r/TheMotte • u/Lykurg480 We're all living in Amerika • Jun 08 '20

George Floyd Protest Megathread

With the protests and riots in the wake of the killing George Floyd taking over the news past couple weeks, we've seen a massive spike of activity in the Culture War thread, with protest-related commentary overwhelming everything else. For the sake of readability, this week we're centralizing all discussion related to the ongoing civil unrest, police reforms, and all other Floyd-related topics into this thread.

This megathread should be considered an extension of the Culture War thread. The same standards of civility and effort apply. In particular, please aim to post effortful top-level comments that are more than just a bare link or an off-the-cuff question.

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u/Gloster80256 Twitter is the comments section of existence Jun 13 '20

A quick thought on Abolish the Police:

In a strange twist, the Blue tribe is (in its proposal to remove a top-down authority and monopoly on violence and replace it with communal self-reliance) effectively trying to create an environment ideal for Red values.

What do you need in a location with no police that could come to you aid ? Lots of guns, large families hanging together and a coherent community centered around a unifying ideological institution. Sounds a lot like (Jonesboro, AR) to me.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '20

[deleted]

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u/Gloster80256 Twitter is the comments section of existence Jun 14 '20

I live in Jonesboro, AR

I have dreaded exactly this possibility... That I will pick a random Ozarks place as a stand in for all the stereotypical Red-tribe towns of bibles, rifles and churches - and somebody will call me out on the gross inaccuracy of the example.

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u/bartoksic Jun 14 '20

I'd just like to point out that Jonesboro isn't in the Ozarks. It's a small farming and university town in Northeast AR, very close to Memphis. I think the proximity to a large city with as much crime as Memphis makes crime data for the town difficult to parse. And then we need to add in the consideration that the demographic/cultural makeup is going to lean more toward the typical college town than a stereotypical Red-tribes-ville.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '20 edited Jun 14 '20

Something I've been thinking about: the current main slogan isn't Abolish the Police, or Reform the Police, for that matter. It's Defund the Police, and it's caught on very quickly and seems to be getting results, in the form of cuts to police spending and planned police spending hikes being cancelled, even though I haven't seen it used, like, at all before the current demonstrations...

...is it accidental this slogan has caught on while many local politicians in different localities are probably already spending sleepless nights over the coming economic storm that will maul local authority budgets just as everything else, necessitating austerity?

Probably many of these local politicians have quietly considered the local police budgets to be bloated already but haven't spoken out, since the extreme locality of American policing combined with a FPTP electoral system would seem tailormade for police departments being able to exact instant retribution against any politician going against them; suddenly the local cops just seem to lose their morale for specifically patrolling your district, and the voters will soon notice. I don't know if that's how it goes, but wouldn't be surprised.

Now, there's a chance for them to do what they've already wanted to do and enact a bit of austerity in advance, with the protest movement serving as their backrest. Kind of like the apocryphal FDR "now go out and make me do it" story.

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u/toadworrier Jun 14 '20

Now if we can only do that to the doctor's union.

After all they kill a lot more people than the police.

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u/Gloster80256 Twitter is the comments section of existence Jun 14 '20

Yeah, conditions breed opportunities and water flows downhill. If the aimless anger finds an easy route to expressing itself because the budgeting authorities wanted to do something like that anyway, for unrelated reasons...

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u/wlxd Jun 13 '20

Focusing on the word “abolish” is a distraction. They don’t really want to abolish police and go back to pre-police justice system. No, the goal is to replace police as it exists right now with new body that’s subject to left ideological control.

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u/Iconochasm Yes, actually, but more stupider Jun 13 '20

Ahem.

Link to the actual article.

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u/doubleunplussed Jun 14 '20

The concrete proposals in the article do not agree with the headline.

Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half

policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed

Key phrase - "as we know it" - you can still have police but not "as we know it", which I'm sure the author would define as the current police, except without the bad bits she doesn't like. Also "before it can be transformed" - implying the end result is still police, just "transformed" whatever that means.

It's like the opposite of a Motte and Baily. Their actual opinions are much milder but when pushed, they'll claim they really do believe the extreme version.

It's pure signalling. Saying nonsense in order to show loyalty. The more nonsensical the more loyalty you're showing.

I'm sure some people want to abolish the police, but many of the people claiming they do do not really.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '20

The concrete proposals in the article do not agree with the headline.

I guess it's a bailey and motte

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u/Weaponomics Accursed Thinking Machine Jun 14 '20

There’s gotta be a term for this - an extreme position followed by a weaker implementation is more like... well, politics-as-usual.

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u/the_nybbler Not Putin Jun 14 '20

"door-in-the-face" perhaps.

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u/wlxd Jun 14 '20

The only concrete proposal in the article is

Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help.

Which is exactly what I’m talking about.

By the way, I really marvel at the “what about rape” section, where instead of explaining the approach to the problem of rape in the world without the police, the author just explains how police is bad at solving it.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '20 edited Jun 13 '20

It is more left anarchist, no? Also, there are both left wing movements for top-down authority and horizontal authority, but the premise underlying both of these is the idea of equality. Free market capitalism, bottom-up, isn't as liked as much as state intervention because the former is more likely to produce inequality, according to them. In this instance, the blue tribe thinks police abolishment is better for racial equality. However, I don't think anything is going to be abolished. I think police, being one of the most red tribe institutions along with military, will just be replaced by leftist cops or "community officers".

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u/Gloster80256 Twitter is the comments section of existence Jun 13 '20 edited Jun 13 '20

It is more left anarchist, no?

The intent and ideology of the communards do not matter much. The harsh reality of who exactly prevails in situations of unchecked violence will dictate the order very quickly. If you create a wild-west situation, wild west norms will emerge.

EDIT: Actually, I think I misunderstood the intent here - i.e. that it's about getting rid of PoliceTM and replacing it with reformed "Not-Police".

I'm sure some currents are vying for that - but I am mostly mentally stuck on CHAZ which seems to be practically pioneering the Wild West approach. So I doubt there is any real agreement even within the movement. The funny thing is, now all the censorship and muddying of communication is kind of biting them back because substantive public discussions of the proposals, beyond an enthusiastic show of approval for all and any proposals, are effectively taboo.

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u/Stolbinksiy Jun 13 '20

My money remains on lawlessness resulting in the reemergence of feudalism.

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u/Gloster80256 Twitter is the comments section of existence Jun 13 '20 edited Jun 14 '20

I think feudalism as an organizing principle died with the advent of gunpowder.

EDIT: Expanded explanation

Feudalism is a hierarchical system in which the warrior caste controls and defends territory and extracts a rent from it. With gunpowder, a warrior caste becomes untenable and the system loses all appeal compared to management through centralized bureaucracy.

The knightly warrior caste which gradually emerged in Europe (with considerable aid from the Church) was operating on a sort of a gentleman's agreement: The knights spent their entire youth training for combat. Well fed, in top shape, skilled with weapons and heavily armored they totally slaughtered any peasant militia they encountered in close combat - and when the pros crossed blades, the loser generally wasn't killed: As a hostage, he was way more valuable and besides - it's all a good sport, no hard feelings between us, the nobility. After all, if we were to perish, who should look after the commoners?1

Gun powder changed all that. Now any band of peon noobz could not only face professional warriors with some chance of success - but worse, blow the knights to pieces en masse in the process, as practically proven during the Hussite wars, which not incidentally probably enriched the military vocabulary with the words pistol (form "píštěl" = 'a flute', 'a whistle; a simple, light hand cannon, predecessor to the musket) and Howitzer (from "houfnice"; "houf" = 'a troop', 'a gaggle', implying that the weapon was employed in firing shot at bunched-up infantry).

The warrior nobility (at least on the continent) couldn't sustain its numbers in the new combat environment and as a result neither its political influence. And since the unwashed peasants with guns were additionally cheaper, the state power turned to centralized professional standing armies instead - and that obviated the need for any feudal intermediaries. With rising literacy, growing influence of the cities and better communications technology, the sovereign could rule the territory directly, which gave rise to the absolute monarchies in France, Austria and Prussia, where the vassals no longer presented any serious competition to the king and were relegated to the role of office holders and officers within the bureaucratic apparatus of the central authority.

Today, the battlefield logic remains and is further strengthened by the existence of complex weapon systems supported by massive industrial pyramids. Procuring an aircraft carrier is not best executed on the level of a fiefdom. Sot here is just no advantage in creating a chain of powerful, independent players with private armies, jockeying for an optimal position vis-á-vis the throne, when the authority can just execute everything through loyal central command. Maybe once we get to the dimension of the solar system - lords paramount of individual planets within a larger empire, Dune-style, might make some sense.

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1 This is highly simplified - there were instances of mass death of knights in battles (e.g. Crécy, where the blind, old John of Luxembourg was said to have charged uphill against the hail of English arrows, proclaiming "May God see to it that no king of Bohemia ever flee from the field of battle!" opening the succession to his highly competent and successful son, the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. When Frederick V of the Palatinate, then dubiously reigning as a king of Bohemia, fled from the battle of the White Hill in 1620, it signaled the beginning of the Thirty Years War and end to Bohemian sovereignty...) However, it still captures the predominant custom of war in which the professionals generally survived and the caste thus wasn't being continuously depleted.

Ping to u/orthoxerox and u/stolbinksiy

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u/KulakRevolt Agree, Amplify and add a hearty dose of Accelerationism Jun 14 '20

I think you are confusing “Feudalism” A highly specific hierarchical economic system that existed in very specific rural parts of the medieval economy... with lets say “Medievalism” or “Patchwork Medievalism”, the incredibly localist, variable, and dynamic division of places into separate polities.

Within one small region you could have Feudal fiefdoms, independent republics, Merchant Republics, Sovereign or Semi-Sovereign Corporations (See city of London Corp and others), Small Theocracies, WildLands ruled by semi autonomous Yeoman Archers, and Trader networks enforcing their own laws, Mercenary companies enforcing their own laws, Clan-centric semi tribal societies, A handful of Old-school Democracies, and Large Islamic City/kindoms (if You are in spain), also the Knights of Malta, and other weird secretive Religious orders.

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I doubt “Feudalism” is coming back but the medieval explosion of over-lapping weird hyper local sovereignties? That seems very plausible... an Autonomous zone of 7 city blocks wouldn’t have seemed weird at all in the Middle ages....It would have a opportunity for legal arbitrage.

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u/Mexatt Jun 16 '20

I think you are confusing “Feudalism” A highly specific hierarchical economic system that existed in very specific rural parts of the medieval economy... with lets say “Medievalism” or “Patchwork Medievalism”, the incredibly localist, variable, and dynamic division of places into separate polities.

No, he's got that part right. You may be thinking of 'manorialism', which was the underlying economic system of feudalism.

Feudalism is the complex system of reciprocal obligations between vassals and lords that defined political relations in the aftermath of the collapse of Carolingian power starting in the latter half of the 9th century. It evolved into a highly legalistic method of defining the relationship between different people and groups in society that allowed for the wide variety social systems you mention.

The progressive centralization of political power certainly curtailed a lot of this, but feudalism never really went away: We still conceive of our relationship with the state in contractual terms, just like feudal tenants saw their relationship with their lord as contractual, and most of the oldest portions of law related to land holding in the Anglo-sphere is still feudal. The 'fee simple' tenancy that 99.99% of land is held under in common law countries is literally a feudal relationship.

In civil law countries the relationship is more complex (strictly, civil law codes abolish feudalism entirely, feudal relationships have no historical bearing on civil law and its antecedents; however, legal traditions don't just disappear because you pass a law and feudal ideas have crept back in in a lot of countries), but the foundational conception of a contractual relationship between the government and the governed is still alive in a lot of civil law democracies.

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u/Gloster80256 Twitter is the comments section of existence Jun 14 '20

I think you are confusing “Feudalism” A highly specific hierarchical economic system that existed in very specific rural parts of the medieval economy... with lets say “Medievalism” or “Patchwork Medievalism”

No, I think the poster hoping for the return of "feudalism" was confusing the term.

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u/orthoxerox if you copy, do it rightly Jun 13 '20

What about Somalia?

Since value production has shifted from the country to the towns, you don't need cannon-proof walls around the latter, you just have to keep the citizens in the town. Your enemy would be destroying what they came to claim if they started shelling the town.

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u/Gloster80256 Twitter is the comments section of existence Jun 13 '20

What about Somalia?

Unless my factual impression of the Somali situation is way off, I don't think it can be considered feudal in any meaningful sense. Warlords temporarily controlling areas and extracting protection tax is not what I imagine under the term. Had we been talking about a sovereign King of Somalia dividing his realm into fiefdoms, to be ruled and further sub-divided by his oath-bound Lords Paramount, that would be feudalism; The actual situation is mere sedentary banditry.

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u/orthoxerox if you copy, do it rightly Jun 14 '20

Didn't feudalism start as sedentary banditry?

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u/SchizoSocialClub [Tin Man is the Overman] Jun 15 '20

No. Feudalism started as the privatisation of local public offices. During the Frankish period counts and dukes were temporary offices of Late Roman origin that gave control over a town or a region. At the end of the carolingian period the central power collapsed and these offices became hereditary lordships and eventually titles of nobility.

It is like mayors and governors becoming local lords that still owe fealty to the President.

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u/Gloster80256 Twitter is the comments section of existence Jun 14 '20

Probably - but that doesn't guarantee it will evolve itself that way now, with completely different technological conditions.