561–570 of 606 posts
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Except for the fact that this doesn't work at all in practice, it makes perfect sense.
Would you like to provide a source for that?
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The US is an extremely flawed democracy. If the US were a functional democracy then maybe popular will would control the police, but it’s not.
Local police are mostly controlled by local institutions, no? Not sure the quality of US institutions at the national level is all that relevant. Note, I'm not claiming that local police are great. I just think that the situation is probably possible to improve, if we work strategically. BTW, in 2022 the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked US democracy above that of Belgium, Italy, Latvia, Panama, and Singapore: https…
Very imperfectly if at all.
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>Since we’re talking about defunding, not abolishing, what’s your point? Is there a difference? If you defund the police completely, isn't that basically the same as abolishing? If protesters just wanted to reduce police funding, their slogan should have been "reduce police funding" instead of "defund the police". "Reduce police funding" is much less ambiguous. This ties into my point about how energy wasn't being di…
> Is there a difference? If you defund the police completely, isn't that basically the same as abolishing? It’s hard to believe you’re being genuine only because, since the beginning, “defund the police” meant reallocating funds to reduce the amount going to cops. I’d understand if this were the first time you’ve heard of this, but it’s been a slogan for years and has been implemented in enough places that a cursory…
Why so many hits for "defund and abolish?" on e.g. Twitter then?
See https://inverseflorida.substack.com/p/sanewashing-and-how-de...
>So, now say you're someone who exists in a left-adjacent social space, who's taken up specific positions that have arrived to you through an "SJW" space - if these are vital ideas that everyone has to adopt for moral reasons, how do you defend them to people who don't exist in any of your usual social spaces? You don't understand these ideas completely, because you absorbed them through social proof and not by convincing arguments. But they're ones you're confident are right because you were assured there's mass consensus behind them.
>When people are correctly pointing out that the arguments behind the position people around your space are advancing fail, but you're not going to give up the position because you're certain it's right, what are you going to do?
>I'm arguing you're going to sanewash it. And by that I mean, what you do is go "Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]".
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>From what I recall, and this is very rough from the top of my head, one such program to use mental health advocates fueled around 1,000 calls in a year. Out of those I think they in turn requested police backup under 10 times.
Not the number I was asking for. I want to know what % of total police activity has been replaced by counselor/paramedic activity.
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>Multiple cities have already implemented trial programs to replace police services with mental health and EMT professionals to wild success. That's chill, but it doesn't seem nearly as radical as the "abolish the police" slogan? What fraction of police calls have been replaced with mental health/EMT calls in these cities? Suppose someone is suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill -- does Denver now call a mental h…
What a ridiculous comment. You get the tagline hilariously wrong and your example is someone committing a non violent crime that the federal government handles anyway? How many strawmen are you going to use? Do an ounce of research into the existing programs and ideas.
I don't think "defund the police" took off as a meme due to a set of well-considered programs or ideas. https://inverseflorida.substack.com/p/sanewashing-and-how-de...
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In most of the US (if not all - I don't know), off-duty police have the same powers as on-duty police, uniformed or not. That's why people want to hire them. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/when-pol... So if police are allowed to moonlight in other jobs, then they by definition bring those powers to the job - and their legal immunities, and their illegal immunities created by the 'thin blue line'…
Did you read the article? People don't want to hire the off duty police. They are required by law to do it and very unhappy. They want to hire regular bouncers without the power to arrest to work their nightclubs.
In places where it is not required to hire off duty police, they still get hired.
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Just a general tendency of all excessive violence always(ish, I can think of one exception) happening to be against colored people?
You're asking me to believe that this man feels a certain way and committed a racist murder based on a general tendency? Even if I grant you the ridiculous premise that this tendency is real, that line of thinking isn't close to sound. I see I'm getting downvoted here by the typical good dogs, but this has always bothered me about the incident. The racism was presented to us by the media with no explanation, and most…
No, no. This man might have had other motives for his murder too. I’m merely saying a contributing factor is that society (and the law/police in specific) seem to be more accepting of violence when committed against minorities.
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The people who are most affected by reduced policing are the marginalized communities where crime is rampant . He's correct that if you remove police from a well-off suburb not much will happen, because they mainly do tickets and domestics, and who really cares if a couple is fighting? But when police are removed from neighborhoods where crime is an issue, it immediately and directly affects those who live there, and…
Like in San Francisco, where the chief of police states publicly that having your window broken and your parked car trashed is just the price of living there? Like when those big inner cities become food deserts because the retail stores start locking up the toothpaste and cans of soup behind glass cabinets a few months before they close down entirely and move out? You think that those places could get worse than the…
Like, you really believe that? Please tell me you don't. This must be a joke.
SF basically told their police to stop going after small time thieves after 2020. The result has been mass mobs of stores and a huge increase in theft. They voted for these polices to raise the bar at which someone can be prosecuted, so police do nothing.
Jesus, do your research (and not on left wing Twitter lol)
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Are you a troll account? I can't imagine someone being so obtuse, this must be a joke. You continue to paint any pushback as some bad faith, exaggerated caricature in order to support your silly ideas. The fact of the matter is most people trust most police, that is evidenced in polls after polls, in every community.
I've made sarcastic posts before, go through my comment history. But this is one of my most sincere postings, I'm being serious, and I'm trying to point out something that others have trouble discerning and recognizing. I can see how it would be more comfortable for you if you could think me a troll. > You continue to paint any pushback as some bad faith, You should ask yourself why your good faith is so bad for ever…
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> Have you ever been to a small town in America? Outside of a few regions, Walmart is all they have...so that sort of nixes points 2 and 3. Yeah, I've lived in them. My dad was in the AF, and (to save money) my parents would shop on the nearest AF base, which was maybe 30 miles away. They'd go once every 2 weeks or so and fill up the car with groceries. The indisputable point is people prefer to shop at Walmart. Nobo…
It lobbies just like any other corporate giant. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/issues?... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/walmart-lobbyists_b_3632526 On the far right front, here's what I found: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Walmart_and_Politics https://www.ufcw.org/press-releases/new-report-on-political-... > A new report issued Tuesday shows that Walmart and the Walton family that found…
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Would you like to provide a source for that?
The fact that the USA is shockingly violent compared to basically all other similarly developed countries which are not heavily armed.
For reference, more people kill themselves with guns in the USA than are killed by other people with guns. If gun violence were truly a huge problem, you'd think that suicides would be outnumbered by gun murders, but they're not.
The numbers look big because it's a country of 330 million people, but ultimately the number of people killed with guns is pretty low (and it's something that can actually safely be completely ignored if you remove gang-on-gang and drug trade related violence, which is the vast majority of firearms deaths). For example, Obama killed more children with drones in 8 years than children were killed with guns in the USA in 20 years. (In both cases we are talking about absolute figures The "USA has a gun violence problem" is one of those "everybody knows" memes, however, so good luck convincing anyone to the contrary.