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United States: How do the Chinese and Russians fall for such obvious government propaganda!?!
Also United States: OMG, my favorite show CSI: Miami Law Blue Bloods Unit is on! OMG, my favorite movie is on Cop Show, but With More CGI and Colorful Costumes!
I feel like you can both enjoy cop shows and know that ACAB IRL.
I personally tend to find it difficult tbh, unless the parts of the show that AREN’T the copaganda hero worship is exceptionally well-written and/or stupid in ways that delight me.
Examples of cop shows (including hybrids with aspects of other genres) I will watch and rewatch for all time:
Lucifer, Brooklyn 99, Paradise PD, Mindhunter, The Wire, Dexter
Examples of shows with so much or so awful copaganda that I believe they should not be allowed on TV without a disclaimer:
Every CSI show; NCIS; every Law & Order show, but especially the ones where they torture and otherwise abuse presumed innocent people the most; 24; Blue Bloods
Cop shows I go back and forth about:
True Detective, Castle, The Blacklist, White Collar, Bones
This is Reno 911 slander
That didn’t count, it was a documentary.
It was supposed to be an off the cuff set of examples rather than an exhaustive list. That being said, you’re right that Reno 911 belongs in that category 😁
My parents really like Blue Bloods. It baffled me how often the cops break the law, acknowledge that they’re breaking the law and hurting innocent people, and then just… move on.
Lucifer… Yeah, the way that show ended, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. The rest are cool, though.
the way that show ended, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole
I have a simple trick for that: I just erase it from my headcannon and skip it on rewatches.
In related news, I’m currently rewatching all 5 seasons of Game of Thrones 😉
Bones is one of the most egregious shows for me. The enthusiasm the title character has whenever she gets to shoot someone or lie to someone “because it’s allowed” is super icky.
Sorry I’m still salty and say this whenever someone mentions it.
Fuck blue bloods, Black Donnellys was so much better.
The original CSI was great. The first few seasons are all about how the evidence is more important than whatever easy story the cops want to make up, and how society is more complicated than just good guys vs bad guys, and the system isn’t always just. It drew a hard distinction between the scientific investigators and the actual cops. Later they turned into just another stupid cop show.
The first few seasons are all about how the evidence is more important
You mean the TONS of debunked pseudoscience that has led to thousands of innocent people being convicted because juries believe what they see on TV and prosecutors know how to exploit that?
Is THAT the “important evidence” you’re referring to?
You are correct and I wasn’t thinking about it from that angle, just about how they didn’t glorify the police.
I enjoy swat, but even with the occasional episode about bad cops, it’s ridiculously pro cop. I’ve decided that the reason I like the occasional cop show is the fantasy of what if cops were actually good.
They can even have gang tattoos and still don’t get sent to the work camps.
1312! Fuck the police
The thin blue line flag is a gang sign. Also, police are necessary and (a lot of the time) earn their pay. We could go a long way in training them better and holding them to higher standards though. Let’s start with not treating ID like crack, not escalating, using unnecessary violence, and actually respecting citizens’ constitutional rights etc. Let’s start with the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th but not forget all of the rest of them. Authoritarianism is cancer regardless of who is in power.
I think this is missing the key ingredient: is the victim white and attractive?
Just say no to unnecessarily censored posts
“Dick Wolf”
Dire Dick Wolf
Lies! He’s just a regular wolf!
Now do “Speed Weed”.
“I have some real problems with this SVU script. We can’t say ‘dick wolf’ on TV!”
“You can’t say that on television!!”
Is this the part where I say “hello”, or…
Thank you, self censorship drives me up the wall.
Maybe it was posted to Reddit and then taken here?
Either way, thank you for your service, soldier!
and miss out on all the activity of like 10 free comments?
You suck.
Then you watch “The First 48” and realize that unless someone actively snitches or the fool immediately goes to the cops “to give their side” and/or flat out confesses, cops would never “solve” crimes.
Moral of the story: Shut the fuck up
unless someone actively snitches
Then you go to The Innocence Project and find out how many jailhouse snitches are issuing false testimony to lighten their own convictions.
My town’s police department posts info on wanted criminals on FB and people comment on the posts basically doing the cops’ jobs for them. Every person who has been posted about has been caught. The cops here rely on the public to catch criminals and they’re shameless about it. Meanwhile they spend their time on duty harassing people who ride ebikes.
Sounds like how the East German Stasi did things.
If you tell me that 65% of your towns entire budget goes to “law enforcement”, I would not be surprised at all.
My favorite thing about it is this the more you watch cop shows and cop movies the more you notice a pattern. The biggest villain for all of those shows, the most consistent threat? Internal affairs. It’s like every single movie and every single series it has shown up at least once. Those God damn Internal Affairs people stopping good cops from doing what they need to do. It’s maybe the single strongest trend throughout all of these shows and movies.
Hell it was even a plot point in Psych. The show about fake psychic detectives had a bad guy Internal Affairs officer.
On top of that, if IA was as powerful and menacing as they are in the shows cops might actually be held accountable.
IA feels like HR at any mega Corp, there to protect the institution not actually solve anything or ensure things are fair.
I’ve recently realized that this is true even for Russia.
The demonization of KGB and FSB, popular at some point, is … not really against the regime, the regime is fine with it. Of course these organizations fulfilled their clearly stated function. But they are not the pinnacle of evil. Cause, well, evil likes uncertainty, and being an organization with rules is not that. KGB had whole universities, most of people from those work in tech, not in FSB.
And FSB is not only doing what public perception says about it. They are doing a lot of usual security stuff, say, phishing and phony ATMs and public systems’ security audits are all their job. Actually those people I’ve met likely to have professional contacts with that service are … one can say very intelligent and perfectly understanding of good and evil.
While thousands of cops, anti-riot units, internal troops and such are the real foundation of the regime. People kinda dumb, not well-paid, heavily dependent upon that state and also led by pack instinct.
With that in place, the evil itself doesn’t need FSB to do whatever it wants, drug trade, murdering those they don’t like, undocumented prisons, kidnappings, whatever.
If only Stabler could have freely roughed up every single suspect, they might have caught a couple of the rapists sooner. Probably would have got some coerced confessions out of some creeps who were destined to rape in future too.
It’s called pre-crime and Tom Cruise said it’s illegal in his documentary, “Minority Report”
This is why I say the Wire is the best cop show out there still, espevially growing up with a cop. It raises up the parts of police work that deserve praise; eg. the individuals that get in for the right reasons or have appropriate respect for the job once there, the opportunity police have to make a positive impact on outliers in our society, etc. It also gives a pretty realistic look at how these things go wrong or become ineffective at an institutional level (and 100% don’t shy away from idiot/aggressive cops, narratively equating them to gang members). As far as I can remember there is never a “big, bad internal affairs” plot line. When it does come up it’s in reference to a character’s problematic behavior and treated as a fair consequence of their actions.
Watch the Wire if you havent and you like crime-drama. It’s as good as it gets.
Reminds me of that one cop show from the BBC that covers an internal affairs and anti-corruption team. It’s called Line of Duty.
I used to work for the Medical Examiner’s Office. I’ve picked up more than my share of rape/murder victims. You wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve heard cops say about the victims. I’ve only ever met a few detectives who really cared and were decent human beings, and coincidentally, they all came from years (or decades) in some other industry before joining their departments as detectives because they had advanced degrees. Never met a single uniformed cop or “promoted from within” detective who was anything other than a soulless piece of power tripping shit at their core.
I was a medic back in the day in a large city. Cops are assholes. Big goofy dumb goons. I’ve seen them do the dumbest shit. Light a smoke for a dead man. Was just one example. I sat at trial two times just to fuck up a cops day cause they routinely fucked people up for no reason. Goons.
Nothing made me more ACAB than having to work alongside cops.
I got stopped for speeding once at work.
With an MI patient (heart attack) who was unconscious and we were doing CPR and pushing drugs. Had lights and sirens and were on a pretty much empty 4 lane divided highway. I was doing 25 over the speed limit. 5kms faster than allowed by law here for an emergency vehicle but I also had a lot going on inside the truck. No leeway allowed. I got a ticket, that’s not the terrible bit though as you read.
Speeding. I had a screaming match with that fucker on the side of the highway. It almost came to blows honestly. Stopped seeing cops as protectors that day. I was 18 and a month into being a full fledged Paramedic.
ACAB all day every day.
I wish I could find that Reddit post about the commenter who called the police every time her ex came by and they literally told her that their arms are tied and there’s nothing they can do. She asked them what will it take for them to act, and the cops said, “Maybe if he tried to kill you.”
And she even said the restraining order meant nothing to the cops.
The restraining order means nothing to the supreme court, also.
“Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled, 7–2, that a town and its police department could not be sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for refusing to enforce a restraining order, even though the refusal led to the murders of a woman’s three children by her estranged husband.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzales
Fuck cops and fuck Reddit.
real
Those cop shows also glorify cops who breaks rules and trample rights as good cops who do what they need to do to solve a crime. It leads to people excusing abuse by cops in the real world
Love how Brooklyn 99 addresses that. Peralta is basically a caricature of the “loose cannon that gets results” cop, but even he doesn’t cross the line when it comes to illegally obtaining evidence.
I like “The Rookie”.
But all these cops obsessing over the letter of the law, keeping each other in line, caring about perp’s life choices and victim’s problems…
This is fantasy. Might as well be Lord of the Rings.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
-John Rogers
I used to like The Rookie, but honestly after George Floyd I just couldn’t stomach any propaganda cop shows anymore.
Those motherfucker CHOCKED the man to death while smiling.
The show tried to pay lip service to it but honestly nothing they could do could possibly be enough.
This happened to me with Brooklyn 99, than even for a cop show is kinda woke.
Or the Dota show, that V, who has been oppressed by the police all her life became a cop officer on the first episode of the second season.
Well yeah, cause the only other way that story could’ve gone was “the OG Black Panthers were right, obviously the good guys and revolution is key” which isn’t a story that you’re allowed to tell.
To be fair, that series pushed that line much more than pretty much anything else I’ve seen on TV, but they did Ekko so dirty.
99 got extra woke in the last season. I thought they handled it well.
They address the George Floyd murder head-on. Rosa quits the force because of it. Jake is forced to address how he’s internalized some of those problematic attitudes. If you stopped before the last season, it’s worth giving it another look.
Might as well be Lord of the Rings.
The longer I live, the more real LOTR seems.
Pining for the well-defined good and evil; the inherent goodness even in some misguided heroes, the honor, bonding, and integrity of the protagonists, despite trial and tragedy. Our characters all striving for a better world despite any personal cost. Something missing these days.
It’s easy to wish for that. But also easy to forget that it was terrible war, both the fantasy one and the one Tolkien himself participated in, that brought about such a grand story. It is real, to an extent.
But also easy to forget that it was terrible war, both the fantasy one and the one Tolkien himself participated in, that brought about such a grand story. It is real, to an extent.
It doesn’t seem easy to forget for me - I mean, if someone’s brain just decides to ignore what “smell of death” means, or what “hewn dead bodies” look like, or the moments where besiegers of Minas Tirith use Osgiliath defenders’ heads as projectiles, or how small the events there are compared to the way idiots think of wars, and still how hard for their participants, - then maybe.
And about honor and integrity - people put in a hard place behave this way more often than it would seem. Being in such a situation is a filter itself.
It’s not all that unrealistic, there are good and evil in real life too. Sometimes with a contrast bigger than usual even for Tolkien.
It was real for them (as in Tolkien’s experience, which was translated into the fictional story).
Not us.
We read the stories and forget how horrible war can be, and unless we have actually experienced those horrors, our understanding is only intellectual.
I agree.
But that would be everything written, and also when put in situations very moderately reminiscing such, I had associations with LOTR from my childhood where I didn’t have any such experience. Tolkien says literally many thoughts people have when encountering horrors.
That’s what makes a good writer and story.
I cannot argue one way or the other if you’re going to simply take the faintest references and call everything the same.
Aragon led Gollum on a forced march without food or drink; Gandalf threatened him with torture. Even the most “good” of the good guys have moral failings in LotR.
Yes, they did. But they weren’t world-ending failings. They didn’t to enrich themselves. They didn’t seek advantage. And objectively they should’ve either killed Gollum or jailed him rather than this back-and-forth frenemy/enemy he became. Gollum certainly tried to do plenty of damage himself, but today we’d have to view him as having a mental illness so that’s different faming than just the story written in the last century.
But, this is fiction, and how the story and characters were written.
Feck off, censors.
The internet isn’t for babies, we can take words.
You mean fuck off?
Don’t you fucking swear, my dad fucking yells at me otherwise.
Depends if Obinice is Irish.
Fair
you’ve never seen a 2-year-old on a tablet. frightening stuff.
I’ve never seen a 2 year old read.
I’ve never seen a 2 year old.
yeah I have known 2-year-olds and 3-year-olds that read. It’s not that uncommon, everyone learns things at different times.
deleted by creator
This made me angry.
As it should.
same thing for the military. I mean, I love Stargate, but I will not pretend for a second that it’s not propaganda.
Honestly I’m not a military fan, but in general they tend to be better trained and are actually a necessary evil, see Ukraine. Sometimes you need people to defend you from tyrants.
Cops are just so much worse, they are given all the privilege in the world and they have comfortable jobs, at least in the western world, yet they act like they are dodging 50cal rounds all day every day.
They think they are at war with the people they are supposed to be serving so this is never going to work.
That is absolutely how they think. I had to turn off an episode of “Dogs with Jobs” of all things because it pissed me off. There was one with a police dog and his handler talked about “the enemy” and I was like “you mean the community you serve, which may include some people suspected of crimes?”
Then you get into the actual military. It’s a bunch of high school kids with responsibility. Good leaders? Rare. Those higher end crazy weird assignments, like SG would have been? Those breed the worst because they usually attract the worst.
“Here, Lippyballscacker will train you on this.”
Wait, Lippyballsacker? Wtf?
“Yeah, his supervisor was hanging in the building and remembered he had to pick him up at the last minute from the airport. One guy asked him what the new guy’s name was. “I don’t know, Lippyballsacker or something.” That name stuck.” - actual story from my time in aircraft maintenance
When they guy left, he was gloating the name wouldn’t follow him. One of the maintenance supervisors had contacts at the new base. The name followed him.
We also had a fuck up who was good at taking tests, so he made rank fast, but was an absolute moron. Didn’t realize he had to put his manual truck in gear or set the brake. Always had to repeat lefty loosey every time…out loud. Walked right through an antenna on the bottom of the plane. Didn’t skip a step.
They show the military way too organized and disciplined. No. Bunch of blind leading the blind.
I really like how Brooklyn 99 addressed this at the end.
B99 was a very good comedy that took place in an absolute fantasy world.
But hey, that’s sitcoms for you. Nobody in Big Bang Theory has to spend a season wiggling out of date rape allegations. Nobody in 7th Heaven gets molested by a priest. Nobody in Cheers beats their spouse.
Well, yes. If you expect any TV show to be a 100% unbiased, accurate representation of reality, you’re an idiot.
That doesn’t mean they can’t address societal issues in a meaningful way.
Addresses what? That entire series, especially the final season, is all copaganda about “Sure, there are corrupt cops out there, but there are also squads on your side that are breaking the law in order to enforce their own morals, so you shouldn’t hate cops”
Yes, they addressed that there’s corruption in the LEO system beyond what I’ve seen any other cop show do. An extremely popular member of the cast quit the force because of the George Floyd shit. What other show even addressed it?
I’m waiting for some examples.
Also, it’s a fucking sitcom. Fuck off with your negative bullshit. A fucking sitcom did what no actual procedural cop drama would.
Final Season:
“Our bad guys, we just realized we’re part of the copaganda machine so all the best characters are going to quit the force”
Some people: “Omg that makes it worse why didn’t you all kill yourselves instead?”
Okay tap the brakes there. It was one character who quit the force. They addressed it in one episode. Then they never bring it up again and she just hangs out for the rest of the season and nothing changes. I like the show but you know, they weren’t exactly breaking down barriers. It was a really rough Awkward episode it’s probably the worst one of the entire show.
Two leave, I know what I said. Cheddar obviously was never a bastard in the first place.
Thank you for anticipating the words that I cannot stomach with my weak-ass feelings and censoring them for me. You’re my hero. you cunt.
Get upvoted lil bro
