Standing Still

Okay... I know that I'm supposed to be on hiatus, taking a break from the complaining about the world that has tended to make up so much of Nobody In Particular for the past 15 years. But the following question came up as relates to the conviction of former Officer Kim Potter in the death of Duante Wright, and, for better or for worse, here is where I work out my answers to these sorts of questions.

Potter -- I mean, she has to go to prison, but... her story seems credible & if we believe it, should she still be going to prison? Is this progress (in the war against cops killing black people)?

My answer to it is likely overly long, but here it is.

Sometimes, people use the tools of legal process and punishment to push back against the temptation that life offers to deliberately act on the perverse incentives that pervade existence. It provides a counter to the impulse to take by force or deception what would require more effort to obtain within the rules (if it can be obtained licitly at all).

But sometimes, the role of the Rule of Law is simply to be cudgel against those who embarrass the society with their actions, intentional or not, or contribute to a sense of unease.

The "war" should not be seen as one against "cops killing black people," because that is not the point. Progress would be a reduced number of police shootings due to an understanding that people's lives (whether they are Black or not) are valuable enough that they shouldn't be casually ended simply out of an assumption of criminality or so that members of the majority don't have to question the constant fear they profess to feel.

(Note that in the trials of George Zimmerman and Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William Bryan, their defenses all more or less came down to "the fact that we confronted a Black person who didn't know us from a hole in the ground with lethal force shouldn't have given them a reason to see us as threatening to them, so their response was a reason for us to fear for our lives.")

Officer Potter does not have to go to prison. Officers have been breezily forgiven of much greater lapses than hers. (A lot of shootings can be traced to officers not following what they were supposed to have been trained to do. Officer Potter had the misfortune of her lapse being close enough to the death that the legal system decided it was deemed relevant in court.) She's being offered up as a sacrifice in the name of bad-faith appeasement: "We gave you Chauvin and Potter (to name two)... what more do you want?" Their convictions will be pointed to a "progress" when it's really little more than scapegoating. Police officers are not the problem; White America regarding the Black population of the country as agents of violence and anarchy is.

Shootings that later turn out to be unjustified are a problem, but they aren't the problem. In the case of Daniel Shaver, he was held at gunpoint by a number of police officers for a quarter of an hour or longer. In all of that time, they were apparently unable to determine whether he posed some sort of threat to them, and they continuously gave him orders, and even as he visibly grew increasingly stressed, an officer said to him, and I quote: "Alright, if you make another mistake, there is a very severe possibility you are both going to get shot, do you understand?" There is something broken with a law-enforcement culture that sees lethal force as a rational reaction to a person under duress making what the officers on the scene acknowledged as errors, rather than attacks.

And sure, part of can be laid at the feet of gun culture in the United States. Officers are expected to behave as if any given random citizen they have reason to stop is armed and dangerous.

But officers are often allowed, or even expected, to treat pushback on the part of a person stopped as active disrespect of their authority, and, perhaps more importantly, a threat to their safety. And citizens are at a disadvantage; the Supreme Court of the United States, in Whren v. United States, allows officers to make stops on a pretext; one can be pulled over for a minor traffic infraction so that an officer can attempt to find a greater breach of the law. And in Heien v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court ruled that a stop is legal even when the officer is mistaken about whatever law they cite in creating reasonable suspicion. So if an officer pulls me over based on something that isn't even a crime, to give themselves a reason to attempt to incriminate me for something else they understand to have happened, I'm expected to lump it. And if things escalate and I wind up being shot, the officer can point to multiple precedents in establishing that they've done nothing wrong. A police officer can have a shitty day; citizens need to always be on their best behavior.

That imbalance of power is accepted, and so are its consequences, because of an implied social contract that states that the law is only weaponized against those who have done something egregiously wrong. As Alan Dershowitz puts it: "Criminal law is supposed to apply to bad people consciously making bad decisions, that they know or should know are in violation of the law." There is an assumption that those shot by police deserved what they received; this is mostly character assassination in the service of the belief that if one is "a good person," they won't find themselves on the wrong end of an officer's bullet for what turns out to be a bad reason.

And that takes us back to former Officers Potter and Chauvin. The video showed the violations of the social contract. Society looked at the video and decided that Daunte Wright and George Floyd, were,  if not entirely blameless, innocent enough that the power imbalance shouldn't have been used against them.

But the setup that the United States has now more or less guarantees more killings, and, as I noted before, not just by police officers. One of the implicit assumptions of allowing the use of lethal force is that some number of times the wrong people will be killed. That is not, strictly speaking, unjust. It's the nature of the beast. Where the putative injustice comes into play is where the determination of whether someone is the wrong person comes from some feeling about them, rather than a clear-eyed application of the rules. And in this particular instance, Kim Potter was on the wrong side of feeling.

XV

Today marks fifteen years since I started this little project, and to celebrate, I'm going to take a break from it. Mainly to give myself some time to look around and find new things to read, and thus, to write about. Current events have become something of a drag recently, with the same general stories circulating around. So I'm going to find something new, then pick up again. I'll likely have one more post before the end of the year, so that there are the requisite 13, but I don't expect to really come back to this before January. So it won't be a long hiatus, but it will be some time away nonetheless.

In any event, thank you for reading.

Tentcloth

Senator Joe Manchin D (well, depending on who you ask anyway) West Virginia is currently living life in the spotlight for being the man who has derailed President Biden's Build Back Better plan for the United States. And, okay, as a matter of Congressional process, there is some truth in this.

But it might also be worth pointing out that there are an awful lot of voters who don't really care for the Build Back Better plan, and not simply because they're partisan Republicans who would be loath to allow the current President to rescue them from a burning building. One of the really difficult jobs in front of the Democratic Party (and one that I think a lot of people would say that they're bungling) is making the case that the plan that they have is both better for everyone in the long run and sustainable. Again, partisanship plays a factor; once someone's convinced that the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is only s step removed from a force of supernatural Evil, it's hard to get them to consider the benefits of policy proposals.

The Democrats are in the position of having to bow and scrape before Senator Manchin because they were unable to pick up enough seats in the chamber that they could allow their less liberal members to buck the team to shore up their numbers back home. Presumably, Senator Manchin ran for office because he believes that he can do something good for the people of his state, and maybe the entire nation. Sacrificing his political career doesn't help him reach his goals, or he'd have done it already.

If the Democratic Party is going to have any hope of getting things done, they're going to have to attract more voters to their cause. Right now, their coalition may be broader than that of the Republican Party, but it's thinner, and right now, that means that it tears easily. Increasing polarization means that there are fewer people in play who can be convinced to join up. The Democrats are going to have to get out there and find them.

Unthreatening

I have, I will admit, grown weary of the assertion that Donald Trump, and those people who are willing to toady to him, are "threats to democracy."

The central threat to democracy in the United States is the impression that the system hasn't solved people's problems in the past, isn't solving them now and has no intention of solving them in the future.

All Donald Trump had done initially was tell Republican voters that this impression was correct, because the system had been captured by people who were intent on using it to enrich themselves and leave the public (or more specially, the average Republican voter section of the public) holding the bag. And for all that people point to the events of January 6th as evidence that then President Trump is an authoritarian at heart, again, the reason why so many people still back him is that even if they agreed that it marked him as an authoritarian, the authoritarian who has an answer to one's woes seems like a better ally than the democrat who's working on behalf of someone else.

For all that people may be of the opinion the democracy may be the best way to organize a government, democracy is still a means, rather than an end. And like any other means, it has no rights. Donald Trump pulled off two interesting political innovations: he freed himself from the need to appeal to the Republican donor class, through a combination of his own money and prodding the major news media to consistently keep his name in the headlines, and he was able to successfully make a case that his failures were not his fault. This second point is especially important. Despite it being a matter of public record that Republicans in Congress intended to oppose President Obama on pretty much everything they felt they could get away with, his inability to get certain things done was still seen as a failure of his own leadership. President Trump had no such problems. If the Democrats stood in the way of something he wanted he was able to make them into the villains, and plead victimhood (usually on behalf of his supporters) in a way that I don't think that other Presidents have been able to get away with. (Whether they'll be able to get away with it in the future remains to be seen.)

The idea that there is some sort of obligation to democracy has to be discarded. As much as salespeople often get on my nerves, I understand that many of them are good at their jobs, and I've come to understand a lot about politics through the lens of what I understand makes a good salesperson. And I have yet to be in a situation in which a salesperson attempted to sell something to me by making the point that I had an obligation to the item being sold.

As a matter of history, democracy in the United States would likely be regarded as an abject failure by many modern standards. From the outset, where it was designed with the idea that high-status minority (landowning White men) could be trusted to actively look out for the welfare of the rest of the stakeholder community, to today, where it's plagued by structural problems and the inability/unwillingness of the public to wield effective oversight, if one were to design a system from the ground up, it's unlikely that any incarnation of the one we currently have in the United States  would be the first choice. And something that's so clearly a kludge when things are working in its favor can hardly be expected to hold up well in the face of the social distrust that has come to dominate so much of the United States.

Even many of the defenders of democracy don't laud its affirmative benefits; rather they point to examples such as Russia and China as examples of what the authoritarianism they perceive will make things worse. But to the same degree that one man's trash is another man's treasure, one person's oppression is another person's law and order. People have often shown themselves willing to trade another person's interests in order to advance their own.

Democracy is not an effective way of mutually hostile groups deciding who will obtain spoils at the other's expense; otherwise, there would be no need for wars. American democracy has, at some point, to start clearly and openly bringing benefits to a broad swath of the overall public on their own terms. In the past, this has been accomplished by shifting the costs of those benefits to others. That's not going to remain tenable forever. But one way or another, it should be understood that if people don't feel that the current system of democracy is what best advances their interests, then they'll look for, and support something that will. Blaming the person that sells them on it is unlikely to change that.

Niche Humor

The tabletop gamer in me found this uproariously funny. While I have nothing against stick figure families (other than they've become a bit of a cliché), I do find the various ways in which they meet their ends to be amusing. The inroads that geek culture have made into modern society are also interesting. I suspect that many more people than one might initially think will get this joke, if for no other reason than Critical Role and other gaming-related media have become so popular.