Objectively intelligent.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Pretty solid take on the NYT op-ed thing.

Cotton's Oped was problematic to the extent it contained factual errors. Its argument that we should use troops should offend most people, but its offensiveness is not problematic. The Oped page of a paper is a competition of ideas. People throw out ideas and the comments in response to them (at the Times, where commenters tend to have brains and decorum) and the letters to the editor they elicit test whether those ideas are worth exploring or are dangerous, like Cotton's.

His idea was roundly criticized as deeply un-American. The marketplace of ideas dismissed his argument as dangerous crackpot thinking. I see no reason to litigate whether what he wrote should never have seen the light of day in the first place. Such sentiments are those of people who think a star chamber of sophisticated consumers of news and data should be allowed to shape the narrative for the broader public. I'm not unsympathetic to that view, but it seems unnecessary. A really bad idea tends to die from exposure. A really bad idea which is prevented from view will often fester online and gain a perverse credibility among knuckledraggers who'll see it as a form of forbidden wisdom.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Literally no one here is having the debate that you want ended. Pretty much everyone is in favor of the government doing more than you support, which is not surprising since you are the person who voted Libertarian in the last election.

To say that tech will create more jobs than it removes is to give intellectual cover to the argument "things will be just fine if we simply let the market do its work." That's the libertarian angle here.

And I don't trust your party to do anything useful any more than I trust the GOP to do it. I'm of the opinion nothing will happen on jobs or climate until its too late and we've a calamity. Historically that's how everything seems to work.

We have two shit parties owned by corporations. Blue, red - either way, you get a bag of shit. Trump may be a huge gift. By accelerating our disintegration, he may have taken us to the bottom faster than we'd ever get there otherwise. And it appears that until we really hit rock bottom, we won't even think about serious future issues, let alone develop policy for addressing them.

And for purposes of abstract discussion, I'd like to dispense with the tech-will-provide-for-those-it-displaces argument.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Cotton's Oped was problematic to the extent it contained factual errors. Its argument that we should use troops should offend most people, but its offensiveness is not problematic. The Oped page of a paper is a competition of ideas. People throw out ideas and the comments in response to them (at the Times, where commenters tend to have brains and decorum) and the letters to the editor they elicit test whether those ideas are worth exploring or are dangerous, like Cotton's.

His idea was roundly criticized as deeply un-American. The marketplace of ideas dismissed his argument as dangerous crackpot thinking. I see no reason to litigate whether what he wrote should never have seen the light of day in the first place. Such sentiments are those of people who think a star chamber of sophisticated consumers of news and data should be allowed to shape the narrative for the broader public. I'm not unsympathetic to that view, but it seems unnecessary. A really bad idea tends to die from exposure. A really bad idea which is prevented from view will often fester online and gain a perverse credibility among knuckledraggers who'll see it as a form of forbidden wisdom.

The competition of ideas doesn't work so well when some people in it are more committed to sharing what they think than in entertaining other people's ideas, like when Bennet didn't read Cotton's op-ed before running it or when you posted without reading or responding to what I linked to.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

To say that tech will create more jobs than it removes is to give intellectual cover to the argument "things will be just fine if we simply let the market do its work." That's the libertarian angle here.

And I don't trust your party to do anything useful any more than I trust the GOP to do it. I'm of the opinion nothing will happen on jobs or climate until its too late and we've a calamity. Historically that's how everything seems to work.

We have two shit parties owned by corporations. Blue, red - either way, you get a bag of shit. Trump may be a huge gift. By accelerating our disintegration, he may have taken us to the bottom faster than we'd ever get there otherwise. And it appears that until we really hit rock bottom, we won't even think about serious future issues, let alone develop policy for addressing them.

And for purposes of abstract discussion, I'd like to dispense with the tech-will-provide-for-those-it-displaces argument.

I would find it easier to take you seriously on this issue if you had supported the ACA, which aimed to decouple people's healthcare from having a full-time job.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower

Minnesota gets real redneck real fast as you leave the cities. Meanwhile, a veto-proof majority of our City Council just voted to (if I can sort through all the misinformation and contradictory claims) take steps to defund and dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with . . . well, they have not gotten that far yet as far as I am aware, but I’m sure whatever they come up with will be fine. In the meantime, it is supposed to be 96 degrees and humid today, so I am urging everyone I know to play this out their windows on repeat all day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KEVdHKsi9w

Honestly, there are actual bad people that require there be police. That drastic changes are needed is clear, but man does “we are getting rid of police” sound bad. You scale back, get some major crime going, Trump gets a bump? I do not know what the answer is, but dumping po po is not it.

[Pretty Little Flower]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Honestly, there are actual bad people that require there be police. That drastic changes are needed is clear, but man does “we are getting rid of police” sound bad. You scale back, get some major crime going, Trump gets a bump? I do not know what the answer is, but dumping po po is not it.

I think most agree that some form of public safety mechanism is necessary, although it is not entirely clear people want that from the confused messaging on this subject, and I have not see a lot of specifics on what that looks like. Adder?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower

I think most agree that some form of public safety mechanism is necessary, although it is not entirely clear people want that from the confused messaging on this subject, and I have not see a lot of specifics on what that looks like. Adder?

If you didn't have the police, you can imagine hoodlums running around and slashing people's tires just for the hell of it. Just imagine.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

If you didn't have the police, you can imagine hoodlums running around and slashing people's tires just for the hell of it. Just imagine.

Thou shalt not kill and not steal were commandments, I mean before there were police. People had to be told that, yet confessions are still necessary.

[Pretty Little Flower]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

If you didn't have the police, you can imagine hoodlums running around and slashing people's tires just for the hell of it. Just imagine.

Haha! That was “strategic.” Listen, I get it. Everyone agrees we need to have a fire department. But what if we found out that, while some of the firefighters were good at their job, others were not good at putting out fires. And, in fact, some of them actually ended up starting fires! Sometimes on purpose! And then we learned that they were overwhelmingly starting fires in black homes, and were actually killing young black people with their fires. And that this has been going on for DECADES with little or no fixing of the problem. We would probably think we need to abolish the fire department. But I am also on the board of a domestic prevention organization, and the police have been very helpful in the eyes of our advocates and staff in approaching these cases with sensitivity and effectiveness (it has definitely not always been that way and took a long time to get there). So until I hear of a plan that will ensure that, for example, victims of domestic violence will be protected, I will reserve judgment.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

My recommendation a few days ago:

“3. Banning the use of predictive police measures in inner cities (IBM and Palantir sell predictive software that, in coordination with cameras and racial profiling, basically turns many inner cities into versions of the movie Minority Report, none of which protects people in the inner cities as much it controls them, in the most Orwellian sense).”

Today:

https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/08/ib...nd-inequality/

People follow us here.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower

I think most agree that some form of public safety mechanism is necessary, although it is not entirely clear people want that from the confused messaging on this subject, and I have not see a lot of specifics on what that looks like. Adder?

One thing that has bothered me for a long time from a privacy perspective is the welfare check. There are a lot of instances when I'd love to authorize our people to call for a welfare check on either a student or a patient, but I don't because the only avenue is calling law enforcement, and there are very proscribed rules in both HIPAA and FERPA for disclosing protected information to law enforcement. Most of the time the law enforcement exceptions do not apply, because the threat is not imminent. If there were a crisis intervention welfare agency that could do those sorts of checks, it'd benefit our populations greatly.

There are so many things we shove over to law enforcement that they're not really the best people to do. We run and staff the psych hospital. So many of our patients come from someone having called the police because someone was acting erratic or otherwise off. Some of them are event violent. But the criminal justice system is not equipped to handle them.

There are something like 18 overlapping police departments in the med center. I've never really understood why so many are necessary, especially the forces for private entities like the Med Center itself or Rice University. One of my closest friends, a Ph.D, in economics from Cal Tech and an undergrad in math from Harvard, was hauled to jail by one of the Med Center cops after she rolled a stop sign and didn't pull over fast enough for the cop's liking. I think the charge was "evading arrest" in a fucking parking garage. I'm sure that her brown skin had absolutely nothing to do with it. Cop was so irritated with her he called her boss in some sort of misguided effort to get her fired. They're fucking mall cops with arrest power, and they are itching to use it. A lot of them end up on the smaller forces when they can't cut it in the bigger forces.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Honestly, there are actual bad people that require there be police. That drastic changes are needed is clear, but man does “we are getting rid of police” sound bad. You scale back, get some major crime going, Trump gets a bump? I do not know what the answer is, but dumping po po is not it.

It sounds bad to people who still associate the police with making things safer. Weirdly, lots of (especially white) people still do even after watching them start riots and rough up protesters all over the country.

We need a public safety system, including, at times, ones with guns. But we're applying the wrong solution a lot of the time and we need to change that.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Adder

It sounds bad to people who still associate the police with making things safer. Weirdly, lots of (especially white) people still do even after watching them start riots and rough up protesters all over the country.

We need a public safety system, including, at times, ones with guns. But we're applying the wrong solution a lot of the time and we need to change that.

what is a public safety system, and how does it differ from police? how does Minneapolis transition? What if someone breaks in your house armed during the transition?

over the years several police forces have been put under Fed scrutiny, Detroit's included. One major change was to make the racial make up, especially in command positions, look like the community. Minneapolis's police does not look like the community.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

The competition of ideas doesn't work so well when some people in it are more committed to sharing what they think than in entertaining other people's ideas, like when Bennet didn't read Cotton's op-ed before running it or when you posted without reading or responding to what I linked to.

I read the article you cited. Here's the TL;DR for anyone interested:

"I think Cotton's article should not have been given a platform at the Times. We should have people who share my sensibilities limit what gets on the Oped page."

It's just another asshole with an inflated sense of self-enlightenment, and entitlement, declaring himself a brahmin who ought to have editorial powers over the public square. The article offered no insight. I should have gone with "I want my 3 minutes back" rather than treat it seriously.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan

One thing that has bothered me for a long time from a privacy perspective is the welfare check. There are a lot of instances when I'd love to authorize our people to call for a welfare check on either a student or a patient, but I don't because the only avenue is calling law enforcement, and there are very proscribed rules in both HIPAA and FERPA for disclosing protected information to law enforcement. Most of the time the law enforcement exceptions do not apply, because the threat is not imminent. If there were a crisis intervention welfare agency that could do those sorts of checks, it'd benefit our populations greatly.

There are so many things we shove over to law enforcement that they're not really the best people to do. We run and staff the psych hospital. So many of our patients come from someone having called the police because someone was acting erratic or otherwise off. Some of them are event violent. But the criminal justice system is not equipped to handle them.

There are something like 18 overlapping police departments in the med center. I've never really understood why so many are necessary, especially the forces for private entities like the Med Center itself or Rice University. One of my closest friends, a Ph.D, in economics from Cal Tech and an undergrad in math from Harvard, was hauled to jail by one of the Med Center cops after she rolled a stop sign and didn't pull over fast enough for the cop's liking. I think the charge was "evading arrest" in a fucking parking garage. I'm sure that her brown skin had absolutely nothing to do with it. Cop was so irritated with her he called her boss in some sort of misguided effort to get her fired. They're fucking mall cops with arrest power, and they are itching to use it. A lot of them end up on the smaller forces when they can't cut it in the bigger forces.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Seth Rogen's highly underrated and hysterical Observe and Report is kind of an accidental documentary. If you're a mall cop, you're one step above prison guard. Dead-ender, dumb as a doorknob, trained badly, and itching to exert power, either out of internal anger, insecurity, or boredom. Giving those chuckleheads the power to arrest people is insane. Whoever green-lit that policy should be fired.