[magnetowasright]

Beautifully said.

Your comment about slogans reminds me of the 'thin blue line between anarchy and order' slogan the police themselves use which, to me, is a bare-faced admission of existing to protect the property and interests of the wealthy by suppressing the rest of us. I've never quite understood why that slogan became so popular.

[lolinder]

Because most people don't equate "order" with "oppression by the wealthy", they understand it to mean "the stability that allows me to live my life without fear", which is a pretty unambiguously good thing by most people's measurement.

We can argue about whether the police deliver what the slogan offers, but your inability to understand why the slogan is popular stems from your very weird take on its meaning.

[magnetowasright]

I don't understand how it's a 'very weird take' on its meaning. Is it any weirder than people finding comfort in it?

It's just hilarious (and confusing) to me that it's just as easily a condemnation rather than praise; no leaps of logic required. At all. Other such slogans are usually a bit more obtuse and harder to challenge than 'yeah, that is exactly correct, and it horrifies me', hence the confusion. I suppose it is a very effective thought terminating cliche.

[lolinder]

> Also an anarchist!

From your other comment. This is the only way in which that slogan can be interpreted to mean anything negative—if you're one of the very small number of people who believe anarchy to have positive connotations.

> it's just as easily a condemnation rather than praise; no leaps of logic required

It's not a leap of logic, it's a leap of semantics. For the vast majority of English speakers "order" has positive connotations and "anarchy" has negative connotations. For you it's the opposite. Given that, it's not surprising that you interpret it the opposite way as most people, but it's weird that you have so little understanding of the rest of the Anglosphere that you don't realize that you're the odd one out.

[magnetowasright]

I was never confused about what is more popular. Re-reading what I wrote might make that clearer to you?

My interpretation of the phrase strictly retains the semantics, including that of the word 'order' to essentially mean 'the state', or perhaps more generously 'the status quo'. Like I said, it's not one of the more obtuse slogans, like ones artfully designed to sound reasonable when taken at face value but is actually semantically overloaded, take any dog whistles like weird anti-trans rhetoric about chromosomes which was never actually about chromosomes. I hear they're on to hand-wringing over gametes now; I wonder what they'll run to next. This thin blue line stuff doesn't have any of that overloading (or resultant churn); the semantics of the phrase itself are no deeper than it first appears.

[yareal]

It's especially funny to me, an anarchist, who believes that self organizing communities built around wellbeing for all would be radically better than today's world. If the police are the only thing between today's world and "luxury space communism", maybe the police need to be re evaluated.

[magnetowasright]

Also an anarchist! Totally agree. Oh how I dream of it!

It's been very frustrating watching so much police violence, corruption, etc. being openly reported internationally and nothing changing, at all. In Australia (and from what I've heard of the US) there's not much of an effort to try and suppress news of or spin better PR over the horrific stories of police brutality and corruption any more. Like they're not even bothering to keep up pretence and plausible deniability any more. It feels like we're unfortunately a long way from re-evaluating the police even very strictly within the current political frameworks we have. Gotta try to stay optimistic and active, though!

[someuser2345]

What exactly is the difference between your "self organizing communities" and the cities and towns we have today? Nobody is forcing you to live in a city, you are free to move to any other city in the country.

[yareal]

Cities of millions of people are too big to effectively be a self organized community, imo. And I have moved to a city or town that operates closer to my ideals.

But the other thing that's important to remember is that those communities need to be organized for the well being of all, and there aren't such places today.

Also, there's a practical element. Capitalism is here and powerful. I still need to eat, so I participate. I just also spend a lot of time and money on mutual aid (I have a spare house I rent at "cost of maintenance" to families in need, because I believe housing should not be a commodity. Do I take what I can out of the capitalist mode and put it into the anarchist mode.)

[zo1]

And you don't think self-organizing communities built around their well-being will ever decide to do anything against those that go against its well-being? What if they end up making a defacto police force anyways, what then?

Also an anarchist, though not the kind you probably are ("anarcho capitalist" vs "anarcho space communist"). Either way, I don't have a rainbow happy view of human nature, and as such I don't think you can get away from having bad guys that require some sort of police or enforcement.

[yareal]

It's important to separate the roles police play. Sometimes they are detectives, solving crimes. Sometimes they are traffic enforcement, mental health interventions, noise violation enforcement, violent robbery halters, etc. Not all of these roles need be filled by an armed central full time force.

While I'd personally push for removing most of those roles from a police force, and I believe that communities could do so safely and better with more community run organizations, as an anarchist I believe it should be up to communities to decide what's right for them. If a group decides they really want police, then they should do that. I'd disagree with their decision, but that's ok.

[lolinder]

> as an anarchist I believe it should be up to communities to decide what's right for them

Isn't this more or less what's already happening today? Some communities have scaled back their police force dramatically, others have maintained theirs or even scaled them up.

Is the difference just that you'd prefer to see us start from a clean slate and choose from the buffet table, rather than have to migrate from legacy systems?