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AkumaChef wrote:

SailorTralfamadore wrote:

To use your "little white lie" example -- the reason little white lies are characterized as such is they're seen as harmless, as benefitting the liar but not harming (or only very slightly but not meaningfully) the person they're being told to. If you can understand the concept of a "little white lie" you already believe that impact matters in terms of deciding when to lie. I'm simply saying we need to expand that a bit.

Little white lies may be "harmless" in and out of themselves, but when a person is known to tell them it undermines their credibility when it comes time for them to be on the witness stand.

I'm not arguing against this from a "hurt feelings" perspective. In my opinion "feelings" aren't even relevant to the discussion. I'm saying that a person's moral high ground to fight predjudice is entirely undermined unless they fight predjudice in all it forms, not just those which they happen to choose to support.

Dressing up "All Lives Matter" doesn't make it any less toothless or irrelevant.

No one is saying you have to trust the police. Trust is earned.

I'll add these two old sayings.

'What's good for the goose is good for the gander" and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".

If blanket statements over whole groups of people is acceptable, if its fits your purpose, then they are acceptable to all to make. "You can't have your cake and eat it too".

Not really. If you have specific reasons beyond "it suits my purpose" for why something is acceptable in one case and not in another, then that argument does not apply. And that's exactly what my and other people's posts have been doing, giving those arguments. You can disagree with those reasons, but the fact that they exist means it's not a slippery-slope situation.

After all, you can say that about anything. For example: "If you give a student an extension on a paper in one case then you have to be open to it in ALL cases!" No, I can listen to students' reasons for extensions and give it to the kid who was sick/had a family emergency, and not give it to the kid who was just procrastinating. The act of giving an extension does not automatically lead to a slippery slope, and neither does this.

You treat people how you want to be treated. It is quite that simple. You don't need paragraphs of explanation. That is all I need to say. Leaving this conversation at that.

Well, as I said in previous posts, I don't take it personally if someone makes a negative assumption about an aspect of my or a person I care about's identity if that assumption is frequently accurate. And I would never want anyone to compare that to more fundamental identities like my gender, race or sexuality.

So I am treating people as I would like to be treated. Wink

AkumaChef wrote:

Just a couple posts ago zaphdash wrote it was "good" if police departments were defunded and therefore couldn't afford to hire good recruits. I didn't see anything in there suggesting this should only apply to violent or racist cops. It was all cops. Should we be defunding Sheriff Chris Swanson? He didn't beat protestors. He joined them. Painting all police as violent racists is no different than painting all people of color as criminals and it just feeds the vicious cycle.

This is a false equivalency. "Police" is a profession that you voluntarily take up or leave. Race is [a fake social construct and] an immutable characteristic that can not be shed or hidden. I see that this has already been said, but it bears repeating, particularly since your only counterargument that I've seen in later posts is to persist in the false equivalency. "Prejudice" toward a group with voluntary membership is not the same as racism. For that matter, prejudice toward a dominant or powerful group is not the same as prejudice against a vulnerable population. When someone engages in "reverse racism" toward white people, for instance, it may reveal something about that person, and it might hurt the feelings of any specific white people it's directed toward, but it has no broader social ramifications because white people are fully in control of our society. Cops are authority figures with the power to legally detain or even kill you (and are frequently able to escape any repercussions even when they exercise that power illegally) -- they don't need our sympathy.

We should be defunding all cops, including Sheriff Chris Swanson, because the institution itself is rotten and cannot be salvaged, so any cops who are "good" should stop being cops. Cop defenders like to write off the Chauvins of the world as "a few bad apples" (someone invokes this saying a few posts later, even!), but that phrase in its entirety goes "a few bad apples spoil the bunch," and really nowhere is that more true than the police.

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Rioting does the same as it only reinforces racist beliefs in those who have them already.

Racism is not the fault of its victims.

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And how on earth are police agencies supposed to get better recruits with less money? That only makes the problem worse. When all you can afford to hire are the bottom of the barrel one can expect out of line behavior to get worse, not better.

If you think I want police departments "hiring the bottom of the barrel," I'm afraid you've misunderstood me. I don't want police departments hiring anybody.

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The violent, racist, and crooked cops absolutely need to go. Likewise for those who enable them. But the answer is not swinging the pendulum of prejudice to the opposite extreme and treating all police that way.

The cops who are neither violent/racist/crooked nor enablers of the same seem to be so few and far between that they make movies about them on the rare occasion that they come along.

Psycho 101 wrote:

On a personal note I would suggest some of you might want to watch your blanket statements. I am the son a police officer who also served 2 tours in Vietnam. I come from a family of military and police. This sort of behavior being displayed by far too many officers is not excusable. However, to say all cops are like this is just ignorant and insulting. There are a lot of cops out there who do take the motto of To protect and Serve very seriously. Unfortunately they are being lumped in with those who are not fit to wear the badge. There does need to be sweeping reform with police training and background checks however. My father himself protested to his department over several officers who were allowed to graduate due to their conduct and personal opinions/thoughts.

Full disclosure: my uncle was a cop for decades, and as far as I'm aware, one of the "good ones." I'm not unsympathetic to the impulse to view the police through the lens of the cops you personally know who you believe would never murder an unarmed black person or beat a peaceful protester. But this only serves to obscure the broader reality of the role the police actually play in our society. My uncle is a good guy, but the police as an institution are not. No matter how many good cops you personally know or are related to, it doesn't change the facts: that cops egregiously abuse their power all the time, up to and including killing people, and most often they get away with it because they are protected by other cops. However many "good cops" there are, it is clearly not enough to fix the problem. And to take statements against the police as a personal attack on you or your relatives comes across a little bit like trying to claim victimhood in a situation in which cops are decidedly not victims.

Thank you zaphdash. That's a better, more detailed version of what I was trying to say.

At the end of the day, we just can't treat "ACAB" as equivalent to stereotypes about race, gender, etc. and act like we are creating a welcoming environment here for marginalized people. Black people have good reason for being suspicious of anyone wearing the uniform, even some well-meaning cop you might personally know. (Because if they don't know him, they don't know he's well-meaning!) And I think if you're truly devoted to the reformation of an institution that you know has a systematic problem like that, you shouldn't actually be that bothered by those kinds of negative sweeping statements. Because you know they're coming from an understandable place.

Again, to me this is similar to how I don't take it personally when people assume that my minister stepdad is anti-gay. Christian religious leaders in the United States in general have stood against LGBTQ equality and the ones who do that also tend to act like they speak for all Christians. And I don't think LGBTQ people and religious minorities are required to go out of their way to find the "good ministers" like my stepdad. They're allowed to just be suspicious of a group that has hurt them until an individual has proven themselves otherwise. Our courts are innocent-until-proven-guilty, but individual people don't have to be -- especially when assuming the worst keeps them safe.

ATastySub wrote:

Dressing up "All Lives Matter" doesn't make it any less toothless or irrelevant.

You're right. I'm not sure what that has to do with my point though; please elaborate.

I'm saying that those people who lump all cops together as racist scumbags are committing the same error of prejudice as those racist cops who lump all POC together as drugged up criminals and this results in their own (very important) cause being undermined.

SailorTralfamadore wrote:

I've already argued why professions are different from say, prejudice against racial groups (and think that's obvious enough to not need to be stated). But the point I'm trying to make ultimately comes down to this question: Are black people or others who have been repeatedly the subject of police violence not allowed to make assumptions about them as a group, or about individual cops they don't know? Even if it's in order to protect their own safety?

No. Because one could just as easily replace "police" with "whatever minority happened to have robbed you".
I have been the victim of three assaults in my 41 years on earth. Every time the people involved were of a particular race other than mine. Am I to draw conclusions about that race from my experience? I say no, I am not.
I have also been the subject of religious discrimination. Well, lack-of-religion discrimination because I am atheist. Those discriminating against me were all of the same religion. Am I to draw conclusions about every adherent of that religion because of my experience? Again, I say no, I am not.
In my career I have a lot of interaction with union workers and my experience has indeed been that those employees were lazy clock watchers. Is it fair for me to characterize all union employees as that? Absolutely not; that is discriminatory, wrong, and I know it.

It's very easy to understand how and why people do this. We all discriminate in minor ways whether we know it or not. It's certainly human nature. But if we are to ask others to fix their problems our voices will be heard much louder when we are not making the same mistakes we are asking them to fix. I can't ask that people stop stereotyping me when they find out that I am atheist if I mentally file them away as lazy workers or likely to rob me. It's all the same game.

Black lives absolutely matter. But that message is lost if it's coming from someone painting all cops with the brush of violence and racism.

AkumaChef wrote:

No. Because one could just as easily replace "police" with "whatever minority happened to have robbed you".
I have been the victim of three assaults in my 41 years on earth. Every time the people involved were of a particular race other than mine. Am I to draw conclusions about that race from my experience? I say no, I am not.

First of all: seriously, dude?

Second of all...As I and others have said repeatedly:
1. Becoming a cop is a choice. Being a particular race is not a choice.
2. There's abundant evidence that cops as a group are prone to racist judgments of the people they police (in some cases, there's evidence that how cops are trained reinforces this) and are also guilty of higher rates of other forms of violence like domestic violence. There's no link between race and capacity for violence.

But perhaps most importantly, cops are given authority to commit certain kinds of violence on civilians that others cannot commit. The specific ways cops hurt black people aren't things they would experience in the same way from people who are not cops. This is not comparable to "I've been robbed by people of the same race" because people of other races are just as capable of robbing you in that way as anyone else. That's why suspicion of cops is warranted by minorities who are disproportionately targeted by then.

And this is why the power differential between people cannot be taken out of the equation like you want it to -- because again, it impacts what the consequences are if your judgment is wrong.

Anyway, I'm glad that you live the kind of lifestyle where you've apparently never had to make a negative snap judgment about someone you didn't know to protect your own safety. As a woman and an LGBT person, I cannot say the same. Most racial minorities can't either. That's why your examples are just not comparable.

ETA:

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I have also been the subject of religious discrimination. Well, lack-of-religion discrimination because I am atheist. Those discriminating against me were all of the same religion. Am I to draw conclusions about every adherent of that religion because of my experience? Again, I say no, I am not.

I'm also non-religious (agnostic), and I would say you have every right to be suspicious of a group of people who've repeatedly discriminated against you for your beliefs. It certainly is a thing that's made me more suspicious of fundamentalist Christians as a group. But also, atheists and agnostics are a relatively invisible religious minority. In the United States (which I'm assuming you're from or from a place where this is similar), while we do experience discrimination from the Christian majority, it tends not to be as violent or as impactful as that that visible religious minorities such as many Jews, Muslims, and Hindus face. (That plus the fact that atheists are disproportionately white -- religious discrimination in the United States always intersects with racism.) As someone from another group that fundamentalist Christians target in more impactful ways -- the LGBTQ community -- I just don't think anti-atheist discrimination is comparable. And so it's a lot easier for atheists/agnostics to be "understanding" than people who are possibly risking their lives by being openly Muslim or gay around the wrong fundamentalist Christian.

zaphdash wrote:

This is a false equivalency. "Police" is a profession that you voluntarily take up or leave. Race is [a fake social construct and] an immutable characteristic that can not be shed or hidden. I see that this has already been said, but it bears repeating, particularly since your only counterargument that I've seen in later posts is to persist in the false equivalency. "Prejudice" toward a group with voluntary membership is not the same as racism. For that matter, prejudice toward a dominant or powerful group is not the same as prejudice against a vulnerable population. When someone engages in "reverse racism" toward white people, for instance, it may reveal something about that person, and it might hurt the feelings of any specific white people it's directed toward, but it has no broader social ramifications because white people are fully in control of our society. Cops are authority figures with the power to legally detain or even kill you (and are frequently able to escape any repercussions even when they exercise that power illegally) -- they don't need our sympathy.

I don't think you understood my point here. Whether one characteristic is voluntary and the other is immutable isn't relevant. Whether the target is in power or is vulnerable doesn't matter either. The point is when you make inaccurate statements your own credibility is undermined. This isn't about "sympathy" for police. It's about avoiding hypocrisy to have better moral high ground to make your point. You're absolutely right that the police don't need our sympathy. But, if the problems with the police are to be fixed--as they desperately need to be--our voices will be heard better if we are not guilty of the same sort of behavior as they are. We don't want to argue from the same level as police, we want to argue from a moral high ground so the problems can be solved and no more black men get murdered by some power-tripping scumbag cop.

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We should be defunding all cops, including Sheriff Chris Swanson, because the institution itself is rotten and cannot be salvaged, so any cops who are "good" should stop being cops. Cop defenders like to write off the Chauvins of the world as "a few bad apples" (someone invokes this saying a few posts later, even!), but that phrase in its entirety goes "a few bad apples spoil the bunch," and really nowhere is that more true than the police.

That "someone" was me.
I'm curious why you advocate eliminating the entire institution rather than preventing the bad apples from spoiling the rest. We haven't gotten to the point where the whole bunch is spoiled as Swanson (and many others) proved.

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Racism is not the fault of its victims.

It absolutely is not, and I hope that's not what you thought I was implying. The point is that we can fight racism more effectively if we do not give ammunition to our enemies.

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And how on earth are police agencies supposed to get better recruits with less money? That only makes the problem worse. When all you can afford to hire are the bottom of the barrel one can expect out of line behavior to get worse, not better.

If you think I want police departments "hiring the bottom of the barrel," I'm afraid you've misunderstood me. I don't want police departments hiring anybody.

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The cops who are neither violent/racist/crooked nor enablers of the same seem to be so few and far between that they make movies about them on the rare occasion that they come along.

I'm curious where your statistics come from. Care to share some numbers?

AkumaChef wrote:

Just a couple posts ago zaphdash wrote it was "good" if police departments were defunded and therefore couldn't afford to hire good recruits. I didn't see anything in there suggesting this should only apply to violent or racist cops. It was all cops. Should we be defunding Sheriff Chris Swanson? He didn't beat protestors. He joined them. Painting all police as violent racists is no different than painting all people of color as criminals and it just feeds the vicious cycle.

This is the same arguement my mother tried to use against me last night. I was very, very dissapointed in her. As Zaphdash said, it is a false equivalency. Race (and other "protected" statuses) is something you are born with. It is something you have no choice in.

Becoming a law enforcement officer is a choice. Working for a particular PD is a choice. It's not so much about "profession" but the organization you are a part of. People leave their employers all the time because they disagree with the decisions or policies of their employer. Law enforcement officers chose a profession that is well known to have significant ethical issues, those that join the PD made a further decision to join the generic branch of law enforcement that is most notorious for ethical problems.

So no, saying a police officer is complicit in the actions of his brotherhood is not the same as saying a black person is complicit in the actions of other black people. The first statement is about choice, the statement is racism.

-t

AkumaChef: Have you considered that maybe "accuracy is undermined" is not the primary concern of a lot of people you see making "prejudiced" statements against police? Maybe other things are more important to them in the moment they make these statements?

You're trying to make this about abstract ethical principles. Those are all very well and good, but people speaking out about non-abstract life-or-death situations often have other things that are more important to them. Your previous posts don't make it seem like you've been in a lot of those situations yourself, so perhaps it's worth stopping and listening to those who have.

Tempest wrote:

This is the same arguement my mother tried to use against me last night. I was very, very dissapointed in her. As Zaphdash said, it is a false equivalency. Race (and other "protected" statuses) is something you are born with. It is something you have no choice in.

Becoming a law enforcement officer is a choice. Working for a particular PD is a choice. It's not so much about "profession" but the organization you are a part of. People leave their employers all the time because they disagree with the decisions or policies of their employer. Law enforcement officers chose a profession that is well known to have significant ethical issues, those that join the PD made a further decision to join the generic branch of law enforcement that is most notorious for ethical problems.

So no, saying a police officer is complicit in the actions of his brotherhood is not the same as saying a black person is complicit in the actions of other black people. The first statement is about choice, the statement is racism.

-t

I feel that my point is being repeatedly, and consistently, misunderstood. It confuses me when you bring up "false equivalence" because it was never my point to equate the two at all. I am not arguing any sort of equivalence here and I am wondering why I keep being accused of it. Equivalence has nothing to do with my argument.

My point is simply the voices calling for the reform of police will be heard a lot louder if they themselves are not being prejudicial. Is the prejudice of the person calling for reform much smaller than the prejudice we have witnessed from the police against POC? Absolutely yes! I never meant to put them on the same level, and I hope that's not the conclusion people were getting from me. But, no matter how small, it still undermines the cause....and that's a bad thing, because the cause is a very important one that needs all the help it can get.

You're saying that what matters most is that these statements are all "assumptions" or "lies." And you're ignoring, downplaying and (yes, in some cases) even denying what makes them different. How is that not "drawing an equivalence?"

Last edited by Tempest on Fri Jun 05, 2020 5:20 pm; edited 1 time in total

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it was never my point to equate the two at all. I am not arguing any sort of equivalence here a

This is the exact excerpt where you argued equivalence:

AkumaChef wrote:

Painting all police as violent racists is no different than painting all people of color as criminals

.

Whatsmore, few people are painting "all police as violent racists." Most are holding all police responsible for the actions of the violent cops and racist cops they choose to work with.

Even the ACAB movement does't imply that every cop is a bad person. It says the institution is a bad one, and even the good people in that institution are part of a problem.

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My point is simply the voices calling for the reform of police will be heard a lot louder if they themselves are not being prejudicial.

Honestly, I don't think they've ever been heard louder than they are being heard today. Their movement is even being discussed on anime websites.

-t

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