FtttG
User ID: 1175
I'm sure plenty of cops do ignore "meaningless" non-physical threats of this nature, and end up with bullets in the sternum for their trouble. In Europe, if a person gets pulled over by the police and is informed that they're being placed under arrest, if the arrestee rolls their eyes and says "you're going to regret this", the likelihood that the person in question has a handgun in their glovebox is somewhere around zero. This simply isn't true of the US, in which there are more guns than people and four police officers get shot every five days.
When a police officer pulls you over, he has no idea whether you're a normal level-headed individual or a short-tempered belligerent asshole, and is making a series of judgement calls on a second-to-second basis. There's no way a statement like "you're going to regret this" doesn't push a cop into thinking you're more likely to be the latter, not the former.
Sure, in an ideal world you could bitch and grumble without giving the officer arresting you legitimate cause to worry if he's about to find himself in a life-or-death situation. But we don't live in an ideal world, and that isn't the fault of the cop arresting you: it's not as if he personally ratified the second amendment.
There's also the point, while the officer is making a series of split-second judgement calls about whether you're about to ruin his day, he's updating his priors using the posterior evidence of how you interact with him. The priors here are your demographic markers: a comment like "you're going to regret this" will be taken very differently if spoken by an Asian woman in Prada driving a Beamer vs. a black man in a tracksuit driving a beat-up Volvo. Is it "fair" that wealthy white people can bitch and moan while getting arrested without having handguns trained on them, while poor black people can't? Maybe not - but again, it's not the fault of the cop arresting you that certain demographics are overwhelmingly more likely to assault or murder police officers than others. (Hell, black American women are more likely to murder people than Asian-American men, and possibly white American men too.) Cops may not be explicitly trained to let people's passive-aggressive comments slide depending on their melanin content, but a cop in a sufficiently diverse American city will quickly find himself becoming a race realist (and class realist, to a lesser extent) as a matter of practical necessity.
FtttG
12hr ago
If a certain course of action is rational, by definition you can't rationalise your decision to take it.
FtttG
18hr ago
Reminds me of those people complaining that they don't like cops because they're so aggressive, scary and intimidating.
Well, duh. That's not by accident, it's by design. Given the nature of their jobs, cops have to be a credible threat to people who deal drugs and murder people for a living. If they aren't scary to those people, they can't do their jobs properly, which inevitably means they're going to come off as a bit scary to people to whom they don't know whether or not they're violent drug dealers i.e. you when they pull you over in a routine traffic stop.
And of course, the crime rate difference between men and women is gigantic.
This seems like a modus ponens/modus tollens situation. If you ask people this hypothetical:
you're traveling alone in a strange city. The only way you know how to get home is by taking a metro. Would you rather take a metro filled exclusively with:
A) young male people
B) young female people
is there any demographic in the entire world for which the majority wouldn't answer B? Young men, young women, old men, old women, black men, white men, black women, white women, gay men, gay women, straight men, straight women - if traveling by themselves, everyone feels safer in a train full of young female people than a train full of young male people.
Does this imply that 100% of young male people are violent and dangerous, or that no one has ever been stabbed for their wallet by a young female person? No, of course not. But everyone understands the risk calculus, and as far as I understand it, "race realists" are simply arguing that the risk calculus is comparably true of certain other salient identity characteristics besides sex. More than that - they are arguing that everyone (whether liberal or conservative) is already using this risk calculus and adjusting their behaviour accordingly, even if they've been trained to believe it's wrong to do so, even if they claim that's not what they're doing (but their revealed preferences say otherwise).
FtttG
18hr ago
FYI, the person you're replying to identifies as a trans woman, and hence has a lot of skin in this particular game.
FtttG
18hr ago
The fact that certain ethnic groups behave just as badly as black Americans doesn't prove that black Americans don't behave badly.
FtttG
18hr ago
I mean, sure, police officers shouldn't beat you up just because you're being crabby and passive-aggressive. But I just don't see what you stand to gain by being crabby and passive-aggressive in the first place. Best-case scenario, the police officer ignores your griping; worst-case scenario, he interprets it as you resisting arrest and beats you up. Has it ever happened that a police officer has announced his decision to arrest someone, the would-be arrestee made a passive-aggressive comment, and the police officer immediately saw the error of his ways and decided to let the person off with a warning instead? Consider the payoff matrix.
Former moderator @ymeskhout pointed out that, 100% of the time when someone complains about their bike having been stolen, the first question everyone asks is invariably "did you lock it?"
Pointing out that the manner in which the victim of a crime comported themselves may have made them more vulnerable to being the victim of said crime is considered a perfectly legitimate thing to do, except when it comes to a woman being sexually assaulted after getting blackout drunk at a party full of men she doesn't know, or when a black man aggressively resists arrest and the officers attempting to subdue him unsurprisingly assault him - in which cases it becomes "victim-blaming" and beyond the pale. It's a bizarre identitarian carve-out.
It's fascinating that, long before all the stuff about the raping came out, Bill Cosby was considered a traitor to the black community for arguing (in the form of his famous "pound cake" speech) that many of the African-American community's problems are of its own making, and nurturing the politics of racial grievance is doing them no favours. And yet, Chris Rock has consistently made the same point for decades (most notably in "black folks vs. niggas", but this sketch too), but to the best of my knowledge no one considers him a race traitor. It is really as simple as his including the obvious fig leaf of "if you're a black guy driving with a white guy in the passenger seat, the police are less likely to beat you up" that allows him to get away with the fact that most of this sketch boils down to "if you don't break the law and are polite and deferential to police officers, they will have no cause to assault you (ergo, most black Americans who were assaulted by police officers have only themselves to blame)"?
FtttG
19hr ago
If you yield, he arrests you. If you resist, he beats you up and possibly kills you. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. Sure your pride will take a beating in the former instance, but there are a limited range of circumstances in which I would literally rather be dead than having submitted.
FtttG
2d ago
I didn't think it warranted a top-level post in the CW thread as I only intended it as an interesting tidbit. Should I delete?
I was in a charity shop a few months ago and found two books I wanted to buy, one of which was a collection of Father Brown stories. They had a buy-two-get-the-third-free deal, so on a whim I bought Nell Zink's Doxology despite knowing nothing about it.
It's set in the early 90s in New York and charts three characters who are close friends, one of whom unexpectedly makes it big as an indie rock star while the other two get married and have a baby. It's extremely knowing, all of the characters are annoying and pretentious (none of them even slightly believable) - and yet for all that, entertaining enough that I'm more than a quarter-way through this large-format 400-pager after starting it on Friday.
On Thursday I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which I did enjoy a great deal, although not quite as much as Never Let Me Go. Normally when a novel employs an unreliable narrator, it's to set up an elaborate twist ending: I found it interesting here to be used for the comparatively modest goal of conveying the inner life of a character who is so used to repressing the emotions he experiences that he is effectively in denial about doing so. Arguably a deconstruction of the whole "English stiff upper lip" thing, though as I pointed out to herself, earlier this year I read Theodore Darlymple's book Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality, which (as its subtitle unsubtly implies) argues that the pendulum has swung much too far in the opposite direction and now British people are encouraged to engage in flamboyant displays of emotion far more than they should.
FtttG
7d ago
I don't really have many questions about Oswald. Dysfunctional, bad-tempered, chronically underemployed loser with authority problems decides (quelle surprise) that communism is super rad. Tries to defect to Russia and Cuba in succession, finds out the real thing isn't all it's cracked up to be and he's just as much of a worthless loser in a communist country as he was in a capitalist one. Returns to the states, tries to make a name for himself as a political activist and ends up with nothing to show for it. Decides to go out in a blaze of glory by killing the most high-profile person he can.
I don't know what else needs explaining beyond that. Yeah, he also enlisted in the military and was a crack shot - so what?
Sure, but prior to the Troubles there was a steadily escalating culture war throughout the fifties and early sixties which periodically exploded into rioting, with the Troubles itself not really beginning in earnest until the mid-sixties. Although the IRA existed prior, the Provisional IRA didn't come into existence until the late sixties, as did the UVF (the UDA came later). To me, it feels as though the US is warming up to its Troubles, not a second civil war.
FtttG
8d ago
Somehow I highly doubt the usual suspects would be kvetching this hard if the bullet that killed Kirk had, say, 1488 instead of "catch this fascist" on its casing.
You're absolutely right. Sadly, theories can accurately describe the world even if their proponents refuse to accept their full implications.
Freddie's theory is interesting and thought-provoking. Will he only ever refer to it when someone on his "team" (broadly defined) does something awful? Probably. When someone on the other "team" does something comparably awful, will he announce that it's an inevitable and stochastic result of Trump's violent rhetoric? Probably. Does that mean his theory is wrong? Not necessarily.
FtttG
8d ago
Third draft of NaNoWriMo project is essentially done. I'm sick of looking at it and thinking about it. I will have to try to do neither.
FtttG
8d ago
That sounds like it was expressing bafflement towards Carson's friends rather than the man himself. Close enough maybe.
FtttG
8d ago
I think this is the relevant link: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new
FtttG
8d ago
I believe many years ago Scott compared it to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which struck me as an apt comparison.
Or if they answer the question "did you lock it?" in the affirmative, the follow-up question will be "how good of a lock did you use?"
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