Correction: you would prefer it much more as five much smaller articles.
Which is fair, your preferences are yours, but I much prefer single expansive essays like this that give the author room to develop large complex idea structures, and to reach out from the central idea to disparate but interestingly relevant related themes. This might not (or might) be the majority preference, but Scott (and the 'Wait but Why' guy, among others) has built up large enough audiences from this type of musings, and mostly good quality audience too, so it's working for him.
Your second paragraph is diplomatic and even-handed. I can get behind it.
Your "Correction" rubs me the wrong way. Of course the OP was expressing their opinion. They weren't making a statement of fact. What good comes from "correcting" them? It just makes you look bad.
The "correction" in the prior post struck me as impolite, pedantic, and uncivil. It didn't read as "jokey" to me.
Arguably, my posts don't add anything too. I guess I'm just tired of having to adopt such a "highly defensive" writing style for HN comments. It irked me to see somebody seemingly pedantically jumping on a poster who was clearly expressing an opinion but wasn't "defensive" enough in their post to clearly state their post was an opinion. That's what I took it for.
> ...who was clearly expressing an opinion but wasn't "defensive" enough in their post to clearly state their post was an opinion.
You are giving OP the benefit of the doubt, which is a nice thing to do, but what if it isn't actually true? One isolated case is no big deal of course, but what if this (people accidentally mistaking opinions for facts) was actually a very common phenomenon? And when combined with the power of the internet to propagate ideas (opinions perceived as facts), brought about a scenario where people's beliefs about reality are highly divergent from actual reality...in a complex system, might this possibly result in a kind of self-reinforcing negative feedback loop?
If one looked carefully, I wonder if some signs of this phenomenon could be identified within the system we find ourselves living in.
If you want to make unambiguous statements of opinion, don't use language that implies statements of facts. See also: E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
> This is a great article, but it’d be much better as five much smaller articles
I can't understand how one could read this as an implication of fact. The phrase "great article" is a qualitative assessment. So is "better".
It wasn't necessary for the parent to "correct" the poster for not qualifying that their comment as opinion. It's clear the comment is opinion on its face.
"Correcting" the poster for not couching their comment in some kind of explicit language that qualifies it as an opinion seems needless at best, and pedantic, rude, and patronizing at worst.
I absolutely hate that I'm so fixated on this, but I can't let it go.
I think the phrase "it’d be much better as five much smaller articles" can be interpreted in two ways:
1) "I would prefer ..."
2) "It would be better ..."
You can be in the habit of giving people the benefit of the doubt, that when they say "A is a better coffee than B" they are merely expressing an opinion, because you think it's too tedious to say "For my taste" before each opinion.
But I hope you see how the phrase literally is "It would be better" as if there is an (obvious implicit) standard by which we can all agree to judge things, and from that standard, "it would be better if".
For what it's worth, I was avoiding the "FTFY" format which always sounds aggressive and rubs me the wrong way, so I chose this as the milder option. I can see it being impolite by the standard that (I hope) HN comments should aspire to, so I'll use something even milder next time. Thanks.
Maybe "I'd rather phrase that..." or "More precisely..."
In general, I think it makes sense to avoid implying that the other person is wrong when you've decided to try addressing in a strict logical way something that was uttered as conversational English.
peteretep:
> This is a great article, but it’d be much better as five much smaller articles
sundarurfriend:
> Correction: you would prefer it much more as five much smaller articles.
dllthomas:
> Maybe "I'd rather phrase that..." or "More precisely..."
You seem to have struck a loop, you are asking that the correction "Correction: That should say it's your opinion" should be "In my opinion, you should say it's your opinion".
Your issue is that they claimed objectivity when they called the poster subjective, which seems like an endless rabbithole to go down, since it is only your subjective opinion that they should do so.
You present my comment as criticism, but you left out important context. I did not respond directly to "Correction:" but to a comment by sundarurfriend that seemed to be acknowledging that "correction" did not play the desired conversational role, even as it represented an attempt to be less confrontational than "FTFY". My comment was friendly suggestion of alternatives, along with some measure of analysis as to what went wrong.
The issue I was pointing to was not subjectivity vs objectivity at all. I was pointing out that the way language is used often doesn't square up neatly to a narrow semantic analysis, and that acknowledging the intent of the communication even when you are moving to a more explicit, semantically-oriented regime might help sundarurfriend achieve more of the kind of conversational outcomes that I understand them to prefer.
I liked this. It serves as a useful followup to and expansion to the CGP Grey video "This Video Will Make You Angry" which explored the phenomena of how groups talk about events and each other. In short, people tend to self-segregate into opposing groups that don't talk to each other. Instead, they talk amongst themselves about how horrible the other group is.
I always get so depressed when I see things like this. I know they're true. I also know there is a concerted effort to influence the things i see/think.
How am I going to be able to sort through the noise to find the signal? Is there even a point? What is the purpose of even trying? Why not just step into traffic?
The signal can even be diluted by well-meaning people. For example, Washington did have a set of teeth that included those of slaves. However, his financial records include the purchase of teeth from "Negros" for the purpose, which at the very least indicates he didn't have someone hold his own slaves down and rip teeth out of their heads. It doesn't preclude there being an element of racism and abuse in the path those teeth took from their origin to their purchase by Washington, but it does show there may not have been, and that Washington wearing slave teeth is not a mark against him personally.
The whole "owning slaves" thing is of course, but that's a separate issue from the dentures.
> Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists.
And it’s true. Reminds me of the onion caption for a picture of a bomb “capable of creating 1,500 new terrorists in single blast.”
Going on 20 years of forever war, why is there such strong bipartisan support for keeping Americans embroiled in the Middle East? Are we going to allow Trump to co-opt the anti-war position that’s traditionally been a tent pole for the progressive left?
This politicians keep us turned on each other with petty, polarizing subjects while they keep doing what they’ve always done. I’m baffled. I hate it.
Trump's position is, very roughly, "We should avoid war because it's bad for the economy." This is a fairly different take than the progressive "We should avoid war because killing innocents is bad" - in particular, once it's good for the economy (which it often is when you're not in a boondoggle), you're back to agreeing with Cheney.
I won't deny that there's a meaningful difference between right-populism and neoconservatism, but as long as the progressive left remains true to its "bleeding heart" nature (for lack of a better term) for reasoning, I don't think that it's a problem to temporarily agree with parts of the right wing on conclusions. Be glad for the opportunity for bipartisan agreement, and keep advocating for what you believe instead of against what they believe.
(... which goes a bit to the article's point: defining your party's goals as "we disagree with them" is great for attention and voter turnout but not necessarily for doing what's important to your worldview.)
Sure. I think you'll find that the anti-war left remained anti-war. Just like Trump and Cheney represent pretty different strains of conservatism despite both being on the right, the anti-war left is a different strain of progressivism from Democratic leadership.
Again - don't give in to the temptation of "the other side is bad." It's easy, it is often true because humans are bad in general, but it's not usually productive in accomplishing your goals, especially if there's a chance the other side shares those goals.
If I had to pick an example of the weak but controversy-raising cases the article brings up (I don't actually find those super convincing, myself, tbh), "WikiLeaks has letters from a couple of scientists internally raising the possibility that a strike that was already fairly controversial may have been even less justified than claimed even though the opponents of the strike are happy to acknowledge that the target of the strike was morally in the wrong, so progressives are hypocrites" seems like exactly the sort of thing he's talking about.
Then it's a good thing that I'm not making the claim "progressives are hypocrites" here and instead giving an example of how the toxoplasma of rage is misused for propaganda to start wars.
There's a long history of parties manufacturing casus belli and it benefits the world to be aware of this so as not to support more wars.
This does not support your claim. Do you have something more recent?
The report reached the following conclusions:
• At approximately 6:00 on 24 March 2017, an Su-22 military airplane belonging to the 50th Brigade of the 22nd Air Division of the Syrian Arab Air Force, departing from Shayrat airbase, dropped an M4000 aerial bomb containing sarin in southern Ltamenah, affecting at least 16 persons.
• At approximately 15:00 on 25 March 2017, a helicopter of the Syrian Arab Air Force, departing from Hama airbase, dropped a cylinder on the Ltamenah hospital; the cylinder broke into the hospital through its roof, ruptured, and released chlorine, affecting at least 30 persons.
• At approximately 6:00 on 30 March 2017, an Su-22 military airplane belonging to the 50th Brigade of the 22nd Air Division of the Syrian Arab Air Force, departing from Shayrat airbase, dropped an M4000 aerial bomb containing sarin in southern Ltamenah, affecting at least 60 persons.
https://www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2020/04/opcw-releases...
Senior OPCW officials reedited the Douma investigators’ initial report to produce a version that sharply deviated from the original. Key facts were removed or misrepresented and conclusions were rewritten to support the allegation that a chlorine gas attack had occurred in Douma. Yet the team’s initial report did not conclude that a chemical attack occurred, and left open the possibility that victims were killed in a “non-chemical related” incident.
Four experts from a OPCW and NATO-member state conducted a toxicology review at the OPCW team’s request. They concluded that observed symptoms of the civilians in Douma, particularly the rapid onset of excessive frothing, as well as the concentration of victims filmed in the apartment building so close to fresh air, “were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine, and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified.”
Chemical tests of the samples collected in Douma showed that chlorine compounds were, in most cases, detected at what amounted to trace quantities in the parts-per-billion range. Yet this finding was not disclosed publicly. Furthermore, it later emerged that the chemicals themselves did not stand out as unique: According to the author of the initial report, the OPCW’s top expert in chemical weapons chemistry, they could have resulted from contact with household products such as bleach or come from chlorinated water or wood preservatives.
The author of the initial report protested the revisions in an e-mail expressing his “gravest concern.” The altered version “misrepresents the facts,” he wrote, thereby “undermining its credibility.”
Following the e-mail of protest over the manipulation of the team’s findings, the OPCW published a watered-down interim report in July 2018. Around that time, OPCW executives decreed that the probe would be handled by a so-called “core team,” which excluded all of the Douma investigators who had traveled to Syria, except for one paramedic. It was this core team—not the inspectors who had been deployed to Douma and signed off on the original document—that produced the final report of March 2019.
After the e-mail of protest, and just days before the interim report was published on July 6, a US government delegation met with members of the investigation team to try to convince them that the Syrian government had committed a chemical attack with chlorine. According to veteran reporter Jonathan Steele, who interviewed one of the whistle-blowers, the Douma team saw the meeting as “unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s declared principles of independence and impartiality.” Interference by state parties is explicitly prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
The inference drawn from the OPCW’s final report—widely disseminated, including by the Trump administration—was that gas cylinders found in Douma likely came from Syrian military aircraft. An unpublished engineering study reached the opposite conclusion. The study evaluated competing hypotheses: Either the cylinders were dropped from the sky or they were manually placed. There is “a higher probability,” it concluded, “that both cylinders were manually placed…rather than being delivered from aircraft.” At “Location 4,” where a cylinder was found on a bed, the study determined that the cylinder was too large to have penetrated the hole in the roof above; at the other site, “Location 2,” the observed damage to the cylinder and to the roof it allegedly penetrated were incompatible with an aircraft bombing. Ballistics experts also said it was more likely that the crater had been made by an explosion, probably from an artillery round...
Hi, thanks for the clarification.
The link you share leads to an article which mentions an investigation by Bellingcat[1] and dismisses it because they are paid by the US. Bellingcat are hardcore investigators though and I'm inclined to take them seriously. What bothers me in both the WL and TheNation's publications is how much quotes they provide out of the context and usually it substitutes for original material.
A really good way to build strong opinion on the matter is to sit and construct a careful chronology of who did/said/wrote what when and to check every source cited, but I don't have the time now and will leave it for the future.
[1] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020/01/15/the-opcw-dou...
Yes, there's a lot here and I don't claim to be an expert on it all, but after Iraq, whenever there's a claim that we must rush off to war for some reason and there's no time to think about it or investigate, I become very deeply suspicious.
I remember originally dismissing the idea that we would go to war with Iraq very early on because it was the "stupidest possible thing we could do." Live and learn?
I picked that article because it gives a good summary, but you're right that it's necessary to pick these things apart in detail.
Or so we’re told, conveniently every single time we try a serious troop drawdown (whether it’s gas attack or dubious “troop bounties by Russia”). Then everyone takes the bait and is clamoring for increased troop pressure. Enough.
"War for oil" wasn't entirely fair, but I do expect the consensus to change rapidly now that we're a net exporter and don't have to fear a repeat of the 1973 embargo.
Question for those who disliked the comment above: do you disagree that the US Navy largely runs on combustion engines; or do you think that Texas and Louisiana have enough seaborne export bandwidth to support a hot war, on their own, without KSA et. al.; or have I missed a possibility?
(I haven't looked at USN tankers, in an asian context an important question would be: are they even Panamax?
As far as the crude network is concerned, Alberta is more closely connected to Texas than California is.
I don't really believe that anyone disliked it for principled reasons, but I am a bit skeptical of relations with Saudi Arabia as a strategy for keeping Navy ships fueled in a hot war. Could we really expect uninterrupted trade from a country that's quite literally on the other side of the world?
> Are we going to allow Trump to co-opt the anti-war position that’s traditionally been a tent pole for the progressive left?
Heck, if Trump managed to do that, it would seem to be reason enough to vote for him if you care about being anti-war - the progressive left be damned. After all, war and anti-war is surely one of the most consequential areas that presidents can directly influence; far more so than most government policy!
> Heck, if Trump managed to do that, it would seem to be reason enough to vote for him if you care about being anti-war - the progressive left be damned.
No, it wouldn't.
Co-opting a political position is about rhetorical positioning and has no necessary relationship to substantive policy.
Of course much of politics is about rhetorical positioning, with only indirect "relationships to substantive policy". From this POV though, rhetorical positioning about war seems to do reasonably well at predicting how a president might influence "substantive" choices relating to war.
> Are we going to allow Trump to co-opt the anti-war position that’s traditionally been a tent pole for the progressive left?
Okay I’m gonna quibble with this. If I had to compare Trump to any previous political figure, it would be Pat Buchanan, who was and is a paleoconservative. Paleoconservatives are anti-war in the old isolationist sense. Ron Paul popularized a more libertarian spin on paleoconservatism but Trump is steeped in it—to whatever degree he’s steeped in anything beyond his own narcissism—and the American right has a rich legacy of anti-war paleoconservatives who once thought maybe FDR was doing too much to provoke Germany and Japan. That just got set aside for about a half century after Pearl Harbor, but they’ve been there this whole time and after the controversies of GWB and his “neocon” advisors, paleocon ideas had a resurgence.
It's also the case that the anti-war right has had much more consistent anti-war positions than Trump, who might have used isolationist arguments to justify reducing US presence in the Middle East overall, but has also defended the notion of keeping troops there to secure oil, escalated with Iran and mooted military intervention in Latin America. The anti-war right wouldn't have appointed the likes of John Bolton to advise them on security.
Well, the old "isolationist" case for non-interventionism has always been in the service of "commerce with all nations", avoiding "entangling alliances" as far as practicable - so it's a bit difficult to differentiate it from either a "progressive left" or a "libertarian" POV. Intervention in WWI and WWII (in both instances, on the side of democracies) was rather broadly supported because the prospect of a world ruled by the philosophy of totalitarianism and military aggression was hardly attractive, even to quite a few "paleo" conservatives.
Pat basically ran on Trump's platform (albeit with vastly different style and rhetoric) but 20yr before anyone wanted to vote for it. It was the 90s. The world was a happy fun place free of the USSR. Why wouldn't the US want to be involved in the world? Why wouldn't the US want to do the maximal amount of trade with everyone. Optimism abounded. Isolationism and pragmatic "we'll serve ourselves fist" policy doesn't do well when everyone is feeling optimistic.
I expect to see a resurgence in isolationist policy in the near future because the world is seen as a crappy place now. China and Russia are widely viewed as threats we need to hedge against and the middle east is widely viewed as a source of inextricable quagmires and nothing good. People are not happy about how things are at home. Regardless of the balance of power between the parties and which parties own which branches there is a lot more looking inward in the near future.
> Going on 20 years of forever war, why is there such strong bipartisan support for keeping Americans embroiled in the Middle East? Are we going to allow Trump to co-opt the anti-war position that’s traditionally been a tent pole for the progressive left?
Your economy depends on USD being the world currency.
> why is there such strong bipartisan support for keeping Americans embroiled in the Middle East?
Never mind oil, the problem with US foreign policy is that it's run by (a) people with links to the countries involved and (b) money.
So policy about Cuba is dictated by those who fled the revolution and their children, regardless of what might be best now for US-Cuba relations.
Policy is influenced in favour of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, those countries are mostly enemies of each other, so US foreign policy is confused and ineffective - apart from the one thing that Israel and Saudi Arabia can agree on, which is that Iran is Bad.
> A rape that obviously happened? Shove it in people’s face and they’ll admit it’s an outrage, just as they’ll admit factory farming is an outrage. But they’re not going to talk about it much. There are a zillion outrages every day, you’re going to need more than that to draw people out of their shells.
I sometimes recall how the civil rights movement got together and amplified the story of Rosa Parks over Claudette Colvin. The optics were much better with Parks:
> "They said they didn't want to use a pregnant teenager because it would be controversial and the people would talk about the pregnancy more than the boycott," Colvin says.
That I think turned out to be a good move. In the absence of this guiding force I think Colvin would end up debated and talked about more.
But also, Rosa Park was frustrated about that decision. She took Colvin into her youth group and forced her to repeat her story at every youth meeting. Intentionally pushing kids toward radicalism.
Yes, Colvin had less of chance to withstand massive pressure Parks was in after bus stand. But she wanted them to rally around Colvin already.
But thats because the civil rights movement had a bunch of humans intentionally amplifying the Rosa Parks story to accomplish a particular policy goal.
Today Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have machine learning models trained to amplify the amount of attention spent on advertising. Any policy outcome will be a side-effect of that.
> But thats because the civil rights movement had a bunch of humans intentionally amplifying the Rosa Parks story to accomplish a particular policy goal.
It's tangentially related to TFA but... The Civil Rights era leaders were very strategic thinkers. MLK, Jr., especially, shortly before his death, was describing very serious, very ruthless strategy to accomplish goals that I do believe would've worked, had they been given the opportunity.
I think that we have ruthlessly strategic thinkers (in our politics and political movements) today but I don't believe their goals are to drive policy any longer.
| Under Moloch, everyone is irresistibly incentivized to ignore the things that unite us in favor of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive.
In social networks the leverage point in eliminating toxoplasma from your life are the bridge people: people who are being rewarded for taking offense in your in-group, and therefore select for the worst possible behavior of the outgroup. These people act as stressors, specifically triggering ideations of worst-case-scenarios. The fix here is removing these people from your feeds/circles of influence.
So the solution is to make the bubble impregnable? The medicine sounds worse than the disease to me.
Thing is, there are bad ideas spreading out there, and you should learn of their existence less they grow out of control with nobody knowing/caring.
Conflict is a regulating tool in human species (and not only for our species). Wishing it away is an utopia that like all others will end up dystopian if put into practice.
I think the compromise for me is "uninvested bridge people." I want to learn about bad ideas, but I want to learn about them from people who don't themselves care overmuch about outcomes one way or the other. That way I'm at a lesser risk of being radicalized and can choose whether to care and to what degree.
I think you’re looking for old-school journalism? You might be interested in the list of people who signed “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, some notable journalists among them: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
Your attention is a scarce resource. A basic point here, is that rage eats your attention for breakfast, and by cost of opportunity, bubbles you into your tribe. By cutting out rage & related weeds, you can actually expose yourself to a significantly larger, and more diverse set of viewpoints.
Conflict as a regulation tool might have worked for our evolutionary ancestors, where resolution can be swiftly found and incentives re-aligned; however, if you reward conflict, the modern machine can generate an endless supply of it, on the tap. The correct solution is to shift the incentives, and reward with your attention the kind of stuff you want to see growing.
I think first of all, conflict rewards itself, no? The conflict has a winner. What you are talking about (and the original article) is about fabricated fake conflicts. Well these ones have winners as well - the ones who fabricate them at least. And if you are on the receiving end of these outrages you are kind of forced to win it. And in doing so you might crush those who overextended their rage doing society a service.
Lots more could be said, but to keep it short I believe we can't simply ignore it.
OR you could have communities policing the tone and approach for disagreements, and then you can have a wide variety of viewpoints represented like in HN
>So the solution is to make the bubble impregnable?
I'd say just the opposite. We think of the filter bubble as being only shown ideas we agree with. But an important part of the filter bubble phenomenon is only showing us the worst examples of ideas we disagree with. It's this second part GP is suggesting we can most easily stop tolerating on a personal level. The former is a bias of the algorithms and would take some kind of collective reform, unfollowing contacts who highlight the worst of your shared ideological opponents rather than the best is an action anyone can take.
> So the solution is to make the bubble impregnable?
Turn the bubble from Jerry Springer into NPR.
What kinds of people does Jerry select for? "GAY KLANSMEN WHO LOVE THEIR HOMOPHOBIC BOYFRIENDS TOO MUCH! IOWAN ZOUAVES FOR WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AND THE MANCUNIANS WHO ENABLE THEM!" The worst of the worst. The circus freaks of the Other Side. The ones voted most likely to throw a chair at someone, even though that was a different daytime TV host.
What kinds of people does NPR select for? The more reasonable ones. The ones who can talk and express ideas without flying into a frothy rage at the very notion of someone disagreeing with them or not agreeing with them quickly enough or not having been in agreement with them a month before they started talking. The ones who can debate.
Everyone has filters. Use yours to filter out the angry idiots who add nothing.
After four sections devoted to demonstrating the premise of increasing change and describing its dimensions and (with highly variable accuracy) suggesting future trends, section 5 looks at limits of adaptability (physical and psychological impacts on the individual), and section 6 on survival strategies (personal and social coping mechanisms, education, and backlash). The psychological and sociological aspects have impressed me most.
The book as a whole is somewhat uneven, though it was ambitious and parts seem highly relevant still.
I'd like a "follow" feature, so I can see what certain people (like you) are doing. Implemented like a personal newsfeed. Just now occurs to me that RSS feeds for HN profiles would be cool.
Last time I checked, your reddit experiment was too much work to upkeep. You were also trying one of the newer hosters, "morpheus"?, but I didn't grok their UX.
A bit late but this aggravates me. I dont mind being unable to down vote in the least, in fact I think if downvoting had a timer it may help people cool down.
But for replies, I feel as though refreshing a page to see if anyone has replied to me, just feels narcissistic. As such I rarely if ever get to reply to something, since I almost never re-read comments on an article, much less my own for the infinitesimally small chance of a reply.
I think an option to have notifications to direct replies (not nested, but could be an option as well), would be pretty cool, as I've spoken before here about the drive-by commenting HN seems to cultivate (but I mean it works, right?).
I dearly miss the offline mail readers from the dial up BBS days. TLDR: most of the features (eg whitelists, blacklists, fetch behavior), were client side. I have a deep hunch that moving all these features to server side, aka social networks, contributed to our current mess.
The recent rehash (front paged) about newsgroups (NNTP protocol) made me wish I had more gumption and just did something about it.
Good comment which makes sense other than one word you used.
> toxoplasma
I don't think that word means what you think it means. It doesn't mean "toxicity" if that's what you're going for. It is a misspelling of Toxoplasmosis and refers to a specific thing that has no mapping whatsoever onto how you are using it.
Toxoplasma gondii is the parasite that causes toxoplasmosis. In the article, Scott makes the analogy of toxoplasma gondii to rage memes: toxoplasma circulates between cats and rats, the way a rage meme circulates back and forth between two opposing factions. (It's way down in section five of the article.)
They seem to be opposing forces (cats and rats, your side and the other side), but to the parasite, their opposition is what makes them both such effective hosts.
You want to eliminate the rage meme (toxoplasma) from your brain.
It's an analogy. Toxoplasma is a parasite that works by playing two sides against each others. A rage meme is a parasite that work by pitting two sides against each other.
> How do you explain this sentence? I don't think the article is written for cats and rats.
Metalepsis. When you see "toxoplasma", read "rage memes".
The PETA thing also showcases another couple of behaviours I particularly enjoy watching:
* Distributed low-commit morality: tell other people to "do the right thing" without actually doing anything yourself.
* Proximity creates responsibility: the best way to avoid having to do anything for anyone is to pretend you didn't see it. The moment PETA admitted they knew what was going on, they had to redirect all their efforts to solving it or they'd get stick
It's pretty funny since it's so predictable. You can always do these things and the reaction means that the right time to do it is to seek attention through it.
> If there were a secret conspiracy running the liberal media, they could all decide they wanted to raise awareness of racist police brutality, pick the most clear-cut and sympathetic case, and make it non-stop news headlines for the next two months. Then everyone would agree it was indeed very brutal and racist, and something would get done.
This has to be the most hilariously and accidentally observational comment in the history of the Internet. Times apparently have changed since 2014.
> Imagine Moloch looking out over the expanse of the world, eagle-eyed for anything that can turn brother against brother and husband against wife. Finally he decides “YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? BIRD-WATCHING. LET ME FIND SOME STORY THAT WILL MAKE PEOPLE HATE EACH OTHER OVER BIRD-WATCHING”
This was not a story about bird-watching. I don't know if you're drawing the comparison due to the faintest glimmer of similarity or you think it's about bird-watching. This was not a story that divided people. "Everyone" (that is, everyone who had opinions they wished to express) agreed the woman was a liar and a jerk.
That quote only describes our reality if taken out of context. "Something would get done" is referring to police reform enacted with a broad social consensus, not to a stream of escalating sub-terrorist provocations from leftists and from the government. And George Floyd was not "the most clear-cut and sympathetic case" in the presence of (e.g.) Breonna Taylor. The kind of hypothetical conspiracy is just not there; instead we're seeing memetic natural selection at work.
Someone with a phone camera just happened to record a video of the ideal case: a police officer obviously murdering a black man. It's brutal and pointless, with racism being the most obvious and likely explanation.
The thesis of this article has a lot of validity though. There is an escalating "PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!" arms race that has no interest whatsoever in solving problems, only in getting attention.
Do you ever worry that we are building Superhuman Artificial Intelligences with the goal of maximizing the amount of attention paid to advertisements? I'm concerned that they might accidentally either turn the world into paperclips or turn journalists into maximally conflict-driven-story finders.
This is not about good/bad journalism. A great journalist will turn in a fantastic story, get it approved and even on the front page, only to have it get few clicks because it can't compete for attention with the sensationalist crap.
This is about how humans first discovered that, given an infinite amount of reading material, we choose to read things that give us an emotional reaction. Any emotional reaction.
On the flip side we are training humanity to be less susceptible to advertising. Hence the increase in noise as humans naturally and unknowingly filter it out.
We really are not training humanity to resist advertising at all.
If anything its quite the opposite and at the very least no change from before. We should try individually and we might get some success. We might try at a societal level but I have not see this occuring (apart from things like bans for things like cigarettes or products aimed at children). There's no fundamental human change occuring.
Additionally the vast majority of HN users are dependent on advertising. Advertisments are core to the western life. It's deep in our psychology, and requires more than just an ad blocker.
Yeah, if anything, we're training people to aspire to be living advertisements, since the reward for success on Instagram is luxury brands subsidizing your lifestyle in-kind and perhaps even in money.
Is advertising in the 50s more or less successful than now? I do not know the answer but I am curious. Does the more in your face advertising actually make a difference or is the bar simply raised?
As far as I can tell, someone actually happened to record a video of a slightly different ideal case: it was obviously a police officer murdering a black man when carefully framed and portrayed that way, the most clear, vivid, brutal and unambigious demonstration of police racism and brutality - but only for people who already believed this. Basically, a cross between what this blog post describes and a maximum-strength scissor statement [1]
The most vivid demonstration of this is that one phrase: "I can't breathe". It really is the most vivid image of racist police murder imaginable: a white officer kneeling on a black man's neck, slowly cutting off his air as he begs for mercy. It's appeared again and again in protests and news coverage worldwide. There's only one slight complication: Floyd started repeating that he "couldn't breathe" before he was down on the ground at all https://www.fox9.com/news/transcript-of-officers-body-camera... All of a sudden, things get a lot more fuzzy in terms of cause and effect and what the officers should've realized, and naturally one idelogical side has been claiming it debunks the whole thing whilst the other is using a different framing to claim this shows the police were even more depraved cold-hearted murderers than previously thought: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/08/george-floyd... It's almost the perfect scissor.
Even if it had been the most clear-cut case imaginable, one of the first things that happened was to turn it into something divisive and effective for signalling by - for instance - demanding charges against the other officers present that seem extremely hard to justify legally speaking, and calling for Minneapolis to burn until that happened. There is no escape from the process described in this blog post.
Kneeling on someone's neck for 9 minutes is inexcusable no matter what was said. In my opinion the most important aspect of the murder of George Floyd is the other cops who stood by and watched while their colleague committed murder. That was the thing that directly contradicted the prevailing 'it's just a few bad apples' narrative among the general populace, because it showed as clear as day that if a 'bad apple' feels like murdering you, their supposedly good colleagues will do nothing to stop it. The apathy to the suffering is staggering.
I would not take that training video as factual evidence.
In a real scenario the officer would be pressing much more force on the suspects neck than what is presented in the video. The placement of the knee is another important factor. Because we see in the video that the training partner is lying completely still and not giving up much of a fight. Why aren't they demonstrating a scenario where the suspect is trying to break the restraint?
The upload date and content is also a direct response to the killing of George Floyd. It was uploaded not too long after his death. They even make a passing mention of it in the video too. This is clearly a video meant to push a narrative of policing techniques that don't actually work.
That just says to me that the man was in distress, and instead of dealing with that distress, the police officer allowed him to die, possibly further exacerbating the issue. Either way, it does not paint a pretty picture, but I guess we're just more forgiving of someone preventing someone from living vs taking their life.
That is a difficult question to answer. I imagine there is always a balancing act. Especially if the police have some rule in place, it could create situations that criminals would attempt to take advantage of. However, I have always been of the mind that I'd rather a guilty person walk free than an innocent person not. And there are always consideration of how use of force can affect those who see it, with secondary effects creating, what I imagine, are the more troublesome effects.
- One poll showed only 10% of Americans calling the Floyd death a "Tragic accident." With the majority calling it murder. That's not even close to a perfect scissor.
- I have several cop friends, from a relatively geographically diverse range of the US. All of them say that how Floyd was arrested was at a minimum against procedure, and almost certainly contributory to his death.
- One cop I spoke to pointed out that his training mandated that once a prone subject is handcuffed, their training mandates rolling them onto their side, as being unable to leverage oneself up can restrict breathing, even if nobody's kneeling on you. He also pointed out that kneeling on the neck or back in order to handcuff someone is well within procedure at his department, but continuing after they are restrained is obviously not.
"- I have several cop friends, from a relatively geographically diverse range of the US. All of them say that how Floyd was arrested was at a minimum against procedure, and almost certainly contributory to his death.
- One cop I spoke to pointed out that his training mandated that once a prone subject is handcuffed, their training mandates rolling them onto their side, as being unable to leverage oneself up can restrict breathing, even if nobody's kneeling on you. He also pointed out that kneeling on the neck or back in order to handcuff someone is well within procedure at his department, but continuing after they are restrained is obviously not."
That's the thing I don't get and that is the most upsetting thing to me about this situation: why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other? The only voices I hear from the police are coming out in defense of other officers who did something bad. This to me reinforces the impression that it's not a small minority that's the problem, but the entire institution. Is the media just not picking these voices up?
If there had been strong voices within the police calling for reform and officers had kneeled with the protestors instead of attacking even peaceful ones, the situation now would look very different.
The prevailing ethic promoted by culture seems to be against acting as a "Karen." In childhood there are admonitions against being a "tattle-tale." There are popular alliterations like "Snitches get stitches."
Let's say if in the case of Mr. Floyd another one of the officers had said, "get off him, this submission hold is not in line with department policy" and the officer got off Mr. Floyd and Mr. Floyd had not died. What then? One might realistically imagine that the above negative concepts would be applied to the officer who said something. Maybe by hearing those words Mr. Floyd could pursue a complaint against the officer.
There are probably lots of reasons why an officer and probably most people in that situation would feel pressure to avoid speaking out in that moment.
> Let's say if in the case of Mr. Floyd another one of the officers had said, "get off him, this submission hold is not in line with department policy" and the officer got off Mr. Floyd and Mr. Floyd had not died. What then?
Then we'd never heard about George Floyd.
Not to say there is no serious police brutality problem, but it's worth remembering the huge selection bias in what videos go viral and we end up seeing.
There is over 1 million cops in the US, and out of however many million interactions they have with the public each day, an overwhelming majority are perfectly fine.
There isn't any room for error when you have the power to ruin or end someone's life. A bad cop can ruin or end more lives over a career than die in a plane crash. Where is the NTSB for police?
> That's the thing I don't get and that is the most upsetting thing to me about this situation: why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other?
Other professional groups that practice solidarity often have review and ethics boards that are, in general, quick to denounce bad actors and strip them of their ability to continue harming others.
I can't remember the last time that a doctor or lawyer blatantly murdered someone on tape and had their peers go up to bat for them about how they're actually the victim and did nothing wrong. When it comes to law enforcement and correctional officers, I can find a dozen of such instances from the last 12 months alone.
> Other professional groups that practice solidarity often have review and ethics boards that are, in general, quick to denounce bad actors and strip them of their continue harming others.
While professional groups are often mistakenly analogized to labor unions, they aren't and have very different functions. Professionals in organized professions like law or medicine may also be in labor unions (this is unusual in the US outside of the public sector), but the labor union and the professional organizations aren't interchangeable.
When was the last time a union carpenter, welder, electrician, or engineer was caught on camera murdering someone, and their peers went up to bat for them explaining how they were really the victim, and they did nothing wrong?
When an engineer's structure causes injury or loss of life, it is studied and taken very seriously. Liability falls on both the engineer and their employer, if there is one. Blatant negligence means the removal of licenses or the ability to practice in the field they're licensed in, along with civil lawsuits or even criminal charges.
When a cop causes injury or loss of life, the entire system tries to brush it under the rug completely, and learn nothing from it. Then their peers go up to bat for them explaining how they're being unfairly persecuted and that they did nothing wrong. Cops are often shielded from civil and criminal liability for abuses that other professionals would end up in prison for.
Trying to place the blame on unions is pretty far-fetched, and you're speaking to someone who is against the idea of police unions in particular.
It may be worth bearing in mind that one thing police union contracts can and do win as a concession is cities taking on civil liability and paying for legal defenses. The whole system is set up to dismiss and ignore poor behavior because those are the grievance-handling processes designed by police and enshrined in union contracts to serve that purpose.
Police unions have played a major role in protecting union members from management. Or as we call it elsewhere in politics, accountability.
I'm not saying solidarity is bad. I'm saying it's a tool that police unions have weaponized against the general public.
> I'm not saying solidarity is bad. I'm saying it's a tool that police unions have weaponized against the general public.
I think that reducing the problems of policing in the US down to "solidarity" isn't apt, as solidarity in other unions doesn't produce this level of opaqueness, lack of honesty and responsibility, negligence, ineptitude, or criminality.
The issue is at play is culture, one that comes from the top and is reinforced every step of the way to the bottom.
I agree that police unions have a strong hand in enabling and enacting the policies that shield police from accountability, but police are given powers that are unique to any other government or otherwise union worker. Allowing easily abused power to consolidate to the point that it has is why I'm against police unions in particular, but not others.
My apologies! I can see I have been unclear. Please allow me to correct this error.
I do not think, do not believe, and do not claim that all the problems of policing in the US reduce to weaponized solidarity. I think, believe, and stand by my claim that solidarity has been weaponized by police unions. I also stand by my previous claim that the particular behavior pattern other commenters pointed to is one form of weaponized solidarity in action.
I hope this has been helpful. Thank you for the opportunity to clarify. Again, please accept my apologies for my failures in communication.
> why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other?
Well, as a programmer, I know from experience that there's a lot about programming computers that isn't obvious unless you actually spend time doing it - and that when you have a group of people (i.e. project managers) who seem bound and determined to portray programmers as lazy, time-wasting, obstinate, overpaid, wastes of space who should be offshored anyway, it's very easy for them to play armchair quarterback and insist that every programming problem was trivial in hindsight and confirm their hypothesis.
Now, apply that to police work. Police are routinely put into situations where their lives and the lives of other police officers are in danger, and they have to make split-second decisions or an innocent person can end up dying. I don't know anything about police work, but I'm willing to gamble that getting that right is even harder than getting programming right, and if somebody's bound and determined to make you look bad, they can do so more easily than project managers routinely do to programmers. If even 90% of the police have good intentions (and I believe that number is much, much higher), it stands to reason that they'd usually be willing to give other officers the benefit of the doubt: this or that may look bad if you put effort into making it look bad, but at least give the officer a chance to defend himself rather than jump to conclusions.
How many people on HN have reported unethical behavior of their coworkers to their bosses?
Now combine that already low number with the fact that there is strong belief among cops that doing so will negatively affect their career trajectory.
As far as cops coming to defense of other cops, every single officer I know has had false allegations against him, including one with a rape allegation that was only proven false because he had his body camera on the entire time he was with the suspect. So anything that's even slightly grey will get the benefit of the doubt as far as cops are concerned.
I've experienced the same thing as a foster parent. I'm not actually sure how many allegations have been made against my wife and I, so I tend to immediately dismiss any news of such against other foster parents (then occasionally it will be be "oh shit they were keeping kids in dog kennels?" and I'll have to backtrack). I'm almost certainly dismissing some actual misdeeds in there, but I also feel fairly secure that the signal to noise of allegations against foster parents is very low.
"The media's just not picking those voices up" is definitely a part of the story. Portland for example is looking pretty bad right now, but the Portland officers did kneel with the protesters.
> The only voices I hear from the police are coming out in defense of other officers who did something bad
You gotta go back to the original article, this is exactly what it's about. Everybody agrees that good cops calling out bad cops is a good thing. Therefore, it doesn't spread, and you don't hear about it unless you pay deep attention to specific goings-on in specific police departments. It's also particularly likely not to spread because the details of such cases are usually kept quiet, and the cop just gets quietly let go.
The only thing most people who are only sort of paying attention hear is, cop does something kind of dubious, activists scream at the top of their lungs about how outrageous it is. They double down way past "this particular bad cop should be fired and charged" to "All cops are bastards" and "Defund the Police". Which then kind of forces cops and people who appreciate law and order to push back, find ways to excuse the action and defend the police.
I've seen a bunch of pics of cops kneeling with protestors. They didn't spread far, and they didn't change anyone's mind. They didn't contribute to the outrage, and so they can't spread among a media class that is highly incentivized to spread only the most outrageous things.
Some of those were followed up by the same cops teargassing the people they kneeled with. They didn't change minds because it's not just the protesting side doing PR. Those photo ops were only convincing to people who wanted to be convinced.
Which poll? And what were the full gamut of options/how large of a majority was it? I'd be absolutely floored if 90% of Americans agreed on almost anything.
(I suspect the scissor is murder vs every other option).
I ended up taking a look at the polls mentioned in that article. The one from Data for Progress (the source of the 10% number for tragic accident, some numbers from other surveys indicate to me the number is probably higher than that) has pretty leading questions.
> On May 25, 2020, an unarmed black man named George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis. An officer knelt on Floyd's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds before he died. Which of the following comes closer to your view: [the choice to add the facts that Floyd was unarmed and knelt on for that long to the question is quite heavy-handed for a survey and sure to influence the respondent]
and
> Which comes closer to your view on recent protests:
>
> These sorts of protests will continue unless we solve the root cause of the problem. We need long-term solutions to poverty and violence.
>
> The first priority is ending the protests and violence, which means we need more police officers and national guard to calm the situation down
>
> Don't know
> [this question pretty assumes the respondent agrees that poverty is the root cause of what's going on]
as compared to the YouGov survey which has a much more neutrally worded set of questions (and a much larger set).
It's therefore not surprising that the YouGov survey records more opposition on some questions that seem similar in spirit to the questions that dataforprogress.org does.
But the two surveys taken together do provide information that does floor me, which is that the overwhelming majority of Americans (indeed around 90%) are convinced that the police officers in this case did something wrong and should've been fired (although they might be not be all convinced of the severity of the offense, but everyone seems to agree it's at least essentially manslaughter).
So you're right! Floyd's death itself is hardly a scissor issue.
The scissor issue instead seems to be the protests themselves. Again I much prefer YouGov's question here to Data for Progress, which asks
> Do you think these protests have been motivated more by a genuine desire to hold police officers accountable for their actions or a long-standing bias against
the police?
And the numbers there are
> A genuine desire to hold police officers accountable: 43%
> A long-standing bias against the police: 40%
> Not sure: 17%
The police responsible were arrested long ago. Even Trump called this a murder and condemned it right away.
This is still going on and over 20 people connected to the protests have died since then. There was a retired cop shot while protecting his friend's store. There was a young girl killed for no reason outside a Wal-Mart. There was a burned body found long after the fact in one of the buildings burned during the riots.
The question isn't whether things should change or whether this is a problem but what to change and how to change it and whether that change will really make things better.
> All of a sudden, things get a lot more fuzzy in terms of cause and effect
It got more fuzzy for who?!
The kind of people who will turn the most clear cut case of police brutality we've seen in years into their own personal chance to play "devils advocate" and be the obligatory contrarian no one needed, wanted, or asked for?
-
Because, after all, do you think the fact he was in respiratory distress means the officer should have knelt on his neck for 9 more minutes while he begged for mercy and was reduced to crying for his mother?
Do you think having your neck knelt on for 9 minutes is an appropriate response for respiratory distress?
It makes them look like even more cold blooded murders.
It makes their initial excuse of "he was faking to get out of the hold" even more abominable
If he was in such respiratory distress that he was dying before being knelt on, it could be interpreted he additionally needed 9 consecutive minutes of having a knee on his neck?
I was wondering how that could be an unpopular sentiment then I realized, I broke the first rule of HN. You can be as passive aggressive about tech stuff as you want, but don't be overtly heated about anything "political", like police murdering (sorry, manslaughtering) people in broad daylight
> demanding charges against the other officers present that seem extremely hard to justify legally speaking, and calling for Minneapolis to burn until that happened
Demanding a moderate response in polite terms has been demonstrated to get you nothing. Nobody making those demands realistically expects them to be met. There is a vague hope that some incredibly watered-down version might come about.
It's rather like pushing at a stuck door that's become stiffer over time and ultimately locked. If you shoulder-charge it, maybe it will budge.
The reason why this case fits in with the cases as described in the article is because it also an ambiguous case but it's also a good example because those on both sides hold concrete views about it.
We must be cautious when we notice ourselves saying "the outgroup is bigoted"
That "pay attention to me" screaming is because of the advertising business model.
I'm not saying it wouldn't happen without advertising. But advertising forces otherwise rational people (e.g. newspaper editors) to do ridiculous things to compete for attention, because attention is money.
And because there are more people screaming for attention, everyone has to scream louder.
...While the people who are supposed to be paying attention find it abhorrent and start deleting their social media accounts and finding ways of paying less attention.
...So the people who need the attention to pay their salaries have to scream louder.
And so it goes around and around, while cities burn and lives are ruined because (as TFA says) nothing gets attention like a controversy that splits the audience into two halves.
> with racism being the most obvious and likely explanation
Is it though? Even after all this time, I've yet to hear how racism had anything to do with the incident, other than rampant speculation. Tragic? Yes. Brutal? Yes. Murder? Yes. Racism? How?
I can't speak to what the parent commenter thinks, but I think it's less the idea that these specific police were racist (maybe they were, maybe they weren't) than it is systemic, institutional racism. Black people are statistically way more likely to be killed by police, and police appear to be largely immune from consequences when they misbehave even egregiously as in this case, the Breonna Taylor case, or many many others. While these killings were obviously tragic and unnecessary, nonchalant acceptance of police brutality and abuse of power remains at the core of the problem that needs to be solved.
> If there were a secret conspiracy running the liberal media, they could all decide they wanted to raise awareness of racist police brutality, pick the most clear-cut and sympathetic case, and make it non-stop news headlines for the next two months.
Yes ...
> Then everyone would agree it was indeed very brutal and racist, and something would get done.
No, because there's an entire counter-news faction out there insisting that absolutely every person killed by police deserved it, that it is unacceptable to ever hold police accountable for deaths of anyone under any circumstances, such as shooting a handcuffed guy on the floor or firing blindly into a darkened apartment, and that everyone complaining about racism is some kind of Maoist.
Recently I watched some of the Live Aid 25th anniversary coverage. The huge charity appeal was sparked by Michael Buerk's famous report on dead and dying children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOj_6OYuJc
I couldn't help thinking that if you filmed that today it would vanish from the social media melee in a couple of days. It was shocking then. It might not even be the most shocking thing somebody scrolls past today.
Almost everyone, deep into trad Republican groups, agree that the Floyd killing was a sickening murder, a symptom of a broken system, and Something Needs To Be Done.
My take is that nothing gets done because Congress is incapable of doing things. At all. There is nothing special about doing nothing on police brutality. It's just one more thing on the pile of unaddressed things.
It's been this way for a long time now, and that is why Presidents now try to rule by executive orders.
There are two layers of elected government between Congress and the Minneapolis police, and several layers of administration between the elected representatives and the police on the street.
Ever hard-head in Congress could have a conversion experience this week from attending John Lewis's funeral, and somewhere next year some guy with a gun or knee could repeat the Floyd killing.
> My take is that nothing gets done because Congress is incapable of doing things. At all.
I mean yes but also... Plenty of us just got and unprecedented $1200-2400 from Congress just a month or two ago... they clearly can act when motivated.
> Almost everyone, deep into trad Republican groups, agree that the Floyd killing was a sickening murder, a symptom of a broken system, and Something Needs To Be Done.
I need you to know that this is not the case. A not insignificant portion of the right does not feel anything wrong was done in this case, and would prefer for police to "crack down." Some will openly discuss that they need to publicly concede that there is A Problem in order to suggest ineffectual solutions to it which will satisfy politicians and pacify mass movements.
The rest of your comment is very correct, but it should be mentioned that bad actors exist and not every American's ideal version of America is completely rid of police murders.
What is your source or qualification for saying this?
I know of several conservative groups that did infact hold or participate in protests against George Floyd's death in the days after. Pretty much everyone in them agrees, even now, that while the case is not quite as clear-cut as some would have you think, it was still wrong to kneel on his neck for 10 minutes after he was already under control.
The right-libertarian circles have been banging on against the militarization of the police and their unaccountability for decades now. Check out Radley Balko in particular, and the books he's written and the articles for reason.com. That's what conservatives saw this as.
Things did kind of turn over the weeks after. This was when the left's narrative that it was a racism problem took hold, the rhetoric escalated into "Defund the Police", and protests into some areas turned into riots and large-scale property destruction. This caused the right to de-emphasize those concerns and put more emphasis on the defense of the police.
Naturally, the Left is incentivized to dig up the most outrageously extreme version of those arguments and try to portray the entire Right as thinking like that. I do not know you or your ideology, but I suspect your source is Left-wing articles that seek to portray the Right in this way. If so, you ought to be aware that it's never a path to truth to view any group only through the lens of their enemies.
Indeed, IMO he's covered many sides of this issue very much in need of attention. Sadly, per the point of the article, it doesn't offend enough people or fit neatly enough into a right-wing or left-wing outrage machine, so it doesn't get a huge amount of attention.
> This caused the right to de-emphasize those concerns and put more emphasis on the defense of the police.
But that's the choice, isn't it; faced with a choice between property damage, however minor or even theoretical, and human life (or the serious injuries incurred by protestors and journalists who had rubber bullets fired at their eyes), conservatives immediately turn around and defend the police.
The police can read between the lines as well as anyone else, so they interpret that as the voters ordering them to go out and injure as many protestors as necessary until the protests stop. Which, of course, escalates the protests.
(How is Radley Balko conservative? It's very hard to tell from that twitter feed)
I'd say Radley Balko is libertarian. The intersection of doctrinally libertarian viewpoints with main stream American politics is complex at best. For what it's worth, I often see his articles shared in right-wing circles favorably. I haven't really heard of him having much of a following in left-wing circles. It doesn't sound very helpful to our political scene to be highly concerned that somebody can't be easily placed in a bucket of right-wing or left-wing.
On the other, to borrow some of the left's standard viewpoints, I could say that it's a very privileged viewpoint that property damage is inconsequential compared to injury. How many lower-class people will suffer from losing their mode of transportation, having their home rendered unsafe, or even having "luxuries" that were sources of comfort in a difficult life destroyed? How many people started out in poverty and spent a lifetime building a business from nothing so they could rise into the middle class, only to watch it be destroyed by privileged mostly-white rioters in response to something that they had nothing to do with, that happened in a completely different city? And it certainly isn't like rioters haven't intentionally attacked, injured, and in a few cases killed, both citizens and law enforcement officers as well.
> Pretty much everyone in them agrees, even now, that while the case is not quite as clear-cut as some would have you think
I think you should dig into this a little deeper, because I think it is disingenuous to portray their take as just being somewhat suspicious of the case. When I dug deeper with my conservative friends, they think that Floyd is a "thug" and drug addict, and fall short of saying that he definitely had what happened to him coming, but that's the implication.
There are loud internet agitators/troll who do this. It's important to not take that as some kind of opinion poll. "One Click One Vote" is a terrible slogan.
Not that I have a poll to offer, though some have surely been done.
I base what I say on most conservatives I'm aware of saying so. I can't think of any "name" conservative who has said the opposite.
I am basing my observations off of the conservatives that I know personally, but offered evidence in the form of public social media used by millions of people because a common retort to this observation is skepticism or the claim that people like this don't exist.
I look at it as building software on top of an extremely complex system. It's just not going to move as fast as anybody likes it to, and often the best course of action after considering a new feature will be to leave it alone because it's not business critical and worth the risk.
The reason the Floyd killing has been such a powerful force is that there is a live video of a man being strangled, begging for his life, for minutes.
It is much easier to discredit a split second decision, mistaken identity, justify feeling threatened in so many other cases, but there it is, a man immobilized on the street with a knee on his neck, people standing around objecting to what’s happening, time, so much time to consider actions when there was no reasonable threat.
One should also watch out of accepting these tools just for use within our in-group and condemning them in the out groups. "they are not like us, when we use rage we do it for a good reason"
Yes. This I can wholeheartedly agree with. Which makes me sad, because it means social and news media usually works against fixing the issues which most of us agree should be fixed. Instead they focus only on the things which keep us all discussing, forever, how evil some tiny minority is. We've DDOSed our ability to get things done.
On a tangential note, an important skill in this environment is simply ignoring people who want you to be angry rather than constructive. "X did Y! Bloody murder!" → Ignored. "How to ensure Y never happens again" → Let's hear it.
>If you want to signal how strongly you believe in taking victims seriously, you talk about it in the context of the least credible case you can find.
I think there's another angle to picking the least credible case in that it requires more psychological investment. Those who join the group are stronger and have expended more psychological effort. Because the cases that are chosen to fight about are ambiguous, to fight about them requires a form of committent and faith. Any doubts about the case and validity of the morality or faith would cause a painful admission of the amount that was psychologically invested in it. The strength of your belief is signalled but the strength also deepens your involvement in it.
>> Studies sometimes claim that only 2 to 8 percent of rape allegations are false. Yet the rate for allegations that go ultra-viral in the media must be an order of magnitude higher than this.
Which implies that publicising a rape allegation makes it difficult to prosecute it successfully. The article suggests instead that feminist activists specifically select false allegations for publicity, which seems to assume that feminist activists possess some kind of ability to identify false allegations before they are prosecuted, or, indeed, to predict the outcome of a rape case with high accuracy. This is a very strong assumption and is the first thing that should be tested for consistency.
A simpler explanation is that rape allegations are more likely to lead to a failed prosecution, than they are likely to be false. If that was the case, we should expect to also observe a higher rate of failed prosecutions in general (i.e. regardless of publicity) than the rate of false rape allegations.
Though I can't find much relevant data for the United States (there is more for the UK) some sources suggest that such an effect can indeed be observed:
According to FBI statistics, out of 127,258 rapes reported to police departments in 2018, 33.4 percent resulted in an arrest.[13] Based on correlating multiple data sources, RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) estimates[30] that for every 1,000 rapes, 384 are reported to police, 57 result in an arrest, 11 are referred for prosecution, 7 result in a felony conviction, and 6 result in incarceration. This compares to a higher rate at every stage for similar crimes.
In other words, while 2-8% of rape allegations are false (according to the article), about 0.7% of rape allegations are successfully prosecuted. Such low rate of successful prosecutions would easily account for a high rate of publicised cases failing without the need of a specialised rape prosecution outcome prediction organ in feminist activists.
It takes two sides to make a war. I think the idea in the article is that one group reacts to the other group which forms a doubling down.
Dodging difficult questions is a skill most politicians seem to possess, in comparison.
So in the feminist example it's not that the feminists publicize a certain ambiguous case, it's that they double down when criticized by the out group. This strengthens the in group and amplifies the message.
Another issue is "what is publicity?" . What does it mean? Is getting something in the news or blogs or trending on twitter an aim in itself? How does the publicity machine work? What gets eyeballs, attention, etc?
Is activism a form of marketing primarily?
Is activism just a capitalist activity selling something? Is there a conflict with activist who want to change things. Is attention activism at odds with the political process, or could it be the primary way most people do politics?
> In other words, while 2-8% of rape allegations are false (according to the article),
When i read articles about rate of false rape allegations, the established percentage was really a percentage of rape allegations that were assessed 'false' by police during investigation. Most rape allegations were just lacking evidence on both sides (not enough evidence for prosecution, not enough evidence for rejecting as false), so they are not counted in this statistic.
It seems to me that no volition is needed on the part of journalists: journolists need sympathetic and sensational stories, but a sensational story is more likely than an average story to be false. (Extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence...). Combine this with the selection pressures on journolists for cutting corners in pursuit of a story/deadline, and you can pretty much guarantee that of any story type a disproportionate number of the biggest stories will be exaggerations published by unscrupulous reporting. This mechanic holds for every story type, not just rape.
The Wikipedia article [1] leads to [2], a RAINN page which links to
itself (quote: "Please visit
https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system for full
citation."), and also (Footnote 1) to the following 'three' alleged
data sources [3, 4, 5]. Note that [4, 5] are exactly, letter for
letter, the same (!) in [2]! Why? Does that sound like serious science to you? Anyway, the RAINN page [2] then claims:
"This statistic combines information from several federal government
reports. Because it combines data from studies with different
methodologies, it is an approximation, not a scientific
estimate.". Let's look at the methodology in [3],
starting on Page 17:
> "The NCVS is a self-report survey that is administered from January
to December. Respondents are asked about the number and
characteristics of crimes they have experienced during the prior 6
months [...] . The survey collects information on threatened,
attempted, and completed crimes. Te survey collects data on crimes
both reported and not reported to police. Estimates in this report
include threatened, attempted, and completed crimes."
Of particular interest is the subsection "NCVS measurement of rape or
sexual assault", starting on page 19. I cannot see any meaningful
attempt at scientific rigour here. Can you explain to me why such
figures should be taken seriously? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! There is no evidence in any meaningful sense here.
This conflict is complicated and our understanding of it is limited.
* We only have SSC's account of the conversation between him and the NYT reporter.
* The NYT does not have a history of doxxing people, particularly their home addresses. Revealing that sort of personal information is traditionally what "doxxing" means.
* SSC's fans revealed the NYT reporters name and home address. That is to say, the only person doxxed here has been the reporter. So the power dynamics are not as clear cut as SSC made out.
* Tucker Carlson has since used his fans to doxx NYT reporters when he objected to them writing a story about him. That is, this has become a right-wing tactic. And that will be unhealthy for a free press.
* It's not at all clear that Scott Alexander is anonymous, or that revealing his real last name constitutes doxxing. Scott Alexander are his first and middle names. He blogged under his full real name for many years at LessWrong. He published an SSC post in a Springer book in 2017 under his first and last names.
1. I do not think this counts as a rebuttal or a reason to distrust either side
2. Scott never claimed that his home address would be published, and implying he did just to disprove it likely would be considered strawmanning
3. I think this is the real point that should be used here, and credit should be given to it. That said, the people who did this are not Scott, so I think he should not be blamed anymore than J.D. Salinger should be blamed for an assassin carrying _The Catcher in the Rye_
4. This seems to be entirely irrelevant to SSC-vs-NYT at all, I cannot see how this weighs on them
5. He has made a clear effort, but he isn't running a darknet market, so there will be holes. As a fan, I have only ever seen his name on a website that is over a decade old and I cannot find this book for sale. That said, I'd be willing to concede that he failed N years ago if you can find that the book and link me to it.
Voluntarily publishing something like that makes me believe that Scott did not make a clear effort. It's not about holes or opsec. It's about Scott putting his full name out there and then regretting it. He doxxed himself, and he can't be undoxxed.
2. Scott never claimed that the reporter was going to reveal his home address, but he said the reporter threatened to doxx him for clicks. I have a very hard time believing that, and I define doxxing very differently than "publishing a name that the subject of the article has already voluntarily revealed."
3. Scott is an old hand at Internet flame wars. I consider it highly likely that he knew that, by claiming that the reporter threatened to doxx him, that the reporter would be doxxed. The rest is protesting too much.
1. What it means is simply we do not know the whole story. We definitely do not know that the reporter, in fact, threatened to doxx Scott. In any case, I think Scott has a very different definition of that word than most people do.
4. If we believe that Scott encouraged his fans to turn up the heat on the reporter, then he is participating in a trend, which I highlighted, that bodes ill for American and the free flow of information. Every time an independent press tries to write a story, do its reporters get doxxed? I guarantee you will read fewer interesting stories when that is widespread.
Sorry to reply late, I do not check comments frequently.
5. That isn't what was claimed, that's a book that included him, not a book he published (as far as I am able to tell). It seems to be _very_ different given that he did not make the effort to publish and the book even fails to call him "Scott Alexander", making it hard to link them together.
2. As point above says, the argument has become incongruent now that it becomes clear he did not publish the book. And, again, there is much value to not publishing a piece on how you are tied to fringe groups online even if your full name was once connected to them in a print book.
3. This isn't a very fair assumption. You, and others, are calling what he did bad because he knew what would happen, but aren't showing he knew ahead of time. It is very easy to say you would have realized WWII would have started, but even something that large would be outside the reach of most people's predictors in the moment.
1. I think _you_ are the one with a different definition, and I would also note that the lack of the other side being published should speak to some extent too. He showed his side, but you are taking the lack of evidence against him as proof he did something wrong, which is not very sound.
4. This attempt at universalization doesn't hold very well given that this was not a reporter trying to cover the story with full honesty; his name was a largely irrelevant detail. They could have named him "Big Bird" and the story would have been the same but with no chance of controversy, since his identity in his private life is not important to the story.
Thanks for the well-organized points, it makes replying a lot more sane.
> We only have SSC's account of the conversation between him and the NYT reporter.
True. But Scott only asked to not to have his full name published and I trust him enough to have asked the NYT beforehand. Even if he didn't, the NYT could've simply said "we won't, but ask next time" and it would look pretty bad for him.
> The NYT does not have a history of doxxing people, particularly their home addresses. Revealing that sort of personal information is traditionally what "doxxing" means.
Just revealing the name is not "traditional" doxxing, I agree. It's clear, though, what he tries to say.
> SSC's fans revealed the NYT reporters name and home address. That is to say, the only person doxxed here has been the reporter. So the power dynamics are not as clear cut as SSC made out.
Well, just after Scott put the blog offline. And he did explicitly ask his readers not to doxx or attack anyone. Now, it is possible say that, given this action, one could know that this would happen with a high likelihood, but, given his situation, he did what he could to prevent it IMO. That's debatable, though, I give you that.
> Tucker Carlson has since used his fans to doxx NYT reporters when he objected to them writing a story about him. That is, this has become a right-wing tactic. And that will be unhealthy for a free press.
That's not on Scott. He neither "invented" this nor asked anyone to do it; in fact, he said the reporter is probably innocent and asked his readers not to. So you can't blame this on him.
> It's not at all clear that Scott Alexander is anonymous, or that revealing his real last name constitutes doxxing. Scott Alexander are his first and middle names. He blogged under his full real name for many years at LessWrong. He published an SSC post in a Springer book in 2017 under his first and last names.
I can see the NYT side on this; not publishing the name of someone who's name is already kinda public if you search a bit seems strange at hand. But on the other hand Scott is right, too; a NYT article would've directly brought up SSC when searching his name. Therefore, I think it's fair enough to ask not to have his name published and I don't think it's too much to ask, to be honest. Also, similar to the sibling, I can't locate this book.
Overall, I can see why he did what he did, but I can also see why it came to this.
I recall Dan Ariely (academic economist) used to go on and on about the power of defaults when presenting people choices with certain patterns can help influence which choice people go for.
He used to to quip that "Even being aware of the phenomenon didn't protect you from it" -- saying even he could be fooled just as easily as the layman or the audeince member.
I'd imagine a similar adage could be applied to SSC.
This is a good article. The only criticism I have is that regarding rape and racism cases, the author misses another explanation as to why the cases that go public never seem to be cut and dry... It's possible the author is inverting cause and effect there. As a case goes public, investigative journalist dig, because that is their job.
Hypothesis: most people involved in a criminal event have something in their past that can be cast in a negative light. This is not a statement of causality---I am not saying that they are involved in a criminal event because of things they did in the past---merely of correlation. But if that hypothesis is true, it could explain why the publicized cases don't tend to be cut and dry... They were more cut and dry before investigative journalists started tearing apart the history of all parties involved.
I feel like I don't understand the essay fully. Take for example George Floyd's case - I'm under the impression that it falls under the category of a "clear cut" case, doesn't it? I'm not American, so maybe my assumption is simply incorrect. But if it is indeed "clear cut", then why did it get so much traction? Following the author's reasoning, it should've sizzled out quickly, without much discussion.
Is my recollection of the events wrong, or is there an error in the essay?
The George Floyd case is the straw that broke the camel's back. The thing everybody was talking about was not the fact he was murdered – it was the rioting, the looters. The controversy. The conclusion of this comment was intended to be “so the article's not wrong, it just isn't covering every case” – but this actually turned out not to be the counterexample I thought it was.
I heard about his murder before the riots, yes. But it was just “oh, look, another guy murdered by the police in the US, now what's going on with that x86 operating system?”. It wasn't on the news until there were protests, and wasn't really international news (except BBC and the like) until there was rioting.
The thing that was controversial about George Floyd's death wasn't how he died. It was whether people should be out protesting during a pandemic.
When the government had forbidden every other form of public gathering for months, and suddenly seemed to make an exception for these protests, that was the wedge issue.
The Floyd case happened after months of people being locked in their homes, unable to lead active and healthy social lives. While not as bad as solitary confinement, 2020 has been a psychologically grueling year. Floyd's death was the spark that set off a powder keg.
Remember, too, that the immediate aftermath was truly widespread horror. Everyone agreed that it was terrible. My recollection is that is the protests against police in general grew harsher, other folks started to accentuate the fact that Floyd was not a perfect man. And then everyone lost control of their collective sanity.
It is not necessarily the case that Floyd died from a knee on his neck. His official autopsy (not the "independent" one paid for by his family) shows that he had a potentially lethal level of fentanyl in his system (11 ng/mL) in addition to 19 ng/mL of methamphetamine (https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bPUNU7...). That combination of drugs is one variant of what's known as a "speedball". It can cause death by respiratory failure. https://www.addictioncenter.com/drugs/heroin/speedball/. The autopsy also says "No life-threatening injuries identified", in particular "No injuries of anterior muscles of neck or laryngealstructures", so it is unlikely that the death was caused by Derek Chauvin putting his knee on Floyd's neck.
There is also the problem of motivation. What possible reason could Derek Chauvin have to murder George Floyd? Surely he understood that doing such a thing could cost him his job, risk imprisonment, and make it very hard for him to find employment. Much more likely is that he believed the hold he used was nonlethal, and, given what we know from the Hennepin County autopsy, that it actually was nonlethal.
> Surely he understood that doing such a thing could cost him his job, risk imprisonment, and make it very hard for him to find employment.
Citation needed. Most similar cases show that this is not true. Indeed, that's the whole point of Black Lives Matter. When this happens the police officer responsible is rarely held accountable.
Edit: This is especially the case for Derek Chauvin, because he had experienced numerous complaints against him in the past and the consequences amounted to nothing at all.
I think you are mistaken in several of your assumptions. The official autopsy literally labels George Floyd's death a homicide:
> But the report released later Monday by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's office said Floyd died of "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint and neck compression." The manner of death was ruled homicide, but the office noted that "is not a legal determination of culpability or intent." [emphasis mine]
And it's another mistake to assume that the county medical office is "independent," as I think you are suggesting. They work for the same municipal government that employed the police officer who killed George Floyd, the same entity that would be subject to a lawsuit for his wrongful death. They have a clear financial and reputational incentive to find that Derek Chauvin did not intentionally kill George Floyd.
The issue of motivation is not a "problem" in any sense. To answer your question, "What possible reason could Derek Chauvin have to murder George Floyd?", you might ask what reason an NYPD officer had to choke Erik Garner to death with a baton, to take just one example of the police killing an unarmed black man. Having said that, Derek Chauvin and George Floyd both worked security at the same night club during the same time period, with overlapping shifts, so Chauvin may have had specific motivation to attack him. But recent history has many examples of police assaulting and even killing Black Americans for no discernable reason.
> The official autopsy literally labels George Floyd's death a homicide
Are we reading the same report? The link in GP doesn't contain the word "homicide". In fact I can't find anything in it stating a cause of death. It looks to be nothing but observations.
I'm left confused by the CBS News link. I doubt they infer that "The manner of death was ruled a homicide" (which was not a quote) from the autopsy case title, quote, "Cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression". It seems more likely that there is another source; that the homicide ruling was made by a different entity (besides the medical examiner's office), or at least by a different document (not the autopsy report).
EDIT: The document stating that the manner of death was homicide was a press release from the medical examiner's office[1].
It's bizarre considering that the autopsy itself does not appear to contain any evidence of homicide.
Edit: They took the autopsy document down from their website. The link used to be hennepin.us/-/media/hennepinus/residents/public-safety/documents/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.pdf.
I hope what you mean to say is that the autopsy itself does not contain _conclusive_ evidence of homicide. Mere evidence of homicide abounds. Of note in particular is the presence of a knee on the deceased's neck in the moments leading up to death.
Nowhere in the Hennepin County autopsy does it say "homicide".
https://bit.ly/2YQiNSG. The title is unclear.
I said "independent" in quotes because I was talking about the autopsy that was commissioned by Floyd's family. Of course I do not think the one commissioned by Floyd's family is independent at all. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/01/george-floyd-family-m....
> [The county medical office] have a clear financial and reputational incentive to find that Derek Chauvin did not intentionally kill George Floyd.
Are you saying they made up the meth and possibly lethal level of fentanyl in Floyd's system? Those would explain why he was reportedly "not in control of himself". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd
This[0] was the result of about a minute of Googling:
> Cause of death: Cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression
> Manner of death: Homicide
As for "independence," the question is how one could consider the county medical examiner to be independent, when they work for the same municipal government that employs the man who is accused of killing George Floyd.
It is possible that drug use contributed to George Floyd's death. But that doesn't matter, because according to US law, "the unexpected frailty of the injured person is not a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them."[1]
Floyd went from walking around, talking, and apparently able to breathe with no problems, to dead, during the first ~5 minutes that Chauvin's knee was on his neck. Is your claim that Chauvin's actions had nothing at all to do with his death - that he simply died of an overdose by coincidence at that time, and that it would have been equally likely that he dropped dead during the five-minute period before Chauvin showed up? That would make for a hell of a coincidence.
Also, 19 ng/mL of methamphetamine isn't a therapeutically active concentration - it's not even enough to trigger a positive drug test [0]. And 11 ng/mL of fentanyl is on the low end of the range recommended for anaesthesia [1] - that same source states that "[b]lood concentrations of approximately 7 ng/ml or greater have been associated with fatalities where poly-substance use was involved," but no other substances were present at high enough concentrations to be therapeutically active. It's possible that Chauvin's actions wouldn't have killed him if he hadn't had fentanyl in his system, but that's not a defense [2].
> that he simply died of an overdose by coincidence at that time, and that it would have been equally likely that he dropped dead during the five-minute period before Chauvin showed up
I'm saying that's a real possibility that is suggested by the county autopsy.
Thank you for the additional context on the drug levels. If you are right about this, then I am not sure how to explain what happened.
The neck restraint is described as "Compressing one or both sides of person’s neck with an arm or leg, without applying direct pressure to the trachea or airway", consistent with the county's autopsy finding of "no injuries of anterior muscles of neck or laryngealstructures". See page 9 of http://www.mncourts.gov/mncourtsgov/media/High-Profile-Cases....
> Floyd went from walking around, talking, and apparently able to breathe with no problems,
According to the bodycam camera transcripts, Floyd first said that he couldn't breathe well before he was on the ground. Floyd then requests to lay on the ground and the officers okay it, and then Chauvin attempts to restrain him on the ground.
> From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.
Caterpillar DNA is butterfly DNA. Toxoplasma DNA in the cat is toxoplasma DNA in the rat.
While there's poetry to saying the hatred is a single life form regardless of where it lives, I think it's a more accurate model to say there are two symbiotic replicators, whose impact on the environment (mostly) makes it more hospitable for the other. Bombs, however directed, contain only a tiny portion of the information content making up the meme.
221 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 555 ms ] threadIt's not like it's that long to start with.
Which is fair, your preferences are yours, but I much prefer single expansive essays like this that give the author room to develop large complex idea structures, and to reach out from the central idea to disparate but interestingly relevant related themes. This might not (or might) be the majority preference, but Scott (and the 'Wait but Why' guy, among others) has built up large enough audiences from this type of musings, and mostly good quality audience too, so it's working for him.
Your "Correction" rubs me the wrong way. Of course the OP was expressing their opinion. They weren't making a statement of fact. What good comes from "correcting" them? It just makes you look bad.
It helps not to take the comments too seriously. It doesn't sound like they meant anything by it.
Arguably, my posts don't add anything too. I guess I'm just tired of having to adopt such a "highly defensive" writing style for HN comments. It irked me to see somebody seemingly pedantically jumping on a poster who was clearly expressing an opinion but wasn't "defensive" enough in their post to clearly state their post was an opinion. That's what I took it for.
You are giving OP the benefit of the doubt, which is a nice thing to do, but what if it isn't actually true? One isolated case is no big deal of course, but what if this (people accidentally mistaking opinions for facts) was actually a very common phenomenon? And when combined with the power of the internet to propagate ideas (opinions perceived as facts), brought about a scenario where people's beliefs about reality are highly divergent from actual reality...in a complex system, might this possibly result in a kind of self-reinforcing negative feedback loop?
If one looked carefully, I wonder if some signs of this phenomenon could be identified within the system we find ourselves living in.
The OP's comment was:
> This is a great article, but it’d be much better as five much smaller articles
I can't understand how one could read this as an implication of fact. The phrase "great article" is a qualitative assessment. So is "better".
It wasn't necessary for the parent to "correct" the poster for not qualifying that their comment as opinion. It's clear the comment is opinion on its face.
"Correcting" the poster for not couching their comment in some kind of explicit language that qualifies it as an opinion seems needless at best, and pedantic, rude, and patronizing at worst.
I absolutely hate that I'm so fixated on this, but I can't let it go.
1) "I would prefer ..."
2) "It would be better ..."
You can be in the habit of giving people the benefit of the doubt, that when they say "A is a better coffee than B" they are merely expressing an opinion, because you think it's too tedious to say "For my taste" before each opinion.
But I hope you see how the phrase literally is "It would be better" as if there is an (obvious implicit) standard by which we can all agree to judge things, and from that standard, "it would be better if".
For what it's worth, I was avoiding the "FTFY" format which always sounds aggressive and rubs me the wrong way, so I chose this as the milder option. I can see it being impolite by the standard that (I hope) HN comments should aspire to, so I'll use something even milder next time. Thanks.
In general, I think it makes sense to avoid implying that the other person is wrong when you've decided to try addressing in a strict logical way something that was uttered as conversational English.
sundarurfriend: > Correction: you would prefer it much more as five much smaller articles.
dllthomas: > Maybe "I'd rather phrase that..." or "More precisely..."
You seem to have struck a loop, you are asking that the correction "Correction: That should say it's your opinion" should be "In my opinion, you should say it's your opinion".
Your issue is that they claimed objectivity when they called the poster subjective, which seems like an endless rabbithole to go down, since it is only your subjective opinion that they should do so.
The issue I was pointing to was not subjectivity vs objectivity at all. I was pointing out that the way language is used often doesn't square up neatly to a narrow semantic analysis, and that acknowledging the intent of the communication even when you are moving to a more explicit, semantically-oriented regime might help sundarurfriend achieve more of the kind of conversational outcomes that I understand them to prefer.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
How am I going to be able to sort through the noise to find the signal? Is there even a point? What is the purpose of even trying? Why not just step into traffic?
The whole "owning slaves" thing is of course, but that's a separate issue from the dentures.
And it’s true. Reminds me of the onion caption for a picture of a bomb “capable of creating 1,500 new terrorists in single blast.”
Going on 20 years of forever war, why is there such strong bipartisan support for keeping Americans embroiled in the Middle East? Are we going to allow Trump to co-opt the anti-war position that’s traditionally been a tent pole for the progressive left?
This politicians keep us turned on each other with petty, polarizing subjects while they keep doing what they’ve always done. I’m baffled. I hate it.
I won't deny that there's a meaningful difference between right-populism and neoconservatism, but as long as the progressive left remains true to its "bleeding heart" nature (for lack of a better term) for reasoning, I don't think that it's a problem to temporarily agree with parts of the right wing on conclusions. Be glad for the opportunity for bipartisan agreement, and keep advocating for what you believe instead of against what they believe.
(... which goes a bit to the article's point: defining your party's goals as "we disagree with them" is great for attention and voter turnout but not necessarily for doing what's important to your worldview.)
It's always amazing how many wars start via a toxoplasma of rage based on false premises.
Again - don't give in to the temptation of "the other side is bad." It's easy, it is often true because humans are bad in general, but it's not usually productive in accomplishing your goals, especially if there's a chance the other side shares those goals.
If I had to pick an example of the weak but controversy-raising cases the article brings up (I don't actually find those super convincing, myself, tbh), "WikiLeaks has letters from a couple of scientists internally raising the possibility that a strike that was already fairly controversial may have been even less justified than claimed even though the opponents of the strike are happy to acknowledge that the target of the strike was morally in the wrong, so progressives are hypocrites" seems like exactly the sort of thing he's talking about.
There's a long history of parties manufacturing casus belli and it benefits the world to be aware of this so as not to support more wars.
https://www.france24.com/en/20190613-chemical-weapons-body-p...
If you search "OPCW leak" you will easily find the leaked documents as revealed by wikileaks and much analysis from many points of view.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/opcw-leaks-syria/
The leaks’ key revelations include:
I remember originally dismissing the idea that we would go to war with Iraq very early on because it was the "stupidest possible thing we could do." Live and learn?
I picked that article because it gives a good summary, but you're right that it's necessary to pick these things apart in detail.
Weapons of mass destruction capable of reaching the capitols of Western Europe. I remember very well.
(I haven't looked at USN tankers, in an asian context an important question would be: are they even Panamax?
As far as the crude network is concerned, Alberta is more closely connected to Texas than California is.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elisabeth_Krausmann/pub... )
Heck, if Trump managed to do that, it would seem to be reason enough to vote for him if you care about being anti-war - the progressive left be damned. After all, war and anti-war is surely one of the most consequential areas that presidents can directly influence; far more so than most government policy!
No, it wouldn't.
Co-opting a political position is about rhetorical positioning and has no necessary relationship to substantive policy.
Okay I’m gonna quibble with this. If I had to compare Trump to any previous political figure, it would be Pat Buchanan, who was and is a paleoconservative. Paleoconservatives are anti-war in the old isolationist sense. Ron Paul popularized a more libertarian spin on paleoconservatism but Trump is steeped in it—to whatever degree he’s steeped in anything beyond his own narcissism—and the American right has a rich legacy of anti-war paleoconservatives who once thought maybe FDR was doing too much to provoke Germany and Japan. That just got set aside for about a half century after Pearl Harbor, but they’ve been there this whole time and after the controversies of GWB and his “neocon” advisors, paleocon ideas had a resurgence.
I expect to see a resurgence in isolationist policy in the near future because the world is seen as a crappy place now. China and Russia are widely viewed as threats we need to hedge against and the middle east is widely viewed as a source of inextricable quagmires and nothing good. People are not happy about how things are at home. Regardless of the balance of power between the parties and which parties own which branches there is a lot more looking inward in the near future.
Your economy depends on USD being the world currency.
Never mind oil, the problem with US foreign policy is that it's run by (a) people with links to the countries involved and (b) money.
So policy about Cuba is dictated by those who fled the revolution and their children, regardless of what might be best now for US-Cuba relations.
Policy is influenced in favour of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, those countries are mostly enemies of each other, so US foreign policy is confused and ineffective - apart from the one thing that Israel and Saudi Arabia can agree on, which is that Iran is Bad.
I sometimes recall how the civil rights movement got together and amplified the story of Rosa Parks over Claudette Colvin. The optics were much better with Parks:
> "They said they didn't want to use a pregnant teenager because it would be controversial and the people would talk about the pregnancy more than the boycott," Colvin says.
That I think turned out to be a good move. In the absence of this guiding force I think Colvin would end up debated and talked about more.
Yes, Colvin had less of chance to withstand massive pressure Parks was in after bus stand. But she wanted them to rally around Colvin already.
Today Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have machine learning models trained to amplify the amount of attention spent on advertising. Any policy outcome will be a side-effect of that.
It's tangentially related to TFA but... The Civil Rights era leaders were very strategic thinkers. MLK, Jr., especially, shortly before his death, was describing very serious, very ruthless strategy to accomplish goals that I do believe would've worked, had they been given the opportunity.
I think that we have ruthlessly strategic thinkers (in our politics and political movements) today but I don't believe their goals are to drive policy any longer.
Do you have a link for this?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Do_We_Go_from_Here:_Chao...
In social networks the leverage point in eliminating toxoplasma from your life are the bridge people: people who are being rewarded for taking offense in your in-group, and therefore select for the worst possible behavior of the outgroup. These people act as stressors, specifically triggering ideations of worst-case-scenarios. The fix here is removing these people from your feeds/circles of influence.
I wrote more of efficient defense systems in the age of attention at https://sdrinf.com/age-of-attention .
Thing is, there are bad ideas spreading out there, and you should learn of their existence less they grow out of control with nobody knowing/caring.
Conflict is a regulating tool in human species (and not only for our species). Wishing it away is an utopia that like all others will end up dystopian if put into practice.
Conflict as a regulation tool might have worked for our evolutionary ancestors, where resolution can be swiftly found and incentives re-aligned; however, if you reward conflict, the modern machine can generate an endless supply of it, on the tap. The correct solution is to shift the incentives, and reward with your attention the kind of stuff you want to see growing.
Lots more could be said, but to keep it short I believe we can't simply ignore it.
I'd say just the opposite. We think of the filter bubble as being only shown ideas we agree with. But an important part of the filter bubble phenomenon is only showing us the worst examples of ideas we disagree with. It's this second part GP is suggesting we can most easily stop tolerating on a personal level. The former is a bias of the algorithms and would take some kind of collective reform, unfollowing contacts who highlight the worst of your shared ideological opponents rather than the best is an action anyone can take.
Turn the bubble from Jerry Springer into NPR.
What kinds of people does Jerry select for? "GAY KLANSMEN WHO LOVE THEIR HOMOPHOBIC BOYFRIENDS TOO MUCH! IOWAN ZOUAVES FOR WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AND THE MANCUNIANS WHO ENABLE THEM!" The worst of the worst. The circus freaks of the Other Side. The ones voted most likely to throw a chair at someone, even though that was a different daytime TV host.
What kinds of people does NPR select for? The more reasonable ones. The ones who can talk and express ideas without flying into a frothy rage at the very notion of someone disagreeing with them or not agreeing with them quickly enough or not having been in agreement with them a month before they started talking. The ones who can debate.
Everyone has filters. Use yours to filter out the angry idiots who add nothing.
Jerry Springer watchers vote and not only that.
Blacklisting the slime spewers frees up that time/attention for more useful information and engagement.
The book as a whole is somewhat uneven, though it was ambitious and parts seem highly relevant still.
I'd like a "follow" feature, so I can see what certain people (like you) are doing. Implemented like a personal newsfeed. Just now occurs to me that RSS feeds for HN profiles would be cool.
Last time I checked, your reddit experiment was too much work to upkeep. You were also trying one of the newer hosters, "morpheus"?, but I didn't grok their UX.
https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/
Reddit and Mastodon (https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius) also support RSS.
Though mostly I don't think I'm posting much of substance presently.
Look for a gitlab static site ... eventually.
HN has a great deal of social engineering, most precisely the opposite of many of the ventures it has launched.
But for replies, I feel as though refreshing a page to see if anyone has replied to me, just feels narcissistic. As such I rarely if ever get to reply to something, since I almost never re-read comments on an article, much less my own for the infinitesimally small chance of a reply.
I think an option to have notifications to direct replies (not nested, but could be an option as well), would be pretty cool, as I've spoken before here about the drive-by commenting HN seems to cultivate (but I mean it works, right?).
I dearly miss the offline mail readers from the dial up BBS days. TLDR: most of the features (eg whitelists, blacklists, fetch behavior), were client side. I have a deep hunch that moving all these features to server side, aka social networks, contributed to our current mess.
The recent rehash (front paged) about newsgroups (NNTP protocol) made me wish I had more gumption and just did something about it.
> toxoplasma
I don't think that word means what you think it means. It doesn't mean "toxicity" if that's what you're going for. It is a misspelling of Toxoplasmosis and refers to a specific thing that has no mapping whatsoever onto how you are using it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis
Toxoplasma gondii is the parasite that causes toxoplasmosis. In the article, Scott makes the analogy of toxoplasma gondii to rage memes: toxoplasma circulates between cats and rats, the way a rage meme circulates back and forth between two opposing factions. (It's way down in section five of the article.)
They seem to be opposing forces (cats and rats, your side and the other side), but to the parasite, their opposition is what makes them both such effective hosts.
You want to eliminate the rage meme (toxoplasma) from your brain.
Not rage.
>In social networks the leverage point in eliminating toxoplasma from your life are the bridge people
How do you explain this sentence? I don't think the article is written for cats and rats.
> How do you explain this sentence? I don't think the article is written for cats and rats.
Metalepsis. When you see "toxoplasma", read "rage memes".
* Distributed low-commit morality: tell other people to "do the right thing" without actually doing anything yourself.
* Proximity creates responsibility: the best way to avoid having to do anything for anyone is to pretend you didn't see it. The moment PETA admitted they knew what was going on, they had to redirect all their efforts to solving it or they'd get stick
It's pretty funny since it's so predictable. You can always do these things and the reaction means that the right time to do it is to seek attention through it.
This has to be the most hilariously and accidentally observational comment in the history of the Internet. Times apparently have changed since 2014.
Brilliant article.
Oh, 2020... https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/us/central-park-video-dog-vid...
Young Adult fiction... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=young%20adult%20literature%20contr...
I wonder if there might be an internet rule: If you can think of it, there are people who hate each other over it
Do people who don't hate each other over things get attention?
https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/enw2kd/running_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/hj9zt5/tropical...
https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/a03n68/tamagotc....
I'm calling Poe's law, though :-)
The thesis of this article has a lot of validity though. There is an escalating "PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!" arms race that has no interest whatsoever in solving problems, only in getting attention.
This is about how humans first discovered that, given an infinite amount of reading material, we choose to read things that give us an emotional reaction. Any emotional reaction.
Individuals have agency. A set of persons responds to incentives.
If anything its quite the opposite and at the very least no change from before. We should try individually and we might get some success. We might try at a societal level but I have not see this occuring (apart from things like bans for things like cigarettes or products aimed at children). There's no fundamental human change occuring.
Additionally the vast majority of HN users are dependent on advertising. Advertisments are core to the western life. It's deep in our psychology, and requires more than just an ad blocker.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
The most vivid demonstration of this is that one phrase: "I can't breathe". It really is the most vivid image of racist police murder imaginable: a white officer kneeling on a black man's neck, slowly cutting off his air as he begs for mercy. It's appeared again and again in protests and news coverage worldwide. There's only one slight complication: Floyd started repeating that he "couldn't breathe" before he was down on the ground at all https://www.fox9.com/news/transcript-of-officers-body-camera... All of a sudden, things get a lot more fuzzy in terms of cause and effect and what the officers should've realized, and naturally one idelogical side has been claiming it debunks the whole thing whilst the other is using a different framing to claim this shows the police were even more depraved cold-hearted murderers than previously thought: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/08/george-floyd... It's almost the perfect scissor.
Even if it had been the most clear-cut case imaginable, one of the first things that happened was to turn it into something divisive and effective for signalling by - for instance - demanding charges against the other officers present that seem extremely hard to justify legally speaking, and calling for Minneapolis to burn until that happened. There is no escape from the process described in this blog post.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
In the linked video, Czech police officers demonstrate that neck kneeling is an effective form of restraint that still allows the suspect to breathe.
In a real scenario the officer would be pressing much more force on the suspects neck than what is presented in the video. The placement of the knee is another important factor. Because we see in the video that the training partner is lying completely still and not giving up much of a fight. Why aren't they demonstrating a scenario where the suspect is trying to break the restraint?
The upload date and content is also a direct response to the killing of George Floyd. It was uploaded not too long after his death. They even make a passing mention of it in the video too. This is clearly a video meant to push a narrative of policing techniques that don't actually work.
I did find this
https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=84
and this
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/176330.pdf
while attempting to research this, they are certainly interesting reads.
- I have several cop friends, from a relatively geographically diverse range of the US. All of them say that how Floyd was arrested was at a minimum against procedure, and almost certainly contributory to his death.
- One cop I spoke to pointed out that his training mandated that once a prone subject is handcuffed, their training mandates rolling them onto their side, as being unable to leverage oneself up can restrict breathing, even if nobody's kneeling on you. He also pointed out that kneeling on the neck or back in order to handcuff someone is well within procedure at his department, but continuing after they are restrained is obviously not.
That's the thing I don't get and that is the most upsetting thing to me about this situation: why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other? The only voices I hear from the police are coming out in defense of other officers who did something bad. This to me reinforces the impression that it's not a small minority that's the problem, but the entire institution. Is the media just not picking these voices up?
If there had been strong voices within the police calling for reform and officers had kneeled with the protestors instead of attacking even peaceful ones, the situation now would look very different.
Fear of reprisals from other officers? (This has happened in a few cases.)
Let's say if in the case of Mr. Floyd another one of the officers had said, "get off him, this submission hold is not in line with department policy" and the officer got off Mr. Floyd and Mr. Floyd had not died. What then? One might realistically imagine that the above negative concepts would be applied to the officer who said something. Maybe by hearing those words Mr. Floyd could pursue a complaint against the officer.
There are probably lots of reasons why an officer and probably most people in that situation would feel pressure to avoid speaking out in that moment.
Then we'd never heard about George Floyd.
Not to say there is no serious police brutality problem, but it's worth remembering the huge selection bias in what videos go viral and we end up seeing.
There is over 1 million cops in the US, and out of however many million interactions they have with the public each day, an overwhelming majority are perfectly fine.
There's a word for this: solidarity.
This is what it looks like from the outside.
The rest of us just happen to call that accountability.
I can't remember the last time that a doctor or lawyer blatantly murdered someone on tape and had their peers go up to bat for them about how they're actually the victim and did nothing wrong. When it comes to law enforcement and correctional officers, I can find a dozen of such instances from the last 12 months alone.
While professional groups are often mistakenly analogized to labor unions, they aren't and have very different functions. Professionals in organized professions like law or medicine may also be in labor unions (this is unusual in the US outside of the public sector), but the labor union and the professional organizations aren't interchangeable.
When an engineer's structure causes injury or loss of life, it is studied and taken very seriously. Liability falls on both the engineer and their employer, if there is one. Blatant negligence means the removal of licenses or the ability to practice in the field they're licensed in, along with civil lawsuits or even criminal charges.
When a cop causes injury or loss of life, the entire system tries to brush it under the rug completely, and learn nothing from it. Then their peers go up to bat for them explaining how they're being unfairly persecuted and that they did nothing wrong. Cops are often shielded from civil and criminal liability for abuses that other professionals would end up in prison for.
Trying to place the blame on unions is pretty far-fetched, and you're speaking to someone who is against the idea of police unions in particular.
Police unions have played a major role in protecting union members from management. Or as we call it elsewhere in politics, accountability.
I'm not saying solidarity is bad. I'm saying it's a tool that police unions have weaponized against the general public.
I think that reducing the problems of policing in the US down to "solidarity" isn't apt, as solidarity in other unions doesn't produce this level of opaqueness, lack of honesty and responsibility, negligence, ineptitude, or criminality.
The issue is at play is culture, one that comes from the top and is reinforced every step of the way to the bottom.
I agree that police unions have a strong hand in enabling and enacting the policies that shield police from accountability, but police are given powers that are unique to any other government or otherwise union worker. Allowing easily abused power to consolidate to the point that it has is why I'm against police unions in particular, but not others.
I do not think, do not believe, and do not claim that all the problems of policing in the US reduce to weaponized solidarity. I think, believe, and stand by my claim that solidarity has been weaponized by police unions. I also stand by my previous claim that the particular behavior pattern other commenters pointed to is one form of weaponized solidarity in action.
I hope this has been helpful. Thank you for the opportunity to clarify. Again, please accept my apologies for my failures in communication.
Well, as a programmer, I know from experience that there's a lot about programming computers that isn't obvious unless you actually spend time doing it - and that when you have a group of people (i.e. project managers) who seem bound and determined to portray programmers as lazy, time-wasting, obstinate, overpaid, wastes of space who should be offshored anyway, it's very easy for them to play armchair quarterback and insist that every programming problem was trivial in hindsight and confirm their hypothesis.
Now, apply that to police work. Police are routinely put into situations where their lives and the lives of other police officers are in danger, and they have to make split-second decisions or an innocent person can end up dying. I don't know anything about police work, but I'm willing to gamble that getting that right is even harder than getting programming right, and if somebody's bound and determined to make you look bad, they can do so more easily than project managers routinely do to programmers. If even 90% of the police have good intentions (and I believe that number is much, much higher), it stands to reason that they'd usually be willing to give other officers the benefit of the doubt: this or that may look bad if you put effort into making it look bad, but at least give the officer a chance to defend himself rather than jump to conclusions.
Now combine that already low number with the fact that there is strong belief among cops that doing so will negatively affect their career trajectory.
As far as cops coming to defense of other cops, every single officer I know has had false allegations against him, including one with a rape allegation that was only proven false because he had his body camera on the entire time he was with the suspect. So anything that's even slightly grey will get the benefit of the doubt as far as cops are concerned.
I've experienced the same thing as a foster parent. I'm not actually sure how many allegations have been made against my wife and I, so I tend to immediately dismiss any news of such against other foster parents (then occasionally it will be be "oh shit they were keeping kids in dog kennels?" and I'll have to backtrack). I'm almost certainly dismissing some actual misdeeds in there, but I also feel fairly secure that the signal to noise of allegations against foster parents is very low.
You gotta go back to the original article, this is exactly what it's about. Everybody agrees that good cops calling out bad cops is a good thing. Therefore, it doesn't spread, and you don't hear about it unless you pay deep attention to specific goings-on in specific police departments. It's also particularly likely not to spread because the details of such cases are usually kept quiet, and the cop just gets quietly let go.
The only thing most people who are only sort of paying attention hear is, cop does something kind of dubious, activists scream at the top of their lungs about how outrageous it is. They double down way past "this particular bad cop should be fired and charged" to "All cops are bastards" and "Defund the Police". Which then kind of forces cops and people who appreciate law and order to push back, find ways to excuse the action and defend the police.
I've seen a bunch of pics of cops kneeling with protestors. They didn't spread far, and they didn't change anyone's mind. They didn't contribute to the outrage, and so they can't spread among a media class that is highly incentivized to spread only the most outrageous things.
(I suspect the scissor is murder vs every other option).
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-americans-feel-abou...
> On May 25, 2020, an unarmed black man named George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis. An officer knelt on Floyd's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds before he died. Which of the following comes closer to your view: [the choice to add the facts that Floyd was unarmed and knelt on for that long to the question is quite heavy-handed for a survey and sure to influence the respondent]
and
> Which comes closer to your view on recent protests: > > These sorts of protests will continue unless we solve the root cause of the problem. We need long-term solutions to poverty and violence. > > The first priority is ending the protests and violence, which means we need more police officers and national guard to calm the situation down > > Don't know > [this question pretty assumes the respondent agrees that poverty is the root cause of what's going on]
as compared to the YouGov survey which has a much more neutrally worded set of questions (and a much larger set).
It's therefore not surprising that the YouGov survey records more opposition on some questions that seem similar in spirit to the questions that dataforprogress.org does.
But the two surveys taken together do provide information that does floor me, which is that the overwhelming majority of Americans (indeed around 90%) are convinced that the police officers in this case did something wrong and should've been fired (although they might be not be all convinced of the severity of the offense, but everyone seems to agree it's at least essentially manslaughter).
So you're right! Floyd's death itself is hardly a scissor issue.
The scissor issue instead seems to be the protests themselves. Again I much prefer YouGov's question here to Data for Progress, which asks
> Do you think these protests have been motivated more by a genuine desire to hold police officers accountable for their actions or a long-standing bias against the police?
And the numbers there are
> A genuine desire to hold police officers accountable: 43% > A long-standing bias against the police: 40% > Not sure: 17%
This is still going on and over 20 people connected to the protests have died since then. There was a retired cop shot while protecting his friend's store. There was a young girl killed for no reason outside a Wal-Mart. There was a burned body found long after the fact in one of the buildings burned during the riots.
The question isn't whether things should change or whether this is a problem but what to change and how to change it and whether that change will really make things better.
It got more fuzzy for who?!
The kind of people who will turn the most clear cut case of police brutality we've seen in years into their own personal chance to play "devils advocate" and be the obligatory contrarian no one needed, wanted, or asked for?
-
Because, after all, do you think the fact he was in respiratory distress means the officer should have knelt on his neck for 9 more minutes while he begged for mercy and was reduced to crying for his mother?
Do you think having your neck knelt on for 9 minutes is an appropriate response for respiratory distress?
It makes them look like even more cold blooded murders.
It makes their initial excuse of "he was faking to get out of the hold" even more abominable
If he was in such respiratory distress that he was dying before being knelt on, it could be interpreted he additionally needed 9 consecutive minutes of having a knee on his neck?
I was wondering how that could be an unpopular sentiment then I realized, I broke the first rule of HN. You can be as passive aggressive about tech stuff as you want, but don't be overtly heated about anything "political", like police murdering (sorry, manslaughtering) people in broad daylight
Demanding a moderate response in polite terms has been demonstrated to get you nothing. Nobody making those demands realistically expects them to be met. There is a vague hope that some incredibly watered-down version might come about.
It's rather like pushing at a stuck door that's become stiffer over time and ultimately locked. If you shoulder-charge it, maybe it will budge.
We must be cautious when we notice ourselves saying "the outgroup is bigoted"
I'm not saying it wouldn't happen without advertising. But advertising forces otherwise rational people (e.g. newspaper editors) to do ridiculous things to compete for attention, because attention is money.
And because there are more people screaming for attention, everyone has to scream louder.
...While the people who are supposed to be paying attention find it abhorrent and start deleting their social media accounts and finding ways of paying less attention.
...So the people who need the attention to pay their salaries have to scream louder.
And so it goes around and around, while cities burn and lives are ruined because (as TFA says) nothing gets attention like a controversy that splits the audience into two halves.
This complaint predates social media.
What are the force multipliers? What makes this new medium different?
My provisional list is: targeting, algorithmic recommenders, bots, anonymity, gamification.
Those are things we can fix, mitigate.
Is it though? Even after all this time, I've yet to hear how racism had anything to do with the incident, other than rampant speculation. Tragic? Yes. Brutal? Yes. Murder? Yes. Racism? How?
Yes ...
> Then everyone would agree it was indeed very brutal and racist, and something would get done.
No, because there's an entire counter-news faction out there insisting that absolutely every person killed by police deserved it, that it is unacceptable to ever hold police accountable for deaths of anyone under any circumstances, such as shooting a handcuffed guy on the floor or firing blindly into a darkened apartment, and that everyone complaining about racism is some kind of Maoist.
Recently I watched some of the Live Aid 25th anniversary coverage. The huge charity appeal was sparked by Michael Buerk's famous report on dead and dying children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOj_6OYuJc
I couldn't help thinking that if you filmed that today it would vanish from the social media melee in a couple of days. It was shocking then. It might not even be the most shocking thing somebody scrolls past today.
My take is that nothing gets done because Congress is incapable of doing things. At all. There is nothing special about doing nothing on police brutality. It's just one more thing on the pile of unaddressed things.
It's been this way for a long time now, and that is why Presidents now try to rule by executive orders.
Ever hard-head in Congress could have a conversion experience this week from attending John Lewis's funeral, and somewhere next year some guy with a gun or knee could repeat the Floyd killing.
I mean yes but also... Plenty of us just got and unprecedented $1200-2400 from Congress just a month or two ago... they clearly can act when motivated.
I need you to know that this is not the case. A not insignificant portion of the right does not feel anything wrong was done in this case, and would prefer for police to "crack down." Some will openly discuss that they need to publicly concede that there is A Problem in order to suggest ineffectual solutions to it which will satisfy politicians and pacify mass movements.
The rest of your comment is very correct, but it should be mentioned that bad actors exist and not every American's ideal version of America is completely rid of police murders.
What is your source or qualification for saying this?
I know of several conservative groups that did infact hold or participate in protests against George Floyd's death in the days after. Pretty much everyone in them agrees, even now, that while the case is not quite as clear-cut as some would have you think, it was still wrong to kneel on his neck for 10 minutes after he was already under control.
The right-libertarian circles have been banging on against the militarization of the police and their unaccountability for decades now. Check out Radley Balko in particular, and the books he's written and the articles for reason.com. That's what conservatives saw this as.
Things did kind of turn over the weeks after. This was when the left's narrative that it was a racism problem took hold, the rhetoric escalated into "Defund the Police", and protests into some areas turned into riots and large-scale property destruction. This caused the right to de-emphasize those concerns and put more emphasis on the defense of the police.
Naturally, the Left is incentivized to dig up the most outrageously extreme version of those arguments and try to portray the entire Right as thinking like that. I do not know you or your ideology, but I suspect your source is Left-wing articles that seek to portray the Right in this way. If so, you ought to be aware that it's never a path to truth to view any group only through the lens of their enemies.
He is the best writer on police brutality, AFAIK.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/radley-balko/
https://twitter.com/radleybalko
But that's the choice, isn't it; faced with a choice between property damage, however minor or even theoretical, and human life (or the serious injuries incurred by protestors and journalists who had rubber bullets fired at their eyes), conservatives immediately turn around and defend the police.
The police can read between the lines as well as anyone else, so they interpret that as the voters ordering them to go out and injure as many protestors as necessary until the protests stop. Which, of course, escalates the protests.
(How is Radley Balko conservative? It's very hard to tell from that twitter feed)
On the other, to borrow some of the left's standard viewpoints, I could say that it's a very privileged viewpoint that property damage is inconsequential compared to injury. How many lower-class people will suffer from losing their mode of transportation, having their home rendered unsafe, or even having "luxuries" that were sources of comfort in a difficult life destroyed? How many people started out in poverty and spent a lifetime building a business from nothing so they could rise into the middle class, only to watch it be destroyed by privileged mostly-white rioters in response to something that they had nothing to do with, that happened in a completely different city? And it certainly isn't like rioters haven't intentionally attacked, injured, and in a few cases killed, both citizens and law enforcement officers as well.
I think you should dig into this a little deeper, because I think it is disingenuous to portray their take as just being somewhat suspicious of the case. When I dug deeper with my conservative friends, they think that Floyd is a "thug" and drug addict, and fall short of saying that he definitely had what happened to him coming, but that's the implication.
A large portion of the right were happy to spread justifications for Floyd's murder and defamation of Floyd's character all over social media.
If you'd like evidence, search r/The_Donald archives, r/Conservative or the thousands of conservative groups on Facebook.
Not that I have a poll to offer, though some have surely been done.
I base what I say on most conservatives I'm aware of saying so. I can't think of any "name" conservative who has said the opposite.
I'm not sure social media reflect "a large portion" of any political spectrum.
It is much easier to discredit a split second decision, mistaken identity, justify feeling threatened in so many other cases, but there it is, a man immobilized on the street with a knee on his neck, people standing around objecting to what’s happening, time, so much time to consider actions when there was no reasonable threat.
These are the downsides of rage. But rage is an useful tool. It's sometimes misused, but which one isn't? Tribalism is the same.
Philosophy like this article is great at asking questions. Answers are not inside of one man but in the conflict of many.
On a tangential note, an important skill in this environment is simply ignoring people who want you to be angry rather than constructive. "X did Y! Bloody murder!" → Ignored. "How to ensure Y never happens again" → Let's hear it.
I think there's another angle to picking the least credible case in that it requires more psychological investment. Those who join the group are stronger and have expended more psychological effort. Because the cases that are chosen to fight about are ambiguous, to fight about them requires a form of committent and faith. Any doubts about the case and validity of the morality or faith would cause a painful admission of the amount that was psychologically invested in it. The strength of your belief is signalled but the strength also deepens your involvement in it.
It would be the 2020 version of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBWr1KtnRcI
Seems tough... maybe it's a job for deep learning?
Which implies that publicising a rape allegation makes it difficult to prosecute it successfully. The article suggests instead that feminist activists specifically select false allegations for publicity, which seems to assume that feminist activists possess some kind of ability to identify false allegations before they are prosecuted, or, indeed, to predict the outcome of a rape case with high accuracy. This is a very strong assumption and is the first thing that should be tested for consistency.
A simpler explanation is that rape allegations are more likely to lead to a failed prosecution, than they are likely to be false. If that was the case, we should expect to also observe a higher rate of failed prosecutions in general (i.e. regardless of publicity) than the rate of false rape allegations.
Though I can't find much relevant data for the United States (there is more for the UK) some sources suggest that such an effect can indeed be observed:
According to FBI statistics, out of 127,258 rapes reported to police departments in 2018, 33.4 percent resulted in an arrest.[13] Based on correlating multiple data sources, RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) estimates[30] that for every 1,000 rapes, 384 are reported to police, 57 result in an arrest, 11 are referred for prosecution, 7 result in a felony conviction, and 6 result in incarceration. This compares to a higher rate at every stage for similar crimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States#Pros...
In other words, while 2-8% of rape allegations are false (according to the article), about 0.7% of rape allegations are successfully prosecuted. Such low rate of successful prosecutions would easily account for a high rate of publicised cases failing without the need of a specialised rape prosecution outcome prediction organ in feminist activists.
Dodging difficult questions is a skill most politicians seem to possess, in comparison.
So in the feminist example it's not that the feminists publicize a certain ambiguous case, it's that they double down when criticized by the out group. This strengthens the in group and amplifies the message.
Another issue is "what is publicity?" . What does it mean? Is getting something in the news or blogs or trending on twitter an aim in itself? How does the publicity machine work? What gets eyeballs, attention, etc? Is activism a form of marketing primarily?
Is activism just a capitalist activity selling something? Is there a conflict with activist who want to change things. Is attention activism at odds with the political process, or could it be the primary way most people do politics?
When i read articles about rate of false rape allegations, the established percentage was really a percentage of rape allegations that were assessed 'false' by police during investigation. Most rape allegations were just lacking evidence on both sides (not enough evidence for prosecution, not enough evidence for rejecting as false), so they are not counted in this statistic.
The Wikipedia article [1] leads to [2], a RAINN page which links to itself (quote: "Please visit https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system for full citation."), and also (Footnote 1) to the following 'three' alleged data sources [3, 4, 5]. Note that [4, 5] are exactly, letter for letter, the same (!) in [2]! Why? Does that sound like serious science to you? Anyway, the RAINN page [2] then claims: "This statistic combines information from several federal government reports. Because it combines data from studies with different methodologies, it is an approximation, not a scientific estimate.". Let's look at the methodology in [3], starting on Page 17:
> "The NCVS is a self-report survey that is administered from January to December. Respondents are asked about the number and characteristics of crimes they have experienced during the prior 6 months [...] . The survey collects information on threatened, attempted, and completed crimes. Te survey collects data on crimes both reported and not reported to police. Estimates in this report include threatened, attempted, and completed crimes."
Of particular interest is the subsection "NCVS measurement of rape or sexual assault", starting on page 19. I cannot see any meaningful attempt at scientific rigour here. Can you explain to me why such figures should be taken seriously? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! There is no evidence in any meaningful sense here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape,_Abuse_%26_Incest_Nationa...
[2] https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system
[3] Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, 2010-2016 (2017).
I think this is https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv17.pdf
[4] Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Incident-Based Reporting System, 2012-2016 (2017);
[5] Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Incident-Based Reporting Sys...
* We only have SSC's account of the conversation between him and the NYT reporter.
* The NYT does not have a history of doxxing people, particularly their home addresses. Revealing that sort of personal information is traditionally what "doxxing" means.
* SSC's fans revealed the NYT reporters name and home address. That is to say, the only person doxxed here has been the reporter. So the power dynamics are not as clear cut as SSC made out.
* Tucker Carlson has since used his fans to doxx NYT reporters when he objected to them writing a story about him. That is, this has become a right-wing tactic. And that will be unhealthy for a free press.
* It's not at all clear that Scott Alexander is anonymous, or that revealing his real last name constitutes doxxing. Scott Alexander are his first and middle names. He blogged under his full real name for many years at LessWrong. He published an SSC post in a Springer book in 2017 under his first and last names.
https://books.google.com/books?id=wtQkDwAAQBAJ&pg=PR9&lpg=PR...
Voluntarily publishing something like that makes me believe that Scott did not make a clear effort. It's not about holes or opsec. It's about Scott putting his full name out there and then regretting it. He doxxed himself, and he can't be undoxxed.
2. Scott never claimed that the reporter was going to reveal his home address, but he said the reporter threatened to doxx him for clicks. I have a very hard time believing that, and I define doxxing very differently than "publishing a name that the subject of the article has already voluntarily revealed."
3. Scott is an old hand at Internet flame wars. I consider it highly likely that he knew that, by claiming that the reporter threatened to doxx him, that the reporter would be doxxed. The rest is protesting too much.
1. What it means is simply we do not know the whole story. We definitely do not know that the reporter, in fact, threatened to doxx Scott. In any case, I think Scott has a very different definition of that word than most people do.
4. If we believe that Scott encouraged his fans to turn up the heat on the reporter, then he is participating in a trend, which I highlighted, that bodes ill for American and the free flow of information. Every time an independent press tries to write a story, do its reporters get doxxed? I guarantee you will read fewer interesting stories when that is widespread.
5. That isn't what was claimed, that's a book that included him, not a book he published (as far as I am able to tell). It seems to be _very_ different given that he did not make the effort to publish and the book even fails to call him "Scott Alexander", making it hard to link them together.
2. As point above says, the argument has become incongruent now that it becomes clear he did not publish the book. And, again, there is much value to not publishing a piece on how you are tied to fringe groups online even if your full name was once connected to them in a print book.
3. This isn't a very fair assumption. You, and others, are calling what he did bad because he knew what would happen, but aren't showing he knew ahead of time. It is very easy to say you would have realized WWII would have started, but even something that large would be outside the reach of most people's predictors in the moment.
1. I think _you_ are the one with a different definition, and I would also note that the lack of the other side being published should speak to some extent too. He showed his side, but you are taking the lack of evidence against him as proof he did something wrong, which is not very sound.
4. This attempt at universalization doesn't hold very well given that this was not a reporter trying to cover the story with full honesty; his name was a largely irrelevant detail. They could have named him "Big Bird" and the story would have been the same but with no chance of controversy, since his identity in his private life is not important to the story.
Thanks for the well-organized points, it makes replying a lot more sane.
True. But Scott only asked to not to have his full name published and I trust him enough to have asked the NYT beforehand. Even if he didn't, the NYT could've simply said "we won't, but ask next time" and it would look pretty bad for him.
> The NYT does not have a history of doxxing people, particularly their home addresses. Revealing that sort of personal information is traditionally what "doxxing" means.
Just revealing the name is not "traditional" doxxing, I agree. It's clear, though, what he tries to say.
> SSC's fans revealed the NYT reporters name and home address. That is to say, the only person doxxed here has been the reporter. So the power dynamics are not as clear cut as SSC made out.
Well, just after Scott put the blog offline. And he did explicitly ask his readers not to doxx or attack anyone. Now, it is possible say that, given this action, one could know that this would happen with a high likelihood, but, given his situation, he did what he could to prevent it IMO. That's debatable, though, I give you that.
> Tucker Carlson has since used his fans to doxx NYT reporters when he objected to them writing a story about him. That is, this has become a right-wing tactic. And that will be unhealthy for a free press.
That's not on Scott. He neither "invented" this nor asked anyone to do it; in fact, he said the reporter is probably innocent and asked his readers not to. So you can't blame this on him.
> It's not at all clear that Scott Alexander is anonymous, or that revealing his real last name constitutes doxxing. Scott Alexander are his first and middle names. He blogged under his full real name for many years at LessWrong. He published an SSC post in a Springer book in 2017 under his first and last names.
I can see the NYT side on this; not publishing the name of someone who's name is already kinda public if you search a bit seems strange at hand. But on the other hand Scott is right, too; a NYT article would've directly brought up SSC when searching his name. Therefore, I think it's fair enough to ask not to have his name published and I don't think it's too much to ask, to be honest. Also, similar to the sibling, I can't locate this book.
Overall, I can see why he did what he did, but I can also see why it came to this.
He used to to quip that "Even being aware of the phenomenon didn't protect you from it" -- saying even he could be fooled just as easily as the layman or the audeince member.
I'd imagine a similar adage could be applied to SSC.
Hypothesis: most people involved in a criminal event have something in their past that can be cast in a negative light. This is not a statement of causality---I am not saying that they are involved in a criminal event because of things they did in the past---merely of correlation. But if that hypothesis is true, it could explain why the publicized cases don't tend to be cut and dry... They were more cut and dry before investigative journalists started tearing apart the history of all parties involved.
Fixed it for you. If you are looking to condemn someone, it's not difficult to do.
Is my recollection of the events wrong, or is there an error in the essay?
I heard about his murder before the riots, yes. But it was just “oh, look, another guy murdered by the police in the US, now what's going on with that x86 operating system?”. It wasn't on the news until there were protests, and wasn't really international news (except BBC and the like) until there was rioting.
When the government had forbidden every other form of public gathering for months, and suddenly seemed to make an exception for these protests, that was the wedge issue.
Remember, too, that the immediate aftermath was truly widespread horror. Everyone agreed that it was terrible. My recollection is that is the protests against police in general grew harsher, other folks started to accentuate the fact that Floyd was not a perfect man. And then everyone lost control of their collective sanity.
There is also the problem of motivation. What possible reason could Derek Chauvin have to murder George Floyd? Surely he understood that doing such a thing could cost him his job, risk imprisonment, and make it very hard for him to find employment. Much more likely is that he believed the hold he used was nonlethal, and, given what we know from the Hennepin County autopsy, that it actually was nonlethal.
Citation needed. Most similar cases show that this is not true. Indeed, that's the whole point of Black Lives Matter. When this happens the police officer responsible is rarely held accountable.
Edit: This is especially the case for Derek Chauvin, because he had experienced numerous complaints against him in the past and the consequences amounted to nothing at all.
https://nypost.com/2020/05/28/cop-in-george-floyds-death-was...
> But the report released later Monday by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's office said Floyd died of "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint and neck compression." The manner of death was ruled homicide, but the office noted that "is not a legal determination of culpability or intent." [emphasis mine]
And it's another mistake to assume that the county medical office is "independent," as I think you are suggesting. They work for the same municipal government that employed the police officer who killed George Floyd, the same entity that would be subject to a lawsuit for his wrongful death. They have a clear financial and reputational incentive to find that Derek Chauvin did not intentionally kill George Floyd.
The issue of motivation is not a "problem" in any sense. To answer your question, "What possible reason could Derek Chauvin have to murder George Floyd?", you might ask what reason an NYPD officer had to choke Erik Garner to death with a baton, to take just one example of the police killing an unarmed black man. Having said that, Derek Chauvin and George Floyd both worked security at the same night club during the same time period, with overlapping shifts, so Chauvin may have had specific motivation to attack him. But recent history has many examples of police assaulting and even killing Black Americans for no discernable reason.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/george-floyd-death-autopsies-ho...
https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/502006...
Are we reading the same report? The link in GP doesn't contain the word "homicide". In fact I can't find anything in it stating a cause of death. It looks to be nothing but observations.
I'm left confused by the CBS News link. I doubt they infer that "The manner of death was ruled a homicide" (which was not a quote) from the autopsy case title, quote, "Cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression". It seems more likely that there is another source; that the homicide ruling was made by a different entity (besides the medical examiner's office), or at least by a different document (not the autopsy report).
EDIT: The document stating that the manner of death was homicide was a press release from the medical examiner's office[1].
1: https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/MNHENNE/2020/06/...
Edit: They took the autopsy document down from their website. The link used to be hennepin.us/-/media/hennepinus/residents/public-safety/documents/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.pdf.
Nowhere in the Hennepin County autopsy does it say "homicide". https://bit.ly/2YQiNSG. The title is unclear.
I said "independent" in quotes because I was talking about the autopsy that was commissioned by Floyd's family. Of course I do not think the one commissioned by Floyd's family is independent at all. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/01/george-floyd-family-m....
> [The county medical office] have a clear financial and reputational incentive to find that Derek Chauvin did not intentionally kill George Floyd.
Are you saying they made up the meth and possibly lethal level of fentanyl in Floyd's system? Those would explain why he was reportedly "not in control of himself". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd
> Cause of death: Cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression
> Manner of death: Homicide
As for "independence," the question is how one could consider the county medical examiner to be independent, when they work for the same municipal government that employs the man who is accused of killing George Floyd.
It is possible that drug use contributed to George Floyd's death. But that doesn't matter, because according to US law, "the unexpected frailty of the injured person is not a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them."[1]
0. https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/MNHENNE/2020/06/...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull
Also, 19 ng/mL of methamphetamine isn't a therapeutically active concentration - it's not even enough to trigger a positive drug test [0]. And 11 ng/mL of fentanyl is on the low end of the range recommended for anaesthesia [1] - that same source states that "[b]lood concentrations of approximately 7 ng/ml or greater have been associated with fatalities where poly-substance use was involved," but no other substances were present at high enough concentrations to be therapeutically active. It's possible that Chauvin's actions wouldn't have killed him if he hadn't had fentanyl in his system, but that's not a defense [2].
[0] https://www.mayocliniclabs.com/test-catalog/Clinical+and+Int...
[1] https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/drug-profiles/fent...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull
I'm saying that's a real possibility that is suggested by the county autopsy.
Thank you for the additional context on the drug levels. If you are right about this, then I am not sure how to explain what happened.
The neck restraint is described as "Compressing one or both sides of person’s neck with an arm or leg, without applying direct pressure to the trachea or airway", consistent with the county's autopsy finding of "no injuries of anterior muscles of neck or laryngealstructures". See page 9 of http://www.mncourts.gov/mncourtsgov/media/High-Profile-Cases....
Here are some more details about what happened. Have a look starting at page 15. http://www.mncourts.gov/mncourtsgov/media/High-Profile-Cases...
According to the bodycam camera transcripts, Floyd first said that he couldn't breathe well before he was on the ground. Floyd then requests to lay on the ground and the officers okay it, and then Chauvin attempts to restrain him on the ground.
https://www.twincities.com/2020/07/09/george-floyd-transcrip...
What measure of proof do you require?
"What possible reason could Derek Chauvin have to murder George Floyd?"
They have history.
"he believed the hold he used was nonlethal"
Then why was he smiling? For 8 minutes and 48 seconds? And continued to kneel, against procedure, and advice from colleagues to stop?
Really, your incredulity is too much.
Caterpillar DNA is butterfly DNA. Toxoplasma DNA in the cat is toxoplasma DNA in the rat.
While there's poetry to saying the hatred is a single life form regardless of where it lives, I think it's a more accurate model to say there are two symbiotic replicators, whose impact on the environment (mostly) makes it more hospitable for the other. Bombs, however directed, contain only a tiny portion of the information content making up the meme.