uziq wrote:
larssen’s posts in this thread thus far have been really tone deaf, which is interesting to me. i do wonder about his managerialist-technocratic ‘third way’ politics. the worst part of that strain of (neo)liberalism is its constant attempts to impute all racism or xenophobia or anti-immigrant feeling to other groups (‘reification’ eeek) and to adopt an attitude of all-knowing wise passivity.
i mean, first of all he mocked at and said he couldn’t see the point in people protesting outside of america. as if nowhere else has a history of institutional racism and as if the black lives matter movement can’t be exported to ‘different historical contexts’. now he’s wondering if we’re not just being unrealistic about law enforcement, and unwittingly welcoming in an era of being policed by T2 robots and skynet (it’s no accident he was styled as an LAPD officer btw).
meanwhile there’s 30,000 protestors in sydney today.
very odd. why are all the people on this board who identify most strongly with liberalism or libertarianism like this?
Seems your reading comprehension is failing you - I'm fine with people protesting if the basis of it is
their own experience in their own national context, not an export of whatever is happening in the US. Does it make sense to you if UK residents would protest police brutality en masse while you yourself linked a graph that showed your country has among the very lowest police-related fatality rates? Doesn't seem quite right to me to directly equate their behaviour to that of police in the US in that case. (note that I'm not writing anything on racial profiling, which may be similar - but the 'brutality' is provably not even remotely comparable).
I did somewhat rhetorically ask 'where do you draw the line' - evidently a guy stomping a 75 year old to the ground causing brain injury is not okay. The most important part being that this behaviour is structural as macbeth pointed out, which in this context I can agree with. With Dilbert's reference to the SAS I'm also reminded of that blatant war criminal Trump pardoned, who was a despicable excuse of a person.
Yes there's people protesting everywhere. Sydney, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam - you name it. But does protest anywhere immediately validate whatever people are protesting about? Did you hold the same opinion when Pegida marched the streets all over Europe and vigorously nod your head to the notion that we should 'get rid of the immigrants' because a few thousand cunts demanded it? Similarly while I can see that there's institutional racism elsewhere, in different contexts it is undoubtedly of a different nature. It's fucking ludicrous to copy paste what's happening in the States to all other countries to protest 'police brutality' when statistically the local police may be some of the most restrained on the planet. That's interest groups using this moment to push an agenda.
