A lot of suicide attempts are hesitant, right?

Or maybe they just wanted to go for a nice dip

Refusing to negotiate (with a party that’s proven to be unreliable) isn’t the same thing as waiting. They’re basically maintaining the war at a status quo where they have a bunch of advantages.

That’s optimistic, but far from impossible or unprecedented.

This reads to me as “if you play by Iran’s rules we’ll stop you.”

You asked:

Name a couple instances where police body cams, and not bystanders’ cell phones or third-party mounted security cameras, resulted in any desirable outcome.

I gave you examples of when:

• A cop was suspended, then later convicted, which led to prosecutors dropping cases that relied on his work and never again calling him as a witness.
• Charges dropped due not to what was caught on camera, but due to the fact that a camera was turned off and then on again.
• A cop wound up getting 3 years in federal prison for turning his camera off.
• A study showed that cameras in one city led to complaints against police being sustained “nearly two-thirds more frequently than the mean for non-bodycam incidents.” It also showed that cameras led to cops getting punished more for sustained complaints and that racial disparities in complaints “largely disappeared.”

When you start out doubting that cameras have produced “any desirable outcome,” then are given examples of them leading to a bunch of desirable outcomes, you should reconsider your opinion.

Your read of this amounts to “cameras don’t prevent or catch everything.” The standard isn’t utopia, the standard is better. All of those situations above had better results with cameras than they would have had without them.

I’d rather give various private citizens Narcan

Who’s dodging questions now? We’re talking about the police.

focus on a meta-analysis, and not anecdotes

So far I’ve dug up an article about how often cops actually use body cams and provided anecdotes you asked for. If you want to look at meta-analysis (and the third link I provided was a study), read some and come back with something more than bad takes. No investigation, no right to speak.

There are so many ways that the police can simply learn to deal with the constraint

Yes, exactly, I would rather cops have to deal with a constraint on misconduct than not. There are workarounds to any constraint, that doesn’t make them useless.

George Floyd was recorded on cell phones. Tyre Nichols was recorded on a streetlight camera.

You’re saying that having video of police is good, but that we don’t want to mandate the creation of more of it. I’d rather have more footage of cops (and more situations where its absence is conspicuous) than go back to the days when we just have their testimony (which usually goes unchallenged, because most defendants don’t testify).

You don’t want to impose this constraint on cops because it increases their budget. Would giving every cop Narcan be bad because it increases their budget?

Still waiting an answer to the question at the beginning you dodged.

If you really don’t know the answer to this question, consider that you may not be as informed on this topic as you think you are:

• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/three-police-misconduct-cases-involving-body-cameras-new-developments-week-heres-happened
• https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/former-columbus-police-officer-pleads-guilty-destroying-altering-records-turning-body
• https://news.gsu.edu/2021/07/20/police-misconduct-body-camera-racial-gap/

You actually want to take power away from them

Making them record their own actions and holding it against them if they don’t is exactly this.

Or go yourself, as governor.

routinely turn off before committing atrocities

Before body cams, it was your word against that of probably multiple cops. With body cams, everyone on scene has to coordinate not switching them on in advance, they have to gamble that none of their buddies arrive with an already-rolling camera, and not having it activated (or turning it off) is an argument against them.

Say you wanted to get away with something. Would you want to be carrying a camera? Would you want everyone around you carrying a camera? Would you trust every one of your coworkers to not have hit record, either intentionally or by accident? It’s bonkers to me that some folks have talked themselves out of this just because (some) cops are for it. That’s just contrarianism.

Audits suggesting police are misusing a tool they have been given

The audit I linked to says proper usage varies, and is very high in some places. And the standard isn’t perfection, it’s whether this is a significant improvement over what it replaced.

body cameras which the abolitionists oppose

Opposing body cams is a really bad take. Would you rather have video evidence of police misconduct some of the time, or none of the time?

The cops not recording when they’re supposed to be can also call their credibility into question at trial, so it’s not a device that only helps cops. It’s also possible to audit camera usage and show areas or specific cops who try to game the system:

Performance varied across the districts, said Michael Tooley Jr., a senior analyst for the commission. But the 22nd District stood out, he said: Officers recorded only 28% of incidents requiring footage, compared with 62% in the 18th District and 73% in the 15th District, and 88% of vehicle stops in the 24th District.

This is the war they’ve wanted for half a century. Why would they oppose it now? Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were much more costly blunders.

The most effective propaganda (from any source) is true.

Or at the very least, you and your company never gets another federal contract, and there’s a fraud investigation opened to determine if you’re crooked or just incompetent.

He dropped it

Little Italy disappearing was directly referenced in The Sopranos.

This is your response when you see facts you don’t like? Here’s a 2021 article on Biden’s support for Ukraine before Russia invaded:

Zelensky observed that Biden “knows Ukraine better than the previous president” and “will really help strengthen relations, help settle the war in Donbas, and end the occupation of our territory.”

Note the acknowledgement that there was already a war on.

While Zelensky’s comments may prove overly optimistic, there is little reason to doubt that the Biden presidency will be good for Ukraine… Whether Biden, who will face many demands on his time, will choose to engage personally is a different question. He knows Ukraine, having traveled there six times when he served as vice president.

To be fair to rank-and-file Democrats, I’m sure they largely didn’t know about the Banderite problem in Ukraine, if only because they probably paid little attention to the country as a whole. But the presence of neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine was certainly no secret. The Biden administration definitely knew the situation.

The complaints and letters they’re talking about are probably public. If so, they can’t take this approach and keep it secret.

The point about China is that even if you don’t believe they’re Real Communists, they at least all act the part, so a Real Communist could rise through the ranks more easily there than in most other places. Say you’re a Real Communist in France or Mexico, for example. If you openly talk about Lenin, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, or how labor creates all value, you’re going to have big chunks of the political sphere openly call for you to be exiled from political life, if not worse. A Real Communist will not get that pushback in China, because there everyone is at least pretending to endorse those ideas, so Real Communists have comparatively easy paths to power.

In the DSA, everyone is at least pretending to subscribe to socialism. It’s right there in the name! So while someone who really believes that might struggle in other parties, or in the broader U.S. political sphere, they’re going to get comparatively less attacks from the right in the DSA.

I don’t know anything about this lady. I’m saying that if there was a pretty cool politican out there, it would be easier to succeed rising through the DSA than anywhere else in the U.S.

Years ago I was reading some “is China really communist?” argument and ran across the following point:

Whatever you think about the current character of the Chinese government, everyone there openly says they’re communist, reads a bunch of communist literature, names their main party “communist,” etc. If they aren’t communist, it’s hard to imagine a better not-already-communist place for an actual communist to rise to power.

Something similar applies to the DSA.