I had someone tell me that the Uyghurs were getting job training in the re-education camps to set them up for good careers and successful integration in Chinese society, and maybe there were some sinister aspects but on the other hand I don't see the US giving job training to people in Guantanamo or anything, so China is way better.
0% exaggerating or mischaracterizing
I have noticed that a lot of slrpnk accounts take a somewhat simplistic view of US politics -- they seem like they want to be left alone to do their thing, which is 100% to the good, but then they don't seem to want to engage with any sort of politics that might enable them to continue to be left alone to do their thing.
Like yes I'm very happy that you want to organize in your community and do good things, it sounds probably better and more healthy than me posting on Lemmy about establishment politics. But the police state or the global war aren't going to go away if you just pretend they don't exist or don't engage with them. Not electing Trump is absolutely critical to you being able to continue to exist in the US and advocate for the type of more-systemic change that it sounds like you're in favor of.
(Of course slrpnk is a lot less homogeneous than lemmy.ml so that may or may not apply to any given user; it's just sort of my reaction to the general vibe of "I like grassroots and non-electoral organizing for real change" coupled with "it's of no concern to me if Trump gets elected." And I do think they're on the balance way more sensible than the lemmy.ml hivemind, FWIW.)
Sounds better? 🙂
Can you link me to that thing if you still have it? I am interested to see it
That's not the same as what you were saying before, and a pretty drastic moving of the goalposts in a way that's a total non sequitur, if you're trying to say Trump is NOT a drastic and catastrophic step in the wrong direction. But other people have already pointed that out.
I wanted to focus on the 100,000 cops a little bit, because I don't think we've touched on that issue before. It will surprise no one that you're picking out one individual element (maybe borne out of compromise, or maybe from very real conservative parts of Biden's thinking, of a piece with e.g. his support for Israel), and then pretending that that's the whole thing.
Here's the ACLU's statement about Biden's crime plan. Honestly, I'll just let it speak for itself:
The president’s plan proposes investments in two competing approaches to this goal.
The first is to hire more police officers and call for more criminalization and incarceration. For decades, this approach has failed to make us safer and it is alarmingly reminiscent of 1990s style policies that fueled mass incarceration. The second approach, however, is to significantly invest in community-based programs and services that have proven to prevent violent crime and can make America safer for everyone. This is the approach that we need to embrace in 2022 to create thriving communities.
Focusing in on the second approach, they say:
President Biden announced several measures that would put us on the right path. The plan includes investments in education, housing, and job training, and proposes lifting barriers to reentry for formerly incarcerated people. These measures would effectively promote stability and prevent violence. He also seeks to put safety in the hands of those best suited to address the acute problems created when societal failures leave people and communities behind: social workers, crisis intervention workers, and violence interrupters. By investing in alternatives to policing, including alternative responses to behavioral health calls, the president demonstrates that he understands the need to adopt preventive approaches to keep people and neighborhoods safe.
“However, in this moment of fear and concern, the president must not repeat yesterday’s mistakes today. He calls for hiring 100,000 additional state and local police officers – the same increase in officers as the 1994 crime bill.
... and so on. That's basically the gist.
I also never knew this before yesterday, but that's actually grossly misleading as far as the impacts of Biden's 1994 crime bill. He's definitely on the pro-police side, but saying as the ACLU does that:
While we are pleased with the president’s commitment to investing in communities, we strongly urge him not to repeat the grave errors of the 1990s — policies that exacerbated racial disparities, contributed to widespread police abuses, and created our current crisis of mass incarceration.
The Biden crime bill from 1994 came at the end of the crisis of mass incarceration, a couple years before previously skyrocketing incarceration rates leveled off. Here's a pretty comprehensive overview -- which includes some pointed and new-to-me criticism of other instances of bad crime legislation Biden was involved in back in the 80s and 90s -- which makes a pretty strong case that Biden's crime bill had nothing to do with the general semi-police-state that steadily took hold in the US during the years from 1980 to 2000. They show, for example, this graph:
... which doesn't exactly make it look like 1994 created our current crisis of mass incarceration.
If there's one thing that's definitely associated in my mind with Trump, it's "can be bullied into a sensible Covid policy." Who can forget the way everyone was able to keep him on an even keel during Covid, and how all Trump's openness to sensible policy went out the window and people started dying, when Biden came along.
Oh, shit -- my bad; fixed.
More than one of these people, I have asked: Okay, what sources would you trust? What isn't all just CIA or Western lies?
They really didn't want to answer the question, and reacted to it with quite a bit of hostility (which I think was tactically a good idea, if they're trying to "win" the conversation for the side they've chosen to support, because it doesn't take a genius to see where I'm going with the next steps.)
But sure, I'm the victim of propaganda. If only I knew the truth, I wouldn't be so ignorant.
If you want some entertainment check out this person’s profile. I thought these were some pretty bad takes, and then I found the other thread where she’s angry that it’s Biden’s fault that Covid still exists.
(Edit: gender)
I have noticed a lot of lemmy.ml accounts absolutely love autocratic regimes regardless of what high or low level of economic socialism is involved in them, so I think maybe yes you broke the code.
Why they think that, I for real have not the slightest idea. There’s definitely a very particular type of thinking there that honestly is just baffling to me.
Part of the point is that they were working a fatal accident. There could have been medical people walking around in unexpected places, or still a body in the road he could run over, or who knows what. If he was driving towards the road that was closed for that reason, then absolutely yes; physically stopping the car if the guy isn't responding to verbally stopping the car is part of the cop's job, not just letting him go and good luck to anyone walking around in the accident scene. (I don't really know, so maybe it wasn't that, but also as far as I know maybe it was.)
It's actually really common that cops have trouble getting people to understand that there's some urgent physical reality that overrides their "but my house is right there" or "but I have to get to work" or "I'm too important to have to stop" argument that in their mind is way more important, and so they need to be able to drive right through the place with the gun battle or the dead body or the downed electrical wires, or whatever.
See this is why I don't like ACAB. Once you start taking this cartoonish version of any given type of people, you start looking at things in this really skewed perspective. People could be good or bad or a mix of both or whatever, sure, but once they're "the enemy" and everything they do is stupid and evil and wrong, the kinds of things you start thinking are plausible start to become off kilter.
I think there is about a 0% chance that the cop just didn't say a word and ran up to the car with his gun out and started trying to break in like a crazy person, and that was the first thing that happened. Maybe it's 100% true that the cops miscommunicated and one guy had told Scheffler to go, and another then told him to stop, or something like that, but I'm still real curious about this blank space between "He was proceeding as directed by another traffic officer" and then there being a cop attached to the outside of the car and Scheffler still moving the car forward and it being a "chaotic scene."
I mean, he stopped after 30 feet, instead of continuing on his merry way through their accident scene or whatever. Sounds like if what happened was the cop grabbing the car and not letting go, then his strategy worked. My bet would be that the bodycam video will show some other less chaotic things they tried to do to get him to stop, as a first step, and the majority of the chaos stemming directly from Scheffler's actions. IDK, maybe not and maybe it's silly to talk about what the video will show before seeing it, but that is my feeling.
40% emissions reductions by 2030