The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance
wired.com
wired.com
They are also presently discussing their next day-out for rednecks in the form of another insurrection and coup attempt on the 17th of January. Let's hope that this time some people will take notice because while everybody seems to be happy that this effort failed from the perspective of the perps it looks like a major victory: they took the bloody capitol with such ease that 10 minutes more planning would have had them hold house or senate members or even the VP or the speaker hostage. Or worse.
This isn't over yet.
This isn't a new phenomenon either. This has been documented [0] time and time again [1].
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-suprem...
The GOP has been doing a large scale equivalent of swinging nunchucks around in public. The problem isn't that sometimes it swings around the wrong way and whacks someone they didn't intend to whack. Well, no, it is, of course that's a problem. But the more fundamental problem is that they're recklessly swinging an unpredictable weapon in public in an effort to be intimidating in the first place. And the problem is that people who didn't feel personally threatened by this behavior just sat there and came up with sorry excuses to try and rationalize it. This is deeply antisocial comportment that should have no place in the top echelons of civil society.
ref: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jan/08/2002562063/-1/-1/1/PLA...
Let say we have the worst case scenario where a bunch of criminals successfully enter the capital building and occupy it. Is the best response to send the army, or as many police units as needed to apprehend the criminals and put them in jail?
By sending the army what we are saying is that there existed a creditable scenario that the people attacking could have taken control of the US government and ruled over the nation.
The National Guard is not the Army, it's a dual-purpose force that is both a reserve for the Army and a reserve for civil authorities during emergencies including civil disorder.
> By sending the army what we are saying is that there existed a creditable scenario that the people attacking could have taken control of the US government and ruled over the nation.
No, even if we were talking about the Army proper, an existential threat to the government is not the criteria under the Insurrection Act for their use to disperse insurgents.
The militia, armed forces, or both may be used (among other scenarios authorized in law) against “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” which “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws”. 10 USC Sec 253.
History is full of examples and dead bodies where the military has been used against its own people who oppose or obstruct the execution of law. It many countries it also follows a period of regret and new laws in order to prevent something similar to ever happen again. Just because the government has a law that gives them authorization to send the military in order to secure a building, it doesn't mean it is a good idea.
Would the military trained personnel have done a better job during the capital attack than the police trained one?
The Guard is a force whose missions include support for Civil authorities during disturbances, and it's training, equipment, organizations, planning, etc. reflect that.
And, quite arguably, that are better than, and trained better than the police for, dealing with large scale civil unrest.
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-elections-racial-in...
https://www.ideastream.org/news/what-national-guard-training...
The fact that you have to reach back that far, given all the more recent problems with conventional police, seems to illustrate my point.
[0]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/dc-riots-c...
Which doesn't mention anything about Mayor Bowser refusing offers of assistance - only the Capitol Police. Indeed, it cites her asking for assistance on December 31st in preparation.
verifiable voting
I think literally anyone on this site could invent a more reliable and common-sense approach to voting.
This is all just fallout from a fallible system that has little trust.
But I think you'd taking the results too far. You'd have to hack into hundreds or thousands of machines within a single state to change its votes. Worse, you have to do this in a way that looks plausible. You're talking about a major conspiracy that would have to take place. And if Russia is going to change votes why wouldn't China, Israel, or others? So they would have to all organize together so they don't undo one another's work. And that would have to happen without us (NSA, FBI, CIA) finding out. You're talking about a conspiracy that would be very difficult to pull off and require high amounts of organization.
Hacking a computer is easy. Hacking a thousand computers in a room full of people that are worried about their computers being hacked? Different story.
The problem with verifiable voting is that it has to break one the properties of American democracy, the secret ballot, or else it doesn't really work. As a voter, I want to see that a) it was recorded that I voted, and b) what my vote was. In the case of invented voter fraud, both A and B need to be possible, but making both of those possible mean it's possible to show who I voted for. Who I voted for is a secret, and is one of the central tenants to American democracy. I can talk about supporting candidate A in public and vote for candidate B in private and a lot of properties follow from that.
The challenge isn't technical, it's a social problem, and technical measures won't solve social problems.
This problem might have a technical solution though. First, each voter generates a private key and publishes the corresponding public key. Then implement a homomorphic vector addition, everybody submits their vote as an encrypted vector, and then you somehow add the vectors together homomorphically, i.e. the addition can be done without decrypting them first.
You need some kind of way to prove that each vector corresponds to a legal vote (i.e. increases the vote total of at most one candidate by at most one vote.) Then you need some way to decrypt the encrypted vector sum using some amalgamation of everybody's public keys, but without allowing to decrypt subtotals for particular subsets.
You can publish all the encrypted votes received and the decrypting amalgamation, so anyone with the capability to download and process a large data set. Anyone can check that every vote was cryptographically approved by a distinct pre-registered voter and the votes were totaled honestly.
If we assume an upper bound of 1 billion voters, each 1 kb of encrypted vector size adds 1 TB to the raw vote data. Based on existing "clever" cryptosystems that do similar things (e.g. ZK-snarks), it's reasonable to guess we won't need more than 100 kb per encrypted vector. So an entire 1-billion-voter election could be processed by a small storage cluster with 100 TB, you can't verify it on your laptop, but the technically inclined could verify the vote themselves for probably somewhere around $1,000 - $20,000 of hardware and sysadmin time.
I don't know if there's existing crypto math to do this, but I'm pretty sure it at least hasn't been proven impossible.
The kind of crypto primitives needed for this kind of system might be found someday.
They killed hundreds of millions of people. You could be raped of tortured at any time.
It is not white supremacist. It is anyone with power.
Right now in the US, the antifa movement is as violent or more violent than anyone else. Certainly the Guardian is not an unbiased source.
Except that... then what? That isn't how a coup works. You can't just take hostages and then make demands about who gets to be the President. It has no effect. Official actions taken under duress are invalid. As soon as you leave the building nobody is going to honor anything you demanded.
It's easy to take a building. Just show up with greater numbers than there are cops in the area. But a building is not the government. Physical possession of the Senate floor isn't what grants the power to do anything. It's purely symbolic.
The fact is that law enforcement operates primarily through deterrence. You can install some bulletproof glass and things like that, but the main thing preventing murders and such is that if you do it then you go to jail for a long time after.
And different measures could make a marginal difference one way or the other, but if you have a huge mob of people trying to get into a building not explicitly designed to be a fortress, that's pretty hard to stop.
They did not just stand around [1]. This was extremely violent, and they intended to murder people. Deterrence meant nothing to them. They were only stopped because the Capitol Police and Secret Service shot one of them. Different measures would absolutely have made a difference and saved lives.
...was that the people they were fairly explicitly targeting escaped the mob, in some cases with very little margin, because of successful use of barricades, delaying tactics, and in one case deadly force.
But the amount of "it could have been worse" attributable entirely to what the mob didn't do, is large. And I don't think I'm wrong to attribute a lot of that to the ordinary deterrents being in effect.
One of the important ones is the line between planning to do something and actually doing it. It's one thing to stand in a crowd chanting something stupid, quite another if the moment comes and you have to choose.
> What they didn't do is mostly because it didn't work, not because there was no attempt.
What I'm referring to is methods, not goals.
Nobody wants to imagine the level of violence that people are capable of when unrestrained. I don't intend to describe it here, but the world has seen it in other times and other places.
Sure, a huge mob of people trying to get into a building not explicitly designed to be a fortress isn't easy to stop, and with the limited resources available evacuation was probably the right move, but what we actually saw on video in front of the Capitol was a line of about six police and a movable fence, and open doors. I've seen more convincing looking security at music festivals. You can try to deter people by what might happen if they try rather than what happens if they succeed, especially if they're crazy people who think what will actually happen if they succeed is President Trump giving them a medal.
What I still can't understand is why the police wasn't prepared for it. Isn't the FBI supposed to infiltrate dangerous groups? Or was the "march on capitol" completely unplanned before Trump suggested it? Finally, has nobody considered that something like this might have happened? (It was obvious to me, as well as at least one thinktank.)
This type of performative hyperbole coming from the left is going to make this whole situation worse. What those yahoo's did was bad enough, there's zero reason to throw gasoline on the fire.
> But if you play out the actual implications then you can use hyperbole and call it a coup. That's valuable language and you don't want to let a crisis go to waste.
The GGP labeled this with an both the correct term and an incorrect term.
1/6 was an insurrection, not a coup. An insurrection is a rebellion against civil authority, which this clearly was, even if it was incompetently executed. I think a coup is typically used for when power is illegally taken by military or police authorities, which this was not.
Trump calls it "getting revenge" and we call it a coup attempt because that's what it was, a coup attempt.
The losing side, given this unorthodox election, wanted some validation of results, as well as to legally challenge the way they were done (PA's changes).
The response was one of derision and essentially shutting out the right from discourse. No effort was made a conciliation. This had the predictable effect of galvanizing people that there was indeed fraud.
If you think that these people had no reason to be angry, you aren't paying attention. If you can understand the frustrations and lead up to the BLM movement, but don't even want to pay lip service to this, you are either a horrible person or stupid. Take your pick: evil, ignorant, or both?
Validation of the result? Beyond all the official counts and recounts? I’m confused.
Also your last paragraph was completely uncalled for.
What did occur was a lot of little things and disparate things that had a huge dampening effect on the mobilization of discussion and questioning of details. And this has been happening for way before the election results were even out, it's been going on for years with a steady escalation.
There was also the constant repetitive narrative pushing, specific language and tone by reporters, activists and politicians that essentially gave "official" and "quotable" legitimacy to potentially-questionable election results, and gave plausible excuses/cover to de-legitimize and conspiracy-blame any criticisms of the election results. This stuff is downright scary, and a good chunk of the people not seeing it are the ones that are (for now) in the "good books" of whoever is overall in charge of driving the narrative and controlling public discourse. Right now, the left/Democratic party is in said good books.
Look how the discussion is so widely and suddenly revolving around conflating this protest with insurrection even though it was essentially a fart in the grand scheme of things, and implying that there is a huge overlap between right/republican/conservative individuals and "racists/white-supremacists". It's laying the ground-work to make it legitimate and acceptable to assume/claim that republicans are racists among other things. Next up we'll have dehumanization, firings and overall de-platforming because said protestors were "terrorists" due to their participation. The event will be labelled as a "coup attempt" and the storming of the building was a "terrorist attack". And if you question any of these accepted facts (because hey all news reports labelled it as such) you too will be de-platformed, ostracized and called a terrorist-sympathizer or a "something-denier" (hint look at the anti covid-lockdown protests for an example).
The process you talk about in your first paragraphs: that some people get subtly shut out of the political process, does happen, but it happens mostly to poor people, black people, and university students. Various forms of voting suppression are aimed at preventing them from voting. Several voter ID laws require forms of ID that conservatives are more likely to have. For example, a gun license would be valid, while a student ID card wouldn't.
Also note the difference in DC police response against the BLM protests in the summer versus this more protest.
> Their affidavits raise a series of observations where the effect is not clear. For instance, one Republican poll challenger, Articia Bomer, said she saw 27 ballots inserted into a counting machine “at least five times.” An affidavit by a poll watcher named Brett Kinney said he witnessed a worker reach into an envelope marked “invalid ballots” and “process them with valid ballots.”
Why would this happen? Can we have an explanation that explains why this is standard operating procedure? Assuming good faith on the part of everyone, an explanation like “each ballot has a unique bar code and a misread would require re-reading, on a misread this red light on the scanner would light up and the ballot should be re-scanned until the green light lights, but even if the ballot is scanned successfully multiple times it would not be counted more than once” - maybe there is an explanation like this out there but I haven’t found it, only repeated insistence from every mainstream media outlet that there is no evidence of voter fraud.
Furthermore, there are credible examples of observers being disenfranchised - again, many not so credible (for example, building at capacity when there are already plenty of bipartisan observers, or “feeling intimidated” or whatever). But in Fulton County, observers insist that they were told by election officials that counting is over for the night, and that’s backed up by news reports from election night (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pipe-bursts-atlanta-arena-ca...) and then they continue counting - but now the election officials insist that nobody was told that counting was over for the night even though ABC reported that a specific responsible person, Regina Waller, had said so. Who is wrong? There are also many reports from several states where observers were kept 6 to 25 feet away or only able to watch the counts through a video monitor, which doesn’t seem like it would allow them to really observe anything. Many of the court cases were thrown out due to lack of evidence that the election outcome was altered - because affidavits aren’t investigations, they of course can’t show evidence of that. I have heard plenty of rebuttals for some of the more far fetched fraud theories, but it still seems to me that observer rights need to be bolstered, including a more thorough explanation of procedures, a way to document and address/explain exceptions in the public view. However, there does need to be a way to filter out the specious complaints, because any system where exceptions require handling can be DDoSed.
So while there is a lot of easily debunked, meaningless, agitating noise, there are also still some valid, unexplained concerns. I think you are right that a lot of people just won’t believe it no matter what, but I also think a lot of reasonable people are still feeling pretty uneasy about this election, and the fact that a couple dozen radicals shut down the last chance for transparency for 75 million voters ought to concern everyone.
Which federal law do you think they violated?
I mean, while we're making stuff up, lets say it's a violation of the constitution to allow for a Democratic government. Article IV, Section 4 requires Republican party rule. /s
There have been plenty of much more questionable elections in the past. 2000 is a big one. In 2004 there were a lot of hints that Diebold voting machines favoured Republican candidates. Still, those elections stood, because the votes had already been cast. If rules are unfair, change them, but don't demand the election gets blindly thrown your way for no good reason.
Then the losing side didn't accept the results from the courts, and that's where it became a ridiculous circus. Also, the demands were ridiculously out of proportion. In the end, because they couldn't get their way, they tried to overthrow the legal result of the election and threatened members of Congress with serious harm.
> "No effort was made a conciliation."
They never tried. They demanded a total surrender of democracy to their demands. That is completely unacceptable. You can't compromise with something like that.
The reason these people were angry is simple: they were lied to and manipulated by media and politicians manipulating them to do their dirty work. The lived in an ecosystem of lies that kept telling them they should be angry, so they were. The lies they believed have been refuted time and time again, but they did not tolerate reason.
> "evil, ignorant, or both?"
Considering how eager they were to hurt people, they definitely check the evil box. It's hard to believe they honestly believed the lies, but it appears that some of them definitely did. But they must have been unbelievably gullible to take it this far.
I really, really hope they will finally learn that their leaders and media have constantly fed them lies; lies that they keep repeating to each other, and I hope they stop listening to them.
But there is no way to compromise with their attitude. You can't say: alright, let's have some lies and some truth. Let's have some freedom and some oppression. Some democracy and some autocracy. A movement that is so eager to hurt people our of sheer hatred should not set the political direction of a country.
This was the Beer Hall Putsch. It's good it failed, but it needs to have consequences. The US can't allow this to happen again.
In case you needed some reminding, since you're defending the term and its use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redneck
I've also paid attention to the doxxing that's been going on in r/SanDiego and most (if not all) of these people live in the city and are business owners. They are hardly definitional rednecks.
We saw this with the word thug. Everyone know what you're doing if you call black people from the suburbs thugs.
If you can stomach it, I ask everyone to watch the full lead up to the shot. It is an absolute failure of policing. Start at 37:20 on https://banned.video/watch?id=5ff6857e00bac0328da8e888 and yes it's NSFL (shot at 39:10).
Given the importance of the building and the people inside, it absolutely needs to be protected.
Is it sad that we need to protect things that are important to us? Yes. Should we do it anyway? Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_sho...
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/ap-fact-check-trum...
"Army leaders say the delay in the movement of Guard troops to the Capitol was because the initial agreement largely limited those forces to checkpoints and Metro stations and *stipulated they would not go to the Capitol*. As a result, authorities had to get approval for the new mission, then call Guard members to the armory, brief them and get them their riot gear, and then send them to the Capitol."
HN is for thoughtful, curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest. The sets of that and political flamewar are disjoint. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended, we'd appreciate it.
What you can't do is destroy this community by tossing bombs of snark, flamebait, name-calling, etc., at the side you consider wrong and bad. That is something completely different, and is what we warn or ban accounts for doing.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Zero resistance from the Police and only arrested the people who still refused to leave hours later.
Think it through logically:
It proves adherence to the law, not intent to break it. Neither zipties or tasers are illegal, but in DC, concealed carry, or even having any personal gun is.
If the intent was to forcibly take over the capital, or some sort of insurrection, it seems silly to worry about concealed carry laws while carrying out an open "rebellion". But even so, let's say you don't want to risk killing anyone with a gun.
You still have a problem, because neither tasers nor zipties are an effective tool if you're going up against an armed federal police force and possibly hundreds of politicians and staffers. Tazers have maybe a few discharges without needing to be recharged. That's not gonna deter multiple people, let alone a crowd. Not even an individual for more than a few moments. Definitely not capital police officers with guns, who are trained to avoid and overcome being tazed, by actually being tazed.
However, if you're a law abiding citizen protesting in DC, and you want to defend yourself against a potential attacker, a tazer is basically the only option you have.
With the mayor's restrictions placed on the National Guard and police officers, it seems especially reasonable, given all the violence of the past year that police and politicians have failed to prevent, sometimes willingly.
Since tazers only disable attackers temporarily, zipties make sense as a defensive tool, if you need to disable an attacker looking enough to get away, or between the time the tazer wears off and when the police arrive. Especially if you wind up in a situation where you are somehow confined in some space, trapped with your attacker.
If people would at least try to perceive Wednesday with an open mind, it's easy to explain 99.9% as well intentioned citizens, peacefully marching.
Even with the confrontations, it's easy to see how people could have unintentionally gotten caught up in an escalated situation.
I get that not everyone was an innocent bystander. But, again, these people deserve the same benefit of the doubt that the left got when taking over the Senate building while admittedly trying to intimidate senators into changing their votes. Yet they were kneeled to in deference by the FBI, before being given unfettered access.
That they wanted to bring weapons into the Capitol at all is damning enough. It's a place for debate, not violence.
then zipties become a useful compliment to a taser (which is only able to disable an attacker temporarily).
But even if it was, why would you need it in the Capitol? Sorry, but everything points to them planning to abduct the politicians they were searching for.
In the months and years to come, we must try to not forget that the government exists solely for the benefit of its constituents, not the other way around.
The ruled class, red and blue, does not want freedom from oppression, they want to be the oppressors.
It means things like “maybe we don’t need armed people to give tickets to drivers with a busted headlight” and “if we put more funds into mental health crisis teams we won’t have to send as many cops to violent incidents”.
There are full-on police abolitionists, but they’re far fewer in number.
I have no idea what this quote means, but left leaning press have explained the concept of defunding the press just fine.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/05/defunding-th...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/07/defund-po...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
Some people seem to mean ‘no police at all’ and some seem to mean ‘don’t task the police with trivial stuff’.
But why then would the right assume it means the former?
but more generally, it's inevitable that the opposing side will interpret a vague slogan in the most negative and scary light possible. I suspect this is often by design, ie motte and bailey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
But to be fair, this article does say:
"But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.
"We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.
"We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison."
The article ends “ Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) is the director of Project NIA, a grass-roots group that works to end youth incarceration, and an anti-criminalization organizer”.
It’s a good read, thanks.
From where I stand (Seattle, know multiple Defund folks), the reaction has been "So, the one true thing we think cops should do - prevent significant violent action and protect people - they failed at. This further proves our point". You can dither on whether blocking traffic is violent (it's not) but the events really only strengthened their case - BLM peaceful protesting is met with an order of magnitude more violence than actual attempted attacks on the government. So why bother having cops if they don't do anything when it actually matters?
According to whom?
The press speaks for the establishment, because to a large extent, that's who owns it. It sucks up to power and reflects its biases.
Now, many of the same champions of this cause are taking on the role of the police themselves. Across Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere, people are creating open source documents with the names of anyone they believe was at the riot.
Most troubling of all, I am seeing many people openly advocating the police should have shot more protesters or brutalized them in some manner.
This seems highly contrary to the goals of the movement.
I have seen many saying black people would have been shot, and this is unequal, that doesn't mean they want more shot.
I've also seen many decrying the lack of defence of congress. Again, doesn't mean more deaths, just better preparation.
Hatred and malice spreads like a viral wildfire on social media, no matter what your political ideology.
On the other, these people literally attempted to overthrow the country, some were armed, some had bombs, some had the intent of abducting and/or harming people like Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. So I would be very sympathetic to there having been a much more robust response, whilst still preferring nobody be hurt.
> This seems highly contrary to the goals of the movement.
It is, and most people "in the movement" I've seen are saying "hey, this gentleness is how BLM protests should've treated, too".
I've seen lots of people ask questions like “where were the tear gas and rubber bullets?”, but I think you are missing the point of those and other references to the behavior of the police during BLM and other protests if you interpret them as a call that the violent behavior should have been repeated.
They are, in at least most cases, using the restraint shown in the attempted coup where top government leaders were targeted to highlight what they see as the inappropriateness of the violent response in earlier protests and the hollowness of law enforcement claims that the force used in those earlier events was reasonable, necessary, and justified rather than motivated by racial and political bias.
> We're not saying shoot them like you shot us. We're saying don't shoot us like you didn't shoot them.
The issue is with the double standard, and that's what's at the root of the BLM movement. Honestly I'm surprised that some people still haven't managed to understand what's at the root of BLM after like all the demonstrations that happened around it.
Even the name of the movement: "Black Lives Matters" aka "Blacks are not a lower class to be treated more arshly and with less humanity"
Which is why when someone says BLM nah ALM, it's absolutely missing the point of the movement. Cause how do you reframe that: "All people are of equal class"... Ok but black people aren't treated equally so like that's not true? That's why there are million of black people protesting. It's okay to maybe wonder... Wait is it true that black people are treated differently? Is it because they are black? Or is it more that poor people (happen to often be black) and are treated differently? Yes sure that's a question one can wonder, but you don't have to go very far at least to suspect that whatever it is, in effect, black people do get treated differently (be it because they are black or because they are poor, or because they're less educated, etc.) The why doesn't matter, the different treatment does, no matter what, nobody should be treated differently.
Sorry for the rant, but it's tiring having to explain these basics. Of course left and right can't even have a proper conversation around the issue when half the table doesn't understand what is the issue to discuss.
And I like to remind people, this isn't just the root of the BLM movement, this is literally the root of the United States itself. The declaration of independence:
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
There are endless videos of normal cops being executed by unhinged drivers who were pulled over for things like "a busted headlight." You don't know who you're dealing with, how close to the edge some people are, or if they are dangerous felons, when you pull them over. If those situations were a very real possibility in your daily job, would you perform that job unarmed? I wouldn't. Maybe some very brave mental health professionals would, for a time, until some of them are killed as well, as indiscriminately as the police, which is inevitable.
What then? Stop pulling people over altogether, because it's not worth risking anybody's life further? Just let people speed and drive drunk, or drive with an unsafe vehicle?
When I get this far in discussions with people, it eventually comes down to "well dangerous people shouldn't have guns." It's a nice thought, naive in my opinion, but regardless, how do we deal with the reality of right now until those ideals manifest in reality? The reality is that dangerous people make regular traffic stops too dangerous for normal people to behave in any other way that to exercise extreme caution.
Frequently, this is because they suspect the cop will find they have a warrant or contraband and the stop will proceed past a ticket to arrest and felony charges.
Separating the civil and criminal enforcement here makes these encounters safer; we can see this in countries where traffic cops aren't routinely armed.
Don't check at all. Check, but report without pursuit. Some have issues with traffic stops entirely, given the racial biases involved in who to pull over. (Demonstrated most effectively in this study, where the disparity disappears when the sun goes down: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/inside-100-million-poli... / https://news.stanford.edu/2020/05/05/veil-darkness-reduces-r...)
There's also the fact that the scary "normal cops being executed by unhinged drivers" scenario is a vanishingly rare scenario. The rate of murders of police officers matches roughly the rate in the general population. https://www.newsweek.com/it-has-never-been-safer-be-cop-3720...
Dude the reason the cat with the warrant hasn't been caught is because they dont show up to their known residence. They are EVADING. Their home isnt a safe space from warrants.
You just effectively nullified the entire reason to have a warrant out for someone's arrest, let alone reason for bail so someone shows up to court.
And no, it's not safer in the sense they aren't shot. Body armor has gotten better and the likelihood of surviving a few rounds to the chest has gone up. The shootings haven't changed, just the body armor. Get out of your sick fantasy world. Better yet, go be a cop to help reform. See for yourself before you think you have an opinion.
Cops who attempt to turn in bad cops get fucked up by other cops, so this is a no-go.
Otherwise I generally agree with your point that not checking for warrants has a really bad consequence of potentially letting go of people who have warrants out for committing heinous, heinous crimes. (Admittedly, often times cops have let go of people during traffic stops without checking for warrants. Several serial killers for example.)
And they wear body armor, can call for backup, and can engage threats with deadly force. I would imagine a job with those tactical advantages would have a much much lower murder rate than the general population.
Philando Castile serves as a good example.
And it does not matter: in the US and most civilized countries a police officer is supposed to have a reasonable suspicion before they start invading someone's privacy.
The idea of someone running warrant checks on the basis of a broken tail light is antithetical to notions like the presumption of innocence and right to privacy.
Hm, there's definitely a line somewhere. I'm with you in that I don't think cops should be able to demand ID and run checks on random people simply out and about in public. Broken tail light? Not sure. Speeding? OK now you're breaking the law and arguably creating a public safety threat, but probably not going to be arrested. DUI? Now you're in misdemeanor territory at least. When is it reasonable to check if you're also wanted for something else? Maybe when you're booked at the jail?
Census workers aren't expected to check for warrants, because it's not their job; I'm advocating the same for things like speeding enforcement.
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/09/06/denver-star-program-me...
> Since its launch June 1, the STAR van has responded to more than 350 calls, replacing police in matters that don’t threaten public safety and are often connected to unmet mental or physical needs. The goal is to connect people who pose no danger with services and resources while freeing up police to respond to other calls. The team, which is not armed, has not called police for backup, Sailon said.
> The team has responded to an indecent exposure call that turned out to be a woman changing clothes in an alley because she was unhoused and had no other private place to go. They’ve been called out to a trespassing call for a man who was setting up a tent near someone’s home. They’ve helped people experiencing suicidal thoughts, people slumped against a fence, people simply acting strange.
> “It’s amazing how much stuff comes across 911 as the general, ‘I don’t know what to do, I guess I’ll call 911,’” Richardson said. “Someone sets up a tent? 911. I can’t find someone? 911.”
In 2019 there were 48 cops killed in the line of duty by 'felonious acts'.
6 were killed during traffic stops
https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...
Also consider the possibility that there's propaganda benefit to making the public think it's common.
From your comments, it seems that because you can show that it's relatively rare, nobody should expect, plan for, or train for it. I look at stats that show police murder rate comparable to the general population and I am honestly impressed that they are able to keep it that low while dealing with some of the most dangerous elements of society. Do you believe it is because violent criminals have a similar level of hatred towards police as they do a member of the general public, or is it because police train for the worst case scenario?
Training is another key aspect of the problem.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/02/dave-grossman-t...
Anyways, domestic disputes are some of the most dangerous calls for cops. A social worker to diffuse the situation seems like a good idea in theory. However reality doesn't give 2 shits about theory. The reason 911 is called out to these is because violence is about to happen, is happening or has been. Hell, Jacksonville sent a female officer to a a domestic dispute of something being stolen between 2 females last year. Body cam shows the officer walks up to the door, knocks, announces herself takes two steps back and waits. A chick just opens the door with a knife and stabs the female officer. "Anecdotal" you say. No. I used to do security integration for a few police departments in Colorado. I got to know a lot of them and would just hear and see this dumb shit nearly daily. Hell, watch Donut Operator on youtube. The amount of videos like this are ridiculously high.
Just out of the blue, a seemingly innocent call, someone gets their stupid on and attacks the cops. And this is Colorado (Denverand Co Springs area). Not the most dangerous area in the country. I now live in Florida.
Do I think cops need a few weeks of better deescalation training or even a better training program needs to be developed? Absolutely and I know for a fact about 80% of other cops want this because they were talking about it back in 2015. Do all cops need to have better hand to hand combat training so they dont need to always result to their firearm or the ineffective less than lethal countermeasures provided (yea tasers and bean bags dont work nearly as often as you think). My opinion doesn't matter because 100% of cops have begged for this, again, since 2015 that I know of. But that all requires funding, unlike Seattle deciding to cut the PD budget by a 3rd, saying they wanted to take more and made their black female chief the poorest paid chief in Seattle history. Who, mind you, even the most racist sexist asshole who looks at her resume will say she earned being the chief, without question.
I swear a majority of people are rational and understand that reality is a dangerous place and bad things happen. They know that defunding the cops and sending an unarmed social worker is just going to result in higher body bag orders or the police are going to get reinvented through them. That's enough internet for now.
My question is, why call it "defund the police"? The core of the idea is that, in many cases we can change our response from involving police officers to involving some other group who will hopefully be able to do a better job. The fact that this can be accomplished by reallocating funds from the police department, to avoid needing to levy taxes to raise revenue, seems like almost the least important part of the plan. Even then, "defund the police" is only the first half of "defund the police and use the additional funding to create another group that picks up some of the police's responsibilities".
My feeling is that many people view police with antipathy, so they like the slogan and concept of "defund the police" because it feels like a retaliation against the police. I strongly suspect that other ideas, some of which may be much more beneficial than changing the response, will be ignored if they can't be phrased as a tactical strike in the culture war.
Here's one list of proposals [0] for police reform, many of which seem very promising for how little cultural sway they have (delegalize police unions, abolish QI, decriminalize victimless offenses, etc.) I wonder if they have so little sway because they can't be phrased in a sufficiently incendiary manner.
(And by the way, just because there's antipathy towards the police doesn't mean the police are directly at fault. For instance, if police are made to enforce unpopular legislation like the war on drugs, that will obviously make people dislike them but the root problem is somewhat upstream)
[0]: https://medium.com/@yudkowsky/a-comprehensive-reboot-of-law-...
I didn't know death by Canadian was something we tracked specifically :P
Ex: "Black lives matter too" vs "black lives matter". or "replace / reboot the police" vs "defund the police". The police one I'm having a hard time thinking of a slogan that would be better, maybe that's why it stuck.
time travels back to a nearby counter-protest, yells:
"All Lives Matter, Always."
time travels back to the future
And now you're back to square one.
Given that ~300 black men are killed by police each year, I don't think that math checks out.
Agree with police reform, although we probably need more funding in many places, not less.
Multiply that by 1,000 and you get 23M.
There are 38M Black and African Americans in the USA, approximately half of which are male.
The math checks out fine.
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793
> Risk peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for all groups. For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.
→ 0.999984802431611 chance of not-being-killed-by-police per year.
pow(0.999984802431611, 69) = 0.998951909443727 chance of never being killed by police.
→ 0.001048090556273 chance of at some point being killed by police
→ just over 1/1000 over a lifetime.
The math checks out... if we ignore the "young" part.
In fact, if you assume that people are young for x% of their lives, and x% of black people are young, this exactly cancels out and you still get `0.001048` odds of being killed by police.
One example of right wing consolidation around their designed messaging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
There is no reasoning that will allow down that anger. No looking at actual facts and statistics.
You have to that with slogans. They're low resolution, so there's an inevitable loss of fidelity. No one marches with a legislative proposal on a placard, and it would be unreasonable to do so.
(I suspect it would actually be quite a bit more incendiary.)
Communication (even at length) is hard. We all bring different baggage to every attempt to speak and listen. It's probably ~impossible once you mix in uncharitable readers/listeners.
I can't speak for the campaigners, but I suspect "reform the police" won't cut the mustard for them because it's the sort of thing the establishment says before it fails to deliver meaningful change. "Today I'm calling for the establishment of a bipartisan commission on police reform", and its short imperative slogan--"reform the police"--could be an inspiring message if people had the impression that is how the gears sound when they're spinning up to change something.
But it's not very fair to insist people should be chanting a demand that seems to translate to "promise to look busy for a few months so that we'll go home and hope we don't notice when you don't solve the problem."
"Disarm the police" would receive the exact same pearl clutching responses.
[1] https://www.alternet.org/2012/10/how-higher-education-us-was...
[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/03/10/defund...
Your first article is someone criticizing prior efforts by others to reduce public education funding. The only person using the word "defund" is the author. Though interestingly, there is a mention of conservative attacks on programs like sociology, anthropology, minority studies, and gender studies. I assure you that many conservatives really do want to abolish funding for those programs.
The second article is a single person using the word "defund" to describe Obama's reduction of military spending. Again, somebody using the word to describe somebody else's actions.
Interestingly, both of those articles are by people who oppose defunding. Perhaps they used that word precisely because it implies "remove funding entirely", which has an exaggerated emotional impact?
In any case, neither example is the same thing as a large social movement using it as a slogan, especially when that movement publishes things like "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
When things like that appear in the New York Times, is it so unreasonable for people to take their word for it? Or should we keep insisting that they don't really mean it?
And before you tell me that that's just one person's opinion, I'll just point out that so were both of your references, and those are the opinions of people who aren't even supporters of those movements. The "defund the police" movement has its own people using the term and saying "yes, we mean literally abolish the police".
I picked 2 old articles from different political tribes to show it isn't new or just 1 tribe. Defund the Pentagon is a slogan now. Bernie Sanders[1] and Barbara Lee[2] proposed cutting the military budget by 10% and called it defunding.
I don't see anyone saying defund can't mean abolish. But most people who mean abolish say abolish because defund can mean reduce funding.
It's unreasonable to listen to people on the fringe of a movement and ignore the majority. It's unreasonable to read NYT opinion pieces and ignore NYT news pieces.[3] It's unreasonable to ignore actual legislation. It's unreasonable to ignore all the top search results.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/16/defund-the...
[2] https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/defund-pentagon-b...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/what-does-defund-polic...
“Defund the police” is misleading in a way that “Trump Train” and “Ridin’ with Biden” are not. It’s not a real train and Biden isn’t with you, but people are not misled.
Better in some ways, worse in others. It avoids the confusion with abolishment, but it looses the connotations of seriously changing the status quo. Because of that, it's less attention-grabbing.
It’s “one crazy trick” or “you’re not going to believe #7” but for matters that are actually important to discuss and debate in specifics.
Pretty much every slogan is a falsehood, if you want to quibble.
IIRC, "defund the police" grew out of frustration with various police reform efforts that failed to address these problems [1]. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to take up the slogan of one of the things you're opposing.
[1] For instance I watch a video of some police deescalation training (in Seattle, IIRC), where the rank-and-file were talking back and not taking it seriously, and the instructors were not very enthusiastic or in control. I can't imagine that reform effort did a lot of good.
Have you ever participated in politics? Because even in a small town government meeting, a board member stating they are changing their view because they "reacted emotionally" initially is going to immediately be followed by a call for them to resign.
I'm not opining on the issue at hand. It's just that when I read the suggestions here on HN about political messaging, many of them don't line up with any political reality I'm familiar with.
This one line summarizes the broken nature of our political conversation.
We are in a cycle of emotional overreactions, amplified by social media, and escalating in severity.
> Defund
> to deplete the financial resources of
> to withdraw financial support from, especially as an instrument of legislative control
I was glad the police, in this case, showed the restraint to not engage in violence due to an unruly crowd who seemed to pose no threat to their lives. They showed how it could be done, although due to planning failures, they were BADLY under-staffed, and it got perilously close to the VP and other leaders. Deadly force was only employed as a last resort.
And I fully support snitching on violent criminals.
There are many consistent positions a large number of people hold. Trying to make this an "us versus them" by proclaiming in your comment that the entirety of "red vs blue" are only out for their own interests is only feeding into a narrative of complete polarization where there is actually a ton of common ground.
> And I fully support snitching on violent criminals
And when the criminals have all been removed, the police will give back their power? Or will they create more? They don’t need your help to arrest anyone, they do need your help to not question their methods.
For the police to be effective, I believe they need to work hand in hand with the people they are supposed to serve. They need the respect and consent of the citizenry. I think that's a two-way street. When that relationship turns adversarial, whatever the reason, we see an expansion in statutory powers, pretextual searches, etc.
As for 20th century Europe, we are already there when armed terrorists invade the Capitol in an attempt to, as they themselves said, overthrow the government.
"Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police" by Mariame Kaba. New York Times, 2020-06-12, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
> By Mariame Kaba
> Ms. Kaba is an organizer against criminalization.
(1) They don't understand the difference between editorial content and reporting, because the media outlets they follow do their best to blur the distinction, all the way down to not even making a distinction organizationally or professionally, and making it seem like more legitimate sources of information don't make that distinction either. So the biggest red flag is that they don't even realize that there are professional standards and practices for keeping those things separate, and they don't understand things like fact checking or there being burdens of proof applied before something considered news reporting is published. To them, editorial content and news reporting are the same thing, with the same minimal burden of proof, because those are the nonexistent standards of literally every source of "information" they have.
(2) They think that when a media outlet voluntarily issues corrections (not from a lawsuit or threat of a lawsuit), that it's a sign that that outlet is less reliable than the places they go that never ever issue corrections unless legally forced to. The reality is completely flipped around, but that's their mentality. Culturally, that dovetails with "never admit being wrong" and "never apologize", which are ideals that resonate REALLY REALLY hard with people in these propaganda bubbles. The lack of accountability makes them trust untrustworthy sources even more, not less. Accountability makes them trust trustworthy sources less, not more.
I would add (3), how they react if they find out that something they themselves put out there isn't true. Watch what happens if they find out something they posted objectively isn't true. Instead of retracting it, they'll say something like, "well it doesn't matter, the meaning of the message is the same", or "well it doesn't matter the fake news media does it all the time". Which is the exact same thing that pathological liars and con artists say when their lies are exposed- that everyone does it, and maybe even that they are victims of hypocrites for being called out on it, because they assume the people calling them out surely lie about stuff all the time too. They're always looking for excuses to do worse, not better, and for excuses to think of themselves as victims, and for any possible reason to lower the bar for themselves rather than raise it for everyone.
>But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.
Later in the article:
>What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all?
Even Kaba, who has been advocating for the abolishment of police and prison for a long time, doesn't just want these establishments gone. She wants all of the funding and resources currently budgeted for these establishments to go towards resolving the root cause of most violent crimes.
The spin that my conservative relatives were told by Tucker Carlson and friends was that "these people want anarchy and free reign to commit crimes" (paraphrasing). While anecdotal, it does seem that conservative media conveniently forgot to mention the rest of the argument to my relatives.
160 years ago, Lincoln and Douglas were able to hold civil debates about slavery, which gave Lincoln the popularity he needed to win the presidency. I'm not sure how public discourse has decayed so significantly when we're more educated than ever.
Slogans, headlines, and protest chants repeat the emotional overreaction, and then when questioned they retort "oh, well, we didn't mean it 'literally'.". This is Trump level political discourse.
I think this is the key takeaway from the opinion piece:
> As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.
I find it an interesting idea to be honest. I don't know that I'm convinced one way or the other, but it definitely seems an interesting area for research and innovation. We innovate solutions to all kind of problems, it seems it has been a while since we've tried to innovate solutions around crime reduction and prevention.
(This is not a disagreement, this is mostly conversing on the nuances of exploring the policy given our current political setting. )
And like you say, nobody is allowed to be wrong or fail in politics anymore, which means we're not allowed to experiment at the local or regional level, or to rollback policies, or just have any kind of rational retrospective. Nope, now it's all ideological, like religion, you can't possibly push a policy that failed, or have a bad idea. That just means you're weak and shall be casted away for the better sharlatan to take your place, he is never wrong, if you doubt how right he is, you shall be jailed or mocked, if his policies don't work, we shall endure them and believe in them even harder.
IIRC, there have been big scandals about that in Germany recently. The neonazis have been infiltrating the military there, too, to the point where they had to disband an entire special forces unit, because it was too far gone to be cleaned up.
Honestly, the liberal fixation on gun control seems a really short sighted to me, given that kind of infiltration and the general right-leaning nature of law enforcement and the military [1]. It seems far more likely to me that liberals (and minorities) would someday need to rise up against an oppressive government than conservatives would be, even though conservatives like to fantasize about that kind of thing more.
[1] Proven very clearly by the events in Kenosha: police shot an unarmed black man in the back, but didn't even stop an armed white kid who just shot three people.
I believe it’s been established as fact that Jacob Blake was armed with a knife when he was shot. I’m not drawing any conclusion about the justification [not comparison], but he was not “unarmed”.
https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/new-audio-shares-the-mo...
I stand corrected, though it doesn't detract any from my overall point.
The shooting was still BS:
> Blake details returning to his SUV while in possession of the knife. It was that knife that Sheskey said he saw moments before the DA said Sheskey followed his training and began firing until there was no longer a threat. Sheskey shot Blake seven times, paralyzing the 27-year-old father of three.
I don't think someone holding a knife and walking away from you can be properly categorized as an actual "threat."
"P.O. Sheskey stated 'Blake, for the first time, showed intent to harm by driving the knife towards his (P.O. Sheskey's) torso.' P.O. Arenas also said, 'at that moment, he feared the armed subject (Blake) was about to stab P.O. Sheskey.' He (P.O. Arenas) would have tried to stop Blake's advances with the knife, but 'he did not have a clear shot due to the positioning of the door.' P.O. Sheskey 'feared that Blake was going to stab him, and he could not retreat because the child could be harmed, taken hostage, or abducted by Blake.' 'For these reasons, he discharged his firearm towards Jacob Blake.' He stated that he later determined that he shot (7) shots and did not stop until Blake dropped the knife."
That's from the independent evaluation at https://www.kenoshacounty.org/DocumentCenter/View/11830/Use-..., video at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/video-shows-police-keno....
I'm so glad I have a desk job.
I think you’re talking about the KSK (Kommando Spezialkräfte, Special Forces) and it was only partially dismantled. Still, that’s bad enough, obviously.
https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/ksk-aufloesung-umstru...
[1] https://nypost.com/2020/06/26/minneapolis-city-council-appro...
So there would still be officers, but the department would be rebuilt from the ground up. Sounds like a great idea. Some departments can’t be fixed and have to be rebuilt.
I don't think any serious person is saying that "no serious person was saying we should abolish the police."
Abolitionism has been a strong movement, close to the core of American values of liberty, since the beginning of professional police and the Charleston Watch, before the civil war.
I am a serious person. And I do not believe that the institution of the police is the best way for a nation whose laws are based on the commonlaw tradition to establish justice or promote safety. Especially in 2020, when there are cameras everywhere and the capacity to report emergencies at lightspeed, I think that continuing to fund and empower this particular experiment is irresponsible.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
I have to admit I find it pretty disheartening that mainstream liberals are for the most part just as unwilling to take a critical look at the most extreme, “all cops are bad”, toppling statues of Abraham Lincoln and burning down police stations subset of the left or even acknowledge that it exists, as the mainstream republicans have been of condemning the trumpism/q-anon alt right.
15% of the roughly 200M adults in the US is 30 million people.
If presented as total elimination of police departments, the survey might have missed support for more nuanced calls to dismantle police, said Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. “One notion of abolition is the need for discontinuity from the violent and racist past of law enforcement,” he said.
It’s not saying that it already includes both groups.
Other people being wrong or behaving badly doesn't make it ok to break the rules.
I'm the first person to argue that 'defund the police' was a terrible slogan to adopt, but that's precisely because everyone jumps to saying "but we don't actually mean have no publicly subsidised law enforcement". Even if the rafts of related reform proposals are still far too idealistic for the real world, it's not a position comparable to the Q faithful having the numbers to win primaries.
Stop trying to "both sides" this, because this is not a "both sides are just as bad" situation. We just saw the top level leadership of a major national party endorse and praise a terrorist mob that tried to overthrow the US government. The president literally said he "loved" those people when he told them to go home. That is problematic on a completely different level from anything that has happened on the left.
All you've done here is ask that people on the right ignore your fringe groups, but would you do the same? Or would you do what they're doing and engage in hyperbole to make you deal with them?
Both your parties are junk to me, so I'm happy to keep saying "both sides" until you all get your bad behavior under control.
Nobody needs to "make" the right own their extremists because they have done so already.
They already do. Barack was training and arming "moderate" rebels in the takeover and destruction of Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Hillary Clinton was laughing when she heard Gaddafi was killed.
> On June 18, a volunteer medic intervened during a sexual assault in a tent in the occupied park area; the alleged perpetrator was arrested.[133] NPR reported that day, "Nobody inside the protest zone thinks a police return would end peacefully. Small teams of armed anti-fascists are also present, self-proclaimed community defense forces who say they're ready to fight if needed but that de-escalation is preferred."
Spenser Rapone, who attempted to infiltrate the US Military, received notable support and has gone on to be a speaker at events [1][2]
This gives a better spectrum picture of what's going on [3] and this statement sums it up fairly well:
> According to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the California State University, if Reinoehl is implicated in the case, "it would mark the first time in recent years that an antifa supporter has been charged with homicide" as "hard-left violence has generally been less fatal and more directed towards property, racists and to a lesser extent police and journalists" which is unlike "the white supremacist and the far right, which glorifies mass violence by loners and small cells against minorities and enemies". Gary LaFree, chairman of the University of Maryland's criminology department, stated that "the case could potentially be included in the university's Global Terrorism Database as the first act of terror linked to antifa".
Left-wing radicalist groups tend to be self-organizing cells which makes them hard to track, much like the group Anonymous from back in the early days of the internet. This has precedent through history as well. [4]
The way your message and my message differ is that I'm not going to provide rhetorical cover fire for either of your groups. They're both disgusting and you both need to own them, because you all provided the foundation or lack of accountability that gave them material presence and impact.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone#D...
[1] https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/06/19/commie-c...
[2] https://www.ncnewsonline.com/news/local-man-west-point-grad-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...
But why are you so quick to get so defensive? Why can nobody openly acknowledge their own side’s faults?
Going back to the topic at hand about abolishing the police, I don’t understand why I never hear anybody say “yeah you’re right, abolish the police is a bad way to say it. Here are the things we actually want. Wr should tweak the messaging to make it more clear”. Everyone is so insistent on doubling down on the abolish/defund language. And if someone doesn’t understand that this is now just a code for a more nuanced agenda, then we’ll extend our outrage to them too!
Compare the two phrases in google trends for example. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=defund%20the%20po...
At the peak in mid-June it was a 100:7 ratio.
On Tuesday night, a cop killed a man in Modesto - it was the 4th person killed by the same cop [1]. As you say, their are serious questions to ask about the police force and militarization. However, the racist/right wing thing is far too reductionary and fails to capture lack of proper training, lack of proper post-shooting responses, etc.
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/krng...
Granted, a lot of that got walked back later, but it did happen. I live close enough to the CHOP that you can't really make me believe there wasn't an huge, loud, violent movement that unambiguously wanted to get rid of cops, period.
As far as serious people (true Scotsmen) go, I guess you're defining them as rational, learned experts. But I would urge you to at least pay attention to what crazed maniacs think too, since it turns out they can do some damage if you ignore them long enough.
This is not a "true Scotsman" argument. There is a meaningful difference between fringe elements acting on their own and powerful politicians or people with actual influence actively encouraging, directing, or praising that fringe. That is what separates the riots that happened last year from what happened at the Capitol on Wednesday.
For my account, I’m in favor of arresting and charging everyone acting criminally lawlessly, whether wearing a Viking helmet, a MAGA hat, or a BLM shirt.
I want the public to be free from the oppression caused by lawless rioting.
Also, a violent insurrection literally storming and occupying the seat of the U.S. government, with the goal of changing the incoming government, is very different from what happened this summer.
What happened this summer included a large number of violent riots, but they targeted mainly state and local governments and private property, and without the goal of regime change.
Both are very bad, but open insurrection against the sitting U.S. government is far worse.
Uhhh, is that actually happening?
I think I have my finger pretty firmly on the pulse of one center of today's abolitionist movement, in Portland (where I was in the streets getting gassed many times this summer), and I don't know of anybody who holds the contradictory viewpoint you're describing.
I don't think most abolitionists care enough about the Capitol in the first place to get enraged about this.
The reality is that there are some groupings of people with contradictory beliefs, but more realistically, each individual has a belief of each issue somewhere on a spectrum. Polarization has further grouped issues together, and attributed each stance as one side or the other, but this is not a useful way to explore issues or try to find the right balance or compromise for individual issues.
You might be left-wing and also support a demilitarization of law enforcement, especially when you look at uneven responses to protests[0], but political affiliation is not nearly as consistent as that just based on race alone[1], despite the greater risk of lethal force being applied when you have black skin[2].
And if you are right-wing and support overrunning the Capitol and disrupting the election process, you believe what was done was right and a fight against a corrupt and oppressive government. But wherever you fall on the political spectrum, if you believe that the individuals broke the law by forcefully entering the Capitol, you may find it dutiful to respond to requests from the FBI to aide in identifying those individuals (particularly if you believe this behavior attacks an important component of elected representative democracy.)
What keeps surprising me, though, is the failure to see President Donald Trump as an oppressor. He labels roughly half of his own citizens as enemies, discredits alternative sources of information (basically anyone that disagrees with him); accepting that behavior is a dangerous way to choose your political leaders. You should strive to unite the citizens, and your government should not be the strongest, loudest voice you listen to, because you need checks and balances against government controlled information.
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polices-tepid-respo...
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-two-party-syste...
[2] https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
> The finding of elevated risk for Black victims in the Mental Health Crisis group suggests two worrisome features of police killings: First, training protocols focused solely on mental health may need to be redesigned to incorporate issues of greater perceptions of threat among Black civilians. Second, race may be more salient than other factors in the decision to use lethal force on a suspect across circumstances. This is particularly worrisome given the additional details of flight and threat in killings with less substantial bases for reasonableness. In other words, race appears to distinguish these killings even after taking into account the additional factors that might justify an officer’s use of lethal force. Police killings, then, are neither race-neutral nor linked to specific features of the incident.
And someone needs to have a deep inquiry into what happened with calling in reinforcements.
Pictures or video would be appreciated.
I won't link because it contains very graphic videos of the death of one of the participant.
One was a guy who had two 9mm handguns. No mention of what led to the arrest, but it seems to be a stop and frisk type of encounter.
The other is the guy who allegedly had a wagon of molotov's, and was also carrying some type of firearm.
Neither seem to be incidents of the people being in the act of using the weapons. Although if the guy had actual molotovs, yeah that's not good.
Early live video showed people who looked like tourists. Things escalated dramatically.
Zip cuff guy appears to have a gun on his hip in addition to the body armor & zip ties for taking hostages. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zip-cuffs-capitol-riots/
We’re now learning of pipe bombs. https://www.businessinsider.com/pipe-bomb-reportedly-found-a...
The killed police officer was attacked with a fire extinguisher, so things other than guns can be used as weapons.
Many photos show body armor, riot shields, and staffs.
Photos show Members of Congress escorted to safety in CBRN hoods (protection against chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear air pollution).
The C-SPAN live feed was cut off for the safety of Congress & the staff at the Capitol. You can watch the moment on YouTube, plus the subsequent audio only broadcast.
What do you think? Is that helpful?
That's honestly surprising, given how heavily armed protests have typically been this year, as well as the mass media description of the event
> The #FBI is still seeking information to help identify individuals who actively instigated violence on January 6 in Washington, D.C. Visit http://ow.ly/z9vt50D3Ovo to see images from current cases, and if you see someone you recognize, submit a tip at http://fbi.gov/USCapitol.
This would be an uprising; it's being called a "coup" because uprising sounds sympathetic.
But people need to be careful, because by saying it was a coup, it normalizes the concept for those who saw Wednesday as a good faith protest march, regardless of what it's now perceived as.
Changing/ shifting the definition of words has behavioral consequences.
But, really, it was a protest. The point was to engage in drama and theatrics. Why break into the Capitol? Even more drama.
Now people are dead, it's managed to tar even Trump's public image, and they're going to get hit with federal charges.
Supporters of BLM have committed far worse acts in recent years but they are not labelled as terrorists. The only people that died at this event were the protestors - one at least was unarmed and murdered by a police officer. The whole thing is on video.
Protestors invading government buildings is quite common in the world, but calling citizens terrorists is usually something you see in non-democratic regimes.
Regardless I'd agree that the Jan. 6 protestors weren't trying to incite terror so much as stop a process they've been convinced was flawed.
Hopefully with a change of government the US political culture can mellow and maybe even reconcile a bit.
The talking point is that the violent extremists who broke into the Capitol chanting “kill [Republican Vice President] Mike Pence”, wearing body armor, armed with guns, pipe bombs, and zip ties for taking hostages are terrorists.
Do you disagree?
Historically, most terrorists, most places in the world, are citizens of the countries they're doing the terrorism in.
> especially on a political basis
Terrorism is essentially always politically motivated.
> but calling citizens terrorists is usually something you see in non-democratic regimes
Eh? No it isn't. Here's a list for Germany, for instance; most are domestic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Germany#List_of_s...
So let's not mince words and false pretenses here. Here is a fair definition of terrorism:
"the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims"
Now, let's go through the list. Was there violence involved? Yes. Was there intimidation. Yes. Was this against civilians and politically motivated.. well yes.
Then it begs the question, is this wilful ignorance, or is there some malice involved. I suppose that is for you to know. But I find it annoying that it's so prevalent. Whichever it is.
To me, and I'm sure to most people, words like "terrorist attack" conjure images of mass murder via gunfire or vehicles, kidnappings, and brutal executions. But none of those things happened here. If one does consider this to be a "violent terrorist attack", then what words are left to describe an actual terrorist attack?
Is anyone else disturbed that the discourse is being ushered toward these particular words; that you're being made to associate a riot of angry citizens with mass-murder attacks by men wearing balaclavas and wielding AK's? To use these words, "terrorist attack, assault on the capitol, violent uprising", for this event, it's imprecise, misleading.
Orwell has a wonderful essay covering this imprecise and practically manipulative use of language. It's a brilliant read, and very relevant at the moment: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
What changes do you expect to have happen in the next year or two in this area? Are you taking any steps regarding your own privacy based on your predictions?
I see the most likely initiatives of the new administration to revolve around reining in the powers of the presidency.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynecrews/2018/10/23/trump-exc...
Take a dive when attacked and play the sympathy card.
In the sense of paying a few people to monitor public social media sites so that widespread in-the-open planning of a mass violent attack on the Capitol doesn't result in the FBI having no indication that anything but First Amendment-protected activities are planned, it does justify expanding surveillance.
It doesn't justify additional government surveillance powers, or intrusion into privacy, though.
Apple/Google/Facebook/Twitter's actions are making things far worse for everyone by forcing conversations underground to alt platforms.
Freedom of speech and expression is really _really_ important on private forums for that reason.
Congratulations, Big Tech. Now we're going to have a million unpatched devices rolling around.
Additionally there’s ample ability to deplatform them and their supporters through the agreements they signed with social media companies and payment processors.
The free market won’t have trouble deciding that these traitors are done with both public life and making enough money to ever have to pay taxes again.
Moreover, we are all well within our rights to practice the conservative principle of not doing business with those we find repugnant.
and that will be their argument for increased surveillance.
I’m not so naïve that I believe that’ll actually happen, though.
Tangentially, that pervasive surveillance is “saving” this investigation instead of letting most potential suspects go unidentified is indicative of the general trend of police departments getting lazy about doing actual investigative police work—-increasingly, if it’s not electronically recorded evidence, it may as well not have happened.
I stopped working with smart city tech because I felt there’s only two realistic directions it can go: Excessive surveillance by the police, or excessive surveillance by people whose only interest is selling whatever data they can collect about you in public spaces to advertisers and other 3rd parties.
1) capital police rejects offers for more support before the event. The capitol police chief resigned because of it. https://wjla.com/news/local/capitol-police-to-resign-after-r...
2) The sergeant arms for the house and senate also both resigned. https://nypost.com/2021/01/07/senate-sgt-at-arms-resigns-aft...
There have also been much larger protests in the capital where they never breached the capital building. No one properly prepared for this demonstration.
While I think the demands for th resignations of the various Capitol officials involved were warranted, I suspect that it will turn out that reliance on the FBI intelligence assessment that there was no indication that anything other than First Amendment protected activities were likely played a significant role in this and the other preparation failures.
Why do you think Biden was quick to identify the protest as terrorism? It will set the tone for the rest of his administration. Civil liberties will be stripped in the name of security/stopping terrorism.
Leading to, irrespective of their intentions, a probable dictatorship and end of this American experiment.
Is this likely? Maybe, maybe not. But I tell you what. There is more danger to under-emphasizing the threat than over-emphasizing the threat. Indeed, fear and control over executive power is at the core of our Constitution and founders' fears. I will not play down what happened, and who instigated it.
The general mob could also have quickly instigated a massacre. Chants of "Hang M. Pence."
Over-emphasize isn't enough. It has to lead to the right actions rather than to damaging ones.
It's not risky to promote violence in public forums in the US provided you're not specific about it. Heck, the ringleader was the president; it's not like we need him to submit ID to get his Twitter back.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
In contrast, many months long BLM riots, while they resulted in many deaths, made thousands of people unsafe and caused billions of dollars of damage, weren't nearly as important.
Why? Because they were controlled by the Democratic establishment and only affected working- and middle-class people, whom those politicians barely consider human. So obviously they didn't see a need for legislation or even condemnation. In fact, they seen the riots as a good thing.
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-extremists/u-s-...
> Reuters photographer Jim Bourg, who was photographing protesters trying to break down doors to the Capitol building, said he heard three older white men in red “Make America Great Again” caps talking about finding Vice President Mike Pence to hang him from a tree as a “traitor.”
> Security agents rushed Pence from the Senate chamber after protesters breached the Capitol building.
(There's video evidence of the crowd yelling "Hang Mike Pence", incidentally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW718KRYDtU)