Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

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> If there were a secret conspiracy running the liberal media, they could all decide they wanted to raise awareness of racist police brutality, pick the most clear-cut and sympathetic case, and make it non-stop news headlines for the next two months.

Yes ...

> Then everyone would agree it was indeed very brutal and racist, and something would get done.

No, because there's an entire counter-news faction out there insisting that absolutely every person killed by police deserved it, that it is unacceptable to ever hold police accountable for deaths of anyone under any circumstances, such as shooting a handcuffed guy on the floor or firing blindly into a darkened apartment, and that everyone complaining about racism is some kind of Maoist.

Recently I watched some of the Live Aid 25th anniversary coverage. The huge charity appeal was sparked by Michael Buerk's famous report on dead and dying children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOj_6OYuJc

I couldn't help thinking that if you filmed that today it would vanish from the social media melee in a couple of days. It was shocking then. It might not even be the most shocking thing somebody scrolls past today.

Almost everyone, deep into trad Republican groups, agree that the Floyd killing was a sickening murder, a symptom of a broken system, and Something Needs To Be Done.

My take is that nothing gets done because Congress is incapable of doing things. At all. There is nothing special about doing nothing on police brutality. It's just one more thing on the pile of unaddressed things.

It's been this way for a long time now, and that is why Presidents now try to rule by executive orders.

There are two layers of elected government between Congress and the Minneapolis police, and several layers of administration between the elected representatives and the police on the street.

Ever hard-head in Congress could have a conversion experience this week from attending John Lewis's funeral, and somewhere next year some guy with a gun or knee could repeat the Floyd killing.

> My take is that nothing gets done because Congress is incapable of doing things. At all.

I mean yes but also... Plenty of us just got and unprecedented $1200-2400 from Congress just a month or two ago... they clearly can act when motivated.

> Almost everyone, deep into trad Republican groups, agree that the Floyd killing was a sickening murder, a symptom of a broken system, and Something Needs To Be Done.

I need you to know that this is not the case. A not insignificant portion of the right does not feel anything wrong was done in this case, and would prefer for police to "crack down." Some will openly discuss that they need to publicly concede that there is A Problem in order to suggest ineffectual solutions to it which will satisfy politicians and pacify mass movements.

The rest of your comment is very correct, but it should be mentioned that bad actors exist and not every American's ideal version of America is completely rid of police murders.

> I need you to know that this is not the case.

What is your source or qualification for saying this?

I know of several conservative groups that did infact hold or participate in protests against George Floyd's death in the days after. Pretty much everyone in them agrees, even now, that while the case is not quite as clear-cut as some would have you think, it was still wrong to kneel on his neck for 10 minutes after he was already under control.

The right-libertarian circles have been banging on against the militarization of the police and their unaccountability for decades now. Check out Radley Balko in particular, and the books he's written and the articles for reason.com. That's what conservatives saw this as.

Things did kind of turn over the weeks after. This was when the left's narrative that it was a racism problem took hold, the rhetoric escalated into "Defund the Police", and protests into some areas turned into riots and large-scale property destruction. This caused the right to de-emphasize those concerns and put more emphasis on the defense of the police.

Naturally, the Left is incentivized to dig up the most outrageously extreme version of those arguments and try to portray the entire Right as thinking like that. I do not know you or your ideology, but I suspect your source is Left-wing articles that seek to portray the Right in this way. If so, you ought to be aware that it's never a path to truth to view any group only through the lens of their enemies.

Agreed on Radley Balko.

He is the best writer on police brutality, AFAIK.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/radley-balko/

https://twitter.com/radleybalko

Indeed, IMO he's covered many sides of this issue very much in need of attention. Sadly, per the point of the article, it doesn't offend enough people or fit neatly enough into a right-wing or left-wing outrage machine, so it doesn't get a huge amount of attention.

> This caused the right to de-emphasize those concerns and put more emphasis on the defense of the police.

But that's the choice, isn't it; faced with a choice between property damage, however minor or even theoretical, and human life (or the serious injuries incurred by protestors and journalists who had rubber bullets fired at their eyes), conservatives immediately turn around and defend the police.

The police can read between the lines as well as anyone else, so they interpret that as the voters ordering them to go out and injure as many protestors as necessary until the protests stop. Which, of course, escalates the protests.

(How is Radley Balko conservative? It's very hard to tell from that twitter feed)

I'd say Radley Balko is libertarian. The intersection of doctrinally libertarian viewpoints with main stream American politics is complex at best. For what it's worth, I often see his articles shared in right-wing circles favorably. I haven't really heard of him having much of a following in left-wing circles. It doesn't sound very helpful to our political scene to be highly concerned that somebody can't be easily placed in a bucket of right-wing or left-wing.

On the other, to borrow some of the left's standard viewpoints, I could say that it's a very privileged viewpoint that property damage is inconsequential compared to injury. How many lower-class people will suffer from losing their mode of transportation, having their home rendered unsafe, or even having "luxuries" that were sources of comfort in a difficult life destroyed? How many people started out in poverty and spent a lifetime building a business from nothing so they could rise into the middle class, only to watch it be destroyed by privileged mostly-white rioters in response to something that they had nothing to do with, that happened in a completely different city? And it certainly isn't like rioters haven't intentionally attacked, injured, and in a few cases killed, both citizens and law enforcement officers as well.

> Pretty much everyone in them agrees, even now, that while the case is not quite as clear-cut as some would have you think

I think you should dig into this a little deeper, because I think it is disingenuous to portray their take as just being somewhat suspicious of the case. When I dug deeper with my conservative friends, they think that Floyd is a "thug" and drug addict, and fall short of saying that he definitely had what happened to him coming, but that's the implication.

> Almost everyone, deep into trad Republican groups

A large portion of the right were happy to spread justifications for Floyd's murder and defamation of Floyd's character all over social media.

If you'd like evidence, search r/The_Donald archives, r/Conservative or the thousands of conservative groups on Facebook.

There are loud internet agitators/troll who do this. It's important to not take that as some kind of opinion poll. "One Click One Vote" is a terrible slogan.

Not that I have a poll to offer, though some have surely been done.

I base what I say on most conservatives I'm aware of saying so. I can't think of any "name" conservative who has said the opposite.

"A large portion of the right...all over social media."

I'm not sure social media reflect "a large portion" of any political spectrum.

I am basing my observations off of the conservatives that I know personally, but offered evidence in the form of public social media used by millions of people because a common retort to this observation is skepticism or the claim that people like this don't exist.

The use of EOs isn't new, and we're not even in the ballpark of high-water marks there: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or....

I look at it as building software on top of an extremely complex system. It's just not going to move as fast as anybody likes it to, and often the best course of action after considering a new feature will be to leave it alone because it's not business critical and worth the risk.

The reason the Floyd killing has been such a powerful force is that there is a live video of a man being strangled, begging for his life, for minutes.

It is much easier to discredit a split second decision, mistaken identity, justify feeling threatened in so many other cases, but there it is, a man immobilized on the street with a knee on his neck, people standing around objecting to what’s happening, time, so much time to consider actions when there was no reasonable threat.

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