The best cop; officer down
Lefty Memes
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, updooting good contributions and downdooting those of low-quality!
Rules
0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such,
as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Mantic Minotaur" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
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- (National) chauvinism
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- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
I see a lot of people in this thread justifying murder when that's REALLY not what's needed. That will just lead to the only people willing to be cops is maniacs with a gun (who are NOT in short supply) when we really need cops who can take a moment and think.
when we really need cops who can take a moment and think.
Those people are actively filtered out by police.
It's not hard to make it through the application process as a compassionate, clever person.
It's just hard to stay employed while butting heads with supervisors that aren't, and the public sends you thoughts and prayers from the sidelines. Sure, they'll riot when evil cops are caught doing evil stuff, but they do absolutely nothing to notice or stop good cops from getting forced out.
Source: My time in law enforcement and my interactions with the public on Reddit where I told my story.
We need to murder the concept of cops as we know them today. That's the only murder we need. No individual's death will fix a fucked up system, gotta kill the system itself.
People will not have any interest in going without law enforcement for X days/weeks/months/years while you reboot everything.
Well, I'd realistically suggest a slow strangle while we build up the alternative in tandem, maybe not "murder", but I opted to use the wording of the poster I replied to.
What would the alternative be? I have never heard of a realistic solution that will be anywhere near the Overton Window and also backed up by data. Again, the last time Americans went without cops (CHAZ), it was a total disaster that "replaced" cops with people who did a far worse job when tasked with the same responsibilities.
I'm not criticizing your use of the word "murder."
Re: murder, it was more a personal clarification hahah, murder implies a swift execution, versus a slow change.
I do not claim to have the solution. That's outside of my area of expertise. What I can say is that the implementation of policing we have now is failing, and I'd rather move towards something new than spin my wheels now.
I can also say that, with how everything else in our society is organized, our current system of policing is probably the most practical. Any kind of change to it will likely be predicated on many other facets of society changing first or in tandem. I have no illusions that it'll be an easy change.
Yeah... the fed-posting isn't good. However, the current system of policing, and the entire rotten criminal justice system, is a system of oppression, is responsible immense amounts of pain and suffering, and can't be saved by just hiring better people. Cruelty (and upholding hierarchy) is the point.
I maintain that firing bad people and hiring good people is the only realistic way to increase the Good:Bad ratio high enough that many of these problems will evaporate.
Save a life. Shoot a cop.
That just makes cops more paranoid and thus more likely to shoot someone who isn't a threat.