Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

I guess my uncool conservative belief is that I'm skeptical about the whole Karen origin on black twitter thing. I've not heard that anywhere but here. Light research suggests that it came from a reddit user that was complaining about his ex who was literally named Karen and the meme stemmed from that. Maybe a coincidence?

according to who? you mean on facebook?

― Evan, Monday, May 25, 2020 8:30 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yes. Every time a post pops up criticizing the general public for not social distancing, there rises a chorus of "Karen!"

I get the social signalling aspect and think it has real value, but where I live, I feel like this is taken care of by the fact that mask-wearing indoors (at least at the grocery store, which is the only place I've been indoors) is universal, even though not mandated by the state.

my uncool conservative belief is that ppl shouldn’t buy into misogynist stereotypes like “Karen” in the first place

white feminist is a slur

10^9 is a milliard. 10^12 is a billion.

ok grandpa

1 x duck is a mallard. 1 x chicken broth is a bullion.

I'm skeptical about the whole Karen origin on black twitter thing

can someone give some more info on the queer/poc origins of karen? i feel like i've been seeing this meme slowly evolve for the past decade on places like r3dd1t

my understanding was that it was just an evolution of the "can i speak to the manager haircut" meme

10^9 is a milliard. 10^12 is a billion.

― imago, Thursday, May 28, 2020 12:37 PM (two hours ago)

imago start saying "crore" imo

lol maybe

I just need to say this somewhere without derailing a good thread - I hate the lofty, self-righteous, self-serious rhetorical tone that every single fucking person adopts on twitter and facebook when they talk about BLM. I hate how every single fucking person feels like they need to make a big dramatic speech on it. I guess the "performativeness" is part of what I hate, and that's not even a conservative critique, I just find it really grating when people do that soaring speechifying thing.

this is THIS

THAT IS THAT

LISTEN

LEARN

PRAY

WALK

THINK

fwiw social media posts scolding people for not wearing masks are pretty performative, seldom seem interested in persuading people so much as wallowing in their own righteousness. I wear a mask and they still rankle. Tho this might be an US/UK thing, less people obnoxiously proud of not wearing them here.

yeah I find that irritating too - "I WAS JUST AT X PARK AND SO MANY PEOPLE WERE NOT WEARING MASKS!" as if just to say "humanity is doomed by its stupidity and I am above it."

look, i dunno. people are freaked out and frightened and i don't blame anybody for reaching for whatever tools they feel they need even if they're super sanctimonious. better that than nothing.

Tracer otm + even the most annoying things on earth can be dismissed if don’t let it aggravate you. Let it roll off of you.

agree, which is why I just quarantine such thoughts to thread like this

True. This is the place for it. And these are tough times. Sometimes stress manifests as irritability. Happens to the best of us!!

I instinctively recoil when men avoid belts.

second-order recoiling

I'm not even sure this is a conservative belief, but yes, people in protests should be making a lot more of an effort to not be creating COVID superspreading events. It looks like most people are masked but, that's it. Stay far apart, don't yell or sing.

most of the people cheering the looting and "expropriation" of private property are privileged white boys who still act like teenagers and use this attitude to further bolster their life choices of not growing up and taking adult responsibilities. The ones that do have "real jobs" all work for other people so they don't really have much responsibility professionally either. Also, they would whine and cry like a toddler if someone stole their prized possessions (e.g. obscure records, film collections, etc.)

I remember someone interviewing an Occupy Wall Street participant. He was holding an iPad 2. The interviewer asked something like, so if it's bad to be a one percenter and have things, why don't you give that iPad to the poor? And the guy was like, um, er, actually what I want is for EVERYBODY to have access to the things of this world... and trailed off.

heh this is mostly prompted by one particular dude in my FB feed who I remember several years back throwing a major temper tantrum over a radical collective space deciding to dispose of a huge vintage film editing machine that belonged to said dude because said dude: had not actually used said machine, had not paid rent on the space where the machine was being stored, had not communicated with anyone whether or not his proposed plans for a radical film collective were actually going to happen because he had done/said nothing for months (if not a year). Instead the radical collective space expropriated his private property ... to the dump.

n.b. i was not in any way involved with the above incident. It was not my space.

I had to do that once, this idiot dragged an abandoned soda cooler from a liquor store back to our place

I've pretty openly despised the police since I was a teenager but this sudden hardline unequivocal push to abolish the police is...something else. I mean, I totally geddit from an emotional perspective but hey maybe just for a start let's repeal the 2nd first because I don't think we're fully considering who's likely to barge their well-armed way into that cop-less void.

I don't even know if this is uncool-ly conservative, necessarily, but I definitely feel out of step with the mad revolutionary rush of the moment in that particular regard.

I've been having some interesting conversations about that lately with people both to the left and right of me. One take I keep hearing is that, at minimum, it's a "negotiating position" like you start with a big ask and work toward something less. I don't totally buy that, because (1) I'm pretty sure most of its advocates don't see it as a negotiating position, and (2) as someone who is involved in a lot of negotiations, it's a lot more nuanced than just "Make really big ask so you can get medium sized thing." I mean, it's right in the sense that you don't start by asking for your end goal (which is what centrist democrats often do, to their own detriment), but it's also not like "I will demand $100 million so that way they will give me $50 million." You have to know "what your case is worth" and you have to be able to convince the other side of what risk they face if they don't accede to your demand (or at least meet you in the middle).

A protest movement mainly has two threats available -- voting and unrest. Will a large city defund its police to avoid rioting? Probably not. Will they do it to avoid getting voted out of office? Not unless you convince them that there are enough voters who will actually vote them out on that issue, which I absolutely do not believe. Jacob Frey knew what he was doing - he knew he faced more risk of getting voted out for saying he would defund the police than for saying he wouldn't.

The other thing is that I have mixed feelings about the communications strategy. I get it on one hand -- #abolishthepolice is catchy and controversial and exciting and will spread. Some of the people who see that and go "What?!" may wind up looking it up and reading more and saying "huh, actually a lot of these ideas sound good." But others are just going to have an absolute kneejerk reaction against it and shut down.

FTR, I'm all about cutting funds and massive reforms and even farming out most/all police duties to more qualified parties with greater oversight. You show me a workable path toward those ends and I'm sold, 100%. It's when people get on the binary tip and shut down conversation and negotiation that my sold-ness wavers. If you ask whether the mayor of a major American city is willing to defund his police department, what response do you honestly expect? It just feels like the good guys have leverage for a change and it's being squandered by pushing too hard and too quickly into underexplored territory.

I appreciate you sharing that, because it does feel like that thing people do when they're at the very height of being against something- they say the solution is the polar opposite full stop. It's the kind of emotionally popular endgame scenario that you have to work backwards to logically justify. And doing that usually involves too many idealistic variables. (Talking specifically about it being taken literally FTR)

xp

actually not "xp", cause I share OL's discomfort.

ah the binary tip

i mean, adrian schoolcraft was just 10 years ago. it hasn't been all that long since the chicago pd had a fucking torture chamber. we are watching police departments across the country beat the shit out of anyone in range. an entire cadre of buffalo american cops refuses to accept that it should be responsible for any of its actions.

and all these cities have democratic mayors, so it's not like voting will make a difference. please delineate your gradual reform plan

A loser like me not being able to perfectly delineate a gradual reform plan right now does not prove anything.

Mookie you do realize that not only are there primaries, but the primary is pretty much the election is democratic cities, right?

Also, the fact that it might be difficult to enact reform doesn’t mean it’s easier to completely abolish the police. It’s almost certainly even harder.

of course none of any of which we speak proves anything!

i suspect, however, that it’s a lot easier to talk about reform when the cops look more like you than their victims do.

I find it a bit stupefying that OL mentioned repealing the 2nd Amendment in this context. Isn't repealing 2A (a good idea!) a similarly hyperbolic rhetorical gambit used to push for tighter gun control...or maybe it's an extreme political position sure to turn off moderates who would otherwise support some, even many forms of GC? And if meant literally, it would be incredibly difficult to make happen politically. The prospect of seeing the Bill of Rights edited in my lifetime is frankly inconceivable.

A lot of the police reforms that people squeamish about abolition bring up are pretty much the equivalent of "ban bump stocks": a totally milquetoast solution that does nothing to address the larger problem and which will be defied/never implemented anyway.

Reading through the twitter thread ShariVari posted in the abolishment thread, I'm realizing my problem is less about being uncool and conservative (as I agree with every single change being proposed) than having rhetorical qualms with that particular phrasing. Contrasted with repeal of the 2nd amendment (which, while admittedly pie in the sky, is quite literally about the end goal of banning all guns), 'abolishment' of the police is, like I said upthread, largely about farming out the necessary functions they're bunglefucking to more appropriate entities. Which from one perspective can be seen as abolishment but from another perspective as something more like radical transformation. It's a nuanced problem and the issue with this particular messaging is that not everyone who's hearing or disseminating the message seems to be picking up on the nuance.

My uncool conservative belief (which I think is very cool and not-at-all conservative) is that activists should focus significant attention on removing SCOTUS authority over the terms with which each state (and DC) issue CCWs, if at all. Repealing the 2nd Amendment is a pie-in-the-sky, but allowing each state to self-determine the terms of how people are legally allowed to carry around guns is not.

Long helpful thread on what it means to abolish the police. There may be other legit interpretations of the phrase, but I think this is pretty spot on.

Do you or somebody you know think that #AbolishThePolice is unrealistic? It might be because you haven’t taken the time to understand what it means, the reasons for it, and why it actually makes a lot of sense. [Thread]

— Bridget Eileen (@TravelingNun) June 4, 2020

I find threads like that well-meaning but a bit grating. There seems to be this constant assumption that if people don't agree with a left policy idea it must be that they simply haven't thought through what it really means and can't possibly have some differing take on it from their lived experience. I mentioned this in the other thread, but my wife teaches in a high school where they have increasingly tried restorative justice approaches. She says that she likes the practice, but that there have been situations where students were violent and calling in cops was the only thing that worked, and that those students often did not respond to the restorative practices and just continued doing what they were doing. I'm talking about serious bodily harm, broken bones, etc. My wife is glad that she has the police to call as a last resort. They may be called too often in some schools. We've all seen videos of police restraining tantruming 7 year olds and that sort of thing and it's abhorrent. But we don't typically see the videos of police breaking up really bad fights that we can't expect teachers or administrators to be capable of breaking up. We don't see videos of police responding when a kid shows up armed. I fundamentally believe that society needs a last-resort option that has a monopoly on force.

And often the people writing those threads *don't* have the lived experience of actually having to figure out to deal with those situations at risk of bodily harm to themselves.

fwiw this was one of the popular responses to that thread:

Friends if you have never thought about abolition until this week you do not need to be posting explainer threads about what it is. Just saw another thread with >50k likes saying we don’t know what police will look like after abolition.

— micah herskind (@MicahHerskind) June 7, 2020

Abolishing the police means abolishing the police and viewing it as ‘abolishing policing as we know it’ is wrong.

Do you or somebody you know think that #AbolishThePolice is unrealistic? It might be because you know what the word abolish means.

TS: #AbolishThePolice vs #PolishThePolice

It’s sort of like the meme that socialism actually just means roads and social services.

I would like to abolish the police.