General > General Technical Chat
'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts
james_s:
--- Quote from: tooki on June 15, 2020, 11:37:56 am ---Law enforcement in USA is too rotten to be saved. It needs a total reboot.
--- End quote ---
What do you base this on and what do you propose replacing it with?
I do not interact with the police often, but the times I have interacted with them I've always been impressed by their professionalism, and I've seen them deal with situations that I would not have the restraint to deal with myself. There are a lot of rather terrible and dangerous people out there who simply refuse to play by the rules and show a complete disregard for their fellow citizens, somebody has to deal with them and I don't know how to do it better than the way we do. My limited observations have been that police in this country are not fundamentally different than police in most other countries, and generally public approval has never fallen below 50% and typically sits much higher. A large majority of the population is not anti-police.
tooki:
--- Quote from: coppice on June 15, 2020, 07:28:59 pm ---
--- Quote from: Cerebus on June 15, 2020, 06:33:33 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on June 15, 2020, 06:12:08 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on June 15, 2020, 06:08:17 pm ---Not glorifying/celebrating ≠ sanitizing.
--- End quote ---
That's one of the excuses they use in 1984. Its sad they so many people right now are happy to side with the bad side in 1984.
--- End quote ---
Direct quote from '1984' to prove your assertion please, or I'll assert that is double-plus not a quote from Orwell.
--- End quote ---
Its years since I read the book, so digging out a specific quote would be a pain right now. However, if you have read it you should remember several things which were not sanitising to make the party look good, but something less innocuous. Of course, its the following famous line that really sums up the effects of erasure:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
--- End quote ---
Yeah but it’s not “the party” wanting the things removed. Again, it’s just not wanting to have statues of racist assholes shoved in their faces all the time, in particular, in public places that should be neutral. (As a quick reminder, the majority of statues of confederate “heroes” were erected in the 1950s, as clear retaliation to desegregation. It’s not as though those statues had been standing since the civil war. They were erected during a time where we already damned well knew that slavery was wrong.)
james_s:
--- Quote from: tooki on June 15, 2020, 07:46:20 pm ---Yeah but it’s not “the party” wanting the things removed. Again, it’s just not wanting to have statues of racist assholes shoved in their faces all the time, in particular, in public places that should be neutral.
--- End quote ---
Who is it then? Because I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to refer to authoritarian leftist progressives as "the party" in this context. Do any of these people actually know for a fact that those people the statues memorialize were "racist assholes"? Did they know them personally? Did those people not have other virtues alongside their faults? Does a negative trait mean that a person cannot be admired or remembered for other reasons? Was their view considered negative or unacceptable by society during the time that they lived? Does that matter?
I don't like the trend of judging historical figures through the lens of the present. I can guarantee that there is something you do or some view that you hold that is perfectly acceptable today but 200 years from now some people will find abhorrent. It seems that some people consider morals and values to be absolute and innate while in reality it seems obvious that they are largely learned from the society in which they are raised.
tooki:
--- Quote from: james_s on June 15, 2020, 07:43:28 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on June 15, 2020, 11:37:56 am ---Law enforcement in USA is too rotten to be saved. It needs a total reboot.
--- End quote ---
What do you base this on and what do you propose replacing it with?
I do not interact with the police often, but the times I have interacted with them I've always been impressed by their professionalism, and I've seen them deal with situations that I would not have the restraint to deal with myself. There are a lot of rather terrible and dangerous people out there who simply refuse to play by the rules and show a complete disregard for their fellow citizens, somebody has to deal with them and I don't know how to do it better than the way we do. My limited observations have been that police in this country are not fundamentally different than police in most other countries, and generally public approval has never fallen below 50% and typically sits much higher. A large majority of the population is not anti-police.
--- End quote ---
Really? You don’t know why I say this?! Have you not been paying attention to the protests happening around the country and now world?!
Really?!?
Anyhow, I outlined why in some earlier remarks. But the upshot is that the police have turned into an old boys’ club accountable to nobody. The police unions protect even the worst cops, preventing any kind of meaningful oversight. And the good cops who try to hold the bad cops accountable end up getting let go. (Like the cop who was fired for NOT shooting an unarmed civilian with a mental problem, for “putting his fellow officers at risk” even though he’d already successfully de-escalated the situation.)
Anyway, my proposal, if I could have it any way I wanted, would be to create all-new police using only “virgin” employees who’ve never worked in law enforcement before. The risk of the old guard bringing in the same rotten culture is just too large. I’d be OK with ex-military, since they’ve been taught how to de-escalate, to not view citizens as the enemy, etc.
(Wanna be horrified? Google “police warrior training”. THAT is why I feel the police now are beyond redemption.)
It’s true that the police deal with some really hard situations. But the overwhelming majority of the interactions they deal with are things the police shouldn’t be handling at all, like mental health, stuff like parking violations, and countless other things that could be handled by other civil servants. (This is what the “defund the police” movements are pushing for: take that money from the police and use it to provide services by people properly trained to provide those services. Leave the police for the real criminals.)
tooki:
--- Quote from: james_s on June 15, 2020, 07:57:56 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on June 15, 2020, 07:46:20 pm ---Yeah but it’s not “the party” wanting the things removed. Again, it’s just not wanting to have statues of racist assholes shoved in their faces all the time, in particular, in public places that should be neutral.
--- End quote ---
Who is it then? Because I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to refer to authoritarian leftist progressives as "the party" in this context. Do any of these people actually know for a fact that those people the statues memorialize were "racist assholes"? Did they know them personally? Did those people not have other virtues alongside their faults? Does a negative trait mean that a person cannot be admired or remembered for other reasons? Was their view considered negative or unacceptable by society during the time that they lived? Does that matter?
I don't like the trend of judging historical figures through the lens of the present. I can guarantee that there is something you do or some view that you hold that is perfectly acceptable today but 200 years from now some people will find abhorrent. It seems that some people consider morals and values to be absolute and innate while in reality it seems obvious that they are largely learned from the society in which they are raised.
--- End quote ---
It’s not the government demanding the statues be taken down, it’s the people.
Yes, they were racist assholes. They fought a fucking war against their own country for the right to keep slaves. It doesn’t get much more clear than that. (Remember, the US had already decided that slavery was bad.)
I do agree with you to a point about judging through a different lens. But does today’s lens not give us the right to say “no, we aren’t going to glorify this guy any more”??
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