This thread's purpose is to discuss politics in works of fiction/media. Please do not use this thread to talk about politics or media in isolation from each other.
I was thinking of asking what people thought were the most interesting post-election Trump related media.
The Good Fight on CBS Access devoted their entire second season to dealing with the subject.
Edited by MacronNotes on Mar 13th 2023 at 3:23:38 PM
I'm thinking that The Wire is actually a pretty decent portrayal of the issues and difficulties surrounding police/community of color interactions, systemic deficiencies, 'maverick detective' types who try to do the right thing despite it all and still end up making it worse.
On the other hand, it's not something I personally live day to day, so...
Thoughts?
In general, I'm not overly fond of the Cowboy Cop trope for a few reasons.
I think some of it depends upon how we define the trope. I would argue a Cowboy Cop is a police officer who is specifically more aggressive. A cop who is less aggressive than their peers is not a cowboy cop necessarily. Whether you agree with this definition or not is probably a major factor in whether you think the Cowboy Cop trope is salvageable.
I suppose you could make a...more sympathetic Cowboy Cop simply by having the bad guys be a hate group. Hell, you can even say the reason why they feel the need to do so is because the rest of the force is coddling them due to sympathies. I'm not sure what you guys make of that, but if I had to write a sympathetic Cowboy Cop, that's what I'd do.
For what it's worth, from videos I've watched of police shootings, I'd argue that a lot of the cops seem to be acting more panicky than anything. Now, take this with a minimum of 3 packets of salt here, but I'm forming a haunch that "wannabe badasses" might not be precisely the problem-at least not in the way you might think. Basically, police officers advertise their machismo to "compensate for something" only to realize they don't have it when they're in an actual high-stress situation. Note that this haunch-even if true-isn't mutually exclusive with other problems with police culture, I just think it might be an overlooked factor.
"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"
They call me.... Prophet
In the US at least, the police aren't trained for very long and most will never shoot their gun. Regular upkeep of training also seems to be poorly checked.
So it's not surprising that many cops have no idea how to handle a situation when they are underqualified for the job.
Queen of Good Things, Honest
It's not just that they're poorly trained. It's that when they are trained, it's often by this guy.
Would that it were so simple.
The problem I find with discourse about Police Brutality is that the people who reject the institution never provide a good alternative for it. Even if you up funding for mental health or social services, there are still going to be murderers, thieves, rapists, and so on. That's partly why institutional solutions to crime at the expense of law enforcement funding play really badly with voters — it makes them feel extremely vulnerable while promising some long term economic recovery, and that sentiment permeates into art because all humans one way or another are political. You can be strongly in support of throwing corrupt cops in jail while not wishing to live in a society where they straight up don't exist.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
A nice butterfly
You can make the case for it in media, where nothing is depicted of the alternative (outside of utopic, or dystopic stuff like Aldous Huxley, Star Trek, Walden 2, or the Foundation series), but mistaking that the theory behind movements like Defund the Police offer no alternative, or demand there shall never ever ever again be anyone who will physically deal and restrain with the rapists and the wife beaters and the sociopaths, is pretty out there.
No such theory assumes that even on the most well educated populace, there shall be no belligerent drunkards an pople who don't need someone stronger than them to restrain them.
Edited by Aszur on Jan 18th 2021 at 4:49:30 AM
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Like reflections in the glass!
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Let me guess, that guy in question is the mastermind behind Killology you mentioned earlier?
Queen of Good Things, Honest
Yeah, that's Dave Grossman. He writes books and leads seminars specifically to teach police how to kill without hesitation. His philosophy, "Killology", is about the psychology of killing. He aims to teach cops to erase their instinctive hesitation to take a life so that they will be able to kill reflexively when in the field. Not thinking, just acting; taking the shot before they even know what's happening.
He's out there teaching our cops things like, "In these dark times we live in, God has blessed us with warriors. A warrior fights violence and what does he fight it with? Violence. Violence is your tool; violence is your enemy. Violence is the realm you live in and you must master it."
He calls guns "the life-saving tools of your profession." He makes emotional appeals like, "A warrior watched 3,000 citizens die before your eyes in pain and agony and despair in a puff of ash, in a cloud of smoke, and you know one person on that plane could have stopped it. You yearn to be that person. Some of you say, 'Yeah, Dave, you got my number. I wish I was on that plane.' Well, good. They ain't coming to your plane. They're coming to your mall, they're coming to your theater, they're coming to your church, they're coming to your kid's school. You need to be ready for them. That means you carry off-duty."
This man is training our cops.
My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.
Like reflections in the glass!
Well the name's meaningful at least. How hard is it to nail this guy to terrorism-adjacent charges?
Con men have gone from being relatively minor villains in my headspace to the worst due to the amount of medical fraud I've witnessed these past few years and obviously the Grifter in Chief. But even now I'm stunned how many experts are responsible for so much mass suffering.
The CIA for example hired two people who created America's torture program who knew torture didn't work and yet had them doing it anyway for years.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Disasturbator
> How hard is it to nail this guy to terrorism-adjacent charges?
Almost impossible because his activity would not be defined as being terrorist related activity ,teaching cops to shoot people with the intention of killing is utterly despicable but unless you have solid proof he's connected to a terrorist cell I'd say the chances of nailing him are zero
New theme music also a box
Surrounded by weirdoes
With how alt-righter groups are now, he sounds like someone who could be caught if only by association.
And I know they are supposed to shoot to kill if it comes down to it, but the way he talks, it's more like training the losers from Texas or your average school shooter than people that are supposed to be about discipline and protecting people.
Edited by Blueace on Jan 18th 2021 at 11:12:34 AM
Wake me up at your own risk.
Its motivational speaking for legalized murder.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Leader of the Holey Brotherhood
I didn't watch it, but really, I've heard all I need to.
This man is horrific.
One Strip! One Strip!
Grossman quite obviously shouldn’t be allowed to teach anything to anyone, but given the fairly limited spread of his training program it seems like missing the mark a bit to point him out specifically as the problem, or assume most police officers are working from that angle. IACP, PERF, and basically every major police policy organization have been tearing into his stuff for years now and warning departments off it, realistically he’s given maybe a hundred or so seminars over the past 20 years which is not massively significant when you consider this country has around 800,000 law enforcement officers spread across 18,000 individual departments.
Police in the US have a culture that’s very much primed for violence. A police officer in a European country can go about their day with good confidence that they won’t bump into a person with a weapon, or that if they do it’ll be a haphazard one. In many parts of the US it would be surprising for a police officer to not bump into an armed person during their day, and armed people in the US are typically as well armed or even more heavily armed than police. This environment has led partly over the years to a legal system and police procedure that encourages deadly, split-second reactions to any perceived threat. The logic goes that if an officer sees you pulling something out of your pocket, they need to react as if it’s a deadly weapon, because if they dawdle trying to figure out what you’ve got and it does happen to be a deadly weapon then they’re dead.
You might notice that the problem there is that we’re expecting a person, even a trained one, to make accurate snap judgements about the intent of a stranger based essentially entirely off surface level observations. People have biases, they’re prejudiced, confused, panicked, all of that. A reality of the job is that the majority of police officers are not combat or firearm specialists. There’s really very little shooting and fighting involved in being a police officer, to the degree where there’s no realistic way to compensate for that with training. In a heated, violent situation an officer is likely to fall back on their preconceived notions and subconscious assumptions to make a snap judgement.
The general attitude seems to be that police officers need to be better at fighting, but that approach hasn’t really shown results. The more productive approach seems to be to teach police officers to be better at thinking. Classes that have officers not only examine why they make certain decisions, for example implicit bias training, but also teach officers to examine how they make decisions in a sort of conceptual sense have noticeable positive effects on the frequency and appropriateness of use of force. Officers who think critically about their own decisions tend to make better ones, and there are proven ways to encourage critical thinking.
Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 18th 2021 at 7:36:17 AM
They should have sent a poet.
Nobody here was acting like Grossman was a comic book supervillain who single-handedly engineered police violence, but it's fairly obvious he's a symptom and a fairly big ideological setpiece of the system that is functioning. His metaphor about "wolves, sheep, and sheepdog" is literally everywhere in modern conservative thought (as he himself points out, it was a key part of American Sniper).
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
In the name of being honest
But not, fortunately, a part of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, the defining War on Terror story of our age.
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
Oh, bother.
It's also in Team America: World Police, albeit that movie used more crass metaphors.
Edited by M84 on Jan 19th 2021 at 2:28:47 AM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Oh, he certainly has his fans, for example that little saying really caught on among civilian gun owners more than cops or soldiers.
His influence on actual police behaviors at either a training or policy level has been basically nothing, though. He’s been toxic for years now, at this point he plays more of a role in discussions about police brutality than he does in furthering the brutality itself.
Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 18th 2021 at 10:42:43 AM
They should have sent a poet.
More information on how the CW's Walker, Texas Ranger reboot will handle law enforcement
.
My question was simple: “How do you go about telling a story about law enforcement nowadays when we have such a conversation going on today about the role of law enforcement and its role in perpetuating systemic racism?”
"That’s a really great question and obviously one that is at the forefront of our minds every day. I can’t say enough what a bizarre ride it’s been to be in a Zoom writer’s room, experiencing the world as we currently are. And I will say, I actually feel very fortunate that we are being forced to have these conversations, and it’s been a very provocative and educational year. And given all the events that have been happening in the world, me, the writers, our cast, I think initially were wary of the position we were in telling the story. And now I feel very grateful because I think we actually have a platform to explore the story correctly, and to be thoughtful. And we have really been given a chance to examine things and hopefully be tying the story in a responsible way. And so we, as a show, are really trying to lean into these topics and learn from these topics and explore the lives of these characters in a very deep way."
"So I feel fortunate. I’d love to hear from the cast too, but we’re excited—excited feels like the wrong word, given the world we’re living in—but we are grateful to be able to talk about these things."
Lindsay Morgan also had thoughts on this issue, noting that she had signed onto the show before the Black Lives Matter movement (the BLM movement has been going on since 2014, but she was referring to the most recent protests of the summer).
"So while I was kinda waiting for the show to begin, the world began to drastically change. And I feel like the show that we were … I had spoken to Anna about the show also changing with it. And in a way it became this unsuspected blessing because suddenly a show about law enforcement in a very divided state such as Texas means so much more now in our world today than it would have pre-2020. So just from my position and the character I play, a big obstacle and learning challenge that I face daily is, where do I fit as a Mexican woman in a majority Caucasian law enforcement team in a state that is, you know, for the history of it, been majorly conservative and not caring too much about marginalized communities and immigrants."
"And so I love that my character is placed in a position of these two worlds and these two kind of warring communities, but hoping to be a liaison and hoping that we can tell a story of tolerance and a story from two perspectives. And also not a story saying which side is right, but this is where we are, and this is who we are, and what are we going to do about it next? And hopefully our story that we’re portraying on television can inspire others in their lives and bring more tolerance and more understanding to both sides of the coin and both sides of different perspectives of all the people in our world and in America. And I think, you know, it’s become so much more than what it was before all this."
Coby Bell added, “We live in a country that’s built on racism, literally built on racism and the aftershocks are still being felt in the law enforcement system and the political system. But at the same time, I think it’s important to tell stories about the people that are trying to do it right. You know?”
Like reflections in the glass!
I was reminded of the "Coco and Haachama reading analytics gets Hololive Banned in China" thing, and subsequently the adage "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" given my expressed interest in a Chinese gacha game. However this sparked another line of inquiries. Specifically if...
- China still currently harbors a hatred for Japan and its people? (my current assumption is "yes")
- the existence of Chinese Animesque gacha games themselves a from of cultural appropriation from China against Japan?
I'm also left wondering to what extent China had embraced the use of capitalism as a means of consolidating and exerting soft power, but that is prolly not germane for this thread.
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jan 19th 2021 at 6:36:12 AM
Many in China, or at least the ruling class, very much hates Japan. In context, Japan in WWII was downright sadistic in its treatment of The Chinese, such as a notable incident where Japanese soldiers raped and murdered 100,000 Chinese women. As such, you can see why China holds some manner of grudge against Japan.
Edited by Protagonist506 on Jan 19th 2021 at 6:40:58 AM
"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"
Like reflections in the glass!
I figured as much, though I also think that was the middle of the eons of bad blood between the nations (the Hololive thing is the most recent IMO). I asked that to make sure because of my other question on Chinese animesque gacha games being cultural appropriation (which per Tobias' description implies a hatred of a people but a desire for their concepts, which in this case include gacha as a genre and the general umbrella of anime aesthetics and tropes that would feature in such games and other media)
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jan 19th 2021 at 6:58:40 AM
Shin Megami Tensei IV
Anime aesthetic itself is a adaptation of the Disney style. You can say Anime is one of the first "globalized" art forms
Watch me destroying my country
Never considered that. Still, this wouldn't be the first time the Law & Order franchise did an episode based on that case. Law & Order: Criminal Intent did an episode inspired by the Central Park back in 2003
.