Supposedly this Twitter account has posted shit like this after every tragedy. I would take this with a large amount of salt.
Wow, CaffeineNeeded felt comfortable posting on some of the things that may have people rethinking how much he’s changed.
And, like old times, I’ll sort of come to his defense. The problem is not going to be the individual cops. It’s institutional. In the US, over the last couple decades, police have really ratcheted up the militarization and the idea that they must be 100% safe. They have a job that isn’t particularly dangerous, yet I’m sure most of them fully believe the propaganda that it is. They are instilled with a really strong sense that they are a special brotherhood and while a civilian death might be sad, a cop death is a national tragedy. The result is they wait for SWAT and tanks and robots and I understand they even held the parents back. And of course, cops lie. They lie and they think that’s the right thing to do. We need them on the walls, the bleeding hearts are making the world go to hell, thin blue line between civilization and chaos and all that.
Now, I don’t really like to follow the details of these stories, so maybe I get something a little off and I’m not going to check back, but I just wanted to offer the thought that focusing on individual cops or even departments is as unhelpful as focusing on the individual shooter.
Lower their budgets. Take away their war equipment. Take away their immunities. The barrel is rotten, not just a few of the apples in it.
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Decades of hundreds of thousands of hours of TV shows and movies portraying them as heroes doesn’t help either. TV and movie cops take on the bad guys by themselves and win all the time. Your average cop isn’t some hero like TV.
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This is a good read. Really more for those from Texas but anyone could read it.
Each revelation of new misery brings a new wave of revulsion, but—I hate to say this—as you learn more about how the social safety net works in Texas, the revulsion starts to fade, and it becomes a dull undercurrent to an awareness of the world instead of something sharp that pokes through. As it fades, so comes the realization that it has faded in the same way for those in power—and that nothing gets fixed because leaders have been immunized from caring to an even greater degree. The grid remains unsteady; children in foster care still get abused. Legislators make a show of passing partial, temporary fixes and resist looking at problems head-on. The Texas Legislature, with all its self-regard and jocularity and pride in itself as an institution, turns out to be suffused with a very dull and banal kind of evil.
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Texas official can’t hug his kids tonight… because he’s at work.
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The problem isn’t just that cops lie, but that everyone accepts those lies at face value. After an incident like this, news agencies publish stories based pretty much solely on the cops account of what happen. Sure, eventually the actual facts might come out (but that initial narrative holds).
The media also runs the cops talking points with limited pushback. A common cop refrain is to point out how they risk their lives every day for our benefit, so how dare we question them. Here the cops immediately put out the story about how they quickly engaged the shooter only to be pushed back when two of them were shot. Of course it looks like it wasn’t actually true and they were only shot at (I wouldn’t be surprised if ultimately the story isn’t that no bullets were actually directed at them, but they simply retreated when they heard shooting).
So the issue isn’t necessarily that these specific cops lied about being heroic, it’s that we as society should be skeptical of any report coming from “officials” and not just repeat cop talking points and propaganda.
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This is an issue, and also that cops are seldom held accountable for their mistakes or intentional bad actions.
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Bad NPC dialog
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There are legitimate quasi-militaristic functions that we ask police to fill. The problem is that we ask the same people to do jobs where something like a social worker is the most appropriate person to deal with the situation. Police are generalists in a world of increasing specialization and division of labor.
Defund the police was always a bad framing of what needs to be done. Repeal and replace the police would be more accurate.
I do think part of the problem of politics is that we ask politicians to be generalists, as well, so I think this is a systemic problem.
The gun lobby is going to bullshit no matter what the facts are. Competent liberals (if you can find any) should hammer home on the fact that the whole Good Guy With A Gun narrative evaporates if the most highly trained cops are helpless against AR-15s. Just keep saying Even The Cops Are Scared Of AR-15s! They must be banned!
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Prolly ponied but here ya go. Short and worth the time
https://twitter.com/amar3455/status/1529848134989406208?s=21&t=Tm1SqlWoC_SzmsYSWFZ78Q
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Criminal justice reform is a lot more lame sounding but it’s much more appropriate.
The entire apparatus of how laws define criminal activity, and how violators are identified, tried, and punished, needs to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up. Defund the police is both scary sounding and wholly inadequate—a really bad combo.
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The level of sheer terror that kid must have been in playing dead. That’s going to be a lifetime of processing.
This is why I don’t like horror movies much the older I get. My mind wanders to real life horrors like this.
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Not her class, I hope.
I love Ted Cruz pushing door control.
I don’t think there needs to be any cognitive dissonance involved. Given where ikes started he has changed a ton. You can improve a lot from that and still have all sorts of terrible views.
So CN being a changed person and still stanning for cops is not really surprising at all.
jesus christ I’m stanning for cops because I’m saying maybe just wait a minute on saying every one of them was just standing by? When that already ended up being completely untrue?
Some of ya have lost the plot.
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