Choice quote:
Putting “ACAB” on my Tinder profile was an effective signaling move that dramatically improved my chances of matching with the tattooed and pierced cuties I was chasing.
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What I’m hearing is: guy gains wealth and cultural capital, realises he is steadily approaching the echelon of society that the police actually protect, decides they are not so bad after all, and now wants privatisation of police so that he can build a personal army.
Like sure it can be argued that policing as it is right now has some benefit to social order, and it definitely can be argued that the situation can be improved. On the latter point, calls to defund/abolish the police are a valid means to that end. Yet OP for whatever reason has decided that the only real solution is literally that libertarian cop copypasta.
NSFW time! I am continually floored by the sheer lack of nuance that these folks have. Here, my guy is conflating three separate concepts:
- ACAB: Police culture has the “thin blue line,” the concept that cohesive policing is the main force preventing modern society from collapsing into lawlessness and chaos. As a result, police cannot be trusted to respect non-police. Our friend here might benefit from knowing that ALAB as well, due to the oath that lawyers profess upon admission to the bar.
- Defund the police: In the USA, many cities have steadily increased spending on police over the past century or so. This has not correlated with a drop in crime (and it can’t cause a drop in crime, since police respond to crime but don’t prevent it!) and so there is a call to reverse spending increases.
- Militarization: Our friend doesn’t explicitly say it, but police have become more violent over the century as well, equipping themselves with ever-more-dangerous tools. This also isn’t correlated with a drop in crime, and some of those tools are illegal to use outside of war, leading to a call for partial disarmament.
Don’t get me wrong; some law enforcement is necessary in a lawful society. Try having a trial court without a bailiff, for example. But it sounds like our dude is a recovering ancap, and he just can’t see shades of grey.
I spent ages writing a comment that I accidentally deleted (>_>) so apologies if this is a bit too long:
I’ve read that a lot of violent urban crime in the US takes place in poor, majority-minority or majority-black neighbourhoods. Those neighbourhoods are “overpoliced and underprotected” areas where cops rarely respond to crime reports & rarely go unless they are conducting a raid in SWAT gear, & people rarely make crime reports either because they don’t expect the police to do anything or expect them to make things worse if they do turn up.
Increase police funding, decrease police funding, it doesn’t change the approach the police take to those neighbourhoods & it doesn’t change the social, political or historic factors that determine the relationship between neighbourhoods and the police.
& re: defunding, surely a libertarian should understand that government money is not a bottomless bucket…Some (not all) cities facing budget issues have increased police funding while cutting mental healthcare, social services or other parts of the safety net. this has 2 effects
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- more people fall through the safety net, resulting in more crime. Poverty/adverse childhood experiences/untreated (mental) health problems => drug addiction & crime => traumatized, impoverished, addicted, parents who have to fight just to stay out of jail & keep custody of their kids => adverse childhood experiences as their kids grow up with absent, neglectful or bad parents &/or are farmed out to relatives, foster homes, shelters for homeless youth or juvenile detention with all the potential for abuse, trauma and induction into crime that those environments offer => the cycle continues. People talk about “virtuous spirals” in economics and sociology - well, this is the opposite.
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- Police become first responders to every social problem as funding for emergency services and social services are cut - some crisis lines also automatically call the police. Police appear at scenes of poverty, homelessness, overdose or illness where their training is basically useless & where all they can really do is put someone in a jail cell or give them a fine. Worse than that, because of the “thin blue line” mentality (& “killology” style training), police turn up heavily armed at scenes where someone is suicidal, in severe distress or just behaving strangely, believing that it is better for them to kill that person than to be injured themselves. In “overpoliced and underprotected” areas, cops come in heavily armed, wearing kevlar or swat gear, & act more like an occupying military than police. Disabled & mentally ill people - particularly disabled or mentally ill black people - have been brutalized and killed by the police in these areas because their difference is seen as a sign of danger by trigger-happy police. And people who are the subject of repeated callouts due to mental health issues, addiction or minor crimes are treated with contempt by cops. All coppers aren’t bastards to everyone, all the time, but the people who see the most of them see the worst of them.
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As a non-American unversed in American political rhetoric, “defund the police” always struck me as a weird call for action. Read without nuance it basically means “don’t pay for policing”, not “reduce the relative funding going to LE in favor of other funding”.
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it’s not a great slogan. In the summer of 2020 there was a mad rush to find a slogan that was radical enough to be credible but not too radical to be popular. It was a bodge.
@gerikson It’s also really about changing the things that the police do get funded for over and above the fixed line items for salary, uniforms, thin blue line patches, squad cars, donuts etc. Fund them for better screening to weed out control freaks and all the other people who shouldn’t be cops. Fund them for week-long courses in situation management, unconscious bias, deescalation, and basic psychology with a passing grade a condition of continued employment. Fund them to train and maintain a small, highly professional and highly skilled tactical intervention unit rather than giving every bozo who can’t even write a ticket correctly a two-day course and a shotgun and calling them the SWAT team. Don’t fund them for what they are way overfunded for in the US - military surplus tanks, armoured cars, tactical gear, offensive weapons they should never need but will end up using anyway because they’re there, and poor quality paramilitary training. Properly fund community services, 24 hour mental health crisis teams and addiction / homeless / etc outreach. Build proper inter-agency responses to mental health crises. Do this and you’ll save more money and save more lives than pretending you’re in a real life Call of Duty.
But hey, Chief says we can get a tank and a margarita machine out of the training budget instead of this classroom bullshit they want us to do! U-S-A! U-S-A!
Yeah sure, I get that. I just meant that as a slogan, “defund the police” can be misread as “abolish the police”.
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trying to solve climate change from within Exxon Mobil
Cap the wells, scrap the equipment, fuck the shareholders. Every day they make the deliberate decision not to do that, and dig us deeper into this mess.
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I only read the intro bit and I had complaints, looked at the scrollbar, felt despair and then I realized nobody is forcing me to read all this, I could just stop.
Anyway, somebody should call marxbro, marxbro will love this. This feels like it will lead up to a ‘ancap/lw misunderstands marxism’ episode again. (Sadly we do not have a breadbro (breadbro? anarchybro? perhaps best to let the anarchist equivalent of marxbro decide their name for themselves) to go to town on how wrong the ancapper is on anarchism as well).
And anyway, this is prob not needed, surely there are enough people in the LW community who are well versed enough in anarchism/marxism to talk to him about it from a honest anarchist/marxist perspective. Right? RIGHT? [insert face of Padme here]
E: late edit, because I just randomly went ‘wait that is actually a really weird thing we do he just admitted too’. I get why women have trust issues, ‘I lied about my political beliefs to get laid’ and nobody bats an eye.
I only read the intro bit and I had complaints, looked at the scrollbar, felt despair and then I realized nobody is forcing me to read all this, I could just stop.
Average experience reading a LW article
Certainly, guess im getting old. I will have to sneer at myself soon. “When I was young we used to read the articles we made comments about!”
Anyway, somebody should call marxbro, marxbro will love this.
I’m hoping they can make their way over here! we are defederated from the bigger instances that call themselves Marxist, but given the extreme toxicity levels of those instances (and their questionable understanding of Marxist ideas on average), they’d likely be happier with a local account here either way
Sadly we do not have a breadbro (breadbro? anarchybro? perhaps best to let the anarchist equivalent of marxbro decide their name for themselves)
I like Kropotkin a lot (he’s much less exhausting to read than most theory) but I’d probably be an awful choice. my pick would be someone along the lines of AnarchoNinaWrites, though Nina herself understandably likely has too much going on to join us here (though the invite is open if she’d ever like to give lemmy a try)
AnarchoNinaWrites seems busy enough to me. (and well, I’d rather see a volunteer, as im not so sure about dragging people towards the abyss and going ‘look a that abyss, isn’t horrible?’). (A reason I made an account here and stopped posting via mastodon (that and the images and quote text not working properly).
Why is Tom Cruise painting a wall? And why doesn’t the roller have paint on it? And how did he get it to go on so well on the brick part without any primer? So many questions…
Shouldn’t paint brick walls. Traps moisture.
He is removing the white line. The world turns darker as the cop paints more, as after removing all other colors from the world, the cop will finally go after white, and there will be only darkness.
(this is why you pay artists to make art for you, and not just ask a computer system to generate something, artists understand what you are trying to say. (for me the image also seemed to imply the cop was moving from left to right) The selection of the image also torpedoes his whole ‘I love punk rock’ thing, it is a failure on so many levels you could write an entire essay on it, esp if you include the fact that nobody on LW seems to have noticed or cared enough to say something about it.).
hero images and their consequences have been a disaster something something something
Less Wrong introduced me to a lot of interesting ideas, like how you can apply Bayesian reasoning to beliefs and making your beliefs “pay rent”, but I’m not in love with the Sam Bankman-Fried of it all.
It’s not bayesian reasoning without actual math, and many beliefs are not so easily quantified under any statistical framework.
All it really offers is unwarranted confidence in one’s own rationality, often used in these circles to cloak nauseating positions.
Making ideas « pay rent », In these circles is also used for black-pilling people into rejecting common sense and humanity. It’s good to be skeptical of new ideas or new claims, it’s even good to analyze and synthesize your own beliefs, it’s a bit dangerous to say that every belief is negotiable, and to give the tools to others the tools to mould them (here be cult dragons).
Despite it’s flaws, it is a good opening to the Declaration of Independence of the US (not American myself): « we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are […] equal […] with certain unalienable rights »
You can’t get morals from stats, and some core ideals ought to live in your mind rent-free.
I haven’t talked to these people on any regular basis, other than once attending one of their weird little seminars at someone’s house once, so I’ve had little to no experience with how they apply these ideas. I just read the blog posts and mulled it over on my own for a while, and my main takeaways were something like “change your mind incrementally when you get new evidence”.
That said everything you’re saying does ring true, and I’ve been changing my mind about Yudkowsky and his ilk pretty gradually for a number of years. Hearing that he’s in with dudes like SBF have made me ready to fully distance myself from their stuff now that I know what they get up to.
I never heard of applying the ad hoc Bayesian thing to moral stances. I’d only ever applied it to questions of fact. Creepy to think where that leads.
Thanks for chatting with me about this, it’s been helpful.
