[danaris]

Hi there! I live in the US. I am a leftist. I am in favor of prison abolition, universal basic income, massively increased taxation of the rich, and voting reform.

Care to explain why I either don't count or don't really exist?

[fragmede]

Because of the two party system, you have to either vote Democrat or Republican for your vote to count, so your actually leftist ideals, which are to the left of the centrist Democrat party, do not meaningfully exist as a voting block.

[danaris]

So the only political movements that you think are allowed to be said to exist in a country are those explicitly and broadly represented by a major party?

I mean, I guess that's a position you could take, but it seems like a pretty extreme one.

[CrossVR]

> prison abolition

Can we stop calling reform abolishment? I know it's more fun to call it abolishment because it triggers the people you disagree with, but it's entirely counter-productive.

I'm just getting so tired of these constant motte and bailey fallacies in US political discourse.

[dragonwriter]

> Can we stop calling reform abolishment?

People talking about "prison abolition" aren't talking about reform when they do.

Some people talking about prison abolition (but far from all, or even the majority) might also be willing to accept reform as an intermediate step or compromise, and might engage in discussion about the shape of reform that might be acceptable in that role, but that's secondary too, and not the focus of, their advocacy for abolition.

[krapp]

People use the word "abolition" not to trigger you but because it's the word they mean to use and because they explicitly don't believe in reform.

You may not respect it enough to take it seriously, but it is a position that some socialists hold.

[CrossVR]

Oh I take it seriously and I also agree that in the US there's a large population that's sent to prison for no good reason, with almost no attention paid to rehabilitation and treatment.

However I have doubts that, when people who hold that position come to power, El Chapo will be walking free with no restrictions the next morning.

Some form of restriction of movement will be required for frequent violent offenders. You may abolish the old system since you believe it's rotten to the core and you may call whatever replaces it something other than prison, but it will still be prison.

[dragonwriter]

> However I have doubts that, when people who hold that position come to power, El Chapo will be walking free with no restrictions the next morning.

"Prison" (carceral punishment) does not encompass all possible restrictions on personal freedom and movement. Even in systems with carceral punishment, other restrictions on freedom and movement are used for some situations, that do not involve incarceration.

[armada651]

And this is exactly why calling for "prison abolishment" is so counter-productive, because when most people hear that the assumption is that everyone who's in prison right now is free to go.

It does not help your cause to adopt a motto that espouses a more extreme position than you actually hold and both your supporters and detractors will feel betrayed when they learn your position is actually more moderate.

[krapp]

>And this is exactly why calling for "prison abolishment" is so counter-productive, because when most people hear that the assumption is that everyone who's in prison right now is free to go.

So what? You say "DEI" or "woke" and people assume you mean racism against white people. You say "toxic masculinity" or "feminism" and people assume you hate all men. "Pro choice" means you choose to murder babies. Transgender people are pedophiles and fetishists. Immigration is invasion. Atheists are incapable of morality. Opposition to Israeli Zionism is antisemitism. Any economic system besides free market capitalism is socialism, all socialism is communism and all communism leads to the death camps. Democracy is the worst system except for all of the others. By the way did you the Nazis were socialist, and BLM was a violent Marxist army that burned entire cities to the ground?

Most people (especially Americans) have been indoctrinated by society to be unable to interpret any radical or leftist concept in any but the most extreme bad faith way possible, so they don't have to take it seriously. Their minds are protected by a cloud of thought-terminating cliches. Despite this, one doesn't let the opposition control one's language or police one's tone, because that just leads to one's own argument being co-opted and undermined.

The position being described here begins with "abolish the prisons," it just doesn't end with that. But that isn't reform, and if one called it "reform" just to be civil, no one would even bother to listen. Even getting people to consider the nature of the systems they live within and benefit from enough to say "abolish the prisons? That's crazy talk" is getting them to examine their biases more deeply than they probably have in their entire lives.

[derelicta]

Because you very likely still defend capitalism and US hegemony

[danaris]

...Where on earth do you get that idea?

Of course, one does have to be careful with one's definitions when talking about "capitalism", because I've seen people mean everything from "the current, specific, late-stage capitalist system and nothing else" to "the basic concept of exchanging currency for goods and services" and everything in between. Personally, I'm in favor of abolishing the former and some of the stuff in the middle, but I'm skeptical that even in a fully post-scarcity society we would abandon the need for the latter.

As for US hegemony...I think that the current situation demonstrates very well why it's a serious problem. We're a single point of failure, and the polarization here has been rising for decades, leaving something like this all but inevitable. Indeed, even if someone like Trump had not come along and normalized hatred and fascism, we would still have likely been in a situation where every 4-8 years the US's policies on a wide range of things flipped violently back and forth.

No; while I fear that the transition will be very rocky, the world will be better off if a broader coalition of nations can collectively take up the role of attempting to enforce the notion of universal human rights across the globe. While they're at it, maybe they'll finally be able to get the US to agree to things like the UN Convention on Rights of the Child, and the authority of the International Criminal Court.