A World Without Police Is a World Run by Mobs

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13 Comments for “A World Without Police Is a World Run by Mobs”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    I was wondering when IGF would start the annual “bash Pride” messaging this year. Right on schedule, I see, and with the usual cherry picking of local outrages and over-caffeinated hysteria (“A World Without Police Is a World Run by Mobs”). Pffft.

    • posted by agee on

      So, do you want to defend the decision? NYC Pride is the biggest, most important pride event in the U.S. So how is it “cherry picking” to showcase it as yet another example of woke lunacy on the LGBTQ left?

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      “So, do you want to defend the decision?”

      No. The decision was local. I have no basis on which to defend or decry the decision, because I have no knowledge about the considerations that led to the decision. There is a history relating to Pride and the NYPD that might have influenced the decision. I just don’t know. If you are getting your information about the decision from conservative homosexual outrage media like Outspoken, you probably probably know even less than I do.

      “NYC Pride is the biggest, most important pride event in the U.S.”

      NYC Pride draws about 2.5 million people, almost as many as Rio’s pride parade and other global pride parades. NYC Pride draws an enormous number of people, though. The next largest US pride parades seems to be Chicago Pride (which draw about 1.5 million). Most other US cities draw less, but a few hunred thousand here and a few hundred thousand there add up, as Everett Dirksen used to say about government spending (“A million here, a million there, pretty soon you are talking about real money.”)

      NYC Pride is the “most important pride event in the U.S.” primarily because the media declares it to be the most important, but I wonder how important it actually is. June sees literally hundreds of Pride events in the United States, large and small, all across the country, and I doubt that most gays and lesbians outside the New York metro area care all that much about what happens with NYC Pride.

      Pride events (e.g. Milwaukee’s PrideFest, a 3-day celebration that is a lot of fun) seem to be replacing parades more and more as time goes on. I wonder if parades are becoming retro celebrations.

      So how is it “cherry picking” to showcase it as yet another example of woke lunacy on the LGBTQ left?

      It’s cherry picking because NYC Pride is, for all its size and media attention, one among many, and local decisions don’t universalize well.

      • posted by Jorge on

        No. The decision was local.

        Your moral blinders, Tom.

        There was a time when…

        the 1691 Project was a local decision in New York, too.

        Much the same could be said about critical race theory, and defund the police. And is still said, no doubt, about the flyover country state (I wonder which one it was???) that was the first to censure a Republican who supported the impeachment of Donald Trump.

        Acts such as these have consequences.

  2. posted by Kosh III on

    Of course this is about NYC which is hardly representative of the rest of the country. But homocons are probably too scared to venture out of their comfy blue enclave.

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      Along those lines, I’d love to see how the usual IGF suspects (Chadwick Moore, Brad Polumbo, Andrew Sullivan and so on) would fare attending Pride celebrations in rural areas of Wisconsin. The events can be a lot of fun — a chance to renew friendships, catch up with each other, eat well, and enjoy a splendid summer day — but I’ll bet that none of them could shake off their dripping contempt for “flyover country” rubes long enough to enjoy themselves.

      • posted by Jorge on

        Along those lines, I’d love to see how the usual IGF suspects (Chadwick Moore, Brad Polumbo, Andrew Sullivan and so on) would fare attending Pride celebrations in rural areas of Wisconsin.

        I wonder what Liz Cheney’s home state is like?

    • posted by Jorge on

      Are you kidding? I love going to red states. But don’t ask me to go anywhere rural.

      I went to Arizona in the time of John McCain’s re-election during my summer vacation. 105 degrees upon arrival, what the hell was I thinking?

      And to South Carolina when there was a buzz around a governor named Nikki Haley. Did I get called the anti-gay F-bomb by a man on the street in SC? Yes I did.

      Last year before the pandemic I went to Alabama, home of the recently deposed Jeff Sessions I was enjoying a nice bus ride, when I answered my phone and spoke in my own New Yorker accent. A crankly old man politely told me I need to go back to my own country.

      Georgia used to be a red state, right? But it was home to Jimmy Carter of the great big smile. I went right in the middle of the great recession. The MOMENT I opened a map, ZOOM came the beggar like a moth to a flame.

      Utah is the state of Orrin Hatch. Why on earth did he start supporting gay rights so openly? The center of Salt Lake City is pristine churchy politeness–even toward children. About ten blocks south and east is graffiti art on the side of the socialist-loving bookstore.

      Texas is the land of George W. Bush, the president who speaks Spanish. I don’t think he speaks the local (Louisiana?) French Creole language you’ll hear in Dallas. And what the heck is an Aggie? Or is it an Augie? That place takes its football seriously, I’m glad I missed the season.

      Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my visit to Pennsylvania, home of the most homocon of homocons, that guy who once worked for Rick Santorum. You know, just out of curiosity about how this random city Philadelphia celebrates Independence Day. I wonder what their local pride might be like? It’s the only place that knows how to tell Casey at the Bat and ruin its bad ending with irrational cheer.

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      “I wonder what Liz Cheney’s home state is like?”

      It is a beautiful state. I drove stayed for a few days with a law school friend who lives in southern Wyoming before moving on to Provo, and I’ve driven through eastern Wyoming any number of times. You probably wouldn’t like it. Too rural.

      Any reason you brought up Liz Cheney?

  3. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Acts such as these have consequences.

    Well, let me know when NYC Pride’s decision results in a “World Without Police”. I won’t be holding my breath. New York is a small pond, and NYC Pride’s decision will result, at most, in ripples in that small pond. I doubt that the decision will change a thing outside of NYC and will be little noticed beyond the NYC/Washington media bubble.

    Stephen’s headline (“A World Without Police Is a World Run by Mobs“) speaks volumes. Like many/most conservative homosexuals, Stephen apparently sees (consciously or unconsciously) the role of police as protectors against, and suppressors of, social movements that rock the conservative boat, almost always movements that conservatives characterized as “mobs”. The police were used to suppress the union movement, the Civil Rights movement, the farm workers movement, and, most pertinent to this forum, the gay rights movement, among many others over the history of this country.

    A few of us who comment on IGF are old enough to remember the days when police cracked our skulls. Things have changed over the years, and few under 70 have memories of being threatened, arrested and/or jailed because we were gay (the last time I spent the night in custody because I was suspected of being gay was in 1968, for example). The world has changed for the better in that respect.

    What hasn’t changed, though, is that conservative homosexuals, and conservatives in general, see the role of police as protecting the status quo and working to suppress outsides who are determined to change the status quo. New targets, but the same old same old.

    And one other thing hasn’t changed — conservatives always get hysterical when change comes.

  4. posted by Kosh III on

    Well said Tom.
    I can remember clearly that most weekend nights the cops would come into the bar, supposedly looking for underage drinkers(age was 18 at that time) but their real purpose was intimidation.
    This despite the fact that bar owners paid plenty under the table to the cops for “protection.”

  5. posted by Kosh III on

    An interesting article on this subject

    https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/05/pride-police-new-york-times-editorial.html

    • posted by Tom scharbach on

      It is an interesting perspective, but it is important to keep in mind that it is an opinion piece and does not shed any particular light on the considerations taken into account by NYC Pride in making the decision, so we continue to have insufficient facts on which to make informed judgments about the decision.

      One sentence in the article struck me: “Pride emerged directly and inexorably from activism, specifically against police brutality.”

      I might have said “brutality and systematic harassment”, so that the article covers the more common forms of police harassment that you and I, and almost everyone else experienced back in the day — the “brutality” an expected reaction to the resistance which followed run-of-the-mill “harassment” in the case of Stonewall, for example — but that is a quibble. The fact is that those of us who are old enough to remember, and who retain the wits not to have forgotten, lived though a significant part of our lives where the larger society used the police to control and suppress us. Young gays and lesbians like Brad Polumbo have no idea what it was like, and older conservative homosexuals, living in “safe harbors” in blue cities and states for the most part, seem to have forgotten if they ever knew.

      As long as I have been aware of the gay rights movement, conservative homosexuals urged a form of docility in the face of the suppression, typified by Bruce Bawer’s “A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society” — a docility that implicitly recognized the right of conservative Christians and other anti-gay constituencies in the American population to set the limits and control the pace of progress toward “equal means equal”, using the police to suppress gays and lesbians as needed to maintain a schema of inequality. As time moved forward, activists rejected that paradigm, insisting that gays and lesbians had a right as citizens to be treated on an equal footing under the law, raising a ruckus about it across the country, and that ruckus is what we now know as “the gay rights movement”.

      I don’t have an explanation for conservative homosexuals’ attraction for docility (it may be nothing more than a conservative homosexual manifestation of conservative adhesion to the status quo in general), but I’ve seen enough of it over the years to have accepted it as a fact.

      If you have followed IGF, for example (as I have done since 2004) you will have experienced more-or-less constant exhortations from conservative homosexuals to the effect that gays and lesbians cannot obtain true equality unless and until conservative Christians support that equality, and that any attempt to push beyond what conservative Christians are willing to accept from time to time will inevitably lead to a “backlash” that will destroy any gains we have made.

      There is an element of truth to that line of reasoning (as a general rule, we have made gains when Democrats are in power and the gains we have made have been rolled back when Republicans are in power), that the potential for “backlash” is not, in my view, sufficient reason not to push for equality. Our history may be one of two hard-won steps forward and one step back, but we have made significant gains, none of which would have been made had we not pushed.

      The current controversies are nothing more than the latest manifestation of conservative homosexual opposition to “equal means equal”.

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