone black, to reach out and touch them? But to do that you would need to know someone black or live within the vicinity of blacks. If that was the case then to take a knee would be superfluous.
If you’re taking a knee as an act of rebellion then what’s been achieved? Taking a knee only works if the media report on it. If it was effective then it could be done at your gate?
So are such gestures meaningful or feel-good moments for people who having nothing to do with the lives of blacks? — Brett

I assume these questions are just addressed to white members of the forum? Or would you like black members to answer as well?

I have no way of knowing. But you’re right, it may mean something far different to blacks. And yet I don’t see that many blacks doing it. I’m aware of its beginnings, I assume with black football players, but in general it’s been whites who have been covered by the media.

What on earth are you talking about? Is this something to do with American football? Why is this in General Philosophy? If you just want to post some random rant, there's the Shoutbox in The Lounge.

No it’s not a rant. I want to look at the idea of symbolic acts and what they mean and what they achieve. This is a quote from Wikipedia;

Kaepernick and his 49ers teammate Eric Reid said they choose to kneel during the anthem to call attention to the issues of racial inequality and police brutality. "After hours of careful consideration, and even a visit from Nate Boyer, a retired Green Beret and former NFL player, we came to the conclusion that we should kneel, rather than sit, ... during the anthem, as a peaceful protest," said Reid. "We chose to kneel because it's a respectful gesture. I remember thinking our posture was like a flag flown at half-mast to mark a tragedy." Wikipedia.

They chose it as a respectful gesture. Traditionally one goes down on a knee as an act of respect to a leader. A. very old practise but that’s it’s origins I’m guessing. So it’s actually an act of serving. Even Kaepernick saw it as a respectful act, but I’m not sure if he meant towards the anthem, which is the country itself or those affected by racism. But in effect it was a piece of drama, which I don’t condemn. He chose a time and place to do it. It had power because of who he was, an individual alone making a stand. It’s the act of the individual. That’s where it’s power comes from.

But whites taking a knee as an organised act seems to be a little shallow. I can see that it’s an act of sympathy or solidarity, but it’s only an act. After that, what?

In a way Kaepernick put himself at the mercy of the crowd, he made himself vulnerable. That’s an action, not mere gesture. Does that seem to you to be totally different than whites going down on a knee?

Young John Cleese has had enough of BLM. On with the culture wars...

You have to contextualise a new symbolic gesture within the gestural tradition.

What does it mean to stand for the national anthem? One stands to attention to show that one is attending to the meaning of the symbolic song, and stands ready to serve the nation.

So one breaks that tradition as a black man by kneeling, to show that one is not on an equal footing, but shows a subservient service. In this way it shows respect but also inequality. The appropriate white gesture is to stand next to the kneeling black man, awarding him the truth and honour of his inequality, and when the anthem ends, to offer him a hand up.

Respect.

So one breaks that tradition as a black man by kneeling, to show that one is not on an equal footing, but shows a subservient service. In this way it shows respect but also inequality. — unenlightened

Yes I absolutely get that. And to stand next to him, but not imitate him. When Democrats go down on at knee in the Capital then you know the gesture has been stolen.

Well I say what I would do if I were a white American, but it's not the law. If others want to make another gesture, of solidarity, I think I can respect that too. What I cannot respect is claiming to be outraged and insulted - that gesture symbolises a guilty conscience and a complete lack of respect for humanity.

They don't need a knee from people in the capitol but legislation.

In the past I don't think there would have been enough of a temptation to re-write the narrative in real time (it's all very well denying history, but denying the present is a lot harder). But in the modern age, dictating reality through filtered social media images has become not only easy but the standard. I think this changes the way these symbolic actions are used, hence the hypocrisy we see. — Isaac

We both know it's also "just a statue"; toppling it doesn't change any policies by itself. How I'm seeing those acts of symbolic destruction in the UK is:

(1) There's hardly any public discourse regarding systemic discrimination in the UK.
(2) Only really the Guardian regularly reports on it. The majority of the UK "news"papers are racist-xenophobic ideological state apparatuses regarding issues like this.
(3) School teaching of British colonial history either doesn't happen, or is extremely favourable to empire.
(4) A symbolic act against the UK's central role in colonialism and its perpetual whitewashing of history maybe prefigures discourse to be more amenable to reasserting the "lost history of the colonised" and challenging the glorification of empire.
(5) I realize by this point it's a slippery slope - but (4) at least acknowledges the problem and makes space for seeing current colonialism and acting against it.

If we care about the rightward shift of the Overton window, we should care about things that shift it left too.

What I cannot respect is claiming to be outraged and insulted - that gesture symbolises a guilty conscience and a complete lack of respect for humanity. — unenlightened

Who do you mean by this? Those who are outraged at Kaepernick’s actions or those who conceal their guilty conscience by being too fervent in their protests?

Kaepernick was attempting a respectful, peaceful protest. Ya know...the kind many American conservatives say people ought to do rather than engage in protest marches that block traffic and sometimes devolve into riots.

He pretty much got fired and blacklisted as a result.

People calling for "peaceful protests" are really just saying, "Stop protesting and accept the crap we are throwing your way."

Just so it’s clear, I have no criticisms of Koepernick.

Who do you mean by this? Those who are outraged at Kaepernick’s actions or those who conceal their guilty conscience by being too fervent in their protests? — Brett

The former. I don't know enough to tell a genuine white supporter from a fake one.

But even a completely accurate picture of Britain's colonial past will be nothing more than a weak gesture if we're carrying on with exactly the same practices without so much as bad word said about it, right? So the whole argument hinges on (4). That's not a critique on its own, so much as checking we're on the same page.

It's not the slaver's statutes that need to come down first, it's Nike's display at SportsDirect, it's Apple's storefront, it's Gap's billboards... Why aren't these the targets? We should worry about correcting historical inaccuracies about slavery when the 40 million modern slaves have been freed. The current problem is obviously vastly more important.

So why do you think we need to take this circuitous route? Why not just attack modern colonialism head on. Why 'open up a space for dialogue about it' using some sideling, proxy gesture and not just have the conversation at Nike's front door where it belongs? The actual kids actually dying right now are actually dying because of Nike's actual supply chain decisions. Why the dance? They're only trainers, we're not talking about doing without bread.

So, the problem I see with "momentum here leads to progress there" types of argument is they leave a massive sociological question unanswered. Why here and not there? Why this problem and not that one?

If the answer is just chance - whatever spark happens to ignite - then we're fine, your theory probably works and we just have to wait for the sympathetic discourse to have its effect. But if the answer were chance, one would have to explain the otherwise significant way in which the popular movements focus on first world problems caused by authority or historic agents, and third world problems caused by our own insatiable need for stuff don't ever seem to be where the spark lands.

If there's a reason for this disparity, and I obviously think there is, then it is not just a matter of time, not just a matter piggybacking off related movements. Some substantial cause of the problem is not being dealt with.

And I'm not going shy away from the risk of being belittling. The problems we're talking about that are not being addressed are orders of magnitude bigger than the ones people are actually protesting about. Ten thousand times more women are abused because of abject poverty than were protected by the 'global' metoo movement. Ten thousand times more minorities are killed by unhealthy working conditions in our supply chains than will be saved by defunding the MPD. So if there is some sociological barrier, some reason why it's never these issues that gain such enthusiastic momentum, it really matters and I think it's not right, given the gravity, to just hope it crops up as a result of these related issues in the face of good historical evidence to suggest it really won't.

I'm arguing about ideas on a philosophy forum, your impact on the world is a complete irrelevance. — Judaka

A narrative on race differences that assigns attributes, intentions and actions to races. Which elicits, promotes and validates opinions on races - and racism. — Judaka

I don't understand at all. You say that my narrative is harmful, but when asked to give examples of harm it's causing, you say that how I articulate myself is irrelevant. Can't have it both ways.

MERGE STARTS HERE:

There's been a LOT of discussion of race relations in recent weeks, and as usual the vast majority of the discussion focuses on emotion and vague calls for various kinds of largely unspecified change. We are told we are supposed to take race relations very very seriously, which is good, but apparently not seriously enough to actually do anything big and specific about race relations problems.

So, this thread will attempt to replace a pattern of vague emotional statements with a policy proposal which is both ambitious and specific.

In the spirit of getting serious, let's try to do more than just fire off some opinions and on the spot analysis provided as fast as we can type. Read that sentence again please.

Instead, I'm hoping you can help me nail down the price tag for the following proposal.

PROPOSAL: Every black American and American Indian should be provided totally free education (tuition, books, living expenses, everything) for any educational experience which can boost their income earning potential. This plan should continue until such time as the vast wealth gap between these groups and whites is erased. The plan should be funded by the richest 1%, that is, those who have most of the money and who have benefited most from America's rigged system.

Here are the kind of questions I hope we will address:

1) How much would such a plan cost? How many people are we trying to serve and approximately how much money is required to serve them as defined above?

2) What would the impact of such a plan be on the 1%? Would they barely notice? Would their economic position be crushed? How much money do they have, and how much of that would such a plan take from them?

If you don't like this plan and would prefer another one, ok, no problem. In that case, please start your own thread outlining your own plan. Thank you. — Nuke

RESPOND TO THAT QUOTE WITH

Yes I absolutely get that. And to stand next to him, but not imitate him. When Democrats go down on at knee in the Capital then you know the gesture has been stolen.

The hashtags, kneeling and placard-waving protests are the bona fides. They are the means with which to signal ones conformity. Beyond that I do not think they serve any function. People were repeating the hashtag #defundthepolice, for instance, before they even understood what it entailed. When a protester asked the mayor of Minneapolis if he would “defund the police”, he tried to confirm if that meant abolishing the police. Upon finding out that #defundthepolice in fact meant abolish the police, he said he disagreed and was booed out of the area.

These expressions resemble the “duckspeak” of Orwell‘s 1984: “pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc”. “It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck”.

Some excerpts of left critiques of BLM that @Issac might be interested in, along with anyone else:

Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism. Such expressions are not a threat but rather a bulwark to the neoliberal project that has obliterated the social wage, gutted public sector employment and worker pensions, undermined collective bargaining and union power, and rolled out an expansive carceral apparatus, all developments that have adversely affected black workers and communities. Sure, some activists are calling for defunding police departments and de-carceration, but as a popular slogan, Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism. And the ruling class agrees.

. (Essay One)

The focus on racial disparity both obscures the nature and extent of the political and strategic challenges we face and in two ways undercuts our ability to mount a potentially effective challenge: 1) As my colleague, Marie Gottschalk, has demonstrated in her most important book, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, the carceral apparatus in its many manifestations, including stress policing as well as the many discrete nodes that constitute the regime of mass incarceration, has emerged from and is reproduced by quite diverse, bipartisan, and evolving complexes of interests, some of which form only in response to the arrangements generated and institutionalized by other interests. Constituencies for different elements of the carceral state do not necessarily overlap, and their interests in maintaining it, or their favored components of it, can be material, ideological, political, or alternating or simultaneous combinations of the three.

Challenging that immensely fortified and self-reproducing institutional and industrial structure will require a deep political strategy, one that must eventually rise to a challenge of the foundational premises of the regime of market-driven public policy and increasing direction of the state’s functions at every level toward supporting accelerating regressive transfer and managing its social consequences through policing. 2) It should be clear by now that the focus on racial disparity accepts the premise of neoliberal social justice that the problem of inequality is not its magnitude or intensity in general but whether or not it is distributed in a racially equitable way. To the extent that that is the animating principle of a left politics, it is a politics that lies entirely within neoliberalism’s logic.

(Essay Two)

If we care about the rightward shift of the Overton window, we should care about things that shift it left too. — fdrake

If you want to move the Overton window any way or to do something to correct social injustices or problems, I think the way isn't to go full forward to a situation where idiotic culture wars discourse prevails. This is the way how to lose focus, how start eroding that consensus that would exist in condemning excessive use of force. To Put this in a different way, in order to erode the consensus of outrage and keep the status quo, anything that will divide people to the old lines we've seen will do the trick.

So is the best way to attack and vandalize a statue of Churchill in the UK? The talk shows will get the usual annoying people to bicker about the issue without any agreement. You know the lines.

Or how about those racist WW1 veterans:



Or I don't know, attack perhaps racist Mahatma Gandhi? Both in Washington DC and in London the racist got what he obviously deserves:



What should be done is to avoid the old patterns and the usual pitfalls. Basically keep things simple, have a simply reasonable goal and not think we are on a cusp of the World changing totally. Or then this is forgotten just like the Occupy Movement.