#Theres actually a big pattern of leftist principles that are expressed entirely in what we dont want instead of what we want

[vanilla-voyeur]

I don't agree with defund the police or ACAB

Or at least I don't agree with the terms. The underlying message is good. The problem with these terms is that they obscure what we really mean in a way that makes us look more unreasonable than we really are.

Take "defund the police". What we really mean is "fund social services". @theabigailthorn made a video on policing in the UK that shows that regardless of whether the police budgets are cut under Austerity or whether police budgets balloon out of proportion like in the US, the outcome is a shitty system so long as funding for social services is low. Without funding to social services, the police wear too many hats. There is no possible way that one single group can handle all the different problems we place on the heads of the police. And that's completely ignoring that they're a white supremacist agent of state violence. Tbh when I first heard about "defund the police" I mistakenly thought that it was supposed to be some sort of punishment for the police being racist. On its surface, that sounds like the wrong approach. I'm pretty confident that that reading is what many conservatives take away when they hear "defund the police".

And then there's "ACAB". What we really mean is that "all cops are complicit" or "good cops don't last". I can't stand when people smugly say that of course ACAB is obviously not literal. If you expect the group that thinks we're all batshit insane and wholly divorced from reality for the most common sense takes to parse the nuance behind the blanket statement then you're batshit insane and wholly divorced from reality.

This is not even a bad optics argument. This is why in the heck are we spreading misinformation about our own dang beliefs that make us sound completely unreasonable.