• fishnwhistle420 [he/him]
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    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Defund The Police sounds awesome to people like us, but to your average liberal/apolitical person I don’t think they fully understand how much of their municipal budget goes to the police in the first place, and how it could be redirected to schools and social programs etc. It was too easy for the right wing to take that slogan and make it sound like the left just wanted total chaos and legalized murder in the streets or whatever, because anarchism = chaos in the average persons mind

    • MalarchoBidenism [he/him]
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      2 years ago

      Something I've noticed is that a lot of leftists seem totally unaware of how reasonable leftist positions might be wrongly perceived by non-leftists.

      "Defund/abolish the police", "the Holodomor is nazi propaganda", "dictatorship of the proletariat", etc. There's a ton of these. It feels like every six months I see a Twitter thread about what exactly leftists mean when they say "stab babies with a fork unironically" and how it's actually very good and reasonable stuff and not at all what it sounds like from the scary slogan.

    • Catherine_Steward [she/her]
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      2 years ago

      I dislike the Defund the Police slogan for the opposite reason: It is far too easy for useless spineless liberals to "um actually" it down into pointlessness. "We don't actually want chaos and anarchy, we love the police, we just think they should be better trained so they can get by without so much equipment!"

      Fuck that. Abolish the police. No compromise. I won't be happy while there is a single cop left in the country.

      • ssjmarx [he/him]
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        edit-2
        2 years ago

        I'm with you. Slogans like "abolish the police/cia/fbi" seem like crank politics in the current context, but consider that until about a hundred years ago "votes for women" was seen as crank politics in much of the world. You have to introduce radical ideas to people, and you have to understand that it will take some time for those ideas to catch on - but eventually you reach a tipping point where so many people are saying it that it's not a radical idea anymore.

        Libs who complain about the slogans of radicals are just trying to be tactful in saying that they don't support that goal. "Oh of course I don't like it when innocent people are gunned down by government death squads, but I don't want to get rid of the death squads entirely!"

    • Presents [none/use name]
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      2 years ago

      I thought crushing the chuds by taking away their protection squad and allowing the underclass to take what it wanted was the whole idea behind defunding the police