Most BLM protesters were white people advocating for Black civil rights.♥️ All their lives, they thought that they had the 1st amendment right to protest, because they had seen white supremacists march without being beaten by cops. They didn't realize that the right to free speech depends heavily on what you are speaking about, and who you are speaking for.
Now I'm seeing college professors and students learn the same lesson about what US cops will do to you if you speak up for the wrong thing.
Free speech in the US is so very selective. It's far from the universal right that many seem to believe it is.
One of my go to examples:
Want to use profanity on radio/TV or show nudity on TV? No way, that's offensive and you'll be fined into oblivion.
Want to send someone a message threatening to rape or murder them? No problem, that's free speech.
On a separate and related note: it's bizarre how many people focus on the inconvenience and not the message around protests.
I'm not sure if that's what Paul meant, but my point is much simpler. You don't need to read Immanuel Kant to know that the 2nd amendment is not a real right. It is not "the right to bear arms." It's "the white to bear arms."
Because simply trying to exercise that right, can get a Black man summarily executed in the streets by the state. And there will be no consequences for the executioner. "Police shot an armed Black man, etc" Having a gun is the only justification needed.
I 100% am not giving the 2nd amendment enough credit, philosophically. Because philosophy doesn't come into my reality.
Do you know that many cops in major cities keep toy guns in their glove compartment? This is called a "drop gun." If the police officer shoots an unarmed Black child, they go back to their car, grab the toy gun, walk over to the child's body, and drop the toy gun on it.
The presence of a toy gun justifies the killing in the eyes of the average American.
@escarpment @mekkaokereke @psa
What the fuck??
@escarpment @mekkaokereke @psa
How is a drop gun ethically permissible?
@violetmadder @mekkaokereke @psa I'm not arguing that it's ethically permissible. I'm saying the original poster is presenting an ethical framework in which it is not ethically permissible.
Allow me to present a framework where it is permissible. Trivially easy to do. It's called anti-utilitarianism. The guiding principle is greatest harm for greatest number. Drop guns would be permissible under this framework.
@escarpment @violetmadder @mekkaokereke @psa Even more effective: have those trucks that spread salt on icy roads refitted to spray guns and ammunition everywhere.
Doesn't seem too short of the apparent goal of "gun rights" groups like the NRA.
@escarpment @mekkaokereke @psa I don't think that is what he's saying. I mean, I'm pretty sure he believes it to be bad, but it's not the point he's making here.
The point is that there clearly isn't a "right" for black people to bear arms, no matter what the constitution says, when cops know and act in the knowledge that if they murder a black person, all they have to do to get away with it is make it look like their victim was exercising that "right".
@escarpment @mekkaokereke @psa
If the right is respected by authorities in a particular place, then it exists in that place.
When authorities face at a minimum job loss (not just firing and quiet rehiring across the county line, but actual banishment from the profession) and possibly criminal sanction for violating a right, they quickly come to respect that right.
@escarpment @mekkaokereke @psa
India is by no means a progressive paradise, but when you consider the lengths officials go to, to make sure every voter is able to vote, no more than 2 km from their place of residence - feats like sending a team of 5 election workers on a multi-day 40 km trek through rugged mountains to reach a hamlet with a single voting age inhabitant - you see that voting is an actual existent right in India.
Both India and the US are considered flawed democracies, but at least India doesn't systematically disenfranchise people. That was one of the most disturbing parts of working elections in the US, watching the various mechanisms those who had power used to make sure those who weren't going to vote for them couldn't. Occasionally Democrats, consistently Republicans.
Sometimes we were able to work around their efforts, sometimes we weren't. It's utterly atrocious.
@escarpment @dragonfrog @mekkaokereke @psa Rights are not given - they are recognized.
"Respecting rights" is not a token in some transaction because the treatment some call respect is only service rendered if it priced, or if it is not mutual.
Understand your rights.
Don't let fascists whisper you into considering them an optional *treat* allowed by thugs or taken by guile.
Here's the hard part:
Or even *earned*.
Does anyone *earn* the right to a lawyer?
*earn* the right to vote?
Nope
@alakest @dragonfrog @mekkaokereke @psa Whether someone has whispered that to you or not has no effect on whether your rights will be recognized.
That's exactly the problem. Thugs can come along and take your rights whenever they want. 6 people could nab me off the street, throw me in a van, and imprison me in a basement for the rest of my life and my rights have no bearing on whether they do that or not.
@escarpment @dragonfrog @mekkaokereke @psa In a way we already agree - rights exist.
They may be recognized - or not.
They may be respected - or not.
It's impossible for any human to completely not recognize or respect another human's rights.
A hesitant, or even more eager, whip hand betrays recognition.
Even 1 in a 1000 favors or outrages not committed erodes constructed status schemes - eventually.
Whispers and gestures, like water carving stone, etch the course of truth.
Eventually.
@escarpment @dragonfrog @mekkaokereke @psa But, I'll admit, not fast enough to counter all transgressions.
Not by a long shot IMHO.
@escarpment @dragonfrog @mekkaokereke @psa "What if 1 + 1 = [something other than 2]?" is kinda how that reads to me.
We could get to more esoteric areas of math where my confidence wavers, but x + x = 2x is how I'm recommending everyone operates until we can agree on particular differences.
@escarpment @mekkaokereke @psa Legality comes into reality; because the thing about drop guns is...they sound like tampering with a crime scene, where the crime is an officer of the law shooting someone who happened to be unarmed and not a viable threat.
And that while the 2nd amendment shouldn't allow that to be a valid way of tampering with a crime scene because simply having a gun is not apparently illegal, it is de facto considered as such for a specific subset of the population.
@escarpment @mekkaokereke @psa That is, the law seems to indicate that we as a society agreed that, philosophically, we don't agree with tampering with a crime scene.
And yet there's this glaring contradiction with the use of "Drop guns".
@AT1ST @mekkaokereke @psa The law indicates that some of us have identified tampering with a crime scene as something we disapprove of. The officers violating this law do not appear to agree with that, or at least think it is preferable to them to place the gun than face the consequences without the gun placed.
The outcome will be determined by whether the people who disapprove of this behavior have the power to prevent it, or if the officers have the power to continue doing this.
@escarpment @mekkaokereke @psa The law is the *encoded* ethics of specific people; it's why murder is against the law, but self defense is an affirmative defense to that crime.
But the thing about the behaviour we're talking about? As @mekkaokereke pointed out, it happens *disproportionately* more to people of a specific race, to the point that it effectively doesn't to people of a different race, and thus essentially rewrites the laws that encoded the ethics of the people who wrote the rights.
@escarpment @mekkaokereke @psa "Most people don't even go about their day thinking about what is legal -"
I'm going to stop you right there, because as true as that is, it's pretty much the *job* of *law enforcement* to think about what is legal. That's kind of the *point* of their job.
@escarpment @mekkaokereke @psa Except qualified immunity apparently exists, where the police are allowed to not know the law...and that is outright not following their job description. We don't need the police to be legal scholars or philosophers - we need them to know the law around what they're doing...and also need to apply it *equally*.
Right now, they don't do either of those, apparently, even when told to do so.
@escarpment @mekkaokereke @psa It's not an "Intellectual curiosity" - it's their *job*, that they are paid to know, and perform actions based on their understanding of the law.
That they *don't* is a problem - and...is the type of thing that the courts have glossed over with qualified immunity when they *really should not*.
Sometimes the drop gun is not a toy gun. It's an unregistered firearm. Some cops keep one of each in the glove compartment. Toys are more credible for younger Black kids without criminal pasts. Unregistered firearms for the adults.
I'd be willing to bet that a higher percentage of white Americans than Black Americans could tell you about Kant. But a higher percentage of Black Americans than white Americans could tell you about drop guns.
But but but Mekka a long-dead German dude wrote a thing!
I read all your posts; thank you! Interesting to me is I often arrive on one of your threads via one of your replies, pause and take a slow breath and sigh — and boost your reply. Not a complaint at all about how you start a thread!
@Loukas @ricardoharvin @mekkaokereke @psa
Yeah. More erm... disturbingly earnest and relentless moral relativism, than the usual snotty stuff from trolls. Which to me is somehow... worse.
@ricardoharvin @mekkaokereke I was willing to entertain a side thread in philosophy initially as I was curious as to what they'd bring to the table.
Wow that went off the rails. As you say, they did so in a very disingenuous way too. Have also muted.
@mekkaokereke @escarpment @psa Am I the only one with an urge to point out a solution might be to do the following?
a.) Have surprise inspections.
b.) Fire anyone who has a "drop gun" on their person or in their vehicle and put their name on an offender list of likely sociopaths who like to wear a badge.
@cohomologyisFUN @mekkaokereke @escarpment @psa Not all police. Not all the time, nor every attempt.
Do not obey.
Even if "they" win don't make it easy.
As Tim Snyder offers:
#1 Do not obey in advance
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
https://scholars.org/contribution/twenty-lessons-fighting-tyranny-twentieth-century
Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. From across the fearful twentieth century, here are twenty lessons about what it takes to oppose tyranny, adapted to the circumstances of today.
@alakest @cohomologyisFUN @mekkaokereke @psa
It was predetermined that, for example, Trump would become president. Nothing that any of the people opposed to fascism did worked, or ever could have worked, because that was the outcome that was "programmed in" by the laws of nature.
Information like the advice you shared from Timothy Snyder was "baked into" that outcome.
@alakest @cohomologyisFUN @mekkaokereke @psa It's sort of like when a company whose stock you own releases a new product and you expect to be able to sell your stock at a higher price, only to discover that the product release was already "baked into" the stock price.
It's fine to spread information- that's part of the predetermined outcome. But it also sometimes rings hollow because to share "tips on avoiding fascism" because nothing "we" do can stop it.
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cohomology is FUN!