From Wikipedia: Animal Farm by G.Orwell
"The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, however, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
>tl;dw: Man was tagging over someone else's art, Raz and group approach and separate him from crowd, chasing him for two blocks. He begins to film them with his phone, they take it from him. He tries to get it back and they attack him, kicking him in the head and breaking his glasses. At one point, Raz threatens to shoot the man. They then begin to gaslight him that it was all his fault. Audio only for most of the end, because woman in Raz' crew filming puts the phone in her pocket while the stream continues. [1]
So it took about 3 days for this anarchist utopia to demonstrate exactly why police exist.
> So it took about 3 days for this anarchist utopia to demonstrate exactly why police exist.
Yes, but not current american police. What is demonstrated here is that unchecked power is bad, which is pretty close to what the american police currently seems to have, leading to crimes like the one that started the whole protest.
Well said. It's about checked power - abolishing police totally would just end up with them recreated again when the need arises, but without the proper infrastructure to control them.
What we really need is a system of accountability and control over police. Police should be as accountable for their actions and mistakes as every other citizen (equality under the law!), or at least that's the idea.
We can start by:
- getting rid of police unions that hide information and do stuff like have police be judged by three of their peers, one picked by the accused, and prevent police from getting fired.
> without the proper infrastructure to control them.
Many, myself included, would argue that they're basically out of control right now. Just look at the sequence of events that unfolds almost to the letter after every unjustified police killing. At best the outcome is the cop involved resigns and quietly goes to work for another police department a few months down the line or retires with full benefits.
Defund of course means a million things to a million people but a lot of what I'm hearing is about moving the armed police response to the minority of roles where it's needed. The amount of time you need an armed officer is a tiny fraction of the times they're there and they're not trained for the vast majority of the actual work they do. Under this defund is about taking the glut of resources allocated to cops and moving it to people better trained to deal with the kind of mental health, mediation, etc tasks that take up the bulk of police's actual time.
I agree with you wholeheartedly on both points. I even said in my OG comment: "What we really need is a system of accountability and control over police." I know the police aren't well-controlled right now, that's why I was laying out a few ways to improve it! (:
I would say, though, that our US police are more controlled than what's going on in the CHAZ, however slightly in some ways.
It seems like folks have been demanding the regulations be fixed for some time now to no avail. Moreover, it isn't always so easy to just 'fix' a regulation. Qualified Immunity isn't a regulation in the traditional sense, it's jurisprudence. Sure, it's possible that legislation can resolve it (and hopefully it does so in a meaningful way) but "just asking" hasn't been working for some time now.
What CHAZ shows us is that there is perhaps a middle ground between "asking" and "taking up arms," but if none of the demands are met, I don't know that there are many other steps left.
Sure, I agree "just asking" clearly hasn't worked, but "the ballot box" hasn't been exhausted as an option yet, in fact I would say that we're gearing up now to see how effective both the soap box and the ballot box can be, as protest action finally seems to be getting through to both the public and (at least part of) the political class.
In fact it looks like in some places the cries to defund the police are finally being heard and actioned. I hope there are more, as this is a radical act and not just a legislative tweak. It's clear that a fundamental rebalancing of the relationship between police and society is needed, starting with talking away their weapons, and total de-escalation of police violence and their effective immunity to the consequences of their racist actions.
I hope "CHAZ" isn't a last step before open, armed conflict, because if it does go that way the public mood is going to shift in a millisecond to enforcement. Just like I hope here in the UK we don't see people pull down statues of Churchill - he was a racist asshole, but he was also the leader that brought us through WWII, and the population of this country aren't ready to stop venerating the latter because of the former yet.
I'm also not sure what "winning" looks like for either side when that starts.
Firstly, I never said anything about taking up arms against anyone. I am simply stating the fact that “unchecked power” is impossible when a monopoly of power (force... aka weapons) is held by the state.
History has shown us over and over and over that an unarmed populace will either A) be subject to unchecked violence by its overlords, or B) be successfully invaded by new and less desirable overlords.
Secondly, “fixing the regulations” is not necessary; what is necessary is enforcing the already existing regulations.
> History has shown us over and over and over that an unarmed populace will either A) be subject to unchecked violence by its overlords, or B) be successfully invaded by new and less desirable overlords.
Which is why the UK gets invaded every other week?
Just like vocal anarchists make the left look bad, the freedom-loving libertarian side is marred by the vocal authoritarians; esp when they feel threatened.
Maybe a 100 years ago. The government has invested high tens to low hundreds of trillions of our dollars into the military at this point. Guerrilla warfare on peoples own land is almost impossible to snuff out but the people also can't possibly "win".
There is little incentive to attempt tyranny when the result can be predicted so easily.
Also, don’t underestimate the power of 100 million people wielding guns. The world has yet to ever witness a force 1/10th as great and well-armed as the American populous.
The purpose of an armed populace isn't to "win" tactically, it's to win strategically and psychologically. It's basically like a poison pill clause, you want to make totalitarian takeover so unpallatable that every victory is a pyrrhic one. You want to force the occupiers to have to choose between killing your own countrymen or defecting, setting up more of a resistance. All the while, you shine light on all the atrocities.
With a sparsely-armed populace, it's easy for the occupying force to roll through without much conflict or challenging decisions.
Winning occurs through attrition of the occupiers, which, unlike Vietnam, can't just "back out".
I don't think the person you were responding to ever made the claim that it would never happen if the police were there. I think the point is that it did happen. If this is supposed to be a utopia free of cops then they are doing a poor job. They have "cops" that beat up people for petty crimes.
Raz isn't a reason why the police exist. Raz is a product of a system where the police exist too much, which if given the proper social and educational services earlier in his life, his character and personality disorder exemplified here would have been nullified.
> This guy and his crew beat up and threatened to kill someone for a petty crime.
That's exactly what caused all of these protests.
> At what point are adults responsible for their own actions?
It's constantly of interest to me how much "free will" actually exists. The more research comes out about environmental factors, the more we realize that people who suffer {home, food, employment, physical} insecurity exhibit symptoms as if they had a lower IQ and stress which is correlated with increased mental illness, stress, blood pressure, and other health problems.
It also strikes me that the current legal corrections system really only works if we, as individuals, have significant ability to decide not to commit a crime as opposed to it being the most likely destiny based on our current {personal, environmental} state.
That doesn't sound like a good excuse for him. Sociopathic behaviors have existed since time immemorial, and the old approach before any form of formal law enforcement even existed was for tribes to enact social law enforcement and isolate or exile such undesirable elements-- and tyrants are born when you got enough armed people on your side to override societal rule.
Yeah. Hopefully the people in CHAZ learn from Animal Farm and shut Raz down now.
Orwell would likely support CHAZ, he fight with the anarchists in Catalonia after all. People tend to not realize that Animal Farm was a criticism of the USSR from a socialist. It is not a criticism of all socialism or anarchism.
"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it." - George Orwell (1946)
See my above comment. We should have basically made the police equal to all other citizens (with the increase in self- and other- defense abilities that are required for the general public to make that possible), where the only difference is that the police are actively doing defense as a job. And police should be sued and arrested just like everyone else is.
Police are civilians and should be treated as such, it shouldn't be any more legal for them to do something any other civilian would face substantial legal penalties for without facing the same penalties.
Exactly. Making police a class above was a mistake from the beginning. Suddenly you have a class that can use violence arbitrarily against the other class with hardly any penalty unless the "lower" class makes a big protest about it. It's really horrible and is a perfect system for turning "sheepdogs" (people who want to protect others) into "wolves" (people who pray on others) through peer-pressure, secretiveness, and lack of accountability. And worse, it draws wolves in the first place.
And suffer the penalties of kidnapping if they do it for the wrong reasons, yes. This would do two things: one, people would have a huge incentive not to do that, and two, maybe we'd raise the threshold for jail and raise the penalty for wrongful imprisonments, meaning cops don't jail people for victemless crimes and we don't have such a massive prison population.
Also, we could make laws saying that prisoners are only allowed to be kept at approved prisons; a law that could be applied equally to police and citizens, while ensuring the government gets to approve who gets imprisoned.
