[ExI] Cory Massimino on advocating police abolition

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Jun 13, 2020, at 4:28 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 8:34 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
>>> >> The police are not going to be abolished, it just ain't gonna happen. Pretending otherwise is a fantasy.
>> 
>> > That’s what you believe, but it still doesn’t explain why you thought Cory (or yours truly) confused abolition with defunding.
> 
> Because the phrase "defund the police" is suddenly all in the news and is basically a good idea, however it's a very poor name to give it because it's practically begging to be misinterpreted; right wingers have tried with some success to tar those who advocate it with the very silly idea of abolishing the police. What "defund the police" really means is to stop using cops to give tickets for minor violations of the traffic laws (robot cameras or the equivalent of meter maids could just write down license plate numbers) and decriminalized the drug laws so police would not be needed to enforce that either, thus the budgets of police departments could be reduced significantly and the money saved used for more important things like drug rehabilitation; unfortunately all that won't fit on a bumper sticker. But they've got to find a better phrase than "defund the police".
> 
> John K Clark

That doesn’t make sense given your response. You could’ve said that you disagree with Cory and then went on to talk about how some folks, particularly those in the Right, tend to confuse police abolition with defunding the police (or for that matter, anything that rolls back police power and privilege). Instead, you clipped my post and made a comment that can only be interpreted as if both Cory and I were responsible for the confusion.

Regards,

Dan
   Sample my Kindle books at:
http://author.to/DanUst
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200613/2bfd217e/attachment.htm>