Mexican flags at protests?

[GuitarStv]

5) Drop the Fear of Uniforms: Almost all police and military personnel are conservative. This is largely because liberal culture finds these professions distasteful. However, the lack of dissenters in these professional cultures is now a potentially deadly issue and a threat to democracy. These people who wield immense physical power will be (or are being) asked to use their power unconstitutionally to support a would-be dictator, who they happen to agree with. They are thus torn between ideology and oath. Just a little bit of diversity in these ranks could result in a "no" answer when a unit is commanded to fire upon civilians, oppress the regime's political opponents, spy on people unconstitutionally, make unjustified arrests, or cause activists to disappear. Yet centrists and liberals are absent. But who, in their vision of the future, is responsible for enforcing the law and defending the people? Conservatives? The culture has to change now so that in 20 years at least some centrist kids have grown up to become law enforcement or military professionals who are willing to take a stand. On a related note, there needs to be place for entrepreneurs and business leaders other than on the far right.

I believe that military and paramilitary tend towards social conservatism by nature of the organizations.

Take police groups.  These organizations have incredible power not granted to regular citizens.  They serve an absolutely vital role in society, and the majority of officers do so well in difficult conditions.  I have a deep respect and a tremendous amount of goodwill for police officers and the job they do.  I am grateful for their contributions.  Any group of people will have some who abuse their position and act poorly.  Universally (at least in every implementation I'm aware of) police groups use every bit of that power they have to protect those who act dishonourably.  This takes the form of hiding bad behaviour, ensuring that officers guilty of bad behaviour aren't punished, obstructing investigation into bad behaviour, socially ostracizing officers who speak up about corruption and rights violations, etc.  Even discussing this makes me anti-police in some circles.

Military groups seem to follow a similar path.  They're doing a difficult job, and the majority of them do it very well.  I am grateful for their contributions.  But again, as with any group there are a few who don't.  There need to be repercussions for everyone involved in the military when atrocities are committed.  You can't operate torture facilities without torturers, supervisors, and multiple levels of support staff enabling the rapes and beatings to continue.  I can't get on board with that, and believe that there should be serious repercussions when this sort of scenario occurs.  This makes me anti-military in many circles.

There seems to be something in the structure of police/military organizations that is fundamentally incompatible with liberal views and policy.  I'm not sure that it's possible to change that.

[RetiredAt63]

1) You've heard the George Carlin quote: "When fascism comes to America, it won't be wearing jackboots. It will be wrapped in the stars and stripes and carrying a Bible."  People feel like the flag was taken from them and now represents something else.  I've heard this even from people in the center, who aren't inclined to get involved. (ETA: not an Carlin actual quote, but it's popularized due to the widespread sentiment.)

This happened in Canada when those convoy douchebags came to town.  If you saw anyone waving a Canadian flag from their car, you just assumed they were a racist asshole.  That assumption went on until the US president started talking about annexing us.  At that point, the rest of us started waving our own flags, but that was more of fuck-you to your administration.

So much this.  So unsettling being triggered by seeing our beloved flag flying from a truck.  Except around Canada Day, of course.

I was on a street that a lot of people walked or drove down to go to the "fun"  The yelling and honking were weird.   It all felt like we were turning into Americans, who are so very vocal about their patriotism.

[GuitarStv]

I don't believe 'patriotism' has much if anything to do with 'displays of patriotism'.  They're often at odds in my view.

[MustacheAndaHalf]

ICE raided Los Angeles to arrest undocumented/illegal immigrants.  People waving a Mexican flag in response to that is a bit like saying "Yes, we're Mexican, not American".  As in, ICE is right to look for illegal/undocumented immigrants here.  I think that was early on in the protest, during the day.  Those inciting unrest were more commonly doing so at night, which is why a curfew was imposed.  And they were trying to injure police and damage property, rather than simply protesting peacefully, so I don't think inciters were waving flags.

Trump saying he might arrest California's governor is way over the line.  And Republicans are wrong to claim L.A. is burning - a small number of vehicles were burning, not the city.

But then California Governor Gavin Newsom has to claim they have no right to do this.  Except at California's border with Mexico, those are ICE agents dealing with immigration - not California.  Democrats talk about how normally the California national guard would not be used for this - okay, but the word "national" is key there.

As usual, both sides are annoying.  I believe there's a court hearing today about the use of the national guard.

[ChpBstrd]

5) Drop the Fear of Uniforms: Almost all police and military personnel are conservative. This is largely because liberal culture finds these professions distasteful. However, the lack of dissenters in these professional cultures is now a potentially deadly issue and a threat to democracy. These people who wield immense physical power will be (or are being) asked to use their power unconstitutionally to support a would-be dictator, who they happen to agree with. They are thus torn between ideology and oath. Just a little bit of diversity in these ranks could result in a "no" answer when a unit is commanded to fire upon civilians, oppress the regime's political opponents, spy on people unconstitutionally, make unjustified arrests, or cause activists to disappear. Yet centrists and liberals are absent. But who, in their vision of the future, is responsible for enforcing the law and defending the people? Conservatives? The culture has to change now so that in 20 years at least some centrist kids have grown up to become law enforcement or military professionals who are willing to take a stand. On a related note, there needs to be place for entrepreneurs and business leaders other than on the far right.

I believe that military and paramilitary tend towards social conservatism by nature of the organizations.

Take police groups.  These organizations have incredible power not granted to regular citizens.  They serve an absolutely vital role in society, and the majority of officers do so well in difficult conditions.  I have a deep respect and a tremendous amount of goodwill for police officers and the job they do.  I am grateful for their contributions.  Any group of people will have some who abuse their position and act poorly.  Universally (at least in every implementation I'm aware of) police groups use every bit of that power they have to protect those who act dishonourably.  This takes the form of hiding bad behaviour, ensuring that officers guilty of bad behaviour aren't punished, obstructing investigation into bad behaviour, socially ostracizing officers who speak up about corruption and rights violations, etc.  Even discussing this makes me anti-police in some circles.

Military groups seem to follow a similar path.  They're doing a difficult job, and the majority of them do it very well.  I am grateful for their contributions.  But again, as with any group there are a few who don't.  There need to be repercussions for everyone involved in the military when atrocities are committed.  You can't operate torture facilities without torturers, supervisors, and multiple levels of support staff enabling the rapes and beatings to continue.  I can't get on board with that, and believe that there should be serious repercussions when this sort of scenario occurs.  This makes me anti-military in many circles.

There seems to be something in the structure of police/military organizations that is fundamentally incompatible with liberal views and policy.  I'm not sure that it's possible to change that.

This is exactly why there needs to be more ideological diversity in the uniformed services. When there is a risk of a whistleblower, a dissident, an informer, or a refusal to follow illegal orders, then a lot less illegal stuff happens. When it's a bunch of bros who all think the exact same and might as well be clones... we know how such organizations go.

I think the more precise reason why liberals are absent from uniformed services is the hierarchy thing. In the police or military, one is expected to follow the commands of a hierarchy of leaders. Also, one's own position as a police officer / soldier grants one special permissions to break rules that civilians have to follow, such as speeding or shooting people. Both of these represent an inequality between the power of leaders and followers and between the power of officers/soldiers and civilians.

Liberals, by definition, advocate egalitarianism - making people more equal. If this is your prime objective, police and soldiers look like anti-egalitarian forces because they have special permissions not afforded to the rest of us, and because their organizations involve highly unequal power structures.

Yet there is hope. Many of these same liberals put on a name tag and walk into corporate offices, where they report to a hierarchy of bosses and conform to an employee handbook, in an attempt to make themselves more wealthy than others. Are they hypocrites, or just effective individuals? Potato-PotAto, but my takeaway is that the center-left could in some future world come to terms with supporting the military/police if those institutions were seen as protectors of otherwise pro-egalitarian social systems with some necessary-evil hierarchy. If the alternative is anarchy, and anarchy evolves into highly unequal outcomes, than the order imposed by authorities may be a desirable compromise.

I think such a mentality could work, at least for the more pragmatic center-left. For example, many police calls are for domestic violence, where they prevent a stronger partner from physically threatening a weaker partner, thus enforcing equality. Similarly, many military actions are against vicious dictators who tend to create oppressive political systems.

[ChpBstrd]

ICE raided Los Angeles to arrest undocumented/illegal immigrants.  People waving a Mexican flag in response to that is a bit like saying "Yes, we're Mexican, not American".  As in, ICE is right to look for illegal/undocumented immigrants here. 

Yes, I cannot think of a better way to make Trump's moves look justified than to (a) claim to be Mexican by waving the flag, (b) in an environment where cars and businesses are being vandalized and people are shooting fireworks at the police. So yes, this is where the dreaded immigrants are hiding out and yes, here is confirmation that they are violent criminals.

I don't think inciters were waving flags.

It doesn't matter when the organizers of the peaceful protest are relying on Fox News to point out this distinction in their "fair and balanced" way. Because the video clips of peaceful and non-peaceful activities are played one after the other, the message is that they are the same people. This is exactly why protesting is obsolete.

Trump saying he might arrest California's governor is way over the line.  And Republicans are wrong to claim L.A. is burning - a small number of vehicles were burning, not the city.

A bit of context the news media are not pointing out is that the protests are only occurring in about 9-10 blocks in a city with thousands of blocks. No, L.A. is not burning. But it looks that way from the perspective of people peering into screens that only show those few blocks.

But then California Governor Gavin Newsom has to claim they have no right to do this.  Except at California's border with Mexico, those are ICE agents dealing with immigration - not California.  Democrats talk about how normally the California national guard would not be used for this - okay, but the word "national" is key there.

And as usual Democrats are failing to point out that these resources could have been used to police the border instead of rounding up Hispanics in central L.A. to create a scene. I suppose if they were to point out that this was a masterclass in crisis provocation on the Administration's part, they would have to confront the irritating reality that the protestors are falling into the administration's propaganda plans.

[MustacheAndaHalf]

Viewpoint diversity in the police would be a good ideal, but is it realistic?
A party that views police as the problem isn't going to join the police.

Study from Feb 2025:

"Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to trust police, more likely to believe police treat different groups equally, less likely to think police killings are a problem, and less likely to think Black Lives Matter protests are motivated by a genuine desire to hold police accountable (Pew, 2016). In fact, as we show below, party identification is among the most important individual-level predictors of policing-related attitudes, surpassing the importance of race or political ideology (see Figure 1 and accompanying discussion)."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajps.12945

[RetiredAt63]

I don't believe 'patriotism' has much if anything to do with 'displays of patriotism'.  They're often at odds in my view.

Yes, that is a very Canadian view.  I  have wondered if our lack of American-style flag waving gave Trump the impression Canadians don't love their country? If so he must have been very surprised at our reaction to his 51st state invitation.

[MustacheAndaHalf]

I don't think inciters were waving flags.

It doesn't matter when the organizers of the peaceful protest are relying on Fox News to point out this distinction in their "fair and balanced" way. Because the video clips of peaceful and non-peaceful activities are played one after the other, the message is that they are the same people. This is exactly why protesting is obsolete.

I haven't seen the Fox News coverage.  One news channel had someone who I thought was a reporter, who mentioned paid inciters.  I later found that was a claim by Trump, which was rather important missing context.  That's also why I didn't mention specific groups (like antifa) when I don't have evidence of their participation.

The protestors were mostly during the day, and the violent inciters were mostly at night - that was my understanding.  And that fits with the action taken by the mayor of L.A., to impose a curfew at night in one square mile of downtown L.A.

Trump saying he might arrest California's governor is way over the line.  And Republicans are wrong to claim L.A. is burning - a small number of vehicles were burning, not the city.

A bit of context the news media are not pointing out is that the protests are only occurring in about 9-10 blocks in a city with thousands of blocks. No, L.A. is not burning. But it looks that way from the perspective of people peering into screens that only show those few blocks.

I've actually heard that mentioned several times on various news media.  The mayor was shown saying it.  CNN likes panel discussions with a mix of political parties, and the Republican (a regular) said L.A. was burning, and was quickly corrected by the next person who spoke.  I don't think this exaggeration will gain much traction, because they can't point to burning houses and buildings.  Just isolated cars burning - I think two were Waymo driverless cars that didn't know what to do.

[GuitarStv]

5) Drop the Fear of Uniforms: Almost all police and military personnel are conservative. This is largely because liberal culture finds these professions distasteful. However, the lack of dissenters in these professional cultures is now a potentially deadly issue and a threat to democracy. These people who wield immense physical power will be (or are being) asked to use their power unconstitutionally to support a would-be dictator, who they happen to agree with. They are thus torn between ideology and oath. Just a little bit of diversity in these ranks could result in a "no" answer when a unit is commanded to fire upon civilians, oppress the regime's political opponents, spy on people unconstitutionally, make unjustified arrests, or cause activists to disappear. Yet centrists and liberals are absent. But who, in their vision of the future, is responsible for enforcing the law and defending the people? Conservatives? The culture has to change now so that in 20 years at least some centrist kids have grown up to become law enforcement or military professionals who are willing to take a stand. On a related note, there needs to be place for entrepreneurs and business leaders other than on the far right.

I believe that military and paramilitary tend towards social conservatism by nature of the organizations.

Take police groups.  These organizations have incredible power not granted to regular citizens.  They serve an absolutely vital role in society, and the majority of officers do so well in difficult conditions.  I have a deep respect and a tremendous amount of goodwill for police officers and the job they do.  I am grateful for their contributions.  Any group of people will have some who abuse their position and act poorly.  Universally (at least in every implementation I'm aware of) police groups use every bit of that power they have to protect those who act dishonourably.  This takes the form of hiding bad behaviour, ensuring that officers guilty of bad behaviour aren't punished, obstructing investigation into bad behaviour, socially ostracizing officers who speak up about corruption and rights violations, etc.  Even discussing this makes me anti-police in some circles.

Military groups seem to follow a similar path.  They're doing a difficult job, and the majority of them do it very well.  I am grateful for their contributions.  But again, as with any group there are a few who don't.  There need to be repercussions for everyone involved in the military when atrocities are committed.  You can't operate torture facilities without torturers, supervisors, and multiple levels of support staff enabling the rapes and beatings to continue.  I can't get on board with that, and believe that there should be serious repercussions when this sort of scenario occurs.  This makes me anti-military in many circles.

There seems to be something in the structure of police/military organizations that is fundamentally incompatible with liberal views and policy.  I'm not sure that it's possible to change that.

This is exactly why there needs to be more ideological diversity in the uniformed services. When there is a risk of a whistleblower, a dissident, an informer, or a refusal to follow illegal orders, then a lot less illegal stuff happens. When it's a bunch of bros who all think the exact same and might as well be clones... we know how such organizations go.

I don't know about this.  It's not that there are a bunch of bros who all think the exact same way at all.  My uncle is a (now retired) police officer.  I regularly roll with several people in law enforcement at our Jiu-Jitsu gym.  Stories from them about seeing something wrong that another officer has done, reporting it, and then being punished for doing so are pretty common.  Eventually you realize that there's no point in reporting the problem - so either you decide that policing isn't for you, or you just accept the rules of the organization you belong to.  My read is that the organization creates and enforces the way of thinking - it's not really up to the individuals.

I think the more precise reason why liberals are absent from uniformed services is the hierarchy thing. In the police or military, one is expected to follow the commands of a hierarchy of leaders. Also, one's own position as a police officer / soldier grants one special permissions to break rules that civilians have to follow, such as speeding or shooting people. Both of these represent an inequality between the power of leaders and followers and between the power of officers/soldiers and civilians.

Liberals, by definition, advocate egalitarianism - making people more equal. If this is your prime objective, police and soldiers look like anti-egalitarian forces because they have special permissions not afforded to the rest of us, and because their organizations involve highly unequal power structures.

Nah.  Maybe this is true for the caricature far leftist sort.  It doesn't hold for anyone remotely centrist.  Hierarchy is how most human organizations work.  Corporations (pretty much any job), political systems, landlord/tenant relationships, most religion (all in practice?), martial arts gyms, etc.

It's very unusual to run into a hierarchy-free way of organizing a group of people.  While it's common for people on the left to look for a reduction in levels of hierarchy, it's only the most extreme who are trying to do away with it entirely.  There are just too many benefits to hierarchical organization to easily dismiss.

Yet there is hope. Many of these same liberals put on a name tag and walk into corporate offices, where they report to a hierarchy of bosses and conform to an employee handbook, in an attempt to make themselves more wealthy than others. Are they hypocrites, or just effective individuals? Potato-PotAto, but my takeaway is that the center-left could in some future world come to terms with supporting the military/police if those institutions were seen as protectors of otherwise pro-egalitarian social systems with some necessary-evil hierarchy. If the alternative is anarchy, and anarchy evolves into highly unequal outcomes, than the order imposed by authorities may be a desirable compromise.

I think such a mentality could work, at least for the more pragmatic center-left. For example, many police calls are for domestic violence, where they prevent a stronger partner from physically threatening a weaker partner, thus enforcing equality. Similarly, many military actions are against vicious dictators who tend to create oppressive political systems.

Again, I think you're misidentifying the problem.  It's not an issue of hierarchy.  The majority of those center left are well aware of the need for police.  The left backlash against policing has to do with the unchecked excesses and usual lack of consequences for blatantly overstepping legal bounds while policing.  Protesting the murder of a George Floyd or Manuel Ellis or Eric Garner, or Michael Brown, or Tamir Rice, or Philandro Castile, or Breonna Taylor, or any of the many others doesn't make someone anti-police.  It may well make policing a less enticing field to enter into . . . but as mentioned earlier, the structure of these policing organizations will beat any dissent out of people who stay in them anyway, so I'm not sure that you can just say 'well if we add some leftists all the problems in this field will go away.

[jrhampt]

ICE raided Los Angeles to arrest undocumented/illegal immigrants.  People waving a Mexican flag in response to that is a bit like saying "Yes, we're Mexican, not American".  As in, ICE is right to look for illegal/undocumented immigrants here. 

Yes, I cannot think of a better way to make Trump's moves look justified than to (a) claim to be Mexican by waving the flag, (b) in an environment where cars and businesses are being vandalized and people are shooting fireworks at the police. So yes, this is where the dreaded immigrants are hiding out and yes, here is confirmation that they are violent criminals.

I still don't really understand this problem with waving the Mexican flag (on top of a burning car, yes that is a problem, but not just waving a Mexican flag at a peaceful protest).  There are plenty of Americans who are also Irish or Italian or Puerto Rican, or something else who like to fly the Irish flag around St Patrick's Day, for example, to celebrate their heritage.  So I would see someone at a protest waving a Mexican flag as supporting Mexican Americans, Mexican immigrants, that part of their own heritage, etc. 

[Log]

Viewpoint diversity in the police would be a good ideal, but is it realistic?
A party that views police as the problem isn't going to join the police.

Study from Feb 2025:

"Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to trust police, more likely to believe police treat different groups equally, less likely to think police killings are a problem, and less likely to think Black Lives Matter protests are motivated by a genuine desire to hold police accountable (Pew, 2016). In fact, as we show below, party identification is among the most important individual-level predictors of policing-related attitudes, surpassing the importance of race or political ideology (see Figure 1 and accompanying discussion)."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajps.12945

I try to point out to my friends on the left when they're upset towards police that this must be just how the right feels towards academia, journalism, Hollywood... And when the right says they're under-represented there, we simply say, "yes, because people with your political disposition tend to not even try to join these institutions."

A little bit of self-awareness goes a long way. We're all hypocrites.

"Both sides"ing may not be accurate in terms of moral equivocation, but it is absolutely accurate when it comes to the psychological tendencies of tribalism that make us dig in our heels about our beliefs, forgive our own sides' failings, and look at the other side as pure evil.

[Log]

ICE raided Los Angeles to arrest undocumented/illegal immigrants.  People waving a Mexican flag in response to that is a bit like saying "Yes, we're Mexican, not American".  As in, ICE is right to look for illegal/undocumented immigrants here. 

Yes, I cannot think of a better way to make Trump's moves look justified than to (a) claim to be Mexican by waving the flag, (b) in an environment where cars and businesses are being vandalized and people are shooting fireworks at the police. So yes, this is where the dreaded immigrants are hiding out and yes, here is confirmation that they are violent criminals.

I still don't really understand this problem with waving the Mexican flag (on top of a burning car, yes that is a problem, but not just waving a Mexican flag at a peaceful protest).  There are plenty of Americans who are also Irish or Italian or Puerto Rican, or something else who like to fly the Irish flag around St Patrick's Day, for example, to celebrate their heritage.  So I would see someone at a protest waving a Mexican flag as supporting Mexican Americans, Mexican immigrants, that part of their own heritage, etc.

It's not about the most charitable interpretation possible. It's about how it will be seen. Again:

"The optics of the protest are the only thing that matters."

Many people who are disposed to a less generous interpretation will see masked young men flying the Mexican flag over scenes of arson and vandalism as validation of their perception of an "invasion" of immigrants. Can you really blame them?

[MaybeBabyMustache]

@Log - I'll caveat this by saying that I generally understand & respect the role police can play in society, and think there's a tendency to lump some bad actors in with everyone, which erodes public trust in a force where some/many people joined to do good. For example, I have a high degree of trust that if I call 911 right now from my home, I would be treated well by the local police, as would my non-white husband & non-white teen children.

That said, it's a strange comparison to make between police forces & academics. The police are in a huge position of power over people. They can arrest you, use violence against you if it's "justified", and can make decisions that can destroy your entire life. . . Academics are not in such a position, and are generally trying to better society by understanding more about how things work. I guess I don't get the comparison and think it's pretty apples to oranges.  I suppose you could make the case that journalism has the potential to sway public opinion, and Hollywood is generally meant to entertain. Those all feel really divergent from the police force.

That said, generally agree on tribalism.

[Kris]

Viewpoint diversity in the police would be a good ideal, but is it realistic?
A party that views police as the problem isn't going to join the police.

Study from Feb 2025:

"Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to trust police, more likely to believe police treat different groups equally, less likely to think police killings are a problem, and less likely to think Black Lives Matter protests are motivated by a genuine desire to hold police accountable (Pew, 2016). In fact, as we show below, party identification is among the most important individual-level predictors of policing-related attitudes, surpassing the importance of race or political ideology (see Figure 1 and accompanying discussion)."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajps.12945

I try to point out to my friends on the left when they're upset towards police that this must be just how the right feels towards academia, journalism, Hollywood... And when the right says they're under-represented there, we simply say, "yes, because people with your political disposition tend to not even try to join these institutions."

A little bit of self-awareness goes a long way. We're all hypocrites.

"Both sides"ing may not be accurate in terms of moral equivocation, but it is absolutely accurate when it comes to the psychological tendencies of tribalism that make us dig in our heels about our beliefs, forgive our own sides' failings, and look at the other side as pure evil.

This is true. But how to deal with it when the training necessary to become a police officer, e.g., means going against all of your ethical beliefs?

My son-in-law is the kind of person who absolutely should be a police officer. He is calm, intelligent, has a strong moral compass, and was strongly motivated to be a LEO. He majored in criminal justice in college, went all the way through police academy, and was accepted in our city’s police force. He went all the way through their training, and then at the end of it, decided he couldn’t be part of the institution as he saw it, and quit.

This is a kid who would have described himself as a moderate Republican in high school.

I’m just not sure this can be described as mere “tribalism.”

[FrugalToque]

I try to point out to my friends on the left when they're upset towards police that this must be just how the right feels towards academia, journalism, Hollywood... And when the right says they're under-represented there, we simply say, "yes, because people with your political disposition tend to not even try to join these institutions."

I think you're misstating the reason for "left" viewpoints in academia.
It's not that leftist people are the only ones going to college. It's that college, education is general, makes you more leftist.
There are numerous studies, for instance, that show that fundamentalism doesn't survive all the way to a PhD and views become more moderate as education increases.


I can't say why actors are like that, but it might that scraping your way up to a good living in movies/television requires a lot of working at crappy jobs for lousy pay and no health coverage.  I don't know what the evidence is on this, though.


But asking, "Why are academics leftist?" gets you "Because they've learned that that's where the evidence leads."
Asking, "Why are most cops right wing?" gets you "Because that's the kind of people they want and the job attracts."


It's not the same.
The evidence is that "building homes" works better than "criminalising homelessness"
The evidence is that "universal healthcare" has better outcomes than "private healthcare with medical bankruptcies"
etc.


Toque.

[Log]

I agree that their are major problems in police forces across the country.

Re @MaybeBabyMustache I also think that many on the right do believe that academia, journalism, and Hollywood, as a broad/dispersed force across society, do in fact have huge power over our lives. These are our epistemic institutions. Telling people what is appropriate/correct/valid to believe, and that other beliefs are simply invalid, is a lot of power! It might not be the literal force of guns and handcuffs, but having control over the "official" narrative is absolutely power.

Re @Kris that is a very concerning indictment of American policing, and whichever police department your son was joining in particular. But imagine a conservative (or even a "moderate Democrat" to make the parallelism fair) trying to go into a particularly left-leaning academic discipline like Sociology or African Studies or the like. I imagine there would be a similar mounting disgust with having to toe the line on every dispute of political correctness, keep their neck out of cancellation campaigns, having to espouse beliefs they don't hold in a "diversity statement" on every job application in order to even be considered...

Again, not morally equivocating, simply stating the dynamics at play are the same. Being upset about ideological bias in both directions is perfectly valid. Crucial institutions engaging in purity testing to only hire and keep around people who are ideologically aligned is a problem.

[Log]

I try to point out to my friends on the left when they're upset towards police that this must be just how the right feels towards academia, journalism, Hollywood... And when the right says they're under-represented there, we simply say, "yes, because people with your political disposition tend to not even try to join these institutions."

I think you're misstating the reason for "left" viewpoints in academia.
It's not that leftist people are the only ones going to college. It's that college, education is general, makes you more leftist.
There are numerous studies, for instance, that show that fundamentalism doesn't survive all the way to a PhD and views become more moderate as education increases.


I can't say why actors are like that, but it might that scraping your way up to a good living in movies/television requires a lot of working at crappy jobs for lousy pay and no health coverage.  I don't know what the evidence is on this, though.


But asking, "Why are academics leftist?" gets you "Because they've learned that that's where the evidence leads."
Asking, "Why are most cops right wing?" gets you "Because that's the kind of people they want and the job attracts."


It's not the same.
The evidence is that "building homes" works better than "criminalising homelessness"
The evidence is that "universal healthcare" has better outcomes than "private healthcare with medical bankruptcies"
etc.


Toque.

I used to agree with you more wholeheartedly, and am now just swirling in some shades of grey. There's a difference between:
1) most educated people are at least center-left-ish because a lot of the right's beliefs are simply wrong. And
2) lots of educated people accrue loony left beliefs that are slightly out of touch with reality in the academy because of group-think and purity testing.

I think both are true at the same time. Off the top of my head, Defund the Police, COVID extremism, and the gender movement in the US as compared to progressive European countries are all examples of educated people in the US group-thinking their way into beliefs that increasingly seem plainly false.

[FrugalToque]

I used to agree with you more wholeheartedly, and am now just swirling in some shades of grey. There's a difference between:
1) most educated people are at least center-left-ish because a lot of the right's beliefs are simply wrong. And
2) lots of educated people accrue loony left beliefs that are slightly out of touch with reality in the academy because of group-think and purity testing.

I think both are true at the same time. Off the top of my head, Defund the Police, COVID extremism, and the gender movement in the US as compared to progressive European countries are all examples of educated people in the US group-thinking their way into beliefs that increasingly seem plainly false.

Would I wipe out police departments? Probably not. But it's waaay overfunded in most US cities. In some places it's apparently more than half the city budget and has wiped out social programmes and mental healthcare.   Yeah, that's a problem.
The transgender issue isn't too hard. Your name and gender are whatever you say they are. If you can do it for married women, hyphenated couples etc, you can do it for kids while they figure themselves out. Most sports bodies have some basic rules about hormones and whether you went through puberty one way or the other and those are mostly working.
I'm not sure what "COVID extremism" is, but we should have ventilated the living fuck out of our school classrooms for the carbon dioxide levels *alone*, and we didn't.


But you know what? On homelessness, healthcare, war and peace, racism, sexism, the left was right.  We should anonymise resumes to protect from bias. We should have universal healthcare. The gov't should build affordable housing, mix it in with other housing, and let all the kids go to the same schools. We should make sure all the poor kids have breakfast and lunch, or you're wasting those education dollars.


I'm not going to get bent out of shape because one feminist said one crazy thing one time, or one trans activist made some ridiculous statement, while Jordan Peterson is out there pretending that using someone's preferred name is "violating my free speech and Trudeau will have me arrested!"


Toque.

[classicrando]

Re @Kris that is a very concerning indictment of American policing, and whichever police department your son was joining in particular. But imagine a conservative (or even a "moderate Democrat" to make the parallelism fair) trying to go into a particularly left-leaning academic discipline like Sociology or African Studies or the like. I imagine there would be a similar mounting disgust with having to toe the line on every dispute of political correctness, keep their neck out of cancellation campaigns, having to espouse beliefs they don't hold in a "diversity statement" on every job application in order to even be considered...

Again, not morally equivocating, simply stating the dynamics at play are the same. Being upset about ideological bias in both directions is perfectly valid. Crucial institutions engaging in purity testing to only hire and keep around people who are ideologically aligned is a problem.

I think I see the point you are trying to get at, even if I feel that the comparison is kind of a reach.  But this is basically addressed by Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.  Someone's right to be an intolerant, [race/sex/national]-ist dickbag is not equivalent to another person's right to exist and be treated with fairness and equity.  You don't debate/compromise with fascists about how many minorities they're allowed to mistreat or exterminate, or what the appropriate level of Jim Crow is; because who should be subject to being segregated or exterminated as the "other" never ends.

And that is the Paradox.  In order to prevent the fascist division of your tolerant society, you have to constantly segregate, suppress, and oppose  fascist thought.

[iris lily]

Love those alternative flags and @PeteD01 's comic.

Is there a reason protesters can't re-co-opt the American flag, though?

I mean, I like the US. I'm proud to be an American and while I also like Mexico (I grew up just a few hundred miles from the border and speak Spanish), I wouldn't carry a Mexican flag at a protest where I'm advocating for people to be able to live/work/stay in the US, because it makes no sense.

Maybe it's time for everyone who is pro-immigrants/pro immigration to start displaying the Stars and Stripes. Let's take it back!

-W

Totally agree!   We are standing up FOR America against those who wish to destroy it.  We should be holding American flags.

This is exactly my take too. 

In fact, I'd say we co-opt the Lee Greenwood song that I heard so much during the '90s right wing rallies.

I thank my lucky stars
To be living here today
'Cause the flag still stands for freedom
And they can't take that away
...
From Detroit down to Houston
And New York to L.A.
Where's pride in every American heart
And it's time we stand and say
That I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free

Sure fly the American flag.

I can never relate to the sentiment above about “reclaiming the American flag” as though it wasn't already “yours” (the generic you.)

You American? You in America? You got the flag, bro. Any idea that it belongs to one political contingent is not valid.

As an aside I have  also wondered about the the various versions of the
American flag I see being desecrated with blue lines and such. I dont especially like that.

[GuitarStv]

I used to agree with you more wholeheartedly, and am now just swirling in some shades of grey. There's a difference between:
1) most educated people are at least center-left-ish because a lot of the right's beliefs are simply wrong. And
2) lots of educated people accrue loony left beliefs that are slightly out of touch with reality in the academy because of group-think and purity testing.

I think both are true at the same time. Off the top of my head, Defund the Police, COVID extremism, and the gender movement in the US as compared to progressive European countries are all examples of educated people in the US group-thinking their way into beliefs that increasingly seem plainly false.

Would I wipe out police departments? Probably not. But it's waaay overfunded in most US cities. In some places it's apparently more than half the city budget and has wiped out social programmes and mental healthcare.   Yeah, that's a problem.
The transgender issue isn't too hard. Your name and gender are whatever you say they are. If you can do it for married women, hyphenated couples etc, you can do it for kids while they figure themselves out. Most sports bodies have some basic rules about hormones and whether you went through puberty one way or the other and those are mostly working.
I'm not sure what "COVID extremism" is, but we should have ventilated the living fuck out of our school classrooms for the carbon dioxide levels *alone*, and we didn't.


But you know what? On homelessness, healthcare, war and peace, racism, sexism, the left was right.  We should anonymise resumes to protect from bias. We should have universal healthcare. The gov't should build affordable housing, mix it in with other housing, and let all the kids go to the same schools. We should make sure all the poor kids have breakfast and lunch, or you're wasting those education dollars.


I'm not going to get bent out of shape because one feminist said one crazy thing one time, or one trans activist made some ridiculous statement, while Jordan Peterson is out there pretending that using someone's preferred name is "violating my free speech and Trudeau will have me arrested!"


Toque.

Yeah, to kind of pile on  .  .  .

Europe doesn't have anywhere near the same number of citizens being murdered by police as the United States does.  The calls to defund the police arose from a situation where there was no (or extremely limited) funding for mental health/drug/homeless related programs and an increasing in funding going to police departments.  Except for the loonies way out on the fringe, 'de-funding' didn't refer to abolishing police entirely it was an attempt to re-allocate some of these funds so that police (who aren't well trained to handle these situations) wouldn't be stuck trying to muddle through them as much.  Most of the studies I've read indicate that this is a more effective approach to take, and one much less likely to result in deaths.


As far as the trans thing goes, there has been goofy stuff that the left has pushed for sure.  Being required to list your pronouns in every email or interaction with a new person is a weird and non-nonsensical thing when less than a third of a percent of people are trans.  Pretending that there's no biological difference in sport between people who have gone through male and female puberty is not science based and a strange thing to claim.  I dunno though . . . to me that all seems a lot less intentionally life ruining than the anti-trans approach.  There's no benefit in forcing a trans person to use the bathroom of your choice.  There's no benefit in denying people ID that says the gender they identify as.  There's no benefit in kicking trans people out of the military - especially after they've served for years with distinction.

[iris lily]

I can never relate to the sentiment above about “reclaiming the American flag” as though it wasn't already “yours” (the generic you.)

You American? You in America? You got the flag, bro. Any idea that it belongs to one political contingent is not valid.

Symbols matter. And how they are received matters.

You can't go around using Pepe the frog willy nilly and say "it's just an innocent frog" when people inform you that it has been co-opted by racists, and seeing it will bring up emotions about how the racism it now represents affects the people that are... affected by racism.

And you can't just bury your head in the sand if a large portion of people have a specific meaning in mind with the American flag.

I cannot see an American flag and simply think "that is the flag of a country that exists." That's not how brains work. It's been associated with Social Conservatives, and increasingly MAGA. It's flown beside Confederate and Libertarian "don't tread on me" flags and Trump / MAGA flags. It has taken on a new meaning, and it won't let go of that meaning easily, or simply through one individual's denial of the symbolism it now carries.

Sure I can! I can indeed  bury my head in the sand/ stand up to the sentiment that “they” (racist good ole boys) own that American flag symbol. They do not. It is my flag too.

Participate in that divide if you like, but I won’t.

[iris lily]

Are you saying when you see someone waving the American flag, you know that they love the country and would welcome your views with open arms?

That if you were not "normal" in their worldview, they would still love you?

I have no idea what the broad swath of people  you were talking about think of me, and won’t pretend to know how they all will act.

Last week I took our American flag down from the front of our house for aesthetic purposes. I had just  redecorated our front area  with flower pots and plantings of a particular color and honestly, I found the flag distracting. But I had also been uneasy with the fact that we didn’t display it  properly. It wasn’t lit at night. We didn’t take it down in bad weather. So, I’m not keen on completely ignoring flag etiquette, but I understand that people do it.

[ChpBstrd]

Again, I think you're misidentifying the problem.  It's not an issue of hierarchy.  The majority of those center left are well aware of the need for police.  The left backlash against policing has to do with the unchecked excesses and usual lack of consequences for blatantly overstepping legal bounds while policing.  Protesting the murder of a George Floyd or Manuel Ellis or Eric Garner, or Michael Brown, or Tamir Rice, or Philandro Castile, or Breonna Taylor, or any of the many others doesn't make someone anti-police.  It may well make policing a less enticing field to enter into . . . but as mentioned earlier, the structure of these policing organizations will beat any dissent out of people who stay in them anyway, so I'm not sure that you can just say 'well if we add some leftists all the problems in this field will go away.

So it's the structure of the organization and its leaders that leads to the abuses, but the hierarchical structure in itself isn't the problem? I see an issue with that distinction. They're both the hierarchy. Couldn't a different structure/leadership deliver a better result?

Whether the problem with policing is a few bad apples, or lots of bad apples, or a whole barrel of bad apples, then wouldn't it be logical to advocate the replacement of however many bad apples there are with people of integrity? Why aren't young liberals signing up to join the forces, forming organizations to counter the unions and leaders, and reforming police departments from the inside out? Such a mission would be at least as meaningful as the teaching, science, healthcare, and government roles liberals often seek out.

To simply wash one's hands and walk away is to be complicit with the problem. That is, unless we also believed that policing work inherently corrupts the mortal integrity of anybody who does it. I'm on the fence about that claim, but I don't hear liberals making it. Instead they can imagine a better system, but are unwilling to be a part of it.

[roomtempmayo]

To simply wash one's hands and walk away is to be complicit with the problem. That is, unless we also believed that policing work inherently corrupts the mortal integrity of anybody who does it. I'm on the fence about that claim, but I don't hear liberals making it. Instead they can imagine a better system, but are unwilling to be a part of it.

I think it's the front line, beat cop work that is uniquely off-putting to liberals.

Other areas that deal with deviance in cities lean heavily liberal, from mental health and addiction counselors to prosecutors offices.  There are lots of liberals in corrections, fire departments, and on paramedic rigs.

The system is full of liberals doing the work to try and solve issues of crime and deviance. 

It's really only front line police work where they're conspicuously absent.

[GuitarStv]

Again, I think you're misidentifying the problem.  It's not an issue of hierarchy.  The majority of those center left are well aware of the need for police.  The left backlash against policing has to do with the unchecked excesses and usual lack of consequences for blatantly overstepping legal bounds while policing.  Protesting the murder of a George Floyd or Manuel Ellis or Eric Garner, or Michael Brown, or Tamir Rice, or Philandro Castile, or Breonna Taylor, or any of the many others doesn't make someone anti-police.  It may well make policing a less enticing field to enter into . . . but as mentioned earlier, the structure of these policing organizations will beat any dissent out of people who stay in them anyway, so I'm not sure that you can just say 'well if we add some leftists all the problems in this field will go away.

So it's the structure of the organization and its leaders that leads to the abuses, but the hierarchical structure in itself isn't the problem? I see an issue with that distinction. They're both the hierarchy. Couldn't a different structure/leadership deliver a better result?

Absolutely, if structural problems are addressed it would deliver a better result.

Whether the problem with policing is a few bad apples, or lots of bad apples, or a whole barrel of bad apples, then wouldn't it be logical to advocate the replacement of however many bad apples there are with people of integrity? Why aren't young liberals signing up to join the forces, forming organizations to counter the unions and leaders, and reforming police departments from the inside out? Such a mission would be at least as meaningful as the teaching, science, healthcare, and government roles liberals often seek out.

Sure.  Replacing the bad apples with people of integrity is a sensible approach.  That is, if you can identify the people to replace and then actually remove them.  This is currently made difficult with existing administration, reporting policies, union protections, and backroom/handshake agreements with prosecutors.

There were about 1.3 million police officers serving in the US last year including all federal, law, and state levels.  Let's assume that we need to replace more than half of them to effect real change.  So 700,000 young liberals need to join the forces.  60,000 new recruits are trained annually (https://apbweb.com/2024/05/police-academy-training-time-for-reform/) with a pass rate of about 86%.  So we get a potential 51,600 new police each year.  Let's assume a massive push, and we get half of those as our elite young liberals.  That's going to require more than 27 years of concerted effort before it's possible to actually override the existing folks there.  Yikes.

Additional problems:
- They might just get drummed out by existing administration anyway in favour of those who like the same old corrupt method of doing this
- They might get infected with groupthink simply by being in the position for an extended time and change positions
- There is no guarantee that these young liberals will be 100% morally above board anyway (political affiliation doesn't predict morality as far as I'm aware)
- Assumes that structural problems aren't imposed from outside forces by higher political groups

I dunno, this doesn't seem like a realistically winnable fight from where I'm sitting.  And with zero guarantee of a better system it would require the sacrifice of the entire career of a huge number of young people.

[dividendman]

Perhaps it's time to leverage the 2nd Amendment. California should issue firearms and ammunition to all residents in the next budget to protect against the tyranny of the federal government - which was one of the actual purposes of the 2nd Amendment.

[Log]

...

...

I really find it so funny when I get these dismissive rote arguments as if I'm just some dumb right-winger who "doesn't get it" when I literally believed all these arguments a few years ago, and now I've simply come around to the moderate, common-sense positions of the silent majority that so many of us on the left refuse to hear.

Police: American police are armed because American criminals are armed. If I could wave a magic wand, I would abolish the second amendment and start the years/decades long campaign it would take to gradually disarm the country. In reality though, American police need guns to do their jobs.

The problem with replacing police with some alternative un-armed civilian intervention staff is that in many cases, the interactions that need armed police and the interactions that don't can't be identified as such until you're in the middle of them. Things like routine traffic stops can rapidly turn into into very dangerous, violent situations because in America you never know if someone has a gun.

America has more crime than other developed countries for various reasons, and has fewer police per capita. European and East Asian countries that progressive Americans look up to have more police per capita, and live at much denser populations, meaning more police per capita is many more police per acre.

Getting empirical data on criminal justice issues is notoriously difficult, but the consensus in the field, as far as I understand it, is that the most effective deterrence against crime is a high certainty of getting caught, and that necessitates having a lot of police coverage. During the '90s, crime plummeted all over the US. In the '00s, crime rates flat-lined across the country, while they continued to drop in New York City, turning it into one of the safest places in the entire country. In research attempting to explain "the New York difference," it is widely agreed that simply hiring a lot more police was a large factor.

You claim there was "no (or extremely limited) funding for mental health/drug/homeless related programs," and yet the progressive cities that had the most aggressive Defund the Police movements were also pouring buckets down the drain on new programs for these issues that were utterly failing to make a dent in the issue. The homelessness issue is mostly an issue of housing costs, which these same left-leaning cities brought upon themselves through supply-denialism and utterly false theories of how new housing actually increased prices through "gentrification."

Trans issues: Again, to burnish my sane liberal credentials against any accusations I'm some kooky right winger, there's a brand new podcast series from the NEW YORK TIMES talking about how the US transgender movement got out ahead of its skis on the evidence for transgender healthcare for minors.

There have been a lot of medical professionals engaged in intensive progressive political activism from within their roles in expert institutions, over-stating the evidence in favor of interventions that they believe in for political reasons, not medical ones. They made faulty claims of evidence that kids denied access to treatment were at elevated risk for suicide, and accused anyone who questioned the gender identities of confused adolescents of "killing trans kids." Science journalists who pointed out, "hey, that's not what that paper actually says" have been victims of pretty vicious cancellation campaigns.

Trans girls just obviously have an unfair advantage against cis girls in sports.

COVID: School closures were excessively long, especially in more progressive places where they didn't have the spine to confront their teachers' unions. Learning loss and social development issues have persisted for a whole generation of kids since the pandemic, and this hit the marginalized and the working class disproportionately hard, as compared to the work-from-home laptop class and those who could afford to send their kids to private schools.

Progressive cities kept a lot of things much more shut down than they needed to be after the vaccine was available. Young, healthy people were never at much risk from COVID, and in places like college campuses where they weren't at risk of exposing older relatives, should have generally been free to go on living life as normal.

---

Again, these are not crazy right-wing takes, these are incredibly widespread, normal, moderate opinions. On things like criminal justice, housing economics, transgender care for minors, these things are the literal expert consensus, which the left shuts their ears to and refuses to acknowledge, even as they claim that they have the epistemic high ground.

I continue to vote exclusively for Democrats, while acknowledging that a lot of my co-partisans are plainly wrong on certain issues. Reflexively defending one team and assuming any disagreement is wrong is not good epistemological practice.

Unsurprisingly, polling shows the public generally trusts Democrats less on the issues where they hold these untrue and unpopular beliefs. So if Democrats re-committed to the facts on these issues, they would plausibly be more popular and win more elections, which would be great.

[MustacheAndaHalf]

Democrats talk about how normally the California national guard would not be used for this - okay, but the word "national" is key there.

As usual, both sides are annoying.  I believe there's a court hearing today about the use of the national guard.

"At this early stage of the proceedings, the Court must determine whether the President followed the congressionally mandated procedure for his actions. He did not.
His actions were illegal—both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. He must therefore return control of the California National Guard to the Governor of the State of California forthwith."
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.450934/gov.uscourts.cand.450934.64.0.pdf

[MustacheAndaHalf]

My son-in-law is the kind of person who absolutely should be a police officer. He is calm, intelligent, has a strong moral compass, and was strongly motivated to be a LEO.

So we get a potential 51,600 new police each year.  Let's assume a massive push, and we get half of those as our elite young liberals.  That's going to require more than 27 years of concerted effort before it's possible to actually override the existing folks there.

If by "intelligent" and "elite" the meaning is high I.Q., some police departments reject candidates with high I.Q.s.  Their belief is that these candidates will get bored and leave the force, wasting their expensive training.

"Court OKs Barring High IQs for Cops"
...
"Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training."
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836

I found some articles mentioning that U.S. states can bar police officers that score too high on I.Q. tests.  But in two pages of search results I couldn't find any mention of another case - Google's results were rather focused on the London case I quoted above.

[FrugalToque]

...

...

I really find it so funny when I get these dismissive rote arguments as if I'm just some dumb right-winger who "doesn't get it" when I literally believed all these arguments a few years ago, and now I've simply come around to the moderate, common-sense positions of the silent majority that so many of us on the left refuse to hear.

Police: American police are armed because American criminals are armed. If I could wave a magic wand, I would abolish the second amendment and start the years/decades long campaign it would take to gradually disarm the country. In reality though, American police need guns to do their jobs.

The issue here is that you deleted everything I wrote and are responding to something else.
I didn't say to disarm the police.  Nowhere did I say that. We have police in Canada. They have guns and tasers. They just don't use them as often. We also have universal healthcare and places that mentally disturbed people can go and be taken care of.
I did not suggest disarming police officers anywhere.
You are arguing against a straw man, as you continue to do in your post:

The problem with replacing police with some alternative un-armed civilian intervention staff is that in many cases, the interactions that need armed police and the interactions that don't can't be identified as such until you're in the middle of them. Things like routine traffic stops can rapidly turn into into very dangerous, violent situations because in America you never know if someone has a gun.

America has more crime than other developed countries for various reasons, and has fewer police per capita. European and East Asian countries that progressive Americans look up to have more police per capita, and live at much denser populations, meaning more police per capita is many more police per acre.

Getting empirical data on criminal justice issues is notoriously difficult, but the consensus in the field, as far as I understand it, is that the most effective deterrence against crime is a high certainty of getting caught,

This is not a common left wing view point, and I'm surprised you bring it up.
The most effective way to prevent crime is to fight poverty and educate children.
Poverty, desperation, lack of education and things like that are the leading indicators of crime.

and that necessitates having a lot of police coverage. During the '90s, crime plummeted all over the US. In the '00s, crime rates flat-lined across the country, while they continued to drop in New York City, turning it into one of the safest places in the entire country. In research attempting to explain "the New York difference," it is widely agreed that simply hiring a lot more police was a large factor.

During the 90s, you had a government that was making huge investments in education.
Your current government is shutting down the federal department of Education.

You claim there was "no (or extremely limited) funding for mental health/drug/homeless related programs," and yet the progressive cities that had the most aggressive Defund the Police movements were also pouring buckets down the drain on new programs for these issues that were utterly failing to make a dent in the issue. The homelessness issue is mostly an issue of housing costs, which these same left-leaning cities brought upon themselves through supply-denialism and utterly false theories of how new housing actually increased prices through "gentrification."

Bigger cities have bigger problems with crime.  When people can't find jobs, they move to big cities and - when they can't find jobs there - start having more serious problems.  It's not that "Defunding police (which they didn't do) and funding mental health causes crime".  It's that "Big cities attract different kinds of problems from small cities"

Trans issues: Again, to burnish my sane liberal credentials against any accusations I'm some kooky right winger, there's a brand new podcast series from the NEW YORK TIMES talking about how the US transgender movement got out ahead of its skis on the evidence for transgender healthcare for minors.

There have been a lot of medical professionals engaged in intensive progressive political activism from within their roles in expert institutions, over-stating the evidence in favor of interventions that they believe in for political reasons, not medical ones. They made faulty claims of evidence that kids denied access to treatment were at elevated risk for suicide, and accused anyone who questioned the gender identities of confused adolescents of "killing trans kids." Science journalists who pointed out, "hey, that's not what that paper actually says" have been victims of pretty vicious cancellation campaigns.

Trans girls just obviously have an unfair advantage against cis girls in sports.

Again, you're not arguing with me.  You're arguing with something else said by someone else.
This is conveniently possible because you deleted what I wrote so you could respond to a strawman.

Most sports bodies have rules about hormones and going through puberty that disqualify biological males who went through puberty male and didn't change until after.  Honestly, as far as washrooms go, children need separate, private stalls to use or they don't feel safe using washrooms at school anyway.
Allowing a small number of overzealous trans activists to make the left sound entirely out-to-lunch is silly.

COVID: School closures were excessively long, especially in more progressive places where they didn't have the spine to confront their teachers' unions. Learning loss and social development issues have persisted for a whole generation of kids since the pandemic, and this hit the marginalized and the working class disproportionately hard, as compared to the work-from-home laptop class and those who could afford to send their kids to private schools.

The longest school shutdown in Canada was in Ontario, which had a very conservative government.  In fact, the same guy, Doug Ford, is still in charge.  His mom was in a nursing home, you see, and he freaked out on a personal level.

BUT HE STILL NEVER PUT GOOD VENTILATION IN OUR CHILDREN'S SCHOOLS.
That would have been effective, but cost money, and he's a conservative, and his goal is to ruin public education, not help children.

Progressive cities kept a lot of things much more shut down than they needed to be after the vaccine was available. Young, healthy people were never at much risk from COVID, and in places like college campuses where they weren't at risk of exposing older relatives, should have generally been free to go on living life as normal.
---

Again, these are not crazy right-wing takes, these are incredibly widespread, normal, moderate opinions. On things like criminal justice, housing economics, transgender care for minors, these things are the literal expert consensus, which the left shuts their ears to and refuses to acknowledge, even as they claim that they have the epistemic high ground.

On criminal justice - i.e. homelessness - it is very clear that criminalising the homeless does not work, but building homes does.
On criminal justice - "getting tough on crime" - it is clear that making criminals miserable makes things worse, and educating them and rehabilitating them makes things better.  But even here in Canada, we have the "Dangerous Offender" laws that allow especially psychotic criminals to be locked away permanently.
On housing economics, it is clear that there is no "market based" solution. There is little profit in affordable housing. You have to force builders to build those homes whenever they put in a new subdivision.
On transgender care for minors, the "consensus" that the right can't handle is that you should call people by whatever name/pronouns they want to use.  For sports, sports bodies have made rulings and those mostly work, although they need ironing out.

I'm not "covering my ears" here - and I'm not deleting your arguments and arguing with someone else, which is what you did to my original, and very simple, arguments.


Toque.

[Herbert Derp]

Agreed that the protestors have an optics problem. Anyone who burns other people’s cars in the middle of the street while waving the Mexican flag needs to be dealt with. Immediately.

Do people like that even want to be part of the USA anyway? I can’t say that I understand the message that such people are trying to convey, but it certainly isn’t positive or supportive of the United States.

These idiots are playing right into Trump’s hands. Waving foreign flags while causing general anarchy and mayhem is feeding directly into the “foreign invasion” narrative that Trump wants. These people are either plants or morons.

[classicrando]

Adding somewhat on to what @MustacheAndaHalf said, given that multiple court cases have affirmed that the police have no duty to protect any specific individual in any specific circumstance, I really kind of struggle to understand why we have police, and why they're so heavily armed, in the first place. 

I mean, the cynical part of me understands that modern policing was born out of slave patrols, strike breakers, and property protection; but who really believes that "the police keep us safe" when there are so many circumstances where they sit back and do nothing, or murder the people they were supposed to help?  If police can murder someone at a traffic stop "because they were scared" and can hide in another subway car while a civilian fights off a knife-wielding assailant and can avoid confronting a school shooter "because of the danger to the officers" then who the fuck are they protecting but themselves?  Like, firefighters run into dangerous situations to protect life and property (and we low-key expect them to, as it's their actual job) but we had 100 cops dawdling outside Uvalde for an hour.  Like, can you imagine firefighters refusing to enter a burning school with children trapped inside? 

Stop giving police--who theoretically have training, practice, and awareness--a pass for having ordinary human emotions while at the same time demanding random citizens be perfectly calm, collected, and rational in every interaction with them.  The average person should not have to conduct their interactions with the police in the same way as when coming across a dangerous and unpredictable wild animal.

If we're going to insist on filling our police forces with uncritical, obedient, C-student, high-school diploma foot soldiers, then I literally do not care how many cops get shot, stabbed, or beaten in the process of protecting the general population and especially preserving the next generation.  The secret service know that it is their job to take bullets meant for the president, we as a society should be demanding the same sort of behavior out of our police forces.  Get your asses in there you fucking cowards, that is what you are here for in a society where you are not merely goons and thugs for the ruling class.

How do you justify destroying a $7 million mini mall to rescue a girl whose ransom was only $25,000?

This shit gets me so heated.

[MaybeBabyMustache]

I agree that their are major problems in police forces across the country.

Re @MaybeBabyMustache I also think that many on the right do believe that academia, journalism, and Hollywood, as a broad/dispersed force across society, do in fact have huge power over our lives. These are our epistemic institutions. Telling people what is appropriate/correct/valid to believe, and that other beliefs are simply invalid, is a lot of power! It might not be the literal force of guns and handcuffs, but having control over the "official" narrative is absolutely power.

Re @Kris that is a very concerning indictment of American policing, and whichever police department your son was joining in particular. But imagine a conservative (or even a "moderate Democrat" to make the parallelism fair) trying to go into a particularly left-leaning academic discipline like Sociology or African Studies or the like. I imagine there would be a similar mounting disgust with having to toe the line on every dispute of political correctness, keep their neck out of cancellation campaigns, having to espouse beliefs they don't hold in a "diversity statement" on every job application in order to even be considered...

Again, not morally equivocating, simply stating the dynamics at play are the same. Being upset about ideological bias in both directions is perfectly valid. Crucial institutions engaging in purity testing to only hire and keep around people who are ideologically aligned is a problem.

Still not going with your take that an academic wields the same power over an individual as the police and think this is a huge stretch of logic.

That said, in order to understand the take you're sharing, I'd have to believe that journalists & academics (I'll leave Hollywood out of it, because I'm not sure how actors hired to play a role really fit the narrative here) are falsifying information in order to demonstrate a more liberal take. Data is data. Science is science. Facts are facts. I'm not afraid of facts, data & science, even when they align with things that surprise me, don't perfectly align with my viewpoint, or force me to look at something in a new way.

[Log]

@FrugalToque - I will not continue derailing the thread unproductively talking past each other, but I will say I was simply redacting long quotes for the sake of space, and I was not arguing a straw man.
1) I started by bringing up those three issues as examples of issues where many on the left make specious claims.
2) You responded with skepticism that the left was wrong about those issues, and so
3) I responded with concrete examples of where the left is broadly out-of-touch with the expert consensus based on research.
4) You have now responded with a sort of motte-and-bailey argument.

You know, I agree that education and poverty reduction are good. I agree that large population centers will always have more crime than smaller towns, and that's a price worth paying because cities are amazing. I agree that we should refer to trans people how they want to be referred to. I agree that improving ventilation was a massively under-rated consideration for the entirety of the pandemic.

I'm not saying, "liberalism is wrong, the left is full of idiots!" I'm saying, "hey team, I think we're wrong on that one and it really cost us with important swing voters, let's try to get this right."

(I will disagree with you on housing. It strikes me as dubious to say "there is no market-based solution" when the market is still incredibly constrained all over the US, Canada, and the rest of the Anglosphere.)

[Morning Glory]

I saw an article yesterday that said Mexican flags at protests are a pretty normal sight in California,  going back at least as far as the farm worker strikes in the 1960s. I was unaware of that since I've never lived there, as are probably most people outside California.  It's has been used historically as a symbol for racial equality and workers' rights.


The cars being targeted are all self-driving.  This is not the first time or place that people have seized an opportunity to destroy those things.  They should be illegal IMO.

[PeteD01]

I saw an article yesterday that said Mexican flags at protests are a pretty normal sight in California,  going back at least as far as the farm worker strikes in the 1960s. I was unaware of that since I've never lived there, as are probably most people outside California.  It's has been used historically as a symbol for racial equality and workers' rights.


The cars being targeted are all self-driving.  This is not the first time or place that people have seized an opportunity to destroy those things.  They should be illegal IMO.

I was waiting for someone to point this out.

Put the question to google and you will find numerous articles explaining the issue well - and now they want to distract to stop the talk about the Mexican flag because the idiots have realized that all it does is to provide an education to Americans unfamiliar with the history of the Mexican flag in the US.

The entire Mexican flag conservative outrage completely backfired because millions of Americans who became curious about the issue learned that it was completely manufactured outrage betting on ignorance of the public.

Being Mexican-American and flying the Mexican flag at a protest against bigoted government attacks on one's community checks all the right boxes, and displaying national flags in order to show appreciation and pride in one's cultural heritage is about as American as it gets.

Of course, if the group doing it is not considered white by the white supremacist/fake patriot set, it is painted as not being sufficiently patriotic and clearly not made up by real Americans.

Overall, provoking bigot outrage by flying a Mexican flag with its complex historical background and more recent association with pro-immigrant sentiment is politically savvy as it is possible for members of the group to come together for various reasons that extend over the entire political spectrum.

Happy NO KINGS day and don't forget to bring your Mexican flag!

[ChpBstrd]

Everyone: Waving the Mexican flag in the middle of a demonstration is absolutely tone-deaf, and playing into Trump's Fox News narrative just like he knows you will.

Protestors: That just means I'll wave it harder! Because people waved it in the past!

{Democratic Party goes on to lose all 3 branches of government in a series of elections}

[PeteD01]

Everyone: Waving the Mexican flag in the middle of a demonstration is absolutely tone-deaf, and playing into Trump's Fox News narrative just like he knows you will.

Protestors: That just means I'll wave it harder! Because people waved it in the past!

{Democratic Party goes on to lose all 3 branches of government in a series of elections}

Protests are not about majorities but about exposing the brittleness of authoritarian regimes and their paranoia.

Waving tons of Mexican flags at anti-Trump events is a good way to keep the Mexican flag issue in the news and that is what one does if one wants to control the narrative.
Looking at your recent postings, you seem to have a defeatist attitude just like many Democrats these days.

When it come to successful propaganda, the first order of business is to set the agenda for what is being talked about, and conservative outrage about flags drowning out subservient reporting on DJT´s birthday parade is one way to achieve that.

Make the opponent react and double down if he does.

[Herbert Derp]

Waving tons of Mexican flags at anti-Trump events is a good way to keep the Mexican flag issue in the news and that is what one does if one wants to control the narrative.

When it come to successful propaganda, the first order of business is to set the agenda for what is being talked about, and conservative outrage about flags drowning out subservient reporting on DJT´s birthday parade is one way to achieve that.

I am not convinced that foreign flags and riots is a winning narrative for the left. They are going to lose on this.

[Kris]

Waving tons of Mexican flags at anti-Trump events is a good way to keep the Mexican flag issue in the news and that is what one does if one wants to control the narrative.

When it come to successful propaganda, the first order of business is to set the agenda for what is being talked about, and conservative outrage about flags drowning out subservient reporting on DJT´s birthday parade is one way to achieve that.

I am not convinced that foreign flags and riots is a winning narrative for the left. They are going to lose on this.

Foreign flags and riots are being shown by the media incredibly disproportionately. Not what is actually happening. The left may indeed lose, but not because of what they are actually doing.

[Log]

Everyone: Waving the Mexican flag in the middle of a demonstration is absolutely tone-deaf, and playing into Trump's Fox News narrative just like he knows you will.

Protestors: That just means I'll wave it harder! Because people waved it in the past!

{Democratic Party goes on to lose all 3 branches of government in a series of elections}

100%...

[PeteD01]

Everyone: Waving the Mexican flag in the middle of a demonstration is absolutely tone-deaf, and playing into Trump's Fox News narrative just like he knows you will.

Protestors: That just means I'll wave it harder! Because people waved it in the past!

{Democratic Party goes on to lose all 3 branches of government in a series of elections}

100%...

BS, displaying as many Mexican flags as feasible during upcoming rallies is the perfect way to keep the Mexican flag issue in the news and it is all good because it keeps them talking about it (although, admittedly, you seem to already have run out of words, but then, silence is often worth more than yada yada yada).

[Fru-Gal]

Don’t judge what the protesters do by what I say. I’m just an independently wealthy person who doesn’t tolerate being told what to do.

[MustacheAndaHalf]

Adding somewhat on to what @MustacheAndaHalf said, given that multiple court cases have affirmed that the police have no duty to protect any specific individual in any specific circumstance, I really kind of struggle to understand why we have police, and why they're so heavily armed, in the first place. 

Maybe if you knew what happens without police, you'd understand.

"On June 11, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan stated that the zone had a "block party" atmosphere; later, The New York Times contrasted Durkan's words with local business people's accounts of harassment, vandalism, and looting."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest

Perhaps you think even nicer people than Americans would behave better, but Canadians didn't during a police strike:

"The Montreal Gazette reported on 8 October 1969:
Fires, explosions, assaults and a full-pitched gun-battle kept Montrealers huddled indoors as the reign of terror brought the city to the edge of chaos and resulted in the call for the Army help..... Hundreds of looters swept through downtown Montreal last night as the city suffered one of the worst outbreaks of lawlessness in its history. Hotels, banks, stores and restaurants around the Ste-Catherine-Peel Street axis had their windows smashed by rock-tossing youths. Thousands of spectators looked on as looters casually picked goods out of store-front windows."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot

[Metalcat]

Adding somewhat on to what @MustacheAndaHalf said, given that multiple court cases have affirmed that the police have no duty to protect any specific individual in any specific circumstance, I really kind of struggle to understand why we have police, and why they're so heavily armed, in the first place. 

Maybe if you knew what happens without police, you'd understand.

"On June 11, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan stated that the zone had a "block party" atmosphere; later, The New York Times contrasted Durkan's words with local business people's accounts of harassment, vandalism, and looting."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest

Perhaps you think even nicer people than Americans would behave better, but Canadians didn't during a police strike:

"The Montreal Gazette reported on 8 October 1969:
Fires, explosions, assaults and a full-pitched gun-battle kept Montrealers huddled indoors as the reign of terror brought the city to the edge of chaos and resulted in the call for the Army help..... Hundreds of looters swept through downtown Montreal last night as the city suffered one of the worst outbreaks of lawlessness in its history. Hotels, banks, stores and restaurants around the Ste-Catherine-Peel Street axis had their windows smashed by rock-tossing youths. Thousands of spectators looked on as looters casually picked goods out of store-front windows."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot

Lol, if you're surprised that Montrealers caused chaos, then you know nothing about Montreal.

Also, people who want less policing don't want less social order, they want better systemic supports to promote social order so that less policing is required.

Obviously if you remove police from a system designed to be managed by police, you will have a vacuum and chaos will ensure, especially in a city like Montreal.

I mean, come on, it's Montre-fucking-al. Know the city you're talking about if you're going to use it as an example of anything. It's a French city run by gangsters, like, the most likely place to erupt into chaotic protests.

Montrealers erupt into chaotic protest as a hobby. It's a huge part of the culture. Sometimes naked.

ETA: last time I lived in Montreal, the city descended into total chaos for months on end because they tried to raise tuition at world class universities from $2200/yr to $3700/yr.

Which then lead to even more chaotic protests because the government took measures to try and quell the initial protests, which resulted in the leader of the province being voted out because that pissed off the protest-loving Quebecers so badly.

[bmjohnson35]

I saw an article yesterday that said Mexican flags at protests are a pretty normal sight in California,  going back at least as far as the farm worker strikes in the 1960s. I was unaware of that since I've never lived there, as are probably most people outside California.  It's has been used historically as a symbol for racial equality and workers' rights.


The cars being targeted are all self-driving.  This is not the first time or place that people have seized an opportunity to destroy those things.  They should be illegal IMO.

I was waiting for someone to point this out.

Put the question to google and you will find numerous articles explaining the issue well - and now they want to distract to stop the talk about the Mexican flag because the idiots have realized that all it does is to provide an education to Americans unfamiliar with the history of the Mexican flag in the US.

The entire Mexican flag conservative outrage completely backfired because millions of Americans who became curious about the issue learned that it was completely manufactured outrage betting on ignorance of the public.

Being Mexican-American and flying the Mexican flag at a protest against bigoted government attacks on one's community checks all the right boxes, and displaying national flags in order to show appreciation and pride in one's cultural heritage is about as American as it gets.

Of course, if the group doing it is not considered white by the white supremacist/fake patriot set, it is painted as not being sufficiently patriotic and clearly not made up by real Americans.

Overall, provoking bigot outrage by flying a Mexican flag with its complex historical background and more recent association with pro-immigrant sentiment is politically savvy as it is possible for members of the group to come together for various reasons that extend over the entire political spectrum.

Happy NO KINGS day and don't forget to bring your Mexican flag!

[Kris]

I saw an article yesterday that said Mexican flags at protests are a pretty normal sight in California,  going back at least as far as the farm worker strikes in the 1960s. I was unaware of that since I've never lived there, as are probably most people outside California.  It's has been used historically as a symbol for racial equality and workers' rights.


The cars being targeted are all self-driving.  This is not the first time or place that people have seized an opportunity to destroy those things.  They should be illegal IMO.

I was waiting for someone to point this out.

Put the question to google and you will find numerous articles explaining the issue well - and now they want to distract to stop the talk about the Mexican flag because the idiots have realized that all it does is to provide an education to Americans unfamiliar with the history of the Mexican flag in the US.

The entire Mexican flag conservative outrage completely backfired because millions of Americans who became curious about the issue learned that it was completely manufactured outrage betting on ignorance of the public.

Being Mexican-American and flying the Mexican flag at a protest against bigoted government attacks on one's community checks all the right boxes, and displaying national flags in order to show appreciation and pride in one's cultural heritage is about as American as it gets.

Of course, if the group doing it is not considered white by the white supremacist/fake patriot set, it is painted as not being sufficiently patriotic and clearly not made up by real Americans.

Overall, provoking bigot outrage by flying a Mexican flag with its complex historical background and more recent association with pro-immigrant sentiment is politically savvy as it is possible for members of the group to come together for various reasons that extend over the entire political spectrum.

Happy NO KINGS day and don't forget to bring your Mexican flag!

WOW, you appear to be a rather angry person.  You do release others can have a different perception without being white supremacist or some other radical outlier?

I see no anger in that comment. Can you point it out specifically?

[bmjohnson35]

I saw an article yesterday that said Mexican flags at protests are a pretty normal sight in California,  going back at least as far as the farm worker strikes in the 1960s. I was unaware of that since I've never lived there, as are probably most people outside California.  It's has been used historically as a symbol for racial equality and workers' rights.


The cars being targeted are all self-driving.  This is not the first time or place that people have seized an opportunity to destroy those things.  They should be illegal IMO.

I was waiting for someone to point this out.

Put the question to google and you will find numerous articles explaining the issue well - and now they want to distract to stop the talk about the Mexican flag because the idiots have realized that all it does is to provide an education to Americans unfamiliar with the history of the Mexican flag in the US.

The entire Mexican flag conservative outrage completely backfired because millions of Americans who became curious about the issue learned that it was completely manufactured outrage betting on ignorance of the public.

Being Mexican-American and flying the Mexican flag at a protest against bigoted government attacks on one's community checks all the right boxes, and displaying national flags in order to show appreciation and pride in one's cultural heritage is about as American as it gets.

Of course, if the group doing it is not considered white by the white supremacist/fake patriot set, it is painted as not being sufficiently patriotic and clearly not made up by real Americans.

Overall, provoking bigot outrage by flying a Mexican flag with its complex historical background and more recent association with pro-immigrant sentiment is politically savvy as it is possible for members of the group to come together for various reasons that extend over the entire political spectrum.

Happy NO KINGS day and don't forget to bring your Mexican flag!

WOW, you appear to be a rather angry person.  You do release others can have a different perception without being white supremacist or some other radical outlier?

I see no anger in that comment. Can you point it out specifically?

I read it again. You are correct. I skimmed over a bit too quickly and misunderstood the statement.  I have removed the comment.  Thanks for asking and my apologies to PeteD01.