Look into what "defund" means in this context. It's a slogan that leaked from more formal and academic discussion into general usage and is misinterpreted as "let's not do law enforcement." That's not what anyone well-meaning means when they use it. They mean that the police are ineffective as a law enforcement institution, and the money spent on them would be better used on other safety projects. Giving a poorly designed institution more money does not improve safety. Maybe an effective public safety institution needs more money than the police get currently (though I doubt that) but no matter how much you give to these guys they'll spend it on retired military gear, warrior training, and building a panopticon of always-on public cameras via private partnerships.

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Sohcahtoa82 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I say this as a self-labeled leftist, but the left absolutely sucks at coming up with slogans.

"Defund the Police" is a motte-and-bailey. It's misinterpreted because the slogan itself is designed to mislead. Once challenged on the idea of eliminating law enforcement, they retreat to the more defensible claims of wanting reform.

"Black Lives Matter" should have been "Black Lives Matter Too" so that "All Lives Matter" didn't become the easy retort.

"White privilege" should have been "minority disadvantage" or something, because people respond in ways that imply it means having the world handed to you because you're white, when the reality is closer to the world being taken away because you're not white.

"There's no such thing as unskilled labor". I worked retail and fast food for 13 years before I got a degree and became a tech worker. I actually find this slogan insulting because it diminishes the work it took to get the education needed to do what I do. It's another motte-and-bailey, since the actual message they want to send is that unskilled labor still deserves a living wage, but that's not what they're saying.

	▲	krapp 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It isn't the fault of the left that people who never had any intention of taking their words in good faith intentionally distort their meaning and message. Defund the Police meant Defund the Police until it was co-opted and corrupted by the establishment. Everyone who wasn't a racist understood what "Black Lives Matter" actually meant. The misinterpretation there was entirely a white supremacist propaganda campaign to undermine BLM's message. White privilege and minority disadvantage are the same thing. Couching the term in indirection so white people don't have to confront the fact that systemic white supremacy exists even if they don't recognize it does nothing to dismantle it. And I mean, it takes effort to misinterpret "There's no such thing as unskilled labor" since you're literally agreeing with the definition of the term even as you disagree with it. You're actually in violent agreement with it. The last thing we need to do is avoid confrontational language, since confrontation is so often the point of leftist activism. If BLM had come out and said "we need to reform the police somewhat" no one outside of the black community would even be listening to them. If they had said "every life matters" no one would get the message, because the entire message of "Black Lives Matter" is that black lives specifically don't actually currently matter. "minority disadvantage?" Disadvantage relative to what if we can't say the word "white" because it offends white people? They get to call us all killers and psychopaths and traitors, openly call for violence against us, for us all to be put into camps as mental degenerates and deviants, they get to to erase black, female and gay people from the historical record, police art and science to purge it of "wokeness" and they get to shoot us in the streets but we have to police our tone? No. To paraphrase Seymour Skinner, it is the fascists who are wrong.

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krapp 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Look into what "defund" means in this context. It's a slogan that leaked from more formal and academic discussion into general usage and is misinterpreted as "let's not do law enforcement."

No it didn't. It came from black activist movements and got popularized by BLM and the Black Visions Collective during the George Floyd protests, and abolition was very much an intended part of the message.

It then leaked into more formal and academic discussion as it was adopted by the white liberal mainstream because the original message was too radical to be acceptable. Which is understandable. No one wants to admit that their complicity in a white supremacist system is the problem.