A Utopian World Without Police?

This unhinged and dangerous hyperbole would drive out ALL investment and leave us with smoldering carcasses where there used to be imperfect but livable cities. Without police, who would you call when you are carjacked? Carjackings happen in my city neighborhood every couple months. Who is your female friend going to call when someone rapes her? Who will protect the firefighters when your house is on fire? Next time someone puts a gun to your head (which happens periodically in my neighborhood), is the solution to talk nicely with that hoodlum and reason with him? Why aren't we hearing uniform battle cries to reform police departments and demilitarize police departments rather than these disturbingly common demands to kill cops and abolish police departments? I thought that only Trump was capable of such nonsensical blather.

These messages seem to be the far left version of the Libertarian wet dream where all we need to do is abolish government and everything will automatically be great.

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A Moment of Unity Slipped Through Our Fingers

I feel like we let a moment of unity slip through our fingers. It seems that when we collectively watched the killing of George Floyd, we were all horrified. I have friends across the political spectrum, and even those I most disagree with – the die hard Trump supporters – were as outraged by that murder as anyone. And then came the first peaceful protest, and it seemed that everyone was absolutely behind it. For a moment.

Protesters gather in downtown Minneapolis. Unrest in Minneapolis over the May 25th death of George Floyd.

Then on the fringes of the peaceful, heartfelt protests came the fringe elements – the violence, vandalism, looting. Even then, for a moment, it seemed that the facts and the narrative were that this was a few bad actors and a few bad cops causing a disturbance at an otherwise peaceful demonstration.

And then very quickly our politicians and the media, jumped in to divide us again. Inadvertently perhaps, but now we're not just divided, we're fractured. Now there are multiple "camps" within the left and right, all disagreeing with each other.

I believe this is because we have gotten so accustomed to having quick, easy answers to what's going on. We need to determine, before we have any facts, who is responsible for the rioting and looting. We demand to know and the media is compelled to fill the airwaves with something, anything, to fill our need to know. And politicians are eager to point blame at whatever entity will help to score points with their base. We collectively want to blame one group of people for this, and assign a single motive. That makes it easy.

  • Angry black people fed up with the way they're treated
  • White people who want to instigate and turn the protest violent to make black people seem out of control
  • Undercover police who want to further the narrative that these protesters should be handled with violence
  • Opportunistic people of any race who want to take advantage of the situation for whatever reason<
  • Radical left wingers who want to destroy our country
  • Radical right wingers who want to destroy our country

Maybe it's all of the above. Maybe there are far more reasons for it than we've heard. But it's still a small number of people amongst the masses of peaceful protesters. But now, because our focus is on the violence, that's the narrative. Now when we say "protester" we think burning buildings and looting. That's so not fair.

It is not fair to anyone, and detrimental to our unity, when we see some photos of white looters, and conclude that all the looters are white. It's not fair to anyone, to see images of black people looting and decide that all the looters are black. It's not fair to see images of cops being brutal to peaceful protesters and conclude that all cops are out of control. It's not fair to see images of some police kneeling with protesters and conclude that all cops are good and want to connect with their diverse communities.

All of that is happening, all at once. We have to open our minds to the idea that this is not something that we can wrap up in a neat package, put a label on it, and feel good that we have the answer. We don't. None of us do. This is complicated. We need to unify to resolve it.

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New Model Code of Student Conduct by FIRE: A Guide for College and University Administrators

FIRE (FOUNDATION FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS IN EDUCATION) recently released its "Model Code of Student Conduct," a guide for college and university administrators for governing student life while protecting student rights.  I've read through the entire Code and I'm impressed.  Much thought has gone into this code.  FIRE has done a good job of striking balances among the rights and duties of the many parties affected by this Code at colleges and Universities.

Here is FIRE's description of the CODE:

FIRE’s Model Code of Student Conduct is a guide for college and university administrators for governing student life. Its provisions are a distillation of FIRE’s experience and expertise gained through over two decades of studying college and university disciplinary systems and responding to daily requests for assistance from students, faculty members, and administrators nationwide.

In sum, this Code is an embodiment of FIRE’s belief that protecting student civil liberties is a necessary prerequisite for preparing our democracy’s next generation for successful leadership and engaged citizenship. FIRE looks forward to discussing these principles and assisting educational institutions in adopting the Code’s provisions.

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The Political Left Cheers Law Enforcement Abuses in the Case of Michael Flynn

I'm wondering how many of us on the political left will be able to tamp down tribal instincts in order to see these disturbing facts for what they are. Matt Taibbi explains in an article titled "Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties: The Blue Party’s Trump-era Embrace of Authoritarianism Isn’t Just Wrong, it’s a Fatal Political Mistake":

Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of Miranda, and the use of never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer.

. . . .

In the last four years the blue-friendly press has done a complete 180 on these issues, going from cheering Edward Snowden to lionizing the CIA, NSA, and FBI, and making on-air partners out of drone-and-surveillance all-stars like John Brennan, James Clapper, and Michael Hayden. There are now too many ex-spooks on CNN and MSNBC to count, while there isn’t a single regular contributor on any of the networks one could describe as antiwar.

Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent.

If you are willing to dig deeper into the details (and I hope you are), spend some time with Glenn Greenwald's article and detailed video (1 hour 45 min long). The long title to Greenwald's article: "New Documents From the Sham Prosecution of Gen. Michael Flynn Also Reveal Broad Corruption in the Russiagate Investigations." The Surveillance State is running amok and those of all political stripes should be deeply disturbed. Neither Taibbi nor Greenwald expect typical members of the political left to have enough integrity to step out or their tribal costumes in order to see and appreciate these disturbing facts.  Greenwald's analysis of tribal blindness is spot on:

Because U.S. politics is now discussed far more as tests of tribal loyalty (“Whose side are you on?”) than actual ideological or even political beliefs (“Which policies do you favor or oppose?”), it is very difficult to persuade people to separate their personal or political views of Flynn (“Do you like him or not?”) from the question of whether the U.S. government abused its power in gravely dangerous ways to prosecute him.

Flynn is a right-wing, hawkish general whose views on the so-called war on terror are ones utterly anathema to my own beliefs. That does not make his prosecution justified. One’s views of Flynn personally or his politics (or those of the Trump administration generally) should have absolutely no bearing on one’s assessment of the justifiability of what the U.S. government did to him here — any more than one has to like the political views of the detainees at Guantanamo to find their treatment abusive and illegal, or any more than one has to agree with the views of people who are being censured in order to defend their right of free expression.

The ability to distinguish between ideological questions from evidentiaryquestions is vital for rational discourse to be possible, yet has been all but eliminated at the altar of tribal fealty. That is why evidentiary questions completely devoid of ideological belief — such as whether one found the Russiagate conspiracy theories supported by convincing evidence — have been treated not as evidentiary matters but as tribal ones: to be affiliated with the left (an ideological characterization), one must affirm belief in those conspiracy theories even if one does not find the evidence in support of them actually compelling. The conflation of ideological and evidentiary questions, and the substitution of substantive political debates with tests of tribal loyalty, are indescribably corrosive to our public discourse.

As a result, whether one is now deemed on the right or left has almost nothing to do with actual political beliefs about policy questions and everything to do with one’s willingness to serve the interests of one team or another. With the warped formula in place, U.S. politics has been depoliticized, stripped of any meaningful ideological debates in lieu of mindless team loyalty oaths on non-ideological questions.

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Rethinking the War on Drugs in the Age of Opioid Addicted Europeans

I don't see racism everywhere I look. In my view, most issues are far too complex for "race" to serve as a dominant explanatory factor.

That said, it's rather stunning to see the recent tsunami of news articles (like this one recent news piece from NPR) taking the position that as people of European descent become an ever bigger percentage of drug addicts, throwing their asses in jail is no longer trendy as a first-choice paradigm for addressing the problem. Almost overnight, in this age of opioid addiction, compassionate treatment has become "common sense."

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