Red and blue should *not* be political!

[nancylebov]

Richard Stallman ordered a button from me-- the top half had blue writing on white which said BLUE LIES MATTER*, the bottom half had black writing on yellow "Prosecute Perjury", and the whole thing had a red ring around the edge to make it more eye-catching.

What could possibly go wrong?

He wore it to Boskone, and several people saw it as being about lies from Democrats.

I considered redoing it with "Prosecute Police Perjury". However, most police lies aren't in court and therefore aren't committing perjury.

Please discuss this at DW/LJ, not on Facebook.


*read it carefully, there's a gotcha

Comments

[twistedchick]

Depends on the definition of 'blue' -- Democratic, sad, pornographic, or referring to laws keeping businesses closed on Sunday. Or police.

I agree that lies by police matter. But any shirt that needs this much disambiguation is unlikely to help people understand that.

[nancylebov]

It clearly does need disambiguation. All I can say is that neither Richard nor I realized there was a problem until the button (not shirt) was tested on the attendees at Boskone.

[twistedchick]

From what I have seen, Facebook and elsewhere, 'blue' only means cops when cops and their families are saying it. Nobody else uses it for that. One of my cousins' son is a NYPD detective, and she has switched to using 'blue' in that way when she would not have before he had that job.

[metahacker]

Another confounder: In military training, blue is "us" and red is "the bad guys". (Green is neutral/UN observers/etc.)

Can't help but worry it also is in the mix with blue=police/red=fire (another rivalry).

I've seen "Police Lies Matter" which is close enough in format.

[nancylebov]

I accidentally did make a button with "Police Lies Matter" and sent it to Richard. He wants the play on "Blue Lives Matter".

[metahacker]

RMS and I disagree on many things.

That being said, people coming up and randomly hating on the button because they think they know what it means seems a bit excessive.

[nancylebov]

I don't know that anyone was hating on the button. Perhaps the people who thought it was about Democrats were happy to see something they agreed with.

[redbird]

Were they "hating on" the button, or were they arguing with it? If I thought someone's button was arguing that lies by Democrats were criminal, and lies by Republicans were either okay or nonexistent, I might well start by asking the wearer why they thought lying was okay when their side did it. (At that, he's lucky if people aren't doing the sort of pattern-matching that overlooks typos, and either agreeing with or arguing with him on the believe that his button says "Blue liVes matter.")

I think this is a case of RMS being a little too fond of his clever idea/phrasing, at the expense of communication.

[stardreamer]

I'd make two changes:

1) Add some clipart of a police badge in between the two text lines.

2) Change the second line to read "Prosecute Police Brutality". Because as you say, most of these cases don't make it into court, so "perjury" isn't really applicable.

[nancylebov]

Police brutality and police lies are separate (though related) issues.

Police are allowed to lie to suspects about the amount of evidence they have and the consequences of pleading guilty. This is both legal and (as far as I can tell) generally socially accepted.

[mneme]

There's a certain amount by which it's not even entirely unreasonable; the point of holding the police to standards are to:

1. Avoid false confessions (and thus punishing the wrong people).
And
2. Avoid our defenders hurting people who aren't guilty of any crimes.

If the police lie to a suspect who then gives a true (and verifiable) confession, the confession is valid even if a lie was made to obtain it. OTOH, if the police lie to a suspect in a fashion that results in them confessing to a crime they're not guilty of because they're convinced the consequences of not doing so are worse, well, that's simply not ok.

Back to the slogan, how about:

Blue Lies Matter

No thin blue lines!

Or better, have the divider be diagonal so it puns on the usual "no" symbol.

Unlike "blue=police"; "thin blue line" is universally known to be about the cops.

(ETA: Oh, interesting! ON preview, a table border=1 tag didn't do anything, but on save it did. Styles always work, though.)

[stardreamer]

That's not at all what I thought you were talking about. I thought it was about cops flat-out lying about what happened even in the teeth of video evidence to the contrary. Most of those cases don't even make it to court before the cop is patted on the back and put back on duty.

[commodorified]

I desire to draw your attention to a thing:

http://openmov.museumofvancouver.ca/object/h20024935/%5Bfield_acquisition_object_name-raw%5D

This has been an ongoing theme/joke/morale booster in Canadian progression politics: you could get a button with "_______" against Vander Zalm, then Harris, then Harper.

That's the only pic I can find offhand; they were/are ephemera.

The fun was in being ludicrously specific: I had Bisexual Carpenters against Harris and a friend had Vegetarian Lefthanded Goths against Harris.

There was never any one owner of the idea; if you could make buttons, you could make these buttons.

I pass the idea on for what it's worth.

[thnidu]

The museum seems to attribute far greater antiquity to this object than is plausible. I've just written to them"

See http://openmov.museumofvancouver.ca/object/h20024935/%5Bfield_acquisition_object_name-raw%5D

The period shown for this artifact, "c. 1886-1991", was quite baffling till I realized that it should be 1986, not 1886:

H2002.49.35 - Actors Against Vander Zalm Button c. 1886-1991

[madfilkentist]

Personally, I'd be happy with either interpretation. But it's characteristic of our times that people would just make assumptions about how it was intended rather than asking.

[redbird]

Also, maybe red and blue shouldn't be political, but red has been political for a long time, whether it was "keep the red flag flying here" or conservatives talking about stopping "the reds."

[stardreamer]

Not only that, red and blue specifically have been political since sometime in the Clinton administration if not before. Because that's how long I've been amazed that the right wing didn't grab blue for themselves and leave red as a smear-by-association for liberals. So saying now that those colors shouldn't be political seems horribly naive, as in "where have you been for the last 20 years?"

[siderea]

Oh, more than a hundred years before it was blue vs. red, it was blue vs. gray.

Massachusetts has been blue a very, very, very long time.

The fact that this present color coding, which was an artifact of happenstance when the names got stuck after years of the colors being flipped every election, assigned blue to my side, again, amuses this bluestocking no end.

[theandrewhickey]

You could just have "prosecute police"? It'd keep the alliteration of the bottom half, and make it clear what the top half was referring to.
I'd suggest "prosecute police lies", but then you'd have "lies" repeated, which is inelegant.