Juno News - June 08, 2020


Calls to defund the police have become mainstream

Mentioned
George Floyd
Calls to defund the police are just leftist nonsense Ep.6 ｜ Sohrab Ahmari ｜ Combatting the woke mob and how conservatives can win the culture war

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

193.6

Word count

571

Sentence count

46

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about how quickly things are changing in the world, and why we need to slow down, rather than just flip from one extreme to another, as we ve ve been doing in the past few months.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 There's a very interesting aspect to our current moment right now, and that is the
00:00:10.360 acceleration of the issues that are under discussion. How quickly things are changing.
00:00:15.600 What do I mean by that? Well, there are only two issues that are really in the news right
00:00:19.700 now that we've been discussing for months on end. One is the pandemic, and then more
00:00:22.980 recently it has been the protests and the sometimes riots that we've seen in our streets.
00:00:29.620 The pandemic first began as a discussion in January, February when we saw there was something
00:00:34.200 happening in China. It had gone to Iran and Italy. Is it going to come here? And the narrative
00:00:38.640 at that point was, no, it won't come here. We learned our lessons from SARS. No, you don't
00:00:43.320 need to do anything. Face masks don't work. Travel restrictions don't work. Oh, and by
00:00:47.240 the way, it's even racist to discuss this, to be alarmed about this. Huh. Okay. Kind of
00:00:52.420 troubling. And then suddenly things did a 180 and the story became something different.
00:00:57.080 How dare you suggest you can even go out and about in society a little bit. You must stay
00:01:01.340 home. COVIDiots. We created terms to name and shame anybody who took a slightly different 0.99
00:01:06.840 perspective on all of that. Very quickly we changed on those subjects, those sort of tight
00:01:13.140 lines of conversation. And boy, the sort of social punishments for people who stepped out
00:01:17.600 of the lines was severe, was harsh. We're seeing a similar thing happen right now with these protest
00:01:23.260 movements. Of course, originally there was anger, seeing that video of George Floyd being killed.
00:01:27.480 I think that was very righteous and justified anger. Then it moved on to the violence and
00:01:31.800 the looting and so forth that rather tragically flared up in a number of cities. And a lot of
00:01:37.060 officials, corporate PR speak and so forth, they're very cagey. They wanted to sort of endorse people
00:01:42.560 being in the streets, even though it went against the public health measures that we were shaming
00:01:46.440 people for breaking even just a sliver of an iota just a couple weeks ago. But they didn't want to
00:01:51.940 say no to the looting and the violence. They were very cautious about not warning against that. Now,
00:01:57.340 very quickly, things have changed in just a matter of 48 hours, 72 hours. The big talking point right
00:02:02.340 now, hashtag defund the police. Where on earth did this come from? It's a very novel idea for most.
00:02:09.140 It's a sort of niche academic neo-Marxist idea that some people have been writing papers on for years,
00:02:14.120 but it's a very new idea. It's suddenly hit us, but people are also expected to be 100% on board
00:02:20.420 with it immediately, and it has become mainstream. Wow. Because really, we don't even know what we
00:02:25.640 mean by defund the police. Different people mean different things by it. Some think it means just
00:02:30.500 reallocating funding. Others think it means dismantling police forces entirely. Man, talk about
00:02:36.840 two very disparate sides and interpretations. And yet right now, the pressure for this is at a fever pitch,
00:02:43.080 and it's all happening so very, very fast. I think we need to slow down as we discuss a whole lot of
00:02:50.100 these issues, rather than just suddenly flipping from one 180 to another, as we've been rather
00:02:54.960 bizarrely doing the past few months.