[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.