NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

My answer to "what would you replace the pigs with?" is always "nothing, you don't replace cancer with another illness, you replace it with health".

Edit: On a related point, "how is society supposed to function without cops?" tells you exactly how empty and fascistic liberal ideology really is. "How is society supposed to function without murderous fascists running around murdering people with state imprimatur?" is not actually a hard question unless, at the base, you think murderous nazis are a good thing


NireBryce
@NireBryce

a big part of the problem is that basically the entirety of US culture talks about how the police are necessary, and without them crime would come back and consume the nation, so a few '''''false positives''''' here and there are '''''unfortunate side effects'''''. and a lot of them are still stuck in that. Even "on the left", it's maddening.

crime has been going down, when you filter for things that were brought in to offset the decline of criminal arrests -- drugs, homelessness, things resulting from having to survive while dealing with exploitative dealers or homelessness in a country that hates you (smash and grab cars, etc).

and WHITE COLLAR crime is what's been rising, even though those get far less offenses and you can get hired after doing them.

the cops don't even serve the purpose they hide behind.


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in reply to @DecayWTF's post:

This leads to boomers like my parents asking questions like "who would enforce the laws?" or "who would you go to for help if you've been robbed or otherwise slighted?"

Which is pretty much equivalent to asking "what's to stop the general population from descending into total chaos without an authority figure looming over them at all times?"

This is similar to reasons for keeping organized religion as a basis for law, too. "What's to stop me from going on a murder rampage other than fear of an eternal damnation by an angry god?"

This is why I had trouble getting to The Purge series's system of political commentary, because despite all the anti-establishment themes of the series, it still makes the fundamental, underlying assertion that humans are violent enough, inherently, to make that work in the first place, and I just don't think that's true. Violence is a tool constantly getting shoved into our hands, not a part of human nature.

It may not be an inherent part of human nature but having met more than a few people who openly fantasize about going on a killing spree, collect mountains of guns to that end, compile detailed kill lists as a fun quirky hobby, obsess over the huge reams of vigilante media made to cater specifically to people like that etc I would not remotely dismiss the extent to which it is an indoctrinated part of American nature. Before the Purge movies came out I was thoroughly familiar with the premise due to dudes at work trying to strike up conversations about how they wish there was a no-laws day so they could finally murder their bitch wives.

not that the cops improve matters so much as give those dudes a paycheck and legal immunity if they ask for it, and maybe stand guard and make sure nobody gets in the way when one of 'em does decide to go ham on an elementary school

I think we agree with each other, we just used different words to get to it. My assertion "Violence is a tool getting shoved into our hands" WAS about the indoctrination of violence, and yeah, you're right, it is uniquely American to a degree that I kind of hate to admit (I live there). The Purge series is also very America-centric, and I'll be the first to admit that I kinda failed to point that out because I have a degree of blindness to a worldwide scope while I was making my original point. Still working on that.

...I guess my point is, cycling back to the original post, that a state monopoly on violence was a choice some people made at some point in time. I believe it is possible to reverse that choice, even in the United States. And indeed, we don't need to replace it. We should get rid of it. We've run the tests on society, and it is bad.

I can't remember if it was a movie or a TV show, but one of the Purge prequels actually called that out. People were just doing petty crime, so the totally-not-Republucans sent in mercenaries to shoot up low income neighborhoods and get the violence started.