And Sleepy Joe Will Get The Credit: US Politics January 2021

Wednesday’s events show that supporting law enforcement is needed now more than ever.

We must ensure that officers have the tools they need to keep America safe.

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) January 8, 2021

there you go, they need MORE tools

Lotta tools on JJs twitter feed. Prob solved

I've been calling them insurrectionists

Been referring to them as terrorists but will switch to insurgents. Good points made here.

So they were insurgents. How does this change anything with regard to what should be done and what we can expect going forward? Answer: nothing.

Jordan's already a big fucking tool. We don't need more of those.

Abolish them? Sorry to be flippant, but how is this the time to ask who will protect us from the fascists if we don't have cops?

― rob, Friday, January 8, 2021 12:22 PM (eight seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

abolish the police doesnt mean have no law enforcement, i dont think there are too many people who just want to be the victims of crimes with no recourse or protection

so what does it mean to abolish the particular police we have now? for one the police are powerful political actors who have mayors et al in their pockets and are completely above the law feeling free to assault and murder people on camera with no fear of repercussions, AND as we saw this week and have for the past year and forever really that theyre politically aligned with white supremacy, theyre a nasty organization rotten to the core

one part of them being so politically powerful is they dominate local budgets often to the extent of being more than half of discretionary spending! part of what happens when you have all the money is you get responsibility for handling lots of things, the vast majority of work the police do has nothing to do with serious crimes, they respond to mental health emergencies and often kill whoever they find there, they respond to medical emergencies and so forth

so what defund/abolish the police proposes is to split those huge police budgets amongst different government agencies that have specialized skills in dealing with various crises, and taking some of the money and putting it towards more preventative measures to alleviate the vast suffering in this country that often provokes said crises

under this plan there would still be law enforcement but they would be smaller and subject to actual oversight and not directly descended from slave patrols

It would help if a lot of these terms were more clearly defined and compartmentalized, cf. the tendency to call any number of Trump's actions treasonous when most/possibly none of them meet the actual legal definition of treason. I mean 'shitbag' has a nice mouthfeel but it doesn't really help delineate how various instances of shitbaggery should be handled.

You’re preaching to the choir here. I think we’re on the same page thanks.
― Boring United Methodist Church (Boring, Maryland), Friday, January 8, 2021 12:23 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

nice :)

good summary lag∞n

xp what's wrong with "illegal"?

There is no better argument to fire all cops and start over than what happened on Wednesday.

C'mon, I recognize the points being made, but these dudes were literally bragging about scaring/intimidating Congress into negating the election. That's terrorism to me.

― soaring skrrrtpeggios (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Friday, January 8, 2021 12:23 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i disagree, congress are prime political actors

fire America and start over tbh

'shitbag' has a nice mouthfeel

FP'd u for that image

And yeah "building security" needn't be conflated with "policing as currently practiced"

lol YMP

It will be interesting to see how congress deals with their own particular enforcers of the law after this. I have a hard time believing they won't gut the capitol police, not knowing at this point who among them is okay with them being killed. Whether the lightbulb pops on and they translate their experience into legit police reform legislation is another question altogether.

fire America and start over tbh

― Looking for Cape Penis house (Neanderthal), Friday, January 8, 2021 12:42 PM (twenty-nine seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

honestly good idea, one of my long time hobbyhorses is a lot of problems in this country are caused by the fact that our glorious founders purposely constructed any anti democratic system, for instance the new senate tho its split 50-50 the democrats will represent 40m more people than the republicans

good summary lag∞n

― stylish but illegal (Simon H.), Friday, January 8, 2021 12:40 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

thanking you

Sending your summary to my conservative mom, who will hate you

yes, thanks lagoon. I am a poor Abolish advocate, because the principle + current violence/corruption seems so obvious to me I stupidly lack the patience to address people's totally understandable concerns.

Sending your summary to my conservative mom, who will hate you

― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, January 8, 2021 12:49 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol hi mom

yes, thanks lagoon. I am a poor Abolish advocate, because the principle + current violence/corruption seems so obvious to me I stupidly lack the patience to address people's totally understandable concerns.

― rob, Friday, January 8, 2021 12:50 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

you know whats funny when i first heard about abolishing the police i was of course intrigued and googled around for what the plan was and couldnt really find anything cause everyone talking about it was so deep in academia or activism that they were all just speaking to each other at a high theoretical level, tho i think thats somewhat changed now

when was that?

xp Well that and also it's hard to give specifics of something we've never tried and don't have any versions of to look at. Abolition is a big unknown, but when held up against the fundamentally racist, white supremacist, nihilist deathcult system we have now, there's a lot of room for trial & error on the way there.

nashwan
Posted: January 8, 2021 at 12:58:32 PM
when was that?

mb like 5 years ago?

Yeah firming up the specifics on how it would and could work will go a long way towards making it happen. On a gut emotional level I despise the cops so just show me the way and I'm onboard.

fwiw terrorism traditionally defined is an act designed to provoke terror, thats why say bombing a crowded market is terrorism its not really a strategic target you do it to make people scared, the people who stormed the capitol were trying to take over the government, more of a standard insurgency, ie not terrorism

C'mon, I recognize the points being made, but these dudes were literally bragging about scaring/intimidating Congress into negating the election. That's terrorism to me.

― soaring skrrrtpeggios (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Friday, January 8, 2021 12:23 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i disagree, congress are prime political actors

― lag∞n,

i may be totally misunderstanding lagoon here, but there is no standard definition of terrorism. but as i have understood it, at least since i became a leading expert on the topic by taking a course on it in college and then never thinking about it again for the last 15 years:

terrorism almost always includes a political objective. it's not terror for the sake of terror. it's terror for the sake of a political objective. again, i may have completely misread lagoon upthread, sorry if i did.

WASHINGTON (AP) — AP Source: Pelosi tells Dems that top military official assured her steps are in place to prevent Trump nuclear launch.

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) January 8, 2021

that's really not what i'm worried about but i guess it's something smh

lagoon this is good:

https://www.8toabolition.com/

the idea of Trump launching a nuclear strike has always been on my mind. not that I think he was likely to do it but he is also an insane person

the people who "stormed the capitol" seem more like suicide bombers if the bomb didn't go off as expected. they were ordered in by president fuckface and their 4chan dork friends. they probably expected to be rebuffed and make their stand at the gates and scream their guts out. instead, they walked right in and stole pelosi's gavel and posted about it on facebook

Many people on both the Democrat the Republican side have already said that what happened is evidence that police need more resources.

The use of the language of the war on terror is meant to increase the repression of the state surveillance apparatus. That is one of its main functions— to convince people that we need to allocate more resources to a bunch of war-games bullshit while the US falls apart.

And as has been noted by study after study, drugs and weapons crackdowns will inevitably be enforced against poorer, Blacker, and browner people in the US, and exacerbate the structural equalities that are already extant. There will not be a meaningful turn toward prosecuting white nationalist types, because the US government serves to protect such people— just look at what happened on Wednesday.

BREAKING: Sen. Joe Manchin (https://t.co/EHSclJLRrQ.) says "absolutely not" to a round of $2,000 stimulus checks

Biden promised to approve $2K checks if Georgia Dems won their Senate races. Pelosi and Schumer also on board

W/ @ericawerner @mikedebonis https://t.co/IjsVMI3kD6

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) January 8, 2021

fuck this guy

As crazy as he might be, Trump doesn’t have the balls to launch an attack. Part of the reason he hasn’t started any new wars. He’s a coward (in this case that’s a good thing).

table I hear what you are saying but I have never forgotten this post from ILX poster difficult listening hour who I greatly respect in terms of current analysis:

this country's going so far to the left you're not going to recognize it

― difficult listening hour, Monday, September 18, 2017 8:53 AM (three years ago)

everybody thought the Soviet Union would last forever, it didn't, change can happen fast, I remain guardedly optimistic

(xp even with Manchin and his bullshit)

Oh c'mon someone just give Manchin something he wants, he's grandstanding because he can.

Look at Manchin, pissin' away the dem advantage before the new administration's even been sworn in.

I admit having Manchin pull this shit right out of the gate is pretty fuckin annoying

fuck it, we can easily peel at least R Senator off on that, fuck Manchin.

I think people in this thread should take a moment and think about why an unambiguous "more White people should be under surveillance" statement from a Black man turned into a discussion about how White people can't be surveilled because it would hurt Black people, therefore we must find another solution that protects White people from being surveilled.

Like, even in the realm of hypothetical venting you guys protect yourselves. Allies don't exist.

xpost he's a terrible taintflap with shitty hair

Shower WV with pork barrel projects, who cares, frankly the state needs an infusion of everything and it's money well spent on almost everything except the coal industry.

we can re-fund his butt

What is the upside for Manchin to do this? His constituents aren't exactly rolling in dough at this point.

needs to get socked right in the manchin

i may be totally misunderstanding lagoon here, but there is no standard definition of terrorism. but as i have understood it, at least since i became a leading expert on the topic by taking a course on it in college and then never thinking about it again for the last 15 years:

terrorism almost always includes a political objective. it's not terror for the sake of terror. it's terror for the sake of a political objective. again, i may have completely misread lagoon upthread, sorry if i did.

― Karl Malone, Friday, January 8, 2021 1:05 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah i mean theres no one official definition but it was always understood to be trying to scare and intimidate the general populous for political aims by attacking soft targets, usually because those doing it didnt have the resources to wage direct war, the famous asymmetrical warfare, so burning down a church is terrorism, but burning down a courthouse is not

i think the fact that one has to have a whole conversation about what it means shows how ultimately its not that great of a term and is generally just deployed... to terrorize people

I think people in this thread should take a moment and think about why an unambiguous "more White people should be under surveillance" statement from a Black man turned into a discussion about how White people can't be surveilled because it would hurt Black people, therefore we must find another solution that protects White people from being surveilled.

Like, even in the realm of hypothetical venting you guys protect yourselves. Allies don't exist.

Before this gets buried in the pace, thanks for posting this DJP. A lot to think about this morning and this is on my list.

lagoon this is good:

https://www.8toabolition.com/

― howls of non-specificity (sleeve), Friday, January 8, 2021 1:06 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

thx! will check it our

this country's going so far to the left you're not going to recognize it

― difficult listening hour, Monday, September 18, 2017 8:53 AM (three years ago)

i think its greatly underrated how far left the country has already shifted, only problem is it hasnt really penetrated the halls of power, its gonna take some sort of big fight