[RD] George Floyd and protesting while black

[Seon]

This is true, but “libertarianism” only exists in relation to opposing the Democrats, specifically the progressive wing of the Democrats, the New Deal, and opposing measures that will threaten the societal status quo and hierarchy.

saying that they have done so since the twenties would be a misnomer because they didn’t exist. They did not claim to be anything aside from fascist or other form of authoritarian right wing then.

 

[Crezth]

Libertarians have always been about justifying keeping the property they stole by plunder and imperialism, so if you think about it, it’s a class struggle, goddamnit.

 

[Seon]

When you think about it, the idea that “free market” ideology is meaningfully and ideologically distinct and independent from rest of the right is a weird claim.

And the claim that anti-interventionism necessarily means free market, rather than any other form of anarchism, is doubly so.

This requires us to examine why we believe certain non-interventionism is right wing and certain non-interventionism is left wing and the only answer I could come up with was.. because that’s what libertarians say.

this creates a circular logic loop without any real insight, so libertarianism is indistinguishable from either anarchism or authoritarian right, depending on whether you believe genuinely in non-interventionism and anti establishmentsrianism or in previlege and property rights, and so does not actually exist.

 

[El_Machinae]

You know, statistically, if you're defending a 'general principle' that has an opportunity cost of hurting some people (and there is opportunity cost to all policies, make no mistake), then there will be a spread of victims. If you're only presented victims with a specific identifying feature, it looks like you're defending victimization of that cohort. It might not be a fair representation of your beliefs, but a poor experimental design on the people confronting that belief. It would like only examining the people who died after treatment to see if a drug is useful.

You test the belief by presenting examples against the presumed bias, to see if the belief is then changed or maintained. This is why showing people a cameraman getting punched out by a cop taught them that their belief "the police aren't too violent" actually was based in racism. Since most people don't realize how racist they are, the cameraman punching created dissonance in them.

But there are some people who were in favour of police abuses, and weren't necessarily actually racist about it. If they'd only been presented with cases of cops punching black people, they'd be accused of 'racism'. But if they shrug with a 'serves them right' when seeing the cameraman getting punched out, you know that they're just regular 'ol authoritarian and not necessarily racist.

To test if someone is 'okay' with a harmful policy due to racism, you need to present cases of where the policy hurt someone outside that cohort. It might be that they're just okay with the policy.

 

[Crezth]

Being a regular ol' authoritarian in the context of American society, where authoritarianism primarily keeps Black communities down, qualifies as "racist" I think. It's not like you pulled these people out of a vacuum. They come from a society where the use of force against Black populations is normalized and, surprise surprise, that's what they justify.

What's interesting to consider is whether being an authoritarian in a white supremacist society also helps you justify the use of force against whites sometimes. It does seem that is the case with the number of white victims of the police that get used as a political tool by pro-police people as proof they're not racist.

 

[El_Machinae]

Being a regular ol' authoritarian in the context of American society, where authoritarianism primarily keeps Black communities down, qualifies as "racist" I think. It's not like you pulled these people out of a vacuum. They come from a society where the use of force against Black populations is normalized and, surprise surprise, that's what they justify.

"Racism" really often needs an adjective: systemic racism, personally racist, etc. Some of the conversation gets lost when people flit between the concepts

There will be a difference between "approving of a beating if they mainly target POC" and "approving of beating despite the fact that they mainly target POC". Maybe not a difference in effect, but it's a difference in motivation that can be targeted for confrontation.

 

[Seon]

Libertarians appear to tend to approve of beatings in general, and will switch tact if necessary with classic cases of whatabouttism.

for instance, their true goal is to preserve the police state which protects rich and business interests. In Floyd murder, their claim is that this protests aren’t genuinely to stop police brutality or for universal gain of reforming the police because there weren’t similar protests re other deaths of poor whites or other minorities. In this regard, they are authoritarians who are willing to further racist rhetorics to preserve the status quo which also harms every other underclass in American society, including poor and low-middle class whites.

I am 99% sure if mass protests had erupted over the brutal murder of a white woman and not Floyd they would be pointing at Floyd’s death to show that the protesters are being racist or sexist or both.

In addition note how their key policy measure which they claim will solve race related issue is to end all welfare, which will not only materially harm the most vulnerable of blacks and Latino population, but also the poor and middle class whites across America.

 

[Crezth]

"Racism" really often needs an adjective: systemic racism, personally racist, etc. Some of the conversation gets lost when people flit between the concepts

There will be a difference between "approving of a beating if they mainly target POC" and "approving of beating despite the fact that they mainly target POC". Maybe not a difference in effect, but it's a difference in motivation that can be targeted for confrontation.

Yeah, I understand this. But there's a bit of chicken and egg here because the context that people are socialized and become aware of police brutality is that context of a system designed specifically to criminalize and incarcerate blacks. And we have decades (not to mention centuries) of cultural material building that up: the war on drugs, the portrayal of black communities as lawless, and a tireless public narrative about the fragile state of law & order.

What I'm saying is it's no accident that a person justifying police brutality in the US is sympathetic to a system that is so explicitly and oftentimes purposefully racist. There are of course hundreds of small areas where a little bit of racial bias adds up to something big, but systematic racism is self-reproducing by engendering in the people it serves the mindset of its reproduction. All you need to do is be a not-particularly-racist authoritarian to promote the continuation of one of the most racist policing systems ever devised. This is also probably the logic of every poor white joining in the slave patrols of two centuries ago: it's not a coincidence that they're racist and that the system offers them employment in the maintenance of racism.

I feel somewhat compelled to quote the refreshingly candid confession of John Erlichman:

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Taken from Harper's Magazine.

So to recap, taking this quote, anybody can say with some amount of plausible deniability they aren't racist, they're just "against drugs." But why are they against drugs, and what does it mean to be against drugs in a society that has demonized drugs in order to maintain white power? It may be an innocuous position... but if nothing else, it is foundational support for an unjust status quo.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

We need to stop giving conservatives the benefit of the doubt, their views and politics are fundamentally harmful to minorities

 

[Seon]

Not only the minority, but the majority.

 

[Takhisis]

When have they ever? Right-Libertarians have always Caucased with authoritarians and racists since the 50s. Their rhetoric evolved out of realization that head on confrontation on matters of economic and racial injustice is no longer possible. American popular opinion have been steadily turning against the idea that the rich should have more power than them and that the whites can openly discriminate against blacks for over a century at this point. Their ultimate goal is thus to reverse engineer the country backwards in time to mid-century Virginia minus the open segregation.


This is why libertarians also tend to be anti-democratic and supportive of oligarchic rule. As Tyler Cowen, one of the most important thinkers in the libertarian movement said: “freest countries have not generally been democratic.” Rothbard and Rockwell, central figures in Libertarian movement, penned racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic newsletters for Ron Paul.

In Democracy: the God that Failed, written by libertarian Hans Hermann Hoppe, states : “A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person, but falls instead in the same moral category as an animal — of either the harmless sort (to be domesticated and employed as a producer or consumer good, or to be enjoyed as a “free good”) or the wild and dangerous one (to be fought as a pest).”

To believe that libertarianism is a separate ideology from run of the mill authoritarian conservatism, albeit with good press for luring faux intellectuals, would be ignoring history and their own writing throughout the last century.

It's caucus with a u, but I can see why you made the typo.

 

[Seon]

Admittedly it’s because my phone autocorrected to Caucasian when I typed in caucused and I only half corrected it

 

[Berzerker]

It's really weird seeing you not distinguish between agents of the state vs regular citizenry. In what bill of rights does it say that the State has the same presumption of innocence that the citizenry does?

Where does the BoR say 'citizens' are presumed innocent? When a cop is charged with murder, he is no longer 'the state', he's just a person with the same due process rights as everyone else.

Oh FFS, Takhisis isnt disagreeing with the presumption of innocence.

Yes he is... "So police, or anybody else for that matter, killing somebody else is supposed to be justified until and unless proven otherwise? Is this what you've come to?"

Therefore he thinks killing someone is unjustified until proven otherwise.

Anybody defending a cop killing a suspect absolutely is. Especially when the deceased is accused of anything less than a capital offense.

The cop is removing that person's right to a trial and presumption of innocence by dispensing judgment and punishment themselves.

The presumption of innocence refers to a defendant on trial for a crime, not a cop arresting or killing a suspect.

Since when did "innocent until proven guilty" mean "we can't assume a dead body with a bullet hole in it and a man holding a smoking gun nearby means a murder happened." Like... that evidence is pretty damn circumstantial for a murder.

Unless you're using a special definition of the word "murder," which I guess would be a great tool for any Orwellian state to deny it kills citizens.

Assuming a homicide is murder presumes guilt, not innocence.

This is not correct. He is on record saying agents of the state should be held at less stringent moral obligation and burden of proof than regular citizenry, so he does distinguish between agents of state and normal people.

I never said cops get a less stringent burden of proof. And dont you mean a more stringent burden since its the prosecutors with the burden, not the accused cop?

My comment about riot cops getting more leeway from the population referred to the court of public opinion. Cops have that luxury when responding to rioters and looters, they didn't have that luxury when they unleashed water cannons and dogs on MLK's peaceful protests.

Cops "who kill people" don't deserve the presumption of innocence. If they can't satisfactorily explain why they killed someone they should be locked up.

There ya go, guilty til proven innocent. During a trial the defendant doesn't have to say anything, the burden of proving guilt is on the state. Now are you going to answer my question? You said I only believe in the presumption of innocence when black people are killed, so when have I argued cops who kill non-black people dont deserve the presumption of innocence?

The thing is that wrongful killing is defined in law (in the real universe, not wherever Libertarians reside mentally) as killing somebody (the killing, obviously) and without justification.

Libertarians define a wrongful killing as justified?

If you want to argue that you're justified then the burden of proof is on you. As I said before, the killer has to justify the killing.

In our system the killer doesn't have to do anything.

As Lexicus says, Berzerker's arguments shift around to accommodate whosever turn it has latest been to have killed a member of the African-American community. Vigilantes, militiamen, law enforcement are all to be given their freedom, just as Berzerker (a self-admitted vocal defender of the KKK) occasionally tries to spin his defence of freedom™ as the free right to take other people's freedom away a.k.a. slavery.

Now that you're done spinning, I've defended the free speech rights of KKK protesters. When did I say people are free to enslave others? As for Lexicus, where has my argument shifted to accommodate anyone?

I'm not sure why he's specifying ‘non-black’ people.

Lex said I only believe in the presumption of innocence when black people are killed. That means according to his 'logic', I dont support the presumption of innocence for cops who kill non-black people. He'll have to explain what happens when the killers are black too.

 

[Takhisis]

Libertarians define a wrongful killing as justified?

You do.

Lex said I only believe in the presumption of innocence when black people are killed. That means according to his 'logic', I dont support the presumption of innocence for cops who kill non-black people. He'll have to explain what happens when the killers are black too.

He already has explained that. At this point you are, yet again, pretending not to have read the thread.

 

[Crezth]

Assuming a homicide is murder presumes guilt, not innocence.

Yeah, usually a dead person and a smoking gun means police start looking for murder suspects. Unless that suspect is a police officer or the victim is black.

 

[Berzerker]

You do.

He already has explained that. At this point you are, yet again, pretending not to have read the thread.

Which wrongful death did I say was justified and what was his explanation?

Yeah, usually a dead person and a smoking gun means police start looking for murder suspects. Unless that suspect is a police officer or the victim is black.

What happens when the suspect is a cop and the victim is white? You dont make any distinction between homicides and murders?

I feel somewhat compelled to quote the refreshingly candid confession of John Erlichman:

So to recap, taking this quote, anybody can say with some amount of plausible deniability they aren't racist, they're just "against drugs." But why are they against drugs, and what does it mean to be against drugs in a society that has demonized drugs in order to maintain white power? It may be an innocuous position... but if nothing else, it is foundational support for an unjust status quo.

The Black Caucus met with Nixon to urge and endorse his drug war and Democrats wrote most of the laws. Now they lecture the rest of us about racism and police brutality

 

[Takhisis]

Which wrongful death did I say was justified and what was his explanation?

At this point you are, yet again, pretending not to have read the thread.

Thank the Lord for the quick quote feature.

 

[Berzerker]

I've read the thread, at no point did Lex show where I oppose the presumption of innocence for cops who kill non-black people.

 

[Crezth]

What happens when the suspect is a cop and the victim is white? You dont make any distinction between homicides and murders?

In that case I think the libertarians just ignore it and vote for Trump.

The Black Caucus met with Nixon to urge and endorse his drug war and Democrats wrote most of the laws. Now they lecture the rest of us about racism and police brutality

Speaking personally, as a libertarian, all I care about is that my preferred political candidate wins the election and continues doing government tyranny things but with my consent.

 

[Berzerker]

In that case I think the libertarians just ignore it and vote for Trump.

Speaking personally, as a libertarian, all I care about is that my preferred political candidate wins the election and continues doing government tyranny things but with my consent.

I dont think Trump got much of a libertarian vote, they're kinda in the open/free market camp. And the most tyrannical domestic policy of the last half century has been the drug war and the Democrats' fingerprints are all over that murder weapon. I guess they just ignore it and vote for Biden.