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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Going back to your original #4, if you had written something like:

Lacking domain-specific knowledge. If you don't understand that there are 18,000 police departments in this country, or how transparent they're required to be with their records, or how much rigorous training officers actually receive, and how ideologically motivated some journalists are to make hay of any single incident... well, then you simply don't know. And combined with some of the other numbered items on this list, it's easy for people to lazily round these things off to "yeah, I guess they are probably just rotten about this and that thing".

...I wouldn't have a problem with it. My interpretation of what you originally wrote (correct me if I was wrong) was to argue that people have a skewed perspective of how policing is actually conducted, and you did that by presenting various statements of fact as a way to demonstrate how ill-informed folks are (e.g. "police don't have quotas but the public thinks otherwise" presumably).

But as I pointed out, much of what you presented as evidence of the public's ignorance turns out to be actually grounded in reality. So it seems to me that what you're actually disputing is how much weight those examples should get, but that's a very different argument to make.

[Also, whether I think police quotas are an appropriate way of dealing with lazy cops is a completely separate discussion from whether or not police quotas even exist.]