US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1497

On May 28 2019 22:07 Stratos_speAr wrote:


Neither myself nor anyone else recently made the argument that the FBI isn't corrupt.

The problem I presented is that institutions like the FBI and ICE serve vital functions, and "abolish the FBI" is a slogan that has turned into mostly an emotional appeal because actually abolishing the agency would be recklessly inefficient due to the need to replace them with another agency that did the same thing.

On May 28 2019 22:16 GreenHorizons wrote:


It's sorta implicit in arguments like "they may have done bad things in the past" and the assertion "they serve vital functions" which I think is of disputable significance/validity.

I'd argue the FBI is already recklessly inefficient as their inability to hold Trump accountable (along with congress and the justice system's inability) and long history of criminal behavior demonstrate.

Abolishing them isn't a slogan (in the pejorative sense), it's part of a larger perspective I've tried to explain with the help of some small selections from the relevant thinkers (some of which the FBI assassinated/helped assasinate).

On May 28 2019 23:31 Dan HH wrote:

What law enforcement is vital to is the legislative being the legislative, the executive being the executive, and the judicial being the judicial, rather than all 3 being the village elders or something else.

That's what is at stake in this discussion, what would be a better power structure? Abolishing a law enforcement branch is beside the point, that's why whenever this discussion comes up you get stuck in an endless loop with people asking you where their workload will go.

On May 28 2019 22:16 GreenHorizons wrote:


It's sorta implicit in arguments like "they may have done bad things in the past" and the assertion "they serve vital functions" which I think is of disputable significance/validity.

I'd argue the FBI is already recklessly inefficient as their inability to hold Trump accountable (along with congress and the justice system's inability) and long history of criminal behavior demonstrate.

Abolishing them isn't a slogan (in the pejorative sense), it's part of a larger perspective I've tried to explain with the help of some small selections from the relevant thinkers (some of which the FBI assassinated/helped assasinate).

On May 28 2019 23:46 GreenHorizons wrote:


I feel like this is missing a word or two making your intention a bit unclear for me. So I'll amend this part if it changes but I'm arguing the perception of the role of law enforcement doesn't match their actual functionality (I think that's the case for the others you mentioned as well but I don't want to expand this too much/quickly).



I'm trying to explain that the best ideas I've come across are laid out in reams of authorship, countless hours of video, and in the oral histories of revolutionaries around the world. Some of which I've provided and demonstrated a willingness to discuss.

I can't (and no one should expect that I) have all of them at my beckoned call any more than they can list off how their preference for reform doesn't result in climate catastrophe, billions dead and displaced, and risk extinction along with still have the atrocities around the world and stuff like black sites in Chicago and Mesa PD getting away with beating and kidnapping innocent people, and all the other problems of the status quo they accept (to varying degrees).

The stakes of the discussion in my view is revolution vs reform and I think it's been made clear by my arguments that one is being held to a much higher standard for (I would posit) the reasons I've mentioned among others.

On May 28 2019 23:48 Acrofales wrote:


Is it the job of the FBI to hold Trump accountable? Clearly not.

That's the job of congress. You can't expect the police department to investigate the chief of the department. And when the FBI actually tried, Trump simply fired the guy in charge for not stopping the investigation. The fact that there was then a Special Council invested with the power to continue that investigation actually shows that something is still working at that level however much Trump tries to break it.

Now whether or not the FBI is corrupt is a separate discussion, but saying they are inefficient because they can't investigate one of the things they are not actually empowered to investigate seems a bit absurd.

You have presented a lot of evidence that police forces throughout the US are rotten to the core. I have no idea how to deal with that, but you are clearly in need of something to watch the watchmen, as right now your law enforcement agencies seem to be more criminal than the people they are policing.

I also think elected sheriffs simply lay bare a problem with democracy in the US. You overshot in your democracy. People don't care enough about hte 100s of things that are on the ballot and will simply go down the list putting an X by whatever name they already know (or whoever is affiliated with their party of choice). Expecting them to study the issues on one or two points (e.g. municipal elections, state elections, congressional elections) makes sense. But it's not just this on the ballot. There's about 700 other things on the ticket, ranging from Sheriff to Attorney General to County Clerk to Coroner (wtf?!) most of which are quite important and are entirely a-political jobs (why the hell are clerk and coroner elected positions?!). And most of those Joe Blog doesn't know what they do or what the requirements are to do them properly, so expected some type of informed vote is not gonna work.

Anyway, that aside, having your sheriff beholden to re-elections causes some problems that other countries simply don't have in their police force. As if being sheriff is partially due to winning a popularity contest, being "tough on crime" is a winning position, and "protecting minorities from police violence" is not. And to make matters worse, there's probably a union of policemen who will finance a reelection campaign for anybody who protects the policemen "who are only doing their job"...

Now I'm not saying that the elected sheriff is the main issue. Just making things even harder to deal with.

On May 28 2019 23:55 Acrofales wrote:


I guess the problem I have with the idea of abolishing the police force is that the police force elsewhere is not necessarily a problem. They are simply an agency and part of the general government apparatus. I don't feel the police force in Spain is abusive. And Spain is not a particularly enlightened country. Many of the hierarchies are the exact same ones that were in place during Franco's dictatorship. There are definitely all sorts of abuses in the system. But the police force mostly just seems to do their job of enforcing the laws. If there are excesses of force (and there definitely are) it is at the direction of politicians (whether that's the Mayor of Barcelona during the 15M protests or the President of the Nation during the Catalan referendum), rather than that it is something systematic in police acts.

On May 28 2019 23:51 Sermokala wrote:
The one behind held to a higher standard is the one that has never worked in history and has almost always resulted in things just getting worse for everyone and everything. Ofc people are going to take "lets roll out the guillotines" poorly when they read about how the French revolution executed the nuns one by one as they were singing.

Reform has a track record of working and doesn't have a track record of horrific atrocities.

On May 29 2019 00:07 Gorsameth wrote:
Sigh, this argument again.

GH is great at taking a point (almost) everyone agrees with him on, like the US police force being terrible in general and needed a reform from top to bottom but then making everyone argue against him by failing to apply the English language.

He doesn't want to abolish whatever agency he is arguing against. He wants to reform it so thoroughly nothing of the old is left, which is fine.

On May 29 2019 00:10 GreenHorizons wrote:


There's literature on the difference between reform and non-reformist reforms and revolution I've provided before. You can ask for it again, you can articulate a counter argument, or a lot of things that aren't accusing me of failing to apply the English language because it's easier than engaging with the argument I've provided.

I found a chart (I haven't reviewed in full) that outlines what I'm talking about regarding policing from an abolitionist perspective.

Just to wrap it into a single post, revolution is born out of a position that those green "non-reformist reforms" aren't new ideas, they have just been roundly rejected by the people with the power to change them and reformists have failed to hold them accountable.

On May 29 2019 00:26 KwarK wrote:
GH, some of the things on that chart don’t make sense. You can’t take pensions because it’s not your money to take, the money is part of their earned compensation for work already performed. You’d have as much luck going after police home equity. Paid administrative leave during investigations is also required for any job where there is suspension before evidence of wrongdoing. It could be used less if the unions were made less powerful so that officers could be immediately fired without investigation where an investigation is clearly unnecessary. But the practice needs to exist because the public trust requires that an officer under investigation be stripped of the power active service gives them. If a cop insurance system were put in place it would immediately be pooled, and probably be paid for by the precinct anyway, so no savings would manifest from introducing a third party profit seeking entity. The insurer would have an incentive to suppress and minimize public claims which very easily create a private pseudo legal system. How credible would a court find a claim of police brutality after the investigation by the insurers already dismissed it? It would also make it economically irrational for cops to cooperate with investigations or to report on each other. My premiums go up if you get caught etc.

Others, such as not shuffling bad cops to other districts, are obviously good.

On May 29 2019 00:27 Acrofales wrote:

Looking at that chart, I think a good start is to simply adopt every single one of those points (except maybe reducing the size of the police force), both those marked red as well as those marked green

On May 29 2019 00:49 Sermokala wrote:
The caping overtime accrual just seems anti-labor. I get cutting spending for "military exercises" but a lot of overtime for police departments (at least outside of major cities) is actually mandatory for the department to fill. I remember my dad having to get an apartment near the airport after 9/11 and the mandatory shifts for fighting drunk driving have only gone up in the decade's sense MADD came around.

I think that the "abolish the police" campaign reforms mostly the reality of what police do in exchange for the image of what they want to get rid of. I really don't get the desire to change one police department for a dozen specialized departments doing the same thing but with less resources for the problems. Most of the problems it attempts to solve would be with just more funding and instead of asking for that they want to go the long way around and make a new order that is less efficent causes more problems and costs more.

The way that police departments work at least outside of the major cities is that the city contracts with the union in order for a set amount of shifts that the union needs to fill. Making overtime mandatory for the union is a way for these cities to save money. When the city needs security or parking assistance for events like a county fair they add that into the contract. The overtime shifts are first offered to the people on top of seniority and are forced to be filled by the lowest of seniority if it doesn't get filled by the people above them.

On May 29 2019 00:53 GreenHorizons wrote:


If you engage with revolutionary theory (some examples I've provided) you quickly identify the critical differences between "fixing" police departments and creating specialists so that you don't have armed cops shooting mental health patients or their care providers or the countless other innocent people they kill, maim, injure, imprison, and harass because that's more acceptable than even something as tame/reasonable as having specialists trained to do what we send them to do.



This, much like Kwarks argument is self-justifying in that it presupposes the system which justifies it as inevitable and immutable. Which means I can only challenge it (presuming it's sound within it's framework which these often aren't) on the grounds that it's not inevitable or immutable.

On May 29 2019 01:13 Sermokala wrote:

Thats not my argument at all. If police departments were funded to the degree of their proposed replacements then the problems that they cause would almost all be solved with little to no risk. Instead of going for the solution of least resistance the "revolutionary theory" seems to actively want bad things to happen in order to get to a point where the same problems will need to be solved but will be hopefully better because we are in a crisis.

Our arguments arn't self-justifying because it presupposes the system as inevitable and immutable our arguments are self-justifying because it presupposes the problem of crime being opposite to law and order as inevitable and immutable.

On May 29 2019 00:49 Sermokala wrote:
The caping overtime accrual just seems anti-labor. I get cutting spending for "military exercises" but a lot of overtime for police departments (at least outside of major cities) is actually mandatory for the department to fill. I remember my dad having to get an apartment near the airport after 9/11 and the mandatory shifts for fighting drunk driving have only gone up in the decade's sense MADD came around.

I think that the "abolish the police" campaign reforms mostly the reality of what police do in exchange for the image of what they want to get rid of. I really don't get the desire to change one police department for a dozen specialized departments doing the same thing but with less resources for the problems. Most of the problems it attempts to solve would be with just more funding and instead of asking for that they want to go the long way around and make a new order that is less efficient causes more problems and costs more.

The way that police departments work at least outside of the major cities is that the city contracts with the union in order for a set amount of shifts that the union needs to fill. Making overtime mandatory for the union is a way for these cities to save money. When the city needs security or parking assistance for events like a county fair they add that into the contract. The overtime shifts are first offered to the people on top of seniority and are forced to be filled by the lowest of seniority if it doesn't get filled by the people above them.

On May 29 2019 01:35 Acrofales wrote:

Oh, I understood that as both only applying to military training. If they were 2 separate proposals then I also disagree with capping overtime accrual.

E: I also agree with GH here that the idea of making overtime mandatory so you can have less policemen is simply terrible practice, and just because it was "always done this way" is a terrible reason to continue doing it.

Oh, and just to hook back to the ongoing discussion. I don't really see how any of the green points in that list are "abolitionist". They just seem like sensible measures to combat obvious problems in the way the police force currently works. How are these measures of abolition (other than the last one: less police), rather than reforms?

On May 29 2019 01:35 Acrofales wrote:

Oh, I understood that as both only applying to military training. If they were 2 separate proposals then I also disagree with capping overtime accrual.

E: I also agree with GH here that the idea of making overtime mandatory so you can have less policemen is simply terrible practice, and just because it was "always done this way" is a terrible reason to continue doing it.

Oh, and just to hook back to the ongoing discussion. I don't really see how any of the green points in that list are "abolitionist". They just seem like sensible measures to combat obvious problems in the way the police force currently works. How are these measures of abolition (other than the last one: less police), rather than reforms?