Why does queer liberation means defund the police sounds dumb to you?
You know that for generations the police have been beating, arresting, and accosting queer people just because they are queer, right? A practice that continues to this day? (Just this year, Seattle police raided gay bars because they were gay bars)
You know that defund is not the same as abolish, right? And that the nypd has an operating budget in the billions annually?
You know that queer health care, particularly access to prophylaxis and safe facilities is woefully under funded, resulting in high homeless, violence, and drug abuse rates in the queer population right?
And that when you put them all together you get, "taking money from the police, who have historically and contemporaneously abused queer people, and allocating those funds to the medical and social welfare of queer people would be liberatory".
That sure as shit doesn't sound dumb to me, that sounds extremely reasonable to be honest given the context, history, and needs of the queer community.
That's what people are saying when they say defund. Reduce funding for. Consistently this is what anyone who says defund the police has always meant. You gotta take off the tin foil hat, my guy.
"We'll find out" haha, you think he's going to shut down the nypd? They have an operating budget of what, $6 billion dollars annually?
He's not going to shut them down, you can't just stop a $6b organization. You can, however, defund it. Maybe they could do just fine with $5 billion. If the city has an extra billion to spend on building housing or improving transit or providing health care or services to the homeless... a billion dollars a year buys a lot of things.
These kinds of folk will panic over "defund the police" as if it's shutting down an entire office. Meanwhile this administration proceeds to effectively shut down the DoED in all but name and we get a shrug back.
It becomes very hard to assume good faith in such situations.
He literally, repeatedly said “defund and dismantle”. He’s not trying to be subtle. I’m not taking anything out of context. It’s obvious that he didn’t mean “reduce funding”, and while that may be what you think is reasonable, it’s not what he meant when he said it. I’ve given you the receipts.
You have to be trying really hard to interpret that in the way you’re trying to do it, “my guy.” I’m just reading his words and taking him seriously.
The NYC Rent Guidelines Board is already tasked with keeping rents lower for rent stabilized tenants, except with long term sustainability in mind. A pledge to put your thumb on the scale to freeze rent for 4 years is a clear sign of prioritizing short term political optics. The clever part about this is even if tenants suffer, he can just blame any negative effects on "greedy landlords."
It is worse for anybody looking for an appartment. Of course the person already living in one isn't worse off, but that has never been the issue that rent control creates. It disincentivises repairs and new constructions.
We'll never know because RBG chose not to retire when Dems could have done anything, and every Dem after that just politely waited for GOP to take advantage of them. It's still happening with folks like Jeffries today being utterly willing to capitulate on policy if it means the institution is respected.
It wasn't hard to see at the time. People just thought the West Wing was how politics should work. That somehow all the players come to play good, fair ball. Many of us were out here caucusing against Obama and Gore and Biden because they represented an obvious losing strategy in the long term.
Try telling people you voted third party because of a deeply held conviction about not electing corrupt politicians. You will be told you are evil, that you've got an unreasonable/impossible purity bar, that you don't really believe in that deeply held moral conviction actually, that you are worse than the people who voted for the other guy, that you are a utopian idealist, etc etc.
Don't get me wrong, I did vote third party and I will continue to do so if the Dems put up candidates like Harris and Biden. But don't expect most people to be willing to weather the storm of vitriol they'll receive for holding a high bar for their politicians.
What I said is factually true, neither mocking, judging nor telling you off. If you believe saying something like, don't look at the sun or you'll hurt your eyes (and then you look at the sun and say that your eyes are burnt) is telling you off, then we have different definitions of the phrase.
This problem is only magnified when you consider our voting system. Any ranked voting system inherently runs into Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which makes what we have right now not exactly democratic. The solution would be to switch to something like approval voting but good luck getting that going.
i had a chance to visit arrow at his palo alto condo circa 2014. his theorem is nice and all, but it only makes sense to apply it to social welfare functions, not voting methods. yes, the correct social welfare function is just the utilitarian sum of all voters' individual utilities.
once you know that, that's the function you use in your VSE metrics. then the performance of the voting method is measurable without having to think about any specific criteria.
It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems, but it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote - ie strategic voting. Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.
Society is well acquainted with the concept of a tie, and whatever tiebreaker procedure we define probably won't factor into voter strategy all that much (that is, it will be less of an effect than the people who don't understand they can vote for more than one candidate)
> it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote
that's orthogonal. ranked voting methods already have (arguably more severe) response to strategic voting AND ALSO can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.
> Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.
what does that even mean? we have VSE figures that measure the combined effect of all failures, including when the Condorcet winner isn't the favorite candidate of the electorate (not the social utility maximizer).
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html
that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.
Restating my disclaimer of "It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems"...
> ranked voting methods ... can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.
Can you clarify whether you're referring to some ranked methods (eg IRV), or all ranked methods (ie including ranked pairs) ?
> that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.
Isn't this due to defining "performance" in a way that is congruent with Approval (/ Score) ? A quick skim of that VSE page has it talking about "utility", which I would imagine is a scalar per candidate representing "happiness" ?
The problem I have with Approval is that coming from our two-terrible-party system - do I Approve my latent terrible party or not? That choice seems purely down to strategy, compared to being able to rank them to say I completely prefer the new party/candidate over my latent terrible party, and my latent terrible party over the other latent terrible party. The dynamic also seems exacerbated knowing there will be a lot of people who continue to vote exactly as they did under plurality.
FWIW, I've believed we've had an authoritarian in power for quite a while now. Obama, Trump, Biden, and Bush have all tried and succeeded in expanding executive power. They've all engaged in extrajudicial killings overseas.
Nothing sets me off like seeing people think this behavior from Trump doesn't have shared roots across both parties.
Biden kept kids in cages. Obama bombed weddings. Yes, the current admin is accelerating hard but like, prior admins were accelerating.
People should really try to stop thinking about politics like it's a two party game where you have to pick a side. Figure out your principles, and start finding candidates who match those principles.
Yes, it has been accelerating a long time. But I worry a bit about toning it down too much by both-sides-ing it. The Dems were no angels, but they most assuredly did not ever try to overturn the counting of the vote for president. They did not relentlessly claim the whole game was rigged. They never openly mocked the citizens who did not vote for them, made policy specifically to spite red states, etc. Or created government web sites like https://www.whitehouse.gov/mysafespace
By both-sides-ing this, it plays into hands of the people who support the current abhorrent behavior by claiming they're not doing anything different than their opponents have done. That is patently false, and we should not accept it.
I'm sorry, I refuse to just simply not acknowledge the role liberalism has in the rise of fascism. Whether it's in the past or today, fascism don't just materialize because one guy talks good. It's neither incorrect nor inappropriate to say (neo)liberalism and austerity are direct antecedents to fascist rhetoric.
It's not both sidesing to identify and critique the role democrats had to play here, especially when I say the gop is clearly worse. A critical assessment of how the Dems failed to protect us is not only not helping the GOP, it's exactly the sort of root cause analysis that helps ensure the mid terms go OK.
Saying now's not the time to criticize Dems is the same sentiment that gets us "vote blue no matter who" when Biden runs but "I think we have to consider our options" when Mamdani runs. It's sticking your head in the sand rather than having to face the fact that the party has a losing platform.
I didn’t agree with your first comment, but reading this one I think we actually have very similar opinions. I think your first comment sounded a bit too much like the libertarian nut jobs that comment on here all the time claiming drivers licenses are fascism.
There’s this quote I read recently: “When a political system collapses, the replacement is chosen from the choices available at the time ”.
I think it’s pretty clear to anyone with a brain that neoliberalism has failed the majority of people. Trump provided an alternative, and democrats ran on “nothing will fundamentally change”. The results are what we see today.
Step 1 is to get people to stop readily voting for the worst option. Step 2 is to get people to vote for the right option. When you confuse the order of these two steps, you short yourself and others in the foot.
Authoritarianism by definition is about controlling all the forms of power, not about expanding one.
Nor it has anything to do with what countries do around the world. You can be democratically elected, law abiding, not overreach and bomb weddings abroad, those are not related.
US has the same constitutional weakness of the countries that went authoritarian in the last decades: a presidential republic.
There's one thing that Russia, Belarus, Philippines, Tunisia, Turkey, Nicaragua made constitutionally simpler to allow authoritarianism to happen, they gave the country a president elected by the government.
Thus enabling:
- personality cult
- hard to remove individuals
- claiming popular mandate despite anything
- deadlocks
All those situations are breeding grounds for chaos.
Say what you want about slow Europe, but it's hard, very hard to pull this stuff here where most countries don't have popular elections for presidents.
In parliamentary republics those shifts are very difficult and are generally centred on party-ism, so identification between state and party.
This is the Indian and Hungarian playbook, as the constitutions don't allow individuals to power grab with ease, it's a very tougher game to succeed.
You don't win an election and start firing executive orders and stretching their limits while courts get to decide what the limits are.
The mayor also capped non police crisis response teams to 24 people. Total. For the city. 24.
Seattle has done everything except defund the police, lol
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