A chaplin recently had to resign in apology at a distinguished academic institution for ... making factual and insightful comments about the George Floyd incident.[1] McCarthy eventually was shamed and disgraced by his casual destructiveness. "Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
Saying someone "didn't live a virtuous life" is not factual. In this case, it's an irrelevant and tasteless opinion about a victim. It implies Floyd somehow deserved to be shot in the back and killed.
> It implies Floyd somehow deserved to be shot in the back and killed.
No it doesn't. This is wild hyperbole. No one deserves to be shot in the back.
However, people are painting him out to be an angel - quite literally there are multiple artworks of George Floyd with a halo and wings [1]. The reality is he was human, and one with a complicated criminal past who was jailed 8 times [2] including for drug offenses. Is saying that someone with a criminal record like that "didn't live a virtuous life" really a fireable offense?
It's maybe important to note that the phrase 'He was no angel' is a common (extremely dark and sarcastic) joke in left-leaning circles around these kind of tragic murders because there is always, without fail, some right-wing effort to paint the victim as some sort of low-life who had it coming one way or the other.
Let's be clear: no one, regardless of how much they've fucked up in their lives, deserves to be murdered in cold blood by the police while they pose no threat to anyone.
To restate: a non-violent suspect's past offenses are not germane when the discussion is about the police summarily executing that non-violent suspect in the street.
Any attempt to confuse this point with ideas about how the victim wasn't perfect, about how they could have done better in the confrontation or not committed a crime in the first place, is an attempt to deflect blame onto the victim.
These kinds of arguments are prima facie disgusting and deserve no quarter in civilized discourse.
"deserve no quarter in civilized discourse." This is a dangerous opinion. I would argue that the entire point of civilized discourse is to provide quarter for even opinions you radically disagree with, after all people hold these opinions and isn't discussing them in a civilized manner rather than dismissing and villainizing the people who hold them the only way to progress? Otherwise you have two sides that aren't discussing anything with each other and resort to violence, legal challenges, and pressure on employers rather than attempting to connect with each other and share another view.
> These kinds of arguments are prima facie disgusting and deserve no quarter in civilized discourse.
Declaring "no quarter" in actual war is saying that if the enemy decides to surrender to you, and lays down his arms, and hoists the white flag, sticks his hands in the air, then you will shoot and kill him.
Declaring "no quarter" in actual war is therefore a violation of the Hague convention. It is "especially forbidden," in the same paragraph as poisoned weapons.
You are defending your actions with a metaphor that celebrates war crimes.
I also found the "no quarter" phrasing interesting by the parent poster. As countless people have found out across history, those who show no mercy will in turn receive no mercy when they need it.
If pushback against the intolerant aspects of progressivism is occurring even on HN (of all places!), they may need that mercy sooner than they think.
It's interesting that this is the place you decided to make an argument about 'no mercy'. Because as a rhetorical question for you using the same analogy: What do you think will happen to the police when they show no mercy? Perhaps that might explain why people find the arguments attempting to justify the extrajudicial execution of someone to be disgusting.
>Is saying that someone with a criminal record like that "didn't live a virtuous life" really a fireable offense?
Talk about wild hyperboles!
“In the wake of George Floyd’s death, most people in the country have framed this as an act of racism,” Moloney’s email continued. “I don’t think we know that. Many people have claimed that racism is a major problem in police forces. I don’t think we know that.”
The Chaplain has said enough things that association with him became a liability for an institution like MIT, that is all.
The new orthodoxy requires this quote to be something awful, and upon reading it, that was my immediate thought as well. "He really said that?".
But it really isn't. In fact, it continues to be an opinion of a large section of the society. He is only saying that the police are not totally racist, maybe only a bit! Disagree as much as you want, this is an opinion beyond the pale now?
And the fact that the culture causes MIT to believe this to be a liability is exactly the point.
>He is only saying that the police are not totally racist, maybe only a bit
Let's not be facetious here, shall we?
He said that we don't know that racism is a major problem in police forces. In fact, we do know that; the structural racism is what many people are protesting against.
Structural racism manifests itself in the rules and protocols, in traditions and patterns in actions. To say that it is a major problem does not imply that the majority of individual policemen are racists. What it means is that the black people are disproportionately affected by the negative effects of policing, including brutality.
To say that "we don't know that" is unacceptable ignorance for a public figurehead of a reputable institution.
No, it is not. Unless by "we" you take to mean the chaplain in question - in which case, it is unacceptable ignorance.
Let me reiterate.
He said that we don't know that racism is a major problem in police forces. In fact, we do know that; the structural racism is what many people are protesting against.
Structural racism manifests itself in the rules and protocols, in traditions and patterns in actions. To say that it is a major problem does not imply that the majority of individual policemen are racists. What it means is that the black people are disproportionately affected by the negative effects of policing, including brutality.
To say that "we don't know that" is unacceptable ignorance for a public figurehead of a reputable institution, because it implies that MIT doesn't know that.
But MIT does. We do. You, perhaps, don't, and it does not look good, but this is a chance for you to learn.
It might imply racism, it might imply that there are major issues with the police use of force in America. It might imply major problems with a lack of training of US police officers, both in techniques used to control someone but also when it's appropriate to use those techniques and for how long.
It might even imply, and I reckon it probably does, that there are some sociopaths in the police form that are wholy unfit to be police officers. These people need rooted out and fired. I would probably put the officer that killed George Floyd in this category.
I'm also sure there are racists in the police force who treat black people unfairly, these people also need rooted out and fired. I'm sure there is a LOT of these types.
But from the video, it doesn't imply that the police officer was racist or that his death is the result of racism. We simply don't know if the outcome would be different had George Floyd been white.
We can't even really tell from teh video if he was intentionally trying to kill George Floyd, I suspect he wasn't. I suspect that his death was a gross mistake, a result of insufficient training and a sociopath police officer. I very much doubt it was racist cop intentionally killing a black man because he was black, on camera, in front of witnesses recording it all on their phones.
The officer that killed Floyd made a gross mistake.
Each of the three officers that were on the scene and watched Chauvin kill Floyd also made a gross mistake by not intervening in an active murder that lasted over 8 minutes.
After the murder, all the policemen involved made a gross mistake by lying on the police report about Floyd resisting arrest, and describing his death as a "medical distress".
Then the people in the justice system made a gross mistake by not opening a murder investigation and not charging anyone.
And the entire police department made a gross mistake by not making any arrests in regards to the murder they knew happened.
All these gross mistakes were happening as the video was widely circulated, and people were out there demanding justice.
And after many violent protests, there are still good chances that the justice system will make another gross mistake and acquit the people involved due to the concept of "qualified immunity", which is, of course, also a gross mistake.
Along with these gross mistakes happening on a regular basis across the country, the repeated pattern of gross mistakes makes me wonder if our police and justice systems are... a gross mistake.
"George Floyd was killed by a police officer, and shouldn’t have been. He had not lived a virtuous life. He was convicted of several crimes, including armed robbery, which he seems to have committed to feed his drug habit. And he was high on drugs at the time of his arrest. But we do not kill such people. He committed sins, but we root for sinners to change their lives and convert to the Gospel."
But most media outlets just quote "didn't live a virtuous life" in their own paraphrasing, as well as "I don't think we know that" - that strengthen those implications by removing any context that would otherwise soften them. It's very easy to assume was justifying the killing, given that no contrary quotes are given.
That's not to say that what he did say is ok/wise/sensitive, but much of the press are clearly sensationalising this.
The utterer was a Chaplain. This is a main aspect of what they are hired for: to remind us of the moral judgments of the religious tradition they were trained in. They're not just psychotherapists who wear funny clothing, and they aren't PERSONALLY setting those rules about the virtuous life. Maybe you don't want chaplains, which is an argument, but that's separate.
So someone gets shot and the chaplain doesn't remind us of the sins of judgment or wrath. He reminds us that the man shot in the back was a sinner??
Even assuming agreement with his religion, he's not even a good chaplain. His own religious texts say he shouldn't judge, and here he is judging a dead man he never met.
The news article you link to is interesting because it contains one inflamatory remark while omitting any context or full text of the email. While I probably strongly disagree with him as well as well as what he wrote in his email the tactics used: Taking the most distasteful sentence (or part of a sentence) they can find and concealing anything else, has been used time and time again in many contexts in order to generate outrage without thought or understanding. This is what I find disgusting about modern news, it's more an outrage generator using incomplete out of context quotes than increasing information about the world.
[1] https://nypost.com/2020/06/17/mit-chaplain-resigns-over-emai...