I doubt many police officers start out just shooting people. How many cops implicated in malicious slayings are rookies? Such cops are made from years of getting away with bad behavior that grows progressively worse over time until they literally think they can get away with murder.
Of course, I’m sure we all agree that we need better accountability for cops and to end the code of silence. But government workers in general are a protected class, hard to hold accountable, even when being nasty and arrogant is what they do every single day. The civilian side of government should be run like the military in the sense that excellence is expected and all who don’t measure up can go find something else to do. Government work should be tougher than private sector work, not cushier.
The “most important” Jefferson-Jackson dinner is the one in Washington, D.C., right? Are they going to change their name? If so, I’d concede that it might be an example of politically correct overkill.
But what about bringing down the Confederate Battle flag, Adaher ? Was that also a “stupid liberal idea”? Political correctness run amok? Oh, I guess you “know the answer” to that since several Republiotard leaders endorsed that change. Do the Democrats need GOP assent to change the name of their dinners? :smack:
But good on you, Adaher ! A top Republiotard leader pushes anti-gay legislation to appeal to haters while secretly paying blackmail to a sodomized boy. And Democrat’s desire to stop honoring a slave-owner is your come-back.
Cheney and Rove started a stupid multi-trillion dollar war which led to disaster in the Middle East, all to enrich a few campaign donors like Halliburton. And Democrat’s desire to stop honoring a slave-owner is your come-back.
Many stupid Republicans in positions of power reject science, have forbidden the Pentagon from considering AGW, etc. And Democrat’s desire to stop honoring a slave-owner is your come-back.
GOP lawmakers have engineered one of the greatest wealth transfers in history, moving wealth from the middle-class and poor to the super-rich. It will be more of the same if they continue to win elections. But some “stupid” Democrats want to stop honoring a slave-owner!
What a lame joke Adaher is. Does he even suspect how stupid he is?
How many of us would particularly object to slavery if we’d been born and raised in a society that fostered it? What things do we take for granted today that some future society might blame us for not considering wrong?
I would like to believe that nearly everyone here, born into a society with slavery, would seek to reform it, although (alas) quite probably not to abolish it.
Slavery in the U.S. was heavily dependent upon cruelty. The lash, shackles, overwork, short rations, and the breaking apart of families. This was a conscious decision on the part of the slave-owning society. They dreaded what might happen if owners were expected to be kind and fair to the slaves. That might lead to a sense of entitlement, and a conception of justice.
We – the good people of the SDMB, born in an alternate history – would be opposed to the whipping and the branding and the separation of families. Some of us would go farther and want the institution of slavery done away with entirely. But none of us should be so smug as to be sure we’d be among those latter.
We were all born into a society that fosters institutional racism, and most of us object to that. I think most of us would be pretty opposed to owning black people if we’re against disenfranchising them and blocking them out of employment opportunities and housing.
There will be many things we do today which will be considered barbaric in the future, but slavery was recognized as wrong even back then by most people, and those who didn’t think it was wrong obviously did on some level due to the nature of their defensive arguments in support of it.
Does Democracy Now count or is that too easy? Anyway, Naomi Klein was talking about the (ultimately unsuccessful) physical blockage by environmental protesters of the icebreaker bound for Arctic drilling. She railed against the victory by the oil company as being “might-makes-right”. However, taking direct action by physically blocking someone’s path is a lot closer to “might makes right” than legally and nonviolently making a ship and trying to sail it out. Now, I think we should not drill in the American Arctic, at least as much from old-school conservationism (i.e. save our oil for later) as from preventing carbon emissions, just enough that I am not sure whose side I am on in the situation, but I’m not going to pretend that the protesters were not the first ones to skirt around the rule of law.
I guess we can throw in Kelly Osbourne’s dumb The View statement on Latinos and cleaning toilets?
That’s the danger of reciting other people’s talking points rather than using your own brain. “Immigrants do a lot of dirty jobs Americans won’t do” sounds a lot better than “Who will clean our toilets?” although the spirit behind those statements is the same.
Not sure this counts as a stupid liberal idea of the day, in that Kelly Osbourne isn’t exactly what you’d call a spokesperson for the left, or really anyone that I can tell.
If you look at the stupid republican idea of the day thread (as opposed to merely taking occasional dumps in it), you’ll notice that the people we’re laughing at are generally politicians --people who have actually acquired or are aspiring to positions of great power despite their insane, laughable, poorly informed, or even psychopathic viewpoints.
So yeah, Kelly’s statement was amazingly tone deaf, but no one at home in the audience is thinking, “Holy crap, I voted for this person?” or, even worse, “Holy crap, I should vote for this person!”.
Well, the more PC version of that statement, “Immigrants do the jobs Americans won’t do” is a stupid idea as well, and also pretty racist when you get right down to it. Plus it’s flatly false. And of course pro-immigration Republicans say it too.
It’s pretty much par for the course. Stupid Republicans cited on the Dope or MSNBC are typically sitting governors, members of Congress, and/or leading Presidential candidates. Stupid liberals cited on the Dope or Fox News are typically some hippie they found at a protest march, or one of the three members of the New Black Panther Party.