Mandates are being used in many different ways depending on the country. But even if it were limited to work, the right to work is also recognized as a human right so the analogy to driving still fails.
per 'defund the police' being extreme, here's a story. living near Pitt in 1981. iiuc, Reagan defunding forced the local psych hospital to empty out. So now we had a bunch of patients with psychiatric disabilities living homeless in the neighborhood, and my understanding is that they needed to stay close by the hospital in order to get daily meds. Of course this resulted in more police involvement, and though I don't have the proof, the common sense reaction would be to allocate more officers to the zone. I'll bet the officers in the street weren't thrilled.
end result : mental health funding decreased and police funding increased.
So my understanding of 'defund the police' is to reverse what happened in that and many similar situations
The “Reagan defunded psychiatric hospitals” trope needs to die. The wards started emptying in the 60s with the granting or rights to the patients. We don’t want to go back to “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest”. Then more with the invention of meds that controlled the worst symptoms. Psychiatric hospitalization rates dropped 65% from 1970-1979. Those hospitals were funded by states not the feds, so there was a much larger trend going on.
The bill had been only law for 10 months when Reagan repealed it. It seems dubious that either the bill or its repeal had any significant impact on the national trend which, as the gp pointed out, was well on its way by 1980.
> So my understanding of 'defund the police' is to reverse what happened in that and many similar situations...
Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning, because I've seen one or two around and this one is new to me.
It is best to take political slogans literally. When a large group of people gets together and starts chanting something, then votes someone in who promises to execute the chant there is always a pretty good chance that the slogan will get implemented literally.
Eg, I'm pretty sure that there were some half-hearted arguments that "build a wall" was metaphorical. It turned out to involve a literal wall.
> Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning,
Most comments explaining "defund the police" are from people who disapprove of it. The above is exactly how I've always heard it described. If they wanted to abolish the police, they could have just said "abolish the police."
I'd argue that this is proof that the refund the police people mean something different.
Right like if you have me saying "defend" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.
I'd also suggest actually reading that op-ed, it's discussing a process that would take decades and specifically arguing against a "reformist" approach to improving police forces.
When you have stories like https://theintercept.com/2021/12/18/little-rock-police-chief... and a former captain of the NYPD signalling that as mayor doesn't trust the police to protect him (after the police union "declared war" on the prior mayor), I'm inclined to maybe believe that policing as an institution in the US needs to be reworked from the ground up.
This should become obvious, and defund starts to make more sense when I say that systemically, US police forces have few or no incentives to actually decrease crime and counterintuitively are often rewarded when crime increases. That the incentives between "the police" and citizens are so completely out of alignment makes you think.
Good lord a bunch of typos in the first part of that, and now too late to edit (I think I noticed one and fixed it in the wrong place, making things worse...)
Should be
> I'd argue that this is proof that the defund the police people mean something different.
> Right like if you have me saying "defund" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.
I think the morale of the story is, people fall for slogans and slogans always turn out shit results. Trump's MAGA, well everyone has a different definition of what it would take to "Make America Great Again." Some might even argue, like myself, that if we say that, we should really take off the "Again" part. I am pretty sure most slogans that get chanted, we could come to the same conclusion, slogans are shit. Trying to have a catch phrase that captures a large and complex idea, is a bad idea.
To Diversify. Obama had the whole "Change" thing. Well what exactly we we changing? And a lot of people chanted about change, but I bet different people had a different idea of what that change looked like.
It is a possible interpretation. But there are a wide variety of interpretations of that slogan in a crowd of people chanting "defund the police". It isn't really possible to say that this specific interpretation is what the crowd means because in all likelihood even the crowd won't agree on any specific interpretation.
The other slogan doing the rounds at the same time - "all cops are bad" - suggests that there was a serious element who wanted to abolish the police on the basis that the entire police force was bad. That needs to be acknowledged if people are arguing about what the phrase means.
I'd say that "defund" is softer than and different from "ACAB" or "abolish the police".
"Abolish the police" is pretty much right out of Kropotkin, and a lot of people aren't comfortable with that (perhaps rightly). "Abolish" as opposed to "disband" is a deliberate nod to "abolition", as in slavery abolition. See also: the meme about how modern policing is descended from slave patrols in the Antebellum South (based on my non-professional reading, this seems to be half-true, and it looks more like modern policing developed in 18th-century England).
ACAB... meh. Because of the power dynamics involved, I see nothing wrong with assuming that any police officer is hostile and a threat to your life and liberty. Police departments generally seem incapable of regulating themselves effectively and seem mostly immune to civilian oversight. Maybe there are exceptions in certain parts of the world.
I do agree that some people take "defund" further than others. I also think that a lot of people are "defund revisionists" to some extent, who are squeamish about really aggressively defunding in starve-the-beast fashion, much like how people are squeamish about "abolishing" the police. But I don't think it's a bad thing that any given crowd doesn't agree on what exactly it means. Politicians seem to be more or less uniformly interpreting it in the way I described it.
how does the linked NYT article support your position that fraud was committed at that site? Did the bipartisan boards of county and state canvassers review the processes and results?
>how does the linked NYT article support your position that fraud was committed at that site?
I never affirmatively said fraud happened. I have no idea. What the link proves quite conclusively that there is the appearance of some BS going on. Which in the context of where the democrats are forced to make sure things dont look like there's a 'voted fraud org' like biden said.
If biden was telling to the truth. This is exactly what it would look like.
>Did the bipartisan boards of county and state canvassers review the processes and results?
Doesn't matter. Bush vs Gore in 2000 was a big boondoggle. Russian interference allegations in 2016 that is questionable. Now this one?
In recent polls a super majority of US citizens believe the elections are fraudulent. Tremendously low confidence the election system is functioning properly. The republicans are paralyzed from accusing the democrats because it'll blow out democracy. How broken is the system if voting fraud almost certainly happened but did it happen to change the results and you can't call it out?
Every single republican report you will read about keeping democracy intact and the necessity to build a new more robust system and make sure votes are counted properly. They actively changed the rules everywhere they could.
Mind you, after biden said voted fraud org. The onus is on the democrats to prove the election was smooth. That sure as shit didn't happen.
The republicans have made it very clear through their actions they believe the election was fraudulent. 425 bills in 49 states post-election is something pretty significant.
It's interesting that they don't say it. They can't say it can they? Trust in democracy is so low from the democrats saying they republicans stole the elections. If the Michigan republicans came out and said that they believe the election was illegitimate. What happens? Trump isnt getting into office. It's not going to change anything. What are the consequences? The militia folks might go take over the capitol or something? Worse? Civil war? The union splitting? Been seeing lots of that talk.
You dont introduce 39 bills because you feel the election went smoothly. They control the senate and house. Those bills will likely pass.
Interesting they just outright put in the title 'based on lies' but that's needed. They are going to do all this voter supression etc based on lies but it'll happen. It has to happen. If 1 side of the election thinks it wasn't legitimate. The next election will be going much more smoothly.
To get back to your question. The same reason Michigan's republicans say the election was fine with various problems is the same reason you heard of 'no significant fraud found' goes back to being unable to say it.
I'm honestly having trouble deciding if you're trolling or not. Do you really not understand that it's not binary but about the chances? isn't it simply how many out of a some big number of vaccinated got it and how bad did they get it, versus how many out of the same big number of non-vaccinated people got it, and how bad did they get it?
Yes, we all understand that. You have to use Bayesian reasoning here. The prior probability of one person infecting another they've spent little time next to, if the vaccines are "extremely effective" to use the claims we've all heard, is very, very low. That's the whole point of saying the vaccines are effective.
What you're arguing is that this event is merely an extreme fluke that a hungry press managed to dredge out of ... somewhere. That doesn't hold water because Omicron is only days old as a recognized variant at all, and these aren't 'two random people' but rather one clearly and recognizably infecting another in a low density space (e.g. not a conference or other big accumulation of people), despite that they're doctors and thus highly vaccinated.
Now, here's something to chew on. The claims of vaccine efficacy you keep reading are all wrong. They aren't measures of relative likelihoods of getting infected as you might imagine. They are heavily adjusted using a statistical methodology that's known to malfunction in the presence of variants. The raw, unadjusted data is unfortunately hidden almost everywhere, except England, where the public health authorities publish it alongside the adjusted numbers. And the raw numbers show that vaccination makes people more likely to get infected, not less. The rates per 100k are higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.
This has led to the ultimate absurdity of the UK public health agency claiming, "Comparing case rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated populations should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 infection".
>Are you arguing that there is no real hate speech?
Do you mean bigotry? Everyone agrees we need to end bigotry. When we find a valid solution to that problem we will implement it.
Hate speech is not bigotry. The definition of hate speech is speech that someone hates. Your 1 sentence could be considered hate speech by some group. Should you be prevented from saying it?
Bigotry is over, we know the solution. Today is the least bigoted day in the history of north america.
What you are experiencing and why you think bigotry hasn't ended is the false narrative. It's a narrative in which intersectionalists are pushing. The end goal is not equality or egalitarianism but rather creating a new caste system where they are at the top.
