You have probably been seeing the above meme scattered around the internet wherever the logically impaired can be found harassing responsible citizens fighting for our liberties and freedoms. I have seen it dozens of times myself and expect to see it many more, since our most rabid critics don’t seem to have a whole lot of tricks in their intellectual bag. Every time I see it I want to barf on the sharers mothers tits and then scatter feathers on that barf. If me barf and feathering your moms tits sounds totally preposterous and idiotic to you, just wait until I show you how totally fucking vapid and moronic your meme really is. Let us dissect this cockamamie ludicrousness one point at a time.
#1- It is implied in this meme that the only victims of police brutality belong to a single generation of people and that it is a younger generation, though it doesn’t specify which. This idea is so patently stupid it boggles the mind. The age range of even the most well known cases of police brutality is so extensive that it encompasses several generations.
Baby Bou Bou was only 19-months-old when police brutally attacked him with a stun grenade. Was this seemingly innocent infant really just an out of control brat whose parents let run too free and wild? Did a lack of discipline and structure in those first 19 months turn this child into an insufferably spoiled brat whose bad experience with law enforcement was just a matter of misguided parenting and a shitty attitude?
Or how about Lora Varner, the 86-year-old disabled woman who was struck twice with a taser while sitting in bed and connected to a breathing device for ‘taking a more aggressive posture’ in her bed? Was this granny-in-disguise really nothing more than a disrespectful little scofflaw? Was it the majority of the eighty six years of her life after surviving the Great Depression that softened her core of authoritarian obedience and turned her into the spoiled, entitled brat whom definitely needed to be taught a lesson by a bebadged hero?
Given that over a thousand people have been killed in the last year by police, and many times more that number brutalized and survived, the age range of police state victims covers the entire range. So exactly what generation is it that deserves all of this police brutality? What of all the others? If your parents spanked you, made you hold doors for the elderly and imbued in you a penchant for using your pleases and thank-yous, should this disqualify you from police brutality? Do you need to have a badge or license or something to prove your parents weren’t inept? Are perfectly well-adjusted individuals with reasonable expectations about their society never being brutalized?
#2- The two different possibilities are presented in a way that suggests that only one or the other can be true. This relates directly to the problem referred to in logic as Equivocation. This logical fallacy happens when two semantically disparate things are presented as being equivalent to one another.
In this case the equivocation is that:
police brutality is not a problem = some parents fail to instill reasonable expectations of reality
As you can see, the two statements are not at all similar or related in any way. This is a classic case of dividing a potato by zero. Potato and impossible math problems are not at all similar. One cannot divide potato by zero, not just because numbers cannot be divided by zero, but because numbers are abstract markers for axiomatic statements that cannot physically interact with objects of solid mass.
Comparing these two things is completely irrational. There is no logical basis for the mention of both ideas if the goal is to end up with a single logically valid point constructed from a comparison of the two. No amount of mental gymnastics could wrestle two such incongruent statements into rational argument. It fails entirely as a link of direct causation. It is semantically moot. Even if used metaphorically, the entire juxtaposition of the two disparate ideas provides no meaningful poetic truth. So if you are reading that meme and shaking your head with your stupid, greasy ‘fuck yeah’ smirk, you are a fucking idiot.
#3- The two scenarios present a false dichotomy, which is an irrational distortion of facts which attempts to present an entire truth of a whole situation by referencing only two finite points on the spectrum in which they exist. The statement presumes that only these two ideas exist and that only one of them can be true. This also relates to equivocation.
So then if police brutality is not a thing THEN every victim of justified force was raised poorly.
-or-
If there is no such thing as police brutality THEN all parents do a good job of raising their kids.
Since it is a logical impossibility that either of those deductions is true, then the premises must be flawed. And they are flawed. Not because neither of the premises is true but because comparison between them in an all or nothing battle for intellectual propriety is not possible. A meaningful deductive outcome cannot be made from the two premises. It is an asinine and logically unsupportable comparison.
This is something that our society does all of the time. The building of an individuals reasoning faculties from false dichotomies causes a great deal of harmful and degrading lunacy. From the primacy of the two party political system, to the false notion of ‘good cops’ and ‘bad cops’, the tendency of our culture to empower false dichotomies leads us on and endless fools errand of illogical, non-critical thinking. While I would be willing to entertain a discussion about how the changing nature of parenting has led to new social dilemmas, the idea that it has caused police brutality is without any intellectual merit whatsoever. And you are provably a fucking dipshit if you believe otherwise.
Image courtesy of CopBlock contributor Amanda
#4- What if it was all of this bad parenting that is causing individuals who work as police officers to commit brutality? For just a minute we will posit that the entitlement of a generation of spoiled brats is an actual thing that can be observed, measured, tested and reproduced with proper controls in place. Does this then only apply to people outside of authority?
I would say that if you are brutalizing citizens because you ‘feared for your safety’ then you probably have an expectation that you should not be subject to any forms of harm. If you believe that a badge entitles you to put your own safety above anyone not wearing badge, then you are suffering from a silly belief, not exercising rational adult thinking. Anybody who believes that they are entitled to an expectation of personal safety while interacting with dangerous social deviants, who their system often helps create, is a deluded asshole.
There is no rational expectation that a police officer should not come unto harm. That is part of the job. There have been many brave men and women who put their lives on the line rather than harm another in a difficult situation. But their numbers continue to dwindle as they are replaced by LEO’s who think that the point of their job is protecting their safety, not ours. If you want to be safe, learn to decorate cakes or become a librarian, don’t become a cop. Being a cop is not safe and should only be done by people whose commitment to their communities and the individuals in it is greater than their own paranoia and fear.
As police departments have grown rapidly in the last few decades, there are more and more younger people working in that profession. By the logic of this meme we might conclude that the reason that brutality is also on the rise is because many of these cops are entitled, spoiled brats whose parents did not instill enough respect for others, personal bravery and acceptance of social norms in them.
#5- You wanna talk about some childish shit? Alright, lets fuckin’ dig in. The entire system of centralized authority that this meme suggests is sacrosanct is itself the delusion of childish fantasy. In almost any school of psychology it is agreed that the irrational need to exercise power and control over others is related to early child conditioning in which the individual continues to transforms their own fears and existential angst into plausible denial via control over themselves, others and the environment. Authoritarians do not become so because some universal objective truth about their own righteousness has been bestowed upon them. They become so because the delusions that authority provides allows them to escape the deeper truth that we are all awash in a sea of unknowable outcomes, with danger and death lurking easily amongst the other possibilities like joy and love.
This is also related psychologically to what Aldous Huxley called the NoboDaddy. The NoboDaddy can be a god or any other form of authority that an individual clutches to like a safety blanket in order to dispel the inevitable truths about our existence being a chaotic gamble with no guarantees. NoboDaddy is the construct created by maturing humans who once thought their father or childhood authority figure(s) were infallible in keeping them safe, and having lost that delusion through maturity, seek to replace it with something else in their environment. So the toddler that cried for papa to come look under the bed for monsters eventually comes to rely on authority to do the same thing for them in adulthood. It was not until after you realized that monsters did not exist that you were able to see your father as a regular, fragile human being full of weakness and faults himself. Yet social authority like government and law enforcement is able to keep creating new monsters your whole life in order that you will never question their necessity, as it is supposedly your only line of defense between you and said monsters. This is why authoritarians want you to fear. They want you to fear terrorists and they want you to fear bad guys and most of all- they want you to fear each other. Once they have you doing that then they have built themselves a perpetual motion machine in which they can rely on your blind, mindless support no matter how much worse they become than the monsters they scared you into thinking you needed them to protect you against.
Humanity is on the cusp of a new era. As we evolved from nomadic hunter-gatherers to farmers and then into industrial dominant paradigms, so too shall we evolve again. We are already on the cusp of doing so. The rapid evolution of technology has sent us spiraling into change faster than it has ever been recorded. Much as electronic devices replaced mechanical ones, so too shall voluntary societies replace compulsive ones. The coming age of information and reputation will, in short order, transform humans and their societies into that which we today might think of as impossible. Authority is becoming obsolete. It will be replaced by cooperation, given that humanity now has the tools to manage such intricate social complexities as it never has before.
Just as a child must one day leave the dependent structure of their families rules and home in order to experience growth, so must humanity leave the nest of authority. It is a badly damaged crutch that we no longer need. Clinging childishly to it, as do the sharers of the stupid fucking meme up top, is not a sign of adult wisdom and maturity. It is the social equivalent of living in your parents basement because you were too crippled by fear to strike out on your own and make and then learn from mistakes. The defenders of authority are not the pragmatically intelligent people that they think they are. They are the final generations of humanities childhood and their fear-driven clutching of authority is just an irrational last ditch effort to maintain the delusions that their tiny little experiences and minds are the whole truth about humanity and reality. Because the people who think and believe all this stupid ass shit are too dumb to even imagine a future unlike their present, they cling to our authoritarian past like Stockholm Syndrome sufferers at a hostage reunion dinner hosted by their former captors.
It is you, copsuckers, for whom the bell tolls. You can either grow up with the rest of us or you can spend the rest of your life sitting in your parents metaphorical basement, using ALL CAPS logic and rhetoric (such as that meme) to assert that your blanket really does keep you safe from monsters. That blanket is the scariest monster in existence, because it eats and shits out your very capacity to reason. It is time for you to grow up and put your lil’ blanky-poo down or you should expect to be treated like the intellectual toddlers that you are. You are not entitled to your stupidity and morally questionable stances. You fuckin’ brats.
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Dear Copsuckers- The Truth About Your Stupid Fugking Meme is a post from Cop Block - Badges Don't Grant Extra Rights