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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

Thank you to share the Ted T'so LKM post. Can you explain the culture reference "thin blue line"? I never heard it before.

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The "thin blue line" is a term that typically refers to the concept of the police as the line between law-and-order and chaos in society.[1] The "blue" in "thin blue line" refers to the blue color of the uniforms of many police departments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line

It's a motto used by American law enforcement to justify extrajudicial punishment. Since they are the "thin blue line" that separates the public from anarchy, they are justified in acting independently to "protect" us when judges and juries do not "cooperate".

Not just extrajudicial punishment, but overlooking corrupt acts and crimes from fellow officers. That it's more important to maintain the 'brotherhood' than to arrest an officer caught driving home drunk.

That is a very strange take. The phrase isn't American and has no negative connotation. It has nothing to do with "extrajudicial punishment". It simply refers to the (obvious) fact that what separates societies from anarchy is the "thin blue line" of law enforcement.

Rowan Atkinson had a sitcom set in a London police station in the 90s called "The Thin Blue Line". Are you under the impression he was dogwhistling about extrajudicial violence?

This is what really confused me about the article. I read the mailing list post and had no idea what was controversial about thin blue line. In fact, I thought most of that post was fairly reasonable.

I'd never heard of the extrajudicial punishment aspect of the phrase (though I had heard the phrase itself) and it didn't show up when I googled, but I'm not American, so maybe there's some cultural differences.

All the extrajudicial stuff is pure political and ideological wank by a subset of ideological extremists. Pay no attention to any of it. It's an attempt to redefine the term for narrative creation purposes.

"Thin blue line" is a popular phrase of the so called "American culture war". During the heyday of the Black Lives Matter movement, it was used as a self-identification by those who did not agree with criticisms of the nations policing and justice systems. A closely related symbol is the Punisher[0] skull from Marvel comics.

[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/punisher-skull

All in all, this could just be another instance of the "culture war" inflaming every other minor disagreement with Ted playfully using the phrase and Marcan misinterpreting it. Or it could be Ted slipping up with their politics. From what I know about Marcan and what can be inferred from his post, they do seem like someone the alt-right would persecute.

Wow, hadn't heard of the punisher skull association either! It seems that it hasn't really traveled that much outside of America.

I had a look, and it seems that Ted Ts'o is American, so I guess we should assume he understands the cultural significance of the phrase (even though I didn't).

No, that's not really true.

Directly, "the thin blue line" expresses the idea that the police are what separates society from chaos.

It doesn't inherently suggest police are justified in acting outside the law themselves, though, of course, various people have suggested this (interestingly, from both a pro-police and anti-police perspective).

It seems obvious to me that the post was using this phrase in the sense of being a thin shield from chaos.

In the US, this is a reference to the belief that members of law enforcement should be loyal folirst to other members of law enforcement and only secondarily to the law. Or at least that is how I have always understood it.

It seems obvious that that’s not what Ted intended it to mean, since it wouldn’t even make sense in this context (the debate doesn’t really seem to be about whether maintainers should be loyal to other maintainers).

A more charitable interpretation would be “we’re the only line of defense protecting something good and valuable from the outside world, so people should give significant weight to our opinions and decisions”. Which, to be clear, I would still mostly disagree with WRT the police, but it at least doesn’t explicitly endorse corruption.

There are many ways to state that without invoking corruption. I think Ted is telling the truth of who he is by choosing that phrase intentionally - we aren't talking about an idiot who just says stuff, he's a smart guy.

Given that "invoking corruption" is neither the plain meaning of those words, nor does it even make sense in this context, I don't think it's reasonable to claim Ted did so.

Ted Tso is an American, he was born in California, did his schooling in the US, and has worked here most (all?) of his career. As such he can be expected to know that "the thin blue line" is an idiom that carries with it a lot of connotation.

It's perfectly reasonable to assume he was aware of the implications of his words and chose to use them anyway.

I'm American, I was born in Arizona, I did my schooling in the US, and I have worked in the US for all of my career. I disagree with your assertion that "thin blue line" necessarily implies support for corruption.

And by the way, so does Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line doesn't mention this interpretation at all. The closest thing is this sentence, which is really not saying the same thing at all, and at any rate only presenting it as something "critics argue", rather than the settled meaning of the phrase.

> Critics argue that the "thin blue line" represents an "us versus them" mindset that heightens tensions between officers and citizens and negatively influences police-community interactions by setting police apart from society at large.

And yet I've never seen that phrase used other than when cops are defending their colleague who is on video murdering/raping/beating someone innocent, or by those calling for reform who are criticizing the cops covering for each other's crimes.

> yet I've never seen that phrase used other than when cops are defending their colleague

Well, now you have!

And it's in a context where some group of people with special power is acting in bad faith to avoid having to follow the rules, and setting up "us vs them" arguments to do so!

Even I have seen it used in other senses by Americans, and I've never been to America. AFAICT it has only acquired that sense, at least to the extent it currently has, after #BLM. Might be an age thing, that most of your cultural impressions are of a more recent date than the majority of mine? (And, say, Ted T'so's.)

The thin blue line comes from the thin red line, where a line of British redcoats held back a heavy cavalry charge in the crimean war. I've always taken it to mean that police officers consider themselves soldiers holding the last line of defence against wild enemies. Which is itself a controversial and probably unhelpful way to think about your job as a police officer.

As important context, it gained popularity in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

I think you might be mistaking the "thin blue line" concept with the "blue / all lives matter" in this case, thin blue line is neither new nor newly popular with BLM.

Certainly more popular since then; probably swept along by "blue lives matter". Have you seen that black-and-blue version of the American flag, with, what is it, six or seven blue stripes (or lines)? How old is that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line TLDR is it's the idea that the police are the one thing stopping society from instantly dissolving into chaos so they shouldn't be questioned (even when they kneel on someone's neck until they die)

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