Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

also to join

I remember those Jack Chick comic books that evangelicals used to leave in phone books and restaurant booths saw no distinction between Catholics and Satanistd

Jointing the book club would be dirtbag appropriate.

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/10/24/16503462/dsa-women-cumtown-chapo

discussed upthread

Interested in checking this out

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing

― Simon H., Wednesday, 25 October 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A whole bunch of materials (incl piece above) here:

The police are bad and should be abolished.

— Marika Rose (@MarikaRose) September 13, 2017

As such, meaningfully dismantling police brutality, racism, inequality and poverty in general requires more than simply reforming or even dismantling the police. It requires dismantling the root of the police - property relations. This, in turn, requires dismantling property as such.

i agree that once we've entered our utopian post-historical stage we will no longer need police

I too reached this conclusion at age 16

idg these arguments that police unions are uniquely bad. guess what - all unions have downsides. union construction costs more, takes longer and produces shoddier work than non-construction. teacher unions protect bad teachers from being fired. unions in general protect + support workers but increase costs (duh) and often lower standards (if the union can protect its members from being fired/disciplined for poor work). why should police be denied union rights of all groups? if you're pro union i don't understand where this exception gets carved out.

the point - for me as a union activist - isn't that police shouldn't be able to organize and have unions. they should, and do. it's that they shouldn't be embraced in solidarity by other unions due to the fact that police unions jobs role is partly doing shit like getting police 2 weeks paid vacation for harming/killing poor people, which is a against the whole point of our movement. a lot of police unions don't even try to be participate in the broader labour movement anyway.

Rather read ppl thinking and arguing the detail through work being done on the question than this ho ho Utopia business - stop acting like 16 year olds. Its not how change happens.

Nobody will abolish police anywhere soon but in the UK they can abolish stop & search and the use of tasering, make police officers accountable for their abuses and close facilities such as Yarl's Wood.

xpi do agree a bit with your point about entering our post-historical stage nonsense though mordy and maybe it should be cross-posted on uncool conservative beliefs - if your solution to pressing social problems - and I've heard this sort of impossibilist argument aimed at the housing crisis, sexual harassment in the workplace, etc. in recent days even - is ending capitalism you're not helping that social problem

and close facilities such as Yarl's Wood.

You're probably aware of this but Yarl's Wood is not operated by police (as some detention centres in the UK are) but rather private security companies.

i think that if you're going to talk about abolishing the police you're inevitably courting "utopia" talk. you can discuss police reforms without discussing police abolition obviously. it's just that the latter makes you look unserious.

way xp to Mordy:
that's not universal -- skilled trades use unions as an education/skill scale (progression from apprentice to journeyman to master, with testing and number of hours logged) and require training. the protection of people who aren't doing well at their job is used as a bludgeon and while some union leadership has been bogged down over generations by inept or malicious administration, that's not universal. if a union is _lowering_ standards then, yes, that union is a problem

the difference being that there's a doing a difference between doing your job poorly and participating in criminal activities during your work.

I have friends and family members who have been union members or managed people who are union members, and there are hoops to jump through (a friend's understandable frustration about trying to have someone on a factory floor do a procedure in a different way and getting a "I'm supposed to do it this way, I'm calling my rep" response), but they value the union

I guess when I see cases of teachers being arrested for child endangerment or molestation, I don't typically see a union lawyer representing them? But for clear-cut assault, harassment, or even rape, cops often get union lawyers

I think part of the problem is that some of the protections unions provide should be part of the standard contract, or enshrined in law, but those protections are demonized or taken as the status quo and we have right to work laws -- which are really "the employer can set whatever terms they want" laws -- in a number of places that put the means in employers' hands

i come into contact with a lot of trade unions (electrical, construction, transportation) and they always cost more and take longer than a non-union equivalent. i understand why and don't blame them -- they get paid by the hour (at a much higher rate than non-union workers) so they're not motivated to complete a job quickly and move onto the next one. i think this is baked into what a union is - how can you expect them to do work inexpensively and quickly if their very existence is designed to increase pay for their members?

like i don't think this makes them bad unions. i think this is the nature of unions.

especially the way it works in philadelphia (it might work different elsewhere?) there are certain buildings and projects that are from the get-go "union" projects. so they don't even have to bid on the work bc it must be done with them. how can you expect them to put in a competitive bid on a project if they've already been awarded it?

it sounds like there's a single union shop there, or at least that the projects chose as a preferred provider? there's also the question about whether you're talking about a general contractor, subcontractor, etc. and the labor pool they use.

and "taking longer" is often shorthand for "following code, proper procedures, and routine inspections" because city inspection is only going to give you the base minimum

my dad, for instance, stopped dealing with a couple companies that would call him in as a favor after they had a job done by non-union resources, only to determine they did a shoddy job and needed someone to come in and clean it up. and that's for something simple like _floor covering_

i believe the way the law works here is that the actual work must be done by a union shop - so primarily subcontractors. a non-union company can be the general.

and it's not just about permits/code bc when we've been a gc and had to hire unions we were responsible for all code, OSHA inspections, but it took longer and cost a lot more than using our non-union crew (and we pay our non-union crew well above standard industry rates). our crew will work overtime hours for one, but also they just hustle in a way i've never seen a union crew do. and i think it's bc they have more of a stake in the success of the project than a union that has been mandated to do the work no matter the quality.

sorry didn't want to turn this into a nuts and bolts conversation about using union vs non-union trade labor. and your point is taken that the teacher's union probably (???) doesn't go to bat for teachers accused of sexual abuse / violence whereas the police union does. of course police violence is a more complicated thing in general since there's never a good reason for a teacher to manhandle a student whereas the police are mandated to have physical contact w/ suspects (and occasionally - tho almost certainly far less often than claimed - they are put in life threatening situations that necessitate the use of violence).

maybe if cops convicted of things were disowned by their unions it’d be a message

police abolition isn’t about, as I’ve read, the abolition of policing or the enforcement of laws, it’s about allocating resources in a way that addresses the causes of crime, decriminalizes a number of petty offenses, and puts rehabilitation and restitution above imprisonment. the current police system is seen as incapable of shifting to that model as an institution

The value of utopian desires is in how they can translate to the real world - if your goal is police abolition there are about a million points along the way to create change, from police accountability and reform to demilitarization and/or disarmament to the just and equitable society getting la-di-da-ed.

note: protecting "bad teachers" and protecting cops who shoot unarmed black men/harassing anyone who protests injustice/etc. are not equivalent actions

Daniel - actually I didn't know (its more that I've read around Yarl's wood). Not sure if public or private matter so much as police and prisons go hand-in-hand in terms of dishing out state brutality and I bundled these together as things that can be immediately carried out by the UK government. I was giving out a few points on the way.

Given the way police behaves (as captured on videos and now increasingly on phones) and (in the US) what I've been reading around the increasing hand-out of weapons I am confident in talking about police abolition as a serious option.

walk me through what that looks like. is it just what mh was saying that we'll have police but we have to start from scratch bc the current institution is hopelessly flawed? (how do we develop this parallel institution and how do we switch over to it when it is developed?) or we won't have police at all? so how will the state police crime? at this pt either you're saying that there's no crime (utopian), no state (post-historical), or some third option? there will be crime but less than we have now and abolishing the police will lead to fewer murders/rapes/robberies than having them does?

beats me dude, there's a book Simon linked, maybe the answers are in there

or is "abolish the police" just rhetoric to signal how angry we are at the police and i shouldn't take it seriously as a policy suggestion? bc that's how i'm inclined to react to the proposal.

generally if you set a goal, then define a mechanism for action and milestones to get there, you'll learn a lot more and adjust plans as you go and get a lot further than you would had you not set an ideal goal

no, it's like saying "black people deserve reparations" and broadly outlining how that could work, as Coates and others have. the reaction isn't "you just can't give people money!" when that was not the proposal of that article

it's ok to have a visceral reaction, because it's meant to provoke discussion. in this case, what would a society without the police be like?

asking "how would we deal with rape and murder?" leads you back to the beginning, how do we stop these things from happening to begin with, and eventually you get back to the point of what to do with the hopefully now rare murder

Abolish the police, hire private contractors

Done

generally speaking people who default straight to the "what about serial killers?!" argument are not interested in a good-faith discussion

the teachers union absolutely goes to bat for teachers accused of misconduct

personally i don't expect anyone who talks seriously about abolishin g capitalism to have thought things out carefully

yes serial killers are the only criminals in our society.

fwiw i looked at the book - i skipped to the conclusion since the table of contents all seemed like critiques of current policing as opposed to a way forward. the conclusion offers a lot of great suggestions that i fully support but none of them as ambitious as abolishing the police. it's rhetoric guys. it's not serious.

xp why? serial killers exist, post-property societies don't

I sympathize with the people who are doing the boots on the ground work when it comes to this, because they have a point that theoretical models don't account for practical cases. There was a local public radio interview with a researcher who'd worked in prisons and jails and done case work who was frustrated with academic studies that pulled statistics but weren't in place in the institutions. There were a number of repeat offenders that, despite rehabilitation programs, were perpetually in jail and had patterns of arrest back to their youth. To him, their methodology was flawed and they couldn't see the forest for the trees. But you need both, because if you're surrounded by trees, you never get a feel for that forest's place in the whole ecosystem.

There is quite a lot of material on the link I provided above (in reponse to Simon's tweet), setting out some of the points by people who are thinking these things out, Mordy. I am currently thinking this out myself, reading around - but I am saying its more than some juvenile demand. xps

If you completely reshape how the police operate, how we look at rehabilitation, prison reform, etc. and change all the pieces if even subtly, isn't your goal the abolition of police? Because the concept of what the police are in the end is significantly different.

It's the Ship of Theseus problem, you guys are just on the "same ship" side

I don't think it's a genuine demand at all. I think these are sincere people making strong cases for reforms who have gotten off-track by letting their rhetoric get ahead of their ideas. I mean look, I agree, "abolish the police," if that's just a nicer way of saying, "fuck the police." I'm not seeing anyone taking it seriously tho. Maybe shame on me for thinking this was a serious cause?

"abolish the police" is a great way to express a direction imho, if you support the sort of proposals and reforms abolitionists are putting forward this seems to be a v small thing to split hairs about

Not sure if public or private matter so much as police and prisons go hand-in-hand in terms of dishing out state brutality and I bundled these together as things that can be immediately carried out by the UK government. I was giving out a few points on the way.

I getcha. I only brought it up because it's an important detail, from a leftist pov specifically - a lot of detention centres are run by private companies (G4S, Mitie), funded by The Taxpayer's Money, and it's all far closer to the US prison-industrial complex than I think the general populace realises.

personally i don't expect anyone who talks seriously about abolishin g capitalism to have thought things out carefully

Plenty have looked at this question, some have tried and other are thinking of trying it again.

see also "end poverty"

This does not mean that no one should articulate or fight for reforms. However, those reforms must be part of a larger vision that questions the basic role of police in society and asks whether coercive government action will bring more justice or less. Too many of the reforms under discussion today fail to do that; many further empower the police and expand their role. Community policing, body cameras, and increased money for training reinforce a false sense of police legitimacy and expand the reach of the police into communities and private lives. More money, more technology, and more power and influence will not reduce the burden or increase the justness of policing. Ending the War on Drugs, abolishing school police, ending broken-windows policing, developing robust mental health care, and creating low-income housing systems will do much more to reduce abusive policing.

this is from his conclusion. i think body cameras are important and disagree w/ his analysis there but look at what he considers routes to reduce abusive policing. he isn't advocating getting rid of the police. maybe it would make more sense to call it 'reduce policing'? when i first saw "abolish the police" i immediately thought "this is dumb af," which might suggest it's not the best path to enroll ppl in the reforms?

see also "ban tankies"

xp

Ending the destruction of the environment - well that's just impossible!

*sits back, watches the end of humanity within my lifetime*

body cameras have been repeatedly shown to do jack shit iirc