The Chait article[0] Taibbi cites may be a slightly more effective version of a similar argument, not least because he goes to a good deal of trouble to emphasize how much worse the problem is on the political right.
Nobody is arguing that the right wing media is not a giant echo chamber. Of course it is. Watching Sean Hannity speak would be amusing if not for the fact that you know there's a bunch of people in their living rooms taking him seriously.
But we on the left need to recognize how crazy this s* is getting.
If anyone questions the insane dogma that has taken over the newsrooms pushed by the far left, then they are labeled a right-winger or worse. Never mind the fact that it causes the left to lose elections when we let our fringe elements take over.
there are tens of thousands of people at any given moment talking about how crazy the right wing is, especially Fox news and Breitbart. But where are you when the New York times is completely going off the rails? You're just defending them as your tribal instincts take over.
Also let's be honest here:
Kneeling before people you've never met to atone for the sins of of other human beings who happen to share your skin color might be something that's normal to you. It is utterly alien to the vast majority of the American public. Defunding police might have nuance to it but it is lost to the American public. If we want to win this next presidential election and Congress in the Senate, we need to be aware of the fact that these ideas are insane to most of America. I can't think of anything that will push a Midwestern voter to pull the lever for Trump faster than watching Minneapolis disband its police department as a councilwoman interviewed on CNN states that calling the police on an intruder is an act of privilege.
If Trump wins in 2020 this will be why. I don't want him to win in 2020. Do you?
> If anyone questions the insane dogma that has taken over the newsrooms pushed by the far left
So...out of curiosity, just what do you see as being this "insane dogma" "pushed by the far left"?
Because so far as I can tell, America still doesn't have anything that could reasonably be called a "far left" that's being taken seriously by any mainstream media.
The most extreme positions I've heard recently that have gained any media traction are along the lines of "we should overhaul our police so that they don't regularly kill, brutalize, and otherwise traumatize innocent civilians".
The media doesn't ever report the numbers on police violence. They report the emotion.
Including both armed and unarmed people, just over 1000 people were killed by US police in 2019.
What percentage of those were black?
Approximately 24 percent. Did you know that? Did it surprise you? I assumed it was 75 percent. 24 percent is very bad, since black Americans are 13 percent of the population. However, it also indicates that race is one of, not the only, independent variable driving this. The media is deliberately not reporting these numbers. Simultaneously, they trot out chart after chart of covid19 infection statistics.
When I saw the data, I was very angry that my own perception was so skewed due to biased, incomplete reporting in the media.
I was also going through the numbers recently and it does appear that there is no place for contrast in the media, both within the phenomenon of police killings itself as you point out, as well as how it relates to other unfortunate and troubling causes of death.
For example ; ~ 250k people a year die from medical errors in the US [0]. From this one could argue that doctors are far more dangerous than cops, possibly on a per encounter basis as well. Certainly something should be done about this. I don't know if a mega riot will do it though.
Also, just what proportion of those police related deaths were actually justified by any standard ? Like how many of those people actually pointed a gun at the cops before ending up as a stat ? Regardless of race. That would be interesting to know. Obviously some heads have to roll when something like that happens, but maybe we should still keep the baby.
I'm usually not quick to side with the cops on any given day, but I like to side with the actual facts on any given day. Policing is a hard, dangerous and ungrateful job. Certainly it has its ( grave ) problems, but just doing away with the whole thing based on relatively few ( albeit horrible ) incidents, is not a rational reaction to this real issue.
African Americans can be racist. What they lack is the might and power of the US justice system, politicians, and the media behind them. That power turns white racism into a much more powerful force than African Americans that hate white people.
Racism without an overwhelming power differential is just angst. Typically people that feel oppressed hate the group they’re being oppressed by. I’m sure you would too.
> Kneeling before people you've never met to atone for the sins of of other human beings who happen to share your skin color might be something that's normal to you. It is utterly alien to the vast majority of the American public.
Kneeling together in humility with other people is a weekly occurrence, if you’re Catholic.
I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian. I don't know the reasoning in Catholicism, but was told to kneel in church as a show of humility and submission to God. I was also told that this was reserved only for God.
I'm no longer religious. I couldn't tolerate the bigotry towards gay people. But the idea of kneeling for a human being repulses me.
If the act of kneeing at all is a problem for you, then I don’t know what to tell you. But kneeling to others, and kneeling with others—joining in with others who are kneeling—are very different actions. I’d suggest you not conflating the two.
This is kind of true. For decades I was an ardent leftist. These days I just can't stomach what they're doing. It's a measure of how far they've fallen that Donald Trump doesn't seem that bad (by comparison).
> These days I just can't stomach what they're doing. It's a measure of how far they've fallen that Donald Trump doesn't seem that bad (by comparison).
What do you think the Left is doing that makes Trump seem not so bad?
Yes, it's been highly disorienting and depressing for me. I suppose I always imagined that the right would come around to some of the left's better ideas, but I never expected that the left would pick up some the right's worst ideas.
The right is calling the press “enemies of the people”, and threatening legal action against media companies for publishing poll results they don’t like, as well as physically attacking journalists doing their job. I don’t know how you read “defending freedom of speech” into any of that.
I agree that the purity tests of the left are extremely concerning, but they don’t control policy yet. The idea that the person who is wielding power badly could be not as bad as some people arguing over an OpEd seems a bit facile to me.
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-...