From a risk mitigation perspective, this is a case of fighting the last war. We know the war that is coming: it's climate collapse. We don't need faster rockets, we need high speed rail.
I don't really know much about him, and I can't dispute your personal gut feeling. But I'm not familiar with anything that gives me this feeling.
For what it's worth, I think in general that if you say, "I just don't quite trust
<name>
. I didn't know why, but they creep me out," about pretty much anyone in public political life you can probably find a basis for that over a long enough time scale.
Last year the army arrested guards who raped Palestinian prisoners and protesters that included members of the Keneset rioted and stormed the prison (Sde Tieman).
There is no way anyone is getting held criminally accountable for this.
I think this requires us to look into what the definition of that word is, as a verb.
To "police" is to dominate and enforce conformity, often with the threat of overwhelming consequence. A lot of people don't realize that the origin of the modern police department was crowd control. They were invented in cities in the early twentieth century to suppress riots and protests. The day-to-day patrol work is just an extension of that core mandate.
I think that if you trained folks up the way we do for volunteer fire brigades that'd be a lot more like working as an EMT than a soldier. Sometimes you might have to lay some hands. But, imo that is not policing if you only respond when someone calls for help as opposed to showing up uninvited to enforce the state's prerogatives.
Showing up to assist and protect someone who is crying out for help isn't actually "policing", imo. That's rendering aid. You aren't acting to disincentivize non-compliance with state directives. So I would not consider such a group to qualify as police, semantically.
You know... I'm a big fan of some of the wild lefty stuff OP is posting, but I also endorse all of this! Those are some great ideas.
Frankly, I don't hate cops. I don't like the system (and I'm not a big fan of the individuals who participate in it), but if someone is willing to be agree to operate with this kind of accountability, I'm willing to give them a chance.
I've been thinking about this a lot. I'm a socialist activist in Oakland (home of the original Black Panters!), and I gotta tell you, this is where the rubber really meets the road.
First, Oakland knows what's up. This is a very politically aware town, with some moderate but genuine leftists in government. We do a lot of community uplift here.
Second, Oakland has very few police. We didn't "defund the police" so much as "mismanage our budget", but we have very few cops relative to the size of our city.
Third: our poorest neighborhoods are suffering TERRIBLY from violent crime and property crime. The city is still nice, but the same areas in which a lot of poor, non-white folks can tell you stories about bad interactions with cops will be the first to tell you that alleviating poverty is important, but they need help NOW. They need someone to call when bullets start flying.
Frankly, I think OP -- and the Panthers! -- have it dead fucking right! We DO need folks on the street ready to step up. We need services, we need parks, we need gun control... we need a lot of alternatives to policing. But we also need direct timely response teams to problems happening NOW. And my fellow lefties should start chewing on that idea, especially as the fascist state begins sending the secret police to bag-and-tag your fuckin' neighbor!
I think the 3rd option is just this with licensing.
I don't expect a system of community policing right now to be good, but let's start with the idea of cops who are required to live and serve in the same area. No traveling to the next town over to police people.
Next, no qualified immunity. No special exemptions to laws or unique authorization of violence. You have no additional powers under the state, just the same rights as everyone else.
If you required local protectors to organize within a licensing body that only let people participate in their organization after meeting requirements I think what you'd get would be an improvement on what we have without being totally chaotic and lawless.
I love this meme because this is the absolute spiciest take and I'm totally here for it.
I know people don't like this concept, but I think it needs more genuine discussion. There is a general unwillingness to address the question of who comes to lend aid to someone who is being threatened. Personally, I like the answer "your neighbors, who've trained in deescalation and have no unique authority" a lot better than either "the state" or "no one ❤️ ".
He is a former Marxist?? I find that bewildering, hilarious, and doubtful.
I think it's great when people have open enough minds to radically rethink their beliefs, but I hope I'm never so brainrotted as to somehow strawman my own former beliefs.
This meme doesn't work because a conservative literally bought me a copy of that book and it's infantile.
This book is titled "Basic Economics" because Sowel is a troll, and the economics in his book are largely correct but incomplete to the point of misinforming people. This is an incredibly "conservative" book through-and-through.
This is great! Thanks for setting it up!