Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbXWrmQW-OE

See? It's already been tried.

If you get rid of the police what's to stop people from just putting out Sting solo albums?

lawyers?

All the recent, tentative BLM support I’ve seen from small town and outer suburban white folks - after how many years and deaths - goes away immediately if they hear that the big liberal city nearby “abolishes” their police force and telling them to read a twitter thread from a self identified #lbtgqinchrist feminist phd to understand the nuance of the language isn’t going to help.

It sucks but it probably has to be framed in some way where the poor overworked cops are doing too much and shouldn’t be expected to be social workers and mental health counselors and this is why the are acting up - which is totally abuser excuse language but ends / means etc

If you're more interested in gaining broader support for the cause in question than in asserting the moral high ground, it seems like barking 'abolish the police' at people who haven't previously given the proposal much consideration is a nonstarter. You will buttress the support of those who are already onboard while passing over people who may agree with you on every finer point but are wary of what 'abolition' seems to entail. The problem seems to be 100% about messaging, because I'm sure a huge swath of people would get behind most of what's being proposed.

I think it's p hard to know tbh. Abolish ICE seems like it kind of fizzled/went nowhere, and that one is simpler/easier to justify imo. OTOH, these sorts of things don't always progress linearly. Three years ago you might have though Black Lives Matter was dead as a slogan/campaign, yet now it seems to be bigger than ever. Maybe it plants the seed with generations growing up now to shift things when they are older. But I do think "abolish the police" is tough as a campaign because it's immediately going to make most people feel threatened and unsafe and sound off the wall. And joygoat otm that a twitter thread by a radical PhD is going to do about zero to change those people's perceptions.

Everything is completely different in 2020 because of the work done by Black Lives Matter groups starting in 2014, even if they didn’t have the country’s rapt attention for the last few years.

I agree, Old Lunch-- although I don't think it's anybody's place to state how other's should moderate their tone, I do think that a very important part of affecting change like this is people reaching out, one-on-one, to family and friends directly and engaging in thoughtful discussion instead of yelling ACAB in their faces. It has been interesting to see my cop wing of my family, in response to everything that's going on (as well as my out speaking to them) are kind of split on the subject right now, even if the cops themselves are unconvinced. The most encouraging and useful thing, to my mind, is seeing that certain changes have been proposed by certain cities, which not only makes abolition seem less pie-in-the-sky than it may have before, but is also very convincing to in discussions with friends and family members as well as letters to municipal politicians.

while some ppl are inevitably out there straight-forwardly and directly trying to convince anyone and everyone that the police should literally be immediately abolished, the overall effect is to nudge the overton window which starts to influence the soft & sensible middle's thinking, esp the young. ppl aren't just influenced by things they agree with/things that strike them as rational

Here is a pithy three-word slogan that you're not sure you can quite get behind.

Then you hear that you're bad because you're focusing on those three words, instead of the three thousand words that you need to read and internalize so that you can TRULY understand exactly what the three-word slogan does and does not mean?

Okay but. No matter how much I agree with the principle, I am not sure that's how persuasive messaging works. (And, not that it matters much, I have been a professional writer for 30 years.)

I have a t-shirt that says Three Word Slogan fwiw

What do we want? A slogan!
How many words? Three!

It’s the best number of words for a slogan I know of.

“Abortion on demand without apology” is good though, but it might be better if it were just “abortion without apology”.

Pro tip: it's not a three-word slogan if you need to read a thousand words to understand what it actually means

Thx

If only the SDS had better slogans, we coulda ended the Vietnam War so much sooner

I don't think you have to read a thousand words to understand "abolish the police".

I for one actually mean: abolish the police. Do not have police. End police. Fire and do not replace the police.