It’s an incredibly subtle point and Jesse brushed up against it but there’s a solution that’s superior to “defund the police” that isn’t just “hope for them to not become hyper aggressive and militarized”.
Break the police unions.
I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care how many political careers need to be sacrificed to achieve it. But d…
It’s an incredibly subtle point and Jesse brushed up against it but there’s a solution that’s superior to “defund the police” that isn’t just “hope for them to not become hyper aggressive and militarized”.
Break the police unions.
I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care how many political careers need to be sacrificed to achieve it. But do that and you’ve solved your problem. They work for us, they serve us, and you know why? Because we pay them. Their jobs exist because of our taxes. In what other employment relationship does the employee call all of the shots? We control the purse strings; it should be up to us how they behave, what equipment they possess, and who gets hired/fired/promoted.
Break the unions, remind the employees who they answer to, fire the low performers, keep the one who prove worthy of the job.
This argument is identical to the argument to break all unions, which strikes me as, uh, not a coincidence?
I think there are good arguments for removing discipline over use of force from the bargaining process-- it should not be up to some arbitrator whether a cop who shoots a homeless guy gets his gun and badge back-- but the idea that they shouldn't have the same rights as any other employee to negotiate over pay and benefits is corporatist claptrap.
No, because “all unions” includes both public sector and private sector unions. The latter are fine(ish), but the former? Nah. You either get a monopoly over supply OR strong labor protections. It’s one or the other, you choose. Don’t like it? Maybe you’re not cut out for being a cop, try art school.
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.
The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.”
-Far-right talking points of the highly uncivilized Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Other policies that FDR's administration supported include such greatest hits as (off the top of my head) racial segregation of the military, so no, I do not feel in some way bound to conform to his view of things.
LOL, did you just get out of a coma? Take a look at the history of policing in this country, or in Canada, or <gestures at communist nations both current and historical> and tell me what exactly was “civilized” about the way they treated people.
TIL “far right” means “wanting to limit the state’s ability to leverage its monopoly on violence”. Someone tell the protesters from 2020 that they’re basically Chris Rufo!
The day that I can run this argument through chatGPT and have it say, “pretty weak; have you considered posting this on Reddit in 2006?” is the day I’ll believe that AI has not only arrived but is friendly.
What kind of school did you go to where kindergarten teachers choked unarmed people to death by the way? That must be the reason you’re trying to draw an equivalence between two dramatically different professions that have next to nothing in common other than public funding. It would be incredibly dumb to make such a facile connection otherwise, so I feel bad for your fellow schoolmates that you had to deal with that trauma.
Now, I’m a bit worried Chris Hansen is gonna bust into my den and expose me for trying to take advantage of an intellectual adolescent but let me spell it out for you: “he who pays the piper calls the tune”. There’s a reason that phrase has existed for ages: the person paying for something gets to define the terms of service. What you seem to want is for the piper to be paid and choose what tune to play while beating the shit out of people and violating constitutional rights. And why? Just because of some weird fetishization of labor.
This is a bit of a reductio ad Hitler but I doubt you can handle anything more subtle than a banal swipe at someone who’s the epitome of “far right” so: You know the people standing on guard towers in Dachau? They were working for a paycheck. They all lost their jobs abruptly in April 1945 during a hostile takeover of their office space, but I’m not too disappointed - because performing a task in exchange for money doesn’t make you special, and it doesn’t give you any kind of moral superiority.
I don’t care that cops work. So do washing machines. I don’t get to opt out of paying their salaries, so I should get to be choosy about whose labor I pay for. I wouldn’t pay a kindergarten teacher who choked kids out and planted sugar cookies on them; I don’t want to pay for bad cops either.
I forgot he’s a lawyer; it’s so hard to understand how partisans can walk upright let alone have jobs. Their brains are like taking a computer monitor and turning the resolution down really low so that simple information becomes needlessly hard to process.
I checked out his profile because I wanted the answer to “what kind of nutcase holds views that are diametrically opposed to this podcast”. There’s two - him and a teacher (coincidentally both think unions are always good).
Ah, ok, that makes a lot of sense. I know people like this - the “what do you mean Upton Sinclair’s book was fiction?” type. I sometimes wonder what these people would be doing in an alternate universe where Twitter and its meme ideologies don’t exist.
It also really highlights the luxury belief angle here. These are cosseted professionals who never think the police will ever hurt them and for whom defunding the police seems like a fun academic exercise with no real world consequences. But if unions go away, well, poof go their paychecks.
Rather than go line-by-line on this gibberish, I will simply point out that your argument is an argument for the repeal of the National Labor Relations Act (and, for that matter, Title VII and any other employee-protective legislation). Since I happen to believe that Workers Having Rights Is Good, Actually, I see no reason to further engage.
I love that you can’t see that “work” in the abstract doesn’t grant anyone special privileges, particularly when those workers get to misbehave with (qualified) immunity. Try rotating shapes some time; take Excedrin for any headaches, Aleve for any cramps.
Literally every time there’s a left leaning protest - people shouting “hire more women prison guards!” or “down with Israel but it’s not because we’re perpetuating the left’s historical antisemitism problem, we pinky swear!” - and cops shut it down, Tumblr blogs everywhere light up with their “oh of course the cops are mean to us but they don’t ever shut down {some right wing event}”. Ok, the way to fix that is by removing cops’ worker protections because, and I can’t say this loudly enough, they are not the same as private employees because we, their clients, cannot opt out of paying them.
Enable them, coddle them, but then don’t act surprised when bad things happen and nothing changes.
“‘I can’t believe leopards ate my face’ says man who consistently supported protections for face eating leopard industry”
Yeah, those uncivilized Germans don’t allow their Beamters to strike. I went to Munich and they didn’t have paved roads or electricity, so it’s definitely a backward place.
The way you do this indirectly is by enabling school choice. Make them compete with every other provider, acknowledging that education is a commodity that private actors need to budget for to a degree that suits them, just like everything else. Public schools will either compete or fold, but at least they’ll have a chance. What they won’t have is a monopoly on supply, or an ability to raise prices without commensurate service improvements.
As someone who is in a public sector job and a union member, if you break the public sector union, then anyone who has a modicum of experience and knowledge will leave in droves. Our pay is already 20% below comparable private sector salaries, but the job stability and benefits make it an appealing trade off for a lot of people. And as someone who is disabled, I feel a lot safer knowing there’s a union that has my back.
The difference with a police union is that they do not care what lengths they have to go to, because those are the personalities that tend to make up police forces themselves. With my union, if I break the law in the course of my job, I’m on my own.
Police unions are a creature unto themselves, and even other union members tend not to like them.
>The difference with a police union is that they do not care what lengths they have to go to
Oh it is? Our school district had strike>pandemic>strike, all while their compensation has grown much faster than the general populations. Additionally a 5 day school week basically never happens now, to the extent the kids and parents are surprised if there is a full week of classes.
School days get chiseled down each year. It is very clear the teachers are out for number 1 above all else, it is no different than the police at all.
Yes, unions do negotiate for the benefit of their members. That’s kind of their purpose. But generally speaking, teachers unions don’t argue that their members are above the law, as police unions often do. If a teacher assaults a student, they almost always go to jail, or at least are stripped of their license and aren’t allowed to teach anymore. Police unions are notorious for shuffling murderous cops around to help them avoid culpability.
Want to crack down on police brutality? End their unions. The far leftists that hijacked the conversation during the 2020 BLM riots are incapable of thinking that a union could do wrong, so they went for defund because Reagan bad.
It’s an incredibly subtle point and Jesse brushed up against it but there’s a solution that’s superior to “defund the police” that isn’t just “hope for them to not become hyper aggressive and militarized”.
Break the police unions.
I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care how many political careers need to be sacrificed to achieve it. But do that and you’ve solved your problem. They work for us, they serve us, and you know why? Because we pay them. Their jobs exist because of our taxes. In what other employment relationship does the employee call all of the shots? We control the purse strings; it should be up to us how they behave, what equipment they possess, and who gets hired/fired/promoted.
Break the unions, remind the employees who they answer to, fire the low performers, keep the one who prove worthy of the job.
This argument is identical to the argument to break all unions, which strikes me as, uh, not a coincidence?
I think there are good arguments for removing discipline over use of force from the bargaining process-- it should not be up to some arbitrator whether a cop who shoots a homeless guy gets his gun and badge back-- but the idea that they shouldn't have the same rights as any other employee to negotiate over pay and benefits is corporatist claptrap.
No, because “all unions” includes both public sector and private sector unions. The latter are fine(ish), but the former? Nah. You either get a monopoly over supply OR strong labor protections. It’s one or the other, you choose. Don’t like it? Maybe you’re not cut out for being a cop, try art school.
Okay, well, every civilized society disagrees with you, but don't let that deter you from spouting far-right talking points.
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.
The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.”
-Far-right talking points of the highly uncivilized Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Other policies that FDR's administration supported include such greatest hits as (off the top of my head) racial segregation of the military, so no, I do not feel in some way bound to conform to his view of things.
Or to logic or anything resembling reality. No, it’s all about the feels for your pet victim groups (the PC term being “marginalized groups”).
LOL, did you just get out of a coma? Take a look at the history of policing in this country, or in Canada, or <gestures at communist nations both current and historical> and tell me what exactly was “civilized” about the way they treated people.
TIL “far right” means “wanting to limit the state’s ability to leverage its monopoly on violence”. Someone tell the protesters from 2020 that they’re basically Chris Rufo!
Those kindergarten teachers sure are misusing their monopoly on violence!
Don't dump anti-union piss on my head and tell me it's raining.
The day that I can run this argument through chatGPT and have it say, “pretty weak; have you considered posting this on Reddit in 2006?” is the day I’ll believe that AI has not only arrived but is friendly.
What kind of school did you go to where kindergarten teachers choked unarmed people to death by the way? That must be the reason you’re trying to draw an equivalence between two dramatically different professions that have next to nothing in common other than public funding. It would be incredibly dumb to make such a facile connection otherwise, so I feel bad for your fellow schoolmates that you had to deal with that trauma.
Now, I’m a bit worried Chris Hansen is gonna bust into my den and expose me for trying to take advantage of an intellectual adolescent but let me spell it out for you: “he who pays the piper calls the tune”. There’s a reason that phrase has existed for ages: the person paying for something gets to define the terms of service. What you seem to want is for the piper to be paid and choose what tune to play while beating the shit out of people and violating constitutional rights. And why? Just because of some weird fetishization of labor.
This is a bit of a reductio ad Hitler but I doubt you can handle anything more subtle than a banal swipe at someone who’s the epitome of “far right” so: You know the people standing on guard towers in Dachau? They were working for a paycheck. They all lost their jobs abruptly in April 1945 during a hostile takeover of their office space, but I’m not too disappointed - because performing a task in exchange for money doesn’t make you special, and it doesn’t give you any kind of moral superiority.
I don’t care that cops work. So do washing machines. I don’t get to opt out of paying their salaries, so I should get to be choosy about whose labor I pay for. I wouldn’t pay a kindergarten teacher who choked kids out and planted sugar cookies on them; I don’t want to pay for bad cops either.
Unions always good, doncha know. Obviously a far left labor lawyer’s pronouncements should be taken as gospel truth on this matter.
I forgot he’s a lawyer; it’s so hard to understand how partisans can walk upright let alone have jobs. Their brains are like taking a computer monitor and turning the resolution down really low so that simple information becomes needlessly hard to process.
I checked out his profile because I wanted the answer to “what kind of nutcase holds views that are diametrically opposed to this podcast”. There’s two - him and a teacher (coincidentally both think unions are always good).
Ah, ok, that makes a lot of sense. I know people like this - the “what do you mean Upton Sinclair’s book was fiction?” type. I sometimes wonder what these people would be doing in an alternate universe where Twitter and its meme ideologies don’t exist.
It also really highlights the luxury belief angle here. These are cosseted professionals who never think the police will ever hurt them and for whom defunding the police seems like a fun academic exercise with no real world consequences. But if unions go away, well, poof go their paychecks.
I have never once heard Jesse or Katie express views hostile to the cause of labor; if I did, I would immediately cancel my subscription.
Rather than go line-by-line on this gibberish, I will simply point out that your argument is an argument for the repeal of the National Labor Relations Act (and, for that matter, Title VII and any other employee-protective legislation). Since I happen to believe that Workers Having Rights Is Good, Actually, I see no reason to further engage.
I love that you can’t see that “work” in the abstract doesn’t grant anyone special privileges, particularly when those workers get to misbehave with (qualified) immunity. Try rotating shapes some time; take Excedrin for any headaches, Aleve for any cramps.
"Special privileges" like... collective bargaining? You know, that concept that is recognized as a universal human right by international law?
I'm trying to rotate the shape of this argument into something that resembles logical reasoning, and so far I am coming up empty.
Literally every time there’s a left leaning protest - people shouting “hire more women prison guards!” or “down with Israel but it’s not because we’re perpetuating the left’s historical antisemitism problem, we pinky swear!” - and cops shut it down, Tumblr blogs everywhere light up with their “oh of course the cops are mean to us but they don’t ever shut down {some right wing event}”. Ok, the way to fix that is by removing cops’ worker protections because, and I can’t say this loudly enough, they are not the same as private employees because we, their clients, cannot opt out of paying them.
Enable them, coddle them, but then don’t act surprised when bad things happen and nothing changes.
“‘I can’t believe leopards ate my face’ says man who consistently supported protections for face eating leopard industry”
Yeah, those uncivilized Germans don’t allow their Beamters to strike. I went to Munich and they didn’t have paved roads or electricity, so it’s definitely a backward place.
Can we break the other public sector unions at the same time? Particularly, the teachers’ unions.
I’m down for flattening every public sector union.
The way you do this indirectly is by enabling school choice. Make them compete with every other provider, acknowledging that education is a commodity that private actors need to budget for to a degree that suits them, just like everything else. Public schools will either compete or fold, but at least they’ll have a chance. What they won’t have is a monopoly on supply, or an ability to raise prices without commensurate service improvements.
As someone who is in a public sector job and a union member, if you break the public sector union, then anyone who has a modicum of experience and knowledge will leave in droves. Our pay is already 20% below comparable private sector salaries, but the job stability and benefits make it an appealing trade off for a lot of people. And as someone who is disabled, I feel a lot safer knowing there’s a union that has my back.
The difference with a police union is that they do not care what lengths they have to go to, because those are the personalities that tend to make up police forces themselves. With my union, if I break the law in the course of my job, I’m on my own.
Police unions are a creature unto themselves, and even other union members tend not to like them.
>The difference with a police union is that they do not care what lengths they have to go to
Oh it is? Our school district had strike>pandemic>strike, all while their compensation has grown much faster than the general populations. Additionally a 5 day school week basically never happens now, to the extent the kids and parents are surprised if there is a full week of classes.
School days get chiseled down each year. It is very clear the teachers are out for number 1 above all else, it is no different than the police at all.
Yes, unions do negotiate for the benefit of their members. That’s kind of their purpose. But generally speaking, teachers unions don’t argue that their members are above the law, as police unions often do. If a teacher assaults a student, they almost always go to jail, or at least are stripped of their license and aren’t allowed to teach anymore. Police unions are notorious for shuffling murderous cops around to help them avoid culpability.
Speaking of "not a coincidence."
https://web.archive.org/web/20200616184657/http://blog.chron.com/goplifer/2015/01/black-lives-matter-but-the-union-always-wins/
Want to crack down on police brutality? End their unions. The far leftists that hijacked the conversation during the 2020 BLM riots are incapable of thinking that a union could do wrong, so they went for defund because Reagan bad.