professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
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User ID: 1157
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
4d ago
Shouldn’t conservatives, i.e. the party of law and order, be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
This assumes they perceived the COVID restrictions to have promoted public safety, and significantly biased (and capricious) enforcement blew that all to hell.
Biased vaccine distribution schedules also likely harmed public tolerance and public trust for any measures.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
4d ago
Is this actually a thing or is it yet another moral panic
Difficult to get data on afaict. Short version you've probably heard before is admin doesn't want too many suspensions (disparate impact; doesn't matter that the school is 90% black either), teachers eventually stop reporting unless the behavior is a severe threat, so maybe you can muddle it out from surveys of teacher unhappiness/early retirements, but I wouldn't be confident at all if someone said "suspensions are down so behavior can't be that bad."
From local teacher anecdotes, yes, it's a thing, but I don't know for sure how widespread.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
9d ago
the formative event for many right wing posters.
Long 2020 was a fascinating lesson in narrative development, enforcement, and the whole gamut of what well-meaning liberals will find ways to justify or otherwise turn a blind eye on.
And, once they've gotten it out of their system and no longer think it's good, the post-Long 2020 period has been a fascinating lesson in how quickly they forget.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
9d ago
We could, on a good day, probably have a nice and well-thought conversation on police reform, and I get the feeling that we'd agree on more than you might expect, though certainly not everything. Unfortunately for both of us, basically no one out in the real world wanted to have a well-thought and careful conversation; they all wanted to go insane or turn a blind eye to the insanity. So whatever I say here is less about police reform in general, and more about a particular form of racism and insanity that afflicts American culture and had an explosion in 2020.
the fact that we have anti-police riots in the US is a strong signal that there are serious problems with American policing
No, it's a strong signal that there is the perception of serious problems with American policing. The reality of the problems is, afaict, almost entirely disconnected from the perception and reactions to it.
Do you genuinely think that this arose from a singular incident?
Ehh... sort of? I think, clearly, bad police exist, but BLM and in particular the 2020 riots weren't really about bad police. BLM is about pie-in-the-sky pro-criminal advocacy, the about-face on bodycams being my primary evidence for this sentiment, and the 2020 riots were about people looking for a socially-sanctioned excuse to go out and get crazy on a spectrum between "block party" and "looting and revolution."
Video is powerful, everyone had cabin fever, and white-on-black crime makes American media go full stupid. If Chauvin had kneed Floyd in some camera-free back alley, it probably wouldn't have risen above local news. If Alexander Keung had been the primary cop instead of Chauvin, it probably wouldn't have risen above local news.
There'd be a lot less resentment and hostility if brutal or reckless cops were consistently punished for transgressions
I agree that they should be, but most of the resentment and hostility is downstream of other problems (ie, disparate impact and the confrontation clause). I think if cops policed themselves perfectly we'd still see much of the resentment and hostility.
The unarmed aspect doesn't really matter much.
I'm just commenting there on well-meaning liberals that have an aesthetic and moral privileging of certain populations based on race to being orders of magnitude wrong about reality.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
9d ago
Thousand.
I was trying to go with the "safe" answer, but yeah, I think there's a lot of merit to how much the rioting affected the murder rate. But Beej did post a recent update based on a Brookings analysis that the murder rate was already increasing in 2020 before The Happening, starting in early to mid March.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
9d ago
the problem with analysing this kind of thing is it kind of assumes malice on the part of the speaker
Surely with years of evidence it's safe to acknowledge Kimmel openly hates Republicans and the malice isn't so much assumed but a known intention?
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
9d ago
This seems remarkably inoffensive to me.
How is, to boil the line down, "those assholes are point-scoring liars" not offensive?
I'm not saying he should've been fired for it, comedians are allowed to be partisan hacks and still get paid. But I don't understand the people who don't notice that it was intended to be offensive. It's obviously insulting, insulting the right (and people dying of covid) is a big part of Kimmel's schtick.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
9d ago
failing to lick the boot hard enough
You know, if you seemed like you were interested in a real conversation I'd be happy to both-sides the indifference problem, but this and your example seem like nice big flags that you're not. Let's try anyways-
Should we be worried that one of the central institutions for public order will mutiny if not granted impunity for their crimes?
I'm considerably more worried that the public order will mutiny if the police across the entire country are not universally perfect, since that's actually what happened. One bad cop treating one possibly-ODing drug addict badly means the necessary response is... billions of dollars in property damage across the country and a couple dozen extra murders? Damn, that's a heck of an exchange rate.
How many unarmed people do the police shoot, and how many do liberals think they shoot?
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
10d ago
Anyway, don't many of his supporters acknowledge that he lies a lot, but say his lies are good car salesman style lies, whereas other politicians may not lie but they are selective with what they include and what they omit?
Trump lies all the time. As a result, many people never trust Trump (and yes, some trust him too much).
To quote the wisest of the Scott As, "the media very rarely lies." The problem being that too many people believe them when they do lie, so you end up with riots because people are orders of magnitude wrong about police behavior.
Joe lied about not pardoning Hunter. I suspect, in the long run, that whopper will have been more impactful than the vast majority of Trump's lies. But we'll have to wait a couple more administrations to really decide if it was a one-off massive insult to the office or a particularly dangerous precedent.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
10d ago
I continue to be fascinated by that brand of distraction, that Trump becomes the only standard (anything less is acceptable by default) and also the only person in the world with agency (no one else is blamed for actions he does in reaction, and any action generated reacting to Trump gets blamed on Trump).
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
10d ago
destroying a few city blocks total across the entire country
If you're counting entire blocks. If you're counting individual stores, it would be much, much higher, and much more distributed.
Remind me why cities thousands of miles away from Minneapolis needed to have riots, why they needed to have minority-owned shops destroyed, and why the riots are worth it to you to minimize and downplay?
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
10d ago
A significant portion of the gap between the 5% and the 50% is the remainder that isn't actively desiring of the riot and murder, but completely indifferent to rioting and murder so long as its happening in ways that don't affect them, primarily affect the outgroup, or are otherwise aesthetically pleasing.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
10d ago
but thinks it's more important for protests to remain untouchable than to stop the riotous excesses".
Indifference is insidious. Indifference to riots or thinking they're worth the tradeoffs is close enough for my tastes. Being unwilling to stop a bad thing or otherwise too high on your ideological supply to realize how easily it could backfire or otherwise go wrong is close enough.
The extra 6000ish black murders were really worth it, to the eyes of those unaffected by them but liked the aesthetics of protests and huffing that tire-burning smell, I'm sure.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
10d ago
Well, no, we don't really know how many because ~every city that had those issues more or less gave up on enforcement.
Some of the murderers got caught, and some of the arsonists, but not all of either. Once you get down to window-smashers and looters I'd be surprised if more than 20% even got recorded via catch and release policing, much less received actual punishment.
Destruction is much easier than creation. It only takes a tiny fraction of 350 million to throw the rest into chaos, if they're determined enough.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
11d ago
that much if it doesn't impact me
That's the big catch. The likelihood of anything in Sudan affecting me is basically zero. The likelihood of, say, inappropriate police behavior caught on video going viral and affecting me for months or years is not high, but significantly non-zero.
We have a culture that prioritizes concern based on identity, and in some ways it's a banal evil (cueing Hannah Arendt?), and in some ways it's an encouragement for people to violate or otherwise ignore their stated principles.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
11d ago
I'm genuinely not sure why the "punch Nazis" stuff would snag so many more would-be-murderers than those.
Maybe because Nazis actually existed, zombies don't, and we firebombed cities to put them down? There's real, actual history of how to react to them, virtually everyone agrees they were evil and there's a lot of guilt-by-association power if you can make it stick?
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
11d ago
No, we don't want each other dead.
Callous indifference continues to be an underrated descriptor complicating perception and reality of how much one side hates the other.
Only a small fraction want each other dead. Of those that do, only a tiny fraction would do anything to achieve those deaths. But there's a much larger fraction who are at best indifferent to deaths among The Other. Fine, to some extent that's signaling (of an extremely sick culture), but that still matters!
It's basically all signaling, a person who says "Look at me support super controversial in-group aligned thing" signals how dedicated they are without ever actually having to do shit.
The catch to this attitude being that ignoring how much someone hates you can have, relatively rarely but importantly non-zero times, quite disastrous results. I think there is very little to be lost following the adage "if someone says they hate you, believe them," and potentially a lot to be lost by ignoring clear signals of danger.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
11d ago
no kings march
At least locally this has been an almost entirely boomer thing. Not sure how that generalizes.
Yes, lockdowns provoked most of the violent delights of 2020, but there may be other factors re: age, race, culture, motivation.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
11d ago
if literally writing "catch this fascist" on a bullet intended to kill a prominent public speaker is still not considered "enough" to have political implications by a large majority of people, what is?
If Ken Martin pre-paid for a billboard to be put up that says "I shot Trump because I am a Democrat" after he does indeed go and do that, successfully, I think most people would accept the statement without adding so many epicycles of excuse. If Joe Biden did it they'd just blame the dementia and it wouldn't really count.
Not sure for anyone else. If Ezra Klein snaps somebody would find some one occasion where he said a less than maximally progressive thing and that would be enough to sow confusion and doubt.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
12d ago
I didn’t worry about a mob getting my house, quiet. But I (quite irritatingly for tax reasons) live at the far edge of sprawling city limits, and I hated getting texts from the mayor’s emergency alert regarding ‘citywide’ curfews (aimed at the greater downtown) that the threats were real and while not that close, closer than I’ve ever experienced. Watching enjoyable shops and restaurants be wrecked, likewise. Watching the ones that posted “minority-owned” signs in their windows and on Instagram being laughed at for thinking it made a difference (the mockers were right; it made no difference), likewise.
Minneapolis is 4 or 5 times further away than Washington but had far more direct impact on my life.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
12d ago
A whole world of social strategies waiting to be named! Thank you, this is also an interesting one.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
12d ago
Writ large, I'd consider that an example of Mostly Peaceful and Well Intentioned propaganda and PR campaigns which successfully won supermajority support among the American people.
Yeah, fair. I certainly don't agree with all the downstream effects despite my [redacted], but mostly? Yeah.
I would 100% go with Walz or Shapiro or Newsom over Stacey Adams. Are you arguing that there were better-qualified non-white/non-cishet-male candidates that were passed over because Walz is white?
Setting the bar pretty low with Adams! No, I'm saying there were candidates passed over because Walz was (thought to be) a generically inoffensive white nobody. Old, non-Group, didn't show up Harris in any way. White wasn't the only requirement, but it was the one he and the campaign leaned into the most in a way that pissed off non-Dems.
Buttigieg had pre-existing name recognition, but gay counts as a Group and apparently is so unpopular with black people it's a statistical oddity. Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard? Maybe Harris didn't want one of the people that did better than her in the primaries. Shapiro, purple state governor that's young enough to have a future, might show up Harris, and Jewish poses an issue to elements of both sides apparently. Bernie, way more name recognition, old, ~white, but definitely shows up Harris when public speaking and again the Jewish problem (ooo that feels unpleasant to type). Charlie Crist could've been an interesting dark horse pick as a former Republican that fulfilled the old and mostly-white requirements.
And that's with like 5 minutes thought of really prominent people. Surely the DNC has a list of potential state politicians since they pulled Walz out of a hat; some of them are undoubtedly less white, less old, less goofy?
What, exactly, were the consequences for the profession for all that shit, and why was the public too stupid to know better?
Lobotomies and thalidomide eventually got banned, so maybe I should give it a few more years to see if GoF gets banned again? Feels too polarized and no one's even asking the question.
The consequences of the Tuskegee experiments were that 50 years later black people still have much lower trust in doctors and vaccines, nobody seems to have an idea of how to fix that, and sometimes that leads the big brains at Harvard and UPenn to really crazy places.
the point is that you're weird relative to the population norm
Guilty as charged. Go weirdos!
Somewhere along the line I lost interest in people bashing Fauci and other causes I care about
Yeah, that's how I feel in liberal-progressive spaces that don't think 2020 was mass insanity and prefer criminals over their victims, and why I've gotten chased out of them. To be clear I did phrase things much more gently back when I was trying, but here among disagreeable acquaintances it's not really the point.
They haven't lost the public trust, they've lost the trust of Republicans.
The trans issue has reduced trust in a fair number of family-minded Dems, but not in the blanket way to turn against vaccines in the stupid way a subset of Republicans did. Hopefully it doesn't take 50+ years to fix the damage that experimental mandates did.
There's bound to be a really interesting anthropological study involved in recent polarization dynamics, but nobody willing to would produce something unbiased enough to be worth reading.
the chasm between the way you see things and the way they do is...significant.
And I could've written the question in a less-steamed manner. Mea culpa.
what you call anti-white racism
The indifference angle is about as far as I am willing to go to bridge the gap. I recognize that it's not entirely hate in the way that a Grand Red Dragon of the Klan hated black people. The underdog factor is... whatever it is, but after 2020 I don't buy it as sufficient explanation unless we're being uncharitable enough to tag on the soft bigotry of low expectations. It gets pretty exhausting putting up the epicycles to explain why the Occam's Razor explanation isn't right.
Would you do this kind of hedging for someone that really likes posting crime stats and HBD commentary? Would you extend so much charity when they say that no no, they're not actually anti-black? When there's Harvard professors arguing that old white people should die for health equity, Yale lecturers fantasizing about shooting white people, the whole insanity around "being on time is white supremacy," are you able to wonder if it exists and isn't something I (and Jeremy Carl, and others) nightmared up?
But what do I know, I've been largely wrong about every prediction I've made in my tenure here.
I'm with you there, hoss.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
12d ago
I'm constantly struggling over this both sides fig leaf people keep throwing out there for the sake of unity... It's a farcical comparison, but they keep making it.
Always has been. The Che posters and shirts, the hammer and sickle posters and shirts, well that's "just a phase." Approximately nobody makes swastika posters or Goering shirts (if he weren't, ya know, a Nazi, the Nuremburg picture would make a fine meme), they're definitely not sold at university-sanctioned and hosted poster sales, and if they did exist they certainly wouldn't be treated like it's "just a phase." Anti-black racism, unforgiveable; anti-white racism, doesn't even exist, definitionally impossible. No right-wing terrorist has ever become a university professor or gotten an honorary degree from Cambridge. Et cetera and so forth.
The thing has, somebody has to be the better person if they want to keep a country. That sucks, it's difficult, it's no fun, it's unfair, illiberal, quite often you'll feel like a chump. If you want there to be any chance of somebody on the other side listening, you have to carefully couch your point, hem and haw both-sides, avoid any invisible fence collars (inverse dogwhistles, if you prefer to skip the article; only the metaphor is relevant to my point). Otherwise you trip their trigger and they shut down.
It sucks and I'm bad at it. Absolutely terrible at avoiding inverse dogwhistles. But I still believe trying is better than the alternative.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
13d ago
There is plenty of institutonal and cultural support for violence among the right. Take, for example, conservative fascination with firearms as a political tool. Or greater suport for state sanctioned killing to achieve policy goals, like the death penalty.
One could model this as the right having an interest in violence that they rarely if ever indulge, and the left blinkering their jaundiced eye to carefully ignore a higher rate of violence and destruction. The right barks, the left bites, as it were; matching relative tastes in dogs and what should be done about pitbulls.
Such a model is a little too self-serving and pat, of course. And yet, I can't shake the grain of truth in it.
Mid-Atlantic here and it's an interesting split, mask-wearers I see are either older black people or (seemingly) younger, especially women, of funny hair color. Not major numbers of either though.
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