The murder of Charlie Kirk

you should see his amazing last post in the canadian thread about israel vs a high school protest .

Alright. But you know they don't mean that. Not that the people who come up with these terms care what they actually mean. Number one criteria is that it provokes. They want the exact reaction you're giving them by taking it literally. And it's not like they say what they actually mean: "hey, hey, ho, ho... crime must go!"

Are you implying spaceman Bryce is a Marxist? Best I know, it's just those high-profile Ivy-ish Marxists pushing that sort of prison abolition.

Well, it is one of the worst named initiatives / movements in modern American political history, so that helps.

The police will hardly turn up for work if they're not getting paid. Or, if they do, and this tends to happen in many of the world's more regrettable countries, they will only turn up in order to extort bribes.

I won’t dispute that it’s poorly named. But at this point, anyone still acting like it means getting rid of the police is being willfully ignorant. As they are so fond of saying, “just look it up!”

There are people that defend that semantic of defund the police, so I’m not sure it’s so clear that getting rid of police is not what it means.

Sounds like you need to look it up, then.

I didn’t name the thing, sorry that the nomenclature bothers you.

liberals complaining about "defund the police" after the Dems voted to double ICE funding and the Trump regime has ICE agents throwing 100s of people into busses a day is pretty amazing.

If you look it up you get different answers. Are you under the impression that people using a political slogan necessarily all believe the same thing?

If we take this “redirect funds” semantic. You don’t think there are people that think removing funding from police would be positive irrespective of whether the funds get redirected? If you acknowledge that is some subset of people, then clearly defund the police is not always about redirecting funds.

That’s why being careful with political sloganeering is important.

My extended family once had a vicious fight over this slogan… Totally ruined dinner

I think we can all agree that police provide a valuable service to the public. The dispute is in the details of where that service begins and ends. People have vastly different opinions of what it means to serve the public.

I mean, nobody is trying to defund the fire department or the EMTs…

uhh

Imo it’s a both and. We need more funding to mental health services and police as well. Police should probably have a mental health mediator there when they are dealing with a crisis rather than being first.

And more oversight, more bodycams, more civilian ability to audit, more training on the laws, modify or get rid of qualified immunity.

There are lots of things even conservatives would agree on.

Ending all of that other stuff today won't mean we've moved to a merit-based system. Because we've never truly lived in one(and most likely never will). So complaining about dei etc is just as performative--unless you want to actually tackle the issue. But from what I've seen most conservatives seem to equate ending dei with winning the battle for merit lol They don't even really address the other aspects that have been around much longer.

Marxist abolitionists:
Angela Davis, "Are Prisons Obsolete?"
Ruth Gilmore, "Golden Gulag"

They see policing and prisons as tools of social control under capitalism. So yeah, there’s a group in elite academic circles and law reviews that take it literally, though more as a challenge to cruel and unusual punishment and other civil rights violations than as a political initiative. Which makes sense, since nobody thinks a statewide vote to abolish police and prisons in 'their' state would pass tomorrow.

A lot of that Marxist drivel comes from people who can’t think past their own belly button. This is the US: who’s more in need of due process protections, the public or the idiots with gang tattoos on their foreheads? Remember, this is ’Merica, and no one could be arrested or sent to prison for their actions, even white supremacists.

So I guess I’ll have to reverse my earlier position: with the exception of the above, getting rid of the police and prisons would virtually eliminate crime in 'Merica.

I support (certain forms of) DEI and have defended it on this forum.

It’d be better if people just ask me my opinion instead of reading opinions into things I didn’t say.

Of course. Get rid of all laws and crime goes down to 0.

You said merit is important. So I assume you've been pretty pissed off(and at the appropriate targets) for a lot longer than recent years in that department ya?

I'm suggesting hat if people don't want to defund the police or abolish prisons, then don't say it.

If they are just being provocateurs and "They want the exact reaction you're giving them by taking it literally", then well done Dems! Your 4-D chess gaslighting conservatives made you completely unelectable and got middle Americans to vote for an egotistical man-child who is only interested in increasing his and his families personal status and wealth, as many felt this was still arguably better than the alternative.

In fairness I would say most Dems dont endorse the idea or the rhetoric and wish it would go away. But they have been outflanked by their own extreme who still use the term in earnest, and they wont renounce because they have ceded them the moral high ground. So they have to resort to making the argument Whatthejish is making, which is completely unsatisfactory and hurts them at the ballot box.

This is actually leading back to something Dave Smith and Nick Fuentes talked about, where I think they had a point. (Note: I am paraphrasing and this isn't exactly how the framed things) And that is that our society has spent the last 20 years being oriented so that we act as if being accused of racism, especially by a black person, is the greatest moral sin, and one that should be avoided at all costs. And we dont recognize when this fear causes us to make very bad decisions.

The correct answer to "We need to defund the police" is always, "No, that is horrible rhetoric and messaging. I dont endorse this at all, and I dont care if you call me a racist over this. I am not a racist and disagreeing with your counterproductive rhetoric doesn't make me one."

But we have been so conditioned to be fearful of being called racist, instead we have to resort to playing bad faith word games to justify the rhetoric.

Now imagine if the right was actually just normal instead of completely unhinged supporting insane candidates, how much better they would do. I always said it to Luciom when he was around, but it bears repeating: for how morally horrific the left has supposedly been for the last ten years, how disgusting must the right be to lose to that.

It is true though that it takes some amount of integrity to go against your base, which the Democrats do much more often than the Republicans from what I see. Or maybe it’s just that they’re both unhinged, and we can blame the moderates for holding on to insane ideas for so long like not wanting a universal healthcare system, supporting cops no matter how corrupt they were, running us into so many wars, not legalizing marijuana 30 years ago when a presidential candidate that had smoked weed got elected regardless, not fixing campaign finance after citizens united, calling all criticism of Israel racism, and probably a lot more. There’s so many stupid ideas that moderates clung to for so long that they strengthened the extremes of their parties.

So even though I consider myself more moderate than the socialists, I do recognize that when you allow stuff to fester and boil over, you give currency to the crazies in society.

(This is just a theory I’m not sure if it could be sustained, but we do hear this justification all the time.)

Personally, I have rarely had a positive encounter with a police officer and have had far more negative ones, but if you abolish/defund/reduce w/e you want the slogan to be, you're going to have to invest more in fire and EMT because they are all tied together in a way - or at least fire some detectives and send them to public safety to aid in evacuations and traffic control but then you just have more patrolling officers.

I don't know for sure, but it feels like cops just aren't around as much as they used to be...writing speeding tickets, DUI's, eating at a donut shop, probably because of body cams because cops were far more corrupt decades ago than now, and I think it's better that cops get less involved with lower level crime.

But I think the issue there is at some point of reduction, you're just going to see a rise neighborhood defense/watch groups or just a general rise in vigilante groups that would go from w/e low level of govt oversight that the police had to literally zero and would be the exact opposite of what many on the abolish crowd was advocating for - or maybe not.

I mean, I get it that cops almost never prevent a grocery store shooting/robbery for example, but I think that there has been an increase in store related shootings involving owners and employees confronting theft over the last 5 years while police presence has reduced. You could certainly argue whether or not that that is a better alternative and a positive trend.

...But I will say that I believe that cops have way too much power and authority, and that position of power creates a lot of the attitude that we see, due to that structure, and it attracts said people who want to be in that position of power. It's a horrendous combo. EMT's and Firefighters are mostly wired a little different.