5 ms·

I guess a statement like that can always be true depending on how you define serious person. But millions of people were and are arguing for the strongest possi

by cactus2093 6y ago

I guess a statement like that can always be true depending on how you define serious person. But millions of people were and are arguing for the strongest possible interpretation of “abolish the police”. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol... I have to admit I find it pretty disheartening that mainstream liberals are for the most part just as unwilling to take a critical look at the most extreme, “all cops are bad”, toppling statues of Abraham Lincoln and burning down police stations subset of the left or even acknowledge that it exists, as the mainstream republicans have been of condemning the trumpism/q-anon alt right.

ABeeSea 6y ago
Do you have a source for “millions of people”?
- cactus2093 6y ago
  This article gives it a funny framing by just brushing it off as “few”, but claims 15% of Americans support abolishing the police https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/22/abolish-police-gallup-poll/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/22/abolish-pol... 15% of the roughly 200M adults in the US is 30 million people.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
    The article also stated that there may have been problems with the poll, like not differentiating between total elimination and partially dismantling police departments. If presented as total elimination of police departments, the survey might have missed support for more nuanced calls to dismantle police, said Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. “One notion of abolition is the need for discontinuity from the violent and racist past of law enforcement,” he said.
    - cactus2093 6y ago
      The way I read it that quote is saying the 15% would be higher if you included both the people who want to abolish and those who want more moderate reform. It’s not saying that it already includes both groups.
  - ABeeSea 6y ago
    That’s not what your article says lol. Do you have another source for your outlandish claim?
    - dang 6y ago
      Please stop using HN for political battle and flamewar. We've already had to ask you this once: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173294, and we ban accounts that abuse the site like this, regardless of their politics. Other people being wrong or behaving badly doesn't make it ok to break the rules.
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    My speculation is that the actual phasing means very different things to very different people, and thus the actual nuance of what people believe in aggregate to be useless to discern by their agreement or disagreement with singular phrases. For example, "abolishing the police, with context that they would be replaced with equally strong mutual support systems, social workers, mental and physical health workers" could be a vast majority of that 15%, or it could be the vast minority of that 15%. We just don't know.
    - Aunche 6y ago
      Social workers aren't going to stop people from breaching the Capitol.
      - notahacker 6y ago
        No, but it's pretty normal to think that the people attending domestic incidents to identify whether a crime has committed and the people guarding the legislature should have different rules of engagement, training and quite possibly uniforms. I'm the first person to argue that 'defund the police' was a terrible slogan to adopt, but that's precisely because everyone jumps to saying "but we don't actually mean have no publicly subsidised law enforcement". Even if the rafts of related reform proposals are still far too idealistic for the real world, it's not a position comparable to the Q faithful having the numbers to win primaries.
      - TeaDrunk 6y ago
        Well neither did the cops, so I don't see your point.
- akiselev 6y ago
  Many people are saying it was a Twitter user named "MillionsOfPeople"
betterunix2 6y ago
You know what the difference is? Those are fringe elements of left wing politics who get little to no endorsement from anyone with any actual power, and who remain mostly irrelevant in Democratic party politics. Whereas on Wednesday, you had the most powerful Republican tell a violent mob to go to the Capitol and "convince" the "weak" Republicans to change their minds. His lawyer, who is one of the prominent faces in the Trump media ecosystem, told them this will be "trial by combat." A Republican Senator showed an affirmative gesture to that very crowd on his way into the Capitol. Stop trying to "both sides" this, because this is not a "both sides are just as bad" situation. We just saw the top level leadership of a major national party endorse and praise a terrorist mob that tried to overthrow the US government. The president literally said he "loved" those people when he told them to go home. That is problematic on a completely different level from anything that has happened on the left.
- kodah 6y ago
  If we make the right own their extremists in terms of rhetoric, action, and ideology then I think the same standard is appropriate for the left. The only people that complain about "both sides" points are people who can't introspect their own ideologies. All you've done here is ask that people on the right ignore your fringe groups, but would you do the same? Or would you do what they're doing and engage in hyperbole to make you deal with them? Both your parties are junk to me, so I'm happy to keep saying "both sides" until you all get your bad behavior under control.
  - betterunix2 6y ago
    Get back to me when the most powerful Democratic politicians in the country throw their support behind violent extremists. The fringes of left wing politics have been kept at the fringe. For the past five years, if not longer, the extremist fringe of right wing politics has been allowed to enter the mainstream of the Republican party. The Republican President has endorsed them, encouraged them, praised them, and defended them, and the RNC just declared him to be their party's leader after what happened on Wednesday. Nobody needs to "make" the right own their extremists because they have done so already.
runamok 6y ago
The clarion call was "defund the police" not "abolish the police". Some people believe these are are synonymous but IMO most agree "defund" means things like de-militarize and add social workers to deal with things like mental health and quality of life issues instead of sending undertrained people with guns... I'd add "prevent them profiting from things like property seizures". Compare the two phrases in google trends for example. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=defund%20the%20police,abolish%20the%20police https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=defund%20the%20po... At the peak in mid-June it was a 100:7 ratio.

ABeeSea 6y ago

Do you have a source for “millions of people”?

cactus2093 6y ago
This article gives it a funny framing by just brushing it off as “few”, but claims 15% of Americans support abolishing the police https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/22/abolish-police-gallup-poll/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/22/abolish-pol... 15% of the roughly 200M adults in the US is 30 million people.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  The article also stated that there may have been problems with the poll, like not differentiating between total elimination and partially dismantling police departments. If presented as total elimination of police departments, the survey might have missed support for more nuanced calls to dismantle police, said Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. “One notion of abolition is the need for discontinuity from the violent and racist past of law enforcement,” he said.
  - cactus2093 6y ago
    The way I read it that quote is saying the 15% would be higher if you included both the people who want to abolish and those who want more moderate reform. It’s not saying that it already includes both groups.
- ABeeSea 6y ago
  That’s not what your article says lol. Do you have another source for your outlandish claim?
  - dang 6y ago
    Please stop using HN for political battle and flamewar. We've already had to ask you this once: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173294, and we ban accounts that abuse the site like this, regardless of their politics. Other people being wrong or behaving badly doesn't make it ok to break the rules.
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  My speculation is that the actual phasing means very different things to very different people, and thus the actual nuance of what people believe in aggregate to be useless to discern by their agreement or disagreement with singular phrases. For example, "abolishing the police, with context that they would be replaced with equally strong mutual support systems, social workers, mental and physical health workers" could be a vast majority of that 15%, or it could be the vast minority of that 15%. We just don't know.
  - Aunche 6y ago
    Social workers aren't going to stop people from breaching the Capitol.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      No, but it's pretty normal to think that the people attending domestic incidents to identify whether a crime has committed and the people guarding the legislature should have different rules of engagement, training and quite possibly uniforms. I'm the first person to argue that 'defund the police' was a terrible slogan to adopt, but that's precisely because everyone jumps to saying "but we don't actually mean have no publicly subsidised law enforcement". Even if the rafts of related reform proposals are still far too idealistic for the real world, it's not a position comparable to the Q faithful having the numbers to win primaries.
    - TeaDrunk 6y ago
      Well neither did the cops, so I don't see your point.
akiselev 6y ago
Many people are saying it was a Twitter user named "MillionsOfPeople"

betterunix2 6y ago

You know what the difference is? Those are fringe elements of left wing politics who get little to no endorsement from anyone with any actual power, and who remain mostly irrelevant in Democratic party politics. Whereas on Wednesday, you had the most powerful Republican tell a violent mob to go to the Capitol and "convince" the "weak" Republicans to change their minds. His lawyer, who is one of the prominent faces in the Trump media ecosystem, told them this will be "trial by combat." A Republican Senator showed an affirmative gesture to that very crowd on his way into the Capitol. Stop trying to "both sides" this, because this is not a "both sides are just as bad" situation. We just saw the top level leadership of a major national party endorse and praise a terrorist mob that tried to overthrow the US government. The president literally said he "loved" those people when he told them to go home. That is problematic on a completely different level from anything that has happened on the left.

kodah 6y ago
If we make the right own their extremists in terms of rhetoric, action, and ideology then I think the same standard is appropriate for the left. The only people that complain about "both sides" points are people who can't introspect their own ideologies. All you've done here is ask that people on the right ignore your fringe groups, but would you do the same? Or would you do what they're doing and engage in hyperbole to make you deal with them? Both your parties are junk to me, so I'm happy to keep saying "both sides" until you all get your bad behavior under control.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  Get back to me when the most powerful Democratic politicians in the country throw their support behind violent extremists. The fringes of left wing politics have been kept at the fringe. For the past five years, if not longer, the extremist fringe of right wing politics has been allowed to enter the mainstream of the Republican party. The Republican President has endorsed them, encouraged them, praised them, and defended them, and the RNC just declared him to be their party's leader after what happened on Wednesday. Nobody needs to "make" the right own their extremists because they have done so already.

runamok 6y ago

The clarion call was "defund the police" not "abolish the police". Some people believe these are are synonymous but IMO most agree "defund" means things like de-militarize and add social workers to deal with things like mental health and quality of life issues instead of sending undertrained people with guns... I'd add "prevent them profiting from things like property seizures". Compare the two phrases in google trends for example. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=defund%20the%20police,abolish%20the%20police https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=defund%20the%20po... At the peak in mid-June it was a 100:7 ratio.