The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[viper37]

Pike commanded American Indians against the US Government.

Clearly worthy of a statue, helping the little guys resist the Empire's encroachement of their territory. 

That's what I was saying

Duh.  I totally misunderstood.  I though you were saying his statue deserved to be torn down for being a rebel like the others.

EDIT: These indians fighting for the Confederacy were slavers though

[viper37]

Reparations paid to whom? And how? Talk about a bureaucratic mess.

Another reason I am in favor of Universal Basic Income. The black communities need money and support, how about $1000 dollars per person per month? And you don't need some big system trying to figure out who is entitled to some one time cash payment that ultimately won't help much.

I could get around the idead of UBI much more easily than any reperation Canada should pay to its black community, has has been suggested recently.

[DGuller]

I don't see how one in any way follows from the other.  I mean, of course we should be focusing on eliminating racism, but how does that follow from race being a social construct?

Okay, you don't see it.  I can live with that.

Is there anyone other than you who understands this logic?  I'm just asking so that I know who to ask to explain it to me.

[viper37]

Yeah that is what I said earlier. Yes if everybody's basic needs were met and there were not crushing depressing poverty in large sections of the country that probably would substantially decrease crime.

There will always be inequality and there will always be people who conveit what the other has.  As you've mentionned, even the filthy rich want to get richer and will not hesitate to steal.

So that was kind of weak. I thought it was interesting many of his other ideas though. Like having different groups better trained for handling specific areas. Now I understand that might only be practical for very large forces in large cities but hey that is where many of the problems are occuring anyway.

Yes, the idea of using social workers instead of cops, or having social workers units integrated with the police force has been floated here.  White males are mostly the victims, so we don't hear much outcry about this from the leftist activist, unfortunately, and it's unlikely to change anytime soon. 

Having to call the police on someone you know is suffering from mental illness is always a scary thing, you never know how it will end.

In the end, it results in relatives not calling the police until the absolute breaking point and the chances of a violent end are then multiplied infinately.

Also it confirmed a lot of my concerns about training and how the police operate.

There were quite a few scandals on police brutality, and police planting evidence on suspects during the late 80s early 90s, mostly centered around Montreal.  There were numerous police reforms after that.  The concept of community police was introduced, it did seem to reduce tensions, and there seems to be less problems with outrigth police brutality.  But the rise in hard left activism is a real problem in this city.  Even the mayor is one stupid leftist moron or a lady.

I have also sorta-witnessed a small city with corrupt cops.  No problem there, so long as you were friends with the right people.  The police chief could be bought with liquor.  Lots of liquor.  But that meant quasi-immunity from most traffic violation.  I know some people never got arrested for DUI, one guy bragged about it constantly and how the police chief was his friend.  <sigh>.  Anyhow.  Hopefully, that was the past.  Knowing this place, not too sure though.

What's encouraging is that in some other cities, when policemen, or even a police chief were arrested for DUI and tried to claim immunity with their "police card", they were still arrested, suspended, condemned and fired.
I think body cameras work well too, both to protect the cop and the citizen.  There should be punishment if it's turned off.  Severe punishment, enough to make sure they don't do it purposefully.

As to the US, the causes are multiple, inherent racism in the society is only one factor of it.  I'm guessing the author hits a right spot when he talks of "police immunity".  Reading articles on the subject over the years, it does seem like the cops get away with fatal shooting, even outright murder quite easily.  And justice always seems to be on the side of the DA, unless you have tons of money.  Reading some stories coming out of Texas about how innocents were convicted despite no freaking evidence, contradictory testimonies, bad investigations leaves a bad taste in the mouth.  Especially with the dp involved

[The Brain]

Other examples of social constructs: language, countries, money. It's real because we make in real. Saying race doesn't exist is like saying money doesn't exist. I mean it's true in the most semantic sense, but I can still throw a quarter at your face.

The claim is that race is based on biology. It is not it is based on arbitrary social definitions. And those arbitrary social definitions are very important to our society but that is all they are.

Whose claim? I have even explicitly described the definitions as being arbitrary. And nothing in the usual meaning of the word "race" suggests that they are not arbitrary.

[The Brain]

The claim was "race doesn't exist". I disagreed with this claim, based on what I see when I "look out the window" into the world, for instance present-day America where people being treated differently depending on race is a huge problem.

If the claim is in fact "race is a social construct", and not "race doesn't exist", then I won't argue against it. It was precisely the "doesn't exist" thing that I had a problem with.

Some people seem to have read stuff into my position that simply isn't there. I have even been accused of being racist, an accusation which is completely groundless and quite frankly hurtful. My hope is that we (Languish) will keep having "meaningless" semantics discussions Languish-style, with plenty of room for drastic phrasing and personal jibes, but leave groundlesss accusations of that kind at the door.

One lesson that I have taken away from all this is to ask IMMEDIATELY which exact meaning of a word is being used when I see a claim that I find very strange. Had I done this here then much gnashing of buttocks could have been avoided I think.

[Eddie Teach]

quite frankly hurtful.

[Josquius]

Quite some bravery in this girl protesting alone in a hick town. Apparently the local trogs heard busloads of antifa were going to come in to smash the place up so turned out in force against her.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/haz5fn/a_lone_young_woman_protests_with_a_blm_sign_while/

One thing I'm confused about is why bikers seem to be so represented amongst the anti BLM groups. They got involved in the statue defence idiocy here too. The last I heard of bikers being political was the anti Fred Phelps lot, but now they're the baddies?

[The Brain]

Quite some bravery in this girl protesting alone in a hick town. Apparently the local trogs heard busloads of antifa were going to come in to smash the place up so turned out in force against her.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/haz5fn/a_lone_young_woman_protests_with_a_blm_sign_while/

One thing I'm confused about is why bikers seem to be so represented amongst the anti BLM groups. They got involved in the statue defence idiocy here too. The last I heard of bikers being political was the anti Fred Phelps lot, but now they're the baddies?

Bikers as in the criminal gangs or bikers as in normal people who have a motorcycle club?

[Duque de Bragança]

In other words, as a North American historian, you think that North American style slavery had a much more profound effect on the world than Eurasian style slavery. Splendid.

As a North American historian who has team-taught classes about freedom and slavery with colleagues working on the Ottoman Empire and China, yes. It's absolutely a point I would argue. Conversely, early-modern Chinese imperialism may have had a more profound effect on the world than early-modern European imperialism. Neither means that slavery in Persia, or warfare in the Andes was great or benign. 

A useful distinction, in the history of slavery, is between "societies with slaves" and "slave societies". The first are societies where slavery existed. The second, where slavery structured the very polity itself. None of the East Asian societies that I know of structured themselves around the institution of slavery the way that, say, Jamaica did. The Ottoman Empire, and its Janissaries, is perhaps the most hybrid case.

I'm speaking to the void... but anyway.
the problem is you focus only on the US.
Of course Atlantic chattel slavery shaped community and racial relations much more than the Ottoman&muslim slave trade when it comes to the US.

When it comes to Europe, it definately shapes how other groups view one another.  You have a pretty good example with Tamas, of which you dismissed the testimony, since he's a middle class white man.

The legacy of the Ottoman Empire has shaped how Turkey views its neighbours, how it views non Turk people inside its borders, how it views outsiders.  It's not something that magically appeared with Erdogan.  It also shaped how Turkey's neighbours see them.  It also shapes how some mulsim countries and their citizens perceive the West.
The term "mécréant" can be often heard in some of Montreal's universities by a certain category of students.  It's not something that suddenly appeared with Salafism or Saudi financed schools in Africa and Europe.

There's no black or white, clearly demarcated lines here.  Lots of blacks don't like whites at all.  Some black personalities will even publicly declare they'll never date whites.  Some black artists never miss an opportunity to spit on whites and disparage victims of black gangs.

But the worst?  Just like Stalin, they have their useful idiots to help them propagate their hate.

Oriental slave trade, by Arabs, Turks and other muslims, goes from the arabo-islamic expansion of the 7th century to the early 20th Century. The Ottoman slave trade is but a part of it. It left specific memories in Europe, as the Barbary slaver pirates did. Both were linked.
Trans-saharian slave trade connected to the Mediterranean trade networks, without Ottoman involvement, was where Europe got most of its black slaves until the 1470's. So after the beginning of the Western slave trade, both coexisted for a long time in fact.

The black slave was called an Abd, a word still used in Arabic today for (black) Africans. The Curse of Ham arguments was used by Muslims as well, predating the use by Christians by several centuries.
Ibn Khaldun, among others, the great Arabic traveller of the 14 century, judged black nations ready to accept slavery, given their low degree of civilisation and humanity.

So believing blacks were not essentialised by the muslim world, unlike the Western World, is either naive or a sign of an extremely biased vision.
Even Arabic prejudices made their way into European langues with words such as Cafre or Kaffir, particularly offensive in South Africa. Cafre has fallen in disuse in French, Castilian and Portuguese but can still have a very negative connotation, at least in the Iberian languages I mentioned.


By the way, this book is pretty much the reference on all black slave trades in French (not translated into English AFAIK), with the background of ancient slavery taken into account as well:
Traites négrières : essai d'histoire globale par Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau
https://www.amazon.ca/-/fr/TRAITES-NÉGRIÈRES-ESSAI-DHISTOIRE-GLOBALE/dp/2070339025
https://www.amazon.com/traites-négrières-dhistoire-globale-Histoire-ebook/dp/B00N09IDUW/

PS: as for mécréants, it really fell in disuse in France, until the contemporary rise of islamism.
Added Canadian link, but should be available in bookshops and libraries as well.

[grumbler]

But H. Sapiens sapiens did breed with Neanderthal and likely produced different H. Sapiens sapiens since some population (Africans have 0%) have as much as 4% Neanderthal genes. I'm guessing the portion of N. genes wasn't stable at 4% over time and it was signicantly higher when the mating first occured.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens neanderthalsis are two subspecies of the species Homo Sapiens, at least according to current thought as I understand it (the issue is a bit more complex than that).  Individuals from two subspecies would be expected to be able to mate and produce fertile offspring.

If race, as a biological concept does not exists and a species is a group that can produce viable offsprings among each other, how does that classify earlier form of humans?  Or should we rather say that despite obvious biological differences, H. Sapiens is the species, and H. Sapiens Sapiens is a subspecies?  But then, since we whites have 4% Neanderthal dna and Africans have 0%, do we belong to different sub-species?

Not every genetic variation creates a subspecies, though, again, the definition of a subspecies is much looser than that of  species.  Breeds of dos, for instance, all belong to the same subspecies, and the dog subspecies has a lot more genetic variation than the Hss subspecies.

Not my field of expertise, I am genuinely interested in this discussion.  Despite being an evil racist for not agreeing with the extreme left.

Genetics is interesting (especially human genetics), but it doesn't include the idea of "races."  The actual genetic variation in humans is astonishingly low.

[Oexmelin]

So believing blacks were not essentialised by the muslim world, unlike the Western World, is either naive or a sign of an extremely biased vision.

I have not used "the Western World", nor the "Muslim World" precisely because these terms cover centuries of history and are not really useful, except for making blanket statements about "the Western World" and "the Muslim World". It would posit an unchanging relationship between black people and Christians or Muslims, and we know this is simply not the case. Relations and perceptions have changed over the years. It is as problematic when writers insist that there is a straight line running from medieval prejudices about blackness to the 19th century, whether in the "Christian world" or the "Muslim world". Essentializing has been a constant component of human relations since forever. It takes a different set-up, and intellectual context, to produce racialization. Some of these elements were certainly present in medieval Al-Andalus, which benefitted economically from the trade, and where domain holders, much like British merchants in the 17th and 18th century, were threatened by the possibility that their captives' conversion would deprive them of their labor.

But these conditions did not last, and the diffusion of Islam in the interior of Africa made these essentialist arguments much harder to maintain in the subsequent centuries. I am sure they lingered, later relayed by the East African trade to the Arabian peninsula. I have made explicit allowances in my answers for the existence of "homegrown" Arabic prejudices emerging from the Transahara slave trade, or the Eastern African slave trade. But, do I believe these prejudices have had the same global impact as those born of the Atlantic slave trade? No. Do I think they are benign? No. A lot of people in Mauritania are still held in bondage today and can testify to the horror of their condition.   

[Josquius]

Quite some bravery in this girl protesting alone in a hick town. Apparently the local trogs heard busloads of antifa were going to come in to smash the place up so turned out in force against her.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/haz5fn/a_lone_young_woman_protests_with_a_blm_sign_while/

One thing I'm confused about is why bikers seem to be so represented amongst the anti BLM groups. They got involved in the statue defence idiocy here too. The last I heard of bikers being political was the anti Fred Phelps lot, but now they're the baddies?

Bikers as in the criminal gangs or bikers as in normal people who have a motorcycle club?

Probably the second?
I don't think biker criminal gangs are much of a thing in the UK.

[The Brain]

Quite some bravery in this girl protesting alone in a hick town. Apparently the local trogs heard busloads of antifa were going to come in to smash the place up so turned out in force against her.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/haz5fn/a_lone_young_woman_protests_with_a_blm_sign_while/

One thing I'm confused about is why bikers seem to be so represented amongst the anti BLM groups. They got involved in the statue defence idiocy here too. The last I heard of bikers being political was the anti Fred Phelps lot, but now they're the baddies?

Bikers as in the criminal gangs or bikers as in normal people who have a motorcycle club?

Probably the second?
I don't think biker criminal gangs are much of a thing in the UK.

Ah OK. The major international criminal biker gangs have had a presence in Sweden for a number of decades.

[Duque de Bragança]

So believing blacks were not essentialised by the muslim world, unlike the Western World, is either naive or a sign of an extremely biased vision.

I have not used "the Western World", nor the "Muslim World" precisely because these terms cover centuries of history and are not really useful, except for making blanket statements about "the Western World" and "the Muslim World". It would posit an unchanging relationship between black people and Christians or Muslims, and we know this is simply not the case. Relations and perceptions have changed over the years. It is as problematic when writers insist that there is a straight line running from medieval prejudices about blackness to the 19th century, whether in the "Christian world" or the "Muslim world". Essentializing has been a constant component of human relations since forever. It takes a different set-up, and intellectual context, to produce racialization. Some of these elements were certainly present in medieval Al-Andalus, which benefitted economically from the trade, and where domain holders, much like British merchants in the 17th and 18th century, were threatened by the possibility that their captives' conversion would deprive them of their labor.

But these conditions did not last, and the diffusion of Islam in the interior of Africa made these essentialist arguments much harder to maintain in the subsequent centuries. I am sure they lingered, later relayed by the East African trade to the Arabian peninsula. I have made explicit allowances in my answers for the existence of "homegrown" Arabic prejudices emerging from the Transahara slave trade, or the Eastern African slave trade. But, do I believe these prejudices have had the same global impact as those born of the Atlantic slave trade? No. Do I think they are benign? No. A lot of people in Mauritania are still held in bondage today and can testify to the horror of their condition.

Well, Western world is broad but then the US south plantation model is not the only, is he? Yet that's the one referenced ad nauseam.

That ternary view of Blacks, Christians and Muslims  is misleading, there has been –allegedly powerful at a time– black Christians in Africa for a while, Ethiopians, who were supposed to help Christendom but ended up having to be helped, for mutual benefit obviously. So much for Prester John.
So that contemporary race-based/identity politics analysis does not work there since what mattered then (15th and 16h century and later on) was religion.

As for the diffusion of Islam, since it also matched the ongoing and ever-spreading slave trade, it also fortified those arguments. Even if some liberties were to be taken with the rule of enslaving muslims. "Bad" or "false" muslims could obviously be enslaved.
The rise of 19th "scientific" racism in the West was when the Western slave trade was ending so the link with racism does not explain everything.

Mauritania is indeed a sad interesting case, with slavery banned several times, last time in 1981, but criminalized only in 2007, a law not being enforced since a putsch in 2008. Some anti-slavery activists being jailed as of 2014. There is this new 2015 law recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity though. No idea if it has changed the situation, however.