Libertarian becomes lawyer, appreciates police

I spent ages writing a comment that I accidentally deleted (>_>) so apologies if this is a bit too long:

I've read that a lot of violent urban crime in the US takes place in poor, majority-minority or majority-black neighbourhoods. Those neighbourhoods are "overpoliced and underprotected" areas where cops rarely respond to crime reports & rarely go unless they are conducting a raid in SWAT gear, & people rarely make crime reports either because they don't expect the police to do anything or expect them to make things worse if they do turn up.

Increase police funding, decrease police funding, it doesn't change the approach the police take to those neighbourhoods & it doesn't change the social, political or historic factors that determine the relationship between neighbourhoods and the police.

& re: defunding, surely a libertarian should understand that government money is not a bottomless bucket....Some (not all) cities facing budget issues have increased police funding while cutting mental healthcare, social services or other parts of the safety net. this has 2 effects

• 1. more people fall through the safety net, resulting in more crime. Poverty/adverse childhood experiences/untreated (mental) health problems => drug addiction & crime => traumatized, impoverished, addicted, parents who have to fight just to stay out of jail & keep custody of their kids => adverse childhood experiences as their kids grow up with absent, neglectful or bad parents &/or are farmed out to relatives, foster homes, shelters for homeless youth or juvenile detention with all the potential for abuse, trauma and induction into crime that those environments offer => the cycle continues. People talk about "virtuous spirals" in economics and sociology - well, this is the opposite.
• 2. Police become first responders to every social problem as funding for emergency services and social services are cut - some crisis lines also automatically call the police. Police appear at scenes of poverty, homelessness, overdose or illness where their training is basically useless & where all they can really do is put someone in a jail cell or give them a fine. Worse than that, because of the "thin blue line" mentality (& "killology" style training), police turn up heavily armed at scenes where someone is suicidal, in severe distress or just behaving strangely, believing that it is better for them to kill that person than to be injured themselves. In "overpoliced and underprotected" areas, cops come in heavily armed, wearing kevlar or swat gear, & act more like an occupying military than police. Disabled & mentally ill people - particularly disabled or mentally ill black people - have been brutalized and killed by the police in these areas because their difference is seen as a sign of danger by trigger-happy police. And people who are the subject of repeated callouts due to mental health issues, addiction or minor crimes are treated with contempt by cops. All coppers aren't bastards to everyone, all the time, but the people who see the most of them see the worst of them.

As a non-American unversed in American political rhetoric, "defund the police" always struck me as a weird call for action. Read without nuance it basically means "don't pay for policing", not "reduce the relative funding going to LE in favor of other funding".

Shouldn't paint brick walls. Traps moisture.

He is removing the white line. The world turns darker as the cop paints more, as after removing all other colors from the world, the cop will finally go after white, and there will be only darkness.

(this is why you pay artists to make art for you, and not just ask a computer system to generate something, artists understand what you are trying to say. (for me the image also seemed to imply the cop was moving from left to right) The selection of the image also torpedoes his whole 'I love punk rock' thing, it is a failure on so many levels you could write an entire essay on it, esp if you include the fact that nobody on LW seems to have noticed or cared enough to say something about it.).

I only read the intro bit and I had complaints, looked at the scrollbar, felt despair and then I realized nobody is forcing me to read all this, I could just stop.

Average experience reading a LW article

Anyway, somebody should call marxbro, marxbro will love this.

I’m hoping they can make their way over here! we are defederated from the bigger instances that call themselves Marxist, but given the extreme toxicity levels of those instances (and their questionable understanding of Marxist ideas on average), they’d likely be happier with a local account here either way

Sadly we do not have a breadbro (breadbro? anarchybro? perhaps best to let the anarchist equivalent of marxbro decide their name for themselves)

I like Kropotkin a lot (he’s much less exhausting to read than most theory) but I’d probably be an awful choice. my pick would be someone along the lines of AnarchoNinaWrites, though Nina herself understandably likely has too much going on to join us here (though the invite is open if she’d ever like to give lemmy a try)

It’s not bayesian reasoning without actual math, and many beliefs are not so easily quantified under any statistical framework.

All it really offers is unwarranted confidence in one’s own rationality, often used in these circles to cloak nauseating positions.

Making ideas « pay rent », In these circles is also used for black-pilling people into rejecting common sense and humanity. It’s good to be skeptical of new ideas or new claims, it’s even good to analyze and synthesize your own beliefs, it’s a bit dangerous to say that every belief is negotiable, and to give the tools to others the tools to mould them (here be cult dragons).

Despite it’s flaws, it is a good opening to the Declaration of Independence of the US (not American myself): « we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are […] equal […] with certain unalienable rights »

You can’t get morals from stats, and some core ideals ought to live in your mind rent-free.