defund the police

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How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik Deboer

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, helicopter parent, income inequality, lockdown, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, post-materialism, profit motive, QAnon, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, TikTok, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, working poor, zero-sum game

Then again, perhaps the George Floyd Justice in Policing bill failed to attract much attention because it was overshadowed by the demand that became associated with the entire movement for justice that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s death, which became inescapable—“defund the police.” THE STRANGE LIFE OF DEFUND THE POLICE Defunding the police captured the public attention to a degree that I’ve really never seen before for a genuinely radical idea. And I believe it hurt the wider cause. I think that, at the exact moment that public support for racial justice was at its zenith, the call to defund the police sapped our attention, sucked the air out of the room, and scuttled the opportunity of more achievable reforms. The exact meaning of defunding the police was never entirely clear. A meta debate about what exactly was being called for bloomed—and became notorious.

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For now, it’s enough to say that a rigid sense of acceptable opinion developed among progressives—no opinion more acceptable than the quixotic quest to defund the police. DEMANDS ARE ASSEMBLED The idea of defunding the police has already attracted more debate than I can summarize, and I will deal with it in more depth later. For now, it’s sufficient to say that through the tangled and chancy process through which broad social movements operate, defunding the police became the central demand of the Black Lives Matter protests. Protests still simmered across the country, sometimes in defiance of Covid lockdowns.

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A handful of municipalities meaningfully redistributed resources away from police in 2020, but no national movement followed. It’s impossible to say what might have happened in a world where defund the police did not become the most-expressed demand associated with the George Floyd moment. I would certainly have been thrilled if “end qualified immunity” had gained similar prominence. Supporters of defunding the police, of course, would point out that the effort to end qualified immunity has not seen much more tangible success than the movement to defund the police, and they would have a point. As is so often the case, the most essential question is one of the hardest to answer—what are the boundaries of the possible in both the short or long term?

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

the share of murders: Madhani, “Unsolved Murders: Chicago, Other B-ig Cities Struggle; Murder Rate a ‘National Disaster.’ ” Since 2017: Charles, “After 3 Years of Progress, Chicago’s Murder Tally Skyrockets in 2020.” “security from government overreach”: Meares, “Policing: A Public Good Gone Bad.” “a relationship in which”: Meares, Goff, and Tyler, “Defund-the-Police Calls Aren’t Going Away. But What Do They Mean Practically?” In Boston, for example: “TenPoint Coalition Founder Departs,” WBUR. Coffee with a Cop: Coffee with a Cop, “About—Coffee with a Cop.” “defunding the police”: Ray, “What Does ‘Defund the Police’ Mean and Does It Have Merit?” Tracey Meares: Meares, Goff, and Tyler. “funding to recreational centers”: Ray. early childhood programs: Heckman et al., “The Rate of Return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program.”

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When “complaints brought against officers were cleared by videos,” the union started seeing the upsides of transparency. Moreover, a randomized control trial found that body cameras “generate small but meaningful benefits to the civility of police-citizen civilian encounters.” The union accepted the cameras. Should We Defund the Police? Defunding the police may seem like a natural response to the lawless behavior displayed by Derek Chauvin. But an underfunded police department will not improve the safety of minority neighborhoods. If fewer police lead to more crime, then the poor will suffer disproportionately. Moreover, a more stressed police force could easily become a more brutal police force.

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Cell 163, no. 3 (October 2015): 571–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.10.009. Rawdon-Hastings, Francis, Marquess of Hastings. The Private Journal of the Marquess of Hastings. Allahabad: Panini Office, 1907. Ray, Rashawn. “What Does ‘Defund the Police’ Mean and Does It Have Merit?” Brookings, June 19, 2020. www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/19/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-and-does-it-have-merit. “Reactions to Plague in the Ancient & Medieval World.” World History Encyclopedia, March 31, 2020. www.ancient.eu/article/1534/reactions-to-plague-in-the-ancient—medieval-world. Rector, Kevin.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

And everyone had a cell phone camera on you.”79 Counter to the claims of those who advocate defunding the police as a way to reduce violence, the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours. Research has found that fatigue predicts a rise in public complaints against cops: a thirteen-hour rather than ten-hour shift significantly boosts their prevalence, while back-to-back shifts quadruple their odds.80 The public supports improving, not defunding, the police. In 2020, 58 percent of Oakland residents told pollsters that they wanted to either increase or maintain the size of the police force.

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“Mom, I love you. Love you. Tell my kids I love them.” He then said, “I’m dead.”3 Within a few hours the video had gone viral, triggering some of the largest protests in American history. In Washington, D.C., in 2020, protesters painted giant yellow letters on the street that spelled out, “Defund the police.”4 In mid-June 2020, more than 1,000 protesters marched peacefully under the banner of Black Lives Matter from Mission High School to City Hall in San Francisco to demand the defunding of the police department. They shut down several freeway entrances, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Bay Bridge.5 In Berkeley a large crowd marched and chanted, “Abolish police,” with drivers honking their support.

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“It’s the existence and persistence and pressure brought about by social movements that keeps these issues on the front burner,” he said. “Just as the women’s movement and the victims’ rights movement kept the issues of the victims of sexual assault and the victims of intimate partner and family violence on the policy front burner.” “But then you need Black Lives Matter to be making a very different demand than ‘defund the police,’ right?” I asked. “Of course, you do,” he said. “There is a social movement there, and it needs to hoist a banner proclaiming that minority victims’ lives matter as well.” “So, you need the moms of the boys who got killed to be like the #MeToo movement?” “Or Mothers Against Drunk Driving,” he added.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested “archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future.”17 Members of the Lincoln Project, a group of former Republicans-cum-Democrats who raked in tens of millions of dollars in donations to attack Trump and Republicans during the 2020 cycle, called on members of the law firm Jones Day to be inundated with complaints for the great crime of representing the Trump campaign in court.18 Meanwhile, Democrats with the temerity to call out the woke, militant wing of their own party were subjected to claims of racism and bigotry. Even elected Democrats, it turned out, were deplorables. When moderate Democrats complained that they had nearly lost their seats thanks to the radicalism of fellow caucus members pushing “defund the police” and socialism, Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) called them bigots seeking to silence minorities.19 Progressive groups including the Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, and Data for Progress issued a memo declaring that fellow Democrats who wished not to mirror the priorities of the woke were participating in “the Republican Party’s divide-and-conquer racism.”20 The battle to silence the silent majority remains ongoing.

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In the aftermath of Biden’s 2020 victory, moderate Democrats in Congress fretted that they’d nearly lost their House majority, and were unable to gain a Senate majority. Those moderates blamed radicals pushing idiotic positions for the tenuous Democratic grip on power: Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) lit into her radical colleagues for their sloganeering about “defunding the police” and “socialism,” pointing out that Democrats had “lost good members” because of such posturing.59 Meanwhile, radical members of Congress—members such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN)—joined forces to savage Democrats like Spanberger, arguing in an open letter to colleagues, “The lesson to be learned from this election cannot and should not be to lean into racist resentment politics, or back away from the social movements that pushed Democrats to power.”60 Because the Democratic coalition is so fragile, representing at best a large minority or bare majority of Americans, it can be fractured.

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During the 2020 election cycle, Democrats, afraid of alienating black Americans, ignored the rioting and looting associated with Black Lives Matter protests; embraced the ideological insanity of CRT; indulged mass protests against police in the middle of a global pandemic; and fudged on whether they were in favor of defunding the police as crime rates spiked. Afraid of alienating LGBT Americans, Democrats embraced the most radical elements of gender theory, including approval of children transitioning sex; they pressured social media companies to punish Americans for “misgendering”; they vowed to crack down on religious practice in the name of supposed LGBT rights.

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

Mastheads and tables of contents changed, pictures and statues were taken down, glass ceilings shattered, but no one honestly expected to do much about the material conditions of misery. The summer of 2020 became an affair of, by, and for professionals. It led to few concrete ideas for helping disadvantaged Black people and a slogan (“defund the police”) that created endless confusion and antagonism. Instead of a political agenda and strategy, it pursued a mystical vision that freezes us all in the ice of our own identity and makes ordinary communication with one another nearly impossible. In a memoir, Alicia Garza, who is credited with originating the term “Black lives matter,” criticized the movement for being too insular, too intolerant, too ready to pursue trivial causes and avoid high-stakes politics.

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Structural racism—ongoing disadvantages that Black people suffer from policies and institutions over the centuries—is real. So is individual agency, but in the Just America narrative it doesn’t exist. The narrative can’t talk about the main source of violence in Black neighborhoods, which is young Black men, not police. The push to “defund the police” in Minneapolis and other cities during the George Floyd protests was stopped by local Black citizens, who wanted better, not less, policing. Just America can’t deal with the stubborn divide between Black and white students in academic assessments. The mild phrase “achievement gap” has been banished, not just because it implies that Black parents and children have some responsibility but also because, according to anti-racist ideology, any disparity is by definition racist, as is any attempt to analyze the disparity with other terms.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

Rushmore Speech Showed ‘His Priorities Are All Wrong,’ ” The Hill, July 5, 2020, https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/505913-duckworth-on-trumps-mt-rushmore-speech-on-protecting-confederate. 90. Joseph Wulfsohn, “NY Times Op-Ed Clears Up ‘Defund the Police’ Confusion: ‘Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,’ ” Fox News, June 13, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/media/ny-times-op-ed-clears-up-defund-the-police-confusion-yes-we-mean-literally-abolish-the-police. 91. Don Lemon, CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, CNN, July 7, 2020, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/2007/07/cnnt.01.html. 92. Mark Hemingway, “Protest Violence and the See-No-Evil Media,” RealClearPolitics, August 28, 2020, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/28/protest_violence_and_the_see-no-evil_media_144086.html. 93.

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The media and their activist allies pushed the narrative that America was and is an irredeemably racist country and that the George Floyd video was just the latest proof of that reality. Despite the nationwide violence, the media insisted that the Black Lives Matter movement, which included calls to “defund the police,” was peaceful.11 Throughout his first campaign and during much of his presidency, Trump was known for gathering massive and exuberant crowds. He gave freewheeling speeches where he tested messages, made jokes, and pushed his policy ideas. But over the course of this campaign, he couldn’t hold as many rallies, thanks in large part to the pandemic.

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Rosenberg had at one time been sentenced to 58 years in prison for possession “of 740 pounds of explosives, an Uzi submachine gun, an M-14 rifle, another rifle with a telescopic sight, a sawed-off shotgun, three 9-millimeter handguns in purses and boxes of ammunition” before her sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton.38 Despite its radical extremism, Black Lives Matter received a tremendous amount of support from corporations and other elite groups. Its website even proclaimed the movement wanted to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure” and sought to “defund the police.”39 The affiliated Movement for Black Lives, which claimed to be made up of over 150 organizations, called for an end to all policing and criminal justice, an end to capital punishment, and an end to cash bail. It called for reparations in the form of a minimum income for black people, with mandated “curriculums” that “critically examine the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism and slavery.”

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The protests carried on for weeks. Most were peaceful, though the anger of protesters was palpable throughout, as was their conviction that uprooting racism from American life required more than mild reform; it required drastic action such as “defunding the police.”43 In some locales, such as Portland, Oregon, protest turned violent. Biden never signed off on “defunding the police,” a solution he regarded as dangerous and unworkable.44 But he understood from the start that he could not do what his Democratic predecessors in the Oval Office had repeatedly done: subordinate racial justice to other, more “pressing” or “important” matters.

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History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html, accessed September 28, 2021; Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” New York Times, June 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html, accessed September 28, 2021. 44.Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns, and Thomas Kaplan, “Biden Walks a Cautious Line as He Opposes Defunding the Police,” New York Times, June 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/politics/biden-defund-the-police.html, accessed September 28, 2021. 45.Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 15, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/, accessed September 27, 2021; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations,” New Yorker, June 10, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/ta-nehisi-coates-revisits-the-case-for-reparations, accessed September 27, 2021. 46.Marantz, “Are We Entering a New Political Era?”

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Celina Su surveyed twenty-five thousand PB participants: Celina Su: “Beyond Inclusion: Critical Race Theory and Participatory Budgeting,” New Political Science 39, no. 1 (2017) 126–42, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07393148.2017.1278858. according to Alexander Kolokotronis, a young scholar: Alexander Kolokotronis, “What to Do Once We’ve Defunded the Police,” Current Affairs, July 9, 2020, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/what-to-do-once-weve-defunded-the-police. Chapter 16: Unmaking the Self-Made Myth hybrid narratives: This sort of narrative was proposed as the most effective format in the Norman Lear Center’s March 2021 report “Stories Matter” by Erica L. Rosenthal. While “personal responsibility narratives” in films or television shows “focus on individual choices and responsibility” with an “emphasis on willpower or lifestyle choices,” “hybrid narratives” combine “personal responsibility with external factors, situating individual stories within a larger structural context. . . .

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays by Phoebe Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, defund the police, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joan Didion, Lyft, mass incarceration, microaggression, off-the-grid, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois

Racial uprisings happening against a backdrop of a global pandemic is something that no one should live through, and as heartbreaking as it was to have footage of George Floyd’s murder circulating all over social media and news outlets,* it created a collective fury. While the jury is still out on whether that passion will bring about substantive change, there’s no denying that it was a historic summer. A groundswell of outrage, marches, and demands to defund the police mixed with a “Well, the world is on fire, so I gotta do something” energy was a chaotic combination that birthed something no one expected and very few wanted: social justice “warriors.” These weren’t the sjdubs of the past or recent past—Kimberlé Crenshaw (professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School), Alicia Garza (cofounder of Black Lives Matter), Rashad Robinson (president of Color of Change), and Marsha P.

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I know the societal narrative is that women are allegedly delicate little flowers who are too emotional, and songs such as Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” and Jazmine Sullivan’s “Bust Your Windows” certainly help reinforce the idea that women can’t let anything go, but, y’all, any time at the end of the night at a club or a bar, when a woman doesn’t give a guy her number, instead of cutting his losses, he’s out here acquiring JG Wentworth’s services in order to get a structured settlement for the three vodka sodas he bought her throughout the evening while still applying uncomfortable pressure in hopes of wearing her down and getting the number. Because rejection or anything that doesn’t positively reinforce his fragile sense of self cannot be accepted. Same for whiteness. That’s why calls for substantive changes such as defunding the police are generally met with pushback, requests to slow down and let bureaucracy do its thing, or deflection tactics, which, even if there are good intentions baked within them, are not really meant to bring about long-lasting results. The call to action to buy books written by Black authors and Blacking out the NYT bestsellers list comes to mind.

Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle

Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, defund the police, disinformation, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, microaggression, Overton Window, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, Streisand effect, zero-sum game

This was misinterpreted as racist because he was replying to a black Twitter user, even though it was a phrase he had used previously in conversation with white people. In June 2020, Nick Buckley, the founder of charity organisation Mancunian Way, which is committed to helping young people from ethnic minority backgrounds to find work, was ousted for criticising the radical politics of the Black Lives Matter movement (most notably their calls to defund the police and abolish capitalism). Although Buckley’s opposition to racism was never in doubt, the charity capitulated to pressure from online campaigners who smeared him as racist and demanded his dismissal. It was only after a petition and counter-campaign that the decision was reversed. In August 2020, Sasha White, an assistant at the Tobias Literary Agency in New York, was fired after a campaign by trans activists who took offence at statements posted on her private Twitter account expressing her view that gender-neutral pronouns were unhelpful to the feminist cause.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

Anyone who sincerely cares about important causes like female empowerment, racial equality, and environmentalism ought to be offended when these causes are cheapened by corporations that pawn them off to advance their own goals. For example, are black communities really going to be better off if we “defund the police”? Or if we “clear the jails”? Or if we “dismantle the nuclear family structure”? Or do these slogans simply make those who utter them feel more noble? Satisfying our own moral hunger is just another form of self-indulgence. Sure, maybe in the short run, some progressives will be happy that there are more women or black people on boards because Goldman Sachs and Nasdaq decided to mandate it for companies that go public.

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Woke activists fail to focus on more tangible examples of truly systemic inequality just because they aren’t quite as fashionable to talk about. The existence of summer break as an institution is probably one of the greatest systematic inequalities in our educational system. But there’s something about going out and chanting “End Summer Break” that doesn’t quite have the same moral ring to it as “Defund the police.” It’s boring to campaign against long summer breaks. It’s much easier and more satisfying to say that we should just end structural racism and then everything else will follow. Liberals complain about trickle-down economics, but they believe in trickle-down politics—don’t worry about boring little policy fixes, just raise your voice against racism instead.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

Camden, a rough town in New Jersey, reduced its police violence problem with education in de-escalation and conflict management. More broadly, the job should be redefined. The police are a classic example of the overloaded state, with cops being asked to deal with problems such as mental health, family breakdown, and juvenile delinquency. “Defund the police” should become “deconstruct the police,” with some functions handed over to trained (and unarmed) social workers. Police reform by itself will not right the system that throttled Floyd to death. Gladstone made a habit of creating big commissions into pressing social problems and then implementing their recommendations.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In all these instances, progressives have argued for the need to enhance prior court-approved restrictions on the easy sale and use of particular weapons, given new existential challenges. America is an increasingly urban and suburban society. There are ever-fewer rural residents, who are most likely to grow up and use weapons for hunting and personal defense. Consequently, some of these restrictionist efforts enjoyed majority public support—at least until the national defund-the-police efforts in summer and autumn 2020 in reaction to the death of George Floyd. Urbanization, along with the end of national conscription, accelerated the general trend in which millions of Americans had not only never bought or used a firearm but likely had never seen one. Yet gun sales reached record heights during the 2020 COVID-19 quarantines and in reaction to rioting, looting, and arson in the streets of major cities.

…

Mostly African American and other inner-city citizens, many of whose stores and businesses were closest to the downtown violence and thus left vulnerable to the looting and burning. As it turned out, the wages of not enforcing the law fell most heavily upon the citizens with the least ability to object to the nullifying of enforcement of the very statutes that civilization relies upon to protect the vulnerable. Indeed, in the midst of defund-the-police movements and reluctance among dispirited officers to enter dangerous crime-ridden areas, murders in 2020 soared in most American cities. In some cases, district attorneys failed to prosecute crimes; in others, law enforcement simply lost all sense of prior deterrence on the assumption that either criminals would not be arrested or, if arrested, would not be prosecuted.50 In sum, state and local nullification erodes the rights of the citizen.

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin

2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, defund the police, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, George Floyd, hindsight bias, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lyft, mandatory minimum, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem

And I don’t know if the reports are true, but the Washington Times has just reported some pretty compelling evidence from a facial-recognition company showing that some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters. They were masquerading as Trump supporters and, in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group Antifa. Now, we should seek to build America up, not tear her down and destroy her. And I am sure glad that, at least for one day, I didn’t hear my Democrat colleagues calling to defund the police. In fact, all those hot-off-the-presses reports about Antifa organizing the attack were a lie, pure propaganda. Antifa had had nothing to do with it, but pumping that concoction into the media bloodstream on the night of the attack gave Republicans a rhetorical antidote to counter the spreading outrage against Trump and his assembled violent insurrectionary forces.

…

Of course, the premise of this Bizarro World insinuation is that the “fake” MAGA and extremist protesters, who were actually Antifa fighters, according to right-wing dogma, had attacked a police officer . . . because they thought he was Antifa—which of course makes no sense. In right-wing conspiracy theory and the land of the Big Lie, we had transcended the world not only of fact but of simple logic, too. By the same token, Gaetz knew that there was no Democratic support for any actual legislative effort in Congress to “defund the police,” but he was anticipating the GOP’s need to promote this fiction, as the party would be working overtime for months or years to downplay and dismiss the brutal face-to-face violence unleashed against hundreds of our police officers, more than 140 of whom were injured by insurrectionists wielding baseball bats, hockey sticks, steel pipes, flagpoles, bear spray, and other unknown chemical irritants.

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Addressing these kinds of issues will make a more profound difference to people’s lives than endless discussions about Empire or street names – arguments that often seem to exist solely in order to boost the profile of activist academics. This copyism of the US was taken to an extreme when parts of the British left started campaigning to ‘defund the police’ only a few months after standing on a manifesto that promised to massively increase the policing budget. The modern left often lacks subtlety or originality as much as it lacks an authentic sympathy with the working class. It reached absurd levels when a desire to copy the reasonable campaign to topple statues in the American South led to bizarre claims that Grey’s monument and statues of Gladstone should be torn down.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Rather, they are so dehumanizing and so incriminated in the reproduction of race and class hierarchies that they must be eliminated altogether. This position often invites the accusation that abolitionists are hopelessly utopian. In fact, they are everywhere involved in daily politics. They have waged successful campaigns across the country to stop the construction of new prisons, to reduce incarcerated populations, and to defund the police. But, as Davis explains, “abolition is not primarily a negative strategy.” It’s also about “building anew.” Abolitionists are not just trying to decrease the number of cops and prisons until both disappear. They are also coming up with better ways of keeping people safe. To do so, Davis argues, it’s essential to “let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment.”

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

airport security, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, defund the police, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, index card, McMansion, Minecraft, pre–internet, QAnon, Skype, social distancing, Transnistria

She’s, like, twenty years older than me and has four kids! Plus I’m already married. To a man.” Eventually, though, I’ll be right, and my host will say, “May I just thank you for being the one person in my life who’s not a horrible racist?” As the weeks passed, I saw more and more protest signs reading DEFUND THE POLICE. That won’t be doing us much good come election time, I thought, worried over how this would play on Fox News: “The left wants it so that when armed thugs break into your house and you dial 911, you’ll get a recording of Rich Homie Quan laughing at you!” Amy worried too. It wasn’t taking money allocated for law enforcement and redirecting it toward social services that bothered her—rather, it was the language and how Trump would use it to scare people.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

The police began pop-up neighborhood parties, where they’d rock up with Mister Softee ice-cream trucks, grill hot dogs, play basketball with kids, and get to know the residents. Seven years later, when American cities were up in flames, literally, over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and protesters chanted “Defund the police,” Camden was cited as a success story. Murders were down 60 percent, crime had almost halved, and complaints of excessive force by police had fallen by a stunning 95 percent. The reframing had worked. A symbolic moment came in June 2020. A new Camden police chief, Joseph Wysocki, not only authorized a big Black Lives Matter street protest—he asked the organizers if he could join them at the head of the procession.

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

And during the violent riots last summer and this spring, which involved looting, arson, and even murder in multiple cities over the course of several months, and where Antifa and BLM had prominent organizational roles, the Democratic Party’s leadership mostly regurgitated the rhetoric and claims of the anarchist/Marxist groups and rioters, including the broad condemnation of law enforcement as “systemically racist,” and were not only loath to denounce the violence, but, incredibly, declared the rioters as “mostly peaceful” and their demand to defund the police (later, changed to slash their budgets) as legitimate. In fact, a BLM cofounder declared in the summer of 2020 that one of their “goal[s] is to get Trump out now.”2 Democratic-controlled cities named streets after the group. And numerous Biden campaign staffers donated to a fund that paid the bail for the release of those who were arrested and jailed.3 Obviously, the Democratic Party and Biden campaign perceived an overlap or synergy of political interests and objectives with the rioters.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, emotional labour, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, impulse control, independent contractor, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, phenotype, QAnon, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, theory of mind, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income

The criminal justice system and mental health system are deeply interwoven, and they both serve to perpetuate ableism. As I described earlier in the book, disabled people are at extremely high risk of being shot by police. Black and brown Autistic people are, in particular, at an elevated risk of police violence and incarceration. Defunding the police and prisons and working to abolish these oppressive institutions will help liberate Black Autistic people, as well as others with disabilities and mental illnesses. Many people who oppose racist police violence argue that cops be replaced with social workers or therapists, and that a state-run mental health force should be dispatched when emergency calls are made.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Heads rolled only metaphorically during the nationwide protests that summer, but street skirmishes with police and right-wing counterprotesters meant the movement took a more aggressive stance than many liberal onlookers were comfortable with. More than three hundred fires burned across Philadelphia, where four hundred people were arrested even before the National Guard arrived. Police precincts burned in other cities, and it seemed like the protest slogan “defund the police” might go mainstream. Why were the protests so large and militant? It’s possible that mass unemployment left people with more time to join the movement. As scholars Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have shown, widespread welfare relief has often been deployed to contain mass unrest.23 In the summer of 2020, it could have been the opposite.

We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation by Eric Garcia

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, defund the police, Donald Trump, epigenetics, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, Internet Archive, Joi Ito, Lyft, meta-analysis, neurotypical, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, phenotype, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, short selling, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

The public deaths of Black people that disturbed the public consciousness led to a call for defunding police departments. Supporters of that movement make the case that psychiatric services or other types of intervention might be more effective at helping people with mental illness than police intervention. Whether one supports or opposes defunding the police, it is likely that finding alternatives to police could benefit mentally ill, autistic, or otherwise disabled people. The fates of Watts, Rios-Soto, and Hayes reminded me of my own interactions with police. As a Boy Scout, I was taught to see the police as respected civil servants meant to protect the community.

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

“The controversy around race and around harm reduction is very different in the state outside of Charleston,” Prosperino said. In one community they don’t care to name, needles get passed out from a Black-church van under the umbrella of a program designed to help Black sex workers. Asked how to fix the opioid crisis, Prosperino said, “We won’t have real harm reduction unless we defund the police.” But in large rural swaths of the country where many decry universal health care as socialism and American flags hang upside down as a symbol of distress, I asked them the same question I’d been scratching my head about for years: Was it a worthy goal for police officers to shepherd people who use drugs into treatment instead of jail?

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Or that democracies never start wars, except for ancient Greece, but it had slaves, and Georgian England, but the commoners couldn’t vote, and nineteenth-century America, but its women lacked the franchise, and India and Pakistan, but they were fledgling states. They can move the goalposts, demanding that we “defund the police” but then explaining that they only mean reallocating part of its budget to emergency responders. (Rationality cognoscenti call it the motte-and-bailey fallacy, after the medieval castle with a cramped but impregnable tower into which one can retreat when invaders attack the more desirable but less defensible courtyard.)14 They can claim that no Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge, and when confronted with Angus, who puts sugar on his porridge, say this shows that Angus is not a true Scotsman.

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

And speaking up can only reveal problems; it’s only the first step toward change. But altogether, whistleblowers, civil rights attorneys, courts and monitors, and especially regular people banding together in protest movements can successfully reform policing. Long before reimagining policing became a topic of public discussion, or “defunding the police” became a boogeyman on Fox News, countless Oakland residents agitated and organized to change policing in their city. Oakland’s story shows that accountability isn’t something that can ever be fully and finally achieved. It was only through continuous protest and obsessive scrutiny of the police department that Oaklanders were able to bring about progress.