In this conversation people should keep in mind that we perhaps have the most people per capita in prison in the world. People spend years in solitary. People end up in jail because they were targeted, can’t pay, and spiral into worse and worse situations. We are living in the middle of a gulag/concentration camp era/country. That should inform how legitimate it is to call the police/prison system “public safety”.
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Ok, sounds like a good idea.
Here we are back to a Rorschach test. We are dangerously close to straying into not even wrong territory. It’s impossible to support or oppose a policy proposal that’s so ill-defined.
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I view it more like:
Abolition is a goal.
Defund is a strategy.
Policy is tactics, a specific proposal like: “taking X% of the police budget and reallocating for _______.”
So, that may be where we are not “speaking on the same topic”. DTP=/a policy proposal.
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The proposal is to start defunding the police with the end goal being different for some. If you are in favor for moving resources from the police to other areas then get on the train and lets get the ball rolling, once you think we’ve reached your preferred level of defunding you can get off the train and be in opposition. Defunding is the process and yes the goal for many will be full abolition but you don’t have to support full abolition to be in favor of defunding the police
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I am sure this won’t go well but…
Seems to me so many issues would at least be better if we stopped the war on drugs.
This could lead to a reduction in funding of police.
.
Help with migration. Create legit jobs south of border.
“Legalize” should be the motto
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Oh snap, we’re still talking about “_____ The Police” and pretending like all this sound and fury the past year signified something and wasn’t the most spectacular case of the dog catching the car that I’ll ever see in my lifetime? Cool.
Of course the police should be defunded, by at least half, and also, again by at least half, they should be put against the wall and buried in shallow graves but of course the abolish/defund/thesaurus-dot-com is capital-B capital-M Bad Messaging and that’s a feature, not a bug. I mean, we’re still arguing about it and at this rate we can fly through another summer with nobody noticing that nobody actually really truly wants to change anything!
Holy shit, honestly it wasn’t until just this very minute that I realized how much more jaded I’ve become. Like, at least 10x since I posted this:
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Counterpoint: inertia
If somebody’s goal is full blown communism I am not going to ally with them until we reached the Nordic model then quit and keep my fingers crossed that the avalanche we started will lose steam.
come on joe. appoint her to Special Envoy of Working It Out With Lindsay Grahamcracker.
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Like, have people wrapped their minds around how goddamn surreal it was that mfs burned a major-city police station TO THE GROUND and didn’t get nuked to glass, in fact, quite the opposite, actually kinda sorta got asked, “Ok, what do you want?” And the fucking reply was, “Um, that was it, you saw it. We wanted to burn down the police station.” God in heaven.
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My Minneapolis PD buddy texted me hours before it was torched that they were abandoning that precinct. I posted about in the 1st George Floyd thread before it actually happened.
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That’s crazy talk, what we need to do is make drugs double illegal but, get this, we get rid of all police so nobody can arrest anybody for drugs.
Is that Rube Goldbergish enough or do I need a few more steps to hide that I don’t want to change anything?
I would argue that you need a slogan that could be considered toxic, so that it forces confrontation. There are way too many people who are comfortable with the status quo and the goal should be to make them uncomfortable. A slogan that sounds nice to a majority of people won’t accomplish anything.
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Ultimately, the police are an enforcement mechanism for the status quo. That is less of a problem when we have a status quo that we like. We don’t have a status quo that we like.
The systemic problem that we have in the US is that we are a capitalistic society that values property over life. I’ve actually considered writing a book to explain the idea that our problems stem from the overvaluation of the right to property relative to other, more important rights. The police enforce a status quo which holds that property matters more than some lives (especially black lives).
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If this is your goal, I would think “Abolish the police” is better than “Defund.” Would you agree?
I agree that confrontation has a role, and I don’t blame activists for wanting to provoke confrontation. But let’s be clear: that’s not what politicians are looking to do, nor will they win if it is.
Activists and politicians have different goals and activists aren’t required to make life easier for politicians. I’m never going to argue that activists should be subservient to politicians. It’s up to them to decide what their own personal cost-benefit analysis of their actions are, based on what their priorities are. As long as they are non-stupid about such analysis, I can live with them being their authentic selves, even if that is contrary to my own goals.
I’m not going to get into an argument over abolish/defund. I don’t think it matters much so long as both cause certain people to react in a strongly negative manner.
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Have you guys learned nothing from the past 30 years of Republicans constantly shifting the Overton window to the right? Make “Defund the Police” the leftwing slogan and it pushes moderate slapdicks into doing meaningful police reform as a compromise. You don’t start the negotiations with a compromise.
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A wild Sklansky appears.
Increase Police Budgets By Slightly Less!
Fuck Tha Police has a nice ring to it
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