I’ve always felt Black Lives Matter should have been named: Black Lives Matter Too
It won’t change the minds of bigots, but it would at least shut down the “All Lives Matter” argument.
This thread always reminds me of this old meme:
I don’t think that meme is necessarily the contradiction it implies.
Suppose a wife finds out that her husband is planning to donate $10,000 to charity. And she berates him, “That’s a lot of money. For $10,000, we could build a patio in our backyard.”
And the husband says, fine, we’ll build that patio.
Wife says, no, I don’t mean we need a patio - we really need to save the money for our kids’ college tuition. I was just saying that a patio would have been more useful than donating the money.
And he says, “Okay, lets save this for the kids’ college tuition.” and she replies, “No, I meant I want a new car.”
“Defund the police” is the worst fucking slogan for any movement in history. It guarantees that it will be used to scare people and drum up support against it. The Republicans couldn’t dream up a better slogan to malign a concept and rally everyone against it even if they came up with the slogan themselves.
But a lot of them would be behind the concept if you sold it as “augment the police” or “re-task the police” or something. Tell them we want to send social workers to all the mental health cases that waste the time of the police so all the police can focus on doing big manly police stuff and they’d be on board.
When the Republicans march, they chant “Jews will not replace us.” Much catchier.
That’s exactly what they did. Those are pretty much exactly the words that were used by Democratic politicians, policy makers, even pundits.
Do you really think so? That was exactly what we said. And they didn’t get on board. I guess we didn’t throw in the “big manly stuff”, but I am assuming you meant that in jest, and not actually as a message that should be sent.
Was that in jest or do you think that that was the part of the message that was missing? Not misogynistic enough, you think?
The slogan is literally “de-fund the police”
If you have to spend the next 2 minutes after chanting your slogan to say “wait, no, it’s not what you think it is, here’s what I mean by it, it’s not as scary as it sounds” then your slogan is fucking terrible. “Defund the police” alone, as a slogan, killed the entire police reform movement. It makes little old ladies think that there will be no more police to come when someone is breaking into her house. Every fucking republican political strategist did a fist-pump when it became clear that “defund the police” was going to become the slogan of the police reform movement because it’s such an obvious case of self-defeat.
Conservatives love authority, they love “law and order”, and for some of them that means they’re just evil and want police to crack the skulls of people the republicans don’t like. But a lot of them actually believe in the mythology of the brave, good, noble law enforcement officer and can be convinced by saying “we’re trying to let the police focus on the stuff police are good for, and augment them by giving them help by not forcing them to do the stuff that’s not really police work” and you’d get those people on board. You say “defund the police” and those people are now completely against you and will fight you with every ounce of their being.
“Defund the police” is almost certainly going to be the biggest defeat of the police reform movement in decades. Here we were at a point in time where we could’ve really mobilized public sentiment into police reform and not only was it squandered but it actively made people more entrenched and more hostile towards police reform, and actually boosted support for the police radicalizing and militarizing and cracking down on people. As we descend into a more brutal police state “defund the police” is going to be a significant cause of it.
Yeah, even someone who agrees with the goal (like me) hears that slogan and is likely to instantly tune out because those are goddamn nutbags talking about crazypants stuff. ‘Defund the Police’ sounds like a slogan from some extreme libertarian that wants no government involvement in anything and doesn’t want the police to exist because they’re a tool of violence from the government or some nonsense.
I paid ZERO attention to anything about ‘defund the police’ for WEEKS after I heard the slogan because of that, and had there been any sort of vote I obviously would have voted against it. I had no interest in taking even ten seconds to try to understand, because it was so obviously nonsensical.
And since the slogan caught on and has become a major thing in the police reform movement, I agree that it has set back police reform by years or decades. So anyone who tries to ‘explain’ it, anyone who even so much as uses that term, utters that phrase, or gives any credibility whatsoever to those who do…I want nothing to do with them. I want them to go away, crawl in a hole, and feel terrible about the fact that they have likely been significant contributors to making the situation worse, out of their sheer idiotic incompetence as far as communicating their intentions goes.
There are a whole lot of things in the universe that are obviously nonsensical at first glance, but which are nevertheless true.
Writing off anything and everything that doesn’t make sense when first hearing of it makes it really hard to learn anything.
The problem is that Defund the Police makes perfect sense. It just that to most people it means abolish the police rather than reform the police. If I was holding a sign up outside a school board meeting that read “Defund Public Education” are you likely to think I want to reform public education or end it?
I read a post today that argued that conservatives could be made to accept, even endorse, higher taxes on the wealthy if the point were communicated that many wealthy Americans are liberals. People like Gates, Zuckerberg, Soros, Buffett, the Obamas and Clintons, Hollywood celebrities, pro athletes, etc.
Since many Republicans are motivated by a desire to hit people different than them, this could make higher taxes on the wealthy much more palatable.
What do you mean by “The slogan”?
Whose slogan?
Yes, but it is not my slogan. It is not Biden’s slogan. It was a slogan that some people chanted as they protested.
Yes, but it was not the slogan of the police reform movement.
Then why do you keep repeating it long after anyone else has?
Yes, but who did you hear it from?
I mean, that’s your right to do, but it pretty much means that you chose your ignorance
Did you even take ten seconds to see who was actually saying it?
But it hasn’t. The only ones repeating it are right wing media that want you to think that it is a prominent democratic slogan. They know that you shut down your ears and your brain whenever you hear it, so they repeat it over and over again, just for that reason.
You miss quite a bit when you choose to be ignorant.
Do you feel terrible about the contribution that your willful ignorance has done to make the situation worse?
Agreed, although we are probably coming at it from different angles. This year was absolutely ripe for true police reform. And contrary to other posters, many on the left doubled down when asked if they wanted to get rid of police. Yes, indeed they said, and many posters on here even talked about sending counselors out to domestic battery complaints and having meter maid equivalents enforcing speeding violations. Some things I think we could all agree on:
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No more military equipment. The founding fathers didn’t want standing armies, and it does no good to have standing armies that we simply call a police force.
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Get rid of overly broad and needless laws. Too many things are criminal. Pare them down to things which truly cause harm or breaches the peace. No more speed traps. Have speed limits reflect the speed the public drives and not what you want them to drive.
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Get rid of pretexts stops. I know the Supreme Court has upheld them, but that doesn’t meant that states cannot pass laws prohibiting them. No more pulling someone over when they have a license plate frame because it is “obstructing the view” of the plate, or when they have a pair of dice hanging from the rearview mirrors they are driving with an obstructed view. We may not agree on this, but no more seat belt laws and cell phone laws, and ticky tack stuff which largely doesn’t hurt people in the moment. Let people be free to make mistakes.
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Be Andy instead of Barney. Don’t use the taser first. Try to talk the guy down. Sure, if your life or safety is in danger, then shoot the guy, but leave the equipment for after you have used your tongue.
Instead of anything sensible that would get pretty widespread support, we get “defund the police” and further get blamed for believing that it is exactly what it says it is: a) police or any other group needs funding, b) we defund them, therefore c) they no longer exist. If that wasn’t the intention, then don’t use words that mean exactly that. It has set back police reform for a generation.
People are saying, eh?
I really want to drive by the elementary school at 90 while kids are going to school.
From who?
Or for not listening when it is explained.
Tell me what politician used those words.
Yes, because the right was looking for excuses to do so, not because some protestors used some words.
Gun Control - Tell conservatives that when a person is shot, the bullet is illegally immigrating into their body.
My favorite is when there was a pharmacist in Kentucky(?) who shot an armed robber in his store, and someone commented on YouTube, “He saw that the robber had a metal deficiency.”
Sure, it logically makes sense. But people aren’t logical.
Conservatives see the police kill an unarmed black man and they think “Liberal media inciting racial conflict over an edge case”.
Liberals see the police kill an unarmed black man and they thing “ongoing systematic racism”.
Liberals go out and protest the injustice. Some left wing anarchists take it upon themselves to throw Molotov cocktails at police cars and stores.
Conservatives view calls for police reform as a threat to the very thing that protects them from the sort of left wing anarchists who throw Molotov cocktails.
More broadly, neither side is going to “sell things differently” to the other side because many of their positions are mutual exclusive polar opposites:
- You can’t be for both lowering taxes and raising taxes
- You can’t be for defunding the police and funding more police
- You can’t be pro-choice and anti-abortion
- You can’t be both racist and not racist
At best you can have a system where both sides are represented and have an opportunity to trade poker chips for what they really care about. That’s a bit tough when you have social media and 24 hour news whipping each side into a frenzy by painting the other side as Nazis (which isn’t helped by having one side actually waving around Nazi imagery).
People have been calling for “police reform” for over 100 years. Sure we got some improvement prior to WWII (a lot of early police forces were literal criminal gangs). But for the last 30 years we got militarization and kill training. People have been calling to “defund the police” for less than a year, and we have major reforms at least proposed. Defund the police has had a much bigger impact, the same way the marches and riots of the 60s had a much bigger impact then white clergy who criticized MLK for acting “unwisely and untimely” ever could.
Oh my god. That would never fly with most conservatives. In fact, an anti-abortion common talking point among conservatives is that Margaret Sanger was trying to exterminate blacks, and hey, conservatives hate blacks, don’t they? Abortion runs deeper with these people than winning elections. Hell, conservatives could theoretically siphon off some democrats by downplaying their abortion stance.
I’m sure all of the people who are decrying the negative effect of that slogan on the “police reform movement” have a long record of being actively involved in that movement.