Well, they've got to come from somewhere.

And then the money's got to come from somewhere.

It reminds me rather of the discussions the SGR mailing list have about "sustainable security".

Every study has shown that investing in community development gives more return per dollar than investing in policing does.

"Where will we get the money" is obvious: we get the money by demilitarizing the police.

Same thing only army. They're of the opinion that if some of the money that's currently being spent on the military was put into the things that are fuelling the wars in the first place - climate change, what have you - it would go further, and without anybody having to get shot.

Iz troo.

Getting the money from the police budget requires cutting the police first and hoping the other things really do cover for it, though, but nothing's perfect.

Academic if they won't blooming do it, though.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, there's a lot of really smart people who've been doing this kind of thinking for decades and have written all sorts of books and essays and papers on it, and it's been implemented in the real world in many places.

It's not a "wouldn't it be nice" armchair dialogue, it's an actual field of study and praxis.

What exactly does "praxis" mean and what kind of a political statement is it?

You say it now and then, and I never got around to asking.

Praxis is the set of thoughtful, considered actions required to do a thing in line. It is a manifestation of theory, which is the ideas and principles that guide us in identifying praxis.

I'd have assumed it just meant practice, but then in that case I'd have thought you'd just say practice, unless, as I say, it's some sort of political thing like "folx".

(crossed in the post.)

For example, an educational theory might be "children have latent capacity which a teacher can help them realize" or "children are empty vessels to be filled by the teacher." The teacher's actions in the classroom are the praxis, and those actions are different depending on which theory the teacher is using.

eg, the first theory will see praxis that gives the kids opportunities to experiment and try different things so they can see what they enjoy and are good at; the second theory will create praxis involving lectures and making all the kids do things the same way.

It's not specifically political, it's a term used in education, philosophy, theology, and medicine.

How odd.

(It comes from a Greek notion that there are three kinds of knowledge: theoretical, which creates truth; poietical, which creates crafts; and practical, which creates action.)

I suppose "practice" versus "praxis" is maybe a lay vs. academic thing, then, rather than a pariah vs. woke thing.

Without theory, action is unguided. Without action, theory is just words.

It does seem to me that the American police have ended up in charge of a ludicrous amount of things, even compared to here, if I'm understanding things correctly.

There's a tendency for things to go that way, here too, because when the authorities need to save money, things like, for instance, mental health services or social work are considered things that nobody will immediately get hurt if it doesn't get done, whereas the police and the physical health services are seen as indispensable.

@A.B. Yes. And they have been given a limited and violent set of tools and training to deal with those responsibilities, and their accountability systems are almost entirely internal.

Which just leads to the "indispensable" services having to cover for the lack of the "dispensable" ones.

And there's a tendency to prioritize property over lives, but that's just capitalism in action and isn't unique to the police--it's just really obviously a problem when it's applied to policing.

(Anorexia an example I tend to think of. Often no money available to attempt any treatment short of an emergency, so left to fend for themselves until they get so starved that they have to be rushed to hospital, force-fed until no longer on the point of dropping dead, then slung out again, probably to come back later as cause of problem has not been addressed. This no way to run railroad.)

That is a great cartoon.

I read a lot of Wikipedia pages and got some idea, but that sums it up much better!

(I mean, the cartoon you posted a couple of pages ago.)

"Abolishing the police and prisons is a lot more practical than critics claim", an NBC News review of Mariame Kaba's book We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice.

I'm just sick of being always in the wrong.

You're curious and ask questions, which means you have a humble posture of learning, and that's great.

Being wrong is the first step in learning, which is an eternal and rewarding process.

Learning's not going to help.

It's not about being wrong, it's about being in the wrong. I'm just fed up with being the bad guy. Ah, well, less bothered about it now, because I'm warmer.

Good article.

Asks a question at the beginning and then ignores it throughout, by the way.

Police don't stop murders.

That's the trick of those sorts of framings: they assume police have a reasonable success rate on things like stopping murders, tracking down thieves, etc, but the statistics really don't support those assumptions.

Ditto with "how do you punish people without prisons?" the question assumes imprisonment is a legitimate and fair punishment rather than a form of torture and marginalization. The book itself goes into more depth, as does any other resource you care to find.

too tired

Being wrong is not a moral failing. I know some people frame it that way but it's just not true. Refusing to learn can be a moral failing, but ignorance never is unless/until it becomes deliberate.

Sometimes being wrong or ignorant means we cause harm. That's inevitable. Everybody is wrong, everyone causes harm. It's how we deal with it that is good or bad: whether we make restitution, whether we learn from our mistakes, whether we help others avoid making our mistakes themselves.

And when we do bad things? We aren't incorrigible. We can still pivot to doing good, though the longer we wait the harder it will be.

People aren't good or bad, we're more complicated than that.

But whatever I do, I'm still going to get stick.

If your measure of success is absolute perfection, rather than consistent progress, you and everyone else in the world will always disappoint.

And if you're surrounded by people who only punish your failures and don't celebrate your successes, find other people.

So much seems to be about demonising everything lately.

Many ways of doing things need to be challenged and replaced. But the way I see it, there's a lot of volunteers for that already and I can probably be of better service focusing on the ways of doing things that need to be built to replace them.

That's a good point.

I kind of don't like joining in Internet witch-hunts against people who've said the wrong thing.

Then... don't?

When you're in a chat-room and asked what you think, it's awkward.

@A.B. I've seen the word praxis often coupled with doxis, especially concerning religion.

But it's a wider term than that.

@BESW This is partially exacerbated by the online discourse, because we're all in the same pool of people talking and not everyone's going to realize how different our worlds are. Most people here have no idea what racism in the States is like

Or what the police brutality is like, in places where it's at its worst.

I at least have the luxury of having a few close friends who live or have lived in many places in the US and hail from commonly marginalized communities

It gets even weirder when kids get a lot of their non-formal education about how social situations work from import media, usually from the Americas...

Yeah, and the relationship between the American TV/film industry and the police is... very very complicated but generally winds up with media as a propaganda arm of the police, albeit generally less formally so than it is for the US military.

And then, Troggy and I live in a place where the police are all brown but the system is the same, and we can see how the people in the system really don't change what the system does.

So it's just patently obvious how hollow the "a few bad people" argument is (quite aside from people totally ignoring the important second half of the "few bad apples" idiom).

oof yeah

I can't say I have actually run into police all that often but when I have it has been,... an experience

well except when they are just buying food at the same place but yeah XD

There have been a few alarming leaks of police participating in or interacting with far-right organizations here, too

Individual officers, but there's the possibility of there being a pattern.

Anyway I wish more people here would realize we're lucky to live in a country where calling the cops still makes things better, not worse, the vast majority of times.

And as a corollary, we should be safeguarding the humanity of our own system instead of taking it for granted, and refrain from assuming that the police are "the good guys" elsewhere, too

as a profession, policing kind of selects for authoritarian traits

I think it's more than that but I won't argue against it

I was talking about this with my mom last night who just finished reading Caste(sic?).'

And that the US is a caste system and always has been.

The issues of racial injustice are directly tied to this and it is baked into our country's system.

Racial injustice is also one of those things I think most people are just... very poorly informed about. (Again, we have a very different situation than US does, and our own kind of racism has evolved a lot over the past century or so)

Many of my friends comment on the US situation while making very Finnish assumptions

Eg. assuming that racial minorities in the US are immigrants

well

some are

and we have problems with denigration towards immigrants too

Sure, it's just nowhere near the same extent as it's here (and even here the assumption hasn't been even close to valid since over twenty years ago)

despite the fact that, for good or ill, everyone who lives in the US who isn't literally First Nations is some form of immigrant already

even if they would prefer to ignore that

err I guess First Nations isn't the right term here?

I think they're more specific, but I know what you mean

Indigenous American

that seems like the most appropriate term

basically practically all the people who complain about all these new immigrants we have coming in are,.... also immigrants

not first generation usually but that,.. doesn't matter

But to stress, the mainstream of our racism for the last decade or so has been coated in anti-immigration rhetoric. One of the most common slurs for colored people nowadays roughly translates as "Invader", underscoring the (perceived) foreign origin of the person.

That doesn't exactly fit in the US situation where non-white people have existed for centuries

I'm just saying like,... we still have plenty of that to go around too

it's certainly not the only form of racism we have but there's a lot of intersection between the people who don't like anyone who's "ethnicity" or wtv is too different from their own, and the people who don't like new people coming into the country

whether that's any new people at all or cherry picking specific places

most commonly you hear people complaining about people from Mexico and South America

but there's really no shortage of complaints about people from just about anywhere

except maybe to some extent people from Europe

Yeah sure, all I'm saying it's super frustrating having to explain to people that conflating race with immigration is even less accurate for the American situation than it's here

but that also probably depends on an individual basis and which country in Europe you are talking about

that is fair

Though tbf I just don't think the devoted racists need to have their rhetoric be factually accurate :(

As long as the others buy it

we have a large poplulation of African American people who,... quite frankly, are here because they are decendants of people who did not even willingly come here

yeah I think that's entirely true

Many people believe the Roma to be immigrants for example (specifically people often confuse them with Romanians)

it's not about factual accuracy, although some people will still make up stuff to make it look like that too

Roma have been in Finland for centuries now

or what is present-day-Finland

No shade to anybody here because "nation of immigrants" is a VERY ubiquitous and particularly noxious piece of American propaganda, but the vast majority of Black Americans are not from immigrant families.

Ah, Troggy said it while I was typing.

yeah

I brought that up specifically because of what Kviiri said

skin color does not denote immigration here

in fact it can be the direct result of being forced to come here

but also like, a lot of white people complaining about immigrants are immigrants

that's what I mean when I say that

it's not a nation exclusively made of immigrants but also like,... there's still irony in white people who are pretty much mostly or even exclusively the descendants of immigrants complaining about immigration

Aye. And yet, even within America the "nation of immigrants" line is so common that people who really REALLY should know better use language that casually erases the nation's entire history of kidnapped and enslaved people.

that's fair

I was trying not to imply that at all

So I'm not at all surprised that people outside the country who mostly know about it through white American media, make the same error.

it's why I said what I said

@trogdor Much of America didn't 'really come here willingly. Not quite like that, but still.

@NautArch I mean, no one was dragged here quite as hard as slaves though

It's an unforced error made even by people who are trying to be pro-diversity. "We're all immigrants here, so don't hate immigrants" is a really common Democrat talking point.

@BESW But I think looking through the lens of that book my mom read, that it's not racism but a caste system that is fundamentally baked into American politics.

That's also an important element, yeah.

Its showing itself as Race right now, but really it's much deeper than that.

@trogdor Not the same at all to chattal slavery, but an example of forced movement nonetheless: the largest influx of Irish families to America happened during the potato famine, most people know that. What may NOT be known is that their English landlords were forcing them to go to America because the landlords were paying taxes for the famine relief efforts based on the number of Irish families on their land.

eww

@BESW Bingo.

And never mind that the early colonists were often debtors who had no other choice.

Jail or New World? New world, please.

But see also Puritans, Quakers, etc.

(American history classes don't tend to go into the three-way struggle for American ideological dominance between the Puritans, Quakers, and ...urgh I can't remember the third right now, I blame Pfizer brain.

@BESW The Dutch!

Maybe?

The difference in ideology between New York and New England is massive.

Big reason I think why I massively prefer NY to Boston.

The dutch were much more accepting of differences as long as you were a capitalist :P

I'm remembering a very dense essay that included a group more south than New England.

Ulster Scots!

And if it's not scottish, it's crap!

You wanna track the history of the American distrust of authority and love of firearms, you gotta go back to the Ulster Scots settling Appalachia.

I seem to recall there is also the incident where... was it James II of England? Tried to impose disarmament on his Protestant subjects

IIRC that's the specific reason why the "right to bear and keep arms" was codified in English law, which settlers --- many of them indeed Protestants who had been targeted by this and similar acts of oppression --- carried on to America.

(codified because the right to bear arms was an ancient customary thing that had seldom been challenged, therefore didn't really need explicitly pointing out before some kingy type decided to not respect it)

then we went and made our own church

The Ulster Scots had a similar situation, but were in a bit of Britain sandwiched between multiple more powerful factions that repeatedly tried to convert/remove them, and they wound up with a "trust no one except your brother and your gun" kind of approach to government.

@Carcer Honestly the number of times English kings managed to flip-flop the Catholic-Protestant barrier, violently too, without the whole country collapsing into a total mess feels almost miraculous

> without the whole country collapsing into a total mess [citation needed]

I was going to say

I think you've got to have a high tolerance for mess to make that statement

Just to pluck an example out of thin air entirely at random, Ireland has something called "peace walls" that were made so citizens of the same communities would have to work harder to murder each other in the streets, and last week people started setting them on fire.

well, that's not the whole country

@BESW fair point

I keep specifically forgetting Ireland was also prominently embroiled in these wars