#and the aggressive unwillingness to grapple with the commonality of violence is pure self-indulgence... | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sheathandshear · 2 years ago

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The "Abolish police/military/prisons! And if you point out any problems with this you are a FASCIST!" people are incredibly annoying not just because of their unwillingness to engage with the complexities and realities of these topics (though they are) but chiefly because they are putting SO much political energy into something that is never going to happen. There is zero majority political will anywhere to eliminate all forms of police and incarceration. Zilch. Meanwhile, the events in Ukraine are making it quite clear that actually, for countries that have aggressive militarized imperialist neighbors, having a standing military is quite necessary for literal survival! And unlike other examples of "people said it would never happen but it did! GOTCHA!" (generally, slavery), there are no powerful economic incentives for state violence abolition either. (Sidebar: Slavery does still exist in many parts of the world despite it being "abolished", because it turns out that making something illegal does not actually force people to stop doing it -- as proponents of prison/police abolition claim to know, and yet somehow don't understand that in the absence of state-sponsored and at least semi-regulated violent "just" actions, people reach for personal violent "justice", which is... not better!) And I do kind of wonder whether uncompromising, realistically impossible goals are the whole point -- to shriek and shame in favor of morally pure nonsense that is ethically laudable and has no chance in hell of ever happening so as to avoid engaging in the real work of political and social change, which is dirty and distressing and imperfect and always ends up hurting someone, frequently through entirely unintended and unforeseen means, even if it benefits the majority. That they are so fixated on doing something that will produce nothing precisely because they are terrified of actually doing something productive that might make them a person who Causes Harm.

#and I am a proponent of universal human rights -- yes even for THOSE people -- and largely pacifist!#but pinning all your political goals on the idea that people are naturally nonviolent and it's only state intervention that causes violence #is -- full offense -- idiotic. I am begging you to look at literally all of human history.#humans gravitate towards institutional violence and there are vanishingly few societies that have not enthusiastically used...#...greater or lesser degrees of violence to internally enforce social norms and externally preserve (or enrich) themselves #and the aggressive unwillingness to grapple with the commonality of violence is pure self-indulgence...#...at the expense of actually DOING anything to make a more net just (though still ultimately unjust) world #politics

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