downerending

I don't think they are using significantly more force. Looking at the riots across the US, the police appear in general to be showing an almost saintly level of restraint, and being killed and severely injured as a result.

This is simply too much to ask.

You should start looking at the videos. I've seen a couple of unconscious people being kicked in the head this week by "protesters". These people are nothing like law-abiding.

To quote the movie: Gotta be rich in the first place to think like that.

The "targeted medical tents" part sounds rather dubious, but yes, "less lethal" most certainly does not mean "harmless".

What would be better, though? How do you get people to obey the law, in a way that is safer for all concerned?

> I think protestors should be able to be armed with whatever police are.

That's insane. A fundamental tenet of (US) law is that using a weapon while committing a crime is itself a crime.

We're not at war. There are a lot of people breaking the law, and we need to reduce that with as little harm as possible.

This sounds incisive, but I'm not really smart enough to follow it. Certainly narrative as "story-telling" seems crucially important. And probably like many, it's hard for me to see a really satisfying story coming out of what we're going through. People screaming madly, people being senselessly maimed and killed. It seems more like tragic chaos.

These charts point out a lot of issues, most real problems, in my opinion. It's far less clear that this is the result of "systemic racism", though. The idea that "poverty begets poverty" could explain a lot of it more simply.

Also, I am very dubious about survey questions. Asking someone how they feel about the police is going to draw a lot of noise and crosscutting motivations. It would be far more useful to know what they do in a situation where they need a policeman.

No doubt, and at least anecdotally, that seems to be happening in real time.

As to the larger question, I'm having a very hard time seeing adding knowledge and science as a bad thing. Without those, any proposed improvement to policing (including abuse) is simply flailing guesswork.

You may well be right. As far as I can recall, though, as of the last time I was regularly using Prolog, trying to do serious work on a (say) 1000x1000 array was a recipe for disaster.

The exception would be Turbo Prolog, but it was a rather restrictive subset of the language. Fast as hell, though.

I grew up in a very fundamentalist (Christian) area, so the lack of it feels very familiar.

What they want is everyone's butts back in their chairs, in the office. The rest sounds like pretext.

It remains to be seen how that will play out at my job, but I am very seriously considering a "100% remote" policy myself (as in, no office, no travel at all), even if I have to switch jobs.

Arguably in 2020, you should be very careful about expressing any opinion that is in any way unpopular. Or that even could be construed as such.

My impression is the reason is that there really isn't widespread agreement on the harmfulness of such communities, so they're sort of trying to split the middle. And perhaps also to advocate for seeing them as awful, per corporate sentiment.

The principal example that comes to mind is TD, which seems more obnoxious and tasteless than some sort of evil.

Subs that truly are beyond the pale by wide consensus seem to get dropped immediately and without objection.

As to not wanting to win, well, yes, dropping everything controversial means losing a lot of page-hits, and as a business, they're likely wary.

No, it's not. But there is a lot of such painting going on, and you can't solve one evil by committing a second.