Fuck the zioNazis and fuck the spineless cowards that run feddit.com. Death to capitalism, death to America, death to Israel, free Palestine, and ALL power to ALL the people.

And frankly, I don’t think feddit.org deserve to be a part of the SDF community, or polite society in general. ZioNazis are exactly that, Nazis with a different coat of paint, and should be treated as such.

BUT I still disagree with SDF specifically defederating instance-wide from Feddit or literally any instance. IMO the only reason I would support SDF defederating an instance is if simply federating with the instance is technically dangerous for out instance.

Because we don’t deserve to be punished for feddit.org’s crimes by throwing away our ability to communicate with, agitate, or monitor Feddit’s users and mod team. I totally sympathize with other instances that specifically and openly curate what their users can and can’t see nuking their federation if that is what their users want. Totally reasonable. But I suspect that a lot of us are here precisely because we don’t defederate from anyone, even if they suck or deserve worse. A lot of us are on this instance deliberately because we want to curate our own feeds.

And personally, I reject the premise that communicating with a person means that I respect or endorse them in any capacity. For example, I’ve replied to various neoliberals all over the Fediverse because they said something horrible or uninformed that needs to be addressed, at least for the sake of everyone else watching. I don’t endorse or respect the neoliberal worldview, but unfortunately in the US and a lot of places we’ve ruined, neoliberalism is the “default” ideology, so that’s where discussions from any other position have to start from: rejecting neoliberalism and disproving its lies.

And as alluded to above, this is my position about neo-nazis, PDF files, cops, and ${insert any morally reprehensible group here} with respect to this instance as well.

So no, I don’t support us site-wide defederating from Feddit, just as I wouldn’t support site-wide defederating any instance unless federation somehow posed a technical existential threat to this instance. Not that they haven’t earned it, because they’ve earned way the fuck worse, but we don’t deserve to lose our ability to speak to them or monitor their monsters.

Yeah and now some of the warlords put on blue uniforms and torture the populace. Others wear camo and bomb civilians in foreign lands. Some even hold all resources in the world hostage as they and their minions systematically destroy the planet. Cops don’t prevent the warlords from taking over, they ensure that the warlords who already have taken over don’t have to personally intimidate their subjects into “”“peace”“”.

CHAZ

As discussed in this retrospective by Black Rose, this demonstrates the need for community self-defense, not the police! The police are the very last people on Earth who need to be called in situations like these!

Ah yes, the oppressor was being polite with someone else so let’s just let him keep doing oppressor shit. /s

These cops are basically an occupying military that we’ve been socialized into believing are our protectors! As long as they’re wearing the uniform, they’re doing oppressor shit and are therefore valid targets for community defense.

Me not doing the midterm exam due on Sunday 😭

Rookie numbers! I unironically use 7 pillows. 3 for the head, 1 for my back (so I can sleep on my side and lean against the wall), 1 between my legs, and 2 to sandwich my feet into.

It’s time to remind Congress that they work for the people

They do? Like I get that’s the pretext for why we remain their subjects, but do we really believe they will ever work for us? The only people I remember them ever “working for” are white landowners.

Actually, most people just can’t afford to leave

Yeah that’s a better answer. Only reason I can leave the house basically at all is because (1) my parents pay for gas and (2) college is the only place I have to go. But my answer is true too; it sucks because everyone is too poor to leave.

America sucks so bad that I’d literally rather not leave my house

What are you smoking and can I have some?

water-ass-phall

I think we’re good now lol.

Like 75% of my feed is Blahaj users. Glad it’s been reversed but I’m still curious as to why it happened 😳

Hey while you’re deleting stuff can you delete my student loans?

…

Yeah I thought not.

please be sarcastic I beg you

So I rolled a critical fail for reading comprehension and thought the comment I replied to was literally about whether or not we used to call DM’s PM’s 😅.

when they used to be called PMs

I was referring to that part specifically 😅. Yes that’s how I unironically read it.

My username and the hundreds of others like it back on R*ddit indicates otherwise 😆

I think you made some really good points about how, in some circumstances, abolishing local police is possible if people can be convinced to do it. This is something I genuinely overlooked that I need to think more about.

This is still not a trivial ask in many communities because the police will try to protect their existence. For example, if people tried to vote the NYPD out of existence, the NYPD has huge resources compared to the community they oppress to produce and broadcast propaganda. In comparison, some small-town police department might not have access to drastically more money than everyone else, at least not enough to flood the airwaves. Additionally, the Free State Project is absolutely tiny. It is something that the capitalists can afford to lose control over. But I think you made some good points and provided a good example.

However, even the Free State Project is under the jurisdiction of at least the FBI and the state police of the state in which they leave, even if they are difficult to call. And lots of places are in border control’s jurisdiction (like a lot a lot, because it’s the borders + the coastline + 100 miles inward!). So these police are going to be much more difficult to abolish by vote, practically impossible.

I’m happy to show you evidence and reasons, and sources. Are you open to that?

Always!

You keep lecturing me at quite a lot of length

Sorry about that, both the lecturing and “at length”.

You can also, if you think an anarchist community would make it work better, just make it happen and make your community, just like the libertarians did.

Yeah that works for very small scale rural communities, but what about the cities and suburbs where the majority of the population is? Those areas are more locked down.

Part 2

It was just “research” from your “comrades,” which makes it sound like only comrades can come up with truth, and anyone else needs to learn from them before “spouting off.” You literally said at one point “don’t use your judgement.”

I want to expand a bit on the “don’t use your judgement” point. A better way to say that would have been: “defer your judgement to that of the victim.” Choosing to defer your judgement to someone else is still a judgement call. And in the case where you are the victim, this collapses into making the judgement call for yourself.

And the reason I said that is because if the victim does not want the cops involved, then the cops should not get involved, period. I don’t see this as controversial, even if the cops weren’t the baddies. But since they are, bringing them in where they’re not welcome is a recipe for violence and further arrests.

I will admit that I typically give my comrades’ views the most weight, but I absolutely do listen to non-anarchists. Actually, that’s one of the reasons I have a SDF account: because almost no one is defederated from us, and we don’t block anyone (I think), so at least as far as Lemmy is concerned, I get stuff from lemmy.world and other non-anarchist instances and people on Lemmy. And for my news digest, I actually just compare several mainstream and independent media sources and try to “estimate” the story from the “corrupted signal” I get from taking all those sources.

I think you are mischaracterizing how insular the anarchist movement actually is.

The cops in most cities are organized by the city council and the mayor. “Capitalism” has nothing to do with it, except indirectly, because it takes money and connections to get on city council.

The phrase “except indirectly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here! Capitalism has an absolutely enormous but indirect effect on local politics. You can buy a politician’s loyalty for shockingly little, so little that even local businesses can do it for local politicians.

There are a lot of places where people through the exercise of their democracy, reduced the funding for the police, instituted other programs like social workers going to some calls, got the police force out of doing traffic enforcement, basically, doing reforms.

And where have those reforms gotten us? Every single time the reformers say they’re going to do some reform, then it gets watered down, and eventually the cops somehow get extra money, extra training, and nothing changes. Supplementary to the discussion above, this is why we need to abolish the police.

If the whole city council tried to disband the police completely, and just have an anarchist city, they would probably lose their election because the people of the city wouldn’t like that idea.

I don’t agree with you here. I think that, if we actually disbanded the police, people would be happier. Also, I’m not interested in winning elections. I’m interested in bringing power to the people.

But there is not some other entity that’s coming from outside and “enforcing” the police on the people of the city. It’s just the city government, which is our system, is changeable by a majority of the people every few years, if enough people can get on board for it.

It is absolutely not our system. In my case, the municipal government is the local branch of the state government, which is itself subordinate to the federal government. And at all levels, the people with the money are the ones that pull the strings. If push comes to shove and it’s the will of the people vs the will of the higher levels of government, the will of the government usually wins, and the will of the most powerful local capitalist will win every time (because states amplify the political power of those who are wealthy enough to prop them up).

It’s not like some Amazon warehouse where the “owners” run the city and make there be police, and there’s nothing the people in the city can do about it.

I would argue that this basically is the reality of the situation, and that the voting is just to make the smallest of changes. (“If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal.” I would like to offer a corollary: if a possibility is so impactful that it would actually disrupt the capitalist order, it will never be put up for a vote, because the government gets to decide what gets voted on, and the politicians are indirectly controlled by the capitalists.) Like with police interrogations, voting is not an equal interaction between the government and its subjects. The government has all the power, and that power is controlled by the capitalist class.

No offense, but I think you might misunderstand some core principles of contemporary anarchist philosophy, like how capitalism and politics are intertwined, and that might be why you’re not getting a warm reception amongst anarchists. I definitely recommend you check out Section D.2 of the Anarchist FAQ, and skim the rest of Section D. (Yes there’s a holy-shitload of reading for anarchists 😆. I can probably find you a YouTube or audiobook version if you’re not in the mood to do all that reading.)

Tl;Dr please read the PDF I linked. It will explain how interrogations work a lot better than I am capable of. And it won’t yell at you.

Part 1

I read your initial paragraph and didn’t see anything even remotely resembling “this is why” or where logically your argument came from.

To be honest, I thought we were on the same page about the cops being baddies, but on different pages about what to do about it, especially since you said you were looking to post in an anarchist community.

you have to realize that you wrote me an initial message with “All cops are bastards, always, everywhere, forever, no exceptions” “a worthless piece of shit.” “No they aren’t” “No you fucking don’t” “it’s terrible advice” and so on.

Yes, there was lots of swearing. That does not diminish my point. In fact, it enhances it, because it increases the chance of it being understood by the widest possible audience, and it underscores the importance of the message. It also forces the reader to practice confronting their beliefs, which in the real world are going to resemble my first post more than a perfectly typed theoretical tome.

I.e., just because someone is yelling at me doesn’t mean that what they’re saying is wrong. And this is something that really takes practice, to learn to listen even when someone is being up in your face, because I might just be “that wrong” or even stepping on someone’s toes in a way I don’t understand. For this reason, I really appreciate contemporary anarchist essays for being upfront and confrontational.

Let’s take these one at a time.

All cops are bastards, always, everywhere, forever, no exceptions

If you want, replace “bastards” with “baddies” and this is exactly what I want to communicate.

Why are cops ever the baddies? Because

• They enforce the will of the capitalist class. More plainly: they work for the rich; your interests come last. In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the cops do not have to “protect and serve.” Even if they are taken at their word, even the pretext of law enforcement, namely to enforce the law as it is written, gives away the game: they enforce the law as it is written without regard for the ethics or effects of those laws.
• The few times that ordinary people do benefit from police interactions, these are not part of the function of the system. For example, sometimes cops will “not see something” if they’re trying to be nice. For example, if a homeless person is living under the overpass, an individual police officer might decide to leave the homeless person alone instead of giving them a ticket for loitering. Now in my view, this is, morally, the absolute bare minimum. But from the perspective of the police department, this is a (small) dereliction of duty, because the homeless person can be found to be breaking the law, yet the officer refused to enforce the law.
• The proof is in my personal experience, the experiences of everyone I’ve ever known, the people to whom I have listened to (comrades or otherwise!), my experience following the news daily (usually NOT from anarchist or even anarchist-sympathetic sources!), all the statistics about police I have ever seen, all the true crime slop I’ve watched, hell even C.O.P.S. made the cops look bad to me, and all the books and articles I have ever read on the topic. And look at what the cops openly and proudly focus on: harassing the homeless, prosecuting drug addicts, harassing sex workers, deporting migrants, silencing protests. And that’s just what they’ll brag about.

Why are the cops everywhere baddies? Because they are baddies in every country, because all states exist to prop up the interests of the locally powerful people, and the police serve the interests of their local state. This is, in my view, a fundamental pillar of contemporary anarchist thought, and I can refer you to literature for a better justification if needed.

Why are cops always baddies? Because being a police officer is defined by membership in a police department, because the powers and protections police officers get are at least mostly effective as long as the officer is in good standing with a police department, including when off-duty.

Why are cops forever baddies? Because:

• At some point, they did not exist. But if they never existed and someone created them right this very second, I would still be able to argue based on the cops’ own stated purpose that they are the baddies.
• When they were created, they were branched out from slave-catching patrols. Slave- catching is evil because it violates the principle of autonomy, which is again a pillar of anarchist philosophy. So they started off evil.
• As modern policing grew into what it is today, the blatant disregard for autonomy has not really improved, as evidenced by the existence of prisons, jails, and police killings. So in the recent past and present, police have been evil. This is supplementary to the discussion above.
• If we keep doing policing like we do now, then it would still be an evil institution. But if we changed it, then the change would really have to be so drastic that it would simply be something else entirely, because the police are such a fractally evil organization.

Why are there no exceptions? Because cops are a subset of the set of baddies, and this is because, as discussed above, cops are evil because their function is evil. So the only way for a cop to stop being evil on account of being a cop is to stop being a cop. And when individual police officers do something good, they do it in spite of being a cop, often in flagrant dereliction of their duty to uphold the law as it is written.

“a worthless piece of shit.”

I very carefully worded that to make it clear that I am calling the police worthless pieces of shit.

Which I am. And they are. They’re actually a lot worse than shit, because shit can be useful as fertilizer. The police, on the other hand, keep our species from reaching its full potential.

“No they aren’t”

Yes, that’s one of the points I want to make. That was in response to “(The police are) there to solve real problems.” My issue really was with the word solve. In case it was unclear: yes, the problems are real, and i do not mean to trivialize them. Furthermore, their pretext for being there will likely be to solve the problem. But they are not there to solve the problem. Solving the problem is a pretext for reestablishing control of the situation in a way that is palatable to their paymasters. In rare cases, for example stopping serial killers (which, from watching hundreds of true crime documentaries, which are notoriously pro-police: they are terrible at doing!), these interests line up with the interests of the people, but considering how many people have their lives ruined or ended by police for property crimes, crimes of poverty, drug crimes, antisocial crimes (i.e. pissing in the street), it is clear to me that this is the exception rather than the norm. That’s what I desperately need to communicate.

“No you fucking don’t”

This was in response to the bit about talking with the police. In the guide I linked, there is a huge section about how the police ask you all sorts of innocent, easy questions to butter you up for hard ones. You really should not talk to the police almost ever. Talking to the police is not a equal exchange. The cops have all the power, and they will use whatever psychological and physical means that they can to fill up their case files.

Saying “no you fucking don’t” was crucial to demonstrate how seriously dangerous a choice that is to make. If I had said “no you don’t”, that would have betrayed how important this point is.

“it’s terrible advice”

Again, that’s the point I wanted to make. I’m not saying that to be mean, I’m saying that because I think it needs to be said. If you told me “you should plug your fork into the outlet” with complete sincerity, I would tell you “that’s a terrible idea, don’t do that” because following that advice could be fatal. I would rather see you alive and upset at me than dead by listening to terrible advice. And then once the fork is down, I will gladly infodump about why it is a terrible idea to fuck with electricity. But in that moment, I need you to put the fork down. Similarly, I need you to not collaborate with the cops in the future. Lives are at stake. At least after whatever incident you’re going through in the present moment since I acknowledge it might be too difficult to reverse course.