Never been one to let the carrier drop

I quote a commenter on my blog: “America needs some work but trying to convince me that one particular demographic are the only ones whose complaints should be addressed sounds racist and divisive, to me”.

Well, it depends on the lens you look at it through. If you look at it as “we are triaging and these are the people the most screwed over, time after time”, then it’s a totally reasonable thing to do. If you look at it as if “if they get more rights, I get less” i.e. the zero sum game approach, then you’ll come to the conclusion (which I obviously think is wrong) that you came to.

I agree that we need to not break up into little tiny groups and then fight over the fact that we want slightly different things. However it is undoubtedly *everyone’s* problem when the police are killing innocent citizens. The police should be willing to *take* a bullet for a unarmed civilian, not to *shoot bullets* at unarmed citizens.

However, statistically, it’s clear the police kill black folk more than anyone else. And it’s clear that there are *many* white supremacist idiots out there, and way too many of them have found themselves into the police departments of America, and that’s a huge problem. It’s a huge problem in general that police can murder with impunity and it’s a *additional* huge problem that a particular segment of the population is being murdered. Hence..

BLACK LIVES MATTER

Which doesn’t mean that other lives do not. Very little of life is a zero sum game.

So, one of the very stupid things that religion makes us do is declare certain spots on earth ‘holy land’. One of the most impressive examples of people not learning from how they’ve been treated is the Jewish occupation of Israel.. as near as I can tell, they are treating other folk almost as awful as they were treated in WWII and they can’t just walk away because it’s “holy land”.

It isn’t, of course. Near as I can tell JHVH was someone’s imagination, and either all land is holy or none of it is, but the stupidity will continue because, yes, religion is a virus, and yes, a bunch of people are infected.

I’m not anti-semitic. However, I can’t look at the situation in Israel without feeling a anger that borders on hatred. Not for all folk of that religion, just for those specific ones. I’m also impressed at how they’ve bought the American political system – as far as I can tell the consulting gig where I was analyzing california voting data looking for signs of fraud was paid for by Israel – they are spending money to manipulate the US political system (which, as we all know, is for sale), and I notice that there are actually *laws* against boycotting israel – and, of course, we keep selling one side and not the other the best guns we can make. Probably some of this is Christianity is derivative of Judaism and a bunch of people in the US are infected with Christianity and therefore they think of one side as “our side” and the other as “infidels”.

I read that most Jewish folk consider the occupation immoral – well, obviously, stealing people’s land and blowing up their houses *is* immoral – but they can’t think of what to do about it. Here’s what you do: You accept there’s no such thing as holy land, and you walk away and let the people who were living there most recently have it. You stop killing people over land and over some really nutty religious thoughts. You walk away.

They won’t, of course. But they should.

As long as I’m opening cans of worms with this article, there’s probably a cautionary tale here about why it’s a really bad idea to think of yourself as “god’s chosen people”. In general, that idea is about as dangerous and as nutty as the idea that there’s one chosen religion and God is going to reward the followers of that religion or punish the adherents of all the others. It’s a horrible idea that leads to horrible outcomes but I can see where as a member of the powers that be that want folk killing other folk just because they’re wearing a different color uniform it’s a delightfully tempting one to sell to the gullible. It does underline the fact that religion has been curated by the powers that be to control the masses.

So, my suspicion is that those of you who are conservatives who are defending the police have not had the direct experience of having cops aim guns at you, cops threaten to beat you, cops physically hurt you for not kowtowing fast enough. I have had all those experiences. I have had police come to my door and threaten to beat me because they thought I was squatting in a house I was legitimately renting, for example.

And I also think you’re not thinking about how you’d feel if it was your child, or your wife, or your friend who was gunned down by the police either because they executed a no-knock warrant at the wrong address or because they just decided that that particular person looked threatening. Our police are out of control – as we’ve seen from how they treated protesters, they are *eager* to tear gas, *eager* to shoot rubber bullets, and totally willing to lie about how the protesters were throwing objects in order to justify it. We’ve seen our guardians slash tires, plant evidence, break windows, incite riots..

I think if it had been you, you’d understand the anger of all these people who *it has been*. They’ve ruined people’s lives over bullshit and trivia, over and over. They’ve murdered with impunity. They’ve abused their authority over and over.

At this point I think the system needs disassembled and replaced, and we need to be data-driven and result-driven when we do this. We need to stop thinking that punishing is *ever* a good thing, for example. A eye for a eye just makes everybody blind, and the actual guilty parties are probably usually so far back in history that there’s no way to even know who they are, much less enact any sort of revenge upon them.

I don’t know how we get from our current situation to something less dystopian, but I suspect some of it involves taking a deep breath and not acting from anger, either towards the police or from the police towards the citizens. It also involves recognizing that the bosses who stand on the necks of us all need disempowered – they have already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they don’t have the best interests of humanity at heart. And I think Trump demonstrates that the same processes that make billionares also, at least some of the time, make profoundly broken people.

One of the things humans seem to love to do is oversimplify problems, fail to identify the root cause, blame a individual, and then punish them and feel good about how they’ve solved the problem. (Hint: They haven’t. They’ve made it worse)

One of the places I see this the most often is the criminal justice system. In the case of the black folk, we have perpetrated a whole bunch of brokenness (slavery, jim crow limiting access to education, and so forth) and then we blame them for being broken after we broke them, and we lock them up with a bunch of other broken people so they can all entrain on each other’s brokenness, and then we’re shocked when there’s a huge recidivism rate.

I agree in general with the people saying defund the police – I’d say let’s also defund the military, because they’ve thugged around in other parts of the world doing massive amounts of damage to humanity as a whole. What we need to do with the funds, though, is figure out where things are really broken and what we can do about it.

In general very few things are one individual’s “fault”. It’s a common failure of abrahamic religions that they paint the idea that we all have ultimate free will and we deserve torture or reward based on our behavior, but the truth is most people do not have a lot of free will as having a lot of free will turns out to be a *lot* of work. It’s the nature of our minds that we are the product of our environment and the box of options we can see open to us is generally fairly small. We tend to build decision trees based on past experiences of what worked and then anneal them until they are very nearly unchangable – witness all the staunch right-wing constitutionalists defending Trump as he shreds the constitution to enrich himself. (Of course it’s not exactly Trump’s fault either, as he is also a product of the life he’s led – he’s broken because his environment led him to be broken)

One can always wonder what would have happened if someone had bought hitler’s art.. and in general I think we should fund artists *regardless* of whether we think they’re any good or not because A: you have to start out bad and get good and B: we have *enough* to feed and house everybody – it’s just the bosses love enslaving folks and so they get off on having us all live in fear. And they are likewise probably the product of a broken culture that *they* grew up in.

Anyway, my basic point is, almost nothing is one person’s fault, and punishment is moronic. Consequences in order to provide negative training are a good idea – we don’t want to have *no* negative results. If you doubt this, try to teach a dog not to bark using only positive reinforcement and you will discover that positive reinforcement has some problems when trying to teach to *not* do something. However, those consequences should be designed to be just enough that the lesson is learned – punish someone out of proportion to their crime and you’ve actually broken their mind worse and justifiably built a desire for revenge into them. It’s true that there are some people who don’t think this way but it still doesn’t make sense to have punishments that are completely out of scale for the crime. (For example, steal $100, spend 10 years in jail, steal $100,000,000, get told what a good capitalist you are)

I do feel like I need to explore the idea of distributed fault that is a probability curve surrounding events more, because I am a product of my culture and I do often fall for the easy trap of simply blaming the most obvious source of the problem. And it’s undoubtedly true that even after we’ve managed to remove Trump and Mitch, the bugs in our culture that enabled them to get so much power and abuse it so thoroughly will still be there. We probably need a constitutional convention, but the bosses like that they can have the police beat us into submission and are not likely to go for having one.

So, I understand the urge to save what’s good about a society – and after all as I’ve talked about elsewhere we must all have conservative neurons or we wouldn’t function, so there is certainly a *type* of conservatism that isn’t wrong and stupid. It’s just not the type we currently have. (You can almost say that the way our experiences become hardwired in a way that makes deletion incredibly difficult is a way that our entire brain is inherently conservative of experience, and that is also a desirable thing)

You can also quite rightly accuse me of being *incredibly* conservative – after all, I test every operating system update and will often refuse to install further upgrades once the operating system appears to be declining instead of advancing. I insist on rigorous tests before performing system upgrades, be they hardware or software. I like to have several backup plans based on most probable things going wrong at all times. And so on.

If ‘conservatives’ were conservative in the way I’m conservative about installing software, I’d welcome them and say they perform a very desirable role. The problem is, what we actually have is they are either A: in love with 1800 and want to go back or B: in love with paper money and willing to destroy real value in order to make more of it or C: in love with war and willing to kill millions of innocents – originally over things as stupid as whether we should be collectivist or individualist – not here in America, but whether other countries were allowed to try out collectivism – but now, even worse, just over lies and in order to make more money. (Weapons of mass destruction, anyone?)

Part of what’s alarming is that the conservative electorate appears to have no memory. Their side lies to them and kills millions of people but all they can do is pull the lever next to the conservative party because they’re afraid some bum somewhere will get some of their money. We’ve spent far more on our idiotic wars over resource system ideology – and destroyed trillions worth of resources, making the human race as a whole poorer – than we ever will giving someone food or a place to live.

Of course, some of this is that the powers that be have figured out how to manipulate the emotions and thinking of a conservative voter. (probably of a liberal voter and a progressive voter as well.. we’re all at risk of being brainwashed.. but it doesn’t irritate me nearly as much when millions of people aren’t being killed).

For example, they’ve sold some really insane thinking over the issue of abortion. Clearly if you believe in God you should A: notice that abortions happen spontaneously even without human help and B: conclude that God presumably has a perl script in place to route souls only to bodies that are going to be extant. If you don’t believe in God, then that is a blank tape, a empty neural net. But I digress. The point is, the conservatives grab the single issue voters who somehow don’t notice that they murder millions. They’ve got several different single issues that push people’s buttons – and *both* sides of the aisle write emails that are loaded with emotionally laden symbols and are trying to push people’s buttons as hard as humanly possible.

Now, if anyone wants to argue that both sides are corrupt, I agree. We need to not have a two party system.. among other things, with a two party system, the only people you can hire when you kick the bums out are the other bums. It’s great for crony capitalism and corruption, not so good for doing a good job at running things.

Anyway, the basic thesis behind conservatism is that the future isn’t going to be better than the past. That we shouldn’t try new things and see which ones work. Beyond that there’s also the thesis that there isn’t enough and won’t be enough and we need to make sure that everyone who isn’t putting their back into it starves. There’s also the thesis that we need to make sure the bosses are able to make everyone who is putting their back into it barely get by while the bosses have multiple yachts.

Now, we’ve reached the point where I actively loathe the right. Part of this is the posting by the president to a link to a video that says “the only good democrat is a dead democrat”. It’s very difficult for me to not be upset by this – I guess I thought the president was supposed to at least *try* to be the leader of everybody, not just his or her chosen party, and was supposed to consider the points of view of everybody. I would say that I pretty much want the GOP to cease existing at this point and be replaced by two different (or more) right wing parties. Of course, I’d also like the Democrats to *stop being a right wing party*. It also makes me wonder how many of my conservative friends think the world would be a better place if I was no longer in it.

I am pretty amazed at how effective brand loyalty is. I have conservative friends who are defending Trump even as he robs America blind and destroys everything. I am fairly sure if they had been told he was a Democrat, they would be attempting assassination by now. But, they believe he’s part of their tribe, one of their brand, so they are carefully blind to his awfulnes. There’s probably a interesting lesson about input filters and brand loyalty here, which perhaps I will find later.

I think part of the problem is that we should be insisting on everything being evidence based and data driven, but we instead would rather push for our ideologies even when they do not align with the data and fail reality testing. But one of the interesting things that happens is our view of reality bends with our beliefs so it’s actually kind of hard to know whether we’re being even remotely objective or not.

So, I see on the news someone was killed in CHOP (the capital hill police free zone). I wish I could say I was surprised, but I’m not. Of course, the presence of police with their current behavior could also very likely have led to someone dying so it’s not as clear cut as “Cops are good, mkay”.

It reminds me of a Niven story, ‘cloak of anarchy’, in which society has chosen to make ‘anarchy parks’ where there are no rules except no one shall raise a hand against another, enforced by a system of robots that have some form of stunner. These robots run on beamed power, and a character in the story decides to experiment with whether “real” anarchy would work by knocking out the beamed power source.

It goes about like you’d expect. Actually, possibly because it’s fiction, the situation deteriorates far faster than it has in CHOP. However, it underlines the challenge in transitioning from one system – even a broken system – to another.

Making a real functional society without police in their current role is challenging, and unfortunately by the time the group realizes that real change needs to happen various transgressions have already occured which make the current situation untenable. Unfortunately my personal beliefs about the people running CHOP is that they are not the team to forge a new criminal justice system or new government – part of this is A: they couldn’t even agree on the name of their autonomous zone and B: they changed it, which suggests they spent time and energy on the subject when triage of the situation would suggest there are much bigger and more immediate issues to be addressed. I wonder to what extent they have even discussed what they will do with individuals who are acting in ways that are not in the best interests of the group.

I feel bad about having a low opinion of the group of people who have been, among other things, occupy – I agree with almost all of what they want, but I feel like we need to triage and work the most important problems first – the fact that their manifesto had *30 items* concerns me about their ability to do this. I agree, everything is broken, but we can’t fix everything at once. Ideally, we’d figure out which problem is most at the root of our issues and fix it first, or alternately figure out which problem is hurting the most people and fix it first.

I am glad that the general public is finally recognizing that the cops are out of control and have become as big a hazard as the criminals – but also as I mentioned in previous posts we need to not just throw them under the bus either. They were placed in a framework that asked them to enforce bad laws – and I really think any time you make a human hurt other humans because of stupid bullshit political ideaology (i.e. the drug war) you damage that human. I mean, you look at things like Vietnam and you clearly see that the people who come back from murdering innocent people over resource allocation system ideology end up profoundly fucked up – we’re just not built to hurt people. We can do it, because we’re *very* programmable, but not without taking some damage ourselves. And I have to imagine that the cops arresting people for smoking weed and watching them get years in jail have to have known at least subconciously that they were acting immorally and making the world a worse place, and I have to assume they took damage from that. At the same time, we ask the police to handle some of the most difficult situations humanity faces – things like the infamous “domestic disturbance” – and increasingly we hate them because we know they’re making the world a worse place. We also know they routinely shoot citizens for no good reason and get away with it, which makes fearing them rational. It’s not a good place for the police to be in and it’s not a good place for the citizens to be in..

However, we do still need guardians – especially because our memetics are so bad. Our religions do awful things to our minds, and our advertising often does some undesirable ones as well. And, it’s difficult for a new system of guardianship to self-organize in a way that’s going to work right right out of the box. The story I mentioned above really shows why this is difficult.

I really don’t know what the right answers are or I would be down at CHOP trying to sell my viewpoint of what a utopian future would look like. I know that the current situation must change because we have cops planting evidence, cops killing citizens, and a obvious systematic bias based on the color of skin. And we also treat life like it’s incredibly cheap – we care more about money than we do about life and will put someone in jail for a year for stealing $100. In the meantime, we’ve built a economic system that is going to fail more and more spectacularly as automation gets better and better – and we’re busy making automation better and better.

I will inject one more comment – conservatism is wrong and stupid. History shows us over and over that when we believe we can do things, we can do them. And modern conservatism says “My money is more important than your life” – while at the same time repeatedly destroying real value in order to make paper dollars. Humans fall in love with political brands, but I think if you pulled everyone out of their bubbles and let them sit down and think for a while they would recognize that politics in general in the USA is broken and we need to kick *everyone* out of the pool and start over – but also that beyond that, conservatism is even *more* broken. That there are republicans trying to block mail in voting – they claim that it’s based on fraud but I’ve dug deeply into the dataset and the fraud I found was fractions of a percent, never anywhere near anything that could change a election – it’s really about the fact that conservatives are willing to cheat to win. At this point my feeling is even conservatives know their policies are bad for the group as a whole, but they are quite willing to let other folks die if they can continue to be rich – and then they’ve sold some very irrational things to some very frightened and/or gullible people. I find it the most interesting when I see conservatives who are only alive because of collectivist health care arguing that the state should not take care of people who make mistakes.. I can’t help but wonder if they realize at all that they want to saw off the limb they’re standing on.

So, since there seems to be some confusion.. in the last sentence of the previous post, I was saying we need a organization to *help the cops*. I don’t *want* them to end up homeless and hungry, and I feel they have been ill done by by our system in general. These are living, breathing human beings and while the current situation is terrifying and has programmed into them some very destructive beliefs, their lives also still matter. We need to deprogram them of the harmful programming that results from too much authority, and also from being the hated and feared face of a broken authoritarian system that’s run by madmen. (That’d be the top-level politicians, who I have a very low opinion of)

I do not *want* the police to be homeless and hungry even if we determine that the way we were using police is inappropriate and we need to break apart the system we have built. That is what I was saying.

Who is going to protect us from the cops after they’re defunded? If they’re the most violent criminals among us, they’ll still *be* there. Community policing isn’t going to protect us from the angry, feeling they should be more empowered than they are, wanting to crack some skulls ex-cops who will now also be homeless and hungry.

We need a massive organization to help bring them back to some kind of sanity.

So, thinking about it, I’m more afraid of the cops than of criminals. I really hope that overall pressure forces a reset of the criminal justice system. I think it’s far more likely that I will be killed by a police officer than a criminal, and far more likely I will be beaten by a police officer than a criminal. I also think the police should be ashamed of their repeated use of violence on peaceful protesters. It does fit my understanding of what they have become – a bunch of bullies who abuse their power at every opportunity and who have no respect for the constitution or the rule of law.

Hearing about the police placing protesters in the hospital in critical condition, I think we need to keep the pressure on until they are disbanded and replaced with a system that is likely to be less flawed. They are almost as big a bunch of murderous thugs as our military has become.

The problem is the politicians who would normally oversee that are also a bunch of criminals – some of the biggest thieves among us – and love that the police are murderous thugs because it is part of the base of their power. It’s hard not to feel like a revolution is the only option, except a revolution would just replace this flawed system with another equally flawed system. We need to design and testbed a good system of government *first*. Since the US is made up of 50 states it’s a ideal testbed environment if we are willing to do the smart thing. Of course, doing the smart thing is not what America is known for, we’re the “hold my beer” country where stupidity is king. But I can still hope.

So.. now that we have computers and a pretty good mastery of statistics, if we had any common sense, as we recognize that the current police and criminal justice system is rotten to it’s core and needs disbanded and replaced, we would

A: figure out what the goals for a justice system should be (rehabilitation, restoration, and prevention, i think)
B: figure out how to measure those things
C: try *many different things* in *multiple cities each* – we might try community policing, having AIs watch the police, training police using techniques used in other countries, etc – I could easily come up with 5 things we should try each for the police, the courts, and the jails. Then by looking at success by the measures in A, figure out which system is the best and move all the cities to that system, and make a mental note to do the same thing again in 20 years.

I actually am thinking one of the things we need in general is some sort of circuit breakers built into the system of government that detect a excess of corruption and force a reset. Without that, people end up putting their thumb on the scales and before long we’re all enslaved by the least moral and most ruthless among us.