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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37177 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Does charging the cop with first-degree murder count as "stonewalling" and justify going national?

I’m referring more to things like how NYC set up a whole board to review use of force cases and then the police refused to give them the actual footage or even allow them to interview cops thus making their job almost impossible. That went on for several years IIRC. So things like that, and union resistance, and systemic opposition. I don’t like relying on high profile lawsuits to regulate behavior when there are better more long-term accountability schemes.

So literally nothing to do with a choice of whether scrutiny in this specific case is "probably best left as a local matter rather than coopted as a national political strategy" or otherwise. Got it.

Going national in such a case could be a rational strategy, if you want the cop to be convicted, since it creates more embarassment for anyone who wants to "protect their own" etc.

However, exploiting such a case for national politics is unleashing a Pandora's Box, as we saw with the George Floyd hysteria. So it's not generally a justified strategy.

Going national in such a case could be a rational strategy, if you want the cop to be convicted, since it creates more embarassment for anyone who wants to "protect their own" etc.

This is a fully-general argument for taking literally any case national, no matter how local and how inconsequential to national issues. So long as you "want". Why would you want? For what purpose? What problem are you actually solving by taking it national? You're preemptively getting in front of some hypothetical injustice? Again, there can be hypothetical injustice that you could conceivably be getting in front of in literally any case ever. The system, in general, tolerates some non-zero percentage of actual, not hypothetical, injustice. It is not hard to have exposure either to the day-to-day workings of the system or even just exposure to those who have exposure to the day-to-day workings of the system and know that there is routine actual injustice (though 'routine' in a nation of almost 400M people is still a tiny percentage). Why even bother with hypothetical when you could spend your time on actual?

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