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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37246 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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I personally disagree with ACAB and think that police misconduct is vastly overstated, but I understand and sympathise with the reasoning behind it. I expressed this a year ago on this forum:

While I disagree on the object level towards ACAB, I have some sympathy towards people who dismiss all cops as being bastards as I have a similar attitude towards all mainstream journalists. The rationale for that attitude is that even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, as a group my observation is that they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession, and when outsiders push against them the wagons circle and end up pointing in a predictable direction, leading me to believe there is a tacit endorsement of the bad aspects. I can easily imagine someone making a similar argument against the police, that they are unwilling to truly clean up their profession in the eyes of the public, that there is a culture of silence and an anti-snitch mentality within the profession. As with journalists, they are performing a duty to society that is sacred and requires the population's absolute confidence so they cannot afford in-group loyalty when it clashes with their duty.

I guess one distinction could be that one could argue that cops are not always aware of specific actionable, denounceable action by bad apples in their group. I don't think journalists can use that argument.

For jobs that require the public's trust, even a hint of in-group loyalty or preference is poison. Sure, it's human to feel a kinship with other people doing the same job, but it's an instinct that has to be fought back, not leaned into. And cops as a profession reek of in-group loyalty, and an attitude like "you can't understand what our job is like" only makes it worse.

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