Calls to defund the police have become mainstream
Episode Stats
Words per minute
193.60307
Summary
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
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There's a very interesting aspect to our current moment right now, and that is the
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acceleration of the issues that are under discussion. How quickly things are changing.
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What do I mean by that? Well, there are only two issues that are really in the news right
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now that we've been discussing for months on end. One is the pandemic, and then more
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recently it has been the protests and the sometimes riots that we've seen in our streets.
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The pandemic first began as a discussion in January, February when we saw there was something
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happening in China. It had gone to Iran and Italy. Is it going to come here? And the narrative
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at that point was, no, it won't come here. We learned our lessons from SARS. No, you don't
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need to do anything. Face masks don't work. Travel restrictions don't work. Oh, and by
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the way, it's even racist to discuss this, to be alarmed about this. Huh. Okay. Kind of
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troubling. And then suddenly things did a 180 and the story became something different.
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How dare you suggest you can even go out and about in society a little bit. You must stay
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home. COVIDiots. We created terms to name and shame anybody who took a slightly different
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perspective on all of that. Very quickly we changed on those subjects, those sort of tight
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lines of conversation. And boy, the sort of social punishments for people who stepped out
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of the lines was severe, was harsh. We're seeing a similar thing happen right now with these protest
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movements. Of course, originally there was anger, seeing that video of George Floyd being killed.
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I think that was very righteous and justified anger. Then it moved on to the violence and
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the looting and so forth that rather tragically flared up in a number of cities. And a lot of
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officials, corporate PR speak and so forth, they're very cagey. They wanted to sort of endorse people
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being in the streets, even though it went against the public health measures that we were shaming
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people for breaking even just a sliver of an iota just a couple weeks ago. But they didn't want to
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say no to the looting and the violence. They were very cautious about not warning against that. Now,
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very quickly, things have changed in just a matter of 48 hours, 72 hours. The big talking point right
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now, hashtag defund the police. Where on earth did this come from? It's a very novel idea for most.
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It's a sort of niche academic neo-Marxist idea that some people have been writing papers on for years,
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but it's a very new idea. It's suddenly hit us, but people are also expected to be 100% on board
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with it immediately, and it has become mainstream. Wow. Because really, we don't even know what we
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mean by defund the police. Different people mean different things by it. Some think it means just
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reallocating funding. Others think it means dismantling police forces entirely. Man, talk about
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two very disparate sides and interpretations. And yet right now, the pressure for this is at a fever pitch,
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and it's all happening so very, very fast. I think we need to slow down as we discuss a whole lot of
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these issues, rather than just suddenly flipping from one 180 to another, as we've been rather