American Politics IX: Winter is Coming

[Spirit of Hope]

ICE should be abolished. Borders should be opened.

Also we should abolish a bunch of other things while we are at it, just a short-list off the top of my head: FBI, DoHS, CIA, NSA, DEA, Police, Prison, Marriage, Billionaires, Landlords, and so on...

Abolish marriage? What about LGBT marriages? Aren't we literally fighting to protect that right?

There probably arguing for abolishing government involvement with marriage, so that the government has no say in who gets married to who. Thus allowing people to marry whoever they want, and offering more freedom.

[Comerciante]

Reagan was terrible. Eisenhower, JFK, and Truman are far better than Reagan

Therm, it t doesn't make you right, but it doesn't make you wrong. It doesn't make me and us right, but it doesn't make me and us wrong. In Politics no one is right and no one is wrong.

You have said some things that have made my head hurt quite often, some things have been more outrageous than others, and to be honest this is actually rather mild in comparison to others.

But for some reason this to me is above all the other things, the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

[Dogmeat]

Therm, it t doesn't make you right, but it doesn't make you wrong. It doesn't make me and us right, but it doesn't make me and us wrong. In Politics no one is right and no one is wrong.

You have said some things that have made my head hurt quite often, some things have been more outrageous than others, and to be honest this is actually rather mild in comparison to others.

But for some reason this to me is above all the other things, the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

The comet's not real guys. Don't look up!

[Maricarland]

I think public housing should be available, but only for those who make under a certain amoint of money and don't have insurance or medicaid. They should also be alble to pass a drug test. Public housing should be state funded, not federally funded, and there will be no rent raises and evictions only in extreme situations. We should also expand Medicaid to everyone who does not have insurance.

Means testing, demeaning and onerous requirements (like drug tests and work requirements), and making aspects of the social safety net and public goods and services conditional, are all bad ideas for many reasons: off the top of my head some of those reasons are the cost of the bureaucracy, the burden of proving someone meets the conditions may disincentive people who legitimately need the service, it is easier to miss people who legitimately need the service, it creates animosity between those who are allowed public housing and those who are not, etc...

Also, people who use drugs recreationally, or people who have drug addictions need housing too, why would we deny housing to someone just because they use drugs?

[Flanderstan]

ICE should be abolished. Borders should be opened.

Also we should abolish a bunch of other things while we are at it, just a short-list off the top of my head: FBI, DoHS, CIA, NSA, DEA, Police, Prison, Marriage, Billionaires, Landlords, and so on...

If you get rid of law enforcement, corporations gangs or the mob will fill the void. And il bet that you will hate them alot more than the police.

[Maricarland]

ICE should be abolished. Borders should be opened.

Also we should abolish a bunch of other things while we are at it, just a short-list off the top of my head: FBI, DoHS, CIA, NSA, DEA, Police, Prison, Marriage, Billionaires, Landlords, and so on...

Abolish marriage? What about LGBT marriages? Aren't we literally fighting to protect that right?

Marriage abolition is also sometimes called marriage privatization. What it means is that the government should not be officially recognizing any marriage, marriage should not confer any special rights or privileges or benefits that non-married people don't have. People would still be free to have their own marriage ceremonies and traditions if they want, but what marriage means is completely up to the parties getting married (they would draw up their own marriage contracts, including the terms to dissolve the marriage). The government would not be in the marriage business anymore and able to tell same-sex couples or polycules that they cannot get married. The only role the government will have is to prevent forced marriages.

[Antipatros]

U.S. consumer inflation soars to new 40-year high

CPI is 7.0% YOY, core CPI is 5.5% YOY.

[Flanderstan]

Abolish marriage? What about LGBT marriages? Aren't we literally fighting to protect that right?

There probably arguing for abolishing government involvement with marriage, so that the government has no say in who gets married to who. Thus allowing people to marry whoever they want, and offering more freedom.

If you hate marrige so much dont get married.

[The Jamesian Republic]

Abolish marriage? What about LGBT marriages? Aren't we literally fighting to protect that right?

There probably arguing for abolishing government involvement with marriage, so that the government has no say in who gets married to who. Thus allowing people to marry whoever they want, and offering more freedom.

I think the only regulations the government should have about marriage is age. 18 years or older to be married.

[Maricarland]

If you get rid of law enforcement, corporations gangs or the mob will fill the void. And il bet that you will hate them alot more than the police.

1. The police are already a gang, just they get to be the gang with the "legitimate" use of coercive force, and at the top of their gang leadership is the state and the wealthy. I actually describe something similar in the anti-police protests and riots thread (and I think my comment where I describe this is still the most recent comment, if you want a more detailed explanation of this).

2. I did not say get rid of law enforcement, I said get rid of police. The police are a class of people with power over others and whose objective is not the prevent, minimize, and heal harm, but to maintain the power of the state and capitalism, and they will respond to harmful elements only insofar as it affects the power of the state and capitalism. We can develop alternative forms of law enforcement without creating police.

[Maricarland]

There probably arguing for abolishing government involvement with marriage, so that the government has no say in who gets married to who. Thus allowing people to marry whoever they want, and offering more freedom.

If you hate marrige so much dont get married.

I don't hate marriage, though I personally don't want to and have no intention of getting married. The abolition of marriage is not about telling people they cannot get married, it is about abolishing marriage as a specific legal status with its own restrictions (like how many people are getting married, or what their genders are), benefits, privileges, and rights. The only role the government should play in marriage is preventing forced marriages.

P.S. A consensual arranged marriage where all parties consent and desire an arranged marriage is not a forced marriage.

[Flanderstan]

If you get rid of law enforcement, corporations gangs or the mob will fill the void. And il bet that you will hate them alot more than the police.

1. The police are already a gang, just they get to be the gang with the "legitimate" use of coercive force, and at the top of their gang leadership is the state and the wealthy. I actually describe something similar in the anti-police protests and riots thread (and I think my comment where I describe this is still the most recent comment, if you want a more detailed explanation of this).

2. I did not say get rid of law enforcement, I said get rid of police. The police are a class of people with power over others and whose objective is not the prevent, minimize, and heal harm, but to maintain the power of the state and capitalism, and they will respond to harmful elements only insofar as it affects the power of the state and capitalism. We can develop alternative forms of law enforcement without creating police.

Like what? The Mob? Social Workers? If im getting robbed, I don't want a fucking social worker I want a cop with a gun. The police are not a gang. Gangs are informal criminal orginizations. The police are duly authorized by the city they work for to protect people from criminals and defend stability. The wealthy have nothing to do with it. If democrats want us to live under a system of constant fear beacuse there is no law enforcement in the traditional sense of the word, then they should make it easier to acquire guns.

[Maricarland]

1. The police are already a gang, just they get to be the gang with the "legitimate" use of coercive force, and at the top of their gang leadership is the state and the wealthy. I actually describe something similar in the anti-police protests and riots thread (and I think my comment where I describe this is still the most recent comment, if you want a more detailed explanation of this).

2. I did not say get rid of law enforcement, I said get rid of police. The police are a class of people with power over others and whose objective is not the prevent, minimize, and heal harm, but to maintain the power of the state and capitalism, and they will respond to harmful elements only insofar as it affects the power of the state and capitalism. We can develop alternative forms of law enforcement without creating police.

Like what? The Mob? Social Workers? If im getting robbed, I don't want a fucking social worker I want a cop with a gun. The police are not a gang. Gangs are informal criminal orginizations. The police are duly authorized by the city they work for to protect people from criminals and defend stability. The wealthy have nothing to do with it. If democrats want us to live under a system of constant fear beacuse there is no law enforcement in the traditional sense of the word, then they should make it easier to acquire guns.

The police do not protect and serve the people. I mentioned earlier that I posted this following exchange in the anti-police protests and riots thread, but I think that this conversation warrants the reposting of it here to illustrate my point about the police.

I came across this post on the antiwork sub-reddit, and thought it would be a good idea to repost it here. It is about someone's experience in the police academy, and why police are corrupt.

posted by Difficult Algae

The Police Will Never Change In America. My experience in police academy.

Throwaway for obvious reasons. If you feel If i'm just bitter due to my dismissal please call me out on it as I need a wake up call.

Over the fall semester I was a police recruit at a Community Colleges Police Academy in a midwestern liberal city. I have always wanted to be a police officer, and I felt like I could help kickstart a change of new wave cops. I am passionate about community oriented policing, making connections with the youth in policing, and changing lives on a individual level. I knew police academy would be mentally and physically challenging, but boy oh boy does policing need to change.

Instructors taught us to view citizens as enemy combatants, and told us we needed a warrior mindest and that we were going into battle everyday. It felt like i was joining a cult. Instructors told us supporting our fellow police officers were more important than serving citizens. Instructors told us that we were joining a big bad gang of police officers and that protecting the thin blue line was sacred. Instructors told us George Floyd wasn't a problem and was just one bad officer. I tried to push back on some of these ideas and posed to an instructor that 4 other officers watched chauvin pin floyd to the ground and did nothing, and perhaps they did nothing because they were trained in academy to never speak agaisnt a senior officer. I was told to "shut my fucking face, and that i had no idea what i was talking about.

Sadly, Instructors on several occasions, and most shockingly in the first week asked every person who supported Black Lives Matter to raise their hands. I and about a third of the class did. They told us that we should seriously consider not being police officers if we supported anti cop organizations. They told us BLM was a terrible organization and to get out if we supported them. Instructors repeatedly made anti lgbt comments and transphobic comments.

Admittedly I was the most progressive and put a target on my back for challenging instructor viewpoints. This got me disciplined, yelled at, and made me not want to be a cop. We had very little training on de-escalation and community policing. We had no diversity or ethics training.

Despite all this I made it to the final day. I thought if I could just get through this I could get hired and make a difference in the community as a cop and not be subject to academy paramilitary crap. The police academy dismissed me on the final day because I failed a PT test that I had passed multiple times easily in the academy leading up to this day. I asked why I failed and they said my push up form was bad and they were being more strict know it was the final. I responded saying if you counted my pushups in the entrance and midterm tests than they should count now. I was dismissed on the final day of police academy and have to take a whole academy over again. I have no plan to retake the whole academy and I feel like quality police officers are dismissed because they dont fit the instructors cookie cutter image of a warrior police officer and the instructors can get rid of them with saying their form doesn't count on a subjective sit up or push up test. I was beyond tears and bitterly disappointed. Maybe policing is just that fucked in america.



can a mod verify I went to a academy to everyone saying im lying

And here is my response to them, though I was a little tired so I may have been rambling a little bit

The problem is that policing will always involve giving some group of people (the police officers) power over another group of people (the citizens), and that power forms inherently unequal castes and attracts authoritarian personalities.

The very function of police is not to protect and serve the community, that is simply how they dress it up. The function of the police (and the military) are to serve as the force behind the law, the state's monopoly on legitimate violence is exercised through the police, and it is exercised to protect the power of the state and private property (private property, such as housing being withheld from the people unless the landlord gets rent from the people who live there, or when workers must do as the employer says without making their own decisions, or when people are denied access to farmland to grow their own food, and so on... only exists because the small group of people who hold papers that say they own that private property have the police and military to enforce their claim over the wider population).

When they say protect and serve, they mean protect and serve the state and the capitalist owner/investor/hoarder/employer class. They only enforce the law in so far as they need to in order to maintain the power of the state, which is why you often see powerful elites get away with breaking the law (unless it was a particularly egregious case and they needed to sacrifice an elite to continue to maintain an image of legitimacy). This is also why when native American women go missing, the police say there is nothing they can do, but when a factory owner reports a break-in at their factory they can find the person in matter of days or even hours. To maintain the power of the state, they must maintain the social order that marginalizes whoever is marginalized in any given society, be they marginalized because of race, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender presentation, mental illness, disability, neurodiversity, religion or lack thereof, language, class, lifestyle, occupation, and so on... Police and prison will always target the marginalized, they may do so on slightly better ways in some societies, but ultimately if they do not target the marginalized in some way they will fail and it will be noticed by politicians and investors and so on... who have the political influence to replace the existing institution with one more to their liking, which whether they are consciously aware of it or not will target the marginalized.

The police and prison system is incapable of actually helping people, because people who deviate from social expectations (like the LGBTQIA+, or the neurodivergent, or the disabled more generally, and so on...), or work expectations, or ethical expectations (such as people who have done actual harm to others) are not easily controllable or manageable, their existence threatens the power structure of the state and the capitalist, unless they can be made to serve those power structures in some way or otherwise co-opted. These people are not seen as human beings in many cases by the police and prison system. The police are not interested in learning what caused someone to commit sexual crimes, or violent crimes, or otherwise serious crimes, they are not interested in societal changes that could prevent these crimes and help people who are more predisposed to commit these crimes live healthy and crime-free lives, they are not interested in the severity of a crime or if it was victimless or not, they are not interested in the needs of the victims or the offenders or the community at large after harm has been done, they are not interested in accountability, or rehabilitation, or restoration, or transformation, or healing, or freedom, or a society free of crime (or at least with minimal levels of crime).

We must abolish the police and prison. Societies have lived without police and prison before. Some Native American societies had a system where the whole community must take responsibility for a crime committed against members of a different village, leading them to be accountable for each other and to help and guide each other to not commit such offenses, and if an offense did occur there would be discussion about what can be done for, or given to the victims to prevent their wrath. This is of course just one example. There are many others, and I am sure we can invent new forms of law enforcement and ways of preventing, responding to, and addressing harm. Human are very creative and have lived in literally thousands of different social structures, but over the last couple centuries, especially under capitalism, our political and economic imaginations have stagnated, and it will take time to build back our collective political imaginations - but police and prisons do not make us safer, they make us less safe, and we would be better off getting rid of them regardless if we have an immediate replacement ready or not (we cannot start healing our society till we stop the bleeding).

[Flanderstan]

Again thats not gonna work. People are inherently evil and will take advantage of lack of authority keeping them in line. Robbery, murder, and rape will florsih if there are no police making sure people do not do these things.

[Vassenor]

Again thats not gonna work. People are inherently evil and will take advantage of lack of authority keeping them in line. Robbery, murder, and rape will florsih if there are no police making sure people do not do these things.

Is that why NYPD strikes made crime go down?

[Flanderstan]

Again thats not gonna work. People are inherently evil and will take advantage of lack of authority keeping them in line. Robbery, murder, and rape will florsih if there are no police making sure people do not do these things.

Is that why NYPD strikes made crime go down?

You again.

[San Lumen]

Again thats not gonna work. People are inherently evil and will take advantage of lack of authority keeping them in line. Robbery, murder, and rape will florsih if there are no police making sure people do not do these things.

People are not inherently evil. I firmly believe in the Anne Frank quote "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

[Ifreann]

1. The police are already a gang, just they get to be the gang with the "legitimate" use of coercive force, and at the top of their gang leadership is the state and the wealthy. I actually describe something similar in the anti-police protests and riots thread (and I think my comment where I describe this is still the most recent comment, if you want a more detailed explanation of this).

2. I did not say get rid of law enforcement, I said get rid of police. The police are a class of people with power over others and whose objective is not the prevent, minimize, and heal harm, but to maintain the power of the state and capitalism, and they will respond to harmful elements only insofar as it affects the power of the state and capitalism. We can develop alternative forms of law enforcement without creating police.

Like what? The Mob? Social Workers? If im getting robbed, I don't want a fucking social worker I want a cop with a gun.

Why? As in, why a cop with a gun? Why not anyone with a gun? Why not one of your neighbours?

The police are not a gang. Gangs are informal criminal orginizations. The police are duly authorized by the city they work for to protect people from criminals and defend stability. The wealthy have nothing to do with it.

The largest form of theft, in terms of dollars lost, is wage theft. Employers not respecting contractual and statutory requirements for overtime pay or paid sick leave or sometimes just outright stealing a worker's wages. Do you know what the police do to combat these unlawful practices? Nothing at all. Why would they? As you say, the police defend stability, and there is nothing destabilising about your boss keeping the wages you are owed. Is that a good situation to defend?

If democrats want us to live under a system of constant fear beacuse there is no law enforcement in the traditional sense of the word, then they should make it easier to acquire guns.

Democrats don't want to abolish the police.

[Flanderstan]

People need authority to keep them in line and to work for the good of society. Im tired of hearing MSNBC, CNN, FOX, PBS, OANN, every god damned politican and even people online bitching about "muh rights".

Muh right to get abortion (murder children)
Muh right to not wear a mask (get others sick with deadly pandemic spawn)
Muh right to guns (perpetuate gun violence)
Muh right to not get vaccinated (right to make the pandemic worse.

These arn't really rights and are whats wrong with this country and world.

There needs to be someone enforcing the rules. You cant play football without refs.

[Flanderstan]

Again thats not gonna work. People are inherently evil and will take advantage of lack of authority keeping them in line. Robbery, murder, and rape will florsih if there are no police making sure people do not do these things.

People are not inherently evil. I firmly believe in the Anne Frank quote "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

Ever read thomas hobbes?

[Comerciante]

Again thats not gonna work. People are inherently evil and will take advantage of lack of authority keeping them in line. Robbery, murder, and rape will florsih if there are no police making sure people do not do these things.

That's a load edgy of crockshit.

People aren't inherently anything but what they are made to be by the environment around them. Of course, there are exceptions, but there are exceptions to everything.

This idea disproves itself every day someone decides to wake up and not be a little shit.

[Untecna]

The ability to own guns in the United States should not be a right but a privilege that you may lose.

We should implement a stronger system to ensure no one that should not be able to purchase a gun or own a gun has one.

We do not need people owning certain weapons, and there needs to be a legitimate reason for an individual to own the weapon.

Despite my staunch socialist stance, I do not believe is is yet necessary to embrace revolution. We may attempt higher and stronger reform first.

[San Lumen]

People are not inherently evil. I firmly believe in the Anne Frank quote "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

Ever read thomas hobbes?

I probably did but its been years.

[Kazak Yeli]

I'm not an advocate of authoritarianism, but people need police+government to prevent lawlessness.

[Port Caverton]

The ability to own guns in the United States should not be a right but a privilege that you may lose.

We should implement a stronger system to ensure no one that should not be able to purchase a gun or own a gun has one.

We do not need people owning certain weapons, and there needs to be a legitimate reason for an individual to own the weapon.

Despite my staunch socialist stance, I do not believe is is yet necessary to embrace revolution. We may attempt higher and stronger reform first.

Don't step on snek commie