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FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows

nytimes.com

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Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows

#32

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It's hard to separate the FBI from J. Edgar Hoover who normalized a lot of these behaviors from the top of the agency at the beginning, so there's always been some ordinary law enforcement and overreach combined in some form.

Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows

#36
post #14

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"Defined the police" usually means "fund social welfare" with a side of "disarm the beat cops so they learn to deescalate". "Abolish the police" is the message of a much smaller group. And any count of crime surge should also include crimes committed by police under color of law.

It was a stupid chant that resulted in a stupider outcome.

It has been fully adopted and distorted by right wing commentators. As the people actually yelling about “defund the police” are poorly organize and have no message, they are drowned out by the people criticizing them, and enabling union action like work to rule stuff in places like NYC.

People in high crime areas don’t want to be abused by police. Police need to behave to professional standards. Pandering to activists and not enforcing the law doesn’t benefit the actual people living with crime.

So now in many places we have police not acting on crime because Johnny Crackhead can trivially jam them up with frivolous complaints, yet police departments obviously struggle with self-policing. Good old fashioned audit and accountability is the oblivious, non-sexy solution.

Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows

#38

Defund the FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF, and DEA. They've proven themselves to cause more trouble than to solve problems.

Then we'd merely have around 10 national intelligence agencies doing shit like this, in addition to all the more local operations. It's absurd how large the intelligence community is.

Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows

#39

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> (homicides are up like 60% compared to the pre-BLM days). Where are you getting this statistic? A quick google search doesn’t show any such surge in the murder rate in the United States. 60% is a very large increase. I would expect this stat to have huge ripple effects if it were true.

In some US cities there was a spike, which is probably what they are loosely referring to.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-h...

Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows

#40
post #28
post #24

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It is possible for a person to be right about some things and wrong about other things.

I made no comment about it being right or wrong, and I don’t know whether the grandparent is a trump supporter or not.

The more interesting question is to consider why Trump would hold this view, especially if you disagree with him on other things. Perhaps you don’t have the same assumptions about the reasons why as he does.

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