dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja: 06/14/20

Sunday, June 14, 2020

"so, wait. you would only support the blacks if they have politics you agree with? where's your solidarity?"

listen.

if you think i should support a movement based on identity politics, then i think you're what's wrong with the world.

yes, i will support you based on whether i like your politics or not, and if you think that's disagreeable, then i'll have to disagree with you.

as an anarchist of the left, i support police & prison abolition in it's most extreme and literal sense. however, i don't support "retributive justice" in any context, whatsoever; i think it's barbaric, and i think people arguing for it are barbarians.

and, i don't care about your race, your ethnicity, your religion, your gender or any other sort of identity you'd like to claim for yourself.

see, like i say - i support this. sort of. what i support is pretty much the most radical version of the abolition movement, and i'm fully cognizant that any movement to actually do this is going to probably end up working against my actual interests, for the simple reason that there's so little support for it. when you get people together in a city like minneapolis, the actual proposals are going to end up disappointingly conservative.

we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, on this. the social conditions for this kind of a change are not yet in place. and, you can call me a technological determinist if you'd like (i don't consider that to be an insult. i'd rather be a technological determinist than a historical materialist.), but it's not clear that we've made the final push past post-industrialization to eliminate the ruling class' system of worker control yet, either. but, as mentioned, this is likely imminent; if active policing is a function of industrialization, it's not clear that it ought to survive deindustrialization, or alter-industrialization, as it may actually be.

but, how much popular support is there for the retribution-first police reform movement that i admittedly initially kneejerked against, apparently partly due to bad reporting? i suspect you'd find that more people support sending the "bad apple" cops to jail, because that's how they're trained to see the issue. people, bizarrely, still seem to think the cops are there to help; they never have been, that's never been their role or function. they've always been there to protect property...

so, i know that the general reading of this is to yell that all of these white people must be racists for standing up for the cops, but i really think the truth is closer to the reality that they're brainwashed by the capitalist press into accepting the benevolence of the police state, just as 40+% of blacks seem to be.

i also need to interject a polling analysis. a poll like this is going to overweight urban & northern blacks, because they're easier to reach. they're actually not the majority of blacks, though. i would suspect that if you were more careful about sampling to ensure proper representation by rural, southern blacks, who are more conservative, then you'd mostly erase the difference, and get more or less the same result.

remember: the capitalist press will attempt to divide us by race at every possible opportunity. that is, to a major extent, it's actual function. and, it's no coincidence that the divide and conquer picks up in times of crisis.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/64-americans-oppose-defund-police-movement-key-goals/story?id=71202300