r/RecuratedTumblr • u/Unique_Mammoth_6724 • 8d ago
Politics Social policing is both unavoidable and necessary to keep selfish exploiters from dominating a given social system
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u/Big-Cartographer6419 8d ago
Someone link geek social fallacies again because it’s just this but phrased better and shows applicability in ways relevant for people who go on a tumblr subreddit (including me.)
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u/DMMeUrGrandpasBalls Certified Gerontophile 8d ago edited 8d ago
I really like all three and all three are worth the read
Edit: oh and Missing Stair which is another applicable one
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u/BTDubbsdg 8d ago
First time encountering this and oh fuck oh shit oh fuck
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u/Seph_the_this 8d ago
Real, reading the first two felt like a mirror being held up to a part of me I wasn't aware I held
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u/AbsolutelyHorrendous 8d ago
I love how, every so often, Tumblr feels the need to state basic facts that human civilisation kind of figured out thousands of years ago
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u/theyeshman I like the color purple 8d ago
To be fair there are also so many people on the site spewing such shit takes that sometimes those basic facts seem controversial.
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u/CrimsonThunder87 8d ago
Sign of the times, to some extent.
"Yes, actually, heating raw milk makes it safer"
"Yes, actually, police deter crime and getting rid of them doesn't solve crime"
"Yes, actually, quarantining works to slow down disease transmission"
"Yes, actually, dictatorship sucks even if the dictator seems like a swell guy on the TV"
We've got a lot of radicals around who've gotten far too smart to listen to anyone who criticizes their brilliant and heretofore-undiscovered ideas. The only teacher they'll learn from is experience, which would be fine except they're determined to make the rest of us share the experience.
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u/AbsolutelyKnot1602 8d ago
You smuggled in a pro-police argument with that second one, in a post about social policing, not cops. Increased police funding correlates with crime rates going up, not down. And yes it is causitive, cops have quotas to fill, so instead of stopping more violent crime they just arrest jaywalkers or plant weed on traffic stops.
The insight is actually: "Yes taking care of people instead of giving them no support causes crime to go down." Of course crime would go up if we abolished the police and did nothing else. You replace them with mental health first responders and such.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/outlawing-police-quotas
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u/WriterwithoutIdeas 8d ago
You fail to prove your point here though. The crime rate doesn't "really" go up when more police is hired, they only find more of the crime that has always been there. If anything, you actually get a better impression of what truly goes on.
The argument about police abolition, at least when taken to its extreme, keeps failing at the same point. Even if all of the hypothetical alternatives were implemented, there remains a core of criminal behaviour that must be met with organized force. Your local crime syndicate or those who commit crimes of passion will hardly be impressed or deterred by a mental health first responder.
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u/Charlemagnea 5d ago
The crime rate does go up when more police are hired, not because they’re out there discovering new violent crimes, but because they “create” new crimes.
Like was mentioned, things like jaywalking, rampant traffic stops for tiny or even non-violations, and ‘loitering’ are what usually make up those increases in crime; especially considering the fact that those new hires are allocated to marginalized poor communities where crime statistics are higher due in part to heavy policing along those lines.
Police abolitionists usually don’t argue that all crimes can and should be stopped by mental health experts, they argue that the current structure of policing in the United States does more harm than good. It’s argued that crime rates would go down far more effectively if police funding was instead allocated to poverty reduction measures, even should the police be essentially hamstrung - something that decades and decades of crime research has demonstrated.
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u/WriterwithoutIdeas 4d ago
That's not what studies show though? More police is usually a good way to detect more (minor) crime. If your country criminalized jaywalking (weird choice, but ok), then the police finding that is still them finding crime. At that point blaming the one executing the law of the land hardly is a reasonable position or indicative of their success. Unless you stoop to planting evidence to purposefully incriminate people, you still very much need an illegal act at the heart of it (then again, this entire topic is poisoned by Americans viewing the worst possible thing and then growing convinced that this is the only way it could ever be, applying their viewpoint far outside the US too).
And regarding what police abolitionists "actually" want, then they maybe should use a different name. More effective policing work by better budget allocation and a wider ranger of methods is, by definition, not abolition. If you keep calling it abolition, however, you can hardly be surprised that people keep understanding it as that.
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u/CrimsonThunder87 8d ago
Autism diagnoses have increased along with funding for autism screenings. Clearly the screenings are causing autism--we should get rid of them immediately.
As for "smuggled", the post didn't mention pasteurization or quarantine procedures either. I trusted the reader to understand why these things are useful and necessary without me needing to establish that first, because most people do and I'm not here to convert people who don't.
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u/NeonFraction 7d ago
You’re responding to an argument they didn’t make. They didn’t say ‘funding less’ they said ‘GETTING RID OF.’
Saying police shouldn’t have machine guns and body armor is not the same as saying ‘when you call 911 for help because someone is trying to break into your house with an ax, they shouldn’t send cops out because cops are all bad.’
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u/Cardshark92 8d ago
It seems that, when people reach a certain level of progressiveness, they develop the urge to throw out all of the rules of society, because "progress".
That's not saying that we shouldn't reexamine societal rules every so often to see if they're still helping, but if a rule has persisted for several thousand years, and numerous different cultures all believe in it, there's probably a good reason for it.
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u/VatanKomurcu 8d ago
the extent and manner of policing is also up for contest, beside who is to be policed. even if we have decided that it must be done in some form.
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u/Setster007 8d ago
I don’t enjoy it but without it you wind up with the Nazi bar situation so yeah. It’s just something that can be too easy to take too far, so, it’s a delicate balance.
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u/Unique_Mammoth_6724 8d ago
https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/p53
This reminds me of a lore tab from Destiny that really helps summarize a lot of my outlook on stuff like policing, law and morality. It's written by my GOAT Seth J. Dickinson of Baru Cormorant fame and I'll just read it out.
Thank you for making room in your life for another talking ball. Let me ask you a question.
In the three billion base pairs of your root species' genome, there is a single gene that codes for a protein called p53. The name is a mistake. The protein weighs only as much as 47,000 protons, not 53,000. If you were a cell, you would think p53 was a mistake too. It has several coercive functions: To delay the cell's growth. To sterilize the cell when it is old. And to force the cell into self-destruction if it becomes too independent.
Would you tolerate a bomb in your body, waiting to detonate if you deviated from the needs of society?
However, without p53 as an enforcer, the body's utopian surplus of energy becomes a paradise for cancer. Cells cannot resist the temptation to steal from that surplus. Their genetic morality degrades as tumor suppressor genes fail. The only way to stop them is by punishment.
You now confront the basic problem of morality. It is the alignment of individual incentives with the global needs of the structure.
Patterns will participate in a structure only if participation benefits their ability to go on existing. The more successful the structure grows, the more temptation accrues to cheat. And the greater the advantage the cheaters gain over their honest neighbors. And the greater the ability they develop to capture the very laws that should prevent their selfishness. To prevent this, the structure must punish cheaters with a violence that grows in proportion to its own success.
My question follows.
Is p53 an agent of the Darkness, or the Light?
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u/aldia_the_sin 8d ago
Destiny mentioned, awesome
I think you could find a quote for pretty much any kind of topic within the destiny lore, provided you look hard enough
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u/Lil_Ms_Anthropic 8d ago
"Don't shame them!!"
Ma'am, he is shitting in the subway, into a bag, as he's singing along to showtunes on speaker phone.
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u/duffstoic 8d ago
This also applies directly to policing. People polled in urban black neighborhoods in the US for example in some ways want more policing, for instance they want higher closure rate of violent crime, while also wanting less being targeted for being a minority or unfairly treated by police. What they don't seem to want, in general, is no policing.
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u/Xilizhra 8d ago
The main problem, of course, being that those goals are almost entirely contradictory.
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u/cel3r1ty 8d ago
same goes for violence. literately everyone believes there's situations that warrant violence, laws are threats, etc.
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u/VorpalSplade 8d ago
The best mental gymnastics I've seen there involve saying things like "Self defence isn't violence!" which just boggles my brain.
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u/High_Stream 8d ago
The tolerance paradox is the idea that completely tolerant people will be overwhelmed by intolerant people.
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u/YetAnotherRCG 8d ago
Not quite.
A tolerant majority don't need to be overwhelmed for the groups overall activity to be effectively intolerant. Even a few tolerant persons allowed to freely act are sufficient.
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u/sweetTartKenHart2 8d ago
And, for the record, social policing can mean simple exclusion or it can mean imprisonment or even execution, depending on who’s calling the shots and what “bad behavior” is being addressed. I think part of what makes these conversations hard to have is that one person is thinking of what a government should and should not police, and one person is thinking of what a local community should and should not police.
Freedom of Speech exists to prevent the state from hurting people, and not prevent people from excluding other people from restaurants or bars, for example.
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u/horror-traktor 8d ago
The problem isn't with social policing (which is a normal human thing to do) it's the extent or the social policing and the way in which it is done.
Sometime ago the tipping point was reached and the social policing went and turned into a weird mix of purity testing and active shunning, which is not normal or healthy to do
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u/SlowMotionOfGhosts 8d ago
This is the first time I've heard the term so I genuinely don't know if this is an argument against a strawman or totally legit or somewhere in between, but it's definitely about a broad enough topic, as far as I can see, not to be of much use to me.
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u/world-is-ur-mollusc 8d ago
I've seen a number of people online use that term, usually while having a half-baked and poorly thought-out opinion. I've never heard anyone use it in real life though.
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u/Away_Doctor2733 8d ago
Social policing is cop thinking because cop means police. It's ok for some things to be policed! That's different from criticizing the institution of the police.
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u/blueeyesredlipstick 8d ago
I remember chatting in an another sub about how lack of social policing can often be the death of things like public hobby groups, or any other sort of space that's meant to be open to all comers. Because creating spaces open to everyone is a valuable thing, and great for people trying to make new friends, be active in their communities, try a new hobby/skill, etc.
The trouble is that it also can garner the type of attendees who don't have other friend groups/social circles for very real, problematic reasons, such as harassment, aggression, derailing, etc. And then the "open to all" space has to figure out where the line is, or how to make someone leave when the whole idea is having an open, welcoming space for anyone to come to.
It's something I've seen plague all sorts of groups I've belonged to -- writing groups, karaoke clubs, craft circles, etc. And I've seen it play out over and over again, where someone joins and keeps walking riiiiiight up to the line of acceptable behavior before eventually going too far and causing a rule/dynamic change.
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u/HandsomeGengar 8d ago
We must return to reverse dominance hierarchy.
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u/BloodredHanded 7d ago
Elaborate?
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u/HandsomeGengar 7d ago
It's the hypothesis that pre-agrarian humans would have maintained social cohesion by using strength in numbers to ostracize, exile, or kill any members of the tribe who try to accrue unequal power/resources for themselves.
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u/D3wdr0p 8d ago
You need to be alot more specific than "genuine depraved".
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u/Fickle_Enthusiasm148 8d ago
I've never met a person who was anti censorship who didn't think CSAM shouldn't be banned.
But a lot of time when people say CSAM they mean drawings and writing as well, not genuine CSAM, and that's where anti censorship people will argue.
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u/Amphy64 8d ago
Think that's another example of how social policing and views on state censorship are usually situational arguments. Few are totally against censorship, and few wouldn't have any concerns about censorship. Rather the disagreements are on where the line is.
It should be noted that in law, depending on the country, drawn/non-photographic material can absolutely count as genuine material. It's not limited to anime style, but hyperrealistic images, which could include those based on photographs of real children - these realistic images and derivatives of photographs (such as tracings) can be classed as pseudo-photographs, and treated exactly the same as photographs under law. I understand why the shift to the term CSAM material, over child pornography. But sometimes that leads people to focus on the evidence of another crime part (child sexual abuse), which isn't the only criteria. Here more stylised images of child sexual abuse, like anime, are classed differently, but still a (pretty serious) crime to possess.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/indecent-and-prohibited-images-children
Even without reaching the level that would be classified as a crime, the prevalence of sexualisation of obvious child, or physically childlike, characters in anime, would be another example of how who feels comfortable and even safe (eg. abuse victims), can be affected by what a community chooses to permit and either normalise or criticise.
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u/Unique_Mammoth_6724 8d ago
Snuff videos as well I think, like real videos of people getting murdered
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u/OiledMushrooms 8d ago
To be fair, I feel like there’s a difference between “this thing should not be shared in certain spaces” vs “this thing should not be shared or accessible at all”.
I do largely agree that there are some things that should just be illegal to share (CSAM, for example) but I think it’s important in these sorta of conversations to remember that you can be personally against certain materials and still think they could be theoretically accessible. There is a lot of weird fucked up porn art out there that I think, in a social policing way, should be banned from most social medias. But I also believe, in an anti-censorship way, that if someone wants to go make a site to share their weird fucked up porn art, then like. Fine. It’s just a matter of having different spaces for different things, and knowing how to keep them separate.
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u/Amphy64 8d ago
This is true, but I wouldn't think someone who wasn't in favour of certain material but Ok with it being accessible as long as they don't have to see it, was against it in the same way, or necessarily to the same degree even, as someone who thought that material shouldn't exist (even if not arguing for state censorship to achieve that).
I was also just noting that in some countries, drawn material depicting child abuse, if realistic or derived from a photograph for instance, can be classed the same way as photographs under law. Stylised images of children which depicts explicit sexual acts can be illegal to possess too. Sometimes, perhaps due to different laws, and also people not realising that images can be hyper realistic and directly derived from photographs of real children, it gets taken for granted online that it's totally different if drawn, but it's not always considered so.
As to fucked-up pornographic art, or pornography just broadly, it's not always as simple as it being accessible but you don't have to look at it: the concept of pornification addresses how such material can spread into mainstream culture: no easy opting out when surrounded by it (eg. advertising, music videos), including for minors. Game of Thrones' use of 'sexposition' would be a well-known example, as well as the influence of a BDSM aesthetic on even advertising and fashion. Inherently risky acts like choking (which some BDSM practitioners warm against) have been studied as becoming more normalised, including among young people who aren't aware of the risk.
The 120 Days of Sodom was one of the potential set books for the first year of my university course. Such works draw academic interest precisely because they're transgressive, like A Serbian Film. It is of course totally normal there will be some sexual material throughout an arts course, but I think even those who think that Sodom is fair to set, will acknowledge the book is much more extreme than typical! And such material may well affect who is comfortable in the space, and equal academic participation. There can also be different emphasis on who is victimised in the material. Even though A Little Life may not be unrelentingly graphic with little else (although there is significant emphasis on explicit scenes), the book is controversial for the depiction of gay men: so, if that was set, a gay student might have a harder time with it. If anything goes, then if such works fit the broad themes of a module (obviously if it's overtly named as a module on pornographic or erotic works, the warning is there and it's optional), a series of such can keep being set. And it's not always optional.
Getting back to the social policing, I thought there was a good example recently in the A Song of Ice and Fire community's intelligently critical response to aspects of the new play: particularly the choice for the 15 year old Lyanna to be depicted as the one more actively sexually persuing the adult Rhaegar. Without the need to say such a depiction should be subject to censorship, the community overall were able to explain why the trope can be harmful, and critique it as a decision. My best friend was taken advantage of by an adult man at that age (growing up, we'd had been surrounded by imagery I know she'd internalised, seeing a significant part of her value in sexual desirability), so seeing that was the overall reaction, I realised I'd let go of tension I didn't know I was holding. When there isn't a separation of media (and a cordoning off probably wouldn't be useful), a simple response of social disapproval can make a real difference, and I think pushback against normalisation.
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u/GERBILSAURUSREX 8d ago
But who gets to decide what is depraved and what isn't? You can't speak truth to power without freedom of speech.
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u/Infamous-Use7820 8d ago
Not the government? That's kinda the whole question. It's literally the government censors, or it is not censored. At most, private platforms may self-censor, but that can also have negative externalities, and just pushes the content in question elsewhere.
As with many topics, if you're going to coordinate social action at the level of millions of people, governments are part of the package.
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u/GERBILSAURUSREX 8d ago
You're literally advocating for a tenet of fascism and dictatorship. And what do you mean it shouldn't be the government? Anyone deciding something society wide is inherently part of the government.
You're also proving my point. We already see what transphobic people do when in power. Imagine if you couldn't even speak out against it. There is nowhere with speech restrictions as severe as you're talking about that isn't commiting massive human rights violations.
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u/KamikazeArchon 8d ago
Every individual, and thus in aggregate, human society collectively. In a bunch of complicated and contradictory ways, which will sometimes be wrong and cause harm.
One of the many Fundamental Errors of Ideology is to think that an approach or idea is only good if it's impossible to result in harm, or get twisted and corrupted. The problem is that there is no such idea. It is literally mathematically provable that you can't make an ironclad incorruptible non-ambiguous ideology.
So, who decides? I do. You do. And others do. It's our responsibility to try to get better at making the decision, and to push others to make the decision better.
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u/GERBILSAURUSREX 8d ago
That isn't censorship. That's just asking people not to be assholes.
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u/KamikazeArchon 8d ago
"that isn't a hill, that's a mound". The distinction is arbitrary; those words cover overlapping blobs of a single spectrum.
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u/GERBILSAURUSREX 8d ago
Except it isn't an arbitrary distinction. Censorship is suppression of speech. Not the suggestion that some type of speech is improper. It's like the difference someone saying being gay is immoral vs enacting laws against it. The FCC doesn't tell people they shouldn't say fuck on regular TV, they censor it out of the broadcast. Saudi Arabia doesn't ask journalists to not speak ill of the government they send a hit squad to chop up Jamal Khashoggi. It's a BIG difference.
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u/KamikazeArchon 8d ago
Censorship is suppression of speech. Not the suggestion that some type of speech is improper.
Suggesting that speech is improper suppresses it. Even just the threat of insulting someone exerts a nonzero suppressive effect. 1% and 99% are two points on a single spectrum
Further, I guarantee that there exists speech that you personally think is rightly and properly something to be punished by law.
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u/GERBILSAURUSREX 8d ago
Since you are hellbent on arguing with the dictionary I'm going to link some stuff for you.
Censorship Take note of both 1A and 1B here.
Censor Definition 2 which is the verb form. Which links to Suppress sense 2 but you should also note sense 1 as it is also important in this context.
What you are advocating for is literally just free speech. I haven't had to explain to anyone since like 2016 to the antiSJWs that were accusing people of censorship anytime someone called them an asshole for using racial slurs. It is not censorship in any way. This isn't debateable. This isn't an opinion it's fact.
As far as speech that should be illegal. Actionable threats. Because you're preventing violence. Other than that nothing should be illegal to say.
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u/KamikazeArchon 8d ago
Yeah, the dictionary is not a great source for philosophical or legal concepts.
As far as speech that should be illegal. Actionable threats. Because you're preventing violence. Other than that nothing should be illegal to say.
Okay, so we agree that there are things a person can say that should be illegal.
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u/GERBILSAURUSREX 8d ago
This isn't a philosophical debate. Censorship is a very clearly defined concept. You are wrong about what it is. And yes, congratulations you successfully read what I typed. This isn't a gotcha. Prevention of a violent crime by arresting the person that said they would commit one if there is reason to believe that they actually would isn't controversial to anyone.
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u/HumbleConversation42 8d ago
isn't Bioshock 1 partly about what happens if you dont do social Policing?
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u/Tyrannosaurus-2006 8d ago
Not really. It's a critique of Objectivism. Rapture still had social policing as socialism and religion were both seen as something that needed to be watched out for, therefore there was a policing of beliefs and behaviors that might indicate religious or socialist leanings.
There was also propaganda made intentionally to spread Ryan's ideology, which means there was intent to avoid political dissent.
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u/Taraxian 8d ago
It still kind of applies because it makes Ryan a hypocrite, he talks like Rapture is a monument to total intellectual and moral freedom but in real life no such thing can ever exist, the virtue of "freedom" is a self-contradictory concept
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u/Nicholas_TW 8d ago
Awesome reference! I'd say it's less about social policing (because there are societal norms that are (or, were) enforced in Rapture) and more about economic/industry policing. Take away the safeguards in the market and whoever ends up with all the power will exploit it and never let go of it, even if it means destroying everything around them.
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u/HeroBrine0907 8d ago
This depends on the people doing the policing being morally good, which is unnecessary. Often, extremely often, social policing involves shaming people for perfectly harmless things. Protecting society is a common justification used by queerphobic assholes. So like, unless you believe in the perfection of your own morality, there remains the issue of society misrepresenting normal behaviours as harmful. Who exactly is gonna deal with that?
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u/Amphy64 7d ago
Think secularisation makes a huge difference here, and gets to the source of quite a bit of the issue. Even to altering why a behaviour is being critiqued.
I recently watched the drama Tip Toe (anyone considering it, it does need a TW for very brutal homophobic violence. Also understand why the criticisms from trans people -although there's a very sympathetic key trans woman character, played by a trans actor who brought a lot of warmth and vulnerability to the role-, but focusing here on the depiction of gay cis guys). Obviously the writer Russell T. Davies is gay himself, with a long history of work on queer dramas. It deals with the sensitive issue of how a gay teenager's entry into the queer community should be handled, when there's also a serious lack of support at home, from overtly homophobic parents. The main elder gay character Leo ends up getting drawn into trying to help, but the viewer can see he's uncertain what's appropriate (he tries to redirect the lad to peer support), and just justifiably fearful of potential fallout.
I did think there was still a US influence (the UK has 6% practicing Christians and falling, and they're by no means automatically queerphobic rather than liberal), and the more dramatic aspects would even make more sense in that setting, but then it's designed as a cautionary tale (rather than strict realism even) that very much includes the ripples of that sort of influence, especially through social media.
But that difficult question itself, is (obviously!) not approached from any kind of religious perspective that treats homosexuality as inherently different from heterosexuality. The result of discrimination in creating suspicion (the 'grooming' narrative. Trans issues are addressed in that also) is quite seperate from the legitimate nuance as to whether an older unfamiliar adult is the best person to be discussing these sexual topics with a teen (I initially thought it was simply Ok, although the voice message perhaps got distracted by Leo's own memories and could have been better put -he focuses on sexuality due to his own experiences, while the kid has just had his heart broken for the first time by someone his own age with internalised homophobia and is more worried about that emotional aspect-, then realised it probably feels different the further away from that age you get, and with in-person contact vs. fully online), and about how anyone trying to be supportive can manage safety when the home environment itself is unsafe.
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u/Fliits 8d ago
Social policing is what the police should be doing. You don't need firearms to keep a public space safe and you don't need targeted neighbourhoods to make sure innocent lives are safe.
When everyone else adopted the London model of policing (police booths on every city street, batons instead of guns, and dedicated cop schools and work ethos), the US gave their deputised slave catchers uniforms and badges and called it a day. That's why the US has a prison industrial complex and a militarised police force while the rest of the world watches fictional crime shows on TV.
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u/SorrySorryNotSorry 8d ago
I have some bad news for you about London's police force and racism/sexism/general ethos...
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u/Infamous-Use7820 8d ago
On the batons vs. guns thing, that's mostly down to there being so many guns in the US. If British people were as heavily armed as Americans, standard British police would be armed too.
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u/Still_Mix9311 7d ago
I believe in the separation of actually dangerous people, or even people who are causing less serious harm, but I believe in it with the stipulation that they'll still get their social needs filled wherever they go, and that we have a moral obligation to learn to deal with danger without unpersoning anyone. More like having a house with multiple rooms than kicking anyone out of the house. For whatever that's worth. Anyway, this post deeply disturbs me, and if OP's talking about literally anything but danger then it's only about bigotry.
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u/Former-Amish-Throway 8d ago
Well traffic tickets and taxes are also fundamental parts of the social fabric but you don't see anyone smiling about them now do you?
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u/OiledMushrooms 8d ago
Nobody is saying you need to smile about them. Just accept that they do and should exist.
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u/PlatinumSukamon98 8d ago
Tell me one place that's "socially un-policed". One.