Why "All Lives Matters" is wrong

[Farm Boy]

Michael Brown wasn't locked up, though, and "or" seems far too small a word to bridge the gulf between those two outcomes. At least, I imagine, so far as his friends and family are concerned.

It's all very well adding such qualifications in abstract, declaring yourself most deeply in favour of due process and reasonable doubt, but that's going to be precious little consolation for those attending the funeral.

Ok, I'll own it. I find it acceptable that Michael Brown was killed when he grappled for an officer's service revolver. There are a hella lot of injustices going on that caused it to be so. I do not find that acceptable. The officer was inept, yes. I do not find that acceptable. But in that situation? Yeap.

 

[Lexicus]

I guess it's not so much fascism 101 as fairy tales white people tell themselves and each other to avoid confronting the reality that the police murder people all the time. But fairy tales we tell each other to excuse x are certainly one of the most important foundations upon which fascism builds.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Is that for me or Farm Boy? If its for me, I don't think you read my whole post...

 

[SkeleTony]

Similarity is in the effect, not the position. In this particular environment, we have people who consistently say totally irrational things and claim to be rationalists, people who consistently support any political proposal or candidate as long as it is Republican who claim to be independents, people who will support absolutely any fascist regime or scheme who claim to be libertarians. Just look at the conversation I'm having with Ryika. He persistently claims to be "left of center," but with 5000 posts of history to draw from he is generally recognized as an advocate for the most extreme positions of the alt-right. He is trying to come across to a new person like yourself as a kindred spirit under attack from extremists because you might give his arguments more credibility than those of us who have come to know him will.

For all I know that could be 100% accurate as I have not read any of his or anyone else' previous posts here but I would hasten to point out that you are possibly coming off as a political purist here. I myself have been called a "Right Wing hack" by Liberals because I did not support alternative medicine, Black Lives Matter or this transgender rights mess that is going on now. And I have been called a "Liberal neckbeard" (and worse) by Right wingers for not supporting a crap-ton of Conservative beliefs/policies (such as denying what should be the rights of every citizen because they want the wealthy to pay nothing (or as close to nothing as they can get) in taxes). That is another reason why I prefer the term "rationalist" as an identifier. In the end, though the overwhelming majority of my political beliefs fall to the Left, this is not because I have some strange fondness for the term "Liberal" but rather because my understanding of these issues and my rationalism/skepticism leads me to certain conclusions which happen to fall on the Left most of the time.
But again, for all I know Ryika really is an 'Alt-Right' advocate but in my experience (again, very limited) it is more likely that he, like I, take some positions rationally and because many on the Left have this firm belief that contesting the BLM movement or saying Mumia Abu Jamal was guilty of murdering a cop = racism.

I'm not surprised that you say you haven't seen such, because this is a pretty unique environment as the internet goes. There is 'social media,' where people generally are known to some extent. They also generally are commenting to 'followers' who are such because they for the most part agree. Then there is the anonymity of the comments sections, where there is hardly any way to become known unless you are willing to just make a career out of constantly commenting on article after article and might eventually have a few people recognize your screen name. Then there is this forum.

An aside but I am almost completely ignorant of Twitter(never used it or tried to view any 'Tweets' save for those I see on TV or elsewhere) and have not had a Facebook account since 2011 -and that was a brief affair, though I did have and enjoy MySpace...back when it was far superior to Facebook.

The number of regular users here is small enough that it is possible (and in fact inevitable) to become known, but because of the public nature of it there is no homogeneity of beliefs. Our 'usual fascists' will be jumped on by the people who regularly jump on fascists, even if they aren't saying anything particularly fascist at the moment. Our 'usual bullies' will be accused of bullying by those who are sensitive even if they aren't at that particular moment. Our 'usual left wing extremists' will be called communists even when they aren't saying anything particularly extreme at the moment. Because we do 'know' each other, at least as well as it is possible over the internet. There are, of course, those who you always wonder if they are presenting a persona, but if they are going to do that here they have to be pretty consistent about it.

I personally find the uniqueness very attractive, and hope that you will participate enough, for long enough, to become another known individual here.

Thank you for that. From your description it sounds like this place is not terribly unlike most other forums I visit. Some are unfiltered/uncensored and will cause my eyes to bleed if I read too much of them. Some are extremely heavy on the censorship and do not allow any sort of politically incorrect posting. Most are somewhere between those extremes but all have their 'old' members, their 'been here for 1+ years' members and new folks and all of them tend to have a majority who denounce specific posters for what they post. I think most often this is deserved as there is always some poster offering racist or misogynistic or otherwise bigoted nonsense but every once in a while there is someone like me (and possibly Rykia for all I know). I have been banned from a forum twice in my life: Once for defending atheism at an atheist debate subforum at the 'Praize' site and once for contesting the validity of the Ancient Aliens TV series at a marijuana legalization advocacy site. But as I said earlier I have also been attacked Left, Right and Center for taking 'rationalist' positions on issues which people assumed to be some form of bigotry or political bias. Very often people attacking me have said to others 'You don't know him like we do. He is a Dittohead/Religionist/hater of art/hater of comic books/Liberal extremist/etc....'.

 

[SkeleTony]

I guess it's not so much fascism 101 as fairy tales white people tell themselves and each other to avoid confronting the reality that the police murder people all the time. But fairy tales we tell each other to excuse x are certainly one of the most important foundations upon which fascism builds.

Can you substantiate this fantastic claim? I mean granted there have been police who murdered (and fairly recently) but saying they murder people all the time is like saying black men rape white women all the time or some such.

 

[Lexicus]

Is that for me or Farm Boy? If its for me, I don't think you read my whole post...

More just an addendum to my post, but I'm not sure why you think I didn't read your whole post

Can you substantiate this fantastic claim? I mean granted there have been police who murdered (and fairly recently) but saying they murder people all the time is like saying black men rape white women all the time or some such.

What is fantastic about it? The police kill hundreds of people per year, certainly greater than 1 per day on average. It's impossible to say with precision because there aren't good statistics. Let's be conservative and say the police kill 700 people per year. Now, here's where you're almost certainly going to scoff but I'm going to again be conservative and say that half those killings are not really necessary to protect the life of an officer or of other people. I think the real percentage is much higher. Going with my conservative assumptions here then I think I have a moral case that the police murder 350 per year, which in my mind qualifies as "all the time" since it's a murder nearly every day of the year. Note I say moral case because of course, legally the police have wide latitude to kill people and they routinely get away with things they do that would be considered murder if I did them (let alone if a black person did).
Indirectly of course the police serve to prop up an unjust system that I would argue results in many millions of unjustified deaths per year. That, though, is a level of moral culpability that I'm unwilling to call "murder" even to make a political statement. The police are just foot soldiers in that war.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Can you substantiate this fantastic claim? I mean granted there have been police who murdered (and fairly recently) but saying they murder people all the time is like saying black men rape white women all the time or some such.

What is fantastic about it? The police kill hundreds of people per year, certainly greater than 1 per day on average.

How many people do you have to murder to be considered "murdering all the time"? I mean, did Jeffery Dahmer murder people "all the time", or does it have to be like brushing your teeth to be "all the time"?

For events of enough significance, I think multiple, infrequent occurrences can constitute "all the time"... like Brady wins the Superbowl all the time. If you've killed 3 people in 15 years, I think that qualifies plenty to say that you're killing people all the time.

More just an addendum to my post, but I'm not sure why you think I didn't read your whole post

Ignore that, I was just mistaken about what you were talking about

 

[SkeleTony]

What is fantastic about it? The police kill hundreds of people per year, certainly greater than 1 per day on average.

The police KILL many criminals who are threatening harm or death to others. You claimed that police "murder people all the time".

It's impossible to say with precision because there aren't good statistics.

You can visit the FBI's web site which keeps statistics for such but I will warn you ahead of time you will not find much support for your claims there.

Let's be conservative and say the police kill 700 people per year. Now, here's where you're almost certainly going to scoff but I'm going to again be conservative and say that half those killings are not really necessary to protect the life of an officer or of other people.

I am not going to scoff. I am going to ask you to substantiate your speculative assertions here. This falls apart for the same reason ALL conspiracy theories fall apart. The Rube Goldberg syndrome If police were murdering that many people as you speculate, in this age of camera phones how would this country still be around today?!

I think the real percentage is much higher.

Do tell.

If that's the case then I think I have a moral case that the police murder 350 per year, which in my mind qualifies as "all the time" since it's a murder nearly every day of the year.
Indirectly of course the police serve to prop up an unjust system that I would argue results in many millions of unjustified deaths per year. That, though, is a level of moral culpability that I'm unwilling to call "murder" even to make a political statement.

While of course I agree that the system is not 100% just, even today (though compared to just 20 or 30 years ago it is a shining beacon of justice!) but I do not understand how you get to where you are at on this? It sounds like you are prone to call any police killing "murder" unless they are shooting a guy who is aiming a gun at a small child or some such. It also sounds like you are one of those who consider capital punishment "murder" and believe there are countless innocent people on death row at any given time.

Those are pretty extraordinary claims and I am asking for a similar degree of evidence supporting such.

 

[Lexicus]

You can visit the FBI's web site which keeps statistics for such but I will warn you ahead of time you will not find much support for your claims there.

No it doesn't. The FBI doesn't track all law enforcement killings.

I am not going to scoff. I am going to ask you to substantiate your speculative assertions here. This falls apart for the same reason ALL conspiracy theories fall apart. The Rube Goldberg syndrome If police were murdering that many people as you speculate, in this age of camera phones how would this country still be around today?!

Are you kidding? The guy that even you agree murdered a man, the officer who shot the man as he was running away and was caught on camera, got a mistrial because the jury couldn't even agree that he was guilty of manslaughter. This argument falls apart of its own accord.

Do tell.

What more is there to tell? I'll be generous and say that perhaps a third of police shootings are really justified. Of those a large fraction could be prevented by implementing better practices. In other countries the police shoot proportionally far fewer people.

While of course I agree that the system is not 100% just, even today (though compared to just 20 or 30 years ago it is a shining beacon of justice!) but I do not understand how you get to where you are at on this? It sounds like you are prone to call any police killing "murder" unless they are shooting a guy who is aiming a gun at a small child or some such. It also sounds like you are one of those who consider capital punishment "murder" and believe there are countless innocent people on death row at any given time.

Those are pretty extraordinary claims and I am asking for a similar degree of evidence supporting such.

It's marginally better than it was 20 or 30 years ago, certainly not a shining beacon of justice by comparison.
Capital punishment as a whole isn't murder but it inevitably leads to murder unless you're suggesting the state never executes innocent people.

 

[W|M]

The violence of the individual is known as ''crime'', while the violence of the state is known as ''law''

Can you substantiate this fantastic claim? I mean granted there have been police who murdered (and fairly recently) but saying they murder people all the time is like saying black men rape white women all the time or some such.

I live in a country where, by very conservative estimates, cops killed over 2500 people in 2014, or seven per day, with 582 of those deaths being in the state where I live in (Source in Portuguese). In the US, at least around 1100 people were killed by cops in one year

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Ok, I'll own it. I find it acceptable that Michael Brown was killed when he grappled for an officer's service revolver. There are a hella lot of injustices going on that caused it to be so. I do not find that acceptable. The officer was inept, yes. I do not find that acceptable. But in that situation? Yeap.

The problem I have with this is that it isolates "that situation." Routine officer ineptness is eventually going to get someone shot. In this case it did happen to be a "dangerous shoplifter" so the killing is "justified," but that's isolating this case as if the "eventually" isn't a significant part of the statement. And this "routine officer ineptness" is built inside a philosophical framework of "if my ineptness/attitude/behavior creates a confrontation my gun will get me out of it intact and the law is on my side." That philosophical framework is what I really have a problem with.

 

[Lexicus]

The problem I have with this is that it isolates "that situation." Routine officer ineptness is eventually going to get someone shot. In this case it did happen to be a "dangerous shoplifter" so the killing is "justified," but that's isolating this case as if the "eventually" isn't a significant part of the statement. And this "routine officer ineptness" is built inside a philosophical framework of "if my ineptness/attitude/behavior creates a confrontation my gun will get me out of it intact and the law is on my side." That philosophical framework is what I really have a problem with.

And before anyone says this is a price we have to pay to let cops do their job, consider that Zimmerman basically got off on the same principle.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

You can visit the FBI's web site which keeps statistics for such but I will warn you ahead of time you will not find much support for your claims there.

No it doesn't. The FBI doesn't track all law enforcement killings.

Without wanting to step too far into the middle of this; as a point of fact Lexicus is correct here.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

And before anyone says this is a price we have to pay to let cops do their job, consider that Zimmerman basically got off on the same principle.

Ah, the glory of a "stand your ground" state.

 

[W|M]

The glory of white supremacy

 

[Farm Boy]

The problem I have with this is that it isolates "that situation." Routine officer ineptness is eventually going to get someone shot. In this case it did happen to be a "dangerous shoplifter" so the killing is "justified," but that's isolating this case as if the "eventually" isn't a significant part of the statement. And this "routine officer ineptness" is built inside a philosophical framework of "if my ineptness/attitude/behavior creates a confrontation my gun will get me out of it intact and the law is on my side." That philosophical framework is what I really have a problem with.

No, I don't want that officer back on the streets. I want officers that are that inept removed from patrol. But do I have a problem with people who attack and attempt to disarm officers during stops winding up dead? No. No I don't.

It's the same reason I have a problem with the big lot of you who called for dead hicks out in Oregon, but haven't particularly been mad at the officer who wasted LaVoy. I'd be even more tired of it if it happened more often. So while, sure, I don't get it get it, I try and pray that I never actually do.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

No, I don't want that officer back on the streets. I want officers that are that inept removed from patrol. But do I have a problem with people who attack and attempt to disarm officers during stops winding up dead? No. No I don't.

Which is understandable. Heck, I might even agree in a general way if the term "during stops" wasn't so nebulous.

Does it count as "during a stop" if there is no defensible legal grounds for making the stop in the first place?

Does it count as "during a stop" if you have been "invited" to enjoy a little backseat therapy to "adjust your attitude" and would have genuine grounds for a self defense claim if the other person didn't have a badge?

Unfortunately I think that the blanket condemnation of "people who attack and attempt to disarm police officers during a stop" feeds directly into that philosophical framework that I pointed to earlier as the BIG problem.

 

[SkeleTony]

Oh, sorry, I misread your post as asking what was the connection between racism and nationalism. My mistake.

However, your rhetorical question has a good answer.

It was not a rhetorical question.

Most of the Enlightenment philosophers who made "rationality" popular to modern audiences were also virulent racists who not only attached essentialist concepts of identity to people but supported and even (in the case of e.g. John Locke) participated in unspeakable atrocities against them.

First of all, can you substantiate this assertion (about "most of the enlightenment philosophers..." participated in overt racist atrocities against minorities.)? Secondly you are committing an ad hominem against a group of people who were by and large abolitionists and/or inspired such in people like Abraham Lincoln.

But thirdly and perhaps most importantly you run into a mess here trying to attack people for "racism" in the context of people who lived over 200 years ago. You might as well be attacking them for not supporting women's right to work or gay rights or what have you. Like it or not morality evolves over time. If you were born in 1745 you would likely be a racist as you grew up and possibly until your death. Especially if you did not favor the enlightenment.

The standard postmodern arguments against the edifice of the Enlightenment apply here: it is a construct which historically was deployed to justify power structures we consider to be barbaric and unjust today.

How so? It seems clear to me that the enlightenment thinkers are overwhelmingly responsible for the very values we hold today including tolerance/acceptance and secularism.

The white supremacist project of colonial empire was held up by plenty of self-described 'rationalists'...

Name one. Name a single self-described "rationalist" (a term that was very rare back then and was more commonly employed as a label for a specific theistic-religious group from hundreds of years prior) who advocated for a "white supremacist project of colonial empire." I am not contesting the fact that racism played a major role in America (and still does though I think the current trend of the 'alt-Right' movement is most likely the death throws of such) but you said "self-described "rationalists"." here.

as an advanced, "rational" European civilization bringing the irrational primitives in the rest of the world into the light of modernity.

Quite possible...even likely I would say of many but that bears little relevance to your claims here unless you are presupposing that all such men were somehow "rationalists" (taking note of the great differences in what various usages of that term entail)

If you're gonna identify as a rationalist, you must be made to grapple with the historical baggage: you can't escape it.

I am fully prepared to grapple with any actual historical baggage -to the extent that it is somehow relevant to what we are discussing here, but I will not assume historical baggage that you baldly assert exists.

Of course, to my mind making "rationalist" the be-all and end-all of your intellectual identity is a bit...I dunno...flavorless? Thin? In the modern day I'd say it definitely implies a kind of neutrality or position "above the fray" that must inevitably be an affectation, a pose.

Well I do not have the inclination to contest your unqualified feelings about rationalism. I am not exactly sure what you mean by "the be-all and end-all of your intellectual ability" so I will ignore that for now.

 

[Berzerker]

Justifying the police murdering a man who was running away because he was afraid of getting arrested due to an outstanding warrant for child support, because getting arrested would get him fired from his job that he got to pay his child support, on the basis of a half-baked hypothetical scenario in which the man runs a bunch of people over in his car is like fascism 101

Oh, okay... I thought he said something like "citizenship and morality require taxes for enriching politicians and their corporate donors". I read his post and I dont see where he justified murder, even in his hypothetical the cop was and should be in jail. I'm not sure why he wandered off on that tangent, but I can see where you went with it now.

 

[Farm Boy]

Which is understandable. Heck, I might even agree in a general way if the term "during stops" wasn't so nebulous.

Does it count as "during a stop" if there is no defensible legal grounds for making the stop in the first place?

Does it count as "during a stop" if you have been "invited" to enjoy a little backseat therapy to "adjust your attitude" and would have genuine grounds for a self defense claim if the other person didn't have a badge?

Unfortunately I think that the blanket condemnation of "people who attack and attempt to disarm police officers during a stop" feeds directly into that philosophical framework that I pointed to earlier as the BIG problem.

Ok, then take it for the original statement. I find it acceptable Michael Brown is dead. I also find the general response to Michael Brown's death understandable, and worthy of support, if not necessarily the rioting, but w/e. We have to have a philosophical disagreement somewhere.