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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

"Revanchist"? What territory did they ever posses and lose? What would be the revanche?

Revanchism doesn't require physical territory, only a sense of loss and a corresponding drive for revenge.

The NYPD sees itself as an occupying force in a hostile city. What they've lost (or believe they've lost) is the respect of the natives; rather than questioning why that is, they've decided that the appropriate course of action is to extract all the value they can from the city while diminishing the natives' qualities of life to the greatest extent possible. Revanchism is the appropriate descriptor.

Even if taken as a general "sense of loss" what did they lose? They didn't lose anything. They weren't "defunded", there was no structural reform or consents decrees. The protests stopped and it went back to business as usual for them. In fact as of last week they exceeded their already notorious annual overtime budget by 100 million dollars![1]][2]

Again what loss do they to avenge exactly?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/nypd-blow...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-nyc-police-overtime-...

Quoting relevant part of comment you just replied to:

> What they've lost (or believe they've lost) is the respect of the natives;

I'm sorry but "the natives"? That's a hollow cliche. What does that mean? Just native New Yorkers? Because it's a city of transplants and immigrants. Tense relations between citizens and NYPD is not new. See Amodou Diallo, the 2004 Republican National Convention protests, "Stop and Frisk", Eric Garner, the list spans many decades. People also realize that realize that crime and public safety are a concern and that police have an important job. The tension between police and residents has been a near constant for decades. It ebbs and flows and there's fundamentally no more or and no less respect now.

"Natives" was just a euphemism for residents.

I don't know why you're performing such a hostile reading: it can be simultaneously true that tension for police and residents has been present for decades, and that the police have shed a degree of respect and baseline approval that they've historically held[1], regardless of whether that approval was ever actually justified.

Which is what has happened[2].

[1]: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/205619.pdf

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/us/gallup-poll-police.htm...

There's nothing euphemistic about it at all. It bizarre to me that you seem to be going out of your way for specific word selection but then you go on to use those words incorrectly. It makes for confusing reading which is where my original question came. There's nothing "hostile" about asking for clarification.

It's the second definition[1], and a common use in English.

The euphemism was more subtle, but is also a known one[2].

I'm sorry if you found either confusing; that wasn't my goal.

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/revanchist

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2612677

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