Let's compare this experience to that of Amir Locke [1].
To summarize: the Minneapolis PD was executing a no-knock warrant in a homicide investigation. Locke was not the target of the warrant but was sleeping on the couch. He was licensed for the firearm and it was completely legal. When startled awake, he reached for his gun (natural reaction) and the police shot and killed him.
You'd think the NRA would be all over this: a legal gun owner killed in his home by police? Nope [2]. I wonder why.
Let's also compare to Kyle Rittenhouse. Attorneys wanted to use the fact that one of his victims was a sex offender as a defense [3]. There are two possibilities here:
1. Rittenhouse didn't know of this, in which case it's immaterial; and
2. Rittenhouse knew, in which case this was a targeted killing (ie murder).
No one is arguing Rittenhouse knew. The whole point here is post facto justification. This is for the court of public opinion and to give the jury something to hang their hat on with an acquittal. That's it.
I bring this up because I want to highlight the different worlds people live in when it comes to law enforcement. Yet you can't bring the above up without some (predominantly white) people getting offended at the mere suggestion that the system is inherently racist.
Duncan Lemp was white, and was similarly awoken in the middle of the night by police, reached for a gun, and was shot dead (unlike Locke, I don't think he even pointed the gun at them). It actually happened the day before the Breonna Taylor shooting (another similar situation), but received almost no media attention. Even around the area where Duncan Lemp was killed, you will find a lot of posters for Breonna Taylor, none for Duncan Lemp.
This kind of violence affects everyone. Some people, particularly those in the media, have worked hard to elevate certain shootings while almost completely ignoring others in order to push a specific racial narrative.
I believe Duncan Lemp should have received the media attention he deserves. That being said:
1- You said "This kind of violence affects everyone" and this is disingenuous when we look at the ratio of black vs white being murdered by police. [1]
2- The media attention Breonna et al. received was not about the individuals but for the community in general due to my previous point.
> You said "This kind of violence affects everyone" and this is disingenuous when we look at the ratio of black vs white being murdered by police.
If you want to argue that this kind of violence affects certain races more, that's fine. But why downplay the fact that it affects all races? The percentages are higher for Black Americans, but White Americans still make up the majority of people shot by police[1]. If people actually cared about creating a broad coalition to address this, they would want to highlight both facts, not hide the latter fact.
You actually see the a similar attitude when racists attack social programs. If members of a minority group are more likely to benefit from a program, they treat it as a program for minorities, even if the majority of beneficiaries are non-minorities.
It's also interesting to see how people divide the demographic information. If you look at the breakdown by sex, you'll find that the divide between men and women when when it comes to these shootings is much, much greater than the divide between races. Yet the latter is talked about a lot all over the media, and while I don't think I've ever seen the latter treated as an issue. My guess is that we'd also see another large divide if we divided the numbers by wealth (and this article is a good example of that).
> If people actually cared about creating a broad coalition to address this, they would want to highlight both facts, not hide the latter fact.
People fighting for black lives aren't hiding bad things that happen to white people. The reason Duncan Lemp doesn't have posters up about him isn't because black activists against police violence haven't fought for him, it's because both black and white activists against police violence haven't fought for him. And as white people still make up the majority of people shot by police[1], far more white people than black failed Duncan Lemp.
I find it to be a fantasy that somehow, if people fighting for black lives would emphasize the suffering of white people, it would suddenly turn the white people who are hostile or ambivalent about this stuff into supporters. Again: you can't get white activist gun owners to defend a licensed gun owner who was surprised and shot in his own home by police executing a no-knock warrant that wasn't for him. The NRA supported gun control to criminalize the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers were an absolutely straightforward open carry movement, with one important difference.
edit: I meant to exclude Reason-style libertarians from this. They're scrupulously consistent.
> Again: you can't get white activist gun owners to defend a licensed gun owner who was surprised and shot in his own home by police executing a no-knock warrant that wasn't for him.
That's patently false at the very least. Everyone I've talked to said it was a horrible act and those officers deserve legal charges.
> Everyone I've talked to said it was a horrible act and those officers deserve legal charges.
That's great for the people you talked to, the comment was about the NRA or any other gun rights group actually defending him. Did you friends protest for him? Did they write their congressperson? Did they raise legal funds at the gun range? If they didn't, then they aren't activists.
What about Philando Castile? The NRA didn't have anything to say about that incident until a year later.
Did you do any of those things, or are you just pointing fingers at people for not doing the same things you did't do?
Make no mistake, the government's job, first and foremost is to protect itself. This means state, local and federal. The only reason we're even seeing any resolution on this sort of thing is they see it as a systemic problem. "Defund the police," and some local government's willingness to put it to a vote put a lot of fear into police departments. Over time, they will revert back to their normal behavior, so it's something we have to be diligent about.
Yes, I wrote my mayor, city councilman, senators, the president and congressman. Nothing really happened until defund the police became nationalized and the state / local / federal governments were forced to act out of pure self interest and self preservation. Bad, murderous cops got away Scott free for decades before that.
One of the saddest parts is good people become police to actually do good for the community, then they are met with this sort of nastiness from their departments and bosses. It's gotta be a real gut punch.
Here's a recent example of a cop trying to pull a sergeant off of a perp. Sergeant was threatening to pepper spray a guy handcuffed in the back of a squad car. Other cop pulls on sergeant's belt to stop what he was doing. Sergeant freaks out and puts his hand around other cop's (female by the way) throat.
> Did you do any of those things, or are you just pointing fingers at people for not doing the same things you did't do?
I protested, donated, wrote letters to voters, and contacted a local politician.
But that isn't relevant to the original comment, which was a person claiming that "everyone I talked to said it was horrible" is equivalent to gun rights activism.
So let me break down how I read it. This is what the person was replying to, he quoted it so will I:
> Again: you can't get white activist gun owners to defend a licensed gun owner who was surprised and shot in his own home by police executing a no-knock warrant that wasn't for him.
Which is first, an absolute, and absolutes are rarely true. Second, you said defend. "...you can't get white activist gun owners to defend a licensed gun owner..." Defining a police shooting as a bad shooting (illegal) is defending the victim of the shooting. To defend the police and not the victim would be to justify it the shooting as a good shooting (valid/legal). Based on what he said, he points to everyone he knows defended the victim claiming it was a bad shooting, therefore, everyone he knew defended the victim and not the police.
It sounds like you might want to slow down a bit and give people the benefit of the doubt, maybe take the time to read and understand what people write. I have the same affliction myself sometimes.
> It sounds like you might want to slow down a bit and give people the benefit of the doubt, maybe take the time to read and understand what people write. I have the same affliction myself sometimes.
Thanks for the advice, but I re-read everything and verified that I understood. It's possible that we just disagree, or maybe your quoted comment removes all context from the discussion.
> Did you do any of those things, or are you just pointing fingers at people for not doing the same things you did't do?
Was this an example of you giving me the benefit of the doubt?
>Was this an example of you giving me the benefit of the doubt?
Hah, good point, it was not. I told you I have that affliction sometimes as well. That's the problem when a discussion becomes emotional, it usually ceases to be a discussion.
>The percentages are higher for Black Americans, but White Americans still make up the majority of people shot by police[1].
Yes I never understood this tactic. If you really want citizen support (which is required), you need to show that all citizens are subject to this type of injustice. If leaders just say one group is affected and don't show that all citizens are affected, you won't get change as fast, if at all.
It's almost as if there is an ulterior motive to actually solving the problem, or perhaps the leadership just won't look past their own environment. Either way, the shiz is way out of hand and everyone should be afraid of it.
I remember reading an article where police were serving a warrant and they straight up shot the guy next to his pregnant girlfriend through the window while they were sleeping. They justified it by saying the room was boobytrapped. The guy was staying at his parents house when this occurred. It was very suspect, but I never saw national media attention it deserved, and I find it highly unlikely a kid living with his parents would place a active, lethal booby trap in his bedroom inside his parent's house. It was an actual murder squad. Pretty crazy. I wish I could find the article (it was local.)
Indeed. If I'm advocating for a project that will bring $10 million in to Town A that has a population of 5,000, and $50 million in to Town B with a population of 50,000, I'm going to be telling both Town A and Town B how the project will benefit them. I'm not going to be telling Town B that this project is only for Town A, and it's not an issue that affects Town B. If someone was saying that, you would expect that they'd be advocating against the project.
It's hard to believe that anyone who's actively downplaying the way an issue affects the majority of the population is actually interested in solving the issue.
I'm relieved that I'm not the only one who has come to this conclusion! It's so annoying and sad listening to all the people out there with good intentions who are failing so hard they actually drive people in the opposite direction. They would further their cause more by removing themselves from the discussion entirely.
>Yes I never understood this tactic. If you really want citizen support (which is required), you need to show that all citizens are subject to this type of injustice. If leaders just say one group is affected and don't show that all citizens are affected, you won't get change as fast, if at all.
It all makes sense if you start from a cynical assumption that the real point of most political activism is exclusively to acquire political capital, then spend it on acquiring power, rather than fixing the issue. In fact fixing the issue would be counterproductive, as that stops power accumulation and requires finding some new issue.
Of course, you have to plausibly pretend to actually care about fixing the issue. What's the solution? Demand unworkable and absurd fixes, like 'defund the police'. The social engineering in it was remarkable - its planned ineffectiveness relied on extremist demanding complete abolition of the police to make it unworkable and scare people away, while at the same gaslighting opponents of the absurd extreme it's _really_ only about small redirection of funds to health services and similar.
What would a real solution look like? It would try to solve the root of the issue rather than symptoms. One major current cause is that new meth is significantly neurotoxic due to unknown impurities from currently dominating synthesis methods. Good article about the issue:
The most effective solution would be to legalize meth and ensure only pure, pharmaceutical grade is being sold. Pure meth isn't especially neurotoxic - and in small doses it's actually neuroprotective due to hormesis. Amount of people with damaged brains would plummet, fewer people would be homeless, fewer people would be violent. Which is exactly the reason it's never going to happen - nobody would gain politically.
Same logic for fentanyl and heroin deaths - cheap, pure (consistent purity = much lower risk of accidental overdoses) heroin would reduce fentanyl deaths to near zero, virtually eliminate health damage (pure heroin is relatively safe and can be used for decades) and reduce crimes committed by addicts to near zero (by virtue of being cheap).
I agree with your assessment of "defund the police," but that was an unfortunate slogan that got converted from "reappropriate funds from police to other services like mental health, counseling, etc." I think that was also politicized. I believe many police departments are entities that also fall into the category of self service and self preservation.
Our medium town spends $500 million on police and barely a fraction of that on drug rehab, mental health, etc. It certainly seems misappropriated.
I don't know much about meth, but concerning the opioid crisis, our solution was to "crack down," on prescriptions, which sounds good to someone who doesn't give it much thought. The actual outcome was people went from using a drug with a dosage printed on the side to stuff made in people's bathrooms and kitchens including god knows what which resulted in many, many more deaths.
Your drug legalization proposals might have the side effects of increasing the number of people who start taking those drugs. People respond to incentives and you can't both say that restrictions aren't making drugs harder to find and that they're driving addicts to dangerous substitutes.
If you decriminalize, you do make drugs more approachable. You also make treatments more approachable, and health research actually possible.
Besides, there are other ways to fight the use of something than sending the police to lock people down with other addicts. And well, all that police involvement does put money on the drug sellers hands, to use on their marketing.
Overall, it seems that the highest damage (by orders of magnitude) those substances cause is due to the police involvement. So I'm quite for taking that involvement away. But there are other damages, and I have never seen anybody with a believable enough model of what will happen to those after drugs are legalized. (And, of course, it will certainly depend on all the details, so any "yes or no" answer is guaranteed to be bullshit.)
>Overall, it seems that the highest damage (by orders of magnitude) those substances cause is due to the police involvement.
Most of the damage done to a cancer survivor was done by chemo, but that's not an argument against the treatment. The right level to stop at is where adding one more unit of police damage would stop less than one unit of drug damage but like you say nobody knows where that is.
We've had a 50 year case study on what harsh criminal penalties for drug use results in. End result? Sky-rocking drug use with increased potency, cheaper prices, and a skyrocketing prison population. I'm not sure you could find a worse outcome.
Not only did we worsen the problem we were trying to solve (drug use), but we created two new ones with increased potency of the drugs leading to more deaths, and booming prison population, the largest in the world. It boggles the mind that any rational person would think that to continue going down this path will lead to some sort of improvement. I suspect it's just poor justification for the institution to preserve themselves. Cops gotta have their pensions.
What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.
>It all makes sense if you start from a cynical assumption that the real point of most political activism is exclusively to acquire political capital, then spend it on acquiring power, rather than fixing the issue.
I suspect that's the case. I mean at least Huey Long got things done for his constituents while lining his pockets. It seems today's political class just want to line their pockets and ignore their constituents.
If we are going to bring into account how many African-Americans are being killed by police we need to also bring into account the FBI's violent crime statistics. Blacks made up 56% of known murder offenders. While European Whites were 28% of known murder offenders while making up 60-65% of the population. Remember, African-Americans are only 11% of the population. That is a huge discrepancy that needs to be brought up while discussing the amount of African-Americans killed or arrested by police.
Numbers are cool and all, but they can't be divorced from context: intergenerational poverty, police brutality and surveillance, the prison industrial complex. And so on.
Correct. And yet, the original comment is strongly implying that the discrepancy is due to contemporary white racism, and not these structural issues you've helpfully pointed out. Issues that certain "white" populations, such as rural Appalachians, also struggle with to similar effect.
What is the attempted statement here? To imply that black people are inherently violent? What are you getting at?
The way i see it, those numbers reflect the state of racially focused stunted development in many communities.
It's like when people throw single-parent household statistics around with blacks. What do we think is the root cause here? That their skin color inherently made them do this? Or maybe, just maybe, the living conditions are not prone to healthy structured families and healthy individuals.
If someone says that “teachers are racist” and points to differing graduation rates of white and Black kids, do you take that assertion at face value? Or do you point out that the kids aren’t similarly situated. Obviously the latter. It doesn’t make sense to blame teachers for disparities that exist at more basic levels.
So why don’t you apply the same logic to OP’s statement above? The data shows that there is no difference in police killings by race on a per incident basis: https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-data-say-about-police-.... Blaming police racism is like blaming teachers. Maybe some are racist, but to a large extent you’re blaming them for problems in the communities they’re serving that are outside their control. Note that there is a five factor difference in incarceration rates between white people in Oregon and white people in Massachusetts. Reducing disparities in criminal justice to race blinds you to the myriad factors involved.
This is an instance of what I call the “liberal conflict of interest” with respect to racial justice. Liberals have taken up racial justice as their cause, but like everyone have strong incentives to view the facts on the ground as vindicating their own ideologies. Liberals don’t like law and order, and they do like teachers, so for disparities involving police they blame “racist police” but for disparities affecting education they don’t reach for “racist teachers.” In the long run this liberal conflict of interest hurts minorities, by obscuring the “root causes.”
Your comment about “single parent household” statistics is another example of a liberal conflict of interest. Let’s stipulate that the “cause” of disparities in single parenthood is generations of slavery and segregation destroying the social structure of these communities. But what about the effect? Countries all over the world with high levels of fatherlessness suffer from high levels of violence by young men. Conversely, the single parenthood rates among white people in Appalachia would be cause for alarm and panic in a number of African countries. But liberals don’t want to explore that avenue (which could lead to solutions) because they’re invested in social theories that reject patriarchy and the importance of fathers in socializing boys. Hence liberals bankrolling outfits like BLM that push not to shore up, but to deconstruct notions of traditional families.
Liberals are invested in social theories that reject the importance of fathers in socializing boys? Are you sure you're not getting this stuff from Youtube, and kind of winding yourself up? Stable two-parent households, high education, and liberalism are all correlated.
I think there are a significant number of liberals, and not just crazy people on the internet, who think this. A data point: a while ago, I fell down a rabbit hole arguing with social justice people online who maintained that the notion that fatherlessness in the black community was problematic was a "myth." They justified their claim on the basis of a US government report which indicated that single black fathers spent more time with their kids as single white fathers. Seeing as this was a clear instance of Simpson's paradox (since non-single fathers of all races spend more time with their children than single fathers of all races, and there are more black single fathers than non-black single fathers), I assumed they'd just misappropriated unbiased research. But digging into the surveys they cited, I found that the researchers themselves had misrepresented their research in press outreach, in their official capacity as researchers. It was such an obvious case of statistical malpractice, I was shocked to see highly credentialed, well-published researchers engaging in it. What I have taken from this incident is that there are a substantial number of activists who have become so invested in social justice for African Americans that they will automatically discount any theory which they believe might place the locus of responsibility for change within the black community, even if the evidence for that theory is very strong.
I believe children are better off being raised by two parents than by one.
I might also bristle in a discussion about crime and poverty if someone parachuted in and said that the real problem was single-parent families. I'd perceive it as an instance of the just-world fallacy. Things are much more complicated than that.
If I tried to express that by arguing that two parents were not in fact valuable for children, I'd be overplaying my hand. I'd be wrong. But I'd be wrong in the service of pushing back against the just-world fallacy, not in valorizing single parenthood.
I think you'd have a hard time finding a lot of liberals who, outside of charged discussions about crime and poverty, would argue that children don't benefit from having two parents in their lives.
For posterity, the previous iteration:
It's not hard to find situations where people will push back on two-parent households, because many of these discussions boil down (or are perceived to boiling down) to a just-world argument in which the fact that, holding income equal, a randomly selected Black family will live in a neighborhood with people making many tens of thousands of dollars left than a white family at the same income level. They're not right when they make those arguments; they're overstating their claim, fathers are important, two parents are beneficial, &c. But that's not really what they're arguing.
And then there are people who believe, I don't know, fathers are somehow malign? A single parent is better than two? But that's a fringe belief.
> Liberals are invested in social theories that reject the importance of fathers in socializing boys?
In academia, public policy, and political messaging, yes. With a few exceptions.
> Are you sure you're not getting this stuff from Youtube, and kind of winding yourself up?
I don’t watch YouTube. It doesn’t even really come up in right-wing media, because much of the Trump right is itself a product of the post-family values 1990s. It comes from my own observations of “stuff my liberal parents take as axiomatic that I can’t say among my friends with graduate degrees.”
> Stable two-parent households, high education, and liberalism are all correlated.
That’s true. You have lots of people who preach permissiveness and self fulfillment in public and practice rigid conformity in their own lives. Growing up I reconciled this as the way my parents did: “things it’s okay for Americans to do versus but not for us to do.” I find that suboptimal now.
>> You have lots of people who preach permissiveness and self fulfillment in public and practice rigid conformity in their own lives. Growing up I reconciled this as the way my parents did: “things it’s okay for Americans to do versus but not for us to do.” I find that suboptimal now.
Are you the product of an immigrant family? Because it sounds quite like something many immigrant parents would say.
This just isn't persuasive. You can find support for any wacky idea "in academia", at any end of the political spectrum --- I don't go around saying that conservatives are deeply invested in the idea of a Catholic Integralist theocracy, and so I object to the idea that you get to drag out someone's Masters in Tumblr Theory graduate thesis to win arguments. Meanwhile: in public policy? In political messaging? Support your claim with evidence, and serious evidence, lest I see whatever BLM thing you come up with and raise you Lauren Boebert.
I suspect that what's happening here is that you've mistaken the notion that people have itchy trigger fingers about people trash-talking single moms (they do) with the idea that people widely believe "single mom" is an optimal child rearing arrangement (they do not). I live in the People's Republic of Oak Park, and you'd be run out on a rail from the Oak Park Progressives group for writing a post about how dads are overrated.
Just for the sake of clarity, and to keep the discussion on the tracks, I'm dialing up my rhetoric: I think these beliefs you have about "liberals" are the outcome of Internet poisoning, not a reflection of reality.
Again: the best proxy we have for measuring social liberalism is educational attainment. People with college degress --- I'm not valorizing them, I didn't go, I think college is an overrated luxury good --- are much more likely to have stable single-parent homes that people without; to the extent that this "nuclear family" gap exists, it's "conservative" voters who are likely to be on the single-parent end of it.
> I suspect that what's happening here is that you've mistaken the notion that people have itchy trigger fingers about people trash-talking single moms (they do) with the idea that people widely believe "single mom" is an optimal child rearing arrangement (they do not).
I think they are so afraid of being accused of "trash-talking single moms," or alienating the academics and activists, that they won't advocate in the culture and politics for two-parent families. The functional result is similar: When was the last time you heard a Democrat talking about the importance of two-parent households? What major Democrat-aligned think tank or advocacy organization is pushing policies to promote two-parent households and decrease out-of-wedlock child births? Where are the Hollywood movies addressing the social upheaval caused by divorce?
> Just for the sake of clarity, and to keep the discussion on the tracks, I'm dialing up my rhetoric: I think these beliefs you have about "liberals" are the outcome of Internet poisoning, not a reflection of reality.
My problem is that the right-wing outrage bait originates where I am: the high school I attended, the law school I attended, my kids's school, etc. On this particular issue, I got shouted down on my high school's facebook page for pointing out that poverty rates are vastly lower among two-parent families. Do those folks represent the liberal mainstream? I think that's besides the point. If those folks shout down enough people, everyone else will stick to points that don't incur their wrath.
> Again: the best proxy we have for measuring social liberalism is educational attainment. People with college degress --- I'm not valorizing them, I didn't go, I think college is an overrated luxury good --- are much more likely to have stable single-parent homes that people without; to the extent that this "nuclear family" gap exists, it's "conservative" voters who are likely to be on the single-parent end of it.
This is true, but I draw the opposite conclusion from it. Economic success today is strongly tied to success in academic institutions. People with high levels of social capital go to those institutions, learn a bunch of wacky ideas, but live in their own lives the way people with their class always have. But everyone else downstream suffers the consequences. E.g. corporate lawyer posts "sex work is work" but she doesn't mean it for her kid. And she doesn't live in a community where being pressured into sex work is a real threat facing young women. But destroying that taboo has consequences that flow down into lower class communities where those pressures do exist.
Meanwhile, those downstream communities have less ability to resist harmful cultural changes. They're not going to college where they learn what to say while being able to observe that the successful people are doing. They often lack the social capital that insulates them from the broader culture. The social institutions they relied on to transmit values and enforce norms, like churches, have often been weakened by decades of attacks. Folks in those communities will get divorced and have kids out of wedlock--because the taboos have been destroyed in the broader culture--but they'll unsurprisingly be mad about the consequences.
It's easy to find Democrats talking about the importance of fatherhood, and that's backed up by public policy: for instance, a goal of Paid Family Leave is ensuring that fathers have time with new children, not just mothers.
It's harder to find Democrats extolling the virtues of two-parent families. But that's no surprise: "two-parent family" is coded right-wing, and politically involves not just the importance of kids having two parents, but also of pushing back on equity in the workplace for women, or benefits for single parents (and, if you go far enough back, say to the 1970s and 1980s, towards liberalized divorce laws).
So I think the claim that liberals avoid talking about family values fails. They use different language than conservatives, but that's just how politics works. You can exploit the semiotics of political messaging to paint either side any way you want, but the idea that liberals are opposed to two-parent households is inconsistent with what liberals advocate for.
An appeal to what gets shouted down on Facebook groups† also isn't persuasive. First, note that you didn't get shouted down for saying that fathers are important (which is how you'd code an appeal to two-parent child-rearing --- single-parent households in the US are overwhelmingly, like >85%, led by mothers). But also: Facebook groups are cliques. There are popular Facebook groups in Oak Park that would ban you for arguing against abolishing the police. But defunding the police failed on our last ballot by something like 70-30. Biden carried our precincts overwhelmingly; by a far higher margin than Cook County as a whole.
Finally, for all you're saying about the downwind effects of elite liberal take-havers saying it's OK to pursue single parenthood, in context what you're trying to say is "violent crime statistics that prominently feature Black people is a natural consequence of liberals de-emphasizing two-parent households". I'm sorry, that's plainly false. None of the circumstances this thread talks about have anything to do with BLM talking about people being raised in part by aunties and grandmas, or anything said on Twitter.
I said upthread and I'll say it again: it wouldn't be fair for me to try to paint conservative thought by what Sohrab Ahmari believes, let alone Marjorie Taylor Greene. But that's effectively what you're doing when you suggest that BLM-Facebook-thought defines liberalism. Liberals overwhelmingly believe in the importance of two-parent child-rearing.
† (As someone somewhat active in local politics, I'll add that Facebook is deeply problematic --- it stands in for public comment and discussion, but provides none of the safeguards of open meetings laws. There's also a trend towards municipalities outsourcing this kind of discussion to platforms like Granicus, with the same problems: private entities can control public speech, which is fine until they become the government's own formal mechanism for collecting feedback. It's a whole can of worms.)
A lot of what you said is reasonable, but I think you're really stretching your argument when you say that 1) liberals refrain from advocating for the "two-parent family" because to do so would imply pushing back on workplace equity and benefits for single parents, and 2) support for fathers' inclusion in paid family leave is proof that liberals care about two-parent families. I think you are seriously underplaying a very real strain in left-wing thought, which views the "traditional family" with extreme suspicion, and associates exhortations for couples to marry before they have kids, to stay together for the sake of the kids, and so on, as essentially patriarchal, religious encroachments on personal liberty.
Since you want hard poll evidence, I browsed Gallup and found a poll:
41% of Republicans vs. 61% of Democrats think having kids outside of marriage is "morally acceptable". [1]
61% of Republicans vs. 73% of Democrats think divorce is acceptable. [1]
Interestingly, you can look at [2] and see that these issues fall pretty neatly into OP's argument about "luxury beliefs". For instance, on the "having kids outside of marriage" issue, only 38% of black Democrats think it is morally acceptable, but 64% of non-black Democrats think it is morally acceptable. The black vs. non-black numbers for sex outside of marriage are 46% to 68%. Given the prevalence of exactly these behaviors in the black community relative to the white community, I think that this constitutes pretty hard evidence that OP's "luxury beliefs" hypothesis has a lot going for it.
I said 'a strain in left-wing thought views the "traditional family" with extreme suspicion.' I didn't say "the majority of Democrats". The polls in question demonstrate that Democrats (though only the white ones) are proportionally more likely than Republicans to make statements in tension with a desire for 2-parent households. OP asked for hard data to back up the hypothesis that Republicans are stronger in their political commitments to 2-parent households than Democrats, and I tried to produce something like that. If you have more compelling data that points in the opposite direction, by all means post it.
But you haven't provided any evidence. Your data point is that more Democrats than Republicans think having a child out of wedlock is morally acceptable. I think having a child out of wedlock is morally acceptable. Raising children is praiseworthy no matter what. But I absolutely do believe that children benefit from having two parents as well. The ambiguity here is central to my complaint about what Rayiner is trying to say.
I believe he’s grouping liberals with a more radical left wing, common by the right wing.
What he’s referring to is the BLM website stating “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement” that it looks like they’ve since removed.
Even that statement --- which few liberals are even aware of, let alone agree with --- is wildly misconstrued. It refers to the fact that Black families have historically lived in generational households with children raised by grandparents and aunts as well as parents, a model (1) common to several European ethnicities and (2) actively discriminated against in suburban America (explicitly, by zoning laws). It's not a declaration that fathers are useless.
I fully believe that these differences in family structure are the product of cultural and economic destruction caused by slavery, Jim Crow, etc. So what’s the solution? For decades it’s been more social liberalism: easier divorce, easier single parenthood, cultural changes to normalize unstable families. At the end of the day the bus that is the Democratic Party is driven by social liberals, and more individual freedom and less collective norm enforcement is the main solution they have in stock.
The Brooking's article claims "Since 1970, out-of-wedlock birth rates have soared. In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. By 1990 the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants, 18 percent for whites."
Why would the racial gains made since the Civil Rights movement lead to fewer stable married households raising children?
I fully believe that these differences in family structure are the product of cultural and economic destruction caused by slavery, Jim Crow, etc. So what’s the solution? For decades it’s been more social liberalism: easier divorce, easier single parenthood, cultural changes to normalize unstable families. At the end of the day the bus that is the Democratic Party is driven by social liberals, and more individual freedom and less collective norm enforcement is their solution to everything.
The statement refers to the fact that discrimination against inter-generational families were a proxy for discrimination against Black, Latino, and, before that, Italian households in the American suburbs. Which is a real thing that did --- and still does --- happen.
And you've skated right past the more important part of my argument, which is that nobody with a BLM sign on their lawn even knows about this "nuclear family" thing. You'd have to go dig it up for them.
I'm going to assume good intent here and say you've been sucked into some white supremacist propaganda. This falls under the umbrella of "1350" [1]:
> The number 13 used in conjunction with either the number 52 or the number 90 is a shorthand reference to racist propaganda claims by white supremacists against African-Americans to depict them as savage and criminal in nature.
If anything, it's evidence of overpolicing.
But this continues a centuries-old narrative that black people are violent and white people are a civilizing force. Both of these provided moral cover for slavery. This include religious figures justifying slavery as the slaves were being converted to Christianity and it would save their immortal souls.
I hope, for your sake, you can deconstruct this propaganda you've been exposed to.
I too will assume good faith, and point out that you have not responded to the point about disparities in violent crime rates. All you've said is: "some white supremicists make the same argument". That's not a refutation, it's an attempt to brush the stats under the rug while smearing the person who asked the question.
No one is arguing that Black Americans are inherently violent.
They are arguing that "historical travesties" -> "current situation for Black Americans" -> "increased risks of criminality and violence" -> "more interactions with cops" -> "more deaths by police".
Which requires different tools to solve than "cops are racist" -> "cops shoot more Black Americans".
And if our goal is to actually help Black Americans than we need to be clear eyed about the causes even if that makes us uncomfortable.
Dismissing others hardship or injustice because theirs is worse seems very counter productive.
What is the intention of pointing out that African-Americans have it worse? Should we have special laws only for that group? Or, should more non African-Americans die due to bad laws to balance the scales.
I never dismissed anyone's hardship. Read the first line of my comment again.
The intention of pointing that out was in response to a specific comment. Context matters.
I want police violence to stop. Period. I want them to be held accountable for their actions. But when an article talks about the way law enforcement treats people of different classes with two different standards, and someone starts complaining that black people are getting more media attention, I feel obligated to reference the reason why, without dismissing anyone's hardship. Again, context.
This is disingenious at best. Looking at the population ratio vs killing makes no sense whatsoever. In that case just use that to justify why men are more often subject to police violence than women. We all know why, but with race there may be no differences ... but there are.
In the case of race you can't just ignore that black people do roughly 50% of violent crimes (just look at arson, don't even try to excuse it) and make up 25% of the lethal shootings with police.
It's also obvious why the racism is the other way around than some people make it out to be. Every police officer thinks twice to shoot on someone with dark skin because of the media coverage that can and often does take place. With killing white people, even if unjust this is rarely if ever a headline (except you can spin it, like when he helped a PoC).
Would you not accept that African-Americans might be victims of circumstances? As shown in the article it matters where you live. Also, criminal who's house FBI forcefully entered was not 'white'.
> Would you not accept that African-Americans might be victims of circumstances?
I don't introduce new standards for them. If you want to mitigate racism, hold them accountable for their actions and don't act like people with a different skin tone can take no responsibility.
Thank you for this information. So do you support the fact that police in this country are working as a judge, jury and executor?
I am sorry, but if I were you, I'd be ashamed to use such justification for people's killings.
Let's focus on the issue at hand, policing violence is a problem that needs to be addressed, putting the blame on one side or the other because "they're more violent" is not a good start to any serious discussion except to shield police from their actions.
The Lemp case has a number of pertinent differences.
First let me say that the bodycam footage to this day hasn't been released. Until it is, I give very little weight to the claims made by police. In fact this should be a rule: bodycam footage should be required for serving all warrants, arresting any suspect and so on. The police simply have too much power that can be abused and video footage (bodycam and amateur) has many times exposed the police lying.
Kemp at least was the subject of the warrant. I'm not saying this to justify excessive police violence. But it is a key difference.
As for what happened during the raid, it's hard to make conclusions since we don't have the bodycam footage.
> The Lemp case has a number of pertinent differences.
You were comparing the Locke case to the Abou-Khatwa case in the article (about a white collar criminal the FBI was going after, where guns weren't involved) and the Rittenhouse case (shootings which didn't involve any law enforcement agency). The shootings of Locke, Lemp, and Taylor all have certain differences, but they're much more similar to each other than to those other cases.
I hope you can understand why common media did not amplify Duncan Lemp's voice - as he had prior intent to harm police and was co-opted as a symbol for extremist right-wing groups. [0]
You will find very little support for no-knock raids but with the circumstances related to their deaths[0], comparing Duncan Lemp to Breonna Taylor is a disingenuous tu quoque.
I think the fact that you have to go to alternative media like Reason to find articles about it speaks volume. Check out searches of mainstream news sites:
Google search for "Duncan Lemp" site:nytimes.com[1]: Two articles, neither of which are about his shooting, but which mention him in passing when talking about Boogaloo "extremists."
Google search for "Breonna Taylor" site:nytimes.com[2]: Dozens of articles from the Times.
Google search for "Duncan Lemp" site:cnn.com[3]: No articles on CNN.
Google search for "Breonna Taylor" site:cnn.com[4]: Dozens of articles from CNN.
It's simply impossible to not notice the glaring disparity with the media coverage (and again, these two shootings happened a day apart).
Simply for what it is worth, if I Google "duncan lemp", I see articles about the shooting from The Washington Post, USA Today, the AP, ABC and The Guardian.
Thanks. I just checked The Washington Post and USA Today. The Washington Post has three articles on Lemp and one that mentions him in passing. They're all in the local news section (the shooting happened in a suburb of Washington D.C.). There's over a dozen articles on Brionna Taylor, even though that happened in another part of the country. Likewise, USA Today has one article on Lemp, and over a dozen on Taylor.
Also, again simply for what it is worth (not arguing anything, just pointing out what I am seeing - do with it what you will!), nearly every article returned when Googling his name seems to be about the shooting.
Simply comparing search results between publications really ignores the context of the stories and how they develop. People think that all newspapers should put out the exact same amount of content on each topic all of the time, but it's never worked that way.
Again, Breonna Taylor's story became an example of the case against the status quo of policing in America. Her story was elevated precisely because it was yet another example of injustice carried out by police that ultimately went unpunished. Community leaders and activists elevated this story on racial grounds because they believed it was important to do so.
Who in Duncan's community elevated his story? Who thought it was important to tell the story that a white guy died in a similar situation? It was covered as an event in the press when it happened, but it didn't get the kind of traction that Taylor's did because it ultimately didn't have the community support. Who would be the white equivalent of an Al Sharpton talking about how whites are mistreated by police? I really struggle to name someone that fits that description.
You switched from passive voice "Her story was elevated" to the active voice "Who in Duncan's community elevated his story?" This raises a question of fact - who got Breonna Taylor's story heard? How did they do it? Did someone attempt to share Duncan's story, and get rejected? Why?
It's easy to speculate. For example, Duncan didn't fit the racial narrative the media is comfortable with. This framing achieves several goals that the more accurate narrative, that police violence is evidence of severe problems with our justice system. The racial narrative pleases left-leaning viewers, it also plays better to right-leaning viewers because the problem of individual racism is still big, but much smaller and easier to accept. Or, they can love to hate the story.
A general failure of the American justice system is just not a narrative anyone wants to hear; it's too big. That narrative is one that challenges the mainstream view that the police are the good guys, and that American justice is fair. It's like "climate change", as a subject - much easier to pick it apart into anecdotes and pass judgement on individuals, which feels good and has no effect, or ignore it entirely, rather than confront the true scope of the issue.
Ultimately the problem is that "news" has shifted firmly from a "public service" of broadcasters, that loses money, to a for-profit endeavor chasing audience, aka "content". The former service tells us what we need to hear, but the latter only tells us what we want to hear. And precious few of us want to hear the truth, especially about ourselves.
This shooting appears to have been covered by the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun and the AP.
People like to blame a certain story not going viral on the media, but it's kind of a scapegoat argument. The press covered the event and people on Twitter chose not to elevate it. That doesn't mean the media was pushing a particular narrative.
In Breonna Taylor's case, black community activists raised their voices in the community to state plainly that her death was an indicator of a fundamentally toxic policing system. There is no such analog for the white right, because those folks are largely ones defending the police right now.
I would be find what you wrote much more convincing if I didn't have sufficient knowledge of the Rittenhouse case to know you were deliberately misleading us by selectively presentating and omitting key facts.
1. You omit the defense's stated reasoning for bringing up Rosenbaum's prior convictions. Their theory was not "pedophiles bad kill pedophiles good." They wanted to argue that Rosenbaum lunged at Rittenhouse in order to take his firearm, because, as a convicted felon, Rosenbaum was not legally able to purchase that firearm. It was important that they show evidence that Rosenbaum had a pernicious motive to lunge at Rittenhouse, because the prosecution was alleging the only reason he did so was in self-defense.
2. More crucially, you omit the fact that the judge prevented his defense from mentioning these convictions in court for fear it would be prejudicial. Because of this, the jury never found out about Rosenbaum's extensive criminal history. [1] This craters the relevance of this example. It doesn't demonstrate any sort of double standard.
> They wanted to argue that Rosenbaum lunged at Rittenhouse in order to take his firearm ...
That reason provides the moral cover for mudslinging at the victim but we all know what's going on.
From the perspective of those around Rittenhouse, they had no knowledge if this was about to turn into a mass shooting or not. Disarming him may well have saved lives (and would've as it turns out).
Defenders of these "stand your ground" type laws ignore the consequences of cases like this. Here's the lesson from the Rittenhouse case: as soon as he pulled out a gun, someone else should've shot and killed him and then argued (with some justification, honestly) they were in fear of their life.
The extreme here is the case of Curtis Reeves [1], who started an altercation with another man who was texting during the previews to a move. When the man stood to confront him, Reeves shot and killed him and successfully argued he was in fear of his life.
Take that further: the victim can reasonably argue he feared for his life when confronted by Reeves so, if he had a gun, he should've pulled it out and shot Reeves dead.
Like I said, I followed the Rittenhouse case extremely closely, and you are completely, 100% full of shit. That you are so confidently spouting off about it means that you are a completely unreliable writer, and no one should trust a word of what you have to say on this thread.
If you are trying to explain to a jury that your client was in danger and needed to defend himself against people, mentioning that the people had committed sexual assault and domestic violence would help with your case that they needed to be defended against and weren't "peaceful protesters" but, actually proven violent criminals that corroborate their violence against your client. The fact he shot three people and all of which happened to be
1. A person released from prison recently for disorderly conduct and a domestic abuse charge
2. An arsonist and convicted child molester
3. Convicted felon affiliated with the "Peoples Revolution" group best known for attacking a police officer, and pointing a loaded gun at your client.
These facts demonstrate without even showing the video footage, that all 3 had the capacity for violence and are the type of people that you may find yourself having to defend yourself against (as other have had to in the past)
The defense brought up one of the rittenhouse attackers was a sex offender to show they are an individual with less than good morals. Someone who would be willing to attack someone with the crowd. So, no, this piece of evidence is not immaterial.
Everything in this world is not race based. There are other nuances to the world that the MSM is hiding to push their race based fear mongering.
You’re missing the point. We place people on trial for committing crimes, not for having “less than good morals.” Criminal courts typically exclude references to a victim’s character for precisely this reason: the goal is to determine whether a crime was committed, not whether the jurors would have personally liked the victim.
The issue isn't whether the jury would have liked the victim. The question was "did the victim attack Kyle?". The fact that the victim had a known violent past is very relevant to that question.
The requirement for a victim’s character witness is that it be a “pertinent” trait. It’s not clear to me that a sexual crime (even an extremely serious one) provides is pertinent to an individual’s homicidal capacity, even if Rittenhouse was somehow aware of the victim’s prior conviction. Which brings us back to the parent’s original point.
The assailant was 0. Not standing trial as he was killed. 1. Threw something at Rittenhouse instigating the self-defense. 2. Running after Rittenhouse telling him he was going to take Rittenhouse’s rifle and kill him with it. And that was just one of the four people who attacked him that night.
Courts use a victim’s (or a perpetrator’s) character in almost every trial. The prosecution used Rittenhouse’s tiktok username and about me section as a way to paint him as a killer driven by fame. The goal is to determine if the person is guilty or not.
The point was "this person was attacking Rittenhouse, and is the kind of person who would attack someone". Rittenhouse was a clear cut, video-verified, and court-confirmed case of self-defense.
1. Rosenbaum wasn't on trial. He was Rittenhouse's assailant.
2. The defense needed to present a motive for Rosenbaum's having attacked Rittenhouse, and they felt his prior convictions helped establish that motive.
3. The judge did not allow the defense to bring up Rosenbaum's prior convictions in court.
I am tired of Rittenhouse being used as race bait. Everyone involved in that story was white. Kyle, and all the people that he shot / attacked him.
I don't even see how your point about Rittenhouse applies at all. There are plenty of examples of white people getting off easy, but you're instead nitpicking the legal defense of this one case.
You're instigating a fight more than making a salient point.
You’re omitting the part where the shooter went to a civil rights protest with a rifle. The fact that he happened to kill two white people rather than black ones isn’t an overriding consideration.
I'm sympathetic to BLM and I don't think Rittenhouse should have been there with a gun.
But calling what was going on in Kenosha a "civil rights protest" makes you look foolish. It was rioting and looting. The kid did not go to some daytime march and shoot people carrying signs. He was LARPing as a security guard because people were torching businesses.
Opinion is divided so much already... if you want to convince anyone to join your side who isn't already there, you have to have your facts straight and be honest about what happened.
Sure, you can make an argument the Kyle is racist. But that comes back to my point: this whole thread is just flame bait. There's no reason to smear Rittenhouse here. It does not connect to OPs point about inequality in the justice system.
Legal right or not, showing up to a protest with weapons is a show of force, intimidation, and in my view enough threat to life to justify self-defense in basically any case where the armed person does basically anything other than stand like a statue.
Like we're not 6 years old, surely we're not so naive to believe "I'm not shoooting youuu. I'm not shooooting youuuu" is somehow peaceful.
What's your point exactly? If more people had done so there wouldn't be a riot. Honestly it's a condemnation of our degraded society that so few show up to defend our cities and towns from this kind of mob violence.
I think it's the fact that he went to that civil rights protest with a weapon and the idea of policing the protestors that was probably a bad thing. Most responsible gun owners would argue that he shouldn't have even been there with weapons. No one is attacking the exercising of one's right. They're pointing out the poor decision making of rittenhouse.
It would be no different than showing up to a freedom rally/protest with weapons and the idea to police the area.
Begs the question: If you can be startled away by the someone breaking into your home and you reach for you gun and are shot dead by the police, do you really have the right to bear arms?
I would really love to see some laws that allow us to defend ourselves against police. If they decide to just beat my ass, they can and I can't defend myself. WTF!?
At some point there needs to be a supreme court decision that reconciles the legality of no-knock warrants with castle doctrine/self-defense/second-amendment.
My understanding of the current state of things is that in some jurisdictions it's simultaneously legal for armed police to violently enter your home without identifying themselves and for you to defend your home by firing a weapon at them.
Basically, we have legalized gunfights, as long as the police have a warrant. In almost all of these cases the police will "win" and therefor we essentially we have legalized murder where the police at least know they're about to get into a firefight whereas the suspect likely does not.
>If they decide to just beat my ass, they can and I can't defend myself.
Kenneth Walker, Breonna Taylor's boyfriend was cleared of charges of shooting back at police. Had it not been as publicized he would probably be in jail though. It's possible but it's an uphill struggle, the system will defend itself any way possible.
The declaration of independence can be interpreted to mean that the
government forfeits its legitimacy when it violates anyone's human
rights. If the declaration of independence is considered legally
binding then theoretically you could have a basis in law for fighting
back against the police when they exceed their remit. I'm no lawyer
but I remember something similar being brought up in the courtroom
scene in the movie Good Will Hunting.
>Let's also compare to Kyle Rittenhouse. Attorneys wanted to use the fact that one of his victims was a sex offender as a defense [3]. There are two possibilities here:
>1. Rittenhouse didn't know of this, in which case it's immaterial; and
>2. Rittenhouse knew, in which case this was a targeted killing (ie murder).
>No one is arguing Rittenhouse knew. The whole point here is post facto justification. This is for the court of public opinion and to give the jury something to hang their hat on with an acquittal. That's it.
No, the whole point is arguing that Rosenbaum likely instigated the altercation, using his repeated violent behavior in the past as character evidence to show this. If Rittenhouse had instigated the fight then he would have had to additionally prove in court that he attempted to retreat in order for his shooting to be considered self-defense, if Rosenbaum instigated then it remains simple self-defense.
> he would have had to additionally prove in court that he attempted to retreat in order for his shooting to be considered self-defense
I mean, he would have been able to, since we have video of the time period leading up to the shooting, where he's running away from Rosenbaum before he turns around right before the shooting, and the prosecution witness testified Rosenbaum appeared to be trying to take the rifle.
The rittenhouse bit is entirely irrelevant. The sex offender you're discussing is on video, from multiple angles, attacking him. He's also on video acting like an unhinged lunatic prior to the altercation. (He's a white dude at a BLM protest shouting the N word at another white person... uh ok).
You can't threaten to kill someone then violently attack them and expect them not to defend themselves.
If you're this woefully uninformed about the rittenhouse situation, have you considered that your sources of information are misleading you?
>You'd think the NRA would be all over this: a legal gun owner killed in his home by police? Nope [2]. I wonder why.
The NRA is horribly corrupt and self serving. It seems many organizations have come to this demise in the US the past few decades. I've heard of many gun owners abandon them.
>Let's also compare to Kyle Rittenhouse. Attorneys wanted to use the fact that one of his victims was a sex offender as a defense [3].
I assume it's a tactic to show he was a "bad guy," which was used to prove that Rittenhouse wasn't the initial aggressor. I believe the person in question had also been discharged from a mental facility that day and had quite a few issues with the law.
>I bring this up because I want to highlight the different worlds people live in when it comes to law enforcement.
While I completely agree with what you are saying, there are many different law enforcement organizations in the US (each city/town has one) and in those departments there are many different officers. Some of those organizations are highly corrupt and shouldn't exist and some of those officers are highly corrupt and shouldn't be employed or be jailed.
Having said that, any organization that tries to cover up the actions of a bad officer shouldn't exist and is part of the problem.
All of this is the result of the 50+ year drug war our government has been waging against its citizens.
The suspect in this case was Tarek Abou-Khatwa, who, maybe I’m making assumptions here, doesn’t sound like he’s white. Are you saying that the super-racist FBI agents decided to cut Mr. Abou-Khatwa a break because he’s a member of the good ol’ boys club?
>Let's also compare to Kyle Rittenhouse. Attorneys wanted to use the fact that one of his victims was a sex offender as a defense
It's relevant because it proves that the guy who was killed already had a lengthy violent criminal record. This helps to build up the case for a self-defense shooting. In most countries past offenses are taken into consideration when prosecuting a wide variety of crimes, meaning this is nothing new.
Also, I have zero pity for someone who raped children, and neither does any jury. Why wouldn't the defense bring it up?
> Yet you can't bring the above up without some (predominantly white) people getting offended at the mere suggestion that the system is inherently racist.
Well, I am sorry, but bringing it up in a thread about a wealthy insurance broker Tarek Abou-Khatwa from D.C. definitely makes it sound like an alarmist racebait by a nutter.
Like, sure, government hides some stuff from the public. But it doesn’t make people who talk about UFOs and Zone 51 look reasonable when declassification is discussed.
At this point, I look at the NRA in the same way I look at the ACLU. Both were issue advocacy groups but both have expanded into a general partisan / left-right fundraising machine thanks to more and more polarization.
Many gun-owning folks I know have joined other pro-second amendment advocacy groups in disappointment.
It was the other way round for the Rittenhouse case. (I watched the entire stream. So for once, I can say I know about the case). Bringing their integrity into the conversation was a hail-mary play for conviction by the prosecutor, because they suspected they'd lose.
The Rittenhouse trial had gone from a cut-n-dry innocence case to one that was attempting to make his trial appear as if it was a hate crime. The prosecutors actively tried to make Rittenhouse look like an out-for-blood killer, the victims look like the nicest people alive and make it appear impossible that the victims could've threatened his life (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary).
It makes complete sense for the defense to counter accusations of bad character with the same when trying to establish plausible threat from the rioters. This was a white-on-white crime, and I still don't understand why the left chose this case as their 'systemic racism' hill-to-die-on.
> mere suggestion that the system is inherently racist
It isn't the mere suggestion is it? It is an active effort to defund and abolish the police. The lasting legacy of the BLM protests was the murders seen in emancipated-zones (CHAZ) and the massive spike in homicides following police defunding. The BLM movement was an ideological package, and I can see why someone would reject the combo-deal even if they agreed with certain aspects of it.
Just because I agree with the general direction of the identified problems, doesn't mean I agree with the solution.
Kyle Rittenhouse's trial occurred alongside Ahmaud Arbery's, and his white killers were sentenced to life in prison by a grand jury of eight white people, three black people and one hispanic person. As long as we are looking at anecdotes, there are plenty on either sides, making grand claims rather hard to substantiate.
___________
The American police system has a problem. It ties into the availability of guns, astronomical gun homicide numbers [1] and the general atmosphere of fear in this nation. I am certain that stereotypes amounting to racism are a part of the greater victimization of black men in 2022 America and that every unarmed killing by police is a tragedy. But, both those issues are nowhere close to the biggest problems in American law enforcement.
Its hyper amplification plays into the current political polarization of the US, such that the only acceptable & amplified opinions are ones on the fringes. It reminds me of Germany's Greens banning all nuclear power in their scorched-earth approach towards imperfect renewables; and that leading to greater CO2 emissions and Russian willingness to invade Ukraine.
Unless American society is willing to accept that their opponents come from a place of good-faith, they will never be able to work towards a mutual-compromise solution. In my experience, those are the only solutions that work in a democracy.
You'd think the NRA would be all over this: a legal gun owner killed in his home by police? Nope
In the gun community the NRA is generally seen has having failed gun owners. There are many cases similar to Amir Locke's. One in particular is Duncan Lemp.
> In the gun community the NRA is generally seen has having failed gun owners.
NRA accomplished some wicked and absurd goals (one might not think it possible if it hadn't already happened) and I think by proxy accomplished a huge one through Justice Scalia which significantly, drastically and fundamentally changed the meaning of the 2nd Amendment from a selfless right to stand guard against tyranny to an intensely and grotesquely selfish right to legally murder in defense of trivial things such as property and indulgences such as pride. This was illegal, unconstitutional, and a massive overreach by Scalia, because obviously he undermined the Founders' expressed requirement for a Constitutional convention and 2/3rds both houses of Congress or of State legislatures to change the Constitution. That this defacement of the Constitution occurred in the way that it did, the 2nd was vandalized without altering the literal words, is interesting, but I believe it only a matter of time before parts of DC v Heller (2008) are overturned for lack of accuracy, overreach, and flippantly reversing a hundred plus years of court precedent with garbage reasoning. Scalia claims knowledge of what most Americans believe, without any support or any evidence whatsoever, which is what he bases his argument and ruling that the right of self-defense is inclusive in the 2nd (a small part of the decision which was entirely skewed to the rest and the case before the Court).
First of all, even one Supreme Court Justice claiming to know what all Americans think and basing decisions on that... is crazy, so he was probably a little senile by then. But I think Scalia knew (or knew once) and we also know from the minutes of the Constitutional Convention that the Founders debated including self-defense in the 2nd and intentionally left it out, and we also know that the 2nd specifically concerns militia (to guard against any tyranny from a professional military) and not a personal right to firearms, which it never meant until the NRA made up that it did and ran propaganda to manipulate others into believing what they, really, just invented, which itself is merely a lie. So the NRA succeeded in campaigns they ran, I think starting in the early 1900s and onwards to try to get Americans to believe the 2nd Amendment meant self-defense and guaranteed it.
But by 2008, contrary to Scalia's claimed omnipotence, I suspect most Americans were far better educated and aware of, at least, the fact that that the NRA's propaganda regarding their claims the right of self-defense was guaranteed by 2nd, was false, and knew and know that the right of self-defense is a natural right that would be redundant to include in the Bill of Rights, and is far older than the 2nd, which concerns militia. Personal gun ownership, right to carry permits, and all other ownership of guns beyond beyond militia (hunting, collecting, engineering & manufacturing, etc.) is really covered by the 10th Amendment. I don't know why the NRA, and everyone that listened to them, got hung up on the 2nd, and obsessively tried to, in large part successfully, mindcontrol Americans into believing literal BS and the NRA's wet dream, which of course could only have led to a needless increase in gun deaths since 2008.
Sure the close knit and loving gun community blames the NRA when it's gun owners that failed America by being duped by the NRA into shirking their 2nd Amendment duties, and falling down on the job by not being well-regulated militia, but instead playing with guns, or leaving guns unsecured resulting in tragedy, or being vigilantes, or intentionally placing themselves where they might get antagonized to use lethal force when such situations could easily have been avoided.
" This was illegal, unconstitutional, and a massive overreach by Scalia, because obviously he undermined the Founders' expressed requirement for a Constitutional convention and 2/3rds both houses of Congress or of State legislatures to change the Constitution."
You are obviously not a lawyer.
"That this defacement of the Constitution occurred in the way that it did, the 2nd was vandalized without altering the literal words, is interesting, but I believe it only a matter of time before parts of DC v Heller (2008) are overturned for lack of accuracy, overreach, and flippantly reversing a hundred plus years of court precedent with garbage reasoning."
Have you read Heller, McDonald, or any of the various Circuit cases on Second Amendment rights?
Flattery will get you nowhere. If you're going to disagree, then please just do so and defend your position rather than... I don't know what this is... empty heckles from the peanut gallery I guess. FWIW, since the Heller decision was unconstitutional, and McDonald was based on Heller, then it also is invalid and unconstitutional. The 2nd Amendment does not guarantee the right of the people to keep and bear arms, and never did, not unless you ignore the first three words of the Amendment, placed there at the beginning almost as if to underscore their importance in clearly laying out the scope of the Amendment, "A well-regulated militia."
Perhaps by the standards of those outside the gun community. For our agenda they've been a failure. The modest policy successes, by our measure, have been obtained in-spite of them.
I don't expect you to agree with our agenda, but don't forget that we define our agenda. All the NRA did was water it down.
> we define our agenda. All the NRA did was water it down.
NRA's agenda is guns for everyone, and to change the Founders' intent to make the 2nd include a right self-defense that it neither ever contained nor needs to contain. That's watered down, you say. If that's watered down, wtf.
It has been proven over and over, just about every week, that more guns means more gun deaths, and that is all it means, iow, it does not mean anyone is safer. In fact, owning a gun doubles the chance of death of anyone living in the gun owners' household. Also, it is more likely a gun owner will injure or kill themselves, or someone they love, than they will ever successfully defend themselves against crime. Also, no one needs the 2nd Amendment for self-defense. We all already have the right of self-defense, so it would be awesome if we didn't let pet agendas unnecessarily monkey with the Constitution.
The Founders never intended the citizenry to be armed, unless organized as a well-regulated militia. It's fine to have your own agenda and opinions about guns, certainly, but let's not ever try to wrap that in patriotism, nor label it American, because the Founders had far far different ideas about this than the gun community. And if guns for everyone and warping the 2nd to include self-defense doesn't please the gun community, then no one need ever find out what will. Secure your weapon, and just sit there and be dissatisfied, and try not to hurt yourself or kill anything.
FYI the neighborhood is Kalorama in DC, where a lot of diplomats and high-level government officials live. Maybe the agents didn't want one of the neighbors to call the director of the FBI to have them chewed out for "making the neighborhood look bad", which is not an impossible thing to happen there considering who the neighbors are.
I imagine if you're an FBI field agent, the last thing you want for your career is for the director to be getting angry calls from other high level officials because of you.
I'd argue that the someone in the neighborhood should call the director of the FBI for unequal treatment of suspects regardless of which neighborhood they live in and who they happen to be.
You think those people have the life experience to know that it was odd that they didn't kick in the front door? Or that they even care that others are treated worse?
It’s worth noting that some of the residents of Kalorama include Barack and Michelle Obama, Rex Tillerson, Hillary Clinton, Jared Kushner, and Jeff Bezos.
Your knowledge seems to extend beyond the article. Any idea why Kalorama is shaped the way it is? Looking it up on google maps, it looks like two triangles connected by a street, which seems odd for a neighborhood.
Well, I don't have any particular knowledge, other than living in and around DC for a long time.
If you look at the neighborhoods to the west of Kalorama on Google Maps [1], bounded by Rock Creek, they are Kalorama Heights and Kalorama Triangle Historic district, which I think most locals would just consider Kalorama. Although I think a lot of people would consider most of the lower triangle to be part of Dupont Circle rather than Kalorama.
There's also this map [2] which, admittedly, is not trying to be an official map of anything, but it is an artwork featured in one of the DC government buildings. It shows Kalorama more as a single triangle.
> Any idea why Kalorama is shaped the way it is? Looking it up on google maps, it looks like two triangles connected by a street, which seems odd for a neighborhood.
I can point out dozens of such intersections in my NYC neighborhood where streets cross at angles not 90 degrees.
Worse - imagine you're an FBI field agent, and your "kick in the front door" operation turned into a "SS agents and FBI agents shooting each other" train wreck - because there was a Secret Service protection detail on the other side of that door, and an agent or few got a very fast judgement call wrong, in the heat of the moment.
Or similar, with some VIP who's got trigger-happy private security - because he knows that (say) Mr. Putin would much prefer that he was dead.
This is a risk that is taken in every "kick in the front door" operation. The people inside generally have right to self-defense and may start shooting. So it's not an excuse to not do it in a certain neighborhood.
Ah...here in the U.S., the consequences for law enforcement agents who gun down innocent homeowners, who were only exercising their rights...those consequences are generally rather mild. Federal agents gunning down each other would have far worse career consequences for the agent who made the "kick in the door" decision.
It’s moot in practice. The people inside the house are caught off guard while the people kicking down the door are well trained, staffed, and practiced. Their zero injury success rate is impressive.
He's pointing out that people in the neighbourhood are politically influent, that's why they are treated that way, not because they are rich. Which I did not get even after reading it. I'm thankful he pointed it out
>What neighborhoods are there where rich people reside who have no more social or political influence than people living in The Projects?
Compared to this one? Nearly all of them. The neighborhoods in Mountain View are filled with affluent people that have no connection to federal politicians and no influence over the FBI at all.
Exactly. Surely wealthier people have more political influence all else equal. But busting down the door of a wealthy person in Mountain View is pretty unlikely to get anyone fired at the FBI. Go ahead, shoot their dog for good measure-- no problem.
Diplomats and senior government officials have more political influence than their wealth would normally provide.
The highest paid government employees earn around $400k [1], foreign diplomats probably earn considerably less (e.g. £150k for the UK's [former] representative to the EU [2], which is the highest-paid ambassador position) but have perks like paid-for private school for children and tax exemptions.
An FBI director makes less than 200k, and will be very politically connected and influential; an engineer making that much probably has as much political influence as people living in the projects.
Money can buy political influence, but that's beyond the reach of lower echelon of wealthy.
Not only that, but the FBI director is appointed by the President, which means the President knows who they are and personally wanted them to do that job (or at least the President's trusted staff recommended them).
The same is going to be true of a lot of people living in Kalorama - they're on "personally know the President" level of political influence or they work directly for someone who does.
It's the neighborhood where Obama lived after his term ended. It's where Ivanka Trump and Jared Kuschner lived during Trump's presidency. That kind of thing.
It's a little different than a standard affluent neighborhood of doctors and lawyers and executives that you might find in any random city in the US.
I understand that you're saying that rich people usually have political influence everywhere, but I believe the only rich people that have direct jobs in Washington, DC are the ones living in DC. The slumlord that went to high school with the mayor isn't the same as the white house official who is employed by the FBI director (hypothetically speaking).
Money is power. That is a truism everybody is aware off. But Liberalism is fundamentally incoherent if that were true. So people have been deluded into forgetting this simple basic fact.
The police exist to protect the property of the wealthy. Of course they have more power than people who make similar money. They have been granted that power by much wealthier, more powerful people. And it is conditional on fulfilling their role.
The median salary for cops in this state is $105k a year. The median salary for software engineers in this state is $89k. Sheriffs make much more than your median cop does.
I think the general point raised by GP stands up pretty well. Even if sheriffs make a little more than devs in some states, it's not that extra bit of money that gives them a lot more political power.
But just for another data point, in California the average salary for a software developer is $139K, while the average for sheriffs is $28/hour.
We could keep pulling up relative salaries from different sources for different states all day, but it wouldn't shed much light on the basic claim that sheriffs tend to have political influence out of proportion to their salaries.
They briefly mention it, but quickly move on to "the FBI doesn't knock down rich people's doors". In this case it's more likely these particular rich people (i.e. well-connected people in the US government) than a blanket policy of "don't knock down doors in affluent neighborhoods".
Not in the DC area, but in plenty of other cities sure.
It's not that they're particularly rich, as far as rich people go, it's that the neighbor is like, the chief of staff for the Senator who's in charge of the committee that sets the FBI's budget. Imagine you're a low to mid level employee of a company, and you go do something that makes all of the CEO's friends, business partners, and investors pissed off at him. Do you think that's going to be good for you?
Sure, plenty of rich people choose not to cultivate political connections.
After all, maybe I make $300k a year and think our mayor is, by the standards of politicians, one of the good ones; and getting invited to fundraising dinners and charity galas and rubbing shoulders with influential people makes me feel important and successful. So maybe I'll donate a few thousand dollars every election cycle.
On the other hand, maybe you make $300k a year but think political donations are a grubby embarrassment; that fundraising events are full of fools, the stuck-up and the self-important; and that the two parties produce policies that are barely worthy of your vote, let alone your money. So you don't donate anything.
Presumably if they avoided kicking down doors in a rich part of Dallas Texas or something. This is on that upper 0.01% of politically connected areas at the national/international level and perhaps top 1% of wealthy areas. Describing it as a wealthy area isn’t wrong, but that not why it’s unusual.
It's also possible that knocking the door down is less effective in wealthy places. The reasons to knock a door down are things like flight risk, destruction of evidence, etc. You can mitigate the flight risk more easily if the property has gardens around it, and knocking the door down might make it easier to destroy evidence because an FBI team would take much longer to sweep a big house.
Obviously I don't know anything about FBI tactics, but it's conceivable that they choose what to do based on experience of what works best instead of just applying the same strategy regardless of where the property is.
Other reasons to knock down doors include: it looks cool, you saw it on a TV show and wanted to try it, no one will punish you for knocking down poor people’s doors and shooting their dog, you’ve been wanting to try out that battering ram…
A lawyer in the article asks that very question. Many of their clients have had their front door bashed in without the FBI ever considering the aesthetics of that. If the FBI is concerned about such aesthetics, maybe it should extend that concern to all houses, and not just those in rich neighbourhoods.
I believe there's evidence that property damage in a neighbourhood can lead to more crime ("broken windows"), so avoiding visible property damage in vulnerable neighbourhoods actually sounds like a good idea.
At the same time, for a sense of justice and equality, it can also be important for people to see that rich people are held accountable for their crimes just like poor people are. So maybe they should only bash in doors in rich neighbourhoods and not in poor neighbourhoods.
Or perhaps the FBI should be congratulated here for having some respect for property that isn't theirs and it's the cops in literally every other case who should be castigated and punished.
I get why the outrage is here, but we seem to be in a race to the bottom. Instead of getting cops not to kick in front doors, make sure they do it to rich people too? Or maybe I've lost the plot.
"No Knock" usually implies that they don't announce that they are police before they kick the door down.
I'm not sure I could confidently say that a rich person is less likely to draw a gun when someone kicks their door down in the middle of the night.
Maybe they are more likely to have a panic room, or just long corridors that provide enough time for the situation to become clear before they have a gun held in their face by someone claiming to be the FBI.
I mean... let's be real... a rich person will answer the knock, follow the police peacefully to the police car, and the only thing they'll say and do is "i want my lawyer"
White collar criminals shredding documents and wiping hard drives is not unknown.
The purpose of a no knock raid is, in theory at least, to stop people destroying evidence. They only incidentally turn into shootouts, that's not what they're intended for.
In modern times.... with hard drive encryption by default, and mostly paperless work, any sort of criminal, who can afford a house like that, doesn't need to run into the office, and start the shredder, while the police are knocking on the door.
Wealthy people also do less violent crime, and use the many loopholes instead of directly stealing or doing other crime. Even if they get caught, they usually just get summoned to court by mail, and most of them don't need a swat team because they're not violent.
There was an interview with the Cops (tv show) producers, where they asked them why they show mostly black and poor white guys on the show, and not some white collar workers... and they said something along the lines of "get me a middle manager, that'll tear his shirt off and start fighting the police, and we'll record that"... Arrest of rich people usually go along the lines of the rich person saying "i want my lawyer" and pecefully following the police to the station.
The rich most of the time don't go to jail and if it's a different kind of jail.
So they don't fight the police because they know it would make jail time more likely.
If they would have the same jail risk as the poor they would fight and run like the poor.
Well, I mean, I think that _is_ kind of the point. Clearly breaking down doors willy-nilly is undesirable, and potentially dangerous, so they'd really want to be making the case that it is _necessary_. The claim by the police here that the overriding concern was the affluentness of the area would tend to undermine that.
> "I can tell you that is not protocol. The problem is there are two justice systems: 1 for poor people and minorities and 1 for rich people and generally white people. You see it when you are one of the few black agents. Everyone is not equal."
Wait, no ... Abou in arabic means "father of ...", so it's in a possessive construct. It needs the other word to make sense. The "ou" is just an approximation, other spellings include Abo, Abu, Aboo, Bou, Ba ...
Whole of North Africa is filled to the brim with Abou-xyz family names, even first names (Abu Madyan "Boumedienne" in Algeria for example) and also many many such names in the other parts of the arab world.
"Abou" is a pretty rarely used prefix in moroccan names in my experience. We don't really use Abou or Ibn in moroccan arabic. It's usually "ould", "bou", "ben", and in general last names are rarely derived from filial/familial links. When they are, the "abou" prefix just get blended like gp said into for example, Boumedienne. It almost never remains separate.
Tribal affiliation is more important (though it is true that Abou-x can be a reference to a tribe instead of a particular family) so you get names like Al Alaoui, Al Idrissi, Al Zitouni etc. To me Abou-Khatwa has more of a levant/gulf sound to it.
They say "1 [justice system] for poor people and minorities; and 1 for rich people and generally white people". In this case, this may have been about a rich person who happens not to be white (though they may well be - you're assuming a name implies a particular ethnicity, which is likely but not 100% certain).
Which we could falsify, if we could identify minorities who don't have this problem because they're generally wealthy, and recognizable groups of white people who do have this problem because they're dirt poor.
But how could we possibly do such a thing? Here, in the United States?
Guess we'll never know if the racist part is true or not!
Not necessarily, that's just prejudice. Literally.
The sad reality is that poor people and their neighborhoods are more closely scrutinized, small conduct violations are pursued with unjustifiable zeal and harmless behaviors are outright criminalized to facilitate targeting.
It's the definition of "systematic racism", and you - it pains me to say - are the target audience of those that institutionalize it.
So you are saying poor communities only commit more crimes because of the policing?
The "systematic racism" argument is so broad and unquantifiable and avoids so many other meaningful factors that can actually be addressed. It's a way for these communities to avoid confronting any internal problems they have - whether or not these were caused by historic racism, cycles of poverty, etc.
You should look into some stories of how criminals ended up becoming criminals. Present-day racism is rarely the cause.
What's actually disturbing is that more than 90% of the time this would be a "no knock" raid with paramiliterized police smashinng down the door, tossing in flash-bang grenades - the works. No knock should be reserved for extreme situations, not the norm.
Not knocking implies that you live there and have a right to utilize the residence which flies in the face of Amendment #3. The fact that they’re geared like the military, etc just makes this even more obvious to me.
Add to the fact that police will be stationed there over multiple days to investigate the domicile… sounds like quartering to me.
It sounds to me that the US Congress is the only body that can ban these atrocities nationwide. Is this true?
> Use of no-knock warrants has increased substantially over time. By one estimate, there were 1,500 annually in the early 1980s whereas by 2010 there were 60,000–70,000 no-knock or quick-knock raids conducted by local police annually, the majority of which were looking for marijuana.
> Currently, Florida, Oregon, Tennessee, and Virginia ban no-knock warrants; however, state-level bans do not affect federal law enforcement. Thirteen states have laws explicitly permitting no-knock warrants, and the remaining states issue them based on a judge's discretion.
The Supreme Court could rule that no-knock warrants are unconstitutional, but that's not going to happen with this court, so yes, practically speaking, it's on Congress.
I'm not from the USA, does the FBI usually throw in grenades when arresting people for insurance fraud? If not, then perhaps other lower-quality social-media websites such as Reddit/Twitter might be more receptive to your comments?
People screaming systemic racism in this thread because the FBI didn't knock down "Tarek Abou-Khatwa's" door, doubtfully read the article. If the system is racist than I can either guess they didn't read this or I imagine that they are implying the system is racist by protecting Arabic men.
Also this man committed insurance fraud, a non-violent crime with no history of violence so the need to catch them off guard before they can begin a shoot out with law enforcement was simply not a requisite. If he was selling illegal drugs and hoarding cash that required him to have fire arms and defend against possible home intruders trying to rob his black-market products/cash than this story would be different, and then the 'systemic racism' people could race bait the story, fortunately not the case, unfortunately the comments persist.
The article says the person raising the issue didn't think they were doing Abou-Khatwa a favor per se, but rather protecting the aesthetics of a tawny, mostly white neighborhood.
> It's not clear whether the FBI agents who searched Abou-Khatwa's house were doing him a favor by eschewing a front-door entry. The agent's testimony makes it sound as if the main concern was the impact that knocking down Abou-Khatwa's front door would have on his wealthy neighbors.
I definitely did. And none of what you pasted has to do with race or is for certain. It is a single agents testimony and has to do with the fact it's a neighborhood full of wealthy politicians and nothing to do with race or systemic racism at all.
My original point was also that if they had performed a no-knock raid on this minority in an affluent area it would be a sign of 'systemic racism' to people who are race baiting. To elaborate further, law enforcement is now in a kafka-esque story of having to figure out the wealth of the suspect, racial demographics of the neighborhood, and race of suspect and his crimes before performing a warrant to decipher the level of force that is allowed and will regardless be the villain according to vocal minorities and journalists. Truly progress.
The FBI absolutely deserves all of the flak they're getting, but I think it's somewhat misdirected. It seems that a lot of folks believe the FBI should have knocked down the door. I'd argue the opposite - I'd prefer they gave people in poor neighborhoods the same level of respect that they showed this time. If the normal policy was to prefer to avoid property damage, then this situation would have just been business as usual and there wouldn't be any outrage.
Lets say law enforcement was given the task to examine the affairs of 100, randomly selected, poor/medium income households and 100, randomly selected, very wealthy households.
Statistically, where would they find the most amount of criminal activity?
Has any similar research been done, and would you care to share the data?
Assuming for a second that the question was asked with legitimate intent: That's the line of reasoning that gets a lot of innocent people treated very very badly based on their socioeconomic status, color of their skin, religion, you name it.
Think of it this way: In 1,000,000 people of race blue, the crime rate is 0.01%. So of those million people: 10 are criminals. In 1,000,000 people of race purple, the crime rate is 0.03%. So 30 are criminals.
All kinds of horrible sounding statistics here: purple people are 3x more likely to be criminal. Purple people neighborhoods have 3x more crime. Purple people 3x more likely to be murderer, drug user, etc.
All of that misleads about the situation: for the most part both purple and blue people are law abiding and any given person you talk to is likely not a criminal.
Now there is a second order problem. (The one that the article is referencing). The truth is that among blue and purple the rate of criminals is much higher. Pretend it's +0.3 for each. So 0.04 and 0.06. But the enforcement of laws at each point in the system are subject to discretion of the enforcer. Does the cop pull you over? Does the cop let you off? Does the prosecutor indict? Does the system give you bail?
Because of focus on "where would they find the most amount of criminal activity?" we are now creating a self fulfilling prophecy where laws are selectively more greatly enforced against purple.
Of course the question was asked with legitimate intent. And because of the issues you raised, that is the reason why the FBI should have in this case knocked that door.
What do you mean by "find the most amount of criminal activity"? Is this about criminal activity that can be easily found? Is it about criminal activity that happens in the household? Would tax evasion qualify as criminal activity? How about minor building code violations? Labor law violations?
Well, then I'd bet that rich people commit many times more offenses, but that medium-to-low income people would have many times more offenses that can actually be found by searching their homes, or even proven at all.
Your thought experiment has a core problem: what is or isn't crime is already a political discussion -- even before mentioning the perpetrators. The wealthy don't commit crimes; they dictate the laws.
For your thought experiment, you would have to have an universal definition of what's legal. While that may be hard to come by, I have it on good authority that one of it's most strident claims is: "Retaining more wealth than 80% of citizens is a capital offense."
How do you count "criminal activity"? Shoplifiting isn't as big a score as kidnapping and eating a neighbor. How long must someone be a habitual shoplifter to bring their score up to the level of someone cannibalized one person?
One consideration is that this type of data can't possibly answer the grandparents question, because we know that the rate of prosecution and conviction is rather unequal, so for any subpopulation "number of convicted criminals" can not be expected to be proportional to "number of crimes", if one of two groups has more convictions it does not imply that it actually has done more crime.
Fortunately we have other sources of data such as the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS asks victims of crimes for details about the perpetrators (amongst many other things). The data aren't perfectly comparable due to how the studies are performed, the way things are categorized, etc., but the NCVS largely corroborates the FBI crime reports. Namely, that Blacks and Hispanics commit a hugely disproportionate amount of crime compared to Whites and Asians.
I'm surprised by the reactions to your comment, because the first thing I thought was "obviously the very wealthy households, because of drugs present".
So in this case the agent says they went through the rear entrance instead of knocking down the front door
Is it common for poorer neighbourhood houses to have a rear entrance? Genuine question - I don't know what the typical USA poor neighbourhood house has
yeah if you have a house as opposed to an apartment you probably have a rear door, and even lots of apartments have other ways of getting out than the door depending on lots of factors.
No, a DC Circuit Judge is shocked to learn that an FBI agent was explicitly stating that they were treating residents of an affluent neighborhood differently.
Well if the suspect was wrongly accused, they'd have to reimburse the damages. Does the FBI have a budget for such things? Does it involve extra paperwork if it passes a certain threshold? Is the issue here profiling of the demographic or the risk ( in terms of cost ).
They should be at risk of losing their jobs for poor behaviour like this (and if they senior figures within the police forces don't deal with it, then they should be at risk of losing their jobs).
I agree in general, although I'm not sure criminal prosecution would be worthwhile/appropriate for breaking a door down. For more serious crimes absolutely.
I think they should experience the MORE legal risk for a trespass and property damage that I do. You seem to be arguing that they should still have qualified immunity, but maybe not so much of it, if I'm understanding?
I guess I feel like there are pretty much no circumstances in which I would need to break down a door. Whereas police officers are likely to find themselves in circumstances where breaking down a door is legitimately the right thing to do quite a bit more often. So perhaps some allowance for that is merited.
I'd like to live in a world where lawsuits aren't necessary to achieve justice, except in extreme cases.
Ok, so let's say there is a circumstance and a process by which they obtain justification from a judge, in the form of a warrant.
Then they execute the warrant on the wrong address.
Why should a cop enjoy immunity for an unjustified felony trespass and property destruction just because they were justified at another address? That's the kind of problem we have now. It's not that cops can't get a warrant for what they do. It's that they are not punished for the stuff they do without a warrant, that you and I would (and rightly should) be punished for.
Police pension funds should be the source of all police misconduct payments. The older guys would _immediately_ weed out the bad apples when it starts hurting their own wallet badly enough.
I highly doubt there'd be any immediate weeding out, but it would begin to restore some accountability and make it less police vs the world and more about police vs incompetent/corrupt police.
> Well if the suspect was wrongly accused, they'd have to reimburse the damages.
Do they? I'm honestly asking, but I would be surprised if most of the time the police (or any 3 letter agency) reimbursed victims for their negligence.
maybe it's a grammatical issue here, maybe it means if the subject was wrongly accused they (the subject) would have to reimburse the damages in which case, yeah that's how it works in real life.
Law enforcement (to include the FBI) mistakenly search the wrong address all the time, and frequently kill animals and people. Despite the fact that they are literally breaking into people’s homes unlawfully and often shooting them to death for no reason, there are basically no consequences to any LEOs involved.
Yeah, I forgot I was on HN. I keep forgetting how many people here have extreme difficulty detecting subtle sarcasm. Even a casual perusal of my comments would have uncovered that I have a, probably unhealthy, distrust of most things government.
Lots of our readers would be agreeing with him if the case in question was someone with an FFL side gig getting their door kicked in for selling stuff that threads the needle of legality or some low margin small business owner getting his door kicked in over dodged taxes.
But because it's white collar fraud, the readers can empathize.
And now we get to it, but people are more concerned about pro-nouns and fighting over hurt feelings among themselves and other groups to realise the problem here.
Aside from the observation that the rich class is made up of mostly white people the problem is 1 rule for them 1 rule for the rest. Look at the lockdown parties in the UKs political capital whilst idiots were fighting over face-masks in shops.
I applaud the FBI for being raked through the mud for this, they bloomin well deserve this. They will no-doubt counter with the cost of restoring a building and public money as if often the get-out.
Either stand-up/speak-out to all of the oppression or don't, picking and choosing is just enabling fighting amongst those who are also being trodden on.
The constant outrage around pronouns, systemic racism, and others is specifically engineered and pushed forward to hide the rich vs poor problematic and keep people busy and with the feeling that they are fighting the system.
Sidenote is doors are really soft in US. Over here armored doors are a thing and they would basically need explosives or just demolish the reinforced concrete wall. Or just call the lockpickinglawyer
Struggling to find something worth discussing in this article: my takeaway is that we can preserve the life and property of our neighbor by making our homes look nicer. :)
This principle plays out in small ways, too. Be diligent about picking up trash in your neighborhood and over time, the rate of littering will decrease. Park carefully on your curb and fewer will park haphazardly or on the wrong side. And so on.
Nah. No one gives a shit about a nice suburb in Dallas. I’ve seen feds execute warrants in very nice neighborhoods. The FBI canceled because the neighborhood was a nice one in DC, where people with external influence live.
I don’t live in Dallas so I’ll take your word for it. When you and your neighbors get together, does it seem hopeless or are there any other strategies being tried to prevent destructive raids?
What specific document or witness mentions “affluent neighborhood”? Without that information, this article is about a judge making an political statement.
People with money and power have it better. Yes, clear, thanks for yet another confirmation.
This is why I could never enjoy NYC. As a normal middle class dude you always feel everywhere that you are a nothing: no fame/no power/no money = people are rude, aggressive, hostile to you. I never felt that in London, which is a quite comparable city to NYC. I felt welcome in most places despite not being rich or famous.
NYC as assertive, that's just the way it is. And most rich and famous people are not identifiable as such.
This is a non-story. If you don't have gang relations, no criminal record, no violence, no gun ownership ... there's no reason for the cops to bang down the door.
That said, I think cops are too aggressive in general about this.
That also said - the cops do have a policy of 'bang down the door' because I think it's actually safer for the cops (I loathe to find that data sorry).
So, like everything, it's complicated.
Definitely policing, like everything else has to be 1) 'smart' i.e. materially proportional, use force where required and 2) we have to accept at least some wiggle room. No matter what, the cops will be wrong some time.
So, like everything, we have to be smart about it.
We could start by prohibiting IQ caps enforced by police departments.
No, really, they went to court to ensure they could continue to refuse candidates who exceed their own intelligence or any other arbitrary intelligence limit they want to enforce.
I've lived in NYC for some years, I don't think people are as rude or aggressive as the stereotype goes. If anything, it's "friendlier" in the sense of it being easier/more normal to just talk to random people.
It is expensive AF though, so yeah, depending on how one defines "middle class", living here could be really suboptimal.
In the Soviet Union the high level apparatchiks lived in better housing, away from the common people.
There will always be elite people. At least in capitalism you become rich by providing value to other people. In socialism you become elite by stealing from your comrades and forcefully eliminating the competition.
It's a common refrain that people get rich by providing value to others, and I used to think that way as well.
Unfortunately I don't think it really stands scrutiny.
First of all, there's no proper idea of what value is. It's a super deep conversation so I'll just leave that headline for now.
Second, even without a clear explanation of what value is, we can distinguish between value created and value captured. You can easily come up with cases where multiple people have done more or less the same thing but one guy gets more out of it than others. Is that the system we want?
Third, even without an explanation of what value is, we can see that there are people who provide no value but get paid a heck of a lot. Heirs, scam artists of various sorts. Not just straight give-you-nothing for something thieves, but also plenty of way overpaid people who live in the space between totally honest trading and totally dishonest thievery.
Value is a self defining concept. It's what an individual want.
The value of a society is the weighted sum of values based on individual power.
Amazon is creating a lot of small value to a lot of people by delivering goods next day.
People on wall street are creating a lot of value for wealthy and powerful people.
An engineer can automate a lot of value creation that was previously done by a large number of people, allowing companies to have a shot at making a lot of money, hence why they're paid more.
Some of those powerful and wealthy people got rich by providing value, some of them got rich by exploiting the government's centralised power, its corruption and the possibility of stealing value from all the taxpayers.
A scam is a crime on par with stealing or charging taxes. Stealing doesn't create value, it just transfer wealth.
Value isn’t what people want. People want drinking water more than just about anything else, but that’s cheap to provide so the cost stays low. Gold on the other hand is rarely something people consider or want, but it’s rare therefore it has high material value.
Value of everything, including money, is subjective and situational.
For a "win-win" transaction (which is the case if everyone is free to choose) you need:
(Value to buyer) > (value of sale price to buyer)
And:
(Value of Sale price to seller) > (Cost to the seller)
If I buy a computer for $1000, the computer is worth more to me than the $1000. To the seller, the $1000 is worth more to them than the computer. Value has been created for both parties.
That’s extremely oversimplified and irrelevant to my point. Expectations of being able to pay less impacts what people are willing to pay for something.
In a transaction, Value defined for the buyer based on the expectation of personal utility and a seller based on their expectation of the market and their personal utility. The actual cost and actual value to buyer are largely irrelevant.
Basically, buyers lack complete information so they will make purchases where (Value to buyer) < (value of sale price to buyer) etc, and of course sellers have the same issue.
the price of water isn't really subject to market forces though; it's usually provided by a regulated utility or directly by the government. based on the existence of lawns in arid places, I'd argue water is mispriced. in this particular case, it seems better than the alternative where poor people can't afford drinking water.
Perfect is the enemy of good, we wan't a system we can change and improve, communism failed because of the great stagnation the leaders in change had no interest in change or improving and the workers underneath them had no means to affect change.
Worker parties offer the optics of democracy that the workers have a say in their work but in reality that didn't happen the workers worked for their boss or starved. Under capitalism you have the same options work or starve but you also get a third option, you can compete against your boss it was ultimately this competition that allowed capitalism to change and improve where communism stagnated.
Does capitalism guarantee success 100% of the time? nope, but it does provide a mechanism to affect change from the bottom up, other systems don't do that.
While I agree with the Soviet part (or any political system for that matter) I doubt the pro capitalist generalization would stand to scrutiny:
> At least in capitalism you become rich by providing value to other people.
One could easily find examples that counter these points. I doubt pyramid schemes (think Madoff's schemes) or crypto scams are the only counter-examples possible.
These more often than not come from an imbalance of information. People (or the market) could make better decisions with all information being accessible at the time of the decision. But all too often one side has more information than the other. Giving this side an edge.
> In socialism you become elite by stealing from your comrades and forcefully eliminating the competition.
In capitalism it is basically the same as long as you can get away with it. I know it isn't a popular opinion, but without regulation capitalism is in now way better than other systems.
Their excesses would all need to be reigned in. Because no unregulated system would be acting in the common good. The system may be organized in a way to slightly enable more or less perdonsl freedom. Or more or less societal freedom. But in the end - for average Joe - uncontrolled capitalism boils down to the working and living conditions of the early industrialisation or (in case of socialism) towards the living and working conditions of late soviet times.
It can be trivially shown to be not true by considering that some people are a toxic drain on a company, costing them immense amounts of money, torpedoing productivity, ruining morale and yet continue to draw a salary for years and years.
> One could easily find examples that counter these points. I doubt pyramid schemes (think Madoff's schemes) or crypto scams are the only counter-examples possible.
it would be more convincing if you could come up with counterexamples that aren't illegal.
Yes, the point of capitalism is that people can do that, but shouldn't. And it should work in tandem with whatever social system that's set up, (justice, laws, morals, ethics, etc)
Pyramid schemes steal a great amount of wealth, and should be regulated. Regulated capitalism is the good thing. The thing is, pyramid schemes aren't run by the state (or shouldn't be) and you don't have a gun to your head forcing you to participate.
I almost feel like "unregulated capitalism" is just a straw man argument that others get tricked into trying to defend.
> Yes, the point of capitalism is that people can do that, but shouldn't.
The "shouldn't" isn't very relevant here though. People shouldn't do that under a communist system either, and yet it happens under both.
> I almost feel like "unregulated capitalism" is just a straw man argument that others get tricked into trying to defend.
I wish it was a strawman, unfortunately libertarians who promote this kind of capitalism (which to be clear isn't all libertarians) are a prominent political group whose members include many elected officials!
In capitalism the default is freedom and decentralization. So people can choose to act immorally and that’s a trade off we accept as a price of freedom. We set up a criminal justice system to fix that bug and set monetary incentives in a way that encourages productive economic activity over exploitive. Finding some bad actors does not disregard the entire system, especially not one that was ultimately convicted and died in prison.
I argue there is no need for regulation and we just need pure capitalism.
Without a government, companies made of people with guns would emerge punishing scammers and criminals in general, advising companies and reputation systems would emerge protecting people from scams.
Due to the nature of entrepreneurship, all these companies could be held in check by competitors. Without regulation slowing down new competitors, if a cartel emerges, there would be a great incentive for a better alternative coming up and making money.
You may argue the systems of companies providing these services would make a sort of government - and you would be right. It would just be more decentralised and therefore there would be less space for corruption.
You also wouldn't force people to pay you a part of their profit or they go to jail and you wouldn't force people to avoid certain substances or limit what activities thay may be doing.
You can at best say: "If you don't pay a protecion agency, you won't have protection against criminals / foreign invaders", "You may take this drug but this recommendation company suggest it's bad for you".
I'd rather live in a free society, a society where I'm free to even damage myself, than in the regulated prison we live in today.
Everything we have seen of low regulation capitalism shows that quite quickly the market becomes dominated by one or, at best two-three huge players who can simply buy any competition that may seem to emerge. As business books will tell you, competition, in capitalism, is for losers. Winners are the ones that don't have competitors.
> In the Soviet Union the high level apparatchiks lived in better housing, away from the common people.
Tho, after USSR fell, inequality in Russia went up by a lot. And it gave rise to what are now oligarch - the mix of very powerful mafia and business with very little constraints on them at the time. And that situation made Russians appreciate Putin, going full circle back to authoritarianism and imperialism.
> At least in capitalism you become rich by providing value to other people.
You become rich by capturing value. Often times, as Silicon Valley and its investors like to remind the world, a lot of value is also being provided so it is indeed a win-win. But you don't become rich by providing value.
1. The purpose of many laws and regulations that support capitalism is to make it very difficult to capture value without creating it. (When compared to a world without these laws.)
2. It's generally much easier to capture value that you create than to capture value that others create.
The result is that there's a massive incentive to create value for others, and a great deal of rich people and organizations are creating value, even if it's not all of them.
IMO this is under-appreciated and taken for granted in the modern era, as if it couldn't be any other way.
> It's generally much easier to capture value that you create than to capture value that others create.
I think that's probably true in general, but that over the course of ~100 years of capitalism the edge cases where this isn't true have been exploited sufficiently that it's starting to become a big problem. The clearest illustration of this being real estate. There are a lot of people getting rich by doing nothing other than buying and holding onto to real estate, often at the expense of others being able to make use of that resource.
Arguably, every time something is bought in the physical world, it comes at the expense of others being able to make use of that resource, not just homes. So I wouldn't say this is relevant to what makes the housing market exploitative. For example, if I buy a standing desk, I've taken it off the market and you can't buy that exact desk I bought anymore, until I want it sell it.
And just like I use my desk most of the time, most property that's purchased is either lived in or rented out. Sure, some properties sit empty, but I think it's the vast minority, I'd guess < 15%. The owners don't get rich by merely holding. They have to actually sell before they make money, which means others are making use of the resource both before the sale (via renting) and at the point of the sale (via becoming the new owners).
Plus, many owners do create value via renovations, which makes the property better. But at the very least, you're on the hook as an owner to repair and maintain the quality of the property so it doesn't lose value. You're a steward. That's expensive, and it does create/preserve value. When it comes time to sell, the vast majority of the sale price is just recouping the original amount you paid, anyway.
Still, when we look at the profits on top of that, it is true that much of it doesn't come from people working to create value. Houses tend to appreciate in value due to demand outstripping supply, because more people are moving to (or being born into) a location than there are houses being built there. However, I wouldn't call this exploitation. When this dynamic is at hand, everyone sells their homes for a profit by default, no nefarious or exploitative deeds required. Even if you're buying up properties for the express purpose of selling them later, you're not selling them for any more than they would've eventually been sold by the people you bought from.
Sure, people are creating rich here without creating value, but they're not doing nefarious things. If there's any villain here, imo it's restricting the housing supply, which fucks with the market's ability to provide more supply and keep prices affordable.
IMO there are better examples of nefarious things happening under capitalism. Usually they're monopolistic and anti-competitive: unfair practices to limit supply, to keep competitors out of the market, etc. Buying up patents (artificial monopolies) and then jacking up prices on a drug, for example. Non-competes or unethical collusion between companies to not hire each other's employees. Stuff like that. But it's worth noting that all of this is decided uncapitalistic, because it's anti-competitive. So even these aren't great examples.
I'd say the worst aspects of capitalism that are actually capitalistic are…
1. Creating negative public externalities, e.g. polluting rivers to create your products, then reaping the profits privately but making the costs public. There is always incentive to minimize costs in a capitalistic system, and so it's a natural challenge for governments to identify these externalities and make companies pay.
2. Accruing too much power as a result of having money. Basically, the influence of money on the political and legal system. More money should get you a better life in terms of access to more goods and services, but it shouldn't allow you to lobby for laws, win elections, or win court cases. This is a hard problem to solve, however, and therefore a natural disadvantage of capitalism.
3. Serving the rich. It generally pays more to create products and services for rich people, because they have more money to spend. That's just how the physics of capitalism work out. The result is that poor neighborhoods, cities, and countries have worse infrastructure, fewer stores, etc. Innovative companies simply have less incentive to sell there. I think this is intrinsic to capitalism, and it's a problem, because it means the rich get richer.
Sure. But then you have to argue that John T. Walton provided $18 billion of value to his parents.
And if Sam Walton were taxed at 100% for all wealth over $100 million, so John Walton were only worth $20 million, then would John have provided less value to his parents?
My parents spend several $100,000 on my upbringing. Does that represent my value to my parents?
The children from the world's poorest families also provide value to their parents.
From this I conclude that "obvious value" of evolution and capitalism's "monetary value" aren't the same.
The current circumstances are from seibelj's comment "you become rich by providing value to other people", where "value" is specifically something which provides economic wealth.
Gaining wealth by being the child of a wealthy person is not something specific to capitalism, certainly happened in feudal monarchies, and almost certainly also happened with the children of high level apparatchiks in the Soviet Union.
That's obviously not how property rights work. Sam Walton was entitled to bequeath his wealth to his heirs however he saw fit, subject to any applicable estate and inheritance taxes.
Inheritance is incredibly over-represented as a source of wealth, among the wealthy. Even those who "earned" it rarely come from a poor background. If you don't see this yourself, reach out to a professor of sociology for a frank chat.
On death, what right do you retain to that property? Under a more capitalist system, your children could not inherit, and instead have to start from the bottom like everyone else.
Suppose you have more money than you need and want to be charitable, so you set up some terms under which you'll give some away. A scholarship fund, a shelter, whatever you like. You can set whatever criteria you want, because it's your money.
But then you could also use the criteria "the people who get this free tuition money and housing are your kids." Being able to do this, benefit their kids, is a primary motivator for parents to work to make more money.
And if you can give away the money to anyone you want three seconds before death, it makes no sense to say you can't sign a piece of paper to that effect at any point prior either.
That’s not capitalism. That’s some kind of meritocratic (anti?-)utopia. Capitalism is when you can do with your property whatever you want including giving it away to whomever you want.
If you’re dead you don’t get to make decisions anymore. These sorts of arguments would have more weight if the parents actually transferred the wealth earlier than their death or shortly before it, but they want to retain all the power that comes with that capital and then pick the winners in the next round of the economy by bequeathing it to their children.
If we want any sort of system even approaching a meritocracy then you should not be able to will away such vast estates that people can control entire companies or never work again a day in their life solely off the inherited assets
if the "after death" silliness is your main concern here, that seems easy to satisfy with the abstraction of a will or trust that is set up before death.
personally I find it pretty reasonable that I get to decide who gets the lion's share of assets I have worked for my whole life. at the same time, it seems bad when enormous amounts of wealth are passed down over generations (and having known a couple people in this situation, it seems bad for them too). the question is, where do we strike the balance?
You might find it reasonable, but it’s not meritocratic at all to will it away to someone else. You also are effecting society in a negative fashion after you are dead and gone and no longer have to deal with the consequences. Setting up a trust where the money removed before you’re at end of life seems far more acceptable because you are willingly giving up the power associated with the money, but deciding to maintain sole control over that power until you’re done with it and then passing it on to your chosen winner afterwards is antithetical to capitalism working correctly.
That's not how that works. It's just the opposite.
If someone doesn't expect to live much longer but can still provide a significant amount of value to others, their incentive to do it is that they can decide how the money gets used, i.e. they can give it to their kids or otherwise choose who gets it after they're not around to use it anymore.
Take that away and you take away their incentive to earn money they soon won't be alive to use themselves, which is a huge distortion.
Meanwhile people starting off with money allows them to use it, but that doesn't imply inefficiency. They don't lack the incentive to use it for something productive.
You can label anything "a mere change in market equilibrium", apparently even someone inheriting more money than the GDP of an average sized country ...
It does have something to do with inheritance. Inheritance directly causes wealth inequality because some people inherit money while others don't (and the amounts inherited vary widely). It's not the only mechanisms which causes wealth inequality, but it is one of them.
Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production vs collective ownership, which is communism. Everything else is a consequence. I can think of state owned companies competing on price or privately owned companies colluding in a cartel to keep prices up or down, basically with no market, or any other combination. Even China's market way to socialism.
As much as I agree with your sentiment, I think you could just as easily quote from the first paragraph of the linked Wikipedia article to find a counter point to your (seemingly) rhetoric question:
> Walton cofounded the Children's Scholarship Fund, providing tuition scholarships for disadvantaged youth.
That's not worth $18.2tn, knowing charity it was probably worth a few tens of millions, at best, and was used for tax write-offs.
Plus knowing rich people, he evaded/avoided taxes (probably hundreds of millions, if not billions) that regular Joes making $36.4k a year would never be able to.
I'm sure plenty of Soviets became rich by providing value to other people today. The main way to become elite regardless is to be born that way, capitalism or not. The rest is noise
I get so tired of comments like this, such low effort brain drainage..
Yes yes we know the glorious Soviet society that was the pinnacle of fair and just.
It's almost like justice and rule of law are separated from the economy and wealth. "But it is not so" - well it should be so, don't ask for further coupling of economic systems.
For law and justice to be fair, liberties need to be given. Not taken.
> Yes yes we know the glorious Soviet society that was the pinnacle of fair and just.
The opposite of end-stage capitalism isn't Stalinism. It's very American to view the opposite of "capitalism" as the Soviet Union, but the truth is there's a whole spectrum in between socialism and capitalism, totalitarianism and libertarianism.
In my opinion this criticism is just as low-effort.
> It's almost like justice and rule of law are separated from the economy and wealth.
I respectfully disagree. Societies with less inequality tend to be more peaceful. Economic policy and social policy are very much intertwined.
> For law and justice to be fair, liberties need to be given. Not taken.
Law and justice is by definition the restriction of liberties to support a functioning society - not the giving of liberties. You begin with the full universe of liberties and law/order is all about choosing which ones are sacrificed by whom to optimize along a certain axis.
> Societies with less inequality tend to be more peaceful.
Yes absolutely, but that's not what we're talking about. We are talking about "justice".
> Economic policy and social policy are very much intertwined.
Cause and effect, yes, but economic policies don't (or shouldn't) affect the notion of justice. Laws should not be written as "if you own X amount or produce y units" as they were in the Soviet union.
>Law and justice is by definition the restriction of liberties
I don't agree but I can see the argument. If I were to never throw rubbish over my neighbours fence, then whether or not the law is there doesn't affect my liberty. Neither if there was a law forbidding the dumping of oils in the water supply.. this isn't a "restriction of liberties" but rather the guarantee of protection to the water: or I would put it as "giving liberty to me and others of the quality of the water"
I understand that this is all subjective and slippery arguments so I'll digress from that.. what else are we meant to do in HN comment sections..
But I do hold to my judgement of "little to no brain use" for anyone who tries to support communism or similar measures.
People need to be free, free to succeed (and unfortunately, free to fail).
Laws and justice should protect people from each other, not enforce someone's failure to understand mathematics or entropy.
But the rule of law does bend under the influence of capitalism, and saying so has nothing to do with communism.
And you mention freedom, but freedom is orthogonal to how economic production is managed. You can have a capitalist society with very little freedom (fascism) and you can have a communist society with lots of freedom (anarcho communism).
But we can also critique capitalism on its own, because the status quo is always worth criticizing, and that doesn’t automatically mean a person is talking about communism at all.
> We should start over, get rid of those parasites, move the capital to the center of the USA like Lebanon, KS out of the swamp.
The physical location of the capitol has been irrelevant since airplanes, cell phones, and the internet. The swamp is a metaphor, not a physical place.
That's not true. Significant amounts of lobbying and palm greasing happen in person, explicitly off of cell phones. It's not a coincidence that all of the companies that receive massive amounts of federal government money have headquarters around DC.
Yes, and if you move the capitol all of that moves with it. You literally admitted that those headquarters are located for the purpose of in-person meetings, not a love of DC. So unless the location you intend to move the capitol to is top secret, it's irrelevant.
I disagree. Move the capitol to the center of the country, put a lifetime ban on former elected officials lobbying, and that would get rid of a lot of corruption.
Of course it wasn't a swamp! That's a Republican talking point, feed it into a search engine all day, the search engine will tell you how dumb you are, it was never a swamp.
US aid is huge and vastly exceeds other countries. As a percentage of GDP or when divided by head of population, its rather less impressive than what other places achieve. I don’t think the budget will be balanced by further disadvantaging the disadvantaged. However reducing arms exports as a form of aid could help, but that gets complex fast. Does Israel need billions of dollars of arms? Ukraine? Couldn’t it all depend on some basic human rights being met?
Doesn’t matter. We should care more about people who are dying on the street (I have seen this firsthand), have seen this myself in Seattle and SF, and giving everyone healthcare before giving Ukraine or any other country aid.
This is something that both Democrats and Republicans seem to ignore because they want to pursue their own self-interested agendas.
> if one is distracted by the disproportionate cultural focus on racism.
Black senators and Congressmen complain that they are not treated equally as their white counterparts in the Capitol building by the Capitol police. These black politicians are literally upper class and yet they face these issues.
Yeah, that certainly sounds like an issue of race and not of class. I guess in racially homogenous societies wealthy people don’t get any preferential treatment by police in any way whatsoever.
But is it reasonable to derail every discussion about wealth into a discussion about race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, height, diet and god knows what else merely because those things are linked in some way?
I agree that a lot (though not all) of the issues people want to pin on race are really just about class, but would you deny that there is at least a correlation between race and class?
Or that law enforcement has a bad racism problem? To be clear, I don't think most cops are racist or bad (in our current culturo-political moment, I probably err on the more pro-cop side), but it's certainly a problem that hasn't been given any real thought or attention by most police departments.
? The FBI have information about the people they are nabbing and already have a risk profile.
If the people the are grabbing have zero history of violence, no gun ownership, no gang association, there's no reason to smash down the door.
Even judging by neighbourhood:
It's probably unfair but my bet is diplomats don't generally get into shootouts with the cops.
They could probably safely do the same in middle class neighbourhoods as well.
It's not a nice statement about equity, rather my belief that the 'risk' to police is probably entirely from specific kinds of problem areas which are probably poor.
If you look at a map of violent crime in cities, the delineations are pretty clear.
Some neighbourhoods have almost zero violent crime, two blocks down, it's Caracas.
'Zip Code' profiling might actually be just, but I don't see why they could not do it on a case to case basis.
There is a perfectly valid reason for law enforcement to break down a door that does not have anything to do with risk profile: they have a search warrant and no one with a key is available to open a door (like in this article).
To summarize: the Minneapolis PD was executing a no-knock warrant in a homicide investigation. Locke was not the target of the warrant but was sleeping on the couch. He was licensed for the firearm and it was completely legal. When startled awake, he reached for his gun (natural reaction) and the police shot and killed him.
You'd think the NRA would be all over this: a legal gun owner killed in his home by police? Nope [2]. I wonder why.
Let's also compare to Kyle Rittenhouse. Attorneys wanted to use the fact that one of his victims was a sex offender as a defense [3]. There are two possibilities here:
1. Rittenhouse didn't know of this, in which case it's immaterial; and
2. Rittenhouse knew, in which case this was a targeted killing (ie murder).
No one is arguing Rittenhouse knew. The whole point here is post facto justification. This is for the court of public opinion and to give the jury something to hang their hat on with an acquittal. That's it.
I bring this up because I want to highlight the different worlds people live in when it comes to law enforcement. Yet you can't bring the above up without some (predominantly white) people getting offended at the mere suggestion that the system is inherently racist.
Think about that.
[1]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/amir-lockes-death-prompts-ban-knoc...
[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/where-nra-gun-rights-group-slammed-...
[3]: https://www.kenoshanews.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/kyle...