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Politics: where a week is a long time
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The idea that your region is better than others is not restricted to nations. Many people dislike NY Gov Cuomo but I think he did a very good job managing the pandemic therefore I am quick to defend him against other states and their leaders like the rodeo queen nut job in SD. Where do you think the use of regional pride goes in the process of defending its values against other regions?
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Here’s some good news!!
Trump shuts down his blog due to lack of followers
I consider this a victory for common sense!!
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It continues:
Not just Arizona: Republicans push more partisan election ‘audits’
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Although I was never a real of this show, this clip from the opening episode really stood out to me. It is very telling even for today
I showed this clip in class last week.
My take on it is, the belief in American exceptionalism prevents American society to deal with the problems it has.
Notice, though, how even with that oh-so-shocking moment in The Newsroom of declaring the US not-the-greatest, Sorkin still goes out of his way to make clear that it used to be, and that it should be, and that they can and will make it the greatest again. Even in criticising America, you always have to make sure to underline all of that, or people will turn away.
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Notice, though, how even with that oh-so-shocking moment in The Newsroom of declaring the US not-the-greatest, Sorkin still goes out of his way to make clear that it used to be, and that it should be, and that they can and will make it the greatest again. Even in criticising America, you always have to make sure to underline all of that, or people will turn away.
And you can’t ask the question as to why America was great in this beforetime, and when exactly it was. It’s just pre-lapsarian thinking.
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And you can’t ask the question as to why America was great in this beforetime, and when exactly it was. It’s just pre-lapsarian thinking.
Well, to be fair, America has more reason to claim greatness than most other countries. In the 18th-19th century, American democracy was indeed something that was a inspiring example to, well, European countries at least. Seeing the idea that a government was actually by and for the people and could be replaced by them at any time actually put into practice, and seeing a nation based on the idea that it was supposed to allow its people to thrive and pursue happiness… all of that was pretty radical at the time. Just don’t look too closely at a lot of things also happening in the US at around that time.
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Notice, though, how even with that oh-so-shocking moment in The Newsroom of declaring the US not-the-greatest, Sorkin still goes out of his way to make clear that it used to be, and that it should be, and that they can and will make it the greatest again. Even in criticising America, you always have to make sure to underline all of that, or people will turn away.
So Make America Great Again was actually a pretty clever campaign slogan.
It’s exactly what pre-lapsarianism is!
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pre-lapsarianism
???
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Yeah not specifying what was so great in the past makes it suspicious. I have a lot of sympathy for some “conservative” ideas, keeping some things as they are, or even restoring things to an earlier state. For instance re-wilding parts of the landscape. Pushing back against privatization. Keeping housing and education affordable instead of letting prices skyrocket. Etc. Longing for things to be as they once were is not necessarily an evil thing. Of course often this isn’t what the conservative politicians do, they’re often just there to make rich people richer.
A right wing figure here in an interview said that society used to be “whole” and now it’s “broken”. This plays on psychological feelings of discontent. Why do I feel like shit? Oh Baudet is telling me it’s because society is broken, and we need to return to an earlier state of wholeness. So let’s give power back to the church, abolish democracy, and reconquer Indonesia.
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For instance re-wilding parts of the landscape. Pushing back against privatization. Keeping housing and education affordable instead of letting prices skyrocket. Etc. Longing for things to be as they once were is not necessarily an evil thing. Of course often this isn’t what the conservative politicians do, they’re often just there to make rich people richer.
Yeah, it’s really strange how conservatism never seems to mean, let’s go back to the times when we had managed to actually control the forces of capitalism better.
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Yeah, it’s really strange how conservatism never seems to mean, let’s go back to the times when we had managed to actually control the forces of capitalism better.
Progressivism and conservatism have both somewhat focused their appeal to narrower groups leaving more moderate positions out of messaging.
Generally, in American history, the lowest principle can sway political action, but political momentum or inertia is usually going to occur irrespective of governance. In America, slavery was going to end as soon as industrialization started, but the Civil War accelerated that and even though the myth is that it was a moral crusade, the real political force that convinced people to fight and die in a war that would individually do them no good no matter who won was the idea of “free labor.” The unfairness of slave labor convinced a lot of people North and South to end slavery even though they had no moral opposition to it, didn’t think much of African Americans and probably would have owned slaves if they could have afforded it.
However, it was essentially a lie and, as the Southern Democrats pointed out, “wage slavery” in the North was often pretty horrific, too. Most common Americans weren’t any more free than most common peasants in feudal Europe and no more free in real terms than the aristocratic nations of the rest of the world at the time of the American revolution or Civil War either.
American democracy primarily was a recognition of the political reality. It took some philosophical concepts to basically sanctify a group of people who didn’t trust each other and were only associated for security. Whether or not they would have preferred to have a king is irrelevant – they certainly were fine having King George when they were fighting the French before the war. The fact was that no one in the “states” would trust anyone else to run things for the “United” states, so American democracy was the result, and the Union fell apart less than a century later.
A lot of politics though consists of convincing people to do things that are not in their personal interest. In 2007-08, a lot of people were retiring, so that meant they were going to cash in on a lot of money saved in their pensions and retirement funds. Then the Financial Crisis hit, and that money disappeared. After bailouts, though the economy “recovered,” those individuals who lost years’ worth of savings did not participate in that recovery. So, how in the world can governments convince common people that they should have faith in the system after that? The only way is to tell them it’s the only game in town – blame everyone from hedge funds to poor people and illegal immigrants – and convince them to act against their own interests. The only way to do that is to lie to everyone and at the same time convince a few important people with influence that they’re a member of the “inside group” that is in on the lie.
At the same time, though, conservatism has never really been backwards looking in my lifetime. From Reagan onward, it has been focused on the future and the political thinkers have adapted their tools to emerging conditions much more quickly than either liberals or progressives who can often fall into static thinking and positions as if to tied to past philosophies rather than listening to constituents dealing with much different conditions than when the party philosophy or platforms emerged. We can’t fight for civil rights or workers rights today or tomorrow the same way they did in the 50’s and 60’s. We can’t even really look at them the same way either.
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The problem with “the good old days” is that for many groups, they weren’t.
What it really means is “I, or my parents, grandparents, etc., could do whatever we/they wanted with little or no consequences”.
Exactly, like Christian alluded to, the time when America was a shining beacon of democracy was the same time slavery was legal, that genocide was being perpetrated on the native peoples, and colonialism was rife. So, you know, exactly like today except that occasionally a famous rapist will have their wrists slapped now.
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The problem with “the good old days” is that for many groups, they weren’t.
What it really means is “I, or my parents, grandparents, etc., could do whatever we/they wanted with little or no consequences”.
Exactly, like Christian alluded to, the time when America was a shining beacon of democracy was the same time slavery was legal, that genocide was being perpetrated on the native peoples, and colonialism was rife. So, you know, exactly like today except that occasionally a famous rapist will have their wrists slapped now.
Hell, sitcoms of the 1950s could be considered propaganda for white nationalism.
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The problem with “the good old days” is that for many groups, they weren’t.
What it really means is “I, or my parents, grandparents, etc., could do whatever we/they wanted with little or no consequences”.
Exactly, like Christian alluded to, the time when America was a shining beacon of democracy was the same time slavery was legal, that genocide was being perpetrated on the native peoples, and colonialism was rife. So, you know, exactly like today except that occasionally a famous rapist will have their wrists slapped now.
Hell, sitcoms of the 1950s could be considered propaganda for white nationalism.
Oh yeah, American culture is steeped in propaganda to the point that a lot of Americans don’t even realise it.
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Critical thinking is a lost concept in the USA.
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Critical thinking is a lost concept in the USA.
Honestly, I don’t really think it’s ever been a “found” concept for the entire history of the world anyway.
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The problem with “the good old days” is that for many groups, they weren’t.
What it really means is “I, or my parents, grandparents, etc., could do whatever we/they wanted with little or no consequences”.
Exactly, like Christian alluded to, the time when America was a shining beacon of democracy was the same time slavery was legal, that genocide was being perpetrated on the native peoples, and colonialism was rife. So, you know, exactly like today except that occasionally a famous rapist will have their wrists slapped now.
Hell, sitcoms of the 1950s could be considered propaganda for white nationalism.
Oh yeah, American culture is steeped in propaganda to the point that a lot of Americans don’t even realise it.
The pro-military propaganda is an “obvious” one.
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The biggest change in American culture was post-war consumerism. It was good when America was a major world producer of more than just weapons and food (though that was and will always be at the top of our exports by the time any of us die) and it drove a lot of innovation and basically funded the development of electronic media and global communications, but it also disintegrated American and Western Culture in much the same way the forms of Communism in Eastern Europe and Asia degraded culture there. Consumer culture trivializes any development in a society reducing everything to the right to buy and sell some cheap stuff you mostly could do without. Everything in the culture is a product and participating in the culture basically comes down to participating in the marketing of a product.
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Lara Trump says her potential Senate run is a ‘no for now, not no forever’
https://www.businessinsider.com/lara-trump-announces-shes-not-running-for-senate-in-2022-2021-6
Last thing this country needs is another Trump in office.
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What can we say about the 74M who voted for Trump? That they are all uneducated, or brainwashed, or traditional GOPers no matter what, or white supremacist? What?
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That Newsroom clip really doesn’t go over well to those who insist that the US is #1 even when certain quality of life statistics and factors prove otherwise. They won’t accept that technically they may be better off in some smaller European countries as the data shows. What drives their stubbornness and insistence? Traditionalism? Tribalism?
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Bernie Sanders when he was running mentioned some nice public programs in some European countries that had some of his voters envisioning here in the US. Why can’t some of those nice programs (ie. national daycare, healthcare, longer vacation time, etc.) that work reasonably well there work here?
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Regarding Sanders and I will include AOC… They are socialists. I don’t claim to be an expert on political economic structures, but the general consensus is that capitalism creates a huge wealth gap like what the Occupy movement was complaining about years ago namely the top 1% controlling a disproportionate amount of the wealth and therefore power. The assertion is that socialism, on the other hand, will give a better distribution of wealth and power to more people. That is how it is ON PAPER and in theory. Just saying. -
Last thing this country needs is another Trump in office.
Emphasis needed.
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Is hedonism destroying society?
No, but the climate is taking a steep toll.
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Regarding Sanders and I will include AOC… They are socialists. I don’t claim to be an expert on political economic structures, but the general consensus is that capitalism creates a huge wealth gap like what the Occupy movement was complaining about years ago namely the top 1% controlling a disproportionate amount of the wealth and therefore power. The assertion is that socialism, on the other hand, will give a better distribution of wealth and power to more people. That is how it is ON PAPER and in theory. Just saying.
The term ‘socialist’ can and is very broadly defined. Tony Blair would in the past say he’s a socialist and so would Lenin, that’s quite a range.
Similarly capitalism can be as wide as the basic idea of competing products (which pretty much everyone agrees with) or that the market should be completely unregulated and everything dependent on your ability to pay.
In Europe the likes of AOC and Sanders would be defined more specifically as ‘Social Democrats’, centre left. The bulk of what they propose – medicare for all, free college, maternity leave, sick pay etc is the status quo in Germany for example. The Scandinavian model leans to higher taxation but better services (hence they tend to top so many of those well being reports).
In that sense it’s not so much theory, we have many working models to look at.
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What can we say about the 74M who voted for Trump? That they are all uneducated, or brainwashed, or traditional GOPers no matter what, or white supremacist? What?
I think that’s the majority. The white supremacists and the disenfranchised gave him a bit of an additional push and he certainly got the anti-choice crowd to turn out and go vote, but mainly it’s just the old Republican/Democrat split.
Seriously, people consume, that’s just what we do. It’s that or asceticism, or some intermediate state.
Like Anders says, climate change means we can’t afford to worship consumerism anymore.
Which is tricky, as capitalism needs consumption to continually grow or it’ll break down. This is why we will all die in a nutshell.
Well, like you say. We also love consuming cultural goods. Those don’t necessarily have to be CO2-intensive. Maybe we’ll be able figure something out.
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Maybe we’ll be able figure something out.
Masturbation is sustainable.
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The ladies do that about me but I digress…
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Like Anders says, climate change means we can’t afford to worship consumerism anymore. Which is tricky, as capitalism needs consumption to continually grow or it’ll break down. This is why we will all die in a nutshell. Well, like you say. We also love consuming cultural goods. Those don’t necessarily have to be CO2-intensive. Maybe we’ll be able figure something out.
The distinction here is between creation and production. We’ve consumed but the point of existence was not simply to consume – to simply keep the wheel spinning faster and faster – but to create comfort and leisure time for society as a whole. Now we have a subordinate class that spends all their time producing for an super-class that spends their time consuming at an accelerating pace fearful of a collapse if anything slows down.
How is this freedom, exactly, when you work 12-16 hours a day to afford to keep things you rarely use (2000 channels on my television that I will never watch) while the people spend 60-80 hours a week producing the same stuff they’ll never use or even be able to afford?
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Wrong thread but I’ll leave it in, why not. Intended for the picture thread. Oops.
Let’s just pretend he’s the new leader of the Lib Dems, it’s not like anyone will know any different.
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Like Anders says, climate change means we can’t afford to worship consumerism anymore.
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Even in criticising America, you always have to make sure to underline all of that, or people will turn away.
I mean, there’s that old idea that the most patriotic stance you can take is to be critical of your own country – you can see that it could be, should be better.
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Wrong thread but I’ll leave it in, why not. Intended for the picture thread. Oops.
Let’s just pretend he’s the new leader of the Lib Dems, it’s not like anyone will know any different.
Who knows, he might even be an improvement!
What do you mean, “might”?
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Thing is in the US, socialism is a bad word.
That’s because Republicans and the Right have been making it one for decades. It, like “communism”, is a simple word to sum up bad, anti-capitalist, anti-American things. What they say they mean and what they actually mean are two very different things.
In the run up to last year’s election, I heard two different Baby Boomers expressing fear that Biden would turn America communist. (Personally, I’m not completely against the idea at this point in American history.)
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In the run up to last year’s election, I heard two different Baby Boomers expressing fear that Biden would turn America communist. (Personally, I’m not completely against the idea at this point in American history.)
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Thing is in the US, socialism is a bad word.
Yes. Meanwhile Americans demand their Social Security checks and Medicare coverage when they become eligible; and Americans happily received their stimulus checks during the COVID crisis, and companies (including mine) happily applied for the funds available through the Paycheck Protection Program. And what about the free vaccine and COVID testing throughout much of the country?
Socialism is a bad word because people in the US don’t understand what Socialism is.
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I think Al what they are attempting to do is reclaim the word and remove the stigma in the US of it being equated with Communism.
I think that’s something that may not be possible with the older generation who have grown up with one definition but the younger ones seem to be embracing it (despite his age Sanders’ supporters skew young).
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In the end it’s a word game. What do you think socialism means? Some “social democrats” reject the label of socialism, others identify as part of it.
It is a word game in many ways.
Where I grew up a large number of people identified and still do as socialist, our definition is a solid welfare state and ability to join a union which is exactly what that journalist writing about Denmark thinks it isn’t. To me socialist systems have always operated within free market economies, that’s why they aren’t called communism.
That’s not to say I am right and he is wrong but the definition I grew up with has endured 100 years in that context and are what the likes of AOC and Sanders are advocating, not state ownership of all production.
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Like Anders says, climate change means we can’t afford to worship consumerism anymore.
Well, I’m kinda hoping that we’re complex enough beings that there’s more than to ways we can go.
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Like Anders says, climate change means we can’t afford to worship consumerism anymore.
Well, I’m kinda hoping that we’re complex enough beings that there’s more than to ways we can go.
Oh yeah me too. Still I don’t think a consumerist lifestyle is going away. We consume philosophy, art, science as well as more vapid pleasures. That’s what life is I think, we feed us with this stuff like it is food. What are the alternatives? Family life? We like to watch movies with family. That’s consumerism. We like dinner with family. That’s consumerism. We like traveling to beautiful places with our family. That’s consumerism.
Eating organic strawberries or buying a craft beer that you really like is consumerism. It’s all brain stimulation, dopamine hits. Even this website, or twitter, or a Shakespeare play, or the news is consumed. All we can hope for is becoming more discerning consumers. Really the only alternatives I think are becoming a monk or having a wise council deciding what everyone gets, eats, watches or reads.
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Fair play to Kim Jong-Un he’s the first person ever to lose a bit of weight (he hardly looks gaunt in the second picture) and have it portrayed as unhealthy.
Does this mean Adele and Rebel Wilson are at death’s door? I’m confused.
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I was baffled by the inclusion of an image slider that appears to show most of the weight loss came from a slight haircut.
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Oh yeah me too. Still I don’t think a consumerist lifestyle is going away. We consume philosophy, art, science as well as more vapid pleasures. That’s what life is I think, we feed us with this stuff like it is food. What are the alternatives? Family life? We like to watch movies with family. That’s consumerism. We like dinner with family. That’s consumerism. We like traveling to beautiful places with our family. That’s consumerism.
Eating organic strawberries or buying a craft beer that you really like is consumerism. It’s all brain stimulation, dopamine hits. Even this website, or twitter, or a Shakespeare play, or the news is consumed. All we can hope for is becoming more discerning consumers. Really the only alternatives I think are becoming a monk or having a wise council deciding what everyone gets, eats, watches or reads.
I don’t think any kind of consumption would be defined as consumerism. When we talk about consumerim, the term is commonly understood to refer to a lifestyle in which consumpation holds value in itself; in which the way to happiness lies solely through an ever-increasing consumption of consumer goods and in which the cycle of advertisement promises and consumption carries the economic success of a growth-reliant capitalism. Consumerism is when you buy a new car every two years because you like new cars or a smartphone every year for the same reason.
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I don’t think any kind of consumption would be defined as consumerism. When we talk about consumerim, the term is commonly understood to refer to a lifestyle in which consumpation holds value in itself; in which the way to happiness lies solely through an ever-increasing consumption of consumer goods and in which the cycle of advertisement promises and consumption carries the economic success of a growth-reliant capitalism. Consumerism is when you buy a new car every two years because you like new cars or a smartphone every year for the same reason.
This is a good distinction and related to the free market ideology that goes along with consumerism.
The idea is that economic activity is based on free transactions and that the driving force for economics is consumption. However, if everything is a product or a service meant for consumption, then it puts some parts of a society at risk when it is all privatized along those ideologies. No one would say that military defense or policing should be profit driven, and we’ve seen that profit motives actually degrade services from cities to entire continents.
We essentially need (or actually have) two economies – one where the services and material production required for maintaining social cohesion and order (energy, food, housing, defense, infrastructure, communications/press and safety & policing) are not beholden to profit motives or market forces and another where private enterprise can operate. A conservative would say that they would rather some private businesses be in charge with little government regulation since the businessmen have “proven” themselves in the arena of the market while progressives would say that government regulation and direction is far more important as businesses are not representative of the nation and governments can marshal greater resources for any particular service or project.
Obviously, ideally the latter progressive view makes more sense, but we have a government full of business people or the lawyers who serve them. So, no matter what we might want, the people in charge are going to go for the former option irrespective what party they represent.
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Plastic is a huge problem, we are living in denial that 80% of it isn’t recyclable and that the majority of what you carefully clean and separate out for collection ends up in a landfill in Asia somewhere. A lot of what is done in wealthier countries is essentially performative to make you feel good but does nothing at all for the environment.
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In the run up to last year’s election, I heard two different Baby Boomers expressing fear that Biden would turn America communist. (Personally, I’m not completely against the idea at this point in American history.)
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With regards to the socialism talk, perhaps the Dems/liberals biggest weakness is in branding. It’s a decades long issue for them. On the abortion front, for example, the allowed conservatives to own the Pro-Life moniker with very little pushback. Brilliant branding by conservatives even though it’s bs. How do you argue against Pro-Life? It helps paint liberals as Darkseid.
Then even today liberals come up with terrible branding like “defund the police”. While I understand what it means and support it, the branding makes it sound like an attack on police and safety. Liberals generally have far better ideas and policies but they’re clueless on how to brand and sell the ideas. They constantly let’s conservative control the narrative as if they believe their ideas will somehow sell themselves.
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A tv show here did research on wether there was any slavery-free chocolate in our supermarkets. Turned out pretty much the entire cacao industry is dependent on slavery. So do we stop eating chocolate? I don’t think so. Do we stop using computers and phones because of cobalt mining?
Everything is a balance because if you take it to an extreme argument then almost any kind of living is environmentally damaging but all we can do is minimise and manage it. A lot of it is an easy win, I got a takeaway today and my paper napkin and sauce packets came in a sealed plastic pouch, what is the point of that pouch? Just put them in the paper bag. It was 2 sachets of chili sauce that I don’t like anyway so will be thrown away, why not ask people if they want the sauce instead of giving it by default in what was 3 plastic containers in total?
So should we eradicate chocolate or work on eradicating the slavery? If that means chocolate is a bit more expensive and more of a luxury treat then is that the end of the world? Not everything can be aimed at the ultimate convenience and lowest cost over other concerns. That’s where consumerism comes in over the basic need to consume. People having fist fights in Australian supermarkets a year or so back because they couldn’t have a free plastic bag, that’s an incredible sense of entitlement over higher concerns.
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So should we eradicate chocolate or work on eradicating the slavery? If that means chocolate is a bit more expensive and more of a luxury treat then is that the end of the world?
Exactly, I agree, we need to consume responsibly, but in a way that is still “consumerist”. Unless ethical consumption doesn’t fall under the nomer of consumerism.
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Exactly, I agree, we need to consume responsibly, but in a way that is still “consumerist”.
Well this is yet another definition thing. I think for most there’s an understanding that we have to consume. Unless you have decent sized patch of land and can sustain yourself it’s pretty impossible not to.
I think the drive against ‘consumerism’ is not quite so strictly defined to all consumption, that would be impossible to achieve, we could not be having this conversation without buying a device and an internet connection. It’s more a society where consumption is seen as the main driver and most important element of the economy. That you don’t feel compelled to change your car or your phone every year for example or products aren’t designed to be obsolete in short time.
Similarly most (although maybe not all) people who claim to be ‘anti-capitalist’ aren’t particularly interested in the local shop coming under state control and the end of money. What they are really saying is they are anti the kind of ‘market first’ ideology of Milton Friedman and the Chicago school, the type of thing where advocates like Betsy De Vos basically think all schools should be privately run for example.
I don’t actually find the term ‘anti- capitalist’ very useful for that reason as it does suggest moving to communism which in truth very few people actually want – as history showed it didn’t work in the main. It’s why I tend to agree with Chris that ‘defund the police’ is a bad slogan because it suggests to most abolishing all police when in fact the main argument behind is states not spending huge budgets on militarisation of the police but more on mental health and social projects which sounds pretty sensible.
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That’s the thing: If you look deep enough into any company or business, you can find some issue with it. It could be extremely minor or very big, and that is also reflected in your own subjectivity, biases, and beliefs. Some products may be a necessity and you may not have many options.
There is no perfect solution. Just do your best with the understanding that your best may fall short sometimes.
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That’s the thing: If you look deep enough into any company or business, you can find some issue with it. It could be extremely minor or very big, and that is also reflected in your own subjectivity, biases, and beliefs. Some products may be a necessity and you may not have many options.
There is no perfect solution. Just do your best with the understanding that your best may fall short sometimes.
Yeah, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism – even if the company you’re buying from has ensured that their materials come from ethical sources, are they doing the same for the companies who make their equipment? Like, the vast majority of steel used in US industry comes from one company, owned by a family who are very much like the Koch Brother
sin terms of how much truly evil shit they fund with the profits. And it’s not like you can boycott them or anything. -
You can buy fairtrade goods
I watched that show some time ago, I think their point was that even fair trade chocolate isn’t guaranteed slave free. You got producers who use forced child labour and pay them very little, or just give them food and a place to sleep, but slip through the net and thier cocoa beans get bought by middle men who get fair trade certification. It’s a murky business.
The people who made the shos started their own chocolate brand, but in the end they admitted they can’t 100 % guarantee it’s slave free.
We have that brand over here in some stores and it’s all I buy now. A bit more expensive, $5 compared to less than $2 for a competing brand, but it’s twice as much chocolate and tastes much better too. Sucks to hear they can’t 100% guarantee there’s no slavery anywhere in their supply chain though.
Here’s how they explain it on their site:
Why we still won’t say we’re 100% slave free – Tony’s Chocolonely (tonyschocolonely.com)
Not 100% slave free?
We have never found an instance of modern slavery in our supply chain, however, we do not guarantee our chocolate is 100% slave free. While we are doing everything we can to prevent slavery and child labour, we are also realistic. Firstly, we cannot be there to monitor the cocoa plantations 24/7, and we don’t believe in that kind of monitoring. And our ambition extends beyond our own bar: we want to change the whole industry which involves being where the problems are so that we can solve them. Only then can we say we have achieved our mission to make all chocolate 100% slave free.So.. is there illegal labour in our supply chain?
The short answer is yes, but we have never said differently, and we are glad we know about it because then we can eradicate it. We actively look for instances so we can solve them. We have a Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation System (CLMRS) in place across all 7 cocoa cooperatives that we source from in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Last year we found 387 cases of illegal child labour and remediated 221. Most big chocolate companies do not know how many cases of illegal labour there are in their cocoa supply chain and therefore they cannot work to remediate them, this is only made possible because we have a 100% traceable supply chain (as validated by PWC in our annual reports).-
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Then even today liberals come up with terrible branding like “defund the police”. While I understand what it means and support it, the branding makes it sound like an attack on police and safety. Liberals generally have far better ideas and policies but they’re clueless on how to brand and sell the ideas. They constantly let’s conservative control the narrative as if they believe their ideas will somehow sell themselves.
Nitpicking but I do feel it’s important: “defund the police” is more of a leftist demand than a liberal one.
But more importantly, there’s no other way to describe the demand. That’s what it means, defund them. That’s what has to happen. Reforming doesn’t work; countless reforms have already been tried, they don’t work, they just give cops more money to keep doing the same thing with a few cosmetic changes. Police, and the outdated and very racist way American society responds to crime generally, makes people less safe, not more safe. Police don’t even do their jobs that well. 4% of their time is devoted to violent crime and they suck at preventing it. This is a great thread on how useless, untrustworthy, and dangerous police are and it includes stats, the 4% number is from an NYT report: Alec Karakatsanis on Twitter: “Thread. You’re going to hear a lot about how cops need more resources because “crime is surging” in the next few months. It’s propaganda, and here’s how you can respond:” / Twitter
Anyway, the point of the slogan is to keep the demand in the public consciousness so that it becomes tenable in the future. Black Lives Matter was hugely controversial just a few years ago, now most brands in America have it on their social media accounts and you see BLM signs on every other lawn, at least in blue states.
Another example: Leftists have been condemning Israel and framing the occupation of Palestine as apartheid for decades but it only just caught on for a lot of average, less politically engaged people.
In college I went to an Angela Davis talk where she made this point: she’s worked for decades as a prison abolitionist and is realistic that it may never happen in her lifetime. But she sees the purpose of her work as keeping the idea in the public sphere for a time when it becomes possible. And in recent years prison abolition has left the realm of academic spaces and leftist orgs so that now most people in America have at least heard of it. That’s a major step even if it remains unpopular.
So, “defund the police” ruffles a lot of feathers but it sticks in people’s brains and that’s a win in the long term.
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“Defund” seems to me the quickest, most literal way to describe what would help. Schools and hospitals are defunded all the time, without notice, with little outcry.
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Nobody campaigns on ‘defund the schools’ though, they just do it sneakily.
In a different scenario to the US Theresa May did defund the police in the UK to the tune of 20,000 officers as part of the austerity programme. The crime rate increased, rapes especially have reduced prosecution rates because they take a lot of resources.
It’s not the same as the US. UK police are largely unarmed and there isn’t an increasing militarisation of buying tanks and the like, they don’t have overtime scams that incentivise them to make trivial prosecutions, but I imagine this is what most people would imagine are the consequences of just ‘defund’ without deeper delving.
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“let’s reallocate resources currently spent on weapons and whatnot to mental health workers and other public services!” is valid.
Which I 100% agree with but I’m not as convinced as Will that applying an absolutist slogan will bring any of that about.
I do get it, like going into negotiations you shoot for the moon and ‘reform’ in the past has been week and ineffective, however you also risk it being dismissed outright by many who would probably be pretty sympathetic with the long version.
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“let’s reallocate resources currently spent on weapons and whatnot to mental health workers and other public services!” is valid.
Which I 100% agree with but I’m not as convinced as Will that applying an absolutist slogan will bring any of that about.
I do get it, like going into negotiations you shoot for the moon and ‘reform’ in the past has been week and ineffective, however you also risk it being dismissed outright by many who would probably be pretty sympathetic with the long version.
The thing is, that argument has been applied to a whole rake of movements that were successful. I was told that verbatim about Repeal the 8th like 5 years ago.
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Police are pigs and criminals are nice, misunderstood people.
Yes, is there a point?
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Nobody campaigns on ‘defund the schools’ though, they just do it sneakily.
It’s worth noting as well that the defunding of public schools is generally a top-down strategy, where lobbyists influence politicians on the behalf of private businesses who want to profit. By comparison, the calls to defund the police in the US are from a grassroots movement that doesn’t have the access to lobbyists.
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I was told that verbatim about Repeal the 8th like 5 years ago.
Repeal the 8th may have seemed unlikely to be passed at certain points but its message was always pretty clear.
You didn’t frame it as ‘reject births! (what we actually mean by that is just the ones that are unwanted where women should be allowed to have the choice and that needs a change to the Irish constitution)’
I’m fully on board with the idea that the left can often be poor at what in recent years the right has been good at, shifting the argument to your side until it becomes the norm (e.g. you can never raise income tax).
There probably isn’t much of a policy point that Will and I would disagree with but I don’t think taking the most extreme stance and hoping people come around is one that pragmatically will work. If you propose ‘abolish prison’ the first reaction of 99% of people is they don’t want serial killers wandering the streets and you are nuts, I don’t think it is turning anyone to the argument.
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Repeal the 8th may have seemed unlikely to be passed at certain points but its message was always pretty clear.
You didn’t frame it as ‘reject births! (what we actually mean by that is just the ones that are unwanted where women should be allowed to have the choice and that needs a change to the Irish constitution)’
Well that’s the thing, they argued that Repeal the 8th was unclear because it didn’t go into detail about exactly what legislation we wanted, that it was too vague and couldn’t be supported as a result. I’d probably be able to find some thinkpieces in the major Irish newspapers that make this exact argument if I went hunting.
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Regardless I think the pro-choice/anti-abortion arguments are all pretty well understood globally outside the context of a single campaign where people might be picking holes in the specifics.
The whole argument around Defund The Police isn’t well established enough in the minds of the public for that slogan to carry all of the additional context that it needs to make sense to people. I think most people hear the slogan as broad anti-police rhetoric that is proposing something (getting rid of the police) that seems self-evidently foolish as a policy.
It’s not a good slogan for what it wants to achieve.
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Regardless I think the pro-choice/anti-abortion arguments are all pretty well understood globally outside the context of a single campaign where people might be picking holes in the specifics.
The whole argument around Defund The Police isn’t well established enough in the minds of the public for that slogan to carry all of the additional context that it needs to make sense to people. I think most people hear the slogan as broad anti-police rhetoric that is proposing something (getting rid of the police) that seems self-evidently foolish as a policy.
It’s not a good slogan for what it wants to achieve.
And people said that they needed additional context to understand Repeal. Like almost word for word what you’re saying here.
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Something to keep in mind is that realistically there won’t be meaningful change in policing in America anytime soon. I hate to be pessimistic but the police are just too powerful. Even now, when there’s hardly been any defunding of police anywhere in America, they’re blaming rising crime rates on the movement, when in fact rising crime is another indictment of their usefulness. They turn each new atrocity they commit into a call for more funding so that they can “reform” themselves. Even though these reforms don’t get results, the public takes it as a win. Rinse, repeat.
Defund the Police is a long game. The point is to keep bringing it up–in protests, organizing, op-eds, news appearances, etc–each time the police do something monstrous. Each time, more people will learn what it means. To take the Repeal the 8th movement as a comparison, the movement is still in the early stages of messaging, a few decades before a formalized call for repeal even became tenable. Dave pointed out that the Repeal the 8th movement had years of pro-choice/anti-choice messaging throughout the world to rely on. Well, one day Defund the Police will have that too.
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Worth noting that the “it’s a bad slogan” argument got used against BLM too
By who though? As I said opposition movements will be default criticise any slogan or movement.
What’s happening with ‘defund’ is people supportive of its aims are critical of it.
It’s frequently used by bad-faith arguers, but I’ve seen the same sentiment uncritically repeated by people with some level of liberal cred, especially pundits and columnists.
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Yeah, Black Lives Matter made a lot of liberals here uncomfortable when it first started, the backlash was never just a conservative thing.
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Black Lives Matter made a lot of liberals here uncomfortable
Not me. It’s a pretty common sense argument in the circumstances. It’s also a message with a positive slant.
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Black Lives Matter made a lot of liberals here uncomfortable
Not me. It’s a pretty common sense argument in the circumstances. It’s also a message with a positive slant.
Sorry, I meant here in the US. There weren’t that many MWers with qualms about it iirc.
I definitely think the response to Black Lives Matter has gotten better, Dave. Like I said earlier, brands have taken BLM up now and there are signs in windows and lawns all over the place around me. I know I live in MA which is really blue but the abundance of signs is something I’ve only noticed in the last couple years. I’m sure it’s different in red states, but the fact that huge brands like Amazon & Netflix have adopted it speaks to the pressure they feel to support it.
I do agree that Defund the Police is a harder sell, as it has a target. I’d personally have gone with something like Fund Communities Not Cops, but even that has room for confusion and still targets police. But given that reforms have failed I really do think there’s just one way to handle the matter and that’s defunding. Any slogan is only going to skim the surface of the demand so Defund’s problems have been overstated imo. The point is to keep repeating it, the more it sticks around the more people will look into what it means. As long as it’s been around there’s been messaging to go with it that it means diverting police funds to social work, mental health, etc.
