this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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I think we already police each other far too much. We need to police the right better.
What puts you on the left, by the way?
They're meant to get a reaction and spark conversation.
"Reform" and "defund" are not the same things. People tried "reform the police". That didn't work. It isn't a good rallying cry.
Defunding the police also makes more sense when you realize that the police are over-funded in the first place.
What do you think that the ideas behind them are? Because I have a feeling that you don't understand the meanings behind some of these slogans.
There's a lot to unpack behind something like "trans women are women", but that's supposed to be the start of the conversation, not the end.
『rant』
Abolish the police.
It's time to take a good hard look at how we approach wrongdoing and injustice, as very little of what happens falls into the realm of petty crime (a category that includes premeditated homicide).
Our current system focuses on detecting and seizing solvent assets and filling prison cells with warm bodies. It has a not-insignificant body count of its own, and completely ignores the elite deviance that costs society more lives, more suffering, more cost and more destruction than petty crime by orders of magnitude. (Such as the opioid crisis, PFOA throughout our water supplies and preventable industrial greenhouse emissions.)
『/rant』
I don't know how much the left can police the right, if at all.
I don't think the left need to police ourselves more, I think we need to police less, but with more patience, respect and insight (better).
I see the left eating its own all the time. A lot of it is the No True Leftist fallacy. Let's say you're a gay vegan communist hippie who just so happens to think trans women shouldn't use the womens bathroom, then you're not reasoned with, you're immediately a bigot. This is the wrong kind of policing and causes people to seek validation from people who think the same.
I'm leftist for sure, communism is the end-goal. I'm vegan, I hate animal exploitation and suffering. We need to save the planet and ourselves. Discrimination sucks. Rehabilitation is more important than punishment. I'm atheist, religion is harmful. What am I missing?
The phrases are meant to get a reaction and spark a conversation sure. That happens on the left, but the right take it at face value and run with it.
The meanings behind the slogans.
"All cops are bastards" systemic issues inherently make the duty of the police, not a community hero, but a revenue generating, fear mongering enforcer of dumb laws.
There are good police officers though who do want to help. That's why I don't like it.
"Black Lives Matter" yeah, they do. End of story.
"Trans women are women" the word woman used to exclusively mean "female at birth". Now it means "those who identify as a woman". Therefore, identifying as a woman makes you a woman.
How'd I do doc? Did I pass? Or am I literally Hitler?
There are good police officers though who do want to help.
Not in the current system. Down to the local precinct they are required to cover for their less kind / more brutal brethren in blue.
If you are in law enforcement in the US in the 2020s, you need to get out. The system really is that comprehensively corrupt.
This is what the right cannot hear, this is the optics I'm talking about. We can't say the quiet part out loud.
I am not convinced that literally all cops are bastards, there are some who are trying to change the system from within, we need to hold these people up as exemplars.
They don't try very hard. If they do, they get demoted, discharged or dead very quickly.
Efforts to change the system from within have been going on for over a century now. We've seen the same patterns of corruption and brutality surface, get confronted and then dismissed with the same inaction.
No, they're all bastards to the last, and even those who quit have to confront the injustice in which they've personally participated just to sleep at night. Law enforcement in the US exhibits a lot of similarities to Heydrich's Sicherheitsdienst and engages in the same kind of overpolicing in order to justify its violence and continued existence.
As for those unwilling to hear it, or who buy into the pervasive pro-police propaganda in the media, they put themselves at risk, for the face-eating leopards are very much on the prowl.
The phrase acab does not imply that literally every single police officer out there is corrupt, a bad cop, whatever, but rather that the police as an institution in general corrupt to the core, acts on impulse, aggression, racism. The goal is to point to the wrongdoings of the police as a whole, as a system.
It's the same thing when people say that, as a whole, all men are pigs or something similar. Yes, of course there are men that aren't but the vast majority of them is. The phrase is pointing to patriarchy, rich white men ruling the world, essentially, toxic masculinity and many other things.
vegan btw
That's not my understanding. "All cops are bastards" because even the "good" cops are complicit in a corrupt system. A cop who is actually a good person can't remain a cop for long, because they would have to fight the very system that they're a part of. In order to remain a cop, you have to remain silent to the injustices that you're aware of.
I agree. I'd argue though that these two directions complement each other instead of being contradictory.
The only point I agree on is that "defund the police" is a dumb slogan. "Defund" means "remove all funding," which is not the solution.
You missed the point entirely.