Linky: https://archive.is/bqfe6 and https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/why-progressives-should-actually-want-more-police-surveillance.html
The whole article is 
and 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danabazelon/
Policy Director at the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office - why did they bury this pretty important conflict of interest information. Slate letting fucking cops write Copaganda disguising it as pro left reporting / opinions.
Conflict of interests do not exist when publishing propaganda for the ruling class.
It's called burying the lede. It should have been disclosed up front.
Burying the lede refers to the practice of hiding the most important and relevant information within a story, often by placing it towards the end or burying it beneath less crucial details. This technique can be used intentionally to manipulate the narrative or unintentionally due to poor storytelling.
I did read the article. It's copagada. Should I conclude anything else? Tightening the noose of the survailence state run by people whose life mission is to suck us dry and destory any leftist
IMO Slate, as an org, should have disclosed it next to her name in the header [Name, Profession, Disclosure, then the yadda yadda] as in traditional practice instead of 3 paragraphs down after some exposition. They knew people don't like cops, especially it's intended audience, so they need a hook to get you invested first so you don't dissmiss it outright which it should be anyways.
She's litterally a cop trying to "we hear you we see you" gaslight us into being comfortable a totalitarian surveillance state that historicallly has and is continued to be used against us on the left. I don't need to go into a long ass tirade about the history - especially in American context.
You may have a difference of opinion on that but doesn't mean you get to throw around "Well you just didn't read the article". No I read it and disagreed with the way it's presented and it's conclusions. I wanted people to know this piece is coming from a cop and should be looked at with scrutiny or scoffed at as it should be. Or as OP posted for - dunking and scoffing.
We've heard all her bullshit before "the benifets outwight the risks"
be pragmatic. Yeah i remeber how much life SUCKS in this country post 9/11 and the damned PATRIOT Act. I have sworn off NY State, Texas, Illinois, Florida, most of California just because it is fucking creepy and fucked up. I stay in the house. Even when I do stay in the house all my electronics have backdoors and zero days. They can use my wifi to see in the house everywhere I go. They know everything I type, all the port I violate my Volcel Oath with. Every password. Everythin I say.I don't want cameras everywhere tracking my every move slappped into a Skynet Minority Report precrime system. Just because we can doesn't mean we should especially given the trajectory of how it's been going so far with secret department and secret laws ans secret programs and "oh we would never" except after 20 years disclose "yeah we really were the whole time so we need this new security law to make the illegal unconstitutional shit we were doing legal to cover our asses".
Edit - oh and the State will magically turn them off, have things break, disappear, or destroyed if it has anything to do with embarssing or incriminating them. Aka Seth Rich who leaked DNC, Hillary emails guned down in one of the most survailed cities (DC) no clue to his assailant, or Jeffery Epstien under suicide watch in prison.
I wonder why people don't trust cops? Well if we can't rely on people because we have fucked our reputation then we're just going to take and do whatever and here's how that's a good thing and won't make things worse.
the way that china uses cameras, for example, if you run a stop sign, and a cop sees you do it, chances are, he's not gonna pull you over, because it was caught on camera and your plate shows where you live and they know who you are, so you can just get a ticket in the mail- i have no problem with this
i have no faith that amerikkka would be using cameras or similar technology this way. it would 100% be weaponized against our daily lives.
your name, face, age, money in your bank account
Every developed country has this info on it's citizenry, heck most developing countries these days do to. You're arguing basic bureaucracy is totalitarian.
where you spend your time, where you have been to, etc.
And most countries have some means of keeping track of this too if they suspect you're guilty of a crime. Again, describing this as some unique "evil" makes no sense, any sort of state administration does this, you have to prove it's frequently being deployed in a extremely malicious way before you can argue any state is more "authoritarian" or whatever than any other.
Okay I take it you're an anarchist then.
Fine, but then you really shouldn't be focusing on China. The US is just as guilty of this, more so I'd argue, especially if we're not just arguing domestically. Whatever country you're from is also guilty of this. Every country is.
The things you listed are so mundane it seems totally asinine to focus your criticism on China. You can literally say this about fucking Andorra 🇦🇩
It's like if you said you hated Bob but when I asked you why you listened a bunch of flaws most humans have and when I point that out to you, you retort "well I hate most people". Okay, why are we discussing Bob then?
Because there's already an entire media empire dedicated to shitting on Bob. One person says something mildly positive about Bob yet you feel the need to jump in and reiterate the shit the media already tells us despite it being totally pointless.
I'm trying to get you to question whether you ACTUALLY hate all states equally or if certain media forces have gotten you to focus needless ire towards particular ones while giving only token criticisms of others.
As someone who lives in the west I have barley any exposure to Chinese media.
And criticisms of the west focus on real shit we're doing. Like Soviet propaganda was just, "look at what they're doing, its bad". Whereas our propaganda has to make shit up. Chinas criticisms of the west are far more likely to be real than ours of them
Honestly most of the news that gets posted here is from western sources anyway, the evidence the west is bad is so strong even western media can't really hide it. Obscuring it really relies on insisting other people are worse.
chinese state media empire that shits on the west,
CGTN is communizing the poor western children and their colonial subjects.
there is also the chinese state media empire that shits on the west
Who gives a fuck, cry like more of a lib about it
Nothing brings me greater pleasure than the knowledge that, barring the west starting nuclear war, China is just going to advance more and more exponentially every year and folks like you are just gonna have to invent new ways to mald over it.
this is the worst bait account I've ever seen, please try to do better next time, it's embarrassing.
Tbh it's all standard capital-L Libertarian fare, I've seen too many unironic uses of "stat[e]ism" in the wild to even count
what is the practical application of that information? it's to keep society safe and functioning. in an ideal world, this wouldn't be necessary but china has 1.3 billion people and remains one of the safest nations on earth for a reason. you don't see police constantly brutalizing people there, because their network of cameras and identification means that unless something presents an immediate threat, they can typically just let the person do their shit and then catch them at home. you can't drive ten miles in america without seeing someone pulled over by police for some minor traffic violation- is that freedom, was that interaction necessary? what about the odds of that interaction escalating to the citizen being murdered by police? this isn't an issue in china because firstly the police are trained and secondly many of those interactions are entirely eliminated
america knows all that about me too but i can still get mugged walking a mile to the gas station and i'll still see 5 homeless people along the way and multiple cops just posted up waiting to fuck with someone
i used to be an anarchist. idealistic thinking isn't realistic.
I'm not an Idealist, but I'd rather die than live under a dictatorship
brother then you know what to do because your ass is living under a dictatorship of the borugeoisie
I do get politically active btw, I just want neither a political party nor the borgeoisi rule me
, I just want neither a political party nor the borgeoisi rule me
Well guess what buttercup, you're going to have to grow the fuck up and learn how politics works because even under whatever anarcho-whateverist bullshit you dream up you're still going to be subject to the rules of the dominant parties.
You're a liberal larping as an anarchist if you think anarchy means "i'm totally free from the burdens of what others want"
You don't want to be ruled, then you're a libertarian. Hence the "live free or die" slogan from the American imperialists in your header image
Call yourself a syndicalist, but no unified council of syndicates to run a group? Best of luck
here is how they treat peaceful journalists:
The same way any country deals with journalist entering restricted areas??
here is how they treat peaceful journalists:
No way you just linked to a CNN dipshit shoving his way through a restricted area while speaking only English. Your "journalists" don't exist they're Western chauvinistic propagandists. Do some self crit and explore the resources hexbear shares on modern China.
now that you know what that is, consider what views you're espousing if you are indistinguishable from them. it's western propaganda, complete blindness to your own material reality, anarkiddie bullshit. "i'm not an idealist, but i'd rather die than live in a dictatorship". comrade what do you think capitalism is? it doesn't matter which supposedly superior western nation you live in, you are in a capitalist dictatorship- refer to what i said about "complete blindness to your own material reality".
your post literally reads like "i can go to walmart and buy a tv on credit, how can you say i'm not free?"
ends up like the USSR or China
yeah, that's not a bad thing. i really think you have a lot of unlearning of western propaganda to do.
comrade, i mean no disrespect- i was an anarchist when i was a baby leftist as well. in an ideal world, and purely speaking ideologically, i am an anarchist. i would love if the world operated entirely free of any sort of state, if any sort of hierarchy was able to be examined and dismantled if need be
but i realize that the modern world is much more complicated than the answers anarchism provides
the only way to achieve communism, even if we're talking entirely stateless communism, is to seize the state and use it as a vehicle to enact the will of the revolution. i am genuinely curious how you expect it to be done otherwise? let's say antifa just shot joe brandon and took over the white house. okay, now what? they just declare amerikkka is over? come on.
I'm an anarcho syndicalist, I belive that we can build workers syndicates and communities where the workers own the means of production and only when we have those organisations we can even begin to think of overthrowing the state
okay, simply put; the state is entirely controlled by capital. we live in a dictatorship of capital- this is a basically irrefutable fact for any sect of leftist.
with that being said, let's say you do start taking over workplaces, building communities around those workplaces which the workers took over; what is the state going to be doing while all of this happens? even if you take over by entirely 'legitimate' electoral and peaceful means.
amazon workers can't even go on strike without someone getting their skull cracked. you can't demonstrate against genocide without being beaten half to death.
what has the state done in the past when workers even went on strike?
Then they bring their bombs and cops and kill you for being a terrorist, what then
okay, but that isn't happening nor will it ever happen. this is why anarkiddies are called that. someone presents you with an actual situation which does happen (workers try to strike, get their skulls cracked) and you respond "hypothetically if i were doing MY anarchist communism i would bring a gun to the strike". come on.
stateist communism always ends up like the USSR or China
Advancing standards of living by leaps and bounds? Taking literal dirt farming feudal serfdoms to literally the world's first space power in the span of literally 4 decades? Ending cyclical patterns of famine that have occurred for thousands of years, but never again under communism?
Oh man so awful
You're the kinda guy who would hear about China building "ghost cities" and just believe the lies that they're building useless shit to juice their GDP, aren't you
here is how they treat peaceful journalists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjLt3XTY-rs Now you may say: tha
Hahahahahaha oh fuck that was hilarious, thanks for posting. "Sirs! They are manhandling me! I say! We are in a public space and they are manhandling me!" Fuckin hilarious, I got no sympathy for CNN anglo propagandists trying to muscle their way into that space when they don't even speak Mandarin and they're obviously there to do a hit piece. Cry about it
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
but I'd rather die than live under a dictatorship
Then why are you alive right now?
Then why are you alive right now?
because I will fight against capitalism, imperialism, dictators and monarchs util my last dieing breath
also what I meant with that is that I'll rather die than live in a dictatorship and not do anything to destroy it's chains of opression
How are you fighting the chains of oppression by complaining about a country you don't even live in on the internet?
also people should know how China suppresses it's people
China's people are huwhite CNN reporters with British accents
do you think the average Chinese person would benefit from having their state overthrown or that they'd even want that? The Chinese state is highly popular among Chinese citizens. It regularly has an approval rating of above 90%. To what end would China benefit from having a different arrangement?
The media bombards us with "China bad" shit 24/7. Even if it is actually as bad as you say you're personal efforts are such a tiny contribution they're effectively useless. Your efforts would likely be better spent trying to inform people about other bad countries that the western media focuses far far less on, or actively downplay their badness. Like Israel for example.
...what if someone else (someone else as within some other member of the CCP) came to power who doesn't like free speech, they could use this against free speech.
They can and do. Free speech is a bad thing, especially in a nation under siege from the Great Satan. I especially want you and people with your views to have their free speech suppressed.
Now you may say: that's not as bad as some US police brutality, but that is because in the US these things actually get investigated and the officers that did wrong at least sometimes get what they deserve.
Unironically believing this
. It took over a year of protests and riots all over the Great Satan to get one (1) pig to get anything more than a slap on the wrist!first: they know less about you than the CCP does about a chinese citizen
Fake news.
zhenli explains anarchism's reliance on idealism (cw: critical discussion of tendencies)
[...]
Second, it ignores the actual, real distinction between Marxists and anarchists, which is centralization and decentralization, originating from differing views on historical materialism and idealism.
Anarchists want to break up society into decentralized units, they see the centralization tendency of capitalist society as a bad thing and want to smash it and build an entirely new and different society out of a void, while Marxists see the development of capitalist society as in fact laying the foundations for socialism which it will be built on top of, i.e. it will be centralized.
Bukharin explained this brilliantly a century ago.
Communist society is, as such, a STATELESS society. If this is the case - and there is no doubt that it is - then what, in reality, does the distinction between anarchists and marxist communists consist of? Does the distinction, as such, vanish at least when it comes to examining the problem of the society to come and the "ultimate goal"? No, the distinction does exist; but it is to be found elsewhere; and can be defined as a distinction between production centralised under large trusts and small, decentralised production.
...Our ideal solution to this is centralised production, methodically organised in large units and, in the final analysis, the organisation of the world economy as a whole. Anarchists, on the other hand, prefer a completely different type of relations of production; their ideal consists of tiny communes which by their very structure are disqualified from managing any large enterprises, but reach "agreements" with one another and link up through a network of free contracts. From an economic point of view, that sort of system of production is clearly closer to the medieval communes, rather than the mode of production destined to supplant the capitalist system. But this system is not merely a retrograde step: it is also utterly utopian. The society of the future will not be conjured out of a void, nor will it be brought by a heavenly angel. It will arise out of the old society, out of the relations created by the gigantic apparatus of finance capital.
—Bukharin, Anarchy and Scientific Communism
It is very important to understand that anarchists aren't simply Marxists who want to get to statelessness faster. They are in many ways the polar opposite of Marxists, the gulf that separates Marxists from anarchists is just as large as pretty much any other ideology.
Anarchists reject historical materialism and view history through an idealist lens, believing that all new societies are "conjured out of a void" as Bukharin put it, and thus they believe this new society can be anything they want it to be, if they can imagine it then it can be implemented.
Marxists on the other hand, with a historical materialist analysis, see new systems as inherently being built upon new conditions brought into existence by the old system, i.e. socialism cannot be anything we want it to be but must be built upon foundations created by capitalism itself.
Hence, Marxists see the centralization tendency of capitalism as the basis for what socialism will be built upon, while anarchists not only do not hold this view, but they view the conditions capitalism is bringing forth as a bad thing that must be entirely destroyed.
A wide gulf separates socialism from anarchism, and it is in vain that the agents-provocateurs of the secret police and the news paper lackeys of reactionary governments pretend that this gulf does not exist. The philosophy of the anarchists is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out. Their individualistic theories and their individualistic ideal are the very opposite of socialism. Their views express, not the future of bourgeois society, which is striding with irresistible force towards the socialisation of labour, but the present and even the past of that society, the domination of blind chance over the scattered and isolated small, producer.
—Lenin, Socialism and Anarchism
[...]
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Link 3:
"the Joe Biden knows everything about you, your name, face, age, money in your bank account, where you spend your time, where you have been to, etc. I don't think you could call that good use of surveillance."
America's surveillance apparatus is leagues more brutal than any Chinese system but USians don't hear about it because it's being field tested in the genocide of Palestine and hunting down migrants at the border. It's also incredibly fucked, your 9 digit SSN is basically used for anything govt. related and can basically be considered your state mandated government ID from birth. So much of American data is held up in data brokers who will literally sell your personal info (enough for anyone to impersonate you) to the government or to other companies, the 3 letter agencies literally hoard petabytes of American data they gathered after 9/11 when the US basically became what the liberal imagination thinks China is.
China has spent decades perfecting their surveillance apparatus and yet it's not the extrajudicial murder, school shooting, prisoner capital of the world.
True you can protest and be blinded by rubber bullets, run over by vigilante trucks, and be ignored by legislators. Freedom baby~
i'd like to introduce you to a bunch of my comrades who protested the genocide of Palestinians on college campuses
i want you to tell them they're very free to protest in the USA and their efforts have viable effects. You might have to do it in person since some of them still can't see through the pepper spray and can't hear very well from their head injuries
Which country do you live in?
If it's the US I'd suggest you focus on criticizing your own country first.
If it's another country the US probably has far more geopolitical influencer over your country than China does, so you're still using your time better criticizing them.
both the US and China have to much influence on my country and all of europe, both are bad and I criticize them both
If you live in Europe I highly doubt China has as much influence on your country than the US has.
Why bother making a hexbear account when you're just going to be banned for being a liberal
Syndicalism
Kaiserreich detected, also it's liberalism regardless
Ogey...
Just to ask, do you believe in countries like Vietnam, Laos, or Cuba, or even Bolivia
If you can't, then even tho you may not a liberal, economically, or culturally, I think you are a liberal at heart, when it comes to foreign policy... aka you tow the U.S state department's line, when it comes to 'good' and 'bad' countries
I'm afraid because of such matters, you might get banned over this
you might get banned over this
I'm new here, but I didn't do anything wrong I think, I just stated my opinion
If I did something wrong please enlighten me
As far as I'm concerned, the community has somewhat of an anti-imperialist or 'anti-western' stance, which then extends to a concept of critical support for global south countries
Critical support, which is public support for an anti-imperialist, if not socialist nation-state, despite one's personal criticism of such (eg. Venezuela, a GLOBAL_SOUTH socdem state, with potential revolutionary energy; remember, it's not necessarily under one party of PSUV than it is, as a popular front)
(You ought to remember Chomsky did support some socialist and socdem states in the Global South, right?)
My question is a litmus test
If you can't sympathize with even one existing socialist state like Cuba, against America, who has committing economic blockades against such countries, then welp...
You can choose lemmy.ml, lemm.ee, midwest.social or any other social media to find other like-minded leftists, who don't necessarily focus on such topics...
Lmfao imagine equating communists with capitalists and dictators and saying it doesn't make a difference, are you a lib?
I said CALL them what you like, the CPC always brands itself as communist, while funding capitalist privately owned cooperations
Would you support the vast number of state owned enterprises in China?
I would, if the people actually had to say something about it, but guess what, they don't
You believe it's a one-man dictatorship entirely disconnected from the workers, which IMO requires more proof than the opposite. Believing the reverse is simply easier because of being born an American
I made no such claim, I just asked you why you were so confident you were right, and what evidence you had for your claim, that's not claiming you're wrong.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
They need to make money so they can continue to raise the standard of living in their country. Their capitalists don't control their society nor do they have any power to influence the government. How else do you get to socialism without doing socialist things?
yeah, problem being that you can't trust capitalists and they'll just put that money in their own pockets
Which is why China has raised the standard of living steadily over the last few decades? I mean where else do you think they got the money to build the cities, infrastructure, power plants, etc.? What actually do you know about China beyond "they have capitalists so they're bad"?
would post China Has Billionaires but I am in despair so I feel this person won't read it, and I'm so fucking tired of getting an instantaneous dismissive reply that indicates they didn't even click on the fucking link
EDIT: I wound up posting it in another part of this thread with a couple other links for them to ignore. I wish there was a way to say "hide replies to this post" so I could avoid seeing a handwaving liberal reply three minutes later
EDIT2: guess I'm just going through some shit right now sorry
It's such a good essay, I didn't even need convincing before because the proof was always there but after reading it completely makes sense. Yeah like obviously capitalism bad but the government isn't run by capitalists like they are in the West, it's a matter of transitioning (if you read theory you'd know this), and they are indeed on that path. What's crazy to me is that they'll probably achieve their goals faster as the planning gets better.
capitalists don't have that much power in the gov. that's the difference
they forced tencent to donate hundreds of millions (billions now) of dollars
read this https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
posting this here for those who might click on these links and read
Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.
from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/
The result of this grim state of affairs is that the oppressed classes understandably become deeply cynical about the entire notion of “politics.” Or, to put it in terms of political tendency, regardless of who they vote for at the booth, they begin to become dyed-in-the-wool Libertarians; “incompetence of government” becomes their main transcendental political truth. This becomes especially apparent when they discuss the choking and overthrow of the government of other peoples, in Venezuela and Syria and Korea. Normally, disillusionment with one’s government would lead to demands for better government, or different government, but Westerners are so ingrained with the idea that theirs is the best government, that instead they reject the very idea of good governance altogether. And so the masses learn to passively embrace the encroachment of private corporations over all aspects of the economy and indeed life in general.
from https://redsails.org/brainwashing/
Now consider these excerpts from the aforementioned Guardian article:
For a reliable benchmark about the power of the party in China, you only need to listen to wealthy entrepreneurs hold forth on politics. These otherwise all-powerful CEOs go to abject lengths to praise the party. To take a few companies listed in a single article in the South China Morning Post, Richard Liu of e-commerce group JD.com predicted communism would be realised in his generation and all commercial entities would be nationalised. Xu Jiayin of Evergrande Group, one of China’s largest property developers, said that everything the company possessed was given by the party and he was proud to be the party secretary of his company. Liang Wengen of Sany Heavy Industry, which builds earthmovers, went even further, saying his life belonged to the party. [14]
Just as the lack of dignity of American workers isn’t merely superficial, but symptomatic, the same is true of the lack of dignity of Chinese capitalists. The periodic execution of corrupt capitalists and the humiliation of Jack Ma matter. Chauvinistic “Left” intellectuals may dismiss them as performative, but Western capitalists accustomed to impunity understand the threat loud and clear. The dignity or indignity experienced by different classes testifies more to the class character of a state than musings about its leaders’ sincerity.
from https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
Don't despair when the lib you're talking to ignores your well thought out response. Instead, look at the people lurking and reading the thread and not commenting, and what they see. They see you provide thoughtful and insightful statements backed up with evidence, only for the lib to either ignore it entirely or just dismiss it with a handwave (and obviously not even reading it). Even if someone agrees with the lib and not you, it still isn't a good look for their "team" to be so smugly and proudly ignorant.
the last three or four weeks have been fucking ghastly. we are ruled by demons
Truly, and it's mind blowing to see people run defence for them, insisting that those that oppose them are the real demons, while claiming that they oppose the powers that be are "just as bad" despite never actually willing to commit to their own claims about what they would do if they were living in the exact situation they claim to despise.
Don't despair when the lib you're talking to ignores your well thought out response.
Said lib has taken to posting about those mean hexbear tankies all over the anti-communist parts of Lemmy (and also for some reason lemmy.ml's anarchism comm). This was never about good faith discussion and all about getting in a pissing contest here then whining about it elsewhere.
Yeah, they show up every now and then so they can whine about "censorship" or mean evilbad tankies. It's so pathetic.
I was wondering how this thread got 80+ comments and it's all just literally one liberal larping as an anarchist
I briefly wondered if i was too mean to them but i figure 80+ comments from a one person struggle session indicates i could have been meaner
They also still don't have enough lol https://lemmy.ml/post/19044744
And even increases cringe levels:
Show
Someone should remind him the Hong Kong protests were started to prevent the extradition of a dude who chopped up his girlfriend and put her in a suitcase. I’m not pro-law enforcement or even close, but the Hong Kong protests are a really strange thing to fixate on.
In reality it was about mix of reasons, main ones was, first, HK was choke full of various crooks who would had chance to move to slammer under Chinese law so they shat their pants, and since they were influental there they incited the petty burgie mob going hard on red scare, commies confiscating their toothbrush etc. Second main reason is because the new law was a step towards decolonisation from British colonial and financial power and this moved the really big players to support the former two levels.
I was considering sharing that post in the dunk tank, but I'm worried it would be too self-promo since it's my comment they're malding over.
I think your instincts were correct, but sometimes the effort isn’t worth it.
It wont be used against them because they will support
SPDHindenburgFuhrer to the bitter endThink of all the Ford f-350s and speed boats on huge trailers that will be sold in your area!
The transfer of wealth to local impoverished luxury car and boat dealers will be great for the local mega-mansion construction industry!
Its Win Win Lose!
It's interesting how she uses the voices of people of color to try to justify this. I tried looking into her background, and it seems like she's just white? This might be more blackwashing (idk if this is a real term) than representing what the "black community" wants. Add to that how the "black community" is not a monolith, and it really doesn't seem very genuine.
Also, she was charged with child endangerment. Just a fun fact I found while looking her up.
Opposing ideas without investigating and ignoring real-world problems that get in the way of sweeping solutions are hallmarks of ultraleftism.
Recognizing the theoretical utility of empowering the investigative apparatus of a hypothetical proletarian state is a piss poor defense of empowering the actually existing settler colonial bourgeois state with tools to defend their class supremacy. I'm no scholar, but I'm pretty sure Mao's point wasn't that you should arm your class enemies to better fantasize about how cool it would be if those tools fell into your lap instead. Lenin is quite clear: "Today, in Britain and America, too, 'the precondition for every real people's revolution' is the smashing, the destruction of the 'ready-made state machinery'"
the guy at the top is at minimum doing actual harm reduction
yeah, and
Joe BidenKamala Harris is the most progressive president in history so who are you to shirk your duty to vote forhimher to Save Democracy™? after all, "shut up and listen to the sensible policy solutions of qualified bourgeois experts" was famously Mao's whole deal...This is the accelerationism debate: do you support marginal improvements because they help people, and that’s the end goal? Or oppose them because they strengthen the existing state? I don’t think you can build a mass movement around opposing what helps right now.
"Marginal improvements" that aim to more effectively maintain the instrument of bourgeois class rule are called "reformism". Proletarian class politics don't involve building a mass movement of settler cops around what helps other settler cops better enforce imperial property relations and racial hierarchy. Marxism is a doctrine of violent revolutionary class struggle. It is not a doctrine of peacefully ceding power to the bourgeois state and their front line enforcers in the hope that you'll incite them to surrender control at some point in the future via the correct combination of campaign contributions, primary votes, and picket signs.
If you’re saying Larry Krasner is essentially Kamala Harris I don’t believe you’ve investigated either in much detail.
Liberals tell me that every day about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and to give them the smallest amount of credit, at least they're technically correct that Trump didn't share Harris and Krasner's career in law enforcement.
You characterized giving cops more power to do their jobs more effectively as a generally understood "marginal improvement" that "helps people". That characterization only follows from a misunderstanding about the purpose of police under bourgeois dictatorship or a very specific view of who constitutes "people". To be clear, there's little to no revolutionary potential in narrow minority of the US population that the bourgeois criminal legal system exists to "help".
"We are not going to build a mass movement by telling people “leftists are opposed to things that help you right now.”
This is the crux of the issue. The people in the United States who belong to a class that the police exist to help will always be counterrevolutionary, because the police do not exist to prevent violence. The police exist to perform violence to one class on behalf of another. This is the primary purpose of a state. A mass movement of propertied settlers whose interests the police represent is an obstacle, not a prerequisite, to proletarian revolution. Saying that we should empower US cops because some individual action might incidentally "stop a bad guy" is akin to saying that we should empower the US military because they built schools in Iraq, or a "floating aid platform" in Gaza, or "stop terrorism". It's not what they're for. It's true that many propertied Americans believe the police and military are there to help them, because the US is the imperial core and its citizens largely labor aristocrats. Socialism requires defeating those people, not persuading them. It requires organizing the subjects of imperial violence, not finding common cause with the beneficiaries of it.
The people in the US that require organization already understand on a deeply personal level that the police do not exist to protect them. They don't believe this because someone convinced them of it, they understand this from experience because the US has never afforded them the luxury of misunderstanding how quickly and easily cops are will kill them.
It really is
