“Can I pet that dog?”
Lvl70 Advanced:
“You know there’s no way you’re gonna stop me from petting that dog, right?”
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You’re an out-of-towner, right? Being any kind of outsider is all it takes really.
The lesson learned from this shouldn’t be to fantasize harder about titillating torture porn scenarios possible if you were black, but rather that black people are outsiders in America. A white person has to go out of his way to look like and/or be an outsider but a black person just has to leave their house, so, all the heinous shit that happens to white people happens a whole fuckload more to black people.
Like,
Lord have mercy this has never helped and it’s not gonna start helping now. God and I know your hearts are in the right place, and maybe we’re in best-kept-secret territory, but, the framing of this narrative is borne from the centrist liberal and compassionate conservative mindset that doesn’t actually want to see positive change . If white people were actually cognizant of and angry at the dehumanizing shit that happens to them, full-stop without any qualifiers, shit would’ve gotten a lot better a long time ago for white and black people.
(and everybody!)
Why do you think the whole band only starts playing when a black person is killed?
The years before I started playing poker I helped a friend research a book about wrongful arrests, convictions and/or sentencings. Nobody gives a fuck. Forget privileged white people, do you know hard it was to teach an average lower-middle-class urban black person to say “what were they convicted for” instead of “what did they do”? Jon Burge And Crew tortured dudes in the basements of police stations to get them to confess to murders. Nobody gave a fuck, and nobody can remember or ever knew the victims’ names.
However, when the whole world is forced to watch a snuff film that’s when delicate sensibilities are offended and polite society declares the whole affair a bridge too far, and the performative white generalized guilt and the performative black survivor’s guilt cum victimhood fetishization breaks the levees. But they don’t want anything to fundamentally change, they just don’t want to watch snuff films.
Put another way: One black person getting killed by police is one too many, but, the chances of an interaction resulting in a killing is astronomically low. What is very fucking far from astronomically low is a wrongful arrest, car impounding, ticket, that ruins your month or year or life. Motherfucking PTSD. The catch is that if the narrative is framed as “black men are getting killed by police worse than hypermegacovidfluaids” and then, conveniently, reality shows that it’s actually relatively rare, people have a built-in excuse to think everything is fine when it’s very much not fucking fine.
I know beyond knowing that posters here don’t fall in that category, and I get the impetus and release of saying “aw sheeit if you were black they woulda loaded you in a cannon and fired you into the sun”, but you need to understand that putting this out in the world inadvertently promulgates this mindset.
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Put yet one more way: you people are or were gamblers! You should intuitively suspect that results-oriented thinking is fallacious here. A random black guy getting treated gently and respectfully and a random white guy getting killed doesn’t fundamentally change systemic racism. It’s all percentages man and white supremacy has that house edge.
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One thing about being a +EV gambler is that the mindset it takes to be one never goes away. This is a really good post for this place.
Lol, well, part of me thinks part of my analysis might be fancy-play-syndrome and some could simply be boiled down to people not grasping the manifestation of basic stats and percentages. They even get something like “9 in 10 black men and 1 in 10 white men get catapulted into the moon by police” but when you actually show that one uncatapulted black guy or one catapulted white guy their brains just break.
But how much did you lose get brutalized by the police?
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Yeah… it bears mentioning that the cops above all are out there looking for good targets to make their numbers. The way they treat these good targets is a national scandal. It’s possible to be white and a good target for the cops if you stack reasons you’re vulnerable. Unfortunately ‘black’ is a pretty heavy indicator of being a good target all by itself.
A good way to think about it is that everyone has a number like a credit score over their head that determines how likely they are to get actively fucked with by the cops. Being not white is a huge modifier for getting fucked with, appearing rich/upper class is a huge modifier for not getting fucked with.
There’s an image that weirdly encapsulates white privilege that always comes to my mind. Like three years ago I was at whole foods in basketball shorts and a tshirt with a full blown quarantine beard going (it was the middle of my busy season, and I work from home… I was not presentable in any way shape or form) and I walked by this black dude…
This guy was aggressively fashionable. He’d spent more money on his haircut than I spend on clothes in six months. His clothes were clearly extremely thought out, and I’m in no way qualified to know if they were expensive or not. And it dawned on me… why am I totally comfortable going out into this pretty nice area looking like a bum, and this guy feels the need to spend huge amounts of time making sure he doesn’t look out of place?
Yeah that’s him working super hard to stack anti get fucked with modifiers to protect himself from Louisville Metro PD… (and probably to get treated with the same level of status I get through assumption at work) I of course am totally oblivious to any of this because I’m a fairly confident white guy and that’s more than good enough to keep me off the bubble.
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Right, and the thing I tell people when they’re white and been a police victim is that this should make them more empathetic, not less.
Volumes could be written about how the right commandeered this talking point and erased the ‘more empathy’ part. Totally insane mental judo-flip.
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Eh. I think people greatly underestimate how much poor whites hate the police. My wife and I are still terrified of them and we’ve been out of the ‘get fucked with’ zone for quite a few years now. There’s a kind of PTSD you get every time you see a police car.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if there were no black people, or if black people were treated exactly the same as white people are now, the way cops treat poor people would be wildly unacceptable and we would still have a prison industrial complex.
This is why reforming current law enforcement is impossible and a waste of time. They’re fucked structurally. It’s blood for the blood god at this point. They’d just find the next most vulnerable group to fuck with.
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Yea because lawyers and judges need to put food on their table. Gotta keep that gravy train coming in 24/7 somehow.
The number of people who live off of the criminal justice system in America is truly insane. It’s a huge system with many tentacles.
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Maybe it’s my bedtime but I didn’t mean to imply I was disputing this at all.
I was referring to stuff like this,
This has led some conservatives to claim that the protesters are deliberately ignoring white victims. Commentator Matt Walsh pointed to videos of two white men, Tony Timpa and Daniel Shaver, being brutally killed by police as evidence that only black killings get attention and that police brutality is not a reflection of systemic racism. At Townhall, Mike Adams wrote an article entitled “White Man Can’t Breathe,” noting that there had not been “George Soros-funded protests” or “Antifa riots” in response to the Timpa killing, and implied a lack of them would show “political opportunism.”
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Yeah I think it’s that it’s early in the morning and I’m sleepy. I don’t think we actually disagree here.
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There is certainly a lot of results oriented posting on poker websites.
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QFT
And a lot of people protesting the fact that Black people are much more likely to be catapulted into the moon still absolutely want the police. Many of them want to increase police budgets and require cops with philosophy degrees. The BLM protest on my block turned into a half-circle jerk about how thank God our local police are good guys.
With there being 10,000+ different law enforcement agencies in the US there are going to be a few of them that do good work… but even they have some pretty screwed up incentives pushing them to be worse, and if leadership changes and brings in more typical commanders they’ll rapidly regress to the mean with a retirement or two.
Nothing about the above is sustainable and it renders almost every ‘good police department’ story anecdotal. They exist, but are about as relevant to what we should do as the x#ofgreats grandma everyone seems to have had who lived to be 97 despite subsisting on cigarettes and gin.
Trying to get someone to travel from the anecdotal to the systemic, in the face of motivated reasoning, is almost always an unsuccessful task. If you think about it, that’s what a large amount of our ‘vigorous debating’ here & elsewhere consists of.
Examples here & elsewhere…
Defund cops -vs- ‘nice’ cop stories
Abolish landlords -vs- ‘nice’ landlord stories
WTF priests molesting -vs- ‘nice’ priest stories
BLM -vs- non-white folk killing white folk stories
etc/etc
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Lvl 256 Advanced:
“Can I paint that dog?”
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Really? What do they do?