BLM already existed but the pandemic meant that many people had more free time to worry about it. Personal opinion here, the scale of BLM over the past 10 months was greater semi-directly due to the pandemic.
“It is too early to say whether Black Lives Matter and other pandemic-inspired protests will result in significant political reforms. Perhaps the reason we are inclined to view pandemics and other crises as moral and political turning points is that we have been conditioned to view them through a medical-historical lens. History suggests it might be better to regard pandemics less as crises than as occasions for political ‘reckoning’ that may – or may not – see the resolution of long-standing social and economic grievances.”
Reads like a high-scoring paper from a critical theory class. Foucault, three examples, and flourishes of vocabulary to basically say “never let a crisis go to waste.”
>It is too early to say whether Black Lives Matter and other pandemic-inspired protests will result in significant political reforms.
If anything there will be the opposite. Go spend any time at /r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut/ and you too are forced to acknowledge police brutality. A tremendous amount of evidence makes it clear. Worse yet, it's not new. Police brutality has been ongoing forever, what changed recently is that everyone has a HD camera in their pocket and are recording.
So why wont that change? There has been some minor things like body cameras; but race isnt consideration. Their brutality is against white people all the same. The fix will only come when the police are no longer employed by the state.
Right now you have broken liability. Police officer brutalizes someone, but he isnt required to keep personal insurance. So the next liability goes to the derpartment but they dont have insurance neither, then it goes to the government itself. So the government is incentivized to cover for itself.
Privatize police and suddenly you broke the chain. Government can outright put anti-brutality right in the contract. When a brutality event occurs, the government is happy to investigate and punish the brutality.
>Privatize police and suddenly you broke the chain. Government can outright put anti-brutality right in the contract. When a brutality event occurs, the government is happy to investigate and punish the brutality.
I've been saying this for more than a decade. Sure you can (and probably should0 have prosecutors or detectives and special cases to be be state run, whatever, that doesn't really matter because those guys weren't the problem. The officers who are just standing around securing street corners or on patrol (i.e the officers who are the bulk of the department's man-hours) need to be replaced with private security that is deputized by the municipality they are working for for the time they are clocked in. Sure you can still have policing for revenue or other BS but those will have to be done at the behest of the municipality but making the police replaceable at least puts pressure on them to satisfy the terms of their contract and give the municipalities an avenue for wholesale replacement if they really screw up. The big municipalities can even hedge their bets by contracting with multiple providers. Policing is no different that street sweeping or trash pickup. Having them be "just contractors" also moves things a step back toward civilian police forces. It's just another municipal service. We need to treat it like one.
I don’t think Covid is deadly enough to cause any kind of changes to society. Especially given that most of the deaths are the elderly.
It’s not going to cause effects like making labour a more scarce resource or liberating more housing or anything of that sort so there is limited ability to cause societal change.
I agree with you insofar as I don't think the pandemic is all that bad in terms of pandemics...humanity has suffered much worse with much less.
What's for sure - we've lost civil rights and set dangerous precedents and politicians do not relinquish the dark tools they craft and use in a haste under the pretense of emergency.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 35.6 ms ] thread“It is too early to say whether Black Lives Matter and other pandemic-inspired protests will result in significant political reforms. Perhaps the reason we are inclined to view pandemics and other crises as moral and political turning points is that we have been conditioned to view them through a medical-historical lens. History suggests it might be better to regard pandemics less as crises than as occasions for political ‘reckoning’ that may – or may not – see the resolution of long-standing social and economic grievances.”
Reads like a high-scoring paper from a critical theory class. Foucault, three examples, and flourishes of vocabulary to basically say “never let a crisis go to waste.”
If anything there will be the opposite. Go spend any time at /r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut/ and you too are forced to acknowledge police brutality. A tremendous amount of evidence makes it clear. Worse yet, it's not new. Police brutality has been ongoing forever, what changed recently is that everyone has a HD camera in their pocket and are recording.
So why wont that change? There has been some minor things like body cameras; but race isnt consideration. Their brutality is against white people all the same. The fix will only come when the police are no longer employed by the state.
Right now you have broken liability. Police officer brutalizes someone, but he isnt required to keep personal insurance. So the next liability goes to the derpartment but they dont have insurance neither, then it goes to the government itself. So the government is incentivized to cover for itself.
Privatize police and suddenly you broke the chain. Government can outright put anti-brutality right in the contract. When a brutality event occurs, the government is happy to investigate and punish the brutality.
I've been saying this for more than a decade. Sure you can (and probably should0 have prosecutors or detectives and special cases to be be state run, whatever, that doesn't really matter because those guys weren't the problem. The officers who are just standing around securing street corners or on patrol (i.e the officers who are the bulk of the department's man-hours) need to be replaced with private security that is deputized by the municipality they are working for for the time they are clocked in. Sure you can still have policing for revenue or other BS but those will have to be done at the behest of the municipality but making the police replaceable at least puts pressure on them to satisfy the terms of their contract and give the municipalities an avenue for wholesale replacement if they really screw up. The big municipalities can even hedge their bets by contracting with multiple providers. Policing is no different that street sweeping or trash pickup. Having them be "just contractors" also moves things a step back toward civilian police forces. It's just another municipal service. We need to treat it like one.
It’s not going to cause effects like making labour a more scarce resource or liberating more housing or anything of that sort so there is limited ability to cause societal change.
What's for sure - we've lost civil rights and set dangerous precedents and politicians do not relinquish the dark tools they craft and use in a haste under the pretense of emergency.