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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

I hear what you're saying, but words matter. I can never support a slogan I explicitly disagree with.

There's plenty of better slogans out there. I'd support "end police violence" or "stop killer cops" or something.

Thats certainly much more catchy than the full slogan right now, which seems to be "Defund the police, but we don't really want to do that, even though some people in our movement actually do want that, but they're a minority - we swear. But we want political power anyway and it'll be fine - you can trust us".

You can tell its a bad slogan because of how much oxygen gets spent explaining it. (Eg, right here)

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"End Police Violence" has been a slogan in fact. It didn't really do much, precisely because not enough people who consider themselves unaffected by the risk of police violence were drawn in by it.

By contrast "Defund the Police" definitely generated a "say what?" response from just about everyone, whether you agreed with it or not.

As for the political power thing ... given the difficulty that existing politicians and political bodies have in exerting control over police authority, the idea that any new group would somehow be able to actually accomplish anything remotely close to abolition is crazy. Look at what happened in Minneapolis as an illustrative example: probably the closest to "actual abolition", and it just fizzled out completely.

What you heard as a “say what?” was a politely phrased “you guys haven’t thought this through” in a lot of cases.

“Think different”, “Think outside the bun”, “Just Do It” are good “say what?” examples. I don’t think “Defund the Police” accomplished the goal to make curious and enlist fence-sitters to the cause and instead likely pushed more people towards supporting their police departments.

Intent and good-faith argument also matter. If you're not willing to look past another person's inexpert use of grammar and/or syntax in order to understand their meaning, then you're doing it wrong. No trophies for elevating language to be a rigid and immutable thing.

From a purely practical perspective, if you're trying to convey an idea the onus is kinda on you to communicate it clearly. If the literal meaning of what you're saying ('defund the police') is not actually what you're trying to convey, it seems unproductive to accuse people of acting in 'bad faith' when they understandably misunderstand. It's like designing something badly and then blaming your users for 'not using it right'.

Sure, I absolutely take your point and as a lover of language generally feel similar leanings. But by the same token, everyone seems to be everyone else's audience these days, so there must be some reciprocal onus on an audience member to realize that a person calling to "defund the police" in Minneapolis might not agree with the statement "law enforcement is universally bad".

If someone says “vote for me, I want to defund the police”, I’m not sure what to believe. Do they support a terrible policy (defunding the police)? Or are they lying? If they actually get in to power and actually do defund the local police, I don't think we get to complain about the outcome.

It might be an ASD trait, but I really like to take people at their word. Please speak what you actually think. I have a hard time trusting people who say one thing while they believe the opposite. Especially in politics.

This sounds very much like the critiques I heard of “black lives matter”. Wait, are you saying white lives don’t matter?

Where do these slogans come from? Are they designed by conservatives to make liberals look bad?

“Black lives matter” is a much more defensible slogan, because if you believe all human life matters, you should also support the idea that black lives matter.

“Defund the police” is much worse because it’s explicitly naming and promoting a policy idea which activists promise they don’t actually want.

Why lie about what you want?

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