For the groups that use it to mean abolish the police, it’s at least accurate.
For the groups that use it to mean redirect 50% of the police budget over to other departments, then it’s very inaccurate.
Intelligent allocation of resources is good. Poor communication is bad.
Do you think I am a republican?
Are republican’s the only ones that think communication should be clear and not misleading? Rush Limbaugh was one of the most annoying people I’ve ever heard or read for this exact reason, inaccurate and misleading communication.
So, anyone remember when armed insurrectionists took over federal property in Oregon? I do. Remember how the feds put on their military gear and stormed the place en masse to prevent the destruction of federal property? No, because they didn’t do that. They waited them out and negotiated for weeks and weeks, before they ambushed the leaders off-site. And even after that, they didn’t take action against the remaining occupiers, they just waited them out and let them leave.
I think it’s easy, when watching the clips of the violent incidents during the protest, to think — “Where are the cops, why aren’t they making arrests?”. But we are well into the 21st century and in general, cops don’t come storming in armed with a show of force . Instead, they go through video footage in the following days and issue warrants and make arrests based on that footage. That’s what they did at Charlottesville. That’s what they did when Erdogan’s security forces attacked protesters. It’s all situational to some extent but the equation has always been to not risk injuries or deaths just to protect property. That is, until now.
It kind of struck me that maybe people who spend their lives fighting federal government overreach might not be totally cool with militarized federal troops storming cities, even liberal ones, just because Trump.
So I thought “I wonder if the Bundy’s have anything to say about this? And I found this video of Ammon Bundy throwing his support behind Defund the Police and Black Lives Matter and ripping his fellow “patriots” as hateful and divisive. Wow. Strange bedfellows and the enemy of my enemy and all that.
I think you, and many many other people, very likely have (or had) a distorted idea of what “defund the police” means, due in no small part to facists and republican spinmasters.
And while there are no three-word slogans that are clear and not misleading, “defund the police” has the interesting property of being 100% accurate. It’s not the whole action plan, of course. But it is the important part of the action plan - because the problem being corrected is that when it comes to interacting with anybody who’s not a violent criminal, american police organizations, in general, suck ass. So focusing on the part people care about - that in many contexts police are a problem, that makes it a good slogan.
But, sure, dilute the message rather than educating people. It’s not like changing the name will result in anybody actually understanding it better; it’ll just be less memorable and get less traction.
I first heard the term from protesters, my immediate thought was “that’s ridiculous, defund means to eliminate all funding, but there are bad guys, we do still need police.”
At some point I looked up from various website that support the current protests and found a couple different definitions. For some people it meant to abolish the police department. For some people it meant something substantially less. Like in Seattle it now generally means a 50% cut.
You think it means a 96% cut, so that’s a third definition.
At no point were republican spinmasters involved in my information gathering, that’s not my style to go to the source that it most likely to be misleading, I try to choose the opposite.
Being more accurate is not diluting. And being less accurate is the opposite of educating.
There’s nothing particularly meaningful about that 96%, by the way, so there’s no third definition. There are two ‘definitions’: reduce the funding and use it to fund appropriate alternative services, and reduce the funding and just let everything go to pot, anarchy style. Though I’m not certain that people who use the latter definition know what they’re talking about.
I doubt it’s difficult to find people expounding while not knowing what they’re talking about.
And “Divest and re-invest” educates you greatly, huh? In any sort of reasonable world we don’t expect slogans and labels to be dissertations explaining the entire policy; we expect people to get off their butts and find out what the discussion is. But this slogan (and Black Lives Matter) are special.
It is special in how bad it is. I don’t think I’ve seen or heard one on any side (left or right) that created as much confusion or was as unlikely to sway the “swayable” public. (that is the goal right?)
I do take responsibility for what my brain did, this is a slow motion re-play:
1 - Check my memory for the definition of the word - hmm, it means to eliminate funding
2 - Check my experiences with the usage of the word - hmm, the only way I’ve ever seen it used is related to complete elimination of funding for some department or program or whatever
It’s notable in that it is clearly more interested in rallying the oppressed than fooling the uninvolved. (Both “pro-choice” and “pro-life” are vague, but their vagueness makes them sound better to the uninformed.) It speaks to the idea that the people championing the phrase don’t think that the disaffected masses are on their side or likely will be.
Look, you can argue all you want that you like the term, but you can’t change reality by posting on a message board.
Here are some definitions from multiple sources:
“Prevent from continuing to receive funds.”
“to withdraw funding from”
“to stop providing the money to pay for something”
“to stop providing funds”
“To stop the flow of funds to”
“to remove the funds from (a person, organization, or scheme)”
…I haven’t actually argued (in this exchange) that “I like the term.” And I haven’t tried to “change reality” whatever the fuck that means.
Huh. None of those definitions include the word “complete” and “elimination” on those definitions. So why did your brain conflate “defund the police” with “complete elimination of funding for the police” again?
And you haven’t provided any sources for your definitions, so I don’t know if you’ve cited reputable dictionaries or just a random person on twitter.
LOL. You convinced me. All of of the dictionary definitions are clearly wrong and every news report I’ve read in my adult life about things like people trying to defund planned parenthood and other programs, all of that was incorrect.
I’ve been fooled by some secretive conspiracy that prevented me from ever encountering the real definition or usage of the term defund.
Now you’ve got me wondering, which other terms do I have completely wrong: orange? banana? Lucky Charms?
I’ll admit, this is challenging given that I am fighting through the fog of confusion due to the secret conspiracy that has been working against me, so maybe “stop” doesn’t mean what I think it means.
I was raised that “stop” meant to come to a complete stop, kind of like a stop sign, or a stop light, or a pit stop, but now you’ve got me questioning that.
…I think that its simply a failure of nuanced understanding on your part. Defund can mean elimination, but not necessarily so. And it only takes a few seconds of googling to determine that defund means withdrawal of some funding, not complete elimination of funding. Complete elimination of funding would mean the complete elimination of the police, but this isn’t what the movement is fighting for. It is specific to funding because…well have you seen the NYPD budget lately? Did you know they have a NYPD has “embedded intelligence officers in 13 locations including London, Paris, Jerusalem, Amman, Madrid, Toronto, and as far away as Sydney?” That they routinely make arrests at the end of their shift in order to accrue overtime?
Defunding these things is not complete elimination of funding and isn’t the complete elimination of the police.
TLDR, you’ve been proven to be completely wrong, and all you’ve got left is to attempt to mock me. Gotcha.
You do get that most peoples understanding of the word “stop” is subjective, and the reason why the term “complete stop” is used (when talking about things like stop signs) is to differentiate it from more ambiguous usage of the word?
We know what “defund the police” means because the people advocating for “defund the police” have told us what it means. If they had meant to say “completely defund the police” then that is what they would have said. It is understandable for you to have been initially confused. But you know better now. There is no excuse for you to continue to conflate the two.