General US Politics

[PyroPlazma]

5 hours ago, Shoblongoo said:

Cops routinely respond to emergency calls and disrupt crimes in progress. The problem is thats a very, very, VERY small percentage of the work that we actually have police doing atm. 

We moved away from the idea that this is supposed to be their main job. 

They're mostly just out there now doing highway patrol, harassing motorists, and issuing ticketing citations for traffic offenses and violations of low-level municipal ordinances subject to minor fines. (because thats how The State makes its money)

...and then at some point, we also decided its their job to be the one's called out as the first line of response when someone with a mental illness or a drug habit is in crisis...

And I think one of the institutional fixes that needs to be made is that we have to move back to the idea of police-work being narrowly focused on responding to emergency calls, catching criminals, and disrupting crime.

...police aren't supposed to be social workers.
...police aren't supposed to be highway tax collectors.

Think about this: for many Americans living outside of high-crime areas, your only regular interactions with police officers are at traffic stops. 

And you actively go out of your way to avoid them.

And when you see a cop car out on the road your gut-response isn't thank you Mr. Police Officer, for Protecting our Streets.

Its Oh Fuck. Whats the speed limit?  Did I signal when I made that last turn? Are my high-beams on? Is my taillight out? Is my registration up-to-date? Whats this fucker going to pull me over for this time? 

And I think one of the most basic things we can do to restore public confidence and policing even outside the whole issue of police brutality is take that role away from them, and get them laser-focused back on stopping crimes. 

Do you have an actual citation for cops "routinely disrupting crimes in progress"? 

Besides that I agree with everything else you said. Defund the police is a good idea with a horrible name and equally horrible political optics. 

I still believe in citizens being armed regardless. 

[Armchair General]

18 minutes ago, PyroPlazma said:

Do you have an actual citation for cops "routinely disrupting crimes in progress"? 

Besides that I agree with everything else you said. Defund the police is a good idea with a horrible name and equally horrible political optics. 

I still believe in citizens being armed regardless. 

Outside of the Highway Patrol looking for speeders in the middle of no-man's-land and the occasional traffic violation, I've got nothing if we're ignoring emergency calls.

[Lord Raven]

I'm not gonna link to that cracker-cunt's Twitter, but I'm going to summarize the bile inducing bullshit I just saw.

He posted wanted posters of protesters who took down Confederate statues or assisted in it, and he's essentially calling for vigilante justice on them.

As far as I know it was generic protesters, many were black but one was white, so... He made it just broad enough that you can target anyone p much.

[DarthR0xas]

Glad that Trump's priorities are trying to hunt down people who damage confederate statues, meanwhile he knew for months that Russia has been paying the Taliban to kill American soldiers and he has done nothing about it. Frankly I was surprised there was a new low that Trump could sink to. I thought after his continued bungling of this pandemic there wasn't anything else, this was Rock bottom, but then this whole shebang comes out. 

To elaborate for anyone not in the know about what was just revealed, a report by the New York Times released yesterday stated that U.S. intelligence had deduced months ago that a Russian assassination unit had been setting up bounties on U.S. soldiers and paying the Taliban to take them out. This article states that Trump was briefed on this and proceeded to do, nothing. In fact he has still invited Russia to the G7, and has only tried to further display his trust in Russia, and his insistence on being equal with them. 
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghanistan-bounties.html
Now, the White House put out a claim today stating that the President had not been briefed on this. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/27/afghanistan-white-house-denies-trump-briefed-russia-bounty-report/3272352001/. Let's just say this is true, since frankly it's a little unbelievable but it being true makes this so much worse. This means that for months, the government has known this horrid shit that Russia is doing, and either failed or decided not to tell Trump about it. This either displays incompetence in the management of intelligent agencies, or that they don't trust Trump with this kind of information, meanwhile he is making it so much worse. And you know how you can tell that you really fucked up? Fox News is covering it, and is generally putting Trump on the bad side this time. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/lawmakers-want-answers-on-russia-paying-taliban-to-attack-us-troops

Meanwhile, the dude decides that vandalism is the most important crime in the world, and signs an executive order stating that anyone who does so to monuments, memorials, or statues will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I think that characterizes Trump the most out of everything else. Statues are more important than lives to him. It's absolutely disgusting.

[Armchair General]

In a way, it's justifiable, considering that easier to prosecute vandalism than it is to accuse someone of running an assassination ring. But he could've informed the military about it if he's so concerned about his appearance.

[Lord Raven]

I would say doing any sort of focus on vandalizing racist monuments over every other fucked up thing in this country / admin is not justifiable.

[Shoblongoo]

On 6/26/2020 at 11:10 PM, PyroPlazma said:

Do you have an actual citation for cops "routinely disrupting crimes in progress"? 

General knowledge of police operations and procedures from my line-of-work.

I'd say about ~30% of the cases that I'm working on at any given time are cases where I represent a police officer against their department in some capacity. (whistleblower retaliation of course being the big one) 

State Police, County Sheriff's Offices, and Municipal Police Departments.

These are cases where we get to subpoena internal police memoranda, comb through all their officer personnel files and incident reports, depose their internal affairs investigators and union bosses...

...just see and hear shit that the general public doesn't have access to...    
____

Its dirty. I have no rose-colored glasses when it comes to policing in America; I've probably seen more then most just how dirty it gets.

But I've also seen there are genuinely good people who go into the profession of policing because they believe in the ideal of protect-and-serve.

And I've seen the good that can come of empowering those people to come forward and do the right thing, and the profound changes that can come to a historically crooked department when even 1 or 2 good cops decide that enough is enough and they wanna blow the lid off the whole operation. 

And I can only believe that as bad as the system is: its not unreformable.

There are some very basic changes we can make to flush the bad actors out of the profession, and get higher quality individuals running our police departments. (and, more importantly, I think we're starting to reach a critical-mass of popular support behind making some of those changes) 

 

Edited June 29, 2020 by Shoblongoo

[Lord Raven]

Huffman isn't out of the woods yet.

But at least this happened. The_Donald was like 5 years too late.

Deplatforming works.

 

EDIT: 

 

Adam Serwer makes a good point. That's probably why Roberts is voting in favor of liberals here.

Edited June 29, 2020 by Lord Raven

[Armchair General]

You do realize that those subs will be back under an different name, right?

[Lord Raven]

4 minutes ago, Armchair General said:

You do realize that those subs will be back under an different name, right?

The_Donald has been gone off reddit for around 4 months. They moved to their own domain, which is still pretty bot dominated. They've moved around, but never in mass. When it got too big, they got nuked. These aren't the only bans that have happened over the last few months.

So... they haven't been back under a different name. The_Donald was thoroughly and utterly razed to the ground the last 3 months, and today's ban was only a formality.

Regardless, good luck re-making The_Donald...  it'll get nuked before it hits 5 digit subs if it's remade. Let alone the 6-7 digit subscribers it had before death.

For the record, altright got banned ages ago and they moved onto voat. And voat had server issues out the ass, they were so racist that the_donald wasn't allowed on there, and they couldn't secure funding to help their server issues.

Deplatforming works. Unification by hate simmers out when you reduce their numbers.

 

(I've been following reddit goings-ons very very closely and seeing how the admins react over time.)

Edited June 29, 2020 by Lord Raven

[Shoblongoo]

@Lord Raven

...The Court reached the correct opinion today--but holy shit--its scary that this was a 5-4 opinion...

[All Warning Signs Flashing]:  87 year old, cancer-survivor Ruth Bader Ginsburg's health holding out until the next Democratic president takes office is the only thing standing between modern American jurisprudence, and the Supreme Court taking us backwards a full 50 years.  

Edited June 29, 2020 by Shoblongoo

[Lord Raven]

Oh yeah, those never-Biden people piss me off because of it. They want to throw away any chance at progressive legislation because Sanders sucked so much at growing his base that he got blown out.

[Johann]

On 6/26/2020 at 6:18 PM, XRay said:

I think the program just needs to close the loopholes and have better oversight so it cannot be abused. Having additional rules like giving residents the priority to live in the new developmental housing with a similar size and price point that they previously lived in sounds pretty reasonable to incorporate.

I'd argue the entire HUD needs to be rebuilt from the ground up since the problems aren't limited to HOPE VI.

On 6/26/2020 at 6:18 PM, XRay said:

You have not cited any sources. If a military source is not available, an academic one or a trustworthy news source explaining how redirecting some of our military expenditure is going to better improve American interests and influence abroad would help.

• The US under Trump is increasingly isolationist, which key allies like Germany, France, and Japan are seeing as a sign that they can't count on us. Even post-Trump, in their eyes, there's nothing ensuring that we wouldn't elect another isolationist.
• Russia and China have been utilizing more methods that a traditional military isn't prepared for, like hacking servers.
• China in particular is focusing more on soft power beyond its immediate sphere of influence, while the US is losing theirs. Focusing on addressing issues like housing, healthcare, education, etc with our money is part of improving the soft power the US has.

On 6/26/2020 at 6:18 PM, XRay said:

I literally just mentioned having the government stepping in. I find your antipathy against the market to be unreasonable. Just because one portion of the market is not working does not mean you need to get rid of the entire market.

I'm saying these problems are inherent to an under-regulated market. They will continue to exist unless the government address it, and if the government steps back, the problems will reemerge.

[Tryhard]

good to know that reddit will ban places like chapotraphouse or consumeproduct in order to appear "fair"

Edited June 29, 2020 by Tryhard

[Lord Raven]

2 minutes ago, Tryhard said:

good to know that reddit will ban places like chapotraphouse in order to appear "fair"

CTH is a shit subreddit that encourages violence and doxxing all the time, wtf are you talking about 

Defending CTH is not a hill to die on, they deserved everything they got, including their quarantine

Edited June 29, 2020 by Lord Raven

[Tryhard]

7 minutes ago, Lord Raven said:

CTH is a shit subreddit that encourages violence and doxxing all the time, wtf are you talking about 

Defending CTH is not a hill to die on, they deserved everything they got, including their quarantine

i'm not defending it, I'm just noting that places like reddit will always go after what they consider both "extremes" when they do this sort of stuff.

There's several there that I don't even get why they were banned. ConsumeProduct, rightwingLGBT, ShitNeoconsSay?

Unless there's some deep conspiracy involving them I don't exactly know why they've been banned.

Edited June 29, 2020 by Tryhard

[Lord Raven]

2 minutes ago, Tryhard said:

i'm not defending it, I'm just noting that places like reddit will always go after what they consider both "extremes" when they do this sort of stuff.

There's several there that I don't even get why they were banned. ConsumeProduct, rightwingLGBT, ShitNeoconsSay?

Unless there's some deep conspiracy involving them I don't exactly know why they've been banned.

Idk about Consume product or ShitNeoconsSay but rightwingLGBT from my understanding was basically better worded as "alt right LGBT"

 

EDIT: this might explain it better

https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/shitneoconssay

Edited June 29, 2020 by Lord Raven

[Armchair General]

1 minute ago, Tryhard said:

i'm not defending it, I'm just noting that places like reddit will always go after what they consider both "extremes" when they do this sort of stuff.

There's several there that I don't even get why they were banned. ConsumeProduct, rightwingLGBT, ShitNeoconsSay?

Looking at KYM, Consume Product is just poking fun at consumerism...Which is probably hurting someone's ad revenue.

[Lord Raven]

1 minute ago, Armchair General said:

Looking at KYM, Consume Product is just poking fun at consumerism...Which is probably hurting someone's ad revenue.

Look at the overlapping subreddits.

https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/consumeproduct

This should paint the picture far better.

[Tryhard]

2 minutes ago, Lord Raven said:

Look at the overlapping subreddits.

https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/consumeproduct

This should paint the picture far better.

Guilt by association, then?

I can see that Reddit pretty much wants to remove any alt-right and dark humour subreddits from that list. Okay.

I could post on both ShitNeoconsSay because I don't like Neocons. I could post on ConsumeProduct because it would be a funny meme.

Also, Vaush is pretty high on that list, a socialist youtuber.

Seems really dumb to me.

[Lord Raven]

Just now, Tryhard said:

Guilt by association, then?

I can see that Reddit pretty much wants to remove any alt-right and dark humour subreddits from that list. Okay.

I could post on both ShitNeoconsSay because I don't like Neocons. I could post on ConsumeProduct because it would be a funny meme.

Also, Vaush is pretty high on that list, a socialist youtuber.

Seems really dumb to me.

I'm not implying a guilt by association at all. I'm surprised you missed the point, you're normally better than this, but you've been slipping the last few weeks.

Do you really not know why overlaps happen? It's not guilt by association, it's the same people post in racist ass subreddits, ergo it's very likely that there was a lot of legitimate racism and dogwhistling and anti-Semitic shit (shitNeoconsSay will lead to anti-Semitic comments in a bad faith version of it, unless somehow you missed that).

If you could judge subreddits by their name and not their content, these wouldn't make sense. But since /r/anime_titties is a world politics subreddit (no, I am not joking; /r/worldpolitics is basically /b/ after being an anime titties and onlyfans subreddit for a week, for reference) and /r/frenworld was hiding white supremacy between pepo memes, you can't trust the title of the subreddit with its content.

KotakuInAction2 is also a really racist ass subreddit too.

[Armchair General]

You are aware that guilt by association is an flawed metric, right?

[Lord Raven]

You're aware I wasn't arguing that, right?

I literally even explained that it wasn't guilt by association. I cited examples of how subreddits don't always match their name and spew racist garbage (or, well, in anime_titties' case, world politics, although I haven't seen enough of it to describe it as racist because I was way more interested in /r/worldpolitics due to the titties)

And yet you came out and said something that I explicitly rebuked as a concept, without addressing anything I said.

Seriously, do you even try?

Edited June 29, 2020 by Lord Raven

[Armchair General]

8 minutes ago, Lord Raven said:

You're aware I wasn't arguing that, right?

I literally even explained that it wasn't guilt by association. I cited examples of how subreddits don't always match their name and spew racist garbage (or, well, in anime_titties' case, world politics, although I haven't seen enough of it to describe it as racist because I was way more interested in /r/worldpolitics due to the titties)

And yet you came out and said something that I explicitly rebuked as a concept, without addressing anything I said.

Seriously, do you even try?

That list you showed me included KIA2 (which is admittedly just another news feed), soyboys, anti capitalism, lgb drop the t, and some other shit. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the aforementioned shit is in that particular sub, nor should it be held accountable for it's userbase if they're posting elsewhere.

[Lord Raven]

3 minutes ago, Armchair General said:

That list you showed me included KIA2 (which is admittedly just another news feed), soyboys, anti capitalism, lgb drop the t, and some other shit. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the aforementioned shit is in that particular sub, nor should it be held accountable for it's userbase if they're posting elsewhere.

I'm arguing the userbase likely did post bad content onto those subs. I even listed an example of what could have been posted.

The subs are shut down so all you have is internet archives, but go on /r/AgainstHateSubreddits and you may see them pop up there, with plenty of examples too.

Don't assume that it's a guilt by association or reddit trying to appear neutral. If reddit were truly trying to appear neutral, /r/politics would be out, but /r/politics isn't a radicalization chamber like The_Donald or ChapoTrapHouse, or for that matter frenworld, coontown, fatpeoplehate, and other related subreddits.

Especially since a place like The_Donald would argue their counterweight is /r/politics, not /r/ChapoTrapHouse. When /r/politics has done nothing that deserves a ban under their own TOS.

 

 

Also LGB drop the T is definitely an anti-trans subreddit. It doesn't matter what their names are if the content is steered in a certain direction. It's like how /r/aaf (for the Alliance of American Football) was lead by someone who banned anyone who posted in like /r/politics, /r/neoliberal, etc because they wanted it to be a racist breeding ground under the guise of AAF fandom.

Edited June 29, 2020 by Lord Raven