Concerning the US Protests and Our Rules

[Dennis]

@anon763

Because I read the first post, which is basically asking people to do the opposite of that. And to go to the general forum for that.

But it seems this became the compilation/mega thread. So I guess I'm wrong here.

 

[Tlos]

@Dennis “However, if you'd like to discuss the protests, you're free to do so in the general forum and in this thread.” From the first post. Yeah... you are wrong here lol

 

[portable]

@Halo is this supposed to be a compliment ?
Yeah clearly all this shit is about police violence. I wonder why the word I heard the most is racism if this is about police violence.

 

[Dennis]

@Tlos Can you believe I read over that twice? Unbelievable, lol.

 

[hokito]

Jesus Christ, I didn't know how many obnoxious and covert racist people use this site until I read this thread.

 

[SilentSal]

I'm only here to make a statement.

I have a huge dong.

 

[Kipsta]

I wish this didn't need an announcement post. Even a fucking black&white drawing collection platform turns into politics. 🤮

 

[Halo]

@portable
This one is good. Using the rationale of primary advocates to dismiss the cause altogether. Sneaky, I like it.

 

[a-rabid-velociraptor]

So, I guess everyone is ok with this whole defund/dismantle police thing right. I mean come on, how could that POSSIBLY go wrong.

 

[Purplelibraryguy]

@TKB25 Apologies, fine, you're an evil man. But though you may claim to hate politics, you clearly have a strong political outlook whether you think you do or not. You are on the side which has property and therefore believe property damage is more important than lives. (Whether you yourself have any property or not, you're on the billionaires' side, which may mean you're actually against your own self; that's the problem with having politics that you never bothered to think about because you "hate politics")

@a-rabid-velociraptor That's not a serious comment, because virtually nobody is seriously advancing such a demand (you can always find someone, but you don't want to go there when you consider some of the kooky and/or genocidal demands of parts of the right wing white community). But I'll take it seriously anyway: One of the major things that brought us to where we are is that, while middle class and higher neighbourhoods would certainly be worse off with no police, it's likely that poor non-white neighbourhoods would on balance be better off. They'd lose a bit from increased crime, but they'd gain a considerable amount from not being regularly harassed, brutalized, fined, and jailed by the police. Consider that one thing people on this thread are massively upset about is property damage--but the police themselves do a lot of property damage every day, breaking in doors, destroying much of the property in people's homes looking for evidence of crime, and so on. Nobody adds it up, but the annual total has to be many times higher than the amount done by the recent protests. Often they steal people's belongings based on allegations that those belongings are the proceeds of crime; they don't have to convict the person of a crime, or even charge them, they basically just take their stuff. They go after those least able to fight back in court, and we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Probably the loss from increase in theft wouldn't come close to matching what they'd gain from not having the cops stealing from them. Then there's the loss of income caused by so many people being dragged off to jail, the loss of income after they return from jail due to ex-cons finding it very difficult to get hired, all the fines, tickets, fees, fines for failing to pay fees and tickets, interest charged on fines, tickets and fees, and so on and so forth--city hall uses poor communities as a revenue centre by creating all that stuff. Overall, even if loss of police presence was replaced by basically nothing, they'd probably be significantly better off.

But they'd be way better off with no police but with the Black Panthers from back in the 60s, or some similar community-organized groups with roots in the neighbourhood. So I would say in all seriousness that in fact, if you got rid of half the cops (and two thirds or more of the jails), keeping the police in well off communities but leaving the poor inner cities to their own devices, those neighbourhoods would not turn into a paradise, nor would crime there end, but there would on balance be less violence, less brutality, far fewer broken homes, and less poverty. And that's why they've had it with the police. Cops are a net gain for you and me, but a net drain for them.

 

[PSRTExperience]

@a-rabid-velociraptor

 

[Yourself]

Just some friendly tips for protestors, bystanders and people in the line of fire: don't use milk to wash your eyes, use baby shampoo. Wear ballistic helmets (or at least a motorcycle one) and ballistic goggles. Science ones won't protect you. Bring a bulletproof backpack with some provisions and water. A good industrial mask is also advised. If you can afford it, a bulletproof vest, handheld shield and slashproof gloves can be very useful too (the police tends to intentionally stab hands when cutting disposable cuffs). Don't stay near the front lines. Also keep your distance from others because corona is still here.

 

[Sunshirou]

While i dont think i can contribute anything meaningful to this thread myself i may as well let john oliver do that for me https://youtu.be/Wf4cea5oObY

 

[Tamerlane]

I'll have to disagree. @Purplelibraryguy

Whilst there are certainly individual economists with their own biases and principles, it'd be lunacy to discredit the field as a whole based on that, as it has been able to accurately explain and demonstrate phenomena within the economic lens. Certainly rich people would fund economic research because it relates to their needs and their vocation, as trying to predict where the stock market will go, what factors are at play, and the distribution of resources is vital.

The best source I can give for is Naked Economics by Charles Wheelean, specifically the chapter "Productivity and Human Capital: Why is Bill Gates so much richer than you?"

Here's a series of exceprts to help explain the phenomena:

Spoiler

"Economists study poverty and income inequality. They seek to understand who is poor, why they are poor, and what can be done about it. Any discussion of why Bill Gates is so much richer than the men and women sleeping in steam tunnels must begin with a concept economists refer to as human capital. Human capital is the sum total of skills embodied within an individual: education, intelligence, charisma, creativity, work experience, entrepreneurial vigor, even the ability to throw a baseball fast. It is what you would be left with if someone stripped away all of your assets—your job, your money, your home, your possessions—and left you on a street corner with only the clothes on your back. How would Bill Gates fare in such a situation? Very well. Even if his wealth were confiscated, other companies would snap him up as a consultant, a board member, a CEO, a motivational speaker...How would Bubba, who dropped out of school in tenth grade and has a methamphetamine addiction, fare? Not so well. The difference is human capital; Bubba doesn’t have much. (Ironically, some very rich individuals, such as the sultan of Brunei, might not do particularly well in this exercise either; the sultan is rich because his kingdom sits atop an enormous oil reserve.) The labor market is no different from the market for anything else; some kinds of talent are in greater demand than others. The more nearly unique a set of skills, the better compensated their owner will be. "

"The most insightful way to think about poverty, in this country or anywhere else in the world, is as a dearth of
human capital. True, people are poor in America because they cannot find good jobs. But that is the symptom, not the illness. The underlying problem is a lack of skills, or human capital. The poverty rate for high school dropouts in America is 12 times the poverty rate for college graduates. Why is India one of the poorest countries in the world? Primarily because 35 percent of the population is
illiterate (down from almost 50 percent in the early 1990s). Or individuals may suffer from conditions that render their human capital less useful. A high proportion of America’s homeless population suffers from substance abuse, disability, or mental illness."

More specifically, in regards to inequality in general:

"Productivity growth makes us richer, regardless of what is going on in the rest of the world. If productivity grows at 4 percent in Japan and 2 percent in the United States, then both countries are getting richer. To understand why, go back to our simple farm economy. If one farmer is raising 2 percent more corn and hogs every year and his neighbor is raising 4 percent more, then they are eating more every year (or trading more away). If this disparity goes on for a long time, one of them will become significantly richer than the other, which may become a source of envy or political friction, but they are both growing steadily better off. The important point is that productivity growth, like so much else in economics, is not a zero-sum game."

"Income inequality sends important signals in the economy. The growing wage gap between high school and college graduates, for example, will motivate many students to get college degrees. Similarly, the spectacular wealth earned by entrepreneurs provides an incentive to take the risks necessary for leaps in innovation, many of which have huge payoffs for society. Economics is about incentives, and the prospect of getting rich is a big incentive.

Second, many economists argue that we should not care about the gap between rich and poor as long as everybody is living better. In other words, we should care about how much pie the poor are getting, not how much pie they are
getting relative to Bill Gates. In his 1999 presidential address to the American Economics Association, Robert Fogel, a Nobel Prize–winning economic historian, pointed out that our poorest citizens have amenities unknown even to royalty a hundred years ago. (More than 90 percent of public housing residents have a color television, for example.) Envy may be one of the seven deadly sins, but it is not something to which economists have traditionally paid much attention. My utility should depend on how much I like my car, not on whether or not my neighbor is driving a Jaguar."

"The subject of human capital begs some final questions. Will the poor always be with us, as Jesus once admonished? Does our free market system make poverty inevitable? Must there be losers if there are huge economic winners? No, no, and no. Economic development is not a zero-sum game; the world does not need poor countries in order to have rich countries, nor must some people be poor in order for others to be rich. Families who live in public housing on the South Side of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house. They are poor despite the fact that Bill Gates lives in a big house. For a complex array of reasons, America’s poor have not shared in the productivity gains spawned by Microsoft Windows. Bill Gates did not take their pie away; he did not stand in the way of their success or benefit from their misfortunes. Rather, his vision and talent created an enormous amount of wealth that not everybody got to share. There is a crucial distinction between a world in which Bill Gates gets rich by
stealing other people’s crops and a world in which he gets rich by growing his own enormous food supply that he shares with some people and not others. The latter is a better representation of how a modern economy works."

Source to a legal online version of the book

The point is that so long as all parties involved gradually gain access to the ability to acquire and produce more resources, the better both parties will be off, even if one party is not able to produce or consume as much as the other. It only matters that both parties are able to mutually benefit from one another, rather than one party dominating over the other in such a way that it does not prevent the development of human capital in one of the groups.

Inequality itself will always exist in some form due to the fact that not everyone has the same talents or skills or the same ability to market them efficiently. Inequality itself is not the issue as much as a lack of growth or ability for individuals to market their abilities.

If you notice, this argument doesn't really depend on the rich as much as people who have strong abilities and entrepreneurial talent to make new jobs and supply the economy. If you remove all the rich people from existence, you will only hinder your own ability to grow economically and provide others with jobs and talent, and whilst I too have an issue with bureaucracy, economics only describes phenomena as they appear and is not made post-hoc as a series of apologetic for the rich. It's a solid argument.

 

[Halo]

@Yourself
Not sure if an undercover FBI agent or antifa member. Either way, MangaDex sure attracts people from the widest spectrum. Kim Jong-un, are you here as well?

 

[Tamerlane]

Maybe @Halo

 

[Halo]

When our resident monk @Tamerlane says that... Togashi was onto something.

Spoiler

 

[Swagner]

Well, considering that
1. police, through civil asset forfeitures (i.e. seizing assets with no criminal charges) surpassed burglaries in terms of dollars of theft per year,
2. police departments (or more correctly, taxpayers) pay out billions of dollars in settlements for property damage, brutality, and wrongful death lawsuits, and
3. police can murder you on video with effectively no risk to even their careers, let alone actual criminal charges
it's hard to imagine that a lack of these same police could possibly cause more destruction than they already are.

 

[Tamerlane]

Spoiler

@Halo

 

[vobo]

Re: disbanding/defunding. Provocative naming aside, disbanding effectively entails making a new police force. It looks like a way to get around police unions and start fresh. It's been done in relatively small locations. Camden, NJ disbanded and made a new one - crime rates are broadly down . It's unclear if this will translate in larger cities.

Defunding, from what I've read on it, is mostly about re-investing into other programs: having mental health professionals respond to suicide calls instead of cops, EMTs for overdose calls, and working on prevention measures.

But exact implementation details differ - probably for the best. Experimentation is important at this stage. Whatever the case, current police systems need to change.

Unrelated: @Yourself I don't know why there's a study on this, but apparently baby shampoo doesn't differ from water. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5851502/