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In a comment on a friend's post, something that's been bugging me finally came together in my head.
In various recent events (Peter Watts' Squidgate, the g20 mess, etc.), there has been a bunch of commenters (live and on the net, natch) who seem to cheer louder the more it looks like the police have abused thier power. These are the folks who say things like "if a cop tells you to do something, you do it *immediately* or you deserve what happens to you", "if you haven't worn a uniform, you don't get to complain", etc.
The general idea of Authoritarian Apologism is that anyone that gets beaten up by the police, or the border guards, or anyone with a bade or a uniform, deserves what they get. That those forces are always justified in whatever they do to thier citizens.
I've been trying to figure out what it is that drives me so nuts about this position, besides the obvious. It finally clicked today - it's the same logical fallacy that drives Rape Culture victim-blaming and shunning of people who are ill. It's the idea that Bad things don't happen to Good people. So when bad things happen to someone previously presumed to be Good, the Apologist makes the inference that the person must be Bad. Because the alternative is that Bad things *do* happen to Good people. And that's terrifying - the Apologist naturally sees zirself as a Good person. If something bad can happen to some random writer, to some random jogger or random tourist, then it means that something bad can happen to *me*!
And a lot of people can't face that. So they go to great lengths to come up with reasons why people deserve to be beaten by cops, to be raped by thier "friend", to get cancer or AIDS. I mean, of course that guy deserved to be arrested and held in a pen in the rain overnight with no drinking water - did you *see* what he was wearing? He was *asking* for it! Good thing I'd never do something like that, so I'm safe.
It's all about Othering victims so that the Apologist can feel safe knowing that bad things only happen to bad people. It's about fear, and letting that fear make your world ever smaller.
In various recent events (Peter Watts' Squidgate, the g20 mess, etc.), there has been a bunch of commenters (live and on the net, natch) who seem to cheer louder the more it looks like the police have abused thier power. These are the folks who say things like "if a cop tells you to do something, you do it *immediately* or you deserve what happens to you", "if you haven't worn a uniform, you don't get to complain", etc.
The general idea of Authoritarian Apologism is that anyone that gets beaten up by the police, or the border guards, or anyone with a bade or a uniform, deserves what they get. That those forces are always justified in whatever they do to thier citizens.
I've been trying to figure out what it is that drives me so nuts about this position, besides the obvious. It finally clicked today - it's the same logical fallacy that drives Rape Culture victim-blaming and shunning of people who are ill. It's the idea that Bad things don't happen to Good people. So when bad things happen to someone previously presumed to be Good, the Apologist makes the inference that the person must be Bad. Because the alternative is that Bad things *do* happen to Good people. And that's terrifying - the Apologist naturally sees zirself as a Good person. If something bad can happen to some random writer, to some random jogger or random tourist, then it means that something bad can happen to *me*!
And a lot of people can't face that. So they go to great lengths to come up with reasons why people deserve to be beaten by cops, to be raped by thier "friend", to get cancer or AIDS. I mean, of course that guy deserved to be arrested and held in a pen in the rain overnight with no drinking water - did you *see* what he was wearing? He was *asking* for it! Good thing I'd never do something like that, so I'm safe.
It's all about Othering victims so that the Apologist can feel safe knowing that bad things only happen to bad people. It's about fear, and letting that fear make your world ever smaller.
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Think, for instance, of the unthinking condemnation of the diet of people living with poverty as being all junk food - not recognizing that buying healthy food is expensive, and that not everyone has the automatic ability to just drop a few more dollars on organic arugula from Chile, rather than another few 33-cent packets of top ramen.
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I had a geography teacher in high school who told us that there wasn't anyone who "couldn't afford" to eat organic. If they weren't, it was because they were choosing not to.
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Food and poverty
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Re: Food and poverty
This thread is drifting, but I'm finding this interesting.
I'll grant there may be cultural differences between the US and Canada, so it may be a YMMV but IME there is a vast difference culturally between the indigenous "poor" and the immigrant "poor."
Additionally, given the references to whole food and "organic" as examples of "healthy food", I suspect there is huge cultural difference between what (relatively) affluent people consider healthy and what government agencies recommend as healthy.
Organic food falls in the realm of "minute details" when it comes to general health and numerous studies show health benefits to be non-existant or marginal at best. Quite frankly, it's for rich people.[1]
There are plenty of inexpensive healthy foods, and when I mean healthy I mean that in combination provide macro nutrient and micro nutrients to sustain general health throughout life, for example
Cabbage 39Cents/lb
carrots 49cents/lb
Tomatoes 79cents/lb
Oats 89cent/lb
Tuna 39cents/can (42g of protein)
lentils, peas, beans $l.29/lb
Frozen Orange juice 99cents/46oz
Skim Milk $2.29/gal
Enriched Pasta $0.79cents/lb
Enriced Rice 69cents/lb
peanuts and peanut butter $1.99/lbs
Whole wheat flour 20lbs/$6.99
What is lacking among the indigenous poor is nutritional education. Immigrant poor, usually bring with them traditional recipes (beans & rice) that contain the cultural wisdom of the ages (ie whole foods not "wholefoods (tm)).
jv
[1] There are conventional practices that produce clinically proven unhealthy foods, but those are mainly related to the meat industry, hence why I left them out. Though even with many of these practices, it's about the massive consumption of meat vs what the human body is biologically equipped to handle.
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Re: Food and poverty
Milk, peanut butter, and the other produce you listed are similarly more expensive. (The lentils, oats, and pasta are available cheaply.)
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It's the magical ward against Bad Things Happening.
Only it doesn't work.
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But I also see the other side of that equation: the people who say "I am a Nice White Privileged Person and therefore the rules don't apply to me. I can go downtown wearing a black bandanna on the morning after the riot and then act outraged when the cops want to see what's inside my backpack."
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so the goal isn't to raise everyone up to some supposed same level of privilege, but to tear down the structures that enforce and create situations of privilege.
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Specifically, in this case, I was talking about the fact that some people are typically privileged in the sense that the police tend to respect their civil rights, while the police might not extend the same respect to others in less privilegd groups. In this case at least, I feel the correct response is to work to ensure that everyone enjoys these rights, rather than attempting to remove the privilege of those who already enjoy them.
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On the other hand, things like "not having the cops assume I'm a criminal because of my skin colour" are privileges that can and should be shared.
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Everyone has the legal right to be free from being stopped and searched unless the police have reasonable cause to believe you have committed a crime. In practice, in general, the police are more likely to respect that right when dealing with privileged (e.g. white) people. So many more POC are stopped arbitarily, on a percentage basis, than white people.
Over the G20 weekend, many people who normally experience this privilege were denied it. The police failed to respect their legal rights, and stopped and attempted to search them arbitarily. This is both a breach of their normal privilege, and also their legal rights.
From a technical legal point of view, everyone has the same rights under the constitution. From a practical point of view, we need to work harder to make sure that the police respect the rights of all people, and not just (or even more frequently) the rights of the privileged.
But that doesn't mean that white people were wrong to be upset when the police breached their normal privilege and ignored their legal rights.
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I think in most cases it's unconscious - I don't think very many people who do this are consciously aware of being afraid that any of this could happen to them. It's more like an unconscious mental defense against cognitive dissonance - they "know", on the one hand, that they live in a nice democratic society where if you just follow the rules and live a normal life everything will be OK, and they also know that bad things do seem to happen to some people, and the mental stress created by "knowing" two different, contradictory things that can't both be true causes a sort of logic error, which the brain handles by coming up with whatever remotely plausible excuse can reconcile the two things.
For people locked into this view, nothing seems capable of changing it except having something actually happen to them personally, or to someone they know well enough that the brought-it-on-themselves response breaks down.
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I have to deal with so much reflexive defense of authority on a daily basis that this post made me squeal.
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I suspect many of these authority figure cheerleaders fall into that category.
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i've always had another word to tar apologists with- collaborator.
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Hit (a palpable one)
right on.
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Completely OT, but considering your range of interests, if you lived in the Cities (or I lived in Toronto), we'd probably know each other.
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