Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

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.

I certainly haven't read so much as a thousand words about it. If you need to read a lot of words to believe that ceasing to have police is both possible and good, you should read them!

Cool, silby, rock on with your bad self, but the twit thread that Moodles linked to literally said:

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.

Which I take to mean: apparently lots of people need more than three words to grasp the true meaning of those three words. Which means it is no longer a three-word slogan. Which is what I am trying to communicate.

It's cool and shit that you have so much certainty. But you could maybe reflect that there might be people who are a bit wary of signing up for that full unalloyed agenda? Just sayin.

No matter how much I may personally agree with the sentiment, it's hard to take implementation seriously when a request for further details is met with a 'Just Do It (Nike swoosh)'. Like the news out of Minneapolis rn is a little more fleshed out than 'Yeah, we're abolishing our police force. Just tossing them out. Buh-bye, coppers!'

Let’s give it a few hours

To me the messaging feels like...

-The fridge is obviously not working.
-Can we repair the fridge?
-We as a household keep sort of trying but nobody seems motivated enough. We need to just throw the fridge out at this point.
-Right and get a new one that works?
-No.
-No? We need a fridge.
-Fridges don't work. They're too big, they require too much energy and frankly have too many features and are relied on too heavily.
-But aside from those and all of the concerns we're dealing with still how do we manage the primary function of the fridge?
-Well we need to do away with fridges as we know them.
-Will whatever that means keep food from spoiling?
-It’s not about establishing some kind of unrealistic utopia where food just magically stays fresh. An ideal kitchen will still have food that turns, sours and expires. But "fridges" in that house will be SO different from everything that we assume needs to be true about fridges today that we might not even recognize them as “fridges” because our concept of refrigeration is so twisted and wrong and messed up. If you do support doing away with the fridge, educate yourself on why this is reasonable and what that could look like.
-Yeah but...

That End of Policing book she links in the twitter thread claims to cover: "[...]places where the robust implementation of policing alternatives—such as legalization, restorative justice, and harm reduction—has led to a decrease in crime, spending, and injustice." I would surprised if those scenarios also had absolutely no police force as well.

I feel ya on the messaging, but the analogy breaks down a bit when you get rid of your fridge but then unauthorized people want to break into your house and haphazardly chill your food for you (whether you like it or not) while also occasionally killing your children, taking your valuables, and sexually assaulting you

No I totally acknowledge that! That sort of refrigeration service is definitely way over the line, I'm not about to ignore those issues, but if totally abolished I'd still be worried about my milk turning?

Or did I misread you- you said after getting rid of the fridge?

a better analogy is that cops are like guns, ostensibly for self-defense but end up killing/maiming a lot of ppl in the process and also fascists love them

I know what I need my fridge for. I don’t believe I need the cops for anything, and if I’ve been unwittingly relying on them for a certain amount of comfort I’ll give up the comfort.

Isn't that thinking of things a little too anecdotally? Also are you libertarian?

I mean I didn’t come up with the analogy

I’m just drawing contrasts between cops and refrigerators

I was ignoring the fridge analogy with those questions.

i feel a john oliver bit coming on

"I don’t believe I need the cops for anything, and if I’ve been unwittingly relying on them for a certain amount of comfort I’ll give up the comfort."

Was referring to that.