Comment by throwaway2037
10 months ago
Thank you to share the Ted T'so LKM post. Can you explain the culture reference "thin blue line"? I never heard it before.
10 months ago
Thank you to share the Ted T'so LKM post. Can you explain the culture reference "thin blue line"? I never heard it before.
The "thin blue line" is a term that typically refers to the concept of the police as the line between law-and-order and chaos in society.[1] The "blue" in "thin blue line" refers to the blue color of the uniforms of many police departments.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line
It's a motto used by American law enforcement to justify extrajudicial punishment. Since they are the "thin blue line" that separates the public from anarchy, they are justified in acting independently to "protect" us when judges and juries do not "cooperate".
Not just extrajudicial punishment, but overlooking corrupt acts and crimes from fellow officers. That it's more important to maintain the 'brotherhood' than to arrest an officer caught driving home drunk.
No, that's not really true.
Directly, "the thin blue line" expresses the idea that the police are what separates society from chaos.
It doesn't inherently suggest police are justified in acting outside the law themselves, though, of course, various people have suggested this (interestingly, from both a pro-police and anti-police perspective).
It seems obvious to me that the post was using this phrase in the sense of being a thin shield from chaos.
That is a very strange take. The phrase isn't American and has no negative connotation. It has nothing to do with "extrajudicial punishment". It simply refers to the (obvious) fact that what separates societies from anarchy is the "thin blue line" of law enforcement.
Rowan Atkinson had a sitcom set in a London police station in the 90s called "The Thin Blue Line". Are you under the impression he was dogwhistling about extrajudicial violence?
This is what really confused me about the article. I read the mailing list post and had no idea what was controversial about thin blue line. In fact, I thought most of that post was fairly reasonable.
I'd never heard of the extrajudicial punishment aspect of the phrase (though I had heard the phrase itself) and it didn't show up when I googled, but I'm not American, so maybe there's some cultural differences.
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In the US, this is a reference to the belief that members of law enforcement should be loyal folirst to other members of law enforcement and only secondarily to the law. Or at least that is how I have always understood it.
It seems obvious that that’s not what Ted intended it to mean, since it wouldn’t even make sense in this context (the debate doesn’t really seem to be about whether maintainers should be loyal to other maintainers).
A more charitable interpretation would be “we’re the only line of defense protecting something good and valuable from the outside world, so people should give significant weight to our opinions and decisions”. Which, to be clear, I would still mostly disagree with WRT the police, but it at least doesn’t explicitly endorse corruption.
The thin blue line comes from the thin red line, where a line of British redcoats held back a heavy cavalry charge in the crimean war. I've always taken it to mean that police officers consider themselves soldiers holding the last line of defence against wild enemies. Which is itself a controversial and probably unhelpful way to think about your job as a police officer.
There are many ways to state that without invoking corruption. I think Ted is telling the truth of who he is by choosing that phrase intentionally - we aren't talking about an idiot who just says stuff, he's a smart guy.
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As important context, it gained popularity in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
I think you might be mistaking the "thin blue line" concept with the "blue / all lives matter" in this case, thin blue line is neither new nor newly popular with BLM.
Certainly more popular since then; probably swept along by "blue lives matter". Have you seen that black-and-blue version of the American flag, with, what is it, six or seven blue stripes (or lines)? How old is that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line TLDR is it's the idea that the police are the one thing stopping society from instantly dissolving into chaos so they shouldn't be questioned (even when they kneel on someone's neck until they die)