It shouldn't be shocking for anyone who was paying attention. There is a good book about related issues by Radley Balco called Rise of the Warrior Cop. Published in 2013. Unlike many comments here and on other websites it's not hysterical, or hyperbolic or contaminated with self-referential post-modernist bullshit. It is a sober and factual analysis of how American police became what it is right now. It's not an easy read, but it's a must-read for anyone who wants to have a reasonable picture of the problem.
The public notion of good policing and the actual practices police departments follow have been diverging for several decades (if they ever converged). What we're seeing right now is not some inexplicable increase in bad behavior or cops deliberately targeting journalists. For modern American police this is just business as usual, except the volume of deployment is significantly higher than in the past few decades and the visibility is much higher as well.
Edit:
There is a flip side to this coin. When you have a systemic problem of this scale, you should be cautious about making simplistic (especially moral) judgements about individuals in the system. When someone's training, incentives, position in the community and even equipment nudge them towards bad actions, even decent people will routinely do bad things.
I like to think I've been paying attention - I'm a person of color who grew up with some financial privilege, I'm a quiet, introverted nerd, and it was obvious from highschool onward that police treated me much differently than my white friends. When I was 17, I got pulled over at 1am on a small unlit backroad, but the cop didn't get out of his car. He stayed in his car, told me via the megaphone to exit my vehicle, put my hands behind my head, walk backwards, put my hands on the trunk, while he frisked me, then put me in the back of the cop car and searched my vehicle, then let me go, telling me "it's a dangerous area and I shouldn't be out this late". Speeding tickets were always aggressive encounters. That stuff sticks with you.
That said, I still found the attacks on the press this week absolutely shocking. Police treating people of color differently than white people is absolutely nothing new. Attacking and arresting credentialed journalists, while they are clearly identifying themselves and broadcasting on live TV is something I never thought I'd see in America.
> Attacking and arresting credentialed journalists, while they are clearly identifying themselves and broadcasting on live TV is something I never thought I'd see in America.
You can thank your president, who labelled the press as "The enemy of the people" for that too.
One of the most poignant comments on police militarization I've heard seems to have come from a television show.
"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people." - Commander Adams (Battlestar Galactica)
Obviously, this doesn't directly address the militarization of the police, but it should be easy to see how it can go both ways. Outfit the police as a military unit, and they'll start acting like one. How much surplus military equipment was sold to police since the Iraq war?
> If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror.
- Hannah Arendt
> This drug thing, this ain't police work. I mean, I can send any fool with a badge and a gun to a corner to jack a crew and grab vials. But policing? I mean you call something a war, and pretty soon everyone is going to be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon, the neighborhood you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory. You follow this? [..] Okay the point I'm making is this: Soldiering and policing, they ain't the same thing. And before we went and took the wrong turn and start up with these war games, the cop walked a beat, and he learned that post. And if there were things that happened on that post, where there be a rape, a robbery, or a shooting, he had people out there helping him, feeding him information. But every time I came to you, my DEU sergeant, for information, to find out what's going on out on them streets... all that came back was some bullshit. You had your stats, your arrests, your seizures, but don't none of that amount to shit when it comes to protecting the neighborhood now, do it?
> When someone's training, incentives, position in the community and even equipment nudge them towards bad actions, even decent people will routinely do bad things.
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." -- Stainslaw Jerzy Lec
If we assume there is such thing as human free will (your quote shrinks the possibility of what we can affect with our free will), Police officers are agents who have the ability to see these environmental factors and {choose to stay officers, ignore employer-provided therapy, vote for the union leadership which negotiates their employment contract, etc.}.
We don't have as much control over our lives as we would want, but police (as individuals and as a voting bloc) have significantly more control over the lives of others than us non-police do.
Don't get me wrong, I understand police violence is a continuing problem, but that doesn't make this instance of it less shocking.
As a meta note, I've noticed that people often respond to comments saying "I'm shocked with a recent occurrence of X" with "X has always been bad and been happening for a long time" and in my opinion that response only serves to desensitize people to the bad thing.
There are a lot of different people out there who get shocked over different things.
And writing for the 10-30% of people who think that incentives matter more than innate character - we don't need people to be sensitised and spring loaded to be shocked. These growth of these problems has been a visible trend for my entire lifetime and longer if you buy arguments like those presented in, say, The Rise of the Warrior Cop.
Anyone who gets shocked by trends that have been around for that long is either very new to this, or part of the problem. The solution is less shock, more reform to promote basic principles of equality, freedom and prosperity.
The problem is that people are already desensitized. They've watched X come and go and they act shocked every time. Then they continue to push it down their list of priorities when they vote.
By next week this will be pushed out of the news. By November it will be completely forgotten, except among the minority who it directly affects and were already aware. All of the outrage you hear now will not translate into change.
So when people say "X has been bad for a long time", people need to hear that as "and this time you should remember it and do something".
I'm also tired of the "X has always been bad and been happening for a long time." While I think some people mean it to highlight how prevalent a problem is, it often comes across (or is in fact intended to be) a way to both virtue signal and put down people who are less informed.
I think the other part of this particular episode that got people more upset is the helplessness of it all. I certainly felt helpless and frustrated watching the video, even though I wasn't there.
Interaction with police is one of the rare cases where self defence doesn't cut it. In fact, defending yourself just gives more justification for law enforcement to apply more violence.
Imagine if you were George Floyd, and you knew you were going to get killed. What do you do? If you don't resist you die. If you do resist you might still die or at least be assaulted, then charged with resisting arrest and will have "deserved" the violence by resisting at the end of it.
On the bystander side too. Everyone watching knew it was wrong, but there is no good way to intervene. You either put yourself in harms way, and probably won't effect the outcome, or intervening action will be used to justify whatever violence was used, or likely both.
Umm, what? What contaminations exactly are you thinking about? I just can't place self-referentiality into this topic. Are you suggesting there is a comparable analysis that does include self-referential motifs? Also, why is self-referentiality or postmodernism bullshit?
Postmodernism is bullshit because it abandons any sense of rationalism and science and is used as an arm waving way of selling an agenda, often political, frequently done in a cynical attempt to seize power illegitimately. Jurgen Habermas has a thoughtful critique.
Self-referentialism can happen when a small group of authors cite one another to establish legitimacy to an idea that has no foundation in what came before. It doesn't by default mean something is bullshit, but it greatly increases the likelihood that a small group of people is able to propagate bullshit.
Think of the foundation as all human knowledge and people keep building upon that knowledge. Legitimacy is conferred when you make references to prior knowledge in your effort to establish your new idea as legitimate.
More recently, citations in the earliest papers proposing an idea have expanded such that the references are often leaf nodes, much of those leaf nodes often have no citations and end up being "like, uh, your opinion, man", but you get enough of these papers with bullshit leaf nodes referencing one another and you end up with a cluster of papers with tenuous or possible no connection to any prior work in a field. It's a cluster of papers referring to one another and look legitimate because there are citations. They may only be a few hops deep before you get to the "like, uh, your opinion, man" nodes, but no one ever looks that deep and notices.
I'll give you one such example that I personally know the origin of on Wikipedia. The person who made this edit doesn't know when they originally heard it, but they said they once heard in passing that this-is-known-as-kebab-case. When someone questioned them about it they went to the wikipedia article and casing and it wasn't mentioned, so they looked around for prior references to this casing name. They said they found one reference but it wasn't a good reference, but it was a reference and so they edited Wikipedia to make the change. They change was accepted and stuck. Within the next year or two lo-dash or possibly underscore.js came on the scene and this person convinced them to add the casing conversion function and name it kebab case because that is what was in the wikipedia article because they added it. Getting this in a major library now made it a legitimate name. At that point, the wikipedia article was updated with another reference, this time to lo-dash.
And that is the story of how self-reference was used to make kebab-case a legitimate reference in wikipedia.
One example of self-referential post-modernist garbage is critical race theory. It basically started as a cluster of self-referentialism completely detached from everything else and then took on a life of its own.
Some entire post-modernist fields like grievance studies are such bullshit that things like this well orchestrated hoax was wildly successful in getting multiple papers published:
No, that list does not show that. The examples from physics and chemistry, at least, are of nonsense papers being published by "predatory journals", which will publish pretty much anything as long as the author pays their fee. They aren't examples of serious journals being hoaxed.
Both the sokal paper and the first paper by the Boghossian group were published in open-access journals, of the same standard as the other fields. The only papers to be published in peer-reviewed journals are the last few by the Boghossian group, and those don't really prove that it's a problem unique to social sciences, either. The Boghossian group didn't seek to establish a control study, so we don't know if a similarly motivated group couldn't get papers published in other fields.
What makes the predatory journals relatively non-serious? What merit is there in your distinction between a "hoaxed" journal and a journal that publishes faulty papers on purpose?
Please see the "Bogdanov affair", where "serious" peer-reviewed journals accepted bogus theoretical physics works. I already linked to the relevant Wikipedia page in a nearby comment.
>One example of self-referential post-modernist garbage is critical race theory. It basically started as a cluster of self-referentialism completely detached from everything else and then took on a life of its own.
How much CRT have you actually read? It's a pretty interesting and uniquely placed discipline of critical theory.
* You seem to conflate citation rings with self-citation and confuse the latter with self-referentialism. It is interesting to think in what way could your comment thus be considered topical...
* Citation rings are, indeed, horrible.
* "post-modernist fields like grievance studies" - WTF?
* While I, too, abhor scientific misconduct, the Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian stunts/attacks were themselves unscientific and unethical to say the least. The thing most people fail to realize when exposed to these attacks on certain little-loved fields is that academia is just as people/relationship based as any other business, and maybe most of the scholarship does not contribute anything significant. What I am trying to say is that the fields the three targeted are not necessarily special. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
>* "post-modernist fields like grievance studies" - WTF?
It's worth noting that the term "grievance studies" was invented by Boghossian et al. and intended to be used as nothing more than a pejorative for studies and topics of research that the authors didn't like.
Bad policing has been going on for a very long time in America, and as you say, this didn't just happen overnight. It's precisely for this reason that protests are happening.
However, the police deliberately targeting journalists who clearly identified themselves is something we haven't seen before in America. And yes, many of these cases were deliberate as you can see in the video embedded in the article. Just in a week, there were over 120 confirmed cases, many of which were live on camera. This is an attack on the free press, and takes police brutality to a whole new level.
Shocking does not mean surprising. You can be paying attention and still find things shocking. If something is no longer shocking, it means you've allowed yourself to become desensitized and accept it as an acceptable compromise of society. No one should find this kind of behavior acceptable.
For some reason, you always have a few commenters who want dismiss shocking events by saying the shocking event is not 'surprising' or that it 'has always been happening' or was in some sense 'already known'. As if that should make it less morally outrageous. I've never understood what purpose that debate was supposed to serve.
Your edit is just a long way of saying "Nuremburg Defense" which at least in the West, we've decided is wrong. Hell, soldiers are trained to kill, but even they have ROE to follow and are held accountable for bad shoots. I'm not sure why police officers always seem to get a pass.
> Unlike many comments here and on other websites it's not hysterical, or hyperbolic or contaminated with self-referential post-modernist bullshit.
Lobster brain claims another. I have to say that one of the most overlooked forms of anti-intellectualism in modern life is the immediate discount of anything that uses even remotely complex terminology or looks in the general direction of critical theory.
It's not anti-intellectual to reject a philosophy that is based in the rejection of the very concept of truth and reality. Post-modernism itself is anti-intellectual, as it's a philosophy that individualizes experience while dis-individualizing responsibility. It rejects both empiricism and rationalism to choose the unhappy middle between the both, elevating anecdote above experiment, emotions above rationality.
"Critical theory" isn't even a thing and barely even intersects with post-modernism, although I suppose it shares some philosophical leanings. It's just a repackaging of Marxist ideals applied to other demographic groupings besides class, and it's just as easily disproven.
Edit: Thanks to whoever downvoted me, because they had nothing worthwhile to say in response. Rejection of objective truth is a core principle of post-modernism, you can ask the post-modernists yourself if you like, they'll agree. Meanwhile speaking the truth earns you hate since the rise of post-modernism.
Weird. I wonder why there's a Wikipedia article for something that's "not even a thing"[0].
> It's just a repackaging of Marxist ideals applied to other demographic groupings besides class, and it's just as easily disproven.
Can you cite a single critical theorist who simply transposes class analysis to "other demographic groupings"? The theorists I've read actually stray pretty far from the concept of class conflict, and they do not construct, for example, "gender conflict" or "race conflict" out of the "ideals" such as class conflict. Is there any evidence for your claim at all? Or are you claiming that any analysis of conflict between demographics is simply a repackaging of class conflict?
You fail to recognize the specificity of the idea of class conflict, and why it can't be "repackaged" as an abstraction. As an abstraction, all you're left with is "societal conflict", but nobody would deny that there is some conflict in society of some kind. The concepts of economic exploitation, alienation, historical and current primitive accumulation, base and superstructure, etc. are all core to class conflict analysis, but from what I've read, few if any of these are present in the literature on race and gender.
And while we're on the topic, can you point to which "easy disproofs" you're talking about as they relate to class conflict or "other demographic" conflicts? Ironically, the same critical theorists you claim "aren't a thing" were the same ones to argue against the traditional conception of class conflict (e.g. Marcuse).
Post-modernism is not related marxist economic theory it is an art movement that rejects the possibilty of a unified narratve, rather than the concept of "objective truth". Embracing absurdity is not anti-intellectual per se.
From memory, it's absurdism that embraces absurdity, referring to the conflict between the human tendency for meaning attribution and the inherent lack of universal meaning. Absurdism is more comparable to existentialism and nihilism. Postmodernism has infinite truths; it values subjectivity and relativism. Truth or knowledge are whatever is pragmatic to the beholder. It can be opposed to the more traditional positivist perspective, that upholds objective truth. Something objectively true can be true or false for the postmodernist. Fields like medicine or engineering seem to stick to a neo/positivist philosophy, thankfully. Imagine building a bridge when opinions can be worth more than objective laws. Adhering to postmodernism has been convenient for politicians, e.g. to spin issues in one's favor or to adopt policy founded on "science" for hidden reasons.
Postmodernism is a stage of development after modernism not a definable philosophy of life. I would argue that strategies for dealing with uncertainty using statistics would be post modern era science and that sort of analysis is often required to comply with "objective law" which is typically defined subjectively using community standards and judgement. It sounds like what you're refering to is moral relativism.
Modernism used paradox as a concept, ie. one meaning or the other is true but both cannot be, post modern reacts against that allowing for multiple similtaneous meanings. These paradigms are are discovered in different fields at different times.
Postmodern philosophy is very much a thing, and arguably the most important part of Postmodernism. I think Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard would be disappointed to hear you say that there's no such thing as a defined Postmodern philosophy for life.
The philosophy is all about subverting epistemic certainty and rejecting the very concept of objectivity. Moral relativism isn't unique to Postmodernism, but it's a critical underpinning. As is the idea to reject objective truth.
You're arguing that I do not know what I'm talking about, except this was actually my field of study. I am very familiar with all aspects of Postmodernism and as I said before if you ask the Postmodernists they would agree with my assessment, although I'm sure they'd have more positive things to say than I do.
My understanding is that in different fields different things are called postmodern, and not all of them are in/about art-in-the-usual-narrower-sense-of-the-term .
Don't make posts about post-modernism or critical theory on HN. They are always, inevitably down-voted regardless of position and will earn you the ire of the mods.
I find these claims of the HN mods getting angry at people for posting certain viewpoints baffling. I've been browsing this site for a while and I've never seen that happen, and the only mod actions I've seen are against people who were deliberately trolling, flame-baiting or insulting other users. If your experience of posting about post modernism involves mods getting angry at you, it is far more likely that those posts involved those things than any kind of ideological censorship.
The public notion of good policing and the actual practices police departments follow have been diverging for several decades (if they ever converged). What we're seeing right now is not some inexplicable increase in bad behavior or cops deliberately targeting journalists. For modern American police this is just business as usual, except the volume of deployment is significantly higher than in the past few decades and the visibility is much higher as well.
Edit:
There is a flip side to this coin. When you have a systemic problem of this scale, you should be cautious about making simplistic (especially moral) judgements about individuals in the system. When someone's training, incentives, position in the community and even equipment nudge them towards bad actions, even decent people will routinely do bad things.