His threat to use the Insurrection Act last week was one of the most unpopular acts of his entire presidency, and directly led to the major rebukes from people like Mattis. So I doubt it.
While that’s a fair point, this situation is a more literal insurrection than the previously seen protests and taking of goods from stores. CHAZ has declared their independence from the USA and historically that kind of thing is really not allowed. Has Trump so thoroughly lost control that secession is legal now?
I think the Seattle Police are thinking, "these are a bunch of kids who want to play-act La Revolución. If we just ignore them for a week, they'll get bored or disillusioned and go home."
So the police aren't going to storm the barricades -- they figure they won't have to.
This basically happens in Berlin every year on the May Day celebrations/marches.
The police let the anarchists do whatever they want, within certain constraints (no injuring people, constrained to certain neighborhoods), and the anarchists only do it on that day of the year. Sometimes there are conflicts between the police and the rioters, but it never escalates to huge conflicts any more.
It’s a display of mutual respect for authority, and it allows the radical groups to blow off some steam, while campaigning for progress.
I know this idea makes no sense to law and order -type people, but it’s an ancient human idea to ritualize and sanctify the behaviors you want to discourage or control.
This is a fitting explanation, and I think developing these kinds of rituals further will help heal some of the divides in this country.
Your last paragraph reminded me of Eric Gans’ “Originary Hypothesis” [1]:
> Gans hypothesizes that language originates in "an aborted gesture of appropriation," which signifies the desired object as sacred and which memorializes the birth of language, serving as the basis for rituals which recreate the originary event symbolically. The originary sign serves to defer the mimetic violence threatening the group, hence Gans's capsule definition of culture as "the deferral of violence through representation."
It’s definitely not an idea that originates with me! :)
I think I got it from a German Literature class. The professor had us read some formational texts, and one of them was a theory for the establishment of religion, written by some German 20th Century thinker. I can’t find the source now, but it was probably a pretty mainstream one, for all you internet sleuths out there.
He tried to put forward an evolutionary theory of religion. Basically, a tribe would come into conflict and children would kill their parents as a result. To try and prevent the same thing from happening to themselves, the children invented rituals that they taught to their children, so that they could control and direct their violence away from the parents. Instead of killing people, they would kill effigies made to look like people. Eventually, the children associate the effigies with their parents. But they like their parents, so they leave out the whole killing part when they teach it to their kids, who come to worship the effigies. They then kill animals instead of people. And so on. It was a really interesting exercise of rationalism!
If someone can find the source for me, I’ll give them my 2 internet points :)
Edit: I think it was Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard.
This is a bunch of leftists forming a squat in territory consciously ceded by local police. Hardly a national security issue. The city continues to provide the area with utilities, clean-up services, port-a-potties, and EMS when requested.
Whether or not the city planned on this, it's a nice clean way to quarantine the most radical protest elements in a playground that lets them live out their revolutionary fantasies in an environment where they can either be constructive, or hurt one-another away from everyone else.
In a month, they'll probably cut services and start pushing them out without making a huge deal of it.
“ The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it—
“(1) so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
“(2) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.
“In any situation covered by clause (1), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.”
I don’t know. Without sufficient intel as to what is happening on the ground I wouldn’t know if civil rights are being denied. If they are and the local authorities are cooperating with the rebellious group then there might be a way to utilize the act. It is just too soon to tell.
From Wikipedia: Animal Farm by G.Orwell
"The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, however, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
>tl;dw: Man was tagging over someone else's art, Raz and group approach and separate him from crowd, chasing him for two blocks. He begins to film them with his phone, they take it from him. He tries to get it back and they attack him, kicking him in the head and breaking his glasses. At one point, Raz threatens to shoot the man. They then begin to gaslight him that it was all his fault. Audio only for most of the end, because woman in Raz' crew filming puts the phone in her pocket while the stream continues. [1]
So it took about 3 days for this anarchist utopia to demonstrate exactly why police exist.
I don't think the person you were responding to ever made the claim that it would never happen if the police were there. I think the point is that it did happen. If this is supposed to be a utopia free of cops then they are doing a poor job. They have "cops" that beat up people for petty crimes.
Raz isn't a reason why the police exist. Raz is a product of a system where the police exist too much, which if given the proper social and educational services earlier in his life, his character and personality disorder exemplified here would have been nullified.
> This guy and his crew beat up and threatened to kill someone for a petty crime.
That's exactly what caused all of these protests.
> At what point are adults responsible for their own actions?
It's constantly of interest to me how much "free will" actually exists. The more research comes out about environmental factors, the more we realize that people who suffer {home, food, employment, physical} insecurity exhibit symptoms as if they had a lower IQ and stress which is correlated with increased mental illness, stress, blood pressure, and other health problems.
It also strikes me that the current legal corrections system really only works if we, as individuals, have significant ability to decide not to commit a crime as opposed to it being the most likely destiny based on our current {personal, environmental} state.
That doesn't sound like a good excuse for him. Sociopathic behaviors have existed since time immemorial, and the old approach before any form of formal law enforcement even existed was for tribes to enact social law enforcement and isolate or exile such undesirable elements-- and tyrants are born when you got enough armed people on your side to override societal rule.
> So it took about 3 days for this anarchist utopia to demonstrate exactly why police exist.
Yes, but not current american police. What is demonstrated here is that unchecked power is bad, which is pretty close to what the american police currently seems to have, leading to crimes like the one that started the whole protest.
Well said. It's about checked power - abolishing police totally would just end up with them recreated again when the need arises, but without the proper infrastructure to control them.
What we really need is a system of accountability and control over police. Police should be as accountable for their actions and mistakes as every other citizen (equality under the law!), or at least that's the idea.
We can start by:
- getting rid of police unions that hide information and do stuff like have police be judged by three of their peers, one picked by the accused, and prevent police from getting fired.
> without the proper infrastructure to control them.
Many, myself included, would argue that they're basically out of control right now. Just look at the sequence of events that unfolds almost to the letter after every unjustified police killing. At best the outcome is the cop involved resigns and quietly goes to work for another police department a few months down the line or retires with full benefits.
Defund of course means a million things to a million people but a lot of what I'm hearing is about moving the armed police response to the minority of roles where it's needed. The amount of time you need an armed officer is a tiny fraction of the times they're there and they're not trained for the vast majority of the actual work they do. Under this defund is about taking the glut of resources allocated to cops and moving it to people better trained to deal with the kind of mental health, mediation, etc tasks that take up the bulk of police's actual time.
I agree with you wholeheartedly on both points. I even said in my OG comment: "What we really need is a system of accountability and control over police." I know the police aren't well-controlled right now, that's why I was laying out a few ways to improve it! (:
I would say, though, that our US police are more controlled than what's going on in the CHAZ, however slightly in some ways.
Just like vocal anarchists make the left look bad, the freedom-loving libertarian side is marred by the vocal authoritarians; esp when they feel threatened.
Maybe a 100 years ago. The government has invested high tens to low hundreds of trillions of our dollars into the military at this point. Guerrilla warfare on peoples own land is almost impossible to snuff out but the people also can't possibly "win".
There is little incentive to attempt tyranny when the result can be predicted so easily.
Also, don’t underestimate the power of 100 million people wielding guns. The world has yet to ever witness a force 1/10th as great and well-armed as the American populous.
The purpose of an armed populace isn't to "win" tactically, it's to win strategically and psychologically. It's basically like a poison pill clause, you want to make totalitarian takeover so unpallatable that every victory is a pyrrhic one. You want to force the occupiers to have to choose between killing your own countrymen or defecting, setting up more of a resistance. All the while, you shine light on all the atrocities.
With a sparsely-armed populace, it's easy for the occupying force to roll through without much conflict or challenging decisions.
Winning occurs through attrition of the occupiers, which, unlike Vietnam, can't just "back out".
It seems like folks have been demanding the regulations be fixed for some time now to no avail. Moreover, it isn't always so easy to just 'fix' a regulation. Qualified Immunity isn't a regulation in the traditional sense, it's jurisprudence. Sure, it's possible that legislation can resolve it (and hopefully it does so in a meaningful way) but "just asking" hasn't been working for some time now.
What CHAZ shows us is that there is perhaps a middle ground between "asking" and "taking up arms," but if none of the demands are met, I don't know that there are many other steps left.
Sure, I agree "just asking" clearly hasn't worked, but "the ballot box" hasn't been exhausted as an option yet, in fact I would say that we're gearing up now to see how effective both the soap box and the ballot box can be, as protest action finally seems to be getting through to both the public and (at least part of) the political class.
In fact it looks like in some places the cries to defund the police are finally being heard and actioned. I hope there are more, as this is a radical act and not just a legislative tweak. It's clear that a fundamental rebalancing of the relationship between police and society is needed, starting with talking away their weapons, and total de-escalation of police violence and their effective immunity to the consequences of their racist actions.
I hope "CHAZ" isn't a last step before open, armed conflict, because if it does go that way the public mood is going to shift in a millisecond to enforcement. Just like I hope here in the UK we don't see people pull down statues of Churchill - he was a racist asshole, but he was also the leader that brought us through WWII, and the population of this country aren't ready to stop venerating the latter because of the former yet.
I'm also not sure what "winning" looks like for either side when that starts.
Firstly, I never said anything about taking up arms against anyone. I am simply stating the fact that “unchecked power” is impossible when a monopoly of power (force... aka weapons) is held by the state.
History has shown us over and over and over that an unarmed populace will either A) be subject to unchecked violence by its overlords, or B) be successfully invaded by new and less desirable overlords.
Secondly, “fixing the regulations” is not necessary; what is necessary is enforcing the already existing regulations.
> History has shown us over and over and over that an unarmed populace will either A) be subject to unchecked violence by its overlords, or B) be successfully invaded by new and less desirable overlords.
Which is why the UK gets invaded every other week?
Yeah. Hopefully the people in CHAZ learn from Animal Farm and shut Raz down now.
Orwell would likely support CHAZ, he fight with the anarchists in Catalonia after all. People tend to not realize that Animal Farm was a criticism of the USSR from a socialist. It is not a criticism of all socialism or anarchism.
I thought you meant the US in general. Because that checks out. It has a Bill of Rights. And the Police has another, better Bill of Rights. Some animals are more equal than others.
See my above comment. We should have basically made the police equal to all other citizens (with the increase in self- and other- defense abilities that are required for the general public to make that possible), where the only difference is that the police are actively doing defense as a job. And police should be sued and arrested just like everyone else is.
Police are civilians and should be treated as such, it shouldn't be any more legal for them to do something any other civilian would face substantial legal penalties for without facing the same penalties.
Exactly. Making police a class above was a mistake from the beginning. Suddenly you have a class that can use violence arbitrarily against the other class with hardly any penalty unless the "lower" class makes a big protest about it. It's really horrible and is a perfect system for turning "sheepdogs" (people who want to protect others) into "wolves" (people who pray on others) through peer-pressure, secretiveness, and lack of accountability. And worse, it draws wolves in the first place.
And suffer the penalties of kidnapping if they do it for the wrong reasons, yes. This would do two things: one, people would have a huge incentive not to do that, and two, maybe we'd raise the threshold for jail and raise the penalty for wrongful imprisonments, meaning cops don't jail people for victemless crimes and we don't have such a massive prison population.
Also, we could make laws saying that prisoners are only allowed to be kept at approved prisons; a law that could be applied equally to police and citizens, while ensuring the government gets to approve who gets imprisoned.
If anyone actually walked through CHAZ they would realize how ridiculous and facile this comparison is. This is a facebook worthy boomer comment. Again and again I am reminded that techies aren't really that smart.
"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it." - George Orwell (1946)
When I look at the list of demands I'm pretty quick to dismiss it. Then I remember how I dismissed the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle too, and how many of the fears those protesters had were realized over the next two decades. I might be too hopeful, but I really think the city leadership should talk to them and hear them out, instead of just trying to push them over.
The city is already cooperating and providing portable toilets and tried to replace the barricades with nice planters. It’s a national conversation now.
The list of demands came from an open mic discussion. They let anyone come up and suggest a demand.
Someonen transcribed those demands and then posted them.
I think it would be better to view those demands as the union of demands of each person willing to speak to a crowd. Which is why you see inconsistency in then, why it's such a long list, etc.
I just think that list of demands is better understood in that context.
Rather reminds me of the demands that used to come out when students would occupy a university building back in the 60s, where they'd demand that the president of Cowtown College get the US out of Vietnam immediately
Okay. You can semantically call it whatever you want!
I'm just trying to give some additional context to how this list of (demands|wishes) came about.
If you view it as a single list of (demands|wishes) it doesn't make as much sense. If you view it as the (demands|wishes) from a wide variety of people, that were made on an open mic at a protest that was transcribed, then categorized, then posted to the internet, it's easier to understand what it is.
There are organized protest leaders that have curated their list of demands and put it out. This very much isn't that! This is basically the raw list of demands from a wide variety of different speakers. The only editing was in the transcription and the categorization of those demands.
The list of demands is extremely tame for a fricking anarchist commune. Look at the list of "economic demands." The biggest ask is de-gentrification and rent control.
Those asks seem pretty incompatible with property law and the legislative process. You can't just unilaterally demand something like rent control and de-gentrification measures. The city government shouldn't even have (and probably doesn't have) the power to meet such demands.
Degentrification could trivially be achieved by eminent domain, condemning existing residential property for public housing for which eligibility would be governed on rules which are incompatible with gentrification. It might be expensive, even prohibitively so, to do on a broad scale, but in terms of legal authority it's well within the scope of powers that local governments usually have.
Note that rent control, even if the city doesn't have the power to establish it for private rentals, can effectively be achieved by the same means.
There is legal precedent to use imminent domain to transfer wealth from one individual to another. Usually it’s stealing from the poor, and giving to real estate developers.
There’d be a certain amount of deferred justice in doing that, but I’d rather the practice simply be banned.
IANAL but I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to use eminent domain to confiscate the homes of citizens based on their race. The law doesn’t make provisions for unpopular races as far as I know.
> IANAL but I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to use eminent domain to confiscate the homes of citizens based on their race
Good thing I never suggested that. Gentrification has a racial dimension because race correlates with economics, but it simply is the rich displacing the poor in a particular region; if you take housing units by eminent domain and establish a process for renting them out as public housing that doesn't distribute them to the highest bidder, you prevent gentrification. You neither have to acquire nor distribute based on race.
I figured you would take that tack. In my defense, the term often does refer to whites specifically. In either case, however, I'm of the impression that a law may not disproportionately target one race or another (it's insufficient to show that a law doesn't explicitly target one race; it must also be shown that it doesn't cause disproportionate harm to one race), but again, IANAL and would be very interested in hearing from an expert (even suggestions on search criteria would be helpful).
> I'm of the impression that a law may not disproportionately target one race or another (it's insufficient to show that a law doesn't explicitly target one race; it must also be shown that it doesn't cause disproportionate harm to one race),
You are incorrect. Laws may both explicitly (or otherwise intentionally) target race and may disproportionately impact race without explicit targeting.
Laws doing the former are subject to “strict scrutiny”: the discrimination must be the least invasive means of achieving a compelling government interest. The latter isn't prohibited at all, though it can be evidence of discriminatory intent. (You may be thinking of employment law, where disparate impact is generally prohibited discrimination, unless closely tailored to a specific legitimate non-discriminatory business need.)
> establish a process for renting them out as public housing
and the process for renting them as public housing will be fairer how? You're just switching out one filtering system (price) for another based on arbitrary rules proposed by petty bureaucrats and politicians. At the end of the day you're still discriminating. The only difference that in your system, you're hoping that you or someone with your sensibilities has the power to do the discriminating.
But they should try something. Maybe degentrification could include a city requirement not to displace people when building new housing. The developer puts the previous occupant up and then guarantees them their same rent for, say, a decade going forward
The problem with imposing restrictions on real estate developers is that it reduces the amount of housing, which increases the cost. (Look at California, for example.)
I’d rather they force commercial developers to put in two bedrooms worth of housing for each full time employee worth of office space they add.
If the developers are short-sighted and only add high end McMansions and condos, that’s fine.
The housing market will eventually oversaturate, and those properties will end up selling at a loss to people that couldn’t afford them at the original price.
The Microsofts and Amazons of the world will end up paying eye watering premiums for open space floor plans, or luxury real estate developers will take a bath. Either way, not a tear will be shed.
Your proposal is merely a preference for housing over commercial space. Presumably you have your reasons, but if covid sticks around a few more months (which it is certain to do) commercial space might be rented like crude oil: landlords paying tenants! We'll soon see office/retail space converted to expensive housing even without this aggressive intervention. Everyone is working from home now.
That's fair. I'd be ok with forcing two bedrooms of housing for each worker space added.
I don't think all the McMansions and condos are good however. I'd rather you force people to add space for lots of people. Otherwise there'll be a period where you drive a lot of poorer folks away. Artists and retail workers and mechanics. People who don't work tech or finance or real estate. I don't know that cities can readily recover from it.
It's why I left San Jose. If it continues too long, it'll be why I leave Seattle. Give people reasonable rents, please. I want to live with artists and civil servants and retail workers and chefs and vets and all these people. It makes life so much more interesting
Don't you think qualified immunity is a bit much? Take the pensions and subtract the money that would have been awarded in lawsuits and it probably evens out to $0.
It’s hard to enumerate the list as if it were some soviet collective document because one of the interesting parts of the wto protests were how decentralized they were. In that they were thoroughly modern.
But 2 issues that stand out as prescient are the environmental impact of an ascendant China and the changes to the US middle class globalization would render.
well, globalization on neoliberal terms has continued to hollow out living standards in advanced countries while turning neocolonial countries into large sweatshops. the life expectancy in the US has fallen for 2 or 3 years in a row now largely as a downstream result of this. that is my understanding of one major concern from that.
I think of neoliberalism and neoconservativism as offshoots of corporatism, which is the idea that government can most efficiently serve the people by protecting the interests of corporations above all else.
This leads to the idea that regulatory capture is economically efficient (“Who is better qualified to regulate industry than successful industrialists?”)
It also leads to things like banning class action law suits, allowing binding arbitration, and allowing individuals to sign away arbitrary rights by implicitly accepting non-negotiated contracts they haven’t even seen.
Oakland has commercial enforcement zones, where private police enforce the law. The idea is that business owners weren’t getting a good deal by paying taxes to fund the police, because it was subsidizing law enforcement in residential areas. Instead, the merchants hire their own police, and pay less taxes. Oakland’s (mostly poor, black) residents fund the police that protect them out of their own taxes.
Anyway, you get the idea. Back to your question:
Neoconservatives generally think corporatism is best achieved by dismantling the government (“repeal Obamacare”).
Neoliberals think it is best achieved by restructuring it (mandate health insurance for all).
(Contrast that with the populists in that debate. They want to dismantle the health insurance industry and replace it with medicare.)
Usually, when people talk about moderates in the US, they mean corporatists. The MAGA crowd are mostly “right wing” populists (xenophobic, “America first”, bring back factory jobs), the BLM types tend to be “left wing” populists.
If you look up corporatism, you’ll see it is a shortened form of “corporate fascism”. I don’t think that term is particularly constructive, though it is accurate: the MAGA and BLM movements both accuse the establishment of being fascist.
One side targets neoliberals, the other, neocons. As General Mattis pointed out last week, divided we fall.
Please don't quote that reptile. Of all the reasons to resign from the currently-reigning administration, he chose the fact that Trump had decided to stop killing Syrian children. Not a good look. If the war media is refocusing its attention on him, we can expect he'll be pimping more atrocities real soon. After all the public must be distracted from its current concerns, otherwise we might spend some money on something besides armaments and prisons.
We don't destroy nations by leaving them (which we haven't done in Syria's case; there are still USA troops fighting there [0]), we destroy them by occupying and slaughtering in the first place. Keep in mind that the "gas attacks" were staged false-flag this-is-how-all-our-wars-start bullshit, which overruled-from-top OPCW investigations made clear. [1] Calling oneself "extremely anti-war" while parroting military-industrial complex submarine interventionist propaganda is fairly ridiculous. Killing more children in Syria wouldn't have saved the lives of Syrian children.
The label neoconservative primarily concerns a niche political movement in foreign affairs and defense. It was largely a small group of highly influential Washington insiders who spent most of their careers at the Defense Department, State Department, and CIA. Ideologically they were realists, but mostly in the context of foreign affairs. In terms of domestic policy they were all over the board, though they were often typically described as socially liberal (i.e. no anti-abortion activists). Discussing their domestic policy preferences is a little non-sensical because they didn't really care about domestic policy. Most of them were Republican, many of their financial backers were Democratic, but the party affiliations were mostly irrelevant except that in terms of appointments their power flowed primarily through Republican administrations.
Well known neoconservatives include Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jim Woolsey, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others. Outside of government, almost to a person they all circulated among a small group of think tanks and lobbying organizations in Washington, DC, one of which I used to work at while in college, and I watched every one of the aforementioned, and many more, come in and out of the office at various times.
I also think discussing the domestic policy principles of neoliberals is a little non-sensical. Neoliberalism, IMO, is best described as a manifestconsequence of the rightward shift in Western politics from the late 1970s to the present time. After Margaret Thatcher's win in the U.K., liberals became increasingly disfavored by the electorate across the West. Neoliberals are politicians who recognized that conservatives controlled the narrative--small government, fewer regulations, pro-business, etc--and ran on political platforms that reflected that shift.[1] Ideologically they almost all supported traditional liberal policies--social, economic, etc--but understood you couldn't actually win national elections on those same platforms any longer. IOW, neoliberalism isn't an ideology, it's natural selection.
Liberals today love to sh_t on Bill Clinton and Tony Blair for rolling back the social safety net, increasing police enforcement, etc. But they have amnesia.[1] The alternatives to Clinton and Blair weren't more liberal policies, they were continuing conservative electoral wins. People forget that two years into Clinton's presidency the GOP won the House and Senate for the first time in ~50 years, and that Clinton lost to Bush not because the electorate was more liberal, but because Bush wasn't conservative enough.
It's amazing that even after Trump's election and even after Brexit liberals are still under the delusion that more liberal policies can win elections. It doesn't matter that individual voters' particular preferences skew liberal; when you package them all up into a platform the controlling political narrative is that they represent biggovernment, and biggovernment is bad. Full stop. And what's the alternative to biggovernment? Whatever it is, it will tend to benefit large corporations because the collective action problem doesn't go away, and the next largest organizations that are capable of marshaling a huge amount of human and monetary resources will fill in the vacuum left by a receding government.
Going forward I don't know what will happen. With the rise of populism any kind of coherent platform, principled or opportunistic, seems unnecessary and irrelevant. We do seem to be at an inflection point, but only time will tell.
[1] I'm sure younger people today might say, "how could you possibly support anything other than smaller government, ceteris paribus." I'm not so old as to be able to tell you first-hand how older generations thought, but as I understand it, it wasn't that you preferred bigger government, it's just that you didn't...
Liberalism was originally the abolition of feudal restrictions on free trade and wage labor. Neoliberalism is the removal of various newer restrictions on that, including: social-democratic laws that protect workers and raise the standard of living, and protective trade laws that protect countries' local industries (large industry in poor manufacturing countries, for instance, or small farmers like in Mexico, who have been wiped out by US agriculture).
China and the US have recently taken an anti-neoliberal turn, in fact the neoliberal era is beginning to end. Both Trump and Jinping have been pretty protectionist.
Because they're the only ones really not playing by the neoliberal rules.
I mean look, whatever people in capitalist circles want to believe, China never really gave up on communism. They repurposed capitalism's weighing machine, and with that, there were people who got rich, which makes it look like Western-style capitalism. But the whole point of the "shadow banking system" and "state-owned enterprise" was to encapsulate a party-run state-driven "communist" system, to ensure reasonably ample work for the workers, and, to ensure a backstop to private enterprise. Maybe it's somewhat like the way Apple has baseline apps that are good enough, and then an app store for everything else. Or another analogy would be the U.S. Postal Service. Not efficient, but it works.
To be clear, globalization has been quite predatory towards weaker developing countries with less centralized authority – and hence – bargaining power. China "won" globalization by subverting it, and indeed, in hindsight, this was the only way for a developing country to win.
China industrialized on the basis of incredibly terrible working conditions (ie high profitability via low wages) that have only recently been improving. And as they've improved, globalization has shifted manufacturing to other countries who have worse working conditions again. "Lifted out of poverty" sounds nice but tends to mostly mean that people who were formerly peasants have instead worked in sweatshops and horrible factories for decades or centuries. It's easy to view that as all well and good if you are happily working in the global labor aristocracy, but it's not actually fair.
"Lifted out of poverty" sounds nice but tends to mostly mean that people who were formerly peasants have instead worked in sweatshops and horrible factories for decades or centuries.
Right, so lifted out of poverty. Just because you think their new job is a "horrible sweatshop", doesn't mean their lives haven't actually improved.
You're mistaken about the standard of living of peasants vs superexploited wage laborers, and doing that smug "the thing that worked super well for me must have worked for those guys no matter how bad off they seem" thing.
I believe Denmark had something like this for a while. It started with squatters taking over an area kind of like this.
Turned into a serious drug venue and eventually fell apart. Sounds like it sort of restarted, albeit with regular Danish law enforcement and other city resources.
> Turned into a serious drug venue and eventually fell apart. Sounds like it sort of restarted, albeit with regular Danish law enforcement and other city resources.
As someone living in Copenhagen, I would not consider that anything near an accurate description of the history of Christiania. What happened was that an old military area and barracks was left abandoned and disused, so a group of squatters moved in, fixed up the place and built a community.
It did not turn into a "serious drug venue". They had issues with hard drugs in the 1970s, but kicked all of that to the curb and there is a strict community-supported ban on all hard drugs. Over the years various sellers have popped up here and there, but they are generally shunned and chased out by the community.
It also did not "fall apart", although it has had its ups and downs. The political winds have varied from indifference to acceptance to attempts to abolish the entire things, raze the area and built apartments. The current state is that the area is owned by a foundation and is treated partly as a part of the city of Copenhagen and partly as an independent enclave. Danish law enforcement is grudgingly accepted in cases of actual crimes, but otherwise not exactly openly welcomed.
I was in Christiania late last year and there were at least a dozen tables with sellers selling drugs. It didn’t seem like the community was shunning them or running them out
That place consisted of people selling weed, people consuming weed, or someone decrying the perception that it was all based around flouting Danish laws relating to weed. It's situated in a nice area of the city, though, if it was just a random suburb it would likely not be a place you'd go.
I would implore everyone to think critically about the term "serious drug use" when used in the media to vilify scenarios and people.
Often these people need help and are self-medicating as anyone using traditional western medicine does (albeit with non-corporate drugs).
This type of stereotype further allows police to run wild and unchecked to "solve the drug problem" by beating and harassing than by actually solving any problem like a social worker is more likely to.
> Turned into a serious drug venue and eventually fell apart
This is not true. I am Danish and my apartment is in Copenhagen. It's in fact so successful it has turned into a tourist attraction. Lukas Graham[1] is a Danish musician who grew up there. I don't see how this community can be called a failure.
We visited Christiania a few years ago. It was lovely. The entire time, we felt just as safe as anywhere else in Copenhagen, and we didn’t see any evidence of drug use (certainly less than you’d see “on the wrong side of the tracks” in any other big city).
If you have a chance to visit Christiania, I recommend it. Copenhagen is one of my favorite towns. They have wonderful parks, museums, and even a really cool amusement park.
According to a June 10 article by City Journal, hip hop artist Raz Simone acts as "co-leader and enforcer" of the Zone, while former mayoral candidate Nikkita Oliver formulates the commune's political aims.[24] However, according to Simone, the Zone has no central leadership, with all residents serving as leaders
Living in a neighborhood in Oakland CA with no enforcer and annoyingly blatant property crime, I’m willing to give an enforcer a try cause it’s not like people trust the police here or that they even come when you call them.
Then stop electing the same people who de-prioritize prosecuting property crime.
I'm amazed by SF and close areas utter disregard for what is normal crime wise. Most people in most cities don't have a story about their car window being smashed in and rummaged through. Every thread I see here / on reddit about SF someone mentions that its completely normal and should be expected there.
...living in evolving anarchy has benefits though. I suspect that San Francisco’s open air drug market with dangerously cheap methamphetamine is one of the dirty secrets behind the engine of creation of Silicon Valley.
There’s lots of that too. My theory implies that a bunch of people that say they’re taking adderall are actually doing a little meth before they get on the Google bus because it’s cheaper and easier to get.
I’m not a meth user but I have one very wealthy friend who is. He insists that meth in the USA is used only by the very rich and the very poor with no middle class use.
That's what led to this. There was night after night after night of police using flashbangs, teargas, and mace on mostly peaceful protests.
It was extremely unpopular with both the protestors and the local residents. There have been many calls for the mayor to resign over the repeated use of force.
So the police finally stopped with the violence. They just...left. They abandoned the East Precinct, expecting the protestors to burn it down.
The protestors decided not to burn it down, and instead set up an occupy style movement on the streets outside the police station.
But, yes. They definitely tried rubber bullets, teargas and mace first.
Seattle police vacated the east precinct, fully expecting protesters to burn it down. Instead, the protesters set up an open zone, compiled a set of demands, and from all accounts set up something cool and unique.
I'm not passing judgment yet since the days are young and the political bias on the ground is thick in both directions. But it is definitely not "by all accounts".
But my personal bias on the table is that yeah, trading police that were imperfectly constrained by the system for new police utterly and entirely unconstrained by the system is probably not going to go well. The real "fun" will start when Raz's faction pisses off enough people to form a violent counterfaction and you get a gang war, so give it a bit. It takes time for these things to develop. Let the honeymoon wear off and have this place showing a functioning system for, oh, say, at least a month before declaring victory. Not that you declared victory, I'm just saying, I recommend against getting too invested in this.
It's not as if "a place that has no police" is some shocking new experiment that has never been run before; you've got plenty of places you can look out in the world to see what happens next. It's not a difficult-to-predict progression.
I watched that video, I saw someone coming in and defacing peoples homes. The people filming asked if they had permission, then asked the person to stop. The person refused to stop painting and pushed the group of folks and there was a scuffle that ended with the tagger walking away.
Aside, intentionally or unintentionally, calling a group of predominantly black people "thugs" is a common dog whistle.
jerf is a well-known racist. He was being exceptionally polite in giving jerf the opportunity to pretend it was inadvertent use of language.
But I understand that you, too, are just trying to play games to pretend that anti-racists are the real racists. This is something that many deranged right-wing extremists do to entertain themselves.
>and there was a scuffle that ended with the tagger walking away.
That was just the beginning of the confrontation. If you watch the full video the group then followed and hassled the tagger for several minutes before the tagger was hit in the face and had their glasses broken (and their smartphone was stolen from them). Someone also threatened to blow the taggers brains out.
A handful of incidents like these are being distorted and blown up by media that treats cop lies uncritically. In comparison, just a few nights ago, cops were beating people and filling the area with tear gas (banned under geneva convention) and it was seeping into residential homes so badly that even nextdoor is anti-police in that area now.
Can you clarify the timeline? AFAIK the police used tear-gas, then they were ordered to stop by the mayor, then they stopped and switched to other means like mace. Do you know differently?
that's correct, although the mayor (who has been very supportive of them forever, incidentally had Amazon campaign donation $350k) built various loopholes into the initial ban (namely, that the police chief could allow them to start re-using it). so, yeah, not much of a ban in the first place by the mayor.
The Mayor ordered them to stop using one specific type of tear gas -- CS gas -- last Friday. For one day, the police used alternatives including mace, pepper balls, steel cored rubber bullets, flashbangs, and smoke with irritating agents.
However, by Sunday (or maybe early, early Monday morning), the police were using CS gas again at the order of the police chief, Carmen Best.
Chief Best said so herself at the June 11 press conference[1].
18:22: Reporter: "So, Chief Best, you stood here on Friday and you said it was going to be your decision and your decision alone to use tear gas. Tear gas was deployed on Sunday. You released a video today to say that it was not your decision to close the East Precinct. So who is making tactical decisions right now, for the Seattle Police Department?"
18:51: Best: "So for the tear gas, it was my decision. ... We suspended the use for 30 days unless it was a 'life safety situation.' And that was the exemption. ... The officers felt like it was a 'life safety situation' ... and I concurred."
19:27: Best: "I own that decision. I made that decision."
Here's a press conference transcript from June 7 where they claimed they would stop using CS gas[2].
Here's a secondary source reporting on the June 11 press conference[3].
that's always been common. the "better" (not really) approach is to simply report "police reported that x, y, z happened" without any sort of critical perspective or fact check at all.
There is a very strong correlation between: local news stations with sizeable real estate interests (i.e., aligned with the interests of property owners, speculative real estate investors, and yuppies interested in moving to "safe, updated neighborhoods" that have been recently cleared out of the poors) and local news stations that print police press releases almost verbatim with absolutely no journalism actually being performed.
I find it hard to take comments seriously when they make statements that just don't accord with reality.
The media treats cops according to what's best for the story. Lately, that involves being extremely critical of them. In other times when we aren't in the midst of a pandemic, mass unemployment and then nationwide protests, and the story is that the cops shot a criminal suspect, they use euphemisms like "officer-involved shooting." The media narrative today is extremely hostile to police.
So when I see "only a handful of incidents," I feel there might be a bit of an agenda behind that. Knocking down the World Trade Center twin towers and a side of the Pentagon were only a "handful of incidents," too. Not to mention the number of unarmed black people shot by police last year (nine total). All of those are a disgrace, but the sheer number of atrocities that happen are irrelevant to how unjust or outrageous the atrocities might be.
Viewing the media's relationship to police as being simply for or against them based on swings of public opinion is incorrect, it is maybe partially true but there is a strong and consistent bias towards law and order by corporate (private for profit) media. There are numerous reporters in Seattle still uncritically reporting police lies. There are a handful who are being more critical. Guess who has more resources and broader reach?
Worth keeping in mind as well that situations like that likely happened before, but a group protecting territory and chasing someone while police is not around wasn't newsworthy.
I think it's going to be difficult to sustain without either strong leadership or strong collective decision making ; my gut tells me it's going to go the way of Zuccoti Park rather Christiana.
It would be nice if it could sustain itself, but it will likely creak under its own weight in a month or so.
Yeah, I expect it'll be an eddy in the river of history and expend its energy pretty quickly. But it has some folks involved that have leadership experience, so it'll be interesting to watch.
It will be fun to watch how they eat each other alive.
I would have believed it plausible had they gone outside the city to some secluded area to create their utopia, but it's being done on existing buildings they did not build, and property that is not theirs but I guess their "revolution" is to not give two shits about anything.
As someone who currently lives near Detroit, the city is faring remarkably well in light of everything that's been going on. I haven't heard anything about rioters, just people who are peacefully protesting.
I actually live just a couple of hours west of Detroit. In any case, Detroit isn't surrounded by mountains and ocean in the same way that Seattle is- sort of a weird comparison. A cheaper Seattle would still have those things near by.
Yes, I'm personally very worried about this as someone who is heavily invested in the real estate market here. The issue of how to deal with the rapid growth in the city is multifaceted and it's difficult to pitch a stance on.
At the very least, you could easily make an argument that a rising tide does not lift all boats; i.e. many people are personally not benefiting much from the tech-boom in the area. On the other hand, if your stance is that our collective goal should be to produce the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people; then we want more people to move to the city have prosperous lives to fulfill the new roles available here. In that scenario it's hard to keep income inequality from expanding.
It seems like thusfar the city council has done a good job at striking a balance; MHA (mandatory housing affordability) is a level-headed way to redistribute some of the gains that tech has brought to those who are less fortunate. However, our current city council is much more left-leaning and I'm worried that their stance towards growth is far more "progressive" and anti-business.
Should people really be entitled to live in an expensive city that they cannot afford? Cities like Manhattan or SF have sort of taken a stance on that and it favors the prosperous. I'm not sure how I feel about the matter; but I certainly do not want us to dampen our potential future potential by encouraging businesses to set up shop elsewhere. We need more initiatives like MHA and fewer like the business head-tax.
> It seems like thusfar the city council has done a good job at striking a balance;
I'm not from the area, but the sheer amount of anger and enthusiasm that has fueled these protests suggests that the city council has not been striking an appropriate balance.
Happy middle class people don't tend to riot and try to start new societies.
Ah sorry, I meant the previous city council, who had been doing a good job it seemed like at balancing the city's growth with the social problems that were becoming more evident at the time.
>Should people really be entitled to live in an expensive city that they cannot afford? Cities like Manhattan or SF have sort of taken a stance on that and it favors the prosperous.
I find it eerie that you're excluding from the equation the tens of thousands of homeless people in those cities. The right question is "to what lengths should we go to give people the ability to live with a roof over their heads?" The bay area has answered with "very little", where most people are barely offering human empathy to the homeless.
Homelessness is a complex problem which I believe namely stems from psychological and substance abuse disorders. I think there is likely a relationship between the amount of income inequality in a society and the amount of homelessness.
I do believe that we should support the homeless populations of our cities; but if you're familiar with Seattle's homelessness problems in particular, you'll know that the city has essentially thrown literally hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem to little effect.
I don't believe Seattle should follow a path of growth-at-all-costs and ignore the social problems the city has; but the city council here is staunchly anti-business, and that carries a risk-too, like the original commenter said—take growth for granted and you can end up like Detroit. In that situation, no one prospers, and everyone suffers; which we definitely don't want. It's a fine line to walk. That's all I'm saying.
>Homelessness is a complex problem which I believe namely stems from psychological and substance abuse disorders
I think this is about as useful as saying "homelessness is caused by loitering". We're confusing cause and effect. Try living on the streets for a few years where people treat you worse than shit without developing some mental illness or abusing drugs to deal with the stress and loneliness. If you think that the cause is mental illness and drugs and throwing money at it mostly does nothing, why do you think San Francisco has by a long shot the highest rate of homelessness in America?
" why do you think San Francisco has by a long shot the highest rate of homelessness in America? "
I can answer this, I lived there since 2005 until this month.
The problem is once you stop enforcing the law it creates incentives for all kinds of people to try it out. This created a diverse population of people who are living outside, from mentally ill, to seemingly normal young people fixing bikes in their tents, to dangerous drug addicts that won't hesitate to stab you.
The problem is there is a law and it is not being enforced. People take advantage of this. Thinking everybody is a poor soul that would buy housing if it existed is an extremely naive view. The homeless population is very diverse in terms of reasons they are out there. SF leadership treats all of them as if it had one solution, so of course that will not work. Some people out there want to be there. You can see they are young and don't mind sleeping in a tent. Others are just out of their minds and need intervention ASAP.
Seattle homeless stats show that those who are simply homeless (I.e., don't have enough money to afford rent) are found shelter. The 'unsheltered' -- those who, despite social programs -- still have no shelter, are almost universally affected by problems not caused by landlord/tenant law.
"most people are barely offering human empathy to the homeless. "
Enough with patronizing. They are not children or robots with no freewill. They have made decisions in their own lives and they need to own up to them. Not holding people accountable makes them more like children, and they are more likely to stay where they are FOREVER. They will all stay on the streets until old age and die there if you think it's not their own fault.
If you can't a afford a city, then MOVE. Guess what though, in cities like SF, they didn't.
They stayed, destroyed SF for decades, and now it is very clear... SF has made its choice... to become the home for the homeless, as a mass exodus occurs.
People are tired of shit and used needles on the sidewalk, dangerous insane people roaming everywhere, extremely expensive food and living, all while the leadership pats itself on the back for being woke. Enjoy your post-apocalyptic shitty.
> many people are personally not benefiting much from the tech-boom in the area
Gosh how can you be so jealous of people you're willing to destroy their stuff. It's the same kind of xenophobia that fuels anti-immigrant rhetoric. People upset that those moving to 'their turf' happen to do better than them.
Yeah, I don't know. The left needs to hold a mirror to themselves and realize that they are more and more becoming just a mirror-image of the right. The idea to "just let it all burn" is just so Trumpian. What the left hates about Trump's tendency to trample all over our international relationships and treaties—they're now advocating for in terms of destroying private property. It's an amazing double standard; and it's the very attitude that will get Trump reelected this November. A shame to watch.
The scary thing is that this protest is foreshadowed by the WTO protests also orchestrated by 'left-leaning' groups, and now we have a president -- Trump -- who is very much against the WTO, except he's bad now because they've moved beyond that.
The other interesting comparison here is the varied response to this and the Malheur National wildlife refuge occupation.
I couldn't agree more; I think part of the appeal of the right is somewhat dogmatic in that most of the sticking points are very fundamental and the messaging is very straightforward; guns, religion, family, low taxes. What does the left stand for? Being a progressive is a moving target, and the inter-messaging is very mixed and often contradictory. Ex. for a long time liberalism was about free speech but now we want to regulate speech with safe-spaces and trigger warnings.
Part of this probably evolves from the fact that Liberals are introspective and willing to challenge their beliefs to their own disadvantage in a way that the GOP never has been; but it's genuinely confusing and the party does not feel unified.
>guns
"There is no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons" - ronald reagan
>religion, family
There squirming to ignore trump on matters like these show how well in line the party walks that's definitely true
>low taxes
Lotsa say a, do b there
They have been very keen to push up deficits tho the focal points where they like to increase spending are different.
They're not really consistent at all but their messaging and party policing has been more strict
>What does the left stand for
>for a long time liberalism was about free speech but now we want to regulate speech with safe-spaces and trigger warnings.
it's funny watching americans sprinkling around left, liberal, etc as political terms whilst defining the weird mix that ends up under the wings of the two parties.
Some (self-proclaimed) libertarians & conservatives, protectionists & free market hardliners standing under the same republicans umbrella with radically clashing beliefs.
Free market liberals fighting with leftists who are laughing at social progressives under the umbrella of the democrats.
>Part of this probably evolves from the fact that Liberals are introspective and willing to challenge their beliefs to their own disadvantage in a way that the GOP never has been
I'd say with growing inequality and declining social mobility it's hard for the mainstream core of democrats to really push a broader platform that the party fully aligns with, differs from the republicans and rings well with their base.
They don't really roll with protectionist stances a la bernie or trump, they don't really align with unions or workers anymore as they've dropped them for an upper middle-class educated focus whilst at the same time still keeping some actual more left wing remnants under their wing that they try to suppress and retain at the same time
They have started less invasions but aren't really against global force projection at all.
They don't really clash with conservatives on stock buybacks, markets, banking, what have you whilst at the same time still pushing cushioning programs like obamacare to give at least a sense of direction there.
So when on a lot of those fronts you're not really united or notably different from the opposition what's left? Social issues. Social equality when it comes to sex, race or what have you. So pushing those makes sense.
> They have started less invasions but aren't really against global force projection at all
Trump has started the fewest invasions of any president thus far. We've had no regime changes, and no extended battles or fights. Obama (Syria and Libya) and Bush (Iraq, Afghanistan, others) and Clinton (Iraq, Kuwait) all engaged in new wars. Trump hasn't, and has in fact withdrawn America troops.
Surely the issue is deeper than jealousy. People develop strong connections to places, and when they begin to get priced out of the place they have a strong connection to, and an area's culture changes as a result, people grow upset by this.
>> "Should people really be entitled to live in an expensive city that they cannot afford?"
They do if you want the people who serve your $5 coffees and $20 meals to be able to live within a reasonable distance. I like to think the people gentrifying them out don't want to push them out, but I'm not sure most of them even realize they're responsible for the huge homeless population. They moved in for the well-paid jobs and pushed the people who lived there out. The pushed out don't always have somewhere to go or a way to get there.
There was almost an air of disappointment from SPD that the police station _wasn't_ burned down. It seemed that they were threatening that it was only a matter of time, "We told you so"-style. But alas.
Their first demand is that the Seattle Police Department be abolished, as in 100% defunded, as in completely deleted. Coming out with a demand like that is just asking to lose right off the bat.
I wish they would delete it and stick with their second demand - take all weapons away from police. No guns, no batons, no tasers. It's also crazy, but at least it's crazy in a "this might just be crazy enough to work" kind of way.
A bunch of people are calling for defunding the police and not total abolition, although that is what this site says. Socialist City Council member Kshama Sawant has already pledged to bring legislation to cut the police department budget by 50%, and city officials are going over it in depth.
> Their first demand is that the Seattle Police Department be abolished, as in 100% defunded, as in completely deleted. Coming out with a demand like that is just asking to lose right off the bat.
Abolition of existing centralized paramilitary police departments in favor of rethinking public safety and social services and reconstituting and redistributing law enforcement within a new framework is an idea which has fairly rapidly recently moved from the fringes to the mainstream of debate, and it is a policy openly and actively being discussed by many local governments, and already committed to by the Minneapolis City Council.
It may seem, by a pre-June-2020 perspective, to be an out-of-the-range-of-serious-debate demand, but the Overton Window on that issue just underwent and sudden and massive shift.
It's also extraordinarily unpopular, across the ideological spectrum[1].
>...which has fairly rapidly recently moved from the fringes to the mainstream of debate, and it is a policy openly and actively being discussed by many local governments, and already committed to by the Minneapolis City Council.
>but the Overton Window on that issue just underwent and sudden and massive shift.
Well you're right about that. Because it's insane, and generates clicks, likes, and retweets and so media keeps covering like it's actually popular despite the fact the inverse is true to keep generating their clicks, likes, and retweets. I've been waiting for the Star Tribune to actually run some local polling on this, because everyone I know still back there also thinks it's insane. My guess is they do run the polls, and don't publish the results for the same reason.
“Cut funding for police departments”, that is shown in that poll isn't what the dismantle/abolish is about (it's not even a fair portrayal what “defund” is centrally about, which is shifting funding from PDs to alternative services.) And that poll is from near the beginning of the recent protests.
More recent polling shows much higher support for both “defund” and “dismantle” than what that poll found for it's lopsided framing of “defund”.
Yes, there exists nuance to the "defund the police" stance (though a lot less on the whole "abolish" the police position). My point is that many people have essentially been gaslit into thinking this has widespread support. It does not, regardless of whatever nuance exists.
From your article:
>For example, 39% of respondents supported proposals “to completely dismantle police departments and give more financial support to address homelessness, mental health, and domestic violence.”
So, only 39% of respondents support "dismantling" (notice the specific word choice here) and essentially creating, out of thin air I guess, another organization that would obviously have a license to engage in violence if their charter includes dealing with domestic violence. This is an echo chamber proposal if there ever was one.
If you told me this stat a month ago, I would never believe it. 39% is a shocking amount and I can only imagine it is going to increase.
You're right that we would still need to train a new organization to deal with violent events. But you're also ignoring the upside of not having a cop with a gun issuing speeding tickets, or dealing with someone experiencing mental health issues, or other things that could be better served by more specialized roles.
>give more financial support to address homelessness, mental health, and domestic violence.
is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this poll, which should be obvious. I'm not ignoring anything. Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems. The grand irony of all of this is that the defunding of the police departments in this country will make the kinds of reforms you are talking about impossible.
>Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems.
You ever put a duty roster together? Done a Troops to Task analysis? If you wanted to have separate divisions that all do only one thing you need more troops. If you spread the workload around you can get by with fewer but the service level probably suffers. It's that simple. So sometimes you do domestic calls, next rotation you're on traffic or patrol. If you want specialized units, which to me does sound smart and does sound like an idea worth exploring, you need more officers. Maybe it's possible to save some money here (I imagine there'd be some salary disparity depending on which specialization you choose). Ironically, again, this would make the police more like the military - not less. The military already has specialized branches that have categories of doctrinal tasks they are responsible for (artillery vs infantry, armor vs cavalry ... and in this example patrol vs traffic).
> If you wanted to have separate divisions that all do only one thing you need more troops.
This assumes that generalists are equally effective at all tasks as specialists. Well, as a generality; in the specific case of all-purpose use of police vs appropriate use of other community services, it actually involves the assumption that specialists in the application of violence to achieve compliance are as effective in specialists in tasks unrelated to application of violence in those non-violent tasks.
In technology, if senior IT management decided they could reduce staff by having network installation specialists, with little to no additional training, cover application development, QA, requirements analysis, SRE, DBA, desktop support, and project management tasks instead of having specialists in each of those domains, they'd rightly be viewed as insane. But that's, broadly, what local governments have done with city services, with cops in the role of the network installers.
> Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems
Cops respond to a wide variety of calls all the time because over time (particularly between the 1960s to 1990s with concerns driven by crime statistics, though the trend has continued even as the original impetus reversed) resources were pumped into police departments, often diverted from other local services organizations.
When all you have is a paramilitary force trained for the application of force, every local problem looks like a target for the application of paramilitary violence.
> So, only 39% of respondents support "dismantling" (notice the specific word choice here) and essentially creating, out of thin air I guess, another organization that would obviously have a license to engage in violence if their charter includes dealing with domestic violence.
“Dismantle” and “abolish” are about equally popular in the movement for those that support the position that goes beyond “defund” in organizational change.
And 39% is widespread, though obviously not majority, support (and “defund” has 76%—a large majority—support in the pool, which I notice you ignore completely.) And nothing in the quote (or the movement) suggests that whatever armed law enforcement functions were retained would be concentrated in a single new organization created ex nihilo. While, again, advocates are mostly calling for a community process to rethink a design new service delivery and public safety systems rather than selling an already completed redesign that just needs legislative blessing, one framework concept I've seen mentioned more than once is redistributing domain-specific law-enforcement functions within service agencies consistent with the agencies’ domain, broadly the same much state and federal law enforcement functionality is rather than being concentrated in a single paramilitary force of general remit.
I don’t have an opinion on the morality of this instance of an “autonomous zone” but it made me think of the concept of “TAZ” as described in this book, may be interesting for those interested in anarchist politics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone
It’s funny; this being HN, some of you must live in Seattle. So instead of spreading sub-Facebook level rumors and FUD, why don’t you walk over to CHAZ and see the reality for yourself?
I live in Seattle, went over yesterday with no preconceived notions of what must be there. I had seen some posts that it was pretty lawless, but really took them with a grain of salt. Nothing I had heard about it was true. I didn't see any guns, no violence, or anything, no checkpoints (just barricades stopping actual cars from coming in, but not stopping people/bicycles). Just a bunch of people kind of hanging out listening to speeches near the East Precinct building. The live stream link on the OP shows it, basically people hanging out, walking around, etc.
If you do live in Seattle, you should head over and see it for yourself. It's a very unique thing and who knows how long it will be there. I assume at some point the police will drive a tank through it or something.
There you have it folks, eyewitness testimony. And yet somehow I suspect the people that believe the rapper warlord Orwellian dystopia narrative won’t change their mind one bit.
Stories are all over the place. How an area looks at 10 AM and how it looks at 10PM can be completely different. Some very nice and safe towns are anything but after a few hours pass.
Well I am a brown man who's lived in America my entire life, and I've never been harassed by police. So there you have it... eyewitness testimony. And yet somehow I suspect the people that believe that America is a police-state dystopia won't change their mind one bit.
It's almost like ... anecdata isn't trustworthy...
Thank you. I think people discount the power of speaking out. Don't worry about the negativity. Speak the truth, and it's all that can be asked of you.
I'll never stop speaking the truth. Had a white professor in an immigration history class attempt to discount my view of being an actual child of immigrants by saying I had become a white person. The gaslighting of immigrant experiences is real. Thanks for the support!
All: this story is here because it's an interesting phenomenon, a la https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Before commenting, please make sure you're up to date on those rules and post in the intended spirit (curiosity and conversation) not the opposite one (ideology and battle).
Thanks for leaving this one up. I understand it's not the discourse this site is directly interested in, but the occasional opportunity to debate such issues in an intelligent forum is something I have trouble finding elsewhere on the internet.
Having said that, I'm sure these types of post create a lot of work for you. I appreciate the upkeep and please keep up the good work!
> the occasional opportunity to debate such issues in an intelligent forum is something I have trouble finding elsewhere on the internet.
That's maybe the good place to ask:
What are other places (maybe places more open to political discussions) the HN crowd would recommend for "intelligent discussions"? Twitter and Reddit are an awful mess at the moment.
I'd suggest ActiviyPub servers (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) There are a ton of instances out there or you can start your own. There is a lot of good discourse out there .. and cat pictures.
You cannot fit too much of the Overton window in any one place. And a lot of politics these days relies on entire parallel media structures so that what even happened is under dispute, let alone the moral response to them.
> It seems like the really good discussion places wouldn't have to carry this caveat.
Ideally, yes, but if the political views you are hoping to find are ones that overtly limit any dissent or respect for any other view (extreme absolute authoritarianism for example) then the views themselves subvert the ability to have meaningful discourse about them.
I was more thinking about how all the right leaning subs have been co-opted by the alt-right gamer types and trolls. The far left subs aren't much better, but there are plenty of open minded moderate subs. I find neoliberal to be a great place to discuss center-left policy.
Yeah Lesswrong has gotten good again; the coronavirus discussion has stood out. They don’t really do politics but as an old user one could probably force a discussion through.
this is not an interesting phenomenon, this has happened many times and still these places exist, whats not interesting is the civilians got caught in these dummies crossfire.
I think it's interesting in the context of current events.
Nothing interests everybody. If one story doesn't interest you, there are plenty of others to read here, and if you run out, the 'past' link in the top bar will take you to many threads you missed. Some of those will surely be interesting.
Can we have this reminder posted on every ratio'd post? (Given the circumstances) things have gotten a lot more political on HN as of late (yes, my opinion, not driven by facts) and I find myself not making my daily lunch-time visit because of that.
This post has been killed and unkilled, downweighted by flagging and then unweighted by mods, then after a front page surge now downweighted because it has more comments than points.
That sentiment makes me pretty uncomfortable given the proximity of this article's topic to wider ongoing events. Like we should all pour glasses of single malt and sit around a table in our smoking jackets having a languorous discussion. These issues are too important, and the horror and shock and outrage are too fresh, to react to nauseating views by politely sipping your whisky instead of throwing it in their face.
If you're dropped into a totally foreign culture and one remark to your guide results in a slightly-discomfited "that's not really how we do things" then you might not think too much of it, but if you venture a comment that's met with an expression of abject revulsion, you know you've said something unacceptable. We're all constantly calibrating our sense of such things in everyday social interactions and those normative pressures ultimately define acceptable discourse. At the moment the Overton window unfortunately admits some very ugly things and I'm not sure it makes sense anymore to persist with gentle nudges in the right direction given the manifest urgency of the problem.
Those unwritten rules that govern social behavior can induce real internal change too. People's attitudes and beliefs are shaped by what they perceive to be customary and deviant in their culture.
919 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 451 ms ] threadPolitics aside for a moment, this is the pinnacle of Cap Hill IMO. Good on them, as long as they stay safe and try not to get too culty.
If this isn’t shut down quickly, I predict we see a national movement like this by Juneteenth.
That blurb on the website "You are now leaving the USA" is tongue in cheek.
The actual demands make no such claim about independence, all US Federal, State, and Local laws still apply.
There will eventually be arrests, and the WORST thing Trump can do is attempt to use the military to squash relatively peaceful protests.
So the police aren't going to storm the barricades -- they figure they won't have to.
The police let the anarchists do whatever they want, within certain constraints (no injuring people, constrained to certain neighborhoods), and the anarchists only do it on that day of the year. Sometimes there are conflicts between the police and the rioters, but it never escalates to huge conflicts any more.
It’s a display of mutual respect for authority, and it allows the radical groups to blow off some steam, while campaigning for progress.
I know this idea makes no sense to law and order -type people, but it’s an ancient human idea to ritualize and sanctify the behaviors you want to discourage or control.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day_in_Kreuzberg
Your last paragraph reminded me of Eric Gans’ “Originary Hypothesis” [1]:
> Gans hypothesizes that language originates in "an aborted gesture of appropriation," which signifies the desired object as sacred and which memorializes the birth of language, serving as the basis for rituals which recreate the originary event symbolically. The originary sign serves to defer the mimetic violence threatening the group, hence Gans's capsule definition of culture as "the deferral of violence through representation."
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Gans#The_Originary_Hypo...
I think I got it from a German Literature class. The professor had us read some formational texts, and one of them was a theory for the establishment of religion, written by some German 20th Century thinker. I can’t find the source now, but it was probably a pretty mainstream one, for all you internet sleuths out there.
He tried to put forward an evolutionary theory of religion. Basically, a tribe would come into conflict and children would kill their parents as a result. To try and prevent the same thing from happening to themselves, the children invented rituals that they taught to their children, so that they could control and direct their violence away from the parents. Instead of killing people, they would kill effigies made to look like people. Eventually, the children associate the effigies with their parents. But they like their parents, so they leave out the whole killing part when they teach it to their kids, who come to worship the effigies. They then kill animals instead of people. And so on. It was a really interesting exercise of rationalism!
If someone can find the source for me, I’ll give them my 2 internet points :)
Edit: I think it was Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard.
Whether or not the city planned on this, it's a nice clean way to quarantine the most radical protest elements in a playground that lets them live out their revolutionary fantasies in an environment where they can either be constructive, or hurt one-another away from everyone else.
In a month, they'll probably cut services and start pushing them out without making a huge deal of it.
“ The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it—
“(1) so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
“(2) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.
“In any situation covered by clause (1), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.”
I don’t know. Without sufficient intel as to what is happening on the ground I wouldn’t know if civil rights are being denied. If they are and the local authorities are cooperating with the rebellious group then there might be a way to utilize the act. It is just too soon to tell.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/h077uv/raz_simone_...
>tl;dw: Man was tagging over someone else's art, Raz and group approach and separate him from crowd, chasing him for two blocks. He begins to film them with his phone, they take it from him. He tries to get it back and they attack him, kicking him in the head and breaking his glasses. At one point, Raz threatens to shoot the man. They then begin to gaslight him that it was all his fault. Audio only for most of the end, because woman in Raz' crew filming puts the phone in her pocket while the stream continues. [1]
So it took about 3 days for this anarchist utopia to demonstrate exactly why police exist.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/h077uv/raz_simone_...
This guy and his crew beat up and threatened to kill someone for a petty crime. What does that have to do with the police existing "too much"?
That's exactly what caused all of these protests.
> At what point are adults responsible for their own actions?
It's constantly of interest to me how much "free will" actually exists. The more research comes out about environmental factors, the more we realize that people who suffer {home, food, employment, physical} insecurity exhibit symptoms as if they had a lower IQ and stress which is correlated with increased mental illness, stress, blood pressure, and other health problems.
It also strikes me that the current legal corrections system really only works if we, as individuals, have significant ability to decide not to commit a crime as opposed to it being the most likely destiny based on our current {personal, environmental} state.
EDIT: Replaced a term for a more neutral one.
How do explain all the people that have those things Raz didn’t and are still assholes?
Yes, but not current american police. What is demonstrated here is that unchecked power is bad, which is pretty close to what the american police currently seems to have, leading to crimes like the one that started the whole protest.
What we really need is a system of accountability and control over police. Police should be as accountable for their actions and mistakes as every other citizen (equality under the law!), or at least that's the idea.
We can start by:
- getting rid of police unions that hide information and do stuff like have police be judged by three of their peers, one picked by the accused, and prevent police from getting fired.
- get rid of qualified immunity
And so on.
Many, myself included, would argue that they're basically out of control right now. Just look at the sequence of events that unfolds almost to the letter after every unjustified police killing. At best the outcome is the cop involved resigns and quietly goes to work for another police department a few months down the line or retires with full benefits.
Defund of course means a million things to a million people but a lot of what I'm hearing is about moving the armed police response to the minority of roles where it's needed. The amount of time you need an armed officer is a tiny fraction of the times they're there and they're not trained for the vast majority of the actual work they do. Under this defund is about taking the glut of resources allocated to cops and moving it to people better trained to deal with the kind of mental health, mediation, etc tasks that take up the bulk of police's actual time.
I would say, though, that our US police are more controlled than what's going on in the CHAZ, however slightly in some ways.
Are you pro individual gun ownership?
The second amendment exists in the US Constitution, first and foremost to balance the power between a populous and would-be tyrants.
Just like vocal anarchists make the left look bad, the freedom-loving libertarian side is marred by the vocal authoritarians; esp when they feel threatened.
There is little incentive to attempt tyranny when the result can be predicted so easily.
Also, don’t underestimate the power of 100 million people wielding guns. The world has yet to ever witness a force 1/10th as great and well-armed as the American populous.
With a sparsely-armed populace, it's easy for the occupying force to roll through without much conflict or challenging decisions.
Winning occurs through attrition of the occupiers, which, unlike Vietnam, can't just "back out".
So the solution for police not being regulated enough, is for the people to take up arms against them?
Rather than fixing the regulations?
What CHAZ shows us is that there is perhaps a middle ground between "asking" and "taking up arms," but if none of the demands are met, I don't know that there are many other steps left.
In fact it looks like in some places the cries to defund the police are finally being heard and actioned. I hope there are more, as this is a radical act and not just a legislative tweak. It's clear that a fundamental rebalancing of the relationship between police and society is needed, starting with talking away their weapons, and total de-escalation of police violence and their effective immunity to the consequences of their racist actions.
I hope "CHAZ" isn't a last step before open, armed conflict, because if it does go that way the public mood is going to shift in a millisecond to enforcement. Just like I hope here in the UK we don't see people pull down statues of Churchill - he was a racist asshole, but he was also the leader that brought us through WWII, and the population of this country aren't ready to stop venerating the latter because of the former yet.
I'm also not sure what "winning" looks like for either side when that starts.
History has shown us over and over and over that an unarmed populace will either A) be subject to unchecked violence by its overlords, or B) be successfully invaded by new and less desirable overlords.
Secondly, “fixing the regulations” is not necessary; what is necessary is enforcing the already existing regulations.
Which is why the UK gets invaded every other week?
Seems an overly reductive viewpoint.
Orwell would likely support CHAZ, he fight with the anarchists in Catalonia after all. People tend to not realize that Animal Farm was a criticism of the USSR from a socialist. It is not a criticism of all socialism or anarchism.
Also, we could make laws saying that prisoners are only allowed to be kept at approved prisons; a law that could be applied equally to police and citizens, while ensuring the government gets to approve who gets imprisoned.
What they lack is qualified immunity, so it's pretty rare because the risk of being wrong is too great. Which seems to be a valuable take away.
When I look at the list of demands I'm pretty quick to dismiss it. Then I remember how I dismissed the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle too, and how many of the fears those protesters had were realized over the next two decades. I might be too hopeful, but I really think the city leadership should talk to them and hear them out, instead of just trying to push them over.
Someonen transcribed those demands and then posted them.
I think it would be better to view those demands as the union of demands of each person willing to speak to a crowd. Which is why you see inconsistency in then, why it's such a long list, etc.
I just think that list of demands is better understood in that context.
I'm just trying to give some additional context to how this list of (demands|wishes) came about.
If you view it as a single list of (demands|wishes) it doesn't make as much sense. If you view it as the (demands|wishes) from a wide variety of people, that were made on an open mic at a protest that was transcribed, then categorized, then posted to the internet, it's easier to understand what it is.
There are organized protest leaders that have curated their list of demands and put it out. This very much isn't that! This is basically the raw list of demands from a wide variety of different speakers. The only editing was in the transcription and the categorization of those demands.
Note that rent control, even if the city doesn't have the power to establish it for private rentals, can effectively be achieved by the same means.
There’d be a certain amount of deferred justice in doing that, but I’d rather the practice simply be banned.
Good thing I never suggested that. Gentrification has a racial dimension because race correlates with economics, but it simply is the rich displacing the poor in a particular region; if you take housing units by eminent domain and establish a process for renting them out as public housing that doesn't distribute them to the highest bidder, you prevent gentrification. You neither have to acquire nor distribute based on race.
You are incorrect. Laws may both explicitly (or otherwise intentionally) target race and may disproportionately impact race without explicit targeting.
Laws doing the former are subject to “strict scrutiny”: the discrimination must be the least invasive means of achieving a compelling government interest. The latter isn't prohibited at all, though it can be evidence of discriminatory intent. (You may be thinking of employment law, where disparate impact is generally prohibited discrimination, unless closely tailored to a specific legitimate non-discriminatory business need.)
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause for a discussion, especially the section under “tiered scrutiny” and “disparate impact”.
and the process for renting them as public housing will be fairer how? You're just switching out one filtering system (price) for another based on arbitrary rules proposed by petty bureaucrats and politicians. At the end of the day you're still discriminating. The only difference that in your system, you're hoping that you or someone with your sensibilities has the power to do the discriminating.
I’d rather they force commercial developers to put in two bedrooms worth of housing for each full time employee worth of office space they add.
If the developers are short-sighted and only add high end McMansions and condos, that’s fine.
The housing market will eventually oversaturate, and those properties will end up selling at a loss to people that couldn’t afford them at the original price.
The Microsofts and Amazons of the world will end up paying eye watering premiums for open space floor plans, or luxury real estate developers will take a bath. Either way, not a tear will be shed.
I don't think all the McMansions and condos are good however. I'd rather you force people to add space for lots of people. Otherwise there'll be a period where you drive a lot of poorer folks away. Artists and retail workers and mechanics. People who don't work tech or finance or real estate. I don't know that cities can readily recover from it.
It's why I left San Jose. If it continues too long, it'll be why I leave Seattle. Give people reasonable rents, please. I want to live with artists and civil servants and retail workers and chefs and vets and all these people. It makes life so much more interesting
As such, it's totally right to take and redistribute things that doesn't belong to rich people only.
Police believe in collective punishment. So deliver it to them.
Is there a list of these fears somewhere? Ideally as presented at the time.
But 2 issues that stand out as prescient are the environmental impact of an ascendant China and the changes to the US middle class globalization would render.
This leads to the idea that regulatory capture is economically efficient (“Who is better qualified to regulate industry than successful industrialists?”)
It also leads to things like banning class action law suits, allowing binding arbitration, and allowing individuals to sign away arbitrary rights by implicitly accepting non-negotiated contracts they haven’t even seen.
Oakland has commercial enforcement zones, where private police enforce the law. The idea is that business owners weren’t getting a good deal by paying taxes to fund the police, because it was subsidizing law enforcement in residential areas. Instead, the merchants hire their own police, and pay less taxes. Oakland’s (mostly poor, black) residents fund the police that protect them out of their own taxes.
Anyway, you get the idea. Back to your question:
Neoconservatives generally think corporatism is best achieved by dismantling the government (“repeal Obamacare”).
Neoliberals think it is best achieved by restructuring it (mandate health insurance for all).
(Contrast that with the populists in that debate. They want to dismantle the health insurance industry and replace it with medicare.)
Usually, when people talk about moderates in the US, they mean corporatists. The MAGA crowd are mostly “right wing” populists (xenophobic, “America first”, bring back factory jobs), the BLM types tend to be “left wing” populists.
If you look up corporatism, you’ll see it is a shortened form of “corporate fascism”. I don’t think that term is particularly constructive, though it is accurate: the MAGA and BLM movements both accuse the establishment of being fascist.
One side targets neoliberals, the other, neocons. As General Mattis pointed out last week, divided we fall.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/20/politics/james-mattis-resigna...
However, the US’s withdrawal from Syria is a continuing humanitarian disaster that has spread into neighboring countries.
[0] https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/07/max-blumenthal-on-baghdad...
[1] https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/28/opcw-insiders-ltamenah-ch...
Well known neoconservatives include Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jim Woolsey, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others. Outside of government, almost to a person they all circulated among a small group of think tanks and lobbying organizations in Washington, DC, one of which I used to work at while in college, and I watched every one of the aforementioned, and many more, come in and out of the office at various times.
I also think discussing the domestic policy principles of neoliberals is a little non-sensical. Neoliberalism, IMO, is best described as a manifest consequence of the rightward shift in Western politics from the late 1970s to the present time. After Margaret Thatcher's win in the U.K., liberals became increasingly disfavored by the electorate across the West. Neoliberals are politicians who recognized that conservatives controlled the narrative--small government, fewer regulations, pro-business, etc--and ran on political platforms that reflected that shift.[1] Ideologically they almost all supported traditional liberal policies--social, economic, etc--but understood you couldn't actually win national elections on those same platforms any longer. IOW, neoliberalism isn't an ideology, it's natural selection.
Liberals today love to sh_t on Bill Clinton and Tony Blair for rolling back the social safety net, increasing police enforcement, etc. But they have amnesia.[1] The alternatives to Clinton and Blair weren't more liberal policies, they were continuing conservative electoral wins. People forget that two years into Clinton's presidency the GOP won the House and Senate for the first time in ~50 years, and that Clinton lost to Bush not because the electorate was more liberal, but because Bush wasn't conservative enough.
It's amazing that even after Trump's election and even after Brexit liberals are still under the delusion that more liberal policies can win elections. It doesn't matter that individual voters' particular preferences skew liberal; when you package them all up into a platform the controlling political narrative is that they represent big government, and big government is bad. Full stop. And what's the alternative to big government? Whatever it is, it will tend to benefit large corporations because the collective action problem doesn't go away, and the next largest organizations that are capable of marshaling a huge amount of human and monetary resources will fill in the vacuum left by a receding government.
Going forward I don't know what will happen. With the rise of populism any kind of coherent platform, principled or opportunistic, seems unnecessary and irrelevant. We do seem to be at an inflection point, but only time will tell.
[1] I'm sure younger people today might say, "how could you possibly support anything other than smaller government, ceteris paribus." I'm not so old as to be able to tell you first-hand how older generations thought, but as I understand it, it wasn't that you preferred bigger government, it's just that you didn't...
China and the US have recently taken an anti-neoliberal turn, in fact the neoliberal era is beginning to end. Both Trump and Jinping have been pretty protectionist.
I mean look, whatever people in capitalist circles want to believe, China never really gave up on communism. They repurposed capitalism's weighing machine, and with that, there were people who got rich, which makes it look like Western-style capitalism. But the whole point of the "shadow banking system" and "state-owned enterprise" was to encapsulate a party-run state-driven "communist" system, to ensure reasonably ample work for the workers, and, to ensure a backstop to private enterprise. Maybe it's somewhat like the way Apple has baseline apps that are good enough, and then an app store for everything else. Or another analogy would be the U.S. Postal Service. Not efficient, but it works.
To be clear, globalization has been quite predatory towards weaker developing countries with less centralized authority – and hence – bargaining power. China "won" globalization by subverting it, and indeed, in hindsight, this was the only way for a developing country to win.
Right, so lifted out of poverty. Just because you think their new job is a "horrible sweatshop", doesn't mean their lives haven't actually improved.
It was not well received at the time, but sadly, it’s predictions have been proven correct over time.
Here’s a contemporary negative review of the book with a point by point refutation of its contents (it is painful to read with the benefit of hindsight): https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten...
Here’s a chronology of related protests, ending in Trump. You could read up on the individual events, I suppose:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trade-nafta-timeline-idUS...
Turned into a serious drug venue and eventually fell apart. Sounds like it sort of restarted, albeit with regular Danish law enforcement and other city resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania
As someone living in Copenhagen, I would not consider that anything near an accurate description of the history of Christiania. What happened was that an old military area and barracks was left abandoned and disused, so a group of squatters moved in, fixed up the place and built a community.
It did not turn into a "serious drug venue". They had issues with hard drugs in the 1970s, but kicked all of that to the curb and there is a strict community-supported ban on all hard drugs. Over the years various sellers have popped up here and there, but they are generally shunned and chased out by the community.
It also did not "fall apart", although it has had its ups and downs. The political winds have varied from indifference to acceptance to attempts to abolish the entire things, raze the area and built apartments. The current state is that the area is owned by a foundation and is treated partly as a part of the city of Copenhagen and partly as an independent enclave. Danish law enforcement is grudgingly accepted in cases of actual crimes, but otherwise not exactly openly welcomed.
Are you sure that the dealers you saw were trading hard drugs, and not soft ones like cannabis, mushrooms, etc.?
Often these people need help and are self-medicating as anyone using traditional western medicine does (albeit with non-corporate drugs).
This type of stereotype further allows police to run wild and unchecked to "solve the drug problem" by beating and harassing than by actually solving any problem like a social worker is more likely to.
The "Now Entering the EU" sign at the exit hints at the locals' view of its status.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
so if you squat long enough anything is possible.
This is not true. I am Danish and my apartment is in Copenhagen. It's in fact so successful it has turned into a tourist attraction. Lukas Graham[1] is a Danish musician who grew up there. I don't see how this community can be called a failure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lukas_Graham
If you have a chance to visit Christiania, I recommend it. Copenhagen is one of my favorite towns. They have wonderful parks, museums, and even a really cool amusement park.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone
I'm amazed by SF and close areas utter disregard for what is normal crime wise. Most people in most cities don't have a story about their car window being smashed in and rummaged through. Every thread I see here / on reddit about SF someone mentions that its completely normal and should be expected there.
That's what led to this. There was night after night after night of police using flashbangs, teargas, and mace on mostly peaceful protests.
It was extremely unpopular with both the protestors and the local residents. There have been many calls for the mayor to resign over the repeated use of force.
So the police finally stopped with the violence. They just...left. They abandoned the East Precinct, expecting the protestors to burn it down.
The protestors decided not to burn it down, and instead set up an occupy style movement on the streets outside the police station.
But, yes. They definitely tried rubber bullets, teargas and mace first.
Performance Art, I guess. Reads like a story of children building a treehouse/fort.
Here's hoping it sustains itself for a while.
I'm not passing judgment yet since the days are young and the political bias on the ground is thick in both directions. But it is definitely not "by all accounts".
But my personal bias on the table is that yeah, trading police that were imperfectly constrained by the system for new police utterly and entirely unconstrained by the system is probably not going to go well. The real "fun" will start when Raz's faction pisses off enough people to form a violent counterfaction and you get a gang war, so give it a bit. It takes time for these things to develop. Let the honeymoon wear off and have this place showing a functioning system for, oh, say, at least a month before declaring victory. Not that you declared victory, I'm just saying, I recommend against getting too invested in this.
It's not as if "a place that has no police" is some shocking new experiment that has never been run before; you've got plenty of places you can look out in the world to see what happens next. It's not a difficult-to-predict progression.
Aside, intentionally or unintentionally, calling a group of predominantly black people "thugs" is a common dog whistle.
But I understand that you, too, are just trying to play games to pretend that anti-racists are the real racists. This is something that many deranged right-wing extremists do to entertain themselves.
That was just the beginning of the confrontation. If you watch the full video the group then followed and hassled the tagger for several minutes before the tagger was hit in the face and had their glasses broken (and their smartphone was stolen from them). Someone also threatened to blow the taggers brains out.
Pieces of shit.
I'd like to think, regardless of anyone's politics, we could all agree that the elected government should have authority over the police.
However, by Sunday (or maybe early, early Monday morning), the police were using CS gas again at the order of the police chief, Carmen Best.
I did not know that. Do you have a reference to back this up?
18:22: Reporter: "So, Chief Best, you stood here on Friday and you said it was going to be your decision and your decision alone to use tear gas. Tear gas was deployed on Sunday. You released a video today to say that it was not your decision to close the East Precinct. So who is making tactical decisions right now, for the Seattle Police Department?"
18:51: Best: "So for the tear gas, it was my decision. ... We suspended the use for 30 days unless it was a 'life safety situation.' And that was the exemption. ... The officers felt like it was a 'life safety situation' ... and I concurred."
19:27: Best: "I own that decision. I made that decision."
Here's a press conference transcript from June 7 where they claimed they would stop using CS gas[2].
Here's a secondary source reporting on the June 11 press conference[3].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rE4VMjClqI
[2]: https://durkan.seattle.gov/2020/06/transcript-mayor-durkans-...
[3]: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/11/43893335/durkan-...
Which media is that?
For more info: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-54-local-crime-re...
The media treats cops according to what's best for the story. Lately, that involves being extremely critical of them. In other times when we aren't in the midst of a pandemic, mass unemployment and then nationwide protests, and the story is that the cops shot a criminal suspect, they use euphemisms like "officer-involved shooting." The media narrative today is extremely hostile to police.
So when I see "only a handful of incidents," I feel there might be a bit of an agenda behind that. Knocking down the World Trade Center twin towers and a side of the Pentagon were only a "handful of incidents," too. Not to mention the number of unarmed black people shot by police last year (nine total). All of those are a disgrace, but the sheer number of atrocities that happen are irrelevant to how unjust or outrageous the atrocities might be.
Consider, in the above post, that 'thug' is a well-known racist epithet. Not 'racially loaded'. Straight-up racist. We see you too.
Whether that's going to be a positive or a negative remains to be seen, but that's one of the key notions in these protests.
By all honest, first person accounts then?
Two stories down in the link you sent, theres a picture of a bunch of people calmly watching a movie in a makeshift outdoor theater.
It sure doesn’t look like the tear-gassed, rubber bullet fests we’ve been seeing around the rest of the country.
My friends that have walked through the area can confirm.
Why predict defeat?
Why not appreciate the experiment as an alternative to our broken system?
Yeah, it'll eventually go away.
But maybe change will be secured, and there are some ideas that do make sense and will spread or stick around.
Is the worst that could happen worse than the status quo?
You sound like one of the commenters on Drew Houston's Ask HN telling him no-one will pay for rsync.
It would be nice if it could sustain itself, but it will likely creak under its own weight in a month or so.
I would have believed it plausible had they gone outside the city to some secluded area to create their utopia, but it's being done on existing buildings they did not build, and property that is not theirs but I guess their "revolution" is to not give two shits about anything.
I give them at most one more week.
At the very least, you could easily make an argument that a rising tide does not lift all boats; i.e. many people are personally not benefiting much from the tech-boom in the area. On the other hand, if your stance is that our collective goal should be to produce the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people; then we want more people to move to the city have prosperous lives to fulfill the new roles available here. In that scenario it's hard to keep income inequality from expanding.
It seems like thusfar the city council has done a good job at striking a balance; MHA (mandatory housing affordability) is a level-headed way to redistribute some of the gains that tech has brought to those who are less fortunate. However, our current city council is much more left-leaning and I'm worried that their stance towards growth is far more "progressive" and anti-business.
Should people really be entitled to live in an expensive city that they cannot afford? Cities like Manhattan or SF have sort of taken a stance on that and it favors the prosperous. I'm not sure how I feel about the matter; but I certainly do not want us to dampen our potential future potential by encouraging businesses to set up shop elsewhere. We need more initiatives like MHA and fewer like the business head-tax.
I'm not from the area, but the sheer amount of anger and enthusiasm that has fueled these protests suggests that the city council has not been striking an appropriate balance.
Happy middle class people don't tend to riot and try to start new societies.
I find it eerie that you're excluding from the equation the tens of thousands of homeless people in those cities. The right question is "to what lengths should we go to give people the ability to live with a roof over their heads?" The bay area has answered with "very little", where most people are barely offering human empathy to the homeless.
I do believe that we should support the homeless populations of our cities; but if you're familiar with Seattle's homelessness problems in particular, you'll know that the city has essentially thrown literally hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem to little effect.
I don't believe Seattle should follow a path of growth-at-all-costs and ignore the social problems the city has; but the city council here is staunchly anti-business, and that carries a risk-too, like the original commenter said—take growth for granted and you can end up like Detroit. In that situation, no one prospers, and everyone suffers; which we definitely don't want. It's a fine line to walk. That's all I'm saying.
I think this is about as useful as saying "homelessness is caused by loitering". We're confusing cause and effect. Try living on the streets for a few years where people treat you worse than shit without developing some mental illness or abusing drugs to deal with the stress and loneliness. If you think that the cause is mental illness and drugs and throwing money at it mostly does nothing, why do you think San Francisco has by a long shot the highest rate of homelessness in America?
Please do not spread lies. SF does not have the highest homelessness rate in America. Eugene Oregon has the most homeless: https://www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics/ , followed by LA and NY.
I can answer this, I lived there since 2005 until this month.
The problem is once you stop enforcing the law it creates incentives for all kinds of people to try it out. This created a diverse population of people who are living outside, from mentally ill, to seemingly normal young people fixing bikes in their tents, to dangerous drug addicts that won't hesitate to stab you.
The problem is there is a law and it is not being enforced. People take advantage of this. Thinking everybody is a poor soul that would buy housing if it existed is an extremely naive view. The homeless population is very diverse in terms of reasons they are out there. SF leadership treats all of them as if it had one solution, so of course that will not work. Some people out there want to be there. You can see they are young and don't mind sleeping in a tent. Others are just out of their minds and need intervention ASAP.
RIP SF
Enough with patronizing. They are not children or robots with no freewill. They have made decisions in their own lives and they need to own up to them. Not holding people accountable makes them more like children, and they are more likely to stay where they are FOREVER. They will all stay on the streets until old age and die there if you think it's not their own fault.
If you can't a afford a city, then MOVE. Guess what though, in cities like SF, they didn't.
They stayed, destroyed SF for decades, and now it is very clear... SF has made its choice... to become the home for the homeless, as a mass exodus occurs.
People are tired of shit and used needles on the sidewalk, dangerous insane people roaming everywhere, extremely expensive food and living, all while the leadership pats itself on the back for being woke. Enjoy your post-apocalyptic shitty.
Gosh how can you be so jealous of people you're willing to destroy their stuff. It's the same kind of xenophobia that fuels anti-immigrant rhetoric. People upset that those moving to 'their turf' happen to do better than them.
The other interesting comparison here is the varied response to this and the Malheur National wildlife refuge occupation.
Part of this probably evolves from the fact that Liberals are introspective and willing to challenge their beliefs to their own disadvantage in a way that the GOP never has been; but it's genuinely confusing and the party does not feel unified.
They're not really consistent at all but their messaging and party policing has been more strict
>What does the left stand for >for a long time liberalism was about free speech but now we want to regulate speech with safe-spaces and trigger warnings.
it's funny watching americans sprinkling around left, liberal, etc as political terms whilst defining the weird mix that ends up under the wings of the two parties. Some (self-proclaimed) libertarians & conservatives, protectionists & free market hardliners standing under the same republicans umbrella with radically clashing beliefs. Free market liberals fighting with leftists who are laughing at social progressives under the umbrella of the democrats.
>Part of this probably evolves from the fact that Liberals are introspective and willing to challenge their beliefs to their own disadvantage in a way that the GOP never has been
I'd say with growing inequality and declining social mobility it's hard for the mainstream core of democrats to really push a broader platform that the party fully aligns with, differs from the republicans and rings well with their base. They don't really roll with protectionist stances a la bernie or trump, they don't really align with unions or workers anymore as they've dropped them for an upper middle-class educated focus whilst at the same time still keeping some actual more left wing remnants under their wing that they try to suppress and retain at the same time They have started less invasions but aren't really against global force projection at all. They don't really clash with conservatives on stock buybacks, markets, banking, what have you whilst at the same time still pushing cushioning programs like obamacare to give at least a sense of direction there. So when on a lot of those fronts you're not really united or notably different from the opposition what's left? Social issues. Social equality when it comes to sex, race or what have you. So pushing those makes sense.
Trump has started the fewest invasions of any president thus far. We've had no regime changes, and no extended battles or fights. Obama (Syria and Libya) and Bush (Iraq, Afghanistan, others) and Clinton (Iraq, Kuwait) all engaged in new wars. Trump hasn't, and has in fact withdrawn America troops.
They do if you want the people who serve your $5 coffees and $20 meals to be able to live within a reasonable distance. I like to think the people gentrifying them out don't want to push them out, but I'm not sure most of them even realize they're responsible for the huge homeless population. They moved in for the well-paid jobs and pushed the people who lived there out. The pushed out don't always have somewhere to go or a way to get there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania
It's been a thing half a century now.
This feels very much overblown.
Seattle Times has an article that outlines similar "occupy" protests.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/welcome-to-the-cap...
I wish they would delete it and stick with their second demand - take all weapons away from police. No guns, no batons, no tasers. It's also crazy, but at least it's crazy in a "this might just be crazy enough to work" kind of way.
Abolition of existing centralized paramilitary police departments in favor of rethinking public safety and social services and reconstituting and redistributing law enforcement within a new framework is an idea which has fairly rapidly recently moved from the fringes to the mainstream of debate, and it is a policy openly and actively being discussed by many local governments, and already committed to by the Minneapolis City Council.
It may seem, by a pre-June-2020 perspective, to be an out-of-the-range-of-serious-debate demand, but the Overton Window on that issue just underwent and sudden and massive shift.
>...which has fairly rapidly recently moved from the fringes to the mainstream of debate, and it is a policy openly and actively being discussed by many local governments, and already committed to by the Minneapolis City Council.
>but the Overton Window on that issue just underwent and sudden and massive shift.
Well you're right about that. Because it's insane, and generates clicks, likes, and retweets and so media keeps covering like it's actually popular despite the fact the inverse is true to keep generating their clicks, likes, and retweets. I've been waiting for the Star Tribune to actually run some local polling on this, because everyone I know still back there also thinks it's insane. My guess is they do run the polls, and don't publish the results for the same reason.
[1]https://twitter.com/databyler/status/1268555840098906115?ref...
More recent polling shows much higher support for both “defund” and “dismantle” than what that poll found for it's lopsided framing of “defund”.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-poll-e...
From your article:
>For example, 39% of respondents supported proposals “to completely dismantle police departments and give more financial support to address homelessness, mental health, and domestic violence.”
So, only 39% of respondents support "dismantling" (notice the specific word choice here) and essentially creating, out of thin air I guess, another organization that would obviously have a license to engage in violence if their charter includes dealing with domestic violence. This is an echo chamber proposal if there ever was one.
You're right that we would still need to train a new organization to deal with violent events. But you're also ignoring the upside of not having a cop with a gun issuing speeding tickets, or dealing with someone experiencing mental health issues, or other things that could be better served by more specialized roles.
is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this poll, which should be obvious. I'm not ignoring anything. Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems. The grand irony of all of this is that the defunding of the police departments in this country will make the kinds of reforms you are talking about impossible.
This makes no sense.
This assumes that generalists are equally effective at all tasks as specialists. Well, as a generality; in the specific case of all-purpose use of police vs appropriate use of other community services, it actually involves the assumption that specialists in the application of violence to achieve compliance are as effective in specialists in tasks unrelated to application of violence in those non-violent tasks.
In technology, if senior IT management decided they could reduce staff by having network installation specialists, with little to no additional training, cover application development, QA, requirements analysis, SRE, DBA, desktop support, and project management tasks instead of having specialists in each of those domains, they'd rightly be viewed as insane. But that's, broadly, what local governments have done with city services, with cops in the role of the network installers.
Cops respond to a wide variety of calls all the time because over time (particularly between the 1960s to 1990s with concerns driven by crime statistics, though the trend has continued even as the original impetus reversed) resources were pumped into police departments, often diverted from other local services organizations.
When all you have is a paramilitary force trained for the application of force, every local problem looks like a target for the application of paramilitary violence.
“Dismantle” and “abolish” are about equally popular in the movement for those that support the position that goes beyond “defund” in organizational change.
And 39% is widespread, though obviously not majority, support (and “defund” has 76%—a large majority—support in the pool, which I notice you ignore completely.) And nothing in the quote (or the movement) suggests that whatever armed law enforcement functions were retained would be concentrated in a single new organization created ex nihilo. While, again, advocates are mostly calling for a community process to rethink a design new service delivery and public safety systems rather than selling an already completed redesign that just needs legislative blessing, one framework concept I've seen mentioned more than once is redistributing domain-specific law-enforcement functions within service agencies consistent with the agencies’ domain, broadly the same much state and federal law enforcement functionality is rather than being concentrated in a single paramilitary force of general remit.
If you do live in Seattle, you should head over and see it for yourself. It's a very unique thing and who knows how long it will be there. I assume at some point the police will drive a tank through it or something.
It's almost like ... anecdata isn't trustworthy...
EDIT: downvoted for pointing out the hypocrisy.
When will they declare independence? That’s when the fun will really begin.
Having said that, I'm sure these types of post create a lot of work for you. I appreciate the upkeep and please keep up the good work!
That's maybe the good place to ask:
What are other places (maybe places more open to political discussions) the HN crowd would recommend for "intelligent discussions"? Twitter and Reddit are an awful mess at the moment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20023209
It seems like the really good discussion places wouldn't have to carry this caveat. It's too bad those are even harder to find.
Wonkery can be debated; humanity can't.
Ideally, yes, but if the political views you are hoping to find are ones that overtly limit any dissent or respect for any other view (extreme absolute authoritarianism for example) then the views themselves subvert the ability to have meaningful discourse about them.
Nothing interests everybody. If one story doesn't interest you, there are plenty of others to read here, and if you run out, the 'past' link in the top bar will take you to many threads you missed. Some of those will surely be interesting.
This post has been killed and unkilled, downweighted by flagging and then unweighted by mods, then after a front page surge now downweighted because it has more comments than points.
Those unwritten rules that govern social behavior can induce real internal change too. People's attitudes and beliefs are shaped by what they perceive to be customary and deviant in their culture.