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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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Maybe they could find themselves some sympathetic white Boy Scout that got gunned down by asshole cops or something.

They won't, because police incompetence on that level is actually quite rare. There will be plenty of sympathetic white Boy Scouts that were merely harassed by cops, maybe even roughed up a little, but approximately zero that were actually shot for no reason at all. This is the same pattern that emerges with black people in cities - many have stories of being pointlessly harassed for no good reason and many of these stories are true, fewer have stories of being roughed up for no good reason and some of these are true, but basically no one just gets shot while they're minding their own business.

Adding to the list, there's Robert Ethan Saylor, who had Down's syndrome and suffocated after being forcibly restrained by authorities. His crime was slipping back into a theatre to watch the same movie twice. A pretty similar situation to George Floyd, except one was a career criminal on meth, and one was mentally disabled. But we know which one got the national outrage. (To be clear, both just seem like unfortunate, preventable-in-hindsight accidents to me. It's just the hypocrisy that I hate.)

basically no one just gets shot while they're minding their own business

Counterpoint: swat teams raiding the wrong address and killing the residents. Which from my memories of reading Reason years ago is a somewhat regular occurrence.

Counterpoint: swat teams raiding the wrong address and killing the residents. Which from my memories of reading Reason years ago is a somewhat regular occurrence.

Link, for the curious. There are other swat-related articles in there, but many are about bad warrants of one form or another.

There have been a number of incidents of police misuse of force in the last few years that have largely dropped out of the public eye. Admittedly not of white Boy Scouts, but not necessarily obvious villains either. There was a couple shot in Houston (the Harding Street Raid in 2019) on what turned out to be a falsified no-knock warrant, or the 2015 biker shootout in Waco that ultimately saw all charges dropped, despite nine deaths (IMO most likely that the police started the shooting). I'm sure there are other examples.

Wasnt there that white kid who was also kneeled on, died, and then the cops were aquitted? Had an alliterative name, i think.

Tony Timpa. Somewhat similar story, crazy guy that the cops were trying to subdue, they did it too roughly and behaved callously. He died. It's pretty terrible and I think they should face justice (as I thought Floyd's killer should have).

Yeah. You've got Daniel Shaver's death; he pointed something that looked like a real rifle out of a hotel window, then got shot by a trigger-happy incompetent asshole cop. Same thing's true for police harassment. Maybe in our fathers' or grandfathers' time there were drop guns and people being shot in the back for running from cops. It might still happen now, but not all that often and if it does the police departments are at least competent in covering this up. Asshole cops can definitely make people very clumsy indeed because they "look like criminals" or something like that. Sometimes the cops are beating up people they really think are criminals but can't prove anything.

Robert Dotson would have a bone to pick with you, but for certain reasons his widow would have to do it for him. And it's not like this is new : Ken Ballew managed to be a short-lived cause celebre among a certain type of gun owner, but Andrew Scott's a good intermediate version that you've never heard of.

Duncan Lemp was floating around the same time that George Floyd was, and tbf he was a bit of a paranoid nutcase (though there is a fun question of whether he was paranoid enough), but so were a number of BLM high-profile examples.