Left behind by progressive messaging

[mtbc]

One thing that often annoys me is organizations arguing for good things but appearing to go incredibly far in how they do it. Perhaps I am becoming a blindly entrenched part of the problem but I commonly start thinking, that would be good progress, and end up thinking, I don't want to touch you wild-eyed people even with a bargepole.

Unions sometimes say things that go too far for me. I am all for good working conditions, benefits, guaranteed hours, flexible leave, etc. but I am also in favor of accountability. Sure, pay people a good wage, be patient with their life difficulties, whatever, but some employees consistently perform markedly well or poorly regardless of structural disadvantage, etc., and it should remain possible to promote, reward, penalize, or fire based on individual merit.

In more recent years, people defending defund the police as a slogan would be another typical instance. I support the underyling message but I do not think that being a victim means that one should not be criticized for using messaging that is misleading and costs the votes required to actually effect positive change.

The latest example that reminds me of all this comes from the Cornish Greens. Stuff like, No-one gets into a rubber dinghy to cross the English Channel in November unless they are truly desperate … By closing down safe routes to asylum, Patel and her government have played into the hands of the criminal gangs who exploit people's desperation to reach a place of safety.

If you suggest that just about every Conservative Home Secretary of my adult life has been a mean-spirited disappointment, that Priti Patel's absolutely no exception (especially lately), that the British immigration system has been wrongly hostile, incompetent, cruel, that everybody including Britain should willingly take, house, integrate their fair share of refugees, including under some post-Brexit Dublin transfer system, then I am right with you.

However, I am getting off that train some stops back from agreeing that people travel so far north across Europe because they are so truly desperate, that parents should even be trusted to care for children after they have paid criminals to take them on a dangerous journey from one safe country to another. Conditions in Calais are bad but, if it were simply about desperation to reach a place of safety, one need not have traveled anywhere near the English Channel in order to flee the Middle East. There already were safe routes to asylum, they chose not to take them. (Actually, judging from NGO surveys and suchlike, most do: these risking their family's lives to reach cousins, rumored easier jobs, etc. are a minority, who should still be saved from drowning.)

The Green Party's brazenly excluding the middle makes me wonder if that kind of rhetoric wins more sympathizers than it has readers dismissing them as loons. There is a compelling story on how those who need to be afforded asylum should be treated far better and that Greece and Italy should have their burden shared, we also still have a long way to go on how the US treats refugees despite the change in administration, but that story is persuasive only if it seems to be true. Whether the Greens perceive reality so differently that it is hard for my mind to meet theirs, or they are simply deploying sophistry so ham-handedly that it reeks offensively, I can only guess. However, I do know that, if I didn't already oppose the Nationality and Borders Bill, the Greens' press release would not have changed my mind, it just seems to play into right-wing talking points.

Comments

[shadowkat]

Sure, pay people a good wage, be patient with their life difficulties, whatever, but some employees consistently perform markedly well or poorly regardless of structural disadvantage, etc., and it should remain possible to promote, reward, penalize, or fire based on individual merit.

It is a problematic policy - that I've seen from both ends of the spectrum. On the management side - you can't get rid of mediocrity or lazy workers, who clock in, chat on their phones, clock out on time, and don't add much. And on the employee side, you are hampered and often penalized by rules targeting the idiots management can't get rid of. This was obvious during the pandemic, when the folks ill-equiped to work from home tried to bring everyone else into the office with them - so they didn't have to be by themselves. Or in regards to not getting any performance reviews, I have no idea how well I'm doing, or where to improve - except in side comments, which aren't helpful.

Yet, OTOH, if you don't have protections in place - employees can be overworked, fired at will (due to favoritism or personality conflicts - I mean a change of managers could end your job like that). Or abused. Or they can bully them into resigning. Let's face it - the union is attempting by this ruling to level out an uneven power balance. It's the result of manager's abusing their power to fire employees. And a lack of job security in an ever-changing and at times perilous work environment due to an increasingly incompetent and narcissistic management.

In more recent years, people defending "defund the police" as a slogan would be another typical instance. I support the underyling message but I do not think that being a victim means that one should not be criticized for using messaging that is misleading and costs the votes required to actually effect positive change.

My brother and sisinlaw are major proponents of the concept, while my mother is upset by it. I think that the phrasing is all wrong, and that the proponents no more want there to be "no police" (if they think about it) than those opposed. What they want is a police force that they can trust to keep them secure and aid them in times of crisis. Which say what you will about NY's crazy ex-Governor, he kind of understand and attempted to educate and make happen, unfortunately his own unsavory and "demonic" impulses got in the way of that and the message was lost. I mean, unfortunately human beings don't handle power well - and the US has a long history of "romanticizing" lawlessness, guns, and community policing. The far left says it wants government involvement but only on certain things, and the far right says it doesn't want government involvement at all - but again only on certain things. Truth of the matter is both sides want to choose what their government gets involved in, and only towards their benefit and furtherance of their own rights, and their way of life - presuming that everyone else wants the same things and has the same priorities and values that they do - and if they don't, exterminate the bastards or something to that effect. And I'm sorry that's not how things work, nor should they. In order to have a truly free society - everyone has to compromise their rights a little and often in ways they may not want to.

I think we do need to scale back some of the "power" cops have, and a lot would be gained if we were to get rid of guns completely. I know seeing a gun on a cop's belt scares me. That person has power over me - they have a gun and have permission to use, also various other weapons on that utility belt. Yet, on the other hand, I'm glad they have those weapons, because seeing them on subways or at the subway can provide a sense of safety. The difficulty is they are under paid, and treated with disrespect constantly, so have copped an attitude of sorts, and recruit various folks who abuse their power. The abuse of power issue is the main one - and how do we resolve it? I don't know. Defunding is too simplistic and academic an answer - it's clearly a solution an academic came up with, outside of an urban environment. It's easy to resolve an issue - if you are sitting outside of it. OR if you see yourself as the victim of it - and just want it to go away. Less easy if you are forced to look at all sides of it, constantly. Defund the police - is a slogan devised mainly by academics and victims of police brutality, but it's ignoring all those who benefit from the cops being present, and require them. By ignoring the later, nothing gets down, except more violence and discord. You can't just ignore the other side when negotiating or meditating your way out of a difficulty. Particularly when the other side outnumbers you.

[mtbc]

For the most part, I do think that the US would be better for having stronger unions than at present, and I agreed with much of the EU labor protection policy that was imposed on unwilling Conservatives, just that what unions say sometimes goes further than I would in protecting employees from accountability. (Basically: I'm with them for quite some distance, just I think they go too far and I wonder if that makes people less willing to hear the good part.) Your mention of the police unions is a good point though, that's probably an exception for me in wanting stronger unions, given the gross lack of accountability they seem to have engendered, coupled with the enormous responsibility they have to act well. Anecdotes about locals' encounters with our city police are not encouraging. Even without guns, cops' word is taken very seriously and goodness knows some sometimes lie, so I would still rather fear their power. To take a simple example, nobody's very surprised if a minor dope offense bumps up to a felony because the weight oddly increased. Or, to take another, a case against a neighbor was dismissed because the cops violated their rights.

A good point about compromise, yes. /-: By instinct I want employers to have plenty of power but then I see the outcome proves me wrong and I have to rethink. None of us get all of what we want and we have to accept that. (See Congress now, heh.)

And, you're right, the cops' perspective is important. They do a difficult and necessary job. I am a big fan of the Victorian model that is far less us-and-them. From a point of ignorance, I wonder if part of the story is that they should be funded to be well enough out in the community (not just peering at it from their cars) so the two sides feel more connected, and if they need incentized better to be available and helpful rather than focusing simply on arrests, convictions, etc. My current sense is that the relationship that cops have with the public is that the cops expect the public to do what they're told without question and the public hopes not to get on their radar at all, I hope I'm wrong in that because that doesn't describe a good relationship.

[shadowkat]

I agree for the most part about unions, I struggle with them. And I tend to share my grandfather's distaste for them. I almost didn't join my current organization because of the union. And the evil library company, I'd been in, had issues due to a union (that I wasn't part of - I was non-represented management). Current org has people who are technically "managers" in a union - we're exception 5. We're appointed to our positions, and not clerical. The power imbalance is that currently management can jerk people around, a bit too much. We really need to put the breaks on the mergers and acquistions and consolidating - it's destroying jobs and isn't as efficient as folks think.

Police, I also agree for the most part. I think more community involvement is needed, less reliance on guns, and less fear. People shouldn't be afraid of calling the police to resolve a conflict. Also we shouldn't be using the police to resolve mental health issues, child abandonment, animal rescues, homeless issues, and domestic disputes. But how you resolve them - is another issue.

It's never simple.

[mtbc]

Very true about the other issues, yes, what I took defund the police to really be about, more. There's something of the same issue in Britain, the police sometimes having to put the mentally ill in cells because no adequate healthcare support is available at that moment.

[mindstalk]

A vocal fraction of leftists insist they really do want to abolish police. Also prisons.

[mtbc]

I most definitely have doubts about the practicality of that. Is this part of where the left overlap with the libertarians?

[shadowkat]

It has a lot to do with prison over-crowding, and police brutality. People have a tendency to go to extremes, particularly if they've been a victim of "stop and frisk" or police profiling. The difficulty is - there's a tendency to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater so to speak. It's not really libertarianism per se, so much as a fear of the police state, and a deep-seated conviction that most people imprisoned are innocent or in for minor crimes, or racial profiling. This is true to an extent - but not completely. Yes, POC are imprisoned more than "Whites", and yes, they are put to work without pay or compensation. But, that's something for systematic reform - and not just prison reform, but Justice system, courts, etc. And that's hard to do with the current conservative judicial appointments - so in frustration, the left has opted to get rid of prisons and police, because they can't change the justice system itself, which is admittedly racist and imbalanced in the United States.

[mtbc]

reform rather than defund absolutely sounds like the verb. And, yeah, the object needs to be broader than police.

[shadowkat]

That's basically my brother and sister-in-law, and various church members who keep sending me emails regarding it. I don't agree with them - mainly because we'd end up with rapists and murderers on the streets. I worked for the Defender Project in Kansas, and actually visited with prisoners in Leavenworth, Penitentiary. There was one guy who was a psychopath and a great artist. I don't want him back on the streets. Nor do I want the heroine addicted hit man who killed people for a drug cartel. But I did want the bank robber who served over 15 years released, he'd rehabilitated himself and earned his release.

Prison reform and police reform makes more sense.