What's up with all the language games lately?
"Defund the police". No no, we don't actually mean defund the police...
"Anti work". No no, we don't actually mean we're anti work...
"Defund the police". No no, we don't actually mean defund the police...
"Anti work". No no, we don't actually mean we're anti work...
I suppose you identified the potential problem here: people inferring that “defund the police” doesn’t actually mean “defund the police” and ascribing softer, feel-good intentions which aren’t there.
But it’s a bit long.
I was thinking more of a case like this: If someone is already outraged about police brutality and they see that a "defund the police" rally is happening, there's a greater chance they'll go as it offers them an opportunity to express their general dissatisfaction with the police regardless of whether they agree 100% with the specific ideology of the organizer. When the headline the next day reads "10000 Attend Defund the Police Rally", this leads to the perception that 10000 people believe in defunding the police when the actual number is much smaller
"True, the subreddit is called /r/antiwork. And yes, their motto (right at the top of their page) is "Antiwork: Unemployment for all, not just the rich!". But is it fair to call them "Anti-work"? Have you considered their moderate membership?"
"defund" is the progressive recuperation of abolition, and "nobody actually means defund" is the liberal recuperation of that.
the process is playing out again with anti-work.
it's hard for the radical origins to refuse the attention and alliance, even if it undercuts and defuses them in the end. at least the overton window moves a bit.
But that’s a story as common as blue skies and chirping birds: once your favorite sub-Reddit gets big enough…it starts to stink.
- An alien invasion movie
Not gonna say I subscribe in text, but in merit...I mean...
To some extent I also believe it's natural to try to elicit an emotional response from the other "side," because then you can focus on attacking their words, tone, character, etc instead of engaging in reasoned discourse and debate. You get a bit of an automatic advantage if your opponent is already in an emotionally charged state. From what I've seen, the phrases you mention are pretty good at that too.
All of this ends up doing more harm than good most, if not all, of the time.
It's unfortunate that people are trying to turn such things into political statements.
I think it can be claimed that it limits the rate of spread, not total spread/infections.
Limiting rate of spread is the same thing as reducing how many infections there are at any given time. Or, the total over a bounded time frame. I don't think "well there will still be about the same total number of infections by 2025 with or without masking" is a useful observation.
Sure. We're probably all getting this thing at some point. But, that's why I said "until all ages are able to be vaccinated."
I really wish the US and other countries would take the Singapore route and require the unvaccinated assholes clogging up our medical system (and exhausting our highly trained/educated/caring physicians and nurses) to pay their own healthcare costs incurred due to COVID.
Having the unvaccinated directly realize some cost for their own ignorance seems highly appropriate here. Although I suppose at least some of them are paying the ultimate price with their life, which is also very unfortunate.
The former just seem like good politics: "states' rights" allowed slave owners to court people who were worried about "big government" while conveniently ignoring the grave injustice that's actually occurring. The latter seems like good twitter politics; it'll get good engagement for being so inflammatory, but at the end of the day, most people don't actually agree.
It's one thing to say "defund the police", and it's another to say "penalize police brutality, take police funds and use them to fund social workers trained to disarm situations without using violence, etc."
I don't know about that. More like it muddies the waters and leads to miscommunication and polarization
It’s not hard to come up with a catchy tagline that doesn’t completely misrepresent the movement. Thing is, the movement is about defunding police. They’re not shy about that: https://defundthepolice.org/
They never do anything about property crime, even for middle class white people out in middle class 'burbs.
The one time we had a shooting anywhere nearby it was really weird and looked a whole lot like a (small-time—the dude was clearly not a seasoned pro, as he wandered into the wrong house first, telling the occupants they weren't who he was after before leaving) organized crime hit, and AFAIK they never solved it even with several witnesses, it happening in broad daylight, and both victims surviving, plus the guy apparently traveling a good long way on foot to and from the scene, and that was years ago, so they're 0/1 on scary violent crime in my area. I can't imagine they'd do better in a more typical case, unless it's one of those incredibly obvious "the boyfriend did it" situations that any idiot could solve in two minute flat. Traffic enforcement should probably be someone else's job anyway, not the police. Imagine how many fewer police officers we could have if they didn't spend 75% of their time sitting on the side of the road with a radar gun, and how much cheaper people who only did that would be—I think we only maintain the status quo because police benefit from fines & seizures, so they don't want to lose that, and as an excuse to fish for other (mostly victimless) crimes or "crimes" (like having too much money in the passenger seat).
I don't really care one way or the other, but if folks in less-nice parts of town want to try getting rid of them, seems OK to me. If it goes very wrong, I expect they'll get experience practically all the downside, so if they think it's a good idea, cool, let's try it. They're mostly dead weight from my perspective anyway—I don't get why actually defunding them, at least to try it out and see what happens, is such a big deal. They're incredibly ineffective and unhelpful, at best. Starting from scratch and seeing what we actually need to pay for doesn't seem like a crazy idea.
"cultural appropriation" - no no, we mean cultural appropriation but from minorities (it's amusing that the popular definitions you see of cultural appropriation have cultural appropriation in it).
"white fragility" - no no, we don't mean white people are fragile but that some are uncomfortable talking about race issues
If you have to explain what your shitty buzzword means every time, then it's not designed to convey your bait-and-switch definition.
Anyway, "Anti work" may as well be parsed as "Anti The-Kind-Of-Bullshit-Work-We've-Been-Doing". A totally reasonable interpretation.
A single voice may have freedom of speech, but the accepted narrative is controlled and much louder.
The crowd around here, of course, always constantly jumps on this as if it is all one big inconsistent argument from a specific group. Selectively forgetting in these moments what the internet is like in general. It's funny, just look at the peer replies here, people are so excited to point out the patent inconsistency, the naive radicals who don't know what they want; obviously because people who would even have something close to those thoughts must be confused and irrational.
To some degree it's click bait, and people getting used to it.
Like "anti work" being the click bait version of "anti how work is currently handled".