3 ms·

Realistically, what do you expect the DA to say? As part of the job, admitting fault for anything pre-emptively goes against all the attributes that get you th

by dd82 3y ago

Realistically, what do you expect the DA to say? As part of the job, admitting fault for anything pre-emptively goes against all the attributes that get you the job in the first place

bell-cot 3y ago
Fantasy scenario: Voters actually notice such "defend any half-wit thuggery, so long as the perp's have badges" behavior by elected officials, and reliably punish offenders at the ballot box. In theory, every voter who claims to be pro-women's rights, or pro-civil rights, or liberal, or ... should be eager to make this fantasy come true. In practice... Hahahaha!!! Yeah, right. So - why the huge gulf? Could it be that the great majority of voters claiming such moral cred are just Performative Activists, who don't actually give a crap?
- jj999 3y ago
  Did you ever vote? Between the very limited number of political leaning options available and the personal morality of the candidates, voters can never vote for a candidate they want but only for the candidate they least don't want.
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    Yes (for quite a few decades now). I've noticed that elections often feature both incumbents and challengers. The latter often attack decisions and statements made by the former - "He voted to raise your taxes!", "Look at [video] what he said about X!", etc. By numerous, and seemingly well-researched accounts, an enormous about of behind-the-scenes political work goes into identifying the very best combinations of incumbent behavior and voter hot buttons, to precision-target those expensive (paid political advertising) attacks. If all the politicians, wanna-be politicians, and their armies of consultants and pollsters, seem to believe that where it counts, in the polling booth, voters don't actually care about a certain issue...might all those amply-motivated experts possibly be correct?
- anon84873628 3y ago
  It's very hard for a layperson to research DA candidates and then choose the optimal one. That's assuming a jurisdiction where the position is elected and there are any worthwhile candidates in the first place. If the position is appointed then you have yet another layer of indirection and competing factors for the voter to evaluate. Even for presidential elections it's hard to feel great about your vote... Democracy kinda sucks.
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    > It's very hard for a layperson to research DA candidates and... True. But in a world where the elderly Secretary of the Methodist Ladies Gardening Society has no problem keeping track of donated funds and flower bulb locations and volunteer weeding in her 3-ring binder... it would be incredibly easy for a few people who actually cared to keep track of DA behavior, year after year, as a side hobby. Bottom-end web hosting is ~free, to make that information available to the public. Yet ~nobody seems to be doing that. Are the police and DA's quietly shutting them down? Perhaps...but 10000X the quantity of hot-headed political attack material is freely available on the web. And it's hard to assert that those police and DA's are every-so-quietly and -competently doing that by night, while regularly bungling similar work by day. Or...is the problem that the modern version of "caring" about such such police and Prosecutor incompetence and misconduct is 100% performative activism, and 0% interest in taking any action which might lead to "positive" change? It's not like that behavior isn't seen on other issues. Lots of well-to-do liberal neighborhoods will poll as being very strongly in favor of (say) affordable housing for less-well-off people. But if there's any hint that such housing might appear near their precious neighborhood ...yeah. Don't expect them to behave the way that poll suggested they would.
- chucksmash 3y ago
  This is a boring thought, but it's my boring thought, and I'll post it because I kind of agreed with you until I realized it was kind of me you were kind of railing against. If you made a list of things that "the other side" truly cares about, it's probably mostly what you care about. When you strip away what people are currently angry about, people mostly care about things that come down to "am I making the world better for my (possibly putative) children." It's a reductive view, but I think it's true in a useful way. That is to say, I think it's true for most people in a pairwise fashion, so it's probably true of you, and it's probably a useful way to think about other people you meet, most of the time. In the context of social media, it is profitable for people to be performative because that drives engagement and engagement is profitable. For this reason, social media is a terrible proxy for other people because is not one to one (pairwise) as above, but one to many. Thus, social media is a massive distortion if you spend time a lot of time on it, or if you spend a lot of time reading the thoughts of people who spend a lot of time on it[1]. I thought of giving exaggerated examples of "the other side" here but I don't even have to draw the pictures, the caricatures literally draw themselves if you think for just a moment. For both sides. Which is kind of what I'm driving at. Most people are essentially like you though, they just want things to be better. They aren't performance artists gunning for virtue signaling engagement, they just disagree with you about the implementation details. Sometimes these disagreements truly are utter incompatibilities, it's true. But there's an entire industry that now exists in convincing people with the same broad desires that the other side desires only to dash their hopes and dreams. My boring thought is that, broadly, there's a breathtaking overlap between what you want and what the (call them) deplorables on the other side want, and you're mostly just vigorously disagreeing on the cause célèbre you've been told is the keystone to everything this season. [1]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/the-new-york-times-would-really-like-its-reporters-to-stop-scrolling-and-get-off-twitter-at-least-once-in-a-while/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/the-new-york-times-would-r...

by dd82 3y ago

Realistically, what do you expect the DA to say? As part of the job, admitting fault for anything pre-emptively goes against all the attributes that get you the job in the first place

bell-cot 3y ago

Fantasy scenario: Voters actually notice such "defend any half-wit thuggery, so long as the perp's have badges" behavior by elected officials, and reliably punish offenders at the ballot box. In theory, every voter who claims to be pro-women's rights, or pro-civil rights, or liberal, or ... should be eager to make this fantasy come true. In practice... Hahahaha!!! Yeah, right. So - why the huge gulf? Could it be that the great majority of voters claiming such moral cred are just Performative Activists, who don't actually give a crap?

jj999 3y ago
Did you ever vote? Between the very limited number of political leaning options available and the personal morality of the candidates, voters can never vote for a candidate they want but only for the candidate they least don't want.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  Yes (for quite a few decades now). I've noticed that elections often feature both incumbents and challengers. The latter often attack decisions and statements made by the former - "He voted to raise your taxes!", "Look at [video] what he said about X!", etc. By numerous, and seemingly well-researched accounts, an enormous about of behind-the-scenes political work goes into identifying the very best combinations of incumbent behavior and voter hot buttons, to precision-target those expensive (paid political advertising) attacks. If all the politicians, wanna-be politicians, and their armies of consultants and pollsters, seem to believe that where it counts, in the polling booth, voters don't actually care about a certain issue...might all those amply-motivated experts possibly be correct?
anon84873628 3y ago
It's very hard for a layperson to research DA candidates and then choose the optimal one. That's assuming a jurisdiction where the position is elected and there are any worthwhile candidates in the first place. If the position is appointed then you have yet another layer of indirection and competing factors for the voter to evaluate. Even for presidential elections it's hard to feel great about your vote... Democracy kinda sucks.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  > It's very hard for a layperson to research DA candidates and... True. But in a world where the elderly Secretary of the Methodist Ladies Gardening Society has no problem keeping track of donated funds and flower bulb locations and volunteer weeding in her 3-ring binder... it would be incredibly easy for a few people who actually cared to keep track of DA behavior, year after year, as a side hobby. Bottom-end web hosting is ~free, to make that information available to the public. Yet ~nobody seems to be doing that. Are the police and DA's quietly shutting them down? Perhaps...but 10000X the quantity of hot-headed political attack material is freely available on the web. And it's hard to assert that those police and DA's are every-so-quietly and -competently doing that by night, while regularly bungling similar work by day. Or...is the problem that the modern version of "caring" about such such police and Prosecutor incompetence and misconduct is 100% performative activism, and 0% interest in taking any action which might lead to "positive" change? It's not like that behavior isn't seen on other issues. Lots of well-to-do liberal neighborhoods will poll as being very strongly in favor of (say) affordable housing for less-well-off people. But if there's any hint that such housing might appear near their precious neighborhood ...yeah. Don't expect them to behave the way that poll suggested they would.
chucksmash 3y ago
This is a boring thought, but it's my boring thought, and I'll post it because I kind of agreed with you until I realized it was kind of me you were kind of railing against. If you made a list of things that "the other side" truly cares about, it's probably mostly what you care about. When you strip away what people are currently angry about, people mostly care about things that come down to "am I making the world better for my (possibly putative) children." It's a reductive view, but I think it's true in a useful way. That is to say, I think it's true for most people in a pairwise fashion, so it's probably true of you, and it's probably a useful way to think about other people you meet, most of the time. In the context of social media, it is profitable for people to be performative because that drives engagement and engagement is profitable. For this reason, social media is a terrible proxy for other people because is not one to one (pairwise) as above, but one to many. Thus, social media is a massive distortion if you spend time a lot of time on it, or if you spend a lot of time reading the thoughts of people who spend a lot of time on it[1]. I thought of giving exaggerated examples of "the other side" here but I don't even have to draw the pictures, the caricatures literally draw themselves if you think for just a moment. For both sides. Which is kind of what I'm driving at. Most people are essentially like you though, they just want things to be better. They aren't performance artists gunning for virtue signaling engagement, they just disagree with you about the implementation details. Sometimes these disagreements truly are utter incompatibilities, it's true. But there's an entire industry that now exists in convincing people with the same broad desires that the other side desires only to dash their hopes and dreams. My boring thought is that, broadly, there's a breathtaking overlap between what you want and what the (call them) deplorables on the other side want, and you're mostly just vigorously disagreeing on the cause célèbre you've been told is the keystone to everything this season. [1]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/the-new-york-times-would-really-like-its-reporters-to-stop-scrolling-and-get-off-twitter-at-least-once-in-a-while/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/the-new-york-times-would-r...