Private Mars Rocket II

One of the many irritations of Arguments on the Internet is the tendency to take a slogan to 11, then argue that. (More formally, a strawman argument.) Two examples.

In Atlanta recently, the police intervened and stopped a carjacking. The victim was an Atlanta councilman who had voted to "defund the police." The argument was that the councilman was a hypocrite. Here's the thing - people voting to "defund the police" aren't actually for abolishing police. They're for taking some of the money we give to police and using it in other programs to reduce crime. (Like, getting homeless people off of the street or treating drug addicts.)

The other example is the current argument over whether the COVID-19 virus came from a Chinese lab. First, saying it came from a lab does not mean it was man-made. It could have been a natural virus being studied in a lab. Second, there is simply no evidence that the virus escaped from a lab. Now, "no evidence" does NOT mean "it didn't happen." It just means, "no evidence that it did." Looking for evidence is reasonable - jumping to the conclusion that "China did it!" is not.

Blue Flu

Reportedly in Atlanta, local police officers called in sick or otherwise decided not to work in protest to the arrest of an officer for shooting a fleeing suspect in the back. The cute name for this activity is "blue flu." A commentator, Beau of the Fifth Column, made a short video which captured my thoughts on the matter with great clarity. To recap:

1) Blue flu is intended to cause pain in the community. The chaos and fear of no cops is supposed to cause the community to run to the cops with open arms and say "protect us."
2) These kind of actions make it clear that the officers aren't interested in serving the public; rather in protecting themselves. True public servants would show up anyway.
3) Generally, blue flu doesn't create chaos and crime. Reported crime either stays the same or goes down.
4) Blue flu typically proves that the US is over-policed and we could be as safe as we are now with fewer and/or less active cops. "As safe as we are now" may not be "as safe as we want to be" but that's a different argument.

Warrior Cops

There is also a phenomenon of "warrior cops." This is a term of art for various training programs which purport to teach police how to survive and win in the event they get in a fight with a violent offender. I am of two minds on these programs.

On the one hand, the history of police work in the US is full of cases where police officers get badly beaten by violent offenders. These events usually end in officer fatalities. There are a lot of tactical lessons to be taken from those sad events.

On the other hand, many of these programs train their graduates to walk around "with a plan to kill everyone they meet." This is not a good outcome, especially since statistically, 95% of cops will never be in a genuine life-or-death fight. Creating this "us vs. them" mentality leads to overreactions and fewer crimes solved, as the "thems" find themselves wanting nothing to do with the cops.

I've heard that the training classes offered by Massad Ayoob square that circle. I'm not sure if he succeeds in that effort or how, but making the attempt is an important thing to try.

I watched about 10 minutes of a video by Candace Owens, Pundit At Large. (Google it if you want to.) Owens made two entirely wrong-headed points in her video.

1) Nobody is claiming George Floyd is a hero.
2) There is no "but."

Point 2 requires a bit of elaboration. Owens said repeatedly "Floyd didn't deserve to die but he was a criminal, etc." *There is no "but."*

George Floyd did not deserve to die. He was illegally killed by somebody who was supposed to uphold the law while others who were supposed to uphold the law did nothing. That's it. That's all there is. Until we as a nation make an effort to do better, we will continue to have problems.

For the first time in months, I'm having a slow day at work. This is mostly because I'm either waiting for people to get back to me or waiting until Saturday to make some network changes. Since I have a bit of time, and I can't see that I talked about this, two deep thoughts.

Statues of Confederate Generals

The South is littered with statues of Confederate generals, politicians, and "Soldiers of the Lost Cause." These statues were built, as Virginian and US General George Thomas said, "as a species of political cant" to cover the crime of treason with a "counterfeit varnish of patriotism." They were also erected in the period 1880 to 1920, when the Southern whites had regained political control in the South and instituted Jim Crow. They were specifically intended to remind the blacks who was back in charge.

This is why there are no statues of Confederate General James Longstreet, Lee's long-time #2. After the war, Longstreet became a Republican and worked to help freed blacks. In fact, Longstreet became the Benedict Arnold of the Lost Cause movement. This movement attempted to paint the Confederacy as noble, and ended up accusing Longstreet of throwing the battle of Gettysburg. In short, the statues are no more "historic" than those of Lenin and Stalin which used to line the streets of communist countries.

Fetishism of the Military

Here I steal a bit from Josh Marshall, who notes that many of the people opposed to the take a knee protests are insulting the troops. One of the reasons the Founding Fathers were against a large standing military (such as we have now) is that they could be used to suppress democracy.

Now, the American Revolution was a case where the British standing army was used forcefully against democracy, but we're seeing how it can be used in an indirect way. Protests that take place as public events where the flag is displayed are deliberately misinterpreted as against the flag and therefore against anybody who fought for it. The symbol becomes more important than the reality of a constitutional right. It's no accident that a lot of military veterans are speaking out in favor of the protests. We value the real, not the symbolic.

What ties the statues and kneeling together is the attempt to paper over reality. The statues paper over the reality that the Civil War was fought so that rich people could keep their slaves, and the kneeling controversy attempts to paper over perceived police injustices.

It's Tuesday, so have some links:

A) My book The Mars Run is featured on eBookSoda. Please share the love.

B) In regards to Black Lives Matter, a great video: Tolerance is for cowards.

C) Point Roberts, USA - An American city stranded at the tip of a Canadian peninsula.

D) Barack Obama on 5 days that shaped his Presidency.

Some links regarding policing in the USA that have been floating around in my Internet. I do find it hopeful that some of the links below are from sites that are conservative and usually heavily support police. Reality is not just for breakfast.

A) What are we asking cops to do? Dallas police chief David Brown: “We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”

B) A very conservative site notes that every organization has bad actors and we as a society need to perceive that these bad actors will be dealt with. This is not the perception when it comes to police and that's a problem.

C) I'm not a fan of Newt Gingrich, but occasionally he gets hit by reality and allows himself to respond appropriately. To wit: “It took me a long time, and a number of people talking to me through the years to get a sense of this,” Gingrich said. “If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively under-estimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk.”

D) Something that's become apparent to me as well - some cops seem to have an instinctive and deep-seated sense of threat from a black man. Combine this with poor training and training which emphasizes a rapid escalation to deadly force and you've got a toxic mixture where people are going to get killed.

Police Shootings and the Catholic Church

So I read an interesting article from a conservative news source entitled You Don’t Have To Be Black Lives Matter To Support Police Accountability. It's a bit light on root causes, but it does have a nice bit on "virtue cloaking."

Basically, virtue cloaking, well, I'll just quote the article: When a profession commands our respect, we often feel tempted to “virtue-cloak” it, insisting against all opposition that members of that profession really are what we know they should be. This is how people end up defending clearly bad police shootings, or saying criticizing police has a "chilling effect" and leads to higher crime. It's also how the Catholic Church ignored pedophilia in its ranks for far too long.

Virtue cloaking is an excuse, and like most excuses it stinks. Having said that, understanding why somebody is doing something is frequently helpful in suggesting alternative behaviors.

Plus Hilary Clinton

So I saw the news conference in which Clinton will not be criminally charged for not securing classified information. I suspect that an unspoken reason for not charging her is the high bullshit quotient of what we classify. Did you know our targeted assassination via flying robot program is top secret? In any event, the whole affair is why I'm not a big Clinton fan - it's too slick by half.

Here in the Chicago area, the Chicago PD, under heavy legal pressure, released the video of Laquan McDonald getting shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke. The shooting happened 14 months ago, but we're just now seeing it. The video is all over the Internet - Google it if you want to see it.

I'll tell you what it shows. It shows an execution. Van Dyke fired 10 seconds after arriving on scene, and was in no way threatened. The various governing bodies of the City of Chicago, who've had this video for over a year, knew that almost immediately, and paid $5 million of city taxpayer funds to the McDonald family before a lawsuit was filed.

There is clearly a problem, and not just in Chicago, but nationwide, over how we as a society deal with over-aggressive police.

Been saving this up...

A) An interesting thought on police misconduct. The author compares fear of police as equivalent to the fear of terrorism. Both are random events that could happen to anybody anywhere, where as other forms of violence can in theory be avoided.

B) What do you eat in Antarctica? The hot dog soup actually looks pretty good, but then one does not get to be my size by being a picky eater.

C) The title says it all Yes, Virginia, people of color do fucking read SF/F.

D) Speaking of science fiction, an interesting anthology having a Kickstarter.

E) Here's a video on the cause of the Civil War:

I think most people have heard something about the arrest of Sandra Bland. I haven't said much, but I find my feelings best captured by this article. Titled, "Sandra Bland's Arrest Wasn't Racism; It Was Something Even Worse" the article says:

Encinia [arresting officer] may have treated Bland differently because she was black. We can't read his mind. But it's much more likely he treated her the way he did because she didn't exhibit blind obedience to his every whim, something he was trained not to tolerate and Americans of all political persuasions seem to have acquiesced to without question.

It shouldn't be that way, not here, the land of the free and the home of the brave.