Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
In Minneapolis, Armed Residents Set Up Patrols Amid Calls to Defund the Police (marketscreener.com)
2 points by tomohawk on July 27, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



Welcome to unintended consequences of ineffectual governance by reactivity to systematic selective amplification of vocal minorities without counterbalance. (Doesn't matter which side you're talking about; if you can't acknowledge a middle-ground and commit to all or nothing, destabilization is what you get)

People will self organize in the abscence of an official, agreed upon need, whether an official body funds it or not. The major difference is, what gets coordinated will lack thorough integration with the rest of the system, accountability or auditability will greatly suffer, and everything will become less transparent.

One of three responses I see as likely:

A) The government realizes the magnitude of oops, and works to figure out what they need to do to get things back to the point everyone is willing to delegate and accept the official edifice again. (One would hope this would be the outcome from a Statesmanship perspective. Rollback and try again in programming parlance)

B) The government doubles down and tries to clamp down on the ability of private citizens to organize their own protections given their lack of faith in the official institution. (This road leads to serious risk of State legitimacy issues or further destabilization; shotgun debug or rearchitecture in programming parlance; who is doing the shotgunning is left as an exercise for the reader's imagination)

C) Deadlock occurs, no official measure for change to compensate locally can be realized, and the complexity bubbles up a layer of abstraction until more remote systems come into play to neutralize/compensate for the change. (Exception raises in programming parlance)

Either way; hell of a ride in progress.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: