So glad to have met these two goobers and spend the last 2 months with them. From living in Loveland, CO, to the beautiful town of Lairme, WY.I've learned a lot, gave many belly rubs , had lots of intelligent arguments, and ate lots of late night snacks(did you know poptart bites were a thing??) But now it's time for my next step in life. I've finally moved to Denver, CO! After talking about it for years, it's finally happened. And hopefully, I'll get to settle down for a bit and get into a rhythm! I'm excited to explore the mountains here, pick up new skills (piano and cooking??), and make new friends.I would be lying if I said it was easy. Moving to a new place is hard. And I'm still dealing with the uncertainty of my shoulder fully healing which is also frustrating.But things are exciting, and anything but boring. And that's all I can really ask for.Excited to see what happens next!
Month: June 2020
Instagram Image
Pupper can't seem to escape the pants
Instagram Image
I’ve been seeing the phrase “defund the police” all over the internet recently. I agree with the values that people are putting forth, but I STRONGLY dislike the phrasing. “Defund the police” and “All cops are bastards” are inflammatory statements that don’t tell the whole story. I hate that as a society we have to put up catchy phrases like this on social media in order to engage people. The phrases are misleading: they should be “all cops who stand by bad cops are bastards” and “defund the police and increase social worker funding”. Most people understand that this is what these phrases ACTUALLY mean, but some americans are taking it to heart. They’re saying “FUCK THE POLICE THEYRE ALL BAD”, or “YEAH, LETS COMPLETELY ABOLISH THE POLICE DEPARTMENT!!!”. Which I think is straight up foolish; obviously there are good people in the police department. Obviously not having a police department is stupid, no country in the world does that.And even when you do understand the complete phrasing, you might not understand the full ideas. “Defund the police and increase social worker funding” still sounds like a bad idea because we won’t have enough police presence to enforce the laws.I would also like to apologize to the people that I lashed out at when I first saw the phrase “defund the police”. It was again because that phrase didn’t tell the whole story, and seemed like a punitive measure that people were taking against the police “yeah the police are being bad so let’s punish them!” It wasn’t until I researched the full story that I understood the meaning behind those phrases. I think a lot of my peers also had this reaction when I asked them about it.And that’s what this post is about. I want to try and explain my understanding of “defund the police”, and why I am (mostly) in support of it. It's too long for Instagram, but please check it out on my blog if you're interested:https://blog.kevinjonaitis.com/2020/06/07/what-does-defund-the-police-mean/
What does defund the police mean?
I’ve been seeing the phrase “defund the police” all over the internet recently. I agree with the values that people are putting forth, but I STRONGLY dislike the phrasing. “Defund the police” and “All cops are bastards” are inflammatory statements that don’t tell the whole story. I hate that as a society we have to put up catchy phrases like this on social media in order to engage people. The phrases are misleading: they should be “all cops who stand by bad cops are bastards” and “defund the police and increase social worker funding”. Most people understand that this is what these phrases ACTUALLY mean, but some americans are taking it to heart. They’re saying “FUCK THE POLICE THEYRE ALL BAD”, or “YEAH, LETS COMPLETELY ABOLISH THE POLICE DEPARTMENT!!!”. Which I think is straight up foolish; obviously there are good people in the police department. Obviously not having a police department is stupid. No country in the world does that.
And even when you do understand the complete phrasing, you might not understand the full ideas. “Defund the police and increase social worker funding” still sounds like a bad idea because we won’t have enough police presence to enforce the laws.
I would also like to apologize to the people that I lashed out at when I first saw the phrase “defund the police”. It was again because that phrase didn’t tell the whole story, and seemed like a punitive measure that people were taking against the police “yeah the police are being bad so let’s punish them!” It wasn’t until I researched the full story that I understood the meaning behind those phrases. I think a lot of my peers also had this reaction when I asked them about it.
And that’s what this post is about. I want to try and explain my understanding of “defund the police”, and why I am (mostly) in support of it:
Here is why simply increase “training” for the police to be “colorblind” and not racist isn’t enough. It’s because at the core, we can’t enforce laws equally, and the laws inherently oppressing poor and PoC. If nothing else, give this article a read on the details of this idea:
The guardian also touches on some of the problems of retraining, and increasing funding to police:
You a fact-based person? Here’s a study done in 2017 that shows additional community organizations focused on crime and community living decrease the murder, violent crime, and property crime rates:
https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/VThwp5JSFz7eNKF5GkxW/full
And here’s an example of Dallas showing that if we send social workers instead of police, it decreases the amount of police in psych wards and the ER:
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dallas-has-been-dispatching-social-workers-to-some-911-calls-its-working-11810019
And finally, you might be wondering, “yes I agree that we should increase social workers, but I fear that getting rid of the police will make things more dangerous”. And you’re right. There is no example of defunding the police in modern times that we can pull on. However, there is an example that when NY officers went on strike 2014 and 2015 and only performed “essential duties”, we actually saw a statistical decrease in crime. Read about it here under “If cities defund police, will violence and crime increase?”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/05/defunding-the-police-us-what-does-it-mean
And really, that article is a good overview of all the questions you might have about defunding the police.
I still think this is the weakest link in the argument to “defund the police”. I think if we had unlimited money, we’d keep the police force at the same level and increase funding to social programs. But if you HAD to figure out the best way to spend x dollars, I think funding social programs, based on the research and evidence above, would decrease the crime rate more than by funding police. It’s new territory as it’s never been done before, and might not work.. But I think it’s an experiment worth trying; we’ve swung too far in the “increase police presence”, and we can see many PoC are dying. I think we should take the leap of faith and try swinging the other way by having a smaller police presence, and putting that money towards social work.
Twitter was right
I saw a post on linkedin today that inspired me to write this blog post. An engineer at FB had decided to quit because of the way that FB was handling Trump’s contraversial posts. He asked his network if they had any job recommendations. He was looking for jobs that were meaningful and impactful, and were in the education space.
Before I dive into that, we need to back up a bit with what’s been going on in the tech world.
For those unfamiliar, Twitter had recently made changes that allowed them to annotate people’s tweets with that were spreading misinformation by linking to resources so that people can “get the facts”. Twitter did this to two of Trumps tweets — both about mail-voter fraud(where he said mail-in voting causes increased fraud, which has been statistically proven not to be the case).
Facebook, on the other hand, took a “hands-off” approach. They said it was not their job to police misinformation or be the “arbiter of truth”.
So that’s why our software engineer friend quit his job at Facebook. I had a chance to read some of the comments people made on his post. You can read it here:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6673316720993824768/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A(activity%3A6673316720993824768%2C6674317457605447680)
or
I’m sorry you felt the need to resign; that being said, you did what you feel you needed to do. It is NOT the job of FB or ANY social media platform to CENSOR speech, especially speech that is not liked, maybe even hated. Either we have free speech or we do not. Outside of making terroristic threats, there is no “this speech is good, but this speech is bad.
or
Right here is the definition of entitlement. When you can’t have your way, you just quit and pretend like you’re taking some mystical moral high ground. Maybe someone more deserving of this job will get hired. Someone that will take a real objective approach to misinformation at Facebook, but that person clearly ain’t you
There were also quite a bit of “you should just have a thick skin and deal with it” comments, and a few just shitting completely on the guy.
So I’d like to call out a couple things.
One, I was ABSOLUTELY BLOWN AWAY by what people were writing. People were coming from sorts of professions writing this inflammatory stuff — presidents of companies, common software engineers at Amazon, sales reps, people with masters and PhDs. These were NOT the lowest-common denominator people you might find on FB or twitter. These were EDUCATED professionals who are I am sure intelligent, spewing things that inflammatory, rude, ignorant, etc.
The most shocking part of this is they have THEIR NAME AND COMPANY attached to what they’re saying. If someone wanted to, they could contact their manager, and be like, “do you know what inflammatory/racist/rude things this person is saying at your company? Do you want someone like that representing the company?” That of course would rely on the fact that the rest of the company isn’t bigoted.
But I digress.
I’m simply amazed but what people are putting out there publicly. We are more divided than I thought, and people seem to have no shame now showing their bigoted side.
Which brings me to the meat of this post.
Most of what people said can be easily dismissed:
- YES he will get hired again, because many companies are taking a stand against trump. Hell, my company is more than happy to hire him.
- Yes he SHOULD take a moral high ground. If he has the privilege to quit because of his morals, he should do so, that’s the best way he can use his privilege to help others — by sending a message that others could not afford to send.
- You can post about whatever topics you want on Linkedin, it’s a damn social network
Now the one thing that sorta has merit and is worth discussing is this:
It is NOT the job of FB or ANY social media platform to CENSOR speech, especially speech that is not liked, maybe even hated. Either we have free speech or we do not. Outside of making terroristic threats, there is no “this speech is good, but this speech is bad.
So a few things to note. I do believe in free speech — I think it’s a cornerstone of democracy. BUT, that being said, a common misconception is it applies to companies. It does not. Free speech is a construct that governments must follow, not companies. Facebook can post whatever the fuck it wants, as long as it’s not discriminatory. I don’t think the guy was saying exactly this, but I wanted people to understand this is the case.
Either we have free speech or we do not.
And this is the crux of the problem. I used to be in that black and white camp. I used to believe, that, tech companies, especially content platforms, should be hands-off when it comes to content moderation. My argument was always this: the second you start moderating content, you go down the slippery slope of silencing opinions and free expression, and next thing you know you’re surrounded by a censorship state.
Now on it’s own, this argument is a bit weak: if a social media company starts silencing or censoring people, then it’s easy to jump to the next one. That much is true. However, there’s also the side that, because there’s only a few “big” social media companies, they somewhat have a monopoly on social media: that is to say, if you’re not on IG/snapchat/FB/tikTok, then you probably can’t communicate as easily your friends because they’re on those platforms.
So I get it. I understand facebook. If you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, it makes sense to not take a stand, because you’re taking a step in the direction of a censorship state, you want to be as neutral as possible.
One more thing to note which leads somewhat into my main point: what twitter did, by adding notes to the tweets, was not really censorship. They added a note to the tweet. Yes, they injected their narrative, but that’s sort of the same as an advertiser putting ads on a new york times article. You can ignore it if you want.
But here is the problem: our nation is segregated. It’s segregated into little pockets of echo chambers. Where people regurgitate the opinions of those that agree with them. And by doing that, and not hearing dissenting opinions, the world becomes polarized. If you hear “nazi nazi nazi” all the time, and nobody tells you nazi is bad, you’re going to think nazi is fine. If you grow up around racists, you’re going to become a racist yourself, if nobody tells you it’s bad.
And that’s the key of the problem here: we have these echo chambers that are building up.
Okay, that all makes sense so far right, heard it before? I’m going to take it a few steps further.
By injecting a dissenting opinion into these broadly broadcast tweets, we are bringing opinions closer to the middle. By balancing trumps right-winged misinformation campaign with “far-left scientific fact”, we are balancing the yin and yang of right and left. Now, when people read trumps tweets, the echo chamber is reduced. They hear trump screaming what they want to hear, but they also hear the other side saying “hey, this actually isn’t correct”.
Now another argument that I made was that okay, what Trump is saying is obvious misinformation, but anyone with a brain can use their own mind to look up the facts. They don’t need twitter to do it for us. What we need to do is fix the education system so people can be critical thinkers. Which I still believe is true. I think if people were, say, a bit more critical in their thoughts, they might not be as polarized. Which I think we need to work on. And we can fix that with policy reform. But to reform policy, you need to first reform policy makers. And now do you do that?
And the answer is: kids. When people are grown up, and they’re racist, it’s hard to change their mind about something. They’re going to believe whatever they want, and your opinion is not going to change that.
But young kids, the tik tok generation, generation z, hell, even my generation. We grew up in the information age. Information that we consumed was unregulated and unbalanced. Now more than ever on the internet, it’s easy to find your niche of people that agree with you and stay with that, never hearing a dissenting opinion. Before the internet, you had to deal with your neighbor, or your local club, or town hall meeting, where you would hear the other side of the story. It wasn’t so easy to find a neo-nazi on your block.
But that’s gone. And the problem is this: kids opinions are formed by those around them. They look to others on how to act. So if all they see, is an echo chamber of neo-nazi propaganda, or that racism is okay, and they never hear a dissenting opinion, they’re going to grow up thinking that’s okay. And then once they get much older, it’s much more difficult to teach them to thing more moderately. And that’s what happens in these facebook groups, or by subscribing to trump’s tweets.
So what’s the solution?
The solution is to bring things back to the middle a bit. To force these young impressionable adults to “see” both sides of the story. The crazy guy in town hall talking about the rise of the south can stay, but we also want the guy in town hall saying racism is bad. If you give them both sides of the story, I believe, that we can raise people that are slightly less polarized.
We, as a public state, need to be a little more hands-on in what we show our children. The grown ups are a lost cause; they’re racist, and set in their ways. But the future can be saved.
So we need to “parent” the internet a bit. Inject those dissenting opinions. Let them see the different sides of things, and bring people closer to the middle.
America has swung “too far” to the freedom of speech side of things. We can still have our freedom of speech, but we also need to balance it a little. Let this guy say his words, then this guy say a bit. Make sure that we have both sides of the story.
And I’ll be the FIRST to say that I’m weary about annotating tweets, or having companies inject their political agenda into other people’s speech. We have to keep a close eye on companies like Twitter to make sure they don’t go to far down this path. But the great thing is, it doesn’t matter what way a company leans — so long as it’s injecting an opinion that is dissent from whatever they’re disagreeing with, we’ll get close to that “middle”.
I will also admit that America has become too much like the wild wild west. We need more moral guidance and handrails for those of us that are still developing ourselves. The internet is powerful, but it’s also dangerous to an impressionable mind.
So that’s why I stand by what twitter did. Because it’s teaching the youth of America to think about the other side. It’s “breaking-up” those echo chambers, and bringing us closer together.
And because we’ve never had a powerful force like the internet before, we’re still learning. I think the first 20 or so years of the internet we leaned too-far to the side of “unbridled free expression”. And I think it contributed to us being here. Now let’s see what happens when we bring it in a bit — NOT TOO MUCH, b/c “meh freedom”, but just enough so that we can be not-so-polarized. For our children, for the future of america.
And I think, if we can teach the future children of America to think in less polarizing ways, then maybe, in a couple of decades, we can make america a little less divided.
Keep political bullshit off LinkedIn! Facebook is so Left leaning its not even funny! I’m sure you were a member of their army to tamp down conservative views! And stay out of our education system as I’m sure you’ll be unable to keep your own opinions out of it!