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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37126 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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The anti-BLM position has never been that every police shooting is justified. I see anti-BLM as making two claims:

  1. Unjustified police killings are rare.
  2. That blacks are killed by police disproportinate to their population is a function of their being disproportionately likely to present themselves as a deadly threat, not police racism.

None of points 2-4 are incompatible with this at all. They are all imply at least one takeaway that indicates the cops have work to do and improvements to be made. I never at any point made any claim that unjustified killings were anything other than rare!

The attitude that we should ignore these improvements and instead circle the wagons around police who we should portray as doing no wrong almost always is a problematic one, and doesn't logically follow!

Speaking as somebody who used to appeal to BLM'ers to include Tony Timpa in their press materials, I did so because I also don't like dickhead cops and argued that BLM's best path forward was to deracialize the issue and get broad buy-in with a patchwork of murder-by-cop horror stories. This was rejected near-totally. And in the years since, I think the ethos they represent is a larger threat to the country across multiple levels than what hotheads with badges occasionally do to people in the lower class.

I've also had a drop in sympathy for many (though not all) of these victims due to their sheer inability to 'act right' with law enforcement, based on some personal experiences. Let's just say that if I can keep calm, respectful, cooperative, and stationary with a cop while tripping balls on several psychedelic substances at once in the middle of a crime scene I am culpable in (a power I did not realize I had until that moment!), then I have less and less patience for the kind of low-level disdain and noncompliance I see in these stories that always increases the risk of LEO escalation.*

*This particular comment is not directly relevant to Massey's story. Just further explanation as to why any common cause with your stereotypical anti-cop activist was left to wither and die.

If they didn't want to hold onto the racial angle so tightly, they could also use Justine Damond.

Let's just say that if I can keep calm, respectful, cooperative, and stationary with a cop while tripping balls on several psychedelic substances at once in the middle of a crime scene I am culpable in

I feel like this is an anecdote worth sharing in full.

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