Yeah, I'm honestly not so cool with that.

Sounds more like i have to defend myself, which I'm pretty decent at from a lifetime of brazilian jiu-jitsu and cross training in other martial arts, and i've been considering buying a gun for a while, but this sounds like anarchy, and there's a lot of dangerous people out there, so then basically the guy with the most fire power and numbers wins.

I'm interested in this as an experiment in a city i don't live in, and where I live it's super safe anyway, but if I were living in a big crime ridden city without any police i wouldn't like it very much...

Not saying I totally trust police, very very far from it, but I've also known some nice cops in my life as well and I do think there are good honest cops out there.

I think it's an experiment worth trying in one city right now considering the circumstances, and i'm cautiously optimistic about it, but people are people, and lots of them aren't trustworthy regardless of whether they are wearing badges or not, so i think this is a wait and see kind of thing that might turn out well or might not.......

This is probably going to come across as dickish, but anarchism (An actual political philosophy) is very different than anarchy (What you see in movies).

No it doesn't come of as dickish to me since i've taught English so actually i'm pretty cool with semantics and getting the usage of words right haha.

So, what's the difference?

Anarchy, as you've used it here, essentially means a society wide free-for-all. Anarchism has actual tenets (Generally being a horizontally organized, stateless society) and does maintain certain social norms.

Yeah, I think I essentially knew that, even though I don't exactly know all the tenets of anarchism.

I did actually mean "anarchy" and not anarchism in this sense, meaning that I don't necessarily think that this would be the specific system of anarchism, but rather, a state of possible pandemonium with no clear cut rules or norms.

That's certainly not impossible, but as someone with ties to the community, things are very organized at this point. There are signs up clearly establishing at least a few rules.

All this time we thought the police were powerful, turns out all you had to do was hit back! Burn one pig pen and they disband like the cowards they always were! Awesome! Rest of the world: take note.

The simplest way to explain anarchism as a political philosophy is "no rulers, not no rules".

Also while I'll admit that we don't really know how a society with no police will ultimately turn out simply because it hasn't really been done in this country before (at least not for an outrageously long time), the knee-jerk panic reflex that assumes it will quickly devolve into a chaotic Mad Max style free-for-all wasteland of violence kinda sounds an awful lot like how Oregonians started panicking about how dangerous and unsafe it would be to allow self-serve gas pumps in the state when the state government floated the idea of allowing them. Granted, self serve gas stations and the abolition of police are two different things but I think my point is that people tend to get so used to something simply because it's always been there that they'll instinctively get uncomfortable and fear the apocalyptic worst case scenario once it looks like it might go away.

Bottom line is that police absolutely do not need to do like 90% of the shit they do, and since the threat of any interaction quickly escalating into violence is so fucking prevalent (especially for marginalized people) I think smashing the reset button isn't a bad idea at all right now. Shit's too far gone.

And if you're too skittish about that, at the very least the militarization of the police needs to end immediately and funding needs to be drastically slashed (ideally down to zero but that's my perfect scenario). If you look at any city in America's budget, every single one of them looks like the dril tweet about the candles. Take that exorbitant amount of money and give it to the fucking schools and hospitals instead of buying more machine guns and urban assault vehicles for the fucking cops.

People are seeing this disbandment as a sudden "turn off" button where all police magically disappear. It doesn't work like that, guys.

Of course not. It's a legal process whereby they send Michael Biehn back in time to stop the police from existing in the first place. I have a degree in pol-sci.

The idea as far as I've seen it is to institute a new group that will act more about public safety, not just letting everyone do whatever they want and saying fuck it.

They want to get rid of the giant clustered bureaucracy of the police, with its cronyism and corruption and racist violence. They're not just going to say 'OK, no more cops, peace out!' There will be some new plan. It just hasn't been tried in the US yet so it's hard to say exactly what the specifics will be.

I can't remember any time in my life I really needed the cops and also can't remember any friends who've been so in need that they would've been shit out of luck without a cop there. I know there are certain things you need for policing. But it doesn't need to be some huge police state where they just have unlimited power and military gear and shit.

This is truly a move of actual leadership in the US and I hope they can work it into something that will change things. It isn't another half-assed "we'll start a committee and have citizens review boards and stuff" idea, and it isn't ignoring the racism like has happened most of the fucking time.

I was lucky enough to have a pretty normal, safe, suburban childhood and can't remember any time in my life I really needed the cops, either.

I agree that there are certain things that will need policing, but this huge police state we have right now is totally unnecessary.

I also don't believe any kind of massive, leadership driven change will happen regardless of the outcome of this upcoming election.

Important to note that none of the nasty crimes are covered by cops that drive around in patrol cars. Guys like Derek Chauvin didn't solve murders, didn't disrupt the mafia, didn't investigate human trafficking, etc.

Having said that, 'anarchy' is also used by many anarchists to denote the type of society which is in accordance with anarchism.

I've lived in half a dozen small towns alone with no gun or alarm or anything and never really had anything happen. I got lucky, I know - but life is a big thing and not everybody is continuously in danger of a break in or whatever every single day. There can be better alternatives than having what we have, yeah.

Protests in Germany were meant as expressions of solidarity with the protests in the USA, but since then German conservative politicians have made a number of ridiculous statements about how racism doesn't exist in the German police at all, using the USA for whataboutism, as in "not as many people of colour die from police violence here as they do in the USA, therefore the problem does not exist here at all", and any future protests in Germany should go beyond solidarity for U.S. protests and aim at that bullshit.

Yeah I never realized how many German nationalists there are until I saw this doc. Don't know how accurate they exactly portray everything, but was very interesting for me. Definitely a lot of parallels between their rhetoric and the rhetoric on the right in America.

It's especially huge in East Germany, which is the number one reason I can't stand the tankie "war on bigotry" thing that's going on (like war on terror or war on drugs), the Soviets conquered Germany but the Nazi assholes just went underground and the minute the Soviet Union tanked (he he) they resurfaced in the same numbers. Only way you stop people from being Nazis is that you show them their life is better if they're not Nazis (which is infinitely true), which is what the Marshall Plan did, in turn the Soviet Union said if you're a Nazi you will be punished, and they just went underground waiting out the Soviet Union to resurface.

I once knew a guy who was a Nazi skinhead, and he switched sides simply because he couldn't get laid, and that's literally how you cure this shit, people need to realise that their life is simply so much better if they're not racist, nationalist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, etc jackasses, and that positive reinforcement works like a charm compared to the tankie threats of punishment that never work at all in any way.

John Oliver has had some heinously bad takes, but that police segment was unambiguously great from beginning to end.

What’re some of his worst bad takes, in your opinion?

The Western European countries are able to play cagey about the topic of racism because even though many of them were every bit as involved with slavery as the US was, they kept the bulk of their slave industries and slave plantations overseas, so they don't have to deal with still having the literal plantations or the sites of slave revolts within their borders despite having reaped the monetary rewards of slavery. This is especially the case in France and the UK, which is why their protests seem quite a bit more localized and not just in solidarity with those happening in America.

Germany didn't exist as a united country while the Atlantic slave trade was in full swing, but it does have the relatively brief but incredibly brutal colonization of Namibia and Tanzania to contend with.

Off the top of my head, equating AMLO with Trump, saying that Florida needs to be chopped off of the US (no, Florida needs to implement Logan's Run, urban Florida is generally really progressive), adding to the calls for Trump to run for President, his vaguely Sinophobic take on China and his questionable rant on Venezuela (Maduro sucks but the rare good thing he does is crushed by the US; this is a much better take on the country imo).

Also, congrats Sedition, your organization is now known and hated by some of the worst people in our country!

Random thought: imagine saying safe injection sites and rehab clinics are a waste of taxpayer money when your Facebook profile says you work for the fucking Air Force.

Many thanks to the Schutzstaffel for handling the undesirables!

Well, there have been some anti-racist protests in Europe as well and they've reached Portugal, a few days ago. While there are, indeed, peaceful protests around here (in which one of my friends even participated in), it quickly escalated to a far-left extremism against historical monuments that depict our past during the Age of Discoveries. There's even a public petition, right now, aggregating votes, threatening to demolish some of our most iconic monuments from such era. A statue of Father António Vieira, a Portuguese-Brazilian priest from the 17th century has been vandalized in Lisbon by those extremists, whom have written, in graffiti spray, the word "descoloniza", which means "decolonize" - even though that António Vieira had always fought for peaceful manners to interact and coexist with indigenous tribes and against slavery.
The thing is that there are some monuments all around Europe that were also vandalized and destroyed by those guys. I'm really afraid of what might happen next around here. The worst part of this is that the marginalized and poor black people living in Portugal (even though that we don't live in such a manifestly racist society like in other countries), keep living in precarious conditions. What are those self-proclaimed "black lives matter" activist doing around here?

The "Age of Discovery" wasn't just Magellan sailing around the world and sailors making maps, it was explicitly the beginning of Western European nations conquering and colonizing much of the rest of the world, which is the origin of many systems of racial and economic inequality around the world. The brutality, racism, and genocide that took place during this period has been whitewashed in traditional Western histories, and it's long past time that the truth be mainstream.

Regarding the vandalism, there has been a handful of examples here in the US of statues of historical figures that were abolitionists being vandalized alongside statues of slavers and Confederates because they look similar and the historical figures aren't well-known. Even so, it's important to keep in mind that these are just statues. I don't know anything about Vieira, but if the people being honored and immortalized by these statues really were good and worth celebrating, their memorials can be cleaned up or repaired. The lives of oppressed people living right now can't be brought back if they're killed, and that's what's being protested.

They are boarding the Winston Churchill statue and the cenotaph amongst other monuments in London ahead of another wave of protests. A guy actually pissed on the cenotaph last weekend. That's disgraceful. Whatever message they were trying to get across was lost right there! It's going to be another bad weekend.

That is indeed disgraceful. How they would merely board and piss on that cenotaph of one of the worst human beings that ever lived, whose atrocities are still felt by millions to this day, isn't even an iota of what that monument deserves. It should be dismantled and placed in a museum commemorating war crimes.

There is very little that is admirable about Churchill aside from a few inspirational wartime speeches. Many of the worst events in the modern history of the Indian subcontinent can be squarely blamed on him.

Pay attention to which monuments are being targeted. Shakespeare, Boudicca, and the like are being left alone.

Who gives a fuck about literally any statue?

I do. If anyone ever fucking tore down the Statue of Liberty or Lincoln Memorial, that'd be sad. I don't think flippantly tearing down statues simply because of present issues is always a good thing. Sure, certain statues make sense, like those Christopher Columbus ones can eat shit. But there is a line where I would hate to see crossed.

There are so much more important things to deal with than hunks of rock.

Right, and all paintings are is oil on a canvas

Certain cultural monuments unite the country under a common image, which actually is why Christopher Columbus statues and Confederate statues are so fucking terrible in the first place.

This. Monuments can do a lot to beautify public spaces and give a weight of history to a place, but Confederate monuments specifically were made to keep black people "in their place".

From a UK perspective, the people that want to pull down statues aren't campaigning against racism, or for anyone's rights - they're establishment politicians, middle class lefties, student radical types that want to impose their view of things on the built environment that we all share. When the Labour Party draws up a 'hit list' of statues it wants to take down, you do have to thank the almighty that all of the real problems are solved.

I appreciate that the US experience is different, and you've all got your own toy box of horrible problems.

True, and TBH it's the Cenotaph I'm more angry about. The Cenotaph is there to commemorate fallen soldiers. There is no need to piss on it.

Urinating on Cenotaphs is a long, storied tradition.

I wonder where all the "preserve history" rednecks were when all the Lenin statues were taken down across Eastern Europe in the early 90s.

So was slavery and that was abolished.

I was only 10 :/ haha