The above is you being dismissive and condescending. This chat is of this form…
You: Here’s a reform-the-police idea I just pulled out of my ass.
Others: The police cannot be reformed.
[a hidden assumption on your part]
You: ZOMG Cargo Cult !!!1!
Note: Saying the police can’t be reformed does not imply “nothing can ever be good or fixed”, or “Donkeys are just as bad as Elephants”, or " that both sides suck equally", or any of that other gibberish you spewed. To demonstrate clearly that you do in fact have a hidden assumption here, consider if we changed the topic such that the reply was “slavery cannot be reformed”, “segregation cannot be reformed”, “capitalism cannot be reformed”, etc/etc. Are you going to whine “Cargo Cult!” in those cases?
On the flip side, we have this kind of exchange ITT…
Here you demonstrate that you haven’t bothered to inform yourself about what the abolitionists are even talking about.
Let’s rewind to what started this. I agreed with a poster about gun control and said this:
Was that being condescending? If I took that tone later it’s because I felt I was being condescended to by some glib one line replies.
You’re getting hung up un the words cargo cult. It’s not a cult it’s just a term to describe a certain attitude. You’re right this isn’t exactly Dems and Reps are just as bad. But it’s a similar idea - that I’m the naive one for thinking reform and new laws can help, and no one wants to be on the naive side. That was my point.
Slavery was already abolished by almost every other nation on earth. There is precedent. Slavery is also inherently evil. Segregation is wrong and should be abolished. Capitalism sucks but I’m not ready to take the leap into anarchy or communism. I’m rooting for Norway basically.
I didn’t know about ggoreo’s thread until an hour ago. I will check it out. If the subject is actually nuanced and more complicated than just “abolish the police” - maybe you should take issue with the one sentence reply people. I got the idea from them.
I just had the most heartbreaking experience in my entire life. Mrs. Tilted and I are driving back from our favorite brewery and we decided to stop at my friends house for a quick laugh. We stayed outside in the car bullshitting for a little bit and finally decided to head home. Buddy has a Section 8 housing apartment right next to him in a gentrified area. As we were leaving a group of 6 little black girls ages 6 to 11 stopped us to pet our dog whose head was hanging out the window. Immediately one of them asks why white people killing black people. Why George Floyd had to die. Another one asks if we think black lives matter. These are elementary aged children. We talk to them for awhile and try to alleviate their fears. At the end they asked if we wanted to race so we obliged and “raced” them to the stop sign. They asked if we could come back tomorrow and said thanks for talking to us. Never felt this much impact from a conversation in my life.
This stuff always sucks because it starts as a conversation about whether it’s rational for cops to imagine everyone has a gun and wants to shoot them, then quickly transforms into one side saying, “You don’t want to reduce the amount of guns in the population.” And it’s just nonsense, because no one is saying that.
We’re just pointing out that it’s completely irrational for cops to be worried about getting shot every time they pull someone over because almost no one plans on shooting the cop when they get pulled over. Cops are literally walking lawsuits for their respective cities right now because they kill/injure a ton of people that represent zero threat to them. It’s bad. Why is there any push back on that point? I can tell you that the Supreme Court justices disagree because they know that they’re never going to be on the wrong side of a cops gun, that’s only something that happens to others.
Saying “X cannot be reformed” (or the equivalent “abolish X”) is not a “glib one line reply”. It’s a raising an (alleged) very important point. You could engage with that point (historic ex: slavery can be reformed by banning importation), or you could ridicule that point (ZOMG Cargo Cult!).
You fundamentally misunderstand what is being said. LOL @ this having anything to do with internal mental drama and such gibberish as “naive shaming”. It’s a matter of lessening the symptoms -vs- curing the disease. Reformist ideas might “help” in the sense of masking the symptoms, but almost invariably they make the disease worse.
A good example was a recent graphic from some reformists with 12 reforms they felt would “help”. Something like eight of them were variations of giving the cops more $$$ y/o authority.
I wasn’t giving you a list of things to agree y/o disagree with. I was giving you a list of examples of things that cannot be reformed. Love’em or hate’em… slavery, segregation, and capitalism are examples of things that must either be endured or abolished.
I don’t disagree with that at all, and I don’t mean to characterize people ITT as being pro-gun or anything.
But I sense people tiptoeing around the issue a lot, both on here and in other far left circles (Bernie bros, for instance), and talking about strict gun control like it’s a complete pipe dream.
I understand the conversation. I fundamentally disagree that police are a disease and reforming them is just masking symptoms.
To demonstrate clearly that you do in fact have a hidden assumption here, consider if we changed the topic such that the reply was “slavery cannot be reformed”, “segregation cannot be reformed”, “capitalism cannot be reformed”, etc/etc. Are you going to whine “Cargo Cult!” in those cases?
There is a question mark here. I said slavery and segregation cannot be reformed. I believe police and capitalism can. I gave you a straight answer to your question.
I know you were trying to establish that capitalism cannot be reformed. I disagree. I think Norway is better than ???
What is your solution for ??? btw? And yes, I am asking you for a straight answer.
Huh? We are having a chat about WTF to do with the cops, if anything. I thought that was what you wanted to do? : confused :
LOL no. It simply amazes me that certain 2+2ers, now UnStuckers, can’t read some simple words without immediately jumping into some kinda alternator conspiracy theory. I’ll make my point like you are a 5yo…
I was trying to establish a small point, as a stepping stone to make my larger point regarding our chat at hand.
That small point was that not everything is amenable to reformism. Instead, some things must either be endured or abolished.
In an attempt to make that small point, I gave you three examples of things that folks often say cannot be reformed.
To actually make that small point I need you to agree that at least one of those examples cannot be reformed.
Again note: for my purposes here ITT, I DGAF what your opinions are regarding the inherent evil, or the coolness, or the number of people who share your feelings regarding the examples. I DGAF how many you agree with “morally”, or which ones… I only care that you agreed at least one, not “morally”, but just that it cannot be reformed.
OK, at this point I’ll assume I’ve made my small point that some things cannot be reformed.
The way I see things, that makes three distinct chats that could be had. Which are…
If the police can in fact be reformed in any meaningful sense.
If we assume they can, and without making the disease worse, what could be done?
No you haven’t. You’ve been doing what everyone does when they don’t have coherent answers to specific questions, which is googling up links, spamming them and then blaming your opponents for not reading them carefully enough. I clicked through to one of your links once to some abolition activist named Andrea Ritchie and looked for the answer to the fundamental question of “what will replace calling 911” and this was the answer:
How to then move it from those individual cases [of communities dealing with people causing harm], often within activist communities, often dealing with harm perpetrated by people that we know, who we can bring in people they know to hold them accountable… how to scale those things up into, you know, the alternative 911 that you call anywhere in the country is, like, it feels like there’s a chasm between those two things that I have no concept of how to bridge. The only thing I can propose is that it be central to all of our conversations.
All the rest is window dressing around the fact that you have no clue what this will look like. Microbet has posted about the Zapatistas in the past, and you can have small communities which work along the principle of communities directly dealing with harm in a democratic manner, but you can’t have cities that work like that. It doesn’t scale. The question “what do we do when someone comes from another community and takes our shit at gunpoint” has no answer other than “I guess get some guns of our own”.
You’ll probably respond to this by reverting to talking about the deficiencies in US policing, or being sarcastic about my lack of knowledge of the storied history of the abolition movement, or posting more links to 20,000 word articles I’m supposed to read, or whatever. What you won’t do is provide an answer to the question “what will replace calling 911 to report a crime” because no answer exists. Not only has there never existed an actual city without a police force that doesn’t look like Mogadishu, there isn’t even a theoretical answer to the question. Everything else you post is smoke and mirrors dancing around this brute fact.
We had this discussion in the Abolishing Police thread, I posted a poll to the effect of “do you think this means actually ABOLISHING POLICE, i.e. no police even for basic law enforcement” and 50% of the thread voted yes, that is what they mean. An effective movement would see this sort of basic disagreement about aims as a problem. The fact that everyone brushes it aside is evidence that subscribers care more about statements of moral principle than about policy progress. It’s the same reason nobody ever had to define what exactly “Make America Great Again” meant, it means whatever you want it to mean.
I’m using “calling 911” as a straightforward illustration of the idea that there’s a set of laws enforced by a law enforcement body which can be called upon across a whole city, or state, or country to resolve crimes and disputes. But you know this perfectly well and this is just more theatre in lieu of tackling the underlying issue.
I mean, one of the issues is that lots of people in American can’t and won’t call the police in emergencies because they know that will make it worse. All this sort of “what do you do if you get raped” “what do you do when you get robbed” stuff just ignores how terrible the cops in America are today. Your imagination of what the police are isn’t always true.
Just don’t know how else to respond to your claim that we need the police so that they can do things that they don’t actually do. They also can’t be compelled to do it either.
I’m assuming you meant to include the bracketed [think this] above. If that is the case, I’m assuming you didn’t separate those espouse who “abolish” from those who do not. If those two assumptions are correct, I’m submitting that was a garbage-in, garbage-out poll.
That’s hardly true. A perfect example is another abolition, the abolition of slavery in the US. Those abolitionists varied widely regarding both means & ends. But what is true as a bedrock: reformism won’t and can’t be effective.
LOL no. Virtue signalling is RWNJ crap. The real world of activism doesn’t work that way. What’s being emphasized is 100% practical and operational. That is again: reformism doesn’t work. I’ll repeat again: saying “X cannot be reformed” == “abolish X”.
Someone asked for an alternative to policing on my NextDoor and I told them that if they were in danger they could call me and I’d come over and help and meant it.
wirelessgrinder voted yes and is on team abolish, several of the other abolishistas who were posting in the thread simply ignored the poll because they didn’t want to answer the question. microbet is in favor of actually abolishing the police, ask him. So is ggoreo. There was an NYT article explaining that, no, abolitionists really do mean ABOLISH THE POLICE.
This has also been done to death but if your slogan polls at sub 50% of politically educated people even understanding what the hell you mean, your slogan sucks. What you’re arguing is that “abolish the police” means something completely different to “abolish ICE” and that we’re dumbasses if this is not obvious to us. In reality, as I said, the slogan functions as a way to elide the distinctions between activists and make it look like there’s a coherent idea of what to do when there isn’t.
Which, like “abolish ICE”, meant “permanently get rid of”, not “come up with a better way to do slavery”. See also: “abolish the death penalty”, “abolish the monarchy”, “abolish apartheid”, every other time the word “abolish” has ever been used in human history.
Words you’re looking for include “replace” and “disband”. I’m not trying to be a semantic nit here, this is the means by which utopians are attempting to co-opt the movement.